White Water

Destroyer 106: White Water

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

PROLOGUE

Since Man first stepped out of the seas to breathe open air and walk on mud, he has reached back into die cold soup that spawned him for sustenance, first with his naked hands, then with rude clubs, baskets, baited hooks and netting, as many species of fish as there were to tempt him with their cold, delicate meat. Man discovered even more ways to capture them. The more he fished, the farther from the safe shores of his dry new habitat he needed to venture to fill his eternally hungry belly. Logs became rafts, and rafts acquired sails. Sails gave way to gigantic floating factories that caught, gutted and processed the multitudinous fish into fillets and steaks to feed the upright multitudes.

Soon no edible denizen of the deep, from the lowliest urchin to the mightiest whale, from the most delicious finfish to the most repellent scavenger, was safe from the species that had claimed the apex of the food chain for its own.

For centuries Man thought the oceans he plundered of bounty to be inexhaustible reservoirs of protein. And so he fished farther and farther away from his safe shores and home ports, on greater and more-efficient sailing craft. Even when the mighty whales became scarce, he paid no heed and continued his unrelenting pursuit of the cod and tuna, the lobster and the mackerel, until their vast numbers began to dwindle. Even when the warning signs became alarm bells, Man's response was to redouble his efforts. For by this time Man was no longer a small, sustainable population, but six billion strong. Six billion mouths clamoring for food. Six billion perpetually hungry bellies of a species who possessed the skills and technology to consume all other species with whom they shared the Earth.

Man, having climbed to the top of the food chain, found himself a prisoner of his adaptive success. Like the sharks he now consumed in greater numbers than had consumed him in the past, Man had to keep moving to eat, keep hunting the lesser species if he was not to sink back into the cold soup that gave rise to him.

But the more fish he caught, the fewer fish remained for his next meal.

Chapter 1

It was supposed to be the last haul.

One last tow. It was all Roberto Rezendez desired. One last good landing before he let the federal government buy his boat, the Santo Fado, out of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, and he took up cabinet making, turning his back of the livelihood that had fed seven generations of Rezendez going back to the days when Innsmouth was the whaling capital of the New World.

The morning sky was the color of oyster shells lying discarded on the beach. The heaving swells were masked by sea smoke generated by the midwinter cold. That the waters of the Atlantic were choppy and heaving Rezendez knew from the way his bow pounded through them, making a relentless thudding that was like a drumbeat to the forlorn melody of his rust-colored trawler engine's noisy ta-poketa ta-poketa stuttering.

In more plentiful times, the Rezendez family hauled active nets brimming with kicking cod and halibut and haddock from Georges Bank, 125 miles cut from Cape Cod. It was the cod that was best. King cod, the fish that had sustained the Pilgrims. That had been long before the first Rezendez left Portugal for a new life doing what Portuguese men had done for centuries to sustain life: fish from boats.

From his grandfather, Jorge, Roberto had heard how Georges Bank had teemed with cod in those days of wonder. How in 1895 the Patriarch cod, six feet long and weighing 211 pounds, had been pulled up from the deep. No fisherman had landed a Patriarch cod since those days of plenty. Cod did not live so long in the new century. And as the new century began to dwindle, the cod had dwindled, too.

Now that the new century was old and almost done with, the trawler nets brought up plenty of trawler trash-starfish and sea stars, skate and rusty beer cans-but few of the white-bellied cod. So damn few that even the men who lived off them had begun to understand they had dredged up almost all there were left.

Men like Roberto Rezendez had been barred from taking cod from Georges Bank. The yellowtail and the haddock were also scarce. If men of the seas respected the bans, the Commerce Department promised, the depleted groundfish stocks would replenish themselves. In ten years, they said. Some species in five. But what was a fisherman to do with himself during those five years?

Other draggers turned to scallops, but the scallop beds were being taxed by the new boats. And it cost money to refit a boat for scalloping. Some Innsmouth men went after lobster, but it was too labor-intensive. Lobstermen still caught lobster the way lobster was caught a century ago, in traps and pots that had to be laid down in the morning and taken up at night. Poachers were a problem for the lobstermen. Roberto Rezendez would have nothing to do with lobsters, which his great grandfather would grind up for fertilizer, he thought so little of the rust red ocean crawlers.

So he fished on, farther and farther out, taking as his primary catch the junk fish he used to toss back into the water dead. Instead of tender cod or delicate flounder, he harvested chewy pout, or cusk or butterfish or froglike monkfish and lumpfish. People ate them now. They cost as much per pound today as had cod or yellowtail two decades ago.

But it was a living. And as the Santo Fado muttered around the protected areas of Georges Bank, Roberto engaged the sonar scope that made finding fish such a pleasure.

His two older sons took tricks and the wheel while Roberto, now forty-nine and bent of back if not of spirit, hovered over the greenish fish-finder scope as it pinged and pinged forlornly.

They were cruising at a mere dozen knots now. Salt spray, whipped by the steady wind, deposited a rime of ice on the radar mast and gallows and netdrum reels. From time to time Roberto knocked it off with a boat hook. Too much ice could capsize a trawler like the Santo Fado if allowed to build up.

It was while seeing to the ice encrusting one of the matched cable-drum reels that Roberto heard the sonar scope begin pinging wildly. Giving the huge steel drum a final ringing crack, Roberto rushed to the scope, boat hook in hand.

"Madre!" he muttered, reverting to the traditional curse of his ancestors.

"What is it, Father?" asked Carlos, the eldest.

"Come look. Come look at what your forefathers lived for, but never saw with their own eyes."

Carlos bustled back while Manuel remained at the wheel. He was a good boy, was Manuel. Steady. Light on his feet on the pitching deck. He had fishing in his blood. His blood was fated to be thwarted, Roberto knew. He would not fish past his thirtieth birthday. That was how sad the state of the family-operated fishing enterprise had become.

The screen showed a vast mass shaped like a saucer. Over a mile long, it was composed of closepacked synchronized blips.

Roberto lay a finger against the screen and whispered, "Cod."

"So many?"

Roberto nodded fervently. His finger shifted. "See these large blips forward? These are the mature ones, the scouts. The others maintain a constant body width between them. This way they are always in sight of one another, should danger threaten."

"Amazing." There was respect in the boy's voice. Then he asked a question. "What do we do?"

"We will follow them. Perhaps they will lead us to a place where they can be legally taken."

"Is there such a place?"

"This is to be our last haul. There are places that are legal and there are places that are not so legal. Perhaps Our Lady of Fatima will smile upon us, on this our last haul."

They followed the bottom-swimming school, using only their sonar. From time to time, columns of cod would make for the surface to spawn. As the day lengthened and the cool sun burned off the sea smoke, they could see the cod break the surface all around them. It was a vision.

"I wish Esteban could be here to see this," Roberto lamented.

Esteban was his youngest boy. Just in junior high, he would probably never fish, never own a boat except a pleasure craft. He played shortstop for the Innsmouth Crustaceans and often spoke of baseball as a career. But that was a young boy's dream, nothing more.

Roberto was back attacking the ice when Manny-now taking his turn at the sonar scope-called out, "Father, something is happening down there."

Back at the scope, Roberto saw that the school of cod was spreading out. He nodded.

"They are beating the sea floor for prey. Probably capelin." He called up to the pilot house, "Carlos, where are we?"

Carlos consulted a marine chart. "We are approaching the Nose."

Roberto frowned, his sun-weathered face a mask of beef jerkey. The Nose was the easternmost portion of the Grand Banks fishery that Canada lay claim to. Technically the Nose was beyond the two-hundred-nautical-mile limit claimed by Canada. But the Canadians had chased the Spanish, and before them the French, from these waters as if the Nose legally belonged to them. They said the free-ranging cod were Canadian. As if any fish could possess a nationality. They existed to be taken. Nothing more.

Taking up his binoculars, Roberto scanned the skies for Canadian Coast Guard aircraft. These skies were empty of all that and of all promise.

"Stay the course," Roberto said, throwing his luck in with the cod as his ancestors had.

The trawler muttered on, its ice-encrusted bow smashing the ten-foot swells like a stubborn bulldog with a foamy bone in its teeth.

The school did not swim in a straight line, of course. It veered this way and that. With every veer, Roberto signaled the Santo Fado to veer.

Inexorably the cod were taking them into the Nose.

"I don't like this," said Carlos.

"Slow," said Roberto, who did not like it either.

They were not in legal waters. There could be a fine just for suspicion of the intent to take fish from these waters if they crossed the invisible two-hundred-mile limit into Canadian waters.

Still, the temptation was very great. This was their last haul, and the teeming cod moving beneath their aging hull were oh so very tempting.

The trawler reduced speed. The waist of the great saucer of cod, like a gigantic living thing composed of green spots of light, moved on. The trailing edge came into view.

Carlos made a noise of surprise in his throat.

"What is it?" Roberto demanded.

In answer, Carlos laid his finger against the large, elongated blip swimming directly behind the school.

Roberto stared at it in disbelief.

"I have never seen this," he breathed.

"What is it, Father?" Manuel called from the faded white pilothouse.

"It cannot be a codfish. It is too long."

"How long would you say?" asked Manuel.

"As long as a man," Roberto said. "Weighing as much as a man." And his voice trailed off. "A Patriarch," he said under his breath, not daring to believe it himself.

"What?"

Roberto's deep voice shook with a growing excitement. "It swims with the cod. It must be a cod. But it is not a scout. Yet it is larger than the scouts."

"A porpoise?"

"No, a Patriarch cod. A fish not seen in over one hundred years." Drawing a breath that burned with sea cold, Roberto Rezendez spoke the words that doomed himself, his sons, and sealed the fates of many fishermen in the days to come.

"I must have it. I must. This is the dream of my forefathers to catch that magnificent monster. We will bring it back living, as proof that the cod stocks are rebounding. The industry may yet be saved."

Rushing to the wheel, Roberto ordered Carlos back to the sonar scope.

"Both of you guide me. We will follow until the cod stop to feed. Then we will lower our net."

"Where are we?" Carlos asked.

"It does not matter. This is a miracle. It is bigger than one boat or one family or even which nations lay claim to what patch of cold, gray water."

They followed the school deep into the Nose. Here cod fishermen from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland were forbidden to practice their livelihoods while boats from other waters were not constrained. Over forty thousand men had been thrown out of work by the edicts of the Canadian Department of Fisheries. Men who watched their nets dry on their docks while other men took what they could not. Roberto knew them to be honest, hardworking men. He understood their plight. He had suffered since the closing of Georges Bank. It was sad.

Until they lowered their net, it would only be a fine. Perhaps not even that. And if the seas were clear when the cod struck their prey, there would be time enough to drag the net twice. And with luck, the great cod would be hauled up from the deep. That one, Roberto and his family would personally consume once the authorities laid their incredulous eyes upon it.

Deep in the Nose, the cod struck a school of capelin. The capelin were lurking on the bottom. Sensing the approaching school, the smeltlike little fish came off the ocean floor like a rising cloud. Predatory arrows, the cod fell upon them, and the gray-green water churned.

"Slow the engines. Drop the net!" Roberto shouted.

They fell to the netting with a grim will. The square-meshed orange otter net-required by the new regulations so they would not catch immature fishes-went over the stern and into the cold water below. They took up the five-hundred-pound steel-framed oak doors and affixed them to the great U-shaped stanchions called gallows. These were dropped into the water, where they sank.

"Full throttle!" Roberto called.

The boat shook and rumbled along.

The great reels paid out cable as the forward motion of the dragger caused the net to bell and open like a great, all-catching spiderweb. The huge net vanished from sight.

Down below, the doors would be forced part, keeping the net wide for the unsuspecting fish.

Ahead a little blood was already rising. And fish flecks. Soon the sea would be alive with churning and consuming. It was the law of the sea. The big fish ate the little fish. And mankind ate the big fish and the little fish both.

Like a meshy mouth, the net was approaching the school when, out of nowhere, a great factory ship appeared.

It was gray. Against the soupy gray of the sea and the dull gray of the sky, it had lain there like stealthy winter's ghost.

A foghorn blew, bringing Roberto's head jerking ahead.

"Madre!" he whispered. Grabbing up his binoculars, he spied the name on the bow.

"Hareng Saur."

"Quebecers!" he muttered. They were not much for high-seas fishing, preferring to crab the familiar waters of the St. Lawrence River. And they were at odds with Ottawa. Perhaps they would leave well enough alone.

But soon the ship-to-shore UHF radio was crackling with an urgent voice.

The call was in French. Only French. The only part Roberto understood was the name of his own boat, which they mispronounced atrociously.

Nervously Roberto grabbed up the mike and said, "Hareng Saur, I do not speak French. Do any of you speak English?"

More excited French garbled out of the radio speaker.

"I repeat, Hareng Saur, I do not speak French. Who among you speaks English?"

It seemed no one did.

The big factory ship came bearing down upon them.

Leaping to the stern, Roberto rejoined his sons.

"Do we cut the net cables?" asked Manny.

Roberto hesitated. This was to be the last haul. But otter nets were expensive. And he was loath to relinquish the Patriarch.

"Wait. There is still time." He rushed back to the sonar scope. Hovering over it, he scanned the blips.

The fish were feeding ferociously. The screen was a frenzy of greenish blips. It was impossible to distinguish cod from capelin. But there was no doubt who were the predators and who the prey.

The big otter bag was slowly sweeping them before it, the cod end filling up with living cod and capelin both. As it should be.

Roberto scanned the area for the Patriarch cod. He did not see it at first, increasing his hope that it had already been swept up by the net.

Then it darted into view. There was no mistaking the blip. Curiously it was moving through the frenzy of fish with a detached purpose. Was it not hungry? It struck out on an undeviating line through the school, and zoomed off the screen.

Roberto looked up. The unerring direction would take it toward the big factory ship. But, of course, cod do not swim unerringly, except after prey.

With a sigh, he realized he had lost the opportunity of a lifetime.

"Cut the net!" The words choked in his thickening throat.

His two sons threw themselves on the brake levers controlling the matched cable reels. They jerked them hard, angrily. The reels let go. Cable whizzed out and spilled off the stern.

And as the last strands dropped into the cold, inhospitable Atlantic, a great sadness overcame Roberto Rezendez. This was how the final haul of the Santo Fado was to end. Ignominiously.

AFTER THAT, things happened with bewildering rapidity.

The factory boat lowered two dull gray dories. They beat toward the Santo Fado. It was possible to escape, but Roberto decided it would be unwise to attempt to flee. There was no proof any of wrongdoing. Suspicion, yes. But no proof. Not with his otter net lying on the ocean floor.

As the dories drew closer, they could spy the faces of the approaching ones. They were strangely white. And there were weird blue vertical spotches covering the faces centered on their noses.

Roberto recalled that the fisherman of Nova Scotia were known as "bluenoses" because the dye of their blue mittens came off when they rubbed their cold noses. But Nova Scotia dory men did not paint their faces white or call their ships by French names.

Only when they were surrounded on both sides by the two dories could the true nature of the whitefaced ones be discerned.

White greasepaint coated their faces. The blue splotches were greasepaint, too. They formed a crisp design. At first Roberto thought of a fish. But, of course, he would. Fish were his life. The designs were not fish. They were too ornate. Coats of arms are sometimes filled with similar designs. In this case, Roberto did not know the name or significance of this design. Only that it was hauntingly familiar.

"Why are their faces painted that way?" muttered Carlos.

"To protect against the cold," said Roberto, who thought it must be true. What other reason could there be?

The dories bumped the old dragger's hull and were made fast. Roberto ordered his sons to help. He himself stood on the heaving deck, shivering in his orange waders and rubber boots, the hood of his grimy gray sweatshirt protecting his head. He was still thinking of the father of codfish that had almost been his.

"Who speaks English?" he asked as the first of the white-faced ones clambered aboard.

No one, it seemed. For when they were on board, pistols were displayed.

"Are you Canadian fisheries inspectors?" Roberto asked nervously, knowing that fisheries officers operated undercover at times.

No answer. Not even in French. It was strange. Their faces were strange with their blue clown mouths and bold blue noses spreading angular wings over their gleaming white cheeks.

"We are a U.S. vessel," said Roberto, thinking that perhaps with the Spanish name on their stern they were being mistaken for a Spanish vessel. Relations between Canada and Spain were very strained even now, two years after the so-called Turbot War.

They were urged into the boats. Not a word was spoken. It was all grunting. Perhaps some of the grunts were French grunts. Roberto could not say. He knew little enough of French.

Nodding to his sons, he led them to the dory that awaited them.

"We will obey these men, for we are in their lawful waters," Roberto said simply.

Soon they were being conveyed to the immense factory ship. One man remained with the Santo Fado. If their boat was seized, there would be very great trouble. It had happened before, during the trouble over turbot. Scallop poachers had lost their trawlers for illegal fishing. They never got them back.

As they muttered toward the Hareng Saur, something in the water caught Roberto's eye. It looked like a shark making its way. Or a porpoise. But the waters were too cold for a harbor porpoise.

With a stab in his heart, he thought, Torpedo!

The wake was arrowing unerringly toward the big gray sea behemoth.

Roberto started to speak up. To point. He was shushed with a hard look and a wave of a pistol. It was very eerie the way the white-faced ones operated in utter silence.

Roberto counted the long seconds to impact.

The thing had to be a torpedo. It was closing very fast. Glimpses of gunmetal gray showed in the gray water. It looked to be as long as a man. Or the Patriarch cod, he thought. But that was impossible. Cod were silvery of skin. And this thing moved like a machine.

Three seconds, Roberto counted. Two. One...

The wake ran into the gray hull, just below the waterline.

No explosion sounded. No impact came. No nothing. The wake simply ran into the side of the ship and was no more.

Perhaps it was a porpoise after all, diving playfully under the great gray hulk, Roberto thought.

Roberto turned his thoughts to his predicament. When the dory eased to the hull of the big ship, lines were lowered from davits and the dory was hoisted to open cargo holds in the side of the ship, then swung in.

They were escorted through the stinking hold, where fresh-caught fish were processed and frozen as quickly as they were disgorged from nets.

Even for a lifelong fisherman like Roberto Rezendez, it was an ugly sight. This was a gigantic processing plant. This was why there were no cod. Ships such as this devoured and reduced to cat food and fish sticks entire fish schools in a day's time.

A corporation owned such a vessel, he knew. No hardworking family fisherman could afford it.

"This," he whispered to his sons, "is why we have no future."

Fish were being ripped-gutted and halved-at conveyor belts in cold rooms. The stench of gurry in the malodorous hold was nauseating.

Passing a porthole, Roberto chanced to look out. There, out in the cold gray-green Atlantic, he saw the rusty bow of the Santo Fado slip beneath the waves. Just like that. He froze but was prodded on.

Glancing out through the next porthole he came to, Roberto saw no sign of his trawler. Only a lone dory cutting the water from the place he had left his livelihood.

Could it be? Had they scuttled her? Was it possible? Roberto said nothing. But all over his body the sweat was cold and clammy, and his stomach began to heave not from the dismal stench but in fear for his life-and the lives of his sons.

They were taken to a steel room whose floor was choked with fish entrails and other leavings. Roberto knew what this was. The fish paste called susumi would be made from such offal. Probably in this very room. It would be used in cat food.

The door valved shut. It was a very bad omen. Interrogations were not conducted in such quarters.

"I would like to explain myself," Roberto began.

He was ignored. Workers in bright orange waders and black rubber boots used long forks to pitch fish offal into a vat. There were blades or something whirling in the vat. They whirled and spun, chewing up the bony fish so that the bones would be small and soft and digestible.

"We were not taking cod. We were tracking the Patriarch. Do you understand?" Roberto repeated the word cod and made the time-honored gesture to show the fish's span. Of course, his arms were too short to truly encompass the size of the cod he had tracked with his fish-finding sonar.

The men with the blotchy blue-and-white faces laughed at him. A fish story. They thought he was telling them a fish story. It was understandable.

Roberto was searching his memory of Portuguese for common words that a Frenchman might understand. The languages had many similar roots. It was possible to communicate with these men before something strange transpired. He remembered the French word for cod, amazed that he possessed this knowledge.

"Morue," he said, stumbling over the syllables.

One of the men pointed to the vat of pureeing fish. "Poisson chat," he said in response. His blue smile was rimmed in pink, like a cut mackerel.

"Eh?"

"Poisson chat." The smile widened so the red of his gums and inner lips was grotesque against the blue greasepaint surrounding them.

"Catfish!" Roberto exclaimed. "Yes. Catfish. I understand." But he didn't understand. Why were they speaking of catfish? Catfish were not caught out here in the cold Atlantic. Catfish were freshwater fish. What did they mean by catfish?

Then it hit him. Not catfish. Fish cat. Fish for cats. They were processing cat food. That was what they meant.

A kind of relief settled over Roberto Rezendez's weathered features, and he smiled sheepishly.

That was when two men stepped up and ripped Carlos. Just like that. It happened with stunning suddenness.

Two white-faced men. They strode up, swinging long tuna knives. Both stepped in, and one thrust his blade into Carlos's unsuspecting right side while the other pierced his left. In the belly. Low in the belly. The blades touched one another with a rasping sound-touched deep in the bowels of Roberto Rezendez's eldest son, and he screamed as Carlos screamed. It was a stereo scream.

Manuel joined in, too. A whisking blade separated Manny from his nose. It fell to his feet, perfectly intact. He ran. Or tried to.

Someone gaffed him like a fish. They used a pole with a hook at the end of it, plunging it into his back. Like a fish, Manny fell to the scummy floor and flopped as the harpoon was driven deeper into his helpless body. The point made an awful rasping sound as it scraped living bone.

Roberto Rezendez had both of his case-hardened fists up and was rushing to the defense of his sons, when the two with the long tuna knives drew them out and turned to confront their attacker.

The blades were red with the blood of Carlos. Roberto stared at them in numb disbelief. It was the blood of his son on the blades. His blood. The blood that had flowed through the veins of the Rezendez family for many generations. And here these-these crazed Frenchmen were spilling it as casually as they gutted fish.

Face atwist, Roberto made to seize those blades. They were sharp, but his anger was sharper still. He swore foul oaths his grandfather seldom used. He cursed these butchers when his hard fingers closed over the bloody blades and the white-faced ones whipped them back, leaving blood on Roberto's palms that might have been his sons' or his own. It didn't matter. It was the same blood, and he would shed all of it to avenge his family.

The blades danced and cut the air, shedding scarlet droplets with each twist. The blood spattered Roberto's face. It got in his eyes. They stung. He tasted blood through his set teeth and he grunted out the low Portuguese curses his foes did not understand, could not understand, because all they spoke was doggerel French.

The blades whacked and chipped at Roberto Rezendez as if he were a totem pole being whittled. Except that he bled. As his sons writhed on the floor in their death torments, their lives irredeemably lost, Roberto threw punches and kicks at the white-faced tormentors, who danced in and out of range, claiming pieces of his own flesh.

The end came for Roberto Rezendez as one man feinted, while the other slipped around and, with two expert slices, whacked off a collop of biceps.

The man danced back with the piece of meat that Roberto knew was his flesh balanced on the tip of his red blade. He flicked it back over his shoulder. It landed in the vat, where it made a raspberry blotch that was soon swallowed by the churning puree.

Roberto knew his fate then. He was to be cat food. No one would ever find him. No one would ever know his fate. Nor the fate of his sons. Not Esmerelda, not Esteban. Not the grandchildren who had yet to be born to carry on the Rezendez name.

"Why are you doing this?" Roberto screamed.

The blades found his belly and his throat, and in that last memory, Roberto Rezendez knew how it felt to be a fish taken from its natural environment to be flayed and boned by strange creatures for an alien purpose.

That last knowledge was a very bitter one. He was a man. He stood at the pinnacle of the food chain. It was absurd to be killed to feed the idle cats of the world. Let the cats fish for their own food. Let them eat fish, not Portuguese.

In his last moments of life, they gutted him. He was too weak to resist. The ripping sounds of his parting abdominal muscles were like sailcloth tearing in a gale.

Roberto watched the gray, slippery loops that were his own entrails as they were deposited into the vat of fish offal.

Santa Maria, he prayed. I call upon you to send to earth an avenger. For I have done nothing to deserve this. Nothing but fish.

In his last moment, he wept. Then he was one with the fishes who were, and had always been, his destiny.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo, and he didn't understand the mission.

It was not the usual mission. The usual mission generally came in one of two flavors. Hit a known target. Or infiltrate and discover an unknown target's identity. Then hit him.

Nothing was said about hitting anyone this time out.

That was strange thing number one.

Strange thing number two was the tractor trailer.

Remo was not licensed to drive tractor trailers. Not that he would let that stop him. After all, a tractor trailer was nothing more than an overgrown truck. Remo had driven trucks before. This one was longer and it had a lot more wheels, but it was still just a truck.

The instructions were simple enough. Pick up truck at rendezvous point A, drive it to point B and wait.

"Wait for what?" Remo had asked the lemony voice on the telephone.

"You don't need to know at this time."

"Do I need to know ever?"

"You'll know what to do when the time comes."

"How's that?" asked Remo of Harold Smith, his boss.

"Everything has been arranged. The loading will be done for you. Just drive the shipment."

"Drive it where?"

"Call me en route."

"En route where? North, south, east or west?"

"You cannot drive east of Lubec. You will drive into the Bay of Fundy."

"I feel like driving into the ocean right now," Remo complained.

"Just obey instructions. You cannot go wrong."

"If you say so," said Remo. "Anything else I should know?"

"Yes. How to double clutch."

"I'll ask someone," said Remo, who then went in search of the Master of Sinanju.

Chiun was not at home.

"Must have gone for a walk," muttered Remo. He was going to leave a note, but the single Western-style pen in the house was out of ink. The goose quill and ink stone Chiun used were locked up tight, so Remo simply dropped down to the corner market and called his own house from a pay phone, leaving a message on the machine. It cost him a dime, but he figured it was worth it.

The drive to Maine had one good thing about it. The part of New Hampshire he passed through was very short. Of all the states of the union, Remo liked New Hampshire the least. He had heard about New England Yankees. His boss, Harold Smith, was one. Remo once thought Harold Smith was just a tightass until he visited New Hampshire and realized that Harold Smith was a typical product of New Hampshire-bloodless about everything except money. Smith would rather swallow a nickel than see it roll down a sewer grate.

Once in Maine, Remo began to relax. Maybe it was the fact that trees outnumbered people in Maine. It wasn't that Remo didn't like people. It was that he had to be particular about whom he associated with. Since he was a sanctioned assassin for a supersecret government agency, this was important. It wasn't that Remo had a cover to protect. He had once been Remo Williams, a Newark cop, until his existence had been erased. Now he was just Remo, last name optional. According to his truck driver's license, he was Remo Burton. But that was just in case he was pulled over. He lived simply, did no work except take on missions and tried to lead an ordinary life within those narrow constraints.

For many years, it had been simple. Remo had no social life to speak of. But now he was dating again. Really dating. The way normal people normally did. And it was an education.

For one thing, Remo had to relearn that women liked to know a lot about their dates. Otherwise there were no more dates.

They particularly wanted to know what their date did for a living.

Normally all Remo had to do was pull out a fake identity card and he was whoever the card said he was. That was fine for missions. But what about a second date? Or a third? He was stuck being Remo Bogart, FBI special agent. Or Remo MacIlwraith, with the Massachusetts State Police.

Then there were the dietary differences. On one memorable date he sat across a restaurant table from a woman who calmly poured milk into her iced tea, explaining that the milk bound the cancer-causing tannins, then confessed to having been a former substance abuser.

"What substance?" Remo had asked guardedly.

"Sugar."

Remo's feeling of relief lasted only as long as it took to wonder what kind of person could turn common table sugar into a abusable substance.

When she started salting her iced tea, Remo decided there would be no second date.

Then there were the ones who were pretending to be single when they weren't. After a while Remo learned to ask Smith for a husband sweep via computer. Two times out of three, a husband would pop up on Smith's monitor. Once, thanks to Harold Smith's diligence, Remo discovered he was dating a female bigamist.

It was all very discouraging.

"Where are all the sane single women?" Remo had shouted into the phone one disappointing day.

"Married," said Smith over the wire.

"Avoiding you," said Chiun calmly from the next room.

And everybody, but everybody, wanted to go to bed on the first date. There was no chase involved. Remo liked the chase. Instead, he was the chasee. It was a problem he'd had for years. Women reacted to him the way cats react to catnip. One sniff and they were rolling on their backs, purring.

The way things were going, Remo felt he was going to have to retire from dating again.

But first he had to get the eighteen-wheeler he picked up in the Lawrence, Massachusetts truck stop to Lubec, Maine, located at the easternmost point of the U.S. according to the map. It was tucked up there on the Bay of Fundy, under New Brunswick.

Why he had to drive the freaking truck all the way up to Lubec still eluded Remo. He hadn't figured out how to double clutch yet. He had gotten on the cab CB and hailed various truckers who came into view.

They patiently explained it to him, but every time Remo tried, he managed to miss a step and found himself crawling along in first gear.

Finally Remo decided to speed shift through the sixteen or so gears and let the transmission watch out for itself. He had a run to make.

JUST SOUTH OF ELLSWORTH, barreling along in eleventh gear, Remo ran out of luck. He was ramming it through the gears, and the transmission soon began grinding like a coffee machine trying to turn lugnuts into espresso.

"Uh-oh," he muttered.

The eighteen-wheeler slipped into the low-ratio gears, and Remo urged it along with all his strength, which was considerable.

In third gear he crawled along another two miles while traffic blared and veered around him. Then he pulled over.

From the soft shoulder of I-95, Remo called Dr. Harold W. Smith, the director of CURE, the agency he worked for.

"Bad news. I lost the transmission."

Smith said, "It is imperative that you make the drop zone."

"This is a drop?" Remo said.

"The Ingo Pungo is due in three hours."

"Is that a ship?"

"Yes."

"I'm meeting a ship?"

"Yes," Smith repeated.

"Ingo Pungo sounds Korean," said Remo. "Why am I meeting a Korean ship?"

"It is connected to the last contract I negotiated with the Master of Sinanju," explained Smith.

"Oh, yeah? Usually you ship the yearly gold tribute to the village by submarine. Why is a Korean ship coming here?"

"That is not as important as your making the drop zone on schedule. Can you get to Lubec?"

"Probably. But don't I need a semi?"

"Make the drop point. I will arrange for another truck."

"Okay." Then Remo had a thought and he groaned. "I hope Chiun isn't bringing a bunch of his relatives to come live with us."

But Harold Smith had already terminated the call.

Abandoning the truck, Remo used his thumb. No one offered him a ride, so he waited until the next eighteen-wheeler came barreling down the highway.

Climbing atop the cab of his own semi, Remo crouched there, waiting. His eyes tracked the approaching rig. He calculated instinctively-and not by numbers-variables such as speed, wind velocity and timing.

When the semi roared past, emitting diesel exhaust, Remo launched himself from his crouch; landed on the semi with his arms and legs spread and became a human suction cup.

Slipstream tried to tear him off, but his body adhered to the stainless-steel top as if Super Glued there.

Squeezing his eyes shut to protect them, Remo climbed down the blind side of the truck and slipped under the chassis where the spare tire sat flat in a tubular rack. There was enough room for Remo to stretch out if he deflated the tire. Which he proceeded to do with kneading motions of his long thin fingers.

There Remo sat like a frog on an inner tube on a pond, protected from view, wind and discovery.

He just hoped the truck was going where he was going.

EVENTUALLY, THE TRUCK pulled into a truck stop; and the driver got out to chow down in a diner. Remo slipped from his perch and called Harold Smith from a pay phone.

"How are we doing?" he asked.

"You have an hour," returned Smith.

"I'm in Machias."

"Hire a cab. Have the driver drop you off a quarter mile from the zone. Walk the rest of the way. You will find a power boat moored to a blue buoy."

"Power boat?"

"Take the boat fifteen nautical miles due east."

"You might as well say fifteen furlongs. I don't know nautical miles from kilometers."

"Rendezvous with the Ingo Pungo. Tell them to hold their position until you have secured a new truck. Then return to shore and find the truck."

"Okay, got it. So what's this all about?"

"It is all about punctuality," said Harold Smith. "Now hurry."

"Damn that Smith!" said Remo, hanging up.

He was walking back to the highway when the truck driver caught his eye. A tall, rangy blonde with a pleasant but lined face, she was on the scruffy side in torn jeans and flannels. But Remo decided she had an honest face. He needed someone like that now.

She beat him to the punch.

"You look like a guy who could use a lift," she said.

Remo said, "I need to get to Lubec fast."

"I'm running a load of sea urchin to the cannery there. I could use the company."

Remo climbed aboard. He watched as the woman double clutched the big rig onto the highway and laid down rubber for Lubec, hoping to pick up a few pointers.

"Name's Ethel."

"Remo."

"What's your business in Lubec?" Ethel asked.

"Gotta meet a boat," Remo told her.

"Say no more." She fell silent. It was a very thick uncomfortable silence.

Remo decided it didn't matter what she thought, as long as he got the ride.

Dusk was falling, but the interval between the sun dropping from sight and night seizing the world was brief.

After a while, Ethel started talking again. "I'm from Nashua. New Hampshire, that is. You?"

"Boston."

"Beantown," she snorted. "Where they drive like they learned how in bumper cars, and the rules of the road are-there ain't none."

"No argument there," said Remo.

"But it's home, right? I know. Once I finish this run, I go back to four walls full of boredom. But it's home."

The unspoken invitation hung in the noisy cabin for a full mile.

Normally Remo's tastes didn't run to truck drivers, but this was a special situation. He took the opening. "Can I hire your rig to haul some stuff back to Boston?"

Her smile was tentative. "Could be. If there's money in it. What stuff?"

"I don't know."

She looked at him sideways, her nostrils flaring. "You can't expect me to swallow that line."

"I'll know when I meet the boat, not before."

"You must be in a fascinating line of work."

"If you're not interested, I'll make other arrangements," Remo said.

"Hold on, now. Believe me, I'm interested." Her voice got low. "You ain't married, are you?"

"No," said Remo.

"Good, because I don't care to have my ass shot off by law or lovers. If you catch my drift."

"Been there, too," said Remo.

"I'm making a good living hauling urchin now. Don't want to mess it all up to do the midnight cha-cha."

"Urchin?"

"Yeah. Used to haul sardines, but the industry's in decline. Would have died, but the Japanese have a yen for seaurchin roe. They pay big. I make good money taking it to the processing plant. Wouldn't touch the stuff otherwise. I'm a steak-and-potatoes kind of gal. The kind you can take home to mother."

She threw Remo a wink. Remo threw it back. That seemed to satisfy her, and the cabin fell quiet, which was how Remo liked it. In her Red Sox ball cap and raggedy work clothes, she was too tomboy for Remo's taste.

It was after sundown by the time they pulled into Lubec. Remo didn't see much of the town except it was old and on the hardscrabble side.

Within sight of the water, Ethel braked the truck. "I'll let you off here and go on and unload my cargo," she told him. "Meet you by the water as soon as I can. Deal?"

"Deal," said Remo, getting out. He hated to trust a stranger, but she had such an honest face.

REMO FOUND THE BOAT moored to a blue buoy. It was a long, sleek, ivory white cigarette boat. The kind drug smugglers use down in the Florida Keys.

The Lubec coast was very rocky, and the boat bobbed in the water a quarter mile out. There was no sign of a rowboat to take him out to it, so Remo simply started out along a long finger of rockweed-covered granite and kept on running when he hit the water.

It was a short sprint to the boat, and the tops of Remo's Italian loafers were dry when he hopped into the cockpit.

Running on water was one of the most difficult techniques Remo had mastered, but he made it look easy.

Venting the gas tank so it wouldn't explode when he fired up the inboard-outboard, Remo waited impatiently.

By the moon's position in the night sky, he was running ten minutes late. Maybe it wouldn't matter on this run.

The boat aired, Remo started the engine, threw off the spring line and backed the craft away from the buoy. When he had good draft, he turned it around and let out the throttle.

He hoped the Ingo Pungo was big enough to spot by moonlight. Otherwise there was a real good chance he was going to miss it completely ....

Chapter 3

Captain Sanho Rhee knew his cargo. He understood his destination. What he did not understand was the why of the long voyage from Pusan, South Korea, through the Panama Canal to the North Atlantic.

Was this somehow illegal?

He didn't think so. There was nothing illegal about his cargo. Such cargo was routinely transported from port to port.

Of course, he'd left his home port empty. The cargo was picked up along the way, some here, some there. That was normal. That was the kind of ship the Ingo Pungo was. That was what it did.

Normally the perishable cargo was off-loaded in a commercial port. Not this time. This time they were to lower the cargo over the side to a waiting craft. No port duties. No inspections. No nothing.

This clearly wasn't legal. But arrangements had been made. It was all taken care of.

So the Ingo Pungo, her full holds displacing four hundred tons of the cold Atlantic, steamed through the waters off Nova Scotia.

These were dangerous waters these days, with the Canadians so protective of their exhausted fisheries. But the Ingo Pungo had done nothing to disturb Canadian waters. There would be no trouble from Canada.

Captain Rhee was in the wheelhouse watching the scaly effect of moonlight on the cold water when the sea before them turned green and luminous.

A whale, he thought.

Right Whales sometimes surfaced in these waters, an impressive sight. Their great, hulking bodies would churn the naturally phosphorescent phytoplankton of the sea. This would account for the greenish phenomenon.

But the black nose slamming up from the deep was no whale's snout. It was metal. Made by man.

A lookout spoke the word before Rhee's brain framed the startled thought.

"Submarine! Submarine off port bow!"

"All engines, stop. All stop!" Rhee screeched.

And belowdecks the laboring diesels ground to a halt.

The submarine finished crashing down from its sudden surfacing breach. Rhee could not recall the name of the maneuver, but understood that it involved rising bow first until the sub's nose broke the surface, poised like a missile, only to smash down, throwing up brine, and wallow in the unsettled seas.

The submarine wallowed now. It blocked their way, then inched ahead slowly as if to let the Ingo Pungo pass.

"Raise this submarine," Rhee ordered.

The Ingo Pungo's radioman got busy. He spoke in the international language, English, for five excited minutes, then turned his confused face Rhee's way.

"The vessel does not respond."

"Searchlight! See what flag they fly."

Deckhands sprang to action. Searchlights were energized and brought into play. They roved the choppy water, then converged on the black submarine hull.

There was no readable name on the bow. Faint white letters showed just below the waterline, but the water distorted them into unreadability. On the conning tower was a swatch of white with a blue mark sprawled in the white field. It was very ornate.

"I don't know that flag," Rhee muttered.

They were sliding past the sub now. Soon it fell behind their stern, making no move to follow or intercept.

"Maneuvers. They are on maneuvers," Rhee decided.

But still they kept their lights and their eyes on the silent black submarine.

As they put distance between the submarine and their stern, Captain Rhee noticed the sub began to submerge. It was a very slow but also sinister maneuver. The steel cigar bubbled slowly from sight, and the conning tower slipped down like a dull predator returning to its watery lair.

"Maneuvers," muttered Rhee, returning to his course. The searchlights were doused and covered again with canvas protectors.

Moonglade mixing with the fading phosphorescent wake was their only warning of approaching trouble.

Something cut through the moonglade on the black water, roiling it noticeably. Then the long, lazy, bioluminescent tail their screws were bringing to life went crazy.

A lookout announced it. "Torpedo! Astern and closing!"

Rhee's mind went blank. Then he heard the impossible word again.

"Torpedo!"

"Hard a-port full!" Rhee screamed. It was a blind order. It might save the ship. It might not. His was a commercial vessel. It had no experience in wartime. He didn't even know that there was a war on.

The great ship lurched in response to the wheel. It heeled left, sliding into the beginning of a long turn it never completed.

The torpedo struck the stern with a dull thunk that immediately flowered into a thunderous boom. The Ingo Pungo lurched ahead, shuddered deep within-and so rapidly that it was like an ugly miracle, it began to list to the stern.

The ruptured stern was drinking bitter ocean, engulfed by a thirst that filled the rear holds with heavy, draggy brine.

Terrified seamen started pouring up from below. Rhee met them at the top of a companionway.

"How bad?" he demanded, his voice a rip of sound.

"We are sinking!" one moaned.

"We cannot sink."

"We are sinking. We have no stern."

On the verge of nervously pushing past the uprushing seamen, Rhee knew he had only time to accept the word of his crew if he was to save their lives.

He turned and cupped both hands around his mouth to give his orders volume. "Abandon ship! Abandon ship!"

Alarms rang the length of the Ingo Pungo. Confusion overtook all decks. Boats were put over the side. Anxious crew ran them down off davits, and they made splashes in the water.

Rhee ranged the deck stem to stern, calling out the abandon-ship order. He wouldn't lose a man if he could help it. He wouldn't lose a single seaman, no matter how lazy and unworthy of life.

Leaning over the side, he called to the large boats below. "Row away! Row as fast as you can! Lest the sinking ship suck you all down to your doom."

His men fell to rowing. There was time yet, he hoped.

More lifeboats splashed into the water-until only one remained.

Satisfied that he had done all he could, Captain Rhee helped his remaining crewmen swing the last lifeboat out on its davits. When it was poised over the heaving ocean, they urged him to climb aboard.

He saw the second torpedo charge toward the starboard. The wake was like a furious, foaming arrow. It ran between two lifeboats, nearly upsetting them. Men clung to the gunwales in fear.

With a sudden drying of his mouth, Captain Rhee saw that the torpedo was going to strike the Ingo Pungo amidships. Strike at the waterline directly beneath the spot where he intended to deposit the last lifeboat.

And he knew all was lost for himself and his remaining crewmen.

The ship shuddered alarmingly upon impact. Cold salt brine was thrown up. It streamed down Rhee's openmouthed face, freezing instantly, stilling his tongue and sealing one eye shut to the elements.

Rhee grabbed for the rail but it slipped from his grasp. The deck was already pitching. It pitched its brave captain overboard, which was a kind of mercy.

The Ingo Pungo slipped beneath the waves as if dragged to its doom by something inimical. From the moment the first torpedo demolished the stern, ten minutes had transpired. But only two more after the starboard hull had been breached.

The sucking of water drew three of the lifeboats down into a brutally cold vortex, carrying its crew to a violent death.

But not as violent as those in the surviving lifeboats.

They were bobbing in the water in sheer disbelief of the calamity that had overtaken them, when the heaving sea around them flattened strangely, belled, then heaved up again as if from some subsea earthquake.

In their midst a black steel snout surfaced, hung poised for a heart-stopping moment, then came crashing down to dash every last lifeboat into kindling.

A hatch popped up in the top of the gleaming conning tower.

A man whose face was as white as the flag on the sail stepped out and looked around. His face mirrored the blue heraldic design in the flag.

He called out. Not words. Just a questioning shout.

He got a return shout from the water. Frightened and disoriented.

A sweeping searchlight raked the disturbed Atlantic. It fell on a bobbing human head.

The bobbing survivor of the Ingo Pungo called out for rescue, his shivering arms lifted imploringly.

The man with the blue device marking his death white face lifted a short-barreled machine gun and chopped the lone survivor into fresh chum.

Then the searchlight began picking out other bobbing heads. And the machine gunner began picking them off with methodical precision. A few ducked when the hot lights swept toward them. They never resurfaced.

The rest screamed or prayed or did both in their last, terrible moments before the searchlight blazed a pathway for the merciful bullets. Merciful because a ripping bullet was preferable to drowning or hypothermia.

The black submarine slipped beneath the waves soon after that.

Other than scattered slicks of blood in the water, no trace of the Ingo Pungo remained.

Chapter 4

Remo Williams held the thundering cigarette boat on a dead eastern heading, his dark eyes raking the tossing seas before him.

It was bitterly cold, but the bare skin of his forearms showed no gooseflesh. The wind whipping through his short dark hair seemed to not bother him at all. It pressed his black T-shirt to his chest, and made his black chinos flap and chatter off his legs.

In the moonlight Remo's face had the aspect of a death mask. Old plastic surgeries had brought out his skull-like cheekbones under the tight, pale skin. His eyes were set so deep in their sockets they looked empty, like skull hollows. Long ago Remo had been electrocuted by the state of New Jersey so that his past could be erased. He might have been the old Remo Williams come back from the grave to avenge his own death. But he had never died. The chair had been rigged, his execution faked.

Remo's body temperature was slightly elevated to compensate for the cold. It was a small technique in the greater repertoire of Sinanju, the Korean martial art from which all succeeding martial arts were descended. Sinanju placed Remo in full control of his body and at one with the universe. Conquering deadly cold or running as if weightless across open water were things he had mastered long ago and would never forget.

Somewhere beyond the drop point, Remo smelled blood in the water. Remo knew death more intimately than most men know their wives, so he knew human blood from ape blood. Chicken blood from beef. He could even sometimes distinguish male blood from female, though he couldn't put the difference into words.

The blood he smelled was human male. And there was a lot of it.

He let his nose guide him toward the metallic scent.

Moonlight on the water didn't show up the blood. It was his nose that told him when he was in the middle of it. He chopped the engine and sent the power boat gliding around in a long arc that brought it back to where the blood scent was.

Reaching over the side, Remo dipped his fingers. They came back mercurochrome red. He could see the red clearly now. It blended with the black of the night sea. There was a lot of it.

Standing up, Remo looked all around. Other smells came to his nostrils. Human smells again. He smelled fear-sweat. There was no mistaking that odor, either. Machine smells. Machine oil. Diesel fuel. Other things that he could not identify by scent but that he associated with ships.

A big ship with a big crew had been on this spot not long before. Remo arrived. But a ship that big should be visible on the water. There was plenty of moonlight.

As Remo scanned the horizon all around, something went bloop behind him. Turning, he saw nothing but heaving swells.

Then the blended stink of oil and diesel filled the air.

He saw it then. A rainbow slick. Something far below had vomited up diesel fuel.

Stripping off his T-shirt, Remo stood in his chinos as he toed off his shoes.

Without hesitation he jumped into the frigid Atlantic. It enveloped him like a cold vise. A biological sensor in his nose caused his body temperature to elevate ten degrees. The same natural reflex had been discovered in children who fell into icy ponds and survived because it threw the body into a kind of limited suspended animation, preserving the brain from oxygen starvation.

Remo's body temperature was now in the danger zone, but the cold of the North Atlantic would counteract the effects of the self-induced fever. Sinanju again.

Remo's eyes quickly adjusted to the changing light conditions. The red end of the spectrum was filtered out thirty feet down. At sixty, orange vanished.

At one hundred feet Remo began picking out shapes in the predominantly blue-gray realm. His skin was slick with oil. He hated the sensation, but the coating helped insulate his skin.

Five hundred feet down in shoal water, he found the Ingo Pungo lying on her side. He read it as a long, dark, night blue hulk, the stern broken open.

Releasing a solitary carbon dioxide bubble once every thirty seconds, Remo reconnoitered the sunken wreck. There was a hole in its side, he discovered-more by feel than sight. Something had knocked the hole in the thick black hull plates. There were jagged edges pointing inward around a human-sized hole. Other holes had edges that pointed outward. No boiler explosion sank this ship.

There were bodies floating in the water, some still trailing cloudy, dark filaments. Blood. Already fish were pecking at them.

There had been no survivors. A finger floated by but Remo ignored it.

Then, reaching out, he momentarily arrested a body slowly drifting by. The dead face looked back with sightless, oblique eyes. A Korean. Remo let go.

Holding his position with lazy stabilizing sweeps of his arms, Remo noticed a strange thing. There were a lot of fish. Maybe it was the bodies that drew them. But they seemed to be coming out of the wreck as if it had been their home a long time.

One swam close, and Remo reached out to catch it. It fought for its freedom and Remo let the fish have it, but not before he had identified it as a coho salmon. A fish native to the Pacific Ocean. What the hell was it doing in the Atlantic? he wondered.

Moving closer, Remo discovered other Pacific species. In fact, they were almost all Pacific fish. To Remo, who knew fish very well, it was as weird as discovering a Pekinese perched atop a candelabra cactus.

Returning to the surface, Remo recharged his lungs with air.

Except for his own lonely craft, the seas were empty.

Back on board the cigarette boat, Remo rubbed his oily arms dry and diverted body heat to the top of his head. His wet hair began to steam. It was soon merely damp, and before long it would be dry.

He threw on his dry T-shirt and, as he kicked the engine back into life, he redirected his body heat to his legs, where his pants were sticking to his flesh like a cold, clammy shroud.

The power boat dug in its stern as it heeled about. Remo lined the nose up with land and let the throttle out.

Something was very wrong here. And the worst part was he didn't know how much trouble it meant.

DR. HAROLD W. SMITH was working late. It was one of the occupational hazards of being the head of CURE, the supersecret government agency that lead no official existence. The cover for CURE was Folcroft Sanitarium, a three-story redbrick building perched on the lip of Long Island Sound. Smith's Folcroft duties were no less demanding than his higher responsibility. So he often worked deep into the night.

The Sound was a bejeweled carpet of anthracite at Smith's back as he trolled the Internet from his desk. The desk was as black as the Sound. Its wide glass top was like obsidian. Set under the glass so that its luminous amber screen canted up to face hum, was the monitor that connected to the Folcroft Four-a set of powerful mainframes hidden in the sleepy sanitarium's basement.

Smith was a spare man whose color might have been bleached out of him by virtue of the tedium of his job. There was nothing glamorous about running CURE. Smith did it from his Spartan office unsuspected by his employees, who thought of him as a hard-nosed, tight-fisted, anally retentive bureaucratic paper shuffler-which he was. And stubbornly proud of it.

Smith was tracking the progress of the Ingo Pungo on his screen. The ship was equipped with the global positioning system transponder beacon carried by many modern vessels. It beamed a constant signal up to orbiting satellites, which sent its position back to earth stations. Smith had accessed the network and was looking at a real-time schematic of the Ingo Pungo's current position.

The blipping green light was fifteen nautical miles off Lubec, Maine, in the Bay of Fundy. It had stopped dead in the water precisely where it should. This was good.

If Remo held up his end, he should rendezvous shortly, and Harold Smith could go home to his bed and his understanding wife, Maude.

Time passed, and the Ingo Pungo remained in place. The off-loading was probably going slowly. Or perhaps there was weather. Smith punched up a real-time feed from the National Weather Service.

There were no storms in that part of the Bay of Fundy. He frowned, his grayish face like that of a corpse wearing rimless glasses in a failed attempt to look natural. Smith resembled nothing more than a third-generation New England banker teetering on the creaky edge of retirement. In fact, Smith was well past retirement age, but as long as America had a need for CURE, he could not retire. Except in death.

Smith was monitoring news feeds on a window on one corner of his screen when the blue contact desk telephone rang, startling him into action.

Smith scooped it up.

"Hail, O Emperor! What word?" cried a high, squeaky voice.

"None."

"The hour has come and gone," said the voice of Chiun, the Reigning Master of Sinanju.

"Remo ran into difficulties. But the ship is on station."

"Of course. It is manned by Koreans. They would not dare be tardy. Unlike my adopted son, who would sink to any low embarrassment."

"I expect the cargo transfer is going on right now," Smith said.

"I should have overseen it myself. But if I cannot trust Remo to accomplish a simple exchange, how can I place the future of my House in his clumsy, thumb-fingered hands?"

"I will let you know when I hear from him, Master Chiun," said Harold Smith, terminating the call.

The blue phone rang again so fast Smith thought the Master of Sinanju had hit Redial.

It was Remo this time. He sounded cold. And Remo never sounded cold.

"Smith. Bad news."

"You failed to make the rendezvous?"

"I made it. The ship made it, too."

Smith squeezed the blue handset. "Then what is wrong?"

"I found it on the bottom of the ocean. It sunk with all hands," Remo told him somberly.

"How can you be certain it sunk?"

"I found blood in the water and an oil slick. I can add two and two, so I went down and found a ship. Ingo Pungo was on the stern-what was left of it."

"You are certain that the ship was the Ingo Pungo?"

"I can read. I can also tell a Korean from a Japanese at ten paces. There were Korean bodies floating around the wreck. Looks like no survivors."

"It had just reached the rendezvous point. What could have befallen the ship in that short a time?" Smith said in a deeply disturbed voice.

"I'm no expert, but I'd say it was torpedoed. There was a hole in the starboard side as big as a Buick. The metal was punched inward."

"Who would torpedo a cargo ship?"

"Who would know about it?" countered Remo.

"No one other than you, Chiun and I."

"And the crew," Remo corrected.

"Yes, of course, the crew."

"Loose lips sink ships. Could be somebody talked."

"That is unlikely," Smith said testily. "This particular cargo would not attract pirates."

"Who said anything about pirates? And just what was the cargo?"

"Unsalvageable," said Smith. "We must start over. Stand by. I must speak with Master Chiun."

"But you don't know where-"

Hanging up, Smith dialed Master Chiun's Massachusetts number.

The Master of Sinanju picked up the phone immediately.

"What news?" he squeaked.

"There has been an accident."

"If Remo has failed me, I will have his ears!" Chiun screamed.

"It is not Remo's fault. He reached the rendezvous zone only to find the Ingo Pungo had gone to the bottom. He believes it was torpedoed."

"What lunatic would torpedo such a worthy vessel as the Ingo Pungo?"

"That is what I am wondering. Who knew of the vessel's mission?"

"You. I. But not Remo."

"This is not random," Smith said firmly.

"And the consequences of this act of piracy will not be random, either," Chiun said in a thin voice. "I will have satisfaction."

"I will make new arrangements, Master Chiun."

"That goes without saying. The satisfaction I seek is in the form of heads. Many heads. Staring sightlessly at eternity."

"This matter bears looking into, I agree. But we must not call attention to ourselves."

"I will leave the details to you, O Emperor. Just so long as I have my cargo and my heads."

Smith depressed the switch hook, shifted the receiver to his other ear and keyed a few strokes on the capacity keyboard on his desktop.

Instantly the line began ringing. Remo's unhappy voice came on.

"How'd you get back to me? I'm at a pay phone."

"It is a simple computer program."

"But this pay phone doesn't accept incoming calls."

"Override program."

"If AT ds out about this, you're looking at hard time in Leavenworth," Remo muttered.

"Master Chiun is very unhappy with the way this has turned out."

"I'll bet. You told him it wasn't my fault?"

"Of course," said Smith.

"Good. So, what was lost?"

"That is no longer important. I am making other arrangements. But in the meantime I need answers to the Ingo Pungo's fate."

"It sunk. What more do you need to know?"

"Who sunk it and why," said Smith crisply.

"Beats me."

"Take the boat out again. See what you can find."

"It's a big ocean."

"And the longer you delay, the farther away the attacking vessel will get."

"Okay, but only if you put in a good word with Chiun for me. I don't want any of the blame for this. I made the drop point on time. More or less."

"Of course," said Smith, hanging up.

He returned to his screen. The blinking green light that was the Ingo Pungo continued relaying its position to orbiting navigation satellites. Before long the batteries would go dead or seawater would get into the electronics and the signal would die.

In the meanwhile it was like a ghost calling out to the world of the living from its watery grave.

Chapter 5

Anwar Anwar-Sadat was enjoying his insomnia.

As Secretary-General of the United Nations, Anwar Anwar-Sadat had been experiencing more than his share of sleepless nights of late. Things were not going well for his grand scheme to subsume sovereign nations under UN control. It was very distressing. He had expected backlashes. All manner of backlashes. This was why he had tread so very carefully in the early phases.

Not many months ago his office polar-projection map of the globe was checkerboarded in blue. Blue for UN blue. Blue for nations enjoying UN oversight and occupations. It was the golden age for United Nations influence upon the nations of the world. Or a blue age.

Anwar-Sadat much preferred to think of it as a blue age.

But now the blue tide was receding. UNPROFOR-the United Nations Protection Force-had been discredited in the former Yugoslavia. Now the uneasy truces were under NATO control. His loyal blue berets had been replaced by the so-called Implementation Force, or IFOR. True, UN forces currently occupied Haiti, but Haiti was a nothing in geopolitical terms. Not even a factor. In fact, when painted blue on the UN maps, it tended to disappear into the blue of the Caribbean Sea, itself a watery nothing.

Haiti was a useless beachhead. It would not advance the cause of the global supernation that Anwar Anwar-Sadat envisioned in his One World of the future.

It was after the debacle in the former Yugoslavia, now a jigsaw comprised of shattered Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia, that the sleepless nights began to steal Anwar Anwar-Sadat's all-important sleep.

No pills would help. Not Sominex. Not Nytol. Not Excedrin PM. Not the new thing called melatonin. Nothing.

So Anwar Anwar-Sadat had had a computer terminal installed in his Manhattan high-rise apartment and taught himself to turn it on and manipulate its complex commands, whereas before, various functionaries performed that duty during working hours.

Anwar-Sadat was too private a man to allow a staff functionary to remain on call during his leisure hours. So he learned to use the mouse and a simple program called Bob and in time became quite proficient in manipulating them both.

In time he became truly glad to have expended the effort to master the computer.

Thanks to Mistress Kali.

The Secretary-General had never met Mistress Kali, but that day was approaching. She had promised him so. Promised many times. Twice they had agreed to rendezvous. But the first time Mistress Kali had canceled. The second time it was UN business that had interfered.

The delays only made Anwar Anwar-Sadat itch with a mighty itching for the golden day he would at last meet his golden goddess.

He knew she was a goddess because she had told him so.

"Please describe yourself to me," Anwar had written those many weeks ago.

"I am golden of hair, and my eyes are as green as the Nile. When I walk, I am like a desert wind sighing through date palms. I am the wind and the palms both. My breath is warm, and my hips are supple and sway lyrically when I move."

"You sound ...enticing," Anwar had typed, feeling a strange warmth he had not felt since he was a young man back in Cairo.

"I am a goddess in womanly form," Mistress Kali had replied.

And Anwar had believed. For who would lie about such a thing?

"Are you ...voluptuous?" he typed.

"My shape is very pleasing. My features are delectable. My skin, flawless."

In those few words, Anwar wove a mental image that had yet to be modified by photographs or videotape. Left to his own imagination, he took the vague description of a blond-haired green-eyed enchantress and filled in the blanks with the woman of his dreams.

Since he had created most of the mental image, of course he fell in love with it. Mistress Kali was the personification of his deepest longings, the embodiment of his most denied desires.

"I worship you, Mistress Kali."

"I exist to be worshiped."

"Am I your only worshiper?" he typed, fear in his heart.

"You have the opportunity to earn that distinction, my Anwar."

"Command me," Anwar found himself typing.

"You must prove yourself worthy of my commands, my Anwar."

With that, Mistress Kali had signed off for three days. Three tedious, hateful days in which his e-mail address and his real-time computer-chat calls were haughtily ignored. Three endlessly sleepless nights in which he tossed and turned, thinking the worst. She had died. She had fallen in love with another. She was married and her husband had discovered her infidelity. For three nights he could not tear his eyes from the always-running blue computer screen with its burning white letters.

When on the fourth day an e-mail message popped up on the screen, Anwar leaped for the terminal.

The letter was brief, to the point, but pregnant with meaning: "Did you miss me?"

His reply was even briefer. "Damnably so."

"We should chat."

Eagerly Anwar Anwar-Sadat logged on to the chat line they used when their difficult schedules coincided.

"Where have you been?" he demanded.

"Away. But I am back."

"I thought the worst."

"Never fear. There will always be a place for you in my life, my darling."

Anwar's heart thumped. It was the first time she had used an endearment.

"My Pharaohess..." he replied, his eyes misting over.

"So how has been your life, Anwar?"

"Difficult. Things do not go well."

And he poured out his woes and ambitions and frustrations, divulging more about his schemes and goals than even his most trusted Coptic aides were told.

To his utter dumbfoundment, her replies were intelligent, insightful and very much on target.

"What is it you do that gives you such a mind?" Anwar Anwar-Sadat demanded.

"I am Everywoman. You need know no more."

"I ache to know all about you."

"Woman is mystery. Once you know all, I will cease to attract you."

Anwar Anwar-Sadat had to be satisfied with riddles. And he was. For a time. Nightly he told her of his day. And each night she advised him on the day to come.

One day he lamented the receding blue tide that was the seven continents.

"I cannot control the nations of the world. They are like mischievous children. If only they would cede some control to me. I could solve many of the world's problems. But the blue nations are reverting to green. In Bosnia my UNPROFOR has given way to a NATO thing called IFOR. If the tides continue to ebb, the only blue that will remain will be the seven seas."

To that, Mistress Kali made a reply that Anwar Anwar-Sadat at first dismissed as childish.

"Why not seek control of the seven seas?"

Anwar Anwar-Sadat was weighing a judicious reply, calculated not to offend, when Mistress Kali followed up with another thought.

"The oceans of the world cover three quarters of the face of the globe. It is the source of food, life and is the oldest medium for intercontinental travel. It keeps nations apart, yet connects them by commerce. He who controls the ocean controls the landmasses. Control of landmass equals control of the world."

"This is an astute observation. But oceans are international. No one political body controls them."

"The oceans are controlled for two hundred miles out by nations that have encroached on waters that for centuries were free of man's domination."

"Yes, yes, that last round of treaties expanded them. This was to protect fishing rights. This was twenty years ago. Before my tenure, you understand."

"From where I view the world, two hundred miles is insufficient for the needs of most nations."

"This may be true," Anwar Anwar-Sadat admitted. "But to extend it any farther would invite disastrous conflicts."

"Exactly why the two-hundred-mile limit should be rolled back, and control over coastal waters and deep-sea oceans should fall where it rightfully belongs-under United Nations control."

"This is an intriguing idea. We already speak to this issue in many respects. There is a UN-sponsored international treaty that will allow signatory nations to board and detain violators of recognized fishing regulations. But it will be years before nations sign in sufficient numbers to give it teeth."

"Is it not clear that the extension of the two-hundred-mile limit has only worsened the pillage of the oceans?" Mistress Kali continued. "Today there is virtually no coastal fishery that has not been fished out. This could have been avoided had only your forces taken control of the situation."

"You are unusually well-informed. May I ask where you were educated?"

"I am a student of human nature."

"You are the most brilliant woman I have never met," Anwar Anwar-Sadat typed, ending that bit of admiring whimsy with a smiley: :-)

He only wished there were some way to type out a heart, for he was utterly smitten by this creature who possessed the brain of a shrewd diplomat and the statuesque body of a goddess.

After that bewitching night, Anwar Anwar-Sadat had studied the situation and decided it was feasible.

He gave a speech warning of a global water crisis if the world's precious resources were not husbanded quickly. It was carefully calculated not to offend world governments. It said nothing of control of the seas or fishing rights.

And it sank like a lead balloon. Those newspapers that carried the story buried it on the obituary pages. This infuriated Anwar Anwar-Sadat. These days he found himself buried more and more in the obituaries. It gave him a very ugly feeling. Newscasts reported his remarks as a one-sentence summary just before the car commercials.

By the next day it was completely forgotten.

Except by Anwar Anwar-Sadat.

"There has been no interest expressed in my ideas, Pharaonic One," Anwar Anwar-Sadat informed Mistress Kali that evening.

"You are not a man to give up easily. All you need is an incident to draw attention to your cause,'' she replied crisply. He could almost hear her dulcet tones, though they had never actually spoken.

"I am not in the business of manufacturing incidents. Only in taking advantage of them," Anwar Anwar-Sadat replied unhappily, adding a frownie face: :-(

"Perhaps there is something I can do up here," replied Mistress Kali.

"What, my sweet?"

"Be patient, my Anwar. And if you do not hear from me for some time, understand I think of you hourly and work to fulfil all of your brave dreams."

After she had logged off, Anwar Anwar-Sadat did an impulsive thing. He was not given to impulsive gestures, but this one welled up from deep within him.

He kissed the cold blue computer-screen glass.

Chapter 6

Remo sent the cigarette boat skimming through the oil slick that had now spread an eighth of a mile over the site where the Ingo Pungo went down.

There was a sonar set on board. Remo had figured out how to turn it on, which was pretty good for him. He sometimes had trouble with the VCR.

Passing over the Ingo Pungo, he got a big dead blip. That was his first clue that he had it turned on correctly. Mostly it pinged and binged pointlessly.

Running past the site, he kept the boat on an easterly course. He figured he was looking for a submarine. Maybe the sonar would find it, maybe it wouldn't. Couldn't hurt to try, he figured. Perhaps he'd get lucky.

An hour passed and he watched his gas gauge. He wasn't much of a boater. Fortunately boats were simple. You just had to point the bow where you wanted to go and follow it. The hard part was making landfall. Remo preferred to just run them up on shore and hop out while the hull and propeller chewed themselves up on sand and rocks. Someday they'd build a boat with brakes.

In the end Remo didn't find the submarine so much as the submarine found him.

He got a string of noisy pings. The boat took him past the point of contact before he could check out the screen. Before the pinging stopped abruptly, the last ping sounded like a very big ping, so Remo brought the power boat around for another sweep.

The gleaming black submarine surfaced directly in his path.

It came up with the sail showing first. It lifted out of the water, a slab of blackness with a square of white on its side. Seawater cascaded and drooled from various places on the hull.

Then the long flat deck broke the surface.

Remo cut the power and let the boat glide toward the sub.

The sail loomed closer and closer. It dwarfed the power boat into insignificance.

At the last moment before collision, Remo turned the wheel, and the side of the boat bumped against the hull. He flung out a looped line, snagged a steel cleat and pulled the boat snug to the submarine.

Stepping off casually, Remo walked up to the imposing black sail. He knocked on it once, hard with his knuckles.

The sail rang like a bell. It was a very satisfactory sound. So Remo knocked again.

"Submarine inspector. Anybody home?"

A hatch popped atop the sail. Remo looked up. At his back another hatch popped. It fell down with a clang.

One eye on the sail, Remo glanced over his shoulder.

Two men in white sailor suits were climbing up from the hatch. They carried Uzis. With their faces painted white, they looked like mimes. The white blankness of their expressions was broken by a dark, flowery tattoo in the middle.

Remo recognized the symbol instantly. It was the Boy Scout crest. No, that was gold. This was blue. It still looked familiar.

"You clowns have caused me a lot of trouble," Remo said casually.

The two creeping closer failed to answer. Remo couldn't read their faces, but their weapons were pointed at him with professional intent.

"I surrender. Don't shoot me," he said, hoping they stepped right up to him. But they approached carefully. They weren't fools.

Remo raised his hands to encourage them. That worked. They moved up on quick sneakered feet.

A man appeared up on the sail and pointed a rifle down at Remo, complicating things. But only a little.

Remo offered a weak smile as the two seamen took positions on either side of him. They looked up. Remo looked up, too.

The man on the sail had a white face, too. He gave a hand signal while keeping the rifle trained on Remo.

The two on the deck took comfort in that, and one holstered his Uzi while the other stood back and trained his weapon on Remo with businesslike intent. His eyes were two dark squints.

Remo realized he was about to be frisked for weapons and decided he really didn't want to be frisked.

When one sailor put his hands to Remo's sides, Remo broke both forearms with his elbows. He dug them into his sides. Crunch. Bones splintered. The seaman let out a high, frightened howl.

Pivoting, Remo spun the screaming sailor in a half circle and let go. The flying body slammed into the other sailor, and they went tumbling down the steep side of the sub.

Remo backpedaled in place ahead of the rifle bullet that punched a hole in the deck where he had stood a second before.

Arcing into the water, he made almost no sound, his lean body cleaving the water like an eel. Feet kicking, he used the slimy, cold skin of the hull to guide him to the bow and over to the other side.

Through the water Remo should have been able to hear the sailors shouting at one another. But they weren't shouting. Even the howling sailor had gotten a grip on himself.

Surfacing on the other side of the sub, Remo reached up and found the ankles of the two still struggling to hold on to the deck. They came into the water screaming.

"Fun's over," said Remo, grabbing them by the scruffs of their necks. "Time to confess to Father Remo."

One threw a punch that Remo avoided with a quick bob of his head. The sailor tried twice more, with the same frustrating result.

"Give up?" Remo asked.

They said nothing. If clown faces could look sullen, these two managed a respectable impersonation.

"Last chance to talk freely," Remo warned.

They offered frowns, and their shoulders slumped dejectedly.

So Remo dunked their heads under the surface. Their hands groped and splashed wildly. When he lifted them, they gasped like frightened flounders.

"Okay, who are you guys?"

They gasped some more, so Remo dunked them again. Longer this time.

When he finally brought them up, they were jabbering some doggerel Remo didn't understand at all.

"You two just flunked Usefulness 101," he said, and brought their faces together so fast and hard they fused.

Like Siamese twins joined at the nose, they sank as one. They didn't even struggle. For them the light had gone out forever.

Remo stepped back onto the deck and found the ladder that led up the side of the great black sail. He started climbing.

The seaman on the sail was sweeping the seas with a small gimbal-mounted searchlight now. He missed Remo entirely every time. That was Remo's doing, not the seaman's fault.

Remo pointed out his error by slipping up to the top of the sail and tapping on his shoulder.

Startled, the seaman spun around.

The expression on his pale face was not so much surprise as it was a cartoon. The blue symbol spread outward like a flower coming to life. A black hole formed in the bottom of the gleaming white face. The black hole had blue lips and white teeth, with prominent incisors. Remo flicked the front teeth with a finger, and they flew back into the sailor's mouth.

The seaman grabbed his throat, eyes bugging out in shock.

"That's only a sample of what I can do if I don't get some answers from you," Remo warned.

The seaman doubled over, coughing.

"Uh-oh," said Remo, who then spun the man around and, jamming his fists into his stomach, Heimliched him.

With a grunt the seaman expelled the teeth lodged in his throat, then collapsed on the sail, gasping.

"Speak English?" asked Remo.

The sailor started to gurgle. Then he vomited up his last meal. It looked like potatoes, except they were bluish.

Reaching down, Remo picked him up by the collar and belt and deposited him down the sail's hatch.

He went down, limbs and other bodily projections banging off the spiral staircase. When he reached bottom, Remo started down after him.

It was a big sub. There had to be plenty more sailors to interrogate. And that one had unforgivably splashed vomit on Remo's shoes.

The stink of the interior of the sub was a mixture of oil, cooking odors and stale human sweat. Remo absorbed all these scents as he slipped down the spiral stairs. Fear-sweat was predominant. The air reeked of it.

That meant an ambush down below.

Remo processed the assorted scents. He got a whiff of inert, unburned gunpowder. Sailors with guns. He wasn't in a great position to dodge wild shooting. On the other hand, only idiots would shoot inside a sub on the high seas.

On the other other hand, Remo remembered, these guys were wearing clown faces. No telling what they would do.

He decided to smoke them out. He was coming down on silent feet, and deliberately he stumbled. The stairs rang like a tuning fork.

And up from the shadows they poured, silent except for their drumming boots. No shouting. No war cries.

"Are these guys all mute?" Remo wondered aloud.

The steps vibrated with their mad rushing as they circled up and around.

Remo reached out and took hold of the spiral rail corkscrewing around the stairs. Stepping out, he let his legs dangle and slid down on both hands.

The sailors saw him going past as they were going up. They collided, bunched up, and started to reverse course.

By the time they got themselves organized, Remo had reached bottom and ducked through a hatch. He dogged it shut. That let him in and kept them out.

Moving down the cramped corridor, Remo came upon a sailor with a white-and-blue face.

"Speak English?" he asked casually.

The sailor was unarmed. He ran. Remo grabbed him by the shoulder and began to squeeze his hard rotator cup.

"Habla espanol?" he asked.

The man screamed. No words. Just high, mindless screaming.

"Parlez-vous Francais?''

More screaming.

"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"

He apparently didn't speak German. So Remo tried Korean. "Hanguk-mal hae?"

The man's rolling eyes turned white. They matched his face. It created an interesting effect. While his mouth was open, Remo checked to see if he had a tongue. He did. A pink one.

Having exhausted his stock of languages, Remo put the screaming sailor out his misery with a hard tap to the temple. The man collapsed in the corridor, and Remo stepped over him.

Back the way Remo came, the trapped sailors began pounding on the dogged hatch. That was all they did. Pound. They said nothing. They might have been completely mute. Or what they seemed to bemimes.

"What would mimes be doing with a sub?" Remo muttered to himself, wishing Chiun were here. The Master of Sinanju would have an answer. It was even money it would be wrong, but at least it would be something to argue about. This slipping around a submarine wasn't exactly Remo's idea of a productive evening.

Remo knocked on each closed hatch as he passed by, hoping to draw someone out. He got no takers. A white-faced sailor dogged a hatch after himself when he saw Remo coming.

That meant they were afraid of him-always a good way to start an interrogation. All Remo needed was someone to interrogate.

Behind him another hatch clanged shut. It was far behind. Then, not twenty yards down the passage way, a hatch opened and a hand tossed out a grenade.

Remo shot into reverse, knowing the blast radius would be small.

When the grenade let go, it did so with a pop, releasing a spurt of yellowish white gas cloud. The cloud had nowhere to go but Remo's way.

Remo smelled the first wisp of gas and understood he was not at risk. It was pepper gas. Nonlethal.

Pausing, Remo picked a hatch and tried to undog it. The wheel wouldn't turn. Someone had locked it on the other side. The same was true for the next hatch. He took hold of it with both hands and forced it to turn. It did give a bit, then it cracked and Remo found himself holding a broken section of useless wheel.

A hatch at the end of the corridor was locked, too.

And the white exhalation kept spreading Remo's way.

He pinched his eyelids shut, making them tear. That was to protect his eyes.

Closing his mouth, Remo sucked in a long breath of air. It stung a little, but was mostly good. Then he began to exhale in a long, slow release of carbon dioxide.

As long as he kept air flowing out through his nostrils, no gas could get in.

That left him practically blind and with limited oxygen. Remo just hoped the gas didn't work through the pores, too.

Turning to face the hatch, Remo found the exposed hinges. They were massive. Laying the side of his hand against the top one, he brought it back and chopped hard at the place his sensitive fingertips told him the metal was weakest. The hinge shattered. Remo chopped the other one. It broke, and a chunk of cold steel fell with a clang.

Grabbing the wheel, he exerted pull. The wheel remained locked, but without functioning hinges, it was useless. Remo wrestled the hatch off its shattered hinges, and the locking mechanism twisted out of its groove.

Dropping it on the floor, Remo moved on.

He found another hatch that was open. It led to a corridor. He moved down its length by feel, ears alert for the pounding of excited hearts. Every sense was alert.

After a while it felt safe to open his eyes. Remo squeezed out the last protecting tears as he tried to figure out his next line of attack.

Before, he had been headed toward the control compartment amidships. Now he was angling back toward the tail.

Remo could feel eyes on him. From time to time, he spotted ceiling video cameras. Remo waved at them where he could.

No one waved back. No one tried to stop him, either.

But a lot of hatches were hastily shut as he approached them. After he passed them, too.

Just to see what happened, Remo knocked on one hatch.

"All clear!" he shouted through the steel. He repeated the call, knocking loudly.

He heard a gunshot. A smooth spot on the hatch abruptly bulged out, followed by two closely spaced ricochet sounds.

Remo decided to leave well enough alone. These guys were so nervous they were capable of sinking the sub with everyone aboard, including Remo.

He moved on. It was weird. The crew seemed pretty scared of him-which they should be. But this was a different scared. Usually Remo had to pile the bodies to the rafters to get this kind of reaction.

Finally he found himself under the deck hatch through which the two sailors first emerged to attack him.

Behind him a hatch clanged shut. The other hatches were also closed. Only the deck hatch remained open like a clear invitation.

Then, with a sudden gurgling of moving water, the sub began shifting and settling. They were blowing the ballast tanks.

Bitterly cold brine began slopping down from the open hatch. Remo saw he had two choices: close the hatch and sink with the sub or get topside and swim for it.

He decided to swim for it.

Remo went up the hatch like a moth on wing, gained the deck and sprinted through the sloshing water surging over the deck plates for his bobbing power boat.

He jumped into it, unhooked the line and pushed off.

The engine refused to start. Remo pressed the starter button again and again. Finally the props churned water.

"Great," he muttered darkly. "Maybe I should have stayed on the sub."

Remo succeeded just as the closing waters met along the dorsal spine of the submarine. The sail was slipping under the waves like a retreating deity of black steel.

Remo stayed with the power boat as long as he could. He felt the undertow drag and clutch at it. A vortex began to take shape.

In the end he was forced to face the same choice as seamen in distress face. Abandon ship--or go down with it.

The boat was sucked under the waves. Remo was, too. He allowed the cold waters of the Atlantic to close over him, then kicked with all his strength. Not up, which was impossible now, but sideways, out of the vortex.

Like an elastic band snapping, the downward tug relaxed, and Remo shot to the surface.

Reaching breathable air, he treaded water.

Then and only then did he realize he had made the mistake of his life.

"I should have stayed with the sub."

In the immensity of the black night, with the uncaring sea holding him in its frigid grasp, and the familiar New England stars looking down from their remote stations, Remo's own voice sounded surprisingly small in his ears.

Chapter 7

The cold of the North Atlantic felt like bands of cold steel squeezing Remo Williams's chest. The air coming in through his nostrils, warmed by nasal passages and throat, was still too cold when it reached his lungs. They burned. It was a cold, life-draining burning.

He was losing body heat rapidly. His nerves were shutting down.

Yet somehow Remo was able to sense the upward ripple of the icy ocean water being pushed by the blunt snout of the shark.

Expelling the remaining air from his lungs, he slid under the waves. If a shark wanted to eat him, it was going to have to fight for its supper.

Under the water Remo's night vision came into play. He made out a blue-gray shape rising to meet him. Jackknifing, he went down to meet it.

Predatory eyes glinted toward him. A mouth like a grinning cave filled with needles showed dim and deadly. It yawned. Teeth revealed themselves, ragged and overlapping but wickedly sharp. Teeth that could snap off an arm or a leg cleanly, Remo knew.

The gap closed. Remo twisted his back to create torsion in his spinal column. He could no longer see the shark, but he could roll out of its path-if he timed it to the last second and the shark cooperated.

At the last second Remo felt the lack of oxygen and knew the maneuver was doomed. He was too weak. His nerves were like spidery icicles that would break under the simplest strain.

Sensing the weakness of its prey, the shark gave an eager, convulsive wiggle of its sleek body and lunged for Remo.

In that moment, with ugly teeth straining for his flesh, Remo noticed a loose shark tooth and remembered something.

Shark teeth are like baby teeth. They come loose easily and regenerate later.

Making a spear with one hand and a fist with the other, Remo kicked like a frog and made for those rows of ugly teeth.

A short-armed punch connected with the blunt snout. The shark recoiled under the unexpected blow. It rolled, twisted and Remo went for the gaping maw of teeth.

With a sweep of his hand, he cleared the upper gums of teeth. The maw snapped shut, squirting a mixture of blood, triangular teeth and angry bubbles. Too late. Remo's hand had already retreated.

On the return sweep he got most of the lower set. A few remained here and there. The lower corner was still heavily toothed.

Threshing about, the shark fought to regain its orientation.

Remo got under it, curled his body into a ball and, with the last atoms of oxygen still burning in his lungs, gave it an upward kick.

Shocked, the shark shot to the surface-as much from panic as from the unexpected blow.

Remo surfaced behind the shark, drew in air and got his mitochrondria-the part of his cells that functions like tiny energy furnaces--charged again.

The cold air felt like the cold water around him. He couldn't tell one from the other. His skin was cold and blue and unfeeling. In the moonlight he saw the skin under his fingernails turning a purplish black.

Kicking, Remo got to the shark's side, took hold of its sturdy dorsal fin and pulled himself on board.

The shark didn't resist. It was stunned.

Its tough bluish hide scraped skin from Remo's bare arms. But that hide could provide warmth by acting as a wet suit. Wrapping his legs around the shark's tail, Remo hugged it tightly, its fin nudging his crotch.

Gradually a bit of warmth was restored in his body. It wouldn't be in time. It would not save him. But as long as he breathed, Remo still had a chance.

Even if he couldn't exactly see that chance. Or where it would come from.

Time passed. The shark began to switch its muscular tail. Remo clamped down to inhibit its forward movement. Once the shark dived, it would be in its element. And it would be all over for Remo.

As they struggled, Remo focused on the will to live. A man fought for his life when his life had meaning. Remo's life had meaning to him. He wasn't always satisfied with it. Often not satisfied with it at all. But it was his life, and he intended to hold on to it.

He thought of Chiun, and how his life had been transformed and redirected through the training of the last Korean Master of Sinanju. He thought of the House of Sinanju, and the villagers who had survived for five thousand years because the Master of Sinanju had gone out into the known world to ply the trade of assassin, feeding the village that could not feed itself because the soil was too rocky to till and the waters too cold for fishing.

Remo saw the impassive faces of those villagers, unchanged down through the ages, with their suspicious eyes and alien faces.

On second thought, maybe staying alive for the sake of those people wasn't the way to go.

He thought of his own life. Of the women he had known and loved and mostly lost. He thought of Jilda of Lakluun, a Viking warrior woman with whom he had had a daughter, a laughing-eyed little girl named Freya. Over a year ago Remo had been visited by the spirit of his own deceased mother and was told by her that a shadow had fallen over Freya. The danger was not yet great, but it was growing.

Since then Remo had been on Harold Smith's back to find Freya, but even Smith's far-reaching computers couldn't locate a teenage girl whose last name was unknown and unguessable.

Shifting position to warm his left side, Remo recalled the image of little Freya. When he had last seen her, she was seven. Now she would be thirteen. A very young lady. Closing his eyes, he tried to imagine what her face would look like today. His imagination failed him. He couldn't envision the daughter he had seen only once in his life; he could only remember her as she was on their last meeting.

Over the lap and gurgle of water, he thought he heard her tinkling laugh. It came again. Clearer this time.

"Freya?"

"Daddy. Where are you?"

Remo's eyes snapped open.

"Freya!"

"Daddy, don't die. Live for me. Live for meeeeeee."

"Freya."

But the voice was gone. Only the monotonous waters spoke.

Regathering his energies, Remo made a decision. He would live for Freya. If for no other reason, for Freya. Freya was somewhere in danger, and he would find her. Somehow.

The shark was threshing more now. Remo kneed it. It huffed, expelling water from its bleeding mouth.

Its triangular head twisted and bucked. Remo held on. He caught glimpses of the remaining teeth down in its lower jaw.

If the shark ever caught him in its mouth, those few ragged teeth would still saw through his flesh like razors.

"You wanna eat me?" Remo growled.

The shark threshed, one eye coming into view. It was flat, black and inhuman. But Remo sensed a cold, predatory intelligence that saw him as warm food.

"You want to eat me, you rat bastard?" Remo repeated, angrier this time.

The shark flexed its stiff cartilage tail.

"Well, maybe I'll eat you instead."

Reaching forward, Remo snapped off a shark tooth. It happened so fast the shark couldn't react in time.

Remo plunged the tooth into the tough hide. It went in. Sharks were not immune to shark bites. They frequently cannibalized one another.

Blood erupted, dark, almost black-red. Remo placed his lips to the wound and drank deep. It was salty and bitter but it was sustenance. It was fish blood, so he could drink it safely. Beef blood would probably poison his purified system.

After drinking all he could stand, Remo reinserted the tooth deep, then ripped it straight back.

The tough hide parted, exposing reddish pink meat.

With quick motions Remo sliced row after row of lines, filleting the shark alive.

It struggled. Remo quieted it by squeezing until its gills expelled water. And reaching in, Remo ripped out a slab of shark steak.

He began eating it raw. Taking big bites and gobbling the food down. There was no time for the niceties of chewing it correctly. He needed the energy from its meat, its life force, in his belly. Now.

The shark tried rolling. Remo steered its fin against the motion. The shark righted itself. It resumed threshing and twisting, but ultimately it was weak from loss of blood. Its blood oozed out, a reddish shimmer on the surrounding waters.

Remo ate on, ripping out fistfuls of tough meat. The taste was rank. Sharks ate the trash of the sea and they tasted like it. So even though Remo's diet was restricted by Sinanju training to certain varieties of rice, fish and duck, Remo rarely ate shark.

As Chiun had once explained to him, "He who eats shark eats what a shark has eaten."

"Sharks sometimes eat people," Remo had said, understanding.

"He who eats shark risks being a cannibal by proxy."

So Remo avoided shark. But this was life or death. His life and the shark's death. It was the law of the sea. The big fish ate the little ones.

Little by little the shark's struggles became noticeably more feeble. After a while it just floated, still alive but dying.

And inevitably the fins of other sharks, attracted by the smell of seeping blood, appeared in the water.

They came from the north, south and west. At first they cut the water in aimless, searching circles. Closing in, they would rip red chunks from the shark's inert carcass in a matter of minutes.

And from Remo, too, if he let it happen.

Remo Williams wasn't about to let it happen.

Fuel in his stomach, his body temperature stabilized, he got up on his hands and knees. Then, balancing carefully because the shark carcass was unstable, he found his feet.

The approaching fins slicing the heaving swells were only yards away now. They knifed the water with cold intent. Remo could almost hear the Jaws theme in his head.

Selecting one fin swimming away from the others, Remo faced it.

The first maws yawed upward and lunged. It was now or never.

Remo jumped from his perch.

Landing on the solitary shark's back, he dropped to one knee, grabbing the stabilizing fin in his hand.

Twisting, he steered it away from the carcass just as the feeding frenzy began.

"Get along, little doggie," Remo muttered as he fought the shark, steering it with its own fin.

In the beginning the shark wasn't exactly cooperative. But it was only a fish. Remo was a man. Remo stood on top of the food chain. No shark was going to disobey him.

He lined up the shark's fin with the western horizon and established a course.

The shark fought naturally. But to live it had to keep swimming forward. Sharks do not sleep. Sharks cannot rest. To keep breathing, they have to continue forward. Or they die.

And since the shark had to keep swimming, it was just a matter of controlling the direction.

Remo kept the shark on course. Sometimes with the fin, other times with a hard slap to its sensitive snout. When it tried to dive, Remo wrenched it back, and the shark would forget all about diving and try to bite the annoying thing on its back.

After a while the shark grew too tired to resist. But it wasn't too tired to swim. It had to keep swimming.

So it swam toward land, with its gills submerged just enough to scoop oxygen.

An hour passed, two, then three. During that time Remo digested the food in his stomach and started to hunger for more. His body was burning calories at a fierce rate. Sustaining his elevated body temperature in the cold North Atlantic was taxing his Sinanju powers.

When he felt strong enough, Remo broke the shark's spine with a single chopping bow. It coughed, an explosion of air. When it slowed to a glide, by using only his index fingernails Remo scored the dorsal hide, carving out a fresh shark steak. He ate two. Then he stood up.

Somewhere in the offshore breeze, Remo smelled land. He had no idea how near it was, but he was ready to make a run for it, especially because the heavy swells were calmer here.

Stepping back, he set himself, charged his lungs and, with tiny steps to create maximum forward momentum, Remo ran the length of the shark and stepped onto the water.

His toes touched, skipped, touched again and kept on skipping.

The art was in not letting his full weight break the surface tension of the water. Cold water was denser and better suited than warm. Otherwise water running might have been impossible in Remo's weakened condition.

But he wanted to live. And so he ran, step after step, sucking the cold, reviving air into his lungs, fighting the fatigue that threatened to engulf him.

He ran because, like a shark, if he stopped, he would die. He could not die, so he ran. And ran and ran and ran, his toes making tiny pattering slaps on the choppy gray-green surface of the Atlantic.

Remo smelled land before he saw it. Remo had no idea how much time had passed. But the smell of cooked food and burning fossil fuels and car exhaust pulled him on.

He saw rocks first. Cold, rockweed-covered New England granite half-eroded by relentless waves.

Remo ran for them. But somewhere in the last mile, his strength gave out. He misstepped, lost his footing and sank into the cold, unforgiving waters-within sight of land and life and safety ....

Chapter 8

She didn't know who she was.

Sometimes in the mirror, she thought she recognized her own eyes. Green eyes. Emerald green. Sometimes they were sapphires. Other times a dull gray. They looked familiar. Her hair did not, but she colored it so often she'd forgotten its true color.

She had been told she was Mistress Kali, but the name didn't fit. Somehow it didn't fit.

When she lay all alone in her great circular bed looking up at the mirrors on the ceiling, she knew she was not Mistress Kali. It was a persona she assumed when she donned the tight black leather that sheathed her supple form. She was Mistress Kali when the silver chains clinked and tinkled. She felt like Mistress Kali when she selected a suitable whip from her stock and donned the yellow silk domino mask.

When she stepped out of her private chambers with its implements of pain and discipline, she knew she was Mistress Kali. There was no doubt. Who else could she be?

But when the silken domino mask came off, the doubts returned. They crept into her mind unbidden.

"Who am I?" She wondered.

Once, she asked. "Who am I?"

"You are Mistress Kali," the sweet but distant voice replied.

"Before that?"

"Before that you were nothing."

"What am I when I am not Mistress Kali?" she pressed.

"Asleep," came the absent reply, dotted by the plasticky clicking of keys. The keys that were never still. The keys that were as much a constant in her life as the clink and rattle of chain. As familiar as the crack of the whip that brought a thrill of power control and sexual release whenever she laid it along a pale white spine and flicked an ass cheek into quivering spasm.

"What will I be when I am no longer Mistress Kali?" she wondered aloud.

"Of no use to me, Mother."

The slip had been strange. She put it out of her mind because the next words chilled her so.

"Do not forget this. Ever."

And the clicking of keys continued. Mistress Kali-she was Mistress Kali again-slid the watery blue-green glass panel back into place.

On the other side, the stunted figure at the computer terminal continued to type without rest. She never slept.

And so long as she never slept, the long, vague nightmare seemed to have no ending.

Chapter 9

The cold water rose up to claim Remo Williams. His mind went blank. He had not the strength to process what was happening to him.

Water touched his lips, splashed into his nostrils, stung his eyeballs.

He held his breath-and his bare feet touched cold, silty sediment. And under it, hard, seaweedslimy granite. Reflexively his legs straightened.

It took a few seconds for the truth to sink in.

The water didn't even cover his head.

Then Remo laughed. It was a laugh of sheer relief. Of pure joy. Within sight of land, he was standing in chin-deep water.

So he began walking, shivering once or twice when the natural protective defenses of the human body overcame his Sinanju training, which had taught that shivering wasted precious energy, even if the body's reflexes forced a person to shiver in order to stay warm.

The last few yards were rocky, and the rocks scummy under his feet. Remo didn't care. He had survived. Chiun would be proud. He had survived an ordeal that might have beaten some of the greater Masters of Sinanju.

But not Remo Williams. He was a survivor. He had survived.

Reaching shore, Remo clambered over the rocks and found a patch of dry, cold sand. His knees felt hollow.

There he lay down and slept until the rays of the morning sun touched his face and a voice asked, "Where the hell have you been?"

Remo blinked, lifted his head and saw a face that wasn't at first familiar, though the Red Sox ball cap was.

"Who are you?" he muttered weakly.

"Ethel. Don't you remember me? I gave you a lift. We had a deal."

"Oh, that. Sure."

Her lined face hovered over him, filling his field of vision.

"What kept you?" she asked.

"I was fighting off sharks."

"Where's the stuff?"

"Something went wrong."

"I kinda figured that." She stood up, eyed Remo critically and asked, "You know what?"

"What?" said Remo, not really caring at the moment.

"Last night I thought you were kinda cute."

"Thanks," Remo murmured tiredly.

"But now you look like something the cat dragged in, and I wouldn't have you on a stick."

"That's nice," said Remo, closing his tired eyes.

"So I guess I don't feel so bad about what I did."

"That's nice, too," said Remo, tuning her voice out.

Ethel stood up and called over her shoulder. "He's over here."

"Who is?" mumbled Remo.

"You are," Ethel replied.

The Maine State troopers surrounded Remo with their hands on their side arms. They looked unhappy, the way men look when they've spent a cold night on a long stakeout.

"Get up, sir," one said formally. "You are under arrest."

"For what?"

"Suspicion of smuggling."

"Smuggling what?"

"You tell us."

Remo got up, shivered one last time energetically and cracked a weak grin. "The only thing I'm smuggling is shark meat."

"Where is this contraband?" the second trooper demanded.

"In my stomach."

Nobody looked very amused.

Because it was the easiest way to go and it meant warmth and probably dry clothes, Remo allowed himself to be taken to the local state police barracks. He was issued a hot shower and blue prisoner denims. He took them in that order.

"We know you're a bad guy," a trooper told Remo in the interrogation room after Remo had gotten dry.

"Wrong. I'm a good guy."

"You're a smuggler. Ethel said so. She's well liked around here."

"You know, I thought she had an honest face."

"She does. Why do you think she turned you in?"

"Good point," said Remo. "I want my one phone call."

"We need your name and address first."

"Sure. Remo Mako." He gave a Trenton, New Jersey, address.

"That a house or apartment?"

"House," said Remo. "Definitely a house."

"Any statement you care to make at this time will be counted in your favor."

"Thanks. My statement is I want to call my lawyer."

A clerical head poked into the interrogation room. "You don't have to. He's already on the horn, demanding to speak to you."

"His name Smith?" asked Remo, who was not about to fall for some trick and lose out on his lawful call.

"Ay-yah. And you must get into a lot of this kind of trouble if he knows where you are so quick."

REMO TOOK THE CALL in private.

"What took you so long, Smitty?"

"Your Remo Mako alias is not on my list of approved cover names. When it went out on lawenforcement wires, my system spit out the fact that the address you gave was that of the Trenton State Prison death house. That told me it was you being held in the Lubec barracks on suspicion of smuggling."

"Good catch."

"What happened, Remo?"

Dr. Harold W. Smith was grimly silent after Remo told him what had happened.

"You can spring me the polite way or I can spring myself," Remo told him.

"We need to do this quietly."

"Don't take long, or I'll take matters into my own hands," Remo warned.

Remo knew he was on his way home when he heard the helicopter rotors beating his way.

The chopper settled on the back lawn, where he could see it from his holding cell. It was a big orange-and-white Jayhawk rescue helicopter with the Coast Guard anchor-and-flotation-ring crest in red-and-white striping on the tail.

Coast Guardsmen in crisp whites came running out, holding their service caps against the rotor wash.

In less than ten minutes Remo was being processed out.

"You might have informed us you were with the Coast Guard," the arresting officer told Remo as he searched his pockets for the handcuff key.

Remo handed over the handcuffs, still locked tight, and said, "Lost my ID in the water. Would you have taken my word for it?"

"No," the trooper admitted.

"There you go," said Remo.

The Coast Guard chopper ferried Remo to the local guard station, where Remo was transferred to a Coast Guard Falcon jet. It took off screaming, and two hours later Remo was deposited at Logan International Airport in Boston.

He took a cab home, thinking that Chiun was either going to be very happy to see him or very angry. Possibly both. It was impossible to predict the Master of Sinanju's moods in advance.

But either way, Remo couldn't wait to see him again. It had been as close to death as he had gotten in a long time, and it felt good to be alive and kicking.

He hoped the Master of Sinanju would feel the same way about things. After all, a mission was just a mission, but Remo was next in line to head the House. How angry could Chiun be?

Chapter 10

She wanted sex. Of course she did. He could tell it from the look on her long face when he walked in the door and from the filmy negligee that would drape a busty blonde wonderfully. But clinging to her scrawny, pale skin, it looked pathetic. Like spiderwebs on a corpse.

He avoided her kiss by striking first. A peck on the cheek, and sensing it would not be enough to avoid the tobacco breath, a second, more careful one on the brow.

She stepped back, spreading the gauzy wings of the negligee.

Lavender, for God's sake. Made her look like a harridan.

"I thought you'd never get home, dear," she cooed.

He wanted to slap her. Tell her to grow up. She was a mother, for Christ's sake. Why couldn't she settle for that? Not these pathetic attempts to rekindle the spark that was long past cooling.

"I had a difficult day," he said guardedly, his eyes going to the closed door of the den.

Her smiling face bobbed into view.

"Then you'll need a long, leisurely ...what?"

"Soak," he said quickly.

"Soak. Yes, have a nice soak. I think I'll join you."

There was no way out. Divorce was out of the question. Without a wife he might as well pack it in. Throw away all hope, all ambition, all thoughts of the future.

"All right," he said, mustering up what passed for marital enthusiasm. "We'll share a soak."

The soak was as sexy as bathing with an Irish wolfhound. With her long face, thin arms and absolute absence of a bust or bottom, she more and more reminded him of an Irish wolfhound, an abysmally hideous canine.

When it was over, she toweled him down lovingly and led him by the hand to the bedroom, where scented candles flamed in glass jars. It was all very bewitching. All the tableau needed was a woman with some meat on her bones.

But he hadn't married her for her flesh, but for her mind, her good breeding, her impeccable character. A respectable wife was one of the inconvenient accoutrements for a man on the move.

He never stopped to think that even sex became boring if one did it often enough in the same two unimaginative positions with absolutely no props or enhancements.

So, once again he went through the motions. Foreplay consisted of a few chaste kisses, a perfunctory back rub and then he mounted her. He wanted to strangle her. Strangling her would have made it exciting for once, and it would have ensured that he'd never have to plumb these unpleasant depths again.

In the moment she gave before his first prodding thrust, he decided the hell with it and took her violently. It was madness, but he was desperate. It had been too long. And he was under such stress at the office, what with the latest Angus Reid polls and all.

To his astonishment, she loved it. She shrieked wildly, then began moaning as he pumped and pumped as if driving a stake through a vampire's heart. That was how it felt. Like driving a stake through the heart of the undead thing that his marriage had become.

Climaxing, she sank her teeth in his shoulder and shuddered uncontrollably.

It wasn't passionate, but as least he had climaxed. For once.

"You came!" she whispered, giving the word a slutty inflection.

"Miracles never cease," he said dryly.

Her smile was a dim porcelain glow in the wan light. "Admit it. It was wonderful."

"Shattering," he said, disengaging.

As he rolled over, she doused the bedroom light and blew the candles out. She was humming. It was some mindless Barry Manilow song he detested.

But at least it was over.

As he waited for sleep to come, he smelled a pungent odor. It was her. But it reminded him of something else. The sexiest smell in the entire world.

The smell of ripped and gutted fish.

It wouldn't let him sleep. He prayed for sleep, but the tuna smell in his nostrils was like scented cotton.

He waited until her snoring filled the room before throwing off the bed covers and digging his feet into his slippers.

He padded into the den and turned on the computer. The paneled walls were adorned with schooner prints. A varnished pine plaque over the monitor had a legend burned into it by a soldering iron: From Sea To Sea.

The system went through its interminable sign-on cycles, and finally he accessed his e-mail via the service.

There was no message from the one who haunted his thoughts. It had been nearly a month. Where was she?

The cellular telephone in his briefcase buzzed. Snapping it open, he lifted it to his face and spoke. "Yes?"

"Commodore."

"Go ahead."

"We had another inconvenient encounter."

"Details, please."

"A U.S. vessel in the Nose. We were conducting routine truffle operations, and the illegal spotted the Hound on his fish-finding sonar. We had to take action."

"Vessel status?"

"Scuttled."

"Crew?"

"Cat food."

"Witnesses?"

"None. As before."

"That will do."

"Aye-aye, Commodore."

"Continue herding operations. Report any anomalies."

"Aye, sir."

Closing the cell phone, he laid it beside the terminal. His eyes went to the screen.

And there, like a beacon, glowed a New Message prompt line.

To: Commodore@net.org From: Kali@yug.net Subject: Call me instantly

But the message area was only blank space.

"Bitch!" he muttered.

He had been warned never to call, never to visit, without being summoned first. No one gave a man of his stature orders, and that was part of the thrill, of course.

He punched out the number from memory and waited with pounding heart and an uncomfortable rising sensation in his crotch.

"If you dialed correctly, you know my name," her cool contralto voice said. "Speak."

"Mistress."

"Commodore."

"Er, I have your message."

"All is well, I trust," she said coolly.

"As well as it can be with the current situation."

"Still conducting tests?"

"Er, yes. We had an accident this evening."

"You must tell me all about it." It was not a polite invitation, but a firm command.

"Be glad to."

"In person."

"I would be delighted. Shall I bring something?" Her voice dripped with contempt. "Bring your obedience, worm." And she hung up.

He changed from his stained pajama pants into fresh trousers and sped through the sleeping city to the place he knew as the Temple.

It was unlocked. He stepped into the anteroom and through double doors beside which danced barbaric carvings of bare-breasted females with ripe lips, lascivious hips and multiple arms poised to please. In the preparation room he removed his clothes down to the last stitch.

His manhood was already rising. He swallowed hard, presented himself to the mirrored door of one-way glass. He saw himself. Behind the obscuring glass, she was looking at him, he knew. He could feel her blazing blue eyes upon him.

Her cool question floated through the barrier. "Are you prepared to enter my presence?"

"I am, Mistress."

"Then assume the position of approach."

Falling on hands and knees, he crept toward the door, bumping it open with his head.

Like a scuttling crab, he entered the room.

He kept his eyes on the polished floor because the penalty for doing otherwise was severe, and it was too early in the encounter to expect the corporal delights to be visited upon him.

He stopped when his head bumped her stiletto boots and one lifted to press its steely pointedness into his bare back.

"Tell me," she said flatly.

"Anything."

"Tell me what happened tonight that disturbs you so."

"Another U.S. fishing vessel stumbled onto a test. It had to be disposed of for security reasons. Crew and vessel are no more."

"Very wise."

"No one will ever know."

Her tone turned sarcastic. "Except you and I and everyone involved. That is how many individual persons?"

"I imagine thirty, all told," he stuttered.

"Thirty people in on a secret that could ruin your career, if not your life. If only one percent of them tell one person, how big a leak is that?"

"Considerable," he admitted.

"How big?"

"Disastrous."

"That's better." Her voice shed its bitter sarcasm, though it could hardly be said to soften.

"It's a well-known axiom, Commodore, that if you tell one person a confidence, you must assume you told three. Because most people feel the urge to confide in their most trusted confidants, who in turn will confide in theirs, and so on several times over until the secret is fully out and no longer a secret but common gossip."

"Stories distort in the telling."

"It may be time to move to the next level."

"Escalation?"

"I have read your polls. They are sinking. You are sinking."

"I am receptive to your merciless counsel, as always, Mistress."

"Of course. How could it be otherwise?"

She dug her heel into his back, and the bullwhip-whose leather he smelled but did not see unwound from her unseen hand to fall heavily over his head like a shiny, crinkled tentacle.

"I can see you are in need of convincing."

In fact, it was the contrary. But he had more urgent needs. Already the bullwhip was being gathered up into a tense, tight coil of unreleased energy.

"Whatever you decree, Mistress."

"I decree pain!"

And the bullwhip cracked down on his back like a bitter, stinging kiss.

His face was pushed into the black floor. His hardness burned, sliding to one side under the pressure of his recoiling body. Later he would discover friction burns. He loved friction burns. They were like a badge of honor.

She was hectoring him mercilessly. "You will escalate. You will provoke and you will obey."

"I will obey."

"You will obey absolutely!"

"I will obey absolutely."

And kneeling before him, she lifted his head by the sweaty hair, thrusting her womanly face into his own. Her eyes burned like icy blue diamonds. Her golden hair was a wild cloud framing a perfect face made more perfect by the yellow silk domino mask. Her lips glistened with a bloody shine. They pulsed with her moist, confident exhalations, not an inch from his eager ear.

"I will tell you what you must do ...."

Chapter 11

Tomasso Testaverde was a survivor. From his earliest days of stealing fish off the slush-laden wheelbarrows and ice buckets on the busy Kingsport, Massachusetts, wharves of his youth to the day he crewed his first dragger, he was a survivor.

It was said of Tomasso Testaverde that he was a survivor to the day he died.

He died on a day just like any other. All of the days of Tomasso Testaverde's life were essentially the same. That was to say, larcenous.

Deep in his larcenous heart, though Tomasso didn't see himself that way, he was a low thief.

When he stole fish off the docks and cooked them over fires made in the crumbling, naked chimneys of Old Dogtown, where witches used to dwell in the long-ago days before his grandfather Sirio came from Sicily, Tomasso saw himself as simply an opportunist. One who took advantage of life's little opportunities. Nothing more. And besides, he was hungry. His father was away for weeks at a time fishing cod off the Grand Banks, or sometimes seining mackerel off the Virginia coast. Tomasso's mother was, as they liked to say, a woman whose heels grew rounder the longer her husband's shoes were not tucked under her bed.

Had he been born a fish, Tomasso Testaverde would have been a bottom feeder.

When he grew older, it was no longer possible to hide in small places or outrun the fishermen from whom he pilfered haddock and flounder. Tomasso discovered he had acquired an unfortunate reputation. And so crewing on the trawlers and draggers of his peers, as his ancestors had done, was not in his future.

But a resourceful boy invariably flowers into a resourceful adult. Denied the livelihood of a man, Tomasso shunned those who refused to let him crew on their boats and so found other, more creative ways to survive.

In those days they set lobster pots in the water just off the shore, lowering the pots in the morning and hauling them up again at night. The buoys were colored, so that no one hauled up a pot that was not his, but as far as Tomasso was concerned, any untended pot he happened upon in his rickety dory was his.

After all, he always replaced the pot just as he found it, keeping only the lobsters within. This was fair.

And so Tomasso acquired a new reputation, one more lasting than the old. For a wayward boy might be forgiven in time, but a man who stole the sustenance from the mouths of hardworking Italian fishermen was branded for life.

Having no overhead, and expending little labor, Tomasso in time hauled up sufficient free lobsters that a more seaworthy vessel became his.

Here began his true career.

Fishing was hard work and hard work wasn't to Tomasso's liking. Not that he didn't try. He attempted dragging. He tried seine fishing and gill netting. He eked out a haphazard living, acquired a crew that often needed firing because it was cheaper to fire than pay a man regularly, and along the way Tomasso learned every draggerman's trick there was.

It was possible to survive by foraging off the coastal Massachusetts waters for many years.

Until the fish began to recede.

Tomasso refused to believe the stories that were circulating. He was unwelcome in the United Fishermen's Club, where these things were discussed. So he learned of them secondhand and imperfectly.

"Old ladies," he would sneer. "The oceans are vast and the fish free to swim. The fish are not stupid. They know they are sought. They swim farther out. That is all. We will go even farther out for them."

But the farther out the boats went, the harder it was to catch fish. Where in the days of not-so-long-ago, it was possible to lower a net and lift it bursting with pale-bellied cod, the nets straining because the innards of the cod were filling with raw air, by the early 1990s, a lowered net came up filled with wriggling, less desirable brownish whiting, some gray halibut and on a good day a mere bushel of silvery cod.

Tomasso, who had to sell his catch down in Point Judith, Rhode Island, because his cargoes were unwelcome in Massachusetts fish ports, could not meet his expenses.

There were other inconveniences. The diamond-shaped mesh was outlawed. Only small square-mesh nets were legal now. But nets were expensive and Tomasso refused to throw his away. After he was caught for the third time hauling up endangered groundfish in forbidden biomass nets, he was told his license was forfeit.

"I don't care," he told them. "There is no more fish. The others have frightened them all away. I am going north, where the lobster is plentiful."

And it was true. Lobsters were plentiful up in the Gulf of Maine. Also, Tomasso Testaverde wasn't known up in Maine. Maine would be good for him. It would be a fresh start.

Up in Bar Harbor he was accepted. The lobsters were coming back after a short period of decline. Catches were exploding.

"The cod will come back, too. You wait and see," Tomasso often said.

They were harvesting other things in Maine. Rock crab. Eels. Spiny sea urchin was very lucrative, too. But it was intensive work, and urchin roe was not to Tomasso's taste. He refused to catch what he could not also eat.

"I will stick with lobsters. Lobsters I know," boasted Tomasso Testaverde. "I will be the King of Lobsters, you wait and see. I know them well, and they know me."

But Tomasso was surprised to discover that they had rules in the Gulf of Maine. The fisheries people down east, as they called Maine or Maine called itself, were concerned that the lobsters would go the way of the cod, although that was absurd on the face of it, Tomasso thought. Cod swam far. Lobsters were crawlers. They could only crawl so far.

In the early months he caught great red jumboes, some albinos and even a very rare fifty-pound blue lobster. It made the newspapers, this monster lobster of Tomasso Testaverde's. Marine biologists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute said it was possibly one hundred years old and should not be sold to the restaurants for food.

A famous actress came to Bar Harbor to personally plead for the life of the blue lobster. Tomasso offered to spare if it the actress slept with him. She slapped him. Tomasso, cheek as red as a common lobster's, dropped the blue lobster into a boiling pot of water and ate it himself out of spite, dropping off the angry red discarded shell at the hotel where the actress slept in selfish isolation.

After that, people shunned Tomasso Testaverde. Other lobstermen especially. It did not matter to him, though. Tomasso cared only about taking lobsters from the Gulf of Maine. And the lobsters were there for the taking, to be sure.

He used all the tricks, such as soaking cloth in kerosene and baiting his lobster traps with the malodorous stuff although this was frowned upon for environmental reasons. For some reason no one knew, lobsters were attracted to the scent of kerosene in the water.

But it was the rules and regulations that bothered Tomasso Testaverde the most. They were many and inconvenient.

Lobsters under a certain length could not be taken legally. These Tomasso dropped into a secret icefilled chest in his boat. These he ate himself. Working with lobsters had not dulled his taste for the crustacean's sweet, firm meat. It pleased him to think he ate for free what rich men better than he paid good money to enjoy on special occasions.

Another rule said the egg-bearing female of any size must be returned to the sea to protect future generations of lobstermen by ensuring future generations of lobsters. Tomasso, who had no sons, thought the law should not apply to him. Only to men with futures. Tomasso cared only about today. Only about survival. Tomorrow would take care of itself.

"The law applies to everyone," a man in a bar once said to him over beer, Buffalo wings and complaints.

"Different rules for different men. That is my law," Tomasso boasted.

An unfortunate admission, because the man was from the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife in Portland and he followed Tomasso down to the docks and took down the name of his scunga-bunga jonesporter boat, the Jeannie 1, named after a cousin Tomasso deflowered at a tender age.

The next time he went out, Tomasso was casually hosing off the jellylike black eggs from under the curled tail where female lobsters carry their tiny eggs. That made them legal. Technically.

A Coast Guard lifeboat came upon Tomasso as he was about this activity, and he hastily finished what he was doing and tried to look innocent as he was hailed and boarded.

"What can I do for you fellows?" he asked.

A Coast Guard inspector stepped onto the Jeannie I and said in a very serious voice, "Inspection. Suspicion of scrubbing."

"I keep a clean boat," Tomasso said, trying to keep a straight face, too.

They took up the lobster he had just deposited into the holding bin. The hold was abrim with crawling red-brown crustaceans. There were a few pistols, too, as the one-claw culls were called.

"All my lobster are over the legal limit," Tomasso protested. "You may inspect them if you wish. I have nothing to hide."

Two inspectors dropped into the hold and did that, using caliperlike measuring tools designed for that purpose. They were very professional as they measured the carapace.

Tomasso watched unconcerned. He knew as long as they didn't find the secret hatch, he was all right.

But when they came up with one particular lobster and an inspector dabbed some indigo solution from an eyedropper onto the swimmerets under the tail, which the other held straight, Tomasso grew worried.

"This lobster has recently had eggs," he was told.

"I see no eggs," Tomasso said quickly.

"The eggs are gone. According to our tests, the cement that holds them on is recent."

"Cement? What would a lobster know of cement?" And throwing his head back, Tomasso laughed uproariously.

The inspectors didn't laugh with him. They handcuffed him and towed his boat back to Bar Harbor, where he was warned and fined.

It was a bitter experience. Not only was it becoming impossible for a lobsterman to earn a good living in Maine, but it was no longer safe to have a convivial beer with a stranger. The bars were filled with spies.

For a while Tomasso avoided taking the eggbearers, but they were too great a temptation. He heard that chlorine bleach could erase all trace of the natural cement that lobsters secreted to hold their eggs in place. Tomasso found it worked. The next time he was caught, they had to let him go, though they weren't happy about it. The jugs of chlorine bleach lay in plain sight.

On the day Tomasso ran out of days, the Jeannie I puttered out of the harbor into the gulf with open cargo holds and many jugs of chlorine bleach.

In a zone where the Coast Guard seldom ventured, where the lobsters were not as plentiful and therefore it was possible to work without competition or interference, Tomasso set down his traps.

It was a cold, bitter, blustery day, and only because he drank his profits did Tomasso venture out. He often dreamed of wintering in Florida, where fishermen caught real fish like tarpon and swordfish. But he didn't have the savings to achieve this dream. Not yet.

Tomasso was lowering traps and pots and hauling them up again by stern-mounted block and tackle when a great gray ship came out of the low-lying fog. He took instant notice of it. One moment it was not there, and the next it was bearing down on him as big as a house, streamers of fog curling out of its way.

Tomasso had a dozen claw-pegged egg-bearers on the deck in wooden trays and was dousing them with bleach when the great gray ship showed itself like a silent apparition.

He had never seen one like it. Lobstermen didn't go out as far as deep-sea fishermen, so the sight of a behemoth factory ship was an unfamiliar one to Tomasso Testaverde.

The ship hadn't veered off course, and Tomasso gave his air horn a tap. It blared, echoing off the oncoming bow.

A foghorn blared back.

Tomasso nodded. "They see me. Good. Then let them go around me. I am a working man."

But the ship didn't change course. It came steaming directly at the Jeannie I. Its foghorn continued to blare.

Dropping his jug, Tomasso dived for the wheelhouse and got the engine muttering. He threw it into reverse because that seemed to be the quickest route out of harm's way.

Still the great gray ship plowed on.

Cursing, Tomasso shook a weatherbeaten fist as red as a lobster at them. "Fungula!" he swore.

Men lined the forward rails, men in blues and whites. Their faces looked strange from a distance.

Tomasso looked hard at these faces. They looked all alike. They weren't the faces of fishermen, which are raw and red. These were a stark white, and in the center of those faces splayed some blue blotch tattoo.

For a strange moment Tomasso's limited imagination made those blue blotches into rows of identical lobsters. And he thought of the blue lobster he had eaten, for which he was still reviled.

For a queasy moment he saw the identical impassive faces staring at him as men out to avenge the blue lobster that had been Tomasso's most famous meal.

But that couldn't be. The blue blotch must represent something else.

The great gray ship made a long turn, and its bow was soon lining up with the Jeannie I.

"Are these men mad?" Tomasso muttered, this time throwing his boat forward.

The Jeannie I avoided being struck by a good margin, but the other ship seemed determined to catch him.

There was no radio on the Jeannie I. A lobsterman didn't need one, believed Tomasso Testaverde. But now he wished he had a radio to call the Coast Guard. This mystery ship was playing with him the way a big fish plays with a little one.

It was possible to avoid the big ship whose name was some unpronounceable thing Tomasso didn't know.

But try as Tomasso might, it wasn't possible to outrun it.

Setting a heading for land, he ran the Jeannie I flat out. She dug in her stern, and the bow lifted as high as it could. But hard on her cold, foaming wake came the sinister gray ship with its ghost-faced crew.

It wasn't a long chase. Not even three nautical miles. The huge gray knife of a prow loomed closer and closer, and its shadow fell on the Jeannie I, drowning it like the Shadow of Death.

In his slicker, Tomasso Testaverde swore and cursed and sweated, hot and cold alternately. "What do you want? What do you bastards want?" he screamed over his shoulder.

The remorseless gray ship nudged the Jeannie I once. She spurted ahead, her fat stern fractured.

Tomasso let out a pungent wail. "Mangia la cornata!"

For the cold ocean was pouring into the Jeannie I, washing her decks. It happened very fast. Taking on water, the lobster boat slowed. The gray prow lunged anew, splintering the wounded boat.

Tomasso jumped clear. There was nothing else for him to do.

By some miracle he swam clear of the foamy upheaval that was the Jeannie I going down.

The cold made his muscles shrink and his bones turn to ice, it came upon him so swiftly. He was intensely cold. With sick eyes he watched the big ship glide on past, its sides bumping aside the fresh driftwood and kindling that used to be the Jeannie I.

The warmth of death came over Tomasso quickly. He knew how one would grow warm just before succumbing to the cold of exposure and hypothermia. It was as true for a child who falls asleep in the snowy woods as for a man adrift in the cold waters of the Gulf of Maine.

Tomasso was a survivor. But he knew he would not survive this.

His body like lead, he began to sink. He didn't feel the hands clutching his ice-rimed hair and flailing arms, nor did he know he was being hauled into a dory.

He only knew that some time later he lay in the fish hold of a ship. It was cold. He tried to move but couldn't. Lifting his head, he looked down and saw that his body was blue and naked. It trembled and shivered involuntarily. It was his body. Tomasso recognized it, but he couldn't really feel it.

I am shivering and I don't feel it, he thought in a vague, wondering frame of mind.

Men were hovering around him. He could see their faces. White. Gleaming white. The blue tattoo that went from forehead to chin and spread out over nose and mouth and cheeks wasn't shaped like a lobster. It was something else.

Tomasso did not know what the design was, only that it was familiar.

A man stepped up and began to apply something white and gleaming to Tomasso's unfeeling face.

They are trying to save me. They are applying some warming salve to my face. I have been saved. I will survive.

Then one of them stepped up with a living fish in one hand, a fish knife in the other. With a quick slash, he decapitated the fish and, without ceremony, while the other man was calmly applying creamy white unguent to Tomasso's features, he inserted the bleeding stump of the fish into Tomasso's open mouth.

Tomasso tasted blood and fish guts.

And he knew he was tasting death.

He did not feel them turn his inert body over and perform an obscene act upon his dying dignity with another fish.

He never dreamed, not even in death, that he was destined to be the spark in a confrontation that would shake the world from which he took much but gave back so very little.

Chapter 12

Boston traffic was, for Boston traffic, almost normal. There were only two accidents, neither serious, although one looked as if someone decided to pull a U-turn onto the UMass off-ramp. The pickup truck in question had ended up on its back like an upset turtle, and the tires were nowhere to be seen.

When the cab he was riding swerved suddenly, Remo saw them rolling in different directions like big black doughnuts out for a stroll.

"Just another day on the Southeast Distressway," the cabbie muttered to himself.

Remo Williams never got used to turning the corner and seeing his house. It wasn't actually a house really. It was a condominium now, but the units were never marketed for several very good reasons, not the least of which was that before it had been converted, the building had been a stone church.

It wasn't a typical church. A typical church is typically topped by a witch's-hat steeple with a cross on top. Its lines were medieval, although it looked very modern with its fieldstone walls and double row of roof dormers.

Still, it had been built as a house of worship, not a dwelling. The Master of Sinanju had wrested it from Harold Smith during a contract negotiation several years earlier. Remo, of course, had had no say in the matter. Not that he really cared. After years of living out of suitcases, it was nice to have a permanent address. And he had one wing of the place all to himself.

What Remo hated most were the idle comments of the cabdrivers.

"You live here?" this one blurted when Remo told him to pull over. "In this rock pile?"

"It's been in my family for centuries," Remo assured him.

"A church?"

"It's actually a castle transported brick by brick from the ancestral estate in Upper Sinanju."

"Where's that?"

"New Jersey."

"They have castles in Jersey?"

"Not anymore. This was the last one to be carried off before state castle taxes went through the roof."

"Must be pre-Revolutionary."

"Pre-pre-Revolutionary," said Remo, slipping a twenty through the pay slot. He had replenished his cash supply at an airport ATM with a card he carried in his back pocket.

At the door Remo rang the bell. And rang it again.

To his surprise a plump dumpling of an Asian woman with iron gray hair padded up to the two glass ovals of the double doors. She wore a nondescript quilted costume that wasn't exactly purple and not precisely gray, but might have been lilac.

She looked at Remo, winking owlishly and opened the door.

"Who are you?" Remo demanded.

The old woman bowed. When her face came up, Remo studied it and decided she was South Korean, not North Korean. That was a relief. For a moment there, he was afraid she was some cousin of Chiun's come to visit for the next decade.

"Master awaits," she said in broken English.

"He in the bell tower?"

"No, the fish cellar."

"What fish cellar?" asked Remo.

"The one in basement," said the old woman.

"Oh, that fish cellar," said Remo, who had never heard of any fish cellar and was dead sure there hadn't been one in the basement before today. "What's your name, by the way?"

"I am housekeeper. Name not important." And she bowed again.

"But you do have one?"

"Yes," said the old woman, bowing again and shuffling up the stairs to the upper floor.

"Chiun better have a good explanation for this," muttered Remo, ducking through the door leading into the basement.

The basement was an L-shaped space, just like the building above. Patches of light streamed through casement windows. They fell on rows of storage freezers like the ones big families use to keep sides of beef and giant racks of ribs. They were new. They hummed insistently. There were also giant bubbling aquariums, also in rows. All were empty of fish.

"Chiun, where are you?" Remo called out.

"Here," a thin voice squeaked.

Remo knew that squeak. It was not a happy squeak. Chiun was upset.

He found the Master of Sinanju at the far end of the cellar, in what had once been the coal bin. It had been changed. The wooden sides had been torn out and the area bricked off. There was a door. It was open.

Remo looked in.

The Master of Sinanju stood in the dim, cool space wearing his face like a mummy's death mask. His bright hazel eyes were looking up at Remo. They glinted, then narrowed.

Chiun wore a simple gray kimono of raw silk. No decorations. Its skirts brushed the tops of his black Korean sandals. His hands were tucked into the sleeves, which met over his tight belly.

His button nose flared slightly and he said, "You stink of sango."

"Sango?"

"Shark."

"Oh, right. One tried to eat me."

Chiun cocked his head like an inquisitive bird, his expression unreadable in the gloom. "And...?"

"I ate him first." Remo grinned. Chiun did not. His head came back, throwing off the shadows that clung to the wizened parchment features. He was as bald as an Easter egg, with two white puffs of cloudy hair over each ear. A beard like the unkempt tail of a white mouse hung from his chin.

"Smitty tell you what happened to me?" Remo asked.

"He did not. No doubt shame stilled his noble tongue."

"I got to the rendezvous zone in time. But someone had sunk the ship."

"You allowed this?"

"I couldn't exactly help it. It was sunk before I got there."

"You should have been early."

"But I wasn't."

"But you avenged this insult?"

"I tried to. A submarine torpedoed it. I went looking for it, but it found me first."

"You destroyed this pirate vessel in the name of the House?"

"Actually it kinda got away," Remo admitted.

"You allowed a mere submarine to elude you!" Chiun flared.

"I know what a sub is. I got aboard, but they chased me off. I did my best, Chiun. Then I found myself floating in the ocean without a pot or paddle. I almost drowned."

Chiun's face remained severe. "You are trained not to drown."

"I came that close. Sharks circled me."

"You are stronger than a shark. You are mightier than a shark. No shark could best you whom I have trained in the sun source that is Sinanju."

"Thanks for taking all the credit, but it was a close call."

"The training squandered upon you brought you home alive," said Chiun, stepping out and closing the door behind him with abrupt finality.

"Actually I don't think I would have made it, but I remembered Freya," Remo admitted.

Chiun lifted his chin in unconcealed interest.

"I remembered that I had a daughter and I wanted to see her again. So I found the will to survive."

Chiun said nothing.

"I'm sorry I blew the mission," Remo said quietly. He rotated his freakishly thick wrists absentmindedly.

Chiun remained quiet, his face stiff, his hazel eyes opaque.

"So, what did we lose?" asked Remo.

"Our honor. But it will be regained. You will see to that."

And Chiun breezed past Remo like a gray wraith.

Opening the door, Remo stuck his head into the bricked-off end of the cellar. It was bare, except for row upon row of cedar shelving.

Shrugging, Remo reclosed the door and started after the Master of Sinanju, and they mounted the stairs together.

"The old lady said you were in the fish cellar. But I don't see any fish."

"That is because there is no fish."

"Happy to hear it. Because I'm in a duck mood tonight."

"This is good because duck will be served tonight and every night for the foreseeable future."

"That's more duck than I was looking forward to."

They reached the top of the stairs.

"That is because there is no fish," said Chiun, without elaborating further.

They ate in the kitchen at a low taboret. The rice was white and sticky, steamed exactly the way Remo liked it, and served in bamboo bowls.

The duck lay supine in a light orange sauce.

Remo was surprised when the old woman who padded about the kitchen like a mute served Chiun a bowl of fish-head soup.

"I thought you said there was no fish," said Remo.

"There is no fish. For you."

"But there's fish for you."

"I did not fail in my mission," Chiun said aridly.

"Usually we eat the same thing."

"From this day until the honor of the House is avenged, you are reduced to duck rations. You will eat roast duck, pressed duck, steamed duck and cold, leftover duck. Mostly you will eat cold duck. And you will like it."

"I'll put up with it, but I won't like it," said Remo, poking at the duck's brown skin with a silver chopstick. "So, what's with the housekeeper?"

"I decided this today."

"She's South Korean, not North."

Chiun looked interested. "Very good, Remo. How can you tell this? By the eyes? The shape of the head?"

"By the fact that she hasn't eaten her way through the cupboard."

Chiun frowned. "Southerners make proper servants, but are of low character. I would not make a servant of a Northerner. Since she is Korean, but not of our blood, she is tolerable."

"You know, this might be a security problem."

"Her English is imperfect."

"I noticed," Remo said dryly.

"And I am weary of cooking for you and cleaning up after you."

"I pull my load."

"Not today. Today you lost an entire ship and its valuable cargo."

"That reminds me," said Remo, "what's Ingo Pungo mean?"

"You understand Korean."

"I don't know every word."

"You know ingo."

"Sounds familiar."

"You know kum."

"Sure. Kum is 'gold.'"

Chiun lifted one chopstick. "This is ingo."

"I remember now. It means 'silver.'"

With his silver chopstick, Chiun speared a fish head from his soup broth. "And this is pungo."

"A fish?"

"Not a fish. Fish is not fish. Fish have names. They have tastes and textures and even ancestries. River fish are different from ocean fish. Pacific fish are superior to Atlantic fish."

"Since when?"

"This soup is made from the heads of Pacific fishes."

Remo leaned over the taboret and scrutinized the fish head. It stared back.

"Don't recognize it," he admitted.

"It is carp."

"Ingo Pungo means Silver Carp?"

"Yes. It is a very worthy name for a vessel."

"Maybe. I never much liked carp."

"No, you are an eater of shark."

"It was a necessity," grumbled Remo.

"Not as much a necessity as bathing."

Remo looked at the Master of Sinanju.

"You smell of shark," Chiun reminded him.

"Better than the shark smelling of me," said Remo, who grinned even after the Master of Sinanju refused to return the grin.

It felt so good to be alive he even enjoyed the duck, greasy as it was.

Chapter 13

Although outwardly Dr. Harold W. Smith looked like a cross between an aging banker and an undertaker, there were days when he resembled an embalmed banker. This was one of those days.

Midwinter did nothing for Harold Smith's complexion. He was well past retirement age, and his hair had turned gray. Not white. A crisp white head of hair would have looked good on Harold Smith. It would have offset the unrelieved gray of his person.

Harold Smith was gray of hair, gray of eye, gray of demeanor and even gray of skin. The gray tinge to his skin was the result of a heart defect. Smith had been a blue baby. He was actually born blue. Like all newborn humans and kittens, Harold Smith had blue eyes at birth.

This soon changed. His eyes turned gray naturally. Silver idodine treatments for his condition had left his skin looking gray. It was as if, his mother had thought at the time, some dour cloud had come along to steal all the blueness from her dear little Harold.

No one knows exactly what forces dictate a man's destiny. Perhaps a man with a colorless name like Harold Smith was destined to enter some colorless field. His preference for Brooks Brothers gray and his chameleonlike ability to blend unobtrusively into social settings probably made the course of his life inevitable. No one named Harold Smith ever ran off with a busty starlet or broke the sound barrier or played music anyone wanted to hear.

It would have been the undeniable fate of Harold Smith of the Vermont Smiths to enter the family publishing business and toil steadily and doggedly and competently yet never brilliantly, but for Pearl Harbor. Harold Smith had enlisted. Smiths did not wait to be drafted. Smiths served their country in time of war.

Harold Smith's serious qualities were recognized early, and he spent the war in Europe with the OSS. This led to a postwar role with the new Central Intelligence Agency. Smith fit into the CIA perfectly. During the Cold War era, it was really a giant bureaucracy. There Smith learned computer science and gained a reputation and an inconvenient nickname, the Gray Ghost.

Smith would have retired from the CIA in the fullness of time were it not for a young President of his generation who saw the nation he loved spiraling into uncontrollable chaos. That President created a simple concept. CURE. An organization with no staff, no congressional mandate or sanction, but the ultimate power to right the keeling ship of state before the American experiment foundered on the shoals of dictatorship.

The President reached out to the supercompetent Harold Smith and offered him the responsibility for saving his nation from ruin. Smith responded to the challenge as he had responded to Pearl Harbor twenty years before. He undertook his civic duty. That was how he saw it, as a duty. He did not desire the post.

That was long ago. Many Presidents, many missions and many winters ago. Smith had grown grayer behind his desk at Folcroft Sanitarium, the cover for CURE. He would never see retirement now. He would die at his desk. There was no retiring from CURE. And there was no end to the missions or the crises.

Now in the winter of his life, with the leaden skies making his gray personality seem beyond gray, he toiled at his desk and the computer terminal through which Harold Smith monitored the nation he was sworn to safeguard.

Smith had called up a simple data base, Flags of the World. Sometimes the deepest mysteries could be solved by simple resources.

Remo Williams had described to him a submarine with a white flag painted on its sail, framing a blue fleur-de-lis.

Smith had already looked up fleur-de-lis on his database. It was French for "flower of the lily." There was some historical confusion, he found. Because the flower represented by the fleur-de-lis was actually the iris, it was thought that the iris was originally called a lily. Thus the confusion.

It had been a symbol of French royalty since the reign of the Frankish King Cloris. The trouble was that the French royal flag was a gold fleur-de-lis against a blue background. A quick computer search of the flag data base showed no national flag depicting a fleur-de-lis of any color. The modern French flag was the simple tricolor. No fleur-de-lis.

Smith wasn't surprised. He possessed a photographic memory and recalled no such flag among modern nations.

Absently Smith plucked the rimless spectacles off his patrician nose and polished them with a disposable tissue. Decades of close computer work had made his eyes extremely sensitive to even the smallest dust particles on the lenses. He was forever polishing them.

Replacing them, Smith attempted a wider search. He called for any flag of any color depicting the fleur-de-lis.

The computer, its screen hidden under the black glass of his desktop, showed the colorless outline of a simple flag with a basic fleur-de-lis in the center.

Instantly it began absorbing color. Smith leaned closer.

He got the Boy Scout emblem. Remo had mentioned that. But the Boy Scout emblem was gold against dark blue. That was not the flag Remo had described. But of course it wouldn't be. The Boy Scouts don't operate submarines, much less attack shipping without cause.

Tapping an illuminated key, Smith instructed the system to continue its search.

After five minutes he came up with assorted heraldic flags, none of which matched the one described by Remo.

Frowning with all of his face, Smith leaned back in his cracked leather executive chair. Dead end. What could it mean?

Snapping forward, he ordered the system to call up any flag depicting any number of fleurs-de-lis. It was a long shot. But he had to know who was behind the sinking of the logo Pungo and if there was any reason to suspect a threat to CURE.

Almost at once, a blue flag divided into quarters by a white cross appeared. Each quarter framed a white fleur-de-lis exactly as described by Remo.

His mouth thinning, Smith studied it.

Of course, he thought. He had lived in Vermont, not very far from the Canadian border, and he should have recalled this particular flag. It was the provincial flag of Quebec, Canada.

Each quadrant matched the flag Remo had described, except the colors had been reversed.

Reaching for the blue contact phone on his desk, Smith dialed Remo's number.

A strange voice answered. "Who calls?"

Smith froze. "Who am I speaking to?"

"I ask first, sour mouth."

"I, er, am trying to reach Remo."

"Remo eating. Call back later. In meantime, go to hell."

And the phone went dead.

"What on earth?" Smith muttered.

Smith called back instantly, saying, "Please inform Remo that Dr. Smith is calling."

"I will. After dinner."

"It is important that I speak with him now."

"It is important that he eat. Go back to hell." And the line went dead again.

A rare flash of anger welled up in Harold Smith's gray, colorless soul. He quelled it. There was nothing to do but wait for the call back.

It came twenty minutes later.

"Smith. Remo. You called?"

"Who answered the telephone earlier?" Smith demanded in his lemoniest voice.

"Chiun's housekeeper."

"Chiun hired a housekeeper!" Smith said in surprise.

"Don't ask me why. She was guarding the door when I got back. And what happened to telling Chiun about what happened?"

"He did not answer the telephone."

"Okay, you're off the hook this time. But he's pretty steamed."

"Remo, the flag you described. Did it have a white cross in the center?"

"Nope. Just that flower symbol. Got anything?"

"My search failed to bring up an exact match, but the provincial flag of Quebec consists of a white cross framing four designs similar to what you described."

"Sounds right, though. They just got the color scheme reversed. But if they can't handle English, why should we expect them to know their colors? Hey, Smitty. Does Quebec have submarines?"

"No. But the Canadian navy has. They are old World War II-vintage diesel-electric submarines."

"This was an old pigboat," Remo said. "And why would Canada sink the Ingo Pungo?"

"Of course they would not. Canada is our ally, and the ship was in U.S. waters, well within the two-hundred-mile limit."

"That's good because now that I've eaten, Chiun wants me to go chasing subs."

"Locating that submarine is your next mission," said Smith.

"I was afraid that was what you were going to say. Look, can it wait? I just spent a night in the water playing with the sharks and I'd just as soon not see open water for a while."

"A hostile submarine operating in U.S. waters is a security problem. Remo, those sailors you encountered. Did they speak at all?"

"No. The sub might as well have been crewed by Marcel Marceau and his Merry Mimes. Hey, he's French, isn't he?"

"I can think of no reason for a French submarine to be attacking U.S. shipping," Smith said dismissively.

"Maybe it's Quebec after all. They mad at us for any reason?"

"No. Quebec is currently at odds with English Canada over the secession question. But that issue has nothing to with the U.S."

"Then they had to be after the Silver Carp."

"The what?"

"That's the English name. I'm sick of saying 'Ingo Pungo.' It sounds like I go pogo."

"No one other than her crew knew of the Ingo Pungo's mission and cargo," said Smith.

"What exactly was it, by the way?" asked Remo.

"Fish."

"Fish!" Remo exploded.

Harold Smith cleared his throat. "Yes, during the last contract negotiation, the Master of Sinanju requested and I agreed to supply regular shipments of fresh Pacific fish."

"Fish?"

"As you may have read, there is a global fishing crisis. Coastal fisheries have been exhausted worldwide, forcing fleets to go fishing in deeper and deeper waters. The quality of catches is in sharp decline. Prices are skyrocketing. Master Chiun has been unhappy with the varieties available to him and requested that I remedy it."

"Let me get this straight-instead of more gold, he held you up for fish this time?"

"Actually the fish will end up being more expensive than gold on a per-pound basis, once all costs are factored in," Smith admitted.

"How's that?" asked Remo.

"The Ingo Pungo was a factory ship. It plied the high seas catching and processing fish. It made a Pacific crossing from Pusan, harvesting varieties of fish on the way. Many varieties."

"That's a lot of fish."

"Yes, of course it is," said Smith. "Master Chiun insisted these fish be delivered alive so as to be as fresh as possible."

"And it might explain the fish cellar."

Smith made a curious sound in the back of his throat.

Remo explained, "Chiun's got the basement set up for what he calls a fish cellar. I never heard of one, have you?"

"No. But Koreans do salt and pickle fish for winter storage."

"It also explains why I had to eat duck while Chiun gorged himself on fish-head soup. Not that I'm complaining, but he threatened to deny me fish forever. I can't live on duck. I gotta have fish."

"Inform Master Chiun I have contacted another fishing concern. The fish clause of the contract will be honored, of course."

"Don't you feel silly saying 'fish clause'?"

"I stopped being self-conscious about my dealings with the House of Sinanju back in 1980," said Harold Smith with no trace of humor detectable in his colorless voice. "Go to the Coast Guard station at Cape Cod, Remo. I want that submarine found."

"If you say so, Smitty. What do I do with this sub if I catch it?"

"Interrogate the captain and report back to me."

"After I kill him."

"Report to me. I will instruct you of his disposition."

"Forget his disposition," said Remo. "He tried to kill me. I'm the one with the disposition. If I find this guy, I'm going to feed him to the fishes."

With that, Remo hung up.

REPLACING THE BLUE receiver in his Folcroft office, Harold Smith addressed his keyboard. He had to make the arrangements with the Coast Guard if Remo was to expect any cooperation.

As he worked, Harold Smith wondered if this incident could have anything to do with the recent rash of missing fishing boats. There had been a surge in lost commercial-fishing vessels of late. He was aware of it because his ever-trolling system constantly offered up clusters of coincidences or related events for his analysis.

Smith had dismissed the cluster of lost vessels as occupational hazards of deep-water fishing during these lean times.

Now he wasn't so certain.

Chapter 14

Coast Guard Lieutenant Sandy Heckman didn't want to hear it.

A swab of a cadet came running up as she made sure the cutter Cayuga was ready to go out. The Cayuga had just returned to the Coast Guard air station at Cape Cod from search-and-rescue duty, and they were knocking the ice off her spidery electronics mast and superstructure while the hundred-and-ten-foot vessel was being refueled.

"The commander wants to see you in his office."

"Tell him the sea waits for no man or woman," Sandy retorted.

"It's important."

"So is search and rescue."

And Lieutenant Heckman went back to overseeing preparations to depart. She was in her glory. Unfortunately her glory meant that out there in the cruel ocean, there was a boat in distress.

This time her name was Santo Fado, an otter trawler out of Innsmouth and missing for thirty-six hours now.

There had been no distress call. That was a bad sign. The boat hadn't returned to port, nor had it been sighted or spotted adrift.

A Coast Guard Falcon surveillance jet was criss-crossing the North Atlantic looking for it. But jets can't land on water, so the entire complement of the Coast Guard stations at Cape Cod and Scituate were out there, too. White-hulled cutters and black-hulled buoy tenders and lifeboats and bright orange Jayhawk and Pelican helicopters.

After a day of around-the-clock searching, nothing had come to light. It didn't look good for the Santo Fado or her crew.

The cadet came huffing and puffing back, and this time the word was, "Commander is ordering you to the operations building."

"I'm about to go back out," Sandy protested.

"Someone else will take your watch. You're needed."

"God damn his hairy ass."

"Don't let him hear you say that. Sir."

"I don't care who hears me say it," Sandy snapped.

At the operations building, there was a white Falcon jet warming up, the diagonal red stripe of the U.S. Coast Guard on her forward fuselage and stabilizer.

An orderly said over the climbing engine whine, "You're on drop-master duty. Orders."

"What the hell is going on?"

"We have two VIPs. The commander wants to present the guard's prettiest face, I guess."

"Is that so? Well, I can fix that!"

Marching to the waiting Falcon, she mounted the air-stairs two at a time and thrust herself into the cabin. "Since when am I an airman!" she bellowed in her best fog-piercing voice.

A hand reached out and slammed her into a seat. Not hard, but very firmly. Sandy sat, very surprised.

The hatch was hauled up and the cabin closed. Whining, the Falcon moved out onto the main runway and, without any preliminaries, went screaming down its length and into the air.

Sandy was getting a good look at the VIPs as her bottom got over the shock of the sudden sit-down.

One was a skinny guy dressed for shooting summertime pool. The other was as old as the hills and dressed for a rousing game of mah-jongg. He looked Chinese, but he wore a turquoise Japanese-style kimono with facing sea horses on his thin chest. Out from his sleeve hems peeked the longest, wickedest fingernails Sandy had seen this side of Fu Manchu.

"I'm Remo Pike," said the tall white one. "This is Chiun." He showed her a card. It said National Marine Fisheries Service.

"So."

"We're looking for a submarine lurking out there."

"Whose sub?"

"That's the question of the hour."

"Isn't this more of a Navy mission?" Sandy demanded.

"We want this kept quiet."

"Look, all available CG vessels are on search-and-rescue duty right now. You're diverting important resources from their mission."

"No problem. While you search for a rescue, we'll look for our sub."

Sandy eyed the pair with what she hoped was her most skeptical look. "What's NMFS's interest in a submarine?"

"That's classified," said the one named Remo.

"All right," she declared, taking a jump seat next to a window. "You do your job and I'll do mine."

"No problem. The pilot has his orders."

"I swear, my commander must suffer from myxololus cerebralsis."

"Isn't that the stuff that regrows hair?"

"You're thinking of Monoxidil. Myxololus cerebralsis is Whirling Disease. Fish get it sometimes. They lose their orientation and just spin and flop out of control. I'm surprised you don't know that."

"We are new to the National Marines," said the Asian blandly.

Sandy said, "Uh-huh," and asked, "Ichthyologists?"

"That's classified, too," Remo answered quickly.

Sandy said, "An ichthyologist is a fish expert."

"We just know subs," explained Remo.

"I am the fish expert," said Chiun.

"What's your specialty?"

"Eating them."

Sandy looked twice to see if he were joking. His face was a wrinkled map without any humor in it. She decided he was some kind of inscrutable humorist and turned her attention back to the waters below.

Under her breath she cursed softly and feelingly. "God damn these fucking fishermen."

"You have the mouth of a fishwife," said the elderly Asian.

"Keep your opinions to yourself. I have a job to do, and so have you. Like we say, 'You have to go out, but you don't have to come back.'"

"That the Coast Guard motto?" asked Remo.

"No. Our motto is Semper Paratus. Always Ready."

"Be ready to call out if you spot that sub."

"Like I said, keep out a weather eye for your stinking sub and I'll do the same for my pain-in-the-ass fishing boat."

"You have a salty tongue," said Chiun. "Perhaps you should spare our gracious ears and still it."

"Stow it," said Sandy. "I spend half my time policing fishermen who are either breaking maritime law or getting their screws caught in foul weather. They've dragged their nets along the ocean floor until it's as barren of life as the moon and won't be satisfied until they've eaten every last fish in the sea."

"The greedy swine," said Chiun.

"Damn right," said Sandy, stationing herself beside a port and taking up a clipboard and binoculars.

Remo took the opposite porthole and hoped the jet didn't have to ditch. The last thing he wanted to do was go for another enforced swim.

Chapter 15

Sea gulls swooped and wheeled in the sunless sky. From time to time they dipped and splashed their wingtips against the gray Atlantic, then lifted up again with flapping sardines in their sharp bills.

And far above them, the Master of Sinanju was counting his grievances.

"I was promised char," he lamented.

"Char?"

"Arctic char," said Chiun, consulting a ricepaper scroll on his lap. "Twenty weights suitable for salt curing. Char is best eaten dry." His right index finger, capped by a filigreed horn of jade, tapped the slashing Korean characters on the scroll. "Cod and croaker were promised. Pollock and pogy, shad and salmon from both great oceans. Sea bass. Sea bream. Mullet and menhaden. Trout and tilapia. Lemon sole and ling. Swordfish exceeding the length of a tall man."

"No shark?" asked Remo.

"Of course not."

"Good. I hate shark. I never want to eat it again."

"You smell of shark."

"That's one reason why I hate it."

They were over the Atlantic now. The Coast Guard Falcon jet flew low. The pilot paid them no heed, and neither did Coast Guard Lieutenant Sandy Heckman, much to Remo's surprise.

"You know," he confided to Chiun, "she doesn't seem to be attracted to me."

"Why should she be? You stink of carrion sango."

"I showered."

"Sango exudes from your pores. It is inescapable."

Remo glanced toward Lieutenant Heckman curiously. So far she hadn't expressed a single ounce of interest in him. That was pretty unusual, especially these days. For almost as long as Remo had been under Chiun's tutelage, he had exerted a powerful effect on women. It had gotten worse in the past year or so-to the point where Remo was fighting them off. Sometimes literally. He'd gotten so tired of it he decided to go with the flow and ask them out first.

So far it hadn't been very successful. The one woman who hadn't tried to jump his bones from a cold start turned out to be gay.

Remo was starting to wonder about Lieutenant Heckman.

Remo wandered over to her at her jump-seat station.

Sandy Heckman was looking down through a port with her eyes clamped to a pair of binoculars. She was scanning the crinkled, greenish gray surface of the Atlantic for fishing boats.

A rust-colored trawler churned a path through the water below. The jet tilted one wing toward the laboring vessel.

Abruptly Sandy snapped a switch and yanked a cabin microphone to her mouth.

"Fishing vessel Sicilian Gold, this is the U.S. Coast Guard. Your vessel is over a closed area in violation of the Magnunson Act. Charges may be filed and your catch seized later. Proceed out of the area immediately."

Grabbing a clipboard, she took down the trawler's name and went back to searching the sea.

"What's the Magnunson Act?" asked Remo.

"A congressional law regulating commercial fishing takings. When it was first enacted back in '76, it stopped foreign fishing vessels-mostly Canadian-from plundering U.S. waters. But Congress got around to making it law too late. The Canadians had made a big dent in the stocks. Now it regulates where our fishermen can go, how long they can go out and how much fish they can take. But most coastal areas are pretty much fished out now."

"It's a big ocean. Can't be that bad."

"It's a crisis. And some of these damn fishermen don't seem to be getting it. This is supposed to be a rescue mission. If I don't get some more rescues under my belt, it's back to buoy tenders for me. Or worse, Alaska and the halibut patrol."

"Halibut patrol?"

"They're scarce, too."

"Mind if I ask you a personal question?" asked Remo.

"I don't date civilians. Sorry."

"That wasn't my question."

"Then what was your question?"

"Are you gay?"

"No!"

"Great!"

"Forget it. I don't date."

"I wasn't asking for a date."

"Good, because you weren't going to get one. Now, will you take a seat? Like I said, this is a search-and-rescue mission. If we happen upon your mystery sub en route, fine. If not, you're just so much supercargo. So kindly shoo."

Suppressing a smile, Remo turned to the Master of Sinanju. "She doesn't want to date me. Isn't that great?"

Chiun nodded sagely. "It is the shark smell."

A flicker of interest crossed Remo's high-cheekboned face. "Little Father, are you telling me that eating shark acts like a female repellent?"

"It is obvious that it does, slow one."

Remo brightened. "No kidding?"

"Truly."

"All I gotta do is keep eating shark, and women will leave me alone?"

"If that is your wish..."

"It's my wish to pick my dates and not vice versa."

"Your desires are your own vice, Remo."

Chiun sat by a port and was examining the open water now. It was cold and choppy and about as inviting as open sewage.

"If you spot that sub, I got dibs on the captain," Remo remarked.

"I will allow you to dispatch him once I have flayed the meat from his bones and fed it to him," Chiun said coldly.

"You sure take your fish seriously these days."

"Have you been to the fishmonger of late?"

"You mean the supermarket. No, you've been doing food buying lately."

"They have been foisting inferior fish upon me. Mealy, unpalatable fishes the like of which I have never before heard, with names like monkfish, cusk and hagfish."

"I hear they're getting popular."

"In the newspaper they are called junk fish. I do not eat junk. I am Reigning Master of Sinanju. You may eat junk, but I will not."

"Good fish are getting scarce."

"Which is why I have prevailed upon Emperor Smith to comb the deepest seas for the sweetest fish so that I may eat as my ancestors have. Sumptuously."

"You eat better than your ancestors, and you know it, Little Father."

"I will not place junk fish into my belly. Did you know that one fishmonger attempted to convince me to eat spiny dogfish? I have never heard of dogfish. It looked suspiciously like shark."

"Dogfish is shark," Sandy called over.

"Eavesdropper," Chiun hissed. "Have you no shame?"

"You're shouting. I can't help but hear you. But what you say is true. The quality of food fish has gotten terrible since they closed Georges Bank."

"What's Georges Bank?" asked Remo.

"We just passed over it. It was the best fishery Of the East Coast. Maybe they'll reopen it in a few years, but right now it's a disaster for our fishermen. A lot were forced out of business. The government has been buying their boats and licenses. But as bad as it is here, it's worse for the Canadian fleets. They've been banned from taking cod from the Grand Banks."

"Where's that?"

"Where we're headed. It's only the richest cod fishery on the planet. It's where they had that turbot war two years ago."

"What turbot war?" asked Chiun.

"Before you answer, what's a turbot?" added Remo.

Lieutenant Sandy Heckman turned in her seat. "Turbot is another name for Greenlandic halibut. The Turbot War was between Canada and Spain."

"Never heard of it," said Remo.

"It wasn't so much a war as an international incident. Spanish fishing trawlers were taking juvenile turbot from the end of the Grand Banks called the Nose. That's where the fishery stuck out past Canada's two-hundred-mile limit into international waters. The Spanish were technically legal, but they were taking fish that swam in and out of the Canadian side of the fishery. Ottawa got pretty hot about it and sent cutters and subs to tear up the Spanish fishing nets. A serious high-seas brouhaha was brewing until the Spanish caved in and hauled up their nets. Since then it's been pretty quiet, although Canada makes a lot of noise about U.S. fishermen taking cod from the U.S. side of the Grand Banks while their own fleets are forbidden to touch them.

They seized a couple of scallopers a while back, but lost their nerve for a showdown. They're making noises about doing something about U.S. fleets taking salmon in the Pacific, but so far it's only cold Canadian air."

"No one owns the sea or the fish in them," sniffed Chiun.

"If the groundfish crisis continues, pretty soon there'll be no more fish to argue over."

Remo looked to the Master of Sinanju. "Do you know about any of this?"

"Of course. Why do you think I am hoarding fish?"

"I'm glad you said 'hoard' and not me."

"Hold it!" said Sandy. "There's something in the water."

She called up to the pilot, "Kilkenny, take us around. I want to check something out."

The Falcon leaned into a slow turn, dropped and was soon skimming the cold, gray, inhospitable waters.

They saw the thing in the water clearly in the fleeting second they passed over it.

"Looks like a body!" Sandy shouted.

"It's a body, all right," said Remo. "Floating facedown."

Sandy got busy on her radio. "Coast Guard cutter Cayuga, this is Coast Guard One requesting assistance at this time. We have a floater at position Delta Five."

They circled the spot for some twenty minutes until a Coast Guard cutter showed up and took on the body.

They watched the procedure, Sandy through her binoculars and Remo and Chiun with their naked eyes.

Divers entered the water and brought it up like a sack of wet, dripping clay.

"Man alive, I never saw a floater with a face so deathly pale," Sandy muttered.

"I have," said Remo.

They looked at him.

"And if that isn't a fleur-de-lis on his face, I'll eat the next shark I see."

"Glutton," sniffed Chiun.

THERE WERE three strange things about the body when it was taken off the cutter at the Coast Guard station at Scituate.

First it was completely nude, and as blue as a human body could get. The blue was from exposure.

The corpse's face was the white of chalk, and spread over the dead man's features was a livid blue fleur-de-lis put on with what looked like clown greasepaint. The nose was completely blue, as were the lips. The upper and lower spears of the design touched hairline and chin, respectively. The wings curved over the cheekbones in perfect symmetry.

Clenched between the man's teeth was something thin and black. With a pair of pliers, Lieutenant Heckman extracted the thing. It turned out to be the tail of a small gray fish without a head.

"This is damn weird," she was saying.

"Nothing weird about a guy trying to stay alive as long as he can," Remo remarked.

Sandy looked at him dubiously.

"He was adrift in the water. Naturally he'd eat whatever he could catch to keep himself alive," said Remo.

"Nice theory. But unless he had stainless-steel teeth, it won't float. A knife cut off this fish's head."

"Open up his stomach, and I'll bet you find the fish head," Remo said.

"At least he did not stoop to shark," Chiun said aridly.

When they turned the body over to look for wounds, they discovered the third weird thing. It was definitely the weirdest of the three weird things.

There was a gray fish tail projecting from the bluish crack of the dead man's rear end.

"I have seen some pretty odd things, but I have never seen that," Sandy muttered.

"Maybe the fish tried to eat him and got stuck," said Remo in a voice that suggested he wasn't exactly embracing the theory.

"That's a turbot, if I know my fish. They aren't flesh eaters, and I don't see how, left to his own devices, one could cram his head into a human rectum."

"What other way could it have happened?"

"Two. The guy was queer for fish or someone jammed it up in there."

"Why would anyone do that?" asked Remo.

"Your guess," said Sandy, "is as good as mine."

"My guess is the fish tried to eat him and got stuck."

The Master of Sinanju reached out with delicate fingers and took the fish by the tail. He pulled. With an ugly sucking sound, the fish came loose. So did a cloud of gases that mixed the stink of blocked bowels and decomposition.

Everyone retreated several yards, Chiun still holding the fish. He lifted it so everyone could see. It was a small, putrid, gray fish with bulging eyes and nothing appetizing about it.

"Whatever it is," Remo said, "it's no prize."

"Halibut," said Chiun.

"Turbot," amended Sandy.

"If you say so," said Remo, holding his nose.

Everyone saw the fish's throat had been cut, making a pinkish smile under its gaping mouth. Chiun then tossed it so it landed on the body with a light smack.

"Someone cut this fish's throat and stuck it in," Sandy said slowly. "Probably the same someone who cut off the other turbot's head and stuck it in his mouth. This is not good."

"Not for the fish anyway," said Remo.

"Not good for anyone. This is a message. The question is from who and to whom?"

Remo looked at her skeptically.

"Look, the turbot is the symbol of Canada's victory over Spain and other high-seas poachers. This dead guy has callused claws for hands. That tells me he's a fisherman."

"So what's the design on his face mean?" asked Remo.

"Beats the living pooh out of me."

"It is the symbol of Frankish kings," said Chiun. He gestured across the room to the bluish corpse.

"Come again?" asked Sandy.

"The French. This man is French."

"The French don't fish these waters. They're mostly in the Gulf of St. Lawrence."

"Nevertheless, this man wears the mark of the French."

"Maybe it's the other way around. Maybe the French have marked him," suggested Remo.

Sandy Heckman shook her sun-bleached head. "Wouldn't be the French. French-Canadian more than likely. Though Quebec hasn't much of a deepwater fleet."

"Maybe we should kick this upstairs to our boss."

"Do it quick. I've still got to locate the Santo Fado."

AT FOLCROFT SANITARIUM, Harold Smith listened patiently and digested every morsel of information. At the end of Remo's recitation, he frowned so deeply Remo thought he heard his dry skin crackle. It was probably only line noise.

"Something is very wrong here," he said in his astringent, lemony voice.

"So what do you want us to do about it?"

"I will have identification of the body expedited on this end. I want the search for that submarine to go forward. There is something very wrong in the North Atlantic. And we must get to the bottom of it."

"In a manner of speaking," Remo said dryly.

"I am attempting to locate it by satellite. Remain in close touch at all times."

Hanging up, Remo turned to Sandy Heckman and said, "We gotta sweep for that submarine. Orders from on high."

"Okay, let's go," she said, grabbing her helmet. "Maybe we'll find that missing trawler while we're at it."

When they left the operations building, they found the white Falcon jet had taken off without them.

"There goes my damn rescue," Sandy fumed.

Remo looked at her. "What rescue? The guy's dead."

"We don't know that's him. And if it is, there's still his boat to be found." Her eyes fell on an idle Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopter. She started for it at a dead run.

"Pilot, we need a lift to the Cayuga."

"She's at sea."

"That'll save us some travel time," Sandy said, climbing aboard. "Hope you can handle a deck landing."

"It'll be my first."

"Mine, too," she said grimly as Remo and Chiun climbed aboard and the Jayhawk's main rotor started to scream.

Chapter 16

The Jayhawk pilot did an excellent job of dropping the bright orange rescue helicopter onto the pitching helipad. The Coast Guard cutter Cayuga came to a dead stop to accommodate it but immediately got underway again, so the chopper pilot had to take off from a moving deck. After a couple of false stabs, he got out and hung his head over the cutter's rail until his stomach was completely empty.

When he finally took off, it was without a hitch.

On deck the Master of Sinanju continued to enumerate his grievances. "Yono," he lamented, his hazel eyes bleak as the surrounding seas.

"What's yono?" asked Remo out of boredom rather than real interest.

"Salmon."

"Never cared for it much."

"It is better than skate."

"Anything tastes better than skate ...."

"I was promised salmon of all kinds. The sockeye. Coho. Chinook. And pink and golden."

"All salmon tastes pretty much the same to me."

Chiun squeezed his eyes with a mixture of pain and yearning. "Orange roughy. I was promised orange roughy."

"Never heard of orange roughy. Is it anything like red herring?"

"I have never heard of red herring. I will see that red herring goes into the next contract."

Remo smiled. "You do that, Little Father."

"Orange roughy. Red snapper. Yellowtail flounder. Bluefin tuna. Gray sole. Black crappie."

"Don't forget purple smoothie."

"Yes, purple smoothie. And redfish and sablefish and bluegill and amberjack and striped bass and rainbow trout. And exotic mahimahi," continued Chiun in a plaintive voice.

"Isn't that porpoise?" asked Remo.

"Dolphin-fish," corrected Lieutenant Sandy Heckman. She had just emerged from belowdecks. A vivid orange Mustang survival suit encased her blue flight suit, its multiple pockets full of flares and other mariner's emergency equipment. A side arm slapped her thigh. "We're approaching the longitude and latitude of your phantom submarine."