An Old Fashioned War

Destroyer 68: An Old Fashioned War

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Chapter 1

He was going to die. If he stayed in Chicago one more day, he knew he would go to the top of one of the taller buildings and throw himself off; or maybe look into the barrel of the .45-caliber pistol his brother had brought home from Vietnam and test-fire it into his own forehead. He thought of trains, but trains might leave him only mangled. Trains weren't a sure thing. Trains were fickle as fate, and Bill Buffalo knew many poems about fate. He thought of fate as a person, a god, a muse, a force personified in cadences as strange to the English language as his native Ojupa language, now officially declared a dead tongue of historical interest alone. He was an Ojupa brave. He was born to hunt. To run. To dance around fires at night, and look into his own soul through the animals of the American plains.

The only animals in his tenement flat were mice, possibly rats, and of course roaches. And the only thing he wanted to dance about was death, his own.

With a slow deliberate motion, he put the clip of .45-caliber slugs into the automatic and looked down the barrel of the gun. What a last vision, he thought. A white man's tool.

"What are you doing in there?" called his landlady. She always called out when his door was shut.

"I'm going to blow my brains out," yelled Bill Buffalo.

"All right, but don't damage the wallpaper," she replied.

"I can't promise that," said Bill Buffalo.

"Why not?" asked the landlady, pushing open the door.

"Because I'll be dead. The dead don't clean up after themselves," said Bill Buffalo.

"Oh my-" said the landlady, seeing the young student sitting in his shorts at the edge of the brand-new bed, a large pistol pointed at his head, and his thumb about to pull the trigger. Immediately she understood the danger. If he missed, the slug would go directly into the new rose-patterned wallpaper behind him. It was from a remnants sale and there was no way she could replace it. Put a hole in the paper, and she would either have to cover it with some picture, or if that failed, buy entirely new paper for the wall and maybe the whole room.

"Don't shoot," she cried. "You've got so much to live for."

"What?" asked Bill Buffalo.

"Lots of things," she said. Her name was Tracto. Because of her bulk people called her Tractor, but never to her face.

"What?"

"Me," she said. She tried to smile at him lasciviously. When she first rented to him she had been afraid of rape. She would watch him walk down the hall, his beautifully muscled body clad in just a pair of shorts, and she would lock her door so that he couldn't walk in and take her forcibly. Then she stopped locking her door and then started leaving it ajar and going to sleep half-nude. And still her fears weren't realized. Now she told herself she could save the handsome young Indian with her body. If it was to save a life, it would not be a sin.

"What do you mean, you?" said Bill Buffalo.

"I would give my body to save your life," said Angela Tracto.

"I don't need body organs. I don't want body organs. I want to die."

"I meant sexually," said Angela Tracto, lowering her eyes.

She saw his thumb tighten on the trigger and his eyes go wide, waiting for the slug.

"And there are other things," she cried.

"What?"

"Don't you want to say good-bye to your friends back in Ojupa land?"

"There is no Ojupa land, only the reservation."

"But you do have friends."

"I have friends," said Bill Buffalo sadly. "I have Indian friends and I have white friends. And I have no friends. Do you know what you get for studying three years of nothing but classical Greek literature?"

"A degree?"

"You get crazy. I don't know whether I'm an Indian or a white man. Dammit, I think more like an ancient Greek than I do an Ojupa or an American white. I'm nothing, and the place for nothing is death."

"Something must have brought this on," said Angela Tracto. If she could get him to turn around, then maybe the bullet would hit a window. She had a renter's policy from a mail-order catalog. The windows were insured. The wallpaper was not. Also insured were doors, chandeliers, and moats that had to be redredged in case of siege. Wallpaper, floors, and fire damage were not. But that was all right. What could one expect for pennies a month? If the Phrygians ever raided South Chicago, Angela Tracto would be rich.

"My brother died. He got drunk and he drove a tractor into a ditch and it turned over on him. It crushed him. And I didn't go to the funeral."

"Well, there's nothing you can do for the dead. Do you want to turn around a bit?"

"It's not his death that made me sad. It's not that I did not go to the funeral that made me sad. What made me realize I was dead was when my father chanted the death dirge over the telephone, and do you know what I did?"

"You asked him if the call was collect?"

"I didn't know Ojupa from Greek or Latin. I didn't know it. I didn't know the words for 'mother' or 'father' or 'earth' or 'good-bye.' I had forgotten the words. And I answered my own father with a quote from Sophocles."

Bill Buffalo took a very deep breath and then shut his eyes because he had decided finally he did not want to see the bullet.

"You can learn to be Indian again. Don't pull the trigger. You can learn again."

"It's too late."

"How did you learn the first time?"

"The first time I didn't have all these other languages swimming around in my head. The first time I didn't dream in Greek or Latin. The first time all I knew was Ojupa."

"You can do it again. Lots have done it. I've had many young men who went to the big university and felt just the way you do, and when they returned to their home countries, everything was fine. Their problem was they were here. Like you. Just get up and face another direction and you'll feel better. Try it." Bill Buffalo looked at the big barrel. He was sure he wouldn't feel a thing, and that was what he was after: not feeling. On the other hand, why,not get up and see if he felt better?

He lowered the gun. Ms. Tracto must have been very happy at that because a big grin spread over her face. That was strange. He never thought she cared about anything but the rent or possibly getting him into her bedroom, the door of which always seemed to be open at night.

"There, see. Don't that feel better?"

"Feels pretty much like before," said Bill Buffalo.

"That's because you're not home. Go home. Go back to the reservation. You'll see."

"I don't belong there."

"That's how you feel now. Not how you'll feel when you're there. Trust me. I know."

It was a lie, of course, but a successful wallpapersaving lie. What Angela Tracto didn't know was that she was sending back to Ojupa, Oklahoma, the man whose birth all mankind would regret and who might possibly bring about the end of the world.

If she had been told that a scourge as old as the first raising of one brother's hand against another was going to reappear, she would have said so long as it didn't reappear on her rose wallpaper that was all right with her. But then, she didn't know what the handsome young man with the strong cheekbones had studied. She didn't know the ancient texts and she didn't know how Greek would combine with Ojupa one night around a fire, when this young man, this walking H-bomb, returned to Oklahoma to be reunited with his people.

All she knew was that her rose wallpaper was safe. "I never thought you knew that much about human behavior," said Bill Buffalo, putting down the gun. "I never figured you for that."

By the next morning he was in Ojupa, Oklahoma, with the heat and the dust and the shanties with the television antennas and the bottles of whiskey and beer lying in open sewers, some of the bottles still attached to his relatives. In Ojupa it was absolutely clear again why he had left: no future. And for him not even much of a past.

"Hey, Bill fella, good to see you back, man," said Running Deere. Running Deere was named after a tractor because everyone knew a tractor was more reliable than any animal. Besides, real deer hadn't run around the Ojupa lands for decades now, but John Deere tractors almost always seemed to run.

"I've come home," said Bill Buffalo.

"How's life in the big city?" asked Running Deere, hoisting his balloon paunch over his too-tight Levi's. He wore a T-shirt proclaiming his love for Enid, Oklahoma.

"I want to get away from it. I want to get away from everything I learned there. I don't know who I am anymore. I'm going to visit my brother's grave. I'm going to sing the death chant. Would you come with me, Running Deere? Would you bring others who know the Ojupa tongue? Would you bring the medicine man?"

"You sure you don't want a beer first?"

"I don't want beer. I don't want whiskey. I don't want tractors. I want Ojupa ways. I don't even want these white man's clothes."

"Hey, if you don't want those cool jeans, I'll take them," said Running Deere.

"You can have everything. Just chant with me at my brother's grave and don't forget the medicine man and Little Elk, and my father. And never again call me Bill, but Big Buffalo," said Bill.

That night he put on clothes that felt right and natural, leaving his legs and arms free, not bound, and gave up his shirt and jeans and went with the friends of his childhood to his brother's grave, and there in the full Oklahoma moon he joined those of his blood in reverence for one of the tribe who had gone to join those who no longer lived in this world.

The night was cold and his skin prickled with goose bumps, but he didn't mind as he felt the old chants come back to him. Warm as his mother's milk, familiar as a hug, the words came from the back of his throat, dancing on his tongue, clicking at his teeth as though he had never forgotten them. All the Chicago boarding rooms and all the hours of study in the library were gone as he felt his feet join with the earth and himself become one with his people. It had worked. Ms. Tracto, the landlady, was right. He was home, and he would never leave again. The words poured out, about loss, about return, until, totally one with the Ojupa words themselves, he said: "Atque in perpetuum frater, ave atque valle."

And smiling he turned to his tribesmen, to see their faces blank and the medicine man, normally the last to show any emotion on his withered seventy-year-old-face, shocked. His tribesmen looked at each other in confusion.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"What language you speaking, Big Buffalo?"

"Ojupa. It was beautiful. I said to my brother, 'And so, brother, forever, hello and good-bye.' "

"That ain't Ojupa, never has been," said Running Deere.

The medicine man, in his feathers and sacred paint, shook his head.

"But the words came right from my soul," said Big Buffalo. "It's the most famous Ojupa saying. Hello and good-bye. It's from a poem about a young man who returns from abroad and finds his brother dead, and says, 'And so, brother, forever, hello and goodbye.' Ave atque valle."

Big Buffalo slapped his forehead and groaned. He had just recited a Latin poem from Catullus. The "abroad" he had referred to was the other end of the long-dead Roman Empire.

He fell to his knees before the medicine man. "Save me. Save me. Kill the foreign spirits in me. Rid me of the white man's curse. I don't want his education. I don't want his languages. I want to dream in my people's tongues."

But the medicine man shook his head.

"This I cannot do," he said sadly. "There is only one way to rid you of the curse, and it is the most ancient and dangerous ceremony of our heritage."

"I don't mind dying. I'm already dead," said Big Buffalo.

"It's not your death I fear," said the medicine man.

"Hey, give the guy what he wants," said Running Deere. He had always liked Big Buffalo and felt the medicine man too much a stickler for the old ways. Besides, there weren't that many old ways left, considering the television and booze and pickup trucks that had become the real life of the Ojupa tribe.

But the medicine man shook his head. They were on sacred ground, the small hill that held the remains of those who had passed on to the other world of the Ojupa. It had been made sacred by the buffalo horns and the fires of the dried mushrooms, and the grasses of the plains and the good spirits that had been called here by previous medicine men. There were crosses here too, because some Ojupa were Christians. But it was still sacred ground because the medicine men of the tribe had prepared it first. The war dead were here also, those who had fought against the white man's cavalry and those who, in later wars, for the white men against other white men. There were marines and soldiers here as well as braves.

"Hey, medicine man, why you shaking your head?" asked Little Elk. He was a construction worker in nearby Enid and he was big enough to stick the old man under an arm and carry him around like a parcel.

"Big Buffalo's problems are bad. There are tales of a man who has lost the soul of his people. This is not new. But the whole tribe must ask the spirits to visit if he is to be saved."

"Okay. You're always doin' that stuff with spirits and things."

"There are spirits and there are spirits. These are the spirits of blood and anger and pride and the great spirit of misjudgment."

"Misjudgment?" asked Little Elk. He laughed. He had never heard of that one and it didn't sound too frightening. Besides, they were running out of beer, and the cemetery on the hill gave him the willies. He didn't like any cemetery, especially at night. Big Buffalo, who had been the smartest kid at the reservation school, was crying on his knees, his hands up in the air, babbling that strange foreign language. Running Deere was looking at his watch because he knew the liquor store was closing soon in nearby Enid, and the others were slapping their arms because the Oklahoma night was getting very cold.

The stars looked brighter on a cold night, thought Little Elk. He hated stars. He hated anything having to do with the outdoors. He hated loud noises. Little Elk liked computers and air-conditioned rooms and people who never raised their voices. Running Deere was yelling at the medicine man and Big Buffalo was crying, and finally Little Elk said:

"Medicine man, do the prayers. Say the chants. C'mon. It's late. It's cold. Big Buffalo has always been a nice guy. One of the nicest. Give him a break. And give me a break too. And the rest of us."

"Yeah," said Running Deere.

And the others joined in too, so that the medicine man finally and wearily said, "I am old. I will not have to live with what happens, but you will, all of you."

"Hey, medicine man, nothing ever happens. If our medicine is so strong, what are we doing in a stinking patch of ground the white man left us? Just do it, make Big Buffalo happy, and let's get out of here and get a drink." Thus spoke Little Elk, but he spoke for all of them.

The old man lowered himself to his knees, and stretched out his arms, palms upward, and began to chant, earth tones with the rhythm of the earth, sky tones with the rhythms of the universe sparkling above them on the little cemetery hill of Ojupa land. Big Buffalo joined the chant with his funny language. Running Deere felt an urge to build a fire, and Little Elk, who normally hated anything physical, scurried around gathering twigs for the fire. The medicine man lowered his head to the earth, and reaching into his waistband withdrew a handful of sacred mushrooms.

He dropped them into the fire, and the fire smoked and they gathered around the little blaze and breathed in the sacred smoke and exhaled the chants, the medicine man and the young braves in the Ojupa tongue and poor Big Buffalo in the crazy language.

The smoke grew and danced, and stretched its arms, and howled, a long, low howl deeper than a coyote and stronger than a bear. Iron banged against iron, and cries of the wounded filled the night air, even though they all knew no one around them had been hurt and no one was banging anything. Big Buffalo was laughing and Little Elk was screaming when they heard the first words.

Later each would recall that the words came in the language he was most comfortable with.

They would wonder what language Big Buffalo heard that night, but they would never know.

"You look like a bunch of regular guys with some brains and guts," came the voice from the fire. There was a man in the fire. He was laughing. Even in his suit, everyone could see he was well built. He looked like a man of men, with a clean smile, a strong jaw, and eyes that seemed to shine in the night.

He carried a briefcase. He didn't burn. The briefcase didn't burn, and the fire went out suddenly, as though doused by a passing rainstorm. But it wasn't raining.

"Hey, let's get a drink," he said. "Let's have some fun."

"Liquor store is closed," said Little Elk. "I knew we wouldn't make it."

"Closed. Fine young men like yourselves denied drink? Who closed it?" asked the man. He thumped his chest, inhaling the good night air.

"It's a liquor store. State runs it. Sells liquor by the bottle. It's closed," said Little Elk.

"Which state?"

"Oklahoma. You're in Oklahoma, mister. I didn't get your name," said Running Deere.

"Whatever you want to call me, friend. I'm here for you. I'm going to make you rich, respected, and famous. I'm going to make you feel like real men. I'm going to make it so that when they sing songs around your campfires a thousand years from today they will remember your names with awe. That's who I am."

"And you call yourself?"

"Liquor store. Are you going to let Oklahoma tell you when you can drink and when you can't? Slaves live like that. Are you slaves?"

"It's closed, mister," said Little Elk. "We missed it."

"Whose locks? Who has a right to lock you out on land that should be your own? Free men, real men, own their land. What are you?"

"Who are you?" asked Running Deere.

"The man who's going to get you some fine drink, the sort of liquor you deserve whenever you want it. Not when Oklahoma tells you."

"I don't know," said Running Deere.

"A big man like yourself? What are you afraid of?" They didn't know his name, but they knew he made sense. This muscular stranger who had appeared out of the fire had an answer for everything. No one noticed, as they marched off the little hill of the cemetery, that the medicine man was not with them. His head was still pressed to the ground, and he was crying, crying that the wrong spirit had been unleashed. Nor did they notice Big Buffalo in a trance, saying nothing, his eyes wide, mumbling only the funny tongue he had learned at the white man's school in Chicago.

At the edge of the cemetery the man turned and threw a snappy salute at the graves.

"I like war dead," he said. "Lets you know men lived here. Real men. The Ojupa are great among peoples. Never let anyone tell you otherwise. You hear?"

They still didn't know his name when they drove into Enid in a pickup truck. The liquor store was locked and barred, and the streets were empty. "Never getting in," said Little Elk.

"I could tell you how to get in there, but a smart guy like you, Little Elk, can figure it out," said the stranger, giving Little Elk a manly slap on the back. "It's an adventure. Let's go for it."

The man's corporate gray suit never seemed to wrinkle and his tie was as neat as he when he stepped out of the smoke of the campfire back at the Ojupa cemetery. The braves felt a sense of excitement about this man, more than anything they had ever felt in sports, more than in the biggest football game.

"What have you got to lose?" he asked. "You want me to lead? I'll lead." He jumped out of the truck, but not before Running Deere, who now seemed faster than ever, cut him off and headed for the front door. Little Elk figured the rear would be easier, and with a car jack he pried open the bars at the rear of the store. Alarms went off but Running Deere and the stranger were too fast. They were in the store and out with a case of whiskey apiece before any police could arrive, and the pickup truck sped out of Enid with everyone singing old Ojupa war songs. By morning, everyone but the stranger had a hangover, and they could see sheriff's cars crisscrossing the reservation looking for them.

"How did they find out it was us?" asked Little Elk.

"I told them," said the stranger happily. He looked even healthier in the daylight, with bright eyes, a peppy disposition, and a can-do attitude. Running Deere wanted to throttle the man. But Big Buffalo, who had found them and who was still mouthing that funny language, reverted to English to tell them not to bother, that it wouldn't do any good.

"I'll tell you the good it'll do, Bill. It'll make me feel good when I go off to jail," said Running Deere.

"And me too," said Little Elk. And so did the others. But the stranger only grinned at the threats.

"Shoot me. Go ahead. Shoot me," he said. "If there is anyone here who loves the Ojupa more than I, let him blow my brains out now. Go ahead."

"You call bringing the sheriff's office down on us an act of love?" asked Little Elk.

"I couldn't have given you a greater gift. Because after today, you will never skulk around a sheriff again. You will never fear when you see his blue bubble coming after you on a highway, or hear his siren. You are meant to walk on this Ojupa land as lords of it, not frightened little boys. Are you men or boys? As for me, give me liberty or give me death."

The stranger snapped open his case and there inside were five brand-new mini-machine guns, smaller than the famed Israeli Uzi, hardly larger than pistols.

"The question is, do you guys want to live forever? Or are you going to stand up once for manhood? Are you going to honor those dead in your cemetery, or are you going to go on living like half Indians, half whites, all nothing? As for me, death doesn't frighten me nearly as much as slavery, nearly as much as seeing my women look down on me, nearly as much as living each dusty, dreary day like some little gopher who has to hide at the sound of a footstep. I cannot promise you victory this day, good Ojupa braves, but I can promise you honor. And that is all any of us have in the end."

There wasn't a shaking hand in the band as they reached for the submachine guns. And it was known throughout the reservation and indeed on other reservations and across the country what happened that day. A handful of Ojupa braves annihilated an entire sheriff's posse, and when the state troopers were sent in, they took them on too. They flew the banner of the Ojupa, and Running Deere said it best for all of them:

"Maybe we won't win this day, and maybe we won't live this day, but the world will sure as hell know we were here."

The state troopers had automatic weapons too, and even an armored car. They outnumbered the small band and had all been trained to a fine edge. But there was a spirit now in the Ojupa. Little Elk didn't mind discomfort and Running Deere no longer waddled but moved swiftly.

They fought through the morning and into the afternoon and laughed at requests to surrender, scoffed at warnings that their cause was hopeless, and by nightfall other young men had joined them.

In a brilliant night attack devised by Little Elk and led by Running Deere, the now larger band outflanked the state troopers and forced them to surrender, taking all their weapons.

"We'll let you live so that you may tell others that you have met the real Ojupa," said Running Deere. He no longer wore blue jeans or a shirt that professed love for Enid, Oklahoma, but a uniform made of real deerskin. A knife was stuck in his belt.

"When we come back we will fill the sky with so many helicopters we'll block out the damned sun," said a state trooper, angry that they should yield to an outlaw band.

"Then we will fight in the shade," said Running Deere.

His words and the deeds of the Ojupa spread to other reservations. By the time the reinforced state troopers returned, they were met by a little army composed of frustrated, downtrodden braves, and this time the army outnumbered the troopers.

And Little Elk, warned about helicopters, had prepared defenses against the slow-moving targets with the many guns. The state troopers fought bravely that day, but the Ojupa were braver and shrewder.

Many died, but as the stranger said, "The tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots."

They buried their dead, even as warnings that the Oklahoma National Guard were about to close in came to the little cemetery on the hill.

One of the dead was Big Buffalo, or Bill Buffalo as he was known for a while. He was buried with full honors, even though it didn't seem as though he died in battle. There were powder burns at his right temple and a gun was found in his right hand. One of the braves remembered his last words.

Big Bill Buffalo had kept repeating: "Tu cogno, tu cogno."

No one knew what it meant, until later, when it was all over, one of Buffalo's teachers from Chicago came down to pay last respects to one of his finest students ever.

"Who was he talking to?" asked the teacher.

"Wasn't talking to anyone. He was looking at our friend who came out of the campfire, and just kept saying those funny words. He said them and then put the gun to his head. And bang. Pulled the trigger," said the witness.

"His words are Latin. And they mean 'I know you. You I know.'"

"Well, shoot," said one of the other braves, listening in. "That's good. 'Cause no one else here knows him."

With the leadership of the stranger and their own good fighting skills and courage, the Ojupa that day registered the first Indian victory against federal troops since the Battle of Little Big Horn. But by now other tribes were ready to join, because this time the word was in the air:

"This time we can win."

In Washington the news was grim. An entire National Guard division, one of the best in the country with the most modern equipment, had been soundly defeated in Oklahoma. Not only that, but the Indian band was growing daily as it marched northward. It had to be stopped.

The problem was that it would be Americans fighting Americans.

"If we win, we still lose," said the President. "We've got to find a way to stop this without a war," said the Secretary of the Interior.

"If you could increase our budget," began the Secretary of Defense.

"What on earth is left for you to buy?" snapped the President, astonished that the Defense Department still wanted to spend more money even though every month it went through the gross national product of most of the rest of the world.

"We could form an exploratory purchase committee to look for new technology."

"We have enough technology. We need a quiet victory without a battle," said the President.

"Impossible. Those things don't exist," said the Secretary of the Interior.

"We could buy one," said the Secretary of Defense.

"From whom?" asked the President. He was known to the public as an amiable person, not concerned with details. But every cabinet member knew he had a firm, sharp grasp of facts, and while he never became angry in front of television cameras, he certainly could show anger in these meetings.

There was silence among the cabinet.

"Thank you, gentlemen. That's all I want to know," he said, dismissing them. Then he went to the bedroom in the White House and, at the proper time, took a red telephone out of a bureau drawer. He did not have to dial. As soon as he picked up the phone it would ring. This time he did not hear the reassuring voice saying that everything would be taken care of, that there was no wall that posed an obstacle or killer elite that was a threat. This time, reaching out for America's most powerful and most secret enforcing arm, he got a wrong number.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and there was no reason he couldn't handle a simple telephone connection as well as the next guy. It was just a matter of putting one connector into another. That it had to be done by getting past guard dogs, and over one of the most modern defense perimeters in the world, did not matter. It was still a simple connection.

"You plug the red socket into the red receptacle. We've colored it red so you won't forget," Harold W. Smith had told him.

There had been a problem on the direct-access line from the White House and Smith feared that the President might not be able to get through without being compromised by some new electronic device on sale to the public. There was so much electronics out there, private eavesdropping, that it had become a problem for the organization to keep its secret phone calls secret. The very office of the presidency could be ruined if ever it was discovered an organization so contrary to the laws of the country was being used to protect those very same laws. There would be disaster if others than the small group that comprised it should ever know of its existence.

Therefore more secure phone access was called for.

As Harold W. Smith, the lemon-faced head of the organization, explained it, Remo should imagine sound waves as two giant pillows encapsulating the world. America's eavesdropping and Russia's. Where they met created an absolutely perfect interference pattern. If the organization could establish its sending base inside that area by the simple plugging of one cord into a monitoring station there, then the President could use his red phone without fear of anyone listening in.

The problem was that the monitoring station was in Cuba, right smack in its most heavily fortified area, just outside the American base at Guantanamo. There the Cuban special forces practiced approaching the American defenses and then retreating. To penetrate the monitoring station to repair the phone lines in the overlap area would be like swimming through a tide of oncoming humans, the best-trained humans in Cuba.

"Let me get this straight," Remo had said. "The red plug into the red socket."

Smith nodded. They were on a small patrol boat just off the coast of Florida. They would meet, if everything went well, in Puerto Rico after the assignment. Even though it was sweltering, Smith still wore his gray three-piece suit.

"And the blue wire into the blue connector. We know the Russian connector is blue. They always coat their connectors in that sort of installation with blue. It's a special noncorrosive metal. Everything tends to corrode in the Caribbean. The Russians have placed their station over an old American monitoring station. Don't worry about the electronics. It will work. Just get into the station with the equipment. And then get out without them knowing you were ever there. That's the problem. We're piggybacking this thing. They've got to think everything is running normally. Can you do it?"

"Red into red," said Remo.

"Getting in and out without being seen, through a wave of their special forces?"

"And blue into blue," said Remo. He looked at the blue wire. Nothing special, no longer than nine inches, with a tiny electrode attached. And the red plug seemed just like a simple outlet plug. He held both of them in one hand.

"Through a wave of their special forces without them knowing you were ever there," repeated Smith.

"Red into red. Blue into blue. Should be easy," Remo had said.

"If they know you've been there, the whole thing is blown," said Smith.

"I'll put the red one in first," said Remo.

And he kept that in mind as he waited for dusk to slip into a little gully just beneath a marine machine gun nest at the outer rim of the Guantanamo naval base. He could have told the marines a friend was going to move through their lines, but their help would probably only serve to alert the other side.

It wasn't full dark as his soft steps became softer, not pressing on the earth but becoming a friend with the ground underneath, feeling the rhythms of the humid Caribbean air, the silence of the ground, the moisture on his skin, and the rich smell of the green jungle growth all around him.

He wasn't a man sneaking past some marines, he was part of the environment they worked in. He was the air they felt, the ground they walked on, the sounds of the jungle, part of it all. And being part, they didn't see him. One sergeant thought he had seen a shadow pass, but shadows, especially at dusk, were everywhere. What they did hear was the rustle beyond of another Cuban special-forces battalion starting their advance.

They would come close, as though attacking, so close they could make out faces even with little light, and then at the last minute they would retreat.

This evening the jungle hummed as fifteen hundred Cubans moved as silently as they could toward the American perimeter. They moved forward and they moved back, and through them moved a man who blended into the jungle more completely than any of the animals living there. And they finished their exercise never knowing that the man had simply walked by them.

Remo found the monitoring station as he was told he would, where he was told he would, and he easily located the guards through their movements. He was quiet within himself, the sort of quiet that does not listen for sounds but allows the body not to strain, thus doing more than not making sounds, becoming the silence that makes all other sound, no matter how small, clear. Through the noise he knew where the guards were, how quickly they walked, or, if they sat, by their breathing how awake they were. And he simply moved where they weren't.

And he found the right room, and he found the red socket. And everything would have gone perfectly, except there was a red wire near the red socket. And Smith had not told him about the red wire.

"Don't panic," he told himself. He plugged the red socket into the red plug. His lean body and sharp features seemed to blend into the darkness even of the machines of the installation. Only his thick wrists seemed to stand out, poking from a dark body-tight shirt set above dark gray slacks. He wore loafers because he never liked shoes tight to his feet. They interrupted the sensitivity of his soles.

The red plug looked fine. He heard one of the guards move down a nearby corridor. He was approaching the room. Blue wire. Remo looked for the blue wire in the machine Smith had described. He found it. Blue wire to blue wire. He attached the blue wire.

Done. He had done it. But why was everything sparking? And why was he hearing some woman in Omaha speaking to the President of the United States? At least it sounded like the President.

"Smith? Is that you?"

"I'm sorry, this is Marion Kilston. I'm from the Omaha Neighbors Bureau. I'm offering today a new introductory neighbor-acquaintance kit."

"Not Smith?"

"We don't have a Smith, although you would think we would, it's such a common name, don't you think? Who is this? You sound just like the President."

The line went dead. Remo pulled out the red plug and saw the brass prongs were twisted. Apparently they didn't fit into the socket. He looked again. It wasn't a socket. It was red, but it wasn't a socket. It had Russian writing on it. It looked like a socket. It was sort of round. But it wasn't a socket.

The problem was that when you used the human body to its cosmic correctness you unleashed the awesome powers of the mind through the universe. Speed and power became something else again. They became knowledge. That was what all training was about, for the body and the mind to know. Unfortunately, when one had difficulty with electrical gadgets, or for that matter any gadgets from toasters to garlic presses, this power left one with plugs that looked like brass taffy. If killing a Russian who had put that sign on the monitor that looked very much like a socket would have helped, Remo would have been fine, he thought. Two Russians or ten would have been fine. Unfortunately, there were no Russians about, and doing harm wouldn't have done much good in the first place. And then Remo noticed two dark vertical slits in a small reddish piece of plastic at the top of the machine. The socket!

Remo took the crushed brass mass at the end of the socket between his two fingers, and slowly, more slowly than more people could perceive, he let his fingers understand the brass, sense the soft yellowish metal, moving its parts ever so slowly, building the heat within it, rubbing, and then faster, so that his fingers could hardly be seen rubbing the yellow metal into a sticky goo, which he flattened and molded and remade into brass prongs as it hardened just so.

"There," muttered Remo, and with a flourish pushed it right into the real socket and there were no sparks. It was in. He had done it. By himself.

Hard leather scuffed on concrete floors. The guard's hand was on the trigger behind Remo, and while Remo wanted to stay and admire his work-he was sure the connection was correct, and so proud he'd gotten it right-if he let the guard get off a shot, one of the bullets could land in the machinery, leaving his connection useless. Also, he was supposed to make sure he was never known to have been in there.

He didn't jump backward but let his body fall backward, so that it didn't look as though he were jumping from his feet but actually pulled into the guard. The motion was deceptive. The guard saw the man with his back to him, leveled the gun before ordering the intruder to throw up his hands.

And then the intruder was on him with the guard's gun flung up above his head, and something apparently slow but fast enough to cause incredible pain, landing hard in the guard's midsection and cutting through his spinal column, and the world went black.

Remo trundled the guard and his gun out of the room toward the next guard post, where, holding the guard's wrists, he started a fight with another guard, keeping himself behind the corpse's body. Slap, punch. The old way of fighting. Remo moved the dead guard's hands in front of the living one, keeping that guard confused, getting that guard to fight, and then he pulled the trigger once, and threw the body at the living struggling guard, knocking him down, and letting him fight his way free of the corpse. They would report the dead one had gone berserk and the living one had fought him off and killed him. The shot, of course, would attract others and there would be confusion, and no one would ever think that the monitor room with the perfect, beautiful plug placed exactly in the socket was ever entered by an American.

What people wanted when they investigated something was an answer. It didn't have to be the correct answer. In large organizations like armies it only had to be an acceptable answer. No one was going to believe that someone in the people's-liberation-monitoring station had started a fight using a corpse, and then escaped without being seen. It was far simpler to believe one guard was forced to subdue another and in the process killed him. That the loser suffered a displaced spinal disk would be glossed over.

That would raise questions. And armies never even answered questions, much less asked them.

Thus Remo remembered from his lessons the wisdom about armies as he moved into the night, out of the monitoring station as though he had never been around. Armies, as it was written in the history of Sinanju, never changed. Only the names and flags were different.

It had been a long time since he had read the histories of' Sinanju, Remo thought, coming back through American lines and appearing at a helicopter pad where Smith said transportation would be arranged for him. It had been a long time since his death had been faked so the organization could have a killer arm without fingerprints in any file, a man who would not be missed, an orphan, a dead man for an organization that was not supposed to exist, one man serving as its killer arm. And because there was only one man, he had to be trained in a special way, a way surpassing anything any white man had ever known before.

In that training, he had become something else. He had become Sinanju, the sun source of all understanding of human power, the home of the Masters of Sinanju. In his spirit he was as much that small fishing village on the West Korea Bay as he was Remo Williams, ex-cop, American.

He thought about that as the special helicopter, camouflaged for night, landed at the base helipad. The pilot could be heard telling the commander of the pad that he was to pick someone up, and the commander was arguing back that he had not been told of any such person.

"We're at the tip of Cuba, buddy. No one gets in or out of here without identification," said the commander.

"I'm told he's going to be here."

"By whom?"

"Can't say."

"Yeah, well, you take those CIA or NSA or whatever letters you want to disguise your spies by and stuff 'em somewhere. This place is guarded by U.S. marines. No one gets through."

"Excuse me," said Remo, moving from behind the helipad commander and up into the chopper.

"Are you blue angel zebra?"

"Maybe. Something like that," said Remo. "I don't know."

"You're the one. They said you wouldn't know your code."

"Who's they?" screamed the helipad commander.

"They never say," yelled back the helicopter pilot, taking off into the night. Above, the lights of the fighters keeping protective cover over the fleet and the base competed weakly with the stars.

Remo edged back in his seat and folded his arms and his legs, and went into that quiet place that was his sleep now. He could smell the burning fuel, and even the new rivets in the helicopter, but he focused on the stars and the patches of clean air, and his own blood system. And they were good, all good.

When the helicopter landed, a blood-red dawn was breaking over the Caribbean, exposing the little stucco villas of the Puerto Rican resort Flora del Mar. Remo could make out the golf courses and tennis courts and swimming pools. He guided the pilot toward one small villa set on a canal. Sportfishing boats with their high captain's nests bobbed along the canal like large white fat gulls grounded in the water.

Remo was out of the helicopter before it fully landed. He walked toward what sounded like a wounded bird squealing softly in a pitch so high that some of the local dogs, dogs looking more like large rodents than canines, were wandering around in a quiet frenzy looking for the source.

Remo knew where it was coming from. He even knew the words. The call was a greeting to the sun, and as he entered the villa, the sounds became louder and then stopped.

"Did you bring the rice?" came the squeaky voice.

"I forgot, Little Father," said Remo. "I was working out this electronics problem."

"Better you should learn Sinanju than wires and bulbs. Leave that for whites and Japanese."

"I am white. Besides, Koreans are getting into electronics now too."

In the living room a wisp of a man with patches of white hair hanging over his ears sadly shook his head. He sat facing the sun in a glorious golden kimono of the dawn, with the precious yellow threads creating designs of splendid mornings over the Korean hills around Sinanju.

"To do one thing well makes a man special. To do one thing better than all others makes one Sinanju. But to be Sinanju means to be in a constant state of becoming, for that which is not moving toward something moves away from it." Thus spoke Chiun, reigning Master of Sinanju, to Remo, who had once been his pupil but was now a Master too.

"I'm not going to read the histories of Sinanju again," said Remo.

"And why not, may I ask?"

"Because I have made the last passage. I'm a Master now. I love you, Little Father. You are the greatest teacher in the world, but I am not reading that nonsense about how Sinanju saved the world from one aeon to the next just because we were paid killers."

"Not killers. Assassins. A bad virus is a killer. An auto accident is a killer. A soldier firing a gun is a killer. But an assassin to a monach is a force for peace and justice."

"How are we a force for justice, Little Father?"

"We get paid and we support the village of Sinanju, full of base ingrates to be sure, but those are our people."

"How is that justice? We go to the higher bidder."

"Would going to the lower bidder be more just?" asked Chiun with a delicious cackle.

"That's what I said. Killers for hire."

"That," said Chiun, "is a dirty lie. If you would read the histories of Sinanju you would see that. But no. You learn the ways of things, but you don't learn the reason of things."

"You think Ivan the Terrible of Russia did justice? He killed people for wearing the wrong clothes."

"Slanderers of his name in your West destroyed his beautiful reputation. He was a most just czar."

"Yeah? How?"

"He paid on time, and paid in good gold. No one in Sinanju ever starved because Ivan the just failed to pay his Sinanju assassin."

"No one ever starved anyhow. You never used the tributes. They just piled up in that big funny-looking building on the hill. That was just an excuse to hoard more wealth."

"The treasure of Sinanju, hoarding?" Chiun let out a pained cry to the very heavens above this new-world sky. A Master of Sinanju, the white man he had trained, had called the sacred treasure of Sinanju, the earnings of four millennia, a hoard. "Besides," said Chiun, "it has all been stolen."

"Don't bring up that again. America has more than tripled its gold tribute just to make it up to you."

"It can never be made up to me or the House of Sinanju. While you were out saving the world, a world which has never done anything for you, you let me search alone for the treasure."

"Yeah, well, where would Sinanju be if the world went?" said Remo.

"The world is always coming to an end from one thing or another, so you say. But it always goes on," said Chiun.

"And so does Sinanju," snapped Remo.

"Because we do things right. We honor the treasure. Lost were coins and jewels from Alexander-a white man but definitely great-statues of such fine porcelain, such exquisite craftsmanship that the Ming emperors only gave them to their sons, and of course to us, Sinanju, their house of assassins; gems from the great pharaoh worth entire countries; tributes from all the ages. Gone."

"And what about the American gold that pays for my services to my country?" said Remo.

"Yes. Gold. That is all America can offer. More. Never better. That is all it knows. More, and more, but never that which makes a civilization wonderful."

"It gave me to Sinanju, Little Father."

"I gave you to Sinanju," said Chiun.

In that point, Chiun was largely correct. They had both given Remo to Sinanju, but to admit to truths in an argument was like fighting while holding one's breath. One lost all power. So Remo ignored the remark, and went out to get the rice, and when he returned he found Harold W. Smith was waiting for him with Chiun.

"I could have sworn I got it right down in Cuba," said Remo.

"No problem there," said Smith. He sat on a couch in the small living room as Remo prepared the rice in the open kitchen near the entrance of the apartment. The doors were shut, but Remo knew that Smith carried enough modern sophisticated electronics to tell them if anyone were listening in. As Remo once said, Smith could probably tell if someone were thinking of listening in. Chiun remained in a lotus position, his long fingernails delicately resting on his lap, his back straight, his body at one with itself, so that he looked more in place in the air-conditioned living room than any of the furniture.

"Koreans are very good with electronics," said Chiun. "I trained him."

Remo ignored the remark.

"We have a strange situation developing in Oklahoma. Well, actually throughout America," said Smith. "A band of Ojupa Indians has gone on the warpath."

"I believe they're outnumbered," said Remo. "You do have an army."

"Army," scoffed Chiun. "An army is a collection of human faults and poor discipline multiplied by thousands."

"An army would be useless in this situation," said Smith.

"Aha," said Chiun. "If but your wisdom could be transferred to Remo."

"The President doesn't want to see Americans killing Americans," said Smith.

"Then he should stay out of our cities," said Remo. Chiun remarked in Korean how true that was, but cautioned Remo against speaking honestly to Smith, who, because he paid the tribute to Sinanju, Chiun insisted on calling "Emperor Smith."

The saying from the eightieth scroll of the fifth Masterhood of Gi the Major, taken in commentary from Gi the Minor, was:

"Honesty to an emperor from his assassin is like holding the sword by the blade instead of the handle. It can only hurt the assassin."

Remo answered in Korean that he knew that passage, and that speaking honestly to Smith made working easier, not harder.

Chiun answered that what might appear easier was always harder in the long run.

Smith sat in the chilled living room of the resort villa with his briefcase on his lap, listening to Remo and Chiun babble on in Korean as though he weren't there. Voices rose and Smith realized that he was hearing an argument.

He tried to interrupt, and both Chiun and Remo told him to wait a minute. When Remo and Chiun finally turned their heads away from each other in disgust, Smith said:

"We have a problem. This little band of Indians has first defeated the sheriff's office, then the state police, and now the Oklahoma National Guard."

"The Oklahoma National Guard is kind of the army, Little Father," Remo explained.

"What would one expect from an army but to lose a battle?" said Chiun. "After all, Ferris wheels never lose battles."

"They would if they were made in Korea," said Remo.

"Don't argue in front of the emperor," said Chiun, resorting to Korean.

"I'm not arguing," said Remo in English.

"I think you are, Remo," said Smith.

"When I want your opinion I'll ask for it, Smitty. This is personal."

"How can you speak to a fool of an emperor like that?" asked Chiun in Korean. "You're a bigger fool. You're acting white. Whatever crosses your mind comes out your lips."

"It's called honesty, Little Father," said Remo in English.

"It's awfully confusing to hear only one side of an argument," said Smith.

"The confusion is ours, O gracious Emperor, that we should bring any unpleasantness before you who are serenity in yourself."

"Well, thank you. I certainly wouldn't want to get involved in anything personal between you two. But we have a problem. The Indian band has become an army. It has moved all the way up into the Dakotas and now is camped at the Little Big Horn, the site of the great Indian victory over George Armstrong Custer."

"The massacre," said Remo.

"Armies always massacre. Do you think they could assassinate?" asked Chiun, vindicated. "It takes an assassin to assassinate."

"Precisely," said Smith. "Therefore we'd like this army to be immobilized by the removal of its leader, who obviously is the guiding force behind this. It's like an army out of nowhere, a powerful, well-trained army with a spirit for battle rarely seen nowadays."

"You have decided well, O Emperor Smith. For a kingdom with a good assassin needs a small army, and a kingdom with great assassins may need no army at all."

At this point Chiun suggested that perhaps the new tribute for Sinanju should be based on a percentage of America's defense budget. He had heard it was over one trillion a year, and that was outrageous when one considered that for, say, four hundred billion dollars a year, a mere four hundred billion, Smith could be talking about a serious and major upgrade of assassin services-not that Smith and America weren't getting the absolute best as it was now.

"He's not going to shell out four hundred billion dollars, Little Father; besides, what would you do with it?"

"Replace the empty coffers that so disgrace my Masterhood. No other Master of Sinanju has lost so much as a copper coin, while I, because of my negligence with my pupil, because I have taken it upon myself to bring a white into the House of Sinanju, now am left like a pauper with bare treasury."

"Hey, stop this 'white' stuff. I know how the treasure was lost. The North Korean intelligence agency tried to trick you into killing for it, and stole the treasure so they could feed it back to you as though they were discovering a trail from a thief. I know what happened. It was Koreans, not whites, who stole it."

"A single misguided fool. One rotten apple does not a barrel make."

"He killed himself so you'd never find it. Talk of rotten," said Remo. They were both talking in Korean now and Smith threw up his hands and asked them to excuse him. The last words he heard were in English, with Chiun promising to take apart the Indian army in a way that would glorify Smith, and Remo promising that the leaders would be out of the way in no time.

Which was what Smith had come for.

* * *

Miles and miles of trucks and guns waited outside the Little Big Horn for the attack to begin. Only this time it was the American army that had the Indians surrounded instead of vice versa, and General William Tecumseh Buel waited for his orders from Washington.

It was ironic, he thought, that at this new battle of the Little Big Horn there would be no horses. His father was an old cavalrvman-though even in his father's time cavalry had meant tanks, not horses-and his grandfather and great-grandfathers were also. In fact, the first Buel to ride in blue for the USA was killed at the Little Big Horn. And while General Buel publicly affirmed he wished no injury to the innocents, in his heart he could not help thinking: Now we even the score.

He set up his heavy artillery behind his half-tracks, which were behind his tanks. The tanks would lead. The infantry would foilow. And if the Ojupa wanted to fight it out, well then, there was nothing he could do about it. They would fight. And they would die. Just the night before he had left two roads open so that young Indians, anticipating the glory of finally defeating the white armies, could join the Ojupa.

He had heard their drums and chants all night. He had heard rumors that they had a great new force with them, that finally the great spirits were with them and they could crush the white man once and for all.

"It is a shame that members of our society can feel so alienated as to express such sentiments," General Buel had said publicly. Privately he planned to grind the bastards into Dakota mud under the treads of his Pattons. He was only sorry that he probably would not be able to let the artillery mangle them for long. He would attack at dawn, approach in five columns, and where they would meet would be the last live Indian. General Buel would finish him off personally. Maybe a shot to the belly and watch him squirm, probably the way his own ancestor had squirmed.

He would then recommend people for medals and make a wonderful speech about how horrible war was, perhaps adding the sentiment that from this horrible battle all mankind might learn to live well together.

That night he did not sleep. Just before all the columns began moving, he got a direct call from the President.

"Bill," said the President, "I've got good news for you."

"What?" asked General Buel warily.

"I think we can stop this thing without bloodshed."

"Good," said General Buel, his voice cracking. "How are we going to do that?"

"Just hold your fire and wait for the results. I've got it covered."

"May I know how, sir?" asked General Buel.

"No," said the President.

"As you say, sir," said General Buel. "But those Indians seem pretty hostile. I'd hate to have to be on the defensive in this case, Mr. President, sir."

"I guarantee that everything will be taken care of," said the President.

"And if it isn't?"

"Ah, but it always is," said the President.

"Perhaps I can give some assistance."

"They don't need help. It's all taken care of."

"Very good," General Buel said, and hung up laughing. He knew the last crew who had tried to enter the tight Indian bivouac ended up tied to a tree with their throats cut. He would give the President until noon and then open fire. A battle at high noon, he thought.

It would be like an inferno in these Dakota hills. The sun would be directly overhead, and fighting men always consumed more water anyhow. He would drive them away from the riverbank. He would get them into a small valley without water, then let them suffer under the sun as his great-grandfather must have done in these very hills, many years ago.

Chapter 3

It was a long way from Oklahoma to the Dakotas, but as the stranger said:

"It's always a long way into courage."

He always made so much sense just when someone was ready to call the whole thing off. After all, how could a small band of Indians beat the United States government today, when the odds were even worse than a hundred years ago? But he pointed out that the odds were never good at the beginning of a victory, only at the end.

An engineering student from a college in Iowa pointed out this was absolute nonsense. He was a Plains Indian who had felt overwhelmed by his studies and just enlisted in the cause to get away. He was willing to fight alongside his brothers, but he wasn't going to believe nonsense.

"Look around you. That's the real U.S. Army out there. They got tanks miles deep, and behind them infantry, and behind them artillery. We're not trapping them like a hundred years ago. They're trapping us."

"We beat 'em before," said one brave.

"Custer was outnumbered. We had the numbers then. Now they got 'em."

And some of the young men, who had been thinking there would be only victories and glory, suddenly had second thoughts.

"I thought they always outnumbered us, but we beat 'em because we were braver, cleaner, closer to the earth. But finally their numbers prevailed."

"We outnumbered them at the Little Big Horn. Custer was the one showing foolhardy bravery. That's why he died and we didn't."

The revelation threatened to send panic through the new Indian army, but as always the stranger seemed to be able to turn things around.

He pointed out that the Israelis were almost always outnumbered, but they won regularly. The engineering student commented that they were better trained. How much training did this new army have?

"It has the training of its fathers. It has the rightness of its cause. Others may want to spend time playing with guns, but the Indian nation has wasted too much time already. You wouldn't be living in reservations today if you hadn't waited too long. What do you have to lose? The white man's pickup trucks? The white man's whiskey, which makes you crazy? You have nothing to lose but your shame."

The stranger in the suit was brilliant, better even than back in Oklahoma, Little Elk and Running Deere had to admit. He could take anyone and make him want to run straight into the guns.

They had decided by now that the stranger had to be an Indian spirit come back to help them in their struggle. After all, he did appear in the sacred fire, and the sacred fire went out when he arrived. He did come with the chanting of the medicine man. He did seem to have some very special powers. He never tired, and he knew who everyone was.

The question was, which Indian spirit? And the answer was to ask the medicine man, if they could find him. But somehow the stranger found out about their concerns and got them aside just before the big battle with the federal troops, even as the sun was breaking over the Dakota plains, even as the tanks over the hills made the ground tremble and half-tracks created dust storms that looked like the end of the world.

"Look," he said, his face almost shining with joy. "What are you guys worried about? Do you care who I am? Would it help to know who I am? I've got my needs and loves just like the rest of you. I'm a lot like all of you. Maybe with you guys I've found a place I haven't had for a long time. Whatever it is, know this, above all: I am with you in your war."

"Do you have a name?" asked Little Elk. He had a clipboard in his hand. He was going to let the first waves of tanks go through into the center, and then break out along a U.S. highway and try to circle back on the rear of the federal columns. The stranger had thought it was a brilliant plan. Little Elk was discovering, as the stranger predicted, that he was, after all, a military genius. If so many people didn't get killed in wars, he would like to fight one a week.

"What name would you like?"

"You have more than one?" asked Running Deere.

"Sure, but lately I haven't had one. I think you great guys ought to have your own name for me. Your special name."

"We asked your name. This isn't playtime," snapped Little Elk. He had became a brusque, efficient leader in the last few weeks, and he didn't like to waste time anymore. Losing time was like losing life itself, especially when a major battle was about to begin.

"Arieson," said the stranger. "Call me Mr. Arieson. And I'm an old friend of the Ojupa."

"Well, we certainly need you now," said Little Elk, going back to his command post, back to his new platoon leaders, back to all the braves who looked to him now that their hour of destiny was near. He loved it.

Chiun was worse than ever. It was more than the complaining. Remo had never seen him attack furniture and machines before. While packing, he broke the washer-dryer that came with the villa in Flora del Mar. He said he was not a washerwoman. He shredded the air conditioner. He sent the television flying five times, until he finally ended up throwing the pieces into the steamy canal outside their stucco abode.

It took fifteen golf carts to carry Chiun's steamer trunks to the airport limousine. The resort's registration desk had lost their account and thought they could make Chiun wait.

He just walked out. They made the mistake of sending a manager after him. Chiun kept the manager.

"You can't keep someone. It's called slavery," said Remo. "I'll carry the trunks."

"I didn't give you Sinanju so you could be a slave," said Chiun.

"You've got to give back the manager. He's not yours. It's stealing."

"They sent him. He's mine."

"What's wrong?"

"Have you read the histories of Sinanju? Have you examined the stars? Don't you know what's wrong?"

"No," said Remo.

"Then read our histories. At least you didn't let them get stolen."

And then, in South Dakota, at the airport, Chiun seemed to go too far, even for Chiun. He refused to leave the parking lot, refused to let any cars move by him, and looked around, ready to take on the world. "There. Even here in this backward part of America they desecrate your parking lots with those signs. You are a decrepit culture. And you're going to get worse."

Chum's long fingernail pointed down to a painting of a wheelchair in the parking lot. The sign showed the space was reserved for the handicapped.

"What's wrong with that?" asked Remo. Even as they were landing, Remo had seen the army forces massing for miles down the roads leading to the Little Big Horn. It was a war he intended to stop. And if he wanted to succeed he didn't have much time to waste in parking lots.

"These are the best spots. They are closest to everything. And they are reserved for the wrong people. They should be given to your best people, your prize athletes, perhaps even to your assassins if your culture had advanced far enough to start producing them."

"Handicapped people are not our worst people. They're people who have been denied certain physical abilities, and as a decent country, unlike some vicious Oriental ones, we take care of them better. If they have a hard time walking, we give them the shortest route. I like it. It's one of the sanest things we've ever done."

"Ruination," said Ghiun. He was not moving.

"What's wrong?"

"You do not see it?"

"No. C'mon."

"Your whole country is doomed."

"You always said it wasn't worth saving anyhow. Let's go."

"And this doesn't bother you?" said Chiun, smiling wanly and shaking his head.

"No. I said so. Let's go."

"I'll explain then," said Chiun. "Many of these people who are in wheelchairs have been injured because perhaps at a moment of' crisis their minds wandered. Maybe they thought of something else while they drove their cars and did not have time to avoid an accident. You are rewarding lack of excellence. And in so doing you are promoting lack of concentration in your populace."

"Chiun," said Remo, "a lot of people suffered accidents that weren't their fault, and a lot of people were born with problems, so let's go."

"There is no such thing as an accident. There are events you have failed to control."

"Chiun, will you tell me what's wrong?"

"Read your histories."

"I'll read the histories. Let's go."

"You promise now because you want to get on to another silly little assignment."

"What's wrong?"

"Armies. I hate armies."

"You loved the assignment back in Flora del Mar."

"I would like anything that would get us out of that dump," said Chiun.

"It was a nice resort. Let's go."

"An army," said Chiun, "steals the bread out of the mouth of an assassin. An army-"

"I know, Little Father. I read the histories of Sinanju," said Remo, and to get him moving repeated that armies terrorized populations, promoted amateurism, instability, and loss of wealth to a host nation, and worse, gave a monarch the idea that perhaps an assassin wasn't necessary. A monarch often thought, wrongly, if he could have a hundred thousand killers for a pittance each, why would he need one assassin who would cost a fortune? There were many examples in the histories of Sinanju of a Master having to show a monarch his army was useless before he could get hired.

And as they drove a rented car toward Little Big Horn National Park, Chiun repeated the examples, with exactly what tribute was given, and at the end of each account he would mention that that tribute too was lost when Remo was off doing other things while Chiun was hot on the trail of the thief.

"We're never going to find that treasure, so stop carping about what you can't do anything about, and let's get on with this assignment."

"I can do something about it," said Chiun.

"Good. Let me know so I can help."

"You can never help."

"Then what is it you're doing?"

"I'm reminding you," said Chiun, nodding in sour satisfaction.

The entire national park was sealed off by military police. No one could enter without a pass. No civilians could stay on the road.

"All civilians should evacuate to the nearest area designated safe, sir," said the MP, his white helmet glistening in the sun, his sidearm polished in its holster, his boots immaculate.

"Thanks," said Remo, gliding past him. He wore his usual dark t-shirt and gray slacks. Chiun had on his gray traveling kimono and refused to wear the black kimono with red trim indicating a Sinanju Master was performing work. He did not think armies should ever be considered work.

The MP issued the threat again.

"Civilians are not allowed in the designated combat zone," he said.

Remo grabbed his brass belt buckle in two fingers and yanked the MP after them to a nearby jeep. Another MP ran up to help, his sidearm drawn. Chiun got him with his fingernails, and pressing nerves in the MP's neck, convinced him that driving them both into the combat zone was in their best interest.

Thus did they pass the miles and miles of cannon, tanks, and half-tracks, with Chiun complaining constantly.

"When I think of the billions your country spends on its armies, every tank costing many millions, every artillery shell costing five thousand dollars apiece, I am appalled at what a mere four hundred billion dollars would do in tribute to Sinanju."

"What would it do? Sit there?"

"The treasures are living things. They span all ages."

"They sit there," said Remo, and Chiun refused to answer such a low and base insult. Of course, he could have said he was planning to move them to a bigger building to show the glories of Sinanju to the rest of the world. But Remo knew that almost every Master for the last twenty-five centuries had planned to do that and never gotten anywhere, so Chiun could not dispute Remo's charge. Instead, he chose to sit in wounded silence.

As they approached the perimeter of the army encampment they heard groans. The morning attack had been called off. Some of these young volunteers complained that they might never get a chance to fire their weapons in combat.

"Armies," scoffed Chiun. "Soldiers."

"I was once a marine," said Remo.

"And that's why it took so much more time for me to break you of so many absolutely bad habits. You used to think enduring pain was a virtue, not the stupidity of ignoring the wisdom of your body talking to you."

Several soldiers, their M-16's cradled in their arms and the dust of the day on their khaki uniforms, their eyes blackened so they could see better in the glare of the sun, warned the two not to proceed farther.

"There are hostiles up there," said one frecklefaced lad with a bayonet stuck in his belt.

"I'm with one," said Remo.

"He an Indian?" asked the young soldier.

Remo saw Chiun thinking of explaining the difference to the young man between the heavenly perfect people and others, like Africans, Indians, and whites. Chiun could be physical in his lessons at times.

"We don't have time, Little Father," he said.

So instead, Chiun simply endured another injustice from the ungrateful society he served and followed Remo along the little valley. Up ahead they could sense the river. There was a way the earth responded to its water. Some people using divining rods could, crudely, sense the water too. But Remo and Chiun just knew the water was there, and they also knew there was a large encampment of people.

A young man with dark hair and high cheekbones, and a hunting rifle with a big bore, fidgeted inside a foxhole and then chose to rise from it as though trying to surprise Remo and Chitin.

"White man, your time has come," he said, and Remo just walked over him, pushing him back down into the hole. No talk was needed.

They both knew what they were looking for and they both knew how to find a command headquarters. It was always the same. Command headquarters might be in different places on different battlefields, but they were always located in the same relationship to the units they controlled. There were always subordinates running to and fro, from the low in rank to those not-quite-so-low, and from the not-quite-solow to those higher up.

One only had to find someone giving an order and ask him who gave him his orders. Then it was easy to follow the chain of running messengers to the head man.

That was it.

All armies were the same.

This was the wisdom of the lessons of Sinanju. The difference between sides was only in the imagination of those sides.

When Remo had first learned this, he became angry. He had fought in Vietnam in the early days as a marine, and said he certainly wasn't like the Vietcong.

"If we're all alike, how come one side wins and one side loses?"

"Because some are trained better and some are trained worse. But they are all trained. And they are trained the same way. Not to think. Not to feel. Not to be. Only to act in some crude way that will make them more effective. An army, Remo, is a mob with its mind taken away."

"A mob doesn't have a mind."

"It most certainly does," answered Chitin, "That is why it runs around in hysteria, blindly attacking anything in front of it. What a mob does not have is control. But it does have a mind."

"So why am I learning this? When am I ever going to need this? I'm in training to fight criminals, not soldiers."

"And I am teaching you Sinanju. Let your silly courts decide who is a criminal and who is not. I am teaching you reality. You will learn armies, because that is the way Sinanju teaches. It teaches thought first, then the body."

So Remo had learned about armies, and dynasties, and how one approached a pharaoh, even though there hadn't been a pharaoh around for over three thousand years and there was little likelihood there would ever be one again. He learned Sinanju, and some of it he learned better than the rest of it.

What he forgot quickly and became bored with was the legends of the Masters, which, as any American over thirteen would recognize, was promotional material for the oldest house of assassins in the world.

And Chiun never stopped tiring of telling him that if he did not learn Sinanju whole he did not know Sinanju. And this meant reverence for the lost treasures as well as the histories. But this admonition was useless after Remo had made the last passage and become himself a Master of Smanju.

For Chiun it meant he could no longer threaten Remo by telling him that if he did not do something, he would never become a Master.

Because now he was. And thus on that hot summer day, Remo and Chiun, two Masters of Sinanju, walked along the prairieland toward the Little Big Horn, ready to stop the second battle there between the U.S. Army and American Indians.

And no one noticed that the two men strolling along under the sun did not sweat, nor did they kick up dust under their feet. And no one noticed that they seemed remarkably unaffected by warnings from braves with guns.

They did not notice these things until it was too late to notice, and then they noticed nothing. A platoon of machine-gunners from an eastern tribe lay forever in the land that once belonged to the Sioux. Cannoneers from Minnesota reservations lay draped over the barrels of the guns they had learned to use only that morning.

Right up the organization created by the military genius of Little Elk moved Remo and Chiun, until they found a long flatbed truck with many antennae sticking out of it, and several men squatting over maps nearby. Only one was out of uniform. He wore a suit and tie and carried a briefcase, and every once in a while the men in the new Ojupa uniform, deerskins, would turn to him with a question. And he would answer it.

They called him Mr. Arieson.

"That's our man," said Remo. There were only a few guards protecting the command group. But even if there were many, it wouldn't matter.

It would not be too hard to move in, take out the leader, perhaps keep the subordinates for a while in some safe place like a locked truck or one of the manned vehicles preparing for this war, and let the army disintegrate into an aimless mob.

Then the remnants could be handled by social workers and sheriffs.

Remo ambled toward the group whistling a tune from a Walt Disney film he liked, the words to which he remembered only randomly, but it was a cheery little thing about going off to work.

He noticed Chiun was not with him, and assumed this was because of Chiun's distaste for fighting soldiers. But then he heard Chiun's voice calling after him, saying what Remo had never heard before.

"It won't work. Come back. Let us return to Sinanju. The time to wait is at hand. Let the world go crazy."

"What're you talking about?" laughed Remo.

"You won't be able to do what you want," said Chiun. Remo did not even turn around.

"See you when I'm done."

"You won't be," said Chiun.

Remo whistled ". . . it's off to work we go" as the first guards threw up their hands, warning him to halt, and lowered the automatic weapons as a sign of what would happen to him if he didn't.

He spun them backward, sweeping his palms upward, bowling them into the dust, and walking on. He took a bayonet charge and kept moving. The last two guards protecting headquarters got off a few shots, and Remo slapped their guns away from them, catching the weapons as they fell and never breaking stride until he walked into the command council of the new Indian army, headed by the men now known as the fearless Ojupa.

He dropped the guns on the map. That gave the kneeling men something to do. Then he went for the man with the thick neck in the three-piece suit. Remo noticed there was no perspiration on the man's forehead, although he was out in the sun.

Was that what Chiun meant by his work being useless, that he had spotted something in this man that showed he knew Sinanju?

But why wouldn't Remo spot it?

Remo did not lunge with a simple stroke. He approached as though offering his own body as a target, but in reality he wanted to make the man commit to a thrust so Remo would see how he moved.

But the man didn't move. He didn't even exhale properly. His eyes seemed to burn, and he was laughing.

To Little Elk and Running Deere and the rest of the commanders of the new Indian army, it looked like some weirdo had startled them by throwing guns on their maps and then walked over to Mr. Arieson and leaned backward.

They looked up to see how he had gotten through their defenses. Where were their guards? A quick glance at the strewn bodies on the dusty grasslands told them.

Running Deere, now always ready for action, always ready to charge, took his own sidearm and got off a shot to the stranger's head. Apparently the weapon misfired, because while there was noise and smoke, the bullet didn't strike anything. He fixed again. And missed again.

The stranger moved as though segments of time disappeared. Now he was leaning backward and now he was between Running Deere and Mr. Arieson. And before he could think, Running Deere got off two more rounds. And they missed the stranger and they missed Mr. Arieson.

Only Remo and Mr. Arieson knew they hadn't missed. Remo had lured the shot to see what effect a bullet would have on the man who did not sweat or move in to deliver a sucker punch. The sidearm was a big, slow weapon. There was the pulling of the trigger, the aim of the barrel, the explosion, Remo dropping beneath the line of the bullet and then watching it go past. Both of the bullets landed in a hillock three-quarters of a mile away, shattering a rock. Both of them went through the third button of the vest of Mr. Arieson.

Mr. Arieson had not even bothered to dodge.

He did not wear armor plating. And he was not affected by missiles. Remo fanned the ground, first with little motions of his flat palm against the dry dust, then faster, feeling the air as hard as wood paddles, compressing it with a swooshing sound until in brown fury the dust exploded into a dry storm.

Grass was blown out of the dirt. And still Mr. Arieson did not move.

Running Deere went at the stranger with his hands. Running Deere kept going, but Remo kept the hands. "I think I know who you are," said Mr. Arieson, "but you're white. I've never seen moves like that from a white man."

"Who are you?"

"I believe I am your enemy," said Mr. Arieson. Just on the chance that it might work, having tried several things that didn't, Remo threw a stiff finger into the right eye of Mr. Arieson.

And this time the dust came back at him in the form of smoke, like a campfire with strange, sweet smells.

And Mr. Arieson was gone.

So it had worked. What had worked, Remo was not sure. But something had worked. Mr. Arieson, the leader of this army, was gone. And now Remo could turn to the rest of the command.

"Well, fellas, who's for dying today?"

Little Elk went for one of the guns Remo had dropped on the map. Remo snapped it between his fingers like a twig.

Three of the other leaders went for their weapons, but Little Elk, always one step ahead of everyone else, ordered them to stop.

"It's over," he said. "Mr. Arieson is gone."

And then from nowhere, from the dust and from the lingering sweet-smelling smoke, came Mr. Arieson's voice. And it was laughing.

"Only the dead have seen the last of me," he said. On that day, Running Deere died from his wounds. General William Tecumseh Buel lost his chance to fight the second battle of the Little Big Horn, and Remo Williams notified Harold W. Smith, head of CURE, that after more than two decades, he was quitting the organization.

"Why? Where are you going? What are you going to do? Has something happened?"

"Yeah. Something has happened," said Remo. "Something bad."

"What?"

"I finally discovered that I'm useless. I've got to do something first."

"What?"

"I'm not sure. But I met something today that I should have known. I'm helpless. For the first time since training, I am absolutely helpless."

"But you put down the revolt."

"I've got a mystery here, little Smitty, and until I unravel it I won't be any good to you, myself, or anyone else."

"The mystery is what you're talking about."

"It wouldn't do any good to explain it, Smitty."

"Why not?" asked Smith.

"Because you're not from Sinanju and you've never read the scrolls."

"Where are you going?"

"To Sinanju."

"Why?"

"Because Chiun is there."

"Has he quit?"

"I think so. And so have I. So long, Smitty."

The line went out in the secured offices of Harold W. Smith, in the gigantic cover installation known as Folcroft Sanitarium on Long Island Sound.

Quitting? thought Smith. So that's what Chiun's message was about. The way Chiun had explained it, it sounded like he was going to give an even greater service to Smith, but was just taking some time to improve himself.

But hearing from Remo, Smith now understood that the flowery tributes to Smith's wisdom and genius, the promise of a return with stronger and better service, were really Chiun's way of saying good-bye.

What was frightening now was not any Indian rebellion, but the great question of how it could get started so easily, and why the normal protective measures of society seemed so pathetically useless.

The United States Army report was alarming. The Ojupa were just a simple group of men who, in a flash, turned into one of the great little armies of mankind, with a fighting spirit rarely seen on earth.

They had developed tactics on the spot that could rival Hannibal or Napoleon. They showed a fighting elan that the finest troops would envy.

But army analysts could not discover why this seemingly normal group of men could become so good, so quickly. The conclusion of this report was that if the same sort of situation turned up elsewhere in the world, neither the U.S. Army nor any other army could handle it. The report also went to the President of the United States, who told his Secretary of Defense not to worry because he had something special that could take care of it like it did at Little Big Horn.

He didn't know he not only didn't have those services, but the world was going to see those same tactics again very soon. Only the dead had seen the last of Mr. Arieson.

Chapter 4

General Mohammed Moomas, first Democratic People's Leader for Life, inventor of People's Democratic Islamic Revolutionary Social Justice-by which the nation Idra sought not only to live the perfect social and religious life but also to bring compassion, love, and justice to the rest of the world-had a problem.

General Moomas always had a problem. His tiny North African country floating on a sea of oil had spent over forty-two billion dollars fighting imperialism, Zionism, capitalist oppression, atheism, and man's general inhumanity to man, and all he had to show for it were thirteen thousand random murders, a half-dozen plane hijackings, four poisonings, fifty-seven kidnappings, twelve hundred tortures, and the unflagging support of several American columnists, especially when America tried to do something about it.

General Moomas had operated freely for years, financing any revolutionary group willing to throw a hand grenade into a hospital and then claim a victory for social justice. There were always comrade citizens unwilling to accept the total freedom, total joy, total growth and liberty of the Islamic Democratic People's Socialist Revolutionary Nation of Idra. This was understandable. Satan, Zionism, imperialism, capitalism, and oppression could reach the hearts of the innocent and foolish, and the General had to face the evil. But given a chance, and with the help of whips, chains, electric shocks, and the old-fashioned holy sword cutting pieces off their persons, many people renounced their evil ways.

The truly obstinate, of course, had to be killed. Thus no one spoke a word of unhappiness in General Mohammed Moomas' country:

All this changed when American bombers flew in low over the Mediterranean, outflew the General's latest Soviet planes, penetrated his latest Soviet missiles, and nearly destroyed his home.

For the first time, the people of Idra learned they might have to pay for their leadership in the revolutionary world. Someone out there was shooting back, and shooting at them.

Several colonels debated overthrowing the General. After all, oil prices were falling, and like so many third-world nations, they produced nothing else of benefit to anyone else on the planet. There was no industry in Idra. There was a steel mill once. They had brought it from Czechoslovakia. The steel would build homes and hospitals, tanks and guns. But when the Czechs left, it just rusted away, like all the weapons the Idrans bought from outside.

Thus, while there were demonstrations in London and Europe over the American bombing, and while several American columnists were screaming daily that bombing Idra did no good-it could not stop terrorism, they said-the General was almost overthrown.

A group of colonels stormed to his desert sanctuary. They all drove in their Mercedes-Benz sedans. There were fifteen thousand colonels in the Idra Islamic Revolutionary Socialist Defense Forces, roughly a third of all the military. The rest were mostly generals. But if one was a general he didn't have to leave his French-built air-conditioned home. Therefore the colonels did all the dirty work, like driving out to the desert to discuss the basic issue of Idra-what had they gotten for their oil money but American bombs?

General Moomas, a handsome man with curly hair and dark penetrating eyes, had not become a revolutionary leader without being able to handle a mob. He invited the entire fifteen thousand colonels to a traditional bedouin feast of lamb, so that from his hand to their mouths would only be sustenance.

General Moomas knew he could provide this traditional feast. A ship from New Zealand had docked just three weeks before and that meant plenty of lamb. Considering Korean stevedores had just arrived to offload, and an army of French cooks had just signed on for the Idra marines, and Italian mechanics were always on hand for the trucks, this traditional feast was now possible.

In years past, Idra women could outcook an army of Paris chefs, using only the meager fare of the Idra desert. But their skills had been lost during modernization, when they were assigned to learn computers and physics and all the things the Idra men found to be beyond them and assigned elsewhere to another gender. Since there was only one other gender in Idra, cooking fell, like all the dirty work for thousands of years, on the women, some of whom actually did become proficient in those subjects and promptly left for London, where they could find work other than posing for news cameras to show how modern Idra was.

Now, as the fragrant aroma of lamb roasting in a thousand imported ovens filled the cold night desert air, General Moomas confronted his brethren to offer an accounting of where all the billions had gone.

"I know I promised you the best air defense money could buy, and look now, American navy air has penetrated those defenses. But I ask you, who would have thought the Russians would flee their posts in our hour of need?"

"I would," said one colonel.

"Then would you have operated the missiles?" asked the General.

There was silence in the desert. Only the mutterings of the French cooks preparing the traditional sweet desserts could be heard.

The desserts were never as good as their wives and mothers used to make, but the French came as close to Idran cooking as Moroccans or Syrians.

Another colonel rose, and this one held a submachine gun. He did not blanch at the guards who outnumbered him and obviously had him in their sights.

"I am a Moslem," he said. "I obey. I obey the teachings of the Koran. I believe there is but one God, and Mohammed is his prophet. I do not believe in killing innocents. I do believe in fighting evil and I do not consider a bomb in a car that will kill any passerby a heroic act of virtue. I thought throwing a man in a wheelchair off a ship was cowardly and disgraceful. If that helps the Palestinian cause, to hell with the Palestinian cause."

There was grumbling like a low volcano from the fifteen thousand that night. Fingers on the triggers of guns aimed at his head closed ever so slightly. If the General hiccuped, the colonel would be dead. General Moomas raised a hand to silence his officers.

"What is bad about killing a crippled Jew who was a Zionist anyway because he was headed for Israel? It is no crime to kill Zionists."

"It is a dishonor to kill the defenseless," said the colonel.

And here the General laughed. He ordered his aides to bring him American newspapers, and taking one from Washington and one from Boston, read the words of columnists who, every time a pregnant woman was put on board a plane with a bomb to blow herself and the passengers out of the sky, every time a crippled man was thrown off a liner along with his wheelchair, every time someone set off a bomb in a nightclub, or hospital, or nursery in honor of the Palestinian cause, these columnists blamed Israel.

"Only when the root cause of terrorism is erased will terrorism end, and the root cause is the lack of a Palestinian homeland."

There was applause that night in the desert encampment, but the lone colonel continued to speak out.

"There was killing of innocents and kidnapping of innocents long before there was talk of a Palestinian state. Who here thinks it is really honorable to kill women and children and old men to achieve your ends? I am for obliterating Israel. But not for any Palestinians-for us. They have humiliated us in battle. I say we should humiliate them the same way. Not kill old men in wheelchairs and women pregnant with our babies."

"But in the great universities there are many teaching that we are in the right, that the West is decadent and must be overthrown by revolution," said the General. "We are winning the war of propaganda."

"Which is what? What others think of us?"

"Soon, America will turn against Israel, and without American arms, Israel will be weak, and then we shall destroy the Zionist entity."

"They survived all our armies at their birth. They were weak then."

"And so were we. But when we destroy Israel, we shall ride into Jerusalem in glory."

"Who here believes that?" yelled out the young colonel. "Who here really believes we are going to do that? Who here believes we will even fight another war against Israel? I do not care about Israel. Let it burn in hell. I do not care about the Palestinians, as I know you, my brothers, care not also. What I do care about is us. We were once a proud and great people. Our armies fought with honor. We won great victories. We could show mercy because we were strong. We were a haven for people because we were tolerant of those who followed the Book. What have we become now, killers of old men? We think it is all right because some Americans who hate their own country and their allies think any abomination is acceptable.

"We were great before the Europeans arrived in America. We were great while Europeans were living in stone buildings and butchering each other in little feudal kingdoms. The Arab world was truly the home of great learning, and military courage, and honor that was a beacon of enlightenment, not a torch in every part of the world where Islam is taught. We are an honorable people. Why do we allow ourselves to be known for infamy?"

"The Zionists control the media. They tell lies about us."

"It is not Zionist lies I care about, but the truth. And the truth is that we buy our weapons and we buy the people to operate them, and when trouble comes, the foreigners leave us to the bombs of the enemies. That is what I speak of."

"Can you do better?"

"I most certainly can. The first thing we must do is learn to fight a war. If we can't use a weapon ourselves, we won't have the Chinese or North Koreans or Russians use it for us. We will only fight with what we can use ourselves. We will give up our fancy cars, our fancy expense accounts in European hotels, and we will go back to the desert and become an army. And then we will fight our enemies-honorably. We shall give succor to the weak, mercy to the innocent, and honor to our arms."

"And what if we lose?" asked the General.

"Is death so bitter that you fear it more than losing your souls? Is defeat in honorable battle more shameful than impregnating a woman and using her as a living bomb with your unborn child, and worse, having it all planned by some of your generals? Are the words of the decadent West so appealing in your ears that they can deny you your heritage of tolerance and courage, just because you attack their enemies? Where are the Arabs who beat the Frankish knights? Who ground the Hindu armies into submission? Who turned Egypt from a Christian country to an Islamic one? Where are those who civilized Spain? Where, where, where?"

The General, seeing this colonel was reaching the hearts of his men where not even a new car or fine imported food could venture, understood he was losing. And to lose an argument in Idra meant losing your life.

He knew almost every colonel in the country, and he couldn't quite recognize that one.

The man was bearded, with a thickish neck. He stood quite proud. The General would have followed him himself after that speech, which is why he knew the colonel had to die.

"You speak well. You speak with courage. I am promoting you to general and making you leader of any force you wish to use to attack Israel. You may stab the Zionist snake right in the belly. Your weapons will be waiting for you offshore, or in Haifa, or Tel Aviv, or any Zionist city you care to name. Good luck. Good hunting, take any volunteers you wish. Any of you who wish to go with our new general, feel free. There will be bonuses."

And with that, the General went into his tent. He took his most trusted adviser into conference, and there whispered to him:

"He will not get followers, of course. No one is going to give up his Mercedes to die. They wouldn't give up their Mercedeses for Toyotas, let alone Israeli bullets. When he fails to get followers for the mission, tell him you will join him. Tell him you have a fine house in the capital you wish to give him for his courage. He will not trust you but he cannot turn down your house, after all. When he comes to dinner, poison him."

"Will he not suspect something?"

"Will he will suspect something. But the beauty of our plan is that a house is too valuable to refuse to look at. He will think he can fool us by convincing us he believes our story, and then try to kill us shortly thereafter when he thinks we think he is fooled. Do you understand, O brother?"

"No one is smarter than you, O brother and leader."

"I am not the leader because grass grows on my forehead." General Moomas smiled.

But suddenly there was cheering from outside. Guns were fired into the air. War shrieks were heard. Columns of men were marching through the scrub and sand of the Idra desert. And to the General's vast relief, they were not marching toward him. They were marching toward the sea. They had left their Mercedeses behind, their lamb dinners served on Royal Doulton china, their almost-Arab desserts. A cry was heard and echoed through the hard night: "Let us die at the gates of Jerusalem."

The General had often ended speeches like that. He would end them and then go home to his air-conditioned palace, and the cheering mobs would go to their homes, and they would all live another day to hear the same words.

But no one was going home. No one was even bothering to drive his Mercedes.

"They will tire in a half-mile and come back to their cars. Then I will tell them they are the real revolutionary heroes and any fools who continue to march with that colonel, excuse me, general, are not heading for Jerusalem, but death. The real road to Jerusalem is through my leadership."

But no one came back that evening or the next evening. The General heard the colonels had organized themselves into platoons and battalions. They trained without comforts. They marched in the desert heat, and if they did not know how to fix a vehicle, they did not use it. Eventually two things happened. Some vehicles were abandoned but others were made to work. The Idran soldiers even became proficient at tank warfare. They did not bother with revolutionary speeches, but learned their weapons, discovered their new leaders, and prepared to live or die in battle.

Their new leader from the ranks of colonels would not give his name. But one of the colonels, a bit shrewder than the rest, pressed him on several occasions to give his name. After all, if he were going to lead them against Israel, they should at least know what to call him.

"Arieson," he said. "You can call me Arieson."

"That's not an Arab name," said the colonel.

"It most certainly is," said Arieson.

"You have been a friend of mine in ages past who would shame the rest of all mankind with your glory."

And the shrewd colonel passed this information to a German reporter in the capital, and that reporter relayed the information to his superiors, and finally the word got to a planning station outside Tel Aviv.

The Arabs were putting together a tough little army the likes of which hadn't been seen in the Middle East since the eighth century, when Arab armies leapt out of the desert to conquer a massive empire in a thunderclap of time.

"How many in that army?" asked Israeli intelligence.

"Fifteen thousand."

"That's nothing."

"You've got to see these guys," they were told. "They're good."

"How good can an Idran be?" asked the Israeli command.

"You'd better not find out."

They dismissed the report. The only time the Idran army had ever fired their weapons in anger was against some defenseless African tribes. And when they heard where the Idrans were going to attack, they were absolutely hysterical. The plan, as they found out, was to launch a drive right into the major base defending the Negev, prove the Israelis could be beaten even though they had larger forces, and then take prisoners and retreat fighting all the way to the Egyptiari border.

None of them in the planning room of the Israeli defense forces outside Tel Aviv thought that within a short time they would be desperately calling up reserves from around Jerusalem to help out their armored units trapped in the Negev.

Sinanju, home of the House of Sinanju, glorious House of Sinanju, smelled as it had the last time Remo had visited it. Waste from the pigsties flooded out into the main street, and the sewage system the Masters had brought the villagers lay unused for want of anyone to install it.

The system was made of the Finest Carrara marble, with pipes hewn by hand and polished smooth. Unfortunately, that particular sewer system had to be installed by Roman engineers. In the year 300 B.C. travel was not as safe as it was nowadays, and the sewer pipes arrived in Sinanju but the engineers didn't. So the pipes lay unused all about, while the town stank.

Remo commented on this as the two of them arrived on the main road from Pyongyang.

"It's amazing the thieves didn't take the pipes also," said Chiun. "But what did you care? You are not even coming with me for love of Sinanju but to find out how to kill someone you cannot kill."

"Do you want me to tell you I love a pigsty?" asked Remo.

"New Jersey is not a pigsty?" asked Chiun.

"It doesn't smell like Sinanju."

"It doesn't produce Masters of Sinanju either," said Chiun.

At the entrance to the village, the elders lined up to greet the returning Master. They were happier this time, because now they could assure him that no treasure was missing. Of course it wasn't missing because it had already gone the last time Chiun had returned to discover that the head of North Korean intelligence had stolen it in a ruse to get the House of Smart ju to work for Kim Il Sung.

When this had failed and the chief committed suicide, which was wise, he had unfortunately taken with him the secret of the treasure's whereabouts. Since he had not even told his glorious leader, Kim Il Sung, the whereabouts of the treasure, it was lost forever.

That North Korea could not reimburse the House of Sinanju was evident. The only question remained whether Kim Il Sung should be punished for the misdeeds of his subordinate, and the answer was yes. But what punishment might be appropriate, Chiun could not decide right away, and in tribute, Kim Il Sung chose to build three new superhighways to the village and place a full chapter glorifying the House of Sinanju in every textbook in every school in North Korea.

Thus, amid Marxist-Leninist ideology would appear the family-history tree of the Masters of Sinanju, with praises on one hand for worker committees and on the ocher for pharaohs and kings who paid on time.

That this confusion was not protested was not unusual. The only thing most students knew about Marxist-Leninist dialectics was that they had better pass it.

So hundreds of thousands of students now learned by rote that Akhnaton in his righteousness gave forty Nubian statues of gold to Master Gi, and King Croesus of Lydia did pay in gold four hundred plowduts, and Darius of Persia offered jewels of one hundred obol weight-along with the principle of the invincibility of the masses over oppression.

This satisfied Chiun that Kim Il Sung was doing all he could. Especially when Remo and Chiun were met at the Pyongyang People's Airport by three thousand students waving the flag of the Masters of Sinanju and all singing:

"Praised be thy glorious house of assassins, may thy truth and beauty reign forever in a world glorified by thy presence."

Remo had waited impatiently with Chiun.

"They don't even know what they're singing," he whispered.

"Never disdain a tribute. Your American students should learn such manners."

"I hope they never learn those verses," Remo had said, so naturally, by the time they reached the village, Chiun had collected this major in of the trip and happily stored it where he nurtured all the injustices Remo put upon him, so that they could bear fruit that could then be sprinkled upon their daily lives.

"Perhaps you think the village elders of Sinanju are fools too, waiting as they are to pay tribute."

"No," said Remo. "Why shouldn't they pay tribute? We've fed them for four thousand years."

"We are from them," said Chiun.

"I'm not," said Remo.

"Your son will be."

"I don't have a son," said Remo.

"Because you play around with all those Western floozies. Marry a good Korean girl and you will produce an heir and we will train him. He too will marry Korean, and by and by no one will know there was a white stain in the Masterhood."

"If that's the case," said Remo, "maybe you already have a white ancestor. Have you ever thought about that?"

"Only in my nightmares," said Chiun, alighting from the car and receiving the deep bows of many old men.

Remo looked behind them. As far as the eye could see, four lanes of absolutely unused highway spun into the Korean hills toward Pyongyang. He knew there were two other highways coming from the village, equally unused. Occasionally, he heard, a yak might wander over one of the massive thoroughfares and leave a dropping, whereupon a North Korean helicopter would speed out of Pyongyang with a brush and a scoop and clean it up, so that Sinanju Highways One, Two, and Three would remain always immaculate. It was the least they could do in lieu of the treasure of Sinanju.

"Greetings," said Chiun to the elders. "I have returned with my son, Remo. I do not wish to hold it against him that he did not help search for the treasure when it was first discovered missing. After all, there are many worse to blame, those who did not offer up their lives to recover it."

There were low nods from the men along Sinanju Highway One.

"You might wonder why I hold nothing against Remo," Chiun said.

"No, they don't. I'm sure they don't wonder that, Little Father," said Remo.

The men looked up, worried. Two Masters were disagreeing. Either one could wreak punishment on them that they would wish they had not lived to endure.

Chiun quieted them with a hand. "He does not mean that. We all know you wish to know why I will not hold this against Remo. First, because he has come home to study. He will read the scrolls of the history of Sinanju now, and why?"

"I know why, Little Father."

"Shhh. They don't know why. He will read the scrolls of the histories of Sinanju because he has come up against something he cannot defeat, and why cannot he defeat this?"

No one answered.

"He cannot defeat this because he does not know what it is," said Chiun.

"I would if you'd tell me," said Remo.

"It would do you no good. You cannot handle this person until you recover the treasure of Sinanju," said Chiun.

"Now I know you're running a game, Little Father," said Remo, who decided not to wait around anymore to hear that. He knew Chiun knew what they were up against, just as he knew Chiun would not tell him right away. But sooner or later he would have to, if for nothing else than to gloat.

Remo was not ready for what he heard as he walked away, though, not ready for the price that was now being offered on his behalf.

"But being regretful and full of great remorse, my son, Remo, knows he must make up for the treasure to all of us, and he has decided to give the village of Sinanju a son."

Heads raised. There was applause.

"From one of the village beauties of Sinanju," said Chiun.

"There is no such thing," said Remo.

"No child, no help with your enemy," said Chiun.

"He's your enemy too, Little Father."

"That he is, but you are the one more anxious to finish him now. Besides, you cannot stay childless all your life, and if you have a son with some white woman, she could run off like all loose white women do and not care for the child. If you have a child with a Sinanju maiden, you know he will be raised honored and glorified because his father is a Master of Sinanju."

"I don't want a child."

"You don't know till you try."

"Just let me at the scrolls," said Remo. "I know if you recognized that guy, the answer has to be in the scrolls. So that's why I'm going to read them again. But marriage, no."

"One night. One moment. One sending of your seed to meet an egg. I do not ask for a lifelong commitment. Let the mother give that."

"Just show me the scrolls."

"No one-night marriage, no scrolls."

"But you used to beg me to read the scrolls."

"That was when you didn't want to read them." Remo sighed. He looked around. The sooner he got the scrolls, the sooner he would know what Chiun had recognized back at Little Big Horn.

And what would be so bad about one night? He wouldn't have to raise the child. And Sinanju would have an heir to the Masterhood.

Would he want his child to know Sinanju? Funny, he thought, looking down at the wood shacks and the mud walks being serviced by three major empty highways, he could not conceive of having a son without him learning Sinanju, becoming Sinanju, no matter what the cost to him and the boy. It was the way of things.

He just didn't plan on making the mother a woman from this village necessarily. He was still American enough to expect to fall in love before he married someone and made a child.

"All right," he said. So what? he thought. Why not? How bad could one night be?

"Then I shall open all the scrolls again to you. You shall read about the difference between the laudations to the pharaoh of the Upper Nile and the Lower Nile. You shall see how not to be tempted by a Ming courtesan. All the things I tried to teach you before, you will know. And you will marry a good girl, too. I will select her."

"I didn't say you'd choose," said Remo. "I'll choose."

"As you wish. Select the loveliest. Choose the smartest. Do as you will. I do not wish to run your life," said Chiun, beaming.

But when Remo finally met the young women, he learned that all the good-looking ones had used the three main highways to leave Sinanju, and those left were the ones who would not leave their mothers, those who knew that even in Pyongyang, where there were more men than anywhere else in the world, they could still not find someone, and Poo Cayang.

Poo weighed 250 pounds and knew two words in English. They were not "yes" and "no,' they were not "hello, Joe" or even "good-bye, Joe." They were "prenuptial agreement."

Every other word in her vocabulary was Korean, specifically the Sinanju dialect which Remo spoke. But Poo's mother did the negotiating for her.

Poo did not think of herself as overweight but rather as fully blossomed. Poo had not gotten married because so far no one in Sinanju was good enough for her, she felt. And she didn't see any potential in Pyongyang. She was the baker's daughter, and before anyone else in Sinanju got their breads or cakes, Poo chose first. It was to be understood this arrangement was to continue if she were to marry the white Master of Sinanju.

More important and more specific, she was never to be forced to leave Sinanju or be more than an hour's walk from her mother.

"You'd stay here even if I left?" asked Remo.

"Yes," she said.

"Will you marry me?" said Remo.

"We haven't gotten to the ownership of the home yet," said Poo.

"Will it be in Sinanju?"

"It must."

"It's yours," said Remo.

"Now for point eighteen," said Poo. "Pots, pans, dinnerware."

"Yours," said Remo.

Chapter 5

It was a brilliant plan. Even the Israelis had to admire it after it was pulled off. Under cover of night, thousands of dhows, old Arab fishing boats, set sail from ldra across the Mediterranean for the Israeli coast.

If the Idran army had used the new Soviet destroyers or the French gunboats, or protected the craft with overflights of their fighters flown by Russians, the Israelis would have picked them up, and certainly the U.S. Sixth Fleet, which dominated the Mediterranean, would have seen them on the most advanced radar system in the world.

But the dhows were wood. And they were sailed by Iraqis who knew their craft from the Euphrates. The Iraqis had no love for the Idrans or Syrians, and actually hated the Iranians, who were not Arabs at all but Persians. They were old feuds. But they too had met a Mr. Arieson and, as they told their Idran passengers, there was something about him that made fighting a war so worthwhile.

"We feel good. We feel proud of ourselves," they said.

"So do we," said their passengers as the great fleet of little wooden boats made its way slowly out into the Mediterranean. The stranger even seemed to be able to control the weather, because during the day, when airplanes would normally see something almost a mile across, there was fog. And one night they came upon the great Sixth Fleet, outlined dark against the sky, stretching for miles in its stateliness and awesome power, lights blinking from the great carriers as the finest fighter pilots in the world left the decks to challenge the world.

They could hear the waves against the wooden prows, and many were the men who silently prayed to their desert god that the great U.S. Sixth Fleet would move off into the night to dominate some other stretch of sea.

But to the horror of many, Mr. Arieson ordered the wooden fleet to turn in to the metal monsters from the West. They were not even trying to escape. They were attacking.

"What are you doing, General?" asked the colonel whom Arieson had made his chief of staff. He was from a mountain tribe deep inland in the country now named Idra. He hated the idea of the sea, but through his courage had nailed his body into the boat with a smile on his face to show his men the proper leadership. Now he was overwhelmed by the stupidity of small wooden boats attacking the greatest navy the world had ever seen.

He pulled at Mr. Arieson's sleeve. It felt like stone covered by cloth.

"What are you doing?" he asked again.

"We'll never see a prize like that again."

"Prize?" asked Colonel Hamid Khaidy, who had studied briefly at Russian military schools and learned they thought of the Sixth Fleet as one of the three great threats in the world, the other two being kept secret from non-Russians.

"Just think of the glory in attacking the U.S. Sixth Fleet. The finest sailors in the world, commanded by the finest officers, with the finest pilots, and the latest weapons. This truly is a challenge."

"But isn't it the purpose of war to win? Aren't you supposed to attack where they are weakest?"

"What's the point in that? Who would you beat then? If you want a victory like that, go fight a clinic for the terminally ill."

"I have never read of tactics where you go looking for the biggest fight in the world," said Hamid Khaidy. He had the hard face of a desert warrior and cold night-black eyes.

"Don't worry. You'll love me for it," said Mr. Arieson. He smiled and let out a soft song about great battles, great Arab battles, how they defeated the Crusaders at the Horns of Hattin, and now how they would defeat the great U.S. Sixth Fleet that stretched across the horizon and could bounce signals of the night moon and demolish any city it chose. Arrogant it was, and greater still, a living electronic and metal dragon that ruled this sea where Western culture was born.

"Know this," said Mr. Arieson, "and pass it along. The word 'admiral' is an Arab word. Once you were great sea fighters too. You shall be known as such again."

"We shall die in this landless place," said Khaidy.

"Then die with honor, for surely you will die either way," said Arieson, and guided the little pieces of the vast wooden latticework bobbing on the coalblack sea like little water bugs toward the metal monsters in the distance.

The electronics rooms on the U.S. ships could detect a fly on the wingtip of a missile cruising at Mach 10. They could differentiate between a nuclear warhead half a world away and a normal explosive. They could do this with missiles, planes, and even artillery shells behind inland mountain ranges.

They could listen to telephone conversations and shortwave radios from Rome to Tripoli to Cairo to Tel Aviv.

They knew when propeller aircraft took off from Athens and when a balloon landed on a hilltop in Cyprus.

They could pick up submarines cruising near the sea bottom and tell a manta ray from a shark three miles down. They could identify a torpedo twenty miles away just as it launched its strike run.

But they could not pick up wood on the surface of the ocean.

Wooden sailing boats had disappeared from active combat almost a century before.

The Idran fleet of a thousand tiny boats bobbed into the great Sixth Fleet that night, and when the little boats were close, the fear became the greatest. It was as though a civilization many stories high loomed above them, churning along with propellers that made great gurgling hisses all about the flimsy wooden boats.

"What do we do now?" asked Khaidy in a whisper. He felt as though they could be sucked under by the great propellers of the aircraft carriers and would no more be noticed than a toothpick going under in a sink.

"We attack for the glory of your tribes and your nation and your faith," cried out Mr. Arieson, and Khaidy prayed for help from his desert god.

But Mr. Arieson was prepared. From boat to boat the order was issued.

"Unwrap the green bundles."

Khaidy had remembered that the bundles were too heavy to be food and too solid to be ammunition. He did not know why Mr. Arieson had some placed on board each dhow in the center, beneath the ammunition.

Now, as one was unwrapped, he saw a nearby gun get pulled to it and stick there. They were magnets. Magnets with ropes. They were magnet ladders, and now Khaidy, always quick of mind, understood what they would be used for. The ldran army was going to board some of the American ships.

And why not? The boats were actually safest here under the ships, because they were in the one place the big guns, the rockets and the airplanes could not reach. Mr. Arieson had showed them how to defeat the finest and most modern navy of all time. Up the ladders went the men of Idra, knives in their teeth, glory in their hearts, and when they hit the decks of the USS James K. Polk, they let out a battle cry and attacked.

The captain of the Polk, scanning reports of air activity over the Crimea, heard the yell and thought it was some kind of party. The captain commanding the marine contingent called out his men, who put up a good fight but were outnumbered. The air pilots had never been that well trained in hand-to-hand combat, under the assumption that if they had to fight someone with their hands, they were already rendered useless for flying. The sailors fought with mops and brooms. But it was no use.

Up went the green banner of Islam aboard the USS Polk with its nuclear weapons and aircraft, and for the first time since the Battle of Lepanto centuries before, the Mediterranean had a credible Arab naval presence.

There was no slaughter of prisoners either. A new sense of combat had taken hold of the soldiers of idra. They honored those who fought well against them.

"Now tell me the truth, friend," Mr. Arieson said to Hamid Khaidv. "Have you ever had so much downright fun in your life?"

"It's more than fun," said Khaidy. "It is life itself."

"I knew you'd see it that way. Now, how do you feel about fighting the Israelis in the Negev?"

"Just make sure we don't have to battle some out-of-shape reservists. I want their standing army," said Khaidy.

He did not even ask how Mr. Arieson planned to get them into position against one of the most heavily defended countries per square foot in the world.

In Washington the word was ominous. A nuclear-attack carrier had fallen into the hands of one of the zaniest countries in the world, which had devoted its military efforts to bombing kosher restaurants in Paris, kidnapping American priests, and trying to buy an atomic bomb to make it an Islamic bomb. Now it had a carrier full of nuclear weapons, had penetrated the U.S. Sixth Fleet, and could, if it knew how to fly the planes and use the equipment, probably slip a warhead right into Washington, D.C. Or anywhere else in the world it wanted.

And General Mohammed Mootnas wanted lots of places. He wanted just about any place with good plumbing and a lack of infestation by tsetse flies; he wanted what were better known as the second and first worlds.

The question was, and it was a hard one, should the United States sink its own nuclear aircraft carrier? The decision fell on the President alone.

"I'm not going to kill American boys just yet. I've got other ways to deal with this," he said.

In Folcroft Sanitarium, Harold W. Smith got the call for help.

"If ever we've needed you before, we need you now. Get your people onto the ship and take it back," came the President's voice.

"Well, I can't commit them just yet."

"Why not?"

"Both of them have gone back to their Korean town."

"Well, call them out of it. Tell them it's more important than anything they've ever done."

"I'll try. But I think they've quit."

"Quit? They can't quit. Not now. No. They can't quit." The President's normally modulated and calm voice began to rise.

"Who is going to stop them, Mr. President?"

"Well, beg. Do anything. Offer them anything. Give them California if you have to. We'll lose it anyhow to that maniac Mohammed Moomas."

"I'll try, sir," said Harold W. Smith, as the civilized world hunkered down for the onslaught.

The wedding of Poo Cavang and the white Master of Sinanju could not be disturbed by an urgent message, not even one from America, where the Masters of Sinanju were now serving.

It was a sacred time for a Master to be married, said the baker in broken, halting English. He was answering Chiun's special phone on this day because Chiun, as everyone knew, considered the white his son, and therefore he was the father of the groom.

As was custom, four bags of barley were brought to the center of the home of the baker and were opened and trod upon by all the guests. Pigs were being roasted and their fresh crisp aroma tickled the nostrils of all those present, even the honored Masters of Sinanju, whom everyone knew did not eat pork, but only the weakest portions of the rice. From this village had come the great Masters of Sinanju, and now with the beautiful Poo Cayang joining herself to the white Master, everyone could be assured the line would continue. And if the line would continue, then the village would be assured of a livelihood without ever really having to work very hard.

The Masters had brought sustenance to everyone for thousands of years and now they could be assured of thousands more. The white blood could be bred out within a generation or two. But even that did not matter.

Korea had lived through rule by Mongols and Chinese and Japanese. Only rarely had they ever ruled themselves. Except for Sinanju. No one dared rule Sinanju because of the Masters. And so when communism, another foreign idea, took hold, they knew it would pass, but what would not pass would be Sinanju.

Poo Cayang was hailed by all as she was carried through the streets of the village and then back to her house. Anyone who couldn't get inside stood outside.

Inside, Remo the white was dressed in a Western suit a tailor had hurriedly made, along with a tie, a silly white ornament. Chiun wore the traditional formal black stovepipe hat and white kimono.

He received the traditional assurances from the parents that their precious Poo was a virgin.

"Of course she's a virgin," Remo whispered. "Who would do it to her of his own free will?"

"You are talking about the woman who is going to be your wife, the mother of your child," said Chiun.

"Don't remind me," said Remo.

Poo entered and the floor creaked. The mother smiled to Remo. The father smiled to Remo. Chiun smiled back.

A priest from a larger neighboring village had been brought in. He bound their wrists in white cloth. Poo pledged obedience and good spirit and whatever dowry she brought. Remo just said:

"I do."

Since Remo was Western, they all said he should perform the Western custom of kissing the bride. Poo lifted her moon-shaped face and closed her eyes. Remo gave her a peck on the cheek.

"That's not a Western kiss," she said.

"How would you know? You never left Sinanju," said Remo.

"I'll show you a Western kiss," said Poo, reaching up to Remo's neck and pulling her face close to his. She pummeled her lips into his and thrust her tongue into his mouth, passionately searching for his.

It felt like some giant-muscled clam was trying to eat Remo's gums. He slipped free and out of respect to the bridal party refrained from spitting.

"Where did you learn that?" asked Remo.

"I read a lot," said Poo.

"Then practice tonight. I've got work. Is the wedding over?"

"There are other things you are supposed to do, Remo," said Poo. "Other bridal things that I am entitled to."

"You got everything in the prenuptial agreement," said Remo.

"I am talking about things that are understood," she said. "Things that don't have to be mentioned."

"Everything has to be mentioned," said Remo. "That's why there are contracts. The two hundred bolts of silk will be delivered in a couple of days."

"She's right, Remo. You owe her certain duties," said Chiun.

"You're interfering in my marriage," said Remo.

"Did you think I wouldn't?" asked Chiun. He was puzzled by this. Remo had known him more than twenty years now. What a silly thing for him to say. Not only was he going to interfere with the marriage but he was going to make sure the son was raised right. And Remo should expect that.

"Then if you care to interfere, you can fulfill the marriage obligations."

"I have done my job for Sinanju. Now it is your turn, Remo," he said, and turning to the guests, Chiun asked for tolerance.

"He has known only white women, generally consorting with the worst scum of womankind. They have gotten to his brain. I am sure that as he grows to know and revere our precious Poo, he will respond in a natural and correct way."

"He's supposed to do things on the wedding night," said Poo.

"It doesn't say so in the contract."

"Every wedding agreement implies that," said Poo.

"Now, you know, dear," said Chiun to Poo, "what I have had to live with to these twenty-some years." There was a grumble among the guests. Part of the grumble was the floorboards creaking under Poo's feet. She had a habit of stamping when she got mad. "Not that I'm complaining," said Chiun.

"A Master never complains," said the baker, Poo's father. Everyone agreed that Chiun did not complain.

"Some would say I have reason to complain, but I have chosen not to. After all, what good does complaining do?" he asked everyone assembled.

They all agreed, except Remo.

"You love to complain, Little Father. Your day without a complaint would be hell," said Remo. Everyone agreed Remo was an ungrateful son, especially Poo.

"Whether you believe me or not, he likes to complain and he knows it," said Remo. "And someday I am going to be the sole Master of Sinanju, and let me tell you all right now: I'm taking down names."

Chiun gasped, wounded to the core. What ingratitude! What malevolence! But what really astounded Chiun so much was that somewhere and somehow, Remo had picked up a knowledge of what would work in the village of Sinanju. Threats always worked, and keeping score was the best way to make them do so. The grumbling stopped. Poo began crying, and Remo walked out of the baker's house into the muddy streets and up the hill to the great House of Sinanju.

It was empty inside. Remo had remembered it full, with treasure stacked on treasure, bowls of pearls, beautiful statues, and gold in coins minted by sovereign countries that no longer even existed. He had been amazed when he first saw it, how fresh the coins looked. How perfect the statues were. It was a historical treasure, untouched and unused. So Sinanju, he felt, really didn't lose anything it needed, rather something that was a poignant reminder of how long this house of assassins had existed.

He would, if he could, get the treasure back, but he knew he couldn't, and his real gift to Chiun and the Masters of which he was a part was doing his service to perfection. That was the legacy of Sinanju. That was the real treasure. What he knew and what his body knew.

The scrolls had been laid out for Remo. He was fairly certain Mr. Arieson would be in some Swedish scroll, since the name was definitely Swedish or Danish.

But the Nordic scrolls, the time of service to the Viking kings by the Masters of Sinanju, were nowhere to be seen. Instead there were the scrolls of Rome and Greece from 2,000 B.C. to A.D. 200. Remo went over them again, looking for an Arieson. There were recorded tributes, recorded services, recorded prices, a comment on a new peculiar religion coming out of Judea which the current Master of the time said had no future because it appealed to slaves.

He had advised one of the followers of the new sect to change a few things to make it popular. Make it appeal to the rich, not the poor. No one was ever going to get anywhere saving, "Blessed are the poor."

It was this lengthy commentary that Chiun had marked, the analysis of gopd religions and bad ones. The religion of the Rabbi Jesus would never succeed because:

One, it did not appeal to the rich and powerful.

Two, followers were not promised power and earthly goods.

Three, there was no place in it for a good assassin. After all, what could one do with a sect that was supposed to love its enemies?

Fortunately, as later scrolls showed, time healed that and Christians could be every bit as good employers for an assassin as everyone else. But at first, especially during its rise in the second century, Christianity had given Sinanju a scare.

And then of course there were the ancient cults of Dionysus and Isis, Mithraism, which also gave Sinanju a scare, and absolutely not one word of a Mr. Arieson, or any description of a man who could let projectiles pass through him. No one could do that. Yet Remo had seen it at Little Big Horn.

Remo knew Chiun was coming up the pathway to the great House of Sinanju.

He could tell the light movement of the body, the silence of the footsteps, the unity of the being that now entered the big empty house, once storage for tribute of the ages.

"The treasures of Sinanju," said Chiun.

"I know," said Remo. "They're gone."

"Only when we get them back will we be able to deal with Mr. Arieson. Until then may the world watch out."

"Since when have you cared about the world, Little Father?"

"I care about a world we may not be able to find work in."

"There's always work for an assassin."

"Not always," said Chiun, and would say no more, other than that Harold W. Smith had called for Remo and Chiun, and Chiun had told him he was not leaving Sinanju anymore.

"I think I will," said Remo.

"You owe something to Poo, precious Poo. Poo Cavang Williams. It is a funny last name. She asks if she must keep it."

"Tell her she doesn't have to keep anything."

The telephone line had been set up in the baker's house for the wedding and Remo entered the house amid the stares of a hostile family. He smiled at the parents. They turned away coldly. He smiled at Poo. She broke down in tears. The phone was off the hook.

"Hello, Smitty, Remo here. If you say it's an emergency, then I'll just have to go."

"Thank goodness. What changed your mind, Remo?"

"No change of mind. Duty first."

"I don't care what changed your mind. We have a problem. The USS Polk, with all hands on board and full of nuclear weapons, has been seized by the world's number-one lunatic, General Mohammed Moomas. We don't know how he did it, but he's got nuclear weapons at his command now. The Pentagon has retreated to its deep shelters beneath the Rockies, and the rest of the Sixth Fleet has surrounded the carriers, and atomic subs are waiting to make a pass. But we don't want to lose those men. Can you get in there and save them?"

"That's not the place you want to get hit. I'm going to go right for the head."

"Moomas?"

"Exactly."

"What if he's not afraid to die?"

"I'll find something, Smitty."

"How come you're so anxious now, Remo?"

"Not anxious. As a matter of fact, I hate to leave home, and if so many innocent lives weren't at stake, I'd never go out."

"You know, you sound married, Remo."

Remo hung up, and with greater gravity he told Poo that only his service to his beloved country could be enough to make him leave Sinanju on his blessed wedding night. Even as he spoke, he realized how Chiun had learned to facilitate untruths so well. He had been married for forty years.

In Korean, Poo said that was all right. She was going to go with him.

"I can't take you with me, it's dangerous," said Remo.

"Who can be in danger when protected by a Master of Sinanju?" asked Poo with a smile.

Her parents nodded.

"And if we should get a moment alone"-Poo smiled-"why then, who knows what we shall do on our honeymoon." The smile became a grin and the grin became a laugh, and her parents packed her trunks and when the American helicopter arrived to take him to the American ship that would take him to the American plane, her luggage totaled fifteen large crates.

"What's that?" asked Remo, pointing to a crate the size of a small car.

"That, dear Remo, is our wedding bed. You wouldn't want us to leave on our honeymoon without our wedding bed."

By the time Remo arrived in Idra he was ready to kill before asking questions. He was ready to kill because it was morning, or possibly because it was hot. He did not care which.

He had left Poo in friendly Jerusalem, to pick her up when he got out of Idra. That she accepted as a necessity, provided he came right back.

Poo, a simple little girl from a Korean fishing village, settled for the suite at the Hotel David that Henry Kissinger used when he did shuttle diplomacy. Anwar Sadat had used it also. So had President Nixon. Poo said it would be fine provided she could possibly have another apartment for her personal effects. Remo left Poo to the United States State Department, which Smith had enlisted for him. He told the charge d'affaires to give her whatever she wanted. He asked if American diplomats ever performed special services for deserving Americans. "Sometimes," he had been told.

Remo mentioned wedding-night duties. The charge d'affaires declined.

Remo flew to Egypt, then boarded a plane for Morocco, and took a Moroccan flight into the capital of nearby Idra.

Idra had three times signed a nation-merging treaty with Morocco. In between it waged war against that state as a traitor to the Arab cause. General Mohammed Moomas listed Aden through Syria as organizations loyal to the Arab cause, including at one time or another every faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Currently Morocco was considered in pan-Arabic unity with Idra, and therefore allowed to land planes. Remo was told that with his American passport he was going to have trouble in Idra.

"No I won't," said Remo.

When the customs clerk at the Idra International Airport asked to see Remo's passport, Remo killed him.

That was what marriage had done to his temper. He beat the clerk's rolling head out of the airport's doorway amid his sudden very loud welcome to the foremost nation struggling against Zionism, imperialism, and the Islamic way of life. No one else asked to see his passport.

In fact, the major part of the army was gone from Idra and the General was alone with a few guards around his palace, morosely listening to the news of the seizure of the USS Polk from the U.S. Navy.

The Arab world was aflame with the news. Here was a truly great victory of courage and skill against a formidable foe. The soldiers had shown daring and brilliance that had even won the respect of their enemies. No longer were they just the darlings of left-wing academics and Nazis.

They were even respected by their foes.

The response was dizzying. People didn't run out into the street like angry mobs or even fire off guns in joy. Rather a new respect was sweeping through the Arab world, a confidence they had not known since Sal a Din.

Remo chased a guard away from the gate and was sorry there was no fight. He stormed in on a vast marble-floored perfumed room called the "Suicide Revolutionary Command Bunker."

The General, in a white suit with enough medals to have participated in fifteen major wars and a landslide, sat glumly listening to the announcers glorify his name as one of the greatest Arab leaders of all time.

Remo grabbed a handful of his curly black hair and shook him. Some of the medals fell off, making clinking sounds on the marble.

"Are you one of his men too?" said the General. "You've finally come to kill me."

"I've come to get back my carrier."

"I don't have it," said the General. Remo gave his neck a short twist between forefinger and thumb, pinching a nerve.

The General cried out.

"I don't control them anymore. I don't control them anymore."

"Well, try, sweetheart. I'm sure you can set up communications to the USS Polk."

"I already have, but they don't listen to me."

"Try again," said Remo. While servants ran to neighboring rooms to bring in communications equipment-the suicide command bunker was only equipped with liquor and food-Remo polished a bit of the marble with the General's face.

He would have killed him, but he needed him to talk. Remo even hated the walls. If he didn't watch out, the dangerous emotion of rage would take away his concentration, and without that he could just as easily kill himself as someone else with some of his moves.

It was the mind that made Sinanju Sinanju. Finally the equipment was brought in and the General, weeping, got through to the USS Polk and a colonel he recognized as Hamid Khaidy.

"Faithful brother, we command you to speak to a beloved guest."

"We're busy," came back the voice.

"What are you doing?"

"We're activating the nuclear warheads. We're in range of Jerusalem and we can penetrate their air cover."

The General put his hand over the receiver. "Should I ask them to stop?"

"Hold on," said Remo. "We've got to think about that one."

Chapter 6

"No. I'd better stop that one," said Remo after a moment. He thought of Jerusalem going up in a nuclear cloud. It was a sacred place to all three monotheistic religions and home to one of them. And besides, precious Yoo was under his protection; it had been announced in the village that she had nothing to fear because she was leaving with a Master. Chiun would never forgive him if she got hurt.

Was he going to save this sacred city, capital of a dear American ally, just because Chiun would hold it against him? Had he lost so much of his moral bearings? Had the work of the nuns in the Newark orphanage been so replaced by Sinanju that he would hardly give a second thought to the fact that Jerusalem was where Christianity was born?

Had it gone that far? Long ago, thought Remo. "Tell him you are sending an emissary to help."

"You will help, of course?"

"They don't need help, apparently," said Remo.

"What can one man do?"

"I'm here, ain't I?" said Remo, nodding back at the wounded at the entrance of the luxurious suicide command center.

"Can we come to an accommodation?" asked the General.

"No."

"What would you take to make sure those top officers never set foot on shore again?"

Remo smiled. He knew what was happening, but he pretended to be the innocent American.

"You want 'em dead?" asked Remo, feigning surprise.

"I am faced with a problem you might not understand. Of course I am the foremost battler against imperialism, Zionism, oppression, and capitalism, as I am against atheism. I fight for the Islamic way of life," said the General, taking a thoughtful sip of his Scotch and soda, which was as forbidden a substance to a Moslem as pork to a Jew. "But to lead the fight, one must not have someone else winning more victories. I cannot afford a stronger battler against these evils than I. Do you understand?"

"Golly, no."

"Let us suppose they defeat the Zionist entity in the sacred homeland of the Palestinians."

"You'll rejoice."

"Of course. A great and wonderful victory. Unfortunately, it will not be mine. It will be theirs. First Jerusalem will be theirs, then who knows? Damascus? Riyadh? Cairo? Where will they stop?"

"What are you saying?"

"I feel safe, on behalf of the struggling masses against Zionism, the independent Arab and Islamic nations working for Allah to restore our rightful sovereignty over Jerusalem and all of Palestine, to offer you any price to make sure those on the USS Polk, the heroic Arab strugglers for justice, never set foot on land."

"Kill them?"

"Any price, and I guarantee you will have the support of every Arab government. We are not poor, you know."

"There is something I want, General," said Remo, and from memory, from the droned recitations of the histories of Sinanju, he listed all the tributes he could remember, all that had been stolen while he was away doing the work of CURE.

"Even for a beginning price, this is astronomical," said the General realistically.

"No. All I want is any one of them, and for you to tell me where you got it. I'll get the rest."

The General promised undying love, and hoped the American and his own renegade soldiers would fight to the death. Then he wouldn't be obliged to search for such an extraordinary list of valuables.

The American certainly was no fool. He had been holding out for a treasure.

Once the American was off on an Idran plane to the USS Polk, now named the Jihad, or holy war, the General contacted the ship again and got Hamid Khaidy on the phone.

The General was about to play another card. He was not a leader of the struggle because he slept all day.

"Beloved colonel," he said, "I am looking for a new commander of all my armies."

"No," came back the voice of the colonel.

"What?"

"No deals. I am a soldier, not some dealer in promotions. I have fought an honorable battle. If I become a general, I will earn it on the field of honor."

"Of course I am talking about honor, the honor of being a field marshal."

"You obviously want me to set up someone, and I'm not going to do it. I will meet whatever enemy I have face to face, and live or die by what I can do with my courage and martial skills. No more scheming. No more baby killing. No more parking a car with a bomb at a supermarket and claiming some great Arab victory. I am going to live and die as a man, as a soldier, as an Arab soldier. Do you know what that is, General?"

"I stand enlightened, brother. Your courage and honor shame me. Let me express my support for your new stand to your second in command."

When the General got another colonel, he whispered into the phone:

"Colonel Khaidv]y has gone crazy. He is talking about getting you all killed. I authorize you to seize command from him immediately and I am promoting you to general as of now. This is an inviolate order."

"I'm not stabbing my brother in the back," said the other colonel. "If I get a promotion, it will be for killing enemies, not Arabs."

"So true. So true," said the General, and asked if there was anyone else near the phone. To twelve men he offered supreme command of the Idran forces, and twelve men refused him, talking about honor, not as a normal word of conversation to make a point, but taking it to some ridiculous extreme. They were going to live by it.

As a last resort he tried the colonel who had caused all this trouble in the beginning. And Colonel, now General, Arieson was most pleased to learn that a thin American with high cheekbones and dark eyes was now flying toward him on an Idran plane that was going to attempt to land on his decks.

"He wanted to kill you, and how, I thought, could I protect our greatest victory but to warn you of his impending arrival? I am showing you I am saving you by sending him on a defenseless plane. And to show my good faith, I made sure it was not flown by a Russian, but an Idran hero commander ace pilot. They may not even reach your deck."

"And in return?"

"Hold off your attack against Jerusalem and meet with other Arab leaders. I will make you commander of all our victorious forces. You may be the ruler of the Arab world."

There was only laughter at the other end of the phone.

"But you don't understand. I have what I want. I don't want the world. I want my war, my good old-fashioned war."

"Struggle, of course. It ennobles the soul. But a war must have a purpose, brother General Arieson."

"It is the purpose, brother struggler," laughed General Arieson, and hung up.

Remo learned almost immediately why the Idran air force, with the most modern jets money could buy, was ignored by the General in favor of hijacking of civilian airliners, machine-gunning of kosher restaurants, and bombing of discotheques where American servicemen danced.

He was two thousand feet up, and still rising in Russia's most advanced fighter jet, when the pilot in the front seat of the two-seater jet asked him how he was doing. He asked in Russian. Remo only remembered bits of archaic Russian needed to understand Sinanju's many years of service to the czars.

"I guess you did all right," he answered in that language.

"Do you want to take over now?" asked the pilot. He was a hero, with medals for shooting down countless enemy planes-according to the publicity, fifty Israeli, twenty American, and ten British to be exact. Actually, under cover of diplomatic protection he had shot a British bobby from an Idran embassy, and when he was ejected from that country, given credit for shooting down British fliers in fair combat.

"No, that's all right," said Remo. "You're doing fine."

The blue sky over the tight canopy made him feel part of the clouds. It was true what they said about an advanced fighter. It was a weapon strapped to the body. He did not like the weapon because it was not his body. But he could see how it would enhance the crude unrhymed moves of the average person to make him forceful. Gut a corner at Mach 3 like an off ramp. Bang, turn, and you were gone into the clouds.

"Did you like my takeoff?" asked the pilot.

"It was fine," said Remo.

"Don't you think I should have throttled forward more?"

"I don't know," said Remo.

"I felt too much resistance. That's why I asked."

"I don't know," said Remo.

"You didn't feel the lack of throttle?"

"What throttle?"

"Aren't you my Russian adviser?"

"No. I'm your passenger."

"Eeeah," screamed the pilot. "Who will land the aircraft?"

"You can't land?"

"I can. I know I can. I've done it in the trainer, but I've never done it without a Russian at the controls behind me."

"If you can, you can," said Remo.

"Not on a carrier."

"You can."

"That's special training."

"I'll show you how," said Remo.

"How can you show me how if you don't know how?"

"I didn't say I didn't know how, I just don't know how to fly the plane."

"That makes absolutely no sense!" screamed the pilot.

"Don't worry," said Remo. "It'll work. Just make a pass at the carrier."

Before they reached the carrier, they had to fly over the entire Sixth Fleet, which sent up planes to look them over. The American pilots flew nerve-shatteringly close.

"Don't think about them. Don't let them bother you."

"How can I not think about them?"

"I'll teach you a trick. I'll teach you how to land the aircraft also."

"But you've never flown one, you said."

"Never," said Remo.

"You are crazy."

"I'm alive and I intend to stay alive. Now, the first thing you have to do is notice the sky."

"It's filled with American planes flown by pilots who not only know how to fly by themselves but are considered the best in the world, if the Israeli pilots aren't. We are cursed with skilled enemies."

"You're not doing what I said. Look at the sky. See the sky. Feel the clouds, feel the moisture, be the moisture, be the clouds, be the sky."

"Yes, I can almost do that."

"Breathe. Think about your breath. Think about breathing in and breathing out."

"I do. It is good. Oh, it is good."

"Of course. Now, don't think about the planes."

"I just did."

"Of course," said Remo.

"I don't understand."

"I dare you not to think about a yellow elephant. You'll think yellow elephant. But when I tell you to think about your breath, you automatically don't think about the other planes."

"Yes, that's so."

"Your breath is vital," said Remo. "Be with your breath," and he saw the man's shoulders slump ever so slightly, indicating the muscles were relaxing, and now the man's skills could begin to take over. Remo brought him out to the sky, out to the clouds, and when they saw the pitching, bobbing little stamp of a carrier deck beneath them, he carefully avoided talking about landing and made the deck a friend, not an object of terror.

One of the most difficult feats in all aviation is landing on a pitching carrier deck, but the pilot was down before he knew it. Precisely before he knew it. If he had known he was landing the aircraft instead of joining the plane strapped around him to a friend whose motions he understood and felt, he would have either crashed or pulled up in panic.

Their plane was immediately surrounded by armed Idran soldiers, but they were not hiding behind their weapons like the guards at the palace. There was something different about these men. They were anxious to grapple with anyone who dared cause trouble.

That was what Remo had noticed about the Ojupa at Little Big Horn. It was Arieson's handiwork. He was sure of it.

And the beauty of an aircraft carrier was that there were no dust storms. This was a manmade thing of steel corners and traps. Arieson and his strange body would not be able to escape in dust this time.

"Ariseon. Arieson. I'm looking for Arieson," said Remo.

"Ah, the general," said one of the soldiers.

"Where is he?"

"Wherever he wants to be. We never know where he is," said the soldier.

Because he had landed in an Idran plane, Remo was accepted as one of the Idran Russian advisers. No one believed the pilot had landed it himself, being a brother Idran. They told him they had found a new way of fighting, using their courage and not machines.

Remo searched the hangars beneath decks. He found the American captain a prisoner in his own cabin. He found marines disarmed but treated well. He found American fliers and servicemen under guard, but nowhere was Arieson.

Finally he took the ldran soldier who had been guiding him around and said:

"I got bad news for you. I'm an American."

"Then die, enemy," said the Idran, and brought up his short-nosed automatic weapon, firing well and accurately right at Remo's midsection. And he was rather quick about it too, for a soldier.

But he was still a soldier. Remo blended him into the bulkhead.

"We're taking over this ship," he said to the marines watching.

"These guys are tough," said the marine.

"So are you," said Remo.

"Damned right," said the marine.

Remo freed the sailors the same way and then the pilots. The battle started in the main hangars and spread up to the control tower. Bodies littered the passageways. Gunfire ricocheted off the metal walls, spinning sparks and death at every level. The two sides fought from midday until midnight, when the last Idran, with his last bullet, charged at a marine with a hand grenade. The hand grenade won.

From the loudspeaker system came a voice:

"I love it. I love all you wonderful guys. You're my kind of men. Here's to you, valiant warriors."

It was Arieson. Moving along the deck was like skating on oil, so thick was the blood. Most of the living could hardly stand. Remo squished up a gory stairwell. It had been carnage. This is what Chiun had meant when he referred to the butchery of war. None of the men were really in control of themselves, rather fighting their own terror and forcing themselves to function as soldiers. It was like a butcher shop.

Arieson was laughing. Remo found him in the captain's control room.

"Now, this is war," he said with a grin as wide as a parade.

"And this is good-bye," said Remo.

He didn't wait for Arieson to commit, he didn't explore, he got Arieson with the steel cabin wall behind him and put two clean blows right into his midsection, the second to catch whatever lightning move Arieson had made to escape in the dust back at Little Big Horn.

Both blows struck.

They met iron. But not the steel of the captain's control room. Remo found himself with his hands piercing a helmet with a red plume on top and a burnished steel chest protector.

In Jerusalem, an archaeologist identified them for him as a helmet and cuirass prevalent in the Mediterranean for centuries before Christ. What puzzled the archaeologist was why anyone would make them new today.

"These are brand new. Look at the forge marks. Look, some of the wax from the lost wax method is still in some of the finer scrollwork."

"I saw that."

"I would say these are fakes. But they use a method of manufacture that has been lost for centuries. How did you make them?"

"I didn't," said Remo.

"Where did you get them?"

"A friend gave them to me."

"What could have made these holes in them?" asked the archaeologist, examining the implosions in the burnished steel.

"That was done by hand," said Remo.

Back at the Hotel David, precious Poo had learned two more words in English.

"Condominium, Bloomingdale's," said Poo. She had just met some lovely New York women who felt sorry for her that she had no Western clothes. They had bought a few rags in Jerusalem. There was a small bill for Remo. Eighteen thousand dollars.

"How do you spend eighteen thousand dollars on clothes in a country whose main product is a submachine gun?" asked Remo.

"I had nothing," said Poo. "I didn't even have my husband for the blessed bridal night."

"Spend," said Remo.

"Money can't make up for love," said Poo.

"Since when?" said Remo.

"Since I don't have a condominium and a charge account at Bloomingdale's," said Poo.

Downstairs there was a message at the desk for Remo. It had come from Ireland.

The message was:

"I'm waiting for you, boyo."

Remo got the American embassy to use a special line to reach Sinanju through submarines in the West Korea Bay. This with the help of Smith of course.

"Little Father," said Remo. "Did you leave a message for me at the King David Hotel?"

"King David was a terrible ruler. The Jews are well rid of him. Fought wars. When he could have used an assassin in the Battrsheba affair, he chose war instead. Got her husband killed in battle. And what happened? Ended up in the Bible. That's what happens when you use war instead of an assassin."

"I take it you didn't leave the message."

"Every moment you are not searching for the lost treasure, you're wasting your time. Why should I waste time with you?"

"That's all I wanted to know. Thanks," said Remo.

"Has Poo conceived yet?"

"Not unless she's made it with a Hasid."

"You're not living up to your end of the bargain," said Chiun.

"I didn't say when I would consummate the marriage. I just said I would."

In Belfast, as the British armored cars rolled by, keeping Catholics and Protestants from killing themselves, and as some of the heavier participants waited in jail for the British to leave so that they could get on with the murderous religious strife that had boiled along for centuries, a man in a loose gray jacket and a worn stevedore's cap sauntered into a pub, bought everyone a round of drinks, and said:

"Here's to Hazel Thurston, long may the beloved Prime Minister of England rule over all. To your health, boys."

Glasses flew across the bar. Some men cursed. Others drew revolvers. But the stranger just smiled. He downed his stout in a gulp and boomed a belch that could extinguish a thousand war fires on a thousand murky heaths.

"Boyos," he said. "Would you be cursin' our beloved Prime Minister what's been hated here by both Protestant and Catholic alive to these many years? Is that what I'm hearing?"

There was a gunshot in the Pig's Harp pub. It missed the target.

The stranger raised a hand.

"What are you shooting at me for if you hate her so much? Why don't you shoot her?"

"Yer daft, man. The bitch is better protected than the bloody crown jewels, I'm sayin'."

"So what do you do? Fire a random shot at some bobby in a soldier's uniform?"

"We do what we want, jocko," said one of the larger men at the bar.

"No. You don't," said the stranger. "Beggin' your pardon, me lad. You don't. Not a whit. Not a hair. Not a follicle on that pale British puss do you do harm to."

"Do you want to step outside and say that?" the stranger was asked.

"What for? I'm sayin' it in here."

"Then maybe, jocko, you'll just end up with a big hole in your head right here."

"Why not, boyo? Certainly keep you from doin' harm to Her Excellency the Prime Minister, Hazel Thurston. You can add another number to the deaths in Northern Ireland, and then go to the Maze Prison and conduct the latest in great Irish tactics. Starvin' yourself to death. Now ain't that a thing for a brave Irishman to be doin' with his body, peelin' his own flesh down to the bone so's all that's left is gauntness lookin' back at that English bitch who couldn't care less if every boyeen in Belfast gave up the ghost the same way."

"Who are you, stranger?"

"I'm someone who remembers the great Irish wars, when you fought with ax and sword and shield like the honorable men you always were. I'm talkin' of the blessed battle of the Boyne, where English and Irishmen fought like men. What do you do today? You invade a neighbor's living room and shoot up his dinner, along with his guests and family. What's wrong with you, boyo? Are you an Irishman or a Swede?"

"Why are you talking about Swedes?"

"You can't get a war out of them today if you stand on your head."

"We don't want a war with them. We got enough war already in Belfast."

"No. That's just the trouble, boyo. You don't," said the stranger. "If you had a war, a real war, an old-fashioned war, you'd march out to the grandest music you ever heard, and face your enemy square on one day, not three hundred and sixty-five including Christmas and the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. You'd have it out. Over and done with. Winner take all and blessings to the loser. But what do you have now?"

"We got unemployment," said one.

"We got streets filled with glass," said another.

"We got all the garbage of war and none of its fruits. We're left out again," said a third.

"Right," said the stranger. "What you got to do now is get Britain out of Northern Ireland so both sides can kill each other in peace."

"Never happen," said one.

"We been tryin' for four hundred years."

"You been doin' it wrong," said the stranger. "You been shootin' here and shootin' there, when you only need to get one lady."

"Miss Hazel Thurston," yelled one of the men at the end of the bar.

"Exactly," said the stranger.

"You can't get near her."

"Who'd want to?" said another.

"I not only know how you can get to her, but where you could put her until the bloody British get their bloody arses off true Irish soil."

"You make a lot of talk, stranger. Let's see you do it."

"Well, come with me and I will," said the stranger.

"One last drink."

"You've had your last drink. Now you're going to have yourselves a British prime minister," said the stranger. "Allow me to introduce myself. My name's Arieson."

"That's hardly a McGillicuddy or an O'Dowd."

"It's a fine old name," said the stranger. "You'll learn to love me. Most men do, but they won't admit it nowadays."

Protecting the Prime Minister of England were not only Scotland Yard and several branches of British intelligence, but a group of terrorist experts who surrounded this great lady with a shield that had never been broken. It was they who, in the last minute, moved her from a hotel room downstairs to the dining room just before her bedroom blew up. What they had, and what the terrorists did not know, was a simple little code that three times out of five could pick up a terrorist target.

It had come from the same great minds that had cracked the German codes in the first days of the Second World War.

It had come from the simple and brilliant British logic that had produced so much good reason in the world. While the terrorist acts might appear random, most were brutally logical and planned from a central source: a KGB office in Moscow.

Despite all the various grievances on different continents in different civilizations, if one simply stepped back from the local complaints and looked at the broad picture, every international terrorist organization was directed against Western interests. None was directed against Communist-bloc countries, where grievances were often greater.

It was a war directed against the populations of the West.

Given that one office in the KGB directed this worldwide network, or at least trained its leaders, then certain techniques had to be standard. There had to be an operational fingerprint. What would appear to be random acts were not.

Knowing there had to be a pattern, the men of British special intelligence formed a broad picture of every incident and put it on a graph, and almost like a production chart did they see a pattern emerge, especially for the IRA, since it was taken over by ostensibly radical Marxists not aligned with Russia.

While they could not protect every target without giving their knowledge away, this special group could most certainly protect the royal family and the Prime Minister.

Thus, when Prime Minister Hazel Thurston's bedroom was about to be blown up, they could move her out of it.

Thus, this day while the Prime Minister was taking a short vacation near Bath and its supposedly curative waters, they detoured her party off a main road.

"Another attack?" asked Prime Minister Thurston. She was pale, with a proud, almost aristocratic face, despite the fact she had been born of middle-class merchants in the shires.

Her special aide looked at his watch.

"I would estimate within two minutes on the normal route," he said.

"You have it down that well?" she asked.

"Sometimes," he said with classic British calm. Two minutes and fifteen seconds later, while the Prime Minister's little protected caravan cruised a narrow back road between golden fields, under a rare and blessed British sun, a muffled boom was heard far off on the main highway.

"I suppose that's them," she said.

"Should be," said her intelligence aide.

"I do hope no one was hurt," she said, and went back to her papers. This was sheep country, and on the back roads, as they had for centuries, the British herders moved their flocks and slowed traffic. The sheep took priority over Rolls-Royces-even government Rolls-Royces.

A herder, his tweed cap weathered by sun and rain, saw who was being delayed, and with his crook in hand came over to the large black car to apologize.

Hazel Thurston smiled. This was the salt of England. The good farmer stock. Did their work. Kept their peace, and when called on, always filled the ranks of Britain's armies. She had known this sort of men from her father's store. Not a one of them was not good for what he owed.

She knew her people and they knew her. The Prime Minister lowered her window. As the herder bent down, so did his staff. It had an opening in the top, rather curious when one looked at it, because this staff happened to have rifling. The herder cleared up the puzzle by explaining that if the British bitch didn't do exactly as he said, a more than wee little bullet was going to come out of the barrel of that staff and blow her bloody British brains all over her intelligence chaps and her official Rolls-Royce.

Chapter 7

"You'll never get away with it," said the Prime Minister. "You simply can't hide a British prime minister on English soil. There aren't places to hide. Now, if you surrender this moment, I will be lenient."

Hazel Thurston looked around the spacious room. It was forty feet by forty feet, with clean stone walls on every side. It had once had windows, but these were sealed by something dark. In fact, the only light came from a single light bulb powered by a generator. It was dank, but the whole country was dank at this time of year. She knew generally where they were, just outside Bath. She had clocked it. They hadn't traveled more than fifteen minutes. And people at the old stone Roman aqueduct nearby had waved to her just before the herder had stuck that gun in her face and blindfolded her.

There was absolutely no way they could hide her within fifteen minutes of a British city. It could not be done.

Already, she and her intelligence aide knew, all traffic in the area was being stopped and searched. Anyone who was not certain to belong in the area was being brought in for questioning.

The intelligence people would search every room, closet, alley, ash can, cellar, attic, belfry, and pew within fifty miles.

"It's probably only minutes before our chaps get here," said the Prime Minister. "So I am giving you a last chance to be easy on yourself."

"Bugger off, we're gettin' what's due us, and this time you gotta give in," said the man who had been disguised as a herder.

There were four others in this large room. The intelligence chap had been tied up and placed in a corner.

"Young man, you're filled with your success. But it's going to be short-lived. There is absolutely no way you can hide a British prime minister so close to where she was kidnapped on British soil. It cannot be done."

"We don't need your lip. We've 'ad enough of that in Belfast, I'll be tellin' you."

"Then let me express myself in a manner you might find more understandable. If you surrender now, there will be a short jail term and you can go back to writing your dissertations on how the world should be turned upside down with us at the bottom and you at the top and running things. lf you don't, sir, we will hang you by your privates until you wish you had been run over by an armored car at birth."

"Pipe down or I'll shoot your brains out."

"Well then, shoot, you pig-faced unemployable drunk."

"If you don't shut up, we'll do to you what we did to Lord Mountbatten," said the terrorist, referring to how they had killed the British war hero by planting a bomb on his boat.

"You mean you will do to me what you do to innocent passersby, British regulars trying to keep the peace, and Lord Mountbatten?"

"Bet your ass, Brit."

"What splendid company to die among," said the British Prime Minister.

Suddenly there was a laugh, a loud roar of a laugh that seemed to reverberate among the stones. The Prime Minister looked behind her. There was an entrance there, a clean stone doorway. But behind it seemed to be a dirt tunnel. And yet this was not a cellar. There was nothing about this large stone room that was cellarlike. There were many windows. Cellars did not have windows. That the windows were blocked by something did not matter. No one built a cellar with large windows.

"Spoken like a man," said the man with the beard and thick neck and blazing eyes. He wore a tweed suit and carried a briefcase and his face seemed alight with joy.

"And who are you?" asked the Prime Minister.

"Someone who admired your Falklands war. Good to see you people at it again. It's been a long time for you, eh?"

"Who are you? What do you want?"

"We want you out of Northern Ireland. Let everyone be free to do what they want."

"They want to kill each other, you know."

"You could call it that."

"What do you call it?"

"I call it the national expression of will."

"Their will is to kill each other."

"Then what do you care?"

"We have an obligation to see that this is settled peacefully. We have citizens there. We have a tradition of hundreds of years there. We do not intend to leave a tradition of massacre in that poor ravaged land."

"Busybody," said the man with the beard. "You allowed yourselves the Falklands. Why do you deny the same joy to your citizens of Northern Ireland?"

"I don't know who you are, but may I remind you we were attacked by Argentina."

"Someone's always attacked by someone, and that someone always has some inalienable and legitimate grievance. Let the Protestants and Catholics there, in their own good way, kill themselves like Christians."

"Are you a jew or Moslem?"

"Can be both at times, although they would be the first to deny me. I really don't get the proper respect I deserve, the way I deserve."

"Perhaps we can change that. May I first ask that you untie my intelligence aide. His wrists seem bound a bit too tight."

The man with the muscled neck waved to the herder. The Prime Minister saw her intelligence aide watch the quick way the herder responded.

Prime Minister Hazel Thurston saw him rub his wrists and then amble to one of the walls with a window and wait there, apparently innocently. But the Prime Minister knew better. Her aide never did anything innocently or casually. Everything had a purpose.

Whatever he was doing by that window had to be protected, so she distracted her captors by saying she might make a compromise.

"You disappoint me, Hazel," said the man. "I thought you were made of sterner stuff than that."

"The world of reality requires reasonable people to negotiate," she said. "Just what can we do for you?"

"Pull out of Northern Ireland. Just get your troops out and let the people decide."

"I'm afraid I can't do that. But what I will do is form another commission-"

"We'll get you out. You see, you are the only person of power in your government, and without you there as a strong leader, they'll strike a deal. It always happens when a country loses a strong leader. It's absolutely predictable. Any nation with a strong leader like yourself is weak without that leader. Strong people make others around them weak. True, and you have to know it."

"Where did you get that theory?" she asked. She saw her man had his hand behind him now, as he stood directly in front of the window. He was doing something with that hand.

"It is as eternal a fact as gravity."

The Prime Minister saw her man nod. She knew they could not talk because this strange room might be bugged. She also knew this stranger might just be right. Without her in the cabinet, her nation just might strike a deal to withdraw all troops from Northern Ireland.

The only redeeming event came when she was left alone with her intelligence aide. He opened up his hand without saying a word and then both of them smiled at each other. A dark crumbling substance filled his palm. From the open window he had taken earth. Someone had just covered this stone room with earth. It would have to show in the countryaide. It would be one of the first places Scotland Yard would look. A stone house that had suddenly disappeared under a pile of earth could not possibly be overlooked, least of all in the communities around Bath.

They waited for the rescue which they expected any minute. And waited.

The problem was simple. Find one prime minister and her intelligence aide seized outside Bath, England, that morning. The solution was just as simple. All roads were cordoned off. Every house in every village was searched. Every hayloft, garage and alley, can, dumpster, ditch was accounted for on a big grid map by teatime, and by supper there was not a hint of a whisper of what had been done with the Prime Minister.

"She has to be here," said an inspector, who had taken time out to enjoy the refreshing springs and the baths the Romans had built here almost two thousand years before, when they had occupied the island as far north as Hadrian's wall.

The town of Bath was named after these baths. Before the Romans, the Celts, Picts, and Saxons-the general populace of the area-had not considered bathing healthy, and they had the aroma to prove it. The Romans, as clean a people as the Japanese, introduced washing to the then barbaric countryside. And specifically at Bath the waters were said to be curative. Now Scotland Yard needed the cure.

"How in bloody blue blazes do you lose a prime minister amidst a homogeneous, friendly population? We have searched every basement, boardinghouse, and hangar, and by damn, she's gone," said the inspector. "I'm sure they're going to kill her."

"Why is that?" asked the Minister of Defense. "The demands are ridiculous. They say unless we pull out of Northern Ireland right now, she dies."

"Might not be that ridiculous," said the Minister of Defense, letting the waters soak through his pores. "The strangest development has occurred there. Add in the kidnap, and we just might make the deal."

"Give in to kidnappers?"

"Do you know what's happening in Belfast now, Inspector?"

"It certainly can't mean we would have to pull out."

"Combined with the fact that there's hardly anyone left to say no with the force of our iron Prime Minister, yes. Belfast has become not an urban guerrilla battleground but a war zone. Someone has formed a provisional wing of the provisional wing of the IRA and is actually engaging British forces in open combat and winning."

"The IRA? Can't be. They can't get fifty people together without fighting amongst themselves," said the inspector.

"A splinter group of a splinter group. And I suspect they're behind this Thurston kidnapping also. They're outfighting us in Belfast and outthinking us in Bath," said the Minister of Defense.

"Are we going to lose?"

"We may have already lost unless we can find our Prime Minister."

"They couldn't have hidden her around here. We've looked everywhere," said the inspector.

"Well, obviously there's some place you haven't looked. There's only one other choice. Call for help from the Americans."

"I'd rather lose," said the inspector.

"So would I, but we can't."

"Why not?"

"State policy. This is my ultimatum. If we don't get our prime minister by midnight, you'll have American help by morning."

Poo and Remo had returned to Sinanju from the honeymoon. Poo had brought dresses from Jerusalem, a Western city with a good ruler, more often than not.

She told her friends about hotel suites and clothes.

She told her friends about new and exotic foods. Bread made of wheat that had a snow-white center and a dark crust.

Sweet drinks like Coca-Cola.

There was even a bread with a hole in it that was very hard, and should not be eaten when it came out of the oven, but baked again after it was split open. It was a delicacy spread with a white milk-fat substance called cream cheese and then topped with fish that had been held over a burning log. All her friends made a face when Poo told them she had eaten this dish called bagels and lox.

Raw grasses called salads were also served.

There was cloth on bedding called sheets and if one rang a buzzer one could order anything one wanted to eat at any time of the day.

There were rings and necklaces. There were rooms for dining where everyone from all over the globe ate.

The roads were not as nice as the ones built coming into Sinanju from Pyongyang, but there were more cars.

"One car would be more cars," a friend said.

And when they asked her about the wedding night, she only smiled knowingly and said nothing, letting their imaginations play over the delights the white Master of Sinanju had given her. But to her mother, she told the truth. She had to. There wasn't going to be a baby.

"He didn't touch me," cried Poo. "He didn't kiss me or touch me or anything."

"Nothing?" asked the mother.

"I said 'or anything,'" cried Poo.

"Did you entice him with the tricks I taught you?"

"I did everything but lengthen it in a steel vise."

"Try the steel vise," said her mother.

"He's a Master of Sinanju. You can't get close to him if he doesn't want you to. And, Momma, he doesn't want to. He doesn't want me."

"He's got to want you. He's your husband. I'll speak to your father."

And so the baker's wife told the baker what the daughter had told the mother, and the baker, with his wife's hectoring voice telling him exactly what he should say and do, fearfully went up to the great wooden house on the hill where the Masters of Sinanju had lived for millennia.

"And don't let him squirm away," called the baker's wife.

Squirm away? thought the baker. Master Chiun could split a man's skull like a dried leaf since he was twelve. He's going to kill me. At least there is one good thing about being killed by a Master of Sinanju. He can make it faster and less painful than anything else.

The baker crushed his own hat in his hands, and bowing, mounted the old wood steps to the entrance of the House of Sinanju. Emissaries throughout history had mounted these steps. Rarely did a villager come except to ask for help with a problem that could be solved by money or swift and deadly justice.

At the door the baker took off his shoes, as was the custom before entering the house. He kissed the threshold, and with his face pressed firmly to the floor, called out:

"O great Master of Sinanju, I, the father of Poo, Baya Cayang, humbly beseech your awesome magnificence to deign to converse with me."

"Enter, Baya Cayang, father of Poo, wife of my son, Remo," came the voice of Chiun, Master of Sinanju. "And rise, for you will be the grandfather of the issue of the marriage."

Back in the streets of the village it had all been clear. The baker's wife had told him to tell Chiun in no uncertain terms that Remo had not performed as a husband. They had agreed to the marriage with a white because they were sure that anyone who was a Master, even though he was white, could perform well. In brief, the baker's family had been cheated. And Chiun should be told that clearly. Either Chiun's son must deliver on all the marriage vows, or Poo would return to the baker's home, and the baker would keep the Master's bridal purse.

It sounded so much more reasonable in the muddy streets of Sinanju than in the great house of many rooms. How was one going to tell Chiun that the white he loved more dearly than a son, the white of whom no one could dare speak even a hint of ill to Chiun's face, was not a man?

It was death, if the speaker was lucky.

But Baya Cayang knew he could not return to his home either, with Poo crying and his wife badgering him. So it was either death or living death, and Baya Cayang, after he had been given rice wine by Chiun; and had talked about the weather, and how the day was going with Chiun, brought up the subject most tenderly.

"We are honored to be the parents of Poo, who has been wed to a Master."

"The honor is ours," said Chiun. He did not particularly like the Cayangs. They were a greedy family and somewhat slothful. But at least they were from Sinanju, and when one considered all the whites Remo had run around with, Poo was a blessing.

"Like you, we eagerly await a grandson," said Cayang. He dared to offer his cup for more wine. Chiun poured it. He was gracious about giving all guests as much wine as he could foist upon them, but considered any who would take it drunkards. He himself, like Remo, could not drink. Their nervous systems would disintegrate under the influence of alcohol, such was the fineness to which they had tuned their bodies.

"No one awaits a grandson more eagerly than I," said Chiun.

What did this dolt Cayang want? They already had enough gold to buy pigs for a lifetime of feasts. He wouldn't even have to bake anymore if Chiun did not demand the fine rice cakes of the village.

"There are things that must happen for Poo to become pregnant."

"Oh, those things," said Chiun. "She could do those lying on her back."

"She can. Not that I know she can. Not that she has. She hasn't."

"Of course she hasn't. I cannot tell you how glad I am, Baya, that Remo has stopped running around with white sluts, especially a Russian. Americans are bad enough, but the Russians are worse."

"Whites go crazy over Korean men, I hear. They do strange things with their bodies."

Movement would be strange, thought Chiun, remembering his own wife. Still, what did one want from a woman but to bear children and cook the meals, and hector as little as possible? Remo, on the other hand, was immersed in white ways. This woman he might have even fallen in love with, this Russian, worked in their government and commanded men like a soldier. He thought Remo might have even married Anna Chutesov, until Poo Cayang changed things. So if the baker beat around the bush, nevertheless he had to be respected for helping save Remo from his own kind.

"Because of your lovely daughter, Baya, Remo will never have to endure those evil onslaughts of white women."

"I hear they wear special clothes and do special things, with ointments and the like," said Bava.

"Let us not talk of the evils of white women, but the virtues of your daughter."

"O Great Chiun," wailed Bava Cavang. "She remains as untouched today as the day she and Remo left on their honeymoon."

"What are you saving?"

"I am saying, Great Chiun, neither of us will be grandfathers."

"What is wrong with Poo?"

"Nothing. Remo has not performed as a husband," said Baya, shutting his eyes, waiting for the blow. Slowly he opened them. Perhaps Chinn did not wish to kill him with his eyes closed. But all he saw when he opened his eves was a Master of Sinanju, his wisps of hair bobbing with his head, nodding agreement with Baya Cayang, father of Poo, baker of the village, who now knew he had an excellent chance of seeing the morning.

"Remo," called out Chiun.

"What do you want?" came the voice from the large house, echoing loudly because there was no longer the great treasure to absorb and muffle the sound.

"I want you to come out here," called Chiun.

"I'm busy."

"He still has American ways of disrespect," confided Chiun. "But we will keep it in the family." And then louder Chiun yelled:

"It will only take a moment." And to Cayang he whispered:

"You would think it would break him to give us a minute. I don't know what to do with the boy. Never have. Given him the best years of my life, and now this. Well, we'll straighten it out like Koreans. We'll have a little one into Poo in no time."

"All right," said Remo, entering the room, reading a scroll. Cayang recognized Korean, but there was other writing on it also, strange writing like that in the West. But none that he had ever seen before, and he had seen an occasional American newspaper sent back to Sinanju by the Master himself for the archives of the house of assassins.

"Little Father," said Remo, "I have reread this scroll ten times, and I see nothing of Mr. Arieson. There are Greeks fighting Persians and Greeks fighting each other, there are religious rites, Olympic games, poems, a description of a drunken feast in honor of the god Bacchus, and the payment of statuary along with gold. What am I supposed to be seeing?"

"You wouldn't see your nose in front of your face, even your big white one," said Chiun.

"All right. I have a big white nose. Now tell me what's going on."

"What didn't go on is the question," said Chiun. Remo saw Poo's father. He nodded hello.

"Poo's father says she is untouched," said Chiun. Baya Cayang nodded deeply.

Remo shrugged.

"Poo's father says there will never be a son." Remo shrugged.

"Poo's father has been nice enough to keep this horrible fact from the village. The fact is, Remo, you have let us all down."

Remo rustled the scroll.

"What am I looking for?" he asked.

"I am looking for a grandson."

"And I'm looking for Mr. Arieson. The next time I see him I want to be able to defeat him. Or is this your way of just tricking me into reading the scrolls?"

"What you want is all there. Find the treasure of Sinanju and we will be able to handle Mr. Arieson."

"Now I know you're pulling my leg. You've been trying to get that treasure back for years."

"Without it, you will never be able to handle Mr. Arieson."

"I don't want to handle him. I want to defeat him."

"Only the dead have seen the last of him," said Chiun.

"Now what does that mean?" asked Remo.

"Why have you not treated Poo properly?" asked Chiun.

"I'll get to it. I'll get to it. I'm good for it. What about this nonsense with the Greeks, and the servant to the Tyrant of Thebes?"

"Read it," said Chiun.

"I've read it. I've read it. The tribute goes on for pages."

"And?"

"And I don't understand."

"Look around you at the empty rooms. If they were not empty you would understand."

"If they were not empty this whole place would be gathering dust now with lots of junk."

"It is that junk we need now."

"I don't need it at all," said Remo.

"You need something," said Chiun. "That precious blossom awaits untouched, losing the blush of her youth while you refuse your duty to house and home, and shame us before my good friend Baya, a good and decent man who has done nothing to us but give us his treasure of a daughter."

"I'll do it. I'll do what I have to, but I don't have to do it right away. It would help if I didn't get a runaround with these scrolls, and got some clear answers."

"You got clear answers. You were just too dim to see them," said Chiun. "There's nothing we can do about Mr. Arieson without the treasures anyhow. So enjoy the delights Poo has to offer."

"I'm not giving up," said Remo, and returned to the room Chiun had set aside for him. It was not a room for living, but one of the treasure rooms. The scrolls had been neatly laid out on a pale square piece of flooring. Something had sat on it for centuries, and the wood had become indented even though it was rare and valuable African mahogany, one of the hardest woods known to man.

The placement of the scrolls on this indentation in the floor obviously was some kind of message. But how could a place be a message? Remo rubbed his hand along the indentation in the wood. He could feel the crushed cells ever so slowly expand back from their compression, and he felt something else on his fingerpads. Dust. There was dust here in the four-foot-by-four-foot indentation.

He captured the particles in the oils of the ridges of his finger and held the dust up to the light. It was pale white. A fine white powder. No. Not powder. Marble. Something made of marble had been where the scrolls of Sinanju had been set for him.

He read the account again. It was a fairly typical service of Sinanju. A great and renowned philosopher had joined with a hero to demand an end to corruption and oppression in Thebes. The people were behind them, because the tyrant, like all basically weak people, was afraid to let anyone speak. The people had wanted to be more democratic, like Athens. They had even sent an emissary to Athens to learn their system of democracy.

No one in Thebes was on the side of the tyrant. He could not speak well, think well, or govern well, and to boot he was a coward in battle, something that offended the Greek idea of heroism. However, he did have one thing. Knowledge of the Masters of Sinanju and a willingness to pay well.

Naturally he won, and the philosopher and hero were found dead in a ravine outside the city one morning. It was said that they had dueled and the hero had desecrated the philosopher's body in a despicable way before attempting to return to Thebes, when he fell and cracked his head against a rock. Outraged, the people swarmed into the street, abandoning their loyalty to the two who were no better than murderers. Naturally it was a Sinanju service that had made the deaths seem like that.

Remo read the story again. It was followed by the usual list of tributes, and the form was the same as the rest of the House of Sinanju histories. What was strange about this story was that it was not an introduction of a new technique. The sacrilege murder had occurred first many centuries before, in the East. It was just an adaptation. But there was not even a hint of Mr. Arieson or anyone operating like him.

An old service not even new in 500 B.C., and an indentation from something marble on the floor of an empty treasure house in Sinanju.

So what?

So there was someone out there Remo couldn't get a handle on, and this wasn't telling him how. "Master Remo. Master Remo. It's for you," came the voice. It was a young boy who had run up from the village. "The telephone in the baker's house has rung for you. Gracious Chiun has given me a piece of gold to run up here and ask you down to the house."

"He's there now?" asked Remo.

"Yes, he left the great House of Sinanju and with the baker went to see your beloved wife, Poo. They are all there with the mother. They are waiting for you, too," said the boy.

"Anyway, I can take the phone call up here."

"Master Chiun had it transferred to the baker's house so you would not be disturbed on your wedding night. No one would dare change an order from the Great Chiun."

"All right," said Remo. "I'll take it."

The call was a relay from Smith. He was all but sure Arieson was at work again in Northern Ireland. Had Remo found anything that could stop him yet?

"No," said Remo, staring at the tear-soaked moon face of Poo, the daggers of her mother's eyes, the distaste of her father, and Chiun totally, siding with that family.

"Can you talk now?"

"No," said Remo.

"I think the man who calls himself Arieson is behind the kidnapping of the Prime Minister of England."

"Arieson? Where in England?"

"In Bath, obviously," said Chiun.

"Ask him how he knows it's in Bath," said Smith.

"If you take the scroll of the years of the horse, pig, and dragon, roughly your years for A.D. 112, you will not only find out why Arieson is in Bath but you will find out where in Bath."

"He's kidnapped the Prime Minister there, Little Father."

"And they can't find her, is that correct?"

"Yes. That's what they're saying. They don't know how they could have lost her," said Remo, repeating what Smith was telling him.

"They can't find her because they don't know where to look," said Chiun. "Take the scrolls with you. You'll find her. But you won't be able to stop Mr. Arieson, so don't even bother. This is where you should be bothering, with this poor, beautiful, lovely creature who wants only for you to deliver what you vowed here in your ceremony."