That was the point when Harold Smith had reached out to his enforcement arm without success.
Now he was frantic, trying. The red phone shrilled again. Smith hesitated. He lifted the handset on the second ring.
"Is something wrong?" asked the President, tone worried.
"Sir?"
"It took you two rings. You usually grab it on the first."
"I was preoccupied," Smith said carefully.
"The situation is going critical."
"Sir?"
"Somehow, that lunatic has overpowered TV transmissions in South Florida. We always suspected Havana had the capability, being that he's only ninety miles off our shores, but we didn't dream he'd dare provoke us that much."
"What is Castro saying?" asked Smith. He had already brought out a portable TV set and turned it on. It had been purchased at a yard sale, and usually took its time warming up.
"I think he's giving Speech Number 33," the Chief Executive said tiredly. "They all sound alike to me. They start with 'We are the defenders of the Revolution' and end with ' "Socialism or Death" is our battlecry.' You'd think he'd make a master tape and just play it every once in a while."
"God," Smith croaked, as his set blinked into life.
"What is it?"
"I'm watching him now. I hadn't realized he'd gotten so fat."
"Smith, any progress?"
Smith hesitated. "No," he said truthfully.
"Very well. Stay in touch."
"Yes, Mr. President," said Smith. He returned to his humming computer.
Harold Smith knew only one thing. That the Master of Sinanju was upset over the stalled state of their current contract negotiations. Usually they were contentious. This time, they had become interminable as well. Never before had they gone on so long. Technically, the old contract had expired. Such a situation had never been allowed to go unresolved for this long.
But Smith had been unable to break down the impasse. The Master of Sinanju had demanded the impossible.
Had Smith been blessed with imagination, he might have been able to imagine where Chiun had gone. But he could not. So he doggedly returned to his computer, his fingers on the keyboard making hollow, manic clicks.
Somewhere, in the vast databanks of the nation, he knew, there must be a lead.
The bulletin came while Smith was staring at a blank screen. The computer beeped musically, and an AP bulletin digest began scrolling before his bleary eyes.
It was brief.
An Air Force jet out of Homestead AFB had shot down a MIG Flogger over the Gulf. The fighterbomber was presumed of Cuban origin.
"My God!" croaked Smith again.
This time the President did not call. Smith knew why. He was too busy conferring with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in an attempt to deal with the escalating situation.
This was no longer a CURE covert operation. It was lurching toward war.
While updates poured in, Smith redoubled his efforts.
The engagement had been brief. The press was speculating on the lone MIG's mission.
"Suicide mission," Smith muttered. "But what was his target?"
Smith logged off and brought up a schematic of the Florida coast. He input the MIG's intercept position, using signals intelligence siphoned off Pentagon mainframes. Then, he projected the jet's probable course.
His gray face blanched as the line plotted through the Turkey Point nuclear power station on the tip of Florida.
"My God!" said Smith. "He's long threatened that plant. This time he actually went for it."
Smith returned to his search, his eyes stark.
It might be too late for Remo and Chiun to enter the crisis, but he would have to try.
If only he had some inkling of their location . . .
Chapter 5
Remo Williams was torn between duty to his country and his responsibility to the House of Sinanju.
It was not the first time. Almost since the day he had been framed for a crime he didn't commit and subjected to a chillingly convincing mock execution, only to wake up in Folcroft Sanitarium with a new face, all traces of his past erased, and then placed in the hands of the Master of Sinanju to be trained in Sinanju-the first and last word in the martial artsRemo had experienced divided loyalties.
In the early years, the choices had been clearer. Remo was an American. A former Newark cop. A Vietnam veteran. America was his home. America his choice, hands-down. No contest.
Over the long years of training, Remo had begun to change. He had become Sinanju, which made him kin to the long line that had stood beside the thrones of history. Although the blood of the past masters did not flow through his veins, their responsibilities had fallen onto his shoulders.
In North Korea, on the West Korea Bay, lay the village of Sinanju, a cold, stark place of mud huts and ignorance. It was from this village that the art of Sinanju had emerged. In the harsh village there was no arable land, and the fishing was unreliable.
In the good years, the simple folk of Sinanju eked out a meager existence.
In the bad years, the children were drowned. First the females. Then, if the times demanded it, the irreplaceable males. It was called "sending the babies home to the sea."
Centuries of this heartbreaking cycle had forced the leaders of the village to seek another way. And so the men of Sinanju had hired themselves out as mercenaries to other provinces. This practice grew, and before long the name of the Master of Sinanju and his cunning mercenaries-the night tigers of Sinanju-had become feared throughout the kingdom of Korea.
With their increasing reknown, the Masters of Sinanju had taken to foreign lands to ply their cold trade. The courts of China, India, Japan, Persia, and Egypt came to know them. Not as mercenaries, but as assassins.
They were a dynasty unrecorded by history. An invisible power that had changed the course of empires. The art they plied was at first simply the seminal martial art. But in a time harsher than any other, a Master, Wang the Greater, had discovered a secret deeper than the hidden historical role of the House of Sinanju. He had unleashed the sun source-the power of the unlocked human mind.
This secret had been handed down from Wang to Ung to Chen to each succeeding master, until, in the latter part of the twentieth century, the last true Master of Sinanju, Chiun the Younger, bereft of an heir and without clients, had been summoned to serve the newest and greatest empire in history: The United States of America.
Chiun had trained Remo. Remo had learned well. He also unlearned bad breathing, unmasked his senses, foresworn the use of weapons, and waxed in skill. And became the secret enforcement arm of CURE. America's unknown assassin.
As he grew in Sinanju, Remo became one with Sinanju. The village of the ancestors-who-were-not-his became as important to him as America.
Now, in the hotel that was more palatial and wonderfilled than the royal halls through which the old Masters of Sinanju had moved with uncanny stealth, Remo Williams fretted about his choices.
His responsibility to the organization and to his country demanded that he call Harold W. Smith.
But he had a responsibility to the House of Sinanju, too.
Above all, it was to feed the babies of the village, lest they be sent home to the sea once again. It had not happened in over a generation. But the gold that emperors paid was the sole coin of value in Sinanju.
To shirk this responsibility would be the same as betraying the country of his birth.
Worse. The worst Harold W. Smith would do to him was to hunt Remo down and kill him-if he could. Remo was under no illusions. He was an expendable component of a supersecret "black budget" operation.
On the other hand, if he pissed off Chiun badly enough, he would suffer horribly. Chiun would see to it.
And to Remo Williams, raised in the orphanage called St. Theresa's, never married, and cut off from his past, the Master of Sinanju was the closest thing to family he had ever known.