"You were the vaunted Master of Sinanju. Our champion, protector of the village. We trusted that you would defend us. Where were you, O Master, when we were murdered?"
He covered his ears and cried out in agony, but the voices would not be silenced.
He ran on.
At one time his arrogance made him think he would be remembered in the histories as "Great." But there would be no future history. The future was as dead as the present. As dead as the past would become with no one to remember it.
Chiun, the Greatest Failure. His true title. He would bestow it upon himself in these, his last hours on earth. Inscribe it in stone with his own blood so that those who discovered his desiccated body would know the truth.
They could bring the stone back to Sinanju and plant it in the lifeless square. A final marker to a dead village.
In his mind he could still see it, could not banish the terrible image. The village of Sinanju was gutted. Houses smoldered. Winter wind howled over frozen corpses.
The image burned his brain as he ran on, mile after mile. He knew not how far he had gone when exhaustion finally overtook his frail body. Feeling every tiring moment of more than a century of hard life, he fell to the ground.
His tears were dry. He had wept them all before. The tired old man lay there in the frozen dirt. The cold crept up his extremities. Chiun welcomed it.
His limbs would die first. Then the numbing cold would seep into his vital organs. Finally his brain would go.
In life Sinanju had been his home. But everything there he had lived for, fought for, bled for was now dead. His home on Earth was gone. His new home beckoned.
He had eluded the pull of the Void for a long time. Now, in exhaustion and despair, he awaited its embrace.
"Come to me, Death," he whispered to the ground, his shivering lips scarcely able to form the words. "We are old friends, you and I. It is long past time we met."
He didn't think he had spoken the words aloud. He realized that he had to have, for out of the desolate wind came a mirthful reply.
"I doubt he'd want to meet you. The way you operate, poor old Death would have a hard time keeping up."
That voice. He had heard that voice before. Chiun snapped his face up from the dirt.
A man stood there, smiling down upon him. As if the desolate land where nothing grew were home to him.
The man had a roly-poly belly and a broad cherub's face. He seemed perpetually on the verge of laughing at some private joke.
The instant Chiun beheld the vision standing above him, his jaw dropped in shock.
The figure was known to all Masters of Sinanju. His exploits had been described in many legends, for countless generations throughout the modern history of Sinanju.
But it could not be him. Chiun was hallucinating. Still, the figure seemed real. Intermixed with the jolly smile was the sympathy of a loving father. Standing in his simple robes in the North Korean wilderness, the figure gazed down on the pathetic little man lying in the dirt.
Chiun shook his head. "Great Wang?" he breathed. So shocked was he and so sore was his throat he was scarcely able to speak the words.
"In the flesh," the vision replied. He considered his own words. "More or less," he amended. Chiun understood well what he meant.
The Great Wang had been dead for thousands of years. Traditionally Wang's spirit appeared to a Master of Sinanju in a much younger stage of training. It was a great honor, and one that Chiun had experienced decades before. Since there was no record of the greatest of all Masters of Sinanju ever returning for a second visitation to the same Master, Chiun assumed that no one had lived to tell the tale.
Chiun felt relief wash over him. It was time. "You have come to aid me on my journey."
"Could be," Wang replied mysteriously. "That all depends on which journey you're going to take." And when he saw the confusion on Chiun's face, the spirit of the Great Wang smiled a knowing smile.
IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT when Colonel Mundhir al-Rasul's plane landed at the airport in the remote region of Iraq.
There was no one on the ground to greet him. The colonel wasn't surprised. The airport had been sparsely manned. The soldiers who guarded the small landing strip had radioed Baghdad earlier in the evening to say that there was something wrong at the nearby palace.
Baghdad had taken the news in stride. For some time now, every day brought a new risk of American attack.
When Colonel al-Rasul tried to reach the palace guard by radio, there was no response.
There were no indications that the Americans were attacking. No reports of explosions or planes flying in. There had yet to be a Pentagon briefing on CNN.
An old MiG-21 from the Iraqi defense force was sent up to overfly the area. There were no fires burning, no lights of any kind. The palace was completely dark.
After much discussion, Colonel al-Rasul was sent to investigate the mysterious blackout.
At the airport in the desert a few miles from the palace, the men he brought with him found a Jeep and two trucks. The soldiers got in the trucks while the colonel and his driver climbed in the Jeep. They headed for the palace.
The road was empty. Sand swirled around the Jeep. Two miles from the airport, the palace rose up from the desert floor. A dark, distant silhouette.
For some reason the great leader himself had visited this isolated palace earlier that day. Colonel al-Rasul didn't know why, but he was aware that there had at one time been some sort of weapons production facility hidden there.
As they drew closer to the outer walls, the colonel instructed his driver to shut off the Jeep's lights. The men in the trucks followed suit. Their eyes were adjusted to the darkness by the time they drove through the main gates.
The image inside the high walls stunned the colonel.
The palace towers had been collapsed by some phantom force. They lay in ruins, chunks of broken brick scattered across the inner courtyard. Most of the outer palace walls were knocked over, exposing dark inner rooms.
"The Americans have returned," the colonel's young driver whispered fearfully.
"Stop here," Colonel al-Rasul whispered gruffly. The driver stopped in the main drive. The trucks drew in behind. The colonel was first out. His shiny boots crunched grit. He addressed the men who were hurriedly climbing down from the trucks.
"The palace guards must be hiding," he snarled. "Find the coward in charge and bring him to me." As the soldiers swarmed the buildings, the colonel went to the palace.
Only a cursory examination told him this was no ordinary assault. There was no sign of missile attack. There was no burning, no charred stone or craters showing point of impact.
The colonel kicked a chunk of rock. In the moonlight he saw a dent in the surface. Kneeling, he put his fist in the hole. Nearly a perfect fit. The declivity in the brick was in the perfect shape of a balled human fist. By the looks of where the big brick sat, it had been part of the base of a tower. It was as if someone were trying to make it seem that brute human force had knocked the towers from the sky.
"This does not make sense," the colonel muttered. His driver stood dutifully at his side, rifle at the ready.
"What is wrong, sir?" the soldier asked. The colonel shot the young man a silencing glare. The devastation around the area near the fallen tower was great, yet there were no treads in the sand to indicate the use of heavy equipment. Cranes with wrecking balls certainly hadn't been secretly shipped into Iraq to destroy one palace and then shipped back out again.
No natural phenomenon could account for the damage. There had been no earthquakes or sandstorms. It almost was as if some huge shadow had marched into the Tigris-Euphrates valley and felled the towers with powerful blows.
"Colonel!"