"In those visions I had before I-" Mark hesitated. "Before Purcell escaped from Folcroft." He pointed at the strange twin rock formation. "I saw that."
Smith nodded. "The Horns of Welcome," the older man explained. "Constructed by one of Chiun's ancestors."
His gray eyes were studying the night cliffs, trying to glimpse a silhouette of movement. He saw none. There was no ambient glow from beyond the rocks. Sinanju seemed dead.
On the shore Smith helped Howard drag the raft from the water's edge. Once it was secure, the two men made their way up the winding bay path to the village.
"Have you ever been here before?" Howard whispered, a worried edge in his voice.
"Yes."
"Was it -I don't know-livelier back then?" Smith understood his assistant's meaning. Even in a village as small as Sinanju, there should have been sounds of life, the collective din of people going about their daily lives. No sound whatsoever emanated from the village ahead.
Smith had brought his .45-caliber automatic from Folcroft. He slipped the handgun from its holster. Before they even reached the village proper, Smith feared they were too late.
He smelled the smoke first. It was a little too acrid in the frigid air. It burned his nostrils.
He saw the buildings when they crested the hill.
Burned husks of the simple wood-framed homes and shops that had comprised the central core around the main square of Sinanju.
And all around were bodies.
The dead lay everywhere. End to end. Across the square, up alleys, on wooden sidewalks. The streets of Sinanju were choked with corpses.
"Good God," Smith breathed, his gun lowering in shock.
Beside him on the road, Mark Howard seemed strangely unbothered by the destruction all around them. There was an odd look on his youthful face. With careful eyes he studied the nearest building, as if he had never before witnessed up close the destruction wrought by fire.
Away from his assistant, Smith was staring at bodies on the ground. One face after another. So many dead. It looked as if the entire village of Sinanju had been-
What little color he possessed drained from his gray face. "Chiun," the CURE director whispered in soft horror.
Stumbling over the nearest bodies, he crouched beside a frail corpse.
The Master of Sinanju was peaceful in eternal repose. The care lines of his weathered face were relaxed.
Scarcely able to believe his eyes, Smith reached out a shaking hand, touching the old Korean's cheek. The flesh was cold. Chiun had been dead for hours. "No," Smith breathed, the word a mournful plea within a puff of white steam. His gun arm went slack and he fell to his backside in the dirt.
"Dr. Smith."
Someone was calling him. The words scarcely registered.
The Master of Sinanju was gone. The most awesome force to walk the face of the earth. Dead. "Dr. Smith!"
Smith turned numbly to the sound. Mark Howard stood a few yards away, an excited expression an his face. The young man seemed unaffected by the death of Chiun.
Didn't he know? Didn't he care?
Smith cared. Professional detachment be damned. Chiun deserved better. More than the fact that he was part of CURE's inner circle, the old man had dedicated his life to this village. His end should not have come this way, along with the death of his beloved Sinanju.
Howard had turned away from Smith, away from Chiun's frail body. He was standing next to a charred and smoking building. Though blackened from fire, the wall was still intact. Mark raised a tentative hand to the wall.
Smith couldn't begin to guess what the young man was doing. Nor did he care. CURE had lost one of its own. This trip had been to warn Chiun and Remo of the danger. An arduous journey ended in bitter failure.
Smith's eyes burned.
Howard glanced back once at Smith, a baffled expression on his broad face. And then to Smith's shock, the young man stepped directly through the charred wall, disappearing through the solid wood like a wisp of winter chimney smoke.
KIM JONG IL WAS HIDING out in his basement bunker when he heard the news.
General Kye Pun of the People's Bureau of Revolutionary Struggle had personally come down to tell him. The general's bodyguard, Shan Duk, stood just inside the door. The premier sat in an overstuffed beanbag chair before his big-screen television, a bucket of half-eaten popcorn on his lap.
"What are we, the goddamn hijacked-plane capital of the world now?" the Korean leader demanded angrily, spitting out an unpopped kernel. It pinged off the TV screen. "Where's this one from?"
"Iraq," replied the general. "And it is not hijacked. It has been put at the disposal of a-" he read from a scrap of paper in his hand "'-a friend of the head of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council."' He looked up from the paper. "They radioed ahead."
The premier's eyes narrowed. "He's got friends like I've got friends. Meaning he's got zip. Can only mean that one guy's on that plane, and he's not the friendly type, either." Very carefully he put down his popcorn bucket. "I hope I backed the right pony in this race," the premier said warily. He looked up at the inscrutable face of Kye Pun. "Let's get this show on the road."
Wiping buttery salt on his knees, Kim Jong II struggled up out of his beanbag.
BENSON DILKEs felt uneasy.
Back in his day, when he was still plying his trade, before cozy retirement in Africa, uneasiness was always the leading edge of failure. A prudent man, Dilkes generally skipped town at the first sign of uneasiness. But this situation afforded no such luxury.
For the first time in his professional career, Benson Dilkes was stuck.
Still, as he climbed the basement stairs of the grand Sinanju treasure house, there were no self-recriminations. He had made the only decision he could. Nuihc had given him no other options.
It was ironic. That day a week ago, when the renegade Master of Sinanju had arrived unannounced at Dilkes's Florida apartment, had actually offered hope. The first Dilkes had had for many months.
For months, long before Nuihc's arrival, Dilkes was certain he was a dead man. He alone seemed to know the truth behind this Sinanju Time of Succession. Some in his profession saw it as an honor, while others saw it as a duty. Dilkes saw it for what it was: clearing house.
They were cagey, these Sinanju assassins. They hadn't lasted thousands of years by being stupid. They might dress it up with pretty words for kings and killers alike, but it was clear precisely what they were doing with all this.
Removing the competition.
There was no opting out of the ritual. Once a contestant was "lucky" enough to be chosen to participate, he was locked in. It was diabolically clever, really. Prove your mettle to the rulers of a nation by murdering that nation's best assassin. See? We're the best. But-oh, no-now you no longer have your greatest national assassin. Not a problem. Sinanju is always available for your convenience. For a reasonable fee, of course.
It was ruthless and brilliant and something Uiat Benson Dilkes himself might have come up with. That was the worst thing about all this. In spite of everything, he still felt such accursed admiration for these killers from the East.
At least for the true Masters of Sinanju. He had no such appreciation for the madman he'd thrown in with.
He found Nuihc sitting in a plain back room in the House of Many Woods. Unlike the rest of the Master of Sinanju's home, there was no treasure jammed to the rafters here. Just a simple wooden floor, a reed mat and a few unlit candles.
The blond-haired man was in the room with Nuihc. He stood in the corner, his blue eyes wide. He was a shadow of a man. Although his mouth opened and closed, no words came out.
The scrawny white man who babbled soundlessly night and day was an obvious lunatic. But Nuihc was just as crazy. Worse. Dilkes hadn't seen it right away. It had come out in dribs and drabs during their days together. Nuihc's insanity was quieter and thus, to Dilkes, more frightening.