The Naval officer accepted the apology.
"Good," said Denia and slapped the officer hard across the face. "Now, remember who I am. Marshal Denia who knows how to use his brains in combat, and yes, I do mean to insult every one of you for not realizing that just as the Sunflower was obsolete for the Americans, so was the Treska unit for us. Because, you dummies, the Treska and the Sunflower were all but identical."
Stunned heads nodded. Even the officer whose right cheek was a red welt nodded. There was a reason why Denia was a leader of men, and now he was showing it.
"General Vassilivich is directing their new weapon against our Treska units, not to destroy us, but to offer up the lives of his comrades so we will be able to see what their new weapon is and counteract it. What he is doing is, granted, ruthless, but brilliant. We are taking one step backward to be able to take two forward. Gentlemen, America may have started this, but I tell you now, we will finish it."
He slammed his fist on the table.
"You have my life on it," he said with finality. "Keep your heads, ladyniks, and welcome to the world of the cold war."
He knew he did not have to add that his life depended on it. Of course it did. But it made a great dramatic impression just to say it. He was not as bold as the other officers might think. Massive failure of his units would probably mean death anyway, or something akin to it, like prison. And, calculating probabilities, Denia had decided that Vassilivich was either dead or doing exactly what Denia had said he was doing. All life was the edge of the sword.
Without those three potatoes, he might have starved to death anyway.
By 4:55 a.m. Moscow Time, Vassilivich, beautiful, intellectual Vassilivich, started justifying his commander's faith. A lower-rank consul in Athens had picked up a note thrown from a rented car. It was three words. Put together, they showed Vassilivich was alive and a captive.
By late afternoon of the next day, a Swedish unit had gotten a long note left outside a small chalet where the crushed bodies of the Gamma unit were found, their guns unfired, their knives still sheathed. Vassilivich was undoubtedly desperate. The note was handwritten on the back of five empty cigarette pack linings. It was not in code. It read:
D. New U.S. weapon. One man. Unusual abilities. What is Sinanju? Special methods. Giant trap. Treska units useless. One male, six feet tall, brown eyes, high cheekbones, thin, thick wrists, called Remo. Travels with Oriental who may be friend, teacher, poet? Called Chiun. Old. Sinanju the key. Long live sword and shield. V.
Denia called a special meeting in a room he had set up. More than a hundred officers from various branches of the KGB were present. He outlined the situation. There would be two steps: first, find out what this new unit was; second, destroy it. In those five shiny cigarette wrappers was the key. It was their job to unlock the puzzle, and Denia's job to wreak final revenge. The new unit designed to combat the American weapon would be named the Vassilivich group, in honor of Vassily Vassilivich, who was undoubtedly dead.
On the banks of the beautiful river Seine, Marshal Denia was being proven correct once again.
Vassilivich had himself broken the key of Sinanju. The Korean Chiun was one in a line of Masters of Sinanju that stretched back for untold centuries. If one took all the martial arts and traced their connections to each other and the history of the development of each, one might be able to calculate that perhaps all of them had come from a single source, most powerful at its center. Unlike television sets, martial arts became weaker as they became newer. There "were no improvements in martial arts, only deteriorations, a slow dwindling away of essence, like radioactivity wearing out. The man Chiun was not a poet. It was even conceivable that he was more powerful than Remo.
Several times the comments "sun source" and "breathing" had been passed between the two in English. With breathing, these people were capable of harnessing the normal human body to its full potential. There was nothing miraculous about it at all. Moreover, if scientists ever got into the mysteries of Sinanju, they would probably discover how man had really survived on the ground before he organized into hunting parties and invented weapons. Barehanded man might at one time have been as strong as the sabretooth.
Sinanju, in some way, had harnessed normal human potential, which, interestingly, Vassilivich thought, brought up something from the old Christian religions. Christ had said it: you have eyes and do not see, ears and do not hear. Perhaps Christ had not been making a moral statement after all.
"Okay, fella, what are you writing?" asked Remo.
"Nothing," said Vassilivich.
"That's it for you," said Remo, and suddenly Vassilivich's eyes did not see, nor did his ears hear, nor did his body feel the Seine splash over him.
But it did not matter.
In the Dzerzhinsky Square building, Marshal Gregory Denia was getting the answers he wanted, and his tactical solution, he thought, was brilliant. If not biblical.
CHAPTER SIX
Ludmilla Tchernova noticed a blemish. Two inches below and slightly to the left of her left breast bloomed ever so slight a kiss of red on the immaculate, smooth white body. The breasts rose in youthful firmness, capped by mounds so perfectly round they looked as if they had been designed by a draftsman's compass. The waist narrowed in gentle tautness to creamy hips that billowed just enough to establish womanhood, and no more.
The neck was a graceful ivory pedestal for the crowning gem: the face of Ludmilla Tchernova.
She had the kind of exquisite face that made other women want to go back to veils. When she entered a room, wives would kick husbands in the shins just to remind them they were still on earth. Her smile could get a rabid Communist to say mass on his knees. She made the average young Russian woman look like a tractor trailer.
She had violet eyes set in the perfection of a pale symmetry composed of a graceful nose and lips that looked as if they were almost artificial in their delicate pinkness. But that they were real showed when she smiled. Ludmilla Tchernova had fourteen different smiles. Her happiness and gentle acquiescence smiles were her best. Her worst was the smile of sudden joy. She had been working on sudden joy for a month now, watching children when she gave them ice cream cones.
"Hello, dear, this is for you," she would say. And she would watch the child's lips carefully. Sudden joy tended to take two forms. One was a delayed action, which was very hard to get just right, and the other was an explosion of the lips, very wide. She could do the explosion, but, as she had told her uncle, who was a general on the Committee for State Security (KGB), it lacked force, and sometimes, if one looked closely, it could be misinterpreted as cruelty. She certainly did not want to look cruel when she intended to express sudden joy.
She had a major of the KGB, female, assigned to her. Lately this major had been picking up ice cream cones, cleaning the dirt off them, and handing them back to children. For as soon as Ludmilla had seen the smile she wanted, she tended to discard the cone.
"I'm not here to feed the masses," she had answered when the female major suggested that, with a little more effort, she might continue handing the ice cream cone forward until the child had a firm grasp on it. "I serve the party in a different way. If I wanted to feed children, I would have become a nurse. And it would be a waste of a great natural resource which I have chosen to give to the party and to the people."
"A little kindness cannot hurt," said the major, not especially known for a soft heart but who, in Ludmilla's presence, tended to think of herself as St. Francis of Assisi.
She was a relatively attractive Volga German with blond hair and blue eyes, clean features and an attractive body. Next to Ludmilla, she looked like a light heavyweight boxer at the end of his career. Ludmilla Tcheirnova could make a rainbow look plain.