Remo recognized the truth in his teacher's words. He locked them away in a quiet part of his heart. For another time. Crouching, Remo braced hands on knees.
He scanned the CD titles. In addition to the Wylander CDs, there were a dozen more.
"You have any Nitty Gritty Dirt Band?" Remo asked hopefully. He remembered the group from the 1970s.
"No," Chiun replied as he fed a CD into the player at his elbow. "But in addition to the enchanting Wylander, I have something called a Garth Brooks. I am about to play his music now."
When the old man looked up, he found that he was alone. His hazel eyes caught but a glimpse of his pupil's fleeing back as the younger man flew from the meditation room.
A proud smile crossed the Master of Sinanju's face. Even departing in haste, his pupil had not upset any of the natural air currents in the room. His loafers made not a sound on their way to the ground floor. Chiun only knew he had fled the building when the front door slammed shut four seconds later.
There was no doubt about it. Remo was a worthy pupil. Who would one day soon make a worthy teacher.
Justifiably proud of his own accomplishment, the tiny Korean reached out a long, sharpened fingernail. When the CD started, Chiun's face became a mask of utter contentment as he allowed the music to wash over him.
Chapter 5
Commander Darrell Irwin was standing above the radar station aboard the USS Walker, a nuclear-powered cruiser patrolling the Windward Passage between Haiti and Cuba, when he noticed the errant blip.
"What's that?" Irwin asked the seaman seated at the screen. He pointed at the phosphorescent dot. "We thought it was a fishing boat, sir," the young man replied earnestly. His eyes were wide and bright.
Irwin frowned at the eagerness in the sailor's voice.
The kid was practically an infant. His dirty blond hair was shaved to his pink scalp. His eyes tracked the moving boat with eager interest. He was about the same age as Irwin's own son back home in Florida. He still had baby fat, for crying out loud.
There was no doubt about it. The enlisted men these days were joining up straight out of grammar school. That was the only explanation. There was no other way they could look so much younger than Commander Irwin.
"So is it a fishing boat or not?" Irwin demanded.
"Too big, sir," the seaman said. "We're thinking it's one of those big cabin cruisers."
"Heading for land?"
"East of Guantanamo if she holds course."
"Smack dab into Guantanamo if she holds course," Irwin corrected. He noted the blip with a frown.
"It'll be in visual range in ten minutes, sir."
"Let's keep an eye on her."
The boat came close enough for visual inspection in just over seven minutes. When it passed by the nose of the Walker, Commander Irwin went out on deck to see it.
Irwin and the two lieutenants who accompanied him had brought binoculars to view the boat. They proved to be unnecessary.
It was a cabin cruiser. Cuban registry. The luxury boat was eighty feet long and traveling at a good sixty knots as it buzzed the prow of the much bigger naval vessel.
"Are they nuts?" one of the lieutenants yelled, gripping the rail in amazement.
The boat came so close it nearly rammed the Walker. It slipped off toward land, trailing a wake of angry white foam.
Irwin whipped up his binoculars.
Frantic men ran along the deck. Even more crammed the bridge, screaming and pounding on equipment. When Commander Irwin lowered his glasses, his face was grave.
"She's out of control," he intoned ominously. As the calm sea churned white in the wake of the runaway luxury cruiser, Commander Darrell Irwin raced to the bridge of the Walker. He had to warn Guantanamo.
THE BIG CABIN CRUISER did not veer east at Guantanamo. It continued on, straight through the outer defenses of the island's United States naval base.
By this point, most of the men on the luxury boat had gone out on the deck. Arms raised above their heads, they waved in desperate fear as the ship plowed ahead.
The Navy brass on the Cuban base were unsure what to do.
According to every report, the boat was heading straight into the heart of the Guantanamo base. But if the looks on the faces of the men aboard were any indication, they weren't some kind of suicidal terrorists. Somehow, their boat had gone out of control.
There would be hell to pay if the United States Navy torpedoed a civilian Cuban ship from a base that Cuba had for years wanted off the island.
For the military, it was the most tense moment on the small Caribbean island since October of 1962. The Navy's paralysis ate up enough time for the situation to resolve itself. With Cuban nationals screaming and leaping from the deck, the cruiser plowed into the broad side of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, which had been docked at Guantanamo after being towed from the Mideast six months before.
Running full out at the moment of impact, the cabin cruiser's nose was pulverized back to midship. Wood and metal ruptured and splintered, skipping and splashing across the water of the bay.
The men who had remained aboard were thrown forward off the deck, slamming like meat-filled bags against the gunmetal-gray side of the massive aircraft carrier.
Only then did the Navy snap into action. Smaller ships circled in, fishing battered survivors from the water. Crewmen were quickly deployed to the half-submerged Cuban boat. Medics prepped the bleeding crew of the crippled ship for air transport to medical facilities at Guantanamo.
And as helicopters swooped in from shore to land on the broad flight deck of the nearby carrier, the first square bag floated to the surface.
At first, no one noticed the plastic-wrapped package.
It was quickly joined by another. Then another. Eventually, a sharp-eyed sailor spotted the yellow bags bobbing gently in the bay waters.
The first helicopter was lifting off for its short hop to land as one of the bags was being fished from the drink. Using a Swiss army knife, a sailor sliced the bundle open. A white crystalline powder dumped through the slit onto the sailor's shoes. The young man looked up in amazement.
As officers and enlisted men exchanged dark glances, bag after bag slowly bobbed like corks to the once more calm blue surface of Guantanamo Bay.
Chapter 6
"Just keep your head down and your mouth shut," the CIA director ordered Mark Howard on the ride over from Virginia. When he spoke, he didn't even glance at the man who shared the back seat of his government sedan.
It was painfully obvious that the CIA director wasn't the one who had requested Howard's presence at this high-level intelligence meeting. He had been hostile to Howard from the moment the younger man got in the car at Langley.
In tense silence, they drove through the earlymorning streets of Washington, D.C.
It had snowed the night before. Just an inch was enough to paralyze the nation's capital, which in many ways still considered itself a small Southern town. Luckily, it had just been a dusting. Not that it would have mattered in this of all weeks. With Inauguration Day at week's end, city government was reacting to everything-crime, emergencies, weather-with shocking efficiency. In a month, when the parties were over and the balloons and confetti had all been swept away, the local government would revert to its regular incompetence. Though it was only a little after 7:00 a.m., the commuter traffic was heavy. It was bumper to bumper all the way to the end of Pennsylvania Avenue. When the White House came into view, Mark Howard felt the flutter of butterflies in his gut. The Washington Monument rose high to the south as the CIA director's car crossed over to the Fifteenth Street entrance of the most famous address on Earth. A Marine guard stood at attention as they passed through the wrought-iron gates. Driving onto the grounds, they parked near the West Wing in the shadows of twisted hundred-year-old trees. Only when the engine was silent did the CIA director at last look directly at Mark. His gaze was harsh. "Remember," he warned. "Mouth shut."