Warren Murphy: White Water

Once in the corridor, he moved swiftly. Racing to the niche, he prepared himself as before and slipped back into the main chamber. It was easier this time. His silks did not snag.

No sooner had his sandals touched the black flooring than as if touched by magic, they cleared.

And below him the Master of Sinanju saw the reason for the constant purl and mutter of the waters below.

Eyes looked back up at him with dull, hungry expectation.

And as if touched by an invisible hammer, the suddenly transparent floor shattered like glass, and the Master of Sinanju was precipitated into the bitterest waters he ever knew ....

Chapter 43

Sandy Heckman was talking to the captain of the Hareng Saur with the assistance of her pocket French dictionary.

"Either you speak the worst, most mangled French imaginable or you aren't French-Canadian," she accused.

"Up yars" the captain said at last.

"A Newfie! You're a Newfie!"

"I have nathing to say," the captain said "What has begun cannat be stapped naw."

"In that case consider yourself a prisoner of war."

"I cansider myself a hastage to environmental pharisees," the captain spat.

"Consider yourself that, too," said Sandy, who led the search of the ship.

On the upper decks they found what appeared to be a bustling factory ship busily converting freshcaught fish into fillets and blocks designed to be frozen and made into fish sticks. Sandy remembered that the creation of the frozenfish-stick market in the early fifties had begun the pillage of the North Atlantic of cod and, haddock-a market Canadian companies had soon dominated.

When she reached the lower decks, she forgot all about fish sticks.

The door was marked Torpedo Room in English and French. Inside they found two types of torpedoes, explosive and the bullet-headed fish chasers. There were compressed-air tubes to blow them out and recover them again.

The torpedo crew looked at them with blank amazement, then surrendered sullenly at the point of M-16s.

The captain was dragged into the torpedo room and a choice of spilling his guts or being sent through the slime line where fish were gutted en masse on a conveyor belt.

He elected to spill the guts he could most afford to spill. "We call them Truffle Hounds, for the way they send the fish where we want them to go," he said, pointing to three torpedoes sitting in cradles.

"Is this a Quebec operation?" Sandy demanded.

"Da I sound like a damn frag to ya?"

"Not exactly," Sandy admitted. "Who gives you your orders?"

"The cammadare."

"You mean 'commodore'?"

"That is what I have said, cammadare," he said stiffly.

"Canadian navy?"

"Na. Fisheries Minister Gilbert Houghton, who is the bright lad who gathered up all us poor, out-of-work fisherman and gave us back our birthright, which is to fish. That is all we were doing, fishing."

"What about the sunken fishing boats and their lost crews?"

The captain looked as guilty as a lobsterman caught holding someone else's trap. "We were just fallawing arders in this little scrum."

"Scrum? Is that a fish?"

"Na, a scrum is what you call a set-to. We been scrumming with Yank fishermen since before Confederation."

"Well, you can tell it to a UN high commission, or whoever is going to hang your sorry behinds from a rusty yardarm."

"I request palitical asylum!"

"For what?"

"Are ya daft, woman? So I can get back to fishing as soon as passible. For I don't much care if I fish for pharisees or federals. Just so lang as I can fish. It's all I know."

"You fisherman won't be satisfied until you've landed the last pilchard in Paradise."

"Not even then," the captain of the Hareng Saur said solemnly.

Chapter 44

The crystalline shattering sounds penetrated to the room where Remo stood looking with dull, questioning eyes at his daughter.

It had been a long time, almost ten years, Remo realized with a start. The little girl he knew so briefly had changed. Her baby fat was almost gone. Her brilliant eyes were the only link to the innocent face he remembered. But they held a different light now.

Then came the crashing. Remo turned. "What's that?" he asked worriedly.

"The old man has been thwarted. He is angry and is taking his anger out on my temple. It does not matter. He will break some things, then he will depart, never to trouble us again."

"You sure?"

"I am Mistress Kali."

"Jilda said she was Mistress Kali."

"I allowed her to think she was. For to manipulate my supplicants I needed a surrogate. I bent her to my will, made her think the thoughts I wished her to think and only those thoughts. She made an excellent domina, for in dominating, she had submitted her will to my own. "

"She's dead," Remo said hollowly.

"She no longer matters, any more than a puppet matters. Any more than our temporary, mortal flesh matters. "

"She was your mother! What's wrong with you?"

"l have achieved the thing l have planned for these long years. Do you not remember, Remo, the last time we met?"

"Sure. It was in Sinanju. You were a little girl then."

"No, you fool! Do not address my host. Speak to Mistress Kali, who has yearned for you for aeons. "

A hand reached up to touch Remo's face. Remo recoiled.

"Red One, remember me with your ageless soul, not with your mortal mind .... Separated we have been drawn together again. Apart, we will rejoin. Two, we shall fuse into one ...."

"Get away from me! I don't want to talk to you. I want to talk to Freya."

"I am she and she is me. We are one. Soon you will be one with Shiva, who is my consort .... "

"I'm not Shiva."

"You do not remember the last time, in Arabia? We danced the Tandava but were thwarted. You slew my last host. "

Remo frowned. His memories of that time were vague. He had put most of them out of his mind ....

"I will not make the mistake I made then," Kali went on. "We inhabit temples of mere meat and bone. It is time to step out of them. To step free into our true bodies .... " Her yellow-nailed hands began to wave and gesture provocatively before his hurt eyes. "When you possess four arms as do I, our lovemaking will be exquisite .... "

Her hands touched his chest and crept up to his throat. They felt cold. Alien. Inhuman.

In that moment Remo let out a bellow of fear and confusion.

And somewhere in that scream of pure pain, he heard the Master of Sinanju call out his name.

CHIUN, REIGNING MASTER of Sinanju, floated in warm water, his face a tight web of wrinkles.

About him the waters roiled.

The flat-headed body of Gilbert Houghton was the center of a boiling of tiny, voracious needle-toothed fish. They nipped and ripped at his dead flesh. In death his arms flopped with such abandon as to seem alive.

Nearby, in the pool that was fast turning pink and then scarlet with blood, the scheming Copt, Anwar Anwar-Sadat was likewise being denuded of all flesh.

Attacked from all sides, his separated head bobbed and rolled, the face turning ceilingward and back again in mad denial of its fate.

And as the feeding frenzy grew to a boil, the Master of Sinanju lifted his long-nailed fingers to spear and flay any and all of the meat-eating fish who dared approach.

But as many nails as he possessed, there were still more fish. And in the room of doom existed only walls and no floor.

Opening his bitter mouth, he called out his pupil's name.

REMO MOVED into reverse before the yellow talons found his throat.

A screech trailed after him as he went down the narrow corridor, a human blur, but he blocked it out.

Coming to the niche, he saw a vertical slice of bubbling red water and saw the Master of Sinanju floating, surrounded by arrowing bone white fish like tiny attack dogs snapping at anything they could.