Warren Murphy: White Water

Stripping off his T-shirt, Remo stood in his chinos as he toed off his shoes.

Without hesitation he jumped into the frigid Atlantic. It enveloped him like a cold vise. A biological sensor in his nose caused his body temperature to elevate ten degrees. The same natural reflex had been discovered in children who fell into icy ponds and survived because it threw the body into a kind of limited suspended animation, preserving the brain from oxygen starvation.

Remo's body temperature was now in the danger zone, but the cold of the North Atlantic would counteract the effects of the self-induced fever. Sinanju again.

Remo's eyes quickly adjusted to the changing light conditions. The red end of the spectrum was filtered out thirty feet down. At sixty, orange vanished.

At one hundred feet Remo began picking out shapes in the predominantly blue-gray realm. His skin was slick with oil. He hated the sensation, but the coating helped insulate his skin.

Five hundred feet down in shoal water, he found the Ingo Pungo lying on her side. He read it as a long, dark, night blue hulk, the stern broken open.

Releasing a solitary carbon dioxide bubble once every thirty seconds, Remo reconnoitered the sunken wreck. There was a hole in its side, he discovered-more by feel than sight. Something had knocked the hole in the thick black hull plates. There were jagged edges pointing inward around a human-sized hole. Other holes had edges that pointed outward. No boiler explosion sank this ship.

There were bodies floating in the water, some still trailing cloudy, dark filaments. Blood. Already fish were pecking at them.

There had been no survivors. A finger floated by but Remo ignored it.

Then, reaching out, he momentarily arrested a body slowly drifting by. The dead face looked back with sightless, oblique eyes. A Korean. Remo let go.

Holding his position with lazy stabilizing sweeps of his arms, Remo noticed a strange thing. There were a lot of fish. Maybe it was the bodies that drew them. But they seemed to be coming out of the wreck as if it had been their home a long time.

One swam close, and Remo reached out to catch it. It fought for its freedom and Remo let the fish have it, but not before he had identified it as a coho salmon. A fish native to the Pacific Ocean. What the hell was it doing in the Atlantic? he wondered.

Moving closer, Remo discovered other Pacific species. In fact, they were almost all Pacific fish. To Remo, who knew fish very well, it was as weird as discovering a Pekinese perched atop a candelabra cactus.

Returning to the surface, Remo recharged his lungs with air.

Except for his own lonely craft, the seas were empty.

Back on board the cigarette boat, Remo rubbed his oily arms dry and diverted body heat to the top of his head. His wet hair began to steam. It was soon merely damp, and before long it would be dry.

He threw on his dry T-shirt and, as he kicked the engine back into life, he redirected his body heat to his legs, where his pants were sticking to his flesh like a cold, clammy shroud.

The power boat dug in its stern as it heeled about. Remo lined the nose up with land and let the throttle out.

Something was very wrong here. And the worst part was he didn't know how much trouble it meant.

DR. HAROLD W. SMITH was working late. It was one of the occupational hazards of being the head of CURE, the supersecret government agency that lead no official existence. The cover for CURE was Folcroft Sanitarium, a three-story redbrick building perched on the lip of Long Island Sound. Smith's Folcroft duties were no less demanding than his higher responsibility. So he often worked deep into the night.

The Sound was a bejeweled carpet of anthracite at Smith's back as he trolled the Internet from his desk. The desk was as black as the Sound. Its wide glass top was like obsidian. Set under the glass so that its luminous amber screen canted up to face hum, was the monitor that connected to the Folcroft Four-a set of powerful mainframes hidden in the sleepy sanitarium's basement.

Smith was a spare man whose color might have been bleached out of him by virtue of the tedium of his job. There was nothing glamorous about running CURE. Smith did it from his Spartan office unsuspected by his employees, who thought of him as a hard-nosed, tight-fisted, anally retentive bureaucratic paper shuffler-which he was. And stubbornly proud of it.

Smith was tracking the progress of the Ingo Pungo on his screen. The ship was equipped with the global positioning system transponder beacon carried by many modern vessels. It beamed a constant signal up to orbiting satellites, which sent its position back to earth stations. Smith had accessed the network and was looking at a real-time schematic of the Ingo Pungo's current position.

The blipping green light was fifteen nautical miles off Lubec, Maine, in the Bay of Fundy. It had stopped dead in the water precisely where it should. This was good.

If Remo held up his end, he should rendezvous shortly, and Harold Smith could go home to his bed and his understanding wife, Maude.

Time passed, and the Ingo Pungo remained in place. The off-loading was probably going slowly. Or perhaps there was weather. Smith punched up a real-time feed from the National Weather Service.

There were no storms in that part of the Bay of Fundy. He frowned, his grayish face like that of a corpse wearing rimless glasses in a failed attempt to look natural. Smith resembled nothing more than a third-generation New England banker teetering on the creaky edge of retirement. In fact, Smith was well past retirement age, but as long as America had a need for CURE, he could not retire. Except in death.

Smith was monitoring news feeds on a window on one corner of his screen when the blue contact desk telephone rang, startling him into action.

Smith scooped it up.

"Hail, O Emperor! What word?" cried a high, squeaky voice.

"None."

"The hour has come and gone," said the voice of Chiun, the Reigning Master of Sinanju.

"Remo ran into difficulties. But the ship is on station."

"Of course. It is manned by Koreans. They would not dare be tardy. Unlike my adopted son, who would sink to any low embarrassment."

"I expect the cargo transfer is going on right now," Smith said.

"I should have overseen it myself. But if I cannot trust Remo to accomplish a simple exchange, how can I place the future of my House in his clumsy, thumb-fingered hands?"

"I will let you know when I hear from him, Master Chiun," said Harold Smith, terminating the call.

The blue phone rang again so fast Smith thought the Master of Sinanju had hit Redial.

It was Remo this time. He sounded cold. And Remo never sounded cold.

"Smith. Bad news."

"You failed to make the rendezvous?"

"I made it. The ship made it, too."

Smith squeezed the blue handset. "Then what is wrong?"

"I found it on the bottom of the ocean. It sunk with all hands," Remo told him somberly.

"How can you be certain it sunk?"

"I found blood in the water and an oil slick. I can add two and two, so I went down and found a ship. Ingo Pungo was on the stern-what was left of it."

"You are certain that the ship was the Ingo Pungo?"

"I can read. I can also tell a Korean from a Japanese at ten paces. There were Korean bodies floating around the wreck. Looks like no survivors."

"It had just reached the rendezvous point. What could have befallen the ship in that short a time?" Smith said in a deeply disturbed voice.

"I'm no expert, but I'd say it was torpedoed. There was a hole in the starboard side as big as a Buick. The metal was punched inward."

"Who would torpedo a cargo ship?"

"Who would know about it?" countered Remo.

"No one other than you, Chiun and I."