Warren Murphy: Unite and Conquer

"Look, Coatlicue! Your brother Popocatepetl is coming to life! All of old Mexico is coming to life. The new is being overthrown and dashed into the cold, unforgiving earth. The old is resurgent, ascendant, invincible!"

And as the thunder of volcanic activity and the rumble of the unstable earth merged into a growling howl of sound, on the lawn of the Museum of Anthropology, Coatlicue stood resolute, her animate serpent heads twisting about, mouthing one word over and over again in a grinding voice.

"Survive, survive, survive..."

Chapter 4

Remo was still feeling good when he arrived home later that afternoon. He felt so good that the sight of the fieldstone monstrosity he called home almost looked good to him.

It took up a huge corner lot bide a sandstone high school. The place had been a church at one time, later subdivided into condo apartments. The roofline was crowded with dormer windows. Instead of a steeple, a squat stone tower bulked up.

As the cab dropped him off before the main entrance, Remo noticed someone was up on the tower roof. There was a flash of plum-colored silk visible between two toothlike merlons.

Remo called up. "That you, Little Father?"

A whimsical, birdlike head poked out from the stone gap. It belonged to Chiun, his mentor and trainer in the art of Sinanju.

"The earth has moved," Chiun said in a squeaky voice. His impossibly wrinkled face was pensive.

"I didn't feel anything."

"How could you? You have only now landed. I have been awaiting you."

"How'd you know what time I'd be back?"

"I spied your pale face as the aerial conveyance descended not forty minutes ago. Come. We must speak."

Remo said, "I'll be right up."

Letting himself in, Remo climbed the stairs to the tower meditation room. The room boasted a bigscreen TV and two VCRs. There was no furniture to speak of. Just clean reed mats scattered about the stone floor in lieu of chairs. The Master of Sinanju refused to let Western-style chairs defile his place of meditation.

Chiun padded down a short spiral stairway lately installed because, he claimed, he liked to breathe the clean air of the higher latitudes.

Remo suspected him of using the roof as a vantage point to spit on passing Chinese. There had been complaints.

Chiun spit on Chinese passersby because a Chinese emperor had once cheated a distant ancestor. Chiun was Korean, the last Korean Master of Sinanju. Sinanju was a fishing village in the western reaches of the Korean peninsula, where the fishing was terrible. Five thousand years ago, the village had first sent its best menfolk out into Asia and beyond to perform assassinations and other distasteful work no self-respecting bowman or samurai would undertake.

From this beginning grew the greatest assassins of the ancient world, the House of Sinanju, which developed the art of Sinanju. Sinanju preceded tae kwon do, karate, kung fu, ninja and the other killing disciplines that had spread to all cultures.

Sinanju was the sun source of them all, and its mysteries never left the village whose desperation had birthed it. Passed down from father to son, it was a closely held secret even today. Chiun was the last Korean Master of Sinanju. Remo was the first American disciple.

Neither looked like the most perfect killing machine to take human form, especially Chiun, but that's exactly what they were. For Sinanju developed more than martial skills. It awoke the brain, unleashing its full, awesome potential, transforming its practitioners and making them achieve what a more superstitious age would call a godlike state but today would be termed a Superman state.

Remo bowed in greeting. He towered over the Master of Sinanju, who barely topped five feet. Born at the end of the last century, Chiun looked seventy, but hadn't been that young in three decades. A plum-hued kimono draped his pipe-stem body. His bald head was very shiny, the skin stretched like vellum over the bone. A cloud of hair roosted over each ear. His face was a mummy's mask of interlacing wrinkles, decorated by hazel eyes so alive they could have belonged to a child. A wisp of a beard hung off his chin.

Chiun bowed in return. Not quite as deeply as Remo, but nearly so. It was a gesture of ultimate respect that he bowed to another human being at all.

"So what's this about the earth moving?" Remo asked.

Chiun's bony hands fluttered in the air, their long nails flashing.

"This is an unstable land. It is always moving."

Remo gave the room a quick glance. "Everything looks shipshape. And the cabbie didn't mention any earthquake."

"The earthquake has not transpired under our feet, but at a location far distant from here. My sensitive feet detected the vibrations."

Remo said nothing. The Master of Sinanju was fully capable of detecting a remote earthquake because he was in tune with his surroundings by virtue of being at one with the universe. It was no more incredible than his hazel eyes being able to spot Remo's face in the cabin window of a descending jet. Chiun could count the ticks on a black cat at midnight.

"Probably in California. They're having a lot of earthquakes lately."

Chiun stroked his wisp of a beard. "No, closer than that."

"Okay, maybe in the Midwest."

"The earth vibration come from the south."

"Well, it'll be on the news soon enough. What's the problem?"

"We are in service to an unstable land. It is politically unstable and it is unstable in far more treacherous ways. The gods are calling down curses upon this new Rome."

"Yeah, well, until Zeus personally tells me to find a new country, I'm not budging."

"Every day it is something new. If not conflagrations, it is typhoons. If not typhoons, it is earthquakes or sludge slides or avalanches of rock or worse calamities."

"That's mostly in California."

"It is connected to the rest of America, is it not? And is it not said that all customs that bedevil America begin in its far western province?"

"Yeah, but earthquakes and firestorms don't migrate like crystal sniffing or color therapy. We have nothing to worry about."

"Yet the earth moved. To the south. Not to the west. If the instabilty to the west has traveled east, then what is to stop it from coming north to topple my fine castle?"

"This is New England, Little Father," Remo explained patiently. "The last time Massachusetts had a major earthquake, the Pilgrims fell off their horses."

Chiun gasped. "So recent as that! I did not know this."

"For crying out loud, that was four hundred years ago!"

Chiun's hazel eyes narrowed. "Perhaps I was too hasty in signing my last contract. Perhaps we should relocate at once lest we be buried under the rubble of this doomed Atlantis."

"I don't believe Atlantis ever existed and, if you'll excuse me, I have a few loose ends to tie up."

Chiun ceased his fussy pacing. He narrowed one eye in Remo's direction.

"You were successful?"

Remo nodded. "The only crack skyscraper in human history has been shut down."

"And the fiend who was called Friend?"

"I threw every computer chip I could find into the Atlantic."

"Good. He will never vex us again."

"Fine with me. Enough vexing goes on around here as it is."

Remo had the phone receiver in one hand and was leaning on the 1 button. It was the foolproof code that connected him to Dr. Harold W Smith at Folcroft Sanitarium, the cover for CURE, the organization he worked for even though it didn't officially exist.

At length a lemony voice came on the line.

"Remo?"

"It's shut down."

"Did you locate the Friend chip?"

"I found a zillion chips. Chucked them all into the ocean."

"You are certain you got them all?"

"All the big ones, at any rate. Cleaned out the place of other vermin, too."