Warren Murphy: Arabian Nightmare

"Amazing. "

"I . . . er . . . suspected that he had survived, and rescued him. He is quite ill, but may recover."

"But he's been presumed dead for months. What on earth tipped you off, Smith?"

Harold Smith hesitated. Could he tell the President that the Spirit of Chiun, Master of Sinanju, had haunted his pupil, Remo, and Smith himself, silently pleading to be rescued from his sandy tomb, until Smith had had the site excavated by the Army Corps of Engineers?

No, Smith decided. He could not tell that to the President. As the head of the supersecret organization that officially did not exist, he was entrusted with one of the nation's most sensitive positions. Telling the truth would put him in the category they used to call Section Eight back in his OSS days.

"I have always been troubled by the lack of a body, Mr. President," he said at last, his vocal cords quivering slightly under the weight of the distasteful lie. "It simply did not occur to me to investigate the Condome site, because it had been sealed with concrete in the immediate aftermath of the detonation."

"I see," mused the President, who was the only man to whom Smith was accountable. "Very good, Smith. The President who selected you for the post you now hold had good judgment-for a Democrat. Too bad they cut him down before he even finished his term."

Smith sighed inwardly. That had been a long time ago. Before Remo. Before Chiun. Before everything.

"It may be that the Master of Sinanju might be able to help us in some way," he went on. "His ancestors-the early Masters of Sinanju-had extensive experience in that part of the world. I will look in on him when we are through discussing the situation."

"Let me know, Smith. I'm going to hold off on a decision until I confer with the other coalition members. I just wanted to check with you first."

"I will be in touch, Mr. President," said Harold Smith, replacing the cherry-red receiver. He then gave his cracked leather executive chair a turn. Rarely oiled ball bearings squealed and grumbled until he found himself facing a plate-glass window of one-way glass and a panoramic view of Long Island Sound and the colorful sails of summer in America.

Dusk was not long off. Summer was on the wane. It seemed, even as he looked out upon the peaceful waters off Rye, New York, where sails luffed and unseen keels etched unreadable signatures on the clear blue slate of water, as if the world was holding its breath.

A vast multinational army stood poised on the border of friendly Hamidi Arabia and occupied Kuran. To the north of that stripped and conquered land, the outlaw nation of Irait, hemmed in by unfriendly powers, isolated by scores of UN resolutions and sanctions, sat like a nuclear core about to go critical from the mounting pressure.

The coalition arrayed against Irait was too fragile to hold for long, Smith understood. The Germans, Chinese, and Jordanians were secretly dealing in munitions and circumventing that supposedly ironclad blockade. The French were showing signs of collaboration. The Hamidis were growing nervous. Worse, the Syrians were putting out feelers to Abominadad that they might entertain switching sides if the U.S. went on the attack.

And the biggest wild card of all, the Israelis, were dusting off their Jericho missiles for a preemptive strike. No one could blame them, but once Irait unleashed its awesome arsenal of mass destruction, civilization might not be able to pick up the pieces for a thousand years.

Harold Smith removed his rimless glasses and brushed tiny dust motes from the immaculate lenses. He had noticed that in his advancing age these tiny things bothered his weak eyes. Too many long hours hunched over a computer screen-scanning his vast data bank for incipient danger signals, guarding the nation from the forces that would twist the Constitution against the land that had birthed it-had made his gray eyes hypersensitive.

A freak of glancing light made the glass window dimly reflective. Smith stared at his own pinched, lemony features, took in the grayed hair that was only a shade or two lighter than his three-piece suit, and understood that the world was poised at a crossroad in history. If all went well, a new world order would emerge in the coming decade. If not, a new Dark Ages loomed. CURE would be needed more than ever-and he was an old man with failing eyes and no enforcement arm.

Smith gave the lenses a final brush, replaced them, and heaved his lanky Ichabod Crane body out of the chair.

He strode wordlessly past his busy secretary and took the elevator to the third floor.

The Master of Sinanju was in the sanitarium's private wing.

Smith knocked politely on the door.

A cracked and querulous voice said, "Enter, O Emperor."

Smith suppressed a start. When he had last looked in on the Master of Sinanju, he was a sunken shell, seemingly clinging to life by the thinnest of threads.

Yet through the heavy oak door Chiun had recognized Smith, whom he called emperor because in the five-thousand-year history of the House of Sinanju, no Master had ever served one who was not royalty-except in disgrace. And Chiun, the reigning Sinanju master of this century, refused to acknowledge that he was any less great than his predecessors.

Thus Smith was Emperor Smith, sometimes Harold the Generous. Other times, Mad Harold. He bore it in stoic distaste, because if there was one thing he had learned since the day he had hired Chiun to train a Newark beat cop named Remo Williams to become CURE's enforcement arm, it was not to directly disagree with the Master of Sinanju.

Clearing his throat, Smith opened the door and stepped in.

Chiun lay under the white sheets, his birdlike head resting on the pillow. No muscle seemed to move on his frail exposed arms. Only the eyes, as hazel as mahogany buttons, showed life. They flicked in Smith's direction.

"How are you feeling, Master Chiun?" Smith asked as he approached the bed.

"As well as can be expected," said Chiun, putting a dry rattle in his voice that had not been there before.

Catching the prompt, Smith played along.

"Is there something wrong?"

"The nurses are brutes," Chiun croaked. "Except for the one who personally prepares my rice. She should be allowed to live."

"It is against Folcroft policy to execute the nurses on the basis of poor performance," Smith said soberly.

"I would accept a caning, if it were severe enough."

"Corporal punishment is out of the question. But if you are insistent, I can have them terminated-I mean let go," Smith added hastily.

The Master of Sinanju closed his eyes wearily. "Yes, by all means let them go. Over a precipice."

Smith examined Chiun's head with a sinking feeling of despair. The puffs of hair over each seashell ear seemed dull and gray, the wisp of a beard that curled from his chin thin and insubstantial as incense. The aged face, like an amber raisin, was a network of radiating wrinkles, the closed eyes sunk in their bony orbits as if receding into death and corruption.

Perhaps it was that the Master of Sinanju was still recovering from his months of coma suspended in a dark body of stagnant water like an insect larva. Possibly it was because Smith had only recently learned that Chiun had turned one hundred, but the old Korean seemed far, far older than before. He looked helpless beyond words, in fact. Smith despaired of the future of the organization he helmed.

"The nurses told me you watched the transmission from Abominadad," Smith said carefully.

No response.

"You saw what happened to Remo."

Chiun's papery lips thinned in a bloodless line.

Smith pressed on. "Do you think that Remo can be salvaged?"

The pause was long before the answer came. "No."

"Does that mean you would not undertake such a task?"