Warren Murphy: The Eleventh Hour

"I don't know. A village."

"How did you get to Pyongyang?"

"By train. From the railhead at Changyon."

The colonel nodded. Changyon was less than one hundred miles south of Pyongyang. Trains ran regularly from Changyon to Pyongyang. Or as regularly as anything ran in North Korea. It was possible for someone with the right racial features and local currency to make such a trip, even if he was an American, so long as he spoke a little Korean and kept to himself.

"You came to North Korea by sea just to turn yourself over to us? You could have applied for asylum in any Western nation. Our embassies are everywhere."

"I didn't come to North Korea to apply for asylum. I'm applying for asylum to get out of North Korea. Alive."

"What, then?"

"I came to see Sinanju with my own eyes."

"I have never heard of it."

"It is a place on the West Korea Bay. My grandfather told me of it."

"You are a spy, then," Colonel Ditko said, thinking that Sinanju must be a military installation. "You admit it?"

"No. I am an American journalist."

"That is the same thing," insisted Colonel Ditko. "You have come to this country to spy into the secrets of the military installation at Sinanju."

"No. That isn't it at all. Sinanju isn't a military base. It's a fishing village. The only secret I found there isn't Korean. It's American."

"American?" sputtered Colonel Viktor Ditko. "No American has set foot in North Korea in over forty years-except as a prisoner."

"I have."

"What is the secret?"

"I will tell that to the ambassador when I apply for asylum."

Colonel Viktor Ditko unholstered his pistol and cocked it.

"You will tell me now. I will decide what the ambassador hears, and from whom."

Sammy Kee felt it all drain away at that moment. The hope, the fear, the despair. All of it. He felt numb.

"The proof is in my trousers."

"Bring it out-slowly."

Sammy Kee stood up and shook his tattered cotton trousers. Something bulky slid down one trouser leg and stopped at the cuff. Sammy undid the blue ribbon and, bending to catch what fell out, produced a black plastic box.

The colonel, who had seen many Western films in the privacy of his Moscow apartment thanks to the miracle of video recorders, recognized the object as a video cassette.

He took the cassette eagerly. "This was recorded where?"

"In Sinanju," Sammy Kee said.

"You will wait," the colonel said, and locked the door behind him to make certain that the order would be obeyed.

Sammy Kee broke down then. He blubbered like a child. It had all gone wrong. Instead of the Soviet ambassador, he had fallen into the hands of a KGB colonel. Instead of bargaining for his freedom, he was a prisoner of an ambitious officer. Probably he would be shot in this very room within the hour.

The KGB colonel was not long in returning. Sammy wiped his eyes on his sleeves and tried to sit up straight. He wanted to crawl under the table instead.

"This is a tape of a fishing village," Colonel Ditko said.

"Sinanju. I told you that."

"Most of this tape is of an old man, sitting on a rock, smoking a pipe, and droning on and on."

"Didn't you listen to what was said?"

"My Korean is not good. I am in this post less than a year."

"Then you don't know."

"No. But you will tell me. Why would an American journalist risk his life and freedom to penetrate North Korea just to tape an old man's life story?"

"It wasn't the old man's life story. It wasn't anyone's life story. It was the story of human civilization. All of the dynasties, and the politics, and the great upheavals in recorded history are a consequence of what has been going on in that little fishing village for five thousand years."

"Are you crazed?"

"Let me start at the beginning."

Colonel Viktor Ditko tossed the cassette onto the plain table with a report like a gunshot. He sat down slowly and folded his wiry arms.

"Start at the beginning, then."

"I was born in San Francisco. My parents were born there too."

"I do not need your life story."

"You wish to understand," Sammy Kee said.

"Continue then."

"My grandfather was born in Chongju, here in the north. When I was a boy, he used to sit me on his lap and tell me stories of Korea. Wonderful stories. I can still hear his voice in my head. One of the stories was of the Master of Sinanju."

"A feudal lord?"

"No. You might call the Master of Sinanju a world power of ancient history. He was neither a king nor a prince. But he was responsible for shifting the balance of power among nations countless times throughout recorded history. You might call him history's first superpower."

"What has this fable to do with your being here?"

"Everything. I thought it was a fable too. The Master of Sinanju was an individual of great wisdom and power, according to my grandfather. He was not a single person, but an office. Throughout history there have been many Masters of Sinanju. It was a position handed down from father to son, among a certain family in the village of Sinanju. That family was known as the House of Sinanju, although Sinanju was not the family name."

"It is the name of the village," the colonel said wearily.

"But it was also something else, according to my grandfather. Sinanju was a discipline, or a power, tightly held by the Master of Sinanju and conferred through the family line. Masters of Sinanju used this power to enforce their will, but they never used it to conquer, or to steal. Instead, they hired themselves out to royalty as bodyguards and assassins. Mostly as assassins."

Something stirred in the back of Colonel Viktor Ditko's mind, a half-memory taking shape from the nervous words of this frightened man. A fabulous story of Oriental warriors who possessed superhuman powers. Where had he heard a similar tale?

"What do you mean by power?" he demanded.

"My grandfather claimed that Sinanju was the original martial art. It predates karate, kung fu, and ninjutsu by thousands of years. All later forms of hand-to-hand fighting are copied from Sinanju. But Masters of Sinanju, once they attain what is called the sun source, achieve mental and physical perfection, becoming supernaturally swift and strong. Perhaps invincible. Like gods."

"There are no gods," said Colonel Viktor Ditko, who had learned in school that science was the only legitimate vehicle for realizing mankind's potential.

"The Masters of Sinanju attended the great courts of history," continued Sammy Kee. "They stood beside the pharaohs of old Egypt. They toppled thrones in ancient Rome. They were the secret weapons of the Borgias, and of France's later kings. Whoever hired them, prospered. Any who challenged them, perished. So my grandfather said."

"So?" asked Ditko, trying to isolate the memory. Was it in Tashkent?

"So this. My father claimed that the Masters of Sinanju continued to this day. They hadn't worked as much in this century because of the two world wars, but the current Master of Sinanju still lived in the village, guarding a fabulous treasure and keeping historical records that explained some of the great mysteries of the ages."

"The old man on the tape. He was the Master of Sinanju?"

"No. He was just a caretaker. But let me tell this story as it happened."

"Do so."

"I loved that old tale of my grandfather's, but I never dreamed it had any basis in fact. Until last year. I was in India. I told you I was a journalist. I was covering the chemical disaster there, in Gupta."

"A horrible tragedy. Caused by an American chemical company. Americans can't be trusted with such things."

"I was interviewing a cabinet minister about the tragedy," Kee said. "At first, the minister didn't want to talk to me because I was an American, but when he learned I had Korean parents, he changed his mind. Koreans and Indians had deep historical ties, he told me. I had no idea what he was talking about at the time. I did my story, but nobody bought it and I decided to stay in India."