Warren Murphy: The Eleventh Hour

Remo jumped from a standing start and tore holes in the plaster ceiling. He pulled himself up, and got to the flat roof.

There, Remo took in a recharging breath. Half of it was smoke. He coughed. Tears streamed from his eyes, but not all of them were from the smoke.

The roof was hot. Remo got to the front side. He could see the upturned faces below. A larger crowd was there. Fire engines pulled up. Hoses were being dragged out and attached to fire hydrants by yellow-slickered firemen.

"I couldn't find him," Remo cried. "Just a cat."

"That's Dudley!" the girl in the pigtails yelled back.

"We tried to tell you," the father called up. "I'm sorry."

But Remo didn't feel sorry. He felt immense relief. "I'm coming down," he said.

"Hurry, Remo," said Chiun, his face anxious as a grandmother's.

But Remo didn't come down. The house came down. Eaten by flames to its very shore timbers, it gave way with a great rending creak of wood and seemed to snuff out the fires in the first floor. The roof collapsed in a mass of beautiful sparks and Remo was lost from sight.

The crowd stepped back in stunned horror. They were too shocked to speak or react. Only when the smoke suddenly surged up again to obliterate all the pretty sparks did they react.

The crowd gave a low mourning groan. Except one person. Chiun. The Master of Sinanju let out a cry like a lost soul.

"Remo!" he wailed. "My son!"

Only the spiteful snap of consuming fire answered him.

Chapter 3

Chiun, reigning Master of Sinanju, last of the line of Masters of Sinanju, trainer of the white American Remo in the art of Sinanju, saw the five-thousand-year history of his art disappear into a boiling mass of crashing timbers and the horror of it shocked him to his very soul.

But only for mere seconds. Chiun bounded into the ruins.

There was no longer a door as such. Just a twisted frame that had been a doorjamb. Chiun went through it, eyes closed, breath held deep within his lungs, willing his body temperature to rise. It was the way of Sinanju when dealing with fire.

The implosion seemed to have knocked out the inferno. Wood burned and smoldered, but not as before. Soon, Chiun knew, oxygen would recirculate back into the ruins and what now smoldered would soon again burn. And burn furiously. The half-collapsed house would become an inferno once more. Chiun had only minutes.

"Remo!" he called.

When there came no answer, the Master of Sinanju knew fear.

Chiun knew that there were stairs near him. He had heard Remo's soft footsteps climb them but minutes before. Chiun went up those stairs, but he found the way blocked.

The Master of Sinanju dug into fallen timber and plaster, clearing the way. If Remo had been a tornado when he had moved through the second floor, Chiun was a typhoon, mighty, raging, implacable.

"Remo!" he called again. Then, in an anguished voice, "My son! My son!"

Chiun found Remo entangled in a pile of burning supports. Remo hung, head down, like a discarded puppet in a junkyard. His eyes were closed in his ash-smeared face. Flames were eating his ragged T-shirt. And worst of all, his head hung at a peculiar angle, his throat pinned between two blackened joists.

"Remo," Chiun said faintly, a deep cold took his mighty heart.

The Master of Sinanju attacked the pile swiftly. He slashed Remo's burning shirt from his body with quick swipes of his long nails. Throwing it away, he next separated the wood that clamped Remo's neck, catching Remo's head tenderly in his hands.

Chiun saw that Remo's throat was discolored. Blue. Almost black. He had never seen such a bruise before and feared that his pupil's neck had been broken. His deft caress of Remo's neck vertebrae told him it was not so.

"Remo? Can you hear me?"

Remo did not hear the Master of Sinanju. Chiun placed a delicate ear to Remo's bare chest. There was a heartbeat, faint at first, then growing stronger. But Chiun did not recognize the rhythm. It was not Sinanju rhythm. It did not even sound like Remo's heartbeat, a sound Chiun knew well. He often lay awake at night listening to it, knowing that as long as it beat, the future of Sinanju was assured.

"What strangeness is this?" Chiun whispered to himself, gathering Remo up in his arms.

Chiun had not taken Remo three paces when Remo came to life with a violence.

"It is all right," said Chiun gently, "it is Chiun. I will carry you to safety, my son."

But the eyes that looked up at his were strange. They were dark, like Remo's eyes, but they held a strange red light. As they focused on Chiun's face, the features came alive. And the expression was terrible, un-Remo-like.

And the voice that emerged from Remo's bruised bluish throat was more terrible still.

"Who dares profane my body with his touch?"

"Remo?"

Remo pushed Chiun, and the force was so great that Chiun was not prepared for it. Chiun fell backward.

"Remo! Have you gone mad?" said Chiun, picking himself off the floor.

And the next words that emerged from Remo's mouth told the Master of Sinanju that his pupil was not mad.

"Where is this place? Am I in Hell of Hells? Kali! Show yourself. The Lord of the Lightnings challenges you to battle. I am at last awakened, from my long slumber."

"You have no enemies here," Chiun said firmly, almost reverently.

"Be gone, old man. I have no truck with mortals."

"I am Chiun, Master of Sinanju."

"I am created Shiva, the Destroyer; Death, the shatterer of worlds."

"And?"

"Is that not enough?"

"There is more. 'The dead night tiger made whole by the Master of Sinanju,' " Chiun recited. "Do you not remember?"

"I remember nothing of you, old man. Be gone, before I slay you like the insect that you are. "

"Remo! How could you-" But Chiun cut off his own words. He knew he was no longer speaking to Remo Williams. But the avatar of something greater. And he bowed.

"Forgive me, O Supreme Lord. I understand your confusion. All will be explained to you. Allow this humble servant to guide you from this place of turmoil."

"I need no guide," said the voice from Remo Williams, and he fixed such a gaze on the Master of Sinanju that Chiun felt his heart quail.

"The flames will return soon, Supreme Lord," Chlun insisted. "You do not wish to be in this place when they do."

But Remo ignored him, casting his imperious eyes over the wreckage of flame and ruin. Smoky shadows played over his bare chest. Remo's body was bathed in a scarlet glow. It made him look satanic.

Chiun felt his own breathing weaken. He could not stay in this place much longer. Sinanju breathing techniques worked only where one could breathe. Soon, that would be impossible.

A crafty look wrinkled his visage. Chiun sagged to the floor.

"Oooh. I am dying," he said, lying on his face. "I am an old man, and the breath is leaving my poor body."

When he heard no reaction, Chiun lifted his head and stole a peek at Remo. Remo was standing by a window, staring out in the night sky, his face troubled.

"I said, I am dying," Chiun repeated. Then he groaned.

"Then die quietly," said Remo.

"Remo!" Chiun squeaked, shocked. And he knew Remo was beyond his reach.

Chiun found his feet as the flames kicked up again. The smoke, which had hung like a thin film in the air, now began to boil anew with the return of air circulation. The dull furnace sound under his feet told Chiun that the only escape now would be through the window.

While Chiun was agonizing over having to leave Remo to the flames, glass shattered in one of the rooms. Then, in another. Chiun could hear the water. Fire hoses were being played on the house, breaking the windows all along the front. The smash of glass came from the next room.

Chiun waited.