Warren Murphy: Master's Challenge

Yet there had once been a man who had taxed all of Remo's resources. A strange, terrible man who could fight every bit as well as Remo.

No, he thought angrily. Keep the record straight. The Dutchman had fought better than Remo.

Because he not only understood the subtle discipline of Sinanju as well as Remo did, but he was also equipped with a mutant mind so advanced and unique that it controlled whatever it fixed on. The Dutchman had frightened Remo. It was a sensation he missed. In a life filled with losers like the Managuan Liberation Front, the sheer skill of an opponent as horrifying as the Dutchman was worthy of respect.

But the Dutchman was long dead. Not by Remo's hand;

34

he hadn't been able to do it. Even now, the knowledge that the Dutchman's death had occurred through forces of nature and not Remo's ability still galled him. It had been his one chance to test himself to the limit, and he hadn't been up to the job. And never, he knew, never would it come again.

The Folcroft Sanitarium complex came into view. "Oh, what difference does it make, anyway?" Remo said aloud. He wasn't some freelance hero searching for adventure at the bidding of the gods, after all. He was just a guy with a job, and for that job he had been trained more expertly than anyone else on earth. It was useless to spend his time moping about inadequate adversaries, because Remo and Chiun were, since the Dutchman's death, the only people alive who even knew anything about Sinanju. Besides, he reasoned, it wasn't as if he didn't have anything to do. Challenge or no challenge, there were enough murderous yo-yos around to keep him busy for the next 600 years.

Just drop it, he told himself. He'd take off for a while, to someplace beautiful and sunny where the girls showed a lot of skin, and, he'd be as good as new. He climbed the steps leading to Folcroft's main double doors. Tahiti. That was where he was going. Tahiti was perfect. Chiun would like it, too. The old man liked coconuts.

Mrs. Mikulka, Smith's secretary, made the usual fuss about her boss's instructions to be left undisturbed, and as usual, Remo beat her to the door and let himself in. Smith was squinting hard at a piece of paper in his hand and reciting from it, a look of extreme discomfort permeating his lemony features.

"On wings of dust gather we into the Void. . . . Good God." He turned when Remo entered. "Oh, i't's you," he said irritably.

"Thank you for the usual warm reception, Smitty.

35

Where's Chiun? I figured the sub from Sinanju ought to be back by now."

"That is correct," Smith said tersely. "The submarine has returned. Chiun, however, was not aboard."

Remo was alarmed. "Is he-"

"He is not spiritually disposed to return at the moment. At least that's what he told the captain. He sent along an Ung poem instead." He waved the paper at Remo.

"The Song of the Butterfly," Remo read. "Oh, that's a good one. Wang's finest. Catchy verse."

"Remo, I dispatched a Navy submarine to venture quite illegally into enemy waters just for the purpose of picking Chiun up from his holiday. The captain is extremely distressed, to say the very least."

"Nothing else? Didn't he send any message for me?"

"Yes, yes," Smith said crankily. He picked up a scroll tied with a reed ribbon and handed it to Remo. "This is for you."

Remo unrolled the aged parchment and read the fading Korean characters.

He is created Shiva, the Destroyer; death; the shatterer of worlds; the dead night tiger1 made whole by the Master of Sinanju.

Below were another set of characters:

The Master will die by the hand of the Other in the spring of the Year of the Tiger. And the Other will join with his own kind. Yin and yang will be one in the Year of the Tiger.

The parchment, finally exposed to light and humidity after centuries of storage, cracked and disintegrated in his hands.

"Aw, come on," Remo said.

36

"What is it?"

"A story," Remo thought about it. "A dumb story."

"What does he want?"

"I think he wants me to go to Sinanju."

"Well, you can't go on a United States submarine," Smith said.

"I'm not going at all. I've waited for this vacation, and I'll be damned if I'm going to spend it in North Korea."

Smith gave a small shrug and leafed through some computer printouts on his desk. He checked his watch. "Er . . . your vacation has begun. Report back to me in ten working days."

Remo dusted the shards of parchment off his knees and swept out of the building.

He'd had it. This time he'd really had it with the old man's sneaky methods of luring him to Sinanju. The place was a pit. And he really needed a healthy dose of Tahiti. Now Chiun would gripe and complain for the next six months about Remo's not showing up when he was summoned by some melodramatic chicken scratches.

For dinner, he ate some rice in a third-rate Chinese restaurant, then went back to his motel room and turned on the television. Chiun can take his vacation by himself for once, he told himself. There's no reason why Remo had to spend two weeks in misery just to keep the old man company. He turned the volume on the television higher.

Still, what did it mean? The Shiva nonsense at the beginning was for him, he was sure of that. Chiun took some kind of perverted satisfaction in pretending that Remo was the reincarnation of some Indian spirit with a dozen arms. For the life of him, Remo could never figure out why. But the rest of it. The Master will die. . . . Which Master? Wang? The scroll had obviously been written centuries ago.

And who-or what-was the Other?

37

He turned the sound on the television up to ear-shattering level. The legends and traditions of Sinanju irked Remo to no end. In the first place, he couldn't understand them. And in the second place, he'd just received a day-long demonstration of how little the mystique of Sinanju affected his daily life.

Dross. It was all just a bunch of baloney to further complicate Remo's already complicated existence. The legends had as much relevance to Remo as the man in the moon.

But Chiun was old. He lived in the past. Let it go. He went over to the television again, found it wouldn't go any louder, and sat back down.

When was the Year of the Tiger? He tried to remember the calendar system used by the ancient Masters of Sinanju. The Tiger was a wild and ferocious beast, beautiful and deadly, swift and quiet and unpredictable. The year would be a time of changes and reversals, unexpected challenges, sudden surprises. It was ... He counted on his fingers.

Then, feeling his heart thudding in his chest, he got up and turned off the television. He sprinted out the door and headed back to Folcroft. Chiun hadn't written the message. The scroll had belonged to the collection among the ancient archives. And yet it had been a warning. Or a cry for help. Which Master-Chiun or Remo? One of them was going to die at the hands of someone-Male? Female? Machine? Spirit?-called "the Other."

And it was going to happen soon, because this was May. It was the spring of the Year of the Tiger.

Chapter Three

Remo arrived soaking wet upon the shores of Sinanju.

"Tell Smitty I love him, too," he mumbled after the rapidly submerging submarine in the distance. Leave it to Smith to stipulate that the sub deposit Remo a mile from shore.

Well, at least he'd arrived. Smith's loud protests notwithstanding, Remo managed to wrangle a ride to the place for which, now that he was actually seeing it, the term "pit" seemed woefully inadequate.

Sinanju was cold and rocky. Its shores, lapped by menacing, steel gray waves, looked like the backdrop in a Frankenstein movie. The only visible forms of life were the lichens and barnacles that grew on the jagged boulders in the sea. But there were other life forms here, Remo reminded himself as he stepped gingerly toward the village.