Warren Murphy: In Enemy Hands

"And what happened?"

"What happens to all great men who don't kiss the ass of the liberal establishment, who stand up for America, who can be counted on to do the decent thing in a crisis."

"What happened to you, sir, is what I'm asking."

"I went to bed as I normally do, supposedly surrounded by loyal and competent guards. During the night I felt a slight tap and when I tried to open my eyes, I couldn't, and I drifted off into a very deep sleep. When I awoke, the world was way down beneath me. Way, way down. I was on top of the Washington Monument and the lights beneath had been turned out. And I was right on top of that needle, looking down. Right leg on one side, left leg on the other, and one man I could only tell that he had thick wrists was on one side of me, below me, and an Oriental with long fingernails was on the other side. And there I was, in my nightgown, with the point of the needle sticking right up between the cheeks of my you know what. And the man with thick wrists said being a tattletale was naughty and that I would resign within the week."

"And what did you say?"

"I said, even if this a dream, I am your President."

"And what did he say?"

"He said they were going to leave me there and I begged him not to and he said it was either being left there, or them bringing me straight down to the bottom. With the needle in between. And in my dream, I said I would resign." He blew his nose fiercely into another tissue.

"So you had a bad dream."

The then but soon to be former President shifted in his doughnut shaped pillow.

"This morning, the surgeon general removed traces of limestone from the rectal tissue of your President. I resign tomorrow."

So it had been, and in the chaos of assuming the presidency of a nation torn by scandal, the former Vice President and now President had never touched that red telephone. Even now, after talking to the lemony voiced man on the telephone, he did not know what he was unleashing. But the risk was worth it. There was a situation in the world that could lead to world war if it were not stopped. And the third world war, with all its nuclear horror, would be the last.

Quietly he shut the bureau drawer and said a prayer. Then he opened the drawer again briefly. Pinkies were always getting caught in that sort of drawer.

CHAPTER TWO

His name was Remo and he bathed his body in the blue deeps off Florida's west coast. He moved with the slow, crisp snap of a muscled fin through the green plants and rocks where crabbers plucked delicacies for the rest of the nation. There had been a shark warning that morning, and most of the pleasure divers had decided to spend that day with gin and lime and stories about heroism which rose with the ascent of the sun and the decline of the gin in the clear glass bottles set on checkered tablecloths, as the drinkers washed down fresh crab and baked mullet in sweet butter sauce. Remo followed four divers with spear guns, fading in and out of their group, going ahead, falling behind, until the group stopped and pointed to him and made the signal for going up to the surface. The surface always looked so shiny from below. He accelerated up into it, like a porpoise, so that as he cut up into the thin air, the water dropped beneath him to his ankles, and at the apex of his thrust, it appeared as if he momentarily stood ankle deep in water. He came back down with a slapping splash of his arms that stopped his head from going under.

The divers broke the surface too.

Puffing and spitting water, they removed the mouthpieces that led to tanks of compressed air on their backs.

"Okay. We give up," said one. "Where's your air supply?"

"What?" said Remo.

"Your air supply."

"Same place as yours. In my lungs."

"But you've been under with us for twenty minutes."

"Yeah?" said Remo.

"So how do you breathe?"

"Oh, you don't. Not underwater," said Remo, and went back down, curving into the green-blue cool of the salt water. He watched the other divers come down in splashing, jerky, waving, energy-wasting motions, muscles that worked against themselves, breathing that had never been trained, minds so locked in what they perceived as the limits of the human body that even a thousand years of training would never get them to use a tenth of their strength.

It was all in the rhythm and the breathing. The brute force of a man was less than almost any other animal per ounce. But the mind was infinite compared to that of other animals, and only when that mind was harnessed could the rest of the body be harnessed. Year after year, human beings were put into the ground at the end of their lives with less than ten per cent of their brain ever having been used. What did they think it was for? Some vestigial organ like the appendix? Didn't they see? Didn't they know?

He had mentioned this once to a physician who had trouble finding his pulse.

"That's weird," said the doctor, meat and animal fat reeking from his body.

"It's true," Remo had said. "The human mind is virtually an obsolete organ."

"That's absurd," the doctor had said, putting a stethoscope to Remo's heart.

"No, no. Is it true or not that people use fewer than ten per cent of their brain cells?"

"True, but that's common knowledge."

"Why are only ten per cent of the brain cells used?"

"Eight per cent," said the doctor, blowing on the end of the stethoscope and warming it up with his hands.

"Why?"

"Because there are so many of them."

"There's a hell of a lot of filet mignon and gold in the world, but that's all used. Why isn't the brain used?" Remo asked.

"It's not supposed to be used in its entirety."

"But all ten fingers are and every blood vessel is and both lips are and both eyes are. But not the brain?"

"Shhhh, I'm trying to get your heartbeat. You're either dead or I've got a broken stethoscope."

"How many beats do you want?"

"I had hoped for seventy two a minute."

"You got it."

"Ah, there it is," said the doctor and looked at his watch and thirty seconds later said: "Hope and you shall get."

"Want to hear it doubled?" Remo asked. "Halved?" And when he left the doctor's office later, the physician was yelling that he got all the practical jokers and he had a lot of work and only a weirdo like Remo would play the kind of tricks he played. But it hadn't been a trick. As Chiun, his aged Korean trainer, had told him early on:

"People will only believe what they already know and can only see what they have seen before. Especially white people."

And Remo had answered that there were plenty of black and yellow people just as insensitive and probably even more so. And Chiun had said Remo was right about the blacks and about the Chinese and the Japanese and the Thais, and even about the South Koreans and most of the North Koreans, they now being unified under the decadence of Pyong Yang and various other big cities, but that if one went to Sinanju, a small village in North Korea, there were those who appreciated the true outer limits of the human mind and body.

"I've been there, Little Father," Remo had said. "And that means you and the other Masters of Sinanju who have lived throughout the ages. And no one else."

"And you too, Remo," Chiun had said. "Transformed from pale nothingness and worthlessness into a disciple of Sinanju. Oh, never has such glory come to Sinanju as to be able to create something of worth from you. Wonderful me. I have made a student from a white man."

And overwhelmed by his own accomplishment, Chiun had gone into a three day silence broken only by an occasional "from you," and then a swoon of awe at what he had done.

Now Remo moved ahead of the divers, flopping with their artificial fins, leaving streams of shiny air bubbles coming up behind them. Four bodies fighting themselves and the water. They used oxygen they did not need for jerkily pushing muscles they did not know how to use. They hunted the shark, and the shark knew with a kind of knowledge better than mere knowing how to move and do. For that which required knowing always had less force than that which was done by the body itself. So Chiun had taught Remo, and so Remo understood as he, like the shark, snapped and curved through ocean waters off the Florida coast.