Warren Murphy: In Enemy Hands

"Can I say something?" Remo asked.

The President nodded. Chiun smiled, awaiting Remo's speech of loyalty to the emperor.

Remo said, "I started in this thing a long time ago and I really didn't want to, but I was framed for a murder I didn't commit. Well, I started learning Sinanju as a way to do my job, and in the process I learned what I could be and what others had been. And what I'm getting down to is I don't like the way you call the Master of Sinanju and me 'those two' or 'these two.' The House of Sinanju was here thousands of years before George Washington ever got his army strung out on a short supply line at Valley Forge."

"What are you getting to?" asked the President.

"What I'm getting to is I'm not all that impressed with whether you have a happy heart or a heavy one. I just don't give a bubbly fart about how you feel. And that's how I feel."

Smith assured the President that Remo was always reliable, awesomely so. Chiun apologized for Remo's insolence before an emperor and blamed it on his youth, he being less than eighty years old.

The President said he respected a man who spoke his mind.

"There's only one person in this room whose respect I want," Remo said. He pointed to the President and Smith. "And you two aren't him."

CHAPTER THREE

The first thing Colonel Vassily Vassilivich noticed, in the new glory days of the Treska, was a loss of discipline. Before, when the Sunflower team was always floating somewhere in the same European cities as the Treska, no man would go up in a single elevator alone, no men would get themselves stranded in the back room of a restaurant without someone on the street as a safety valve, and everyone kept in constant contact with the rest of the killer unit.

Now, as executive officer of the Treska, he would lose the whereabouts of men for days. They would run through their hit lists in half an hour, then go off to savor the delicacies of the Western capitals and only report back when their money ran out, smiling a stale whiskey smile, bearded, tired, content with their own dissolution.

When Ivan Mikhailov, the laughing giant, returned to a contact point in Rome, the Geno Restaurant down the narrow sloping street of the Atlas Hotel, he became enraged when Colonel Vassilivich accused him of returning only when he ran out of funds.

Ordinarily, someone like Ivan would have stayed on his farm in the Caucasus, taking over some of the chores of plow horses. But his enormous strength had been noticed early by the KGB, which brought such things as candy and radios and extra meat rations to the Mikhailov family, so that when young Ivan reached fifteen he happily went off to training camp at Semipalatinski, where top graded instructors watched in amazement as he showed how he could snap two by four boards in his bare hands, how he could lift the back of an official black Zil limousine with one hand, and how he could kill. And how he loved it.

Semipalatinski was less than two hundred miles from the Chinese border, and when a People's Army Patrol got lost and ended up inside the Soviet Union, the school sent out an urgent message to the Fifteenth Red Rifle Division that the KGB unit would handle the Chinese patrol, while the Rifle Division sealed off their escape. The message really meant the KGB unit commander wanted to blood his trainees. The Rifle Division commander scoffed at the policemen and spies trying to do soldiers' work, but he had to accept the order.

Three brigades from the Rifle Division trapped the Chinese patrol in a small valley. The Chinese retreated up the sides of the valley to small caves, where they dug in. The Rifle commander wanted to shell the caves, roll in explosives, and go home if the Chinese did not surrender. KGB had other ideas.

When night fell, trainees of the KGB Treska unit were sent in with short knives, garottes, and pistols. The order was that for every bullet the trainees fired, they would receive a lash on the back.

Vassilivich, then an instructor of English and French at the school, waited that night with the commander of the Rifle Division. They heard an occasional shot from the caves. About 3:45 a.m., there was a scream from one person that did not let up until after 4 a.m. Then there was silence.

"We will have to shell the caves at dawn," said the Rifle commander. "A waste of Russian blood. That is what you policemen have done. You have wasted young Russian blood. You should stay to sticking a microphone in people's asses, is what you should stay to."

"What makes you so sure it's not the Chinese who were killed?"

"For one, those were Chinese weapons fired. For two, if your silly little boys had won, they would be coming out now. At first light, we do what we should have done before."

"They have orders not to use pistols and to stay where they are until light, so that your soldiers don't become panicstricken and shoot at them, and thereby force us, general, to annihilate you. Sorry, but that is the truth, general," said Vassilivich.

"Lunatics," said the general. But his staff officers were quiet because all military men were quiet when KGB was around.

Vassilivich had shrugged, and in the morning when the sun first broke over the valley, the Treska trainees came out singing and dancing. Ivan skipped out of the cave, juggling two heads in his massive hands, and each trainee had to empty his pistol to show he had killed without it.

The soldiers were left to clean up the bodies. Several of them passed out from what they saw. Laughing Ivan had to be told he could not keep the heads.

"Give them to the general of the guards, Ivan. That's a good boy. Good boy, Ivan," Vassilivich had said. And Ivan pushed the two heads into the general's reluctant hands and sniffled because they were his heads; he had taken them off the Chinamen, and why couldn't he keep them and take them home to his village when he had leave, because nobody in his village had ever seen a Chinaman's head?

"Your mother wouldn't like that, Ivan," Vassilivich had said.

"You don't know my mother," Ivan had whimpered.

"I know whereof I speak, Ivan. We can send her apples."

"She has apples."

"We can send her a bright shiny new radio."

"She has a radio."

"We can send her whatever she wants."

"She wants Chinaman heads."

"You don't know that, Ivan. You are lying."

"Not lying. She always wants Chinaman heads."

"That's not so, Ivan."

"She would if we gave them to her."

"No, Ivan. You can never keep heads again."

"Never?"

"Never."

"Once now and never again?" Ivan had asked.

"Never, Ivan. Not now, not ever. Never."

There had been other incidents, but Ivan had always responded to a firm hand before. When the American, Forbier, had been outed and Ivan had crushed his ribs with one hand blow and Vassilivich had said enough, Ivan had backed off, and Vassilivich had given him a friendly pat on the cheek and they had gone out to enjoy the rest of the beautiful spring day in Paris.

But now, in the dim Italian restaurant with the three plates of spaghetti topped with veal in cream sauce set before Ivan, Vassilivich found reasoning difficult.

"I not spend all money," Ivan said, and his two large hands brought out bowlfuls of tenthousand lire notes, equal to about twelve dollars American apiece. The Treska unit did not calculate finances in rubles but in the American unit of dollars.

Ivan plopped the money down on Vassilivich's side of the table. Vassilivich tried to organize them and counted as he did.

Ivan lifted one plate of dripping spaghetti like a small saucer and sucked it all down, veal and sauce as though it were the dregs of a tiny cup of tea.

He licked his lips. Then he finished off the other two and asked that the basket of fruit on a counter in front of the kitchen be brought to him. The waiter smiled and with typical Italian elegance and grace presented the basket to Ivan. Ivan took the basket and began to swallow apples and pears whole, as if they were little pills. The waiter eagerly got the brown wicker basket back before the customer ate it like a cracker.