The Eleventh Hour td-70 Read online

  The Eleventh Hour

  ( The Destroyer - 70 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  It's always darkest before the end

  Things weren't exactly looking bright for Remo and Chiun. Not to mention for the entire world. From an evil inferno the ancient almighty god of destruction had risen to possess the Destroyer's body and soul. Meanwhile Remo's Oriental master, Chiun had been betrayed by the U.S. President himself, and was now a weapon of the U.S.S.R. Smith, their unflappable superior in C.U.R.E., planned to take the easy way out-commit suicide. But for Remo and Chiun, the solution wasn't going to be quite so simple and not nearly as painless..

  Destroyer 70: The Eleventh Hour

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  Chapter 1

  Right up until the moment he sold America out, Sammy Kee would have laughed at anyone who called him a traitor to the United States.

  Was it treason to love your country so much that you fought to improve it? "And God knows it needs improvement," he would say.

  After all, everybody knew that America was a fascist, racist country.

  Everybody knew that anyone in jail in America was a political prisoner.

  Everybody knew that there was no atrocity committed anywhere in the world so bad that America hadn't committed a worse one.

  Everybody knew that there would be peace in the world if only America would stop building nuclear weapons.

  Sammy Kee had never been formally schooled in these positions. He had figured them out simply by watching the television network news. Would television lie?

  So he repeated all his slogans and he marched against aid to the Nicaraguan contras and he bought every record by Peter, Paul, and Mary and he was still unhappy.

  He was unhappy because all three major television networks had refused to hire him as a roving correspondent, even though he had sent each of them, as an audition piece, a fifteen-minute videotape sample which had been his senior project at the UCLA film school and which had earned him the unprecedented mark of A-double-plus.

  The tape was a dimly lit, slightly out-of-focus series of interviews with prostitutes, drug dealers, and muggers, all of whom earnestly stated for the camera that Reaganomics had driven them to crime.

  The network rejections had left him despondent for two days. Then he decided that the problem wasn't his; it was the problem of the three television networks. First, they weren't ready yet for his hardhitting brand of independent journalism; and second, they were increasingly under the control of the evil government in Washington, D.C.

  Figuring out a way to blame his joblessness on Ronald Reagan instantly made Sammy Kee feel better and it was then that he had his master idea. If the networks would not hire him to prove how bad America was, he would make himself an overseas correspondent and prove how good other countries were. Same church, different door.

  And now Sammy Kee had just such a story. All he had to do was to get it home and it would make him the biggest name in television since Geraldo Rivera. Even bigger than Rivera because Sammy had found something more important than empty bottles in Al Capone's old closet.

  But first he had to get back to the United States, and he was beginning to think that might not be so easy.

  He had tried to reach the airport but the beautiful Asian capital city had been ringed by guards and only an official pass would satisfy them. Kee did not have a pass. All he had was a white cotton blouse and dirty trousers tied at the cuff with ragged blue ribbons in the peasant style. But peasants were not welcome in the capital and they had turned him away without even asking for his nonexistent pass.

  So he had ducked under an old vegetable truck waiting at the south-road checkpoint and ridden the axle into the city.

  He had not expected the city to be so beautiful. He had been told that it was completely flattened by American bombers thirty-five years ago but it had been rebuilt from the dirt up. It sparkled. There were skyscrapers and massive government buildings, scrubbed as if new, and heroic statues stood in every square. The bland, flat face of the Great Leader stared down from posters and billboards like some sort of benign pancake god.

  But the city was also soulless, Sammy Kee discovered after crawling out from under the vegetable truck. Few people walked the streets. Little traffic hummed in the roads. Shops and restaurants were stagnant from lack of trade. Even the neon signs lacked color. And there were the soldiers with the hard boyish faces and almond-shaped eyes that one saw everywhere in this corner of Asia. Only they were more numerous here.

  If only he could have slipped past the soldiers, huddled on every corner in their green overcoats and fur caps, Sammy Kee might have found a way out of the country. But two of the soldiers spotted his peasant garb near the Koryo Hotel and shouted to him to stop. Sammy immediately took flight.

  He did not know where he ran, only that he took every corner he came upon. The heavy sound of their running boots dogged his path, but Sammy ran faster because they were motivated by duty, but he by fear.

  On Turtle Street he saw a familiar emblem on the gate. A flag fluttered on a pole. It was red. And behind the gate, the massive white marble of the Russian embassy sat in the darkness like a sullen ghost.

  Sammy ran to the gate. He looked back over his shoulder.

  There was no sign of the soldiers. Sammy Kee felt his lunch, some rancid kimchi he had found in a garbage can, rise in his esophagus. For the thousandth time he brushed a dirty hand against his trouser leg, feeling the reassuring hard plastic box under the white cotton. What was in that plastic would buy his life, his freedom, and make him a star. lf he could get home.

  He hesitated before the gate. Then the sound of a military whistle filled the neighborhood. Sammy forced himself to press the buzzer. Only the Russians could protect him, an American in Pyongyang, the capital of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea, where no American had walked free since the Communists took over forty years earlier.

  Sammy wiped a tear from his eye as he waited. There was a man in a green uniform coming to the gate. He looked white, which reassured Sammy Kee, even though he himself was not white, but of Korean descent. Sammy had been born in San Francisco.

  "What do you want?" the uniformed man said in stiff, formal Korean. He was slight, blondish, like a minor bureaucrat who had been drafted into military service. His most outstanding feature was a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. He was so nondescript that people always remembered the glasses but not the face behind them.

  "I want political asylum," Sammy Kee said in English. "I am an American."

  The Russian looked as if he had been shot. The shock of hearing Kee's accent tightened his face. He pressed a hidden switch and unlocked the gate. "Quickly," the Russian said, and when Sammy Kee hesitated, he yanked the American who looked like a dirty Korean peasant into the compound with such force that Sammy Kee hit the pavement like a tackled halfback.

  "Fool," the Russian said, taking Sammy by the arm and lifting him bodily. "If any of my Korean comrades had caught you, I could not have stopped them from having you shot as a spy."

  "I want to see the ambassador," said Sammy Kee.

  "Later. First, you will answer questions. Who knows you are in this country?"

  "No one."

  "I mean, what Americans know?"

  "No one. I came on my own."

  The Russian led Sammy Kee into the basement of the Soviet compound. They went in through a side door obviously used for rubbish disposal. Somewhere a furnace issued a dull roar. The corridor was lined with stone. But the doors were of wood. They looked more substantial than the stone. The Russian pushed Sammy through one of them, locking it behind them.

>   It was an interrogation room. That was obvious. A simple table sat under a cone of harsh too-white light. The chairs were of uncomfortable wood.

  Sammy Kee, surrendering to the situation, sat before he was told to sit.

  "I am Colonel Viktor Ditko," the Russian said, and immediately Sammy Kee knew that the man was KGB.

  Sammy Kee started to volunteer his name, but the colonel snapped a question first.

  "How did you get into this country?"

  "By the Yellow Sea. A raft."

  "From a submarine?"

  "No. I left from South Korea."

  "Where did you beach?"

  "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 te
ll 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."

  "A mistake," said Colonel Ditko. He had gone to India once. When he had stepped off the plane, the smell had hit him like a thick hot wall. Even in the modern air terminal, the mixture of chaos and filth was overpowering. He immediately reboarded the Aeroflot jet and returned home, later sending a subordinate to finish the task assigned to him. As punishment, he had been given the worst assignments in the KGB and rotated often. North Korea was only the latest odious post Colonel Viktor Ditko suffered in.

  "I became friendly with the minister," Sammy said. "I questioned him about his remark, about the deep ties between India and Korea. It was then he whispered a word I hadn't heard since childhood. The word was Sinanju."

  "I see," said Colonel Ditko, who did not see at all.

  "The minister told me that India had been one of the greatest clients for the Masters of Sinanju. Sinanju was still highly regarded in their halls of power, even though no Master of Sinanju had worked for an Indian potentate in generations. We compared stories. This man had heard virtually identical stories. He confirmed that the current Master of Sinanju still lived, and had actually visited India only months before. The minister didn't know the details. It was very secret. But the visit somehow involved the United States."

  Colonel Viktor Ditko bolted upright in his chair. It creaked.

  "Involved. How?"

  "I don't know. That didn't interest me so much at the time. But the journalistic possibilities did. Here was a missing piece of history. A secret international power that ran through history like an invisible thread, touching everything, but recorded by no history book. Except the one maintained by the Master of Sinanju. I decided to go to Sinanju."