An Old Fashioned War td-68 Page 10

  "Bugger off, we're gettin' what's due us, and this time you gotta give in," said the man who had been disguised as a herder.

  There were four others in this large room. The intelligence chap had been tied up and placed in a corner.

  "Young man, you're filled with your success. But it's going to be short-lived. There is absolutely no way you can hide a British prime minister so close to where she was kidnapped on British soil. It cannot be done."

  "We don't need your lip. We've 'ad enough of that in Belfast, I'll be tellin' you."

  "Then let me express myself in a manner you might find more understandable. If you surrender now, there will be a short jail term and you can go back to writing your dissertations on how the world should be turned upside down with us at the bottom and you at the top and running things. lf you don't, sir, we will hang you by your privates until you wish you had been run over by an armored car at birth."

  "Pipe down or I'll shoot your brains out."

  "Well then, shoot, you pig-faced unemployable drunk."

  "If you don't shut up, we'll do to you what we did to Lord Mountbatten," said the terrorist, referring to how they had killed the British war hero by planting a bomb on his boat.

  "You mean you will do to me what you do to innocent passersby, British regulars trying to keep the peace, and Lord Mountbatten?"

  "Bet your ass, Brit."

  "What splendid company to die among," said the British Prime Minister.

  Suddenly there was a laugh, a loud roar of a laugh that seemed to reverberate among the stones. The Prime Minister looked behind her. There was an entrance there, a clean stone doorway. But behind it seemed to be a dirt tunnel. And yet this was not a cellar. There was nothing about this large stone room that was cellarlike. There were many windows. Cellars did not have windows. That the windows were blocked by something did not matter. No one built a cellar with large windows.

  "Spoken like a man," said the man with the beard and thick neck and blazing eyes. He wore a tweed suit and carried a briefcase and his face seemed alight with joy.

  "And who are you?" asked the Prime Minister.

  "Someone who admired your Falklands war. Good to see you people at it again. It's been a long time for you, eh?"

  "Who are you? What do you want?"

  "We want you out of Northern Ireland. Let everyone be free to do what they want."

  "They want to kill each other, you know."

  "You could call it that."

  "What do you call it?"

  "I call it the national expression of will."

  "Their will is to kill each other."

  "Then what do you care?"

  "We have an obligation to see that this is settled peacefully. We have citizens there. We have a tradition of hundreds of years there. We do not intend to leave a tradition of massacre in that poor ravaged land."

  "Busybody," said the man with the beard. "You allowed yourselves the Falklands. Why do you deny the same joy to your citizens of Northern Ireland?"

  "I don't know who you are, but may I remind you we were attacked by Argentina."

  "Someone's always attacked by someone, and that someone always has some inalienable and legitimate grievance. Let the Protestants and Catholics there, in their own good way, kill themselves like Christians."

  "Are you a jew or Moslem?"

  "Can be both at times, although they would be the first to deny me. I really don't get the proper respect I deserve, the way I deserve."

  "Perhaps we can change that. May I first ask that you untie my intelligence aide. His wrists seem bound a bit too tight."

  The man with the muscled neck waved to the herder. The Prime Minister saw her intelligence aide watch the quick way the herder responded.

  Prime Minister Hazel Thurston saw him rub his wrists and then amble to one of the walls with a window and wait there, apparently innocently. But the Prime Minister knew better. Her aide never did anything innocently or casually. Everything had a purpose.

  Whatever he was doing by that window had to be protected, so she distracted her captors by saying she might make a compromise.

  "You disappoint me, Hazel," said the man. "I thought you were made of sterner stuff than that."

  "The world of reality requires reasonable people to negotiate," she said. "Just what can we do for you?"

  "Pull out of Northern Ireland. Just get your troops out and let the people decide."

  "I'm afraid I can't do that. But what I will do is form another commission-"

  "We'll get you out. You see, you are the only person of power in your government, and without you there as a strong leader, they'll strike a deal. It always happens when a country loses a strong leader. It's absolutely predictable. Any nation with a strong leader like yourself is weak without that leader. Strong people make others around them weak. True, and you have to know it."

  "Where did you get that theory?" she asked. She saw her man had his hand behind him now, as he stood directly in front of the window. He was doing something with that hand.

  "It is as eternal a fact as gravity."

  The Prime Minister saw her man nod. She knew they could not talk because this strange room might be bugged. She also knew this stranger might just be right. Without her in the cabinet, her nation just might strike a deal to withdraw all troops from Northern Ireland.

  The only redeeming event came when she was left alone with her intelligence aide. He opened up his hand without saying a word and then both of them smiled at each other. A dark crumbling substance filled his palm. From the open window he had taken earth. Someone had just covered this stone room with earth. It would have to show in the countryaide. It would be one of the first places Scotland Yard would look. A stone house that had suddenly disappeared under a pile of earth could not possibly be overlooked, least of all in the communities around Bath.

  They waited for the rescue which they expected any minute. And waited.

  The problem was simple. Find one prime minister and her intelligence aide seized outside Bath, England, that morning. The solution was just as simple. All roads were cordoned off. Every house in every village was searched. Every hayloft, garage and alley, can, dumpster, ditch was accounted for on a big grid map by teatime, and by supper there was not a hint of a whisper of what had been done with the Prime Minister.

  "She has to be here," said an inspector, who had taken time out to enjoy the refreshing springs and the baths the Romans had built here almost two thousand years before, when they had occupied the island as far north as Hadrian's wall.

  The town of Bath was named after these baths. Before the Romans, the Celts, Picts, and Saxons-the general populace of the area-had not considered bathing healthy, and they had the aroma to prove it. The Romans, as clean a people as the Japanese, introduced washing to the then barbaric countryside. And specifically at Bath the waters were said to be curative. Now Scotland Yard needed the cure.

  "How in bloody blue blazes do you lose a prime minister amidst a homogeneous, friendly population? We have searched every basement, boardinghouse, and hangar, and by damn, she's gone," said the inspector. "I'm sure they're going to kill her."

  "Why is that?" asked the Minister of Defense. "The demands are ridiculous. They say unless we pull out of Northern Ireland right now, she dies."

  "Might not be that ridiculous," said the Minister of Defense, letting the waters soak through his pores. "The strangest development has occurred there. Add in the kidnap, and we just might make the deal."

  "Give in to kidnappers?"

  "Do you know what's happening in Belfast now, Inspector?"

  "It certainly can't mean we would have to pull out."

  "Combined with the fact that there's hardly anyone left to say no with the force of our iron Prime Minister, yes. Belfast has become not an urban guerrilla battleground but a war zone. Someone has formed a provisional wing of the provisional wing of the IRA and is actually engaging British forces in open combat and winning."

  "The IR
A? Can't be. They can't get fifty people together without fighting amongst themselves," said the inspector.

  "A splinter group of a splinter group. And I suspect they're behind this Thurston kidnapping also. They're outfighting us in Belfast and outthinking us in Bath," said the Minister of Defense.

  "Are we going to lose?"

  "We may have already lost unless we can find our Prime Minister."

  "They couldn't have hidden her around here. We've looked everywhere," said the inspector.

  "Well, obviously there's some place you haven't looked. There's only one other choice. Call for help from the Americans."

  "I'd rather lose," said the inspector.

  "So would I, but we can't."

  "Why not?"

  "State policy. This is my ultimatum. If we don't get our prime minister by midnight, you'll have American help by morning."

  Poo and Remo had returned to Sinanju from the honeymoon. Poo had brought dresses from Jerusalem, a Western city with a good ruler, more often than not.

  She told her friends about hotel suites and clothes.

  She told her friends about new and exotic foods. Bread made of wheat that had a snow-white center and a dark crust.

  Sweet drinks like Coca-Cola.

  There was even a bread with a hole in it that was very hard, and should not be eaten when it came out of the oven, but baked again after it was split open. It was a delicacy spread with a white milk-fat substance called cream cheese and then topped with fish that had been held over a burning log. All her friends made a face when Poo told them she had eaten this dish called bagels and lox.

  Raw grasses called salads were also served.

  There was cloth on bedding called sheets and if one rang a buzzer one could order anything one wanted to eat at any time of the day.

  There were rings and necklaces. There were rooms for dining where everyone from all over the globe ate.

  The roads were not as nice as the ones built coming into Sinanju from Pyongyang, but there were more cars.

  "One car would be more cars," a friend said.

  And when they asked her about the wedding night, she only smiled knowingly and said nothing, letting their imaginations play over the delights the white Master of Sinanju had given her. But to her mother, she told the truth. She had to. There wasn't going to be a baby.

  "He didn't touch me," cried Poo. "He didn't kiss me or touch me or anything."

  "Nothing?" asked the mother.

  "I said 'or anything,'" cried Poo.

  "Did you entice him with the tricks I taught you?"

  "I did everything but lengthen it in a steel vise."

  "Try the steel vise," said her mother.

  "He's a Master of Sinanju. You can't get close to him if he doesn't want you to. And, Momma, he doesn't want to. He doesn't want me."

  "He's got to want you. He's your husband. I'll speak to your father."

  And so the baker's wife told the baker what the daughter had told the mother, and the baker, with his wife's hectoring voice telling him exactly what he should say and do, fearfully went up to the great wooden house on the hill where the Masters of Sinanju had lived for millennia.

  "And don't let him squirm away," called the baker's wife.

  Squirm away? thought the baker. Master Chiun could split a man's skull like a dried leaf since he was twelve. He's going to kill me. At least there is one good thing about being killed by a Master of Sinanju. He can make it faster and less painful than anything else.

  The baker crushed his own hat in his hands, and bowing, mounted the old wood steps to the entrance of the House of Sinanju. Emissaries throughout history had mounted these steps. Rarely did a villager come except to ask for help with a problem that could be solved by money or swift and deadly justice.

  At the door the baker took off his shoes, as was the custom before entering the house. He kissed the threshold, and with his face pressed firmly to the floor, called out:

  "O great Master of Sinanju, I, the father of Poo, Baya Cayang, humbly beseech your awesome magnificence to deign to converse with me."

  "Enter, Baya Cayang, father of Poo, wife of my son, Remo," came the voice of Chiun, Master of Sinanju. "And rise, for you will be the grandfather of the issue of the marriage."

  Back in the streets of the village it had all been clear. The baker's wife had told him to tell Chiun in no uncertain terms that Remo had not performed as a husband. They had agreed to the marriage with a white because they were sure that anyone who was a Master, even though he was white, could perform well. In brief, the baker's family had been cheated. And Chiun should be told that clearly. Either Chiun's son must deliver on all the marriage vows, or Poo would return to the baker's home, and the baker would keep the Master's bridal purse.

  It sounded so much more reasonable in the muddy streets of Sinanju than in the great house of many rooms. How was one going to tell Chiun that the white he loved more dearly than a son, the white of whom no one could dare speak even a hint of ill to Chiun's face, was not a man?

  It was death, if the speaker was lucky.

  But Baya Cayang knew he could not return to his home either, with Poo crying and his wife badgering him. So it was either death or living death, and Baya Cayang, after he had been given rice wine by Chiun; and had talked about the weather, and how the day was going with Chiun, brought up the subject most tenderly.

  "We are honored to be the parents of Poo, who has been wed to a Master."

  "The honor is ours," said Chiun. He did not particularly like the Cayangs. They were a greedy family and somewhat slothful. But at least they were from Sinanju, and when one considered all the whites Remo had run around with, Poo was a blessing.

  "Like you, we eagerly await a grandson," said Cayang. He dared to offer his cup for more wine. Chiun poured it. He was gracious about giving all guests as much wine as he could foist upon them, but considered any who would take it drunkards. He himself, like Remo, could not drink. Their nervous systems would disintegrate under the influence of alcohol, such was the fineness to which they had tuned their bodies.

  "No one awaits a grandson more eagerly than I," said Chiun.

  What did this dolt Cayang want? They already had enough gold to buy pigs for a lifetime of feasts. He wouldn't even have to bake anymore if Chiun did not demand the fine rice cakes of the village.

  "There are things that must happen for Poo to become pregnant."

  "Oh, those things," said Chiun. "She could do those lying on her back."

  "She can. Not that I know she can. Not that she has. She hasn't."

  "Of course she hasn't. I cannot tell you how glad I am, Baya, that Remo has stopped running around with white sluts, especially a Russian. Americans are bad enough, but the Russians are worse."

  "Whites go crazy over Korean men, I hear. They do strange things with their bodies."

  Movement would be strange, thought Chiun, remembering his own wife. Still, what did one want from a woman but to bear children and cook the meals, and hector as little as possible? Remo, on the other hand, was immersed in white ways. This woman he might have even fallen in love with, this Russian, worked in their government and commanded men like a soldier. He thought Remo might have even married Anna Chutesov, until Poo Cayang changed things. So if the baker beat around the bush, nevertheless he had to be respected for helping save Remo from his own kind.

  "Because of your lovely daughter, Baya, Remo will never have to endure those evil onslaughts of white women."

  "I hear they wear special clothes and do special things, with ointments and the like," said Bava.

  "Let us not talk of the evils of white women, but the virtues of your daughter."

  "O Great Chiun," wailed Bava Cavang. "She remains as untouched today as the day she and Remo left on their honeymoon."

  "What are you saving?"

  "I am saying, Great Chiun, neither of us will be grandfathers."

  "What is wrong with Poo?"

  "Nothing. Remo has not perfor
med as a husband," said Baya, shutting his eyes, waiting for the blow. Slowly he opened them. Perhaps Chinn did not wish to kill him with his eyes closed. But all he saw when he opened his eves was a Master of Sinanju, his wisps of hair bobbing with his head, nodding agreement with Baya Cayang, father of Poo, baker of the village, who now knew he had an excellent chance of seeing the morning.

  "Remo," called out Chiun.

  "What do you want?" came the voice from the large house, echoing loudly because there was no longer the great treasure to absorb and muffle the sound.

  "I want you to come out here," called Chiun.

  "I'm busy."

  "He still has American ways of disrespect," confided Chiun. "But we will keep it in the family." And then louder Chiun yelled:

  "It will only take a moment." And to Cayang he whispered:

  "You would think it would break him to give us a minute. I don't know what to do with the boy. Never have. Given him the best years of my life, and now this. Well, we'll straighten it out like Koreans. We'll have a little one into Poo in no time."

  "All right," said Remo, entering the room, reading a scroll. Cayang recognized Korean, but there was other writing on it also, strange writing like that in the West. But none that he had ever seen before, and he had seen an occasional American newspaper sent back to Sinanju by the Master himself for the archives of the house of assassins.

  "Little Father," said Remo, "I have reread this scroll ten times, and I see nothing of Mr. Arieson. There are Greeks fighting Persians and Greeks fighting each other, there are religious rites, Olympic games, poems, a description of a drunken feast in honor of the god Bacchus, and the payment of statuary along with gold. What am I supposed to be seeing?"

  "You wouldn't see your nose in front of your face, even your big white one," said Chiun.

  "All right. I have a big white nose. Now tell me what's going on."

  "What didn't go on is the question," said Chiun. Remo saw Poo's father. He nodded hello.

  "Poo's father says she is untouched," said Chiun. Baya Cayang nodded deeply.