Bidding War td-101 Read online

  Anwar-Sadat blinked. "Surrender what, may I ask?"

  "I do not know. He merely said the word 'surrender.' He is quite agitated, I might add."

  "Perhaps," mused Anwar-Sadat, "he means Iraq is now willing to come into compliance with all UN resolutions. I will take his call, thank you."

  When he made his connection, the secretary general said "Yes, hello?" in a deliberately neutral voice. If his guess was correct, this would be a great victory for his office.

  The thick voice of the Iraqi ambassador said, "We surrender. Immediately. Call off your troops."

  "What is it?"

  "Do not trifle with me. We know your game. We surrender. We will not fight. We will not be drawn into another crisis just so you may strangle our nation further. We are disinterested in fighting. Thus, we will never be defeated. Now, please accept our surrender at once."

  "Are you drunk?"

  "I am a Muslim. I do not drink. And my country will not fight. Basra is yours if you wish it. We ask only safe passage for our Republican Guards. They will lay down their arms and abandon their armor. But we will not fight. Do I make myself clear? We will not fight."

  The voice of the Iraqi ambassador was tearful, almost pleading. The secretary general, knowing the tenor of the Iraqi leadership these days, could almost envision a cocked pistol at the head of the poor Iraqi ambassador, the hammer ready to fall if he failed to negotiate a successful surrender.

  "Very well. I accept your surrender," Anwar-Sadat said. "Is there anything else?"

  "Yes. Terms. We must have terms."

  "Of course. How careless of me. What is a surrender without terms? What were you thinking of?"

  "Withdraw your forces to the DMZ."

  "Our forces are in the DMZ."

  "They are within thirty minutes of Basra. And closing."

  "I will have to get back to you on this matter," said the secretary general of the UN coolly, then hung up.

  He placed a call to UNIKOM HQ, and received no reply. There were no replies from any of the support units in Kuwait.

  "This is quite strange," he muttered. Hitting his intercom, he said, "My car, please."

  "Yes, Mr. Secretary."

  "No more. I am General Anwar-Sadat now. Address me properly."

  "Yes, my General."

  In his war room, General Anwar-Sadat received the telex reports. There was only silence from UNIKOM. Utter silence.

  "Get me the Kuwaiti ambassador, then."

  The call was placed, and the pale blue receiver was laid in his dusky hand.

  "Mr. Ambassador, I am receiving reports that my UNIKOM forces have strayed into Iraqi territory."

  "I cannot confirm this. I am sorry."

  "You sound stressed, my friend. What is wrong?" asked Anwar-Sadar.

  "I cannot talk now. I am needed in the war effort."

  "War. What war?"

  "The drive to crush the hated beast in Baghdad before he can unleash Al Quaaquaa upon the royal family."

  And then the line went dead.

  Woodenly, his eyes dull, Secretary General Anwar-Sadat replaced the receiver and said, "It is true. Kuwait has attacked Iraq. It is impossible, unbelievable and not a little insane, but it is nonetheless true."

  "And UNIKOM?" wondered the aide.

  "We must find out." Anwar-Sadat snapped his fingers impatiently, "Quickly, turn on CNN."

  "Immediately, my General."

  CNN was in the middle of a special bulletin.

  "Repeating, United Nations peacekeeping forces are reported operating on Iraqi soil, and at this hour there is no official explanation. But Baghdad has issued an unconditional unilateral surrender and a call for all forces to pull back to their preinvasion deployments."

  Anwar Anwar-Sadat turned to his aide. "I gave no order to attack Iraq. Did I?"

  The aide consulted a leather date book and shook his head vehemently. "It must be that abject appeaser, Sir Timothy," he said.

  Anwar Anwar-Sadat pounded his fist on the chair armrest. "I will have him cashiered for this outrage. We are peacekeepers, not war makers. He is ruining my grand one-world plan!"

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The Air Italia flight had hardly leveled out over the Italian countryside when a dark-skinned man in the back came forward and slapped a stewardess out of his way. At the front of the cabin he turned, held up a bottle of some clear liquid and announced, "This is a hijacking."

  Chiun looked up from a letter he was reading. "Look, Remo. We are being hijacked."

  "Damn," said Remo.

  "In the name of the Islamic Republic of Iran, I sentence you all to death. Your crime is flying in the same plane as the godless Master of Sinanju."

  "Did you hear, Remo?"

  "I heard," said Remo, coming out of his seat.

  "You! Stand back! This is a hijacking."

  "And this is a counterhijacking."

  "You cannot counter my hijacking. I have the bomb."

  Remo stopped in his tracks. He fixed the Iranian with his eyes and, holding his gaze, kept talking. "Just take it easy. We can talk this out."

  "There is no time for talk, there is only time to die. Where is the evil one who dispenses un-Islamic death? Show yourself."

  Chiun stood up and stepped out into the aisle. Bowing his head, he said, "I am Chiun, Reigning Master."

  "You will never serve the enemy Iraqi."

  "I have made no agreement with Baghdad."

  "You lie. They call you Al Quaaquaa, the Ghost. And threaten us with your ways of death. But no more. You will die here and now, and I will dance with the houris."

  Remo moved his feet in tiny steps that inched him closer and closer to the shouting terrorist but gave the impression of standing still. He was now four feet away, and inch by inch closed the distance.

  The hijacker was raving now, in a mix of broken English and Farsi. He seemed determined to milk his hour of glory for all it was worth. Remo decided if the houris gave out Oscars, he was definitely in the running.

  "Oh, please do not kill me, O dangerous one," said Chiun, and Remo kept the betraying smile off his face. The old reprobate was setting the guy up, and he didn't know it.

  Two and a half feet from the hijacker, who was pounding his chest and shredding his shirt in a last expression of earthly penitence, Remo struck.

  One hand closed around the fist that clutched the bottle of deadly liquid, and Remo brought it up to his bearded face. The hijacker was startled to see the bottle moving independent of his volition. He froze in the middle of a round vowel, and his mouth stayed round as his widening eyes saw with disbelief that the cap was no longer on the bottle's neck.

  He heard the soft click of the stopper hitting the aisle carpet, and then the bottle neck was in his open mouth and his head was abruptly jerked back by his short black hair.

  The contents of the bottle burned as it went down. He coughed. And out came a jet of bluish fire like his soul escaping.

  He was dead when his flame-broiled lips hit the carpet.

  "Okay, folks. That's it. Nothing to worry about," said Remo, picking up the body and stowing it away in an overhead bin.

  He was applauded and took a brief bow.

  Returning to his seat, Remo told Chiun, "Word getting around?"

  "We will be rich beyond our wildest dreams. Oh, that I frittered the precious years working for Mad Harold."

  "So where are we going next?"

  From the pile of FedEx mailers on his lap, the Master of Sinanju lifted one emblazoned with a bloodred flag and a yellow sunburst with sixteen points.

  Remo frowned. "I can't read the name."

  "It is a name steeped in legend."

  "Yeah?"

  "Macedonia."

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff hadn't slept all night, and now a dangerous new day was dawning over the Potomac River.

  He was in his twenty-eighth hour of wakefulness and he stopped counting the coffee cups. He on
ly knew that every time someone dropped a pencil, his gut gave a caffeine jump and another shot of adrenaline coursed through his thick body.

  The Mexicans were still on their side of the border. They weren't threatening. They weren't demanding anything. They just stood poised and waiting.

  A knock on the door made the JCS chair want to jump out of his tired skin.

  "What is it?" he snapped peevishly to the aide who poked his head in.

  "We have a NOIWON, General."

  "Christ! That is all we need," he said, picking up the telephone.

  "This is General Shali. Go ahead," he said.

  "It's called Ying Lung, and the Taiwanese are saying it's the counterweapon to the Red Chinese's East is Red!" a breathless voice said.

  A second breathless voice interrupted. "Never mind that. The Hungarians—"

  "General," a third anxious voice broke in, "our mole in the CSIS reports talk of a new Canadian superweapon called Wendigo."

  "One at a time. One at a time, please. CIA. You start."

  "Thank you, General. This is Foxworthy. We have reliable intelligence about the Ying Lung. That's Chinese for 'Shadow Dragon.' The Hong Kong press claim it's the counteracting weapon to the Red Chinese East is Red."

  "East is Red. Why have I not heard about this before?"

  "I have no information on that, General. But we think, based on the name Shadow Dragon, it's some type of stealth weapon. Probably not a plane. Maybe a missile."

  " A stealth missile?"

  "Our nomenclature analysis suggests this."

  "Fine. Next."

  "NSA here, General. We have intercepted a communication emanating from Hungary that talks of the Turul, which is some sort of mythological falcon, according to our research. The Hungarians are warning their neighbors that they will not hesitate to deploy Turul if threatened."

  "Where did you intercept this information?"

  "Hungarian state television, General."

  "How secret can it be, then?"

  "We don't know what it is. So technically it's still a secret weapon. But the existence of the weapon is no secret."

  The general groaned, and drained another cup of cappuccino.

  "Next," he said.

  "NRO here, General. The South Koreans are also claiming development of a weapon hitherto unknown to the modern world."

  "They what?"

  "I'm quoting from Seoul Shinmum. That's the chief newspaper in Seoul. Their source is the CIA."

  "That's a lie!" the CIA duty officer exploded.

  "The Korean CIA," the NRO man clarified.

  "Continue," said the general.

  "It's called Ch'onmach, which is a kind of flying horse in Korean mythology. We don't know what it is or what it does, I regret to say."

  "Damn it, find out!"

  "Yes, sir."

  • "Sir, this is CIA again. A report just crossed my desk. According to Tokyo Shimbun, the Japanese are announcing a defensive device they call Kuroi Obake."

  "What does that mean?"

  "We came up with 'Black Goblin,' sir."

  "I meant the other word."

  "Shimbun? That's 'newspaper.'"

  "The same word means 'newspaper' in Korean and Japanese?"

  "It's not exactly the same word. It's just similar. Want me to fact check it for you?"

  "No!"

  "Yes, General."

  The JCS chair let out a caffeine sigh. "By the way, does anyone have an update on the Mexican crisis?"

  "I do," a helpful voice said.

  "And who is this?"

  "Chattaway. NRO."

  "Go ahead, Mr. Chattaway."

  "Our latest satellite imaging shows the Mexicans have not moved in the last twenty-four hours."

  "Thank you," the general said in a frosty voice. "I already have that intelligence on my desk."

  "Never hurts to reconfirm, as they say over at State."

  "That will be all," said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before he hung up. A fresh cup of coffee was suddenly at his elbow. He sniffed it before tasting. It smelled like boysenberry fudge swirl, but when he tasted it he decided it was probably cranberry mocha.

  Whatever it was, it was going to have to pass for breakfast. There was a lot to do.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  If the president of Macedonia—a country referred to insistently as FYR Macedonia by the hostile world and the spineless United Nations—understood one thing, it was the value of a trademark.

  Men had gotten wealthy all over the world prior to the emergence of multinational corporations by having the foresight to trademark the name of a famous foreign—usually American—product in the days when American products were confined to America. As the great corporations expanded, they found no serious competition for their colas or their breakfast cereals, just grubby little men who came crawling out of the woodwork bearing legal papers and claiming to have registered the trademark of Pepsi Cola or some such in their native land.

  The mighty American companies, having a product and no right to their own name in an alien land, did what their lawyers told them they must do. Buy their own trademark at a dear price or cede rich new market territories to these competitors.

  This was the problem the president of Macedonia faced in the wake of the breakup of embattled, fractured Yugoslavia. Suddenly there was no Yugoslavia. Just Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia, all of whom quickly and with great relish began tearing chunks off one another's territories until there was no hope of putting the pieces back together again. Ever.

  To survive in this vacuum, the president of what was then the Yugoslavian province of Macedonia understood that he would need a name. One to conjure with. For his patch of the former Yugoslavia lay at the crossroads of the Balkans and was subject to being gobbled up by Greece, Turkey, Albania or Bulgaria, all of whom historically had designs on the area or on their nationals living within it.

  And so naturally he chose the name Macedonia, taking the ancient Macedonian symbol of a sixteen-pointed sunburst star—the Sun of Vergina—as its flag.

  There seemed no reason not to. No one else was using it. No one had before expressed a problem with a province called Macedonia—even though the historical Macedon of Alexander sprawled over what were today four separate modern nations.

  So with the stroke of a pen Macedonia reemerged as a nation once again.

  And suddenly a country with untrained conscripts, no tanks or warplanes and no war chest was perceived as a dire threat to mighty Greece and a natural ally of Greece's Balkan rivals, Bulgaria and Albania and Turkey, who themselves didn't get along.

  Greece closed it borders. Bulgaria courted Macedonia. Everyone coveted it. To keep order, five hundred U.S. soldiers had to be imported as a protective buffer—which everyone knew might become the tripwire to a new Balkan conflict that could lead to a third great European war.

  Applying for admittance to the United Nations, Macedonia was forced to accept the official designation Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, whose disputed flag was the only member state flag in history ever to be barred from flying before the UN Buildings.

  It was a slap in the face. The prince among ancient nations was reduced to being the geographical equivalent of the singer formerly known as Prince.

  And with the world nervously eyeing this toothless upstart nation, the President of Macedonia had begun to conclude he might better have taken the name Lower Slobovia. That trademark was no longer in force, he understood.

  Until his ambassador called from New York City.

  "I am flying home at once. You must recall me."

  "Why must I recall you?" the president asked.

  "Because the Master of Sinanju has returned to the world stage."

  "A Master lives?"

  "He lives, breathes, speaks and has offered his services to the highest bidder."

  "Which cannot be us, I must remind you."

  "Sinanju worked for Philip of Macedon. Possibly Alexander, too. Perhaps a ye
arning for the old days will entice him to Skopje."

  In Skopje the president looked out of his office windows at the running River Vardar and his heart swelled. The nostalgia all Macedonians felt for the old days of glory was more potent than ever.

  Surely, he thought, agreeing to recall his ambassador to discuss the matter further, the Master of Sinanju would feel the tug and pull of such days in his noble heart.

  Chapter Thirty

  When the next NOIWON came, the JCS chair was asleep in his chair, his head thrown back, his mouth open and snoring like a water buffalo.

  "General, another NOIWON."

  Snorting, the general pulled himself together, fumbled his wire-frame glasses onto his nose and asked the aide, "Does this concern the Mexico crisis?"

  "I don't know."

  "Ask."

  "Yes, sir."

  The aide came back saying, "It's not about Mexico, General."

  "In that case, you take it."

  "Me?"

  "Yes, you. And I want a complete summary within the hour."

  "Yes, General."

  "And don't disturb me again if it isn't Mexico or the President. In that order."

  And the JCS chair leaned back, folded his hands over his olive green gut and resumed snorting at the ceiling.

  When he awoke two hours later, he was completely refreshed and summoned his chief aide by intercom.

  "Coffee and that NOIWON summary. In that order."

  "Mocha almond fudge or banana hazelnut?"

  "Java. Black."

  Sipping the steaming beverage, the JCS chair leaned back in his seat as the aide summarized the most recent NOIWON.

  "CIA says the North Koreans have announced development of a new defensive weapon, Sinanju Chongal. 'Chongal' means 'scorpion.'"

  "What's our source?"

  "Rodong Shinmum."

  "There's that word again." The general's face gathered. "Isn't Rodong their top-of-the-line ballistic missile?"

  "I believe that's Nodong, sir."

  "I seem to recall it's spelled 'Rodong,' but it's pronounced 'Nodong.' I wonder if there's a connection."

  "Shall I look into it?"

  The general frowned. "Skip it," he grunted, gesturing for the aide to continue his report.

  "The Russians have claimed a weapon of their own. Zholti Zarnitsa. It means 'Yellow Lightning.'"

  The general frowned more deeply. "Sounds to me like the Russian equivalent of White Lightning."