Infernal revenue, p.12
Infernal Revenue, page 12
Sometimes that duty involved sitting in the Truck. The Truck was a deuce and a half. It was not always the same deuce and a half. They rotated them every other day, and the engines had to be overhauled practically every month.
The Bridge of No Return was the chief choke point against a North Korean land invasion of the south. Barely wide enough for a Humvee to rattle across, it was practically an open door to the human-wave assaults that the North Koreans had used during the conflict so long ago.
That was where the Truck came in.
It was stationed with its ass end pointed at the southern terminus of the bridge, engine perpetually running, clutch depressed and gear set in reverse.
Today it was Sergeant Mark Murdock’s turn to sit behind the always vibrating wheel.
There were spotters all around. A mixture of blue helmets and green. It was their job to warn the man in the Truck to slam that sucker into reverse and bottle up the bridge long enough to buy time to evacuate U.N. personnel or order up reinforcements.
Nobody knew which were the standing orders. Everybody knew that the man who was unlucky enough to be in the Truck when it backed up onto the bridge would probably die behind the wheel. The bridge was too narrow for the doors to open and let him out.
So Sergeant Mark Murdock sat in the cool of the late Korean summer, inhaling carbon monoxide and gritting his teeth against the constant thrum and vibration of the truck motor.
It was horrible duty. The monotony was broken only by the stink of gasoline as the fuel tank was replenished by hand. But as long as the truck stayed in place, Sergeant Mark Murdock figured he’d see Fort Worth again.
Still, he couldn’t keep his eyes off the driver’s-side mirror. He had heard the stories. How U.N. guards had gone out one day to trim a poplar tree and shrieking North Koreans had poured across the bridge with axes and clubs. No one ever figured out what set them off. But two American servicemen had died, only the scorched skeleton of the tree marking the spot.
And that was in the calm period after the Pueblo incident and before the Rudong I.
Ever since North Korea had tested the Rudong I–the nuclear-capable modified Scud missile that could hit Tokyo eight minutes after launch–the world had become very nervous about the north.
Patriot missile batteries had been rushed to the DMZ.
There was talk of bombing suspected North Korean nuclear installations before they got the bomb. Some said they had the bomb already.
Not much hard news came down from the north these days. Rumors, yeah. Every other day the scuttle-butt had it that there were food riots, mass executions and other evidences of a dying regime up there.
Now there was talk of a missing U.S. submarine that had strayed into Korean territorial waters and vanished.
Washington said that it had been captured. Pyongyang swore it knew nothing about any U.S. submarine. The accusations were flying thick and furious–and the veiled threats were losing their protective gauze.
And on either side of the bridge at Panmunjom, the two armies, technically still in a state of war, had been placed on the highest state of alert, waiting for the word.
So far, the word had been: stand down.
That could change at any moment, Sergeant Murdock knew. So he kept a weather eye on the driver’s-side mirror, watching the shadows and imagining they sometimes moved.
He almost wet his pants when someone knocked on the driver’s-side window and a distinctly American voice said, “Move the truck, pal.”
There was a man standing there in the darkness. He was tall and looked American. But he wore some kind of black outfit that made Sergeant Murdock think of the Vietcong’s black pajama uniforms.
“Shake a leg,” the guy said, giving the glass another hard tap.
“What?”
“We gotta get across.”
“You’re defecting?”
“No, you are defective,” a squeaky voice said from Murdock’s right. He whirled.
Standing on the other side was a little yellow man, all in black. He was looking up at Sergeant Murdock with hard hazel eyes and a face that was a cobwebby mask. “I can’t let you across the bridge,” Murdock said.
“You would not need to if you idiots had not destroyed my personal tunnel.”
“Your personal–”
“Constructed with the cooperation of Pyongyang for the convenience of the Master of Sinanju, and destroyed by careless cretins.”
“Move it or lose it, pal,” said the white guy.
“I can’t. I have my orders.”
“Suit yourself,” said the white guy, tapping the glass. This time he tapped once, gently, and the glass spiderwebbed and fell into the hollow of the door like candy glass.
A hand at the end of a thick wrist came into the cab, and Sergeant Murdock reached for his side arm.
He touched the butt of the revolver, scooting away from the driver’s-side door and the reaching hand. Before he could clear the holster, the passenger door fell open and he fell with it. Right into the dirt.
A sandal stamped down like a punch press, and Sergeant Murdock found himself holding a useless twist of steel instead of an Army-issue Colt .45 automatic.
The old Korean leaped into the passenger’s seat as the white claimed the driver’s seat, and both doors slammed shut. The Truck slammed into reverse, tires spitting hard dirt into Sergeant Murdock’s stunned face.
It rolled onto the Bridge of No Return, and kept going.
In the dark the U.N. blue helmets jumped to the wrong conclusion.
“Retreat! Retreat to defensive positions.”
Only Sergeant Murdock knew it was a false alarm, but the way the U.N. troops were pulling back, firing as they ran, he had no choice but to pull back with them. That or be shot by his own people.
As he sought the safety of a U.N. bunker, he wondered about the white guy. He sounded as American as can be. What kind of American would defect to North Korea in this day and age?
· · ·
Colonel Kyung Cho Chi saw the Truck approaching his control bunker in reverse.
He recognized it as an American deuce and a half, and since it was coming from the direction of the Bridge of No Return in reverse, he leaped to a logical conclusion.
It was the Truck, the one the Americans kept on standby in case Colonel Kyung received the order to storm the Bridge of No Return.
It was supposed to block the bridge, but it was clearly coming toward his fortified post. And it was alone.
“What kind of lunatic attack is this?” he muttered, dropping his field glasses from his narrowed eyes. “Shoot out the tires!” he yelled.
The word went up and down the line, and the gunfire commenced.
“Cease fire!” he ordered when the Truck slewed to a wild stop, ending up facing forward.
“Capture the driver!”
Commandos went out, but they started back the instant they reached the Truck. They came back in parts. An arm here. A leg spun there. A helmeted head bounced and rolled to a stop at Colonel Kyung’s feet like a turtle whose legs are pulled in from fright.
Not a shot was fired. Not by his men. Not by the Americans–unless one counted the distant shooting too far away to hit anyone under Colonel Kyung’s command.
“The next northern dog who fires at the Master of Sinanju,” a booming voice resounded, “will cause the deaths of himself and all who run with him.”
“Sinanju!” Colonel Kyung barked. Lifting his voice, he demanded, “Who comes?”
“Chiun. Reigning Master.”
“Why did you not use the tunnel?”
“The idiot whites filled it with clods of dirt.”
Colonel Kyung stood up. “They are barbarians whose days are numbered.”
“Their empire will outlast the regime in Pyongyang by a thousand years,” the Master of Sinanju flung back.
Stung, Colonel Kyung did not respond to this. He was a good Communist, and fully half his men were political officers whose task it was to shoot any defector headed south in the back and report disloyalty directly to Pyongyang.
“You wish transportation north?” Colonel Kyung asked after an awkward silence.
“Send a jeep to fetch us. I will walk no farther now that you have stupidly broken the truck of the Americans with your clumsy bullets.”
“Us? Who is with you?”
“My nephew.”
Colonel Kyung personally drove the jeep to the spot in no-man’s-land where the U.S. truck sat on three blown tires.
The Master of Sinanju stood with his hands unseen in the sleeves of his kimono. Beside him stood a tall man, also in black. Colonel Kyung recognized it as the two-piece fighting uniform of the ancient night tigers of Sinanju.
Remembering to bow first, he addressed the Master of Sinanju. “It is an honor to ferry you to Pyongyang.”
“We go to Sinanju.”
“Once Pyongyang authorizes this, I will be honored to take you to Sinanju.”
“If Pyongyang learns of my presence before the Master of Sinanju is ready for Pyongyang to know, dire will be your fate.”
“Understood,” said Colonel Kyung, who was a good Communist but preferred his internal organs to remain within the warm bag of his body and not be torn from them in anger.
In the dark he noticed the face of the tall night tiger. It was white.
“This man is white,” Colonel Kyung said suspiciously,
“Half-white.”
“Half?”
“He is my American nephew.”
“You have an American nephew?”
“His mother was from my village. His father was a soldier in the invasion.”
Colonel Kyung spat on the ground. “He looks all white.”
“Consider at his eyes.”
Colonel Kyung stepped up to the unflinching eyes. The eyes of the white night tiger were very dark in the dim moonlight. They were also very dead. They gave Colonel Kyung the chills. They were the eyes of a dead man who had refused to lie down and relinquish his life.
“They do look Korean,” he admitted. “A little.” The Master of Sinanju smiled. The white frowned. He seemed to understand Korean.
“What name does this half-breed go by?” Colonel Kyung demanded.
“He is called Gung Ho.”
“That is no name for a Korean.”
“It is good enough for a half Korean. Now I must be to my village.”
Colonel Kyung waved to his waiting jeep. The Master of Sinanju and his half-white night tiger took the hard seats in back. And Colonel Kyung set the jeep rolling north, stopping only to warn his men not to leak word of the Master of Sinanju’s advent.
He felt certain that none would. All were loyal to Pyongyang, but even Pyongyang feared the wrath of Sinanju.
In the back of the jeep, Remo nudged the Master of Sinanju.
“Gung Ho?” he asked in English.
Chiun shrugged. “You were a Marine. It suits you.”
“And that fib about me being half-Korean?”
“How do you know that you are not?”
Remo folded his arms and said nothing. He did not like being back in North Korea. It was as alien to him as the moon.
As they pushed north, he began noticing how much like New England the trees and hills were, and it suddenly occurred to him why Chiun had taken to living in New England so well. It was probably as close to North Korea as he could get in America.
Chapter Sixteen
It was as dangerous a risk as Harold Smith had contemplated in all his years as head of CURE.
He sat facing the placid sound, brows knit, wiping his rimless eyeglasses, thinking hard.
He stood at a crossroads. He had lost every advantage that his position as head of CURE afforded him. All his secrets were known and laid bare before his unknown foe. Except one. Smith’s discovery that he had a hidden opponent. In that one fact not recorded on his mainframes lay the advantage of surprise. For Harold Smith, bereft of his enforcement arm, was about to enter the field personally.
This was not as risky as it seemed. His foe appeared to be extremely computer literate but ruthless. Yet he lacked real-world commonsense qualities. Otherwise, Smith would have been executed.
A hacker, perhaps. Someone seated before a monitor exerting his will electronically. It all might be a grandiose prank on the part of some MIT graduate student with access to a computer more intelligent than himself.
This mind might not expect Harold Smith to attack him outside the realm of cyberspace.
On the other hand, he might be expecting it. Perhaps all that had come before was engineered to force Harold Smith out of the cold cocoon of his Folcroft office and into a position of peril.
Therein lay the risk.
Smith thought hard as he cleaned his glasses of even the tiniest dust speck. As his eyes aged, any such mote on the lens was enough to give him a blinding headache. Eyes that looked for the tiniest connections couldn’t see past a speck of lint.
Replacing the glasses on his patrician nose, Smith turned and brought up a blank screen. His fingers caressed the touch-sensitive keyboard until a crisp amber sentence appeared on the buried desktop screen: I KNOW YOU EXIST.
Smith pressed the transmit button, although he had every reason to believe that whatever he wrote onscreen was simultaneously reproduced elsewhere.
He waited for a reply. None was forthcoming. Smith frowned. He knew he was not wrong. Perhaps he had chosen to contact the unknown at a time when he was sleeping or attending other matters.
The intercom buzzed and Smith keyed it.
“Dr. Smith, your wife is on line two. And I have your mail.”
“Bring it in,” said Smith, automatically reaching for the button that would darken the monitor. He felt its coolness and stopped. Reaching for his ROLM phone, Smith left the screen illuminated. The keyboard had gone dark once his hands had withdrawn from the capacitor field.
“Harold, are you coming home tonight?” came Mrs. Smith’s voice.
“I’m not certain, dear.”
The office door opened and Mrs. Mikulka came in, her eyes brightening at the sight of Smith’s new desk.
“Very nice,” she mouthed, laying a short stack of mail on the shiny glass and walking out again.
“Harold, I have last night’s meat loaf in the refrigerator. If I keep it another night, it might not be very good.”
“Then you have it, dear. I will eat in the cafeteria.”
“Harold, you forgot to call to say you weren’t coming home last night,” Mrs. Smith said in a sad, resigned voice. “It’s not like you to be so thoughtless. Is everything all right?”
“I am in the middle of an IRS audit,” Smith explained, and it bothered him terribly to distort the truth to his faithful Maude. “But I will try to be more considerate in the future.”
“Very well, Harold.”
Smith hung up. It had worked; his secretary had practically loomed over the monitor and not seen it. The screen was canted toward him slightly, making it virtually invisible unless one faced it squarely. Once he arranged his desk nameplate, pen holders and other items strategically about the desk, the blips of reflected light from the overhead fluorescents would combine to conceal the entire arrangement from prying eyes.
His eyes went to the screen, and Smith was disappointed to see no sign of a reply. Then he noticed that his original message had been changed. It now read: YOU KNOW I EXIST.
WHO ARE YOU? Smith typed out.
This time the reply appeared under Smith’s question:
:-)
Smith blinked. What was this?
It winked out.
REPEAT REPLY, Smith typed.
Back came the same string of seemingly nonsense symbols.
Smith stared at this for some moments. It looked for all the world like a comic-strip representation of a four-letter word. He saved the screen and called up a corner window where he could work. Typing out the string of symbols, he asked the computer to analyze them.
The answer came back at once.
:-) IS AN EMOTICON USED IN COMPUTER BULLETIN-BOARD COMMUNICATIONS TO SIGNIFY A SMILE. ALSO KNOWN AS A SMILEY.
“A smiley?” Smith muttered, puzzled. It struck him a moment later. Tilted upward, the symbols constituted a crude smiley face. He was being taunted by his own computer.
Lips thinning, Harold Smith considered an appropriately salty reply. Instead, he typed: YOU WIN.
YOU LOSE, appeared in place of Smith’s admission of defeat.
Smith logged off the system and pressed the black button that powered down the desktop monitor.
“Mrs. Mikulka,” he said into the intercom, “I will be out the rest of the day.”
“What about Mr. Ballard?”
“Ballard can wait,” said Smith, reaching for his briefcase. The IRS was the least of his worries.
Chapter Seventeen
Chip Craft was beginning to think that the past five years of his life were all a mirage.
He had come to XL SysCorp fresh out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology class of 1980 with a degree in computer engineering.
The computer field was booming then. Not like now. Back then the sky seemed, not the limit, but a simple stepping stone to cosmic heights. Back then it was not XL SysCorp but Excelsior Systems. And Chip Craft never got to see the inside of the CEO’s office, much less occupy it in style.
In those days he had been an installer. Not just any installer. Excelsior had been deep into supercomputers: the Umbra 44, the Dray 1000 and the first supercomputer with artificial-intelligence programming–the ES Quantum 3000. And it had been Chip’s responsibility to install ES machines into various Pentagon, CIA and NSA offices. He had top secret DOD clearance. And he was at the top of his profession.
Chip never dreamed of the CEO’s chair in those days. It was exciting enough jetting between the old building in Piscataway, New Jersey, and wherever the U.S. government needed him, just like 007. Except he carried a tool valise not a Beretta.
It began to change when a government agency whose name Chip never learned had won the bid on the ES Quantum 3000 prototype. And after a short trial period, returned it as unsatisfactory.
It was unheard of. No one ever returned a supercomputer. Not one that was voice activated and responded in a fetching female voice that was programmed into the software because studies had determined that the female voice was more attention holding and also because it made a great selling point–even to the Intelligence community.
