The boiling air consumed treetops, branches, even birds on the wing, who were scorched to charred bone and dropped to the ground more like spent coal than dead things that once lived.
Roaring and roaring, the missile vaulted into the sky.
The air shook for a long time after it was gone.
When it was safe, Remo stood up. "It's okay, Little Father."
"Not for those who sought my life," said the Master of Sinanju, for from the blockhouse door crept tendrils of smoke that mixed chemical rocket fuel with the unmistakable sickly sweet smell of roasted human flesh.
"What the hell was that all about?" Remo wanted to know.
Chiun patted his kimono clean of dust. "I was to be the first Korean in the Great Void," he said unhappily.
"You were almost the first human Korean barbecue. By the way, those guys who tried to kill us back home? Chinese. Probably sleeper agents."
"How do you know this?"
"Each time someone swore in Chinese. Any idea what 'Fang Tung' means?"
Chiun nodded. "It is an Han insult, meaning 'turtle's egg.' Come, Remo. Obviously there will be no service to be had from the Han."
"Where to next?"
"Russia."
"Great," Remo said dispiritedly.
"I am glad you approve," the Master of Sinanju said blandly as he allowed Remo to hold the Chinese limousine door open for him.
"I'd prefer Canada. They're not big on violence up there."
"A client who does not fear Sinanju would not appreciate Sinanju," Chiun sniffed. "Even Smith had the good taste to shoot at me when he realized Sinanju was lost to him."
Remo jumped behind the wheel and got the car going. "Smitty did that? Why didn't you tell me?"
The Master of Sinanju rearranged his kimono skirts carefully. "We were leaving America. I did wish you to see him in a good light, ere you cling to your homeland with the stubborn nostalgia of your past."
Chapter Forty-two
No one knew when it would happen, or even if it would happen at all.
But everyone knew how it would happen. The elements had been in place for more than forty years, strung along the most heavily armed and fortified border in human history. The scenario had been analyzed and war-gamed to death.
Every simulation assumed a sudden thrust from the north, overwhelming the entrenched southern forces. Seoul would fall. There was no denying that.
Victory, if it was to happen, would come in the counterattack, it was assumed.
All the scenarios were wrong. They were wrong for a very specific reason.
They assumed North Korea would attack South Korea. Ultimately it didn't happen that way.
General Winfield Scott Hornworks knew it was a mistake. A colossal mistake. It was the mistake of mistakes. The mother of all mistakes.
He liked to use that phrase, "mother of all mistakes." "Mother of all hemorrhoids" was another favorite. As the general who had led the multinational United Nations force to victory in the Mother of All Battles, better known as the Gulf War, he felt he had some basis for being an authority on the subject. The decision, handed down by the JCS, was the biggest pain in the ass to come his way since the Tet Offensive.
"Are you out of your cotton-picking mind? Sir," General Hornworks had barked barely a year before.
"The decision has been made at the highest levels, General. We are turning operational control of all South Korean forces over to the South Koreans. You ire relieved of all responsibility for ROK troops."
"Begging your pardon, sir," General Hornworks had said in a strangled voice. "But if damn Kim Jong II takes a mind to send his forces south, unified command and control is gonna be all-important to victory. We do want victory here in the Land of the Rising Sun, don't we?"
"It's 'Land of the Morning Calm. 'Rising Sun' is Japanese."
"So noted, sir," said General Hornworks. "But getting back to the catastrophe at hand—and make no mistake, we've got us a beaut on the horizon if this Hoes through."
"It's through. Decided. Live with it, General."
"It ain't the living with that rankles me, sir. It's the dyin' from it. We got over a million North Koreans hanging over our heads like so many human cluster bombs. They get the word and next thing you know they'll be pouring across the damn DMZ, yelling 'Mansai!'"
"I think you're thinking of the Japanese again."
"Allow me to correct you, sir. The Japs yell Banzai. The Koreans yell Mansai, and my silver-haired daddy told me enough stories about his days in the Korean War to freeze the blood. It was worse than Nam. I don't want to live through what my poor daddy did. So you gotta get this asinine decision re pealed. Sir."
"It's final. I'm sorry. But the thinking in Washing ton is that even with the economic aid we're providing Pyongyang, the regime will collapse of its own weight. Then the South can take control without fir ing a shot."
"That's a right pretty theory, sir. But the Koreans have a little saying of their own."
"Yes?"
"I die, you die, all die."
The JCS chair had nothing to say to that. He gave General Hornworks his best and wished him Godspeed. And General Hornworks duly thanked him and spent the next hour retching up solids.
Retirement had beckoned General Winfield Scott Hornworks after his miraculous triumph in the Gulf War. Some talked of running him for high office. The truth was, all he wanted was to get the sand out of his boots and the Arab allies out of his hair.
So when he was offered the position of supreme commander of joint Korean defense forces, he had leapt at it. This was Cold War stuff. General Hornworks had grown up in the Cold War. He understood the Cold War. He didn't understand the Middle East or what the Pentagon was now calling OOTW—Operations Other Than War. He was a soldier. Trained to fight. Not keep the peace.
Holding the line against the godless Commies. That, General Winfield Scott Hornworks understood.
Just as he understood that if it came to all-out war, his ass was hanging out, politically and corporally.
So when General Hornworks was relieved of control over ROK forces, he began each day personally walking the wire, looking for gaps and spy tunnels that might be a prelude to the long-feared invasion.
Barbed wire ran across the Thirty-eighth Parallel like an unhealed scar, but in the end Hornworks knew force fields couldn't hold back the North. They had, per capita, the largest standing army on earth, and as the months rolled by, the frontline forces were getting hungrier and colder and less and less likely to listen to whoever was supposed to be in charge in Pyongyang.
No one knew anymore. Some said Jong was dead. Others said he had been imprisoned while his half brother, Kim Pyong II, ran things. Others said both were dead and the generals ran the show.
Even though he was a general himself, this was Hornworks's worst-case scenario. The North was slipping into famine and deprivation. Generals fight wars. They don't build industries or feed people. If push came to shove, the generals would send all of North Korea south to chow down rather than see their egg-sucking asses hanging from Pyongyang lamp posts.
As he walked the line, the first snap of the fall was in the air. Over on the other side, the enemy had traded in their green helmets for Russian-style fur hats. Winter was coming. And with it more cold and the gnawing winter hunger that moved mountains. And motivated armies.
Satisfied that the line hadn't been breached through the night, he started back for his Humvee. The clattering of an OH-58 Bell helicopter came to his ears.
The chopper dropped onto the cold ground, and a major came running out, white as a ghost, saluting reflexively.
"General. They're on the move!"