"Nor am I," snapped Chiun. "We fly to Skopje."
"Phui! Skopje is not Macedonia, but the capital of liars and irredentists. There is nothing for you there. This is the true seat of Aleksandar Makedonski."
"The House never worked for Alexander, and we demand that you convey us to our proper destination in Macedonia."
"But this is Pirin Macedonia—the true Macedonia."
"And that was your final breath," said the Master of Sinanju, whose sleeves came apart, birthed a hand like a striking adder and, at the exact moment when the Bulgarian's heart was poised to take the next beat, Chiun's fist struck the correct spot over the heart like an old ivory mallet.
The Bulgarian general noticed that his heart skipped a beat, then began to hammer wildly. His breath came in gasps, then did not come at all. Finally he pitched forward on his face and went into full cardiac arrest, his life and his nationalism leaking out of him in a long, slow, cool breath.
Turning on his heel, the Master of Sinanju returned to the plane.
Remo said to the stunned surviving dignitaries, "Do what he says or it'll be a lot worse."
The honor guard hesitated. Then the escape chutes of the jet popped out, began inflating and the frightened passengers started evacuating, along with the flight crew, some of whom broke windows in their urgent need to exit the plane.
"Don't be too long with the replacement crew, okay?" said Remo, and boarded the plane himself.
The jet lifted off less than ten minutes later. It was a short flight, and since there was no need to pressurize the cabin, no one felt the compulsion to close the emergency exit doors before the aircraft took to the skies.
"This is turning out to be harder than I thought," said Remo.
"That was not the Vardar," Chiun sniffed."It was the Iskur. You should have known this."
"I should have insisted we go to Canada first. I could work for Canada."
Chapter Thirty-two
It was an image-interpretation clerk at the Air Force's National Reconnaissance Office who provided the first key to the problem of the secret North Korean terror weapon.
Walter Clark was an expert on North Korea. During the tense period in the Korean-American relationship, when the DPRK refused to open their nuclear processing plants to international inspection, it was Clark's daily task to analyze oversize satellite images of the various nuclear facilities at Yongbyon and elsewhere.
Relations with North Korea were still in an unsettled state, but everyone agreed they were better off than a year ago, when the two Koreas stood on the precipice of war. Few knew this at the time, but it kept Clark awake at nights.
These days he slept reasonably well for a man whose job it was to spy on the last Stalinist state on the face of the earth.
The call from his superior was tense.
"It's called Sinanju Chongal. It's Pyongyang's secret weapon."
"Is it chemical, nuclear or biological?" Clark asked.
"That's the question of the hour."
"So what do I look for?"
"No one knows. So just look very, very hard, Walter."
As he hung up the phone, in the room where giant photographs and transparencies sat on light tables or hung before backlit wall screens like colorful X rays in a surgical facility, Walter Clark began talking to himself.
"Sinanju. Sinanju. That name sounds familiar…"
He went to his computerized concordance and input the name.
On the green-and-brown 3-D topological map of the Korean peninsula, two red lights winked northwest of the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. There were on the West Korea Bay.
One said Sinanju Eub. The other, simply Sinanju.
And Clark remembered. During the nuke scare—to this day no one knew for sure whether Pyongyang had the bomb or not—he had stumbled upon the bizarre fact that there were two places named Sinanju, virtually next to each other.
Calling up his index, he simultaneously dialed his superior.
"I found it."
"In three minutes?"
"Two-point-five actually," Walter said with restrained pride. "There are two Sinanjus in West Korea. Sinanju Eub is an industrial town. 'Eub' means 'town.' The other is just Sinanju."
"Is it a city?"
"No. That would be Sinanju Si. 'Si' means 'city.'"
"It's an installation, then."
"Just a minute. I'm expanding the picture now." Keys clicked under his tapping fingers, and a red rectangle zoomed in on the twin red dots, expanding the urea within until it filled the screen.
"During the bomb hunt, the dual names were noticed and we conducted deep analysis of Sinanju Eub us a possible nuclear processing center, but they seemed to indicate it was nothing more than an industrial town with no clear military significance."
"But it is a denied area?"
"AH of North Korea is a denied area."
"That's right, isn't it?"
Walter rolled his eyes in silence. Middle managers, he thought ruefully. Aloud, he said, "I have the latest digitized sweep of the area on-screen now, and nothing seems to have changed since last year."
"What about the other Sinanju?"
"As I recall," Clark said, tapping a key, "it was of no importance whatsoever."
The red rectangle squeezed down to the lower red dot, and it exploded into a section of muddy coastline.
"Looks blank. I'm going in tighter."
Keys clicked and the picture bloomed into a close-up.