"What have you got? What is it?"
"One minute, sir. This is strange. This is very strange."
"What is? What is?"
"The second Sinanju appears to be a fishing village."
"Can't be."
"I agree. There are two strange configurations here, sir. On the beach there are two—I can only call them formations."
"What do they look like?"
"From above they look like two pieces of giant driftwood, but they cast shadows that show their true nature. They look like fangs," Clark said.
"Fangs?"
"There's one at one end of a section of beach and a matched one on the other. Sort of like curved fangs or maybe horns, except they're quite large and separated by some distance."
"Any supporting facility?"
"Just fishing shacks."
"They can't be fishing shacks."
"I have to agree, sir. If for no other reason than I see a three-lane highway that stops right at the edge of this so-called fishing village."
"Where does it go?"
"Just my question. I'm backing off from the fishing village and—uh-oh, this highway, sir, runs in a direct line from Pyongyang, bypassing Sinanju Eub altogether."
"No one builds a three-lane highway from the capital to a goddamn fishing village."
"I think that's a safe analysis," Walter Clark said dryly.
"Any traffic on that road, Clark?"
"None whatsoever."
"Strange."
"North Korea is chronically low on fuel, private ownership of cars is restricted to less than two percent of the population and in the countryside they're supposedly eating their sandals for want of rice. So it's not strange at all."
"This is super work, Clark. Keep digging."
"Thank you, sir," said Walter Clark a half second lifter the line went dead in his ear. He went back to his screen. This was interesting.
This was very interesting. Why, he wondered, had no one noticed this before?
Chapter Thirty-three
En route to Skopje, two fast Galeb fighter jets appeared and bracketed the passenger jet. The copilot came back to the cabin, where the winds howled and paper scraps flew, and approached the Master of Sinanju, who sat patiently in his window seat.
"We have been warned to divert to Belgrade or we will be shot down," he reported anxiously.
"Who has warned you of this?" Chiun asked.
"Those Serb fighters on our wings."
"There are only two?"
"Yes."
Chiun signaled for Remo across the aisle. "Dispense with those pests."
Sighing, Remo got out of his seat and began collecting pillows and seat cushion flotation devices until he had two bulging maroon armfuls.
"Try to get ahead of them," Remo told the copilot.
"Yes, yes, but do not get us shot down. I have children."
"Don't sweat it," said Remo, moving to the end of the cabin.
The rest room doors banged loudly in the whooshing cabin winds, and the rearmost emergency exit, which led out to the cone-shaped tail of the plane, hung open to frame blue sky.
Remo whistled patiently as the jet's engines spooled up. Briefly it pulled ahead, outpacing the two fighter escorts, which jinked in and out of view in the open tail.
Remo began pitching pillows and seat cushions at them. Tumbling out like funny marshmallows, they were sucked into the Galeb's intakes with big whoofing sounds.
The jets flamed out, first one and then the other, and when the pilots realized there was no restarting their engines, they hit their seat-eject buttons.
Canopies popped, rocket-assisted ejection seats kicked them upward and out of sight. Since he had a few cushions left, Remo waited for the pilots to descend and tossed pillows at their faces. The slipstream provided the velocity. All Remo had to do was calculate the vectors and let go.
Both pilots received big cushy maroon kisses to their unhappy faces and shook angry fists as the passenger jet pulled ahead and out of view.
Returning to his seat, Remo asked Chiun, "Are we there yet?"
"Stop asking that. You sound like a child."
A page of some newspaper careened toward Remo, like a fluttery bird, and he caught it with an unconscious reflex that turned it into a pea-size ball faster than the eye could follow.
"I've had quieter flights, you know," he remarked, flicking the papery pellet out the rear.
"Be grateful there are no stewardesses to perch on your lap and toy wantonly with your locks."
"After three months on the reservation, I've begun to appreciate stewardesses."