"Good luck," Colonel DeSouza offered.
The stranger-who was obviously CIA or was with some other covert agency-answered in a most enigmatic way.
"I believe in luck about as much as I believe in fortune-tellers," Remo muttered, turning over the engine.
Flooring the jeep, Remo raced away from the Bridge of No Return, down toward the student encampment.
Chapter 24
He remembered the camp.
Freezing-cold winters that seemed to last forever. Scorching summers that took up the time between blizzards. And no food. He remembered the hunger more than anything.
The prisoners had been forced to work. Many died hollowing the great gun caves in Stone Mountain, which overlooked the DMZ. Still more had perished digging the eight story subbasement complex of the People's Bureau of Revolutionary Struggle, the deep basement bomb shelter of the presidential palace or the labyrinthine undergrounds of government buildings all around Pyongyang.
It seemed that anything the Democratic People's Republic of Korea deemed important was buried so far below the surface that no one without a pickax and a hundred years would ever see it.
Man Hyung Sun had seen it. At least in its rudimentary stages. And he remembered.
He had starved as he wielded his ax beside other laborers. They chipped away for hours upon hours. Day would come up on their chipping. Night would descend, and still the relentless chip-chip-chip sound would fill the dark shadows.
Only when the cloak of night had been pulled so tightly that even the North Korean soldiers who oversaw their work force recognized the difficulty of the task were the prisoners allowed to shuffle off to their camp. They were awakened before dawn to begin the process anew.
This was how Man Hyung Sun had spent several long years in the early part of his life.
Sun had once been a soldier under the command of Kim Il Sung himself. He had been a favorite of the future president during those dark days when Kim led a Korean unit in the Soviet army during World War II. But when Kim Il Sung had become president of the People's Republic in 1948, the seeds were sown for their eventual falling-out.
Man Hyung Sun had been opposed to the invasion of the South by Kim that led to the Korean War. The president saw his opposition as treachery. His former ally was thrown into prison without any more compassion than one might show an ant underfoot.
Sun lived for several long years in the camp. The work was hard, the food scarce. The hunger? Severe.
There were many times he thought he would die. Many more that he wished he would.
It was only by a miracle that Sun ever escaped. As the work detail was being led back to the prison one cold dark night, one of the guards got sloppy. His attention was drawn away. Afterward, Sun never could remember why.
A scuffed shoe. A stumbling prisoner. Perhaps one of the emaciated wretches farther along had died. It did not matter. Sun saw his opportunity and took it.
While the guard was looking away, Sun smashed him over the head with a rock. He did not creep up. No stealth was involved. Indeed, he could not have managed it if he had to.
He saw an opportunity and sloppily seized it.
The trip across the frozen wasteland to the DMZ had been arduous and fraught with difficulties. There were soldiers, dogs, mines. Even tanks and planes. Searchlights.
None were looking for him specifically. They were just the regular accoutrements of a Communist dictatorship.
By some miracle, he made it. By an even greater miracle, the Americans had let him across. Man Hyung Sun became a free man on that day. Penniless, starving but free.
Fortunately for him, he already spoke English, having taken many courses at university as a youth. He stayed in the South only a brief time, eventually moving on to America.
His single foolhardy experience opposing Kim Il Sung notwithstanding, Man Hyung Sun was nothing if not savvy. He soon learned that the Americans had a law that allowed churches to operate without paying taxes.
Sun needed money and food. It was a match made in heaven. He founded the Grand Unification Church in 1956.
It was amazing how easy it was to manipulate the minds of the imbecilic American youth. The first were ordinary converts. He needed to do nothing special to convince them to devote their lives to him. In a land as rich as America, the spoiled, idle children were looking for ways to avenge themselves against their parents for showering them with so much. Sun and his church became the ultimate vengeance.
The culture of sloth was beginning to erode the foundations of the great Western nation in the years immediately following the establishment of his church. America was on the cusp of the 1960s. Man Hyung Sun read the times like a clairvoyant.
During the full blossom of the sixties, his followers were commissioned to bring others into the flock. Whether they wanted to join or not.
Sun had not been a Communist for nothing. He knew all of the advanced brainwashing techniques taught to the North Korean government by their friends the Russians. The new recruits were quickly converted to the Grand Unification Church. In short order, they were in airports all around the country haranguing travelers with flowers, tambourines and words of love from the Reverend Man Hyung Sun.
For more than a decade, parents were reluctant to charge the church with taking their children against their will. Most attributed the new attitude of their offspring to dope, free love, whatever. It was the times, after all. The kids would come around.
They didn't.
Only when the sixties became the seventies did people begin to look more deeply at the "conversion" tactics of the Reverend Sun. He managed to escape criminal prosecution on these charges, but it was during this closer scrutiny that his nonchurch-related tax irregularities became evident to the federal government.
Sun went back to prison.
It was not as it had been in North Korea. He had more food than he could eat, and he was still able to run his religious empire from inside. Upon his release, he decided to take a more low-key approach to his religion.
Property became very important to Sun. Also his Washington newspaper, which he frequently used as a forum to harass his old friend, now bitter enemy, Kim Il Sung.
It was while working at his newspaper that he began hearing stories of a place out west. Supposedly, for a fee, one could learn the future there.
The service was only available to the very wealthy or the very connected. Actors, businessmen, politicians-all swore by this place.
Something about the story intrigued Sun. It was not on a conscious level. More of a dream trying to push itself into the reality of his daily life.
Sun planned to visit the ranch where the prophesying was alleged to take place, but history was one step ahead of him. There was an explosion at the Truth Church. Along with many deaths. Sun had been too late. Or so he thought.
The day of the explosion at Ranch Ragnarok was the day he began having the visions.
They were bizarre, surreal images. Waking dreams.
There was the great plain. As vast as time and space itself. A sky so red it was as if it had been painted in thick daubs of blood. Ground as bloody as the sky above. And sitting in the center of the lonely battlefield, a single morose figure. A patch of yellow. Beckoning. Always beckoning. Calling out to Man Hyung Sun.
He had been chosen. He did not know why, only that he had been selected above all others.
The spirit was frail. The visions strong at times, weak at others. It took many months to realize what was being communicated to him. During this time, he did as the mysterious, dreamlike figure suggested. More Sunnies were indoctrinated into the faith. The sailors aboard the U.S.S. Courage, some New York police officers, some South Korean student protestors, as well as several other individuals-the importance of all of whom was unknown to Sun. He merely did as the spirit commanded. Still, he did not know where to locate this strange force. It took him a great deal of soulsearching to find out.
When he was finally certain, the reverend had dispatched his Sunnie servants to find Michael Princippi and to find the urn of the Pythia the exgovernor had carried away from the ruins of the ranch in Wyoming.
Sun needed only to come in contact with Princippi to know that the former governor had been ignoring the signals being sent to him by the Pythia. The essence of the spirit was strong within the sneaky technocrat. The Pythia had been trying desperately to seek his aid, but Princippi had ignored it. Sun was not like the ex-governor. He had heeded the call.
It was glorious. Once the urn of yellow powder was in his possession, the waking dreams were far more powerful. There was someone else in his mind at all times.