At this, Chiun only grunted.
There was a long moment during which neither man said a word. Chiun finished gathering his sticks. On shuffling feet, he carried them to the open mouth of the cave. As he laid them carefully inside, Remo finally broke the silence.
"I'm going back, Chiun," he announced all at once.
The old man turned slowly. His expression was unreadable. "How soon?"
"Soon. I haven't checked in with Upstairs in ages. Smitty's probably wondering if I'm dead again." A thought occurred. He turned from his teacher, cupping his hands to his mouth. "Hey, Pun!" he hollered in the direction of the village. "You nimrods get the phone working yet?"
Although he should have been too far away for anyone other than Chiun to hear him, his words carried easily across the village far below. Somehow the sound avoided the ears of the people, who were busily engaged in their daily business of hanging around doing nothing. Like a vocal dagger it landed only on the ears to which it was directed, those of the North Korean general, who was still using his hankie to polish rocks over on the bluff near the House of Many Woods.
Far, far on the other side of the village, Kye Pun scrambled to his feet. There was panic on his face. He twisted left and right, looking for ghosts.
"Over here, you doof!" Remo yelled.
Kye Pun's eyes were drawn to the source of the voice. Squinting, he saw the impossibly tiny speck of Remo standing way off in the distance, on the flat hill in the shadow of one of the Horns of Welcome. "The phone!" Remo yelled. "Is it working?"
Kye Pun took in a deep breath. "The work was completed this morning, Master!" he screamed at the top of his lungs.
More than a few heads in the village turned his way. The villagers had no idea why the North Korean general was standing up on the bluff with a dripping hankie and shouting like a lunatic to himself.
Across the village, Remo turned to his teacher. "Phone works. I guess I can finally call Smitty."
"You need not have waited four months," Chiun said. "You could have phoned your emperor from Pyongyang."
With some sadness, Remo noted the "your" emperor.
"I don't like Pyongyang. Too many Pyongyangers for one thing. Plus I have it on good authority that a young man puts his virtue at risk just walking down the street there."
"And so you remained here," Chiun said. "Which I suppose means that you now like Sinanju?"
"Parts of it," Remo said. He looked around. Below, the morning sun was burning steam off the thatched roofs and mud streets. With the rising steam came the rising stink. "A part of it," he admitted. "Pretty much just the you part."
Chiun could feel the sympathetic waves emanating from his pupil. He turned his weathered face to Remo. "And so you thought to extend your time here. Why? To watch your poor old Master in his dotage? To mope around and stare me to an early grave? I told you before. I have a future."
Remo released months of frustration in an exhale of angry air.
"Of what?" he asked. "Really, Chiun. What? Pruning hedges? Taking care of Flossie over there?" He waved a hand at the homely little animal. "You're retired, Little Father. And I know the rules. First I become Reigning Master. At some point after that, I get a pupil of my own. As soon as I do that, the retired ex-Reigning Master is required by tradition to climb into that cave over there like Punxsatawney Phil, and we all pretend you're dead."
"That has been the tradition for many years," Chiun admitted, nodding agreement.
"Well, it's stupid. But you're this big stickler for tradition, so I know one morning I'm going to turn around and you're gonna be squirreled away in the back of that cave. I say screw it. You're better than a freaking hole in the ground. You're not ready for retirement."
Chiun considered his wards thoughtfully.
"No," the Korean said eventually, the light of wisdom dawning in his young eyes. "You are right."
Remo felt a tingle of hope in his chest.
"Yes, Remo, you are correct," Chiun insisted firmly. "I am ready for something else."
"Yeah?" Remo asked, a hint of relief in his voice.
The old man's jaw was firmly set. "I am ready for breakfast," he announced with certainty. Unhooking the leash from the rock, he led the strange little animal past his pupil.
"Come, Remo," the wizened Korean said to the creature. The animal struggled on short legs to follow. Beast in tow, Chiun headed back down the rocky path to the village.
"On the other hand, I could always toss you in there myself and roll a rock in front of the door," Remo called after his retreating back.
"If that is the wish of our beneficent new Reigning Master, this humble retired villager would have no choice but to obey," Chiun called back. "After breakfast."
And he was gone.
Alone on the bluff, Remo glanced at the dark mouth of the cave. Only a few months before, he had seen a hint of his own future. Now, looking into that cave was like staring into the future of his teacher. Cold and unavoidable.
A dark chill gripped his heart.
Turning his back on the cave, Remo headed down the rock-lined path to Sinanju.
Chapter 3
Captain Frederick Lenn had sailed his ship beneath the proud shadow of Lady Liberty in New York Harbor and down the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.
He had been blessed with calm seas and good weather, something for which Captain Lenn was grateful. The Caribbean Sea was a sheet of glass. He could have skipped a flat stone all the way to Puerto Rico. The perfect blue water sparkled as he dropped anchor, barely making a splash or ripple.
It was truly a beautiful day. Unfortunately, Captain Lenn was too busy to enjoy it.
Lenn had spent his life on or near the ocean. He had enlisted in the Navy at nineteen, a few years before Vietnam began to ooze up into the nation's consciousness. When the war was over and his hitch was up, he drifted from job to job. Somehow he always wound up near water.
He repaired fishing nets in Nova Scotia, worked as a night watchman at a cranberry bog on Cape Cod and even opened an unsuccessful fried-fish restaurant near the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.
A stint in the merchant marines led to a long career with a passenger cruise line. He retired from that job two years earlier with a captain's rank, a nice pension and-still fit at the age of sixty-two-the promise of a long and healthy life of shuffleboard and Thursday-night bingo.
After two weeks of sunny retirement, Frederick Lenn was going out of his bird. Within three weeks he had a new job.
It was not a luxury cruise liner this time. But he was a captain again. And with the command of his own vessel and a rolling deck beneath his feet, there was nothing that could destroy the romantic allure the ocean had for Captain Frederick Lenn.
Sure, other ships had names that challenged the human spirit like Endeavor or Enterprise. Or called to mind great historical figures like Washington, Grant and Nimitz, or places like Alabama, Maine and Virginia. But a rose was still a rose no matter what you called it.
So Captain Lenn's ship was called 12-837. It was a serviceable name. It might not inspire poets or balladeers, but then Samuel Coleridge and Gordon Lightfoot probably had a bugaboo about garbage scows.
So what if 12-837 hauled trash around the high seas? It was still Captain Frederick Lenn's boat and he treated her with the love and tenderness he had failed to show either of his two ex-wives and his three estranged children.
On the bridge of his ship, Captain Lenn looked back across the mountain of trash that was mounded behind him. The scow was like a long flat pan floating in the sparkling sea. The bridge sat at one end, a rusted rectangular box. The windows were weathered, filled with pits and scratches.
The smell was strong, even in the closed-off bridge. This was New York City trash. The worst of what the Rome or Athens of the modern world considered junk. Seagulls flapped all around the massive pile, leaving blobs of white everywhere they went.