"Destroyer - 019 - Holy Terror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Warren)

The Maharaji heard how lucky he had been. Not everyone had survived the earthquake in Patna, and the next day, government officials arrived to examine the bodies of the holy men who had been killed. All of them who had died, however, had died in the earthquake. No holy man's death had been the cause of it.

No government official, no policeman or soldier or representative of the prime minister herself, bothered to check the ox carts as they squeaked out of town to the dumping pits. So they did not see the one much-darker body at the bottom of the pile of untouchables, the one with pierced palms and legs and the wound in his side.

It had been such a terrible earthquake, they had thought at first that the holiest men had died. But apparently this was not so, especially since the border with China remained quiet. There would be no terror from the east.

But east, even east of China, in a small town on the coast of North Korea, a message arrived. The Master of Sinanju would be returning home soon, because his employment would be bringing him to India, some incident in Patna that was of concern to his employer. On the way there, he would be given, in tribute to his glorious service, a triumphant return to the village his labors had supported for so many years.


CHAPTER TWO


His name was Remo, and he was bored with lacquered plates flying at his head, the ones with the fanged jaws of a dog inlaid over a calla lily background, the ones that came zipping in, sometimes with a curve or a dip or a hop, and sometimes straight for the cranium with enough speed to crack a skull.

Remo's left hand seemed to float up and gently touch most of the plates. Some of the plates he did not bother to block, and in the plates that were not blocked was the skill he was reminding his muscles and nerves to perform. Skill was not muscle but timing, and timing was merely being in unity, making and then keeping his perceptions in tune with reality.

This act of keeping the death plates from harming him reminded him of a simple lesson long ago when the Master of Sinanju had used slow bamboo spears that had at the time looked so fast that Remo had stood in terror as they came at him.

But these plates came five times as fast, just slower than a .22 short bullet. They whacked into the pillows behind him, tearing plush red fabric and snapping the springs of the couch. But the lesson he had learned from the bamboo staves was still the lesson now. Do not defend where you are not, but only that which is valuable to you. The hooking, dipping plates would only harm him if he went at the plates themselves, instead of staying within the zone of his body, and merely protecting it from the plates' intrusion.

The last plate came horizontal at his eyes, seemed to hang for a moment, then arched above his right ear and rose cracking into the wall, which opened a three-foot seam in the white plaster wall of the Rhoda Motel in Roswell, New Mexico. Outside was the Rio Hondo, a slip of a rocky stream that only in this parched summer would be called anything more than a brook.

"Home run," said the hurler of the plates, whose joy, unmitigated and mounting, had made Remo's life hell. If one had to have hell, Remo had thought, why must it be in New Mexico? But that was where he had been told to be and that was where he was. Chiun, the hurler of plates, did not mind being in New Mexico. He was going home to his native village of Sinanju in Korea, which his labors supported, just as the services of his father and his father's father and ancestors back to the earliest recorded time had supported the village.

Chiun was but the latest Master of Sinanju, and the services of the Master of Sinanju were always needed by one emperor or another. By czar and emperor, pharaoh and king, president and ethnarch, there was always work for the assassin, and the ancient House of Sinanju, sun source of all the martial arts, was simply the world's oldest, established, permanent repository of the assassin's skill. For hire.

In America, the services that had been hired were slightly different from usual. The Master of Sinanju had been retained to train one man, a white man, a man who had been made publicly dead, an electrocuted man. RemoЧwho was then Remo Williams.

And in the years that followed, the training changed the very nervous system itself so that the body and the mind of Remo could see plates come at him and know instantly which required his body's attention and which he could safely ignore.

"It's no home run, Little Father. The pitcher doesn't get home runs. The batter gets home runs."

"You change the rules on me because I am Korean and not expected to know. I am being cheated of home run," said Chiun, and he folded his long delicate fingers over each other so that his golden kimono with the white butterflies settled in repose. Even his wispy ancient beard seemed to rest triumphant. The Master of Sinanju had caught his pupil in an injustice that he was savoring.

It had been like that since Chiun had been informed that since Remo would be going to Patna, India, going west over the Pacific, they would be going near Japan and Korea, and Chiun would be allowed to visit his home village of Sinanju, even though it was in the politically unfriendly northern part of Korea.

Since that day that Upstairs had gotten riled over something that had happened in IndiaЧwhy India, Remo didn't know, since India had about as much to do with Upstairs' mission as potato soup did with the hypotenuse of a triangleЧsince that day Chiun had been collecting injustices, the long-suffering Korean in a land of white racists.

He would return to his village to tell them what he had endured for them, while hiring out his talents so that the payments could support the aged and the infirm and the poor of the village of Sinanju.

"If I were white, it would be a home run," said Chiun.

"First, Little Father, we were exercising. I was, at least. And we weren't playing baseball."

"You wouldn't play with a Korean. Like your Little League. I understand. You whites are all alike. Bigoted. Yet, I maintain myself above your pettiness."

Through the crack in the motel room wall, a face peered. As the face retreated, Remo and Chiun saw a ten-gallon Stetson on top of the face that was on top of a bare chest, bare waist, and bare everything else. The man retreated further from his side of the wall. There was something on the bed, however. Blond and ass sassy and nude as a defrocked tick.

"Hi, there, fellas," she cried.