For the Glorious House of Sinanju

  DestroyerBooks.com

  With special thanks and acknowledgement to Tim Somheil for his contribution to this work.

  Copyright

  First published in the United States in 2004 by Worldwide

  First published in Great Britain in ebook by Sphere in 2016

  This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2023 by Head of Zeus, part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  ISBN: 9781035999798

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 Warren Murphy

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  www.headofzeus.com

  Contents

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Epilogue

  About the Authors

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  One day you’re a young man and the next day you’re old. One day your eyes are sharp enough to make out Cloudcroft, better than fifty miles to the northwest, and the next day it’s just another blur on the horizon. One day you’re strong enough to walk to Cloudcroft for a sack of beer, and the next day you’re tuckered out just from shuffling down to the latrine pit.

  One day you’ve got your sanity. Next day, well… Bo Janks expected his eyes to go bad and he knew his legs would get tired, but somehow he never expected his mind to give up on him. Not that he relied on it all that much, anyway. Not that he had to think through any new problems. Bo Janks was living the exact same life today as he’d lived thirty years, forty years back. What was there for him to think about? But he did need his old brain to show him what was real and what wasn’t, and for the first time ever it wasn’t pulling its weight in that regard.

  It started on April 15, Bo recalled, the day that Mel came out to fill the water tanks and wouldn’t you know it, the rain came that same night. Bo was at home, drinking his one nightly beer and watching the rain from the porch, when his mind betrayed him.

  “What is that?” he asked. Bo talked to himself all the time. That didn’t make him crazy, did it?

  “I know what that is, don’t I?” Bo remarked a minute later, and by this time he was so intrigued he got up, knees creaking, and walked out into the rain with his thumb over the top of the beer bottle to keep it from getting diluted. He followed the thing, only to become disoriented when he came near enough to recognize what it was. What he recognized couldn’t be real, so he had to be hallucinating. Bo fell over, knocked his head and he spilled his beer.

  When he came to his senses again it was morning. Bo Janks found himself looking up at an Air Force man.

  “You okay, there, old-timer?”

  Bo got to his feet with the help of the Air Force man, who had more than a few uniform decorations. “You gave me a scare when I saw you stretched out like that,” the officer said.

  Bo looked around to find he was in the scrub only a hundred paces from his place. His head hurt like hell and he saw the rock he had banged it on. There was a little blood on it.

  “I should get you to a doctor.”

  ‘Tm all right,” Bo said, but he didn’t feel all right He felt as though his life was over. Once your mind goes bad, that was all she wrote.

  “Maybe you ought to go easy on the Budweiser,” the officer suggested.

  Bo picked up the bottle, showed the officer the dregs. “You’ll find five unopened bottles in the cooler at my place and not another empty bottle around. I ain’t a man who drinks to excess.”

  The Air Force man nodded. “Okay. What, were you taking a premature dirt nap, then, old-timer?”

  Bo saw no reason to kid himself or this stranger. Bo was a straight shooter, always. “I was seein’ things. Chasing my past in the desert.”

  “Chasing your past?”

  “Something walked right out of my past and by my place and then into the desert. I saw it plain as day.”

  “Somebody you knew once?” the Air Force man asked.

  “Not a somebody. A something.”

  The Air Force man looked at his black sedan, parked up by Bo’s place, and he looked around the sandy desert, and then his eyes sort of just wandered on back to Bo. “You saw a thing that walked?”

  “It warn’t real.”

  “What did you mean when you said you know what it was, old-timer?”

  “I know it because I’ve seen it before.”

  “Well, then? What was it, anyway?”

  Bo Janks looked out into the desert himself, mind going back to what he’d seen the previous night, and then going back to when he’d seen it before. Out loud, to the stranger from the Air Force and to God and to the world, but mostly to himself, he said it as if he was making a confession, “It was Ironhand.”

  Ironhand. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but he hadn’t even thought that name in forty years.

  Where had his daddy’s old books gone to anyway? Probably sold off with the rest of his daddy’s belongings. When Bo’s daddy died, Bo’s sister couldn’t erase his memory fast enough. She sold or trashed everything in the house, then sold the house, and she sent half the money that was left over to Bo. The check in the mail was how Bo found out his daddy died.

  Daddy used to have some books that Bo read when he was twelve years old. Those books were old already. The ones with covers, and there weren’t many, showed grimy old drawings of what Bo saw in the desert on that night.

  “What’s that mean, Ironhand?” the stranger from the Air Force asked.

  Bo got suspicious then. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but who are you anyway, and why’d you come to my place?”

  The Air Force man smiled. “We lost a missile. I came by to see if maybe you spotted it.”

  They lost a missile that went maybe a thousand miles per hour and what Bo saw was a thing that walked no faster than a man.

  “A missile?” He laughed.

  Bo drank two beers that night, just as if it were Christmas or the Fourth of July. Drowning his sorrows.

  He started chuckling again when he thought of the Air Force man. “A missile!”

  After the Air Force man left. Bo looked around, hoping against hope to find some evidence that what he saw in the night had left a mark of itself, but there was nothing. Course not. It wasn’t real. Ironhand didn’t exist.

  Once there was an Ironhand. Bo’s daddy saw it at the World’s Fair in St. Louis. He told Bo about it time and time again. That World’s Fair was more than a hundred years ago, and Ironhand must be long gone now.

  “Don’t look for excuses for your old brain. Bo. It’s just worn down. Face it, Bo, you’re losing it.”

  It was a hard pill to swallow. If his mind went, he couldn’t live alone anymore. He would have to go to town, check himself into the home for old geezers, and that was unthinkable. He had lived in the desert for thirty years, independent and happy enough, and he couldn’t change his life now. When a man was eighty-nine years old, he was too old to change. So what options did that leave him?

  Next day, more strangers from the Air Force came by, and they weren’t as friendly. They wanted Bo to talk about what he’d seen, and they accused him of being a drunkard. Bo asked them to leave politely, then got on the phone to the sheriff, and that convinced the Air Force men to leave Bo’s land.

  But the visit got Bo thinking. Not that he could trust his thinking, but it seemed odd, all this attention from the U.S. Air Force. There had been stray missiles from White Sands before, and Bo had talked to the Air Force men before. They never sent men on the first day, with all the decorations. They never came back for a second visit. They never sent the goon squad.

  What did it mean?

  He spent all the following day in the desert, searching the ground for any sign left by the thing that his mind had made him see.

  “Dam fool!” He was home at dusk, a whole day wasted, his neck sore from bending so much.


  Then the next day he got up and he looked some more.

  On the third day, he found something strange. It was a flake of heavy, corroded iron, small as a fingernail, lying atop the sands where nothing made of iron ought to be. Bo held it in his shaking hands. He looked at the ground again and noticed how the sand sunk down in a way that wasn’t right.

  That night, Bo drank three beers and woke up sick. He heard pounding and it took a long time to figure out there was somebody outside his place. It was more Air Force. They were nicer this time, but they kept talking and talking and all Bo wanted to do was to lie down and sleep or maybe just lie down and die.

  But when they left at noon he got his shovel and he went to the place where the iron chip had been sitting on top of the sands, and he started to dig.

  The rain started coming down. The day got dark, and by the time of the real dusk. Bo was exhausted, his old arms on fire and his head pounding. He was too old for this.

  But he had to know. Bo kept digging, the powdery sand piling up on either side. He kept thinking the sand was too loose, as if something had been digging here recently, when it should be hard as sandstone.

  His shovel hit something metal under the sand, and Bo scrambled out of his newly dug hole in a panic, He stared down there, terribly afraid. Whatever metal object he hit, it was still under the sand.

  “Bo, you really ought to go down there and get your shovel,” he told himself.

  Then a lightning bolt struck not a mile away and Bo came to his senses. “Damn fool! Don’t you have enough sense to come in out of the rain?”

  He began heading back to his place, turned around once, and saw the lightning get closer. He saw—he thought he saw—something moving around by his newly dug hole.

  Bo moved as fast as his old legs could go, and he was too afraid to look back again until he got to his place. He tried to get his breath, standing on the tiny porch and holding the wall, watching the desert.

  The lightning struck nearby and the crack seemed to rip the air apart. The brilliance lasted long enough for Bo to see that the desert was good and empty.

  “Damn fool!” Bo gasped.

  Body pumping with adrenaline, he knew sleep wouldn’t be easy. He decided to write a letter to his dad. He did that, every twenty years or so, as a way of helping him think through a crisis. This time it seemed especially appropriate, because who else in the world would know a thing about it except his dad?

  Writing was hard, because he didn’t do it much and his hand bones hurt just awful, but he got most of it down, in pencil, on the back of some old phone bills.

  When he woke up he was lying on the table, the letter under his head. The lightning had stopped.

  Bo Janks wasn’t an educated man, but he knew something about electricity. He knew that a thing made out of metal ought not to be walking around in a desert in a storm. Now the storm had passed on. If there was something in the hole he’d dug, if it were made of metal, then it wouldn’t come out when the lightning was striking. It would wait until the night was peaceful again, like now. Bo got to his feet, slipped on his boots and walked out of his place. The desert smelled fresh and clean, as if God just gave it a good scrubbing. The clouds were almost gone, the moon and stars were bright and Bo could see the desert as clear as in daytime.

  There was something in the desert, walking toward Bo’s place.

  “Ironhand,” Bo Janks said. “You really here? Or am I just a dam, senile old fool?”

  He got no answer, so he sat himself down on his stoop and just watched. The hallucination came close enough to touch him with its moon shadow.

  ‘I wish you was here, Daddy. You’d want to see a sight like this, that’s for sure.”

  Those were Bo Janks’s last words, to himself, to his daddy or to anybody.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and he was looking at the most beautiful woman in the world.

  Her eyes had the sparkle of youth and the depth of an ageless soul, while her golden hair made the sun want to hide for shame. Moving with less noise than the shimmers of heat coming off the desert, she crept across dried patches of vegetation in a wilderness naked of cover, but she remained unseen by her prey. The beautiful woman hunted, but the hunt was a mission of mercy.

  Remo watched from a cliff. He was hundreds of yards away, but her grace was unmistakable. Alongside this young woman the bobcat and the snake were clumsy and incompetent. The coyote she stalked was no more aware of her than he was aware of the generations of the ancestor spirits that hunted with her and smiled upon her.

  When she grabbed the coyote by the scruff of the neck, it made an almost human sound of surprise and kicked at the air wildly.

  The most beautiful woman in the world held the coyote by one hand and let it kick, gently tamping in the earth with her foot around the rabbit burrow it had been digging in. She looked up to the top of the cliff and gave Remo a smile, such a smile as the earth was not worthy of beholding. Sure as shooting, Remo Williams wasn’t worthy of it, but the smile was for him

  “Told you I could get him, Daddy,” said the most beautiful woman in the world, Freya, daughter of Jilda of Lakluun and Remo Williams.

  “I didn’t doubt you for a second, sweetheart,” he said.

  Only after he said it did Remo realize that Freya spoke in a normal tone of voice and he answered in a normal tone of voice. It was no surprise, that he had heard her clearly, but she should not have been able to hear him. The senses he possessed came of years of training in the art of Sinanju, the sun source of all martial arts. All other martial were just splinters and fragments of the greatness that was Sinanju. So much of the great abilities of Sinanju came from magnifying the senses beyond that of other human beings, to levels that modem science would have called impossible.

  So how had Freya learned to hear like that? And how had she learned to breathe? Because, by all the gods in heaven and on earth, the girl could breathe like a—well, like a Master.

  The one who taught the girl much of her breathing skill was walking to the top of the cliff. Remo didn’t hear him. Just an old Native American with the dark, lined face that came from a life outside in the sun, as well as from genetics. He wore expensive but old, scuffed cowboy boots and he didn’t pay much attention about where he put them down, one foot after the other, but somehow he managed to make no sound.

  “Howdy.”

  Remo wasn’t alarmed. “Hiya, Sunny Joe. I was on my way to visit and spotted Freya from the road.”

  Sunny Joe Roam chuckled. “Girl’s tryin’ to reform ’em.”

  “Reform who?” Remo couldn’t tear his eyes away from her.

  “The coyotes. Ever hear of such a thing?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “The heck of it is, she’s doing it. Watch.”

  The young woman knelt by the burrow and her arm shot inside. She came out with a desert hare, a scrawny gray creature with ridiculous ears. It gave a few hopeless kicks. She put the rabbit on the ground and stepped on it, pinning it to the earth without crushing it, but she wasn’t so gentle with the coyote. She flattened it next to the rabbit and, despite its struggles to get free, it made a greedy snap at the rabbit. The young woman pinched the thickest part of its upper leg.

  The coyote went rigid and a tiny sound leaked out of it like the pitiful howl of the damned in hell.

  The woman stopped pinching and the coyote snapped at the rabbit again. The nerve pinch was reapplied, harder this time. The coyote was rigid with agony.

  When the pinch was removed, the coyote wanted nothing to do with the rabbit, but the young woman wished to make her point and make it stick. Holding the canine by the scruff of the neck, she dragged it to the rabbit, forced it to smell the little rodent and then pinched it again.

  It must have been a very effective pinch, because the whimpers that came out of the coyote were almost words. Then the coyote was free.

  As it stood shakily, the young woman gently lifted the rabbit and offered it to the coyote. With a yipe it ran off so fast it almost left a coyote-shaped dust cloud.

  “Thanks, Bugs,” the young woman told the rabbit as she set it down at the entrance to its burrow. “Let me know if those beasts come bothering you again.” Sunny Joe Roam chuckled in his old, dry throat. “Want to bet that coyote just swore off hare for all time?”

  Remo Williams beamed with pride. “She’s a miracle.”

  “Best tracker the Sun On Jo have seen since my grandfather’s days,” Sunny Joe agreed. “You should see her track rattlers with her bare hands.”