LEGACY Book 1: Forgotten Son Read online

  “Yes, uncle, I have been preparing,” Tomás said, tapping another key. A map of Arizona appeared on his laptop and it zoomed into the southeast corner, focusing on a city on the American side of the border called Douglas. A small group of arrows appeared to the east of Douglas, pointing north through the Sinanju reservation.

  “Our next move will involve a small army that I shall personally supervise. I shall not fail you, uncle,” Tomás said with the cold smile of a killer.

  “I am so proud of you, Tomás. If only my sons were men like you,” Manny said, cupping the back of Tomás’ head. “Your mother is very proud of you.”

  Tomás looked sadly up at his uncle. “The doctor does not give her any hope.”

  “Doctors are not God!” Manny said and spat on the marbled floor. “They told me to lose weight twenty years ago and look at me! I am a strapping bull of a man!”

  “I just worry about her,” Tomás said. “She’s all I have.”

  “Your mother will be fine,” Manny said, laughing. “You just need to find a good woman, that’s all.”

  “When I have my own house and steady income, then I will look for a girl, uncle. Until then, I am your soldier.”

  “Good boy, Tomás,” Manny said, messing his hair up. “Good boy.”

  Tomás ignored the sentimental gesture and pointed to an area on the map. It was the only route they had not tried.

  “This is where we have to hit them uncle, and hit them hard. I will personally carry the package, surrounded by a small army. If we move quickly, there will not be time for them to react.”

  “Is that area even passable?” Manny asked, squinting. The satellite map showed large landmarks stretching horizontally.

  “Those fortifications look to be as large as the river.”

  “Those are only trenches and unmanned ruins left over from the last century. We will move our army through this pass,” he said, pointing with his finger. “Three waves. The first wave of men will overwhelm any resistance, allowing me to pass through with the second wave to our contact in Tucson. The third wave will follow, protecting our flank. After delivery of the package, our men will disperse throughout the country and return separately within the month.”

  “You think like a general!” Manny said, impressed. “How many men will you need?”

  “Three hundred,” Tomás said, thinking about a movie he had once seen of three hundred men who had fought against a million. He forgot about the part where they died. “I need three hundred of your best men. We can no longer be seen as soft.”

  “I don’t have three hundred men to spare at this short notice. I shall give you ninety of my best men.”

  “I can work with ninety, but we will need an advantage. Some of our soldiers now fear the border.”

  “My soldiers are a superstitious, cowardly lot,” Manny admitted. “They fear what they don’t know. We need a disguise to strike terror into the hearts of our enemies. We must become something terrible, dark…a creature of the night!”

  Tomás looked to the ceiling for just a moment as his uncle’s words triggered a memory from the earliest part of Tomás’ childhood.

  “I have it!” Tomás said and began furiously typing on his keyboard.

  Manny looked at the odd words his nephew was typing into the search bar. Tomás triumphantly clicked on IMAGES and the screen was filled with people dressed in dark masks and suits carrying all manner of weaponry.

  “We will dress each of our soldiers thusly, striking fear into the heart of our foes!”

  “Who are these people?” Manny asked, impressed with their dark, savage look. Many of them carried three-pronged knives and slim blades.

  “They are the most feared people on the face of the Earth, uncle. They are silent, deadly and no known force on Earth is their equal,” Tomás said gleefully.

  “I have never heard of these…niñas.”

  “No, uncle, not niñas, these are Ninjas! They conquered Asia through their martial arts, invisible assassins who cannot be stopped!”

  “My men know nothing of these neen-ja or how to fight like that,” Manny said. “They only know the gun and the knife.”

  “But in the United States, everyone knows of the ninja. They are the most feared assassins in the world! Many movies have been made of them. Just by placing our men in these fierce dark uniforms, we take back the advantage. I shall build a great Mexican Ninja Army and our enemies will crouch in fear at their coming!”

  Manny smiled. He did not know what Tomás was speaking of, but this was his test and he would be allowed to pass or fail on his own.

  Chapter Nine

  It was just past noon, in the hottest part of the day. Ben drove up the sandy trail that had at one time been a paved road. The cracks would have sprouted weeds, had vegetation actually been able to thrive in the area. But, like the rest of the Sinanju tribal grounds, sand had long ago taken over any plants that had tried to grow there. It had become the de facto yard for each of the small houses that peppered the southeastern part of an otherwise uninhabitable desert.

  Looking for any sign of life in the small shantytown, Ben shook his head. The town consisted of a bunch of small houses scattered around a row of buildings attached to each other by a small wooden sidewalk. It was almost like traveling back in time. Ben imagined that Tombstone might have looked like this after it had been abandoned. None of the buildings was clearly marked, so he pulled in front of the largest one, a storefront that had once been red decades ago. The remaining chips of faded maroon paint defiantly tried to maintain a semblance of their former color.

  Only after he placed the car in park did Ben notice the girl standing at the front of his car. She had not been standing there when he pulled in. Her blonde hair and piercing blue eyes most certainly did not look Native American. Cautiously, Ben placed his index finger on the pistol in his jacket pocket and slowly exited the car.

  “Didn’t see you there,” Ben said, remaining behind his open car door. “I’m looking for Stone Smith.”

  Something is very wrong, Ben thought as he looked around. It was too quiet. There were no signs of any vehicles. And the girl…she was not there when he pulled in. She just appeared out of nowhere. The way she stared at him, dissecting him with her eyes, Ben felt like he had just pulled onto the set of a horror movie. The girl looked to be no more than sixteen, but he clearly felt an air of danger around her. For all he knew, this was a ghost town populated by a lone teenage girl.

  “Stone’s my brother. How do you know him?” she finally asked.

  “Only from his resume,” Ben said, keeping his hand in his pocket.

  “Unless you’re looking for trouble, you need to ditch the gun.”

  Surprised that someone her age had noticed that he was packing, Ben slowly placed his pistol under the driver’s seat and locked the door. “My apologies. Do you know where Stone is?”

  “Everyone’s at lunch. It’s our weekly communal meal.”

  “Then why aren’t you there?”

  “You ask too many questions,” Freya said and turned. “Follow me.”

  Ben walked the length of the wooden sidewalk behind Freya until they reached the last building on the strip, a green-painted monstrosity that acted as the village’s assembly hall. The building had seen better days and those days had obviously been in the middle of the previous century. Inside, a group of twenty men sat eating at various tables. They were talking and laughing until the door opened.

  Everyone stared at the visitor standing beside Freya. After a moment, they resumed eating, but remained quiet except for whispers and quick glances at the foreigner.

  As Ben looked around, he saw mostly older men in western cut shirts, but Stone was nowhere to be found. His research on the Sinanju put their number around eight hundred. This must be some kind of council leadership meeting.

  At one time, the Sinanju tribe numbered in the thousands, but that was before construction jobs in the nineties and the siren song of bright America
n cities began luring their young from the old ways.

  The Sinanju were a dying tribe.

  “You must be Ben,” a firm voice said from behind him.

  Ben’s training kept him from showing that he had been startled for the second time in five minutes. That was twice someone snuck up on him. Maybe this was a ghost town.

  “Sunny Joe Roam,” the tall man said, extending his hand. “But you can call me Bill.”

  While studying about Stone, Ben learned that he was being trained by the man standing before him. Sunny Joe stood tall for a man in his eighties and though his thin frame still looked powerful, Ben couldn’t imagine a guy who looked like a beardless Abraham Lincoln seriously teaching any kind of martial art.

  Ben smiled and shook Sunny Joe’s hand.

  “Afternoon, Bill. I didn’t know I was expected. I’m looking for Stone.”

  “I know,” Sunny Joe said. “He’ll be here momentarily.”

  “I have a few questions while we’re waiting, if you don’t mind.”

  Sunny Joe led him off to the side so they could talk privately. “The court records show that your tribe is called Sunonjo, but everyone else is calling it Sinanju.”

  “It’s always been Sinanju. Some stupid government surveyor misspelled our name in the 1800’s and we’ve been fighting since then to get it changed. Just imagine if they had been spelling your country ‘Uhmarika’ for almost two centuries. It literally took an act of Congress to fix it last year.”

  “And the martial art? To be honest, what I’ve read seems unbelievable. You’re their teacher?”

  Sunny Joe leaned toward close to Ben’s face. “You know what they say about Fight Club?” he asked.

  “The first rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club,” Ben replied.

  “That’s ’cause they’re afraid we’ll find them and kick their asses,” Sunny Joe said with a confident wink.

  Before Ben could pry further, the back door slammed open and a young man with dark hair stormed toward the front of the room. Stone was carrying a small duffel bag and wearing an old button-up shirt. Though his steps were independent statements of frustration, his footsteps made no sound.

  “You’re the guy I’m supposed to go with?” he asked Ben.

  “Right.”

  Stone nodded, then said to Sunny Joe, “She’s not supposed to be here.” He still had not looked at Freya.

  “Freya, don’t embarrass him,” Sunny Joe replied in a language that was not English.

  Ben wasn’t sure, but it sounded more like an Asian language than a traditional Native American tongue.

  Freya stepped behind Sunny Joe, but kept her eyes on Stone.

  Stone’s eyebrows knotted in frustration.

  “You ready to go?” Ben asked Stone.

  “Yeah,” Stone replied, glaring at Freya. “I am now.”

  Chapter Ten

  Sunny Joe watched Ben and Stone leave. It took several minutes before the dust cloud from the car became too small for him to see. He entered the small building the tribe used as City Hall and entered his office. He sat behind the wooden desk built by his father as a ceremonial gift for taking over as Sunny Joe.

  But Bill Roam had never wanted to lead the Sinanju tribe.

  His father was a serious man dedicated to the old ways, but like others his age in the early sixties, Bill had been more worried about finding out who he was than maintaining the status quo. He couldn’t do that under the constant thumb of tradition on the reservation. After mastering all the basics of Sinanju at twenty-seven, he left to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood. Bill quickly became a famous stuntman, able to perform amazing feats of strength and endurance that audiences attributed to trick edits or special effects. But Sinanju didn’t help his acting ability, so he was pigeonholed as Hollywood’s go-to stuntman, eventually becoming the man behind the suit in the famous Muckman movies. It took two decades for Bill to discover that he could not find what he had been looking for in Hollywood, so he returned home, to his father, to his people and to the old ways.

  Perhaps it was because he was wiser, or perhaps the call to be the next leader of the Sinanju tribe was subconsciously trapped in his mind, but at fifty years of age, Bill Roam knew what he was meant to do.

  His father ignored the time Bill had been gone, and over the next decade, finalized his training in Sinanju. Unlike their Korean counterparts, who were the greatest assassins of all time, Sunny Joes concentrated mostly on the defensive aspects of the art. The Tribe of Sinanju was not to directly compete with the House of Sinanju. There would be no killing by contract.

  That was forbidden.

  And his father continued teaching Bill about the history and legends of the Masters of Sinanju. The most important one, the legend that was repeated every year on the anniversary of the tribe’s establishment in Arizona, was the story of the twins Kojing and Kojong.

  As Bill remembered the story, he heard it spoken with the voice of his father.

  There was once a Master of Sinanju by the name of Nonga. He was fearsome in battle and, more importantly, brought much tribute to the small fishing village on the Korean bay.

  But something happened on one of his missions — something that cost him most of his eyesight. Because their training placed their bodies at the pinnacle of human development, Masters of Sinanju could see farther, more clearly and even in the dark. One of Nonga’s scrolls mentioned that he had an accident, but provided no details of the incident.

  Masters of Sinanju never had accidents.

  The scrolls of Sinanju detailed every Master even before the Great Wang, who first discovered the Sun Source. The scrolls were the living history of the House of Sinanju, handed down from one Master to the next. Nonga didn’t explain how it happened, but blamed the accident on the god Kali.

  When he returned, Nonga could barely see, so when his wife bore twins, she was able to hide one of them from Nonga, for there can only ever be one Master and one pupil. Kojong, as the second twin, would have normally been cast into the sea. But his mother had him trade places with his brother Kojing every other day, teaching each other the lessons they had learned from their father.

  Nonga had completely lost his eyesight before the boys began training in earnest. And when he died, for the first time in history, there were two Masters of Sinanju. Kojong, sensing the unrest the pair had inadvertently caused, volunteered to exile himself. He assembled a small raft and took with him the barest of rations and set sail over the Great Eastern Sea.

  The greatest story in the Tribe of Sinanju was the story of the journeys of Kojong Shiva. When Bill first heard the story, he scoffed. Despite all the superhuman achievements of the Masters of Sinanju, Bill still questioned old world gods.

  When Kojong reached the American coast, he was greeted by attack from various tribes, until he reached what is now known as Arizona. A small tribe of people welcomed him into their homes. They housed and fed him. The people were poor, like the Korean fishing village he grew up in, and Kojong grew to feel a kinship to these beleaguered people.

  When they were attacked by a rival tribe and the chief was killed, Kojong defended them and the invaders fled. The tribe then crowned him with the feathers from the dead chief and Kojong assumed command of the tribe.

  He was given the chief’s daughter as a wife and she bore him a son and named him Gerah. Soon after his birth, survivors of the rival tribe assembled an alliance of other local tribes to attack them. They used poisoned arrows, flaming arrows, and even a few newly-acquired Spanish rifles in an attempt to overwhelm the tribe.

  In Bill’s mind, his father’s voice always lowered for the next part.

  Then came a mighty earthquake, which shook until the men were thrown off their horses. Lightning struck from the sky. Kojong’s eyes darkened and his voice filled the plains.

  “I am created Shiva, the Destroyer!” Kojong Shiva cried. “Death, the shatterer of worlds! The night tiger made whole by the Master of Sinanju! Who is t
his dog meat that dares challenge me?”

  The armies, unfazed by what they considered to be a trick to scare them, descended as one. Hundreds of men from surrounding tribes moved to assault Kojong with their knives and their bows and their guns, threatening to overpower them with sheer numbers.

  And then they died.

  They all died.

  After their enemies lay dead, Kojong’s eyes returned to normal. His fellow tribesmen, fearing him, whispered the name they had heard him utter as best they could in their own tongue.

  “Sunny Joe…Sunny Joe…” they chanted.

  The tribe was renamed Sinanju and the heirs of Kojong were called Sunny Joe. Each taught his eldest son the secrets of Sinanju, only for tribal defense, careful not to interfere in the outside world lest they compete against the House of Sinanju in Korea.

  The goal was always to eventually return to Korea and somehow reunite the two factions of Sinanju, both the House and the Tribe. And now Bill Roam — Sunny Joe — found himself violating two of his ancestors’ most sacred rules in order to accomplish that goal.

  It was forbidden to train more than one pupil. Their very existence in Arizona was due to a violation of that principle. More importantly, tradition strictly prohibited a woman from ever being trained in Sinanju.

  Even though he wasn’t as ardent a believer as his father, Sunny Joe felt a little guilt. But he had a reason. His own son, Remo, had returned as the reigning Master of the Korean House of Sinanju, and left Sunny Joe to care for his children, Stone and Freya. Sinanju tradition demanded that Sunny Joe only teach Stone. But Stone was stubborn, favoring his military training while Freya was a natural in everything he showed her. He could tell that she had been breathing correctly most of her life, while Stone had only started after moving to the reservation.

  Stone could only maintain a Sinanju center for short peaks before his body had to recover. Until he stopped smoking, he would not be able to retain his Sinanju center indefinitely like Freya.

  Freya was the key to the future.

  As daughter of both factions of Sinanju, she could reunite the House and the Tribe. But it was too large a burden to share with her until she was older.