By Eminent Domain td-124
By Eminent Domain
( The Destroyer - 124 )
Warren Murphy
Richard Sapir
THOSE CRAZY KREMLIN GUYS ARE AT IT AGAIN...
Things are changing for the supersecret organization known as CURE. Dr. Harold Smith has a protégé, Remo is thinking about apprentice shopping and Chiun is fantasizing about retirement from the headaches of the job (i.e., Remo). Yet the world still has big trouble to dish out for the master assassins-and this time it's a real doozy.
Somebody's given America an eviction notice in Alaska-in the form of mass murder. Pipeline workers and dozens of U.S. troops are being slaughtered by a mysterious "ghost force" of silent killers. Remo and Chiun recognize the techniques-a bargain basement brand of Sinanju-which poses an alarming question. Who has trained an army of die-hard Soviet troops in the ancient, secret art of the master assassins?
Destroyer 124: By Eminent Domain
By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir
Chapter 1
Sometimes, if he scrunched up his eyes tight enough and concentrated really, really hard, he could almost taste the warm apple pie. Other times it was roast pork, hot from the oven and spitting delicious, mouthwatering fat. This day, the last day of the rest of Brian Turski's young life, it was freshly baked chocolatechip cookies.
In his mind's eye, they were baked to perfection. Not cooked so much that they were brittle. Just soft enough that when they were broken in two, the chocolate formed drooping, gooey threads between the two halves.
He took a deep breath, savoring the remembered aroma.
The smell that flooded his nostrils was that of diesel exhaust and commingled human body odors. And the cold.
Here, cold was a living thing-assaulting all the senses at once. You could see it, taste it, smell it. On a still night, when the snow fell, you could hear it. Each flake hit like frozen thunder. Mostly, though, you could feel it. Seeping through boots and gloves. Leeching deep into bone.
It was the cold Brian had to deal with every day. His wife's cooking-including her trademark chocolate-chip cookies-was a million miles away.
Brian opened his eyes. He was in the back of a truck. Fifteen other men were arranged on two benches around him. They were bouncing along a rutted rural road.
"Your wife's cooking again, huh?" grunted the man beside him. Like Brian, he was tall and thin, his strong arms hidden beneath his heavy parka.
Brian nodded glumly.
"Why do you torture yourself?" his seatmate asked.
More than once, each one of the men in that truck had asked himself the same question. The answer they invariably gave was that it put food on the table and a roof over the heads of their families. For eight months each year, they trudged out into rural Alaska during the long, dark months of winter for the same reason the surgeon went to the hospital or the baker went to the bakery. It was their job.
"If you live in Alaska more than two years, your feet will be frozen in it." So went the old saying. For Brian Turski, frozen feet were just part of a bitter reality.
Insulated boots stomped the floor for warmth as the big truck drove along the rough access road. Another dry winter had yielded little snow in this part of the Last Frontier. Patches of white dotted the land. When the tired old truck finally rolled to a squeaking stop, brittle scrub grass crunched beneath the tire treads.
Cold steel doors popped open on a featureless plain. A stiff breeze-like icy fingers-curled inside the vehicle. As he stood, Brian pulled his hood over his long, matted hair, knotting it beneath his whiskers with freezing fingers.
There was only one native Alaskan in the group. He had the broad, flat face of an Aleut, with eyes that were weather-battered slits cut deep in dark flesh.
The Aleut was first out of the back. Brian followed, with the others filing rapidly out behind.
The wan light of perpetual dusk painted the landscape in an otherworldly gray. The men ignored the sallow sky.
On the sleeves of their matching parkas, each man wore the APSC insignia of the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company. The same logo adorned both sides of their truck.
Daylight was already at a premium. Their foreman-a burly, urgent man whose once delicate skin had been ravaged by years of exposure to the hostile climate-rounded to the back of the truck from the cab.
"Chopper spotted the break over that rise," Joe Abady said, pointing with his chin as he tugged on his Thinsulate gloves. "We've got maybe a couple of hours if the generators hold. You all know what to do. Let's do it fast."
A second truck had trailed the first. The men hurried over to it. Tools and ladders were hauled out onto frozen ground. Plastic canisters were dropped beside them. The sharp smell of gasoline sliced the cold air.
Two men struggled to haul the generators from far back in the truck.
"Can't we drive around?" one panted as they lowered the second generator to the road.
"Access is too far down," the foreman explained gruffly. "We're doing this the old-fashioned way." Brian Turski and three of the others hefted up the bulky portable generators. The rest of the men gathered the tools and the gas. They left the welding tanks to Joe Abady.
The foreman hooked a pair of leather straps around his shoulders and shrugged the big tanks onto his broad back.
With Abady in the lead, the group of twenty men struck off across the tundra.
Twenty yards off the path, the plain turned to hill. Brian Turski's breath was labored as he struggled under the weight of the generator. The hill had seemed gradual from the road but quickly grew steeper with each labored step.
"I'm not hauling this back," Brian panted.
"You wanna carry these?" Abady asked. The strain of the welding tanks stretched his leathery face.
"What I want is homemade apple pie," Brian said. His heart was straining in his chest. His lungs felt as if they'd been rubbed raw with sandpaper. "Or chocolate-chip cookies."
The words burned his hoarse throat.
Sweating and cursing, the men crested the hill. As soon as they reached the summit, they saw the problem.
The floor of the long, narrow valley below was stained black. Towering above the ground was a massive pipe that stretched in either direction. And in the side of that pipe, an angry hole was like the open mouth of Hell itself.
Moans rose all around.
"Swell," one man complained at the sight of the spilled crude oil. "We're gonna need a vacuum truck up here."
"Already on its way down from Wiseman," Abady said, not breaking stride. "Let's move it, ladies." Hitching up his tanks, the foreman began to pick his careful way down the far side of the hill to the wounded section of the massive Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
TEN MINUTES LATER, crude oil swamped Brian Turski's boots as he eyed the gash in the pipe.
"That's not from stress," he said to Joe Abady. "They only saw the spill from the air," the foreman replied with a frown. "Not this."
"Looks like someone took an ax to it," Brian said. Still frowning, Abady glanced down the broad ravine. Some of the men followed his line of sight. The pipeline slithered off like a great fat snake in either direction. To the north it was a straight run into the nothingness of the Alaskan wilderness. To the south it twisted around a bend in the ravine and was gone.
The forty-eight-inch pipe was built on raised pipeline support members that looked like field posts for Titans. Here and there below the pipeline were dark, uncertain patches and bits of brittle scrub. A few broad streaks of windswept snow hugged the ravine walls on either side.
"Just a rupture," Abady announced gruffly. "Probably froze, then popped. No one'd be stupid enough to come out here except us. Let's get to work."
Stepping carefully through the thick pool of oil, Brian headed for one of the support members. As he walked he cast a casual glance down the ravine. And froze.
Something had moved.
It was subtle, ghostly, caught more with his peripheral vision than anything else. But though his eyes had almost ignored it, his brain wouldn't let them.
He squinted into the distance.
Nothing. No movement, no anything. Just the land and the sky and the pipeline that ran between them. For Brian Turski, an eerie silence descended on the ravine. The grunts of the men behind him faded to silence.
After a moment he grew less certain. He was about to chalk it all up to his imagination when the air seemed to coalesce. A shape suddenly appeared from the drab landscape where a moment before there had been nothing.
Brian didn't have time to give voice to his shock.
The instant the figure appeared, there came a flash of brilliant orange.
The bullet struck Brian Turski in the right side of the chest, spinning him. His feet went out from underneath him, and he went sprawling into the pool of black oil. Crude flooded into his gaping mouth. Another shot, followed by another.
Brian pulled his face up, spitting thick oil. The pain in his chest was blinding.
Joe Abady was sliding to a stop next to him, a nickel-size hole in his forehead.
Men screamed and ran. Another flopped on his side in the oil pool, blood streaming from his open mouth. More gunshots crackled off across the desolate Alaskan wilderness. And all around, bodies fell.
A few men tried to clamber back up the hill. Bullets found backs. The pipeline workers slipped and rolled back down to the valley floor.
Back near the pipe, panicked and bleeding, Brian struggled to get up. His arms were too weak, and he dropped back to the ground.
The oil was thick on his clothes, filling his mouth and nose. Spitting, he flopped over onto his back. Using the heels of his boots and pressing one hand to his bleeding chest, he slid back against a metal support member.
The gunfire had stopped.
The dead lay all around him. Steam rose from gaping wounds and slack mouths.
To Brian Turski, they were already a distant thing. As if he were viewing the landscape through a fuzzy telescope. His legs were growing numb. Already there was no feeling in his right arm. He let it flop to the ground.
Something rose before him.
It was as if the tundra had come to life. The figure was streaked with whites and browns.
Others appeared behind it. Phantoms of earth and snow.
No. Not ghosts.
Crude oil caked one eye. Squinting with the good one, Brian Turski peered at the figure.
His dying lips formed a surprised O.
It was just a man. The blurry figure carried a smoking automatic rifle. The other white-and-brown shapes became men, too. They fanned out around the area, kicking over bodies with the toes of their boots.
Sitting in the shadow of their leader, Brian took his last deep breath.
This time, he didn't smell the cold or the crude or the hint of blood carried on the frigid air. He smelled chocolate-chip cookies. Hot out of the oven. With the gooey brown chips that burned his numb fingertips.
A growl.
The man above Brian was speaking. The pipeline worker didn't understand the language.
Tasting chocolate, Brian looked up.
An angry rifle barrel stared down at him.
It didn't matter. Death could come and claim him if it wanted. Brian had finally gotten his wish. His belly warm and full, he gently closed his eyes.
He was already dead before the bullet popped his head open like a paint-filled water balloon.
As his body slumped into the pool of black slush, the shadows slipped away. One after another the stealthy figures disappeared, swallowed up by the Alaskan wasteland until all that was left behind were the bodies of the dead and the endless, desolate wind.
Although Brian Turski hadn't understood the words that were the last to reach his living ears, the language was not new to the Last Frontier. If he had understood them, they would only have confused him in his final moments of life.
For the actual words spoken by Brian Turski's killer-loosely translated-were a notice of eviction.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he stared out at the world of the living through a dead man's eyes.
There was a time when Remo would have fought the notion that he was dead. For a long time he had insisted that his dying was nothing more than a ruse. After all, he breathed and walked and ate and loved just like the next nondead man.
But with the passage of time came a realization-like a hole finally worn through rock by a single, remorseless water drip. In spite of his early protestations, Remo one day realized that he was not like the next man after all.
Yes, he breathed. But it was not a process that involved gasping lungs straining to supply oxygen to a sluggish bloodstream. Remo breathed with his entire body. Every cell alive, alert and aware.
He walked, but it was without the effort of normal men. Remo's gait was a comfortable glide that flowed naturally. Entirely unlike the rest of the human race, which seemed always to move as if it were wading through wet concrete.
His diet was no longer loaded with fats and sugars-slow poisons all. The food he ate was specific and minimal. Just enough to fuel the perfect machine that was a body in tune with the forces of the universe. The last thing-love-was something that definitely no longer had a home in the soul of Remo Williams as it did for other men. Not that he was incapable of the emotion. Far from it. It was just that his profession didn't exactly lend itself to the notion that he might one day link arms with the woman of his dreams and go tripping tra-la through a field of summer daisies.
Remo was an assassin. Trained by the Reigning Master of the House of Sinanju-the most deadly line of assassins ever to ply the trade. Feats seemingly superhuman were just a day at the office for the men from Sinanju.
In days gone by Masters of Sinanju dodged hurled spears and rocks. These days it was bullets. All the same.
Sheer walls were just things to climb. Fortresses were built from match sticks. Armies, merely toy soldiers.
The skills displayed by Sinanju Masters involved muscle and brain and bone. Breathing, conscious and unconscious thought.
Remo had long ago stopped trying to figure out exactly what made him different from other men. Better would have been the word his teacher used. Remo didn't think he was better. Just different. Of the world, yet apart from it.
And so Remo had one day realized that the man he had been was, in fact, dead after all.
Even though acceptance for him had been a long time coming, it had been far easier for the rest of the world to come to terms with the death of Remo Williams. Part of the reason for that was the grave on which he now sat.
The headstone was a simple no-frills number. Just a granite slab with a plain carved cross and his own name etched into the smooth, cold surface. The edges of the letters had begun to wear with age.
Remo had rarely found the need to visit what-to the world-was the final resting place of Remo Williams. There were only two other instances where he had stood above this grave and contemplated its significance.
Six feet below the spot where Remo now sat was a body. Little more than a few scattered teeth and bones by this point in time. Some faceless indigent who thirty years ago had unknowingly become Remo's stand-in so that Remo might be free to pursue his new calling.
America had been at a crossroads. Social and political upheaval were threatening to tear the nation apart. Down one path led anarchy. Down the other, a police state. In order that the republic could survive, a third option had to be tried, a new and treacherous trail blazed.
A new agenc
y was created by a young President who would himself become an eventual victim of the incipient anarchy that plagued his nation. Called CURE, the organization would work outside the strait jacket that was the United States Constitution in order to preserve the very document it subverted.
The existence of CURE was known to only four men at any given time. Remo was one of those four. And in order that the secret be preserved, all traces of his former existence had been eliminated, including his life itself.
Framed for a murder he did not commit, honest beat cop Remo Williams had been sentenced to die in an electric chair that didn't work. Only when he awoke in Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York-the secret home to CURE-had Remo learned the truth of what his lifework would be.
After a rocky start, he had accepted his destiny fairly easily, all things considered. He had even agreed with the bulk of the rules governing his behavior as set forth by Upstairs. At least in principle.
It made sense that he should never again try to visit the nuns from St. Theresa's Orphanage, where he had been raised. Ditto his fellow cops from the old precinct. But one of the things he was absolutely never supposed to do was come to Newark's Wildwood Cemetery and sit on the frozen ground and stare at his own headstone.
Two out of three wasn't bad.
In his defense he had a lot on his mind these days. And although most people wouldn't have the opportunity to know it, sometimes your own grave was the best spot to sit and sort through life's real important stuff.
It was the third week of February, and already most of the winter snow had been chased away. In another month it would be gone completely, wiped from the landscape by warming sun and drenching rain. The exposed ground was brown and cracked. Leaves from autumns past rotted to compost at the sturdy concrete base of the nearby wrought-iron fence.
The surface leaves were frozen stiff. Remo could smell beyond them, to the rich loam being born beneath. Deeper still, he could feel the worms twist in their winter slumber. High above the ground the soft scent of pines carried to his nostrils. His sensitive ears registered the flicking movements of the farthermost wind-tossed needles.