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  Ground Zero

  ( The Destroyer - 84 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Where had all the Flower Children gone?

  What was nifty in the '60s was nasty in the '90s. Hippies were crazed eco-freaks out to save the earth by destroying the square world. And the image of a Haight-Ashbury angel named Sky Bluel played with atomic weaponry instead of love beads.

  But if the flower children had gone to hell, they met their monstrous match in the mega-mogul of the 80s, Connors "Con" Swindell, who gave the concept of blood money diabolical new dimension to save his empire of avarice.

  Caught between the strike force of self-righteous savagery and the desperate last stand of grab-it-all-greed, Remo and Chiun faced the most deadly challenge and shocking climax of their career...

  Destroyer 84: Ground Zero

  By Warren Murphy apir

  Chapter 1

  La Plomo, Missouri, was dying.

  For almost fifty years it had been dying. A farm town nestled in the rolling paradise of Adair County, La Plomo had been hit hard by the Depression, although it had never been a dust-bowl town. Back then the Santa Fe Railroad stopped at La Plomo a dozen times each day, hauling La Plomo corn, wheat, and soybeans to market.

  After the war, La Plomo started to change. The ugly blacktop highways went up. The trains came less frequently. To the north, beyond Grizzy Creek, nearby Kirkland flowered into a center of commerce, but La Plomo remained a modest farm town. It boasted only one business strip, consisting of a drugstore, restaurant, and general store across the street from a simple rectangle of grass on which sat a cabled-down Korean War-vintage jet fighter that had been placed there for children to play on. Such was La Plomo's modest town square.

  This incongruously modern touch did nothing to change the basic character of La Plomo life. Fathers still hunted squirrels with their male children. Skinny-dipping in the watering hole was a summer tradition. Square-dancing often led to marriage.

  Adult La Plomons entertained themselves with their outdoor bean festivals, where locals repeated the same cornball gags their great-grandfathers had yarned a century ago. Only the names of the local politicians changed.

  A pocket of changelessness in a fast-moving world was La Plomo. Always a close-knit community, the farms kept it that way, all through the long cycle of seasons, good and bad, to the present day.

  Then came the drought. The wheat dried up. Even the tall green corn withered and shriveled. The economy started to dry up too. Foreclosures began. Farms that had been in families since the Civil War were sold off to strangers. People pulled up their roots and moved to the city and its civilized horrors. More than a community was being tested. A way of life began to break apart.

  La Plomo truly started to die then.

  On the night La Plomo, Missouri, gasped its last-literally-Aldace Noiles lay in bed contemplating the changes he had seen in his life. It had sprinkled some that evening. A few final drops pattered on the eaves of Noiles's simple house. He enjoyed lying alone in bed, in the dark, the sound of rain sprinkling his roof. It made him feel safe and warm, which to a sixty-seven-year-old widower was a not-unimportant thing.

  Aldace had been La Plomo's postmaster during the postwar years. He had been but a lowly mail clerk when his draft number had been called back in 1943. When he returned in '46, the postmaster announced his retirement and Aldace slid right into his old job. La Plomo was that small. The population then was less than two thousand. Tonight, Aldace reflected, it was considerably less than a thousand.

  He had no inkling of it, but by the time the dawning sun burned off the strangely yellow prairie mists, the total population of La Plomo would drop to zero.

  It was the events of the 1943-46 period of his life that made Aldace Noiles appreciate the simple pleasure of lying awake in bed without worry or fear. Sure, La Plomo was hurting. But it would go on, might even prosper again one day. Aldace Noiles might not see that fine day, but he knew it would come.

  Aldace Noiles appreciated being alive. He had been with the Rangers in Burma, where the Japanese were dug in deep. After months of fearsome fighting, the Japs had retreated into caves and the only way to get them out was to burn them out.

  Ranger Aldace Noiles had wielded a flamethrower, and the things he had to do with that terrible tool, the power fire had over human flesh, haunted his sleep for years and years after he had returned home.

  Aldace had a simple prayer in those days. It was: "Please, dear Lord, let me die in my own bed."

  He mumbled it for the first time in a rain-swollen foxhole. It stayed with him during the long voyage home on a troop ship. Even after he had returned to his simple bed, physically whole but emotionally impressed by war, Aldace made a special point of kneeling at bedtime and repeating his midnight mantra. War made a man appreciate his simple joys like nothing else.

  These days, Aldace Noiles invoked that prayer less religiously than he once had. He was retired now. Didn't even drive anymore. Dying in bed looked more and more like a sure thing. But every so often-say, once or twice a month-he remembered to say it.

  Tonight happened to be one of those nights.

  Aldace Noiles wasn't sure when he fell asleep.

  At his age, sleep was a stealthy fog that stole up on a body slowly.

  He woke up suddenly, in surprise. He seldom awoke at night anymore. No worries troubled his rest. He had a government pension. The mortgage was paid off back in '66. But on this last night, the night he was destined to die in bed along with the remaining 862 inhabitants of La Plomo, Missouri, Aldace Noiles shot bolt upright, clutching at his throat.

  It was the stinging, coughing sensation that he noticed first. There was a burning tang smelling faintly of geraniums in his dry old nostrils. Like a beached trout, Aldace took a gulp of air through his mouth. He released it like a dog spitting out a throat-caught bone. Except the bone wouldn't expel.

  Aldace noticed the yellowish haze in the room. Moonlight coming through the gauze curtains made the haze shine evilly.

  Aldace coughed again. This time a glob of reddish phlegm spattered on the bedspread.

  Aldace looked at it in horror. His first thought was that he had cancer. But cancer didn't come on sudden-like to rob the breath. And Aldace had smoked his last Marlboro back in '59.

  The coughing racked Noiles's pigeon-chested torso. He fell out of bed, faded pajama legs flapping against his thin shins as he stumbled, coughing, to the green-tiled bathroom.

  He ran water into a drinking glass and gulped it down.

  The water came up as a pinkish vomit. It had no sooner hit his stomach than it regurgitated again, along with the creamed beef and garden-fresh peapods that had been his dinner.

  The coughing got worse. His lungs labored for air, but each breath was shallower, each exhalation more painful. He spat another bloody clot of viscous matter, and feeling himself about to retch again, hung his head over the porcelain toilet.

  Then he heard the sounds. They came through the walls. Coughing. Other people coughing. Choruses of coughing, racking, crying. Someone screamed. It sounded like old Widow Story.

  Somehow Aldace Noiles found the strength to stumble out his front door. The grass was damp under his bare feet. The night was cool, but the air was not. It burned his lungs. He thought the grass burned his feet too.

  Looking up and down the street, Aldace saw lights in the houses come on. One here, another there. La Plomo was awakening. And Aldace could see why. The moth-bedeviled auras of the streetlights were yellow and hazy. They were cool blue lights, not the harsh halogen lamps that Mayor Dent had tried to force on them. They shouldn't be yellow. The pure night air of La Plomo should not be yellow.r />
  A car started up and screeched back out of its driveway. He recognized young Randal Bloss at the wheel. The car careened down the street and went up on a lawn, crushing a mailbox perched on a whitewashed post. Bloss stumbled out, holding his throat, his tongue out, coughing and hacking. He ran around in an aimless circle, like a beheaded chicken, and then simply lay down on his back, looking up at the hazy yellow air and coughing out his life.

  "I'll get help, Randal," Aldace hollered. He returned to his living room. The phone in his ear was silent. No dial tone. He plunged back out to the street.

  "Don't you fret!" he called. But Randal Bloss' struggles were growing feeble. His forearms folded, the hands hanging from his wrists flaccidly. He reminded Aldace of a beetle on its back after being hit by a squirt of Black Flag.

  Aldace plunged down the street. The air was worse here. He stumbled twice. His own coughing worsened and the cold sweats started. But he fought on, determined to make it to the nearby town square.

  The air was worse there. Not merely harder to breathe, but more yellow. Frighteningly yellow. And Aldace saw why.

  The Sabrejet, which had been placed there in 1965 after the town fathers had exhausted every effort to have a steam engine-a more fitting symbol of La Plomo's former glory-placed in the square, was expelling something from its tailpipe. It came out in furious yellowish streams.

  The truth dawned on Aldace Noiles then. His mind had refused to accept it. Until now.

  "My God, it's gas!" Aldace croaked. "Poison gas!"

  And all over town, the hack-cough symphony swelled to a crescendo.

  Aldace Noiles knew then there would be no escape, and so he stumbled back toward home and the comfort of his lonely bed. He didn't make it. Aldace collapsed on the burning green grass, coughing up crimson clots, his body racked with the shakes.

  Aldace Noiles was not going to die in bed after all-not in the peaceful manner he had been counting on.

  But at the last, Aldace was a simple God-fearing man. He would accept what the Good Lord had in store for him without complaint. If only it didn't hurt so deep.

  As he died, he coughed out a little prayer. Not for himself, but for the good people of La Plomo. Especially the young ones, who hadn't had much of a future when the day began, but now had absolutely none at all.

  Their pitiful cries scorched his ears.

  His last act was to stick his shaking fingers in his ears to block out the Godawful din. Even that did not help.

  Later, the morticians had to break his stiff arms the better to fit him in his coffin. By that time, La Plomo was a silent necropolis in which no songbirds sang and the drone of insects was curiously absent.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and he was being ignored.

  The ignoring began in North Korea, in the village of Sinanju, to be exact. Sinanju was not much of a village as villages go. It was basically an apron of mud flats overlooking a barren gray sea, the West Korea Bay. Back of the mud flats the huts clustered, ramshackle, weathered, and unfit for human habitation.

  It was nevertheless one of the best places to live out your days north of the thirty-eighth parallel. No men from Sinanju were ever drafted into the People's Army. No taxes were ever collected, not since the year 1945, when an emissary of the new communist government arrived to insist that the village must now pay its taxes, even though taxes had been waived in the long-ago days when Korea was ruled by the Dragon Throne.

  The tax collector-whose name is not recorded in the annals of Sinanju-was handed his head. Literally.

  He had stood there facing the Master of Sinanju, whom he assumed was something akin to a mayor or village chief, repeating his request to the Master, because the old man was apparently deaf. He kept saying, "What?" in a querulous voice.

  "If you dispute the amount of the tax," the tax collector had explained, "you may file for an abatement."

  "I do not know that word," said the Master of Sinanju, suddenly hearing very well. "It sounds Western." He spat.

  "An abatement is the return of unfair tax."

  "I declare all taxes on Sinanju unfair. You may go now."

  "I must insist."

  Finally the Master of Sinanju, who was called Chiun, made a vague gesture with his impossibly long fingernails. The tax collector remembered the gesture to his dying instant.

  The tax collector heard the one called Chiun say, "Put out both hands."

  Thinking that he had prevailed upon the old man, the tax collector obeyed. His neatly severed head fell into his upraised palms.

  His ears echoed to the Master of Sinanju's bitter, "There is your abatement." But he heard the words not. He was dead.

  "Thus did Kim II-Sung, first leader of communist North Korea, learn of the House of Sinanju's attitude toward his mastery of the land," Chiun said gravely, many years later, a wise finger lifted to the sky. "By being ignored."

  Remo Williams heard this story sitting around the village square with the very same Master of Sinanju. Chiun's wizened old face broke into radiating wrinkles of joy as he finished his tale. He slapped one silken knee. The light in his eyes was as clear as agates polished by a meandering stream. His thin frame and wispy beard shook with humor. Even the puffs of hair over each ear seemed to vibrate with mirth.

  Remo laughed. The villagers laughed, a little nervously, because they were outnumbered three to one by Mongol warriors, guests of the Master of Sinanju. The Mongols roared. Their laughter shook the very blue in the sky. Back from the shore, at the inner edge of the village, scores of Mongol ponies whinnied and dropped dung. The sound of dropping dung was like a noisome intermittent rain.

  This had gone on all month, since they had journeyed on horseback from distant China, bearing the treasure of Genghis Khan.

  "Pretty good story, Little Father," Remo Williams, the only white man in the gathering, said.

  He was ignored.

  The significance of this was lost on him until, hours later, with the sun sinking and the moon turning into a crystal bowl low in the cobalt sky, the Mongol leaders-Boldbator, who called himself Khan, and the bandit chief Kula-drew themselves up and offered farewell toasts to the dying blue of the sky.

  The Master of Sinanju bade farewell to the Mongols with Oriental gravity. Ornate snuff bottles were exchanged. The bowing went on for nearly an hour.

  Remo placed his hands on Kula's shoulders and Kula returned the gesture. He and Boldbator also exchanged the traditional Mongol gesture of farewell. Warm words were exchanged. They perfumed the air as the entire village trailed the Mongols to their houses.

  "Farewell, brave brothers of the horse," Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, called after them. "Sinanju owes you a great debt."

  "It is good to know that the ties which bound Lord Genghis to Sinanju survive in the modern world," thundered Boldbator.

  "Have a good one, guys," Remo called. Everyone looked at Remo, unsure how to respond to the white man's empty words.

  Remo grinned sheepishly.

  Then the Mongols mounted and arrayed their ponies, Boldbator and Kula taking the lead. Kula raised the nine-horsetail standard of Genghis Khan high in a one-handed salute. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone together would have needed all four hands to hold it off the ground. But Kula lifted it with no especial effort.

  "Farewell, comrades," they sang, starting off.

  Remo and Chiun watched the undulating rumps of the ponies disappear into the gathering dusk, dropping their seemingly ceaseless supply of malodorous fertilizer.

  When they were no longer visible, the villagers let out a collective sigh of relief. The men almost wept with the joy of having supped with Mongol raiders and survived. The women stopped walking with their thighs together, no longer in fear of being ravished.

  "Well, that's the last of them," Remo said.

  "I thought they would never leave," Chiun spat, turning to go.

  Walking carefully so as not to step in anything organic, Remo followed, saying, "Am I mis
sing something? Didn't you just swear undying admiration to those guys?"

  Again he was ignored.

  Shrugging, Remo fell in behind the purposeful figure of the Master of Sinanju, who strode up to the one sound edifice in the entire village, the House of the Masters, built of rare woods back in the days of the pharaohs.

  Chiun undid the intricate locks and pushed the door open. He disappeared within. Remo started to follow. The door slammed in his face. Remo stopped, put his hands on his hips.

  "What did I do!" he complained loudly. Silence greeted his demand. He pounded on the door. "Chiun? Open up. You hear me?"

  No answering sound came from the House of the Masters. Remo put one ear to the polished wood.

  He heard an extended adenoidal goose honking that was unmistakable proof that the Master of Sinanju has fallen asleep.

  Annoyed, Remo returned to the village, wondering in Korean, "Anybody have a clue what bit Chiun?"

  The villagers, who had been so friendly before-many of them had looked to Remo for protection against the barbarian Mongols-turned away.

  "Ah, screw it," Remo muttered, seeking a place to sleep for the night. There was no sense pressing the villagers. Every one of them had seen Chiun's public rebuff. And they blindly followed the lead of their Master, not caring about his reasons.

  "You ingrates just wait until I'm head of the village," he warned aloud.

  The expressions that comment created ranged from startled to panic-stricken. Remo was suddenly surrounded by offers, ranging from a place to sleep for the night, to the best leftovers from the feast, and more than one Korean maiden offered him her maidenhead-but only on the condition that this was not revealed to the Master of Sinanju, who, everyone knew, abhorred whites.

  Remo accepted a place to sleep from the aged Korean named Pullyang, who acted as village caretaker when Chiun was away. He wasn't in the mood for leftovers or maidenhead. He had eaten too much fish at the feast.

  Led by Pullyang, he walked to the modest hut, his thick-wristed hands stuffed in the pockets of his gray chinos. In his black T-shirt he looked nothing like a man who was the sole heir to the House of Sinanju, a line of assassins that had shaped the fortunes of the ancient world. Although he weighed less than 160 pounds, his scuffed Italian loafers barely left a mark in the eternal mud of Sinanju.