Scorched Earth td-105

  Scorched Earth

  ( The Destroyer - 105 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  As the White House and Pentagon cover up with reflective tinfoil to ward off deadly superheated rays from an invisible object in space that vaporized biobubble habitat scientists, Remo and Chiun are sent to Russia to stop the attacks before World War III breaks out.

  Destroyer 105: Scorched Earth

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  Chapter 1

  In the beginning, no one expected the BioBubble to burst.

  Certainly not the national press, which hailed it as being in the vanguard of man's exploration of space-even though it wasn't part of the space program.

  When the space program angle became old news, the press hailed it as the perfect tool for solving the global eco-crisis of the moment.

  The eco-crisis of the moment changed from moment to moment, of course. Sometimes it changed from newspaper to news outlet.

  On the same day, at opposite ends of the continental United States, the BioBubble-a three-acre honeycomb terrarium of thermopane glass supported by white-painted steel trusswork-was simultaneously hailed as the solution to the global-warming crisis and the jumping-off point for man's eventual relocation to a less polluted planet.

  Thus claimed the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, respectively.

  After a while, the national press began seeing it differently. Even with the decline in readership and the spiraling cost of bulk newsprint eroding the page counts of most big-city dailies, the editors still had column incises to fill.

  The first red glimmering of trouble came when to support the faltering project-no one at BioBubble Inc. would say why it was faltering, just that it was-the facility was opened to tourists. Only then was the first discouraging word heard.

  "Tourists? Isn't the BioBubble hermetically sealed? With airlocks?" asked a reporter at an outdoor news conference at the BioBubble site with the eroded redsandstone hills of Dodona, Arizona, shimmering in the background. The spot had been chosen for its resemblance to the landscape of Mars, according to the earliest press releases.

  "Yes. To simulate every ecosystem on our fragile planet," said the director of information for BioBubble Inc., Amos Bulla.

  "If you let in tourists, won't that destroy the BioBubble's eco-integrity?" a second reporter pressed.

  "Tourists will not be allowed in. Only to look in. Think of it as a zoo with people on both sides of the bars."

  "What if someone throws a brick?"

  "The glass is tempered and bulletproof. But no one would be so malicious," Bulla said sanctimoniously.

  In truth, no one was. Unless one counted the press and their figurative cast stones called factoids.

  There was a spate of editorials criticizing the project for stooping to the level of a scientific Disneyland. But another round of editorials from rival papers, insisting that scientific research needed to hack out uncleared paths, put a temporary halt to that line of criticism.

  Then a Japanese tourist with a Nikon and a roll of Fuji Super D Plus film shot the half-chewed pizza crust sticking out from the compost heap on the other side of the sealed glass-and-steel honeycomb habitat.

  He sold the shot to the National Enquirer for sixty thousand dollars, and the Enquirer ran it on the front page, with the headline BioBobble Revealed. Because the Enquirer was now a chief news source for the national press, the Boston Globe took it seriously and sent one of its photojournalists to investigate.

  "The photos clearly showed a pizza crust in the compost heap," the journalist argued.

  "I agree," Amos Bulla said forthrightly. "But not our compost heap."

  "The photo definitely showed white-painted steel trusswork in the foreground."

  "A clever fake. The BioBubble has been sealed for over a year now. All the food is grown organically, then recycled. There is no pizza being baked or grown in the BioBubble habitat."

  "Then why did the Enquirer pay a Japanese tourist sixty grand for a snapshot?"

  "To sell newspapers. Just like you're doing," retorted the director of information for BioBubble Inc.

  After the pizza-crust crisis blew over, things settled down for a while. And so did publicity. With publicity off, the tourist flow dropped to a lazy, sporadic trickle.

  "We need to pump up the volume on this thing," said the financier of the project by long-distance telephone.

  "Last time, the whole thing was almost blown out of the water," Bulla told him. When not dealing with the press, he functioned as project director-a position neither demanding nor critical, inasmuch as the facility, once sealed, was supposed to be self-sustaining.

  "Whose fault was that?"

  "That won't happen again. I laid down the law. Next time we sneak in pizza, everybody eats their crust, too. We can't afford another PR problem."

  "Maybe we can manufacture a crisis."

  "What kind of crisis?" asked Bulla guardedly, thinking I'm the front man so I'm the fall guy if anything goes wrong.

  "An eco-crisis. What else?"

  A solemn press release was duly issued, alerting the nation and the universe at large that the BioBubble, the self-sustaining greenhouse that was itself a miniature Mother Earth, was mysteriously, inescapably losing oxygen.

  "This may in some way mirror the loss of greenhouse gases our dear Mother Earth is currently experiencing," Bulla announced.

  This was said at a press conference at the Dodona, Arizona, site of the BioBubble construct with the hot sun making the Dome resemble an otherworldly gem.

  The press was there in substantial numbers. It was a slow news day.

  "Do you have any reason to suspect leakage?" Bulla was asked.

  "BioBubble integrity stands one hundred percent. There is some atmo imbalance occurring within the habitat. Or one of the ecosystems."

  Someone wondered if there was excess methane in the air.

  "As a matter of fact, that is one of the rising gases. Why do you ask?"

  "Methane is released through intestinal gas. There's a theory that bovine methane emissions are responsible for the ozone-layer problem," said the stringer from Mother Jones.

  "There are only a dozen cows in the BioBubble."

  "People fart, too. Especially eco-pioneers living off beans and tofu."

  This was said in all seriousness, but the assembled press rippled in raucous laughter.

  The director of BioBubble information wasn't amused and did not join in the merriment.

  "Methane is only one of the problematic ascendant gases," he added. "Nitrogen is up, too. As is carbon dioxide."

  "Will you pump in fresh oxygen?"

  "Absolutely not," Bulla said firmly. "BioBubble seals must remain intact until the current test period is over. Otherwise, the experiment will be contaminated, and we must start over."

  "How about sabotage?"

  "Impossible. Who in their right mind would want to sabotage the salvation of all mankind? It would constitute mass suicide for Spaceship Earth."

  Because this made a great soundbite, no one questioned Amos Bulla further. They rushed to beat each other to the air or in print with it.

  The story made the back pages, and the press and public forgot about the BioBubble until the next crisis: another photograph showing portable tanks pumping oxygen into the supposedly airtight dome.

  This time it was a National Enquirer photographer assigned to the BioBubble beat who broke the story. It turned out their first story had raised circulation thirty thousand copies. The Enquirer wanted to hold on to their readers and their quarters.

  When the Enquirer broke the oxygen story, the national press jumped on it with
all four feet.

  Director of Information Amos Bulla fielded new questions like a man before a firing squad dodging bullets. Badly and not at all. His neck kept jerking.

  "Why wasn't this oxygen infusion announced?" he was asked.

  "Our last announcement was barely covered by you people. We concluded there was no press interest."

  "What about the public's right to know?"

  "They know now. We are hiding nothing." Bulla spread his meaty palms in a gesture of abject innocence. Every camera caught the slick sheen on his perspiration-drenched palms.

  "Is the habitat environment contaminated?" he was asked.

  "No. Just refortified. It was either this or start over. Since oxygen is a pure and natural gas, we thought it acceptable to introduce a fresh supply. It's organic, you know."

  "What about pizzas? Are you introducing more of those?"

  "That story is a fraud," Bulla snapped indignantly.

  In the end, the reputation of the BioBubble was tainted, and once the first blot had appeared, the press went scurrying for more.

  They found plenty. Falsified resumes. Drug use. Financial diversions.

  Despite the rain of discredit, the lame jokes and talk-show ridicule, and every attempt to expose the BioBubble as a glorified tourist trap, it refused to burst. It remained unburst for so long that people forgot their expectations.

  The project lumbered on, and the press moved on to the O.J. story and never looked back.

  Until the night the BioBubble became a smoking, stinking heap of blackish brown silicon-and-steel trusswork whose pristine white paint framework turned black and bubbly as hot tar.

  Nobody saw it happen. Not exactly. The only witnesses were calcified by the tremendous heat that melted them inextricably into the viscous glass-and-steel bubble.

  It was after sundown. There were no tourists. And no press.

  The BioBubble sat in the red desert, burnished by silver moonlight and looking as dignified as a child's cluster of bubbles. The internal lights were off. The inhabitatants-as they were called-were fast asleep, from the tiniest songbird to Project Director Bulla in his mobile home a quarter mile away.

  Only the cockroaches, imported from many parts of the globe to ingest vegetable waste, were awake. In the three years the BioBubble had been operating, they had managed to flourish, proving that the scientists who predicted cockroaches would one day inherit the earth were, for once, correct.

  The roaches crawled along the inside of the tempered glass panes as if they owned the project. By night, they did. Nobody was brave enough to stay up after lights out.

  No one witnessed the event because nighttime visitors were distinctly prohibited. The official reason was to allow the inhabitatants to get their proper rest. They went to bed at dusk and rose with the sun.

  The unofficial reason was nighttime was when the catering truck usually arrived.

  This was an off night. There was no catering truck.

  So there were no witnesses other than the roaches and the inhabitants of the nearby artist's colony of Dodona, Arizona, some of whom later swore they saw a white-hot column of light sizzle down from the clear, star-dazzled sky for the briefest of seconds.

  A crack like thunder sounded, waking others, who also swore they saw the beam of light once they understood it was a sure way to be interviewed on national TV. The pale mushroom cloud of moonlight-illuminated smoke was sighted by several people as it drifted and billowed up from the desert floor.

  Since it sounded like the thunder accompanying a lightning strike, no one bothered to check the BioBubble until the next morning. That's when the brown slag heap of vitreous, rehardened glass and steel was discovered and people started to tell their stories-true or otherwise.

  The first thing people realized was that the thunder followed a lightning strike. It never preceded it.

  And no one had ever heard of lightning that could reduce a project the size of the BioBubble to slag, cooking all its eco-dwellers to burned pork chops.

  This once, even the cockroaches didn't survive.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and he was trying to make liver pate.

  The trouble was the livers on the menu of the day were not being cooperative. Their owners wanted to keep them-preferably in their bodies and functioning normally.

  Remo had other plans.

  It was a simple assignment, as assignments went.

  For two years now, the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, had succumbed to a triple-digit annual homicide total, fueled by the simple mathematics of the drug trade. In the process, it acquired the disreputable nickname of "Moneyapolis."

  At least, that's how Remo's employer, Dr. Harold W Smith, explained it to him when Remo had blurted out, "Minneapolis?"

  "An ounce of crack cocaine that sells for five dollars in Chicago and other cities fetches twenty on the streets of Minneapolis. This has attracted drug traffickers in unusually high numbers. Consequently there is a drug turf war going on."

  "You want me in the middle of it?" asked Remo.

  "No. I want you to neutralize the next round of players. A rising Mafia group, the D'Ambrosia crime family."

  "Didn't I nail one of their soldiers a while back?"

  "I do not keep track," Smith said with lemony disinterest. "They operate out of San Francisco. But they see an opportunity in Minneapolis. If we interdict them now, the D'Ambrosias may decide to remain in San Francisco, where local law-enforcement agencies can contain them without our intervention."

  "Gotcha," said Remo, who was in a good mood because it had been over a year since he'd gotten a simple in-and-out assignment.

  "The D'Ambrosia Family is convening a meeting with a local supplier at the Radisson South Hotel, adjacent to Twin Cities Airport," Smith continued. "See that their meeting adjourns permanently. Arrangements have been made for you to join the wait staff."

  "Why do I have to go undercover for a simple massacre?" Remo wondered aloud.

  "The usual reason-security," said Smith, then hung up.

  Since he was in a good mood, Remo didn't rip out the pay telephone at Logan Airport. Instead, he went to catch his flight, knowing that the superefficient Smith had already booked him on the cheapest air carrier known to man.

  Presenting himself at the Friendly Air reservations desk, Remo said, "I'm Remo. You have a ticket for me?"

  The clerk looked him up on his monitor, and asked, "Remo Bozzone?"

  "If that's what it says," said Remo, who often got his cover surname from people not in the loop. He had been Remo Williams most of his life. Until the electric chair.

  "What was that?" asked the clerk.

  "Remo Bozo. That's me."

  "Bozzone."

  "That's me, too," said Remo cheerfully, fishing out a driver's license at random and flashing it with his thumb over the last name.

  The clerk saw that the face matched and the first name was the same, so he didn't push the issue. "Good news, sir," he said brightly.

  "I have a crash-proof plane?"

  "No. We're bumping you up to first class."

  Remo's face fell. "No way. Stick me in coach."

  "But there's more leg room in the first-class cabin."

  "My legs fold just fine."

  "It's free."

  "I'm not paying for this. My employer is."

  "Complimentary drinks," the clerk coaxed.

  "I can get distilled water in coach. Alcohol and I parted company a million years ago."

  Remo now had the bored reservation clerk's interest.

  "What's wrong with first class?"

  "The stewardesses have way too much time on their hands," said Remo with a straight face.

  The clerk looked at Remo as if Remo was John Wayne Gacy come back from the grave. Remo looked back as if he were John Wayne come back from his grave to deal harshly with his namesake.

  In the end, the clerk sniffed and said, "We have no seats available in coach. Will you take a later flight?" r />
  "No time. Is there a place that sells luggage in this terminal?"

  "Try the main concourse."

  "Fine. Give me the ticket."

  Boarding pass in hand, Remo went to a gift shop, picked through the luggage until he found a tan leather carryon with a tiny, keyed padlock and purchased it using his Remo Itri credit card.

  "It's one of our finest bags," the gift-shop manager said, handing back the card and receipt.

  "1 only care about the lock," said Remo, taking the padlock and the tiny wire keyring with its two flat keys and walking out.

  The manager called after Remo. "Sir, what about your bag?"

  "Keep the change," said Remo.

  Going to a men's room, Remo took the padlock hasp between two fingers and began rubbing it vigorously. After a moment, the metal began to thin and elongate until the U shape of the hasp was longer and thinner than manufacturer's specs. When it was long enough to do the job, Remo ran the end through the square hole in his zipper tongue and hooked it in an up position with his belt buckle. Then he locked it with a tinny snick.

  Separating the keys, he slipped one in his Italian loafer under his bare foot and the other in one pocket of the tan chinos and hoped the metal detector wouldn't go off.

  It didn't.

  Already it was a good day.

  The flight to Minneapolis had only one hitch. The usual. A stewardess with short russet hair and green eyes like happy emeralds rested her gaze on Remo's trim, 160-pound body, his overthick wrists and the strong planes of his not-too-handsome face and used a line Remo had been hearing from stewardesses for the best part of his adult life.

  "Coffee, tea or me?"

  This one smiled. Many didn't. Some wore pleading or hopeful expressions. Others actually wept. And one memorable bleached blonde turned their encounter into an unmistakable cry for help by jamming her TWA letter opener into her throbbing jugular and threatening to take her life right there in the center aisle if Remo was brute enough to give an ungentlemanly response.

  "I don't drink any of those things," said Remo this time.

  The redhead wasn't taking no for an answer. Redheads, Remo had long ago discovered, rarely did.

  "But you don't know how I taste," she said plaintively.