Oil Slick Read online

  Oil Slick

  The Destroyer #16

  Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir

  For Brian and Devin,

  true partners in crime.

  CHAPTER ONE

  No greater enemy exists than one’s own illusion of safety

  —House of Sinanju

  HE WAS A BIG ONE. Standing upright, he could reach the topmost branches and in one bite consume the terrified man-apes hiding there. A swat of his giant paw could crack the sabertooth’s spine like a dried twig.

  But nothing was dry here in the lush foliage, where each step oozed into muck and the very air steamed from the rich, tropical growth as Tyrannosaurus Rex thundered through the swamp.

  In drier climates, others of his species would leave their bones for the descendants of the man-apes to piece together for their museums. But this would be thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years later, when the man-apes ruled the earth.

  For now, the man-ape was only a tender morsel, scrambling desperately through the treetops, where branches touched and mingled.

  Since Tyrannosaurus feared no enemy, he moved along without looking down, his eyes searching the branches for any man-apes too slow to have fled. Then a hind leg went into the muck just a little too deeply.

  The danger signal flashed in the tiny, bird-sized brain. With his other hind leg, the giant animal tried to lift himself, but that leg sank even deeper.

  As the creature sank, the small front paws grasped at a tree, but only tore it—muck sucking from its flooded roots. With a raging bellow, the Tyrannosaurus swallowed slime and then settled into the soft ooze.

  One terrified man-ape, hidden in the treetop high above, watched as the huge hulk sank out of sight beneath him. His primitive brain wondered only briefly if there was any way he could get a piece of that massive meat, now sliding away from him. He soon forgot the thought.

  No matter, the man-ape was alive for a while longer and what he did not know and could not perceive was that his own descendants, who would walk easily on two legs and who would not need the trees for protection, would need the Tyrannosaurus’s body for survival more than he did. His descendants would fight and scheme and lie over the monster’s body.

  For even as the oxygen stopped coursing through the giant reptilian body, a strange chemical change was beginning. The body was beginning to rot, and along with smaller bodies and foliage it would decompose under great pressure, and over many thousands of years, these decomposed carbon-based bodies would form a black liquid called oil.

  The black liquid moved under the earth as if alive. It passed easily through porous stones or openings, until it hit a cap of unporous rock that prevented it from moving upward. When water pressure from below prevented it from moving back downward, it became a stable, motionless, very accessible pocket of oil. All a man would have to do would be to sink a hole through the capstone and out would gush dark, black crude.

  When that happened, the Tyrannosaurus’s body would be indistinguishable from any other organisms, even the occasional body of the ape that would become man. They would all be crude oil, and because of a difference of merely pennies a barrel for their liquid remains, the industrialized world would almost manipulate itself into bankruptcy.

  The ground above the particular pool of oil to which this Tyrannosaurus had contributed its remains gradually changed from swamp to jungle to sandy hot desert. The area became a Phoenician trading post, then a Roman city, then trackless desert again. Finally it was resurrected by Italians, whose presence and wealth attracted roaming Berber tribesmen.

  In the Arab nationalism of the late twentieth century—according to Western measures of time—the land above the Tyrannosaurus’s body became known as the Revolutionary People’s Free Arab Republic. To most of the world it was still known as Lobynia, a name it had carried for centuries, until the deposing a few years before of its king, His Islamic Majesty Adras.

  While new history books reported that the king had been deposed by the heroic struggles of the illustrious Arab people’s revolutionary fervor, the great page in Arab heroism had been helped along by Seagram’s Seven Whiskey.

  The king’s personal pilot, Pat Callahan of Jersey City, N.J., U.S.A., had been drunk the week of the revolution, and only the Lobynian Air Force’s chief of staff, Muhammad Ali Hassan, was available to fly the king’s jet from the Swiss health spa he had been visiting back to the Italian-named capital of Dapoli.

  When King Adras heard that revolutionary forces were taking over the palaces and the Royal Lobynian Radio Station, he offered Callahan five thousand dollars in gold to put down his bottle of Seagram’s Seven, sober up immediately, and fly him and his German bodyguards back to Lobynia.

  “Oh, Majesty, I would be honored to fly you for nothing,” said General Ali Hassan, chief of staff of the Lobynian Air Force.

  “Ten thousand dollars,” said King Adras to Callahan, who was trying to get to his knees.

  “How much is that in rials?” asked Callahan, who had been working for the king for five years now. But before King Adras could answer, Callahan passed out in the hotel suite.

  “I will fly you through storm and flak and over ocean and under clouds. I shall carry your royal majesty in grandeur like the eagle. I go where you command,” said Air Chief of Staff Ali Hassan.

  “Try going away from me,” said the king, who had $250 million worth of Mirage jets rusting on Lobynian airfields, an investment made to show royal confidence in the Lobynian Air Force, whose leading pilot was none other than its commander, General Ali Hassan.

  Hassan was so good, said his fellow Muslims, that he could almost fly a jet without a Frenchman as copilot. When Ali Hassan had made his first solo in a Piper Cub, Lobynia promptly bought the jets. They never touched a cloud again.

  Thus, when his Air Force chief of staff was the only one capable of returning him—or, more accurately, willing to return him—to Lobynia, King Adras decided to reassert his royal presence by making a long-distance telephone call.

  With the help of the Swiss national police, he finally got a call through to his palace.

  A young colonel answered the phone.

  “Where is my minister of defense?” asked the king.

  “In jail,” said the colonel.

  “Where is the commander of my armies?”

  “Fled to Morocco.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Colonel Muammar Baraka.”

  “I don’t remember you. Describe yourself.”

  “I scored highest on the entrance exam in the history of the royal military academy.”

  “I don’t place you.”

  “I lead the Lobynian armor on your birthday parade.”

  “Oh, yes. The Italian-looking fellow.”

  “Correct.”

  “Well, you are now a general. I have just promoted you. Crush the rebellion. Shoot the traitors and clean the blood out of the palace before Friday.” King Adras looked at the unconscious Callahan still clutching his bottle of Seagram’s Seven. “Make that Saturday.” he said.

  “I am afraid I can’t do that, your majesty.”

  “Why not?”

  “I am the leader of the rebellion.”

  “Oh. I guess you’re ready to face my German bodyguards?”

  “They have no way of getting here and besides every man, woman, and child has lifted his voice in the revolution. We will tear you and your imperialist reactionary lackey to shreds. We will burn your eyes out, tear your limbs. Today we have taken the first step towards Arab glory and civilization.”

  “This doesn’t mean a complete stop to my income, does it?”

  “Not necessarily. A king who does not try to regain his crown can live very comfortably.”

 
“May Allah bless the revolution.”

  “May Allah bless his majesty.”

  “Use the Swiss banks. They’re more experienced in these matters. And don’t worry about the legend of my family crown.”

  “What legend?” asked the colonel.

  “It is said that when my family ruled Baghdad…I am not a Berber, as you know.”

  “That helped considerably with the revolution.”

  “When we had the caliphate of Baghdad…this was way before that sergeant declared himself shah…well, in any case, it is said that when an ambassador from an eastern country wished to present the most magnificent gift he could think of, he gave my ancestor—the caliph—a promise. This promise, he said, was worth more than gold, more than rubies, more than the finest silks from Cathay.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “I’m telling the story,” said King Adras.

  “I don’t have all day.”

  “Well, to make a beautiful, long story short and ugly, what he gave was the promise of the services of the finest assassins in the world. He who takes the crown from the head of any of the descendants of the great caliph will reap a whirlwind from the East. But it will come from the West.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Long live the revolution. Good-bye.” And the young colonel hung up the phone and did not think about the fanciful tale, one more tool of reactionary forces, until he held the industrialized world by a ring through its nose. And the ring was what the Tyrannosaurus’s body had become. Oil.

  And at first, just like the Tyrannosaurus, Colonel Muammar Baraka was afraid of nothing.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HIS NAME WAS REMO and he was ready.

  He did not have to be told he was ready, because if he had had to be told, then he would not have been ready. He could not feel he was ready because the knowledge was beyond feeling. It was a knowing so quiet, so beyond far and yet so close at the same time, that when it was there one knew it.

  It came to him, not during nerve-chilling exercises and not during his balance tests as he hovered twenty stories above the street on a narrow hotel ledge. It came to him in his sleep in a hotel room in Denver, Colorado. He opened his eyes and said:

  “Wow. I’m ready.”

  He went into the bathroom and turned on the light. He looked at himself in the full-length mirror behind the door. It was more than a decade now since he had started, and if anything, he had lost ten or fifteen pounds since then. Thinner. Definitely thinner. But he still had the thick wrists. They had been nature’s gift; everything else he had been taught.

  He dressed. Black socks, tan slip-on shoes of Italian leather, gray slacks, and blue shirt. He had dark eyes and high cheekbones, the flesh drawn taut under them. There hadn’t been any more operations to change his face recently, and in the last few years he had learned, if need be, to change it himself. It wasn’t that hard, and anyone could do it. It was just a matter of tiny changes, muscle manipulations within the mouth, a tensing of the scalp around the hairline, a change in the cast of the eyes. When most people tried it, they looked as though they were making a funny face, because they forgot and did one thing at a time instead of making all the changes simultaneously.

  The hotel hallway was silent when he slipped out, and Remo Williams did not bother to lock his room. What would anyone take, anyhow? Underwear? Slacks? So what? And if they should take money, so what again? What could he spend it on? He’d never be able to buy a home, at least not one to live in. A car? He could buy all the cars he wanted. So what?

  Money was not a problem. He was told at the beginning that he would never have a money problem again. What they didn’t tell him was that it wouldn’t make any difference. It was as though someone were assured that he would be free from attack by flying saucers. Well now, isn’t that nice?

  No, there was different treasure now, that no one could take away from him. Remo stopped in front of the adjacent hallway door. Well, only one person could take it away. That one person was sleeping in the adjacent room. His teacher, Chiun, the Master of Sinanju.

  Remo took an elevator down to the lobby, hushed in its deep night wait until morning would make it alive with people again.

  When he and Chiun had checked into the hotel the day before, Remo had looked out the window and said, “There are the mountains.”

  Chiun had nodded almost imperceptibly. The frail wisp of a beard on the yellowed parchment face seemed to shiver.

  “Here it will be where you must find the mountain,” he said.

  “What?” Remo had said, turning to Chiun, who was sitting on one of his fourteen gaudily lacquered steamer trunks. Remo wore all his clothes. When they became soiled, he threw them away and bought new ones. Chiun never threw possessions away, but he chided Remo for his white American materialism.

  “It will be here,” said Chiun, “and you must find the mountain.”

  “What mountain?”

  “How can I tell you, if you do not know?” asked Chiun.

  “Hey, don’t play philosopher with me, Little Father. The House of Sinanju is a house of killers, and you’re supposed to be an assassin, not a philosopher,” said Remo.

  “When something is so good, some one thing is so glorious, then it must be many things. Sinanju is many things and what makes us different from all those that have ever been before is what we think and how we think.”

  “God forbid Upstairs should miss one payment to your village, Little Father. They’ll find out how philosophical you are.”

  Chiun thought a long moment while he looked at Remo. “This may be the last time I look at you the way you are,” he said.

  “Which way? As what?”

  “As an inadequate piece of a pale pig’s ear,” said Chiun with a high cackle before he disappeared into a separate room. He did not answer when Remo knocked. Not for morning exercises nor for evening advancement did the Master of Sinanju respond to Remo’s knocks, even though during the day, Remo could hear the dull television voices of the soap operas in which the Master of Sinanju found pleasure. Thus it was for several days, until Remo was awake and aware that he was ready.

  It was cool that spring night in the mile-high city, and while Remo could not see the great Rockies ahead of him, he knew snow was there. At a street corner, he stopped. The snow would melt and whatever destruction the winter had done to life would be exposed. If not buried in some dry place, elk or man or field mouse would rot in the sun and become part of the soil and of the mountain which had been there long before life tiptoed over its crust, and which would be there long after life was buried in it.

  Ten years ago, when Remo had started his training, he did not think of such things.

  He had been framed for a murder he had not committed. He had thought he was being executed but had awakened to find he had been selected as the enforcement arm of a secret organization that did not exist.

  It did not exist because public knowledge of it would be an admission that the United States Constitution did not work. Its job was secretly to balance the books that had tilted on the side of crime. Remo, as its assassin, was the chief bookkeeper. “Violate the Constitution to save the Constitution,” the young president who created the secret organization named CURE had said.

  Only three men knew what it was and what it did. One of them was the president, another was the head of CURE—a Dr. Harold W. Smith, director of the Folcroft Sanitarium research center in Rye, N.Y., that served as CURE's cover—and Remo.

  After he had been recruited from the electric chair, Remo had been put in the hands of Chiun, an aged Korean, for training in the assassin’s art. But not even Dr. Harold W. Smith of Folcroft could have anticipated the changes that the training would make. No computer could have projected what the human body could do, not even if they had fed in data calculated on the per gram strength of an ant times the balance of a cat.

  They had selected one man and his body to be a tool to serve a cause, and ten yea
rs later he found himself using the cause to serve the tool.

  Remo felt the mountains and knew this. He was who he was, and he realized now he had always known this. It was the mountain that Chiun had told him he must find, the mountain of his own identity.

  Over the decade the Master of Sinanju had shown through training, through pain, through fear, through despair, just what Remo could be, and now that he understood it, he knew that what he could be, of course, was just what he had always been.

  Done. Then he knew. So this was it. As Chiun had said, the truth is a common thing. Only fairy tales glitter like rubies in a crystal universe.

  “Hey, gringo. What you looking at, eh, gringo?”

  The voice came from behind a parked car. There were eight of them, none taller than Remo. Cigarette butts gleamed in the black, moonless night. Down the street a traffic light became green and nothing moved.

  “Hey, gringo, I talking to you. You Chicano or gringo?”

  “I was thinking and you interrupted me.”

  “Hey, Chico, he thinking. The gringo is thinking. Everybody shut up, the big gringo, he thinking. What you thinking, gringo?”

  “I’m thinking how lucky I am to be upwind from you.”

  “Hey, the gringo, he smart. The gringo he real smart. Heavy, man. Gringo, no one tell you this is Chicano territory? This is a Chicano street. I Caesar Ramirez. You need my okay to go thinking on my street, gringo.”

  Remo turned and walked back toward the hotel. He heard one of the youths yell something else. Then they were following him. When one got so close Remo could feel the hot breath on his neck, Remo caught him by the lips and yanked forward, pulling the arching body over in front of him, before walking into the young man’s descending spinal column. Pop, crack, that was it; the body was a lifeless bag of flesh. When the sanitation men found it the next day, the hips and shoulders would not be connected by bone.

  Immediately knives were thrust at Remo’s back. In a little dance step, without changing direction or stopping, Remo continued moving toward the hotel.