Skin Deep td-49 Page 2

  There was Chiun, of course, his trainer and teacher. Chiun was the Master of Sinanju, the greatest assassin alive, but he was still an eighty-year-old man whose principal interests ran toward ancient Korean poetry, reruns of 1965 soap operas, and a terrorist Oriental news anchorwoman named Cheeta Ching. And killing people. Not exactly your scintillating after-dinner conversationalist.

  Using as markers the long steel poles rooting the bridge to the ocean floor, Remo dived and swam underwater for the next half-mile. Up for air, watching the cars overhead breezing into the country's southernmost land mass, back under for another half-mile. After ten minutes he was on land, running down Roosevelt Boulevard, past the acres of shopping complexes and fast-food eateries known collectively as "New Key West," waving occasionally to honking cars filled with pretty girls, and turned onto Truman Avenue into the old town, Cayo Hueso, as the Spaniards first called it, with its winding tropical streets and warm kitchen smells tinged with Cuban coffee and the pungent sweetness of crawfish.

  He was feeling better. His last assignment from upstairs had not gone smoothly. More lives had been lost than he'd counted on, and he had had to travel halfway around the world with an injury to his nervous system that had nearly killed him. After it was over, Remo never wanted to work again. But now, in the fragrant Florida sunlight, surrounded by an explosion of orchids and hibiscus and frangipani, he was growing stronger.

  "Let's see, let's see," he mumbled as he continued to enumerate the human beings he was close to. "Chiun," he said, holding up one finger. "And..." He scoured his mind.

  Parents couldn't count, because Remo didn't have parents, and the nuns at the orphanage where he was raised didn't count either, since he never got to know many of them well, and those who knew him did not like him. The cops at the precinct in Newark couldn't count because he was still a rookie on the force when he got bleeped out of official existence, framed for a crime he didn't commit and sentenced to die in an electric chair that didn't work. Only everyone thought it did work, and that Remo had died in it, because it had been set up that way by the sneakiest, coldest, least human individual in America...

  Remo held up a second finger. "Smith," he said disgustedly.

  Dr. Harold W. Smith, director of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, was Remo's second and only other link to the rest of humankind.

  Folcroft was Smiths cover for what he really did, which was to employ Remo as the enforcement arm of an organization called CURE. It was a secret organization, an extra legal offshoot of the president's office. CURE's job was to control crime by functioning outside the Constitution.

  Sometimes Smith worked alone, pulling out information from the giant computer banks built into Folcroft and getting that information to the right people through thousands of innocuous channels— clerks who thought they were informing for the FBI, government workers who thought it was the CIA who was sending them small but helpful checks each month, reporters who thought they had a hush-hush link with the Treasury Department.

  But Smith didn't always work alone. Sometimes— when somebody needed to be bumped off, to be precise— Remo worked for him.

  That was the depressing part. As if killing people wasn't bad enough, Remo had to kill people for the dullest, driest, most extraordinarily boring and humorless man on the globe.

  Smith had sent him to Key West three days before, to "await further instructions," as the lemon-faced New Englander had put it. Smith always talked as if he were writing memos. "Awaiting further instructions," of course, meant that Remo was going to have to cream someone pretty soon.

  What a way to make a living, he thought as he sprinted past the chic boutiques on Duvall Street, past the Bull and Whistle, where the area's tough guys strutted, past the throbbing discos, where too-pretty boys displayed their wares with studied decadence to moneyed old men. The carnival midway of Old Key West was already in full swing, beckoning with its lights and music and tropical sea breezes to sailors, lovers, Caribbean blacks, college kids, local shrimpers, and sponge fishermen.

  Remo went on the Mallory Dock, where the tourists had long since finished applauding the nightly sunset as if it were a Broadway production. Near the dock was Chiun's and Remo's temporary home, a quiet little Conch house, built indestructibly by local craftsmen, or "conches," and surrounded by the wild orange blossoms of massive poinciana trees.

  "I'm home, Chiun," Remo said.

  The frail old Oriental with tufts of white, wispy hair in patches on his head and chin sat on a mat on the floor, his almond eyes transfixed on the television, where the lizard-eyed, venom-tongued Cheeta Ching spewed out the day's misdeeds with spiteful relish.

  "A naval aircraft carrier bearing the mangled bodies of 213 dead crew members, undoubtedly the victims of yet another U.S. government plot against its oppressed people, has been discovered off the coast of Florida," the newscaster said. On the wall above the television hung a color photograph of the same woman, encased in an ornate gilt frame. "More details of the Navy Death Ship tonight at eleven. Till then, this is Cheeta Ching, the voice of truth."

  "Hi," Remo said, trying again for the old man's attention.

  Chiun ignored him.

  "It's a nice night. I thought maybe we'd go into town, look things over. We could have a good time."

  "Silence, brainless one," Chiun said, still staring fixedly at the television.

  Remo sighed. It occurred to him that if he had known he was going to have to spend his life with only two people, and one of them was going to be an eighty-year-old Korean assassin and the other was going to be Harold W. Smith, he would have stayed on at the orphanage.

  * * *

  A thousand miles away, in Washington, D.C., a score of top U.S. government officials sat in darkness as they watched slides depicting the gory aftermath of the massacre aboard the U.S.S. Andrew Jackson.

  "This is typical of the sort of damage inflicted," said a uniformed officer who had been introduced as a forensic scientist. He waved a pointer over a slide showing a man with no eyes and a gaping hole in the middle of his neck. "Can we have a closeup of this, please?" he asked politely.

  The projector clicked, and the festering neck wound sprang into bloody detail. Somebody swore softly.

  "Of course, these bodies weren't found until some three days after the deaths occurred, so a certain amount of decomposition had set in. Still, you see the general idea. Next."

  The following slide showed the deck of the ship, littered with slaughtered bodies and tinged with the rusty-brown remains of a sea of blood.

  "Good Lord," someone said.

  The slides flashed one after the other. Dead men lying in macabre repose in their bunks, in the mess hall, frozen in position in the latrine, in the engine room, charred and blackened from the heat of the furnaces, keeled over at the controls on the bridge. "This is how the ship was found," the medical examiner continued. "No one alive on board, anywhere."

  "Wasn't there an alarm sent, an April-day or something?" a man in an impeccably tailored suit asked from the darkness. He was the Secretary of Defense of the United States.

  "No Mayday, sir," a gruff voice belonging to a vice-admiral answered.

  "Weren't they in radio contact with somebody?"

  "No, sir. They were on top-secret maneuvers to try out the sea-landing capability of the F-24. It's a new bomber designed to fly without radar detection—"

  "I know about the F-24," the secretary said drily. "I'm paying for it. I pay for everything around here. The stealth bomber. What's that got to do with it?"

  The vice-admiral hemmed and hawed. "Actually, quite a bit, sir. You see—" He stammered, cleared his throat, then tried another tack. "To get back to the maneuvers, sir. Since the stealth bomber was to be launched, the ship was under orders to avoid radio contact for forty-eight hours unless the F-24 was detected by radar. That would have meant the bomber had failed, and radio contact would have confirmed its location. Since we didn't hear from the Andrew Jackson, we assumed the man
euvers were a success."

  "A success," the secretary growled. "It's only a success if it's free. How did you eventually find the ship, anyway?"

  "A cruise ship heading back from the Caribbean found her by accident, sir."

  "A cruise ship!" the secretary bellowed. "Swell. All we need is publicity and a media circus."

  "There's no reason to panic," the medical examiner said hastily. "After all, those men on board didn't die of any disease. No one's going to catch anything from them."

  "Fine. Wonderful. There's no reason to panic, none at all. Two hundred and fourteen well-trained sailors on secret maneuvers with the most powerful bomber ever invented are murdered off the coast of Florida, that's all. What the hell do you mean there's no reason for panic?" he yelled. "The president's going to hang me."

  "Two hundred and thirteen men, sir," the medical examiner corrected diffidently. "One was missing. We presume he must have been washed overboard. From the looks of things, they ran into some bad weather."

  "Who was it? An officer?"

  "Yes, sir," the vice-admiral said. "A Lieutenant Richard Caan. The copilot of the F-24."

  "Well, at least we save some life insurance," the secretary said. "Anything else?"

  "We do have more slides, sir," the medical examiner said.

  "Hang the slides. Anything else?"

  The vice-admiral coughed into his fist. "Well, yes, sir. We were coming to that. One piece of machinery was also missing."

  "Which?" the secretary asked, a spark of alarm already showing in his eyes. "How much did it cost?"

  The vice-admiral took a deep breath. "The F24, sir. The stealth bomber."

  A rumble rose from the small crowd.

  The secretary stood up slowly. Even in the dark, every man in the room could see the color drain from his face. "It is clear that the United States Navy has been incapable of containing this problem," he said slowly and quietly. "I had better inform the president." He swept over the room with a gesture. "Proceed with the meeting, gentlemen. Do not let me keep you from your slides." He turned briskly and walked out of the room.

  From the back row of seats, another man rose inconspicuously. He was an ordinary, dull-looking middle-aged man with graying hair, steelrimmed spectacles, a three-piece gray suit, an attaché case, and a pinched, lemony expression. He, too, left the meeting.

  In the corridor, he turned left, walked two doors down, and entered a small room containing a smaller cubicle constructed of plexiglass and guaranteed to be bug-free.

  He locked the door to the small room, stepped into the plexiglass cubicle, opened his attaché case containing a small red computer-powered telephone, and waited. Harold W. Smith was expecting a call from the President of the United States.

  He checked his watch. The call wouldn't come for another twenty minutes, at least, but he had no need to watch more of the grisly pictures in the meeting room. He had known there would be trouble, ever since a report two months before concerning a "lost" cargo ship— another casualty of the Bermuda Triangle, according to the press. But Smith knew from several clandestine sources that the ship hadn't been lost until the Navy sank it, quietly disposing of the mutilated bodies on board when no answer to the riddle of the massacre could be found.

  The Navy, the Coast Guard, the Army, the Air Force. They had all tried. They had all failed. That was why the president had asked Harold W. Smith to Washington, to the top-level briefing on the Andrew Jackson enigma, to the tiny plexiglass room with no listening devices.

  The phone rang. "Yes, Mr. President," Smith said.

  The voice at the other end was weary. "The F-24 is missing," the president said.

  "Yes, sir."

  The deep voice spoke deliberately. "You know, of course, about the summit meeting scheduled for this week in New York City?"

  "I do," Smith said.

  "The Soviet premier will have heard about the incident on board the Andrew Jackson and the missing stealth bomber by then."

  "It cannot be avoided," Smith said.

  The president spoke softly. "The stealth is the only thing that's making these bastards want to talk seriously about reducing forces. With it gone, we won't have any bargaining position at all. We have to get it back."

  "My man is in position in Key West," Smith said. "He's prepared to take action immediately."

  "How's that?" the president asked, shocked.

  "He arrived five hours after the ship was discovered."

  "But the briefing today was the first disclosure of the incident, even to top-security-cleared personnel. How did you know about it?"

  There was a long pause. "Will that be all, sir?" Smith asked.

  'The president sighed. "One man..."

  "Good day, sir," Smith said, and hung up.

  It had just been a matter of time, Smith knew, before CURE would be called in. That was why he had placed Remo in Key West at the first rumblings of the Andrew Jackson fiasco. He replaced the phone in his briefcase, locked it, left the plexiglass-enclosed room, and walked quickly into the street, to a pay phone where he began the long routing codes that would eventually connect him securely with his human weapon.

  Remo Williams. The Destroyer.

  Just a matter of time.

  That time had come.

  ?Chapter Three

  The small rowboat slid noiselessly through the blue water. Remo's arms ached. He had been rowing for more than twelve hours, since before dawn, steering the tiny craft in ever-widening circles from the point where the Andrew Jackson had been sighted.

  "This is useless," he said, throwing down the oars. "That ship drifted for three days before it was found. We don't even know what we're looking for. There must be thousands of islands in the Florida Keys."

  "There," Chiun said, pointing in the distance to a cluster of postage-stamp-sized islands. The tuft of white hair on top of the old Oriental's head fluttered in the breeze. "Take us to that island. The one with the concealed path."

  Remo looked to the cluster, then back at Chiun sitting like a dowager in the back of the boat. "There's no concealed path, Little Father," Remo said, suppressing a smile. "These islands have never been inhabited."

  "Thus said Marco Polo to the Master Hun Tup when they approached China," Chiun snapped. "Stop your arrogant prattling and drive us to the island."

  Remo turned the boat toward the islands. "A Master of Sinanju was with Marco Polo?" he asked.

  "One of the finest. You think the white man could have found anything by himself? Had Hun Tup not persisted, the expedition would have ended up on the Arctic subcontinent."

  "No egg rolls for the crew, I guess."

  "Polo would have been like that crazed Columbus, who claimed that your country was India. How could it be India without filth and curry and plague?"

  "But Columbus didn't have a Master of Sinanju on board," Remo said, smiling.

  "He did, unfortunately. Ko Wat, the Misdirected, was with him. A minor blemish on the glorious House of Sinanju. Halt," he said, pointing. "Do you see?"

  As they neared the small island, Remo narrowed the focus of his eyes until he seemed to be looking through high-powered field glasses. In the fading light he saw cleverly concealed traces of human existence: broken twigs, a sweep across the sand to cover footprints, a dead tree covering what looked like a narrow path.

  "You were right," Remo said.

  "And you were wrong. As usual." Chiun grinned. "As usual, heh, heh."

  They moored the boat. A flock of fat white gulls settled lazily along the shoreline.

  "Look at the size of these birds," Remo said. He felt an uncomfortable turn in his stomach when they were joined by still more seagulls, pecking idly at the ground, their black dolls' eyes never leaving the two men. "Something's funny about these birds," Remo insisted.

  But Chiun was standing completely still, gazing at the bushes farther inland. "Silence," he said softly. "We are being watched."

  A twig broke. Instantly Remo's attention riveted on th
e bushes. His muscles tensed and then relaxed, ready for the inevitable attack. Then, with a piercing yell, it came, like a vision from Hades.

  There was only one man, and he was no more than a boy, judging from the awkwardness of his movements. He was squat, with the stocky, long-torsoed build of an Oriental, and he was naked except for a loincloth against his sundarkened skin. His hair, coarse and straight and black, stood up from his head in stiff peaks. In his right hand he held a club. His left was a gnarled stump, with four fingers missing.

  These were the things Remo saw first as the strange attacker leaped a foot above the tops of the bushes, screaming and wild-eyed. But a split second later, Remo no longer saw the intruder as a person. All he remembered after that moment was a face, a face so frightening and grotesque that everything else about the man became secondary.

  Remo's breath caught at the sight. He ducked and spun to begin his attack, but was knocked out of the way by a tremendous force out of nowhere. It was Chiun.

  "Hold," Chiun called, his yellow robe still billowing from his inexplicable assault on Remo.

  "What'd you do that for?" Remo asked as in front of him the boy with the disfigured face stood unmoving, his unsightly features twisted in bewilderment.

  Now Remo got a better look at him. He was an Oriental, but only vaguely so. Maybe Polynesian, Remo thought, although the scars and lesions on his skin all but obliterated his natural appearance. He was covered with sores, seeping with clear liquid, and one eyelid was swollen to half-mast, revealing the blackened remains of a dead eye beneath.

  "I am the Master of Sinanju," Chiun said. "This is my son. Tell your chief we are come."

  The boy's pustule-encrusted mouth opened. He dropped the club from his hand as if it were a foul thing. Then, to Remo's amazement, he emitted a small cry and fell to his knees before Chiun.

  The old man touched his head. "Go," he said gently. "We will wait here."

  The boy stood up, bowed again, and scurried back into the underbrush.

  Remo followed him with his eyes for a few moments. When the monstrous-looking boy had disappeared into the thick jungle greenery, Remo turned to Chiun. "What was that about?" he asked, rubbing the spot on his arm where Chiun had pushed him out of the boy's way. "Do you know him?"