Destroyer 026 - In Enemy Hands

VIP免费

2024-12-06 0 0 2.37MB 63 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

ALL IN A DAY'S WORK

"What brings you here?" asked the Russian.

"Work," said Remo. "I'm an assassin. Right now, I'm working on the Treska."

"How do you know about Treska?" said the man.

"It's complicated, you know, government politics and everything. In any case, I'm here to kill you if you're Treska.

You're Alpha Team, right?"

"We happen to be Alpha Team, yes, but aren't you overlooking this," said the man and

jiggled the short British gun. By the time the man fired the Sten gun, his arm was broken.

He did not feel the pain of the broken arm because one needs a spinal column to transmit

pain impulses. The man had lost a piece of his about the same time, the pain would have

reached his brain.

The Alpha Team, sluggish with days of drinking, moved with surprising speed to their

weapons. But by the time their eyes adjusted to Remo's movements, his hands were snapping

through bonequick silent kills. In seconds they were all dead. Had anyone been watching they

would have thought: "How could one man do so much?" To Remo it was just another day's

work . . .

THE DESTROYER SERIES:

#1 CREATED, #20 ASSASSIN'S PLAYOFF

THE DESTROYER #21 DEADLY SEEDS

#2 DEATH CHECK #22 BRAIN DRAIN

#3 CHINESE PUZZLE #23 CHILD'S PLAY

#4 MAFIA FIX #24 KING'S CURSE

#5 DR. QUAKE #25 SWEET DREAMS

#6 DEATH THERAPY #26 IN ENEMY HANDS

#7 UNION BUST #27 THE LAST TEMPLE

#8 SUMMIT CHASE #28 SHIP OF DEATH

#9 MURDER'S SHIELD #29 THE FINAL DEATH

#10 TERROR SQUAD #30 MUGGER BLOOD

#11 KILL OR CURE #31 THE HEAD MEN

#12 SLAVE SAFARI #32 KILLER

#13 ACID ROCK CHROMOSOMES

#14 JUDGMENT DAY #33 VOODOO DIE

#15 MURDER WARD #34 CHAINED REACTION

#16 OIL SLICK #35 LAST CALL

#17 LAST WAR DANCE #36 POWER PLAY

#18 FUNNY MONEY #37 BOTTOM LINE

#19 HOLY TERROR #38 BAY CITY BLAST

WRITE FOR OUR FREE CATALOG

If there is a Pinnacle Book you wantand you cannot find it locallyit is available from us simply

by sending the title and price plus 50(4 per order and 100 per copy to cover mailing and

handling costs to:

Pinnacle Book Services

P.O. Box 690

New York, N.Y. 10019

Please allow 4 weeks for delivery. New York State and California residents add applicable

sales tax.

_Check here if you want to receive our catalog regularly.

PINNACLE BOOKS

LOS ANGELES

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

DESTROYER #26: IN ENEMY HANDS

An original Pinnacle Books edition, published for the first time anywhere.

ISBN: 0523409028

First printing, January 1977 Second printing, March 1978 Third printing, November

1979

Cover illustration by Hector Garrido Printed in the United States of America

PINNACLE BOOKS, INC. 2029 Century Park East Los Angeles, California 90067

For the great McAdow's of South Charleston, Ohio. Sam, Carol, Sam, Jr., Beth, John and Michael.

IN ENEMY HANDS

CHAPTER ONE

Walter Forbier surrendered his .25 caliber Beretta to the owner of a small bookstore on Boulevard Raspail in Paris,

France, just as the first buds appeared under the fresh spring sun that early April day, and four hours before laughing

men beat his rib cage into the muscles of his heart.

"You have no knives?" said the scrawny old man with a gray sweater and a twodayold beard. His teeth were black

from a gummy thing he chewed and rolled over his lips.

"No," said Forbier.

"No brass knuckles?"

"No," said Forbier.

"No explosives?"

"No," said Forbier.

"Any other weapons?"

"I know karate. Do you want me to cut off my hands?" Forbier asked.

"Please, please, we must get this over with," the man said. "Now sign this." He unsealed a

plastic case and took out a three by five card. Forbier could see his own signature on the

back. The man placed the white card on the counter, unlined side up.

"Why don't you have one with photograph and height and weight?"

"Please, please," said the man.

"They're more afraid of my killing someone than of my getting killed."

"You are expendable, Walter Forbier. Is that the correct pronunciation?" He had

pronounced it Foebeeyay.

"That's the French way. It's four like in the number and beer like in the drink. Fourbeer."

He watched his little pistol go under the counter. Forbier wanted to grab it and run.

He felt as if he had lost his bathing suit while swimming, and that now, while thousands lined

the shore, he would have to walk through all of them back to his clothes.

"That's all," said the man after Forbier signed the card. "Leave."

"What are you going to do with it?" asked Forbier, nodding to where the pistol had gone

under the counter.

"You can get another when you're allowed."

"I've had that one for five years," said Forbier. "It's never failed me."

"Please, please," said the man. "I don't want you spending too much time here. There are

others."

"I don't know why they didn't just call us home," Forbier said.

"Shhhh," said the man. "Get out of here."

Walter Forbier was twentynine years old and he was wise enough that spring morning not to

expect to live to thirty. He had a knack for bad timing.

Five years before, just out of the Marines with a degree in mechanical engineering, he had

discovered that almost everything he had learned before doing his military hitch was now

useless.

"But I graduated summa cum laude," Forbier had said.

"Which means that you're one of the foremost experts in outdated systems," said the

employment agency.

"Well, what am I going to do?"

"What have you been doing recently?"

"Wading in mud up to my neck, avoiding booby traps, and trying to stay alive in situations

that did not lend themselves to longevity," Forbier said.

"Have you thought of politics?" said the employment agency.

Forbier had gotten married, just in time to find out that others were enjoying the same

pleasures without the legal complications. On the honeymoon, his wife invited several

pretty young things to their hotel dining table. He was amazed that she showed no fear of his

being attracted to them. Then he discovered it was he who should be jealous. They were for

her.

"Why didn't you tell me you were a lesbian?" he had asked.

"You were the first really nice man I ever met. I didn't want to hurt your feelings."

"But why did you marry me?"

"I thought we could work it out."

"How?"

"I didn't know."

Thus, without a wife and without a job and with a useless technical degree, Walter

Forbier vowed he would not mistime his future again. He would get into something that was

going to last. He looked around, and the one profession that looked healthiest was fighting

the cold war. Even if America lost, there would be even better employment under the

Communists.

And so Walter Forbier joined the Central Intelligence Agency, and, for $427.83 a month

extra, a hazard mission called Sunflower.

"It's beautiful. You see the world. You travel singly or in groups. You get your extra pay

and all you have to do is stay in shape."

"Sunflower won't be disbanded?" Forbier asked cautiously.

"Can't be," said the officer in charge.

"Why not?"

"Because it's not up to us to disband it."

"Who is it up to?" Forbier asked.

"The Russians."

It was the Russians, the officer had explained, who had started the whole thing. At the end of World War II,

the Soviet Union had had an excess of highly trained killer teams in Eastern Europe. They were not mass combat

troops, but specialists

in eliminating specific people. Most soldiers just fired away and advanced. These men

could be given a name and could guarantee that the person, whoever he was or wherever

he was, would be dead within a week. The Russian group was called Treskawhich meant cod.

The officer didn't know why the Russians had named their unit Treska any more than he knew why the CIA

had named its counterunit Sunflower. The Treska had been crucial in the Russian takeover of Czechoslovakia,

and even more crucial when the country had rebelled briefly. Their job was to make sure key leaders died just

as the Russian tanks moved in.

"They're beautiful. Not one peep out of the Czechs. The tanks were only window

dressing, sort of like a show of force. The Czechs lost because they had no leaders left

living, nobody to tell the people to go to the hills."

"Why didn't we use Sunflower in Vietnam?" asked Walter Forbier.

"That's just it. We don't have to."

And the officer explained that the real purpose of Sunflower was to keep a counterkiller

team floating in Western Europe, just so that the Russians knew that if they used Treska,

America would use Sunflower. "Like an atomic arsenal neither side wants to use." America

had it, so Russia wouldn't use it.

And it worked, he said. Except for an occasional body here and there, the two squads

floated through Western Europe in relative luxury, each letting the other know it was

around. But neither acted.

The only thing that could terminate Sunflower would be the KGB's decision to terminate Treska.

Forbier said he was looking forward to joining Sunflower, and he planned privately on being with the team in

Rome in time for Christmas. He was off by 41/2 yearsand that was reduced training time, allowing him six

months credit for his Marine experience.

Five years of training.

He learned French and Russian so well he could dream in them. He learned energy control, to be able to

function for a week with only a halfhour's sleep. Parachuting for Sunflower was jumping out of the plane with

your chute in your hands and putting it on in midair.

He learned the feel system of firearms. You didn't use sights, you used feel. Sights were mechanical, and

fine to teach thousands of people how to get a bullet flying in the general direction of their target. But the feel

system required working with a weapon so that the flight path of the bullet was an extension of your arm. You

imagined a yardlong rod behind the barrel of the gun and the curving drop of your bullet, and, after four

hundred rounds a day for four years, you just knew what was in your flight path. This had to be done with one

weapon only, and the weapon became part of you. For Walter Forbier, it was his .25 caliber Beretta.

Forbier arrived for his first day's duty with Sunflower after five years of training, and got the instruction that he

had to surrender his Beretta at a bookshop. He didn't even have time to exchange his American dollars for francs.

His contact stuffed

crisp hundredfranc notes into Forbier's pocket. The ride to the bookstore cost fortytwo

francs on the meter, roughly equivalent to ten American dollars. When Forbier entered the

bookstore, he was a deadly instrument of foreign policy. When he left, without his gun and

without even an explanation, he was a target waiting to be hit.

Once again, his timing had been awful.

But if he were going to die, at least he was going to have one good Parisian meal. Not a

great one, but a good one. He somehow felt that if he headed himself toward a great meal, his

luck would not allow it. But he might be able to sneak a good meal past his luck.

On Boulevard St. Germaine, he chose Le Vagabond, an adequate twostar restaurant. He

began with Fruits de Merraw clams, raw shrimp, and raw oysters.

"Walter. Walter Forbier," said a man in an elegant Pierre Cardin suit. "I'm so glad I found

you. You're really wasting a meal with Fruits de Mer. Please let me order."

The man deposited his black homburg on a chair next to Walter and sat down across

from him. In perfect French, he ordered a different meal for Forbier. The man was in his

early fifties, with an immaculate tan, the elegant smile of a Wall Street board room.

"Who are you? What's happening?" asked Walter.

"What's happening is Sunflower is surrendering its weapons. This is an order from the Security Council to the

top of the CIA. The government is

terrified of any more CIA incidents. They figure with no weapons, you can do no damage."

"I don't mean to be rude, sir," said Forbier, "but I don't know what you're talking about."

"That's right. The contact word. Let's see. This is the first day of spring. Subtract two letters

from G, which gives us E and we haveEarly End, Ethel's Earrings. All right?"

"Fine Friends," said Walter using the following letter of the alphabet half the number of times

the previous letter had been used to him.

"I know who you are. No one uses the contact words any more. Everyone knows everyone

else. Don't eat the bread."

"Am I glad to see you," Forbier said. "When can I make contact with the rest of the team?"

"Let's see. Cassidy is in London and retiring, Navroki is out, Rothafel, Meyers, John, Sawyer,

Bensen, and Kanter were out yesterday and Wilson this morning. So that leaves seven more,

but they're in Italy and they should be out by tonight and tomorrow." "Out? Out where?"

"Out dead. I told you not to eat the bread here." The man snatched the crust from Walter's hands.

"Who are you?"

"I'm sorry," said the man. "I'm so used to everyone in Sunflower knowing me. Didn't they tell you who I was in the

States? I guess they don't bother any more with photographs. I'm Vassily." "Who?"

"Vassily Vassilivich. Deputy commander of Treska. You would have gotten to know me better if

your government hadn't gone bananas. I'm sorry things worked out this way. Here comes the

food."

Forbier noticed the man was armed. He had a trim shoulder holster tailored to the lines of the

impeccable suit. Almost invisible, but armed he was. So were the two men looking at Forbier

from the back of the restaurant. One was a giant. He was laughing.

Vassilivich said to ignore the laughter.

"He's a stupid brute. A sadist. The problem with longterm operations like these is that you live

like a family with your group. That laughing man is Mikhailov. If it weren't for the Treska, he

would be hospitalized as criminally insane. Like your Gassidy."

Forbier decided to change his order. He wanted a filet. When that came he complained the

knife was too dull. The waiter, white apron swinging before him, disappeared into the kitchen

to get a sharper one.

"Am I the last of the Sunflower?"

"In Northern Europe? Just about."

"I guess you're pretty happy with your success," said Forbier.

"What success?" said Vassilivich, swirling a piece of veal in wine sauce and carefully balancing it up to his mouth so

the dripping sauce would not mar his shirt.

"Destroying Sunflower," Forbier said. He knew what he would do. He had been trained for five years to do

something and if he were the last of the weaponless Sunflower team, they would at least go out with something on the

Scoreboard. He forced himself to avoid looking at Vassilivich's throat and

looked toward the kitchen on the left rear of Le Vagabond, from which the waiter would be returning with his

sharper knife. He took a bite of the bread. Vassilivich had been right. The crust was a bit too cardboardy.

"When Sunflower is destroyed, we will have our way in Western Europe and England, and

then, if we are not stopped, we will be sucked into America. And then, if we are not stopped,

we will ultimately all find ourselves in a nice little nuclear war. So what have we won by

destroying you? A battle in Europe? A battle in America? We had a nice balance of terror

going here and your idiot Congress decided to live by kindergarten rules that never applied

anywhere in the world. Your country is insane."

"Nobody's forcing you to work over Western Europe," said Forbier.

"Son, you don't know how vacuums works. They suck you in. Already there are people

back home plotting brilliant moves for us. And it will all look so good. Until we kill

ourselves. If you had lived, you would see. Just as we must take advantage of your being

weaponless, so we will take advantage of Western Europe being weaponless, so to speak."

"Your English is very good," said Forbier.

"You shouldn't have eaten the bread," said Vassilivich.

When the sharper knife came, the laughing giant, not the waiter, delivered it, and, still

laughing, cut Forbier's filet for him. Forbier declined dessert.

In an alley, off a side street near St. Germaine, behind a shoe store featuring high glossy boots,

the laughing man and three others beat in the rib cage of Walter Forbier.

Vassilivich watched in gloom.

"Now it begins," he said in his native Russian, gloom on his face like the coming of a

winter storm. "Now it begins."

"Victory," said the laughing giant, wiping his huge hands. "A great victory."

"We have won nothing," said Vassilivich. A sudden shower came upon the city that spring

"Victory," said the laughing giant, wiping his huge hands. "A great victory."

"We have won nothing," said Vassilivich. A sudden shower came upon the city that spring

day, feeding the roots of the trees for the new buds and washing the blood of Walter

Forbier from his young face.

In Washington, a messenger arrived from Langley, Virginia, with orders to interrupt a

National Security Council meeting at which the President was presiding.

The messenger got a signature from the secretary of state to whom he was assigned to

deliver the small sealed package. Under the first wrapping was a white envelope, chemically

treated so that if anyone touched it, a black mark from his body oils appeared. The Secretary

of State, wheezing from his paunchy weight, left a trail of black marks across the envelope as

his pudgy fingers tore it open. The President looked on, occasionally sucking at the pain in

his right forefinger. Someone had passed a document marked "Single, Lone" around the large

polished oak table in the sealed room behind the Oval Office. It had been fastened with a

paper clip. It went from the Secretary of State to the Director of the Central Intelligence

Agency, the Secretaries of the Army, Air Force, and Navy, the Secretary of

Defense, and the director of the National Defense Agency. When it got to the President, he grabbed it in such a way

that the clip plunged into his index finger, drawing blood.

"It's a good thing the Secret Service isn't in the room" the President said, laughing, "or they

would have wrestled that paper clip to the ground."

Everyone laughed politely. It was no accident that the three water pitchers always ended up,

bunched at the far end of the long table. Whoever sat next to the President somehow found

himself nudging any close pitcher away. The Security Council had accidentally discovered that

some classified documents were water soluble when someone had left a water pitcher near the

President's elbow. The Secretary of State read the document he had been handed, and in solemn

tones, reflecting the guttural accents of his German youth, he said, "It was to be expected. We

should have known."

He removed the single paper clip from the document and handed three loose sheets of gray

paper to the President of the United States, who cut his thumb on their edges.

Everyone agreed that paper could be very sharp. The President asked for water for the cut.

The Secretary of Defense filled one glass half full. He passed it up the table.

"Thank you," said the President, knocking the glass into the lap of the Director of the Central

Intelligence Agency, whose turn it was to sit next to the President, but who complained that

somehow the Secretary of the Army always missed his turn.

The Secretary of Defense poured another glass and hand-delivered it up to the head of the table

where the President put his bleeding thumb into the glass.

"Be careful, sir," said the Secretary of State. "That document is water soluble also."

"What?" said the President, taking his thumb out of the glass and holding the papers

in both hands. The right thumb went through the document like a spoon through

fresh, warm oatmeal. The pages suddenly had a long thumb hole in them. "Oh," said the

President of the United States.

"No matter," said the Secretary of State. "I remember what it said. Verbatim."

The Sunflower Team had been annihilated, said the Secretary of State. This team had been

the counterforce to the Russian Treska which had operated so successfully in Eastern Europe.

Sunflower had been destroyed when it was deweaponed. The weapons had been taken away

for fear of another international incident. Now the Treska was loose, blooded, and there was

nothing apparently to stop them.

"Perhaps a stern note to the Kremlin?" suggested the Secretary of Defense.

The Secretary of State shook his head. "They have their problems too. They cannot

stop. We have created a vacuum they are being sucked into. They cannot not proceed. They

have their hawks too. After almost thirty years of cat and mouse, they suddenly had the

mouse in their mouths and they swallowed. What do we threaten them with in this note to the

Kremlin? 'Be careful or you will be even more successful next time?' "

The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency

explained how the Sunflower worked and that it took a man an exceptional man at least five

years of training to achieve the level of competence needed for that sort of clandestine

killing. What was needed now to stop the Treska was another equally good small unit. Or a

nuclear war.

"Or time," said the Secretary of State. "They will kill and kill until even the American public

wakes up."

"And then?" asked the President. "Then we pray that there is something left to fight them with," said the

Secretary of State.

"America is not dead yet," said the president, and his voice was somehow calmer and his

eyes just slightly clearer when he said this. In some manner, a decision had quietly been

made, and he turned the agenda to another subject.

He canceled a meeting with a Congressional delegation that afternoon and went to his

bedroom, a surprising move for a very fit President. He shut the large door behind him and

personally drew the drapes. In a bureau drawer was a red telephone. He waited until 4:15

p.m. exactly, then picked up the receiver.

"I want to talk to you," he said. "I've been expecting this phone call," came a lemony Voice.

"When can you get to the White House?" "Three hours."

"Then you're not in Washington?" "No."

"Where are you?" "You don't need to know."

"But you do exist, don't you? Your people can perform certain extraordinary things, can't they?"

"Yes."

"I never thought I would have to use you. I had hoped I wouldn't."

"So had we," came the voice.

The President put the red phone back in the bureau drawer. His predecessor had told him

about the phone one teary day the week before he resigned. It had been in this very

room. The former President had been drinking heavily. His left leg rested on a hassock to

ease the pain of his phlebitis. He sat on a white doughnut pillow.

"They'll kill me," said the former President. "They'll kill me and no one will care.

They'd celebrate in the streets if I were dead. Do you know that? These people would kill

me and everyone else would celebrate."

"That's not so, sir. There are many people who still love you," said the then Vice

President.

"Name fifty-one percent," said the former President and blew his nose wetly into a tissue.

"Ever the politician, sir."

"And what do I get for it? If John Kennedy did what I did, they'd think it was a little

boy's game and some sort of joke. If Lyndon Johnson did it, no one would find out. If

Eisenhower did it..."

"Ike wouldn't do it," interrupted the vice president.

"But if he did."

"He wouldn't''

"He wouldn't have had the brains to do it. Everything was handed to that man on a platter. World War II,

everything. I had to fight for what I

got. No one ever loved me for myself. Not even the wife. Not really."

"Sir, you called me for something?"

"In that bureau drawer is a red telephone. It will be yours when I am no longer President." The thought

overwhelmed him and he sobbed. "Sir."

"Just a minute," he said, regaining his composure. "All right. When that day happens, you

will have that phone. Don't use it. They're bastards and disloyal and never think of anyone but

themselves."

"Who, sir?"

"They're murderers. They get away with murder. They go around our country murdering

civilians and you're going to be responsible for them when you're President. How do you like

them apples?" The President served up a delicious grin amidst his banquet of tears.

"Who are they?"

As the former President explained it, John Kennedywho never got blamed for anythingwas

really the one who had started it. Code name: CURE. "Basically, they were a vicious, disloyal

pack of killers who couldn't be counted on in a crunch. When things were going well, they were

your babies. But when the going got tough, so did they. They got going."

"You still haven't explained, sir. I will need an explanation."

The President explained. CURE had been organized because the government had come to fear that the

Constitution could not survive the spread of crime. The government needed an extra boost

in that department. But the extra boost itself was a violation of the Constitution. So without

getting caught or blamed, with nary a peep from the newspapers or from anyone else, that

good old liberal John F. Kennedy had plucked a CIA man out of duty and set him up with

a secret budget. It was a vast secret budget. It had a network throughout the country, and

no one except the head of it a New Englander who looked down on people from California

because they weren't born rich knew about it. It had an enforcement arm too a homicidal

maniac psychopath, and his teacher, who was a foreigner, and who wasn't white.

"Sir, I don't understand how no one would have heard of it by this time," the then Vice

President said doubtfully.

"If only three know of it and only two understand it and if you can kill anyone you feel like, as free as the

breeze without anyone complaining, you can get away with anything. But if you are the President of the United

States and a Republican and come from California and if your wife wears a plain old Republican cloth coat, then

you can't even get away with trying to save the presidency and the country...."

"Sir. In my administration, I won't tolerate this organization."

"Then pick up the phone and say to them, you're disbanded. Go ahead ... say that. Johnson told me

about them and told me any time I wanted to get rid of them, all I had to do was say they should disband."

"And did you?"

"Yesterday."

"And what happened?"

"They said it was up to you because I was resigning this week."

"And what did you say?"

"I said I wasn't resigning. I said I was going to fight. I said if those chicken livers won't

support their President in his hours of need, I was going to put the screws to them. Announce

what they were doing. Expose them. Get them put on trial for murder. I'd fix this CURE. I

told them."

"And what happened?"

"What happens to all great men who don't kiss the ass of the liberal establishment, who

stand up for America, who can be counted on to do the decent thing in a crisis."

"What happened to you, sir, is what I'm asking."

"I went to bed as I normally do, supposedly surrounded by loyal and competent guards. During the night I

felt a slight tap and when I tried to open my eyes, I couldn't, and I drifted off into a very deep sleep. When I

awoke, the world was way down beneath me. Way, way down. I was on top of the Washington Monument and the

lights beneath had been turned out. And I was right on top of that needle, looking down. Right leg on one

side, left leg on the other, and one man I could only tell that he had thick wrists was on one side of me, below me, and

an Oriental with long fingernails was on the other side. And there I was, in my nightgown, with the point of the

needle sticking right up between the cheeks of my you know what. And the man with thick wrists said being a

tattletale was naughty and that I would resign within the week."

"And what did you say?"

"I said, even if this a dream, I am your President."

"And what did he say?"

"He said they were going to leave me there and I begged him not to and he said it was either

being left there, or them bringing me straight down to the bottom. With the needle in

between. And in my dream, I said I would resign." He blew his nose fiercely into another tissue.

"So you had a bad dream."

The then but soon to be former President shifted in his doughnut shaped pillow.

"This morning, the surgeon general removed traces of limestone from the rectal tissue of your

President. I resign tomorrow."

So it had been, and in the chaos of assuming the presidency of a nation torn by scandal, the former Vice President

and now President had never touched that red telephone. Even now, after talking to the lemony voiced man on the

telephone, he* did not know what he was unleashing. But the risk was worth it. There was a situation in the world

that could lead to world war if it were not stopped. And the third world war, with all its nuclear horror, would be the

last.

Quietly he shut the bureau drawer and said a prayer. Then he opened the drawer again briefly.

Pinkies were always getting caught in that sort of drawer.

CHAPTER TWO

His name was Remo and he bathed his body in the blue deeps off Florida's west coast. He moved with the slow, crisp

snap of a muscled fin through the green plants and rocks where crabbers plucked delicacies for the rest of the nation.

There had been a shark warning that morning, and most of the pleasure divers had decided to spend that day with gin

and lime and stories about heroism which rose with the ascent of the sun and the decline of the gin in the clear glass

bottles set on checkered tablecloths, as the drinkers washed down fresh crab and baked mullet in sweet butter sauce.

Remo followed four divers with spear guns, fad20

ing in and out of their group, going ahead, falling behind, until the group stopped and pointed to him and made the

signal for going up to the surface. The surface always looked so shiny from below. He accelerated up into it, like a

porpoise, so that as he cut up into the thin air, the water dropped beneath him to his ankles, and at the apex of

his thrust, it appeared as if he momentarily stood ankle deep in water. He came back down with a slapping splash of

his arms that stopped his head from going under.

The divers broke the surface too.

Puffing and spitting water, they removed the mouthpieces that led to tanks of compressed air on

their backs.

"Okay. We give up," said one. "Where's your air supply?"

"What?" said Remo.

"Your air supply."

"Same place as yours. In my lungs."

"But you've been under with us for twenty minutes."

"Yeah?" said Remo.

"So how do you breathe?"

"Oh, you don't. Not underwater," said Remo, and went back down, curving into the green-

blue cool of the salt water. He watched the other divers come down in splashing, jerky, waving,

energy-wasting motions, muscles that worked against themselves, breathing that had never been

trained, minds so locked in what they perceived as the limits of the human body that even a

thousand years of training would never get them to use a tenth of their strength.

It was all in the rhythm and the breathing. The brute force of a man was less than

almost any other animal per ounce. But the mind was infinite compared to that of other

animals, and only when that mind was harnessed could the rest of the body be harnessed.

Year after year, human beings were put into the ground at the end of their lives with less

than ten per cent of their brain ever having been used. What did they think it was for? Some

vestigial organ like the appendix? Didn't they see? Didn't they know?

He had mentioned this once to a physician who had trouble finding his pulse.

"That's weird," said the doctor, meat and animal fat reeking from his body.

"It's true," Remo had said. "The human mind is virtually an obsolete organ."

"That's absurd," the doctor had said, putting a stethoscope to Remo's heart.

"No, no. Is it true or not that people use fewer than ten per cent of their brain cells?"

"True, but that's common knowledge."

"Why are only ten per cent of the brain cells used?"

"Eight per cent," said the doctor, blowing on the end of the stethoscope and warming it up

with his hands.

"Why?"

"Because there are so many of them."

"There's a hell of a lot of filet mignon and gold in the world, but that's all used. Why

isn't the brain used?" Remo asked.

"It's not supposed to be used in its entirety."

"But all ten fingers are and every blood vessel is

and both lips are and both eyes are. But not the brain?"

"Shhhh, I'm trying to get your heartbeat. You're either dead or I've got a broken

stethoscope."

"How many beats do you want?"

"I had hoped for seventy two a minute."

"You got it."

"Ah, there it is," said the doctor and looked at his watch and thirty seconds later said: "Hope and you shall

get."

"Want to hear it doubled?" Remo asked. "Halved?" And when he left the doctor's office later, the physician

was yelling that he got all the practical jokers and he had a lot of work and only a weirdo like Remo would play

the kind of tricks he played. But it hadn't been a trick. As Chiun, his aged Korean trainer, had told him early on:

"People will only believe what they already know and can only see what they have seen

before. Especially white people."

And Remo had answered that there were plenty of black and yellow people just as insensitive and probably even

more so. And Chiun had said Remo was right about the blacks and about the Chinese and the Japanese and the

Thais, and even about the South Koreans and most of the North Koreans, they now being unified under the

decadence of Pyong Yang and various other big cities, but that if one went to Sinanju, a small village in North

Korea, there were those who appreciated the true outer limits of the human mind and body.

"I've been there, Little Father," Remo had said. "And that means you and the other Masters of 23

Sinanju who have lived throughout the ages. And no one else."

"And you too, Remo," Chiun had said. "Transformed from pale nothingness and

worthlessness into a disciple of Sinanju. Oh, never has such glory come to Sinanju as to be

able to create something of worth from you. Wonderful me. I have made a student from a

white man."

And overwhelmed by his own accomplishment, Chiun had gone into a three day silence

broken only by an occasional "from you," and then a swoon of awe at what he had done.

Now Remo moved ahead of the divers, flopping with their artificial fins, leaving streams of shiny air bubbles

coming up behind them. Four bodies fighting themselves and the water. They used oxygen they did not need for

jerkily pushing muscles they did not know how to use. They hunted the shark, and the shark knew with a

kind of knowledge better than mere knowing how to move and do. For that which required knowing always had

less force than that which was done by the body itself. So Chiun had taught Remo, and so Remo understood

as he, like the shark, snapped and curved through ocean waters off the Florida coast.

He had never been a big man and now, after more than a decade of training, he was thinner yet, with only his

very thick wrists to hint that he might be something other than a thin six footer with a somewhat gaunt face,

high cheekbones, and dark eyes, and a sensual quietness about him that could make an elderly nun kick over a

statue of St. Francis of Assisi.

He saw the shark before the hunters.

It moved low and steady above clear white sand. Remo flashed the white of his body and

gave short choppy flips with his hands to look like a fish in trouble. The shark, like a

computer aboard a cruiser, zeroed in, and with great gray strength closed upon the man in

a small black bathing suit.

The key, of course, was relaxing. The long, slow relax and to attain this, you had to

disengage your mind, for this was the shark's home, and a man was a lesser being in this

ocean place. A long, slow relax for to try to resist the rows of driving shark teeth meant the

ripping of flesh and the loss of limb. You had to become like the rice paper of a kite, light

and accepting, so that the shark's plunging snout drove into your belly and you collapsed

around its great fins, causing it to snap its head in frustration at the light paper in front of its

mouth, always in front of its mouth, never allowing it to get a mouthful of the beautiful

white tender meat. And then you allowed the great force of its snapping body to bring your

left arm under its belly, and there with sudden power the left hand closed, solid and eternal,

on the rough, thick skin.

All this Remo did, until finally, as he and the shark snapped at each other, in one

wrenching moment the shark's belly skin ripped out, and the shark swam away in its own

dark blood, its intestines trailing behind it. And, tasting its own blood, in fury it attacked its

trailing belly.

Remo went down in rhythmic, steady moves beneath the dark blood clouds above him. The shark hunters

puddled along, still unaware of what had happened.

Remo came up behind them and one by one snapped the artificial flippers from their feet,

leaving bare white toes pushing around. The flippers lazydipped and pivoted their way to the

bottom. Four pairs. Eight flippers. And to prevent them from retrieving their artificial flippers,

Remo snapped off their mouthpieces and sent them to the bottom also.

The hunters fired off a few harmless spears. If they had dropped their tanks and separated

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

ALLINADAY'SWORK"Whatbringsyouhere?"askedtheRussian."Work,"saidRemo."I'manassassin.Rightnow,I'mworkingontheTreska.""HowdoyouknowaboutTreska?"saidtheman."It'scomplicated,youknow,governmentpoliticsandeverything.Inanycase,I'mheretokillyouifyou'reTreska.You'reAlphaTeam,right?""WehappentobeAlphaTeam,yes,b...

展开>> 收起<<

Destroyer 026 - In Enemy Hands.pdf

共63页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Destroyer 026 - In Enemy Hands

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: