Warren Murphy: Unnatural Selection

AS HE TORE the left wing off the speeding Cessna, Remo Williams continued to whistle a peppy version of "La Cucaracha." He was still whistling as he let the wing slip from his fingertips.

As the wing banged and spiraled away behind him, Remo was already ducking under the belly of the plane.

The crippled Cessna whipped around in a 180-degree arc.

Remo came up on the other side. A sharp hand caught the leading edge of the second wing. The momentum of the plane sliced around his stationary hand.

The second wing plopped off into his upturned palms. He caught it with a tidy flourish and a click of his heels.

"La-la-la-la-la-la-la! Ole!" Remo sang as he flung the wing with its dead engine deep into the dark woods.

The Cessna rolled to a dead stop. As it did, the small door popped open and two furious men sprang to the tarmac. With shouts of angry Arabic, they aimed rifles at Remo.

"U.S. health inspector," Remo announced to the men, ignoring the guns leveled at his chest. "We had a tip at HQ there'd be a cockroach incursion tonight. And what do you know? Here you are. Prepare for fumigation."

The two new arrivals sized up the thin young American in his black T-shirt and matching chinos. They seemed to regard him more as an annoyance than a threat. They shouted to the men over at the hangar.

The men who had been awaiting the plane were already racing over. Only Faysal al-Shahir remained rooted in place.

All five men surrounded the thin young man who had torn the Cessna to shreds, seemingly with his bare hands.

"Who do you work for, American?" asked one of the new arrivals, a higher-up in the al-Khobar organization.

"Funny you should ask," Remo said. "I've just spent half the day sorting that one out. But I think Upstairs has gotten the message now. Technically I'm a free agent who hires out to one guy at a time. One boss, one set of orders. Simplifies the chain of command, don't you think?"

"Who is, as you say, 'Upstairs'?" asked one of the al-Khobar agents, prodding Remo with a rifle barrel. "Is this American slang for CIA?"

"Didn't you hear? We decided we didn't need the CIA anymore. That is, until we got attacked and needed something to give the politicians a fig leaf for blowing our spy budget on daffodil stuff like measuring cow farts and making sure little Timmy gets a free lunch at school. And what's with that anyway? In my day parents were able to master the complexity of smearing peanut butter and jelly on two slices of bread."

Obviously the terrorist wasn't satisfied with this response. His gun barrel jammed harder into Remo's ribs. Or at least it tried to. To the terrorist it felt as if Remo's rib was hinged. It swung out of the way of the barrel.

"What are you doing here?" the al-Khobar leader asked.

"I told you, I was sent to crunch cockroaches. My boss is wired in to this stuff. Don't ask me how he does it. But he figured out what your plan was. How next week you were going to blow up a couple of little bridges out in the middle of nowhere. Then with the authorities distracted in the heartland, how a few hours later you were going to fly planes loaded with explosives into commodities exchange buildings in big cities. Chicago, Atlanta, wherever the hell they are around the country. He even found out that you'd gotten smart this time and bought your own flight school here, rather than run the risk of taking lessons somewhere else. And he knew a couple of big shots were coming in to oversee the final stages of everything. That's you. I've already taken out the rest of your teams. You fellas are the last."

As Remo spoke, the two new arrivals glanced at each another with growing shock. Their latest scheme was only supposed to be known to the upper echelon of the al-Khobar terrorist organization. Yet this American had just recited all of the broad details.

To insure secrecy, the various al-Khobar cells around the country operated independently of one another. It would take hours to track them through channels to find out if they had indeed been dismantled.

In the meantime, there was one thing that could be done.

The time for questions was over. Exchanging tight nods, the two newest men promptly opened fire on the American agent. The other terrorists fumbled with their guns and followed suit. Barrels flashed and bullets screamed through the night.

Remo danced around the volley of lead. "Now, you've probably noticed that I don't have any cans of pesticide," he said as the men continued to fire. "That is because I am an environmentally friendly, completely organic exterminator. Spraying is for sissies. For dealing with the really big cockroaches like yourselves, we enviro-organo-exterminators adhere almost exclusively to the bang-crunch method." He held up a finger. "Observe."

He vanished.

The stunned terrorists stopped firing.

When they twirled around to look for Remo, they found that he had somehow reappeared ten feet from where he had been standing, directly behind one of the baffled terrorists. The man had only an instant to wonder why all of his companions were suddenly staring directly at him.

Remo grabbed him by the scruff of his neck. "Abra cadaver," he announced.

And with that, the terrorist was airborne. A human missile, he zoomed at the crippled Cessna. When he hit the fuselage, the plane went bang and the head went crunch.

As the dead man crumpled to the runway, the remaining terrorists wheeled back on Remo.

"Of course, if you don't like bang-crunch, we've got other options," he said.

"Kill him!" an al-Khobar leader screamed.

The men opened fire once more. Stray bullets peppered the tail of the plane, somehow missing the thin American who was even now advancing on the group of desperate terrorists.

"There's pop-splat," Remo said.

Blurry hands found the sides of a terrified terrorist's bleached head. A single squeeze and the dome of his skull went pop. The splat came a few seconds later when his cannon-launched brain hit the roof of the distant hangar.

"Or maybe crack-crack-whomp."

A twirling toe took out the kneecaps of one man with successive cracks. A nudge as Remo darted by sent the tumbling terrorist to the ground with a whomp so powerful it shook the near runway and collapsed the man's skeleton to a formless lump encased in a shroud of purple polyester.

"Or thump-bong."

A thump from an unseen heel sent a head sailing from a set of shoulders. The decapitated head landed in a trash barrel near the closed hotdog stand with a rattling bong.

All told, it took no more than ten seconds. When Remo was through, there was only one al-Khobar terrorist left alive on the runway. The man stood in shock, gun hanging slack from his shaking hands, as he stared down at the dismembered, flattened corpses that had been the pride of the al-Khobar Martyrdom Brigade. He dropped his gun.

"I surrender," he cried in English, falling to his knees. "See, I love America, in all her sinful decadence." To prove it, he pressed his lips to the ground.

As he gave the ground a sloppy, wet kiss, a shadow cut between the al-Khobar leader and the nearer runway lights.

Remo loomed above, his face now grave. "But you know," he said, not listening to the terrorist leader's words, "if you want to know my personal preference for cockroaches like yourself, there's nothing in my book that beats just plain old squashing."

He put his heel on the al-Khobar leader's head, just behind the ear. Very slowly, so that the man could feel every fused section in his skull separate, Remo proceeded to squash the man's skull. The terrorist screeched and howled in what was the most excruciating minute of his life, but which was only prelude to his eternal punishment.

When he was done, Remo cleaned the sole of his leather loafer on the dead terrorist leader's shirt.