Warren Murphy: Dark Horse

The alligator plunged into the water and snapped up the general by one flailing arm. It wasted no time. It dragged the screaming man, pounding against its greenish hide, below the water.

After that, Remo decided to tread water and count bubbles.

When the bubbles stopped, Remo had counted forty-two. The water had become a diffuse color resembling pink lemonade.

Remo climbed onto shore with the intention of taking care of the assailants. They must be pretty dumb, he thought, to let the general get away from them like that. Or maybe not so dumb-since he hadn't actually gotten away.

The gunfire had died down.

It started up again, more ferocious than before.

Remo went through the saw grass like a lawnmower through hay. He got to the high hump and looked down.

The FBI and Federal marshals were pinned down in a crossfire. The withering fire was coming up, from the surviving boats, and down, from a line of fawn-uniformed attackers not a dozen yards below Remo's position.

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe this was a Colombian hit team, after all.

Remo slipped down to the line and began relieving the assailants of their weapons. He did this in a novel way. He literally disarmed them.

The first man to be disarmed was down on one knee hosing the low ground with his Uzi when it happened.

Remo slipped up behind him, took him by the hard balls of his shoulder bones, and separated his hands. He seemed to exert casual effort. But five thousand years of accumulated knowledge were behind the gesture.

The shoulder joints went pop!

The man's arms came away in Remo hands. He threw them in two directions.

The man jumped up and, squirting blood from each shoulder like a human lawn sprinkler, began to dance and caper until blood loss had turned him into a squirming pile on the ground.

By that time, Remo was flinging arms in all directions with joyous abandon.

This spectacle didn't exactly go unnoticed. Gunmen scattered, firing to cover their retreat. Remo was forced to waste time evading the crossfire. He could dodge bullets as if they were spring rain, but this was a slashing rain.

Remo was forced to drop to his stomach and let the storm pass over him.

When the firing finally had died down, Remo stood up in time to see the remaining attackers pile into the water under a hail of FBI return fire. The attackers were stubborn: They did not desert their comrades. A few died in the attempt to rescue the others who had fallen.

This forced Remo to revise his opinion yet again. No drug-killer worked this way. This was a military operation.

Then, under harassing fire, they waded up on a single air-boat and blasted away at the grassy isle that had been chosen for a baptism but instead had become a baptism of fire for a number of federal agents.

Hearing the FBI getting itself organized, Remo faded back to the back end of the isle and the water.

He swam past the bloated body in the fawn-colored uniform. The alligator had hold of it by the head and was vigorously attempting to crack open its skull.

As Remo, swimming underwater to avoid detection, left it behind, his ears were rewarded by an ugly crack of a sound.

He hoped Upstairs would be satisfied with the way things had turned out. The target had been taken out, even if Remo had had help. As for the attackers--whoever they turned out to be-they would have a hard time getting out of the country once the FBI had alerted Washington.

The last thing Remo heard as he put the day's work behind him was the throaty voice of Rona Ripper, threatening to sue everyone from the FBI to the President of the United States.

It annoyed him-but the thought of General Emmanuel Alejandro Nogeira, roasting in Hell, unbaptized, more than made up for that.

Chapter 3

Dr. Harold W. Smith received the first report on the deaths of the governor of California and his lieutenant governor directly from the President of the United States.

There was a red phone on one corner of Smith's desk, in an office that overlooked Long Island Sound. The phone had no dial. It didn't need one. It was a dedicated line. On the other end, hundreds of miles south of Washington, D.C., an identical red instrument nestled in an end table attached to the bed in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.

When the phone rang, Harold Smith brought the red receiver to his gray, bitter face. He cleared his throat and said, "Yes, Mr. President?"

He held his breath. He always held his breath at these moments, because if the next voice Dr. Harold W. Smith heard was not that of the current President of the United States, Harold W. Smith was obligated to swallow a coffin-shaped poison pill he kept in the watch pocket of his gray vest. After shutting down CURE, the organization that officially did not exist.

The parched Texas-by-way-of-Massachusetts voice came as an imperceptible relief to Smith. The news did not.

"The governor of California has just perished in an airline crash," the President said, dry-voiced.

Smith recalled the governor. Like the President, he was a Republican. He could not recall the name of the next man in line, the lieutenant, and whether or not California's lieutenant governor was a Republican or not: Not that it mattered to Smith. He no longer voted. It was the price he was forced to pay to remain above national politics.

The President's next words made Smith's unspoken question moot.

"The lieutenant governor was on the same flight," the President said.

Smith sat up. His cracked leather chair, his personal seat of power for as long as he headed CURE, creaked in protest.

"Isn't that against all protocol?" Smith asked. A frown creased his pale forehead. Or rather, the permanent lines of worry that rode his face deepened.

"It is. That's why I'm calling you. The FAA will naturally be investigating this, but I thought, given the bizarre circumstances, that you might look into this-discreetly."

"I understand," Harold Smith said. "Discreetly" meant that Smith was not to send in Remo. When Remo went in, bodies piled up. This was not that kind of situation. Yet.

"Do you have any idea where the two men were bound when the plane crashed?" Smith asked.

"It didn't actually crash. It flew into the side of a mountain."

"That is unusual. I will get on the matter directly," Smith said.

"Remember. Be prudent."

"Always."

Smith hung up. When the President had interrupted his workday, Smith was going over the overtime logs for the institute whose management was his day-to-day responsibility-and CURE's cover.

The brass plate on Smith's closed door read: HAROLD W. SMITH, DIRECTOR. There was a larger brass plate on one of the brick posts that framed the wrought-iron gates to the institution. It read: FOLCROFT SANITARIUM. Smith headed Folcroft. But Folcroft business could wait.

He slid the overtime logs into a desk drawer, and his thin hand paused over a bottle of Maalox. It was his habit to take a tablespoon of this every day at this time, in the normal course of events. On bad days, he took Zantac. On hectic days, children's aspirin. A triple dosage. Then there were his Alka-Seltzer days, and his mineral-water days, and his warm-milk days.

Today, Harold Smith felt like none of these things. He wondered if this had anything to do with the recent ordeal he had undergone-in which an ancient enemy of the Master of Sinanju had ensnared them all in his web. It had been a disturbing experience, which Smith only dimly recalled. Smith had not been himself. The doctor had pronounced it a virus. Both he and Chiun had been infected. It was invariably fatal.

Smith might have died but for a quirk of fate.

He had suffered a heart seizure. Only quick action by the Folcroft staff, and the electrical restimulation of his diseased heart muscle, had pulled him back from the brink.