Warren Murphy: Blood Lust

"But he's dead. O mistress," Kimberly whispered.

His soul is not dead. Make it scream.

Kimberly threw herself into it. She pulled the rumal tighter and tighter with relish. The ambassdor's mouth actually fell open. With two fingers, she reached in and pulled out his long, discolored tongue. It looked like a short black tie hanging down his chin.

As a last gesture, she plucked his eyelids up. They had been sealed shut with spirit gum.

The Iraiti ambassador's fixed eyes held the same expression of horror that they had when Kimberly last saw him.

"It is done," Kimberly said, sealing the lid.

Excellent, my vessel. The tyrant Maddas cannot ignore this provocation.

"I am glad you approve, my lady."

I do. The tongue was a nice touch too.

Chapter 41

The Army Corps of Engineers had already unloaded their earth-moving equipment when the army helicopter deposited Harold Smith in the fenced-off desert outside of Palm Springs, California.

A balding young lieutenant was running a Geiger counter around a crater that resembled a fused sinkhole of blackened glass, getting only a desultory clicking for his trouble.

"I am Colonel Smith," Harold Smith said, adjusting the collar of the old khaki uniform that had hung in his attic.

"Lieutenant Latham," the young man said, shutting off the machine and returning Smith's handshake. "Background radiation is normal, sir."

"I understood that. Are you ready to begin excavation?"

"We've been waiting for your arrival."

"MAC flights are hard to come by these days. Since Kuran."

"Tell me about it. Let me show you the size of the nut we have to crack."

They walked across the brittle glass. It gave under their feet with a crunching like a shattered but intact windshield of safety glass. Where the heavy equipment was, uniformed engineers clustered around a huge cap of concrete half-smothered by windblown sand. It resembled an ugly gray plug. Soldiers were sweeping the flat surface free of sand.

"I say we dynamite the sucker," Lieutenant Latham suggested. "Shaped demo charges should lift this stuff clean off."

"You will not use dynamite," Harold Smith said tightly.

The huddle of engineers turned at the sharp sound of Smith's voice.

"I'm the demolition expert," one said. "You must be Colonel Smith."

"I am, and you will use jackhammers."

"Begging your pardon, Colonel. But we're looking at a two-hundred-foot tube in which maybe ten tons of concrete has been poured. It will take forever to jackhammer it all loose."

"We do not have forever, and you will extract the concrete with jackhammers."

The no-nonsense tone of the colonel's voice settled the matter. That, and his credentials. The army team thought Smith had been sent there by the Pentagon. The Pentagon thought he was on loan from the CIA. The CIA had been instructed by the White House to go along with the cover story.

"Okay," the lieutenant called out. "You heard the colonel. Let's unload those jackhammers."

They set to work. It was dawn. By evening, under Smith's expert guidance, they had made mounds of chunky concrete and opened a broken hole into the great well.

Smith approached. He was in his shirtsleeves, having aided in the lugging of concrete. His joints ached.

"What the hell is this thing anyway?" Lieutenant Latham wondered as he wiped smeared sweat off his face.

"The developer called it a Condome," Smith said, looking down an exposed flight of stairs.

"Excuse me, sir?"

"A Condome," Smith repeated. "A kind of underground condominium. It was intended to open up the desert to condominium development. In effect we are standing on a high-rise apartment building sunk into the sand."

"Sounds goofy to me."

"The accidental detonation of a neutron bomb ended the project," Smith said.

"That I read about." The lieutenant looked down. "Do you mean to say, Colonel, that these steps lead twenty-eight floors underground?"

Smith nodded. "I will go first," he said.

Accepting a flashlight, Smith went down. It was like walking into a cave with stairs. After descending two flights, it became no different than walking down the fire stairs of a skyscraper during a blackout. The undesertlike humidity was oppressive, but it was cool. Cool, Smith thought mordantly, as a tomb.

Spraying his flashlight beam in all directions, Lieutenant Latham piped up behind Smith.

"Is what we're looking for classified?" he asked.

"Specifically, yes. Generally, no."

Latham had to think about that a minute.

"Generally speaking, Colonel, will we know it when we see it? I mean, what should we be looking for?"

"A corpse."

"Oh." The lieutenant's tone implied: I don't like this.

Down and down they went, until the air was close and suffocating. The fire doors, when they had descended five floors, were impossible to open. The concrete had flooded deep. The air thickened with moisture content. Men began coughing. The echoes were comfortless.

Seven floors down, it was like breathing pond scum. Each floor below that was worse. They were able to work the doors open starting ten floors down. Then the search began in earnest through a manmade labyrinth of empty rooms and foul air.

Each successive floor gave up nothing larger than the occasional dead scorpion.

Finally, midway down the twentieth floor below ground, the cracked concrete stairs disappeared into tea-colored standing water.

"I guess this is as far as we go," Lieutenant Latham muttered. "Sorry, Colonel."

Harold Smith stood regarding the standing water, his flashlight darting this way and that.

"Divers," he whispered.

"What?"

Smith's white-haired head snapped around. His voice was charged with urgency. "I want a naval recovery team brought to this site."

"We can do that," Lieutenant Latham said. "Take some doing, but it's possible."

"Now!" Smith snapped.

"What's the rush? If your dead guy's down there, he's been dead a long time."

"Instantly," Smith repeated.

And to a man, the engineering team turned and marched double-time back up the long flights of stairs to the breathable air of the surface.

Smith remained, staring into the water.

"Yes," he said slowly. "This is where he would have gone when the neutron bomb detonated. Water is a perfect shield against radiation. Yes."

Smith returned to the surface, where he dug his briefcase from the waiting helicopter. Sheltered from the others, who were working a mobile radio, he logged onto the CURE computers back at Folcroft.

The situation was deteriorating, he saw from the early reports.

The body of Ambassador Abaatira had arrived in Abominadad. Under the glare of TV cameras, President Maddas Hinsein had thrown open the casket. And had immediately thrown up at the sight of the bloated dead face with its blackened tongue and bright yellow ligature tied so tightly about the throat that the term "pencil-necked geek" fitted Ambassador Abaatira to a T.

The TV transmission had gone dead. Only silence, brooding and portentous, had come out of Abominadad ever since.

Meanwhile, a "peace offering" had been shipped to Nehmad, where the sheik himself had opened the long ornate box to find his only son, Abdul Fareem, strangled, his bloated body desecrated by a yellow silk scarf that seemed to have caused his liverlike tongue to disgorge in death.

Although the sheik had made a public pronouncement that his worthless son was better off dead, he was privately calling for a strike against Abominadad. Washington was resisting. War was near-nearer than it had been at any time.

And the master plan of Kali became clear to Dr. Harold W. Smith.

"She's trying to egg both sides into conflict," he said.

A cold lump of something indescribable settled into his sour stomach.