Warren Murphy: Skin Deep

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 maneuvers 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."