Warren Murphy - Ship Of Death

"How do I get out of here?"

"No hablo inglés" said the young man.

Remo pressed harder.

"No hablo inglés!"

"Shit," said Remo and threw the man down the corridor. He ducked into a small room, empty except for a mop standing in a plastic bucket.

Behind the bucket was a panel, again of dull gray metal, soundproofed by soft rubber molding. Remo brushed his hands along the panel. It moved by pressing and forcing sideways. It moved almost silently. He smelled the fresh oil. All the moving parts apparently floated in grease.

The panel opened to a closet and over the sharp odors of detergents, Remo smelled the faint saline aroma of old blood. He was in a cleaning storage area. He slid the panel closed hehind him.

Outside, on the other end of the closet, he heard footsteps, clear and loud. He heard voices like people spitting.

He walked through the closet and opened the door and stepped out onto plush carpeting where the hallways were wide and exotic tapestries covered the walls and soft lights played up and down the ceilings. This was the ship he recognized.

He moved through crisscrossing corridors and then he was in familiar territory outside the Iranian Embassy. It was somewhat lucky since he would have had to spend at least two hours looking for the embassy if he hadn't bumped into it. There were guides and officers every few hundred yards, of course, but they were still learning their jobs.

Remo's pass was good for entrance and the bodyguard bowed as he allowed Remo in. The embassy rooms themselves were like a large floor of an apartment building and Remo quietly entered his room where Chiun was dictating to the young thing supplied by the Iranian government.

Chiun was dictating in Persian. Every once in a while the girl would laugh and look at Remo.

"What'd you say, Little Father?" Remo asked, after one such demonstration,

"It is a Persian joke. It cannot be translated into English," said Chiun. He was in a light pink evening kimono with strands of simple gold woven throughout.

"Try me," said Remo.

"It loses its flavor in English," Chiun said. "Let's see."

"He walks like he walks because he walks," said Chiun. The parchment face beamed joy. The girl giggled.

"Yeah?"

"That is the joke," Chiun said.

"What?"

"He walks like he walks because he walks," said Chiun.

"That's not funny."

"In Persian, it is most witty," Chiun said.

"Yeah, well, I have news for you. We're on television."

"Really?" said Chiun. His seated posture assumed a slightly more heroic tilt.

"Yeah. This isn't one ship, it's two. There's the ship everybody knows about, and then there's another one that's like built inside it."

"Network television?" asked Chiun.

"No. There's an internal circuit. There are people here watching every one of us. They can get in and out through closets and probably through the walls too. I guess that's how they killed all those Lebanese in their consulate. They're listening to us now."

"I don't televise well," said Chiun, who had once been shown through a studio and when he saw tapes of himself realized Western technology had a long way to go. It could reproduce recognizable images but not the grace and grandeur and benign magnificence of truly wondrous peoples. That Caucasians would still have to work on.

"The whole ship's a death trap, Little Father."

"In that respect, it is like the rest of the world," said Chiun. "We stay." And he waved to a small fixture on the ceiling that Remo recognized to be at the same angle that the TV sets were down below. The fixture was broken off. Chiun had known all along and had put the camera out of commission.

In Skaggerac, Norway where the giant ship had been built, Inspector Dawes, loaned to MI5 from Scotland Yard, laid out through precise analytical deduction the same principles Remo had discovered on board the United Nations ship.

He had isolated one contractor who had purchased "X" amount of materials to do "Y" and had "Z" amount left over.

"Sir," said Inspector Dawes, "the answer to this mystery is Z. I call it the Z component. Z represents materials that were left over because you didn't use them to build what you were supposed to build. Instead you built something else, a hidden network inside that ship, and you are therefore an accomplice in murder. Don't deny it." And Dawes laid out the subcontractor's travels, precise times isolating months of consultation in Greece.

"But sir," said Dawes, "you were not consulting with Demosthenes Skouratis, the builder of the ship. You were consulting someone else. Someone who would stop at nothing. Someone to whom the slaughter of helpless people means nothing. Someone willing to invest millions of dollars and many years to bring about his own ends."

The builder listened stone faced. He sat in his living room of rough-hewn lumber and matched stone floors. A large bay window overlooked the clear silver fiord below. The builder had white-blonde hair and a face as impassive as a frozen pond. He sipped a sweet green liqueur.

Inspector Dawes stoked his Meerschaum. His ample belly pressed out the tweed vest so tight that returning his pipe tamper to its pocket required a snug push.

"And, sir, that is what stumps me," said Dawes. "I know there are two ships floating out of New York Harbor. I know this has been in the works for years. I know this takes a knowledge of shipbuilding and an awful lot of money. I also know this trap started in the conversion of the giant hull from a supertanker to a luxury liner. I also know that the Scytha were ancient horsemen and don't exist anymore. What I don't know, and this is what stumps me, sir, is who in the bloody blue blazes would bother?"

The builder finished his drink.

"You say a lot of people have been killed?" he asked.

"So far, many. I might add that just following orders to make a special structure is not a criminal offense. You have done nothing criminal."

The builder poured himself a full glass of the green liqueur. He drank it down and licked his lips clean.

"Nothing criminal?" asked the builder.

"Nothing," said Inspector Dawes.

"You have a logical mind, no?"

"I like to think so," Dawes said.

"If all these people have been killed, as you say, why would I be any different? And by that, I mean, why would someone stop at killing me? If I have done nothing criminal, then I don't have to talk to you."

"It could become verv criminal," said Dawes. "I'm sure your country of Norway has maritime and business laws that punish people who say they build one thing and then build another, yes?"

"Yes."

"I saw a room with charred and smoking bodies; burned to the bone, some were. I know a man like you would never want to build something that might be responsible for that, would you?"

The Norwegian finished his drink and then poured another.

"Would you?" Dawes asked again.

he Norwegian builder drank half the sweet warm minty liqueur.

"I said, would you?"

"Sure," said the builder.

"Sure what?" asked Dawes, harumphing his throat clear.

"Do something like that. I'd do that," said the builder, and he drove a fist into the ample tweed-vested belly of the inspector from Scotland Yard and watched the mound of pink flab collapse on the stone floor, retching. He went outside to a small tool shed he had built one summer and got a 1.2-meter beam of raw oak, smoothed a handle with a medium-grade wood file, took off any burrs with 020 production, sandpaper, decided against unwieldy flanges and returned to his living room overlooking the fiord where Inspector Dawes was attempting to recover from the hard body blow.

Inspector Dawes had one hand on an arm of a wooden chair. He groaned.

"You broke a rib," he gasped.

"Sure," said the builder, and beat in his head with the 1.2-meter beam, which worked infinitely better than one with flanges. The problem today, thought the builder, was that the world was flange happy. He weighted the body with lead stripping, careful to securely wrap Dawes and the lead weighting with three-centimeter nylon ribbon and dropped the body to the bottom of the very blue fiord.