Warren Murphy: Death Therapy

A roll, a fast stop and another roll got rid of the spiked shoes with the help of short kicks; now Remo was padding the heavy damp grass of the fairway in his stockinged feet. Remo moved head-on into the forty-yard range of the first man, and the middle man brushed the front man slightly in an effort to establish his own line of fire. The front man stopped for a moment.

Remo went into a straight speed line and was on the leader in a flash, his right thumb rigid, making a sweeping arc up as he closed in. By the time he was arms' length from the leader, the thumb was driving and then the thumb bit deep into the first man's groin, sending him careening back with a pathetic lip-surrendering "ooh" into the second man. The "ooh" was very soft, which was not surprising, since his left testicle was now adjacent to his lower lung.

With his left hand, Remo brought his fingernails up to the shin of the second man who was trying to get off a shot with his machine pistol. The fingernails went through his face as if it were head cheese.

And then, unbelievably, the sniper who was reloading, stood up and threw away his rifle. He did not reach for his .45 calibre sidearm, but stood in the karate sanchin dachi, feet curved in, pigeon-toed, arms curved slightly in front, fists rigid.

The man was tall and lean and hard, the kind of man whose face gave Texas its reputation. His fists were the size of pound coffee cans. He towered over the hedges. Now he waited calmly for Remo's assault, the glint of his teeth matching in brilliance the colonel's eagles on the shoulders of his uniform.

Remo stopped.

"You gotta be kidding, Mac," he said.

"Step up, little boy," the colonel said. "Your time has come."

Remo chuckled, then put his hands on his hips and laughed out loud. He stepped back, out of the rough. The man with the displaced testicle had passed out. The other, with the split face, was writhing on the ground in a growing bath of blood, his khaki fatigues darkening.

The colonel looked at the two of them, then at Remo, and then began softly to hum to himself.

Remo took another step back and the colonel took a step forward. He moved jerkily to his right as he moved forward, obviously in preparation for an inverted fist, low thrust.

"Who taught you that dingaling move?" Remo said, dancing backwards, but not so far that the man could use a quick draw on his .45.

"C'mon, you traitorous punk," the colonel said. "I'm going to cleanse America of you."

"Not with an weaken shita-uchi," Remo said. "Not by you; not by that move."

"Stand still and fight," the colonel said.

"Not until you tell me who taught you that nonsense," Remo said.

"Agreed," the colonel said thinly. "The U.S. Special Forces," and then he moved forward, sending a blindingly fast right hand snapping down towards Remo's face. Unfortunately for the man, his follow through was a bit more thorough than he had planned. His arm kept on going, out of its shoulder socket, assisted by Remo—who pulled the man forward, then set him tumbling into the air, to land face-first in the sand trap next to the third green.

With a crack of a semi-closed fist, Remo sent the back of the skull deeper down in the sand, where it could not be removed by a simple blast of a sand wedge. He did this while keeping his left arm straight out of courtesy to the country club which would soon be shocked to find that a special forces colonel had, in a small way, become a permanent part of the great third hole, dog-leg left.

Then Remo neatly finished off the other two soldiers. Strange, how peaceful men were in death. They always shared graves in harmony.

He moved on to the caddy on the chance, the very slim chance, that the boy might still be alive. He wasn't.

Then Remo walked off the course, leaving by the 17th hole, adjacent to a small side road. The shoulder of his blue gray golf shirt was torn slightly where it had been nicked by a bullet. And Chiun had assured Smith that Remo could function off peak. That was enough to make Remo angry all over again.

But his anger would fade the next day when he saw Dr. Harold Smith's lemony face dissolve in shock as Remo assured his chief that the secret organization, CURE, was no longer secret to someone. And neither was Remo Williams, the man known as the Destroyer. Remo had the nicked golf shirt to prove it.

CHAPTER THREE

On July 4th, as America celebrated a long hot weekend and politicians made speeches about the cost of liberty to people waiting for free beer, an American Air Force general named Blake Dorfwill, 48, upped the retail price of that liberty on the world markets by doing something he was trained to do very well. He bombed a city.

St. Louis.

He used a ten-megaton device capable of destroying four St. Louises and contaminating most of Missouri. The damage it actually caused was a very big hole in a garbage dump and minor radiation damage to the garbage.

Air police, military police and the FBI surrounded the dump and assisted Atomic Energy Commission personnel in removing the un-triggered weapon.

Major General Blake Dorfwill caused more damage with his person. He destroyed a home television antenna, the roof of a porch and a porch swing in a suburb of Springfield. He was removed with sponges and rubber bags. When the owner discovered that the thing that had come crashing into his house was an Air Force general, he demanded double-the-cost damages, including payment for the loss of television reception for a week, causing extreme discomfort and alienation of his family. When he was paid immediately and in cash, he descended into severe depression, haunted by the possibility that he might have demanded and collected five times as much.

The co-pilot of the bomber, Lt. Col, Leif Anderson, explained to the FBI, his commanding officer, his commanding officer's commanding officer, the Central Intelligence Agency and a Doctor Smith, a thin gaunt-faced man newly appointed to the President's staff, that General Dorfwill had taken the plane out of formation while on a training flight from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington.

According to Colonel Anderson, General Dorfwill ignored his questions and just kept flying on to St. Louis where he released the bomb. Colonel Anderson pointed out that the device required two men to trigger it and he would not do so.

"Were you asked?" asked the gaunt-faced Dr. Smith.

An Air Force general seated at the table looked at the thin civilian as though he had just released gas. But the civilian was undeterred. "Were you asked?" he repeated.

"No, I wasn't," said Lt. Col. Anderson, who then launched into a description of altitude, release time of the weapon, air traffic patterns.

"Did the general explain to you why he was veering off course?" Dr. Smith interrupted.

The Air Force general at the table audibly exhaled his exasperation at the stupidity of a civilian who could conceive of a general explaining anything to a lieutenant colonel.

"No," said Colonel Anderson.

"And during the flight, did he say anything?"

"No," Anderson said. "He was humming."

"What was he humming?"

The men sat around a long board-room table, under fluorescent lighting in a special Pentagon meeting room. The four-star Air Force general pounded thet able with the flat of his hand, hard enough to make the lights flicker.

"Dammit, what difference does it make what he was humming? A nuclear device was released on an American city. We're trying to determine how to stop it from happening again. I don't see, Dr. Smith, how in a pig's ass what the man was humming would matter."

Smith showed no response to the verbal assault.

"Colonel," he said. "What was the man humming?"

Lt. Col. Leif Anderson, a robust, youngish looking man in his thirties, looked anxiously at the general. The general shrugged his shoulders in disgust. "Answer him," he said in a tired voice.