Feeding Frenzy td-94

by Warren Murphy

  Feeding Frenzy

  ( The Destroyer - 94 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  While searching for the lethal ingredient in a popular snack food, Remo and Chiun encounter an exotic beauty determined to make Chiun her instant enemy and Remo her love slave.

  Destroyer 94: Feeding Frenzy

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  Chapter 1

  Later on, no one would remember who was actually the first one to eat the bug, but a lot of them tried to take credit for it.

  Brother Karl Sagacious said that he remembered it clearly. He had been hiking around the hills north of San Francisco while on sabbatical from his professor's job at UCLA where he taught a history course titled "Egyptians, Phoenicians, Romans, Greeks, and other Black Folk," and as he was pitching his tent one night to sleep, a brilliant light appeared in the sky.

  And then a thin voice came and it said, "All your science is false. But I will show you the true way."

  It was a woman's voice, Brother Karl Sagacious later recalled.

  He remembered he had been blinded by the light, but impelled by some force he could not understand, he staggered sightlessly from his tent and pushed his way through the forest, until the voice commanded him:

  "Kneel and eat. This is your truth."

  Still unseeing, he obeyed. His hands found tiny nuggets of food which he popped into his mouth. They were delicious. They tasted like miniature lobster tails. He could not stop eating and when he did, he finally fell asleep where he knelt.

  He woke with the morning sun and found himself in the middle of a field of weeds. The weeds were covered with brown, soft-shelled bugs. Was that what he had eaten?

  He looked closely. The bugs were not moving. They were asleep. Or dead. His stomach rumbled at the thought that he might have chosen to eat dead insects for supper.

  But then he remembered the voice.

  "This is your truth," She had said.

  Slowly, with trembling fingers, he reached out and plucked one of the bugs from the weed. He examined it carefully. It even looked benign. It had a round head, but no pincers, and its legs were but little hairlike stubble on the side of its inch-long body. And it was dead.

  He gulped once, swallowed, and then popped the bug into his mouth and bit into it.

  It tasted exactly like lobster tail. It was wonderful. Nirvana.

  He stayed in that spot for breakfast, and then when he was full, he returned to civilization to spread the word.

  At least that was how he remembered it.

  Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles remembered it quite a different way.

  No modern man, he insisted, had been the one to discover the bug. It had been part of the collected wisdom of the Native Americans who had ruled these lands before the white man came to despoil it with his cities and schools and churches and toilets and homes.

  And he, Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles-as the spiritual and physical heir to those noble Red Men-had known since childhood of the magical properties of the thunderbug, so named because they invariably lifted their tiny heads quizzically whenever it thundered-and had been eating nothing but them since he was little more than a papoose on the Chinchilla Indian reservation in Sedona, Arizona.

  Some reporters found out later that Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles had never so much as seen an Indian reservation in Arizona. Instead, he had been raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as Theodore Magarac, the son of an immigrant Latvian steelworker. He had spent fifteen of his forty years in jail for petty theft.

  His last known scam had been perpetrated in the wake of the U.S. Postal Service's pick-an-Elvis-any-Elvis campaign. Theodore thought that if they're going to put a junkie on a stamp, they ought to put a fag on too, so he started a 900 number to lure people into paying for the privilege of voting on whether Liberace or Rock Hudson should have his gummy backside licked by the Postal Service's patrons.

  The scam collapsed when the Postmaster General called the number, got an answering machine and no callback, and subsequently discovered a $49.99 telemarketing charge on his office phone bill. He got steamed and sicced the Inspector General and the FCC onto Theodore. Magarac did a year in Folsom.

  However, the reporters decided that running a story on Theodore Magarac's pedigree would add nothing to the public's necessary store of knowledge on the subject. And since the new bug was obviously going to be such a boon to mankind, it would not do to confuse the discussion with a lot of extraneous nonissues, and so the story was never published.

  They were saving it for when the story peaked.

  But while the history of the bug's discovery might have been in doubt, what was certain was that somehow Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles and Brother Karl Sagacious had come together and created an organization called PAPA-People Against Protein Assassins-and it was their stated goal to make the bug the new staple of the world's diet.

  "The world no longer needs chicken farms or cattle ranches or hogs raised for meat. With the discovery of the Miracle Food, we have ended forever the specter of hunger and starvation on our planet," read one of their press releases.

  Even in California, where people will sign up to do almost anything, it was a tough sell convincing people to eat bugs. But as time went on, more and more came aboard.

  Soon PAPA was taking over the entire membership of the state's hundreds of New Age groups. Crystal-strokers, cosmos-guiders, rain-foresters, Harmonic Convergers, Pyramidologists-all decided that the Miracle Food was the way of the future. They joined by the hundreds and the movement slowly crossed the Rockies and came into America's heartland.

  It could no longer be ignored.

  The Miracle Food was tested and examined in scores of laboratories, and the preliminary reports were almost as glowing as Brothers Karl and Theodore made them out to be.

  The bug was a little-known insect named Ingraticus Avalonicus. It was able to live in all climes but in the past had been slow to reproduce and therefore had not ever been previously found in large numbers.

  The entire body of the insect was edible, high in protein, carbohydrates, and essential amino acids, but without fat and with the added property of apparently lowering the blood cholesterol of someone who ate it. People could eat them like popcorn and actually lose weight.

  The bug's habits were also peculiar. It did not sting and there were no known allergies exacerbated by it. It did not eat valuable crops. Instead, the lowly and insignificant Ingraticus fed only on common weeds that grew everywhere, and it would simply light on a weed and eat until it died.

  A panel from Consumers News magazine made a test of the Miracle Food, both raw and cooked, and reported that the thunderbug tasted better than pizza.

  In every state in the union, PAPA groups sprang up. The United Nations called for action. Official Washington decided the lowly thunderbug was now worth its consideration and it ordered redone, at a hundred times the original cost, all the tests that had been done privately. But first a new laboratory had to be built at a cost of six hundred million dollars in the Arkansas district of the Speaker of the House. With cost overruns, the lab ultimately cost four billion dollars, but eventually it got around to studying the thunderbug.

  "Is the Millennium Here?" the New York Times wondered in a front-page editorial. "Has mankind really found the answer to worldwide starvation?"

  Back in California, in the wooded clearing where the original one hundred members of the very first PAPA group still lived, there were rumblings of internal problems.

  Brother Theodore was unhappy because Brother Karl Sagacious had been on television too much of late, depriving him of equal-opportunity face time.

  A
nd Brother Karl had been heard to complain that he thought Brother Theodore was raising too much money for "research" that never seemed to get done.

  It got so bad that the two stopped talking to each other.

  And then came the Great Schism.

  One day, Brother Karl came out into the clearing to address the faithful.

  "You will remember that I was the first to eat the Miracle Food. And I ate it raw. And now, it seems that many of you are under the misapprehension that the sacred bug must be cooked first. This is heresy. From this moment on, the dietary rules are set by me. And not anyone else."

  Brother Theodore entered the clearing an hour later to address the same faithful.

  "My people," he said, meaning his imaginary Chinchilla forebears and not the Latvian steelworkers, "have been eating the thunderbug for centuries. It must be cooked. We let it die on the vine and then cook it. It is the only correct way."

  Brother Karl was back a few minutes later. "The Miracle Food is better eaten fresh. Cooked dead food is no better than beef stew."

  In the morning, the hundred earliest disciples had split into two camps.

  Brother Theodore called his people The Harvesters. They waited until the insects had died on the weed of overeating and they cooked them in a clear broth like chick-peas.

  Brother Karl said that hereafter there would be only one approved way to eat Ingraticus Avalonicus. "Pick up the bug, snap off its head, and pop it into your mouth. Fresh and good. The way She wants it."

  Brother Theodore dismissed Sagacious's followers as heretics, calling them "Snappers."

  Sagacious gleefully picked up on the name. He had T-shirts made for his Snappers, in six designer colors and silkscreened with a legend rendered in what he claimed was genuine Phoenician calligraphy:

  SNAP OFF THEY HEADS AND EAT THEM RAW

  He proclaimed Brother Theodore and his Harvesters to be hopelessly New World and therefore counterprogressive.

  Theodore told his followers that the Snappers were practicing the kind of cruelty to living things that all thinking people must protest. He had his own T-shirts made up for the Harvesters. They read:

  ALL IN GOD'S GOOD TIME

  The calligraphy, he claimed, was fourteenth-century Mohican. They sold like hotcakes at $29.99.

  The next day, Brother Karl's followers moved out of the communal clearing into the next clearing. Both groups continued to share the slit trench latrine, and one evening Brother Karl and Brother Theodore met there, quite by accident, when both came to squat.

  "Karl, you're screwing things up," Brother Theodore said.

  "I am following the way that She set out for me."

  "Forget her," Theodore snapped, "whoever the hell she is. We've got a good thing going here and if we start fighting about it, we won't have anything left."

  "I'm not interested in 'a good thing,' " Karl said. "I am interested in truth."

  "All right, all right. You want truth. Try this: How is it that somehow it's wrong to kill a freaking chicken, but you can snap the heads off the thunderbug and swallow it down warm?"

  "Because that is what She told me to do."

  "That's your answer? She told you to do it? What kind of an answer is that?"

  "A truthful answer," replied Brother Karl Sagacious.

  "You know what's wrong with you?" Theodore snapped. "You're a nut. You never should have left the campus. They like nuts at UCLA. That's why it's called macadamia."

  "The word is academia," said Karl, "and yours are the remarks of a desperate man."

  "Look. Can't we get together on this and stop bickering? Let everybody eat the way they want. No skin off anybody's ass."

  "You're a charlatan, Theodore."

  Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles growled, pulled up his pants, and left, wondering what he was going to do about Brother Karl Sagacious.

  He did not intend to let this one get away from him. He had been on the wire all his life, scratching to make a wrinkled dollar. Con games had put him in jail. Anointing himself as a Chinchilla Indian had gotten him room and board and a little good press for a few years, until his thick black hair began thinning and falling out. Male pattern baldness, a specialist had told him.

  "Well, fix it," he had insisted. "I can't be no freaking Chinchilla Indian without hair. You ever see a bald spot on a Mohawk? Or a Dakota Sioux with a receding hairline? Everybody knows the noble Red Man had the follicles of a grizzly bear. That's why my Chinchilla ancestors were so heavy into scalping. Hair was their totem. They ate hair, thus insuring abundant buffalo and no unsightly dandruff on their noble Chinchilla shoulders."

  "Sorry, friend. Your hair's going."

  Shortly after that, the Indian movement went up in smoke signals when most of its members went to jail for murder, and Brother Theodore drifted West where he lived on the fringes of assorted loony movements until one night, in a restaurant booth, he heard another man-who turned out to be Karl Sagacious-talking about the wonderful bug food he had discovered.

  "Tastes just like lobster," the man kept repeating.

  Theodore decided that there might be some way to turn a buck from it, and after the people had left, he went into the north California hills the man had been speaking of and, trying hard not to vomit, ate a couple of dozen bugs until he found one that tasted like lobster.

  He went immediately to the press, concocting his story about the ancient Chinchilla thunderbug-eating tradition as he talked, and created PAPA right on the spot. A few weeks later, Sagacious-who never quite understood that the discovery had been stolen from him-showed up, and the two men agreed on a partnership to lead the new organization, People Against Protein Assassins.

  And it had worked well enough until now . . . until this damn stubborn display by Sagacious.

  Something was going to have to be done about him, Brother Theodore thought as he was falling asleep that night.

  By morning, something had been done.

  "Wake up, wake up, Brother Theodore," a young woman called, rushing into his tepee.

  "What's the matter? What is it?"

  "He's dead."

  "Who's dead?"

  "Brother Karl is dead."

  "Oh, no. How sad. Oh, what a loss is ours," Theodore moaned and turned and buried his face in his pillow so the woman could not see him smile.

  "And that's not all."

  "What's not all?"

  "Others are dying too," she said. "They're dropping like flies."

  "Oh, what a pity," Brother Theodore said. And this time he meant it.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and his favorite movie was still Gunga Din.

  He thought about it as he was sitting in the Harvard University auditorium, waiting for the start of the film tribute to Hardy Bricker, Hollywood's newest wonderchild.

  He had liked Sam Jaffe in Gunga Din. But Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks and Victor McLaglen were good too. What other movies did he like?

  He saw Fantasia once and really liked the dancing hippopotamuses. And Casablanca was okay except he never liked that fat guy who was in it. But Citizen Kane was about a sled, for crying out loud, and he had seen three minutes of Batman once, but the picture was so dark it looked like it had been filmed in a cave. He hadn't seen much else, not even in the various apartments he had lived in all his life, because while he had a VCR, it was always being used by Chiun, his trainer, to watch old soap operas.

  It wasn't as if he hated movies. He didn't hate them. He didn't care enough about them to hate them. He just didn't think about them at all.

  But he was willing to make an exception for Hardy Bricker.

  Hardy Bricker had made five films and was now being called the hottest director in Hollywood history. "The thinking man's director," some critic said on television and Remo thought that might be true if the thinking man involved never thought about anything but bullshit.

  Bricker's first film had been called Frag. It showed how American soldiers committed atrocities in Vietna
m, pushed to perform them by an evil military-industrial complex intent upon enslaving the world. Remo had been in Vietnam for a while and he knew that the soldiers there were no better or no worse than any America had sent anywhere else. They just wanted to stay alive.

  To call them criminals was in itself criminal. But it had rung just the right note for Hollywood. That city, run by people so dumb that they thought conspiracies explained everything, had found in Hardy Bricker an eloquent new spokesman. They bombarded him with picture offers. He took only the ones that paid him the most money.

  Frag was followed by Dependent. Day, showing how America was an evil racist country that turned its back on the noble soldiers who had fought in Vietnam-the same noble soldiers who were murderers in Frag.

  And then he did a movie called Horn, about some jazz musician who killed himself with a drug overdose brought on by his worrying about America turning into an evil racist country.

  Then his movie Jocko told the story of a rising young politician who was killed by an evil racist secret power structure of the United States, in a conspiracy involving 22,167 people. It won Bricker his third Academy Award.

  And tonight was to be the preview of Bricker's latest epic: Crap, which proved that all organized religion in the United States was the tool of an evil racist secret power structure trying to promote fascism in America. To be followed by remarks from Hardy Bricker himself, for those who needed even pictures explained to them.

  Does anybody believe this bullshit? Remo wondered, then looked around at the bearded, hairy Harvard underclassmen who had packed the auditorium, and he nodded sadly to himself. These zanies would swallow anything.

  Remo could tell that it was eight o'clock, and right on time the house lights dimmed and the elegant title Crap appeared on the screen, the individual letters apparently made by arranging dog turds on a white background.

  Then the camera pulled away and the white background turned out to be a priest's cassock. The priest had it pulled up around his waist. He was sexually molesting a preteen girl. In the first five minutes of the film, the same priest sexually assaulted three more children. Then he shaved, put on expensive aftershave lotion, and went to lunch with an evangelist at an expensive New York City restaurant, where they talked about following the secret orders of their military-industrial masters. Before lunch was finished, both clergymen had ducked into the hatcheck room to ravage two waitresses.