Bay City Blast td-38

by Warren Murphy

  "How big?" Remo asked.

  "A giant," Mickey said. "A monster. A Jaws. Keep reeling."

  Remo got around to the right rear end of the

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  boat just in time to see the shark move up to the surface of the water and angle sharply to the right. The shark was at least twenty feet long.

  "A great white!" Mickey yelled. "I told you! Do whatever you want, but don't let him break that line." He was unclipping a ten-foot-long steel harpoon from its rack under the gunwhale. "Cap'n," he yelled. "Wake up."

  "Hah?" came a voice from the cockpit, twelve feet above the deck.

  "Great white," Mickey yelled. "Start the engines."

  "Hah?"

  "Shit," Mickey cursed softly. He screamed. "Start the frigging engines!" To Remo, he said, "Two tons if he's an ounce. Don't let him snap that line. When he comes close again, I'll get this harpoon in him."

  "It's a great white," Remo called over his shoulder toward Chiun.

  "An improbably named species," Chiun sniffed.

  The fish was racing parallel to the boat now, along its left side. Remo saw that if the shark made a quick turn in toward the boat, his line could get hopelessly hung up on the cleats or hardware on the front of the boat and snap. He started working his way forward along the side of the boat. He tripped over Chiun's feet.

  "Watch your feet, Chiun," he growled.

  "Watch your mouth, great white thing," Chiun said.

  Remo hopped up onto the railing. There was still slack in the line so there was no danger of his being jerked overboard and Remo walked along the railing until he was in the front of the boat. The shark dove under the water and then swerved right,

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  passing in front of the boat. Remo kept reeling up slack.

  "Good move, sveethot," Mickey said as he came up behind Remo, the long harpoon in his hand. He hooked it to a half-inch-thiek nylon rope, which was fastened to three barrels. If the harpoon got into the shark and lie pulled out the heavy line, the barrels were supposed to make it harder for him to sound, to drive straight down, because their buoyancy would keep fighting him back upward.

  "Come on, you sucker, come back," Mickey yelled at the fish, which was passing from left to right across the front of the boat, barely visible as it cruised just under the water sixty yards away. As if he had heard the mate, the shark turned and raced toward the prow of the boat. Remo heard the motors of the boat start behind him.

  The giant shark raced straight toward the bow of the boat. Remo could almost feel the anger in the giant fish's body. When the shark was only fifteen feet away, Mickey raised the harpoon to his right shoulder and fired. It bit into the flesh of the shark close behind the bullet head and the shark twitched and dropped below the surface of the water.

  The barrels went skimming off the front of the deck boat.

  "All right. You can cut your line now if you want," Mickey told Remo. The shark, racing toward the stern of the boat under the water, yanked the rope against the bow of the boat and it turned slowly in the water; and then the shark was speeding back toward Manhattan and the boat followed along behind him, the captain gunning the engines, trying to stay close enough to the shark so that the fish's

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  strength wasn't pitted against the boat's weight, in which case the only casualty would be the half-inch-thick line connecting them.

  Remo used his fingers to snap the nylon line on his fishing pole, as if it had been an overcooked strand of vermicelli. He stuck the pole into a rack alongside the gunwale and followed Mickey, who had gone to the stern to prepare another harpoon. If they could get another harpoon into the shark, they could slow him down by letting the weight of the boat drag on him. Until then, though, the rule was let him run.

  "Fun, isn't it, Chiun?" Remo said.

  Chiun fixed him with a chilling glance and folded his hands across his chest.

  Mickey had the second harpoon assembled and Remo followed him to the front of the boat.

  As the mate hooked another line to the harpoon, they suddenly felt the boat rock backward slightly, as if it had been caught in the wake of a large passing ship. .Remo saw the blue-and-white nylon line which had been attached to the shark limply drop into the water.

  "Shit, shit and triple shit," shouted Mickey. "The sucker snapped the line." He shook his fist out at the sea. The three barrels bobbed around on the surface of the water, still connected by the line to the shark. Then as if they had been attached to a falling mountain of rock, they dropped straight beneath the surface of the water. Remo and the mate stared for long seconds as the barrels disappeared, and then, as if they were corks released underwater, the barrels rose again, shooting .eight feet up into the air, before hitting back down with a string of

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  three slap splashes. Above their heads, the captain cut the engines.

  "We lost it, Chiun," Remo called back.

  "Good," said Chiun.

  "You don't understand," Remo said. "It was a giant. A record, maybe."

  "This fish was very important to you?" ,

  "Yes."

  "If you caught it, we would go back to our room before I am burned black by this malevolent sun?"

  "Yes."

  "I see," Chiun said.

  Mickey nudged Remo. "He may come back. Sometimes they do."

  The two men stood at the front of the boat, watching, their eyes circling, but the ocean was still.

  "We're far away from the chum slick," Remo said.

  "Makes no difference," the mate said. "When there's a great white around, the other sharks make themselves scarce."

  Remo glanced back and noticed that Chiun had risen from his seat on the locker. Ht was standing at the rear of the boat. From behind, he appeared to be dipping his hands into the water. Mickey noticed him too.

  "What's he doing?" the mate asked.

  "Don't be surprised at anything," Remo said.

  As they both looked toward the stern, they saw it. The giant shark came up to the surface of the water, directly behind the boat. He was only thirty feet away. He sped toward the boat at full speed.

  Mickey ran toward the rear of the vessel.

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  "Chiun, look out," Remo called. He started back also. Chiun did not move.

  The shark was upon the boat now and the vessel shuddered as the giant fish hit it at full speed. Remo could see the snout of the big beast rise above the gunwale as his teeth and mouth rammed the back of the boat. Chiun, instead of retreating, leaned further over toward the water.

  Mickey grabbed another harpoon. Remo ran up behind Chiun. Before the two men reached him, the old Korean turned, an angelic smile of calm on his face.

  "Now we go?" he said to Remo.

  And behind him, the body of the great white shark rose slowly to the surface, floating, its eyes already glazed over with death. It was a full twenty-feet long and its tail fins fluttered feebly as it floated behind the boat, and then it slowly revolved onto its back and its white belly reflected the afternoon sunlight like a piece of metallic foil.

  Mickey tossed the harpoon into the shark's belly and quickly secured the nylon rope to one of the rear cleats.

  "I don't believe it," Remo said. "I've seen sharks with a bullet in their head live for hours."

  "I have seen grasshoppers withstand cannon shot," Chiun said.

  Remo said "How?"

  "Because the cannon shot missed. The bullets in the shark's head missed. I do not miss."

  "Got to bring him to side before he sinks," Mickey said. He began hauling the shark in closer to get another line around his tail. The captain came down from the top cabin to lend a hand.

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  "What happened to him?" the captain asked.

  "Don't know, Cap," the mate answered.

  "They don't just die for no reason," the captain said.

  Mickey shrugged. "Got me," he said.

  As the two men struggled to bring the shark in, Remo asked Chiun, "How'd you do
that?"

  "Do what?"

  "Make him come. Then kill him."

  "I called him with my fingers. It is really easy. If you had paid attention, you would have learned how. I think I taught that to you . . . yes, in your second month of training. Ten years ago. What? You mean to say you weren't listening?" Chiun looked at Remo quizzically. "Surely you must remember. It came right between my lecture on Ung poetry and the history of the House of Sinanju during the reign of the greatest Master, Wang. You do not remember this?"

  ' "Don't be wise," Remo said. "You know I don't remember it. I slept through that month. How'd you kill him?"

  "I hit him on the nose as I will hit you on the nose if we do not return immediately to our room."

  Chiun climbed into the large deck chair, closed his eyes and pretended to nap.

  Behind him, Remo heard someone swear.

  He looked up to see Mickey and the captain leaning over the port side of the boat. When he joined them, he saw the faint trace of the great white's silvery-brown body slipping down through the waters toward the bottom of the ocean.

  For a moment, Remo thought of jumping in after it to retrieve the line, but decided it would take

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  "

  too long. The shark would drop down to the bottom and within minutes other fish would begin eating away at the once-feared killer.

  "Line broke," Mickey explained. "Damn."

  When they got to shore, Chiun woke up and looked around.

  "Where is the fish you wanted so badly?" he asked Remo.

  "It got away," Remo said disconsolately.

  "The big ones always do," Chiun said.

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  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The fishing boat dropped Remo and Chiun off at a private dock jutting out into the ocean, before going back to the main marina where the mate and captain planned to tell everybody about the giant shark that just seemed to die of old age, but slipped the ropes and dropped to the bottom before they could boat it. In a town whose economic survival depended more and more on shark hunters and stories of great whites caught and almost caught, 90 percent of those who heard the story would smile and quietly consider it a lie. The other 10 percent would keep open minds. They themselves had run into great whites and they knew anything was possible.

  When they walked across a hundred yards of sand dune and entered their motel room, Remo and Chiun found Dr. Harold W. Smith sitting in a chair. He was not watching television or reading a newspaper. He was simply sitting, as if sitting

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  were an end in itself and he had worked hard to learn the technique of doing it well.

  "You should've seen the shark we had, Smitty," Remo said. "Thirty feet." He spread his hands as wide apart as he could to illustrate.

  Behind him, Chiun held up his right hand, with thumb and index finger separated by only about three inches. Silently, he mouthed the words to Smith, "A minnow."

  "Yes, yes," Smith said. "I'm glad you've both enjoyed your vacation so much."

  "Do I detect the past tense there?" Remo asked.

  "Actually it was the present perfect," Smith said. "But past will do. I have an assignment."

  "Bay City?"

  "Yes," Smith said.

  "I knew it. I knew it. I knew you were going to change your mind. I knew I should have hit that guy while we were there."

  "Please, Remo," Chiun said. "Don't talk about hits. It makes you sound like some kind of killer."

  "Sorry, Chiun," Remo said. He turned back to Smith. "All right, I'll finish it tomorrow."

  "You don't understand," Smith said.-

  "What don't I understand?"

  "You've got the job assignment wrong. I don't want to dispose of Mayor Nobile."

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "I want you to be his bodyguard. Protect him."

  "From what? The FBI? An overdose of cava-telli? What?"

  "I don't know from whom or from what. He got a threatening letter today from someone who called himself 'The Eraser.' "

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  Remo sprawled down on the bed and looked over at Smith. Chiun turned on the television set and pulled the vanity chair around so he was sitting six inches from the screen. A sports program was showing the full contact karate championships. Chiun turned off the set in disgust. He had hoped there would be an ice skating show on. He had fallen in love with one of the skaters. When he found out she was married to a football player, he watched football hoping the player would be killed and cursed defensive linemen for their inability to make him into a vegetable.

  " 'The Eraser?' " Remo said.

  Smith nodded.

  "Why should we care if Rocco Nobile gets himself knocked off by The Eraser or by anybody else for that matter? I told you he was turning that city over to the mob. What's it to us?" He put his hands behind his head and looked at the ceiling.

  Smith cleared his throat. Chiun went into the bathroom to count the bars of soap. If there were extras, they would go into one of his trunks.

  "Remo," Smith said, "a number of years ago the CIA had an agent in Europe named Wardell Pin-kerton the Third."

  "He must have been a winner," Remo said.

  "He was. He was one of the best field agents the CIA ever had. Then he developed heart trouble and had to be moved out of active line duty. He came back to the States."

  "And today, I believe, that man is a certified public accountant?" Smith looked at Remo in confusion but Remo was rewarded by Chiun's roar of laughter from the bathroom. They had been in New York

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  City one evening to buy roasted chestnuts and they had happened onto a playhouse off the main theater district. The picture in the box office window illustrating the play was so appalling that they went inside to see it. It was a one-actor monologue with lines so deadly dull that half the audience was asleep in the first ten minutes. And when the actor delivered the line about the public accountant, Chiun could contain himself no longer. He leaped onto the stage and chased the actor off it. He was about to leave when he looked out and saw the seventy-five faces looking up at him from the darkness. He delivered one of the shortest of the Ung poems, and an hour later, when everybody in the audience was asleep, he and Remo left.

  "Certified public accountant?" Smith said.

  "Never mind," Remo said. "You had to be there. What happened to Pinker Waddington?"

  "Wardell Pinkerton the Third. He retired to California. Then his wife and daughter were killed in an accident. He got bored and tired and started drinking too much and one day, he decided the only way to pull himself back together was to go back to work."

  "So?"

  "So he was recruited at the very highest levels of government for a secret mission. Wardell Pinker-ton the Third vanished from the face of the earth."

  "What has this got to do with me?" Remo asked. There were 266 pressed board tiles in the ceiling. Nineteen rows of fourteen each. Since Remo had never been able to multiply, he had counted each one of them.

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  "Well, precisely this," Smith said. "Wardell Pin-kerton is Mayor Rocco Nobile."

  Remo sat up in bed. "Say it again."

  "Rocco Nobile, the mayor of Bay City, is Wardell Pinkerton the Third. He's a federal agent. He's working for us on this program, even though he doesn't know it is our operation. After he vanished from California, he had plastic surgery and then showed up again in Miami, where he used money to make mob connections. We were able to help him with that. We've been moving him around inside organized crime for five years. Then it was time to move. We sent him into Bay City to take over the town."

  "But why? Why turn it over to thugs?"

  "He has given an open invitation to organized crime to move its operations into Bay City. He's opening the piers so that contraband can move in and out easily. So drugs can flow freely. Mob interests are coming from all over the country. Cutting rooms and jewelry factories for stolen diamonds. Printing facilities for counterfeit stock certificates and sec
urities. Major counting rooms for the nation's biggest illegal gambling operations."

  "You still haven't told me why."

  "Remo, he's turning it into a safe city, so we can get most of America's crime centralized there. And when we do, we're going to go in and shut it all down at once."

  "I got it."

  "Now you know why Rocco Nobile has to be kept alive. If anything happens to him now, the mob people will leave before we really get a chance to

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  set them up. Remo, we want to get them all. We want to deal crime a blow that it might never recover from. That's why it's imperative you protect Rocco Nobile ... er, Wardell Pinkerton."

  "The Third," Remo said.

  "Yes."

  "All right," Remo said.

  Smith said, "Of course, he doesn't know who you are or who you work for. He doesn't even know who he works for. He doesn't know CURE exists."

  "Does he know we're coming?"

  "He knows a government agent is coming to join his bodyguard staff, but you'll have to be discreet. You can't blow his cover. You've got to be a mob member protecting another mob member," Smith said.

  "If I have to wear a pinky ring and a pinstripe suit, I quit," Remo said.

  "Do the best you can." Smith stood up and picked up his briefcase from alongside the chair. He looked toward the closed bathroom door and lowered his voice to a whisper. "Perhaps it would be best if he did not accompany you. No attention should be called to this operation and he sometimes makes scenes." «

  "Leave it with me," Remo said.

  Smith spoke aloud. "Give my best regards to Chiun."

  "I will."

  As the door closed behind Smith, the bathroom door opened. Chiun came out with two small bars of soap and a half-filled box of facial tissues. He carefully placed them into one of his trunks at the far end of the room.

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  Chiun slammed down the trunk lid with a crack that could have been heard even over the disco bands in the nearby town of Southampton. He picked up a small lamp and threw it through the back window of the motel room.

  When he turned to Remo, his face was pale.

  "Now what did he mean that I sometimes make scenes?" Chiun demanded.