Feast or Famine td-107

by Warren Murphy

  Instead, Remo reached up and casually slapped the crushing fingers to loose sausages.

  Jaromir let out the screech of screeches and turned it into a high howling yowl. Coming out of his seat like casual lightning, Remo turned and quieted the man with an equally casual slap. His jawbone flew off its hinges and tried to jump out of his mouth. The envelope of skin that was his stubble-blue chin kept it from hitting the opposite wall. Finally, it stopped wobbling and just stayed slack. Jaromir's tongue hung out like a panting dog's.

  He tried to speak, but without working mandibles, all he could manage was a hollow groan and a slow drool.

  "That," said Remo, "is one definition of the verb to nail."

  The interrogation room was quiet long enough for the alleged Jaromir Jurkovic to finish his groan. Then tensed hands slapped for side arms. That gave Remo permission to defend himself, and he did.

  In place, he spun around. Arms floated high. One foot came up and out. Centrifugal force made the rest automatic.

  The stiff fingers of Remo's left hand reamed out a man's eye sockets while the right jabbed another's Adam's apple. The foot, still rising, impacted a groin. The groin became suddenly and forever concave. The owner didn't care. The pain traveled up his spinal column and literally short-circuited his brain.

  Remo left four groaning Serbs on the floor in various degrees of distress, thinking that it had been a detour worth taking.

  Like most Americans, when the fractious ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia had broken out, he hadn't known for five months who was who. If the Russians had declared war on the Canadians, he would have known whom to root for-after some thought. If Germany had reinvaded France, he would have had a clue. If Korea had bombed Japan, he would have had a rooting interest.

  But he didn't know what a Bosnian was. A Croat might as well have sat on a grocery shelf labeled Croats. Remo early on figured out that a Serb was a kind of low-rent Russian. But it was months before the TV news anchors had added the qualifier Muslim to the noun Bosnian and Remo was all set to cheer on the Croats because these days the only Muslims fighting anyone were car-bombing civilians. Until the first pictures of the emaciated Bosnians in Serb concentration camps started coming out, and it began to look as if the Serbs were the real bad guys.

  To this day, he had no clue what a Croat was or did or looked like. But he knew that the Serbs were being bastards and Bosnians were being victimized.

  He gave up on the United Nations before the UN rolled in. The UN was fine if there was no shooting. But they had simply stood around with their hands in their pockets while helpless families were being massacred in so-called safe haven after safe haven.

  That lasted until NATO came in, but NATO wasn't much better. They actually surrendered confiscated weapons so Serbs could start up all over again. And when the call came to arrest war criminals and detain them, they ignored it. War criminals were celebrities in the former Yugoslavia. No one dared touch them because it threatened the fragile peace hammered out in Dayton, Ohio-of all places.

  The way Remo saw it, a fragile peace in which war criminals were issued free passes was no peace at all.

  Finally, Upstairs saw it this way, too.

  "Go to Sarajevo," said the lemony voice of Remo's superior, Dr. Harold W. Smith. "And get General Tanko."

  "Done," said Remo, who by trade was an assassin. In this case, he was an unofficial U.S. government sanction.

  The idea was to nail the biggest war criminal of them all. Maybe that would scare the others into hiding or surrender.

  Remo walked through the terminal at Sarajevo past bullet-pocked windows and other evidence of the long war that had shattered a once semicivilized nation and found his way to the cabstand.

  The cabs were green. They looked as if they had been salvaged from a junk heap. Consulting his clipping, Remo went from driver to driver asking, "Are you Bosko?"

  The fourth cabbie in line said, "I am Bosko."

  "I need a ride to General Tanko's house."

  "You have business with Tanko?"

  "He said to ask for you," Remo lied.

  "Come in. Come in. I will take you to Tanko."

  The drive was depressing. Bombed-out buildings. Open sewers. All the amenities of warfare. The international community kept talking about rebuilding, but with all three sides still at one another's throat, no one wanted to pour money into the rat hole its inhabitants had made of Yugoslavia. So the people lived in squalor.

  "You bring drugs, eh?" Bosko asked.

  "I bring the most potent narcotic of all."

  "Heroin, yes?"

  "Heroin, no. It's called Death."

  "Death. Is designer drug, yes?"

  "Is ultimate drug," said Remo. "One hit, and you never want to wake up."

  "You tip me with Death, of course."

  "You read my mind," said Remo, smiling with thin lips that bordered on cruel.

  Remo didn't look strong. He looked wiry. His build was average for a six-footer, but his wrists stood out. They were freakishly thick, as if they belonged to someone else. But there they were, holding his longfingered hands to his wiry forearms. The tendons in them stood out like white cord.

  He didn't look old enough to have been a Marine in Vietnam, but he was. He didn't look like a former cop, except maybe around the eyes. Remo was that, too. And he certainly didn't look like the most dangerous killing machine wearing white skin. But he was. Remo was a Master of Sinanju, the first and ultimate martial art. The discipline that gave rise to every Asian fighting skill from kung fu to yubiwaza, Sinanju had been practiced exclusively by the head of a Korean house of assassins that originated in the village of Sinanju high in rocky, forbidding North Korea.

  For five millennia, the House of Sinanju had been a Korean power. Now the secrets that transformed an ordinary man into the perfect fighting machine had fallen into non-Korean hands and were dedicated to furthering American aims. And Remo was the disciple who was focusing now on one aim in particular.

  The house of General Tanko was in a suburb and very well maintained. No bullet holes. Intact glass. The paint looked fresh. It had once belonged to a Muslim doctor whose blood had seeped into the front door after they stood him before it and shot him to bone splinters. The fresh paint was to mask the blood.

  The cab rolled up the graveled path, and at the entrance, the driver turned and smiled with big yellow teeth.

  "You tip me with Death?"

  Bosko's eyes were on Remo's eyes. They were dark and set deep into his skull. They were the eyes of a death's-head. In his last moment, Bosko thought exactly that.

  Remo didn't know or care. He simply brought the heel of his hand up from his knee and applied it to Bosko's aquiline nose. It was a good nose for shattering purposes. The cartilage bent to the left, snapped and, when the heel of Remo's hand impacted on the bone, it shattered like shrapnel.

  Splat!

  Bone splinters riddled Bosko's unsuspecting brain.

  Remo reached up and pulled him by the hair over the seat and down onto the back-seat floorboards.

  Getting out, Remo walked confidently to the front door. He liked front-door hits. No one ever expected his assassin to come knocking in broad daylight.

  While he waited for a response, Remo put on his polite-encyclopedia-salesman face.

  The door opened. It was General Tanko himself, eyes black as a crow's and his pugnacious features unconcerned. He wore the gold braid and tinsel that was his Serbian army uniform. General Tanko liked to wear his dress uniform. He was proud of the innocents he had butchered.

  "General Tanko?"

  "I am he. Who are you?"

  "I'm from the U.S. Board of Unofficial Sanctions."

  "Sanctions?"

  "We sanction people like you. I'm pleased to announce that you are this month's sanctioned Serb."

  "You cannot sanction a person. It is preposterous. Nations are sanctioned. Not persons. It is unhumane."

  "You mean inhumane."

&nbs
p; "Yes. Inhumane. Not to mention ethicless. How dare you come to me with this announcement of sanctions."

  "We tried sanctioning your country," explained Remo. "But it's so poor, it can't get any poorer. So in its infinite wisdom, Uncle Sam has decided to sanction you personally. Think of it like having the Publisher's Weekly Prize Van roll up and take instead of give."

  "I have rights."

  "Everyone has rights," agreed Remo, still polite.

  "Yes, everyone."

  "Except the innocents you butchered."

  "I am not butcher, but a Serb."

  "In your case, it's the same thing. Now if you'll step out of your nice, ill-gotten house, we can get this sanction over with."

  General Tanko blinked. "What does this entail?"

  "A lecture on niceness."

  Tanko blinked again. Then a slow smile spread over his coarse features. "I am to be lectured?"

  "On being nice."

  "By you?"

  "Yep," said Remo.

  "By an undernourished joke of an American such as you? You dare to sanction the great Tanko, the Scourge of Srebrenica?"

  And General Tanko threw back his black head and roared his amusement.

  Splat.

  Remo couldn't wait. It was the description under nourished. Nobody called him that. He was not undernourished. It was that his body contained almost no body fat. He looked thin. He didn't look muscular: But he could erase General Tanko from existence with a sweep of his hand, which he did.

  Remo's sweeping hand came up and impacted the cutting edges of General Tanko's upper teeth. The force was enough to shatter the general's teeth, but the angle was perfect. Instead, the teeth were forced into the jawbone, and the entire top of General Tanko's large head snapped back and, like a pineapple breaking off its stalk, it fell to the ground behind his back.

  General Tanko's lower jaw remained attached to his stump of a neck. It sagged. The tongue remained attached to the lower jaw. It gave a meaty little toss as the nerves controlling it waited for signals from the disconnected brain and, receiving none, plopped dead onto the sagging jaw.

  Remo pushed the tottering body back into the foyer and drew the door shut. Body and door impacts blended in one sound.

  Reclaiming the cab, Remo drove back to the Sarajevo airport whistling.

  He had made the world a safer place. And he would make his flight.

  Chapter 3

  Word of the ultimate sanction befalling General Tanko of the Bosnian Serb Army raced from Sarajevo to the capitals of Europe and to Washington, D.C., within thirty minutes of the discovery of his body.

  It reached the lonely desk of Dr. Harold W. Smith in Rye, New York, at the same time it hit Washington.

  The Associated Press report was sketchy.

  Sarajevo (AP)

  General Tanko, otherwise Tanko Draskovic, indicted Serbian war criminal, was discovered in his home, the victim of a savage attack perpetrated by persons unknown. General Tanko was found with his head ripped from his body as if by a tremendous force. Initial reports are he was not beheaded. What was meant by this statement in the context of his fatal injuries is not known at this time. Draskovic was fifty-six.

  Dr. Smith read this without his gray eyes registering any reaction that it meant something to him. His gray, patrician face likewise registered no emotion. But the news told him that his enforcement arm had succeeded in his assignment.

  If all went well, Remo would be en route to Kaszar Air Base in Hungary and safe passage home. If not, well, the Serbian authorities would suffer unacceptable casualties trying to prevent him from leaving the former Yugoslavia. Smith had no concerns for Remo's personal safety.

  A long time ago, he had selected Remo to be his enforcement arm, framing him for a murder he didn't, commit. Remo had been a Newark beat cop in those days. Smith had railroaded Remo through a kangaroo court trial to the Death House. He had been one of the last men electrocuted by the state of New Jersey.

  Remo Williams, believed dead and buried by the world, had been given over to the last Master of Sinanju for the training that transformed him into a virtually unstoppable killing machine. For over two decades, in missions great and small, Remo had never failed.

  A phone rang. There were two on Smith's black glassy desk. One blue, the other gray. It was neither of these. The ringing came from the right-hand middle drawer of his desk. It was muffled but insistent.

  Sliding open the drawer, Smith dug out a fireengine red desk telephone and set it on the desktop. He picked up the receiver and said, "Yes, Mr. President."

  "I was just handed an intelligence report that General Tanko is dead," the familiar presidential voice said.

  "I have read that report," Smith said noncommittally.

  "Between you and I, was that your man?"

  "Do you need to know the answer?" returned Smith in his natural lemony voice. It wasn't disrespectful. Neither was it inviting. It could be read either way.

  "I was just curious," said the President. His voice was not exactly offended. Neither was it hurt.

  "Intelligence came to me that General Tanko was considering a terroristic attack on the NATO Implementation Forces in Bosnia. Orders emanating from his political masters in the rump Yugoslavia. An expression of U.S. displeasure had to be undertaken."

  "That's good enough for me," the President said. "This conversation never happened, by the way. You won't read about it in my memoirs."

  "I intend to write no memoirs," said Harold Smith, who meant it.

  The President hung up, and Smith returned the red telephone to the desk drawer and shut it. Before he left for the evening, he would lock it with a small steel key. It was a dedicated line directly to the White House, and was linked with its identical twin in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.

  For the thirty years since Harold Smith had been plucked out of the CIA's data-analysis department to head CURE, the supersecret government agency that didn't exist, he had lived with the only private hot line to the Commander in Chief at his side. A President of the United States had created CURE in the lonely womb of the Oval Office. He had told no one of his idea until he had found the man to head the organization-Harold Smith.

  "The nation is sinking into chaos," the President had told Smith, then many years younger but just as gray as today. Smith thought he was being interviewed for a security position with the NSA. That impression was dispelled once he found himself alone with the young, vigorous President who was soon to die a martyr's death. The month was June, 1963. Smith had forgotten the exact date, but the conversation remained etched in his memory like glass scored by a diamond.

  "I see," said Smith, letting the President talk.

  "Crime is out of hand. Our judges and unions are corrupt. The police-the good apples-are not equal to the demanding task at hand. I don't control the FBI. And the CIA is forbidden from operating on U.S. soil-not that they don't try."

  Smith said nothing to that. He was strictly an analyst. His days of action were far behind him, as were the President's. Both had seen action in the Big One, the President in the Pacific, Smith in the European theater of operations.

  "I see chaos, perhaps civil war by the end of the decade," the President continued.

  Smith did not contradict that view.

  "I can suspend the Constitution," the Chief Executive went on, "or I can declare martial law."

  He paused, fixing Smith with his crinkling blue eyes.

  "But there is a third option."

  "Yes?"

  "Have you ever heard of CURE?"

  "No. What do the letters represent?"

  "Nothing. I'm not even sure what I have in mind should even have a name, but let's call it a cure for a sick world. I need an organization that will watch the watchers, get at the cancer infecting this great nation of ours and excise it like a surgeon. Quickly, cleanly and, above all, quietly. And I want you, Harold Winston Smith, to head it."

  "I will require a large staff," Smith said stiffly,
neither accepting nor rejecting the offer because he loved his country and if the President asked him, he would head up this CURE entity without reservation.

  "You do it with next to no staff. If this gets out, it's my backside and your neck. Or maybe the other way around. You are one of the top computer men over at Central Intelligence. You'll sift though data, isolate the malefactors and arrange for them to be dealt with."

  "This is extralegal," Smith warned.

  "No. It is extra-Constitutional. Which is far worse," the President said soberly. "But it's this or admit the American experiment is an abject failure." The President fixed Harold Smith with his warm, humorous eyes. They turned steely. "Not," he added, pronouncing each word like a drumbeat, "on my damn watch."

  "Understood, sir."

  With a handshake, the secret pact was made.

  Smith resigned from the CIA, ostensibly for the private sector. He took over Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, as its new director. From Folcroft, he quietly ran CURE. Funded by black budget money, using computers and confidential informants, it reached out to the cancers of American democracy and seared them dead.

  In the early months of CURE, the President was cut down. Smith was on his own. The successor President, rattled by his abrupt and bloody ascension to power, signed on for the agency to continue operations.

  "Indefinitely," he said. The new Commander in Chief was afraid he was next.

  Over successive administrations, Harold Smith had worked to salvage a foundering nation. But the forces of social instability were greater than one man could bear.

  Smith was forced to recruit an enforcement arm. A former cop named Remo Williams. Vietnam vet. Marine. Expert rifleman. Skills he would have to unlearn if he were to do the work of a wounded world.

  A beeping brought Smith's reflective eyes to his computer screen buried in the black glass of his desktop. The hidden monitor connected to the mainframes and optical WORM-drive servers in the Folcroft basement, the information octopus that reached its tentacles out to cyberspace.

  It was another AP report. The system was kicking it out as mission related. CURE's mission, not necessarily Remo's.

  Sarajevo-Airport Altercation (AP) Serbian authorities report a massacre at the airport at Sarajevo. As many as twenty-nine security forces were reported dead or wounded. A Serb jet has taken off. Destination unknown. It is believed the hijacker or hijackers are aboard.