Ship Of Death
( The Destroyer - 28 )
Warren Murphy
Richard Sapir
Beware Greeks bearing gifts - especially when it's billionaire Demosthenes Skouratis selling the biggest pleasure cruise ship ever built to the United Nations for their headquarters. CHEAP! Over three times the size of the QE II, this huge vessel has everything from high tech offices and communications equipment to luxury spas, casinos, restaurants and palatial apartments. But the deal doesn't include a dozen dead bodies and a hull full of bombs being rigged to explode the night of the opening gala! And Remo Williams, the Destroyer, plans to crash the party. Tipped off the plot when CURE director Harry Smith is getting beaten up by some tough crew members, Remo and Sinanju master Chiun blast full steam ahead, drowning the sleazy rats and save the UN from a watery grave.
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* Title : #028 : SHIP OF DEATH *
* Series : The Destroyer *
* Author(s) : Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir *
* Location : Gillian Archives *
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INTRODUCTION
It was the early 1960s and America was in trouble. Crime was getting out of hand, engulfing the country, forcing it surely toward either anarchy or dictatorship.
So a young president of the United States made a brave decision, and CURE was born. CURE was a supersecret agency, set up to save the Constitution by working outside it to fight the rising tide of crime. And, to head this agency that only he in government would know about, the president selected Dr. Harold W. Smith, a tight-lipped New Englander who had served in the OSS and the CIA.
CURE had everything: money, manpower, and a free hand. And still it failed. It needed something more. It needed a killer arm to mete out its own brand of justice.
So Remo Williams, a young, Newark policeman, was framed for a murder he did not commit, sent to an electric chair that did not work, and woke up working for CURE. Remo's training was put in the hands of Chiun, a tiny, aged Korean from the North Korean village of Sinanju. For centuries, Sinanju had provided the world with assassins and Chiun was the latest Master of Sinanju.
Chiun, the Master of all the Oriental killing arts, taught Remo to kill.
At first it was just a job for Remo. But as the years went on and the training went on, it became more than a job and he became more than a man. He became a Master of Sinanju himself, a troubled man torn between his Western heritage and his Eastern training.
And the bodies piled up.
CHAPTER ONE
She was big.
From even the first thought of her in the mind of Demosthenes Skouratig, she was big. There had never been one bigger.
Almost a half mile long from bow to stern she was, and tall as an apartment house. You could lay two Queen Elizabeth II's end to end and fit them in her big belly. You could parachute from the top of the superstructure to her cavernous insides. Made to haul oil from the Persian Gulf she was, and she had the power systems of a large city, the gut strength of a thousand armies of tanks, and the capacity of all the trucking of an entire state.
"Make her a little longer, sir, and we could lay her across the Atlantic," joked Sir Ramsey Frawl, president of Frawl Shipping Combine Ltd.
Demosthenes Skouratis smiled. He did not smile often and he did not smile widely. You had to watch the crease in his dark lips part ever so slightly to realize the sallow face was showing a form of joy.
"I am in ships, not in pipelines, Sir Ramsey," said Demosthenes Skouratis. He drank almond-flavored water and refused a glass of port. He was a short man, squat as if he had been compressed from a taller one. He was ugly enough to make other men wonder how he always managed to get beautiful women trailing after him, and rich enough to make them sure they knew why. But those who thought Skouratis ruled women through his money were wrong. Many people were wrong about Demosthenes Skouratis. For Sir Ramsey Frawl, such a mistake would cost him Attington, the grand, green estate at which Skouratis had first outlined his idea for the big ship.
Attington had survived raids from the Norsemen, the Norman invasion, the great depressions, the staggering drain on the family's fortune from World War II and ensuing taxes, several national scandals involving the Frawl baronetcy, and the growing disinclination of the Frawl family's younger members to preserve the family business. It would not survive doing business with Skouratis, the former Greek shoeshine boy, whose shipping interests were rivaled only by those of another Greek, Aristotle Thebos.
When Frawl announced to his board of directors that they were going to build the largest ship in the world for Demosthenes Skouratis himself, Frawl stock immediately jumped to an historic high on the London exchange. It did not bother them that someone was selling short on large amounts of Frawl stock. If they had been more suspicious, instead of enthusiastic, they might have hired detectives to find out who was behind the small brokerage house that was selling their stock short. And they would have found out that it was Demosthenes Skouratis himself.
When someone sells stock short, it means he is selling stock he doesn't own. When it comes time for him to deliver the stock, if the stock has gone up, he will lose money because it will cost him more to procure the share than he received for already selling that same share. But if the stock should plummet, if he has sold stock for 150 pounds a share, for example, and then is able to cover his sales by buying the stock for a dismal two pounds a share, he has made a 7,400 percent profit.
This is what Demosthenes Skouratis did with Frawl shipping.
He knew something Sir Ramsey Frawl did not. Doing business with Demosthenes Skouratis was not an instant road to riches, but, instead, an opening of your veins to let him suck the blood out. A handshake with Skouratis did not conclude the bargaining, it started it.
At first, one would have thought he was Sir Ramsey's long lost father. He helped the firm to find financing. He used his influence to open up the Skaggerac shipyards in Stavanger, Norway for the building of the hull. When Frawl Ltd. was so heavily committed to this one project that it could not survive without its successful completion, the friendly long lost father started making changes. He wanted different metals here and a different structure there. He did it so regularly and in such small detail that the ship he would receive was almost twice the value of the one he had initially ordered. Sir Ramsey, himself now gaunt and haggard with dark signs of worry under his eyes, personally refused the last change.
"Mr. Skouratis, we are not equipped to install atomic-powered engines. I'm sorry, sir, we cannot do it."
Skouratis shrugged. He was not a shipbuilder, he said. All he knew was what he wanted. And he wanted atomic engines.
"You cannot have them from us, sir."
"Then I do not want your ship."
"But we have a contract, sir."
"Let us see what the courts say about that," said Skouratis.
"You know quite well, sir, that we are so heavily in debt that we cannot wait for complicated litigation to win us our money."
Skouratis said he knew nothing about courts. All he knew was what he wanted and what he wanted was atomic engines. He pointed out that the final design of the ship would perfectly support atomic engines.
"If we are going to succumb financially," said Sir Ramsey with all the dignity of hundreds of years of nobility, "then at least we shall do so with a certain succinctness. The answer is no. Do your scabrous worst."
But Greek shoeshine boys are not put off by a few trifling words. Life is too hard on the bare edge of starvation. And he who raises himself in the gutters of Piraeus does not build his schemes for regal gestures to undermine.
While Skouratis did not know about shipbuilding and he did not know about courts, he did know about financing. Now Sir Ramsey was talking his game. There was no great, great problem and talk of bankruptcy was nonsense. Why, Sir Ramsey wasn't even using the full potential of his credit base. There was the vast worth of Attington, a great landed estate. Sir Ramsey's problem was that he could not turn a thousand years of British history into liquidity. But Skouratis could and he would help him. Now if Sir Ramsey did not lose his head with all this bankruptcy talk, Frawl Combine could extend its credit base, put in atomic engines and make a vast profit. Did Skouratis ever say he would not pay handsomely for the engines? No. Never. He wanted to pay for what he got. But he wanted what he wanted.
This time, Sir Ramsey demanded deposits and bonds and assets in trust. This time, Sir Ramsey said, he wanted to protect himself. And protect himself he did.
But only until delivery, when he read in the London Times that Skouratis was not going to accept delivery. The stock plunged to slightly more than a pound a share. Creditors in sudden panic descended on the old and reputable firm like crazed sailors reaching for lifeboats. All the assets in trust for the atomic engines could not delay the onslaught. And then Sir Ramsey discovered, when the stock hit bottom, that Skouratis had bought it and owned a majority share of the company. With a bit of deft juggling, he then sold the assets in trust back to himself, sold the giant ship to himself at the original scandalously low price, collected Attington because he was the banker behind the loan, sold Frawl yards to a dummy company that declared public bankruptcy and, for an added kick, picked up Frawl stock for mere shillings and turned it over to the luckless people who had bought it from him when he sold short at 150 pounds a share.
It was a maneuver that could make a toad gloat.
It left Sir Ramsey with three choices: kill himself with a gun, kill himself with a rope, or kill himself with a chemical. He wanted a private leaving of the world, something near his ancestors. So one chilly October day, five years after the Greek shipping magnate had offered him that splendid opportunity to test Frawl shipbuilding skills, he drove up to Attington for the last time in a dark Rolls-Royce. He said good-bye to his chauffeur and apologized for not being able to give him the security of retirement, which had been implicit in his hiring, and gave the man a gold watch fob that was somewhat recent, having been in the family for only 210 years.
"Feel free to sell this," said Sir Ramsey.
"Sir, I will not sell it," said the driver. "I have worked twenty-two years for a gentleman—a real gentleman. No one can take that away from me. Not all the Greek money in the world. This is no more for sale than the twenty-two good years of my life, sir."
A thousand years of breeding in the cold British clime enabled Sir Ramsey not to cry. Death would be an easy thing after this.
"Thank you," said Sir Ramsey. "They were twenty-two good years."
"Will you be needing the car tonight, sir?"
"No. I don't think so. Thank you very much."
"Good afternoon then, sir. And good-bye."
"Good-bye," said Sir Ramsey, realizing that life was always harder than death.
The furniture was covered for storage as it had been for the last year. He went to the room where he was born and then to the room where he was raised and, finally, in the grand banquet hall with its majestic fireplaces that he could not now even afford to fill with wood, he strolled the gallery of family portraits.
And in the sense that comes to dying people, he understood. He understood that the baronetcy had not begun in grandeur but probably very much like that wretch Skouratis—with lying, robbing, stealing, deceiving. That was how fortunes began, and to preside over the ending of one was perhaps more moral than to preside over its beginning. Sir Ramsey would oversee the end of the Frawl fortune with grace. That was the least he could do.
The low purr of a Jaguar engine came into the quiet peace of the great banquet hall of Attington.
It was Skouratis. Sir Ramsey could tell by his desperate pudgy run. Skouratis jiggled several locks until he found an open door and, finally, sucking great inadequate lungfuls of air and wiping his forehead of greasy sweat, he stumbled into the great banquet hall of Attington that he now owned.
"Sir Ramsey, I'm so glad I got here in time."
"Really? Why?" asked Frawl coolly.
"When my people told me about your despondency and when I discovered you had come here with a pistol, I rushed here right away. I am so glad I got here in time, that you have not shot yourself already."
"You are going to try to stop me?"
"Oh, no. I just didn't want to miss your suicide. Go right ahead."
"What makes you think I won't shoot you? Just curiosity, mind you."
"To survive, one must know people. That is not you, Sir Ramsey."
"It has just occurred to me," said Sir Ramsey Frawl, "that you might have selected me to build my own disaster for other than business reasons."
"As a matter of fact, yes. But business is always first."
"Have I done something to offend you in any special way?"
"Yes. But it was not out of malice. It was something you said to the newspapers."
"What, if I may ask?"
"It was a small thing," Skouratis said.
"Obviously not that small to you, Mr. Skouratis."
"No. Not to me. You, as president of Frawl, had said that Aristotle Thebos was the foremost shipping man in the world."
"He once was. Before the great ship."
"And I am now, correct?"
"Yes. But my comment was so long ago. So very long ago."
"Nevertheless, you said it."
"And that was enough?"
"No. I told you it was business."
"I think there is something more, Mr. Skouratis."
"No, no. Just business. And, of course, Aristotle Thebos. What you had said."
"And that was enough to make you want to ruin me?"
"Certainly."
"And now you want to watch me finish the job?"
"Yes. Sort of a grand finale to all we have accomplished."
Sir Ramsey smiled. "It's too bad that you haven't read the newspapers this morning. You may have accomplished nothing at all. You may have become the biggest dinosaur since the Ice Age, Mr. Skouratis. The Jews call today Yom Kippur. It's their Day of Atonement. Your day of atonement is yet to come."
"What are you talking about?"
"A little war that started today in the Middle East."
"I know about that. I knew about it before the newspapers."
"Have you ever thought what you're going to do with the largest tanker in the world, when oil becomes too expensive? Your tanker, sir, was built to carry cheap oil. Cheap, plentiful oil."
Sir Ramsey turned his face from the grunt of the man in the ill-fitting suit to gaze upon a more graceful sight, the chair where his father had sat during so many formal dinners and the chair that he had used, and had been used so many times before when the British Empire was the empire of the world. And he pulled the trigger of the small gun, whose barrel he had stuck in his mouth, and it was so very easy. So much easier than life.
Skouratis watched the far side of Sir Ramsey's head pop out like a burst of tiny red spit. There were, of course, the proper witnesses coming into the room now, none of whom would remember Demosthenes Skouratis ever having been there. Actually, there had been no need for him to be there. He had known Sir Ramsey was a doomed man from the first time they shook hands on the deal to build the great ship.
Sir Ramsey had not been the first death connected to the great ship. There were eighteen others but, to Skouratis, that was just the average number of people killed or maimed in a large project. The real tragedy was the oil embargo. There wasn't enough oil to move because now there were too many ships ready to move too little. The price quadrupled and, like any other commodity, the more the price went up, the less it was used.
The great ship lay moored in its Norwegi
an berth and to just keep the engines running enough and the ship from rusting into an island of waste, it cost Demosthenes Skouratis seventy-two thousand dollars a week. It was like financing an empty city and he might have scrapped the great ship called only Number 242, except for the party that Aristotle Thebos had thrown for him in the shipyard when the ship was completed. Kings were there, socialites were there, the press was there, and every picture showed the great hulk with two hundred and forty thousand dollars' worth of tarpaulin, acres of it, covering the great pumps and fixtures.
"I am giving this party so that we may pay respect to the greatest ship ever built before my poor, poor friend, Demosthenes, must dismantle it," said Thebos.
"Ridiculous," was Skouratis' response to newspaper reporters. He answered with a little smile, as if the comment really were ridiculous.
And he was trapped. He knew Aristotle Thebos was correct. So did Aristotle. So did anyone else in the world who knew shipping. But it was only seventy-two thousand dollars a week, and it was worth seventy-two thousand dollars not to let Thebos have the last laugh on him. Only seventy-two thousand dollars a week. He could live with it for a while. The awhile became years—until lunch with an African diplomat one day in New York City, when Demosthenes Skouratis realized what he would do. He would be famous for it, great for it. Aristotle Thebos would die from envy. Die from it.
Skouratis had kissed the pimply black cheek of the African diplomat and danced around the table at the restaurant. The African diplomat had looked bewildered—until Demosthenes explained to him what he would do.
By the time the United States State Department found out about it, it was too late.
"Are they kidding? They're lunatics."
The officer who said that was talking about the United Nations. And everyone in the State Department agreed with him.
CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo and he was supposed to enter the room after the lights were turned out. He had been told everything was arranged which, nowadays he knew, meant that he had probably been given only the right name of the city—Washington, D.C.—and the right name of the building—State Department—and possibly the right room—B Level, 1073.
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