Skin Deep td-49

by Warren Murphy

  Caan stood, frightened, a chill like a razor running down his back. Nie wieder. Nie wieder?

  "The plane, sir," a soldier said, tapping his arm.

  He looked at the young man in bewilderment. "The plane? Yes, the plane," he said ambling off.

  He didn't even see the lepers pick up their rocks and clods of earth and hurl them toward Lustbaden and his men.

  "Ana is right," someone called. "There are worse things than death."

  "You murdered our chief."

  "Zoran is a liar and a killer!"

  A stone struck Lustbaden on the shoulder. The villagers cheered in approval.

  "Fire," he shouted to his troops. "Kill all of these diseased scum. They never deserved to live in the first place. Fire, I say!"

  The shower of bullets sounded like thunder, puntuated by the screams of the wounded and dying. But the lepers refused to run. Watching their neighbors drop beside them, an unspoken bond seemed to rise among the survivors and command them to stay and fight the soldiers with whatever weapons they could find— to stand and die.

  A young boy took Ana's arm and helped her to her feet. You are brave," he said gravely. "Fight with us now. Do not fear pain." He picked up Timu's knife and handed it to her. "This belongs to you now," he said, clasping her fingers over the hilt.

  At the edge of the rain forest, Chiun dropped the bundle of herbs and leaves in his arms and ran for the melee. He could hardly believe his eyes. Timu, along with a score of villagers, lay dead by the hut. Lustbaden's SPIDER corps was picking off the unarmed lepers in a bloody massacre of the people his ancestor had sworn to defend.

  With a high leap that made him seem to float in midair, he descended on the soldiers with the fury of a jungle cat. The Nazis fired randomly, but their weapons were of no use against this small old man who possessed the force of ten divisions. He traveled from one soldier to the next, shattering their pistols and rifles with quick, complex strokes of his hands.

  The lepers fought with him, cheering each other on as the soldiers dropped beneath Chiun's killing blows. When at last the few who survived had dropped their weapons and fled, Chiun stopped.

  "Who is named successor as chief?" he shouted to the throng of villagers.

  The young man with Ana stepped forward. "I am, Master," he said.

  "Henceforth, call no man Master," Chiun said. "You are evenly matched, now that the soldiers have been deprived of their guns. Lead your people into battle with these evil ones who run from you, and do not fail."

  The boy brightened. "I will," he said. And with a cry he brought the lepers forward to fight.

  Smith looked up from his straw mat in the hut, trying to mask the pain from Lustbaden's kicks to his ribs and back.

  "Is Lustbaden alive?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "Why did you stop?"

  Chiun answered softly. "With my skills, I can bring safety to the lepers. But only they can win back the pride that Zoran and his men have taken from them."

  He wrapped Smith's ribs. "I must leave again. There is something I need to attend to."

  "Remo?" Smith asked.

  "Remo."

  Smith took hold of Chiun's sleeve. "He's dead," he said quietly. "The plane. Stop the plane."

  "Remo first." Chiun left.

  Behind the straw hut he knelt, his eyes half closed, his heartbeat slowed almost to coldness. He sent his mind ranging through space, seeking to connect with another beyond the hearing of every other being in the universe. Chiun signaled only one word: Shiva.

  You are created Shiva, the destroyer, death, the shatterer of worlds, the dead night tiger made whole by the Master of Sinanju.

  And in the cave, deep in hypnotic sleep, Remo stirred.

  ?Chapter Twenty

  The SPIDER corps was gone.

  The bodies of their dead lay strewn in a mire of blood and mud extending from the village clearing to the edge of the rain forest. Lustbaden alone remained, crying out frantically to his lifeless protectors.

  "Get up!" he commanded, kicking a fallen soldier where he lay. "This is insubordination. This is treachery." He shook the corpse of another. "Do not betray me!" he raged, his white coat now bloodsoaked and torn.

  Led by Ana and the new chief, the lepers converged on him.

  "He is mad," the boy said.

  "He has always been mad," Ana answered, steadyng the knife in her grip. "And we were mad to listen to him."

  Lustbaden turned, his eyes wild. "I am not mad," he shouted hoarsely. "I am the greatest medical mind the world has ever known. You dare to come to me like this, you foul creatures with blood on your hands?"

  "We will welcome your blood on our hands," Ana said, swinging the knife high over her head.

  Suddenly Lustbaden laughed, the highpitched giggle of a girl. "You forget," he whispered, his madness darting like lights out of the blue eyes. "The birds."

  He held up his left arm, showing the wristwatch with the ultrasonic alarm. "I'll call them," he threatened. "I'll call them and you'll all die. Every filthy, stinking last one of you."

  "The birds," someone whispered.

  "Zoran still has the birds."

  "The birds will kill us."

  The villagers began to disperse, crouching and fearful, seeking shelter in their huts. Their victory had vanished.

  "Come back," Ana cried. "Can't you see? He would not release his birds. He is in the open with us. They would kill him, too."

  "They won't kill me," Lustbaden said, his half-moon smile twitching. "Nothing can kill me." He pressed the button on his watch.

  A high shriek like the wail of a ghoul pierced the air. In the distance, the dark shadow of a gull flapped toward them.

  * * *

  Remo awoke.

  Wilhelm Wolfe, who sat beside him reading, looked up in surprise when Remo rose from the settee.

  "Get out of my way," Remo said.

  Wolfe attempted a smile, but it died on his face. There was something in Remo's countenance that frightened him down to his bones.

  He picked up the red glass ball, its sparks still swirling inside. Remo swatted it away, shattering it in the air.

  "What— what's gone wrong?" Wolfe said, more to himself than to Remo. He barreled around the room, opening drawers, searching frantically for some kind of weapon. At last he found a small silver pistol on the corner of a desk. Whirling around, he fired at Remo without taking aim.

  Remo dodged the bullet easily. It came to rest in the wall behind him. "I thought you weren't going to try to kill me," he said. "Just you and me and the doc, remember? The three musketeers, sowing my Aryan seed for the glory of the Eighty-eighth Reich or whatever the hell it is."

  With a sliding jump that took him completely across the room, Remo was on him, and the pistol was flying, and Wolfe cried out in alarm.

  "I was only following orders. That's all. I meant you no harm personally."

  "That's the biz, sweetheart." He grasped him by the back of the neck.

  "Wait," Wolfe gasped, his eyes bulging. "Please."

  Remo loosened his hold.

  "I know that I must die," he said. The marks on his neck from Remo's hands stood out, raw and mottled. "Perhaps in another time, in other circumstances, we could have been friends." He shrugged. "That is of no consequence now. All I ask is that I be permitted to take my own life."

  Remo considered. "Why?"

  "I was born to an ancient and noble house. Dishonor would fall on the shadows of my ancestors if I were to be killed by a man with no weapons other than his hands."

  "How would you do it?"

  Wolfe held up his signet ring with the embossed spider design on the front. "Poison. I have carried it for many years. It will be quick, I promise."

  He flipped open the gold spider top and stood staring into the hollow ring for some moments.

  Remo stepped forward. "Is it powder?" he asked, thinking afterward that his question must have sounded flip at such a moment.

  "No," Wolfe sa
id, smiling faintly. "Acid," He hurled his arm at Remo, sending the liquid shooting directly toward him.

  Remo ducked quickly enough so that the acid missed his face, but he felt the burn of the droplets on his back and shoulders. The cloth of his T-shirt disintegrated in huge holes, uncovering deep red marks on his skin. By the time he could stand upright, Wolfe was halfway out the door.

  Remo caught him before he had taken another step. "Ancient and noble house," he said. He took hold of Wolfe's hand with its spider ring still on it and pulled slowly toward Wolfe's face.

  The Nazi was panting, his eyes darting frenetically around the silent cave halls. "Who are you?" he whispered.

  Remo looked him dead in the face. "I am Shiva," he said. "My line is ancient, too." And with that, he pressed the ring into Wolfe's forehead until the skull cracked. When he was finished, Wolfe lay alone in the empty hallway, his brain oozing from the back of his head. His eyes were wide and staring. On his forehead was stamped the red silhouette of a spider.

  ?Chapter Twenty-One

  The sky was dark with the huge, low-flying shadows of the birds. The clearing, once filled with villagers, was empty except for the two figurs of Ana and Lustbaden, standing among the dead.

  Ana's face was expressionless. She dropped the knife from her hand. "You have won, Zoran," she said. "We will all die now. I did not think you had the courage to give up your own life in order to kill us."

  Lustbaden laughed, convulsive and maniacal. "But don't you see?" he said, tittering. "I won't die." He pulled a small vial of liquid from the breast pocket of his lab coat. "They will not attack me with this. Only you will be killed. You and the rest of your leper friends."

  Seeing the girl's shock, he waved the vial at her tantalizingly. "But before you go, Ana, I wish to tell you a story. It's about the incident at Molokai. Your violation, my dear girl. By the gang of strangers. Remember that?"

  He waited for a reaction from her, but the girl didn't move. He arched an eyebrow in mock commendation. "Better, Ana," he said. "There was a time the mere mention of it would have sent you into paroxysms."

  "I no longer fear the past," she said.

  "Good. Good, good, good. Because I wish to inform you, in the hour of your death, that the men who raped you were my men, SPIDER corps troops I had been gathering from all over Europe."

  "What?" The color drained from her cheeks.

  "I kept them on Molokai, outside the leper colony, where I knew the authorities wouldn't come. Through hypnosis, I trained your mind not to remember their faces. But they've been here with you all along, ever since that day in Hawaii." He laughed uproariously.

  "But you— you found me," she stammered in a small voice.

  "Naturally I found you," he said. "My darling, I was the first to have you."

  She seemed to explode from within. "You!" she cried, picking up the knife at her feet and running toward him.

  With remarkable deftness for a man his age, Lustbaden lunged forward and grasped her wrists. Then, with her hands struggling in his, he kicked her between her legs. The air whooshed out of her in a gust. She crumpled to the ground in a heap.

  He unscrewed the lid to the glass vial. "Good-bye, Ana," he said quietly.

  Suddenly a loud bang reverberated in the clearing. Lustbaden screamed, his face twisted in amazement as he looked at his left hand, which had held the vial. In its place was a broken shard of glass embedded in a bloody mass of tissue and bone.

  Through his blurred vision, he saw a wisp of smoke lingering in front of one of the huts in the village. A man leaned in the half-shadow of the doorway, a Nazi Luger smoking in his hand.

  It was Harold Smith.

  "Nein!" Lustbaden shrieked above the noise of the oncoming birds. "Gott, nein!" It was a cry of rage and despair, the helpless wail of a man defeated on the verge of triumph.

  "I won't kill you," Smith said. His face was bathed in sweat, the muscles of his neck straining with each word. "The birds will do that."

  Lustbaden searched the sky, as if he remembered the birds' presence for the first time. He waved his arms at the flying killers above. There were hundreds of them, a blizzard of white beasts, mindless and lusting after prey. Lustbaden's arms, the injured one shooting off jets of fresh blood, fell to his sides in dull resignation. He looked like an old, old man.

  "Not the birds," he whimpered. "Please. Don't leave me to them. Use your gun. Shoot. Please, Smith."

  Smith looked pityingly at him. Thirty-six years. He had spent more than half a lifetime chasing this old man who begged for death.

  He raised the Luger. Death was bad enough. But death by the birds would be slow and painful and terrible.

  Lustbaden stood before him, trembling as he waited for the bullet. He covered his face with his bloody hands like a frightened child.

  This was not the Prince of Hell, Smith thought. Like Zoran, the island deity, the mad genius of the war camps was just another disguise Lustbaden had donned to hide his insignificance.

  Smith aimed. A shot in the head would be painless and swift. He squinted through the sight. His head was swirling again. At the end of the pistol's barrel he saw a face, Dimi's face.

  There was Dimi, alone and white-haired, shuffling in his shabby room, remembering his wife and daughter and his twin boys. Had their deaths been painless, those children under Lustbaden's knife? Did the daughter, with her sea-green eyes, die easily when she tore the broken glass into her own arm? And what did Helena, the kindly wife who had given Smith soup and a blanket, feel when she was marched into the showers at Auschwitz and found a stone in place of soap?

  Smith threw the gun to the ground. "No," he said. "I'm sorry for you. The end will be bad. But I owe a justice."

  Lustbaden stood still for a moment, his shoulders slumped. His round face was streaked with blood. With a final glance at the sky, turbulent with the flapping of birds' wings, he tucked his exploded hand close to his chest and scrambled on his fat, short legs toward the rain forest, seeking shelter from the birds he knew would find him.

  Smith went back into the hut and collapsed. Before he lost consciousness, it occurred to him that the birds would be coming for him, too, and for Chiun who had saved his life. Remo was probably already dead. And the plane would take off as scheduled. It was a sorry end for all of them, perhaps for all the world. A sorry end, senseless and mad.

  In the darkness of unconsciousness that slowly enveloped him, he saw himself, as if from a great distance. He was weeping— for Dimi, for his family, for Remo and Chiun. Even for Lustbaden, the Prince of Hell, who was, after all, no more than a fool cursing in the shadows. And for himself, too, for the man with no answers. He wept for them all.

  * * *

  Remo ran toward the clearing at top speed. Overhead, the birds shrieked menacingly. Ahead, he saw Ana, standing alone and oblivious to the danger in the sky. Her face was starkly white, and she stood as still as a corpse, her hands crossed in front of her chest, as if preparing herself for death.

  He reached her just ahead of the birds and pushed her into the hut. As the gulls descended, Chiun appeared from behind the hut, pale and trembling from his trance.

  "Help me, Chiun," Remo said.

  The old man took his place beside him in silence. Together, they waited for the birds.

  The creatures dived in squadrons of twenty or thirty, their screams tearing through the sky. They dropped toward the two men, their beaks open, their talons unsheathed and poised like daggers.

  Remo took the leader, snatching its claws and throwing the beast to the ground. But when the rest converged, he grabbed whatever he could in the snowy fluttering of wings. Sinewy necks, cold beneath their down, snapped in his fingers. The air was thick with their gamy smell. Remo felt a wave of nausea rise within him as the bodies of the birds mounted beside him, and he was puzzled that the killing of beasts seemed more like murder than the killing of men.

  But these were not natural beasts. He could tell by their weight, by the uneven
distribution of their masculature, that these animals had been bred to become the sharks of the air— hardy mechanisms of survival, genetically programmed to kill on command.

  He was surrounded by hungry black eyes like buttons, seeking out his own eyes. Their yellow beaks jutted and stabbed, probing for his throat. Already his arms were cut and bruised from their attack, and the acid burns on his shoulders were torn open. He killed mechanically, thoughtlessly, discarding the limp flesh of the dead as he grappled with the living birds.

  At last they thinned, and the sky showed blue again. A few escaped over the ocean, their shrill calls growing faint, until the clearing was silent.

  The Valley of the Damned, Remo thought, looking over the bloodstained wasteland. Flies buzzed around the heads of the dead soldiers and lepers. The felled bodies of the birds lay in heaps over every inch of the clearing. The huts were closed and silent, their inhabitants hiding inside. The place was aptly named.

  On the edge of the rain forest, Zoran Lustbaden's mangled body lay twisted and blood-drenched. His throat had been torn out by the birds, and two gaping holes where his eyes had been stared upward toward the afternoon sun.

  "It is nearly finished," Chiun said wearily. A white feather dropped from his shoulder and fluttered onto Lustbaden's open palm.

  There was not so much as a drop of blood on the old Oriental's robe. "Nearly?" Remo asked.

  "The plane," Chiun said. "There is still time to stop it. It is the Emperor's wish."

  In the distance, Remo heard the drone of the F-24's engine as it prepared for takeoff. "Oh, God, Caan, you crazy Jewish Nazi," Remo muttered as he headed for the airstrip.

  He was too late. The stealth bomber, with its terrible cargo, was already taking off.

  ?Chapter Twenty-Two

  Caan adjusted the oxygen intake valve on his helmet. He would be flying high above radar range, and the air would be thin. He looked straight ahead, out to sea, as the F-24 taxied swiftly down the airstrip.

  The mission, he said to himself. Don't think of anything except the mission.

  What was the mission?

  Caan thought it over. Ah, yes. Brisket. Brisket and a starched lace tablecloth and pillowcases that smelled of lye soap. Rocking chairs and a Star of David and his grandmother...