Lords of the Earth td-61

by Warren Murphy

  Lords of the Earth

  ( The Destroyer - 61 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Superfly

  He's big. He's black. He's bad. And he ain't afraid of no DDT. The Lord of the Killer Flies was a buggy billionaire, out to liberate oppressed vermin everywhere. He didn't include people in that category. The Destroyer did. Still, he thought the world was worth saving.

  Feisty little species, though. Even for a two-man SWAT team like Remo and Chiun. There were computers to humiliate, bombs to beat, and terrorists to terminate. And an honest-to-God fly hotel, where the Destroyer checked in to help the other guests check out...permanently.

  Destroyer 61: Lords of the Earth

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  Prologue

  "In the end, it will be the insects who rule the earth." -Noted scientist.

  "In the end, who cares?"-Remo Williams, identity and address unknown, fingerprints on file nowhere, former policeman, still recorded in some old newspaper files as the last man to be executed in the electric chair in the New Jersey State Penitentiary.

  "End? What end? You whites will be with us forever." -Chiun, Master of Sinanju, vessel of the sun source of all the Martial Arts, His Awesome Magnificence, known as "Little Father" by Remo Williams, who is a white, but one of the nice ones at times. Not all the time, however. And lately, even less frequently, if you could believe that. Not that complaining ever did any good.

  Chapter 1

  Winston Hoag was afraid of many things in life, but never the thing that killed him.

  He was afraid of the sudden air eddies that came up over tree lines on warm days and sent his small singleengine plane into a sudden dive until, only feet above the cotton fields, he was able to wrestle back control of the craft.

  He was afraid of the chemicals he released over the fields, afraid that constant contact with the pesticides that protected the crops for the farmer would somehow get into his blood system and kill him.

  He was afraid of losing his contracts as a crop duster and afraid of seeing his family go on welfare. He thought he would rather kill himself than let that happen, although he did not know if he had the courage to kill himself.

  He was afraid also that his plane would come apart one day because Winston Hoag always had to measure the cost of new parts against the cost of sending his children to a good school, of his wife being able to put good food on the table, of being able to help support his aging parents.

  He was afraid of sunsets that played games with his depth perception and afraid of sunrises that could suddenly blind a pilot in an open-air cockpit.

  But one thing he was not afraid of was the young couple who offered him two hundred dollars to let them install a video camera between his legs to shoot upward and film his face as he dusted crops.

  All he wanted was to make sure that the camera didn't get in the way of his foot controls.

  "We want you to turn on the camera before you get your chemical valves to release," said the young woman. "This is important. We want your spraying system off until you have the camera on for at least a minute."

  "Two minutes," corrected the young man who was with her.

  "Sure," said Winston Hoag. "But why?"

  "Because that's how we want it," said the woman. She was an ash blond and spoke with the long vowels of wealth, with the casual, confident air that made her look rich in a pair of faded blue jeans. If Winston Hoag wore faded jeans, he knew he would just look poor. In fact, the first thing he'd done when he enlisted in the Air Force had been to throw away his old faded jeans. And when he was discharged, one of the first things he did was buy brand-new jeans, stiff blue-black ones, spanking new, and uncomfortable.

  Winston Hoag, like many people who had been dirt poor when they were young, always dreaded returning to that. He could use the two hundred dollars.

  "If that's how you want it, that's how you'll get it," he said, "but I would like to know why."

  "Because," said the woman.

  "Because we want to get the change in your expression from when you're not spraying to when you are," the young man explained.

  "There ain't no change," said Hoag.

  "There is," said the woman. "There has to be."

  "Actually, we don't know," the man said. He wore sandals and khaki-colored shorts with a lot of buckles on them, and carried a roll of hundred-dollar bills. "We'd like to find out.'' His old T-shirt called for saving the timber wolf from extinction. Its legend read: "Extinct is forever."

  Winston Hoag could go along with that. He didn't like to see animals die out. And the animal he would least like to see die out was himself.

  He took the two hundred dollars.

  "Remember," the woman said, "A full two minutes before you turn on your chemical spray, we want the camera between your legs turned on."

  "Okay," Hoag said.

  "How do you protect your insecticide tanks?" the young man asked.

  "What?"

  "What protection do you use for your insecticide tanks?"

  "Don't use nothing," Hoag said. "I'm the one who needs protection."

  "How do you know your insecticide tanks won't release prematurely?"

  "They're safe from that."

  "Let me see," said the woman.

  "They're just plain old insecticide tanks," said Hoag.

  "We want to see them anyway," the young man said.

  Hoag took them to the plane, and explained that he had more than adequate safety measures to protect the tanks from premature release.

  "You've got to remember," he said. "That insecticide costs money and I could be sued if I sprayed some residential area."

  "Yes," the woman said. "We know that money means a lot to you."

  "Listen, I can use the money," Hoag said. "But everybody's got to earn a living and I don't rightly take no job with insults attached."

  "We understand," the young man said soothingly. "We didn't mean to insult you. Could you possibly reinforce the insecticide tanks?"

  "Sir?" said Hoag, trying to be polite in turn.

  "Could you reinforce the insecticide tanks, sort of put another set of brackets around them?"

  "Not for no two hundred dollars," Hoag said.

  "Three hundred," said the young man.

  Hoag shook his head. First of all, the new metal might cost another hundred and that would add weight to the plane and cut his fuel economy. He was ready to forget the whole thing right there. There were a lot of things he would do for a few hundred dollars, but taking risks with an old plane was not among them.

  By the time the crop duster and the young couple worked out exactly how they wanted the insecticide tanks protected, it added two hundred pounds of weight to the plane, threw off its balance and would cost the couple no less than fifteen hundred dollars. Winston Hoag was sure they would refuse.

  But the hundreds just kept coming from a roll of bills in the young man's hand. And they didn't even want a receipt.

  "You know," said Hoag, "even if this danged plane crashes, those tanks won't be harmed. Darn, if they aren't the most secure things this side of Fort Knox."

  "You're sure?" the woman said.

  "I wish I was that well protected," said Hoag, and the couple flashed simultaneous smiles.

  They came back the next day to inspect his work. They insisted on installing the camera, setting it just so, and demanded to see where he sat in the plane. They readjusted the camera's angle to makeaure, they said, that the lens got his face perfectly.

  "I think it's pointing at my chest," said Hoag as the young woman ran her hand down between his legs. He liked the touch of her hands so he didn't complain.<
br />
  "We know what we're doing," she said. "Now, let's see you reach forward for the switch."

  He leaned down and reached for the shiny metal toggle switch which looked as if it had been removed from an old electric motor. It had been soldered onto the trigger of the video camera.

  As he touched the switch, his chest was less than two feet away from the camera lens.

  "Perfect," said the woman.

  Hoag took off that afternoon to dust a small crop of peanuts outside Plains, Georgia, fifteen hundred dollars richer from two young people he thought of as fools.

  He wasn't even going to bother dusting that day. He didn't want to risk going tight to the peanut field, skimming close to trees with the plane's extra weight. He planned to get over the peanut field, turn on the camera, fly absolutely level for twenty minutes so the camera wouldn't catch anything but his face and the sky, and the two rich idiots would never know he hadn't been dusting. Then he would fly back, give them their camera, remove the heavy junk from the plane and do the regular peanut-dusting run the next day.

  "A fool and his money are soon parted," thought Hoag as he reached two thousand feet and leveled his single-engine plane. Then he leaned down into the cockpit, smiled at the camera lens, and tightly grabbed the toggle switch. He was still smiling as the camera lens shot forward like a projectile, driving directly into his heart with enough force to shatter his sternum and explode it throughout his chest cavity.

  The coroner never figured this out, though, because there wasn't very much left of Winston Hoag when the pieces of everything were picked up off the red-clay dust of the Georgia field.

  The plane's wings were shredded, the fuselage was junk, and Winston Hoag resembled bones held together by blood clots. The only things that emerged unscathed from the wreck were the reinforced insecticide tanks, two bright metal cylinders that looked like unexploded bombs.

  Eyewitnesses said that Hoag had been flying at about two thousand feet, very level and steady, when the plane suddenly went into a crazy spin and flew into the ground at top speed, narrowly missing a peanut farmer who had his eyes on a rabbit that he thought ready to attack him.

  It was only when the local television station got an anonymous phone tip that the coroner found out it had been a murder and not just an accident.

  "If you look for a camera lens," said the caller, "you'll find that it has been shot into the chest of mass murderer Winston Hoag."

  "Mass murderer? Who did Hoag murder?" asked the reporter, desperately signaling someone to get the police to trace the call.

  "Everything," said the telephone voice. "He murdered the mornings, the chirps of birds and the loping beauty of the endangered timber wolf. He murdered our water and our sky. Most of all, he murdered tomorrow."

  "He was just a crop duster," the television man said.

  "Exactly," said the caller. "We are the SLA and you're not going to do this to us anymore. Neither you nor the other Winston Hoags of this world."

  Why would the Symbronese whatever-it-was want to murder a crop duster? thought the TV reporter.

  His question was answered without even being asked.

  "We are the Animal Liberation Alliance," said the caller. "It was a moral killing."

  "It's moral to kill the father of three kids?" said the reporter losing his dispassionate professionalism and was yelling into the telephone.

  "Yes. We crashed a plane and took a pilot without adding further trauma to the environment. The insecticide tanks did not release their genocidal poison."

  In the next month, there were three other "moral killings." The Species Liberation Alliance took credit for strangling a cattle rancher with his own barbed wire. They did not, as they carefully pointed out in phone calls to the press, leave the barbed wire around for animals to cut themselves on, but instead imbedded it all in the rancher's throat. The SLA also wrapped the crew of a tuna boat in their own nets and sank them in the Pacific, off Baja, California, in such a way that the net would never break loose to trap any more fish. And they capped an oil well in Georges Bank off the Massachusetts coast with the crushed skulls of the drilling crew, proudly proclaiming that they had used a "natural nonpolluting plug."

  Waldron Perriweather III did not attempt to justify the killings. After each one, he appeared on several television programs to explain his position on the deaths: "While I disapprove of violence in any form, we have to look at the root causes of these murders." And then he lectured for a half-hour on the cruelty of man to other living creatures:

  "What sort of society are we," he asked, "that would say of cruelty, 'he treated someone like a bug'? Or a worm. We impale living creatures on barbed metal hooks to bait other living creatures that we ensnare and then suffocate to death, and call it sport. I am talking, gentlemen, about fishing."

  "We understand that, Mr. Perriweather," said the commentator. "Particularly in your position as America's leading protector of nature. But what about murdering an entire rigging crew?"

  "What about the millions of deaths every day that a biased press does not report? After all, what is the Species Liberation Alliance trying to do but bring to the public's attention the atrocities done in their name with government support."

  "What atrocities?" asked the interviewer, and on national television, Waldron Perriweather III, heir to the Perriweather fortune, a handsome blond man whose delicate features were the result of Perriweather money always marrying beauty, listed the atrocities done with American money. Mass murder of insects. Poisoning of fish and air. Legalized murder of moose called hunting.

  Waldron Perriweather III had little use for those groups that merely protected the obviously lovable, like pets, birds and beautiful animals.

  "What about the Inga worm?" he asked. "Around the clock, scientists are working to find a spray that will stop this creature's respirations. It reminds me of the Nazi gas ovens."

  "Doesn't the Inga worm destroy crops?" he was asked.

  "So does man," said Perriweather. "How does man destroy crops?"

  "The same way the Inga worm does. He eats them," Perriweather said. "But when the Inga worm attempts to share the bounty of the earth, we feverishly try to destroy it with chemicals. It is about time we stopped our human-centered biases. We must all share this earth together or we will lose it together."

  On that note, he left the studio to polite applause. But some of the newsmen were talking about the need for a new awareness of lesser creatures, and some in the audience nodded their heads approvingly. For one who did not condone the killing of Winston Hoag or the cattle rancher or the drilling crew whose families had to bury the headless bodies in closed coffins, Waldron Perriweather III had done much to promote the SLA's cause.

  Perriweather returned to his palatial estate in Beverly, Massachusetts, a giant rock fortress set on a hill overlooking the Atlantic, in an area the Perriweathers had ruled for more than a century and a half. There were no lawns around the Perriweather mansion only high grass where birds and insects could nest. No pesticides ever touched the Perriweather fields.

  Any servant caught using a repellent during mosquito season would be fired. Nor did the Perriweathers use netting to deter mosquitoes, preferring instead what they called the "humane approach." This involved having servants staying up all night fanning the Perriweathers so that the gentle breezes would not let a mosquito land on Perriweather flesh. Of course the servants, in truest Perriweather tradition, worked during the day as well. Just because the Perriweather family showed morality toward insects did not mean that they were financially foolish. There were, after all, limits to one's sense of decency.

  At the entrance of the estate, Perriweather's Rolls-Royce halted. The chauffeur bent over and Waldron climbed onto his back to be carried by foot to the great stone mansion. Waldron did not like driving on the estate because he did not believe in spewing oil exhaust into the air of his "fellow residents," namely the flies, worms and mosquitoes.

  This day, he was especially anxiou
s to reach the main building, so he kicked his heels into the chauffeur's flanks to get him to run faster. He didn't understand what was wrong with the chauffeur when the elderly man broke out into a terrible sweat, and at the steps, he bucked and convulsed, almost knocking Perriweather to the ground.

  Waldron stepped over the stricken man, commenting to the butler that he wondered where the driver had been trained. Then Waldron rushed into a rear room of the mansion, sealed by an iron door, and with netting that closed on both the inside and outside.

  Air ducts fed the room. They were also sealed by fine mesh netting. The temperature was a perfect 85 degrees: Ripe fruit and spoiling meat made the air so heavy with decay that Waldron felt he could swim in it.

  A white-haired man in a white coat was leaning over a microscope, looking at a petri dish. He perspired profusely in the heat and every once in a while he would spit into a bucket. He had complained once that the air was so foul he could taste it and, once tasting it, he couldn't keep his meals down.

  "I'm paying enough so you can be fed intravenously," Waldron Perriweather III had reminded him, and the scientist stopped complaining.

  "Is it ready yet?" Perriweather asked.

  "Not yet," said the scientist. "These are just the eggs."

  "Let me see," Perriweather said anxiously.

  The scientist stepped aside and Perriweather leaned down until the miscroscope eyepiece touched his lashes. Then he saw them-wiggling, white and large, the most adorable things he had ever seen.

  "They're lovely," Perriweather said. "They will be all right, won't they?"

  "Them?"

  "Of course them. They will be all right, won't they?" Perriweather snapped.

  "Mr. Perriweather, I don't think you really have to worry about those maggots."

  Perriweather nodded and looked back into the eyepiece, focusing on the dish of maggots eating away at rotten meat.

  "Kootchy, kootchy, coo," said Waldron Perriweather III.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and he knew old buildings the way a doctor knew blood vessels. He could not remember when he had started to know them this way, to understand how builders' minds worked and where they would put passages or where they had to have spaces or felt that they needed spaces.