"Destroyer 034 - Chained Reaction.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

"Yessir."
"If I let you live, will you follow orders?"
"Oh, yessir. Yessir. Yessir. Anything. Special unit all the way."
"I'm going to get a head one way or another. Drake. Give me Teasdale's head."
Trooper Drake, still trembling with fear, dove for the sword, lest Teasdale change his mind. He snapped it from the rawboned young man's hands and was up and swinging wildly in an instant. He took a slash at the head and the blade cut through flesh and bounced back off the skull, stunning Teasdale. He felt the blade crack at his head again and then he heard his colonel talking about a level blow from behind and there was a stinging at the back of his head and then a deep dark numbness.
The eyes did not see as his head bounced down the hill rolling crazily in bumps and bounces like a punted football making its way toward an end zone.
The eyes did not see, nor did the ears hear. The
19
body was back up on the hill spurting red rivers from the neck.
But a last thought was held somewhere out in the vastness of a universe that went on forever.
And that thought was that Colonel Bleech, for all his talk of soldiering and killing, was but a clumsy amateur at best. And by this evil deed he had offended a power in the center of the universe, a power so vast it would unleash the ultimate force of man.
And when that force was unleashed, Bleech would be but a pitiful popped pumpkin, splattered like the melons the men had practiced their sword thrusts on.
20
CHAPTER TWO
His name was Eemo and it was his last assignment. He did not know the man, but he never knew the men. He knew their names and what they looked like and where he could find them.
But he no longer cared about what they had done or why they had done it. He cared only that when he finished them it was neat and clean and with an economy of motion.
This last man lived in the penthouse of a hotel in Miami Beach. There were only three entrances to it, all guarded, all locked with triple keys that three men had to agree to use simultaneously, and since a former security advisor to the Central Intelligence Agency had designed this little hotel fortress and guaranteed it impenetrable from above or below, the man slept that morning with ease and contentment, until Remo grabbed his fleshy pink face in his hands and said into the stunned eyes that he would squeeze the man's cheeks off unless he explained some things very quickly.
Remo knew the man's shock was not at his appearance. Remo was a moderately handsome man with high cheekbones and a dark stare that tended to liquefy the resolve of women when he
21
turned it on them, if he cared about that anymore, which he didn't. He was thin, lean to perfection, and only his thick wrists might indicate that this man might be anything different from normal.
The assignment certainly wasn't. Remo had seen this sort of penthouse arrangement fourteen times. He called it "the sandwich." They put a nice piece of bread on top with perhaps a machine gun or two, several men and a metal shield reinforcing the roof, and they locked all the entrances below, probably adding devices there, and so the top and bottom were nice and cozy and safe. But the middle was as open as a French bikini.
The attack on it was not new with Remo; it had not been new fifty years ago or fifteen hundred, for that matter.
Remo had been told about the first successful assault on the fortress defense.
To protect themselves against assassins, ancient kings would take the highest floors for their sleeping quarters, put their most trusted men below and above and go to sleep in the illusion of safety.
This problem occurred to a Master of Sinanju in A.D. 427 (by western dating) when a Himalayan prince put his brothers as guards above and below him, and arranged it so that his son hated the prince's brothers, so that the brothers knew that if the prince died, his son would become prince and slaughter them all. This was known to the Master of Sinanju, the reigning assassin in an ages-old house of assassins whose labors went to support a tiny village in cold bleak North Korea.
22
The Master knew that people worked with their fears instead of their minds. Because they were afraid of heights, they thought others would be. Because they slipped on smooth stone walls, they thought others would. Because they moved with noise, they thought others did and their ears would be protection.
The fortress sandwich was always open in the middle and that Master of Sinanju had taken less than a minute to realize he had only to move up the wall and enter at the level of the prince's room to complete his duty, and thus win that year, as it was written in the records of Sinanju, food and grain for ten years from a grateful enemy prince. Also a bust of that king, which Remo had once seen stored in that peculiar domicile in the village of Sinanju, a town he did not intend to return to ever again no matter how many generations of master assassins it had produced, none of whom had ever given one more minute of thought to wondering about how to penetrate the fortress defense.
And Remo didn't either.
He found the hotel and didn't even bother to look up.
Hastings Vining, one of the major commodities brokers, owned the hotel and lived in the top two floors. Remo didn't even bother to figure out whether he was sleeping in the twenty-third or twenty-fourth floor. It was the twenty-fourth. It was always the highest floor.
People always equated height with safety and assumed that people would first try to enter from below or then from above. They worried about helicopters and parachutes and even balloons, but
23
they never gave a thought to somebody who could just climb up the smooth walls of a building.
Remo didn't feel like working that hard that morning so he took an elevator to the twenty-second floor and knocked on a door.
"Who is it ?" called out a woman's voice.
"Gas man. Problem with hotel gas. Got to fix it."
"Problem with gas? This hotel doesn't have gas. I don't have gas. Try the kitchen."
"You've got gas now, lady, and it might be dangerous. I've got to go outside and check your gas."
"Are you from the hotel?"
"Check the desk, lady," said Remo with that sort of bored surliness that for some .peculiar reason bred trust in most people.
"Oh, all right," said the woman and the door opened. She was in her early fifties and her face glistened with creams fighting their losing battle in a retreating action from youth, whose only victory was not getting worse for another day. She wore a floppy pink muumuu and had her hair in some sort of plastic device.
"Anything you want," she said with a lewd grin when she saw Remo.
She was suddenly awake and happy. She adjusted one pink device in her reddish hair and smiled again. This time she licked her lips invitingly. Remo wondered how much creamy gook got attached to her tongue when she did that.
"Just the gas, lady."
"I want you and I'll pay you for it," she said.
"All right," said Remo, who knew never to argue with someone obsessed. "Tonight."
24
"Now," she said.
"Lunch," said Remo.