Created, the Destroyer

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The car sped along Route 440, suddenly bare of construction. Then, a right turn, and they were on a gravel road, bouncing along in a sudden enveloping darkness.

The car stopped at a corrugated steel gate. The headlights played on a triangular yellow sign which read: «Protected by Romb Detective Agency.»

The lights went out. Remo heard crickets in the distance. «We're here,» Felton said.

Remo said a silent prayer to one of Chiun's thousands of gods. «Vishnu, preserve me.»

He opened the car door and stepped out onto the hard gravel. It made a crunch. The nearby river air bathed him in a chill. The night stars were clouded over. He smelled a faint odor of burnt coffee coming from somewhere. He rubbed his hands.

Behind him, he heard Felton warn his daughter that there were many rats in the areas. Did she want to come? No, she decided. She'd stay in the car. «Keep the windows closed,» he suggested.

The doors opened again, then closed.

«Let's go,» Felton said advancing on the gate. The butler grunted assent. Remo knew they were both armed.

«Yeah,» Remo said. «Let's go.»

Felton unlocked the gate and opened it. It groaned, like metal abused by the weather. Remo tried to linger, to be last. But they waited.

«After you,» Felton said.

«Thank you,» Remo answered.

They walked down the gravel road, Felton in front, Jimmy behind, Remo in the center. Felton went through the motions of explaining the yard's operation, and pointed out where different car parts for different years and different makes were stored.

The crunch of their footsteps sounded like an army advancing. Remo could not see Jimmy, but he sure as hell could look at the back of the head in front of him. Felton wore no hat.

On they marched, through the night, down the road. Remo heard water rippling nearby, the lights pulsing off the river.

The minute Felton's hand went to the back of his head in his giveaway gesture, Remo would move. That was all the leeway he could give.

A dark hulk of a concrete structure loomed ahead like a giant pillbox by the sea.

«That's the heart of our operation,» Felton said. Remo moved closer. The pillbox had a concrete ribbon of road leading down an incline into it. A dilapidated car was parked on the ribbon, blocks under the wheels.

«When we finish stripping a car, what's left goes into this processor and out comes a cube of scrap iron that we sell to the steel mills. We made a lot of money during the war, didn't we, Jimmy?»

«Yeah,» Jimmy said. He was close behind Remo.

«This is where…» Felton's hand went to the back of his head… «where we keep our Maxwells! Now!»

Remo leaned forward as the slow lazy blow came from the butler. He pulled with it like child's play and crumpled to the ground.

No overconfidence. See what they do. Maybe Maxwell is here.

«Nice hit, Jimmy. I think we got the bastard. We finally got him.»

Remo saw Felton's highly polished black shoes move near his lips. Then he felt a sharp crack on his chin. Felton had kicked him.

He did not move.

«I think you killed him.» Felton said. «What'd you hit him with?»

«My hand, boss. I still didn't get a good shot at him.»

«He's the one,» Felton said, with resignation. «He got Scottichio and Moesher.»

«I wish he'd a lived to go in the machine.» Felton shrugged. «I feel tired, Jimmy. I don't care anymore. Get him ready.»

Remo felt Jimmy's large bony hands reach around his rib cage and hoist. He was dragged, his feet scraping, around to the ramp end of the concrete blockhouse. Through half-opened eyes he saw Felton walk to the other end of the building.

The junk car's doors were off and Jimmy rested Remo on his bony knee for a moment, then threw him headfirst onto the floor mat where the front seat had been. Remo heard engines, not car engines, groan. Jimmy removed a block from in front of the car's front right wheel. Walking toward the back of the car, he leaned in to throw one last punch. Remo Williams had waited long enough.

With his left hand he grabbed the large bony wrist and snapped it, silently, swiftly. Jimmy would have screamed if Remo's right hand had not buried itself knuckle-deep into his solar plexis, only a split-second earlier, knocking the air and the sound from him. Remo smashed the nose bone with his left hand and Jimmy went out.

Remo slid out from under Jimmy's limp frame, then pushed Jimmy into the car, in the place intended for Remo. Remo trotted silently to the back of the car and removed another block from behind the rear wheel.

The engines that Remo had heard groaned louder, and at the bottom of the concrete ramp, a steel door rose on hydraulic pistons. It opened a steel compartment that in the dim light Remo could see was big enough for several cars at once.

Remo released the emergency brake in the car, gave it a push, then sat on Jimmy's head and gently eased the car down the hill into the giant box.

As the car bumped to a halt against the end wall, Remo dashed for freedom. He almost stumbled as he heard the giant steel door slowly lowering with a hideous hiss.

Remo heard sounds from the other end of the giant concrete pillbox. He moved silently on the balls of his feet, like a phantom gliding over a padded graveyard.

Peering around the wall, he saw Felton, stripped to his white shirt, his coat and jacket lying on the ground, sweating over an instrument panel.

Felton yelled: «Everything all right, Jimmy? You got him set?»

Remo stepped around the building. «I'm all set, Felton. All set.»

Felton went for the gun. With one swift motion, Remo snapped the revolver from his hand. He moved behind Felton, and spun him wildly around in a circle, moving him like a rolling barrel along the concrete sidewalk beside the concrete and steel crusher.

It was like dribbling a basketball. Felton's blows were wild and thrashing. He was too old for this business, too old.

By the time Remo got Felton to the other end, the steel door had closed. Felton spun around and swung. Remo caught the blow on his left arm and crumbled Felton with a soft chop to the temple.

Felton collapsed to the concrete. And Remo saw something sticking out beneath the steel door. It was a leg. Jimmy had tried to slide out. He hadn't made it. The steel door had sliced it like a hot wire going through cheese. The tip of the shoe seemed to be jerking, not from impulses which were severed, but like an organism, primeval without intellect.

Remo gave Felton another tap on the temple, then went back to the control panel. It was a simple panel but Remo didn't understand it.

There was a right lever with gradations, a forward lever, a top lever, an entrance lever, and an automatic control.

Remo grabbed the entrance lever. Then it hit him like a jolt of electricity. He began to laugh. He was still laughing as he heard the heavy steel door begin to hiss open.

He picked up Felton's pistol, then walked to the ramp at the other end of the concrete blockhouse. «Maxwell,» he kept repeating. «Maxwell.» Felton was where he had left him, his arms spread grotesquely wide over the concrete driveway.

Jimmy had rolled back down the incline after the door had severed his leg. But the hiss of the opening door drove him on. With his one leg and a stump and two hands, Jimmy was hopping and crawling like a horrible, crippled, crab up the incline, trying to escape. In the faint moonlight, Remo could see the terror etched deeply into his face.

Remo cocked Felton's pistol and fired a bullet calmly into Jimmy's one good leg. The bullet spun Jimmy around and Remo took a step into the driveway and kicked the big Texan back into the box over the leg that was no longer his.

Then Remo lifted Felton and heaved him down the concrete incline. Remo ran around to the controls and pushed back the entrance lever. The heavy steel door hissed shut again and a light went on inside the blockhouse. Through some sort of heavy plastic peephole, Remo could see inside. Felton was not moving. Nor was Jimmy.

Felton would come to soon enough. Remo reached into his shirt pocket and lit a cigarette. He glanced once more at the control panel, mumbled «Maxwell» again with a smile, and settled down to smoking his cigarette. So that was it.

On the fourth puff, he heard a scratching on the plastic shield. He took a deliberately long time turning around. When he did, there was Felton's face, pressed against the plastic window.

The old man's hair was wild. He was yelling something. Remo could not make it out.

Carefully, Remo formed the word with his lips: «Maxwell.»

Felton's head shook.

«I know you don't know,» Remo yelled.

Felton looked desperately puzzled.

«Here's another one,» Remo yelled. «MacCleary?»

Felton shook his head.

«Don't know him either, huh?» Remo called. «I didn't think you would. He was just a guy with a hook. Think of him when you're being crushed to death. Think of him when you're a hood ornament on somebody's car. Think of him because he was my friend.»

Remo turned from Felton who scratched frantically on the plastic window and examined the idiot panel. He shrugged his shoulders. He heard a muffled plea for mercy. But there had been no mercy for MacCleary or the other CURE agents or for America.

He had been created the destroyer and this was what he was meant to do. He pushed the lever marked automatic and the machine moaned into operations, its giant hydraulic presses forcing hundreds of thousands of pounds of pressure into a moving wall. And Remo knew he was not just working at a job, he was living his role in life, fulfilling what he was born for.

It took no more than five minutes. First the front wall pressed in to crush the contents of the blockhouse, then a side wall moved in to crush from another direction, then the roof slowly lowered and it was over. When all the hydraulic walls had returned to their normal positions, Remo peered through the plastic window. All he saw was a cube of metal, four feet square. An automobile and two humans, now only a cube of scrap iron.

Remo looked around for an implement. He saw a rusted crowbar resting against one of the blockhouse's exterior walls.

He walked slowly over to the crowbar, picked it up, then went back to the panel. He didn't know how to turn off the lights, let alone the machine. Someone would find the cube in the morning. It would probably be shipped out with the rest of the scrap.

Remo pried a small metal badge from the top of the control panel. It was a trademark. It was as far as CURE'S one agent had been able to penetrate.

It read: «Maxwell Steel Reducer. Maxwell Industries, Lima, O.»

Cynthia didn't mind too much that Daddy had decided to stay at the yard. She wanted to be alone with Remo anyway, and she was happy that they had finally gotten to understand each other.

She didn't even mind that Daddy didn't come home for breakfast. Remo made a personal phone call from Lamonica Towers to Dr. Smith at Folcroft. He made the call from Felton's bed while Cynthia slept beside him.

«A what?» Smith said.

«That's what Maxwell was,» Remo repeated. «Felton was the boss.»

«Impossible.»

«All right, it's impossible,» Remo said.

There was a long pause.

«How much could one of them cost?»

«How should I know, damn it?»

«Just wondering,» Smith said.

«Look. I know where we can get one cheap.»

«Oh, really?»

«A friend of mine now owns one. She'll sell it to me cheap. One hundred billion dollars,» Remo yelled into the receiver, then hung up.

He was caressing his bedmate's fanny when the phone rang.

«This is Viaselli,» said the man at the other end of the receiver. «I just wanted to thank Norman for releasing my brother-in-law, Tony.»

«This is Carmine Viaselli, right?» Remo asked.

«That's right. Who is this?»

«I'm an employee of Mr. Felton's and I'm glad you called.»

Remo continued: «Mr. Felton called me early this morning and said I should try to reach you. He wanted to see you tonight. Something or other about a Maxwell.»

«Where should I meet him?»

«He has a junk yard on Route 440. It's the first right off Communipaw Avenue. He'll be there.»

«What time?»

«About nine o'clock.» Remo felt Cynthia roll into him, cuddling her face in his chest. She slept in the raw. «Better yet, Mr. Viaselli. better make it ten o'clock.»

«Right,» came the voice from the phone.

Remo hung up.

«Who was it, darling?» Cynthia asked sleepily.

«A man about business.»

«What business, dear?» she murmured.

«My business.»

AFTERWORD

When was the last time you saw a hero? Not one of those mindless, looney-bin rejects who line the bookracks: The Exterminator, The Extincter, The Ripper, The Slasher, The Wiper-Outer, The Mutilator, The Ix-Nayer, all those same series, with their same covers, their same plots, and their same moronic machine-gunning leads who figure the best way to solve a problem is to shoot it.

No. A real life-saving, mind-craving hero for the world today.

Not Tarzan, he won't help. He's in Africa. Not Doc Savage, he was in the thirties and forties. Not James Bond. He was left behind at the turn of the decade.

For the seventies and eighties, the word is in. It's The Destroyer.

Why The Destroyer? Why the phenomenon that has writers, editors, literary agents, ad men-people who deal in words, and who you think would know better-following these tales of Remo Williams and his Korean teacher Chiun with the same kind of passion and faith that only a few like Holmes and Watson have instilled?

Why has this… this… paperback series drawn such high reviews from such lofty heights as The New York Times, Penthouse, The Village Voice, and the Armchair Detective, a journal for mystery fanatics?

Honesty.

Look beyond the facts that The Destroyer books are written very well and are very funny and very fast and very good.

The Destroyer is honest to today, to the world, and most importantly to itself.

And who is The Destroyer? Who is this new breed of Superman?

Just sad, funny, used-to-be-human-but-now-isn't-quite Remo. Wise-assing Remo whose favorite line is: «That's the biz, sweetheart.»

What's this? A hero who doesn't like killing? Not some crazy who massacres anything that moves with lip-smacking pleasure?

No, Remo doesn't have the callous simplicity of a machine gun to solve the world's problems. He uses his hands, his body, himself. What he's saying with «that's the biz, sweetheart» is that you knew the job of fighting evil was dangerous when you took it.

But somebody has to punish these soul corrupters, and reality has bypassed the government and the police and the media and the schools and has chosen Remo.

And who's he to argue with reality?

The other fist backing up The Destroyer is philosophy.

Yes, that's right. Philosophy.

It isn't just the incredibly drawn supporting characters who are written so real that you see them on the street everyday. Not just the «future relevancy» of the books' strong stories, even though The Destroyer has beaten the media to such subjects as radical chic, world starvation, detente, and soap operas. Not only that, but The Destroyer gets it better with a more accurate view. Chiun was delivering the truth on soap operas long before Time magazine's cover story. When the literati was pounding its collective breast over the struggle of «the noble red man,» Remo was up to his neck in the movement, and delivering some telling truths about «the Indians from Harlem, Harvard, and Hollywood.»

No. What's different here is the philosophy of Sinanju, that forbidding village in North Korea-it's real-which spawned Chiun and the centuries of master assassins preceding him. The philosophy culled from its early history, a history of starvation and deprivation so severe that its people became killers for pay so the babies wouldn't have to be drowned in the bay.

Kind of chokes you up, doesn't it?

Chiun too. He'll tell you about it. And tell you about it. And tell you about it. And he'll tell you other things.

Chiun on Western morality:

«When a Korean comes to the end of his rope, he closes the window and kills himself. When an American comes to the end of his rope, he opens the window and kills someone else. Hopefully, it's just another American.»

Chiun on old girlfriends:

«Every five years, a white person changes. If you see her again, you will kill her in your eyes. That last remembrance of what you once loved. Wrinkles will bury it. Tiredness will smother it. In her place will be a woman. The girl dies when the woman emerges.»

Chiun on Sinanju:

«Live, Remo, live. That is all I teach you. You cannot grow weak, you cannot die, you cannot grow old unless your mind lets you do it. Your mind is greater than all your strength, more powerful than all your muscles. Listen to your mind, Remo. It is saying to you: 'Live'.»

Philosophy. It makes the incredible things they do, just this side of possible.

And it says that Remo and Chiun are not vacuous, cold-hearted killers. Nor are they fantasy, cardboard visitors from another planet with powers and abilities, etc., etc.

They're just two a-little-more-than-human beings.

Chiun must have been reincarnated from everybody's Jewish momma. Remo is the living embodiment of every-man, 1970s style.

Will Chiun ever stop kvetching about Remo being a pale piece of pig's ear and admit the love he feels for him?

Will Remo ever get the only thing he really wants, a home and family?

Keep reading and see. Destroyer today, headlines tomorrow.

Remo Williams, The Destroyer, didn't create the world he's living in. He's just trying to change it. The best way he know how.

And for the world's greatest assassin, that's the biz, sweetheart.

-Ric Meyers,

a still-born fetus

in the eyes of Sinanju.