The New Destroyer: Dead Reckoning - Softcover

Murphy, Warren; Mullaney, James

3.96

116 ratings by Goodreads

9780765357618: The New Destroyer: Dead Reckoning

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765357615 ISBN 13: 9780765357618

Publisher: Tor Books, 2008

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Death takes no holidays.So small it can't be seen with the naked eye.So deadly it can wipe out millions in minutes.If you breathe it, you're already dead...A daring daylight prison break at a top security federal penitentiary frees the infamous "20th hijacker," the only 9/11 terrorist to miss his flight that September morning. It seems Mustafa Mohammed's been hiding a toxic secret right under the noses of federal authorities. Soon, hundreds start dying throughout the country; the CDC classifies the virus responsible as "UNKNOWN."Luckily, Dr. Harold W. Smith always knows the most effective treatment for what ails America, and dispatches Remo Williams and his mentor, the magnificent Chiun, to administer the cure. But this time, the usual prescription might not be strong enough.Remo wants to destroy the bio-weapon. The antiwar crowd wants to steal it, the Iranians want to duplicate it, and poor little Mustafa just wants to use it t

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About the Author:

Warren Murphy's books and stories have sold fifty million copies worldwide and won a dozen national awards.
James Mullaney has worked for Marvel Comics and has ghostwritten books that have sold over a million copies.

The New Destroyer: Dead Reckoning
1 He had never had a cold. Not so much as a sniffle in his forty-four years of life. When he was little, a virulent strain of measles had attacked the village. Many had died, most of them children. He had watched the bodies paraded past his window, mourners shrieking, dressed in black. In his parents' house he was healthy and happy and wondered why he could not go outside to play. He had never had a childhood experience with the flu virus, which was probably just as well. There was no Sudafed, TheraFlu, NyQuil or the thousand other palliatives that were available in every corner drug store in the West. The only thing in the village to relieve influenza symptoms was aspirin and even that was not available most of the time. When one got sick in his small village in northern Iraq, one either toughed it out or died. But, thank Allah, flu was not a problem for Mustafa Mohammed and the rest of his family. They simply never got sick. As a boy he had once stepped into a nest of cobras andbeen bitten a dozen times. The other adults were certain he would die but his father knew better. Mustafa sloughed off the deadly venom as if the poisonous snakes had injected him with water. The fang marks had taken a little while to heal. Mustafa remembered that they had itched a little. Measles, mumps, chicken pox. Mustafa had never had any of them, nor had his siblings or father or any of his father's blood relatives as far back as anyone could recall. One time there was some funny bug in the water. It was so small that you could not see it with your eyes but it had made everyone in town go from both ends for weeks. All their playmates were ill so Mustafa and his siblings played alone until the Red Cross came and fixed the problem by pouring something in the well. The real test came after the end of the first Gulf War when the glorious leader of the great Republic of Iraq flooded Mustafa's small village with nerve gas. Half the village population died overnight. The rest crawled through the poisoned dust, longing for death. When the television crew from Frontline came to do a film documentary on the village a decade after the gassing, they found victims blinded, subject to spasms, crippled. They were shocked to find that the effects of the gas had leached into DNA and was being passed down to children born long after the attack. The crew filmed infants with missing limbs or limbs growing where limbs should not grow. The saddest were the children born with only brain stems who were living lives in permanent vegetative states. The television crew filmed everything they could find and then bundled up their cameras and film and left forever. They never asked about the boarded-up house at the edge of the square, the building that had housed three generations of a family that could not fall ill. After the nerve gas attack, news of the family that was impervious to the toxin reached Baghdad. When further research revealed that no member of the family had ever fallen ill and that all members of this one unique family hadlived in perfect health until extreme old age, trucks came to the village to cart away Mustafa and his relatives. The family with the miraculous inability to suffer sickness even with chemical bombs raining down on their roof was brought to a special facility outside the capital and turned over to the great leader's finest medical minds. One of the first things the great leader's brilliant doctors had done was chop off Mustafa's father's hand with a big knife. Afterward, they sat around smoking cigarettes to see if it would grow back. They waited two hours. As Mustafa's father screamed and wept, one of the scientists finally spoke into a tape recorder that by Western standards had gone out-of-date with the eight-track, but which was state of the art in the great leader's Iraq. "Limbs amputated do not regenerate." The scientists decided that perhaps they had gone too far with a full amputation. Deciding to apply rigorous scientific discipline, they used hammers to give Mustafa's father a compound fracture in his forearm. They studied the broken bones protruding through the skin to see if they would mend before their eyes. But not only did the shattered bones fail to mend, the whining old patient threw a bone fragment into his bloodstream and died in a matter of minutes. "Subject appears dead from complications resulting from second procedure. Observation continues." Perhaps the miracle of this family's alleged perfect health was only manifested when the body was pushed to its limits. The patriarch, poor old dead Hunsien, could not be pushed any further. Teams of doctors watched the body in shifts but when the stink grew too strong, it was determined that the first test subject had failed them. "First subject's moribund state persists after thirty-six hours. Moving on to second subject." Mustafa's mother had been fed feet-first into a vat of acid. Quickly dipped, in and out, like french fries in a decadent American fast food establishment. Mustafa and his aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters heardhis mother's screams from the little cages where they were being warehoused like lab animals. Mustafa's older relatives tried to explain that it was only those of Mustafa's bloodline who possessed the inability to become ill, not those who married into the family. But the doctors were efficient and would not be told how to be scientists by a bunch of weeping peasants in dog cages. So away family members went to Allah, stabbed, bludgeoned, shot, drowned, strangled. When there were only ten men left the doctors finally moved on to nerve and viral agents and all manner of toxins. The scientists had not believed the stories about this family were true, especially as the pile of corpses in the mass grave outside of town grew. But the great leader had charged them to learn what protected these people so that he might obtain the secret of perfect health for himself. And so they moved from bullets and blades down to things that could only be viewed under the lens of a microscope. At last, after weeks of testing, these men of science discovered that the stories were true. Men who had been sealed in glass tanks flooded with anthrax were as healthy coming out as they had been going in. Sarin did not kill these strange men from the north. One died when he was exposed to mustard gas, but that was only because the doctors had gone to lunch and left him in the locked booth too long and he died of dehydration. Another asphyxiated in a sealed tank filled with smallpox when they forgot to flip the little switch that fed him oxygen. And so they went through the entire family, with little accidents that would here and there claim another life because while science was perfect scientists were not, until only two were left, Mustafa and his older brother Achmed. "They will murder us too, Mustafa," Achmed whispered at night to his brother from his dog cage. The doors of all the other cages were open now. The room where they were warehoused seemed empty. All oftheir relatives, from elderly Uncle Karim all the way down to little two-year-old Samir, were dead. "They will not take our lives," Mustafa insisted. "Of course they will," Achmed said. "They have slaughtered us one by one, Mustafa. They are not going to spare us. We are not special." "I am." And Mustafa giggled. Achmed was used to such behavior from his brother. Mustafa had always been an idiot with no sense of the world around him. The great leader had poisoned their town and murdered their family members one by one, yet Mustafa still bowed reverently whenever the bloodthirsty maniac's name was mentioned. And even though Allah seemed to have abandoned them all at the moment when they needed Him most, Mustafa insisted on reading from the family Koran daily, his fat lips moving as he carefully sounded out the big words. He was reading the Koran now. Achmed had read from the same holy book as a child. The book had belonged to great-great-grandfather Abdullah. The goat leather cover was reddish brown and frayed at the edges. The pages were gilded with raised Arabic writing decorating cover and spine. A single rip in the corner of the front cover had been stitched closed with Chinese silk by grandmother Habbab. Mustafa turned a page, careful not to wrinkle the ancient yellow parchment. "Mustafa," Achmed began slowly, for when one had something important to say to his brother it was important to speak slowly so that he understood it all. "We have none of us wanted to tell you this because we were sensitive to your feelings. But since we are both going to die, it is time you learned something important. You are stupid, Mustafa. You are not as bad as those poor souls born with bad brains who must be cared for all their lives. Unlike them, you can function in the world, Mustafa. You have worked, and you can read and speak well enough. But when it comes to thinking, you are lost. Yes, you are stupid, Mustafa. And even dumber than I thought if you think we are special and will somehow be spared thecertain, terrible deaths these people in the white coats have planned for us." "I did not say we would be spared, Achmed, I said that I would be spared. I do not know your fate, only mine." Achmed shook his head in pity. "How do you know?" Mustafa pushed his Koran aside and crept to the edge of his cage. Looking around to make certain no one was eavesdropping, he pressed his blubbery lips between the bars. "Because, brother--" Mustafa's voice slipped to a barely audible whisper--"the Prophet came to me last night while you slept and told me that I was destined for greatness." For Achmed it was not even worth arguing with Mustafa. He said nothing the rest of the night and did not say good-bye to his brother when the scientists collected them both for more experiments the next morning. More poisons were tested on them in the ensuing months. At one point Achmed was told that thanks to his family, a new virus had been developed. Rather than use Achmed's immunity to illness to heal, the scientists had used it to develop something that would kill on contact. This supervirus was undetectable, unkillable, and could be concentrated in small, lethal doses. A single smuggled dose could be hidden easily on an individual and remain dormant until activated. Once the supervirus was active, it could obliterate an entire city in a matter of hours. Best of all, the West had no idea the substance even existed. Achmed and Mustafa were allowed out of their cages. They were not free to leave the complex but they could move about inside it. The two brothers were put to work as janitors. Mustafa accepted his broom with joy. "Why are you always singing?" Achmed asked his brother as they swept the laboratory where the supervirus had been perfected. "Stop your singing, crazy one." "I cannot help but sing," Mustafa said, "for the Prophet has told me that my time will soon be here." "End this now," Achmed snapped, so loudly some of the scientists glanced at the dirty middle-aged man with thebroom. Achmed lowered his voice. "You are out of your mind. The Prophet has not come to see you, fool." "Yes, Achmed, he has. And I can prove it." "Then do so, fool." A gleeful smile on his face, Mustafa used his broom handle to point across the room. "He is here now."
A man had just entered the lab. Achmed had not seen him at the complex before. He was tall, well over six feet, and walked rigidly as if his spine were an iron rod. He was thin, skinnier than any man Achmed had ever seen. His skin was as pale as bleached bone and his thinness lent him the aspect of an ambulatory skeleton. He wore a long black lab coat over a deep black suit. It was the only lab coat of that color Achmed had seen in all the time he had been held in captivity in the secret laboratory. So gaunt was his face that to look upon it was like looking at a living skull. Thinning white hair brushed his collar. A pair of fat black rats scurried around the man's feet. Rats were frequently used in testing when the supply of human beings ran low. Occasionally they were known to escape from their cages, as these must have. The rats, their fur mottled and their tails long and pink, were fat from feasting on the flesh of the dead. Achmed had never seen rodents so brazen as these. The other scientists recoiled at the animals and shouted for the researchers to catch them but if their presence bothered the skeletal man his face did not show concern. The rats played around the hems of his robes. The cadaver-like man conferred with the scientists, and seemed to be a source of great wisdom for the eager attention they gave him. When he glanced over at the two Mohammed brothers and smiled, Achmed felt something cold and strangely familiar wrap around his thudding heart. Achmed tripped over his own broom handle in his haste to leave the lab. Later, Mustafa asked his brother why he had seemed so frightened to see the Prophet. "Because I know this thing even if I have never before laid eyes upon it. If it speaks to you again, ignore it, Mustafa. Run away from it as fast as you can." "I cannot ignore the words of the Prophet." "That is not the Prophet, Mustafa. Stay away from it." But for the first time in his life, Mustafa could not listen to his brother's advice. Achmed was usually clever but this time he was mistaken. When his brother described what this being looked like to him, Mustafa laughed. "A skeleton? Now who is feeble-minded?" Mustafa said. "He has a face of unsurpassed beauty. A perfect Arab face. His skin is not white, but healthy brown. And you say he has no beard but his beard is thick and black. You must have been looking at someone else, brother." But Achmed knew he had seen the true face of the being that was not the Prophet and that his foolish brother was only seeing that which he wanted to see. Eventually the weapons programs were put on hold. The Americans were holding one of their fool elections again and Iraq's great leader wanted to remain quiet during this time. Despite Achmed's warning, Mustafa continued to speak with the Prophet. Achmed heard them some nights whispering, saw the figure draped in black at his brother's bedside. The loose rats of the weapons complex danced at the hem of his robes. Achmed asked for and was granted quarters on the other side of the complex, as far away from his brother as possible. Achmed was not present in Mustafa's dirty little room on that fateful night when the Prophet came to visit his chosen and most faithful disciple. "You have to act fast," the Prophet said. He had entered Mustafa's quarters without opening the door. One moment he was not there, the next he was standing before his loyal follower. "They're shutting down the ... oh, get up off your knees, for heaven's sake." "Forgive me, Prophet," said Mustafa, and he scampered obediently to his feet. "Old mustache-puss is getting cold feet. He's shutting down the whole shooting match for a year or two. All those beautiful dead bodies are being put at risk because he's scared the Americans are going to elect someone who might get the nerve to finally drop a blockbuster on his palace." Mustafa had never seen the Prophet agitated. For an instant, the beatific visage seemed to phase out, replaced by a ghastly white skull. It looked much like what Achmed had described all those months ago. But as soon as he saw the image, it was gone. A trick of the light. &qu...

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