The Red Menace #7: Ruses Are Red

By James Mullaney

SPLAT IS WHERE IT'S AT!

A trendy new drug nicknamed "Splat" has come out of nowhere and is suddenly sweeping the nation. The designer narcotic boasts that it will get kids higher than they've ever been before. But coming back down is murder.

With a body count rocketing up from coast to coast, MIC Director Simon Kirk decides to send in the cure for what ails America's youth. Enter Podge Becket and Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright, the most lethal therapeutic MIC can prescribe. Their mission: find out who's behind this synthetic drug and give them a dose of their own medicine. The permanent kind.

Except, as usual, nothing is exactly as it seems.

Splat is just the opening gambit in a much larger game. Unknown to Podge and Dr. Wainwright, all the pieces are in place for a fatal final match involving the underground drug scene, the Soviets, and a couple of old enemies of the Red Menace eager to prove themselves.

What goes up must come down, but the bad guys soon find out the masked man with the target on his back won't crash so easily. Before this trip is over the psychedelic seventies drug scene will find out the hard way what it's like to O.D...on Red!

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Mullaney
• Release date: Feb 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9798201938307

James Mullaney

James Mullaney has worked with Warren Murphy on the Destroyer Series for a number of years.

Book preview

Red Menace 7: Ruses Are Red

By James Mullaney

Copyright © 2023 James Mullaney. All Rights Reserved.

THE RED MENACE TM & © James Mullaney. All Rights Reserved.

Cover by Mark Maddox

Editor: Donna Courtois

James Mullaney Books, August 2023

Available in paperback from Bold Venture Press

PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior express written consent of the publisher and the copyright holder.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Ruses Are Red

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

A Note from Jim

About the author

Other Books by James Mullaney

For Grammy

The sweetest little Irish

grandmother there ever was.

Gone a lifetime ago.

Never forgotten.

Ruses Are Red

Prologue

The icy wind off the dark Siberian lake sliced through the heavy greatcoat of General Anatoly Yavanovich Drobkik.

General Drobkik was a young man. Too young to be a general. At least that was the opinion of the older officers who had clawed their way up through the ranks, some of them even before the upheaval of the Russian Revolution. Of course, the old guard never dared voice these complaints aloud. The mere thought of banishment in Siberia was enough to freeze one’s tongue to the roof of one’s mouth.

Young Anatoly Yavanovich is pet of Comrade Stalin. Only those who seek exile or worse are fool enough to speak against those close to Stalin.

This was the shared opinion of Drobkik’s fellow generals.

Young General Anatoly Drobkik, scarcely thirty-five years of age, had a different opinion of the frozen region that every normal citizen of the USSR — from prole to Politburo — thought of as a terrifying, frigid wasteland of ice, snow, and death. For Anatoly Drobkik, newly minted Red Army general, Siberia was home. A new home, to be sure, but one which he never expected to leave.

Da, da, General Drobkik announced, nodding approval at each squat cement building and length of hurricane fence on the brand-new facility.

It was early spring in Siberia, which merely meant the snow was thinner on the rock-hard ground. General Drobkik was pleased that the facility had been built in winter and under the original short time estimate. Its rapid construction was a credit to the hard work of the men who had been conscripted to build the small secret base in the middle of nowhere.

As if on cue, a few sudden bursts of machine gun fire sounded from the nearby woods. The dissident workmen were being rewarded for finishing their job.

No one could know about this base. No word of its existence would ever reach the outside world. The men who were assigned here would never leave. They had no families, no loved ones. No one would miss any of them.

The only female under his command accompanied General Drobkik on his tour.

This way, general, she said, gesturing to a sturdy building across the compound. She directed him to the blockhouse.

The beautiful girl did not smile. She never smiled. Whenever the young men assigned to the base felt the sap of youth rising, she was there to satisfy their needs. General Drobkik had thought of everything.

Olga Svetkolga was a pretty young thing of twenty-five, with black hair that shined like a raven’s wings and hard eyes like shards of black flint. Olga, like all the men that Drobkik had selected, also had a fanatical devotion to the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Comrade Stalin.

The girl was wearing a fur hat and greatcoat over her captain’s uniform. She, too, had received a rank higher than her age would ordinarily merit. Everyone assigned to the base had jumped two, even three ranks merely for accepting the desolate posting.

Olga marched her commanding officer past the blast doors set into the ground at the center of the compound, slowing her pace to accommodate the general’s intent gaze at the great round plate with the interlocking halves set deep in the frozen ground.

General Drobkik allowed a flickering smile to cross his lips before resuming his faster pace. Captain Olga Svetkolga quickly led the general over to a metal door set into the side of the sturdy blockhouse.

A long staircase descended into a viewing room. In front of a monitoring station deep underground sat three civilian scientists.

Olga offered a crisp salute before departing the room, continuing down into the depths of the base where she haunted her new cramped communications area. A flight of supplies was due in that afternoon, and one of Olga’s duties was to make sure the men received all they desired. The great bounty that was regularly delivered by parachute on the nearby frozen lake was compensation for the lives they had surrendered in order to secretly serve the general secretary.

General Drobkik stood for a moment next to the panel and watched the civilians poke around at the buttons on their control panel.

Everything was new. The world was young. The future belonged to the Revolution. For a minute, General Drobkik contemplated the glorious role that had been entrusted to him, feeling a swell of pride grow so great in his chest that he thought it might burst the buttons on his coat. At last the general interrupted the three men.

It is ready? he demanded.

He nodded to the crystal clear, blast-proof glass of the angled window that overlooked the deep chamber adjacent to the control room.

Yes, comrade general. We need only to receive the command.

General Anatoly Yavanovich Drobkik nodded satisfaction. The young general looked out with a father’s pride at the silver missile nestled like a bird in its silo nest.

The Cyrillic letters on the side of the rocket just beneath the USSR read: Phoenix.

The year was 1952.

1

Tomorrow, the newspapers and TV stations would dispassionately state that she, by all accounts, had been a good girl. Happy, at least outwardly. From a prosperous family, which was so often the case with these baffling teenage hippie types these days.

Neighbors, teachers, and her family minister — who saw her religiously twice a year, on both Christmas and Easter — would to a man describe her as bright-eyed, always cheerful. She was never, ever disrespectful like so many of her generation.

A spokesman for the family, standing on the crunching gravel outside the locked driveway gates shaded by the California wildrose shrubs, would ask that her parents’ privacy be respected at this enormously difficult time.

Please, show a little compassion, her father’s brother would beg the ghouls of the San Francisco press corps camped out in the street outside the high wall of the Belvedere Island mansion. Don’t any of you have kids? For God’s sake, she was their only child.

What about the fact that she appears to be the first? Any comment about that? the reporter from the Chronicle would demand.

The reporter was a middle-aged woman in a cheap powder blue Sears pantsuit who, despite her short stature, always managed to muscle her way to the front of the gaggle of mostly men, sometimes with elbows and kicks. After all, this wasn’t the 1950s anymore. The women’s liberation movement was at that very moment deciding that women could be anything men could be, even unlikable, overbearing, and rude. The reporter would hold her pen and notebook at the ready, feverishly awaiting a reply.

Her question would throw the girl’s uncle back on his heels, almost as much as had the news of his eighteen-year-old niece’s death.

‘First?’ he would demand. What the hell do you mean, ‘first?’

# # #

Thirteen hours earlier, the girl who would be first was in a strange bedroom in Alamo Square with a man she had met only three minutes earlier.

The rest of the party still rumbled discordantly to the scratchy vinyl din of Jim Morrison on the other side of the warped door with the peeling green paint.

Denise Parisette, the girl who in just under twenty minutes would be first, wanted the man to know that she wasn’t a slut.

It’s just that you might get the wrong idea, Denise said. Barbara, she’s the girl I came here with. Barbara says you’re cool. I wouldn’t even be in here with you if Barbara hadn’t told me you were okay. How old are you?

He dodged the question with one of his own.

Barbara? asked the man on the bed, who was a bedraggled forty-year-old struggling unsuccessfully to look twenty years younger behind sheets of greasy long hair.

"She’s my friend I told you about. You know Barbara. My age, long blonde hair. She’s out there now with the rest of the party. She’s wearing that poncho tonight that she always wears? The girl with the pink jeans with the daisies on the back pockets? You know. Barbara. Anyway, Barbara’s seen you at these parties before. She said you could, you know— The girl bit her lip and glanced with giddy guilt around the filthy bedroom. When she failed to spy anybody hiding amid the piles of dirty laundry, she dropped her voice to a whisper that was barely audible over the mellow Doors din assaulting the far side of the bedroom door. Barbara said you could hook me up."

He had to read her lips to understand her final three words.

Oh. Shit, man, he grumbled.

He was sprawled on a pile of tousled bed linen that hadn’t seen so much as a single teaspoon of laundry detergent since it had been liberated from the Salvation Army a year ago. The bedding was pulled off one end, exposing half the mattress and revealing intricately overlapping stains, some of which had already been there when he’d rescued it from the curb on trash day. He stretched a laconic arm across a particularly dense minefield of smelly Dalmatian spots to an ancient nightstand that he’d found dumped in an alley down the street. He removed a large vial made of smoky brown glass — the kind issued a million times ever day in pharmacies across the country — unscrewed the plastic top, and shook out a single pill into his wrinkled, aging palm.

The pill was bright yellow.

Kneeling on the edge of the bed, Denise’s eyes were transfixed by the pill. When she reached for it, the middle-aged hippie quickly clamped his hand into a fist, save for his extended index finger that he waggled before her nose.

Nuh-uhn. Not so fast, darlin’, he warned. This right here? He rolled the pill between his thumb and index finger and held it up for her to examine. This is heaven’s sweetest candy. This is your key to unlock the pearly gates. But you and me is living in a capitalist world. Just what are you willing to give in exchange?

Daddy gave her a generous allowance every week, so Denise had the money. But her purse was with Barbara in the other room for safekeeping, and she’d heard these new pills cost as much as five dollars, and she was saving up for some new shoes for the prom because Daddy was being stubborn and was refusing to buy her a new pair to go with the expensive $150 dress he’d just bought her. Besides, in the light cast by the weak, dirty yellow bulb sticking out of the wine bottle lamp on the nightstand — half-hidden by his sheets of stringy, graying hair — the stranger in the bed almost didn’t look quite as old as he obviously was.

However, Denise, like the dirty figure sprawled on the even dirtier bed, was a byproduct of the bourgeois capitalist system.

She held up two fingers in a V.

"Two pills," she insisted.

His smug smile vanished. The crows feet at the corners of his eyes tightened as he carefully examined the girl as he would a piece of meat in a supermarket case in order to determine whether or not it was worth tossing in his shopping cart.

Dammit, he grumbled.

He rattled the bottle again, then flung it back into the nightstand and slammed the drawer. He very carefully set a pair of yellow pills in a dent on the scarred surface.

He unzipped the fly of his torn Levi’s while across the mattress Denise shimmied out of her little pink panties.

She only had to writhe around for two minutes on top of a stranger who was old enough to be her father, and when it was done she left the room with her shoe fund intact and with the pair of yellow pills clutched tight in her palm.

She found Barbara sharing a joint with two boys on a three-legged couch.

Denise vaguely recognized the boys from school. Shop class kids, she thought. If not, it didn’t matter. They were some kind of bums on the verge of flunking out. Loser boys who’d never amount to anything in life. Denise had warned Barbara a million times to be more selective in her choice of friends.

Let’s leave, Denise said.

We just got here, Barbara answered.

Yeah, man, one of the boys said, flashing a lascivious grin of surprisingly expensive dental work. His attempt at a beard looked like it had been swept off a barber shop floor and stuck on his cheeks with Elmer’s glue. Have a seat right here.

He patted the cushion between himself and Barbara, raising a cloud of dust that caused the seated girl to choke. Denise fanned the dust from the air.

"I got them," Denise insisted, her voice a happy hoarse whisper. She held her fist out to Barbara.

Her classmate’s face lit up like the burning tip of the joint that was currently in the custody of the boy at the far end of the couch.

When Barbara hopped to her feet, her departure threw the three-legged couch out of balance. The girls left the two boys frantically repositioning themselves so as to keep the sofa from listing in the direction of its missing leg.

The two girls fought their way through the crowd in the living room, Denise tugging Barbara by the elbow. They knocked the drinks from a couple of hands along the way.

Whoa, bitch, the war’s that way, growled a college-aged boy whose only experience with the military was watching Gomer Pyle, but which lack of knowledge didn’t prevent him from wearing a faded U.S. Army jacket.

Sorry, Denise said.

Near the door was a tin tray table on which was arranged a dozen cans of Coca-Cola. Denise grabbed a can on the way out the door.

The hallway stunk of rotted wood, urine, and despair. Denise and her friend ladled onto the smelly gloom a dollop of giggling triumph.

They each took a yellow pill and placed it on their tongues. Denise popped the tab on the Coke can with a snapping fizz. The girls took turns taking sips.

Denise felt the bubbles whisk the yellow pill down her throat, and all the way down to her stomach.

How long does it take to work? she asked.

Jennie Long said Billy Franks told her it wasn’t even a couple of minutes for him, Barbara insisted.

Denise set the Coke can on the railing overlooking the stairwell, which was missing nearly every other baluster. The rotted wooden teeth in the wide-open mouth of the balustrade seemed to drift away, along with Barbara’s voice.

Denise? Denise? Oh, wow. This is, like, so far out.

It was far out. It was very far out. It was as far out now as was Barbara in her poncho and pink jeans sitting on the railing. Denise’s schoolmate was way over there on the horizon, like a cowboy riding off into the sunset in one of the old black-and-white Westerns from the 1950s that her daddy often fell asleep to in his den. Barbara was riding the rotted railing like John Wayne, high in the saddle with a Coke can horn.

Denise got a vague impression that the horse suddenly broke a half-dozen of its many legs. They splintered like wood, and Barbara disappeared over the horizon.

Bye-bye, Barbara, Denise thought. Vaya con dios.

The thought of Barbara’s makeshift horse actually plunging down into a stairwell rather than galloping over the horizon made a feeble attempt to assert itself in her mind, which had suddenly become simultaneously both fuzzy and brilliantly bright. But that was silly. Barbara was John Wayne.

Barbara Wayne, Denise said. Barbara Wayne wears a Stetson hat, Denise said. The thought of her friend riding around sagebrush and cacti in a giant cowboy hat made her giggle.

She was giggling as she felt along the railing and began climbing the stairs. Not down, where Barbara lay unconscious amid the broken railing she’d attempted to straddle, but up. Up the long staircase, to another, then another. Then to a door that seemed to be calling to her from deep inside her brain, and which squeaked open with a push and left fascinating bits of rust clinging to her palm.

She did not know why she climbed the stairs. She only knew that she could not help herself. A distant part of her mind remembered a story her father used to read to her when she was a little girl. It was about a man who played a flute and got all the rats in the city to follow him. She couldn’t remember the details of the story. At the moment she only barely remembered her father’s soothing voice. The only thing she was really aware of was the uncontrollable urge she had to climb. To go up, up as high as she could possibly go. It was hazy, yes, but exhilarating.

San Francisco lay before her. The view wasn’t very good. She couldn’t see the Golden Gate or Alcatraz. She knew that Haight-Ashbury was only a fifteen-minute walk in the direction in which she was facing, but she was barred from seeing San Francisco’s center of peace and love. She saw only the grimy side of a crummy building with a smattering of windows made bright by yellow lights glowing from within.

She’d kicked off her shoes at some point. She didn’t know when. She only knew that she was suddenly standing barefoot on the ledge, with the street eight stories below her wiggling toes.

Whatever was in those yellow pills was wonderful. She didn’t know its scientific name. Maybe it didn’t even have one. She only knew it by its street name: Splat.

It was new. Like brand new. Like had just burst on the scene in the past week. Splat is where it’s at is what the kids were saying.

The rhyme made her laugh.

Splat is where it’s at, she announced to the building across the road.

The building didn’t answer, which would have disappointed her if she didn’t feel more alive than she ever had in the entirety of her eighteen years on the planet.

Thanks to Splat, she was the night, she was the sky, she was the stars. She was one with everything.

She could fly.

The little pill that had disintegrated in the mouthful of Coca-Cola in her stomach as much as screamed it up at her. She couldn’t argue with it. She had no desire to try.

The cold breeze of the San Francisco evening blew her skirt against her legs. She swayed for a moment in the breeze; then joined it.

Denise took one step forward and plunged eight stories to the street.

Three seconds later, she slammed with the force of a fired cannonball into the roof of a parked Volkswagen van, pulverizing bones, smashing her skull to pieces, rupturing every internal organ, and spraying the interior of the vehicle in a wash of blood.

In the instant before her death, as the air whizzed by her ears and her tousled hair flew wildly in her wake, only one thought rocketed through the mind of Denise Parisette, the girl who would become known as the first. It was a final thought that was tragically shared by three other youths in San Francisco that very night:

Splat is where it’s at!

2

The rented car whipped alongside the smear of a broken yellow line, its speedometer topping out just in excess of eighty miles per hour.

The posted speed limit was fifty-five. Thanks to a squeeze from OPEC, some states had reduced speed limits in an attempt to conserve oil. There were even rumblings out of Washington that a national drop to fifty-five miles per hour was imminent. Yet despite the newly-reduced state limit, there were no police officers within miles to enforce the law. Not at this desolate time of year. No cruisers were tucked behind faded billboards, officers shivering at the encroaching upstate New York winter. There was only an endless forest of towering spruce trees, beyond which the Catskill Mountains, like Atlas of old, held aloft the crushing weight of the autumn sky on their broad shoulders.

Up ahead, a pair of low, looming mountains squeezed between them every last blinding white ray of the dying sun, as if they alone knew that this was the final day that Earth’s lonely star would provide warmth for a cold planet that relied on it for life.

The brooding figure behind the wheel of the racing car knew that for the vast majority of the planet’s current inhabitants this day’s setting sun would rise again. It was for two individuals for whom no sun would ever again rise that Patrick Becket was speeding down this deserted stretch of road.

As he drove, a single phrase weighed more heavily on him than did the great burden of the sky on the shoulders of the distant mountains.

Honor killing.

Patrick Podge Becket had traveled the world many times over, and was as repulsed by the phrase this day as he had been when he’d first encountered it.

The first time had been in Iran nearly ten years ago. Podge Becket dabbled in, among many other ventures, oil. It was while touring a potential petroleum site in that Mideast country that he was told that the wife of one of his workers had been brutally killed, her throat slit, her limbs severed, and her body stabbed repeatedly.

That’s horrible, Podge had said to his Arab escort. Did they catch the killer?

His employee had offered a quizzical look.

Catch?

Podge assumed he’d stumbled over the proper Farsi word.

Apprehend, he said. The killer. Do they have the killer in custody?

His Kurdish tour guide nodded understanding.

"Ah, I see. No, Mr. Becket, you do not understand. Massul’s wife had more than once spoken to the man who delivers their London Times. She did so several times. Massul saw her, his brother saw her, her father saw her. When he confronted her, she insisted that she was only being friendly, but— The man had shrugged. —you see."

Podge had not seen. Not clearly. But he had begun to understand. Once it was fully explained to him, he was appalled.

Iran was considered one of the more modern Middle Eastern states. Its women attended universities, held public office, and were permitted to walk freely in public without being accompanied by a male family member or swathed in layers of concealing Stone Age blankets. Yet there were those who still held to the more primitive tribal ways. Apparently Podge’s employee Mossul Mohammed was one such Neanderthal.

Podge had met Mossul Mohammed on a dozen occasions. The man had seemed friendly and highly Westernized, with his capped teeth and tailored suits. Podge wondered if Mossul had been wearing one of his impeccable Saville Row suits when he’d drawn the knife across the throat of his late wife for committing the unpardonable sin of being friendly