Red Devil: The Red Menace #6

By James Mullaney

SPEAK OF THE DEVIL
When the nation's number one oil company becomes a target of terrorists, everyone naturally blames the usual rabid environmentalists. After all, when you're as big as Dallaco Oil and its larger-than-life CEO Jim Bob Slickens, you get a pretty good sense of who's painted that bull's-eye on the back of your ten-gallon Stetson.

Except this time Dallaco's Mideast well fires and ocean oil spills seem to have attracted an enemy a few millennia older than the Sierra Club. Just who is the mysterious red fiend with the crooked horns who seems hellbent on disrupting the world's petroleum supply?

America runs on oil, and Director Simon Kirk of MIC vows to keep the motor running come hell or high water. Kirk calls in his two top men to make a deal with the devil: the permanent kind. Podge Becket and Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright are determined to get to the bottom of things, but soon discover that giving the devil his due is harder than even they imagined. It turns out the road to hell is paved not with good intentions, but with the bodies of innocents.

The Red Menace vows to raise hell and put a stop to the evil figure with the fiery eyes, but this time, for the first time, the masked man might not have a snowball's chance...

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Mullaney
• Release date: Jun 14, 2022

James Mullaney

James Mullaney is a Shamus Award-nominated author of over 50 books, as well as comics, short stories, novellas, and screenplays. His work has been published by New American Library, Gold Eagle/Harlequin, Marvel Comics, Tor, Moonstone Books, and Bold Venture Press. He was ghostwriter and later credited writer of 28 novels in The Destroyer series, and wrote the series companion guide The Assassin's Handbook 2. He is currently the author of The Red Menace action series as well as the comic-fantasy Crag Banyon Mysteries detective series.He was born in Taxachusetts, and wishes he were an only child, save one.He can be reached via email at [e-mail]

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

Cover by Mark Maddox

Editor: Donna Courtois

James Mullaney Books, December 2021

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

Red Devil

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

Epilogue

About the author

More from Bold Venture Press

For the Lamkins

Red Devil

CHAPTER 1

She had a full belly on the day she died, which made her untimely end all the more tragic.

She’d spent the weeks before that fateful last day baking in the unforgiving Middle East sun in the coastal nation of Farouki Arabia. Many men had fawned over her, but none loved her as much as Captain Eddie Shaw.

She’s a beauty beyond compare, Captain Shaw insisted with a wistful sigh. He wore dark sunglasses to protect his sharp blue eyes from the brutal Mideast sun. The spotless lenses reflected twin versions of the perfect lines of his one great love. Shaw cracked a lopsided grin. Of course, don’t tell my wife I said that.

The man to whom Captain Shaw confided this deepest secret of a philandering heart was his own first officer, Commander Jameson Wilson. Shaw offered this confidence from the spot on which the two profusely sweating men cast long, praying mantis-like shadows across the great concrete dock beside which was moored the true love of Captain Shaw’s life, the Dallaco oil tanker Mediterranean.

The Mediterranean was barely seven years old. Captain Shaw had been her first and only skipper, assuming command precisely one year to the day after the end of his twenty-year stint in the United States Navy.

The USN had never seen fit to reward Shaw with his own command. Not unless one counted as a bridge the dull battleship gray metal desk he steered on a daily basis after his graduation from the United States Naval Academy. The closest Shaw came to the sea was an endlessly burping water cooler that the maintenance department could never fix.

He did not object when Uncle Sam stationed him in an office in Baltimore. The war was still raging in the Pacific, after all. Good men were dying. New blood was desperately needed. Papers could be pushed by others. He was certain it would only be a matter of time before he was sent to where his talents as a seaman would be put to use.

When the war ended, Lieutenant Shaw was present, at least in spirit if not in actual body, when the Japanese signed the official surrender. While the final action in the years-long struggle was taking place aboard the Missouri, Lieutenant Shaw was half a world away, listening to the historic signing on a staticky radio on his office shelf. As Edward R. Murrow gave the play-by-play, Lt. Shaw was stapling together stacks of life preserver requisition forms while listening to the infernal belches of a water cooler that was five seconds away from receiving an unofficial bicarbonate of soda in the form of a one-way trip out a second story window.

Lt. Shaw had missed his chance to serve his country with valor.

"Well, I’m happy you didn’t go overseas, lovely Agnes Stanton, the future Mrs. Edward Shaw, had insisted at their quiet corner table in the Italian restaurant the night she became his fiancée. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Eddie, it’s true. I simply couldn’t bear it if you’d been killed."

No risk of that happening now, he replied glumly, on what was the happiest night in the life of his newly affianced, eighteen-year-old bride to be. I’ve been informed that there are very few fatalities as a result of paper cuts.

She took his hand across the table and looked him square in the engagement ring.

"You’ll always be my war hero," she insisted.

It was one of the most miserable evenings of his young life. Eddie Shaw determined that night that he would get a command of his own even if it killed him.

Starting just a month after V-J Day, Lieutenant Edward Shaw had assiduously worked his way up through the Navy ranks. It took ten long years of toiling on bone-dry land before the soles of his shoes finally felt the sway of a deck beneath them. He was sure that he’d make captain in no time. Yet, despite an exemplary service record into the 1950s and beyond, Shaw hadn’t managed to achieve a rank higher than third in command of an old World War Two destroyer. That tub had been in such sorry shape it should have been decommissioned and used for target practice two decades before.

There was no hope. A captaincy wasn’t in the cards, and he could no longer take being third in a row of second bananas. When he’d at last put in his time, Commander Shaw cashed in his chips at the nearest window and returned full-time to dry land.

As luck would have it, his former office skills landed him a private sector job with the Dallaco Petroleum Company. Within one year of securing what he thought would be the desk job he’d ride into retirement, Commander Edward Shaw returned to the sea, this time as captain of the pride of the Dallaco private fleet, the oil tanker Mediterranean.

Captain Shaw’s first command was part of the new line of oil tankers that had gone into production in 1957. His tanker had been commissioned ten years after that, in 1967. It was now five years on from her maiden voyage with Captain Shaw in the center chair, and she still looked brand new. The Dallaco Petroleum Company wouldn’t have stood for any ship in its fleet to be in anything other than tiptop shape, but even if his employers relaxed their standards Captain Shaw never would.

It was with the same stirring in his heart he’d felt when he first set eyes upon her that Captain Edward Shaw gazed anew at the Mediterranean in her Farouki Arabian berth.

‘A goodly vessel did I then espy, come like a giant from a haven broad,’ Shaw cooed gently to the massive ship. ‘And lustily along the bay she strode.’

A throat cleared beside him. He’d forgotten he was not alone.

Sir? his first officer said.

Captain Shaw was not ashamed to have spoken the words aloud.

Wordsworth, he explained to Jameson Wilson.

Ah. Yes, sir, replied the first officer.

The younger man’s brow was clearly furrowed behind his own pair of midnight-black sunglasses. Wilson didn’t understand. How could he? The first officer had never known and therefore could not understand the joy, privilege, and awesome responsibility of his own command.

Get aboard, Mister Wilson, the captain ordered. We set sail in one hour.

There was activity all around the great tanker. Men were like insects scrambling about the almost prehistoric shape of the Mediterranean. Some of Shaw’s own crew were specks hustling high up on deck. Dallaco workers and local Arabs down below were uncoupling the last line. Pumps fell silent. The massive hoses were retracted and were abruptly inactive. The hoses had carried every last drop of crude from the inland oil fields that now filled the great hold of the Mediterranean nearly to the bursting point.

The sky above was a magnificent cobalt unsullied by gulls or clouds as the great ship set out on her final, fatal mission.

A few men on shore waved the Mediterranean on her way. Beyond the gleaming glass of the bridge, Captain Edward Shaw offered a snapping salute, and could contain neither his grin nor the poetic stirring in his chest.

‘I pursued her with a lover’s look. This ship to all the rest did I prefer,’ the captain of the Mediterranean proudly proclaimed.

The ship’s cook, who happened to be on the bridge, exchanged a glance with the first officer. Commander Jameson Wilson only smiled and shrugged amused surrender as he glanced over the upcoming menu which, unbeknownst to all present, included the last meal any of the men aboard would share on earth or sea.

# # #

Four days after the Dallaco Mediterranean had set sail from her Farouki port, half a world away, Max Porter was shivering in the cabin of his brother Rich’s thirty-foot fishing boat somewhere in the pitch black night off the coast of Massachusetts and complaining for the tenth hour running.

At least Rich assumed it was ten hours. His allegedly waterproof watch had died after a dousing of seawater the previous night, so he was only judging time as best he could by the few faint dying stars that were beginning to haphazardly wink on through the slowly tearing veil of storm clouds.

"I told you you were going out too far, Max groused. You always go out too far. Ma says it all the time, you know. Harry told me you pulled the same shit with him last summer. At least you didn’t almost kill him."

The weather said calm, Rich Porter replied. (It was precisely the tenth time he’d reminded his brother of that fact, but who was counting?) I watched two of those Boston weather assholes, and both of them said the same thing. You heard the radio yourself.

They probably changed the forecast, Max said. We don’t know if they did because…uh, let’s see. Why, again? Oh, right. The radio got soaked and stopped working in the middle of that monsoon you nearly got me killed in. You know Ma’s probably got the Coast Guard searching all the way up to Maine for our bodies by now. You know how she is.

Rich Porter was twenty-seven and still lived with his mother. Older brother Max lived only three streets over with his wife and three kids, but spent every Sunday at his mother’s house for supper. The family matriarch insisted she be informed of every move her two boys made. She hated Rich’s boat since the day he bought it, and was even more dead-set against it when she heard his friends joking about what a lousy sailor he made, how he took his boat too far out, and how he stayed out far too long. She had protested this fishing trip from the moment her sons announced it.

Ma was right, Max said. I should have stayed home. You know, you don’t have to go out as far as Greenland in this thing. What the hell’s that smell?

Rich had tuned out his brother’s whining. Although he didn’t hear the words, his own nose was lifted in the air as well. He sniffed the breeze.

That’s oil, Max insisted before Rich could say a word. Are you leaking oil now, too?

The gauges were dark. There was nothing onboard to shine across them. The weak stars of the Milky Way didn’t offer any kind of adequate light.

The unexpected storm that had swept up from the south had nearly swamped the little boat. It would have been a short-lived squall for a larger craft; easily sloughed off. Back on land, it was nothing but a soft patter on windowpanes to ignore for an hour. Out in the Atlantic, it was as if the two brothers were strapped to the back of some thrashing Leviathan. They’d held on for dear life as the small fishing boat rose and fell on suddenly turbulent seas. As predawn descended, along with it came a dead calm that was the direct opposite of the watery roller coaster of the night before. All that could be heard was the soft whine of the motor and the gentle churning of the sea. The steady, thin spray of salt water chilled their bones and flooded their nostrils. But the oil smell was something new.

Are you leaking oil? Max demanded, voice laced with dread.

As if in response, the motor began to struggle, chugging hard.

She feels fine, Rich replied, baffled.

But something was definitely wrong. It was as if the ocean had grown more dense. It felt like The Fishin’ Magician, the name Rich Porter had mistakenly thought was clever when christening his boat, was plowing through oatmeal.

Both men were peering aft where the outboard motor was struggling to propel them back to their home port of Gloucester, when Max happened to glance forward.

The clouds of night had further torn asunder, and in the dark gray veil that preceded the dawn, Max spied a horror as great as the storm of the previous evening.

Holy shit! the older Porter brother screamed, eyes wide with sudden terror. Turn, turn, turn!

The mountain sprouted up from the sea directly in their path. The great black shape obscured the horizon. Dawn broke somewhere simultaneous with Max’s screams, flooding yellow light around the grounded hulk of the Dallaco Mediterranean.

Rich was a better skipper than his brother would have expected under the circumstances. The younger Porter brother immediately cut the engine and desperately wrenched the wheel. In the tense twenty seconds that followed, Rich Porter managed to avoid slamming head-on into the side of the tanker. He did, however, bring The Fishin‘ Magician hard enough into its broadside contact with the huge oceangoing vessel that the little recreational fishing boat cracked its side like an egg on the rim of a bowl.

The Porters were taking on water. Fast.

The brothers’ bad luck retreated momentarily when in the growing daylight the outline of a metal ladder rose up before them. It ran from the sea line up the long side of the towering vessel, disappearing from sight in the curving distance.

Rich was first to see the ladder. He slipped desperately across the deck, nearly getting caught up in the gush of sea water that launched across the deck of the crippled fishing boat as if shot from a fire hose.

No, Rich realized, it was not just water.

The young man’s hands were dark and slippery. His clothes were caked in glistening black slime.

When he grabbed the first rung that was bolted to the side of the tanker, his palms immediately slipped off. He grabbed tight and pulled, somehow managing to haul himself up off the deck of the fishing boat. He felt something clawing at his pant legs.

Rich looked down into a pair of frightened, desperate eyes. He reached down and hauled his older brother up behind him just as The Fishin’ Magician gave up the ghost.

The little boat crumbled like saltines in soup. What little was left that didn’t plunge below the sea began to slowly spread off in scattered shards across the blackened surface of water that was turbulent only for a moment, then suddenly calm once more.

The two brothers, who’d barely managed to escape the shipwreck with their lives, were panting, infinitesimally insignificant specks on the massive side of the stationary tanker. With Rich’s help, Max managed to hook his arms around a rung.

What is this shit? Max demanded. His right palm was an inch from his face as he struggled to retain his hold on the rung.

"It’s oil. Climb!"

The brother had no idea how long they struggled to climb the side of the tanker. It was an endless effort. Hand over hand until they could no longer feel their bleeding calluses. They alternately perspired and shivered in their soaking wet clothes. A dozen times they nearly fell to their deaths. Hands and feet slick with crude oil slipped repeatedly from the metal ladder rungs.

When they finally crested the port side of the ship, the autumn sun was blazing in full fury above a level horizon. The two men fell panting to the deck.

The ship was listing to one side. By the time they reached the top, the long climb up the ladder had helped to shed most of the oil from their bleeding palms.

Their clothes were slick with oil. Rich was too winded to speculate aloud that they must have been soaking up the thin oil spray for some time on his little fishing boat before they’d even noticed the heavier smell. Beside him on the deck of the tanker, his brother Max struggled to regain his breath.

Why is the deck so crooked? Max panted, when he was finally able to exhaled a few ragged words. Did they hit a reef?

With the sun up full now, Rich had a pretty good idea their location.

Sandbar, he explained, as he glanced up and down the empty deck. I wonder why the crew hasn’t come to check on us.

The lights were out on the tanker. She was dead, at least to the naked eye. But even if her instruments were out the crew should have heard the approach of another vessel on such a calm sea, even one as comparatively small as The Fishin’ Magician.

Maybe they abandoned it, Max speculated.

Whatever, let’s see if we can find somebody. Or at least scrape up a radio.

The brothers set out along the deck in the direction of the bridge.

Rich had seen large ships before, even avoided collisions with them on an occasion or two which he’d kept from his worrying family, but he’d never seen a vessel as large as the Mediterranean. It was as if someone had strung together multiple football fields, painted them black and set them afloat. At least the deck was tipped in their favor. The pitch was not so severe, but he was pleased to not have to struggle against the metal railing that encircled the main deck. A plunge to the ocean from that height would be deadly, and he was looking forward to a months-long battle with his insurance company over reimbursement for his late, lamented pleasure boat.

The brothers encountered not a soul on their way to the bridge.

A few seagulls had come out to the play on the morning breeze, which was thankfully warm for so late in the season. The cawing birds dropped hard, then rose rapidly on shifting eddies.

Hey, Max said suddenly, here we go.

They had passed a storage locker, its metal door yawning wide. Max paused to scrounge around inside, but Rich’s attention was focused elsewhere.

The younger Porter brother suddenly felt a worried tingle in his belly. Fear and adrenaline had propelled him until now. The frightening night at sea, the loss of equipment, the collision with the tanker, the harrowing climb up her side. But now the reality of this lost and empty ghost ship was finally sinking in.

Rich noted with some growing dread that the gulls seemed as interested in the bridge as he was. The greatest number of birds was located around the open door. Rich shooed them away as he made his cautious way for the door.

Something was wrong. He knew it; could feel it in his gut.

The dread unknown was far less frightening than the horrible reality that Rich Porter saw when he was finally able to screw up his courage and stick his face through the wide-open bridge door of the Dallaco Mediterranean.

The bodies were stacked just inside the door. Rich had no idea how many there were. It was a jumble of intertwined arms and legs. Body cavities yawned wide. Organs sloshed across the blood-stained deck and were piled like half-filled water balloons against the bulkhead. The head of Captain Eddie Shaw had been hacked off with the rough edge of a dull blade and propped up in the window, dead eyes staring out to sea.

The door on the far side of the bridge was open as well. Seagulls were fluttering in and out, hopping around on blood-stained feet, viscera trailing from their beaks.

Something had been painted on the wall. A symbol. Dripping red from the points. It registered deep in the back of Rich Porter’s swirling brain.

Whatever the symbol was, Rich didn’t have time to allow his memory to pull up something that matched the bloody image on the wall. He was too occupied spinning away from the door and vomiting across the sun-drenched deck.

His brother was running up, an object clamped in his hand. Max was shouting something and pointing at the sky, oblivious to the gruesome scene on the other side of the thin metal wall.

Rich became dully aware of the sound of an approaching plane.

Max was waving his arms over his head. He raised the item in his hand.

The kaleidoscope in which Rich swirled abruptly resolved into real life once more.

No! Rich Porter managed to yell as he grabbed for the flare gun in his brother’s hand.

Too late. Max had already pulled the trigger.

The flare went up high in the morning sky, traveling in a whistling arc far away from the crooked deck of the marooned tanker.

If the pilot of the search plane hadn’t seen the flare as it flew through the air, it definitely caught his attention when it landed.

The burning flare dropped into the center of the thick black slick that encircled both the Mediterranean and the sand dune on which the tanker had run aground.

Rich held his breath, unsure if the match would go out. There was a silent moment after the flare struck when it seemed as if the ocean had snuffed out the flame.

FOOM!

The fire vomited up from a single spot, like an undersea volcanic eruption breaking the surface, before it raced across the water directly for the Mediterranean. It separated when it reached the listing side and then rocketed off in either direction. Within seconds, the roaring flames encircled the great ship.

A wall of black smoke like fast-moving fog rose up the side of the ship. The brothers were caught in the center of an inferno. Rich lost sight of the burning water behind the thick cloud of choking smoke.

Rich glanced through the door of the bridge, out the open door opposite and over to the far side of the ship.

Curls of thick smoke were rising up over the distant rail.

They could run. Try to find a clear spot. Maybe locate another ladder to carry them down to the sandbar. Rich hesitated for a moment.

What do we do, Rich! Max pleaded, tears streaming down his face.

It was not Rich, but the Mediterranean that answered the older Porter brother’s desperate question.

The explosion was violent and mercifully brutal. The side of the tanker was ripped out from underneath the Porter brothers. The two men were hurled out into open air, as if the great tanker were a dog shedding nuisance fleas. Their arms pin-wheeled wildly as they followed a trajectory similar to that of the flare a minute before. Their howls were silenced by subsequent blasts within the rumbling belly of the tanker.

In seconds the two hurtling brothers were swallowed up by the massive black cloud and were gone.

The authorities determined that the two men were likely dead before they hit the burning sea. At least that’s what Gloucester’s chief of police, who was a friend of the Porter family, told Max and Rich’s sobbing mother.

Rich always took that boat of his out too far, the chief said. But look at it this way, Gladys. He died doing something he loved. Not many of us can say that.

The Mediterranean burned for three days. The cloud of black smoke could be seen from Boston to the north and Rhode Island to the south. Beaches that weren’t slick with crude oil were covered in oily black soot that fell for days like filthy snow.

The wreck of the Mediterranean was quickly dubbed the worst ecological disaster in the history of the United States.

And on the New York Stock Exchange, the Dallaco Petroleum Company took a ten-point hit to close the week out at its lowest point in more than a decade which, in certain horrified minds, was a catastrophe far