Annotation
Red Alert
When a diabolical superfoe acquires a superlaser that uses hypercolor to control emotion, he throws the world into a kaleidoscope of deadly mood swings. CURE goes on red alert.
And if things aren't black enough, a rival nation has seen the mind-blowing potential of beaming mood-altering color from satellites... and rendering entire nations defenseless.
Color them crazy, but Remo and Chiun know they've got to thwart this bizarre color scheme. More than ever before they must rely on their sensory skills honed to a razor sharpness - because the Destroyer is going to catch the enemy blindfolded.
Destroyer 99: The Color of Fear
By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir
PROLOGUE
No history book ever recorded it, but the first shot of the Franco-American Conflict of 1995 was fired on a Civil War battlefield outside the city limits of Petersburg, in Virginia.
This time civil war would escalate beyond the shores of the continental United States.
Before it was all over, two long-standing allies would launch punishment raids upon one another's most sacred institutions in a new kind of war, one never before witnessed in human history.
And two men, one famous and one obscure, both of whom the world believed long dead, would collide in mortal combat.
All because Rod Cheatwood misplaced his TV remote control.
History never recorded that fact, either.
Chapter 1
If Colonel Lester "Rip" Hazard had known as he sped down the Richmond-Virginia Turnpike toward Petersburg that before the sun again rose over his beloved Old Dominion he was destined to fall in what history would call the Second Battle of the Crater, he would have driven even faster.
That was the kind of man he was. Virginia born and bred, he loved the land of his birth, which to Lester "Rip" Hazard meant Virginia first and the good ole U.
S. A. second.It was not that Hazard was no patriot. He had served in Panama and again in the Gulf War. He had fought for his country and he had killed for it. And when he had returned from Kuwait, whole in body but tormented by a nagging cough that forced him to resign from the Virginia National Guard, he swallowed his bitter disappointment in manful silence and devoted himself to software support. A gentleman of the Old South did not complain, and so he did not. His great-great-grandfather, Harlan Hunter Hazard, had died with both legs blown off and his lifeblood oozing into the dark and bloody loam of the land he had loved, and it was passed down through the years that Captain Harlan Hazard had died dry of eye and bereft of regret while humming "Dixie. "
That was during the 1864 Battle of the Crater, soon to be renamed by historians the First Battle of the Crater.
If Colonel Hazard could only know, his eyes would have shone with pride, for he loved his heritage far far more than he loved his life.
Instead, he piloted his silver Lexus at high speed while checking in with the caterers by cellular phone.
"Ah'm running a mite late," he told the caterer's office. "Them eatables been trucked in yet?"