Nick Carter

The Death’s Head Conspiracy

Prologue

The island of Mumura was like a tiny green jewel set in the deep blue velvet of the South Pacific. Tucked away in the corner of the Tuamotu Archipelago, Mumura was one of the few Polynesian islands not subjected to missionaries and civilization. The Mumuran people were still free in the fullest sense of the word. No one had put constricting shoes on their feet or covered the fine brown breasts of their women. Some five hundred of them in all, they were unaware of the paradise that was their island, for they had known nothing else.

Almost the entire population waited now on the golden beach as a motor launch sliced through the gentle breakers toward their shore. In the bow of this foreign craft stood Atu, tall and straight and unafraid of the speed of the craft or the roaring engine, as befitted a chief.

As the launch swerved to a standstill a few yards off shore the men ran down to their chief, while the women remained up on the beach laughing excitedly among themselves and cautioning the children not to get in the way.

Stepping from the boat, Atu took a large suitcase from a crewman and waded into the water, holding the case chest high to keep it dry. The launch roared to life and sped back toward the white yacht riding easily half a mile out.

Atu strode up the beach bearing the suitcase proudly before him. He laid it on a stone his ancesters had used as a sacrificial altar, but which was now used as a rostrum.

The Mumurans crowded around. The musical cadence of their language rose with excitement.

Atu raised his hand for silence, and at once the only sound to be heard was the sighing of the late afternoon breeze through the palms. The white-haired chieftan smiled upon his people affectionately, and bent to open the clasps of the suitcase the way the white men on the big boat had shown him.

He ran his hand over the glossy brown material of the suitcase. It was like nothing he had ever touched, and Atu caressed it with wonderment. Then, seeing the impatience of his people, he grasped the lid at the two corners and raised it.

He brought the treasures out one at a time, letting the people savor each one. A length of cloth, unbelieveably pliable, and splashed with spirals of colors unlike any flower in Polynesia. Necklaces strung with marvelous stones that caught the light of the sun and shattered it into a rainbow. Little oblong packages of paper-wrapped strips that were sweet to the taste. Atu slipped one into his mouth and chewed to demonstrate as the white men had showed him. He passed out the other strips, seeing that as many children as possible got them. The wonders continued to come from the suitcase. There were things that bounced, things that glittered, things that made sounds. Each new treasure brought a pleased murmer from the crowd.

This would surely be a day long remembered on Mumura.

Aboard the yacht, now steaming away from Mumura, two men stood at the rail watching the receding island through binoculars. One was heavy and bear-like, with a tangle of black hair that needed washing. The other was taller, and thin as a whip, with silver blond hair brushed straight back from a high, smooth forehead. Although the men wore civilian clothes, there was something military in the way they held themselves. Behind the taller man sat an enormous German shepherd and a muscular black Doberman pinscher glaring at the world with hatred.

Fyodor Gorodin, the heavier man, spoke. “Why don’t we get it over with, Anton? We must be far enough from the island by now.” His voice was a harsh growl that increased his resemblance to a bear.

The silver-haired man, Anton Zhizov, lowered his glasses and nodded slowly. His tiny dark eyes were hidden in deep sockets beneath straight black brows. “Yes, I think the time has come.”

Zhizov turned to a third man who paced the deck restlessly behind them. “What do you say, Wamow? Are you ready?”

Knox Warnow was a slight man with stooped narrow shoulders that made him seem even smaller than he was. He had the pale, unhealthy skin of a man who seldom went outdoors.

“Yes, yes, I’m ready,” Warnow snapped. “I’ve been ready for the past twenty minutes.”

“Undue haste can be very costly,” Zhizov said smoothly. It should make quite a pretty picture now in the rays of the setting sun.” He turned to a young man in the uniform of a seamean. “Boris, tell the captain to hold us steady, I want to get photographs.”

The young man braced at attention. “Yes, sir.” He started to move forward to the bridge, then hesitated. “Sir?”

“What is it, Boris?” Zhizov asked impatiently.

“The people on the island. Will they have had time to evacuate?”

“People? You mean those brown-skinned savages?”

“Y-yes, sir. They seemed quite, well, harmless.”

Gorodin whirled from the rail, muscles bunching in his huge shoulders. “What are you whimpering about, boy? You were given an order!”

Zhizov held up a manicured hand. “Boris is young, Fyodor. He retains a touch of humanitarianism, which is not always a bad thing.”

He turned to the young seaman. “If we are to attain our goals, Boris, it is necessary that some lives be sacrificed. As you know, conditions for all the peoples of the world will be much improved by the changes we will make, so these simple natives will have given their lives for the good of mankind. Do you understand, my boy?”

“Yes, sir,” Boris replied, though doubt still lurked in his eyes. He marched forward toward the bridge.

“I don’t know why you bother to explain things to that one,” Gorodin growled. “An order is to be obeyed instantly. That is the way you and I were taught”

“We must recognize that the times are changing,” Zhizov said. “We will need the bright young men like Boris when we are in power. It would be unwise to alienate him now.”

The pitch of the engines changed, and the yacht slowed. At the slight shift in equilibrium the two dogs braced their legs and snarled, confused by the unsteady footing. Zhizov snatched the end of their double leash from where it was looped over the rail and lashed both dogs across the muzzle. They cringed back against the cabin bulkhead, black lips drawn away from the strong white teeth in soundless snarls.

“I don’t know why those dogs don’t tear you apart, the way you treat them,” Gorodin said.

Zhizov gave a short, barking laugh. “Fear is the only thing these beasts understand. They would kill for me on command, because they know I have the power to kill them. You should learn more of psychology, Fyodor. With a young man like Boris, one must be patient. With these pretty devils, only cruelty works.” Once again he lashed the leather cord across the faces of the dogs. They made no sound.

“If you’re through playing with your pets,” Warnow said with heavy sarcasm, “I will get on with the demonstration.”

“By all means. Let us see if all the time and money we have invested in you will pay dividends.”

Warnow dug a hand in his pocket and pulled out a black leather case. From this he took a thin cylinder of metal, six inches long and tapered to a point at one end. “This is the electronic stylus,” he explained. “With this I manipulate the triggering mechanism, an intricate series of adjustments that only I know”

“Do we need all this talk?” Gorodin complained. “Let’s see the action.”

“Be patient, Fyodor,” Zhizov said. “This is Mr. War-Bow’s big moment We must let him enjoy it to the fullest After all, if his project should fail, what remains of his life will be most unpleasant” “It won’t fail,” Warnow said quickly. “You must remember that this is one of my less destructive devices. Still, it will be more than adequate for an island the size of Mumura.” Holding the electronic stylus in one hand, he began to unbutton his shirt. “The beauty of it is that even competent customs inspectors would never have found a bomb in that suitcase, because there is no bomb there.”

“We know all this,” Gorodin broke in impatiently. Warnow continued as though there had been no interruption. “There is no bomb among the trinkets because the suitcase itself is the bomb. Soft, pliable, workable into any number of shapes, the ultimate extension of the plastique explosive principle — fissionable nuclear plastic. The detonating device is miniaturized in the metal latch. And here, the triggering mechanism.” With his chest now bared, Warnow worked the tips of his fingers into what seemed to be a healed vertical scar on the left side of his chest.

Big Fyodor Gorodin shuddered and turned his face away. “Ugh, I can never stand to watch him do that” Warnow laughed shortly. “You have no compunction about watching several hundred people die from a distance. Yet you can’t stand to look at a man opening a flap of his own skin.” Gripping the edge of the scar with his fingertips, he pulled gently outward. With a sucking sound the flesh pulled away from his chest, exposing a pocket holding a round metal object the size of a silver dollar. A hundred tiny contact points no bigger than pinheads covered its face.

Warnow touched the edge of the disc lightly with the stylus. “The passkey, I call it For me the passkey to riches and revenge, for you the passkey to power.”

“And for those who stand in our way,” Zhizov added, “the passkey to oblivion.” “Quite right,” Warnow said. He began to touch the point of the stylus to a series of contact points on the trigger disc. “No need trying to memorize the order of contacts,” he told Zhizov. “It automatically changes after each completed signal. A man needs to cover himself.”

Zhizov gave him a thin smile. “I admire the thoroughness of your self-protection. Connecting your passkey to your pacemaker was a nice touch.”

“Yes, I thought so,” Warnow agreed. “If for any reason my heart should stop beating, the passkey is programmed to signal the detonation of all nuclear plastic bombs in existence. Once we are in business and all the terms of our agreement have been met I will disconnect the passkey from my heartbeat, of course.”

“Of course,” smiled Zhizov.

Warnow completed his manipulation of the stylus and smoothed the skin flap closed. “There. It’s done.”

The three men stared at the island on the horizon. Gorodin turned his massive head slowly.

“Nothing happened, Warnow,” he said, “Your bomb doesn’t work.”

“Just keep watching,” Warnow told him. “There is an automatic thirty-second time lag between the input to the passkey and the output to the detonator on the bomb. This would give me time, if it were ever necessary, to apply the disarming signal.”

“A wise precaution.” Zhizov approved. “But no such reprieve will be necessary this time.”

Warnow watched the sweep second hand complete its half circle on the face of his wrist watch. He counted the final second aloud. “Five, four, three, two, one.”

At first it was a second sun, rising as the other set. Hie yellow-orange fireball grew like some immense instant cancer as black smoke and white steam hid the island of Mumura. The shock wave raced across the water toward the yacht, visible as a ten-foot breaker rushing away from the holocaust. The wave smashed into the stern, washing over the vessel and its passengers. Simultaneously the sound hit them. A sustained rumbling roar like thunder amplified a thousand times.

Anton Zhizov turned to his companions with a thin-lipped smile of triumph. “I think we have seen enough. Let us go inside and dry ourselves while I tell the captain to get underway.”

The two dogs cowered, belly-down on the deck, their eyes wide with terror as the fireball, now a dull red, rose into the sky on a black smoke pillar. Zhizov yanked on the leash, snapping the choke-collars tight, and half-dragged the animals behind him as he led the way toward the cabin.

From the distance of the yacht, the towering club-shaped column of smoke had a certain violent beauty. On the island of Mumura, now blackened and crisped, there was no more beauty. Only the rush of the wind sucked in to fill the void where the boiling flames had consumed the oxygen. The rest was silence. And death.

One

It was two weeks after the fiery death of Mumura and its people that the nuclear explosion began to have its effect on my life. It happened at a most intimate moment.

Her name was Yolanda. She had straight blue-black hair and a creamy complexion. I had met her earlier in the evening in a small flamenco club just off Broadway. She was dancing there, wearing a tight red velvet dress that emphasized her fine breasts and small waist, and flared around her long dancer’s legs. She gave me a long, challenging look as she paused in her dance in front of my table. It was an invitation and a dare. It was a look that asked a question I couldn’t ignore.

Now, as she stretched her body on my bed, she wore only the proud smile. She wanted me to admire her nude body, and I didn’t disappoint her.

“Come, Nick,” she said, “get rid of your clothes now and come lie with me.”

I pulled off my shirt, grinned, and took another sip of my Remy-Martin.

Yolanda ran her eyes over my bare chest and down my body. “Come,” she said imperiously, “I want you now.”

I widened the grin a little. “Funny thing about me. I don’t respond too well to orders in my own bedroom. We’re going to have to come to an agreement about who’s in charge here.”

She sat up in bed, Spanish eyes flashing, carmine lips parted to speak. I stepped quickly to the bed and silenced her protest with my mouth. At first she tensed and gripped my bare shoulders as if she wanted to push me away. I slid my hands down her velvety sides, kneading the yielding flesh where the bulge of her breasts began.

She gasped under my mouth, and her tongue darted forward, tentatively at first, then more eagerly. Her hands moved around to my back and I felt the bite of her nails as her fingers trailed down my body. Her searching hands slid inside the waistband of my slacks probing, seeking.

Abruptly she pulled her mouth from mine. She was breathing hard, and her skin glowed with the blush of desire. She found my belt buckle and undid it with hands that trembled ever so slightly. I stood up and finished the job for her, returning to lie naked beside her. I kissed her open mouth, pushing my tongue past her sharp little teeth. She seized it in her lips and sucked, moving her mouth back and forward on my tongue in a sensual promise of delights to come.

I pulled back gently, kissing her rounded chin, then moving down to the hollow of her throat. Yolanda pulled in her breath sharply as my tongue trailed down the crevice between her breasts.

I raised my face above her, and she cupped her breasts in her long-fingered hands, offering them to me. The nipples stood erect, moist roses against the darker brown of the aureoles. As I bent forward to take the offering, an insistent beeping came from the small room off my livingroom, which I use as an office.

“Oh Nick, please don’t stop,” Yolanda gasped as I hesitated.

“Darling,” I said, “there is only one thing in the world that could make me leave you at a time like this, and that sound you hear is it.”

I swung my legs out of the bed and strode out of the bedroom and into my office. There on the desk the red scramble phone continued its shrill summons. Beside myself, only one man had the number of that phone — David Hawk, Director and Operations Chief of AXE, U.S. Special Espionage Agency. An electronic scrambling signal made it impossible for anyone to tap into the line. I picked up the receiver and spoke into the cupped mouthpiece, which made my voice inaudible in the room.

“You have a genius for picking the most inconvenient times to call,” I said.

Hawk’s voice answered in the familiar dry New England twang. “The lady will have to wait, Nick, whoever she is. This is urgent.”

“I figured it was,” I said, ignoring his accurate guess as to how I was occupied.

“There’s been a nuclear explosion in the Pacific. A little island called Mumura, in the Tuamotu group.”

“You mean somebody’s started testing again?” I asked.

“This was no test. The island was destroyed, along with several hundred Polynesians who lived there.”

“How long ago did it happen?”

“Two weeks.”

“I haven’t heard anything about it”

“I know. There’s a total news blackout in effect. All the big nations know about it, of course. We all have radiation detecting systems that will locate a nuclear explosion anywhere in the world. But none of the countries with atomic capabilities will admit to knowing anything about it.”

“Somebody’s lying?”

“It’s hard to say for sure, but I don’t think so. This morning our government received what amounts to a ransom demand from the people who claim to have blown up Mumura.”

“You mean they’re asking for money?”

“Much more than that. What they’re asking amounts to the unconditional surrender of all U.S. military forces and delivery of our government into their hands.”

“Could the message come from a crank?”

“Were convinced it’s genuine. They have facts about the Mumura explosion that only those responsible could know.”

“They sure ask a big price. What if we turn them down?”

“According to the message, our largest cities will go up like Mumura. New York will be first, and after that, one of our cities will be destroyed every two weeks until we capitulate to their demands or there’s nothing left.”

I gave a tow whistle. “Where do I fit in?”

“The President wants an all-out effort on this, but we can’t afford a highly visible operation. Well have the full support of the Joint Intelligence Committee, but the job itself falls to AXE. And you’re the man, Nick.”

“When do you want me in Washington?”

“How soon can you make it?”

For the first time I saw that Yolanda was standing in the doorway watching me. She was still naked. One hand rested against the door jamb and her long legs were spread slightly. Her Spanish eyes smoldered with desire.

I said into the phone, “I can leave right away if you need me, but would tomorrow morning do?”

Hawk’s sigh came through clearly over the wire. “I suppose there’s nothing we could accomplish tonight, anyway. Go on and entertain your lady, but try to save some strength. I want you here and alert first thing in the morning. There’s a time factor here, and the morning briefing will be a crucial one.”

“I’ll be there,” I said and hung up.

Yolanda’s eyes roamed down my body, lingering when they came upon the center of her interest

“Thank goodness,” she said. “For a moment I thought I had lost your attention.”

“Not a chance,” I assured her. I moved forward quickly and picked her up in my arms. She was a big girl — broad through the shoulders and tall, with full, solid hips, and she was not used to being lifted into the air by a man. I carried her into the bedroom and eased her down onto the sheets.

“Oh, Nick,” she breathed, “please don’t leave me again like that.”

“Not tonight I won’t,” I promised her. Then I leaned forward and picked up the action where we had left off.

Two

When I stepped off the 747 at Dulles International Airport I was met by a silent young man who whisked me to a waiting limousine. He maneuvered neatly through the morning traffic to pull up finally in front of an unremarkable building on Du Pont Circle.

I recognized the man who came out the door as I entered. He was the President’s top national security adviser. He was not smiling. The people in the lobby — a magazine vendor, browsing customers, a guard at the elevator — seemed average enough unless you looked closely at their eyes. Then you saw the hard, no-nonsense scrutiny that shows in the eyes of trained government agents on duty. Full security was in effect at AXE headquarters.

I presented my credentials three different times, had my face scanned by telecomputer and my palm print verified by an electronic sensor. Finally the electronic and human watchdogs were convinced that I really was Nick Carter, AXE Agent N3, rating Killmaster, and I was allowed in to see David Hawk.

He sat in his frayed leather chair, chewing on one of the long cigars he almost never lit His steel-blue eyes betrayed no emotion as he nodded me into a chair across from him.

“I can’t understand,” he said, “how you continue to look so abominably healthy, considering the life of debauchery you lead between assignments.”

I grinned at the old man, who sat ramrod straight, looking more like a man in his fifties than his seventies. “The secret is always to think pure thoughts,” I told him.

“Sure it is,” he said. One side of his mouth quirked slightly, which was the closest thing to a smile that ever appeared on his leathery New England face. Then he went dead serious. “Nick, we’ve got deep trouble.”

“So it seems. You said we received a message yesterday.”

“That’s right. The man claims he and his people are responsible for the Mumura explosion and they are prepared to destroy our cities one by one.”

“Who is the man?” I asked.

“Anton Zhizov. I believe you know the name.”

“Of course. Number-two man in the Russian Miliary High Command. I thought you said none of the big powers were involved.”

“The Soviets deny any responsibility for Zhizov. As you know, he’s been the leader of the militant hardliners in the Kremlin. He’s been increasingly unhappy with the growing detente between our countries. Apparently he’s pulled out on his own. He took Colonel Gorodin of the Red Army and some navy personnel who didn’t believe in peaceful coexistence. They also seem to have gotten away with a large supply of Russian gold.”

“And Zhizov thinks that with a few nuclear weapons they can conquer the U.S.?”

“What he’s counting on, our experts believe, is that once he’s muscled us into negotiations or blown up several of our cities, the Soviet government will switch its policy and back him up.”

“Do you think the Russians would do that?”

“I don’t even want to speculate on it,” Hawk said. “Our only concern now is that Zhizov must be stopped. The President has indicated there will be no discussion of surrender. If Zhizov is telling the truth — and we’ve got to assume that he is — his bombs are already planted in a number of American cities.”

“You said New York is the first target. Did Zhizov give us a time deadline?”

“Ten days.” Hawk’s eyes flicked at the open page of his desk calendar. “We have nine days left.”

“Then the sooner I get started the better. Do we have any leads?”

“Just one. An agent in Los Angeles working with the Atomic Energy Commission saw the secret data on the Mumura explosion and the message from Zhizov and contacted us Just a few hours ago. The agent says she has information that may be valuable and asks that we send a man out so she can deliver it in person.”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “did you say she?”

Hawk bit down hard on his cigar and frowned at me, but I detected a twinkle in his eyes. “I don’t know how you fall into these things, Nick, but yes, the agent is a woman. A very attractive one, if we are to believe the picture in her dossier.”

He slid an eight by ten black and white photo across the desk.

The face that looked up at me had high cheekbones, large pale eyes set wide apart, and a mouth that showed a hint of humor, all framed by rich blonde hair that flowed loosely to her shoulders. I flipped the photograph over to check the vital statistics. Rona Volstedt, Age 26, Height 5’7’’, Weight 115 pounds.

I gave the picture back to Hawk.

He said, “If I had luck like yours I’d make my fortune at the racetrack and retire in two weeks.”

I grinned. “As I told you, I owe it all to thinking pure thoughts. Do you want me to get started right away?”

“You’re booked on a one P.M. flight for the Coast. Before you leave, drop in at Special Effects. Stewart has some new toys to show you.”

As usual, Stewart was fussy and meticulous about showing me his latest developments, but since his “toys” had saved my life more than once, I let him present them in his own way.”

“You will observe the small fire burning behind the glass partition,” Stewart said by way of greeting.

“You’ve done it this time, Stewart,” I said. “You’ve invented fire!”

He ignored my remark and went on. “These round white pills in my hand are a refinement on our familiar smoke pellets. I will demonstrate.” He shoved one arm through the mouth-like rubber seal in the partition and tossed one of the pellets into the fire, quickly withdrawing his hand.

There was a soft, popping sound, and a blue haze filled the small sealed room.

“That’s it?” I asked, a little disappointed.

“As you can see,” Stewart said as if I hadn’t spoken, “the smoke appears to be very thin, barely coloring the air and apparently no hindrance to vision or actions. However, I’d like you to take a very small sniff.”

Averting his face, Stewart pried apart the rubber lips of the seal with his thumbs. Any smoke that escaped was too thin to be visible, but I went ahead and took the smallest possible inhalation. Instantly I was coughing and sneezing. Tears blinded my eyes, and the lining of my nose and windpipe seemed to be on fire. Some fifteen seconds after Stewart had closed the seal the symptoms cleared up and I was able to breathe and see again.

“Powerful stuff,” I said, noting that Stwart seemed Just a little bit smug about my discomfort

“The effects, as you perceive, are quite temporary,” he said, “but the smoke from one pellet can immobilize everyone in an average-size room within three seconds. Now I’d like you to try this.” He handed me what appeared to be an ordinary linen handkerchief.

“You want me to blow my nose?” I asked.

“A superfine mesh is woven into the cloth,” he said. The corners will attach behind your head to provide a mask against the effects of the smoke.”

I pulled the handkerchief across my nose and mouth and pressed two corners together at the back of my head. They stuck to each other and kept the mask in place. I opened the rubber seal on the glass partition and took a small experimental whiff, then breathed in deeply. The acrid smell was still there, but this time I had none of the unpleasant effects. I closed the seal and took off the handkerchief-mask.

“Good work, Stewart,” I said, and meant it.

He tried not to look too pleased. “I have one more little item here that you might find useful.” From a drawer he took a brown leather belt and held it out in front of me like a proud father displaying his new baby.

Taking the belt from his hands, I said, “Stewart, you must be slipping. That is one of the most obvious phony buckles I’ve seen in years. It wouldn’t fool a professional agent for ten seconds. What’s inside, a Captain Midnight decoder?”

“Why don’t you open it and find out?”

Something in Stewart’s tone told me he was ahead of me, but just the same, I examined the trick buckle, quickly finding the tiny spring latch that opened the hidden compartment. I popped it open and there was a sharp report as a paper cap went off in the buckle.

Stewart said, “In the real model there is a small explosive charge inside instead of a cap. Not powerful enough for much destruction, but quite capable of killing or crippling the sharp-eyed enemy agent who has taken it away from you.”

I took half a dozen of the smoke pellets and the handkerchief-mask and traded my own belt for Stewart’s trick model. I took the tools of my trade out of the small bag I’d brought with me — Wilhelmina, my 9mm. Luger, and Hugo, my double-edged, razor-sharp stiletto. I put the Luger into an FBI-type belt holster and the stiletto into a specially constructed chamois-skin sheath that I strapped to my right forearm. With just the right flex of my forearm muscle, Hugo would drop hilt-first into my hand. I slipped my jacket back on, picked up my bag, and headed for the street to grab a taxi for Dulles. Killmaster was back in business.

Three

It was one of those rare days In Los Angeles when the wind swept the basin clear of smog. The city was spread out below the jet like a living organism of concrete and asphalt with the great freeway arteries laid open as though by a great dissecting knife.

The taxi ride from L.A. International to Rona Volstedt’s address at the foot of one of the canyons in the Santa Monica Mountains was a long one. I relaxed with a cigarette while the driver told me in detail how he would do things if he were managing the Dodgers.

He dropped me off in front of a comfortable-looking cottage, tucked back off the road among the pines. The canyon stillness was broken by the noise of about a dozen motorcycles a short distance down the road. It seemed like an odd place for a bike club to be gathering, but there’s no accounting for the preferences of motorcycle types.

I climbed the short flight of stone steps and padded across a carpet of pine needles to the front door. There was no bell, so I knocked.

The girl who opened the door was, if anything, an improvement over the photograph I’d seen in Hawk’s office. Her skin was clear and white, with a touch of color at the cheekbones. Her eyes, I could now see, were the deep blue of Nordic seas and the soft blonde hair seemed touched with moonlight.

“I’m Nick Carter,” I said, “from AXE.”

Her eyes gazed for a minute at my face, then took in my shoulders and ran over the rest of my body. “Come in,” she said. “I’m Rona Volstedt.”

Her livingroom looked like an explosion in a music store. Bits and pieces of guitars were scattered about without apparent method, bottles of glue and shellac sat on the carpet, and a few intact instruments leaned against the walls.

Bona saw me take it all in. She said, “My hobby is building and repairing guitars. I find it very relaxing.”

“You must spend a lot of time alone working on them,” I said.

“I hadn’t realized how much till just now.”

“Maybe we can make some adjustments in the way you spend your leisure time,” I said. “But first, you were going to give us some information about the Mumura explosion.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” she said doubtfully.

It was the right response. I had deliberately not given her the recognition sign. I knew Hawk would have briefed her, and I wanted to be sure I was talking to the right woman.

“Can you spare a match?” I said.

“Sorry, I don’t keep them since I quit smoking.”

“I tried to quit last year myself, but I only lasted two weeks.” I always felt just a little silly going through one of these routines, but it’s little safeguards like this that can make the difference between a live espionage agent and a dead spy.

Rona Volstedt relaxed and sat down on the small couch. She wore a pair of blue pants that kept her legs a secret, but her loose fitting blouse gaped enough to reveal firm, uptilted breasts that didn’t need any support from the lingerie industry. She was a lean girl but by no means emaciated. I sat down next to her, inhaling a light floral scent, and she began to talk.

“As you were probably told, I’m with the AEC. Most of our undercover work and investigations are handled by the FBI, but we do a few of the jobs ourselves. It was on one of those that I met Knox Warnow.

“Five years ago he had a very minor post at one of our power projects. He began to talk at cocktail parties and apparently expressed some strange political opinions. I was assigned to get as close as I could to him to sound him out. It wasn’t difficult. He was starved for someone to listen to his ideas. He had in his mind a process for making a nuclear explosive in plastic that could be molded into almost any shape. I asked him what the object of that would be, and his eyes really lit up. This stuff, he said, could be shaped into innocent looking objects, smuggled easily into any country in the world and planted in their cities. A demand could be made that the country surrender or the cities would be destroyed one by one.”

“Sure sounds like our Mumura people.”

“That’s what I thought He needed money to perfect his process, a lot of it He took his scheme to AEC officials and they practically threw him out of the office. Our emphasis is mostly on peaceful uses of atomic energy, and nobody even wants to talk about weapons.

“Naturally, Warnow was eased out of his Job with the commission. He was pretty bitter about it. Swore he’d get even with the whole rotten country for not supporting him. Soon after that he dropped out of sight, and we didn’t try too hard to locate him, since, frankly, we considered him a crackpot.”

“You did a good job on Warnow,” I said, Then to tease her a little, I added, “How close did you manage to get to him?”

She lowered her lids and peered at me with her deep blue gaze. “As a matter of fact, I never got that close. Warnow was so completely involved in his plastic process that he couldn’t get interested in… other things. I was a little relieved. He had an electronic pacemaker to regulate his heartbeat, and it would have been pretty embarassing to have it short circuit at an intimate moment. Tell me, Nick, you don’t use any artificial aids like that, do you?”

“Nope,” I grinned. “I’m still using all the original parts.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Would you like a cocktail?”

“That’s an excellent idea,” I said. “Then I’ll call Hawk in Washington and pass on what you’ve told me. If we’re lucky, we might have the evening to ourselves.”

We walked together to the bright, compact kitchen at the rear of the cottage. I said, “This is quite an isolated place you have here.”

“Yes, I know. I like it this way. Crowds have never appealed to me much. That road outside dead-ends a couple of miles up the hill at a private estate, so there’s not much traffic past here.”

“If it weren’t for those motorcycles growling outside, you might be miles out in the country. Do they come around here much?” “No, this is the first time I’ve ever seen them. They seem to be waiting for something to happen. It’s a little creepy, but they haven’t approached the house.”

Alarm bells went off in my head loud and clear.

“Rona, that call you made to Hawk this morning — did you use the phone here?”

“Yes, I did. Why—?” She gasped as understanding came. “Do you think my line is bugged?”

“It’s safest to assume all lines are bugged until you prove otherwise. I don’t like that cycle gang out front Do you have a car?”

“Yes, it’s parked on the street pointing up the hill.”

“Throw a couple of things together and let’s get out of here.”

“But where will we go?”

“AXE keeps a beach house out at Malibu for agents to use when necessary. You’ll be much safer there.” I didn’t add, “If we get past the motorcycle crowd,” but that’s what I was thinking.

Four

We went out the back door and slipped through the shrubbery to the steep road where Rona’s car was parked.

“You’d better let me drive,” I told her. This may take some tricky maneuvering.”

She handed me the keys and moved quickly around to get in on the passenger’s side. I slid behind the wheel, noticing that the back seat was full of more of her guitar-making equipment — rosewood panels, spools of steel and nylon strings, and ebony fingerboards.

The motorcycle bunch hadn’t seen us yet, but they were milling restlessly around at the foot of the road. I kicked the engine to life and heard shouts behind us. I slammed the shift lever into low, and the car leaped up the hill. We squealed around an S-curve, momentarily out of sight, but I could hear their machines roaring up the hill after us.

We picked up speed on a short climbing straightaway, and I gave a silent thanks that Rona had herself a car with some muscle under the hood. The motorcycles came into sight in the rearview mirror, and I heard a popping sound that was not part of their exhausts. A slug whanged off the rear deck of the car and was followed by another, aimed low.

I jockeyed the machine around another curve and dug Wilhelmina out of the holster. I flicked off the safety and handed the Luger to Rona. I said, “I can’t slow down to give you a good shot at them, but keep firing and it’ll give them something to think about”

Rona leaned out the window and fired left-handed at the bikers. I was pleased to see that she knew how to handle a gun. Holding the car on the road kept me too busy to look around to see if she hit anything, but a change in the pitch of engine noise behind us told me she was at least slowing them down.

Just as I was getting a little breathing distance between us and the bikers, the sharp smell of gasoline told me they’d shot a hole in our tank. The needle of the fuel gage was already jiggling at E, so I knew we weren’t going a whole lot farther. I tramped the accelerator pedal to the floor and we swerved dangerously around two more curves.

The cycles were still roaring up the road behind us, but I had a couple of turns between us when the engine coughed and I knew we were down to the fumes. During the past thirty seconds I’d come up with a desperate plan to get us out of there alive. Rona had emptied the Luger, and there was no time to reload. The brush on both sides of the road was too thick for us to run far. There were only seconds to act before the pursuers were upon us, so my first try would be the only one we would get.

I slammed to a stop in the middle of the road, grabbed a spool of steel guitar string wire off the back seat, and sprinted to a utility pole at the side of the road. I looped the wire around the pole, double-twisting the end to make it secure. Running back to the car, I tossed the spool in through the rear window, jumped into the front seat and goosed the last ounce of power out of the machine to boost us up a small grade and out of sight behind a clump of chapparal on the other side of the road.

The thunder of the motorcycles was just one curve downhill from us when I leaned across the seat, at the same time telling Rona, “Get out and crouch down behind the car.”

“But, Nick, they’ll see us as soon as they get past the bushes here.”

“I think they’ll have something else to think about,” I said. “Now, do what I tell you.”

As Rona followed instructions, I grabbed the spool of guitar wire and yanked it taut. I opened the door, wound the wire about the window frame, and rolled up the window to hold it in place. Then I slammed the door. The bikes were roaring up the straightaway when I fell beside Rona, leaving the steel guitar string stretched across the road at a height of about four feet.

The two leaders of the motorcycle pack hit the wire almost simultaneously. It looked as though they had nodded together in agreement at something, but in the next instant the two heads stayed poised in air while the choppers roared out from under them. The helmeted heads hit the asphalt and bounced crazily along the road like grisly soccer balls. The cycles, handlebars still gripped by the headless riders, roared on up the Hill for several yards before one wobbled over to bump the other, sending them both into a spinning tangle of flesh and machinery.

The rest of the bikers attempted lurching, sliding stops on the blood-slick pavement. The result was a pile-up, a tangle of twisted machines and sprawling bodies. I grabbed Rona’s hand and we raced off. We were lying prone behind a clump of bushes when the survivors of the motorcycle gang could be heard starting their bikes, fading in the distance.

A shudder went through Rona’s lean body. “Who do you suppose they were, Nick?”

“They’ve got to be tied up with the people who blew up Mumura and are threatening New York. Probably there’s been a tap on your phone for a long time. This morning, when you called Hawk, they knew you were onto something. They waited to see who AXE would send out, then planned to dispose of us.

“Yes, but they’re only troops. Who gives the orders?”

“The leader appears to be Anton Zhizov, a real warhawk from the Red Army. One of the men with him seems to be Fyodor Gorodin. Not as smart as Zhizov, but just as dangerous. And if your hunch is right, there’s Knox Warnow.”

“So all you have to do is find them and stop them from blowing up most of the United States.”

“That’s all. But what the hell, I’ve got eight whole days.”

After a safe interval we returned to the road and walked to a clapboard-front store run by an apple-cheeked woman who looked like everybody’s mom. I bought Rona a root beer and got a handful of change for the telephone.

First I called the LA contact man for the Joint Intelligence Committee. I told him about the bodies up the road, and about Rona’s car in the bushes. I phoned for a taxi and Rona and I settled down to wait

Five

Malibu. Playground of the movie stars, weekend homes for the wealthy, and location of AXE Emergency Quarters Number 12. There were a number of these spotted around the country for use of AXE agents in special circumstances. I felt that Rona and I met the requirements.

The same key, carried by every AXE agent, opened the door to any of them. They were located in all sorts of neighborhoods and all kinds of buildings. The one in Malibu wasn’t adequately described by the term Emergency Quarters. A modern glass and redwood structure, it was sheltered from the access road off Pacific Coast Highway by a seven-foot fence. Downstairs was a huge, high-ceilinged livingroom with comfortable furniture arranged around a hanging fireplace. A ten-foot ebony bar separated the livingroom from the small, functional kitchen. A spiraling wrought-iron staircase led up to a three-sided landing, where the bedrooms were.

Rona spotted the bathroom with its sunken Roman tub. “I’d sure like a bath,” she said. “Do you suppose there’s anything around here I could slip into afterward?”

“Take a look through the bedrooms,” I said. “These places are pretty well stocked.”

She went upstairs and prowled through closets and drawers while I checked out the bar. In a little while she came tripping back down with a velour robe draped over one arm and her hands full of bottles and Jars.

“AXE certainly equips their hideouts for all occasions, don’t they?”

“They’re not all this plush,” I told her. “I’ve been in a couple where I had to battle the rats for sleeping space.”

Rona gave me a long look from the foot of the stairs. “That’s one problem we won’t have here.”

“At least one,” I agreed. “What do you like to drink? HI have a couple ready when you come out.”

“Whatever you’re having,” she said, stepping into the bathroom.

The wall section by the sunken tub was of pebbled glass, and faced the bar outside. When the bathroom light was on, the glass was quite translucent, and whatever was going on inside was very visible, at least in suggestion, to anybody watching from the bar area. I couldn’t be sure whether Rona was aware of this voyeur effect or not, but from the studied grace of her movements, I suspected that she was.

She set the bottles and jars down on a shelf, then peeled off her blouse. Even through the distortion of the pebbled glass the pink of her nipples was distinguishable from the whiter flesh of her breasts. She stepped out of her loose blue pants and slid a strip of black bikini panties down her long, slim legs. She tested the water with one foot, took a last look at herself in the full-length mirror, then stepped down into the tub.

I walked to the telephone at the far end of the bar to call Hawk. The private number got me through at once. There was a possibility, of course, that the Malibu phone was tapped, but at the rate things were moving, I couldn’t stop to worry about it.

Before I could report what I’d learned from Rona, Hawk opened the conversation.

“I’ve just been on the wire with a very excited JIC rep out there who says you left some rather messy cleanup work for him to dispose of and explain to the local police.”

I admitted the accuracy of the report

“Nick, I understand,” Hawk went on, “that in our line of work a few bodies are bound to be left behind. Would it be asking too much that in the future you make the necessary disposals in a tidier manner… say shooting them through the heart?”

“I’ll try to be neater,” I promised, “circumstances permitting.”

“Good. Now tell me, does Miss Volstedt have anything valuable for us?”

I suppressed a smile as I saw Rona stand up in the tub and reach a naked arm out for the towel. “Yes,” I said, “I think she has.”

I told Hawk about Rona’s investigation of Knox Warnow five years ago, and his scheme for blackmailing a nation by threatening to blow up its cities one by one. Hawk was especially interested when I told him Wamow’s idea for making a plastic nuclear explosive.

He said, “That fits in very nicely with a new development on this end. I don’t want to discuss it over the phone, but I’d like for you to fly back to Washington in the morning.”

“Right. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

Rona was out of the tub now, toweling herself off. With casual sensuality she moved the fluffy towel up and down the smooth expense of her inner thigh. When I answered Hawk, a little of my disappointment at ending such a promising acquaintance so soon must have come through in my voice. Hawk cleared his throat in that disapproving way of his. “You might bring Miss Volstedt along. The project I have in mind will include a job for the two of you.”

“We’ll be there,” I said, with more enthusiasm.

I hung up the phone and built a couple of martinis from the well-stocked liquor supply beneath the bar. As I dropped a twist of lemon into each glass, Rona emerged from the bathroom. She wore the short velour robe belted at her waist. It was just long enough to reach the crease where thigh met buttock.

“I’m afraid this robe wasn’t made for a tall girl,” she said.

“I wouldn’t say that,” I told her. Rona’s legs, exposed as they were now, didn’t look even a little bit thin. Instead, they looked rounded and smooth and pliable. I handed her the martini.

“Thank you,” she said. “Did you call Washington?”

“Yes. Hawk wants us to fly back there tomorrow. Says he has a job for both of us. Is that all right with you?”

“Why not? It’s got to be better than hanging around here with motorcycle creeps and God knows who else shooting at me.”

Rona took a sip of her drink, then set the glass down on the bar and began to shudder violently, as though fanned by a blast of chill air.

I took a step toward her. “Rona, what’s wrong?”

She drew a deep breath. “A delayed reaction, to all the excitement this afternoon, I guess. It seems I’m not as cool and collected as I thought I was.”

I moved in and put my arms around her. Her body, which looked so lean and capable in clothes, melted against me with a warm suppleness that was surprising. Her breasts, pressing against my chest, moved softly with her breathing.

“I’m so damned scared, Nick,” she said, “for you and for me and for everybody else in the world. How will it end?”

“Badly,” I said. “But not for us. Now relax and let me worry.”

I massaged the smooth muscles of her back through the velour robe.

She tilted her head to look up into my eyes. “I hope you’re right, Nick,” she said.

I bent and kissed her on the mouth. She smelled of soap from her bath, with a touch of some floral scent in her hair. Her lips were cool and yielding, and sort of minty to the taste.

My hands slid up and found the open edge of the robe, then moved down to the warm, rising hills of her breasts. With a small cry of desire, she pulled away from me Just long enough to loosen the belt and slide the robe back over her shoulders, letting it fall to the floor.

Slowly, deliberately, she drew my hands down over her nakedness, pressing her breasts for a moment, then letting the nipples bob up again as she wound my hands down her body and across the flat stomach with its softer-than-chamois skin.

Her eyes were entranced as she bent her head to watch, she guided my fingers over her silky cushion to her warm center, and her hungry eyes rose to meet mine.

As I stepped back and hurried out of my clothes, she studied me with frank interest and admiration, never turning coyly away, even when I was completely naked. Then she simply opened her arms to welcome me.

I glanced upward to the bedroom landing, but she shook her head — as if to say that her need was too urgent for delay — that the place was here, the time was now. So we stretched out on the thick blue carpet and I stroked her body. Her moans came softly at first, like the sighing of wind, but soon rose to feverish cries of demand, as she rolled and pulled me down on top of her.

She arched her lean blonde body up to meet me as I entered her. Then there was the writhing, twisting rhythm of her tortured desire, the mounting together on a cresting wave of climax, followed by the long, surging descent to the empty shore of sweet exhaustion.

Six

Early the next morning Rona went to work and turned out a huge breakfast. The night’s exercise had given us both big appetites, and we put the food away with enthusiasm. As the coffee cooled in our cups, other things began to warm up. However, this was a working day and, from what I’d learned of Rona the night before, a spot of after-breakfast recreation might just keep us occupied until late afternoon.

So instead, I stood in the sunken tub and took a cold shower.

We got away from LA. International on a nine o’clock flight, and at Dulles another of Hawk’s silent, efficient chauffeurs met us with an AXE limousine.

We went through the security rigamarole and soon were seated across the desk from David Hawk. The head AXE man ran his eyes over Rona Volstedt and turned back to me with an unspoken question in his gaze. I shrugged and grinned back at him as innocently as I could.

Hawk cleared his throat explosively and got down to business. “At the time you called me yesterday, Nick, we were holding a seaman named Juan Escobar off the Caribbean cruise ship Gaviota. He was picked up in Fort Lauderdale when he was acting suspiciously going through customs. No contraband was found on his person or in his suitcase, but with all our people on double alert these days, the Florida authorities called our office. We had Escobar brought up here for questioning, but we couldn’t get anything out of him. Then, when you passed on Miss Volstedt’s information about Knox Warnow and his nuclear plastic explosive, we had a closer look at the suitcase he brought in. Sure enough, our labs showed it to be fissionable material. In the latch we found a microelec-tronic detonator that could be activated by a long-distance radio signal. And, funny thing, there was a small skull embossed on the handle — a tiny death’s-head.”

“Have you learned anything more from the seaman?” I asked.

“Not much. I’ll let the man tell you himself.”

Hawk tapped a button on his intercom and said, “Send in Escobar.” A minute later a pair of grim looking government men entered with a sullen, pockmarked man between them. The government men left and Hawk motioned Escobar into a chair.

I walked over and stood in front of the man. “Let’s hear your story,” I said.

Escobar shifted uncomfortably. “I already told it twenty times.”

“Tell it again,” I said. “To me.”

He took a look at my face and started to talk without further hesitation. “The big man, he give me the suitcase and five hundred dollars. He say take a couple weeks off. Then when I catch up with ship, he give me another five. All I do is stick the suitcase in a locker in Cleveland and leave it there. That is all I know. I swear.”

“Who is the big man?” I asked.

“I do not know his name. He comes on board sometimes at one port, sometimes at another. All I know, he is with new owners, and when he gives an order, everybody jump.”

“New owners, did you say?”

“Si. Five, six months ago, they buy the Gaviota. Most of the old crew they fire, a few of us they keep. Me, I work for anybody. It’s a job, you know. The new guys they put on the crew, they are not South American like the rest of us. They talk funny, and they keep away from us.”

“Tell me more about the big man.”

“He is the boss, that is all I know. He looks rough and he talks in deep voice. Big shoulders, like a bull.”

I glanced at Hawk.

“The description fits Fyodor Gorodin,” he said.

To Escobar I said, “Anybody else giving orders?”

“One man I only see twice. Skinny, mean looking, white hair. He’s the only one I ever see give orders to the big man.”

Again I turned to Hawk. “Zhizov?”

He nodded.

I stuck my hands in my pockets and walked slowly to the far wall. Then I came back and planted myself in front of the sailor again. I stared into his eyes till he looked away.

“Juan,” I told him, “you have probably heard that the United States deals fairly with criminals and that you don’t have to be afraid of mistreatment. But this situation is quite different, Juan. There is no time for patience. If you are lying to us, I will personally see to it that even if you live, you will be useless to the senoritas. Do you understand me, Juan?”

“Si, senor!” he snapped. The bulge of his eyes told me that he knew I wasn’t kidding. “On my mother’s name, I tell the truth! There were six others who they give also the suitcases. Where they take them, I do not hear. My case was for Cleveland. That is all I know, senor, believe me.”

I did. I nodded to Hawk and he had Escobar taken away.

“I presume you checked out the ship and these new owners,” I said when the three of us were alone again.

“Yes. The Gaviota is Venezuelan registry. The former owners were paid a huge sum in cash by a man who said he represented an outfit called Halcyon Cruises. It’s phony, of course.”

Rona spoke up. “Couldn’t you seize the ship and question the crew? Find out where the bombs are coming from?”

“We could,” Hawk admitted. “But we couldn’t be sure that Gorodin would be aboard, and it seems that Zhizov almost never appears. Even if we did learn where the bombs are being made and where the triggering device is kept, word of the seizure of the ship would reach them before we could. And then they might set off the bombs already planted in God knows what cities. No, this exercise has to be low-profile, that’s why I wanted you and Nick here.”

“I’ve been wondering when you’d get around to that,” I said. “No offense, Rona, but I’m accustomed to working alone.”

“Not this time,” Hawk said. “Our first move is to get somebody aboard that cruise ship. And a single man would attract too much attention.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It so happens that the Gaviota specializes in…” here the old man found it necessary to clear his throat again, “… honeymoon cruises.”

Rona Volstedt started to smile, then quickly sobered as Hawk gave her one of those severe New England looks.

He said, “I have arranged with the Atomic Energy Commission to have Miss Volstedt assigned to AXE for the duration of this emergency. I don’t suppose it would be stretching your acting talents too far if I asked you to play the part of a honeymoon couple.”

“I think we can manage it,” I said with a straight face.

“As long as it’s in the line of duty,” Rona added, giving me a wink when Hawk wasn’t looking.

“I knew I could count on your cooperation,” Hawk said drily. “You will join the cruise tomorrow at Antigua. The Gaviota will make several ports of call in the Caribbean, sail through the Panama Canal and up the west coast of Mexico, terminating at Los Angeles. But if you haven’t uncovered the base of operations and disabled it by the time the ship gets to Panama in eight days, it will be too late. Because eight days from now, the New York bomb is scheduled to go off.”

“Short honeymoon,” I commented.

Hawk continued as if I hadn’t spoken. Tour mission is to find out where the suitcase-bombs are being put aboard the ship and backtrack to the source. There you should find Anton Zhizov, and very likely Knox Warnow. You are then on your own. I will give you whatever support I can from this end, but any large-scale operation is impossible.”

Rona and I left the old man’s office and went down one flight to Document Control. There we were provided with all the papers and photos we would need to pass as Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Hunter.

As we left AXE headquarters, Rona played it kittenish, acting for all the world like a bride-to-be.

“Don’t you think,” she said coyly, “that since our ‘marriage’ doesn’t officially begin until tomorrow, we ought to stay in two separate rooms tonight?”

“Good idea,” I said as I hailed a cab. “I’ll have to be out rather late tonight, and I wouldn’t want to wake you coming in.”

“Oh, really?” she asked with heavy sarcasm. “What’s her name?”

“Come on, darling, surely you wouldn’t begrudge me enjoying my last night as a bachelor.”

We climbed into a taxi and Rona edged as far away from me as the seat would permit. With arms folded and knees pressed tightly together, she sat frowning out the window.

I let her sulk for half a dozen blocks, then relented. “If it will make you feel any better, I’ll be at AXE headquarters tonight doing my homework.”

She turned, and fastened those Nordic blue eyes upon me. “Really?” she asked in a little-girl voice.

“Really,” I said. “I don’t mind mixing business and pleasure when one doesn’t get in the way of the other. But tonight it’s got to be all business. I want to go over everything we have on Anton Zhizov, Fyodor Gorodin, and Knox Warnow.”

Rona reached over and laid her hand lightly on my knee. “I’m sorry, Nick. I didn’t mean to be childish.”

I grinned at her. “Wouldn’t have you any other way.”

She slid next to me then, and I bent to kiss her affectionately.

Seven

A chartered plane flew us to Antigua the next morning a couple of hours before the Gaviota was due to arrive. St. Johns, the capital city of the little island, is still very British in the downtown parts. But as soon as you get out into the native quarters, you start to hear the soft, musical calypso language and see the colorful costumes the people wear, not to impress the tourists, but because they like colors.

The travel agent in Queen’s Hotel wasn’t anxious to sell us cruise tickets on the Gaviota.

“You’ve already missed the first part of the cruise,” he said, “and I’ll still have to charge you full price.”

“What do you think, dear?” I asked, bridegroom-like.

Rona ran her tongue sensually over her lips. Tm sure we’ll be able to make do with whatever there is left of the cruise.”

I winked at the travel agent. “You see how it is.”

With some reluctance he made out a couple of tickets for Mr. and Mrs. Hunter. With somewhat less reluctance, he took my money.

Rona and I strolled around a bit, window shopping and holding hands, playing the newlyweds in case anybody was looking us over. Actually, it was not at all a hard part to play.

After a while we wandered down to the docks to watch the Gaviota put in. She was sleek and white with a speedy-looking silhouette, maybe a shade under five hundred feet long. As she pulled alongside the deepwater dock, the happy honeymoon passengers were noticeably absent.

An isolated couple here and there peered smilingly over the rail, but the ship seemed to be sailing with far fewer than her capacity of four hundred passengers. Apparently the new owners were not pushing their product very hard, which was understandable, considering the other ventures they had going.

I watched the few passengers and crew members who left the ship, and the minimal on-and-off loading activity, but saw nothing suspicious and no familiar faces. True to Juan Escobar’s account, most of the crew looked more Slavic than Latin.

Rona and I boarded and located the purser. With a complete lack of enthusiasm he showed us to our stateroom, an outside room one deck below the Promenade. It was sparsely furnished with a chair, a divan, small table, dresser, and twin beds. This last seemed unusual for a honeymoon cruise, but Rona and I soon discovered that they moved easily together on rollers. The rather chilly light was provided by a fluorescent tube over the dresser mirror. I pushed the curtains aside and let some warm Caribbean sunlight stream in the porthole.

Rona crossed to stand close beside me. She said,

“Well, what would you like to do now, hubby dear?”

“I shouldn’t have to tell you what I’d like to do. However, what we are going to do first is take a walk around the ship. Business with pleasure, remember?”

“Oh, all right,” she said. “But if this honeymoon doesn’t liven up pretty soon I may go home to mother.”

I swatted her nicely rounded rear and hustled her out on deck. We strolled the decks for a couple of hours, checking out the bars, gymnasium, dining salon, theater, card room, and gift shop. The scarcity of other passengers was eerie. The honeymoon couples we did meet seemed too intent on each other to notice if anyone else was sailing with them or not. The few crewmembers we met were studiously preoccupied with their tasks, and seemed to find us invisible.

The rest of the afternoon we sat in the observation lounge sipping a couple of those fruity rum drinks while covertly watching who came on board and sizing up the luggage they carried.

At dusk nobody looking remotely like Fyodor Gorodin or Anton Zhizov had come aboard, and no strange suitcases appeared in the hands of returning passengers or crew. Meanwhile, the sweet rum drinks were sloshing uncomfortably in my stomach.

As darkness swept toward us from the Atlantic, the Gaviota gave a couple of toots on her whistle to summon any vagrant passengers back aboard, and we prepared to sail. A native steel drum band serenaded us as the ship eased away from the dock.

We had a light supper in the nearly deserted dining salon, then walked once around the deck and back to our cabin. Inside the door Rona turned to look up at me, and I took her in my arms and kissed her. It began as Just an easy, friendly after-dinner kiss. But then I felt the tip of her tongue lightly, almost shyly, touch my lips, and I had a hunch that the “honeymoon” would be no charade. I had more than a hunch when her sweet little hand slipped under the wasteband of my trousers and groped playfully downward, lingering for an affectionate caress that promised a long night of erotic acrobatics.

She stepped back and, moving with the sensuality that is born in all women but used effectively by only a few, took off her clothes. She did it slowly — from the first button of her blouse to the final shrug of her hips that sent her panties sliding to the floor, revealing her tanned, velvet-smooth skin. Two narrow strips of white traced the outline of the bikini she had worn while sun-bathing. The white borders framed a fluffy-soft triangle that was only a shade darker than her blonde head.

During our frenzied lovemaking in the house at Malibu, I had not had a real chance to appreciate Ronas incredible body. The greyhound leanness she seemed to possess when clothed was deceiving. Although there was not an extra ounce on her anywhere, there were no sharp angles either.

She posed in front of me, enjoying my admiration. “You don’t think I’m too skinny?” she said, her face expressing not the least doubt.

I stroked my chin and tried to look critical “Well, now that you mention it…”

She placed her fingers lightly on my lips. “I get the message. It’s time for me to quit fishing for compliments.”

I closed my arm about her waist and pulled her toward me, kissed the soft little mound of her tummy.

Rona squirmed against me, made whimpering sounds of pleasure as now I explored her belly with my tongue in a slow circle, ever-descending.

I released her and she fell against me, her mouth searching wildly. I lifted her in my arms, and carried her to the bed. There I let her down gently on the satin spread.

Rona caught her lower lip between her teeth and watched with hungry eyes as I slipped out of my clothes.

It is true that we were not really the carefree newlyweds we pretended to be. But I doubt that any legitimate pair of honeymooners ever had a more fulfilling wedding night than ours. Before we finally slept, the first gray light of dawn had smudged the eastern horizon.

Eight

We were up, dressed, and on the good side of breakfast by the time the Gaviota sailed into Martinique. Rona wanted to visit the colorful boutiques that lined the waterfront of Fort-de-France, but I told her I had to stay where I could watch who and what came aboard. I sent her off alone, but she was back in less than an hour, saying it was no fun by herself.

As it turned out, I might as well have gone with her for all the good it did watching the gangplank. We spent four hours at Martinique, during which several honeymooners trooped ashore and returned with shaggy straw hats and other junk from the souvenir stores. The crew stayed aboard for the most part No suspicious suitcases were brought on. No heavy, bear-like Russians. No thin Russians with white hair.

That night Rona and I again made the circuit of the promenade deck. Activity aboard the Gaviota was, as usual, minimal. We retired early to our own stateroom, where the action accelerated considerably.

Our next stop was La Guaira, the seaport for Caracas. Since the Gaviota was registered in Venezuela, I was hopeful that something might happen at the glittering capital of that country.

Again I was disappointed.

That night I began to worry about our mission, though I didn’t confess my doubts to Rona. We had, after all, no solid reason to believe that Zhizov and his crew had not previously planted all the suitcase bombs for the fatal hour. The major cities of America might already be mined and ready to go up in a nuclear cloud as soon as the right button was pushed at some unknown location. If Juan Escobar had told the truth, at least six of the bombs had been sent out with crew members of the Gaviota. For all we knew, there might be other ways of distributing them too.

And in just five more days the first bomb was scheduled to go off in New York. With the uncertain mood of the American public these days, the destruction of our largest city might be all it would take to start a clamor for negotiation. Of course, there’s no negotiating with people like Anton Zhizov.

We had only two choices — surrender or fight-Chances were that, after a little democratic debate, the government would choose to fight. But that would be ridiculous, since there wasn’t a visible enemy. Hidden bombs triggered by radio signals from an unknown location don’t provide much of a target. When the second and third cities blew up, the people’s will to fight might crumple. Even if it didn’t, the destruction of the nation’s major cities would leave the people with no power to resist.

So the Gaviota was really the only gamble we had. The alert customs man who had detained Juan Escobar had provided us with the one tiny chink in the enemy’s armor. My job was to get through that chink and deliver a killing blow before he had time to strike.

Five more days.

That night our lovemaking lacked its former spontaneity, on my part at least Of course Rona sensed that something was wrong.

“What is it, Nick? Are you worried about the mission?”

“We should’ve had some action by now,” I said. “Tomorrow we hit Curasao, and if nothing develops there, we’re in trouble.”

“Would you rather I moved over to my half of the bed and let you sleep?” she asked seriously.

I grabbed her and locked her naked body against mine. “Sweetheart, if we have only five more days before the world starts blowing up, I intend to spend as little of them sleeping as possible.”

With a little purr of pleasure Rona wrapped her legs around mine. And for awhile I didn’t think about nuclear bombs in the guise of suitcases, I didn’t think about the death’s-head.

At Curasao Fyodor Gorodin came aboard the Gaviota. I was so glad to see the scowling, broad-shouldered Russian that I could have kissed him. Curasao is an international free port with some of the best shopping in the Caribbean. Most of the passengers left the ship in the morning to hunt bargains, and when they came straggling back in the afternoon, the burly Gorodin was among them, trying vainly in a Palm Beach suit to look like a typical cruise passenger, whatever that might be. I spotted him right away and kept him in sight while he made a brief pretense of wandering the deck before sneaking into the officers’ quarters.

I was a little disappointed that he didn’t bring one of the trick suitcases on board with him. But since Curasao is a historic headquarters for smugglers, I had a hunch that the time had come. It would make my job a lot simpler if one of the bombs showed up, so I could attempt to trace it But if not, I could always put the squeeze on Gorodin.

After I found out what cabin the big man was nesting in, I joined Rona at the bar in the observation lounge.

“Gorodin’s on board,” I told her.

Her blue eyes widened with excitement. “Oh Nick, that means you’ll be able to track the bombs through him.”

“That or blow my skull. Because so far it’s been a bust.”

I saw the brief look of hurt and reached across to take her hand. “Don’t misunderstand. In a way, these have been three of the best days of my life. But the job is first, and you might say without much exaggeration, that the whole goddamn world is on my shoulders.”

“I know, darling,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be selfish.”

“When this is over maybe we can take a little vacation,” I said. “It would be nice to slip into bed without Zhizov, Gorodin, and Knox Wamow joining us.”

Rona put on a shocked look. “I should hope so!” Then she smiled at me and it was all right again.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Pray that one of the suitcase bombs is put aboard so I can move in. Otherwise I’ll have to go after Gorodin. Fast and neat. Because somewhere Zhizov and Warnow are waiting with the button that can blow up most of the U.S. If I get careless enough, somebody could send them a message not to wait for the deadline.”

“What can I do, Nick?”

“Stay out of the way,” I snapped, then softened. “Rona, from here on things can get frantic and deadly. I’m trained for this kind of action and you’re not. I want you to go back to our stateroom now and lock yourself in. Don’t open the door unless I give you the signal.”

“All right,” she pouted.

I sent Rona on her way. She was good company. And helpful. But not for this phase of the operation.

I stepped back out on deck to have a better view of the gangplank. As darkness fell, we prepared to sail, and not one suitcase had been put on board. We moved out of Willemstad Harbor past the swinging pontoon bridge called Queen Emma, and I decided I was going to have to confront Mr. Gorodin. Then I heard the launch.

It was a fast twin outboard, running without lights. When it pulled alongside, somebody dropped a sling down to it. A squat, bald man in the launch seemed to be giving the orders. His men lifted a dark, rectangular object into the sling. It was a suitcase; and I was laying odds that it was just like the one taken from Juan Escobar.

When the sling began to rise I moved aft along the rail to see who was doing the hoisting. It was my friend Fyodor Gorodin, still wearing his ice-cream suit, and directing a couple of the non-Latin crew members. Reaching under the tail of my pullover shirt, I slipped Wilhelmina out of the belt holster. With the familiar Luger gripped in my hand I took a step toward Gorodin and his friends.

One step was all I managed. Something slammed into the back of my head, and the deck swung up and hit me like a giant fist. There was an immediate rush of sound in my head that seemed to be sucked back through my skull as everything went silent and black.

Nine

Strangely, at first I was only aware that my nose itched. I tried to reach up and scratch it, but my hands wouldn’t move. I opened my eyes. That’s when I became aware of my head. It hurt like one big tooth with the nerve exposed to a blast of cold air. I shut my eyes again and opened them slowly. The pain had not gone but my surroundings were coming into focus.

I was stretched out on my back on top of a narrow bunk in a small inside stateroom. I could see that my feet were bound together with several turns of adhesive tape. My hands were crossed at the wrists behind my back; they were also taped together. On the bunk across from me was Rona Volstedt, wearing a bright striped blouse and a pair of flared slacks. Her hands and feet were also taped.

“Glad to see you are back with us, Mr. Carter,” a heavy voice growled from somewhere at the front of the cabin. With an effort I turned my head in the direction of the voice. Fyodor Gorodin was lounging in a vinyl chair pulled out to face the two bunks. “I don’t suppose there is any point in calling you Mr. Hunter,” he continued. “That masquerade was over almost as soon as it began.”

In front of the cabin door a young man with neatly combed brown hair sat on a folding metal chair next to a card table. I recognized the Luger he held pointed at me — Wilhelmina. I moved my arms a fraction of an inch and was not happy to feel a lack of pressure where pressure should have been. The stiletto was gone. I saw it resting under Gorodin’s belt.

“Yes, Carter,” Gorodin rumbled, “We have your weapons. And your… ‘wife.’ Perhaps you will talk to us now.”

“I don’t follow you,” I said, giving it the old college try. “My name is Nicholas Hunter.”

Gorodin turned to the young man and snapped, “Boris, give me the card.” He snatched a five-by-seven file card from Boris’ hand and read aloud. “ ‘Nick Carter, AXE agent N3. Rating: Killmaster. Reports to David Hawk, Washington, D.C., director of AXE.’ Don’t you think our people know you by reputation. Carter? We knew when your friend Miss Volstedt phoned AXE that they were sending an agent. Perhaps if our comrades in Los Angeles had recognized you, they would have been more cautious in their pursuit.

“Not only your reputation, but your face is known to some of us who have been given copies of your photo, Carter. The captain recognized you when you came aboard with the woman in Antigua. He informed me by radio, and you have been watched ever since. When I came aboard, we knew you would make your move soon, and we were ready for you.”

“All right, Gorodin,” I said, abandoning the game, “what do you want?”

“You know my name too I see. Well, that was to be expected. What I want is very simple. First, I want you to tell me all that you know and suspect about our operations. I presume you got the name of the Gaviota from Juan Escobar. We saw him picked up in Fort Lauderdale.”

Quickly I calculated that there wasn’t anything we knew that would come as a surprise to Gorodin, so I laid it out for him while using another part of my mind to look for a way out.

“We know Anton Zhizov is heading your show,” I said. “It was obvious, since he signed the ransom telegram. We know what kind of bombs you’re using, how you’ve been getting them into our cities. We suspect that a scientist named Knox Wamow is making them for you. That’s it.”

“Very good,” Gorodin said. “That answers the easy part. Now I want you to tell me about AXE. Of course, the organization will be of no importance once we take over, still it will simplify matters if we are familiar with its operations. You may begin by telling me the number of agents now actively assigned.”

I said nothing. My head throbbed. I tried to think.

“Carter, I have no patience with games,” Gorodin barked, all semblance of amiability disappearing. “I can make you talk — I can make any man talk — but it might be faster to get answers from the woman.”

“She doesn’t know anything about AXE,” I said quickly. “This is a one-time assignment for her.”

Gorodin lunged from his chair and stepped forward with remarkable speed for a big man. With the back of one hairy hand he lashed me across the mouth. I tasted blood.

“Silence,” he ordered “When I am through with the woman, you will have another chance to speak.”

As the hulking Russian turned from me and stood over Rona, my pain-fogged brain recalled the trick belt Stewart had been so proud of in Special Effects. The one that exploded in the bad guy’s hands when he took it away from you to examine the obviously phony buckle. Why hadn’t Gorodin found it? I looked down and saw the answer. My sport shirt covered it.

I tried to squirm around on the bunk to expose the belt. Young Boris, sitting by the door, motioned to me with the barrel of the Luger to lie still. Even if I had been able to expose the belt and Gorodin fell for it, Rona and I would still be securely bound with a gun covering us and a shipload of decidedly hostile crewmen. I lay still, my mind racing for an alternative.

Gorodin looked directly down into Ronas face. From my position I could see that her blue eyes were wide and frightened, but she had not lost her control.

“It is your turn, Miss Volstedt,” he said, “to tell me about AXE.”

“What Nick said Is true,” Rona said levelly. “I know nothing about AXE.”

“Sooner or later you are going to tell me what I want to know,” Gorodin said. “The smarter you are, the sooner you will talk.” As he said this the Russian reached down and grasped Rona’s blouse, inserting his thick fingers between the buttons. He gave a vicious yank and the blouse tore away, leaving him with a handful of flimsy material.

Rona’s breasts fell into view, the tops lightly tanned, the rounded bottoms white from being hidden in her bikini top.

Gorodin turned to Boris at the door. “What do you think of those, my boy? Not so big as some, maybe, but firm and full.”

Boris nodded shortly, but his eyes revealed his disapproval of Gorodin’s actions.

“Good to the touch, too,” Gorodin said, running his big hands over Rona’s breasts. “What a pity we do not have time for some pleasure before the questioning begins. Maybe there will be time for that later, eh, if the lady gives the right answers.”

I could see the muscles move in the big man’s arms as he began to squeeze the girls breasts.

“We will begin again,” he said. “You will tell me the names of everyone you know connected with AXE.”

Rona gasped as Gorodin squeezed her breasts like ripe fruit in his massive hands. “I don’t know any other AXE people!” she cried.

Gorodin, straightened up, leaving red finger marks where he had gripped Rona. He shook his head sadly and turned to me. “Your lady friend is going to be stubborn too. It seems I am going to have to hurt one of you, and I think I would most enjoy hurting her.” He ran his hands down over Rona’s bare stomach and began to undo the buttons of her slacks.

Right here is where the movie hero would say, “Hold on, don’t touch the lady! I’ll tell you want you want to know.” It doesn’t work that way. Sure, I was fond of Rona, and what Gorodin was going to do to her would leave scars on me too, but she was a professional, and you don’t get into the espionage business, whether it’s Killmaster for AXE or some two-bit spying for the Atomic Energy Commission unless you’re prepared to take the risk. And from a practical standpoint, the minutes it would take Gorodin to destroy Rona Volstedt only to learn she had nothing to tell him would give me that much more time to figure a way out so that I might still complete the assignment. In the end, the most important consideration must be the mission. So I ground my teeth together and tried to concentrate on a plan of escape.

Knuckles banged on the cabin door.

Gorodin swore in Russian as the door opened and a pale crewman stood there at stiff attention, trying not to look at the half-naked blonde on the bunk

“A radio message for you, sir,” the crewman rattled.

“Not now, you idiot,” Gorodin roared. “Get out of here!”

“B-but, sir, it is General Zhizov. Urgent.”

With a grunt of annoyance Gorodin turned away from Rona.

“Very well. Tell the general I will be there.”

The crewman saluted smartly and disappeared.

Gorodin paused at the table where his young aide sat. “Boris, keep the gun on these people at all times. Watch out for Carter.”

“Yes, sir,” Boris answered, keeping Wilnelmina un-waveringly pointed at me.

Gorodin went out and slammed the door behind him. Working behind my back I tried to hitch up the shirt so Boris would get a look at the trick belt. At the movement I could see Boris’s finger tighten on the trigger.

“You had better lie still,” he said. “Do not doubt that I will shoot you if I have to.”

He meant it. I quit moving.

A stifled sob came from Rona. I glanced quickly across at her. She hadn’t seemed like a crier. Boris looked too. When his eyes fell on her bare breasts he looked away.

Rona sobbed again, made a series of pitiful, whimpering sounds, took a shuddering breath. “Boris,” she said tearfully, “are you going to let him do this to me?”

Then I understood. Rona was more of a pro than I had imagined. She had caught the earlier flash of compassion in the young man’s eyes, and now she was playing him with it.

“I cannot help you,” Boris said. “You must tell the colonel what he wants to know.”

“I can’t,” Rona said. “I don’t know anything. Hell do horrible things to me. You aren’t like him, Boris. I can see there’s humanity in you. Please help me.”

She was good, really convincing, and she was only half-acting.

Boris chewed at his lip but shook his head. “I can do nothing to help you.”

Precious seconds ticked away. I had a certain physical freedom, enough for a desperate gamble — if Rona could create a diversion. I caught her attention, then pointedly eyed a pack of cigarettes resting on the card table in front of Boris.

She smiled wanly at him and released a long sigh. “I understand, Boris,” she said. “You’re working for what you believe in, just as we are. Whatever they do to me, I know it would be different if you were in charge.”

The boy looked at her with something very close to gratitude.

“I won’t ask you to betray your beliefs,” Rona went on. “But could you just do one small favor?”

“If I can,” Boris answered in a barely audible voice.

“Before that beast Gorodin begins his torture I’d like a cigarette.” She managed another feeble smile.

“It’s a small pleasure, but it could be my last. Will you give me one?”

Boris hesitated, then nodded. “Of course.” He picked up the pack in front of him. “These are Russian. You don’t mind?”

She shook her head. “A cigarette is a cigarette when your nerves are screaming for relief.”

“It will be awkward,” he said. “I cannot release your hands.”

“Please just light it and put it between my lips,” she answered.

It was a very long shot. I would have only a couple of seconds. I tensed, coiled myself.

Boris lit the cigarette, stood and put the gun into his waistband. He crossed the cabin and put the cigarette between Rona’s lips. As he moved, I eased my feet off the bunk to the deck and came slowly to a sitting position.

I was preparing to launch myself at him when he turned. I had hoped that he would hover above Rona, lifting the cigarette from her lips occasionally. But apparently he was about to go back to his seat.

And now he saw me from the corner of his eye. He turned around sharply to face me as he grabbed for the Luger. But then I got an unexpected break. As Boris swung around to face me and turned his back on. Rona, she snapped her knees up almost under her chin, aimed her feet at the target, and shot them forward in a mighty shove. It was done with marvelous dexterity and lightning speed.

Boris had the gun in hand but had no time to bring it up before he was catapulted toward me, hurled off balance with such force that he sprawled head first at my feet, the Luger clattering to the deck. It took only a split second to raise my taped feet, now a double leather-soled club, and smash them down on his skull. The first blow was at least stunning, but the next three in rapid succession executed by leaping up and mashing down with the full measure of my weight, consigned him to oblivion.

“Poor Boris,” said Rona after she had leap-frogged over and was gazing down at him with a queasy-gut expression, “I was almost beginning to like him.”

Ten

I had no time to express my thanks and admiration for Rona’s surprising agility and quick-thinking performance at the moment of truth. I was too busy looking around the cabin for the sharp edge of something to cut us loose. But at a glance there didn’t seem to be anything sharper than the blunt comer of a mirrorless bureau.

Then I spotted the fluorescent light fixture above the bureau. It was out of my reach, of course, but the tube would break easily enough if I could hit it with something. I could forget my Luger, resting now on the deck nearby. With my hands wrapped behind me I’m not a very good shot; besides, a shot would make too much noise. For the same reason, I couldn’t throw the gun at the light.

I swung my taped-together ankles over the edge of the bunk and sat up. By working my heels one against the other I managed to ease one of my shoes down so that it hung suspended from the toes of my right foot There was only going to be time enough for one try. I swung my legs from the knees tentatively a couple of times, then kicked up and out as hard as I could.

The loose shoe left my foot and spiraled up through the air. It seemed to move in slow motion as I watched it arc toward the target. The heel of the shoe hit the fluorescent tube dead center with one of the most beautiful little crashes I had ever heard.

The stateroom was plunged into darkness, and I hopped across the floor to where I heard the glass shards fall. Squatting and groping behind my back I found the thin pieces of glass. They were sharp enough, but most were — too small. Scrabbling through the fragments, I finally found one big enough to hold between my thumb and forefinger and saw at the tape on my wrists. As I worked with the curved piece of glass, my hand suddenly went slippery wet. I knew I had cut myself, but my hands were too numb to feel the pain.

When I had at least a notch started in each thick-ness of tape I wrenched my wrists apart and they ripped free. Still working in the dark I tore the adhesive from my ankles.

“That’s done it,” I told Rona. “Say something so I can find you.”

“I’m over here,” Rona’s voice said from the darkness.

I got to my feet and was moving toward the sound of her voice when I heard a foot scuff the deck outside the cabin door. Then the latch rattled.

With a leap toward the bulkhead I flattened myself next to the door. The door opened, light spilled in behind Gorodin, who hesitated a fraction of a second. It was a fraction of a second too long. I hit him with a straight right to the hinge of the jaw that sent shock waves all the way up to my shoulder.

I caught him around the waist as he sagged and dragged him out of the doorway. I plucked the stiletto from Gorodin’s belt, and slipped Hugo back into my forearm scabbard. There was enough deck light to locate Wilhelmina, and I repossessed the Luger too.

Now I stepped to the bunk where Rona sat patiently waiting, and ripped the tape from her wrists and ankles.

“Let’s go,” I hissed, tossing her what was left of her blouse. “Stay close behind me and I’ll try to get us over the side. It’s our only chance.”

We stepped into the passageway. I tried to get my bearings. At each end of the passage I could see a flight of narrow metal stairs. I had a fifty-fifty chance of guessing which direction would be safe. I made my choice and ran for the stairs, with Rona right behind me.

I’d made the wrong choice.

As we reached the bottom of the stairs, I heard the approaching sound of heavy feet. I drew the Luger and fired upward at the men coming down.

With my free arm I swept Rona out of the way as a body hurtled past us and smacked the deck. It was one of the Slavic seamen. We heard the sound of feet thundering down the passage on the deck above.

I wheeled around and, with Rona in my wake, raced for the stairs at the other end of the passage. I could see that we were on a lower deck, and I knew we had to go two levels higher before we could get to the rail.

We rattled up the metal steps and reached the next deck just as a bunch of Gorodin’s men charged around the corner. I took a pot shot in their direction that slowed them down just long enough for us to sprint up the next flight of stairs. Down below somebody got his gun unhitched and fired two booming shots. The slugs sang off the steel bulkhead as we leaped onto the next deck, out of range.

Down this passage were the doors that led out to the lifeboat area. I had no thought of freeing one of the boats, but there were life jackets stored along the bulkheads there, and if we could grab a couple of those, we might survive in the water.

As we burst through the doors into the outside air, three crewmen stood between us and the rail. One of them carried a rifle. He raised the weapon to fire, but I already had Wilhelmina in my hand. I sent a bullet crashing through his forehead and he pitched forward onto the rifle. One of the other crewmen tugged at the rifle to free it from the dead man while the third dug a hand gun out of his clothing and got off a wild shot in our direction. Wilhelmina answered. The gunman grabbed his chest and staggered backward into the rail, cartwheeling over the side to splash into the black Caribbean below. The survivor gave up his attempts to free the rifle and bolted toward the stern.

I jerked the lid off a wooden container stencilled Life Jackets, but found only one inside. I tossed it to Rona, and she shrugged into it, pulling together the remains of her blouse as best she could.

There were harsh shouts now and feet running toward us along the deck from both directions. Time to bail out. I made an up-and-over motion to Rona with my hand, climbed the rail, lowered myself to the narrow outside ledge, and dived.

In the furious shoot-out to escape, I had forgotten the raw wound on my clobbered skull. I remembered it well when I hit the salt water with a massive jolt.

Then the lights went out. But I soon came around, coughing and blowing water like a broken radiator.

The Gaviota had steamed a couple of hundred yards, but now she was coming about, her searchlights playing over the water.

There was a brisk wind and the sea was choppy. It would be difficult for them to spot us in that churning desert of ocean. The water was warm, but full of unfriendly types with sharp teeth — and it was lonely.

Lonely! It came to me that I hadn’t seen Rona since we went overboard. Had she actually dived with me? I couldn’t be sure. I paddled in a wide circle, submerging when searchlights swept toward me, but I couldn’t see Rona.

The Gaviota was ploughing slowly toward me now. She looked huge and menacing from my water-level viewpoint. Some fifty yards from me the ship churned to a stop and the lights began to sweep methodically back and forth over the water.

Something white bobbed for a moment on the waves between me and the ship. I couldn’t risk calling out. Over the water the sound of my voice would carry easily, and the ship’s engines were now silent. I struck out in a crawl toward the object in the water, but stopped abruptly when my hand struck cloth and flesh.

It was not Rona. With a mixture of relief and disappointment I found it was the body of the crewman who had plunged over the side after I shot him.

In a blinding blaze, the long finger of the searchlight found us. I dived instantly, leaving the dead seaman afloat above me. Underwater, I stroked in the direction of the ship. I could hear the muffled rattle of gunfire and the choong of bullets knifing into the water.

When I surfaced, the hull of the ship loomed before me like a white steel wall. They were still shooting up on deck, and I heard the sound of a boat being lowered. I made my way back along the hull to the stern where I tucked in as well as I could under the overhang. Here I was out of range of the searchlight and would be hard to see from a boat unless it nearly ran over me. Unfortunately there was no place to get a handhold, so I had to tread water to stay close to the hull.

The boat splashed down amidships and the oarsmen struck out for the silver patch of water where the searchlight was holding steady. They reached the spot with a few powerful strokes and dragged the sodden body into the boat. Somebody cursed, then stood up and hailed the Gaviota through a bull horn.

“It is not Carter or the woman! It is one of our own!”

After a moment of steaming silence, Gorodin’s voice boomed, “Come back aboard. We will search again when it is light.”

The boat returned obediently to the Gaviota and was hoisted aboard. Daylight was still a good seven hours away and I didn’t expect to be in the vicinity when it arrived. By a very rough guess, I figured we were somewhere in the Gulf of Honduras. I took a bearing on the stars, and as soon as the sounds up on deck diminished, I struck out with a long-non-splash stroke for the east, which I calculated was the direction of the nearest land. The water still felt warm, and the sea had calmed enough to make swimming easier. With luck, I might reach some kind of land or be spotted by a friendly boat.

As I swam off quietly, moving slowly to conserve my energy, I again wondered what could have happened to Rona. I felt a deep pang of sadness.

Eleven

Daylight sneaked in, all pink and golden somewhere ahead, as I stroked, floated, stroked steadily on through the Caribbean. My body heat had been dissipated hours before and the once warm waters now felt teeth-chattering cold. When it grew light enough, I paused to survey the horizon. At first I saw no land in sight, and my muscles shrieked their protest at swimming on with no reward in sight. Then I spied a smudge of brown where the blues of sea and sky met in the east. Land. I decided it was either Honduras or, if the currents had carried me to the north, Yucatan. It didn’t much matter. Any hunk of dry, solid ground would be welcome.

I gave myself a couple of minutes to float, then rolled over and began a long, easy crawl toward the distant shore. In a little while I had company.

At first it was just a ripple in the smooth surface off to my right. Treading water, I watched and saw another ripple. Then another. And another. I knew what they were even before the first sickle-shaped dorsal fin broke the surface.

Sharks.

When I stopped moving, they changed direction, cutting across in front of me, then circling back behind me, closer now. I was able to make out three of them, though I didn’t doubt they had friends nearby. When I submerged I could see them clearly, circling me at a distance of about fifty feet. They had the slate-colored backs and white underbellies of the blue shark. Though the white shark is a more vivious man-eater, the blue is not my favorite companion for a long-distance swim.

The three specimens circling me were from eight to ten feet long. I was a strange intruder in their waters — clumsy, slow-moving, possibly dangerous, but a potential meal. Now and then one of the trio would dart in toward me, then veer away as though testing my response. I knew that sooner or later one of them was going to come all the way in and take a slash at me with those razor teeth.

I resumed swimming toward the ridge of land. With an effort, I kept my stroke slow and relaxed as if I were not in the least worried about the three predators. This was more for my own benefit than for theirs; you don’t psych out a shark.

My escorts moved steadily closer as I continued my painful progress toward shore. Luckily, the blood had long ago washed away from the wound on my head and the cut along my thumb where I had sliced it with the glass from the fluorescent lighting fixture. If I had been leaking fresh blood into the water around me, the sharks would have ripped me apart without hesitation.

With my attention riveted on the sharks, I hadn’t seen the brown sail between me and the land, a bit to the north. Since I didn’t know the size of the boat, I couldn’t determine its distance from me. But it was coming my way, and I mentally tried to reach out and speed it up. With a sail it wasn’t likely to be from the Gaviota, and even if it were, I would rather just then have taken my chances with Gorodin’s crew than with the deadly torpedo shapes that continued to close in on me.

While I was thinking these thoughts, something rushed by just below me. It didn’t touch me, but the turbulence spun me in the water like a cork. My playmates were preparing to attack.

I quit swimming and waved my arms frantically at the boat. I couldn’t tell if I had been seen, but the boat kept sailing in my direction, which was encouraging. When another of the sharks made a pass just six feet in front of me, I slipped Hugo out of the sheath and gripped the hilt underwater in readiness. The stiletto didn’t do much to change the odds against three killers weighing in at three hundred to four hundred pounds apiece, but it gave me a chance.

I dove repeatedly to watch the sharks, while keeping an eye on the approaching boat. Now another of the sharks peeled away from his companions and came at me. There is a popular theory that because a shark’s mouth is located on the underside of his head, he has to roll over on his back to bite. Don’t believe it. When the lower jaw drops on its hinge, the vicious crescent mouth opens into a deadly sawtoothed cave. A shark can chew you up from almost any position.

This one chose to come at me head-on. I flattened out below the surface to meet him the same way, presenting the smallest target possible. He was on me like a blue-black underwater missile before I could bring Hugo into a defensive position. Man’s maneuverability under water is limited at best. And there was only time to lunge upward and let the great black shape pass under me. It was such a near miss that the sharks grainy skin scraped my shoulder.

Having found me seemingly defenseless, the shark made an instant change of direction and rejoined the other two. Their agitated movements suggested that they might be preparing for a concerted attack. Stealing a glance at the boat, I could see now that it was a simple wooden craft with just the one sail. Small, dark-faced men stood in the bow pointing toward me. They seemed to be shouting, but I could not hear the words.

A dorsal fin sliced the water nearby. I dove deeper this time and so did the shark. He made a hook below me and headed up, jaws wide, his malevolent eyes seeming to challenge me. I kicked into a somersault and avoided the deadly teeth by inches, but this time I had Hugo ready. I plunged the blade into the sharks upper belly. My arm was wrenched as though I had stabbed a rushing freight train, but I held on as the shark’s momentum carried us both upward, and the stiletto blade sliced through the tough white belly skin.

Before we reached the surface, I kicked away from the wounded shark who trailed dark red blood behind him like smoke, a loop of intestine bulging out of the slit along the belly.

I churned up and away from the stricken killer, looking back just once to see one of his recent buddies strike his middle and, with a savage jerk, tear away a great chunk of flesh and entrails. The third shark wasn’t far behind.

I broke the surface and gulped the sweet fresh air into my lungs. In a minute my ears stopped ringing, and I heard voices. Ten feet behind me the boat bobbed on the light swell, sail reefed. There were four men in the boat. They were short and dark with fine features set symmetrically in small round heads. The words they spoke were unintelligible to me, but I recognized the language as Mayan, the ancient language of lower Mexico, now spoken in the southeastern part of Yucatan, Quintan a Roo.

Brown hands on sinewy arms reached down to me and hauled me out of the water into the wooden boat At a sound behind me, I turned and looked at the bloody froth on the water where the two sharks tore the wounded one to bits. In a few more minutes I’d have been the next course.

I held out my hands in a gesture of thanks to my rescuers, but their hooded eyes and impassive faces showed no response. One of them motioned for me to sit in the bow. I did so, and they reset the sail. The wind caught the canvas and the light boat seemed to lift in the water and skim toward the land.

Twelve

As the boat moved smoothly and soundlessly to-ward the shore, my exertions of the past sixteen hours began to catch up with me. The fight and escape from the Gaviota, the long swim, and the battle with the sharks had exhausted me. I let my head nod and closed my eyes just to rest them, and in a second — so it seemed — the bottom of the boat scraped gravel and people were running down from a cluster of huts to pull the craft up on shore.

All activity ceased when I stepped out and stood on the beach. None of the Mayans stood any higher than my armpit. And, like my companions in the boat, they showed neither welcome nor hostility on their faces though they eyed me with some curiosity.

These were the descendents of the tough, rebellious Mayans who never submitted to Spanish rule during the days of colonization. After the rebellion of 1847 in western Yucatan was put down by the Spaniards, those who could, escaped to the jungles of Quintana Roo, where armed resistance continued into the twentieth century. Even now, remote villages like the one where I had been brought were left strictly on their own by the federal government to rule themselves in accordance with the old tribal traditions.

Two of the men from the fishing boat stepped up to flank me on both sides. Each placed a small brown hand on my elbow and urged me forward. I didn’t know whether I was being escorted or taken prisoner.

They marched me through the village of some twenty dwellings between lines of silent, watchful Mayans. We stopped in front of a hut smaller than the rest at the outer perimeter of the village. The roof was thatch, and the adobe walls had no windows.

As one of my escorts began to lead me through the door, he nudged against the metalic lump of Wilhelmina, still holstered at my hip. He raised my damp shirt, and drew out the Luger.

“Pistola!” he snapped, in the first word of Spanish I’d heard from any of them.

“No se funciona,” I told him. It was the truth. The gun didn’t work after a night’s immersion in salt water. “No tiene balas,” I added. Also true. I’d used all my cartridges shooting my way off the Gaviota.

No response from the Mayans. Apparently they knew only a word or two of Spanish. Confiscating Wilhelmina, the Indian shoved me into the hut and banged the wooden door shut behind me. He spoke in Mayan to his companion. From the tone I gathered that one of them was to stay there and guard the door while the other went off on some errand. I sat down on the hard-packed dirt floor and leaned back against the wall.

For the first time in many hours I thought about the mission that had brought me to the Caribbean. Was it only yesterday that I’d been on the verge of nailing the whole suitcase-bomb conspiracy when I had started toward Fyodor Gorodin with the Luger in my hand? Yet how far I was now from doing anything to prevent the nuclear destruction of New York in three more days.

I tried to wrench my thoughts back to the present predicament, but a vision of Rona Volstedt flashed into my mind, greyhound slim and nordic blonde. Where was she now? Dead? Better that she be drowned than to be plucked from the sea by Gorodin.

The door of my hut was yanked open and my two guards entered. By gestures and grunts they made it known I was to accompany them. I got up and went along with them, back into the village.

We approached a hut larger than the rest. Once painted white, it was fading to gray. The two Mayans marched me in through the door, then came to a halt before an old man seated on a platform. He had shaggy white hair and a face as hard and wrinkled as a walnut shell.

He raised a gnarled hand and my two guards backed out, leaving me alone with him.

“I am Cholti,” he said in a strong deep voice that seemed incongruous to his age and tiny chest. “Here I am el jefe, the chief.”

“I am honored,” I said, “and pleased to find someone who speaks English.”

“In the village, only I speak English,” he said proudly. “I learned at school in Merida. I would teach my sons, but they do not wish to know the language of the yanquis.” He paused then, hands folded in his lap, waiting for me to speak.

“My name is Nick Carter,” I said. “I am an agent of the United States. If you would take me to the nearest town with a telephone, I would be grateful. I would pay you well.”

“I am told that you carried a pistol,” Cholti said.

“Yes. In my work I must sometimes defend, sometimes kill.”

“White men are not well liked in the Quintana Roo country, Carter. White men with pistols are not liked at all. My people have had very bad treatment from white men with pistols.”

“I mean no harm to you or your people, jefe. The men I fight are evil ones who want to destroy the great cities of my country and kill a great many of my people.”

“What should that mean to us here in Quintana Boor

“If these evil men are allowed to win, no place in the world will be safe from them, not even your village. They have just destroyed an island in the Pacific Ocean where the people were much like your own.”

“Tell me how you came to be floating in the sea, Nick Carter.”

I told him the story from the time Rona and I stepped aboard the cruise ship in Antigua. Cholti listened with eyes so narrowed they were all but sealed, hands motionless in his lap. When I had finished he sat for a full minute in silence. Then his eyes opened and he studied my face.

“I believe you, Nick Carter,” he said. “Your voice does not lie, and your eyes speak truly. The telephone you seek can be found to the north in Vigfa Chico. I would have you taken there, but…”

“But what?” I prompted.

“You are a white man. You brought a pistol into our village. For these reasons my people want you to die. They will listen to me as el jefe, and perhaps I can make them believe, as I do, that you mean us no harm. But there is one who cannot be swayed.”

“Who is that?” I asked.

“His name is Tihoc. He is my son. When I am dead, he will be chief here. I fear that will be very soon. Tihoc will never agree to let you go until you have faced him.”

“Faced him? I thought you said no one else here spoke English.”

“There are other languages,” the old man said. “My son awaits you now outside my house. How you conduct yourself with him will determine your fate. So it must be.”

“I understand,” I told the old man. Cholti nodded his head toward the door of his hut. I turned and walked out.

Before I had taken two steps into the clearing In front of the chiefs hut, something whooshed through the air and thudded into the ground at my feet. It was a six-foot spear, its narrow, double-edged point buried in the earth.

Across the clearing from me stood a young Mayan, naked to the waist, his brown skin taut and glistening over tensed muscles. He clutched a twin to the spear at my feet, held across his body at an angle, in the traditional position of challenge. Ringed about us were the villagers, their faces impassive, but their eyes alert.

This, then, would be Tihoc, son of the chief. This was the man I would have to face in combat if I was to leave the village alive. Yet, if I killed him, would his father give me passage to Vigia Chico? Even if the old man agreed, would his people let me live? Somehow, I had to defeat Tihoc, yet not rob him of his honor.

Before touching the spear, I deliberately removed Hugo from the forearm sheath. I held up the stiletto for the villagers to see, then sent it spiraling to the door of the chiefs hut where it stuck fast, the handle quivering. Though there was no audible response from the watchers, I could sense an undercurrent of approval.

I pulled the spear from the ground then, and holding it in the same position as Tihoc, advanced to the center of the clearing. There we touched spear points in a salute oddly like that used in the art of quarterstaff. A deadly difference here was the twelve inches of steel blade that tipped our spears, a blade capable of impaling a man or slicing a limb from his body.

I backed off a step in the ready stance, and Tihoo attacked at once with an upstroke of the butt of his spear. I dropped my spear to block the blow, then raised it swiftly to fend off the downward slash of the blade that would have cleaved my skull.

My riposte was an upstroke of my own, which the Mayan anticipated and blocked. He moved then to counter the blow he expected, but I merely feinted with the blade and wheeled the butt in a side stroke to his rib cage. Tihoc grunted in pain but adroitly crossed his spear, ready to block a fatal thrust.

We backed off, resumed the ready position, and the combat began again.

The art of quarterstaff is in many ways as formalized as fencing or even dancing. Every blow has a block, every block moves to a counter. The only sounds in the Yucatan clearing were the clack of the shafts and clang of the blades, punctuated by the huffing breath of Tihoc and myself. More than once I had seen an opening to drive home the spear point, but slowed my thrust just enough to allow the young Mayan a block. I had so far managed to keep his own blade away from me except for a crease along my side that left a crimson stain on my shirt.

The break came when I knocked the spear out of one of his hands with a double upstroke when he had expected the usual upstroke-slash attack. With his spear dangling uselessly in one hand, Tihoc’s throat was exposed to my blade. I pulled my thrust a fraction of an inch to the side, barely slicing the skin. I saw in a flicker of the Mayan’s eyes that he knew what I had done.

Regaining control of his spear, Tihoc now went to the attack with a deadly ferocity. I gave ground before his battering charge and began to fear that the contest could only end with Tihoc’s death or mine.

The end came, with startling suddenness. Tihoo feinted me high, then dropped to a crouch and swung the butt like a baseball bat, catching me just above the ankles and knocking my feet out from under me. I crashed to the ground and rolled to my back just in time to see the blade of Tihoc’s spear thrust into my face. At the last second it bit into the ground so close to my ear I could feel the heat of it.

I flipped to my feet, spear again at the ready, and faced my opponent. A new message was in his eyes— the camaraderie of battle. We were even now. I had spared his life, a thing he could not forgive until he had spared mine.

I gambled. Taking a step forward I tilted my blade toward Tihoc in salute. He dipped his own spear to meet mine, and the battle was ended. We dropped our weapons and clasped hand-to-wrist in the Mayan style. The villagers chattered their approval, and for the first time I saw smiles on the dark Indian faces.

The old chief approached us and spoke in Mayan to Tihoc. Then he turned to me and said, “I have told my son that he fought bravely and with honor. I say the same to you, Nick Carter. Vigia Chico can be reached within an hour. Two of my strongest men will take you there by canoe.”

He handed me a package wrapped in a waterproof fabric. “You must clean and oil your pistol before the salt water dries, or it will be of no use against the evil men you seek.”

I thanked him and retrieved Hugo from the door of the hut. Then I followed the two muscular men who were already waiting to take me to the canoe.

Thirteen

The canoe trip up the coast was swift and silent. The two Mayans stroked us powerfully along just outside the tumbling surf. Neither of them spoke.

We came ashore at Vigla Chico, a settlement three times the size of the village we had left. The dwellings seemed more permanent, and a railroad track from the east terminated at the outer limit of the town. My oarsmen took me to what appeared to be the house of the local headman, talked with him briefly in Mayan, and left me abruptly without a glance.

I asked for a telephone, and was taken to an all-purpose building that apparently served as school, general store, meeting hall, warehouse, and what-have-you. The telephone was an early model in a scarred wooden frame with a crank on the side.

The next two hours were spent getting through to Merida, the capital of Yucatan, and from there through a maze of relays and intermediate operators until the familiar voice of David Hawk Anally crackled over the line.

I told him where I was and gave him a condensed version of how I got there, talking fast for fear we might lose the connection at any moment.

“I need a fast way out of here,” I told him. “There’s a railroad, but from the looks of it, the train must run once every total eclipse of the sun.”

“I’ll get a helicopter in to you. What’s the mission status?”

“The suitcases are coming aboard the Gaviota from a launch out of Curasao. Fyodor Gorodin seems to be the field man for the operation with Zhizov apparently stationed at their headquarters and making only an occasional appearance outside. No confirmation that Knox Warnow is the key man, but the evidence is strong enough that we can consider it a certainty.” I hesitated, then added, “We lost Rona Volstedt.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Nick,” David Hawk said. I knew he meant it. As director of AXE, he was familiar with death, yet the loss of an agent hurt him more deeply than most people would believe. “Can you work alone from here?” he added.

“I can, but it would be a help to have someone familiar with the territory along. It’s getting dark here now, and I don’t have to remind you we’re fighting a deadline.”

“You certainly don’t,” Hawk said drily. “Hang on a minute.”

The telephone crackled emptily in my ear for several seconds, and I knew Hawk was punching information into his desk-side computer. Then he returned with the answer:

“The CIA has an agent stationed in Veracruz, code name Pilar. She will contact you there at the Hotel Bahia Bonito.”

“She?”

“Yes, Nick, your incredible luck seems to be holding. I am told this one is a redhead well equipped with… uh… all the extras.” Hawk cleared his throat, then went on in another tone. “Can you make arrangements for a helicopter landing at Vigia Chioo?”

“There’s a clearing just beyond this building. How soon can you send a chopper?”

“I’ll have to work through the State Department. If they’re on the ball, you’ll have your bird in three to four hours.”

“Fine. I’ll arrange to have flares or fires laid out to mark the landing area.” As we discussed these details, it occurred to me that under normal conditions such information would never go out unscrambled over public telephone lines. The circumstances, however, were anything but usual, the conditions primitive.

“You’ll need money,” Hawk said. “I’ll have it waiting at your hotel in various Central American currencies. Is there anything else?”

“Yes. My Luger took a salt water bath, so I’ll want to have a gun cleaning kit handy. Also 9mm. ammunition.”

“It will be waiting.” There was a pause on the line, as if Hawk wanted to add something more. But then he said merely, “More than luck to you, Nick” and rang off.

I had a Job persuading the local head man to get the signal fires going to guide in the helicopter. He was not eager to help me. The natives of Vigia Chico were a little less hostile to the outside world than the Mayans had been in the village down the coast, but their ties to the old ways were still strong. White men had seldom come to Yucatan on peaceful missions, and the people were not eager to bring in one of their flying machines.

I finally got their reluctant cooperation through an age-old method. By promising them money. Privately, I had hoped the State Department CIA pilot would bring some cash. It might be a little sticky getting out of Vigia Chico if the villagers thought they’d been conned.

For the next couple of hours such worries were tucked away in the back of my mind as I directed the placement of the signal fires. There was plenty of dry brush around, and I had six fires set in a circular pattern to outline the landing area.

Once the fires were burning well and the clearing illuminated, I sat down to wait. And wait. And wait.

With the State Department involved, I should have known it wouldn’t go smoothly. By the time I heard the sound of the helicopter rotor, dawn was breaking and my crew of fire-builders were definitely unhappy with the delay. The pilot spotted our little party and brought his craft in, raising a great cloud of thick red-brown dust.

The pilot’s name was Martin. He was a thin young man with a sharp nose. We exchanged identification while the villagers clustered around, eying the helicopter with intense suspicion.

“I hope they sent some money with you,” I said.

“Money? What for?”

“To get help with the signal fires I had to promise these people some payment.”

Martin squinted up at the brightening sky. “I don’t know what you needed signal fires for; it’s almost full daylight.”

“When I asked for a helicopter,” I said coolly, “it was dark. I had hoped that the State Department would respond with a fair amount of speed and get me out of here before dawn. I’m on rather a tight schedule, old pal.”

“Nobody said anything about bringing money,” he grumbled.

There was an uneasy muttering from the people standing around us, and I was afraid they were catching the gist of our conversation.

“Did you bring any money of your own?” I asked.

“Well… some,” he said cautiously.

I was losing my temper. “So get it out, goddammit! I promised these people money, and I have a hunch they’ll break your bones if they don’t get it.”

Looking pained, Martin dragged a battered wallet out of his hip pocket and began leafing through the bills. In exasperation I grabbed the wallet away from him and stripped out the greenbacks. It added up to a little over fifty dollars in U.S. bills. I handed it to the head man who counted it solemnly then nodded without smiling. He spoke to the villagers, who moved away, clearing a path for us.

As we got into the helicopter, Martin said, “Did you have to give them all of it? Those Indians would probably have been satisfied with half.”

“Maybe,” I said. “And maybe they would’ve been unhappy — until they put a spear through your throat. Would that be worth twenty-five bucks to you?”

He kicked the engine to life without comment

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’ll make a full report of your contribution, and you’ll be reimbursed through the usual State Department channels. If you’re lucky, you’ll get your money back by Christmas. Maybe not this Christmas…”

For the first time, Martin relaxed a bit and even managed a small grin. “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got to admit it’s cheaper than a spear in the gullet. Where to?”

“Veracruz,” I told him, and we sprang into the air.

Fourteen

Hernando Cortes came ashore at Veracruz in 1519, the first Spaniard to set foot on Mexican soil. Since then, the city has been captured in various wars by the Americans and twice by the French.

As we skimmed in over the Gulf of Campeche and I squinted down at the sunlit city, it was plain that Veracruz was now, at least, a prize worthy of all that blood and thunder.

We settled onto a pad behind the American Consulate, where I turned down an invitation to stay for lunch. I was feeling stiff and sticky from my exertions, wiped out for want of sleep, and I didn’t feel like making small talk over martinis with some of our foreign service types. I shook hands with Martin, assured him again that he’d get his money back, and used an outside telephone to call for a taxi.

The cab ride to the Hotel Bahia Bonito twisted through some of the city’s ancient cobblestone streets lined with quaint old houses, and zoomed along the wide modern thoroughfares next to steel and glass skyscrapers.

My hotel was antiquated but comfortable, the kind with a big center courtyard open to the sky and three tiers of rooms around it I told the driver to wait and went inside. When I gave my name, the man at the desk handed me a room key, a thick, sealed envelope, and a package the size of a clarinet case. I slit the envelope and found, in various sizes and colors: dollars, pesos, quetzales, cordobas, colons, lempiras, balboas, bolivars, gourdes, pounds, francs, and guilders. I pulled out the pesos, paid the driver, and with the package under my arm, went up to my room on the third floor. There wasn’t any message from Pilar or from anyone else.

I took a long, steamy bath followed by a cool shower, then unwrapped the package of gum-cleaning equipment and went to work on the Luger. I could have asked Hawk to get me a new pistol, but Wilhelmina was an old and reliable friend.

I stripped the Luger down and examined all the parts. Since it had been well-oiled and protected by the waterproof covering, the salt water hadn’t yet cor-roded the metal. I used solvent on every part, even the tiny screws, and ran patches through the bore until they came out virginal white. I dried the disassembled gun with the lint-free cotton wiper, touched the critical parts with low-viscosity lubricating oil, and put the Luger back together. I filled the eight-cartridge clip from the box of shells Hawk had provided, and slipped Wilhelmina into my belt holster.

My body needed sleep, but my mind wouldn’t give up. There were plans to make, loopholes to close. And whenever I gave my brain a rest, the picture of Rona swam into view. The blonde girl whose slender, supple body had been so many nights in my embrace, could not be dismissed as Just another working partner lost.

They don’t allow the time or depletion for sorrow, I thought bitterly, and banged out of my room. Down at the desk I asked if there was a store nearby where I could buy clothes.

“Yes, senor. Aguilars, just across the street, has an excellent selection,” the clerk said.

“Gracias. I am expecting a visitor. If she arrives, tell her where to find me.”

I crossed the street and spent a fistful of Hawk’s money on clothes. Dressed in a new suit with all the appropriate accessories, I checked with my desk clerk again, then sauntered up the street to a sidewalk cafe. I took a table where I could watch the entrance and ordered a bottle’ of local brandy, which burned like fire but didn’t taste bad. Sipping the brandy, I wondered how long I should wait before deciding that my contact, Pilar, was not going to show.

Just then a dark girl in a low-cut blouse that barely contained her magnificent breasts, swayed between the tables and came to a stop at mine. Her hair was black and thick, with a slightly tousled, fresh-from-bed disorder. She had black-coffee eyes that promised exotic pleasures.

“Can you spare a match?” she asked with a bare trace of accent.

“Sorry, I don’t keep them since I quit smoking.” I clued her.

“I tried to quit last year myself, but I only lasted two weeks,” she answered correctly.

“You must be Pilar.”

“Yes. And you are Nick Carter… called Killmaster. Your reputation has preceded you.” “I don’t know if I should play modest or apologize.”

Her full lips curved into a smile. “One should never apologize. May I sit down?”

“Of course. My manners are a bit worn today, like the rest of me.”

Pilar eased into a chair across the table from me. “You look as though you could use some sleep,” she said.

“Business first,” I said with an insinuating smile. “Can we talk here?”

Her lovely eyes drifted over the idlers in the cafe and the pedestrians strolling by on the sidewalk. “It’s as good a place as any,” she told me with a shrug.

I signaled the waiter for another glass and poured brandy for Pilar. Then I asked abruptly, “What did you do to your hair?”

Instinctively, her hand went to her head in momentary confusion, then she smiled. “You must have been told I was a redhead. As you know, it often becomes necessary in our business to change one’s appearance. Do you like it black?”

“Love it. Bet you were a knockout as a redhead, too.”

“Why, thank you,” she said and peered at me mischievously from under her long lashes.

For an instant Pilars features seemed to fade and shift into the fine-boned face of Rona Volstedt. I took a gulp of the powerful brandy and the image vanished.

“The only lead we have,” I said, “is the launch that put the suitcase aboard the Gaviota. I couldn’t spot a name or identifying numbers in the dark. It rode too low in the water and was powered by twin outboards.”

Pilar chewed on her lip and shook her head.

“That’s not much to go on. Did you get a look at any of the men in the launch?”

“The man in charge was short, thickly built, and completely bald.”

She held up a hand to stop me. “A stocky, bald man?”

“That’s right. Do you know him?”

“I think so. There is such a man who leads a band of smugglers on Curasao. He is called Torio.”

“Can you tell me where to find him?”

“I can take you there. I know Curasao, and we’ll be able to move quickly.”

For a minute I was going to object. I didn’t want her to end up like Rona. But Pilar was right, I could waste precious time blundering around Curasao without a guide, and time was the all-important factor.

“How soon can we leave?” I said.

“We can catch an early flight tomorrow morning. I will make the arrangements.”

“Can we get started sooner?”

“No. And it is important that you rest tonight. Tomorrow you will have to be strong and alert.”

My aching muscles agreed. We drank another glass of brandy, and she walked with me to my hotel.

“I will come for you in the morning,” Pilar said, “and we will go to the airport.”

I left her in the courtyard and wearily climbed the stairs to my room.

Fifteen

I took my second shower of the day and drew the blinds against the late-afternoon sun. I stripped off my new clothes and laid them over a chair. Then I stretched out naked on the bed, pulled a sheet over me, and stared at the ceiling.

To simply will yourself to sleep is usually impossible. Every nerve in my body cried out for rest, and my eyes were gritty pouches, but I couldn’t sleep.

Somewhere a former U.S. scientist and a former Russian general were preparing to erase my country, city by city. New York would go first, day after tomorrow. I should be racing somewhere to stop them, not flaking out on a hotel bed in Veracruz.

But rushing into action without preparation would be foolish and dangerous. And if Pilar could locate the smuggler, Torio, there might still be time enough to carry out the mission. I closed my eyes. The vision of Rona swam before me, faded, then returned.

The sunlight filtering through the orange blinds dimmed gradually through all the shades of gray, and finally it was dark. Still my mind wouldn’t rest.

Every sound from the street below seemed to be piped directly into my ears. A toilet flushed in the next room, a gushing Niagara Falls.

Then someone knocked lightly on my door.

“Yes?”

“It’s Pilar,” came the soft answer.

I swung out of bed, grabbed a towel and opened the door. Pilar wore a black dress with tiny flowers that seemed to grow happily in the mounds and valleys of her rich terrain.

“Come in,” I said.

“I didn’t really believe that you would be able to sleep,” she said, and stepped inside.

“Your beauty is only surpassed by your wisdom,” I answered.

“I brought you something to help.” She settled lightly upon the edge of the bed.

“Pills?” I asked. “I never take them.”

She offered me a lazy smile. “No, not pills. Me.”

“Well,” I answered, recovering from my amazement, “you certainly are a delightful tablet, and you wouldn’t be at all hard to swallow.”

Her pretty face sobered, became almost stern. “Don’t make Jokes,” she said. “Both of our lives may depend on your physical condition tomorrow, and…” Here she hesitated, her eyes walked over my towel-clad frame. “And perhaps I, too, would rest uneasily alone tonight.”

“Perhaps,” I said.

“You will leave everything to me?”

“Pilar, I am in your hands.”

“Bien. First I want you to lie here on the bed.”

I moved obediently to the bed and was about to sink down when her strong brown fingers slipped inside the towel I was wearing and whisked it away.

“For this, we will not need the towel,” she said crisply. “Lie down on your stomach, please.”

I spread myself prone across the bed, made a pillow of my folded arms. Something cool touched my neck at the base of the skull and trailed slowly down my back. I caught the light scent of cinnamon. Over my shoulder, I saw that Pilar had taken a tiny vial from the bag she carried, and had spilled the contents down the length of my spine.

“Oil of cinnamon,” she explained. “Now I want you to put your head back down and let me help you to relax.”

“Yes ma’am,” I grinned. There was a whispering silky sound. From the corner of my eye, I caught the flash of a tawny hip and knew that Pilar had taken off all her clothes.

As if sensing my thoughts, she closed my eyes with a butterfly touch of her cool, soft fingers. “Relax,” she murmured. “Now you must only relax.”

Her hands played over my back then in smooth little circles, the pressure of her fingers both firm and gentle. She spread the oil across my shoulders and down over my rib cage, making little humming sounds of approval to herself. She found the crease in my side where the Mayan spear had grazed me, and her fingers caressed the pain away.

She smoothed the oil down over my waist, her hands sliding deliciously over my skin with the scented lubricant. Down and down, across my buttocks and the back of my thighs. A little extra touch at the hollows of my knees, then over my calf muscles, along the Achilles tendon to cup my heels on her palms.

Gently Pilar brushed the oil over the soles of my feet, sliding a slippery finger between each of my toes.

My skin was alive and supersensitive to her touch. It seemed I could sense through my pores the nearness of her naked body.

I said, “Pilar, I don’t know if I’m excited or sleepy. Please make up my mind!”

“Be still,” she softly scolded. “We have just begun.”

She took my toes then, one at a time, caressing them, rolling them between her fingers. With her thumb and forefingers she made an oiled sheath, sliding up and down each toe.

Next, Pilar took each foot between her hands and kneaded it till I could feel the bones crack. Then she moved her hands up my legs again, her expert fingers digging into the tensed muscles, squeezing, manipulating, drawing out the aching soreness.

My rump received special attention. With one hand on each buttock, she leaned and squeezed with surprising strength for a woman, her hands rolling rhythmically from the heels to the fingertips.

The bed sagged slightly as Pilar kneeled astride my legs. From this position she leaned forward and worked her supple fingers over my back, magically loosening the tight muscles.

As she reached far forward to massage my shoulders and the base of my neck, I felt the nipples of her swaying breasts brush against me. Now her hands slid all the way down my naked back from shoulders to feet.

“Roll over now,” she said, “and I’ll do the other side.”

“I don’t know if I can stand it.”

“Don’t worry, I’m sure you will bear up bravely.”

I turned over onto my back.

Pilar gave a little gasp. “Why, Nick, I thought you were relaxed!”

“The devil you did!” I grinned, taking the opportunity to peek at my nude masseuse. Her skin was like burnished copper — smooth and flawless. Her breasts were full and ripe. They dipped, then rose sharply. Her narrow waist and her round, firm hips glistened with a faint sheen of perspiration.

She bent gracefully to pick up the vial of oil from the bedside table and drizzled it down the front of me, spreading it with her hands.

“Don’t worry,” she said, as if reading my mind again, “nothing will be left undone!”

So now I surrendered myself to her hands. My eyes closed — no troubling pictures swam in my mind. I had a sense of weightlessness, as if my body, directed by those knowing fingers, were drifting in space. I seemed to be made of taffy… pulled, stretched, deliciously strung out to within a fraction of the breaking point.

I opened my eyes abruptly and reached down to seize Pilars hand. “That’s enough,” I said. “We have just reached the limits of massage. Do you have other talents?”

Pilar gave me a lazy, teasing smile. A shock of exquisite pleasure engulfed me as her mouth closed over me.

And for a time I felt as if I were being pulled through a small, velvety hole into a world of unimaginable delights. Then a shudder of release overcame me. And for the first time in many hours I was empty of thought or feeling, adrift in a void, floating toward the deep well of oblivion.

I drew the warm, glowing body down beside me and covered us both with the sheet.

In less than a minute the sleep that I’d sought for so long enclosed me in a warm, cinnamon-scented embrace.

Sixteen

I woke up at dawn feeling as if all the old parts had been replaced with brand-new, teflon-coated permanent-press components. The sound of splashing water and a woman’s voice singing in Spanish came from the bathroom. I swung out of bed, padded over to the door, and pushed it open.

Billows of steam rolled out into the room. Behind the transluscent shower curtain, I could see the silhouette of Pilar’s beautiful body as she soaped herself and sang something from the days of Pancho Villa. Now and then the curtain would cling to her skin, displaying the glistening surface like the cellophane window in a box of candy.

I stood there for a minute, enjoying the sight, then grabbed the curtain and pulled it aside.

Pilar gasped with surprise, and moved to cover herself with her hands in the instinctive female gesture. Then she dropped her arms and stood smiling under the shower jets while the water sluicing down over the mounds and dips of her body made her glisten like a seal.

“Good morning, querido,” she said. “I hope I didn’t wake you.” Her eyes moved down my body. “Do you always wake up in this condition?”

“It all depends on who’s taking a shower in the next room.”

“I trust you slept well.”

“Like a log. If the world ever learns about that in-somnia cure of yours, we’ll see the last of barbitur-ates.”

“Flatterer. Get in and I’ll soap your back.”

I stepped into the shower and Pilar turned me around. She lathered up her hands, but the area of my anatomy she soaped was definitely not my back. I turned and stood facing her, water splashing off both of us. For the first time I realized what a tall girl she was.

“It occurs to me,” I said, “that I’ve been taking an awful lot of orders from you. It’s about time I took over.”

“What did you have in mind, querido?” she breathed, leaning forward, those magnificent breasts swinging toward me.

Placing my hands under her arms, I lifted Pilar and brought her toward me. Then I lowered her, a fraction of an inch at a time.

She made a little sound of delight as her arms encircled my chest and she pulled us together, squashing her breasts against me. We began a slow, undulating, stationary dance there in the shower, gradually stepping up the rhythm until Pilar twisted and flailed like a woman possessed. Suddenly, she cried out, her voice piercing the monotonous drone of the water.

Afterward, we stood together, letting the water wash over our bodies.

We dressed quickly, then went to the caf£ next door for a delicious breakfast of huevos rancheros. We washed it down with Mexican beer, which even at breakfast time is better than the bitter Mexican cof-fee.

A taxi took us to the Aeropuerto Nacional, where we boarded a small jet. We took off at six-thirty. With the two-hour time differential, we would land in Curasao at about noon.

As we flew over the peaceful green of Yucatan and the deep blue of the Caribbean, I couldn’t help remembering that not many hours before, I’d been fighting for my life down there.

As if by mutual consent, Pilar and I didn’t speak during the trip. Earlier that morning we’d been just a man and a woman enjoying life and each other as if our biggest problem was deciding what to have for breakfast. But now we were two professionals, heading into unknown dangers, knowing that we might never return. It wasn’t the time for small talk. We sat quietly, lost in our private thoughts.

The voice of the pilot broke the silence. “Those of you on the starboard side can now see the island of Aruba up ahead. Aruba is the smallest of the three islands that make up the Netherlands Antilles. Curasao another fifty miles to the east. We are beginning our descent and will be landing in approximately fifteen minutes.”

As the pilot went on to tell us about the weather conditions in Curasao (ideal, as always), I watched Aruba slide past below us. The straits between Aruba and Curasao were speckled with white sailboats and a number of tiny brown islets with no permanent population, though they were used occasionally by fishermen.

Our plane put down at Plesman Airport, and we found a taxi for the five-mile ride into the capital city of Willemstad. The cab was an old Hudson, with the top removed to make it an open-air vehicle.

The driver was a talkative little man who seemed determined to fill us in on all the local gossip during our short ride. I didn’t pay much attention to what the man was saying till one phrase stabbed my consciousness like an icepick.

“Wait a minute,” I barked at the driver. “What was that you said about a blonde woman pulled from the sea?”

He turned in his seat with a wide grin, pleased at having aroused my interest. “Oh, yes, senor. Much excitement at the fishing docks two days ago. One of the boats returned with the yellow-haired lady. She wore a life jacket that kept her afloat, though she was not conscious when they brought her in. Very strange, as no boat has been reported in trouble.”

“Where is she now?” I cut in,

“When word went out from the fishing docks, the lady’s husband soon arrived and took her away with him.”

“Her husband?” I repeated.

“Oh, yes. He is the big man, like a bear, who sails sometimes with the Goviota.”

Gorodin! He must have returned to Curasao when he was unable to find me or Rona in the water. No doubt he’d been there waiting when word came from the docks that she had been brought in by fishermen. That was two days ago. I calculated the odds that Rona was still alive. It was a long shot “Do you know where the man… her husband… took the woman?” I asked.

“No, senor, but maybe my friend Saba the fisherman can tell you. He is the one who pulled the lady from the sea.”

“Can you take me to Saba?”

“Now, senor?”

“Now.” I slipped a ten-guilder note out of my bulging wallet and handed it to the driver. “And make it fast.”

“Five minutes,” he said, pocketing the money.

In five minutes, almost to the second, we had twisted our way through a maze of narrow streets to the fishing docks outside Willemstad, clearing the way with a horn that the driver leaned on constantly. We jerked to a stop on a waterfront street in front of a frame building with one large smoke-stained window and a sign with weathered paint spelling “Vanvoort’s Hideaway.”

As I stepped out of the car, I felt a tug at my sleeve and realized that I had almost forgotten about Pilar.

“Nick, the blonde woman… is it your Rona?”

“It must be.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“Find her if I can.”

“But we have a mission.”

If it weren’t for Rona, there wouldn’t be any mission. She’s the one who gave us our key clue, and now she can lead us to Gorodin. Besides, she wasn’t trained for dangerous work as we were. If she’s in Gorodin’s hands now, she could be paying a terrible price. I have to try to find her. I owe her that much.”

“You don’t owe her anything,” Pilar said. “You didn’t force her to take the assignment. And the time… you know what day this is?”

“Yes, I know. Tomorrow is the deadline.”

“Forget about her, Nick. Come with me, and I will take you to Torio. We will find him on the waterfront not far from here.”

I stopped walking in front of the door of Vanvoort’s Hideaway and looked down into Pilars face. When I spoke, my voice was cold. “The decision is mine, and I have made it. Are you coming in with me?”

She met my gaze for a moment, then looked away. She reached out and touched my hand. “I’m sorry, Nick. You must act according to your conscience. I will help you in any way you ask.”

I gave her hand a squeeze and pushed on in through the door.

Seventeen

Vanvoort’s Hideaway was no tourist bar. The lights were dim, the air was stale. The walls were covered with posters advertising beer and politicians. The linoleum on the floor had worn through to the bare wood in the strip along the front of the unvarnished bar.

The clientele were fishermen and sailors of many nations. And all male. The hum of conversation and clink of glasses ceased abruptly as the customers caught sight of Pilar who looked spectacular in a short lemon-yellow dress.

The man behind the bar was a brush-cut Dutchman with biceps like cantaloupes bulging from under the short sleeves of his shirt.

“I’m looking for the fisherman called Saba,” I said.

The Dutchman’s tiny eyes ran over me like insects. “Who says he’s here?”

“His friend the taxi driver. The one in the chopped off Hudson.”

He shook his massive head from side to side. “Don’t mean nothin’ to me.”

Planting both hands on the.bar, I stuck my face into his. “Mister, I don’t have time to play games, and I don’t have time to explain. But I want you to know this: if you don’t point Saba out to me in five seconds or tell me where I can find him, I am going to come over this bar and break your bones till I get an answer.”

The Dutchman knew I meant it. His ruddy complexion paled. “Over there,” he rasped. “Alone in the booth by the wall.”

When I turned from the bar, the babble in the place suddenly began again, and everybody got busy not looking at Pilar.

The man alone in the booth was a black Virgin Islander.

“Saba?” I asked.

“That’s right, mon. Sit down. And de lady, too.” His speech had the musical part British, part calypso lilt you hear in parts of the West Indies. “You must put de fear of God in Hans, make him back down like dat.”

“I want to ask about the woman you brought in two days ago. The one you found in the sea.”

“Ah, de yellow-hair lady. Very pretty. She don’t wake up to say even a word. Very, very tired. The sea drain your strength. I don’t think she hurt bad, though. Nothing broken.”

“And a man took her away? One who said he was her husband?”

“Oh-ho, maybe he’s not her husban’, eh? I not surprised. He don’ look like de kind of mon de yellow-hair lady take for husban’. Too rough, too ugly. Are you the husban’, mon?”

“No, but I’m her friend, and the man who took her away definitely was not. Do you know where he took her?”

“Yes, I know. I tell him de way to Queen’s Hospital. He say never min’, he take lady to where he have friends. He say they take care of her. So I watch where he go. He take de lady in de power boat with two other men. They go to Little Dog, a little island twelve miles offshore. Nothin’ but big rocks on Little Dog. Big rocks and ol’ fisherman’s shack. No fishermen use dat place no more. Men with guns dere now, scare everybody.”

“Can you show me how to get to Little Dog?” I asked.

“Sure. Walk down to de docks, you can see de place. Come on, I show you.”

The black man stood up and moved out of the booth. Pilar followed us out onto the street and down a couple of steep blocks to the waterfront Saba pointed out across the sparkling water to what appeared to be a jagged outcropping of brown rocks.

“Little Dog,” he said. “Maybe 500 meters long, 200 wide. Only safe place to land a boat is aroun’ de other side. Can’t see from here.”

“I need a fast boat,” I said. “Do you know someone who will rent one to me?”

“Sure. I have a friend with de fastest boat in de harbor, except de smugglers and de police. He charge you plenty, but you get your money’s worth.”

“Good.” I turned to Pilar. “Now I’m going to ask you to do something that will be very difficult for you.”

“What is it, Nick.”

“Wait for me. Just wait If I’m not back by dark, notify David Hawk in Washington and tell him everything you know.”

“Can’t I come with you? I can steer a boat. I can help in many ways.”

“No,” I said firmly. “This is my job, and I want you to stay here.”

“Yes, Nick,” she said with a submissiveness that was unlike her.

I gave her arm a squeeze and followed Saba down to the docks where we would find his friend with the speedboat. It turned out to be an old ski boat that had been lovingly kept in sound condition by its proud owner. The man was not over-anxious to let a stranger take off in his pride and joy, but enough guilders changed hands to ease his reluctance. he motor was a giant Evinrude that roared instantly to life and soon I was skimming over the light chop of the straits toward Little Dog. Before I got too close, I wheeled in a wide circle around the rocky island. In an inlet on the far side a cabin cruiser was tied to an unpainted pier. Beyond the pier stood a wooden shack. Pale gray smoke drifted from the chimney pipe.

I throttled the Evinrude down, then scanned the shack and surrounding rocks for any sign of life. There was none. So I gunned the motor and looped back around the island.

I prowled along the rocky shore on the far side, looking for a possible landing place. Jagged pinnacles thrust themselves upward fifteen or twenty feet, as if some vast disturbance in the center of the earth had flung them up from the ocean floor. Finally I came upon a narrow wedge of water between a pair of jutting boulders and managed to squeeze the boat through. I made her secure and climbed up through the rocks and headed toward the shack on the opposite side of Little Dog.

The going was slow at best, and I moved cautiously in case Gorodin had posted a lookout. After twenty minutes I reached a vantage point where I could lie on my stomach and watch the shack. It looked larger here than from the ocean side, and it seemed to be divided into two rooms. The only window I could see had boards nailed over with only slitted openings. Still no sign of human life, just the spiraling smoke smudging the air. Now that I was downwind of the smoke, I noticed an unpleasant stench. Perhaps in the back of my mind I knew what it was, but I rejected the thought and crept toward the shack, keeping out of sight of the slitted window in case someone watched behind it.

I made it to the shack without being challenged and crouched below the boarded window.

The stench here was unmistakable. It was the smell of singed flesh and human hair. I clenched my teeth and tried to erase a mental picture of what might have happened to Rona Volstedt. Inside the shack a voice spoke in the tight tones of rage barely contained. It was the heavy growl of Fyodor Gorodin.

“You have made much trouble for me, you and Carter,” he was saying. “But you can still earn my forgiveness. You have information; I need this information. A simple exchange. And really, how can you refuse a man like myself who has so much talent for persuasion?”

Slowly, I raised my head to squint through the space between the boards as Gorodins voice continued.

“We know that Carter did not drown. We have word that he was brought ashore at a Mayan fishing village on Yucatan. Beyond that we have been unable to trace him. There would have been a contact point where you could reach him in case of emergency. I want you to tell me where it is.”

Through the window boards, I could now see into the room. Slumped in a wooden chair, Gorodin hovering near, was Rona Volstedt. A single rope was tied around her middle, binding her arms to her sides and holding her to the back of the chair. She wore only a tattered scrap of the pants she had worn when she dived from the cruise ship. Above the waist she was naked, her small, well-formed breasts exposed. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her hair matted. When she spoke, it was in a weary, distant voice.

“There wasn’t any contact point,” she said.

“You’re a liar and a fool,” Gorodin said. “You must know that I can make you tell. Peacefully now, or later in screaming agony. One way or another I will find Carter. He has already killed some of my best men, and every minute that he remains alive, he is a threat to our plan. Now — once more — where can we find Nick Carter?”

“I don’t have any idea where he is,” Rona said in a tired monotone.

“I have no more patience,” Gorodin rumbled. “And now I will show you what happens to people with whom I have lost patience.”

The big Russian moved aside and the source of the smoke from the chimney was revealed. In a large iron brazier a fiery bed of charcoal smouldered. The rubber covered handles of a long tool of some sort protruded from the coals. Gingerly, Gorodin grasped the handles and drew out the tool. It was a long, sharp-nosed pliers. The pincers glowed dull orange as he displayed them for Rona.

“Perhaps you have heard of the technique,” he said.

“The flesh is pulled from the body a pinch at a time. The tender breasts of a woman receive special attention. You will live quite a long time, but in each moment of that time, you will beg to die.”

Rona’s eyes were fixed hypnotically on the gleaming tips of the pliers. “But I know nothing,” she said tearfully, “nothing at all.”

Gorodin ignored her. “I will give you one more chance to answer my questions,” he said coolly. “Then we will begin.”

I considered my course of action. I could kill Gorodin by shooting through the window slats, but by their shadows in the dusky room, I could see that two more men stood against the near wall. They would certainly be armed and quite probably would kill Rona before I could get around the corner of the shack to the outside door. Another door, directly across from the window, apparently led to a second room. It offered no help. If the room had a window, it would be boarded.

As I tried to think of a workable plan, Gorodin replaced the pliers in the coals and turned in my direction. I ducked out of sight as he said to one of the invisible men, “Bring him in here. Show Miss Volstedt what she can expect if she does not cooperate.”

A crewcut Slavic type crossed in front of my window, and as I raised my head again, he opened the door on the opposite side. A bumed-flesh smell spilled out like some foul gas. The Slav returned in a minute dragging something on the floor behind him which he deposited a few feet from Rona.

The thing on the floor was man-shaped, with a head, a trunk, two arms and two legs. Little else about it suggested a man. The flesh and muscle was lacerated, scorched, ripped, and pulled away from every part of the head and body. There seemed not to be a patch anywhere that had not been mutilated. In many places the bones showed through holes in the flesh while the thing leaked blood and other body fluids.

The lips were completely ripped away, leaving a skull-like grimace of naked teeth. Where one eye had been, there was now only a moist, blackened hole.

Worst of all, that remnant of a man was alive.

Rona gagged and turned her head away as this apparition scrabbled pitifully at the floorboards with a spastic hand.

“You shouldn’t turn from an old friend like that,” Gorodin said. “Or perhaps you don’t recognize the handsome young Boris.”

Rona released a shuddering sob.

“We found him unconscious but still alive,” Gorodin continued. “We revived him. We nursed and fed him for the ordeal. Then he paid, not too bravely, I admit, for that careless moment when he shirked his duty and allowed you and Carter to escape.” Rising abruptly, his voice hardened. “And now your time has come. I want Nick Carter, and you will tell me where to find him.”

“I–I don’t know,” Rona sobbed.

Gorodin made a cursing sound in Russian and reached for the rubber handles of the pliers.

The water proof tube that contained the six smoke pellets Stewart had given me was in my hand. Somehow, I had to hurl one of the pellets into the glowing charcoal. It was an easy distance — the problem was sending the pellet through the slatted window. What I needed was a blowgun, and as the image sprang into mind, I quickly undipped a ballpoint pen from my shirt pocket and unscrewed the cap, discarding it along with the ink cartridge inside. This left me with a three-and-a-half-inch tube, narrow at one end, just wide enough at the other to take one of the smoke pellets. I dropped a pellet into the pen barrel, poked it between the window boards, and began to adjust it carefully so that the trajectory of the missile would be accurate.

Now Gorodin advanced to Rona. Holding one grip of the pliers in each hand, he eased the red-hot pincers toward her left nipple. I aimed the barrel of the makeshift blowgun toward the glowing charcoal. My first try would have to be perfect, because I wasn’t likely to get a second.

I drew in a deep breath, put my lips to the end of the tube, and expelled the air in an explosive poof.

The pellet flew into the charcoal and settled on the burning embers with a delightful hiss and mushroom puff that sprayed its pale, choking smoke to all corners of the room.

Blessing Stewart’s ingenuity, I pulled out the handkerchief mask and cupped it over my nose and mouth. I wheeled around the corner of the shack and shouldered the door. It shuddered loose, then splintered open when I gave it a violent kick.

As I charged into the shack, Luger in hand, I saw Gorodin stumble through the door into the adjoining room, while one of his men was blindly searching for a target for his machine pistol.

I fired and he went down. From the floor he was still trying to raise the machine pistol, so I shot him again and he quit moving.

The second man in the room charged me with the red-hot pliers after picking them up from the floor where Gorodin had dropped them. I put a bullet through his head, then rushed to Rona and quickly released her. Between coughs she managed to gasp out my name.

“Nick?”

“Right,” I said. “Take it easy and I’ll have you out of here in a minute.”

The handkerchief mask slipped away from my mouth as I carried Rona outside and let her down on the ground. I waited until my eyes cleared, then I went back after Gorodin.

I stepped over the quivering remains of Boris and into the second room of the shack. Empty. There was a board-covered window, but it had been smashed open. I peered out at the surrounding rocks, but saw no sign of Gorodin.

A distant yell from Rona jerked me away from the window. I charged back through the shack and out the front door. Gorodin was running down the short path between boulders toward the dock where the cabin cruiser was tied. As I came through the door, he whirled and fired at me with a long-barreled Erma pistol. His bullet tugged at my sleeve, just enough to spoil my aim as I squeezed off two answering shots. One of them caught the cruiser’s fuel tank, and the boat went up with a mightly whoomph as Gorodin flung himself off the path and into the protecting rocks.

I knelt beside Rona. “Can you walk?”

“I–I think so.”

“Stay right behind me, then. I have a boat tied up on the other side of the island. It won’t be easy going, and Gorodin’s out there somewhere with a gun.”

“You lead, Nick,” she said. “I’ll make it”

I peeled off my shirt and gave it to Rona, not for modesty’s sake, but because it was almost the color of the rocks, and would camouflage her white skin. My own hide was sun-bronzed enough to keep from being such an obvious target. With Rona behind me I picked my way back over the jagged rocks in the direction of my boat, painfully alert for the slightest sound or movement.

There was just one narrow ridge of rock between us and the boat when I saw it — a glint of metal in the sun. Whirling, I threw Rona heavily to the ground and dropped flat beside her just as the flat crack of the Erma pistol shattered the silence and gravel spurted two feet in front of us.

“Stay flat,” I hissed at Rona and aimed with the Luger at the spot where I had seen the flash of the gun barrel. I fired once, twice.

Gorodins arm and shoulder appeared around a boulder and he let off a wild shot that pinged off the rocks over our heads. I fired back and heard the Russian cry out in pain as my slug ripped his forearm.

Careless now, Gorodin shifted his position to examine his wound, and threw a perfect shadow on the facing boulder. Apparently he wasn’t hurt seriously, for I saw the shadow clench and unclench its right hand, then take the pistol again and creep higher on the rocks for a shot.

When Gorodin’s head came into view, I was ready with the Luger centered. I squeezed the trigger. The hammer snapped on an empty chamber. I’d used two clips of ammunition and didn’t have another.

The Russian got his shot off but, hampered by the bullet wound, his aim was poor, and he ducked back out of sight.

I scanned the jagged rocks around us for a spot that would provide better cover. Ten yards back the way we had come was a coffin-shaped cavity.

Mouth to Rona’s ear, I whispered, “When I tell you, get up and run for that hole back there. Move fast and keep down.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but Gorodin was up and taking aim again. “Go!” I said softly. Rona leaped out, ran in a crouch, stumbled, and plunged into the niche as a bullet bit off a chunk of boulder inches from the opening.

I scrambled to my feet and followed her. As I dived for the shallow pocket, a bullet burned my shoulder and thudded into the dirt. I tumbled into the sheltered space and felt the sticky wetness of blood where I had been creased.

“You’re hit!” Rona said.

“Just barely.”

From beyond came the voice of Gorodin, who might now have guessed why I wasn’t returning his fire. “Carter, can you hear me? One more like that will finish you! Come out with your hands up!”

After a few seconds of silence, there were two more shots. One of the bullets found our narrow opening and, ricocheting back and forth, spattered us with chips of rock.

Leaning close to Rona, I whispered, “Next time he fires, scream.”

She nodded in understanding, and at the next gunshot gave an agonized shriek. I gave her the “okay” sign and waited.

“All right, Carter,” Gorodin bellowed. “Come out or the woman will die!”

“I can’t!” I shouted back, making my voice tight with pain. “I’m hit and the woman is badly wounded. Let her go and I’ll make a deal with you.”

“I think you are out of bullets, too, eh. Throw your gun away; then we will talk.”

I smeared blood from my wound into Rona’s hairline and down her face, set her in position on her back and told her what to do. Then I called to Gorodin and tossed the gun out.

When I heard Gorodin approaching, I turned on my belly and lay hunched and still. The sound of Gorodin’s heavy footsteps crunched to a halt above us. After a beat of silence, Gorodin said, “Out, Carter, out!”

Then Rona said weakly, “He — he’s unconscious.”

“Perhaps not,” Gorodin growled. “Let me see if he is only faking.”

His gun exploded just above me and a bullet scattered soil and rock chips an inch from my head. His words had signaled the gimmick, and I didn’t move a muscle.

A shadow fell across the rocks. I saw it from the corner of my eye as he bent over me. I knew he had the gun in his fist, carefully leveled, and I waited in heart-jolting suspense. Rona, I prayed, don’t fail me now!

Then I heard the thrust of her leg, the soft thump of her foot as it connected with Gorodin’s body and he tripped.

The stiletto clutched in my hand, I twirled instantly and sank the blade into his massive chest. With a long sigh, a gurgling moan, he gave up the gun — and his life.

I led Rona out into the fading afternoon sunlight and said, “The boat’s just past that ridge. Wait for me there — I’ve got one last thing to do.”

She looked at me questioningly, but turned and walked toward the boat. I bent for the Erma pistol Gorodin had dropped and jacked out all the shells but one. Then I picked my way back over the rocks to the fisherman’s shack. The door hung open and the smoke had cleared.

I walked across the room to the torn remains of Boris. Barely audible whimpering sounds came from the ruined throat, while the one working hand scratched at the floor.

It seemed there should be something profound for me to say, but I couldn’t find words. So I simply placed the pistol on the floor by the moving hand, and walked out the door.

I had gone only a short distance back to Rona and the boat when I heard the shot

Eighteen

When I joined Rona in the boat, she was sitting hunched in the bow, hugging herself like a small abandoned child. Tears running steadily down her cheeks, and she trembled pitifully.

“It’s all right now,” I said. “No one will come after us.”

She reached out for me and folded her arms about me, clinging to me as if I were a raft of survival. After keeping her cool through a nightmare of violence and long exposure to the ocean, she was at the limit of endurance — at the edge of collapse. And I knew she must have rest and medical attention.

With one hand holding Rona close to me, the other steering the boat, I sliced across the water to the docks of Curasao. As we neared the slip where the speedboat was moored, I saw a figure standing there, waiting. It was Pilar. Apparently watching for the boat, she had seen us coming.

I throttled down, drifted to the dock and threw the bow line to Pilar. She made it fast on a cleat as I jumped out and secured the stern. Then I cradled Rona in my arms and lifted her to the dock where, in the trance-like catatonia of shock, she sat like a zombie.

“This must be Rona,” Pilar said.

“Yes. She’s in bad shape. Let’s get a taxi and take her to a hospital.”

“I can do better than that. While you were gone, I rented a Jeep. It’s parked just over there. You take Rona in back; I’ll drive. I know the way to the hospital.” Then, incongruously, she added, “Your Rona is very pretty.”

“Pilar,” I said, “I’m glad to see you. You’re a handy gadget to have around. Let’s go.”

When we were in the Jeep with Pilar tooling expertly through the streets of Willemstad, she said, “What happened on the island.”

“Gorodin was there with a couple of his goons,” I told her. “He was about to torture Rona to make her talk. What he didn’t know was that she had no answers to give him. She was just an amateur in a game for hard-core pros.”

“But she did volunteer,” Pilar observed.

“That’s right, but none of us took the time to tell her the risks involved.”

Pilars black eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “Do you care for her, Nick?”

I stopped to think a moment before I answered. “If you mean am I violins and candles in love with her, the answer is no. I’ve been in this dirty business for so long I don’t know if I could really love anyone in the classic sense. But if you mean do I care what happens to her, sure I do. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gone bucketing off to Little Dog island to help her. I know that seems a bit too human for me, but I haven’t quite turned into a block of ice.”

Pilar spoke quietly, keeping her eyes straight ahead. “Nick, tell me something.”

“Sure.”

“Do you care what happens to me?”

I reached up and laid my hand on the warm flesh of her shoulder. “Very much,” I said.

Pilar sighed, then in a curious tone said, “I hope you will never be sorry.”

Just then we turned and gunned up the drive of Queen’s Hospital, a sparkling new building of pastel blue. I left a wad of bills with the cashier and was assured by one of the resident physicians that Rona would have the very best of care. Any extra expenses would be paid by the American consul, I told the doc-tor, and then called the consulate to make the arrangements.

I rejoined Pilar in the Jeep. It was dark, and the sky sparkled with an infinity of stars. I said, “Let’s go rip off some smugglers.”

I took the wheel of the Jeep; Pilar gave directions. We headed back to the waterfront, and then turned south.

“There must be other news you have not told me,” Pilar said. “How did you leave Gorodin?”

“Dead.”

“And the two who were with him?”

“Also dead. And a kid named Boris who died because he was too kind and too careless for the game.”

“So you left four bodies?”

“Right. But somewhere Anton Zhizov and Knox Wamow are preparing to blow up New York tomorrow. If we don’t get to them first it won’t matter a damn if there’s four bodies found on Little Dog Island or four thousand.”

Pilar looked pensive. And was silent.

We drove on into the shabbiest section of the waterfront where the poorest of the local fishermen moored their sorry looking boats in water thick with oil and debris. A couple of miles further on Pilar pointed out a scabrous gray frame building, illuminated in front by a single pale light bulb. It made Vanvoort’s Hideaway seem like Trader Vic’s in comparison.

“This is where we have to start,” Pilar said. “If you want Torio, you go to Little Liza’s.”

The sound waves struck us when we were still fifty feet from the door. A full blown riot could not have been louder. Inside, we joined a hundred or so merrymakers who, though not quite rioting, were at least hysterical. Everyone seemed to be in perpetual motion. It was impossible to talk above the din, so everyone shouted. Occasionally a peal of shrill female laughter would cut through the cacophony. Somewhere a juke box was playing, but only the reverberations of the deepest bass notes could be heard.

Pilar and I picked our way among the frenetic bodies to a simple plank bar set up at the rear of the building. Standing back of this, pouring drinks from unlabeled bottles was a woman roughly the size of Godzilla. And almost as attractive.

“Little Liza?” I shouted in Pilars ear. It was hardly a wild guess.

“Little Liza!” she confirmed with a grin.

Liza wore a cascade of tight curls in a shade of red that couldn’t have been human hair. Somewhere between six and seven feet tall, Liza was all pouches and pockets and odd-shaped lumps of flesh. It was as if an amateur sculptor had hurriedly slapped clay on a framework. Intending to finish the job later, he had rightfully lost faith in his creative ability and had given up.

When I finally got her attention, Liza lumbered toward me from the other side of the plank bar, the flesh of her various parts all dancing to different rhythms.

“What’ll it be?” she rumbled in a voice like an empty barrel rolling over cobblestones.

“I want Torio,” I shouted.

“Never heard of him,” Little Liza boomed back at me.

“Gorodin sent me.”

“Never heard of him either.”

I pulled out my wallet. I was running low on guilders, so I spread out a number of U.S. bills on the plank bar in front of the huge woman.

“Andrew Jackson I’ve heard of,” she said. “Torio’s in the back room sleeping one off.” She pointed a finger about the size of a dill pickle.

With Pilar in tow, I headed for a narrow door at the far end of the bar. The small room behind it was furnished with one chair, one table, and one cot Lying boozed out on the cot, twisted in a tangled grayish blanket that may once have been white, was the squat, baldheaded man I had seen in the smugglers’ launch.

I closed the door and the noise from beyond it diminished. I checked another door in the opposite wall. It led to the open air behind the building. I crossed to the oblivious smuggler, frisked him and came up with a Colt .38 automatic. Passing this to Pilar, I stuck the barrel of my Luger under his nose and slapped him across the face.

“Torio!” I yelled.

He rolled his head, made complaining grunts, then slowly dragged his eyes open. When he saw the gun under his nose, his eyes got very wide.

“Hey, what is this, a heist?”

“Get up, Torio,” I growled. “We’re going for a ride.”

That startled him. He sat up. “Wait a minute,” he pleaded. “I don’t even know you.”

“It’s not that kind of a ride,” I told him. “Play it straight with me and you’ll have a round trip. Now move it!”

I gave him a little poke with the gun barrel for emphasis, and Torio sprang from the cot with remarkable agility for a man with a bad hangover. I shoved him out the back door and he marched obediently around to where we had parked the jeep.

Pilar drove, while I sat in back with Torio and covered him with the Luger.

“Drive up the road about a hundred yards, then pull off when you find a dark spot,” I told her.

“Now, Torio,” I said, when we had driven up a dim side road and parked, “I want to know about the suitcases.”

“Suitcases?” he echoed.

“My time is short, Torio,” I said, “and so is my temper. In only a minute or two, you will hear bones snapping, and you will see lots of blood. Those bones and that blood will be yours, Torio, so please take this opportunity to volunteer information.”

In the glow of moonlight, I could see beads of sweat pop up on his scalp and trickle down the smooth sides of his head.

He nodded rapidly, “Okay, okay. I’m not about to be a hero for a bunch of foreigners. You mean the suitcases I been runnin’ out to the Gaviota, right?”

“A clever deduction, Torio. I want to know who gave them to you and where you picked them up.”

“It was a husky, foreign sounding guy I made the deal with six months ago. Big, hairy ape. He never told me his name, and it wasn’t a guy you could ask questions. He always paid me in advance, then he would tell me when there was a suitcase to pick up. I’d head out south of here, a little ways up into the hills, and a helicopter would come in with the suitcase, and I’d take it out to the ship. Believe me, that’s all I know, friend. I even looked in one of them suitcases, and it was empty. Damned queer business, but I don’t get paid to be curious.”

“How many of the suitcases have you put on the ship?” I asked.

“Lemme see, we took the last one out three nights ago. That’ll make eight, total.”

“Can you take us to where the helicopter lands?”

“Sure, but there’s always a couple of guards there with guns. Them and the pilot, a guy named Ingram, who hangs around there when his whirlybird is in.”

“It’ll be up to you,” I said, “to see that we get past the guards. Now let’s have the directions.”

Pilar drove south and turned into a narrow dirt road indicated by Torio. And then we wheeled into open country. It was fortunate that Pilar had rented the four-wheel-drive Jeep, for it was rough going as the road became a trail, the ground rocky, the terrain rising into rolling hills.

I had the smuggler sitting up in front now, so that when the spotlight hit us he was able to jump up and wave his arms to be recognized before anybody started shooting.

“It’s me, Torio,” he called.

A man carrying a rifle advanced slowly, coming to a stop six feet off to the side. “What are you doing here? There’s no pickup tonight”

“There’s some trouble on the Gaviota,” Torio said. The big man said I should come and tell Ingram.”

“Who are these other two?” the guard asked suspiciously.

“They’re — they’re—” Torio began clumsily.

“We’re with Gorodin,” I cut in. “We have information that must go to Zhizov at once.”

The names carried weight with the guard. The barrel of his rifle lowered, and he walked closer to the Jeep. “Show me some identification, please, sir,” he said respectfully.

“Of course,” I said, and fumbled in my pocket for some scrap of paper. I held it so the guard would have to reach in for it. When he did, I grabbed his wrist and yanked him forward. Pilar quickly hand-chopped the man behind the ear, knocking him cold before he had a chance to cry out.

I put a gag in the guard’s mouth and tied him up with a piece of nylon rope I had found in the boat and appropriated for such an emergency. Swiveling his spotlight, I lit up a small wooden building fifty yards beyond. Just behind it rested a small sturdy helicopter. I killed the light and motioned for Pilar to shut off the Jeep’s motor. Hustling Torio ahead of me, Luger in hand, I climbed out on foot toward the building with the coil of rope and hurried off, Pilar close behind. When we reached the door, I kicked it open and rushed in as I poked the button on the spotlight. Two men sleeping in cots along the far wall sat up abruptly. One was a heavy Slavic type who could have been the brother of the disabled guard at the entrance, the other was a pale skinny man with a big nose and weak chin. He would be Ingram, the pilot, I decided.

The guard type was sneaking a hand toward his rifle leaning against the wall near the head of his cot.

“You’ll die trying,” I told him, and the man froze. Ingram sat numbly, rubbing his eyes and blinking.

Pilar found a light switch and its glaring overhead flooded the single room of the building. Off to our left was a sophisticated short-wave radio set.

“Torio! You sold us out,” the guard accused.

“Sure,” the smuggler said, “with a gun at my head, I sell out fast — just like you, pal.”

“Ingram, you get dressed,” I ordered. “Is the helicopter gassed up?”

“Yes, to capacity,” he answered nervously.

The man was shaking with fear. I didn’t want him so frightened that he couldn’t fly, so I said. “Just follow orders, and you won’t get hurt.” That calmed him, and he began pulling on his clothes.

“Torio, sit in that chair,” I said, and the smuggler hastened to obey. I tossed the coil of rope to the guard and said, “Tie him up. I shouldn’t have to warn you to do a good job.”

I covered the guard and Torio with my Luger, watching to see that Torio was secured with good, tight knots. Pilar had the smuggler’s .38 in her hand and was keeping an eye on Ingram, but he wasn’t going to cause us any trouble.

When Torio was tightly bound, I said to the guard, “Now you sit in the chair on the other side of the room.” When he sullenly obeyed, I said to Pilar, “Get the rope and tie that one, too.”

Pilar handed the Colt to me and walked over to the guard. It was a bad mistake. She had stepped between me and our prisoner. In one swift movement, the man pulled out a knife from somewhere in his clothing and seized Pilar, twisting her around in front of him with her head bent back and his knife blade at her throat.

“Drop your gun or the woman dies,” he grated.

Crouched as he was behind the ample body of Pilar, the man offered no target I couldn’t be absolutely sure of missing her and hitting him in a mortal spot. If I moved the gun to take better aim, he would slash her throat. So I hesitated.

“Goddamn you, I said drop that gun.” he snapped. “Do you think I am bluffing?”

When I didn’t move, the guard twitched the knife and a red worm of blood crawled down Pilars neck. Still I held the Luger poised.

“Ingram, take this idiot’s gun away from him,” barked the guard.

“I–I can’t do it,” the pilot said in a tremulous voice.

The guard snarled at him, “Be a man for once, you sniveling coward or I’ll—”

We never found out what the guard might have done to Ingram because in his anger at the pilot, he had turned his head, just long enough for me to bring the Luger into position and shoot him through his exposed left temple. He spun away from Pilar, bounced off the wall and sagged to the floor. The knife clattered harmlessly away.

Pilar stared at me with a wounded expression. “You’d have let him cut my throat before you gave up your gun, wouldn’t you?” she said.

“Sure,” I admitted. “Once he had my gun, you and I both would have been as good as dead.”

She nodded slowly. “Yes, I suppose you’re right Just the same—” She shook her head, “You’re a cool one. You give me the chills.”

“We’ll warm you up later,” I said quickly and turned to the pilot “Now, Ingram, you’re going to take me to the place where you pick up the suitcases you deliver to Torio.”

“You mean Zhizov’s hideout?”

“That’s right. Where is it?”

“In the mountains on the border between Venezuela and British Guiana. But I could never land there in the dark. It’s difficult enough in the daylight.”

I checked my watch. “If we take off now, it should be light by the time we get there. And Ingram, if you should happen to fly me in the wrong direction, you’ll be grounded permanently. Six feet under.”

“I’m neither brave nor stupid,” he answered. “I’ll do exactly as you tell me.”

“That’s good, Ingram. You may yet live to write mama all the nasty details.”

Pilar, who had been standing quietly off to the side, spoke now. “Nick, you talk as if you’re going on alone from here.”

“I am,” I said. “This is the end of the line, and there will probably be some fireworks. A woman could be a handicap.”

“No,” she said, her feet spread in a determined stance. “We’ve come this far together, and I will not be left behind now. I have been much help to you, have I not?”

“That’s true, but—”

“Take me with you, Nick,” she broke in. “I can shoot as well as a man, and two guns will double our chances of success. It means very much to me, querido”

For a moment, I was undecided.

But what Pilar said made sense. She was a seasoned professional, tougher than most men. And she knew that she was expendable, that, if necessary for the sake of the mission, I would sacrifice her.

“Com© along then,” I said. “Since you won’t be using the Jeep to get back to town, go and pull the distributor cap so it’ll be useless to anyone who might find it helpful.” I couldn’t help adding, “You do know what a distributor cap is?”

Her full lips curved in a faintly mocking smile. “Yes, querido, I know about distributor caps and many other things you would not believe.”

I grinned back. “Okay. And you might give our friend out there another tap to keep him asleep for a while.”

“I will hurry,” she said, and, taking the .38 from me, she scurried off.

I crossed to the radio, smashed it to the floor repeatedly until the case burst open, then destroyed the guts with the butt of the guard’s rifle. During this crude disassembly, I kept an eye on Ingram, though he was being a very good boy, and was no more threat than a toothless old hound dog on a rope.

To Torio, I said, “You’ll work loose in a while, then you can walk back to Willemstad. It’s a long hike, but you’ll have time to consider better ways of making a living. Take up plumbing,” I suggested.

He barely smiled. He didn’t have much of a sense of humor.

Pilar returned carrying the distributor cap, which she held up for me with a mock curtsey. “The one out there should not wake up before noon tomorrow,” she said. “And then he will have a headache no aspirin will cure.”

“All right, Ingram,” I said, “let’s get your chopper into the air.” Then the three of us trudged across the rutted, rock-strewn ground to the waiting helicopter.

Nineteen

Ingram seemed to take charge of himself when he got behind the controls of the helicopter, and we lifted off into the night sky. We headed to the east and a little south, soon leaving the lights of Curasao behind us. The smaller island of Bonaire slipped away, too, and for awhile we had only the black Caribbean below us and the star-speckled sky above.

Presently we picked up the lights of Caracas, and for a time, followed the Venezuelan coast.

“You say this mountain hideaway of Zhizov’s is hard to spot,” I said.

“Almost impossible,” Ingram answered. “No airlines are routed to fly over the place. But if they were, they’d never see it. The buildings are constructed of the same orange-brown rock of the mountains. It’s all but invisible from the air. There are no roads leading up to it. All the supplies have to be flown in. Zhizov has a deal with one of the South American governments, I don’t know which, to fly the stuff in. My job has been to carry VIPs and those suitcases. And if I didn’t know the landmarks to guide me, I’d never find the place myself.”

We passed Trinidad off to our left and veered south to head inland over the marshy ground of the Orinoco Delta. The eastern sky began to lighten, and features of the land became visible as we thundered into the mountainous area known as the Guiana Highlands.

We had to gain altitude then, and Ingram adjusted the pitch of the rotors to take a deeper bite of the thinner air. The day grew brighter, but the high cloud cover showed no signs of dissipating.

The thought I’d been consciously avoiding forced its way into my mind. This was the day New York would die, unless I could stop it.

Ingram nudged my shoulder, breaking into my thoughts. He pointed up ahead at a rocky formation roughly in the shape of a raised fist delivering an obscene salute.

“See that up ahead?” the pilot shouted over the hammering of our engine. “That’s the landmark the pilots have to go by. Finger Mountain, we call it. Just beyond that, there’s a little rocky valley where Zhizov has set up his compound.”

“What are the chances that they’ll start shooting as soon as they see us coming in.”

“Not very likely, I think.” Ingram seemed to gain courage in the air that he lacked on the ground. “They’re pretty confident of their security up here, and copters come and go fairly often. Unless they’ve somehow got word of what happened back on Curasao, we shouldn’t have any trouble setting down.”

“Good,” I said.

“But that’s just at first. As soon as they spot you or the lady, all hell will break loose.”

“Can you give me an idea of the physical layout of the place?” I asked. “Where Zhizov’s headquarters are? Where the scientist, Warnow, does his work?”

“Nope,” Ingram said, then looked at me quickly as though to assure me of his sincerity. “Believe me, at this point, I’d tell you if I did. All I ever do is stay at the copter pad while somebody gets out or gets in, or while they load whatever they want me to carry.”

“What if you want to deliver a message?”

“I give it to the guard at the copter pad. He’ll come out and meet us. And he’ll be the first one you’ll have to deal with.”

We rounded the thrusting finger of rock, and began dropping into a narrow canyon with sheer cliffs on all sides. Even then, if I had not been searching for them, I would not have seen all the buildings, roughly constructed out of rocks. I counted four rather large structures, a small one near a patch of level ground toward which we were dropping. Low rocky ridges and boulders cluttered the whole area, and there were only faint signs of paths connecting the buildings.

As I watched, a man came out of the small structure near the helicopter pad and looked up at us. He carried a rifle slung over his shoulder.

“That’s the guard,” Ingram said.

“Is he the only one?”

“He’s the only one I’ve ever seen. There could be others.”

To Pilar I said, “Get down low so you can’t be seen.” After she was in position, I also made myself invisible.

“When we land,” I told Ingram, “signal the guard to come in close, right up to the door.”

“What if I can’t get him over here?” the pilot asked nervously, his airborne courage beginning to drain away.

Try real hard,” I answered. “As if your life depended upon it. Because, Ingram, old buddy, it does.”

We touched down gently in the small clearing and Ingram cut the engine. As the big rotor slowed to a standstill, the man with the rifle called something from where he stood, twenty feet away.

Ingram shoved the door open and yelled, “I’ve got something here for the general.”

“Are you lame?” the guard called back. “Bring it over.”

“I–I’ll need help with it,” Ingram said. “It’s too heavy for me.”

There was a silence. But then, footsteps crunched toward us on the gravelly surface. “I’m not supposed to be a porter, you know,” complained the guard. “You ought to—”

He stopped abruptly, as if he might have seen us. I knew we were in trouble when I heard the unmistakable sound of the guard unslinging his rifle and working the action. I held the Luger ready, but to risk a shot now and alarm the whole crew would be fatal. Instead, I applied pressure to my forearm and Hugo dropped into my palm. I reversed the stiletto; nipping the blade between thumb and forefinger, and rose quickly into the door opening. The guard was bringing the rifle up as I sent the blade winging toward him.

The Stiletto turned over once in the air before the blade buried itself in the mans neck. He made a sound like a hoarse whisper, took two steps backward, then fell to the ground, blood pumping from his throat.

Pilar jumped out of the copter. Ingram gaped from the pilot’s seat at the dead man.

“What now?” Pilar asked.

“Now I’m going to sneak in and investigate this rock village. You stay here to watch Ingram. When I come back, I may be on the run, and I’ll need somebody to cover me.”

“All right, Nick,” she said, with a meek acceptance that surprised me.

I kissed her lightly, then bent over the dead guard, yanked my stiletto from his throat and wiped the blade clean. I returned it to the forearm sheath, then took off through the rocks, avoiding the path that led away from the guardhouse.

Remembering my aerial view of the site, I hustled off in the direction of the largest building. It seemed a logical assumption that it would be the headquarters of the operation. I lay on a small ridge overlooking a path that lead to a long, low structure — a barracks. As I watched, men in rough blue clothes and the caps of workmen filed from the exit. They appeared to be unarmed. A number of others carried holstered sidearms and wore the brown uniform with red trim of the Soviet army. Beyond the barracks, I spied the large square building that I had made my first target.

I left my vantage point and, circling the barracks, made a sneak approach to a point above it. Like the others, it stood only about six feet high, and I had a hunch that the interior descended below ground level. I heard voices, and knelt to listen at a narrow ventilating slit.

“You sent for me, General Zhizov?” It was a young voice — eager, military.

Zhizov answered with an oily-smooth, patronizing inflection. “I sent for you, Major Raszky, because I did not receive a communication at the scheduled time from Colonel Gorodin. So we must assume that he will be unavailable to us in the final stages of the operation. I need a second in command, and I have chosen you.”

“I am honored, General.”

Tell me, Major, are you entirely familiar with the plan?”

“Yes, sir. We have planted nuclear explosive devices in seven American cities, and the most recent device was placed at the Panama Canal. The names of the cities and the exact locations of the bombs are known only to you and to the American scientist.”

“Very good, Raszky. And do you know when the first bomb is scheduled to go off?”

“Today, sir.” An embarrassed clearing of his throat “The rumor is all over the camp, sir.”

“Yes, it’s hardly a secret; the preparations are obvious. I’ll tell you now that the first of the American cities to be destroyed will be New York. Since their government has not accepted our terms, Dr. Warnow will detonate the first bomb in exactly four hours.”

Vastly relieved, I glanced at my watch. There had been the icy fear that while I was whirling through the Venezuelan sky at dawn, New York might even then have been leveled in the hellish flames of a nuclear blast.

As I considered the odds against me, the echo of chilling snarls poured from the ventilator.

“Ah, I see my canine friends have come awake,” Zhizov purred. “Don’t be afraid, Major, as long as I am in control, they will not harm you. But a word from me and they would kill you in a matter of seconds.” Zhizov’s delighted laughter was mimed by an unconvinced Raszky. “These beasts are ruled by the two most powerful forces in the world, Major,” Zhizov continued. “Fear and hate. Remember that”

“Yes, sir,” the major responded uncertainly over the growls of the beasts.

I eased away from the ventilator and took up a prone position overlooking the paths between the buildings. Above all, I needed some clue to the whereabouts of Knox Warnow, who was the key to the whole deadly business.

Workmen strolled by singly and in pairs. The armed soldiers with their cocky bearing seemed confident to the point of indifference. Perhaps, as Ingram had implied, they had grown careless in the belief that their security in such a location was invulnerable.

It was clear that I must have freedom to move about. So I waited until the next workman passed beneath and dropped behind him. I clubbed him with the Luger, and he went limp in my arms. Quickly, I dragged him off into the rocks and silenced him permanently.

I peeled off the blue coveralls he wore and pulled them on over my clothes. The legs were a little short, but otherwise it was a good fit. I put on the hat and pulled the visor low over my forehead. From a reasonable distance, I could pass undetected. After hiding the workman’s body between two giant boulders, I headed back to the path and began to follow it. Footsteps crunched behind me. I ducked into the low doorway of what appeared to be a supply room. I knelt there with my back to the path and fiddled with the handle of the door as if I were inspecting a faulty lock.

The warm smell of food reached my nostrils as two workman paused to linger on the path behind me.

“I don’t have to guess who gets that breakfast you carry,” one of them said. “The American, yes? The scientist.”

“Of course,” said the other. “He is our guest of honor.”

“What is he having this morning while we choke our usual garbage?”

“Fresh eggs, ham, toasted bread, and ripe tomatoes.”

The first workman; groaned expressively. “I pray that it will not be icing until we can all leave this mountain purgatory and live like human beings again. How I envy the fine food and willing women enjoyed by the American.”

“That time is near, comrade. We are supposed to strike at the Americans today.”

“If so, then tonight we celebrate. But now I must go.”

As I watched covertly, one of the two men went up an adjoining path, branching left, while the other, carrying the tray of food, continued straight ahead. I let him get well down the path, then tailed him, the cap low over my face.

The man did not turn around, and so I followed him to one of the larger structures, set apart from the cluster of buildings. He went down several steps, opened a door, and vanished behind it I gave him several seconds, then entered the same door.

These buildings, I discovered, had been dug much deeper and finished far more elaborately than I had suspected. Their thoughtful design indicated a long period of preparation.

There was one long corridor with walls of smooth stone that curved in a gentle arc. Though I could not see the workman, I could hear his footsteps up ahead. The corridor was lighted by electric bulbs at regular intervals, and there was, no doubt, a generating plant.

I remembered then that several years before there had been rumors of a Russian base being readied somewhere in South America. It was about the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and in the detente that followed, such rumors died. It appeared now that the base was a fact. It was probably abandoned by the official Russian regime, but reactivated by Zhizov and his faction as a hidden center for their operations.

Along the entire corridor, I had passed only one door. Apparently they were few rooms, since they had to be carved out of solid rock. At the sound of voices up ahead, I halted abruptly.

“I have brought a kings breakfast for his highness.” It was the food bearer’s voice, heavy with sarcasm.

“Just deliver the food, and shove the idiot remarks.” The answering voice was gruff, all business”.

“What does the American do in there?” the workman asked. “Is he prepared for the big day?”

Now I inched along the curving wall to get a look at the speakers and reached a point where I could see the end of the corridor. A soldier with an imposing black moustache stood there guarding a solid door. He took the tray of food from the workman and pursed his lips before he said, “He seems no different than usual, except that he was up at dawn this morning. But I cannot know what goes on in his head.”

“No, I suppose not. Well, the best for him, the worst for me. I’m on my way to the morning slop at the mush bucket.”

I hurried back down the corridor the way I had come. Now that I knew where to find Warnow, I had to scheme a way to reach him. As I pondered this problem, I rounded a curve and, too late, saw a figure approaching in the distance. I could see by the uniform that it was one of the soldiers.

Casually, as if I had forgotten something, I turned back. He called after me but I played deaf and dumb. Around the curve, out of the soldiers view, I sprinted back toward Warnow’s sanctum. But “footsteps approached from that direction. I paused. That would be the food-carrying workman returning, another soldier behind him at Warnow’s door.

I made a fast decision and bolted for the one door I had seen leading off the corridor.

The door was locked, so I dug under the workman’s coveralls into my own pocket and came up with a thin springy strip of steel. Stronger and more flexible than the traditional piece of plastic, this device quickly sprung the simple lock.

With the workman still approaching from one direction and the soldier from the other, I shoved the door open and darted inside.

Twenty

It took a few seconds for the plush interior of that room to register. There were no rough surfaces, no drab colors. In soft textures, there were cushions, divans, beds, lounges — all in a carnival of rainbow hues.

“You might knock at least,” came a definitely female voice from somewhere off to my left

“The great scientist must be up early today,” said another voice from the other direction.

When my eyes had adjusted to the dim light, I discovered that the voices came from an area of satiny beds and furry cushions in recessed ovals at each side of the room. As I watched, tousled blonde heads appeared left and right, followed by bodies like college cheerleaders. Blonde number one wore a pink nightgown short enough to leave no doubt that she was born a blonde. Number two wore harem pajamas transparent enough to confirm that she was also a genuine blonde.

“Hope I’m not intruding,” I said.

“I’m Terri,” said blonde number one in the pink shorty.

“And I’m Jerri,” said number two in the harem pajamas.

“Both spelled with an ‘i’.” Terri explained

“An essential bit of information,” I said.

“We’re twins,” Jerri offered.

“Another startling revelation,” I said.

The girls left their beds and came to look me over.

“I’ve never seen you before,” said Terri.

“You don’t really belong here, do you?” Jerri added.

“You blew in like a storm,” said Terri. “I think you’re being chased and you want us to hide you. How exciting!”

“You’re not a policeman, are you?” said Jerri. “We don’t hide policemen.”

“I’m not a policeman,” I assured them. “What I am and what I do — it’s too much to explain in less than an hour, and I don’t have thirty seconds. But you might say that I’m one of the good guys — and no kidding at all — I need your help.”

Just then we heard voices and went to listen at the door.

“Why did you turn and go back when I called to you?” This was the voice of the soldier who had shouted at me in the corridor.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just dropped off the professor’s breakfast. I didn’t see you until just now,” the workman answered.

“You were coming this way a minute ago, then you turned around and went back.”

“Not me.”

“No one came in with you?”

“No. You can ask Yuri at the professor’s door.” “I will. I’m on my way to relieve him now. And if you’re lying — never mind. On your way, comrade!”

Sound of the workman’s footsteps moving off down the corridor. A jangle of keys outside the door.

I flattened against the wall on the hinged side of the door, the Luger in my hand. The twins stared at the pistol with wide cornflower eyes, then looked at each other with suppressed giggles. What passed through their tiny brains at that moment could mean life or death for a whole lot of people.

The guard unlocked the door and pushed it partly open.

“Well, well, you girls are up early,” he said.

“What of it?” Terri said.

“We can get up any time we want to,” Jerri added.

“Up and down, up and down, that’s your whole life,” the guard said with a snort of laughter.

“Which one of us does the professor want this morning?” Terri asked.

“Or is it both of us again?” Jerri put in.

“Neither yet. He just got his breakfast, and with him, work is first. Then food — and women for dessert.”

“Then what are you doing here, Marcus?” Terri said. “You are not supposed to enter our room unless the professor sends you for us.”

“I’m looking for a man,” he said with an air of apology.

Giggles from the girls answered him.

“I thought I saw a workman in the corridor,” Marcus went on in a stern voice. “One who didn’t belong. I thought he might have come in here.”

“We haven’t seen any man,” Terri said innocently.

“It’s such a disappointment,” Jerri added disgustedly.

“I’m not one to see phantoms,” Marcus said. I heard him take a tentative step forward. “It will be awhile before the professor finishes his breakfast and sends for one of you. Since I am already here, perhaps we could amuse each other with a little—”

“Absolutely not!” Terri broke in. “Our contract says we are here for Dr. Warnow exclusively. We’ve been warned not to play games with any others.”

“But well think it over,” Jerri said mischievously.

“Teasers,” the guard said. He backed out and the girls closed the door. The lock snapped.

“Now we really are in trouble,” Terri giggled.

“But what fun,” said her sister.

“Big thanks,” I said, and slipped the Luger back into its holster. I grinned. “Maybe I’ll find time to repay you. Is it true that you are here only to… uh… service “Warnow?”

“You heard what we told Marcus, we’re just wind-up toys for the American scientist,” Terri answered.

“And considering the kind of a man he is, that doesn’t take up much of our time,” Jerri said, and moved closer to me.

“How did you get into this?” I asked.

“You mean what are nice girls like us doing in a place like this?”

“Something like that.”

“We answered an ad in a San Francisco underground paper,” Jerri said. “ ‘Congenial girls wanted for travel, excitement, adventure.’ ”

“And obviously, you got the job.”

“Sure. There must have been fifty other girls, but we had the advantage of being twins.”

“That isn’t all you had,” I said, taking note of their generously displayed endowments.

“I like you,” Terri said.

“I’ll bet you’re a lot more man than the professor, too,” Jerri added.

“His sexual talents, or lack of them, don’t interest me,” I said seriously. “But he happens to be the most dangerous man alive, a threat to the U.S. and the whole world. I’ll spare you the gruesome details, but believe me, at this moment there is nothing more important to the future of the human race than for me to get into Warnow’s laboratory. And I want you girls to help me.”,

“You mean that silly old laboratory is more important to you than this?” Terri said, lifting her shorty nightgown even higher.

“And this?” Jerri chimed in, thumbing the waistband of her pajama bottoms and sliding them halfway down her rounded hips.

“I said more important, girls, not more enjoyable.”

“Why should we help you?” Jerri asked. “You won’t even be nice to us.”

It was plain that patriotism and humanitarianism were words that wouldn’t register inside their pretty blonde heads. But without their help, my chances were nil.

“As the old saying goes,” I told them with a poker face, “You scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours.”

A pair of radiant smiles lit up the room. “You mean you will?” the twins chorused.

“If you’ll help me get into Warnow’s lab.”

Nodding in happy agreement, they each took a hand and led me toward a stack of multi-colored cushions where they quickly peeled their flimsy coverings. In a flash they were naked, striking various seductive poses among the cushions. I discovered that Terri had a tiny mole just below her left breast, and by this alone I was able to tell the twins apart.

It was the one time in my life that I was in a hurry to complete what is perhaps the mast fascinating of all human transactions. And so I set a new world’s record for removing the most clothing in the least time.

“Mmm, delicious,” Terri commented.

“I knew he’d have more than that old professor,” Jerri approved.

“Come lie here,” Terri directed, “right between us.”

Swiftly I kneeled and arranged myself in the classic position above Terri’s eager little body.

“I didn’t mean between me, but between us,” she said with a sighing little groan that seemed anything but a complaint.

“Are you objecting?” I asked her as I entered the gateway to paradise.

“Ohhh — nooo,” she moaned.

“Then hereafter, I’ll call the plays,” I told her, and plunged on, into the tunnel of love.

That was how it began, though in a very short time, we assumed an endless variety of gymnastic positions, most of them not covered in the marriage manuals.

After awhile we got so wrapped up in each other that Jerri said in a small, woeful voice, “I don’t really like playing seventy.”

I had been placed in an awkward position for conversation, but turning my head with a mighty effort I asked innocently, “What does that mean, Jerri? — playing seventy.”

“Lord, everyone knows that,” she answered peevishly. “Seventy is sixty-nine with one watching.”

I reached out to her and, with little coaxing, she became a third partner in one of the most complex, exotic and exhausting performances I can remember. And I remember quite a few.

Afterwards, as I began to dress quickly, the twins eyed me with happy expressions, punctuated by little smiles and winks of gratitude. It was Jerri who said with a long, happy sigh, “You know, I think we three would make a fantastic couple.”

But my thoughts were already absorbed with the problem of Warnow and company. “All right,” I said, “the fun and games are over. Now let’s see if we can’t find a way into Knox Warnow’s sanctum.”

They nodded, almost in unison. But their faces expressed no real interest.

“You do remember our little bargain?” I asked them.

“Yes,” said Terri with a frown. “But it might be dangerous to help you.”

“Besides,” Jerri added. “We have a lot to lose. They’re paying us more money than we’ve ever seen in our lives. When we leave here, we intend to use it to open a little dress shop.”

At that moment I had the decided impression that the twins were not nearly so dumb as they pretended to be.

“So you’re going to open a dress shop when you leave here,” I said. “And what makes you think that you ever will leave here? You’re prisoners, don’t you know that?”

Terri shook her head “We’re not prisoners at all. We come and go as we like. When we’re tired of being cooped up, we take walks all over the. place. And nobody stops us.”

“Of course,” I said. “You can go where you like because there’s no way out of this rock fortress except by air. But tell these people you want to quit and ask them to fly you out of here. That’s when you’ll find out what you should’ve guessed long ago — that you might as well be slaves in chains.”

Now I had their undivided attention. Their cute lit-tie faces had grown solemn, and they exchanged fearful glances.

“I didn’t risk my life to come here for laughs,” I went on hastily. These people intend to take over America and the whole world by atomic force. Their bombs are already placed in key cities of the U.S., ready to explode one by one if our country fails to meet their demands.”

I looked at my watch. “If I can’t get to Warnow, who is the only one who can trigger the devices, the first atomic bomb will destroy New York City and all its people in just over two hours.”

I nodded as they gaped in astonishment. “Yes, those are the facts. And so you gals can stop putting me on with the dumb blonde act, and get on with it. Because, aside from Warnow, who has denounced his country, we are the only three Americans in the midst of the enemy camp.

“And without me, you’ll never make it out of here alive.”

“Oh Jesus God,” said Terri. “What can we do to help?”

“I want the procedure used to get you two in and out of Warnow’s lab, living quarters and whatever. I want you to tell me anything you’ve seen in there that might give me a clue to his operation. And make it fast; the time to move is now!”

They both started to talk at once. “Hold it,” I said, “Terri, you begin.”

“There’s a relief guard,” she said. “But Marcus is on duty most of the time. He sleeps in that little room outside the professor’s door, which seems to be made of solid steel. And he alone escorts us back and forth. He presses a signal button and Warnow comes to the other side of the door, opens a flap and speaks through a kind of iron grill. There’s no key to that door; it opens from inside — and the professor never leaves for any reason.”

“Okay. What else?” I snapped. “What’s inside?”

“As you go in,” said Jerri, “there’s an office with a desk and a phone. The place is bare, no other furniture. But there are filing cabinets. And a large framed map of the U.S. that hangs on a wall near the desk. There’s another door leading from the office to—”

“Wait a minute!” Terri interrupted. “Behind that map, there’s a wall safe. Well, not really a safe. But a square cubbyhole.”

“How would you know that?” I asked her.

“Because one time, as I was going in, I saw it. The map had been taken off its hook and was sitting on the floor below this hole in the wall about a foot square. Warnow had papers spread over his desk that he must’ve been reading while he waited for me. I guess he’d forgotten to put the papers away and cover the space with the map.”

She chuckled. “Or else he thinks I’m too dumb to know a hole in the wall from you-know-what. Anyway, I pretended I didn’t notice, and at the time I wasn’t especially curious. Next time he sent for me, the map was in place, no papers around.”

“How does he tell you apart?” I asked, merely to confirm my educated guess.

“I have a mole right here,” Terri said with only the hint of a smile as she pointed to the area below her left breast. “And as you see, we wear different costumes to distinguish us.”

“All right, Jerri, go on. What’s in the room next to the office?”

“Well, it’s really one big room divided by a curtain. On one side is the bed, a couple of pieces of furniture, and a bathroom that connects to the office. On the other — don’t ask me. I’ve never seen it I think it contains some kind of equipment. Oh yes, and next to the bed there’s another of those inside phones.”

“Did you ever hear him talking on those phones?”

“Only once. But it was a kind of double talk, and I didn’t understand it”

“Twice when I was there, he got calls,” said her sister. “I didn’t get what he was talking about either. But I think I do now.”

“Tell me about it, Terri.”

“Well, he seemed very angry. And he said something like, listen, don’t pressure me, general, And don’t threaten. Remember, if I go, everything goes with me. And that includes Moscow, general I arrived there with two suitcases for the conference. But somehow, one got lost.” And then he paused and he said, ‘Does that tell you anything, general?’ ”

“I don’t know what it tells the general,” I commented. “But it tells me plenty. Warnow’s got the system rigged so that if he dies, all the cities including Moscow will die with him. He’s not only an evil bastard, he’s a damn clever one.”

For a minute my mind spun as I sorted out the various aspects of a workable plan. Then I said, “On the one hand, time is the most important factor. But I don’t see any way to hurry the action. I can force Marcus to take one of you to that door. But I can’t make Warnow open it unless he takes the initiative. That is, unless he has already sent Marcus for you.

“Also, I can’t force my way in behind you without killing Marcus, who will be standing right at the door where Warnow can see him. And before I could take care of Marcus, he’d slam the door in my face. So everything depends on you girls. Whoever is today’s vio-tim has to jam something in that door to keep it from shutting completely, and do it without being seen by Warnow. And that calls for a miracle of timing.”

“I have a better idea,” said Terri. “The one who has the nod from the professor goes into the bedroom with him, gets him primed and in bed. Then she pleads that she has to go to the john. He can’t argue with that, so shuts herself inside the bathroom, flushes the john, then runs through to the office side, and opens the steel door for you. Then she gets back through the connecting door and climbs in bed with Wamow.”

“Pure genius,” I said.

“But meantime, you’ll have to get rid of Marcus,” Terri rushed on, “and be waiting at the door.”

“Give me about five minutes,” I said. “And I want Marcus lured in here by the gal who stays behind — so I can take care of him quickly and silently.”

“He doesn’t usually want both of us for the morning quickie,” said Jerri. “But suppose he does?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be prepared for almost anything,” I told her.

There was another thoughtful silence and then I said, “Now all we have to do is wait. But for how long?”

“He’s like a clock,” said Terri. “It should be any minute now.”

“Sure,” said Jerri. “But if this is his big day to wipe out New York, maybe he’ll be nervous and hell have no appetite for the bed.”

“Oh Jesus,” Terri groaned.

And I said nothing, Because the enormity of that question and the potential disaster riding on the answer numbed my brain.

Twenty-One

There was a sort of dressing table in a dim corner of the room and I crouched behind it, completely screened from the door. The minutes ticked off endlessly as my cramped muscles begged for relief. At last I stood. It seemed foolish to remain in that awkward position when there would certainly be the warning sound of a key in the door.

A half hour went by as I reasoned that the enormous question had been answered Warnow was going to dispense with frivolous entertainment and keep his mind on the grim business of the day, his hand ready to send the signal that would blast the city of New York into the sky. And unless at the last hour the President decided to risk a national panic and evacuate Manhattan, the fate of all those people was in my hands.

Waiting, I fought an expanding sense of dread by calculating the feasibility of half a dozen alternate plans. They were all practical and clever enough. But each came to a dead end — at the impregnable steel door between me and Warnow.

From time to time, I heard vague, muted sounds from the tunnel corridor. Garbled voices, the hollow thump of heavy feet, the clank of metal. The girls listened for me with ears pressed close to the door, but reported that they could hear nothing of importance, just useless bits of chatter as a number of men, all apparently in a hurry, went striding past.

Then, after a long period of silence, as I was about to gamble on any desperate ploy, no matter how insane the risk, there was an impatient knock on the door, followed instantly by the rasp of a key in the lock.

I was already well concealed when Marcus burst into the chamber of the professor’s concubines and bellowed, “You there — Little-Miss-Mole, the American demands your services on the double! The professor has been delayed by a visit from the high brass, and he says if you don’t come at once hell feed you to the general’s dogs for supper.”

“Oh Lord, those dogs would gobble poor little me in three bites,” said Terri in her dumb blonde voice. “Let’s hurry before the professor loses his hot.”

“I think you mean his cool, not his hot, Terri dear,” corrected Jerri.

“I call ‘em like I see ‘em, darling,” she answered, and scampered toward the door.

“Oh, Marcus!” cried Jerri, “after you deliver my sister, would you come back for just a teeny minute?”

“Come back?” snapped Marcus irritably. “What for?”

Tm lonely and — and I need a real man, not that tired old bag of bones.”

“Yeah? Is that so now?” said Marcus, his voice crackling with excitement. “And what could you do with a real man in only a teeny minute?”

“Could you spare two teeny minutes?”

“I could spare plenty but I might get into trouble.”

“I won’t tell. And don’t you think I’m worth taking a weeny chance?”

And then, after a dreadful, uncertain pause, “Yeah, HI be back. In less than a minute. Be ready!”

As if it were an exclamation point of acceptance, the door slammed with a thud. And there was then a great vacuum of silence.

“Don’t waste a second,” I low-voiced to Jerri “And keep him busy!”

“Hell never know what hit him,” she murmured, and I ducked down again.

In a matter of seconds, Marcus returned.

“As you see, I’m ready, lover-man,” said Jerri.

“I’m more ready than you’ll ever be,” he told her with a nervous chuckle. “But I’m supposed to be guarding Warnow’s door and there’s no time to undress.”

“Forget that silly door,” answered Jerri. “A wild bunch of elephants twenty feet tall couldn’t break it down if the room inside was floor-to-ceiling with peanuts.”

Apparently Marcus was too far under the hypnosis of desire to answer. But after a minute he let out a couple of all-business grunts as Jerri said, “Oh — my — Cod, you are just too much!” and I sneaked from behind the dressing table.

I stepped lightly but swiftly forward with the stiletto. I hovered above them for an instant as I hoisted the weapon over his broad back. Jerri’s open eyes dilated at the sight of me.

Suddenly, prodded perhaps by some animal instinct, or by the look in Jerri’s awe-stricken eyes, Marcus lifted his head and turned half toward me.

So instead, I buried the blade in his chest.

His mouth gaped and his eyes were positively incredulous. But then, with only a small cry and a terrible grimace as I swiftly withdrew the knife, he obediently collapsed on top of Jerri and was still.

I wiped the blade on his uniform Jacket and restored the weapon while Jerri, wearing the most horrified expression, tried vainly to shove the body away from her. So I grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked, and he rolled off to the floor. He stared up into an eternity of space.

Jerri sat and wiped a smear of blood from her naked body with a comer of sheet while she gazed at me with an expression I could not accurately define. Except to say that it was possibly a mixture of admiration, disbelief at the close reality of savage death, and a tinge of loathing. Loathing for me, the blood, or the corpse, I could not tell.

“Yes,” I said, as if in answer to an unspoken question, “this is how it is. And if I don’t hurry, millions of others, far more innocent, will die.”

Then I left her, and after a glance up and down the passageway, bolted toward that great steel door, behind which, Warnow, and the apparatus of remote-control destruction, awaited the hour.

A couple of anxious, sweating minutes passed. And then I heard the snick of a latch and the door opened just a fraction. It began to swing toward me but I caught it and squeezed in, just in time to catch a glimpse of Tern’s naked back as it winked out of sight behind a closing door.

I closed the door quietly and swallowed the entire room in one gulp of the eyes. As described by Jerri, it contained a desk with phone, file cabinets, a large framed map of the U.S. and a portion of Central America she had failed to mention. I made a pass at the desk drawers, but they were locked. I made another pass at the file cabinets, same result.

I studied the map. Rings drawn with a red felt-tipped pen circled seven U.S. cities and the Panama Canal. The targets for destruction. One of the cities was Cleveland, but we could disregard that one since the bomb intended to erase it was intercepted by Customs. On the map the cities were numbered and, excluding Cleveland, they were, in order of elimination: New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

I observed that the capital had been saved until last, doubtless to give our government the chance to negotiate right up to the final hour.

The map was suspended with wire from a substantial brass hook. I lifted it from the hook with the certainty that, as Terri said, I would find a gaping hole or cache in which secret papers were hidden. But there was no such depository, the wall beneath the map was smooth as an infant’s behind.

It had occurred to me that a mere hole in the wall behind a map was not very imaginative for a scientist of Warnow’s caliber. And so now I began to experiment with the brass hook, twisting it this way and that but finding it solidly anchored and immovable. But not entirely immovable. Because when I pulled the hook toward me, it gave slightly with a tiny, oiled click. And immediately a square portion of the wall slid back soundlessly to expose a receptacle containing a small, leather-covered notebook and a series of numbered blueprints, each bearing a red, circled skull which obviously, to me at least, indicated the location of the planted suitcase bombs.

They indicated the locations, that is, if you had the related explanation of which building was in what city. For without some text or other guide, the prints were meaningless.

Though it seemed an age in those tight, nerve-wrenching circumstances, a glance at my watch told me that barely two minutes had passed. And since I figured that Wamow could survive another ten minutes or more with Terri alerted to my need for time, I sat down behind the desk and began a rapid examination of the pocket-sized leatherbound book.

At first the letters and numbers it contained were about as intelligible as a Chinese crossword puzzle is to most people. But I’m used to puzzles of all sorts, and there are few agents in the world so well versed on the art of unraveling codes. I soon recognized this one as an American code in use by scientists of Warnow’s era. And, though the code was basically simple enough if one were given the marvellously cunning mathematical formula to decipher it, to my knowledge it had never been broken by an enemy inside or outside of the U.S.

I thumbed back through my memory, and the principle of the code flashed into mind almost at once. I found a pen in a holder on the desk beside a scratch pad and made quick shorthand notes as I decoded and condensed just the bare fundamentals of the text and numbers, an outline of the death’s-head conspiracy. It included the secrets of Warnow’s bomb-triggering device, activated by a self-powered stylus. Microelectronics had been designed into the dollar sized, skin-flap disc to make it capable of transmitting a powerful high-frequency signal to vast distances — an attachment somewhat like the heart pacemaker, but infinitely more complex, exploded all bombs in unison, seconds after the last beat of Warnow’s heart.

This intricate, incredibly small remote-control device was labeled Passkey on the opening page. And on the closing page under the heading: DISARM, there were a series of five numbers which, as the text explained, were the key to disabling the bombs even after they had been signaled to explode. This emergency safeguard would circumvent the pacemaker attachment to Warnow’s heart.

But there was a catch. Once the delayed-action signal triggering the bombs had been sent, there were only thirty seconds in which to cancel the explosions.

I quickly made a mental photograph of the numbers and projected the image of them on the front wall of my mind. I have a nearly infallible memory and to recall a dozen numbers would have been no real problem. Nevertheless, I wrote the numbers on a scrap of paper which I folded and put in my pocket.

For another minute I studied the diagrams of the stylus and disc, then I wrote down the locations of the suitcase bombs in the various cities.

This done, I placed the little book and the notes decoding its essentials in another pocket. I had gambled about five minutes to scribble down the decoded facts because I had to have an immediate working knowledge of the device if I was to abort Warnow’s deadly plan. And I had found that I could remember almost anything if I put the details in writing first. Anyway, once you understood the device, operating it was about as simple as touching a pencil to various points of a compass.

Now I shoved the blueprints, too bulky to carry, into the wall receptacle, thumbed the brass hook to close the opening, and hung the map in place.

I softly entered the connecting bathroom and crossed to the other door. Pressing against it, I heard what I figured was Warnow’s voice, and the answering voice of Terri. I paid small attention to the conversation as I eased the Luger from its holster and grasped the door knob. But the gist of it was Warnow apologizing for haste due to “urgent experiments which must be prepared at once,” and Terri pleading to be allowed just a few more minutes with the charming professor who was so much man that he had left her gasping for more of the same.

As I inched the door open and peered into the room, Knox Warnow, white lab jacket over slacks, stood in profile to me, hands resting on Tern’s shoulder as she, clad in her boudoir attire, gazed up into his eyes with a pretense of adoration.

Warnow’s abundance of hair was black, heavily seasoned with gray. He had small undistinguished features and a slender body that seemed almost frail. Until I got a look at his intense green eyes which were chillingly vacant of emotion though as hard and brilliant as emeralds, he appeared an unlikely threat to the survival of the world’s most powerful nation. And hardly a man who could go a single round with Terri or her twin.

“This evening I will send for both you and your sister,” he was saying now. “There will be much to celebrate with vintage champagne and a special dinner. Then well share a long exotic night of pleasure together.”

“I doubt that very much, Warnow,” I told him as I stepped into the room behind the Luger. “This evening I expect that you’ll be on your way back to the United States as my prisoner.”

His face dropped with surprise as his head snapped toward me. While he groped for words, I said, “Terri, go back to your room. I want you and your sister to be dressed and waiting when I come for you.”

She opened her mouth to speak, then hurried out

“I know who you are,” said Warnow quite calmly, his face working for composure. “Does that surprise you?”

It did, but I said nothing.

Warnow sank into a massive leather chair beside the bed, crossed his legs, and folded his arms across his chest. “Do you think, Carter,” he continued with the whisp of a smile, “that I’m unprepared for an eventuality such as this? Of course not. I will never leave this room with you alive. And if I should die, half the world will crumble in ashes at almost the same moment.”

“I know all that,” I said. “I’ve decoded your secret papers and your preparations are wasted. Do the numbers 5-21-80-54-7 mean anything to you?”

His maniacal expression flickered like a candle in the wind — and went out. For a space I could almost see the gears of his mind shifting down, clashing harshly, then grinding on the alternatives.

He shrugged and fashioned a wan smile of resignation. “Well,” he said, “ultimately nothing matters. All the people, all the foolish creations of mortal men, must come to an end.”

“A noble philosophy,” I answered.

“The two of us,” he went on, “we alone in this dungeon of a room control the density of the world. Think of it. Just think of it! The unspeakable power we hold in our hands.” He paused. “We can join forces and rule the world together. Or we can destroy each other in the next few minutes. Which shall it be?”

“Neither,” I said. “Even a bad loser knows when the game is over. And accepts his losses. Now — I’ll give you thirty seconds to decide. Come with me and face trial, or die in that chair. Personally, I hope you choose to die. Because it will take more than a little doing at the risk of my neck to get you out of here.”

The spastic fingers of one hand tensely kneading the thick, padded arm of his chair, Warnow slowly nodded. “All right, I’ll come with you,” he said. He uncrossed his legs and seemed about to rise.

But suddenly he shoved against the chair arm. The top, cushioned portion of the arm instantly folded back on concealed hinges to reveal a small, lighted console. It contained a large, red button, a toggle switch and a numbered dial.

As he hit the button sharply with the heel of his palm, I shot him through the chest Even so, his other hand was already reaching for the dial. So I shot him again. The hand convulsed, drifted back toward the toggle switch. I don’t know if it was the reflective spasm of death or the last superhuman effort of a man who was just a second from eternity; but to my astonishment, the hand continued its descent, and in so doing, yanked the toggle switch.

A thin click was followed by the distant, muted sounds of alarm bells and wailing sirens. If such sounds could filter through great stone walls and about half a ton of steel door, I knew that outside in that commune of soldiers and workers, it was a screaming, clanging, ear-bursting summons for help.

I had intended to force Warnow to tell me where he kept the all-important stylus without which the pacemaker detonating signals could not be canceled But now he was dead, I didn’t have the stylus, and the last thirty seconds were ticking away toward the most devastating multiple explosions in the history of man.

Wamow’s eyes were rolling up, glazing in death when, darting a glance at the sweep hand of my watch, I bent, tore his jacket open, and ripped away his shirt in almost the same motion. And there was the stylus; suspended from his neck on a long silver chain!

His chest was bare but awash with blood. Madly, I wiped the blood from a four-inch square of skin bordered on three sides by a plastic seam. I worked my fingers under the edge and pulled the flap of skin loose — to reveal the passkey with its spiral of tiny, numbered contact points.

Holding the stylus as delicately as a brain surgeon would a scalpel, I touched the tip to the contact points, sparking the electronic combination for the DISARM signal: Five… twenty-one… eighty… fifty-four… seven!

Now my eyes leaped at my watch. Four — three-two — one and — wham! Time for a bursting and rending of cities that never came I had made it with four seconds to spare. And it was done!

Or was it?

I peered down at the chair-arm console. Above the red button, there was the label: DESTRUCT. Above the toggle switch the label read: ALARM. Now I studied the numbered dial. It was labeled DESTRUCT TIME DELAY and circled by gradations marked from zero to sixty minutes. The pointer control which Warnow had obviously been trying to twist down to zero, rested on sixty.

Sixty minutes to what? A green light glowed above the red DESTRUCT button. There was no other button to cancel the time lock so I hopefully pressed the same button again. Nothing. The green light remained aglow.

I listened. Distantly, the alarm bells and sirens continued their awesome clamor. I whipped the chain and stylus over Warnow’s head, stuck the device in my pocket and loped for the door, gun in hand. I yanked the door open and was hit by the deafening sound of bells and sirens. I checked to be sure that the steel door had locked in closing so that no one could enter to discover Warnow’s body, and rushed through the guard room to the tunnel. At first I saw no one and hurried toward the door of the twins’ chamber.

As I reached it, two soldiers with rifles appeared from around a bend and took aim. I flattened myself against the chamber door as they fired, missed. I straight-armed a careful shot at the lead man. As he tumbled and went down, the other quickly retreated around the bend.

Hammering on the door, I shouted my name. Terri peered out with enormous eyes, then opened to admit me and slammed the door shut.

Both girls were dressed in unrevealing, almost severe gray suits. A pair of small, matching suitcases rested by the door.

“Forget those cases,” I said. “We’re in a tight squeeze, and you’ll be moving too fast to carry them. Are you ready, then?”

Both nodded gravely.

“Have either of you ever fired a gun?”

“My father taught me to shoot at targets with his pistol,” Terri offered

“Jerri?”

She shook her head. “I always hated guns. But if I must, I suppose I can aim and pull a trigger.”

I crossed to the sprawled body of Marcus and snatched his gun from its holster. I gave it to Terri. “Shoot to kill” I told her. “C’mon, let’s go!”

I led them cautiously into the tunnel. The alarms had now ceased, the silence was shattering. We crept sideways to the first bend of the tunnel, hugging the wall. There I bellied down and slithered forward until I could see around the curve.

Three feet away, the soldier who had retreated stood against the near wall, rifle at the ready. He saw me a split second too late and I fired at his chest My aim was high in that awkward position, and I caught him souarely in the mouth, the bullet drilling a couple of front teeth before passing through his brain.

As we passed his body, the girls paused to look down with expressions of revulsion. The soldier was carrying a sidearm. I bent to claim it and passed the weapon to Jerri. For a moment, she gazed at the gun as if it were a deadly snake. But then, with a shrug, she asked me how to use it and I showed her.

Now we dashed for the mouth of the tunnel where I checked for lurking soldiers. Finding none, we burst into daylight. We hurried along a path for a few yards, and were confronted by a pair o£. men in work clothes walking briskly toward us. They were unarmed and so I made no attempt to shoot them. They barely glanced at me. but looked curiously at the girls in passing.

And then I remembered that I, too, wore work clothes, the men had been so distracted at the sight of the girls that they had failed to take a close look at me. Perhaps there were so many working types that they were not all well-known to each other.

I cut away from the path and led the girls up a hill strewn with great boulders that offered cover and concealment. As I paused by a great rock, gazing back down to see if we had been followed, two men in uniform, one wearing the insignia of an officer, stepped from behind the rock with rifles aimed directly at us from six feet away.

I had not heard a whisper of sound and was caught with the Luger at my side, no time to bring it up.

“Stand right there and tell me who you are?” the officer said to me in Russian.

Happily, I was trained to speak the language with a flawless delivery, and I said quickly in Russian, “I am Boris Ivanov, and I have been detailed by Major Raszky to escort these girls up into high ground among the rocks, where they will be safe until the danger has passed.”

The officer made a sneering face, kept his rifle staring me right in the eye and said, “The major would not send a worker to do a soldiers job. Anyway, the assignment of workers is my personal task and no such name as Boris Ivanov has ever appeared on my roster. Nor do I remember your face, which has a foreign cast — American, no doubt. So you would be the Nick Carter we are hunting. With great difficulty, since you are dressed as one of us.”

As this rather lengthy indictment was pronounced by the officer, I stole a couple of glances at the girls. They wore the puzzled frowns of people who do not understand the language spoken, but at the same time they appeared frightened witless, Terri eying the relentless, cocked-rifle stance of the Russians with something close to panic.

“You will open your right hand,” said the officer’s companion, “and you will simply drop the pistol to the ground. And then you will come with us.”

With only a moment’s hesitation, as both men fastened unblinking eyes upon the gun hand I held limply at my side, I relaxed my fingers and the Luger fell to the ground. The small thump it made as it landed was never heard. The sound was erased by two crashing shots fired close together, like giant hands clapping my ears.

As I watched with a sense of total unreality, the officer, one eye rammed back through his head, slowly stumbled back, slumped against the rock, gave up his rifle, and toppled sideways to the ground.

His companion, who had been shot through the neck, gushed crimson as he sagged to his knees and pitched forward, his rifle still clutched in his hands.

And there behind me, still pointing Marcus’s heavy, smoking pistol, stood Terri, her pretty mouth forming a great round, speechless ohhhh…

Jerri also held her pistol, though it was. half-heartedly raised and ineffectually aimed.

Abruptly, Terri lowered the gun, sank to the ground and bawled. “You — you were supposed to — to shoot at the same time,” she sobbingly accused Jerri, who, staring down at the dead soldiers, also began to weep.

Patting Tern’s tousled blonde head, I said softly, “I owe you, baby. My God, how I owe you!”

I reclaimed my grounded Luger and then gathered them both into my arms, hugged them and said, “C’mon little soldiers, let’s go!”

Twenty-Two

When we had hustled up to the top of the hill, crouching low, dashing from rock to rock, we began to circle toward the helicopter pad. Just ahead of us the terrain above the buildings was alive with soldiers searching for us. Guns had been passed out to some of the workmen, and they, too, were hunting us. It was impossible to get through so we hid in a small pocket between two outsized boulders shaped like crouching, prehistoric monsters.

The girls sat with dazed expressions, weapons in their laps.

“I don’t see how you got away with it,” I said. “Why didn’t the soldiers see your guns?”

“Because,” said Terri, “when we were down below and we saw the workman coming, I stuck my pistol under the band of my skirt and closed my jacket around it. I motioned to Jerri and she did the same. Those clods couldn’t hurt us, but I thought if they saw the guns, they’d spread the alarm. So when the officer and his flunky popped out with their rifles and began to talk in Russian, I whispered to Jerri and said, ‘pull your gun and shoot when I poke you.’ ”

Terri sighed, “But she didn’t go through with it. She chickened out, didn’t you sis?”

“I probably couldn’t shoot a snake if it was coiled to fang me,” Jerri answered.

“Anyway,” I said, “it was a gutsy play, and damn clever. You’re both very smart cats. So why do you pretend you’re dumb blondes?”

It was Jerri who answered with a wry smile. “Well,” she said, “we found out long ago that men love to feel superior. And if you’re a sexy little blonde, you can get a lot more mileage out of a guy by giving him the cute but dumb routine.”

“That’s not the half of it,” said Terri. “If you hide behind that kind of smoke screen, you can look and listen and figure and come out on top every time. Because when you seem empty-headed, you fade into the background. You come on about as dangerous as a stick of furniture. And so the big wheels who would try to screw you in more ways than one, let all their secrets hang out”

“Did you ever think of becoming spies?” I asked with a chuckle.

Their heads nodded, almost in unison.

“In our own way,” said Jerri, “we do a bit of spying. For corporation executives. Business stuff. But it’s a hard, ruthless game and we want out We thought this charade would be a regular vacation.” She glanced up at the steep overhang of stone. “Some vacation. We could join the WACS, get more rest and be a lot safer.”

Nodding, I loaded a fresh clip into the Luger. “If we ever get out of here alive, I’ll remember you gals,” I said. “You have many talents,” I added with a grin.

“You don’t think well get out alive?” said Terri, chewing her lip.

“I’ll be honest with you. It doesn’t look good Just now.” I studied my watch. “I have a feeling that if we aren’t looking down on this stone-age fortress from that copter in exactly twenty-five minutes, we’ll be looking down from heaven. Or up — from hell.”

“What does that mean?” said Jerri, her eyebrows soaring. “Listen, I’m far from happy in this world. But I’m not ready to die.”

“I think you’d be better off not knowing what it means,” I answered. “It’s only an educated guess, anyway. And if I’m right, being warned in advance wouldn’t do you a bit of good.”

“Can you fly a helicopter?” Terri said.

“Yes. I can fly almost anything. And my memory of the topography would get us to the nearest city. But if all goes well, we’ll have a pilot who knows every inch of this country.”

I glanced down obliquely through a space between the rocks. Off to my left, the copter sat away from the center of its pad. It had been moved a short distance, close to a storage tank. And I hoped to God this meant that Ingram had gassed the bird up. Where was he? Where was Pilar? The pad and the surrounding area was deserted. The body of the dead guard had been removed.

Pilar must be in hiding. Or had she been captured? And finally, I asked myself, how did the soldiers know they were hunting for Nick Carter? With Warnow dead, who could pass the word?

The logical choice of explanations appeared to be that either Pilar had been captured and the truth tortured out of her, or that Ingram had escaped and had spilled the beans.

“I’m going down to check the situation at the copter pad,” I said. “And I want you girls to stay here. The three of us might never make it together. On the other hand, if you were caught alone you could play dumb and say that you were Just frightened and were hiding out until the shooting was over.”

I grinned. “You won’t have trouble playing dumb, will you?”

They chuckled weakly and sent me a pair of diluted smiles.

“Now,” I continued, “from this little spy hole between the rocks, you can see the pad clearly. And I want one of you to keep an eye on it at all times. When I get down there, if all is clear, I’ll peel off these coveralls and stand waiting in the suit I’m wearing underneath. That will be your signal to come down on the double. And I do mean on the double.”

Both nodded gravely.

“If you see that I’m in trouble down there, stay put Until I give the signal its over. I could also be quite dead. If that’s obvious to you, come out and go into your innocent act. And don’t get caught with the guns. Get rid of them.”

I moved to leave, paused. I winked and gave them a small salute.

“Goodbye, Nick,” said Jerri.

“So long, and God’s luck to you, Nick,” said Terri.

I turned and ducked out

Twenty-Three

There were plenty of soldiers and a few workers groping around the slopes above the cluster of buildings behind me. But as I sneaked forward to the embankment directly over the copter pad, I encountered no one at all.

The immediate area seemed now to be deserted and silent I did not find the absence of troops especially ominous. It could well be that having combed the vicinity of the copter, the soldiers were now concentrating their efforts in the high grounds above the center of the compound where there were many more places of concealment.

On the other hand.

Dashing from cover, I raced down the embankment to the copter pad. I looked toward the chopper. It squatted empty and unprotected, ready to leap into the sky. My electric watch told me there were fourteen minutes left — still plenty of time. Behind Wilhelmina I advanced to a point near the door of the concrete guard station. The door was closed and so I edged close to one of the narrow, steel-barred windows for a peek inside.

At that moment, the door sprang open. I fell prone and lifted the Luger to fire point blank. But my target had long black hair and wore a toothy smile of welcome.

It was Pilar! But for the pistol I had left her, which was strapped about her waist, she looked utterly feminine and desirable.

I relaxed my trigger finger and stood with a grin, then reached inside the coveralls and fed the Luger to its holster.

Pilar trotted to me with open arms. She embraced and kissed me. “Nick!” she said. “I wasn’t sure, I heard shots and I thought you might be—”

I laughed. “I’m only half dead,” I told her. “From exhaustion. Where’s Ingram?”

“They took him away. To discipline him for bringing you here.”

“You can die from their ‘discipline’,” I said.

She stepped back and gave me an admiring once over. “You look none the worse for wear, Nick.” She sighed. “You’re lotta man and I’m gonna hate to lose you.” She yanked her gun from the holster and aimed it at my chest with a hand so steady it could have been a hunk of steel enclosed in a vise. “But,” she continued, “that’s how — as the saying goes — the cookie crumbles, huh?”

“So all along you were on the other team,” I said, really stalling because I suspected that at any second she was going to kill me.

“No,” she answered, “not precisely. I am a double agent, a coin with two faces. I serve Russia, in secret, while I also pretend to be the agent of your America. Both pay me well — oh, so very well. And my love of money is more than the love of any country, you see?” She smiled mockingly.

I shook my head. “No, I don’t see. Not too clearly.”

“Russia,” she explained, “the true and official government of the USSR, assigned me to uncover this base of operations so that Warnow, with General Zhizov and his independent faction, could be restrained before they triggered a nuclear war with America. So for a time I was your ally. But then, when I saw that the good general could not fail, with the help of Warnow, to bring down the mighty U.S., I was persuaded to join his forces. It is a grand strategy for Russia, and the government in power will fall into line once the coup has been accomplished.”

She paused and now her finger tightened about the trigger.

“Besides,” she added, “the general has paid me a fantastic sum. My money belt has become a thick girdle of currency. And truly, money is the only power I worship.”

I was about to tell her that Warnow was dead, but I knew she wouldn’t believe me. And the door to that room would have to be blasted off with a powerful explosive before the fact could be proven. Besides a glance at my watch told me that barely ten minutes remained.

Anyway, these tumultuous thoughts were rudely interrupted when Pilar bared her teeth in a grimace and released a loud, shrill whistle.

Instantly, from around the back corner of the guard station, rushed three soldiers carrying machine pistols. They were followed closely by General Zhizov, resplendent in his bemedaled uniform. The Doberman and the German shepherd, straining against choker; leashes, pranced before him.

When this unholy group had surrounded me, Zhizov ordered Pilar to relieve me of my weapons. And the hand which had so lovingly caressed me stole into my clothing, found both Luger and stiletto, and took them away.

“I do admire such a formidable enemy, Carter,” said the general. “But my admiration does not include mercy. Therefore, I believe that the punishment should suit the crime. And what could be so apt as to feed one animal to others of his kind. Though, of course, these are of a higher species.” He looked meaningfully down at the dogs who, staring at me with malevolent eyes, snarled and showed me their gleaming, flesh-starved teeth.

As he said this, I began to toy with the absurdly disproportionate, oversized belt buckle provided me by Stewart in Washington. With a thought for future emergencies, I had fastened the belt supporting it around the coveralls. It gave my garb a ridiculous aspect But it also attracted special attention to the buckle.

Remembering that the belt had long been immersed in salt water, I mentally applauded Stewart for making the buckle totally waterproof.

As I made an obviously sneaky move to open the buckle, the general caught the gesture.

“Drop your hand from that buckle!” he bellowed. I obeyed with a look of having been caught with my hand in a lethal cookie jar.

“Take the belt from him and bring it to me!” he commanded Pilar.

With a scornful caught-you-didn’t-we? smile, Pilar loosened the belt and passed it to Zhizov. As one of the soldiers took possession of the dogs, he began to examine it, lifting his gaze occasionally to send me a narrow-eyed glance of smug self-approval.

“The American method of concealing miniature weapons,” he said, “is not clever enough to fool any five-year-old Russian boy. What do you have inside here, eh? A single shot pistol? A switch knife? Or the traditional cyanide pill?”

Working to find the poorly hidden spring catch, he said, “How idiotically simple. Hie catch is hidden in this scrollwork and—”

He was squinting down at the dummy buckle when the booby trap exploded with a startling report, the sound bouncing off the hills and echoing briefly through the canyon below.

The hands that held the buckle vanished and the general slowly moved one bleeding stump toward a face that had been opened as if it were a rotting watermelon. He smashed to the ground.

That was when I launched myself and chopped the neck of the soldier who held the dogs’ leashes in one hand and a machine pistol in the other. Before he crumpled, I grabbed the pistol and sprayed his buddies with a short burst that slammed them down like toy ducks in a shooting gallery. Pilar was aiming her gun at my middle, so I kissed her farewell, a kiss of lead, without regrets.

The soldier I had karate chopped was coming to life again, beginning to rise. I folded him back and pinned him to the ground with another quick burst.

I had expected the dogs to leap at me immediately. But on the contrary, they had turned on their helpless master who had so cruelly abused them, and were chewing savagely at that gory remnant of a man.

Now I peeled my coveralls and after checking to see that the stylus and the little leather code book, complete with deciphering notes, were still in the pocket of my suit jacket, I pivoted toward the monster-like boulders. Lifting and spreading my arms generously, I sent the girls a broad signal of victory and welcome.

For a moment I watched them scramble from the rocks and race toward the embankment, their wheat-blonde heads bobbing in the sun. Then I recovered the Luger and stiletto from the ground near Pilar. I stood above her and thought: how evil, how beautiful. What a waste!

I turned to leave, then with an afterthought whose purpose was not greed, I opened her blouse and removed what she had described as a thick girdle of currency — namely a money belt.

Carrying it with me, I ran toward the copter. I had checked the fuel gauge, had nearly cried with joy when I discovered the tank was full, and was warming the motor, the big blade twirling, when the girls ducked under and climbed aboard.

I brought the rotor up to speed, adjusted the pitch, and we left the ground like a great wingless bird startled by the boom of a hunter’s shotgun. Below the complex of buildings that had housed the fatal conspiracy of Knox Wamow and Anton Zhizov seemed to melt into the terrain as we rose and slipped away.

Whirling through the notch between the mountains, passing the gigantic upstretched finger of rock, we had almost lost sight of the compound.

But in another minute, it was awesomely defined for us as it was blasted, burned, pulverized by the atomic explosion that I had been expecting at any second as I kept checking my watch. As the sound reached us, so did the shock waves. The copter was lifted and bounced and spun around as if teased by a giant hand.

The searing white glare was so intense we were forced to look away. But when the cork-on-rough-water tossing of the copter ceased, we again gazed at the site of the explosion, and saw the pale-smoke mushroom of the rising, expanding cloud.

I nodded to the tortured, buttercup faces of the twins, and I said, “Yes, that’s right It was the big one, the grandaddy of explosions. And I knew it was coming. Do you wonder I saw no point in warning you? You would have been hysterical, in panic.”

“And why weren’t you in panic?” Terri asked reasonably.

“Because the threat of death is almost routine to me,” I answered. “On every assignment it walks at my elbow.”

“Assignment?” said Jerri. “What assignment? Tell us what you do. Tell us what the whole horrible business is all about.”

“Who were those people?” Terri asked. “And what was in those buildings?”

“What buildings?” I said. “What people? There were no people. There were no buildings. They never existed.”

“News of the explosion will reach the papers in headlines and then we can tell all our friends what happened,” said Jerri.

“It will never reach the papers,” I said. “And if asked, I will deny the least knowledge of the explosion and the events surrounding it. Subject closed. Period!”

“How can you be so mysterious in the face of—” Terri began.

“My work is a mystery,” I said. Then, with a smile, “And I am a phantom with no real existence — just an image of your dreams.”

I handed the money belt to Terri and I said, “I owe you, sweetheart, and there’s a little down payment. I owe you both. And I suspect that there’s enough in that filthy-rich girdle to open a dress shop.”

Twenty-Four

Two days later I was stretched out between the satiny sheets of a bed as big as a regulation size tennis court in the most expensive and luxurious suite of the Royal Curasao Hotel on Pescadera Bay. In one hand was an iced glass of the dry orange liqueur that takes its name from the island, in the other was a baby-blue telephone. In my ear was the voice of David Hawk, who was Just then giving me an unusually cheerful sign off from his throne in Washington, D.C.

“And don’t forget to send the money!” I told him.

“Sunny?” he shouted. “Well, its not sunny here. Been raining all day!” Then he softly chuckled.

“Send the money by wire!” I shouted back at him. “I am a man of infinite patience. Therefore, anytime in the next hour will do nicely. And if it is indeed raining there, be sure to wear your rubbers!”

I put down the phone.

I rolled over and winked at Rona Volstedt who lay next to me, propped by pillows and drinking a glass of the same native concoction.

“Hawk wanted to know if we’d like a bonus vacation on the government,” I told her. “He suggested a leisurely Caribbean cruise.”

Rona made a sour-lemon face. Then she chuckled. “I didn’t know the old guy had a sense of humor.”

“He keeps it well hidden,” I answered. “And only drags it out when there’s some special occasion worthy of a little smile. Like when the entire nation has been saved from city-by-city atomic devastation.”

Rona sipped her drink. “And what else did he say?”

“Only that, following my directions, his boys located all the suitcase bombs. He’s informed the Russian government that the death’s-head conspiracy has been smashed; the file is closed.”

“My God,” she groaned. “And that’s all there is to the whole caper? A little cruise, some shots fired, a dip in the ocean, a torture chamber, more shots, and a piddling explosion?”

She grinned. “So what’ll we do for excitement?”

I didn’t say a word.

But just the same, I spent the next two weeks answering that question.

The End

Content

Nick Carter
The Death’s Head Conspiracy

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four