by Nick Carter
The padlock clanked softly at his touch — and something rustled in the trees.
He drew back into the darkest of the shadows and listened to the night. He heard crickets, the flutter of birds’ wings, the sigh of a low breeze in the leaves, a frog, the splat of water as the cruiser gently swayed and rocked. Nothing alarming, nothing out of place. Yet, his muscles were taut with expectancy, and the hair on the back of his neck stood out like porcupine quills.
Someone was near. He was sure of it.
But nothing moved as he strained his eyes and cars into the darkness, and after a long, waiting moment he took the tiny compasslike device from his pocket and trained it first in the direction of the boat and then at the shambles of the boathouse. It gave no reaction to the boat. But as Nick swung it back toward the boathouse he could see the little illuminated needle jerking convulsively around the dial in his cupped hands, and then he was sure the boathouse was the supply depot and the boat was the meeting place.
So. He would attend their next meeting, whenever it might be.
Blue light from the boat spilled across the jetty and made a shining path of it. He would have to turn back around the curve of the inlet, strip, and slide into the water, or he might be seen by . . . by whatever it was that was making his skin crawl.
He inched his way forward, wishing for the thousandth time in his life that he had eyes in the back of his head, eyes with built-in night sights to turn the darkness into light. But he did not. His night senses were exceptionally acute, but he was only human.
His foot scrunched across a tiny, unseen twig when he was about five feet from the boathouse and heading stealthily for a cluster of tall boulders. He heard the other sound in that same instant and knew that he had given himself away. There was a rustle of cloth behind him and the softest of footfalls; he flung himself sideways and jerked Hugo loose from his sheath. But the two muscular arms were already locking themselves around his neck in a blinding stranglehold. They tightened around his windpipe, squeezing mercilessly. Nick kicked backwards violently as his own hands shot up to claw at the ones at his throat. His kick missed, as the man behind him sidestepped with an agile, twisting movement. The grip became a neck-breaking bear hug.
Hugo’s flicking blade bit deep into the pressing hands. They loosened infinitesimally to change position, but then the grip became a choking armlock. The man was tall and incredibly powerful. His clutch was iron and his determination must have been made of the same stuff, because Hugo was making no impression. The grip tightened further and then there was a sudden savage twist that had Nick almost off his feet. He thrust backward with the stiletto’s ice-pick blade and had the satisfaction of hearing a pained grunt. Then he rolled with his attacker’s own twisting movement and threw himself hard on the ground, dragging the other with him. Again there was a gasp of pain, but the grip still held him. Dizziness began to blur his mind. His throat and chest were burning in a blaze of agony. Even as his mind swirled he grudgingly admired the other man’s tenacity, because apparently Hugo’s bite was beginning to take effect at last, although the iron hold was still choking him inexorably.
He brought his elbow back with all his strength and slammed it hard and deep into the other man’s stomach, and when the loud grunt came and the feet flailed he twisted abruptly and wrenched himself free. A long, bony knee jabbed upward toward his groin and he dodged it with a rapid rollover. It struck his thigh but he brushed it aside with a swift kick of his own that brought a savage sound from the other man and a miraculously swift movement.
The man was on his feet — incredibly, on his feet — and his right hand was thrust inside his jacket.
Nick was up and pouncing. His left hand caught at the other’s reaching arm and twisted it, and Hugo sank into the chest. The tall man uttered an animal sound and kicked out in a whiplike motion that snaked his leg past Nick’s and made his own long body sway like a falling tree. The man swore furiously and chopped out with both hands.
Nick ducked low and kicked upward from his half-crouch even as he rose. His toe connected with the chin and the tall man rocked and grunted. He cursed. In Chinese.
“That was your last chance, friend,” Nick said conversationally, and nailed Hugo through the fellow’s neck.
The man gurgled and kicked out, his lanky body flailing like an injured octopus, and his hands and feet thrashed in motions of attack. Again Nick felt a wave of reluctant admiration. The fellow was refusing to die, prolonging the battle and his own agony.
Hugo drew back and darted forward one more time.
The tall man’s hands clawed wildly at Nick’s face, while his body, still almost upright, teetered crazily, fighting death itself. For a long moment the tall figure stood there, swaying and squirming. Then it dropped like a felled oak.
Nick crouched beside it, waiting, meticulously wiping Hugo’s blade on the other man’s sleeve and probing the darkness with his ears and eyes. The dying heart slowed and stopped. The silence was even deeper than before.
His listening ears caught nothing but normal night sounds.
He hoisted the body over his shoulders and carried it to the nearest clump of rocks. When he had dumped it on the other side he played the thin beam of his flash over the narrow, flat-planed face and powerful body.
No doubt of it. Six down, and three-plus-one to go.
The contents of the pockets told Nick that he was searching one John Daniels of New York. Known as J.D.? He did not know; he did not care. All he cared about was six down and three-plus-one to go.
He straightened up, still listening. The instinct, the trained instinct that had served him so many times before, told him that he was now alone.
Nick walked cautiously at first and then more boldly through the pale moonlight. At the boathouse he paused briefly to double-check his instinctive feeling that his only company was one dead man, and then he glided openly along the jetty to the boat. No shadowy figures leaped at him and no guns spat.
The boat had one small cabin, with a separate wheelhouse, a lot of deck space and a tiny galley. Once upon a time it must have served a fisherman well. But now it —
Now it was a meeting place, and he could hear a car somewhere in the distance.
He boarded the boat quickly and gave it a rapid onceover. Everything else about it was old and dilapidated, but the engine was new. The small hatch in the after section held rope and canvas. After a moment or so it also held Nick. He propped the overhead door open with one hand and pricked up his ears. The sound of the car faded out as he crouched there.
Long minutes passed.
He had just about decided that the car must belong to some local resident when he heard the rustle of leaves from the shore and then the footsteps on the creaking jetty.
Wilhelmina slid into his hand. He fitted the silencer on while he waited for his guests.
Low whispers carried to him through the night air. Chinese whispers. He strained his ears to listen, and fragments came to him.
“. . . should be here before us . . . car . . . hidden . . . but where can he be? He only . . . from New York.”
“His orders may . . . changed. Perhaps Judas . . . .”
“Surely we . . . notified? After all the trouble we took to meet at Buffalo air —”
“Quiet! Might be . . . Yuan Tong, you stay on deck . . . Watch . . .”
“Nothing to . . .”
Now the whispers were clearly audible “Yes, but don’t forget our losses. We must take care.”
The boat rocked as one man . . . two men . . . three men boarded her.
Nick peered through the barely open door of the hatch.
The three men were looking around the boat.
“All seems well,” one murmured. “It must be that he was delayed in New York. Perhaps by misadventure? We should make contact with him.”
“Should we not search?” the second man whispered.
“For what?” snarled the third. “Can an army hide here? Would Judas have us meet
him here if he were not sure that it is safe? No, we will contact Jing Du from within. Yuan Tong will do guard duty. Not so, A.J.?” Nick heard a slightly fruity chuckle, and the second man nodded and answered in an exaggerated southern American accent. “Yeah, sure, you bet, C.F.,” he twanged, and his face stretched in an ugly grin.
Two men, carrying suitcases, went into the small cabin and closed the door. Yuan Tong, alias A.J., sat down on a coil of rope and opened his large traveling bag to haul out a gun.
Nick knew the weapon. It was a particularly nasty Chinese device, a minor mortar with a repeating action that made it more than twice as murderous and swift as the average automatic.
Yuan Tong sat still for a moment, half-listening to the soft murmur of voices through the partly open cabin porthole and feeling his gun barrel with a loving touch. Then he rose restlessly and began to prowl about the deck.
He lifted a canvas and peered beneath it. He stopped at the low side rail and gazed out over the lake. He strolled into the wheelhouse. He looked in through the cabin port. He stared back at the boathouse and the grove of trees.
And then he strolled casually toward the deck hatch within which Nick lay hidden.
Nick watched him through the narrow opening made by his own clutching fingertips. His other hand tightened reflexively on Wilhelmina — and then slackened. Even the low pop of the silencer would be heard by the others who sat so close by, and then there would be the thud of the body and the clatter of the falling gun onto the deck. Too loud; too chancy.
He would have to take another kind of chance.
He waited. Maybe Yuan Tong would not look into the hatch.
The man approached slowly, almost languidly, his weapon dangling from his hand. And then suddenly all that Nick could see of him was a thick shape blocking out nearly all of the dimly glowing light, and the weight of the hatch cover lifted from his fingertips.
It took Nick one split second to put Wilhelmina silently down upon a coil of rope and tense his body for the spring. Then the hatch cover opened above him and he made his move. In a lightning grab he caught the dangling gun and thrust it down beside Wilhelmina even as the steely fingers of his left hand went for the other’s throat. Then both of his hands were acting together, clamping themselves swiftly and savagely at Yuan Tong’s neck and squeezing with an expert viciousness born of the desperate need to do the thing right and do it quickly. He heard a tiny strangled gasp and felt the hatch cover thud down heavily against his arched back, and he offered up a small and silent prayer that the noises were not as loud as they seemed to him.
Yuan Tong’s feet were scraping along the deck like files over rough sandpaper and his mouth was working in a frantic effort to produce some sound. Nick tightened his grip around the neck and pulled down with a sudden snapping jerk that brought the Red Chinaman’s belly down hard against the edge of the hatch and almost on top of him. There was another sound, a sharp expulsion of breath, and flailing arms dug into his body from above. But they were like bugs on a beach for all the harm they could do. Nick’s thumbs had found the arteries in the other’s neck and they were pressing in relentlessly. Harder, harder, harder! he commanded himself, and poured all his strength into that one act of squeezing. The man’s body arched suddenly and then relaxed. Nick changed his hold by fractions of inches and concentrated on the windpipe. Hot breath belched into his face . . . and sighed away to nothingness. Yuan Tong sagged on top of him and the hatch cover sagged down with him.
Nick crawled out from under and raised the cover silently. No outcry came to meet him. There was nothing to be heard but the gentle sounds of the lake and a low tap-tapping from within the cabin.
And lots of luck to you, Nick thought grimly. Still crouching where he was, he turned and gave one final, devastating chop against both sides of the Red Chinaman’s neck. Unnecessary, perhaps, but it did not pay to take too many chances.
He retrieved Wilhelmina, wriggled out of the hatch, and lowered the lid silently over the late Yuan Tong.
Seven little Red Chinamen, gone.
Nick padded to the single open porthole of the tiny cabin. The tapping had stopped and two low voices were engaged in an animated discussion in colloquial Chinese. But it told him nothing he did not already know — mainly that J.D. was not answering from New York.
He waited. Maybe they would go on to something more illuminating.
“But Judas’s message said we were to plan to finish this tomorrow,” one said, “How in the name of Satan will we do it when we are so few?”
The other grunted. “It was planned for few,” he murmured. “Judas will know what to do. After all, this is only a question of proving that it can be done. One final wave of terror, and the American fools will be reduced to gibbering, terrified idiots. Do you know what people were talking about on the plane, what they were saying? That the Martians have landed! That they are being taken over by creatures from outer space. Tee, hee, heel With such a mentality, do you not think they will all be jelly by the end of tomorrow night?”
“I myself may be jelly by the end of tomorrow night,” the first said moodily. “They know about us, don’t you understand? They are picking us off slowly, one by one. It is the Russian woman and that Egyptian Sadek. They have us marked for death.”
“Pah! You talk like a gibbering American yourself. How can they possibly . . . ?”
But Nick’s ears had picked up something else.
There was a car approaching from somewhere beyond the glade of trees. As he listened, the sound of its motor grew louder. And then stopped.
It had to be Judas. It had to be.
Well, two was company. And four made two too many. He had been waiting for a long time to meet Judas again and he did not want the scenery cluttered up with extras.
He slithered silently around the tiny cabin. Seconds later the lockpicker’s special had done its work and the two men were locked in. He thought, but he could not be absolutely sure, that the trees in the grove were rustling with an extra sound.
The two voices were whining on. Not for long, Nick told them silently, and drew Pierre from his pocket. He gave the deadly little gas bomb one quick twist and dropped it lightly through the partly open porthole. It landed with a little click, and rolled.
“What was that?” The two men leaped to their feet. One went groping after Pierre and the other reached for the door. Nick closed the porthole quietly and waited. No doubt they would open it within moments, but that would not help them. He ducked down out of sight. No need to watch them die.
But they did it loudly, much too loudly. It took only slightly more than thirty seconds but in their dying throes they screamed in gurgling, high-pitched voices and hammered on the door. For a moment he thought the flimsy boards would shatter beneath their weight even though Pierre’s swift-acting poison was already gnawing their nervous systems, and he braced himself against the quivering door to hold it shut.
Was there, or was there not, a sound of footfalls coming through the trees? Hurry with your dying, damn you!
The screaming and the pounding stopped with a curious abruptness and there were two dull thuds. He counted slowly to ten and then rose to peer through the porthole.
Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two . . . .
Nine little Red Chinamen, gone. The last two were dead heaps on the floor.
He ducked down low on the deck and crawled aft, past the hatch he had turned into a coffin. There was still one man to go. The tenth man, the biggest of them all.
A bird fluttered and squawked. And then the glade of trees was silent but for the soft sighing of the breeze. A thick bank of cloud obscured the moon. Everything was in utter darkness on the shore.
Nick crouched behind the shallow bulkhead screening himself from view. The blue light would make him a sitting duck if he so much as raised his head. And yet he could scarcely put it out at this stage.
A new sound began with a low trilling and” then built into a fluting bird call t
hat rose and fell in the cool night air. It ended in tense silence and Nick went on waiting, mind racing and muscles taut. There was someone out there and it had to be Judas, and the sound was a signal of some sort. But what in God’s name was the answering signal?
The sound came again; rising, falling, dying away. Silence settled again.
He had to do something, answer somehow.
Nick pursed his lips. A low, trilling sound came out of them, a sound that built into a fluting bird call that rose and fell like the call from the glade, then drifted into silence.
There was a rustle. Something moved among the trees — moved away from him. Wrong answer!
He cursed softly and flung himself over the side to land lightly on the jetty in a running crouch. Harsh sound spat past his ear but he was ready for it. Wilhelmina spat back as he zigzagged rapidly along the sagging pier and flung himself toward the boathouse, then around it toward the grove of trees and the sound of running footsteps. The splat of fire came back at him and Wilhelmina answered sharply, aiming at the little burst of flame.
Then suddenly the bursts of flame were gone and he could no longer even hear the sound of footsteps. He paused for a moment, tuning eyes and ears into the silent darkness, and then he heard the unmistakable sound of a car door opening. A motor raced, and he ran toward it with Wilhelmina nosing out in front of him and his feet picking out a path between the trees. Judas’s car, of course, and Judas was making a getaway!
The first shot sang past his ear before he even saw the car — the first shot of a fusillade that sent him belly-down to the ground and pumping shots into the dim shape of a streamlined sports car that stood there with motor running, lights out, and windows spitting bullets in all directions.
He pumped lead into the tires and guts of the car before he realized with a shock of horror that the bullets were still spewing wildly in all directions and also that the car was not moving so much as an inch. Then he crawled toward it frantically, beneath the aimless spray of bullets — and saw that the car was empty. No Judas! Nick swore again, this time out loud, and snaked his way below the spray of fire in search of the other cars he knew must be there somewhere.
