by Nick Carter
Annotation
"WE WILL BURY YOU!"
The Communist threat had never seemed so real! AXE had barely assigned Killmaster to his new mission when the message came from "the spoilers" — they were threatening to deal a death blow to American international influence.
It was clearly a job for Nick Carter — the most lethal of his career. For AXE's top Killmaster was destined to play the lead in the diabolical plot.
What had they done to him? Had they really turned AXE's most valuable agent against the very powers he was sworn to protect? It wasn't until Nick came under the spell of the sensuous Russian operative that he began to understand how he was being used. But was it too late? Did his mind already belong to the KGB?
* * *
Nick Carter
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Nine
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Eleven
Twelve
* * *
Nick Carter
Agent Counter-Agent
Dedicated to The Men of the Secret Services of the United States of America
One
When pursuing dangerous game, a hunter sometimes finds that he has unwittingly changed roles with his prey and become the hunted. Many wild animals possess the cunning necessary for ambush, like the killer jaguar of Mato Grosso, which hid along its own trail to maul and kill hunting dogs with a swipe of its claws, always killing the last dog in the pack first. And the Dabi rogue elephant, which developed the nasty habit of tearing its human pursuers limb from limb.
Man, of course, is the most cunning of all ambushers, and I considered this fact carefully as I walked along the dark forest path. This was the perfect place for an ambush; and I knew that it had been planned that way.
I walked cautiously, slowly, watching every tree and shrub for movement, listening for any small sound. My Luger, Wilhelmina, lay ready in its holster, but unloaded. The stiletto, Hugo, rested in the chamois sheath strapped to my right forearm, under the jacket I was wearing. I had just moved past an overhanging branch when I heard the sound behind me. Even before I turned, I knew what it meant — a man had dropped from a tree to the ground behind me.
I whirled just in time to see a hand descend with a knife in it. The thin, sharp blade was headed straight for my chest.
Throwing my left forearm up to block it, I grabbed at the man's wrist. At the same time I jabbed the index and middle fingers of my right hand toward the man's eyes. But he jammed his free hand up against the bridge of his nose just in time to save his eyes.
I grabbed his other wrist with both hands, turning and twisting away from him, and pulled hard as I bent forward. The man went flying over my shoulder and hit the ground on his back. The knife flew out of his hand. I tensed a muscle in my right forearm, and my stiletto slid down into my palm. Before the man could move, I stuck the slim point of the stiletto up under his chin and held it there.
"Better luck next time," I said in a low voice.
I didn't drive the knife in under the man's chin as I would ordinarily have done. I held it there while his eyes narrowed on me.
Suddenly he grinned. "Very good, N3," he said.
"Any suggestions?" I asked, moving the stiletto away from his throat.
He sat up and dusted himself off. "Well, I could mention that you should get more of your hip into the throw. And that your stiletto is not regulation issue and is considered inferior to the German Trapper's Companion you just took away from me. But I think you know all that, anyway. And you seem to get the job done, regardless."
I put Hugo back in its sheath. 'Thanks," I said.
I had passed the first test of the refresher course. My assailant was the assistant aikido instructor at the AXE training academy, and I had to admit he'd done a damn good job of making sure I remembered the fundamentals of self-defense. We were on the grounds of the AXE supersecret school for agents.
"Now proceed along this path till you reach the intersection with the trail leading back to the training center," he told me. "Expect anything."
"I always do," I answered, smiling.
I left him there and started down the winding path. The moon slid out from behind the clouds, streaking the trail with an eerie silvery light. I moved cautiously, ready for anything. When I got to the intersection, I paused for a minute. I was aware of the absence of insect sounds, which meant there was a good possibility that somebody else was in the immediate area. I had just started along the path leading to the training center when a man jumped out of the darkness into the path directly in front of me. I drew my Luger and beat the man to his weapon. I aimed the Luger at his chest and pulled the trigger. There was a click on an empty chamber.
"You're dead," I said. "With a 9 mm slug through your heart."
The dark-suited figure laughed, and I saw that he was wearing a stocking over his face. The laugh and that stocking set wheels turning inside my head. While I was still trying to figure it out, I heard a slight noise behind me. The man had been only a decoy. But it didn't make sense. The instructors never worked in teams against you, not on the night exercises.
Before I could turn to face the second man, I felt a sudden, sharp pain explode at the base of my skull. Bright lights flashed at me in the blackness. My knees buckled, and the ground came up and smashed into the back of my head. I heard a low groaning somewhere, a rasping sound, and it was coming from my own throat.
"Is that him?" I heard a voice say.
"Yeah, that's him," the other man answered in an accent of some land.
I opened my eyes painfully and saw the two dark figures swimming in the darkness. They both wore stocking masks. "What… is this?" I managed to ask.
"Real life, Mr. Carter," the one with the accent said. "Not games at school, as you thought."
I squinted through pain-blurred eyes to see the shapes of the faces behind the stockings, but it was too dark to see much of anything. Anyway, it didn't require any brilliant deduction to figure out that these were not instructors from the training academy. I was just trying to guess how they'd gotten onto the grounds when one of them kicked me hard in the side.
I grunted and swore under my breath. The pain was excruciating. The man with the accent was aiming a Colt Cobra.38 Special at my face.
"That was just to convince you that this is not a game, Mr. Carter," the one with the Colt told me. The other man was breathing shallowly, and he looked as if he'd love to repeat the lesson.
The kicker put the small automatic back in his pocket. He pulled a black envelope out of his jacket. Making a sound in his throat, he threw the envelope to the ground beside me.
The one with the accent spoke again. "That's a message for your superiors, Mr. Carter. It concerns the forthcoming Caracas Conference. I suggest your people read it carefully and seriously."
My mind whirled in the pain-filled darkness. The conference was a meeting between the American Vice-President and the Venezuelan President that was going to be held at the Palacio de Miraflores, the White Palace, within the next couple of weeks. It was an important political event and was expected to strengthen economic and political ties between the United States and Venezuela.
I wanted to ask questions, to get them to speak some more. But they were through talking. The one who had kicked me before was about to give me one last kick before they left. His trouble was he enjoyed his work too much. This time he aimed his heavy shoe at my head. I grabbed his foot and gave it a vicious twist. I heard the bones crack, and he bellowed as he lost his balance and fell heavily against his comrade. The other man stumbled backward, and they both went down.
"Fool!"
the man with the Colt shouted as he scrambled to get back on his feet, trying at the same time to take aim.
By then I was on my feet, and somehow the kicker got himself between me and the gun, which was fine with me. He threw a big fist at my face, but I ducked and it glanced off my jaw. The man with the gun was up on his feet and running into the shadows. I hit the other man, smashing my fist into his temple. He fell onto his back, and I threw myself on top of him, but he got his foot against my gut and shoved. I went flying, and by the time I was back on my feet, he was dragging himself off into the brush.
But I wasn't about to forget how much he'd enjoyed kicking me, and that gave me energy I didn't know I had left. I let the stiletto fall into my hand and threw it after him underhand. It hit him in the back just as he was entering a thick patch of bushes. He yelled, grabbed at his back, and lunged forward onto his face, disappearing from view in the underbrush.
As I walked over to the fallen man, an instructor came out of the shadows behind me. "Hey," he shouted, "what's going on here?"
He came over to where I stood and saw the stiletto sticking up out of the thug's back. "Jesus!" he said. "What the hell happened?"
I pulled the stocking mask off the husky man and saw that he was dead. The face wasn't familiar. "We had visitors," I said. "One got away. He's gone by now."
"You killed this one?" He looked a little sick.
AXE instructors are specialists in self-defense, but most of them haven't spent much time in the field. They train us to loll but are never around for the dirty work.
"It looks as if I did," I said, moving past the slack-jawed karate expert to pick up the envelope my assailants had left with me. I opened it up and could just barely read the message in the dim moonlight.
At the forthcoming Caracas Conference, the government of the United States and particularly the AXE intelligence network will suffer severe humiliation and embarrassment. This is an open challenge to AXE to determine what form the humiliation will take and how it will be executed, and to prevent it if you can. When you fail, the world will see the inefficiency of AXE and the ineffectiveness of the United States government in world affairs.
It was signed simply "The Spoilers." The entire message, including the signature, was pasted up from magazine clippings.
The ashen-faced karate instructor came over to me from the dead man. When he spoke, his voice was cool. "Was that left by these men?"
"That's right," I said.
"May I see it, please?" he asked in his instructor's voice.
"I'm afraid not," I answered.
His face filled with anger. "Now look here, Carter. This unfortunate incident occurred on school grounds. And you have some explaining to do."
I stuck the paper into my jacket pocket. "David Hawk will get a full report."
Everybody at AXE answered to Hawk, even this man's boss at the training center. I suspected that the instructor resented the fact that I reported directly to Hawk. As I started past him to retrieve my stiletto, it looked like he was going to try to stop me.
"Do you think you can take this paper from me?" I asked with a sarcastic grin.
He hesitated for a minute. I knew he wanted very much to accept the challenge, but he was aware of my rank. That single fact frightened him in spite of his black belt in karate.
He moved aside, and I retrieved the stiletto. I cleaned the blade on the dead man's back and returned it to its sheath. "You can take the body to the training center," I said, "but leave it there till you hear from Hawk. And don't remove anything from his pockets."
The instructor just stared hard at me, resentment written all over his face.
"In the meantime, exercises are over," I said. "No more skulking around in the shadows tonight."
I turned away and headed back toward the buildings. I had to get a call through to Hawk right away.
* * *
A couple of days later Hawk and I sat at a long mahogany conference table at AXE headquarters with the head of the CIA, the chief of the National Security Agency, the Secret Service boss, and the director of the Venezuelan Security Police. Hawk had asked these men to meet with us because their agencies were going to provide the security for the Caracas Conference.
Hawk was at the head of the table, speaking through a huge, smelly cigar. "You all have copies of the message before you, gentlemen," he said. "If any of you wish to examine the original again, I have it right here." His spare frame seemed electric with energy, and his hard, icy eyes looked out of place in his jovial Connecticut-farmer's face. I noticed, as I had many times before, that when Hawk spoke, people listened carefully — even these notables.
"There is no lead as to who wrote it?" the CIA chief asked. He was a tall, sandy-haired man with piercing blue eyes and the manner of a five-star general.
"I'll let N3 answer that," Hawk said, shifting the cigar in his mouth.
I folded my hands in front of me on the table. I can't stand these bureaucratic meetings, especially when I have to answer a lot of questions from intelligence brass.
"There's no way to trace the materials that they used for the message itself," I said. "We've checked out the paper, envelope, clippings, and glue, and it's all common stuff that they could have bought at any one of a thousand stores in the area."
"What about the men themselves?" asked the Secret Service head impatiently. He was stocky and blondish, with streaks of gray starting at the temples. He looked very nervous.
"The man I killed turned out to be a shoe salesman in a large department store here in Washington. No leads. He hasn't got a record with any of our departments or with the police. And all I can tell you about his friend is that he's a tall guy with a European accent."
"Russian?" the NSA man asked. He was an older man with white hair and a long, jutting chin. He was doodling on the note pad in front of him, but he watched my face intently.
"I couldn't tell for sure," I said. "It might have been a Balkan accent. And of course it could have been phony."
The Venezuelan drummed his fingers on the table. He was a big man with an olive complexion and dark, heavy eyebrows. He was the man who had successfully protected the Venezuelan government during a series of attempted coups a while back, and he was obviously worried now. "Then we have no idea who is behind the message," he said slowly, in his thick accent.
"I'm afraid that's the present situation," Hawk admitted. "Even the signature doesn't mean anything to us."
"If it were up to me, I wouldn't worry about it," the NSA chief said. "The whole thing is probably a hoax of some kind."
"Or just some men with a grudge against AXE," the head of the Secret Service commented. "Amateurs who can be handled easily if they show up in Caracas."
"I don't see the Russians or Red Chinese going about an assignment in quite this way," the man from the CIA said slowly. "But then, it's almost impossible to guess how the KGB and the L5 will conduct themselves in any given situation."
"The hard, cold fact remains," Hawk said, "that there is a threat to the conference. The note talks of humiliation and embarrassment, not just disruption. And it is specifically addressed to AXE. What kind of embarrassment would particularly affect my agency, gentlemen?"
There was a short silence. Finally, the CIA chief spoke again. "Your people are often brought in where an assassination attempt is expected," he said, "to block their executioners with yours." He glanced in my direction.
"That's right," Hawk said, sitting back in his chair and glancing around the table. "So if AXE is to be embarrassed at this conference, it's just possible that someone is planning to assassinate our Vice-President or the Venezuelan President or both."
There was a buzz of conversation around the table. The head of the Secret Service regarded Hawk somberly. "I don't see how we can draw that conclusion from the note, David," he said. "I think you re exaggerating its importance."
The NSA man got up from his chair and started pacing back and forth beside the long table, his hands cl
asped behind him. He looked like a retired British colonel, striding down the room. "I think we're all taking this thing much too seriously," he argued. "The damned note could be a practical joke."
Till now I'd purposely kept quiet. Hawk wanted to hear everyone's opinion before we expressed ours. But now I thought it was time for me to speak up.
"It's a little too well planned for a joke," I said quietly. "Remember, these men managed to gain access to the AXE training-center grounds. And they knew my name and managed to find me there. The one with the accent, who gave me the note, said exactly this: T suggest your people read it carefully and seriously. "I looked around the table. "He didn't sound like he was kidding."
"If I'd killed a man in such a situation, I would want to interpret the whole thing pretty seriously, too," the Secret Service man said acidly.
I couldn't afford to lose my temper. "One of the men held a revolver on me while the other worked me over," I said coolly. "If you'd been there, you certainly would have taken it seriously. I used my knife because I had to stop the man, not because I love killing."
The Secret Service chief just raised his eyebrows and gave me a patronizing smile. "No criticism of your judgment was intended, Mr. Carter. I'm just trying to point out that the intelligence services receive such notes regularly. We just can't afford to take them all seriously."
The Venezuelan cleared his throat. "That is true. But this one seems different to me. And where there is any possibility of an attempt on the life of my President, I cannot take any chances. I intend to double my guards at the Palacio de Miraflores during the conference. And since your Vice-President may also be in danger, I strongly suggest you take extra precautions, too."
"I've just spoken with the Vice-President," the CIA chief spoke up. "He isn't concerned at all. I've told him that all four agencies will have men there, anyway, and he feels that is sufficient."
Hawk looked back at the Secret Service man, who was pressing his clasped hands against his mouth. In spite of his cynical remarks, he was obviously aware that he had the primary responsibility for the life and personal welfare of the Vice-President.
