The Aztec Avenger

by Nick Carter

  Carlos cocked his head and stared at the big, ex-prize-fighter. “You really mean that?”

  Bickford nodded seriously. “I sure as hell do. I don’t want any part of kidnapping or murder.”

  “Who said anything about murder?”

  “You see what I mean?” Doris interrupted. “He’s been like this all day, ever since you brought the old man here. And when Brian Garrett came in with the girl, he went completely apart.”

  “I can’t go through with it, Carlos,” Bickford said, apologetically. “I’m sorry.”

  Doris gestured toward me. “What about him?” Carlos smiled at her for the first time. “He’s with us from now on,” he said. Doris looked at me in surprise.

  Susan Dietrich lifted her head. Shock was written all over her face. I kept my own features blank. Susan turned away from me, despair and fright showing in her eyes.

  Doris was measuring me in the same cold way she might examine an expensive sable coat brought out for her approval. Finally, she said, “He’ll do. A hell of a lot better than Johnny, I think.”

  Bickford turned around in his pacing. “What do you mean by that?”

  “You wanted out, didn’t you?”

  “That’s right. For both of us. You’re coming with me.”

  Doris shook her head, her long, platinum hair swinging heavily in front of her face. “Not me, honey,” she said, bitingly. “I don’t want out. Not now. Not when the big money is going to start rolling in.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Bickford demanded, incredulously. He strode over and grabbed her by the shoulders. “You’re my wife! You go where I go!”

  “The hell I do! I want a man, not a broken down old prize-fighter who can’t talk about anything but the good old days when he was getting the shit kicked out of him. Well, the good old days are just beginning to come for me, honey. And you’re not going to stop me from enjoying them!”

  Bickford looked as if he’d Just caught a hard right cross to the jaw. Bewilderment glazed his eyes. “Listen,” he said, shaking her roughly. “I took you out of that life. I gave you things. I made a lady out of you Instead of a hundred-dollar call girl! What the hell’s gotten into you?”

  “I took myself out of that life!” Doris told him sharply. “And I’m the one who pushed you so that you could afford to give me things. Who introduced you to Brian Garrett? Who paved the way for you? Don’t be stupid, Johnny. It’s been me all the way. If you don’t want to come along, then I’m going by myself. Don’t think you can stop me.”

  Bickford stepped away from her. He looked blankly at Doris and then turned helplessly to Carlos. “Carlos?”

  “I prefer not to get involved.”

  “The hell you do,” said Doris assertively, turning to Ortega. “You and I are already involved. It’s time this big, stupid jerk learned about us, Carlos.”

  Bickford looked at each of them in turn, a man rocked by one blow after another, yet still standing, still asking for more punishment.

  “The two of you?” he asked, numbly.

  “Yes, the two of us,” Doris repeated. “All this time. Didn’t you know, Johnny? Didn’t you even suspect a little bit? Why do you think we took so many trips every year to Mexico? Why do you think Carlos visited us in Los Angeles so often?”

  The telephone rang, cutting through the silence that followed her words. Swiftly, Ortega picked up the phone. “Bueno! . . . oh, it’s you, Hobart. Where the hell . . . at the airport? . . . Good! How soon can you be ready to leave?” He looked at his watch. “Yes, twenty minutes at the most Maybe less than that. I want you ready for takeoff when we get there. Full tanks, we’re going all the way.”

  Ortega hung up. “Shall we go? Hobart’s at the airport.”

  Bickford stepped in front of him. “Not just yet,” he said stubbornly. “You and I have things to talk about. I want to get something straight first.”

  “Later,” said Ortega, impatiently.

  “Now!” said Bickford, taking an angry step toward him and pulling back a clenched, knuckle-broken fist to smash into Ortega’s face.

  “Johnny!”

  Bickford turned around to his wife. Doris lifted the gun in her hand, straightening her arm so that it pointed at him, and pulled the trigger.

  There was a sharp explosion. Susan screamed. Bickford’s face contorted. He opened his eyes in a wide stare. I couldn’t tell if the expression of amazement on his face came from the impact of the bullet smashing into him or from the shock of realization that it was Doris who’d shot him. His mouth opened and a trickle of blood ran down his chin. He forced himself to take a staggering step toward Doris, reaching out with both of his powerful hands for her. She backed away and pulled the trigger again. Bickford collapsed on the floor.

  In the silence, Doris turned to Carlos and said crisply, “Are we going to hang around here all night?”

  It was a small, private airport, a single dirt strip with two hangars at the near end. Hobart was waiting for us as the big sedan swept off the main road and jounced along a rutted track to the far end of the field. In the moonlight, the plane looked larger than it was. I recognized the aircraft as a Piper Aztec Model D with twin turbo-charged engines in flat nacelles.

  We got out of the car, all of us except Paco. He sat immobile, the engine running.

  “Hello!” said Hobart as he saw me. “You’re the chap I met the other evening. Fancy meeting you again so soon.”

  “Are you ready to go?” Carlos asked impatiently.

  “I topped the tanks myself. She’s checked out and been run up. We can take off as soon as you’re all on board.”

  Susan helped her father climb into the aircraft and followed him in. Doris went in after them, stepping up onto the wingroot, waiting until they had seated themselves and had fastened their seat belts before she entered.

  I climbed up onto the wing and paused. From the time we had arrived at Bickford’s until now there had not been a moment for me to take any action. Had I been alone, it would have been a different story, but I had seen how ruthlessly Doris Bickford had put two bullets into her husband. I knew she’d have no compunction about turning the gun on Susan or Dietrich. She’d no more hesitate in killing either of them than she did in killing Johnny Bickford.

  This would be the last opportunity to make, a break in one way or another, but if I was aware of that fact, so was Carlos. Sharply, he said, “Please don’t try to delay us. We’re running out of time.”

  There was nothing I could do, not with Doris in the aircraft holding a gun on Dietrich and Susan, not with Carlos holding a revolver that he could turn on me in a split second, and especially because Paco was now leaning out the window of the car, holding his big 9mm Mauser Parabellum pistol as if he were just hoping for the chance to use it.

  I was about to duck my head into the aircraft when I heard the sound of an automobile racing down the dirt load toward us.

  “Hurry!” Ortega shouted at me.

  The police car turned on its siren and its flashing red beacon. A series of shots came from it as it raced down the side road toward us. I heard the thunk of bullets slamming into the side of the heavy sedan. Paco flung open the door and scrambled to the front of the car. He began to fire back at the police cruiser. The big Parabellum bucked in his hand with each shot.

  I heard Ken Hobart cry out, but his shout was drowned in the blasting of Paco’s Mauser.

  Suddenly, the police car swerved off the road in a long skid, spinning around in a scream of tires, completely out of control, its headlights making revolving arcs in the darkness like a gigantic, whirling St. Catherine’s wheel. Paco stopped firing. I heard the gasping wheeze of Carlos’ breathing.

  The silence was almost complete, and in that moment, with the danger gone, Paco fell into a panic. He leaped to his feet and threw himself into the driver’s seat. Before Carlos could grasp what he was doing, Paco had put the sedan into gear and was racing off into the night across the fields as fast as he could push the car
.

  Carlos shouted at him to come back. “Idiot! Fool! There’s no danger! Where are you going? Come back!”

  He stared at the taillights of the car growing smaller every second. Then he shrugged and dropped down off the wing, ducking under it to get to Ken Hobart The lanky, redheaded Englishman lay in a crumpled mess on the ground near the right main landing gear.

  Carlos stood up slowly, the gun in his hand held limply by his side, frustration showing in every line of his body.

  “He’s dead.” He uttered the words in a tone of quiet resignation. “And that fool has driven off.” He turned away from the body. I dropped off the wing and knelt beside Hobart. The Englishman’s head had fallen against the right tire of the aircraft. His chest was covered with blood that still seeped slowly out of him.

  I pulled Hobart as far away from the aircraft as I could. Wiping the blood off my hands with my handkerchief, I walked back to Carlos, who was still standing beside the aircraft. “What’s the matter with you?” I asked him roughly.

  Defeat was written into every line of his face. “We’re finished, amigo,” he said dully. “Paco has gone with the car. Hobart is dead. We have no way to escape from this place. How long do you think it will be before there will be more police here?”

  “Not before we can be gone. Get in that airplane!” I snarled at him.

  Carlos looked up at me blankly.

  “Damn it!” I swore at him. “If you’re going to stand there like an idiot, we’ll never get out of here! Now move!”

  I scrambled up onto the wing and into the pilot’s seat. Carlos followed me in, slamming the cabin door shut as he settled himself in the seat.

  I snapped on the cabin overhead light and scanned the panel quickly. There was no time to go through the complete checklist. I could only hope that Hobart had been right when he’d said that the plane was ready for takeoff, and I prayed that none of the shots fired by the police had struck a vital part of the aircraft.

  Almost automatically my hand went out, turning on the master switch, turbo-charger circuit breakers on, turbo switches off. I flicked on the magneto and the electric fuel pumps, then I cracked the throttles about half an inch and pushed the fuel mixture levers to full rich. The fuel flow meters began to register. Back to idle cutoff. I engaged the left-hand starter switch and heard the whining, rising scream of the starter motor.

  The left-hand prop swung over once, twice, and then caught with a spitting, cracking roar. Mixture back to full rich again. I fired up the right engine.

  No time to check out all the gauges. Time enough only to move elevators, ailerons, rudder, as I fed in power to the twin engines and taxied the aircraft to the runway, turning onto it, trying to line up with its dim outline in the darkness. I turned off the cabin interior light and turned on the landing lights. I set quarter flaps, and then my hands were on the twin throttles, pushing them forward smoothly until they hit the stop. The big turbo-charged Lycomings bellowed as the aircraft began moving forward down the strip, faster and faster.

  As the airspeed indicator reached eighty miles an hour, I hauled back on the ram’s horn control wheel. The nose lifted, the pounding of the main gear on the bumpy dirt strip ceased. I snapped off the lights. We were airborne.

  I made the rest of the climbout in complete darkness, pulling up the gear lever, hearing the whine and then the heavy thunking of the main gear retracting into their wheel wells. At a hundred twenty miles an hour, I trimmed the aircraft to hold a steady rate of climb.

  For the same reason I’d snapped off the landing lights as soon as I’d cleared the ground, I didn’t turn on the red and green running lights or the rotating strobe beacon. I wanted no one on the ground to see the aircraft. We were flying in complete darkness, illegal as hell, with only the faint, blue spitting flames from our exhausts to give away our position and, as I reduced climb power, even those disappeared.

  At eighteen hundred feet, I turned the aircraft northwest, keeping the mountains to my right. I turned to Carlos. “Look in the map compartment. See if Hobart has his charts there.”

  Ortega pulled out a stack of WAC maps.

  “Good,” I said. “And now, if you’ll tell me where we’re going, I’ll try to get us there.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It was daylight when I reduced power and came down over the mountains to the brown, bare hills somewhere in the area bounded by Durango, Torreen and Matamoros. We were flying now at less than five hundred feet, with Ortega peering out the starboard window, giving directions to me.

  I made a landing on a strip to the north of an isolated ranch house. There was only a wooden shack to mark the end of the strip. I taxied the big Aztec twin up to it and killed the engines.

  A surly-faced Mexican in worn chino trousers came out of the shack to meet us. He didn’t speak to us as he began to service the aircraft, topping off the tanks and checking the oil.

  We all got out of the plane. I spread out the sectional air charts on the wing of the plane and Carlos drew in the route for me to follow, marking the point where we would sneak across the border into the States.

  “Here’s where we cross,” he said, pointing to a spot on the Rio Bravo just south of the Texas railroad town of Sierra Blanca. “Beginning here”— he pointed again, this time to a place more than a hundred miles inside Mexico——”you’ll have to fly as low as you can. You cross the river at no more than treetop height, make an immediate turn to go around Sierra Blanca to the north, and then, at this point head northeast.”

  “And from there?”

  Carlos straightened up. “From there, I’ll direct you again. Remember, minimum altitude until we are well across the border.”

  I folded the charts and stacked them in the order I’d use them. The Mexican had finished refueling the aircraft. Doris came back with Susan and the old man. They climbed aboard the aircraft, Susan ignoring me as if I did not exist, Dietrich walking stiffly like a man in a trance. Carlos got in after I did.

  He shut and locked the door and fastened his seat-belt. I sat there a moment, rubbing the bristles on my chin, my eyes tired from lack of sleep, my right arm aching.

  “Shall we go?” Ortega prodded.

  I nodded and started the engines. I swung the big Aztec around into the wind and fed in power as we raced down the dirt field and took off into the crisp, blue Mexican sky.

  It takes several hours to fly from Torreon-Durango to the Rio Bravo. I had plenty of time to think and the vague ideas that had begun to form in my mind the evening before—wild, almost impossible thoughts—began to crystallize into a hard suspicion that grew more and more solid with every passing minute.

  Following to Carlos’ instructions, I came in low and crossed the border at treetop height south of Sierra Blanca, and then swung around the town in a pant curve far enough to be out of sight. Ten miles to the north, I turned the aircraft to a northeasterly heading. As the minutes passed, the suspicion in my mind began to jell and became more than just a vague, uncomfortable stirring.

  I picked up the airway chart again. El Paso was to the northwest of us. I projected an imaginary line from El Paso at a heading of sixty degrees. The line went into New Mexico, coming close to Roswell. I looked at the compass on the panel of the aircraft. On our present heading, we’d intersect that line in only a few more minutes. I watched the clock.

  Almost as if he, too, had been looking at the chart and watching for the imaginary line, Carlos said, at just the precise moment, “Please take up this heading,” and put his finger on a spot that lay to the north of us in the valleys of the Guadelupe mountains.

  It was now no longer a suspicion. The thought became a certainty. I followed Carlos’ instructions until we finally flew over a ridge and there was the valley and Carlos was pointing down at it and saying, “There! That’s where I want you to land.”

  I pulled back on the throttles, pushed the mixture controls to full rich, dropped flaps and gear, and set up for the landing. I turned the twin-engi
ne aircraft into a tight bank, straightening out on final approach with full flaps at the last minute.

  I wasn’t surprised to see the big Lear jet at the far end of the airstrip or the Bonanza single-engine plane beside it. I put the Aztec down nose high and let it settle gently onto the dirt strip, applying just a shade of power to extend the rollout, so that when I finally turned the aircraft off the runway, it came to a stop only a short distance away from the other two planes.

  Carlos turned to me.

  “Are you surprised?” he asked, with a faint smile on his thin lips and a glint of amusement in his dark eyes. The gun was once more in his hand. At that short distance I could see that each chamber in the cylinder “Was loaded with a fat, copper-sheathed bullet.

  I shook my head. “Not really. Not after you gave me the last heading. I’d have been surprised if it had turned out any other way.”

  “I think Gregorius is waiting for us,” said Carlos. “Let’s not keep him waiting any longer.”

  In the blazing heat of the New Mexico sunlight, I walked slowly beside Gregorius’ bulky figure. Carlos, Doris Bickford, Susan Dietrich and her father were in the air-conditioned Lear jet. A muscular, acne-scarred gunman walked a dozen steps to our rear, never once taking his eyes off me.

  Gregorius strolled in slow deliberation, with his hands held behind his back and his head lifted toward the brilliant, cloudless sky.

  Casually, he asked, “What made you suspect that I might be involved?”

  “Carlos knew too much too soon. I just couldn’t buy the idea that his men had me under such tight surveillance that they knew every move I made. Sure, the first time I met with Stocelli, I wasn’t on my guard. What I couldn’t accept was the idea that Ortega’s men had followed me the night I saw Dietrich—or that they’d heard our entire conversation. It was too much of a coincidence. Carlos kidnapped Dietrich within hours of the time I made my report to Denver—and that report was for your ears only! Except for myself, you were the only man in the world who knew what Dietrich had discovered and how valuable it was. So, Ortega had to be getting his information from you.”