by Nick Carter
The girls giggled in surprise, but then they bowed deeply with great respect.
"Thank you, Carter-san," one of them said.
Carter smiled, and returned the gesture in the proper form, then turned on his heel and headed up to the house — as any proper Japanese gentleman would — leaving the girls standing open-mouthed in the courtyard.
The main house was large by Japanese standards, and was ruggedly constructed because of the weather. A sharp cold wind either blew off the sea or down from the mountains. Already this early in the fall there was a lot of snow, and Carter figured the temperature had to be well below freezing.
A broad veranda ran the entire front of the house. Just inside, Carter took off his shoes and stepped into a broad, airy central hallway in which hundreds of plants provided a summertime feeling.
Another of Heido's daughters, this one somewhat younger and prettier than the first two, greeted him and helped him off with his coat.
"This way, please," the girl said in singsong English.
Carter followed her to the rear of the house, and she led him down a corridor of rice-paper walls and tatami-mat floors to the bathhouse where a large, round, steaming tub was sunk into the brightly scrubbed cedar floor.
A fresh cotton kimono and thick white cotton socks were laid out, along with several large bath towels.
The girl put Carter's coat aside and helped him out of his sport jacket. She had absolutely no reaction to his shoulder holster and Luger. But when it came off, she handled the weapon with a great respect, laying it carefully on a high shelf well away from the tub.
"What is your name?" Carter asked in Japanese.
She looked up at him in surprise, then smiled. "My name is Mariko."
"Mariko," Carter repeated. "I'm…"
"Carter-san," Mariko said. "Your shirt, please?"
She finished undressing him, and only when she came to Pierre did she show any nervousness. But that left almost immediately.
While Carter took the traditional, prebath shower, Mariko got undressed. She joined him, lathering his back and legs and feet.
This was the Japan of Carter's fond memories. He relaxed and allowed himself to be ministered to.
When Mariko came to the bandage around his ribs, she was very gentle. Carter reached out and touched her cheek. She looked up at him and smiled.
She was a short girl, with tiny breasts, boyish hips, and sturdy legs. It was obvious she was used to hard work, and yet there was a softness about her that Carter found appealing.
The water in the large tub was scented and extremely hot. At first it was painful on his battered body, but then as he sank into it, the warmth was almost like a narcotic and he let himself go, completely relaxed for the first time in a very long time.
Mariko climbed into the tub with him, and slowly and methodically began massaging his muscles, beginning at the base of his skull and working slowly downward. She was very good; she knew all the proper pressure points, and she had the strength in her fingers for the job.
Another of Heido's daughters joined them in the bath a little later, though Carter did not get her name. He felt himself drifting, half in and half out of sleep. The second girl brought cool towels for his forehead, and then a sip of sake, which went immediately to his head.
Sometime later, though Carter never knew how much later, the girls helped him out of the tub, gently dried his body, and helped him on with the kimono. Then Mariko led him back down the corridor, where she slid back a rice-paper door into a dim, scented sleeping room.
"Please, Carter-san?" Mariko said, smiling.
Carter thought about Kazuka and he started to shake his head, but she gently nudged him into the room and closed the door after him.
For a moment or two Carter stood just within the dark room, until warm hands led him across to the soft futons on the floor, then took off his kimono.
"Nicholas," Kazuka said in his ear. She was nude, and she held him close for several long moments, her body heat wonderful in the chill air. Then she helped him down to the floor.
"You're hurt," Carter mumbled. It would be impossible for her to make love with the burns on her thighs.
"Now is not the time for talking, Nicholas-san. Now is the time for enjoying."
Carter's eyes had become accustomed to the diffused light coming through the thin rice-paper walls. Kazuka had pinned up her hair. Her lips were moist, the nipples of her breasts erect.
He reached up and caressed her breasts with his fingertips. "You don't have to do this…"
"No talking now," she purred, and she bent down and kissed his forehead, then his eyes.
Slowly then, and with much gentleness, Kazuka began to give Carter a much different massage than the one Mariko had given him. This time, instead of relaxing his muscles, her purpose was to increase his pleasure, bringing him to readiness very slowly.
Her fingers and lips lingered at his ears and his neck, then around his nipples and down his stomach. She worked gently on his legs and thighs so that at one point his muscles began to jump. For a while then, she simply lay against him, her body warm and soft and soothing.
When he was calm and warm, she began again, with his fingers and toes and inner thighs.
As she continued, everything else seemed to be blotted out of Carter's awareness, only the pleasure of the moment and Kazuka's body next to his having any meaning.
His pleasure was building, slowly, a bit at a time until he thought he would explode, and then Kazuka took him in her mouth, and he was falling faster and faster, the pleasure seeming as if it would never end but would go on until there was nothing left of his body.
* * *
Carter woke with a start. The room was very dark, and he was warm and comfortable under a thick quilt. Kazuka was gone, but the feeling of her body against his still lingered.
He raised his arm and looked at the luminous dial of his watch. It was a few minutes past eight. In the evening. He sat up. He had slept through the entire day.
Throwing the quilt back, Carter got up and padded across the room where he opened the door and looked out into the corridor. He could hear someone talking somewhere in the direction of the central room, and he could smell the marvelous odors of cooking food.
He found a light switch and flipped it on, and the sleeping room was bathed in a soft glow. His suitcase had been laid out, along with freshly pressed clothing. A sliding door at the far end of the room was open onto a Western-style bathroom where his shaving gear was laid out neatly on a shelf. Even his weapons had been cleaned and oiled, laid out in neat order on a small table.
Fifteen minutes later he was shaved and dressed, his ribs still sore but manageable, and he headed down the corridor back to the plant-filled central hall.
Mariko met him. "Ah, Carter-san," she said, bowing deeply.
"Where is everyone?"
"This way, please, Carter-san," the girl said.
Carter followed her down another wing of the house, where she slid back a rice-paper door, then stepped aside for him to enter.
Kazuka, dressed in a traditional silk kimono, sat at a low table across from a hard-looking old man with a wrinkled, leathery face and a wiry frame. They looked up when he came in.
"How do you feel, Nicholas?" Kazuka asked.
"Rested," Carter said.
Kazuka made the introductions, and Heido's lips broke into a gap-toothed grin.
"My daughters tell me mysterious things about your body, Carter-san," Heido said, laughing. "For instance, they say that you have been blessed with three balls and that you carry weapons to protect them."
Carter laughed, and took his place at the table. "An exaggeration, venerable sir," Carter replied in precise Japanese.
Heido nodded his approval. Carter understood that he had just passed some sort of test.
The sliding door opened and two of Heido's daughters came in with Carter's dinner: fish, rice, a meat dish, a lot of vegetables, warm sake, and cold beer. After the
y served him, they left the room.
"Kazuka tells me that you wish to see Svetlaya. She is very worried about such a trip," Heido said.
Carter ignored the Western silverware he had been given. Instead he used the chopsticks like an expert. He was ravenous and the food was delicious.
"How do you feel about it?" Carter asked.
"To Svetlaya itself by sea would be impossible. Their gunboats are everywhere. But we could get close to the coast to the south. What exactly is it that you wish to see?"
"The submarine pens."
Heido nodded thoughtfully. "You are perhaps tall, but we can make a Japanese fisherman of you…"
"There is more," Kazuka interrupted.
Heido's eyes narrowed. "Yes?"
"I also want to get onto the base," Carter said. "To the submarine pens themselves."
"Is it permitted for me to ask what purpose you wish to serve?"
"I need to steal something."
Heido smiled wanly. "Perhaps you want to steal a submarine. Is that it, Carter-san?"
"Something much smaller."
"To fit in a suitcase perhaps?" Heido asked.
Carter looked sharply at Kazuka.
"It came late this afternoon while you were sleeping," she said. "Hawk sent it over by military jet, and one of my people brought it up."
"How are things in Tokyo?"
"Tense. Everyone believes you are dead. It's even in the newspapers that an American businessman by the name of Nick Carter was murdered by unkown assailants."
"How about Major Rishiri?" Carter asked.
"Charlie didn't say."
Carter turned back to Heido. "When can we leave?"
"As soon as you are finished with your meal, Carter-san. My girls are making the boat ready."
Kazuka started to say something, but Carter cut her off.
"You are staying here. And that's an order!"
* * *
Mariko and Kim, the youngest of the five daughters, were to remain at the house with Kazuka, though they all came down to the dock.
It was pitch-black outside, and very cold. A stiff wind out of the northwest had blown in another front, bringing with it more snow.
They had used a walnut-seed soup to stain Carter's skin over his entire body, and had dressed him in traditional fishing clothes, consisting of wrapped leggings, a long quilted jacket, and felt boots beneath rubber sea boots. Considering the weather, the clothing wasn't very warm.
The black anodized aluminum suitcase was very heavy; Carter estimated it weighed about seventy pounds. It was mostly filled with batteries and other gear to keep the chip at a perfect temperature and humidity.
The girls had equipped the boat — a forty-two-foot fishing trawler — with plenty of food and fuel for the two-hundred-mile trip across and then the return, with plenty of reserve. At something around eight knots cruising speed — providing the weather didn't get worse, providing they were not spotted and stopped by a Russian gunboat, and providing there was no trouble with Heido's boat (which Carter thought looked older and more weather-worn than its owner) — it would take them twenty-four hours to make landfall on the Soviet coast.
They carried no weapons aboard other than Carter's personal arsenal.
"If they stop us and find no weapons, we will have provided one very good argument toward proving we are nothing other than simple fishermen," Heido said.
"Once they find the suitcase though, we will have lost that argument," Carter said.
Heido nodded stoically. He turned and went up to the wheelhouse to start the engines. His daughters waited at the bow and stern with the lines.
"Be careful, Nicholas," Kazuka said from the dock. "I want you to come back to me."
"When this is over we will have your uncle's house for a vacation."
The trawler's diesels started with a tremendous roar, making any further talk on deck impossible. Kazuka smiled and waved as the girls tossed the lines onto the dock, and Heido eased them away into the dark, windblown sea, the trawler rising up to meet each wave, then settling heavily with a huge splash into each trough.
Within a few minutes even the lights ashore were lost to the black night. Carter went up to the wheelhouse where Heido was turning over command of the boat to Mioshi, the eldest of his daughters. She seemed very competent and strong as she took the wheel, bracing herself expertly each time the boat pitched or rolled.
The other two girls had gone below to get some sleep. They would take the watches through the night, leaving Heido and Carter to rest.
Below, in the main cabin, Heido brought out his charts of the Soviet coastal waters. Much of the detail and information had been drawn in by hand from direct observation, though there were good satellite-developed charts available.
Heido said he had been boarded by the Russians before. They had paid very close attention to his charts. Had he the satellite charts aboard, they would have known he was more than a simple fisherman.
He had been working these waters with his daughters for several years, and his skin was still intact. He had developed a strong intuition about the Russians, and Carter knew that he could do no better than to trust the man's judgment.
"Svetlaya," Heido said, stabbing a blunt finger on the chart.
According to Carter's information, the town was a primitive Siberian settlement that became all but cut off from the rest of the world during the harsh winters.
The submarine base itself was eight miles north up the coast from the town. And the nearest other towns were Amgu, fifty miles to the south, and Samarga, about the same distance to the north.
Heido's chart, however, showed a fishing village between Svetlaya and the naval installation.
"Sovetskaya-Senyev," Heido said.
"That's where I want to go," Carter replied.
Six
The late dawn broke dark and cold over the large seas a hundred miles off the Soviet coast. Heido had already been up for an hour when Carter got dressed and went topside to the wheelhouse. Suiko, the second eldest daughter, was at the helm while her father scanned the seas through a pair of binoculars.
"Good morning, Carter-san," Suiko said.
"Good morning."
Heido lowered his binoculars and looked over. "Your stomach and head are all right this morning?"
Carter was one of those few people who never seemed to get seasick. Only once, when he was aboard the space shuttle in free fall, had he felt a slight nausea. This morning he felt fit and rested. Even the pain in his chest from his cracked ribs had eased to a tolerable level.
"I'm fine," he said. "Any signs of the Russians?"
"No," Heido said. "There were lights earlier to the north, but I believe they were another Japanese fishing boat." He looked out the windows. "We may have some difficulty, however, Carter-san."
"Yes?" Carter asked, looking out at the choppy seas and the whitecaps."
"My daughters say in the night they have heard a great deal of Russian radio traffic. There may be some sort of a naval exercise today. If that is so, we will not get close to any part of the coast."
Carter glanced up at the powerful communications radio in its rack above the pilot's position. It was silent.
"They have maintained radio silence since six this morning," Suiko said.
"It is always so when they conduct their maneuvers," Heido added.
Again Carter stared out across the sea. It was possible, he told himself, that the Russians had not fallen for his ruse in Tokyo. It was very possible that they knew about the construction of the special computer chip carrying case, and had realized that someone might be trying for the chip at Svetlaya. If that were so, the morning's naval exercise was designed to stop any such attempt.
The Russians were efficient and ruthless, Carter thought. The downing of the Korean jet with all of its passengers not so very far from where they now were proved that. The Russians certainly would not hesitate to sink their boat and let all hands go down with her.
&nb
sp; The next question in Carter's mind was whether or not he wanted to submit Heido and his three daughters to such a risk.
"What troubles you, Carter-san?" Heido asked.
"This naval operation may mean that they know or suspect I am here."
Heido looked at him for a long time. "This thing that you wish to steal from them… it is that important?"
"Yes, it is," Carter said.
"If they board us, and if they find the suitcase, they will surely know what it is you are after?"
Carter nodded.
"But to throw the suitcase overboard would make your mission impossible, yes?"
Again Carter nodded.
"A difficult decision, Carter-san," Heido said thoughtfully. He looked at his eldest daughter for a long moment, then looked out to sea. "But it is your decision. We will do whatever you wish, for at times they are a government without a conscience."
Carter knew Heido was thinking about his wife and son. The Killmaster realized it had to be very difficult for the old man to live so close to the Russians without being able to do anything to them.
Carter turned and went back to the main cabin where he took out Heido's charts of the Soviet coast and studied them again.
There had to be another way, he told himself. One in which there would be no risk for civilians such as Heido and his daughters. They were so close now, though — less than a hundred miles from the sub pens. And yet it might just as well have been a million miles with the Russian navy out there running its exercise.
He lit a cigarette as he tried to think of an alternative plan. In his career he had been on a number of seemingly impossible missions — operations in which the odds of his success were so slim they were barely worth considering.
Perhaps, he told himself, this was the one mission that was impossible, the one mission in which there were absolutely no odds in favor of his success. If that were the case, he would be throwing away not only his own life in an attempt, he would be forfeiting the lives of everyone helping hint.
He went to the carrying case and opened it. It was densely packed with batteries and electronic equipment. Only a very small slot behind a spring-loaded glass door was empty, ready to receive the submarine's computer chip.
