by Nick Carter
“The place appears heavily guarded,” Gabrielle said. “Even if we manage to get in, how will we get out?”
“We will not get in or out,” I said to her. “I win—”
I squinted into the lowering sun and saw a long, black car coming from the garden on the way to the front gate.
“What?” she asked.
“Unless I’m badly mistaken, here comes the general,” I said.
The black limousine, a Rolls-Royce, had stopped at the gate while the soldier, a submachine gun slung over his shoulder, unlocked it.
I shifted the Citrõen into low gear and twisted the wheel as the car shot forward. We moved off the road into high bushes just beyond the level shoulder, where the Citrõen was hidden from view.
The Rolls glided past on the dirt road, moving swiftly but almost noiselessly, raising a great cloud of burnt umber dust behind it. Soon it was gone. I climbed from the Citrõen, and Gabrielle followed.
“That was the general, all right,” I said. “I got a glimpse of him and saw the insignia. He looks like a tough hombre.”
“He has a tough reputation.”
“I just hope he’s decided to leave for the evening,” I said, glancing again at the peach-hued sun, already dipping behind the mountains that circled the palace. I looked down the road to a high, rocky escarpment that abutted the estate grounds. “Come on.”
I grabbed Gabrielle’s hand and pulled her along after me to the road, across it, and into the brush. We walked through low greenery for a hundred yards, always heading uphill, and found ourselves in rocks. We continued climbing until we crested the escarpment and moved out onto a rocky ledge that overlooked the palace and grounds, giving us a good view of the place.
We lay on our bellies on the rock, studying the scene below. Besides the guard at the gate, we saw at least two other armed soldiers up near the building itself.
The sun had disappeared behind the mountains, and the sky was losing its warm colors and deepening to mauve and a pale lemon hue. It would soon be dark.
“Did you say I could not go in with you?” the girl asked.
“That’s right,” I told her. “It’s a one-man job once I get past that fence. But you’re going to give me some hints about what I’ll find inside. And you’re going to help me get in.”
Gabrielle looked over at me and smiled. Her hair was done up in a knot at the back of her head, and some strands had come loose. It was very becoming. “How, Nick? How can I get you in?”
“By using your Almohad dialect on that guard at the gate. But let’s talk about the palace first. I presume the third floor is primarily a storage area?”
“The top floor was never used for living quarters, not even by the caliph,” she said. “Of course, the general might have renovated it. The second floor consists of bedrooms, with a small study at the northeast corner.”
“And the first floor?”
“A reception hall, a kind of throne room, a ballroom for entertaining European visitors, a library, and a big kitchen.”
“Hmm. So the library and the second-floor study would be the most appropriate rooms for an office, unless the general wanted to renovate a guest room?”
“I believe so.”
“All right. I’ll go to the library first. That would seem to suit the grand style of a general. But it may be pretty difficult to get in on the first floor without breaking a window, so I’ll have to try the roof.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“Don’t worry about my part. You’re going to have enough to do yourself. I’ll tell you the details when we get back to the car. But we might as well wait here until it’s dark.”
We lay there in the encroaching dusk, watching the outlines of the estate emerge into shadow. A moon was rising behind us, and a cricket had begun rasping away in a nearby thicket.
Gabrielle turned to me, and my arms went around her. Our mouths met, and my hand found its way inside her dress, caressing the soft warmth of her breasts. She sighed, her legs parting almost automatically. She raised her hips to help me as I peeled off her panties, and then I moved onto her. She moaned as I reached deep inside her and then there was nothing for me, nothing for her, but our bodies and the need to be satisfied again and again.
She was silent when it was over, and we lay once more side by side. We stayed that way for a long time. Finally I touched her shoulder gently. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s get there.”
We drove slowly down the road toward the gate to the estate. Gabrielle was at the wheel, and I was crouched low in the back seat. It was black now, with a dull moonlight. As we approached, the olive-drab soldier moved from a small gatehouse, unslung the submachine gun, and aimed it at Gabrielle.
“Keep cool,” I whispered from behind her. “Drive right up to him.”
The car moved on to the gate. There was a hissing from the radiator and when we stopped just a few feet from the sentry, it steamed up angrily from under the hood, just as I planned.
Gabrielle spoke to the man in his native dialect. She gave him a disarming smile, which seemed to remove the scowl from his face, and I saw him look her over appraisingly, even as he held on to the gun. She mentioned car trouble and asked if he could help.
He hesitated, then answered her uncertainly.
Gabrielle got out of the car, and he followed her movement suspiciously with the big gun. She was speaking and gesturing, the smile turned on him, her eyes pleading.
He returned the smile and shrugged his shoulders. He was a slim mountain man with a dark beard. He wore a fatigue uniform and cap, with a cartridge belt at his waist. As Gabrielle walked to the front of the car, he followed her, the gun hanging at his side. She raised the hood, and he ex-claimed and gestured at all the additional steam that was released.
He was obviously a simple man who knew little about machines, but he would not want this beautiful woman to know that.
The sentry looked under the hood with Gabrielle. I climbed quietly from the Citrõen, Hugo in hand, and made a circle around him and Gabrielle, on his blind side. I was behind him as he leaned over the car.
He was speaking to her, gesturing to the radiator, apparently explaining the problem. His dialect was fast and slurred, and I was glad Gabrielle was so good with it. I could understand nothing of what he was saying, but one thing was clear: he was caught up with Gabrielle completely.
I moved up closer, grabbed him with my left arm, pulling his head back as Gabrielle stepped away from us. He tried to bring the gun into play but couldn’t. I drew Hugo across his throat with my right hand. He made a muffled sound and slumped to the ground.
I touched Gabrielle’s arm. “Go open the gate while I get him over to this clump of bushes.”
She hesitated only a moment. “All right.”
I dragged the soldier out of sight, then stripped the clothes off him. Gabrielle came back, and I handed them to her. She began putting the uniform on over her own short dress.
“This is just to reassure whoever is looking toward the gate from the house,” I told her. “If the General’s car should return before I get back, run. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Hide, and fire a warning shot from this.” I pointed to the submachine gun.
“All right.” She buttoned the shirt over her full breasts and stuck most of her red hair under the cap. I gave her the gun and she slung it over her shoulder. From a distance she would look enough like the sentry to get away with it.
We moved back to the gate, and she took up her position. I climbed into the car, drove it behind a small clump of trees off to the left outside the guardhouse, and then entered the grounds past Gabrielle. She closed the gate behind me.
“Good luck, Nick.” she said.
I winked at her and moved on down the drive toward the palace.
In a few moments I was crouching behind a square-pruned hibiscus bush near the building. There was a small port
ico on the front of the place, under a Moorish arch, and big double doors behind it leading into the glittering interior. The doors were open this balmy night, and I could see two soldiers standing in the entrance hall, talking and smoking. There might be others in there, too. Looking up at the second floor, I saw that there were few lights on. There were probably no guards up there.
I left cover momentarily and ran in a crouched position to the corner of the building. The arched portico ended there, in a bramble of bougainvillea. I planned on going around to the rear of the place, hoping to find a way up to the roof.
When I turned the corner of the building, I al-most walked right into a guard who was standing outside smoking. He had not seen or heard me, and when I stopped short just inches from him, his eyes went wide in surprise, then narrowed quickly as he dropped his cigarette, reaching for a big military pistol on his belt.
Hugo slipped into my palm. The man was just drawing the big automatic to fire when I stepped even closer and shoved Hugo in under his ribs.
The pistol thumped to the ground and the soldier looked at me in disbelief. I withdrew the stiletto as he grabbed at his side. He slid down the side of the building, his face twisted in death.
I cleaned the stiletto on his uniform and returned the blade to its sheath. Looking down the side of the building, I saw a small wheelbarrow covered with a tarpaulin. I got the tarpaulin and threw it over the fallen guard. Then I moved to the rear of the place.
As I suspected, there was a trellis on the back wall. The vine that grew on the trellis was not thick at this time of the year, and that helped. I climbed the trellis quietly until I reached a second-story roof over a kitchen area. From there I climbed a drain pipe up to the top roof.
The roof was on several levels, and there were open spaces across an interior court and between the different levels. I started working my way toward a service hatch but found that a ten-foot space separated me from the section I wanted to reach.
The surface of the roof was curved tile, and it was difficult to perform acrobatics on it. Also, I didn’t want to be heard downstairs. I took a long hard look at the open space, backed up a few feet, ran, and sprang across the black gulf. I landed on the very edge of the other roof. I almost lost my balance and fell backward, so I leaned far forward at the waist. But that made my feet slip under me. In a split-second I was sliding off.
I grabbed frantically as I slid, but my fingers found nothing to hold on to, and I was going over.
Then, just as I was sure I was on my way down, my hands caught the eave trough which drained rainwater from the roof. It groaned and bent under my weight as my body jerked to an abrupt halt. My weight pulled my left hand free, but the right one held. The gutter let go at a bracket near me and dropped me another foot. But then it held tight.
I closed my left hand over the trough, waited half a minute for some strength to return to my arms, then did a slow chin-up. From that position I hooked my arms into the gutter and pulled myself arduously back onto the roof.
I squatted up there, sweating. I hoped things would go better when I got inside. Slowly and cautiously I moved over the slippery tile to the closed hatch. Kneeling beside it, I pulled on it. It seemed stuck at first, but then it pulled open, and I was looking into blackness.
I lowered myself into the dark room below. It was an unused, attic-type place, and it had a door that led to a corridor. I moved out into the corridor which was also dark, but I could see light coming from the bottom of a stairwell. I went down the stairs, which were dusty and full of cobwebs. The railing was all hand-carved hardwood. When I reached the bottom, I was standing in the second-floor corridor. It was fully carpeted, with mosaic decorating its walls. There were rooms with heavy wooden doors off each side of the corridor. The study Gabrielle had mentioned was to my right, and I tried the door. It was open. I entered and snapped a light on.
I had been right. The room was not used as the general’s office. Undoubtedly he did his work in the library downstairs, where the guards were. But the room was still interesting. The walls were covered with maps of Morocco and adjacent countries, the military installations marked with pins. One large map showed the pattern of fighting in a recent military exercise, a war game. Then I saw it. In a corner of the room, stuck on the wall with thumbtacks, was a small map, a map drawn by hand, but expertly done.
I went over and took a good look at it. It was of a part of southern Morocco, the dry arid area that André Delacroix had talked about. On the left edge of the map was the village of Mhamid, the one Delacroix had described to Pierrot, the one near the laboratory. There was a road drawn from that village, and at the end of the road was a simple circle with an “X” in it. There seemed little doubt of it: the mark revealed the location of the super-secret laboratory of Damon Zeno and his L5 boss, Li Yuen.
I tore the paper from the wall and stuffed it into a pocket. Then I turned the light off and left the room.
There might have been other information on the facility in the General’s office downstairs, but I had as much as I needed. I had the map and all I had to do was get out with it.
There was a broad, elegant stairway down to the reception hall from the second floor. I stood at the top and peered below, the Luger in hand. I did not see the guards who had been standing there earlier. Maybe they were having a snack in the kitchen.
I moved slowly down the steps, one at a time. It was uncomfortably quiet. Just as I reached the bottom and stood looking out through the open front doors, I heard the double roar in the night. Gabrielle had fired the gun.
I started to run outside when the voice came from behind me. It spoke in English.
“Stop! Do not move!”
There were at least two of them. As I whirled around, I dropped to one knee. There was a thin, tall one and a stocky one—the men I had seen before. As my eyes focused on them, I automatically looked for weapons. The thin one had his out already. It was a heavy military automatic, similar in style to the U.S. Army .45. The big gun banged loudly—and missed because I had crouched low as I spun. I squeezed the trigger of the Luger and it barked its angry reply. The slug caught the thin soldier in the gut, picked him a foot off the floor and slammed him back against the bottom post of the staircase.
The stocky soldier threw himself at me. He had not yet gotten to his gun. I turned the Luger toward him, but he hit me before I could fire. I fell to the floor under the impact of his body and felt a big fist crunch into my face.
His other hand was going for Wilhelmina. We rolled toward the open doors and then back to where we had fallen. He was strong, and his grip on my right wrist was turning it. My hand struck the wall and the Luger slipped from my grasp.
I slugged him hard, catching him full in the face, and there was a crunch of bone in his nose. He fell heavily off me, his nose bleeding. He muttered something as he went for the gun on his belt.
In the ensuing split-second I glanced around and saw an urn sitting on a shelf beside me. I grabbed the urn, which was heavy, and threw it hard toward the stocky man just as his gun cleared the holster. It hit him in the face and chest and broke into pieces as he went down under its impact. There was a low grunt from him as he hit the floor and then lay still.
At that moment the second man aimed his gun at me and fired. The slug chipped into the wall between my right arm and my chest; it would have killed me if it had been a few inches to the left.
As I dropped the stiletto into my hand, the thin soldier propped himself onto his elbow for another shot. He re-aimed just as I released the knife. The gun fired, creasing my neck, and the knife hit him over the heart. He fell back to the floor.
Getting to my knees to retrieve Wilhelmina, I thought it was over, but I was wrong. There was a wild yell behind me from the direction of the hallway to the kitchen, and when I turned I saw a heavy man swinging a meat cleaver toward my head.
This was obviously the general’s cook, who had been brought to the front of the place by the gunfire. The clea
ver descended on me, glistening brightly in the light. I ducked backward and the blade struck the ornament on the stairway post behind my head, completely severing it.
I rolled away from the next blow, and it chopped a small hall table in half. He was fast with the weapon, and I had no time to make any but defensive moves. The third chop with the heavy, silver-gleaming cleaver came right at my face. I was against a wall, and I moved to my left just a split-second before the weapon buried itself in the wall behind me.
In the moment it took him to try to wrench the cleaver free, I pulled a leg up close to my chest and kicked out, hitting him hard over the heart.
His jaw flew open as he released his hold on the buried cleaver and fell backward to the floor, making ugly grunting gasps.
I saw the Luger near me and stretched out my arm to retrieve it.
“That will be quite enough!” the loud voice commanded.
I turned and saw the tall, husky General Djenina standing in the doorway. In his hand was one of the bulky automatics, and it was aimed at my head. Behind him, in the tight grasp of an orderly, was Gabrielle.
SEVEN
“I am sorry, Nick,” the girl said.
Another uniformed man, probably the general’s chauffeur, moved into the hallway. He held a gun on me too, as he came over and kicked the Luger out of my reach, glancing at the men on the floor. He muttered something in Arabic.
“They warned me about you,” Djenina said, striding toward me. “But it appears I did not take you seriously enough.” He spoke excellent English. He was a tough-looking man in his fifties, with a square jaw and a scar across his left eye. He was about my size, and he looked as if he kept in shape. He had a way of pulling his chin up as he talked, as if he were wearing too tight a collar. His uniform was covered with braid and ribbons.
“I’m glad I didn’t disappoint you,” I said.
He stood ominously over me with the automatic, and I thought for a moment that he might pull the trigger. But he replaced the pistol in a big holster on his hip.
