by Nick Carter
He sniffed the fresh night air. And frowned. It was not quite so fresh as it should be. Smoke. So? Even monks built fires. He sniffed again. Cordite? Phosphorus? It was both, he was almost sure, and there was a smell of burnt wood as well. For a moment he was tempted to toss his own flare into the valley below to see what its bright light would reveal. But that would be the end of stealth, so he decided not to. Yet the smell in the air convinced him that he and Paula’s Terrible Ones were not the first arrivals.
He heard her soft whistle from nearby and he whistled back.
Paula appeared beside him.‘
“You’ve found yourself a nice, secluded spot,” she murmured.
Nick reached for her swiftly and pulled her down to the soft moss.
“I had to be alone with you for just one moment,” he whispered. “The ladies are all dolls and I love them dearly, but they do get in the way.” He brushed his lips over her face and kissed her tenderly. She cupped his head between her hands and stroked his hair.
“It has been difficult,” she breathed. “I wanted so much to come into your room, but . . .” She chuckled softly. “I think they all did. It would have been unfair of me.”
“Oh, I wanted you,” he murmured, and his arms encircled her. “When this is over we’ll find a place to be alone together— a boat, a barn, right here, anywhere. Whatever happens tonight, promise me we’ll have that time.”
“My darling, my darling, I promise you.” Their arms tightened about each other and their lips met in a flaming kiss. Nick’s pulses raced as he felt her so close to him, felt the soft warmth of her breasts press longingly against him. His tongue probed passionately and his body filled with sudden heat. Paula trembled violently against him and gave herself up completely to his kiss. He ground his body against hers, wishing savagely that he could rip the clothes off both of them right then and there and sink himself deep into the warmth of her. Paula gasped and clung to him, her fingers digging into his back and her tongue searching desperately as if with her mouth she could give him all the love that was stirring so hotly in her body.
Just as suddenly they drew apart, panting for breath and fighting down their rising desire.
“Oh, Paula,” Nick muttered, pulling himself together with an effort. “Let’s get this thing done with so we can do what really matters.”
She touched his hand lightly and moved away from him.
“It will be soon,” she promised. “I know it will be soon. But I must leave you now, or it will be—too soon.”
He laughed softly, wanting her still but knowing this was not the time.
“I’m going down there now,” he said. “I know we agreed to wait for morning light but I have a suspicion that someone’s beaten us to it.”
Paula drew in her breath sharply. “But how will you see where you are going?”
“For the first part of the trip I don’t need to see,” he said grimly, pulling on his climbing claws. “This can’t be any worse than Cap St. Michel. And wait for my signal, understand?”
“I’ll wait. But please take care. I love you.”
She kissed him once more, quickly, and was gone.
Nick felt his way toward the edge and lowered himself gingerly. It seemed to him that he was always climbing when he would much rather be doing something else. But at least this was a little easier than the Haitian climb.
Minutes later he was on the floor of the narrow valley pulling off his claws and peering into the pre dawn gloom. There was no sign of anything remotely like a castle. There was no sign of anything at all.
A frog croaked hoarsely nearby; the croaking ended in a tiny splash.
Still waters! Nick’s heartbeat quickened. ‘Still waters’ in the Valley of the Shadow . . . of Death? The smell of smoke hung heavy in the air, a reminder that death was probably quite near.
Nick raised his night-seeing telescope and held it to his eye. Through its circle of eerie green light, visible to him alone, he could see the sharp outlines of the valley walls. He swung the finder slowly over rocks and trees. Stopped suddenly, swung it back and re-focused. A stone wall sprang clearly into view.
It was the wall of something very much like a medieval stronghold, built under overhanging rock and blending imperceptibly into the natural rock face. A clump of thick bush almost, but not quite, hid a doorway . . . and the heavy, iron-studded door was hanging limply on its hinges, a great hole blasted through it. Leaning against the clump of bushes was a Chinese soldier with a carbine dangling from his shoulder, an odd way for a man to stand.
He was not standing. He was sprawled back against the bushes, and he was dead.
So they had a little difficulty getting in, Nick thought grimly. But they’d made it. Some of them. He wondered just how many.
He panned the scope from one side of the valley to the other, looking for a sign of life. There was none, but for a little ripple on the surface of the quiet pool at the far side of the valley, and a narrow stone stairway hacked out of the crude rock by the hand of man. At the foot of it there were two almost-human figures, but they were deader than the stone itself. Nick stared at them through the glass and felt slightly revolted. Their heads had been blown off. Grenades, it looked like. It was impossible to make out for certain what they had been before being smeared across the valley floor, but their mutilated bodies were wearing what looked like Cuban Army fatigues.
And that was all the telescope could tell him, except that flares had been used to light the way into and across the valley and that there was nothing to stop him walking straight in through the open door.
He padded silently across the soft damp grass, past the dead Chinese soldier with the big hole in his chest, and into a tunnellike hall. In the absolute darkness his foot kicked against something soft and bulky. Nick flicked on his flashlight. The body of a big-bellied monk lay at his feet, its black cowl sticky with blood from the bullet hole in the man’s head. A second monk lay sprawled several feet away, his cowl ripped away from his face and a look of outrage in his dead and staring eyes. An ancient blunderbuss lay on the floor beside him. And there was something else.
A Chinese in bloodied olive drabs was slowly raising himself from the floor and the gun in his wavering hand was pointing at Nick’s chest.
Wilhelmina spoke once with a muted thunk of sound. The man sighed softly and dropped like a weighted sack.
Nick picked his way between the bodies down the passage toward another sound, a distant one that suddenly pierced the stillness and rose into a shriek. He turned a corner into another passage, this one lit by the flickering light of a single candle in a holder on the wall, and stepped over another dead monk. The shriek became a frenzied string of recognizable words. He listened as he padded on, disgusted by the carnage around him and chilled by the madness in the shrieking voice.
“Every one of you will die!” he heard. “One after the other, and then you, last of all, but slowly—slowly, slowly, horribly! Tell me where it is, you son of Satan!”
Nick stepped over yet another body and stopped outside an open door. What he saw beyond it was a scene from hell.
Everything that Loves Must Die
“It is you who are the son of Satan,” the deep voice said quietly. The black robe was torn, the face was bared of its black cowl and streaked with blood, but the big man’s expression was calm. “What was left here once by evil men will be given up only when the people of my country come to claim it.”
He stood in a room that only hours before must have been a peaceful, simple chapel, facing a tall Chinese who had made it into a charnel house. The rough stone floor was strewn with the dead and dying, Chinese in drab fatigues and monks in their black robes. On each of several wooden pews was a living monk, each with his robe torn down to the waist, and each with his hands stretched above his head and tied to a wooden armrest. A sullen-faced Chinese stood over one of them, a curved knife in his hand; a machine-gunner stood in the pulpit with his weapon trained upon the supine men; a thir
d figure in olive drabs stood several paces from Tsing-fu Shu and the only monk left standing. He, like Tsing-fu himself, was armed with a snub-nosed gun, and he also carried a carbine.
Nick clamped himself against the wall outside the door and craned his head toward the horror beyond, noting each position, every weapon, every detail of the scene.
Machine-gun, carbine, two pistols, one knife and possibly another gun in a hidden holster, and one belt-load of grenades. And four men to use them.
Versus one Luger, one stiletto, and one gas pellet that made no distinctions between friend and foe. Plus one squad of women too far away to help and whose presence anyway could only be an added complication.
The madman was still screaming at the tall, calm monk.
“Do you know what it is to die with a knife grinding into your belly?” he shrieked. “Do you think that these robed fools of yours will enjoy it?”
“Kill me, if you must kill,” the monk said calmly. “I pray that you will spare the rest of my poor brothers, for they know nothing.”
“You pray!” Tsing-fu howled with something like laughter.
“Yes, pray to me, you fool, and see if that will save them. Show me where that cache is hidden, or watch your ‘poor brothers’ swim in their own blood.”
“They are not afraid to die, and neither am I. It is better that there should be an end to this.”
“An end, yes.” Tsing-fu’s face twisted into a hideous mask of sadistic malice. “You will beg for the end, each one of you in turn. It is not yet the end. Mao-Pei!”
The man with the knife and the grenade belt looked up and grunted.
“Begin carving, if you please.”
The machine-gunner first, Nick decided swiftly, or there would be a spray of death across this room that would truly be the end for all but Tsing-fu and his men. Nick flicked his eyes away from the machine-gunner for a second and saw Mao-Pei bring his knife down against the bare chest of the nearest supine monk and begin a slow slice into the flesh and down toward the belly.
“He will be slowly disembowelled,” Tsing-fu said pleasantly.
The knife described a curving, agonizing path through the supine man’s gut.
Nick raised Wilhelmina and sighted carefully. The machine-gunner in the pulpit was watching the grim proceedings with such ghoulish fascination that he had taken his finger from the trigger and was resting the big gun lightly on the lectern. But Nick’s trigger-finger was already squeezing, and Wilhelmina’s elongated nose was pointing steadily at the inviting little scene between the gunner’s eyes. Wilhelmina spat once with her dull, thunking sound and sent her lethal message straight home in a blast that splashed blood and brains against the pulpit wall. She was already homing in on her next target as the machine gun clattered to the chapel floor and the gunner folded out of sight.
Next—the knifer with the grenades, the fellow who was carefully carving up the monk who could no longer contain his pain in silence.
There was a split second of confusion as heads swung toward the pulpit and the knifer froze. Nick grabbed the opportunity and moved forward rapidly in a low running crouch that had him ducking behind a pew in that same second, with the Luger stabbing toward the profile of the sullen-faced man with the knife. Wilhelmina spat once, twice; skimmed the back of the thick head with her first kiss and sliced away the top of it with her next. Nick was running again by the time the body dropped. Bullets sang past his head and Tsing-fu was screaming something incomprehensible.
Two down and two to go. The carbine next—but he no longer had the advantage of surprise and there was little cover. Tsing-fu was near the altar; he ducked behind the only statue in the chapel, probably a figure of its patron saint, and fired as he screamed. But the fellow with the carbine was in the clear. Unfortunately he was busy spilling the contents of his pistol in Nick’s direction, and his aim was getting better all the time.
Nick dropped down low behind a fallen monk’s body and squeezed off one shot that missed by inches. His human shield jerked with the impact of the answering fire; he sent one more fast shot toward the altar, heard it spit uselessly into either the statue or the wall, and he threw himself sideways underneath a pew. Both guns were trained inexorably upon him now. The last shot had singed him with its closeness, and Brother Whatsisname, still calm and proud and unafraid, had somehow gotten in his line of fire. Nick slithered quickly down a row of seats, briefly hidden by a clutter of wooden slats and bodies, and bobbed up yards away from his previous position with Wilhelmina poised for action. Tsing-fu Shu—he assumed that was who the fellow was—was still pumping shots from behind the statue, and Brother Whatsisname was still in line— no, he wasn’t . . .!
One of the guns had suddenly stopped firing, and the big, quiet-voiced monk was wrestling with the carabineer for possession of the carbine. For a fleeting second the man’s pistol waved silently in the air, and then it swung toward the Brother’s ribs for a close, but-blasting shot that never came. The big monk leapt away with astonishing agility—and he wrenched the carbine with him as he sprang. The other man turned on him with a snarl of animal rage and stuck the pistol almost in his face. Nick snapped off one shot at Tsing-fu’s cautiously emerging figure and fired again literally without stopping to think. Wilhelmina seemed to find her target automatically. The pistol flew from the man’s hand and skidded on the floor. The Chinese stood there for a moment, looking astonished, and then the great butt-end of the carbine landed against his head in a bone-crushing blow. Brother Whatsisname stepped back, satisfied with his killer-blow, and spun the rifle around in his hands so that its nose pointed at Tsing-fu’s covering statue.
“Attababy, Brother!” Nick shouted exultantly. “You cover his rear and I’ll get him from the front. And you’d better give up, you behind the statue. You’re the last one left.”
There was a second of absolute silence. Tsing-fu was out of sight behind the statue of the saint. Nick crawled rapidly toward him on his hands and knees, Wilhelmina ready. From the corner of his eye he saw the big monk quietly stalking the statue from the other side.
Then he heard a dull little click and a howl of rage. Tsing-fu leapt out from behind the statue, tossing aside his empty gun, and with a movement too swift for a gun to follow he was at the foot of the pulpit scooping up the fallen machine-gun.
“We all die, then!” he screamed, dancing a little jig of maniacal fury. “See the brothers on the benches, trussed like pigeons—see how they will die!” He whirled about and made a crouching leap for the pulpit stairway, landing with his body half-turned toward the pews and the machine-gun swinging toward the helpless figures of those few who still lived.
The big monk’s borrowed carbine roared and bit a great chunk out of the pulpit but left Tsing-fu unharmed.
“You first!” Tsing-fu screamed, and swung the gun toward the monk.
Nick dropped to one knee and fired.
Wilhelmina’s last bullet struck Tsing-fu full in the chest and rocked him backwards.
“Get the hell out of his way. Brother!” Nick shouted, and made a flying jump toward the pulpit stairs with one thought in mind—to wrench the murderous machine-gun from Tsing-fu’s hands before it sprayed death throughout the room.
He was a split-second late. Tsing-fu lurched convulsively in his dying agony and his finger tightened on the trigger. Streams of hot lead spat from the pulpit and bit chunks from the statue that had been Tsing-fu’s refuge. The big monk now crouched behind it bellowed angrily and dropped down low so that the rain of death slammed high above his head. Nick halted abruptly on the bottom step. Tsing-fu was crumpling slowly, the gun still cradled under one arm and its hot barrel spewing high, wild shots through the pulpit wall and chewing it to shreds. He was making no attempt to aim, no attempt to rise one last time and turn his fire into the room. He was looking at the statue with a strange, unreadable expression on his face. There was no need, now, to wrench the gun from him.
Nick turned to follow the gaze of those dying
eyes.
The head of the statue was gone. Its body was chipped in a dozen places; one arm was off, and there was a great hole in the torso. Something was pouring out of it. The whole thing was tottering and crumbling. And then it fell. Nick caught his breath and felt a shiver running down his spine.
The shattered saint split down the middle and disgorged a stream of glittering objects. Brilliant stones cascaded from the plaster wounds—red ones gleaming with fire, green ones blazing like cats’ eyes in the night, ice-white ones throwing off sparks of suddenly released light. They clinked and clanked onto the floor, mingling with the gold pieces and the pendants, the rings, the chains, the plaster, and the blood.
Tsing-fu screamed once more. His face was twisted into something inhuman as he stared agonizedly at the wealth he had been searching for. The scream was a maniac’s babble that rose to a shriek of insane, sobbing laughter, and then stopped forever. He slumped where he was and lay still in his own blood. The gun went on coughing out its aimless hail of bullets, and then chattered into silence.
Nick made sure that he was dead before checking to see what had become of the big monk. But there was no doubt that he was dead, along with all those who wore the olive drabs and many of those in the torn robes of the Blacks.
He heard a long explosive sigh and turned to see the big monk gazing at his Brothers, at his charnel-house of a chapel, with a look of indescribable pain on his face.
“Forgive me for having come too late.” Nick said quietly. “I would give anything to have avoided this.” He slipped Hugo down his sleeve and started cutting the bound monks loose with swift, decisive strokes. “But you fight well, Brother,” he added. “You and all your Brothers.”
The monk stared at him. “Who are you?” he asked.
“Another treasure-hunter,” Nick said flatly. “And your name, Brother?”
