by Nick Carter
He slithered back onto the tractor, deciding to get it going first and shoot only when it became absolutely necessary.
And then one of the men looked at his watch and yawned. The two of them nodded at each other and grimaced. Nick looked again at the radium dial of his own watch. It would soon be daylight in the hills.
The men above him walked along the narrow catwalk, onto the main circular walk, and out of sight.
He waited one more precious minute before starting the diesel engine. It made even more noise than he thought it would. But he could still hear the constant humming of machinery. With any luck at all another motor noise would not be noticed… for a while.
The tractor nosed slowly forward, pulling behind it a wavering line of creaking cars. Nick changed gear and led his centipede-like trailer up the sharp slope toward the open entryway, holding the latest of his stolen machine guns at the ready.
The centipede lumbered through the doorway. Coupling creaked and complained. A car scraped loudly against the wall, stuck there for a moment, reluctantly dislodged. The purring of the diesel sounded like a roar that would wake the dead.
Seventeen minutes to go.
The contraption swayed and groaned. Turned left with a clanking of couplings and another scrape against the wall. Straightened out into the main hallway with the elevators, squeaking and wiggling its long, wormlike tail. Stopped at the door to the turnoff Elena had not wanted him to take. It was going to be one hell of a turn.
So far the hallway was clear. He maneuvered his trailing centipede into the best position he could manage and jumped off the tractor to open the door he had left closed but unlocked. For one awful moment he thought that someone had come along and locked it after him. But then it clicked open and he swung it wide and out of his way.
He leapt back on the tractor and sparked the murmuring motor back into full life.
The tractor nosed through the doorway and chugged urgently up the steep slope, hauling its odd burden behind it. Cars screamed and scraped as they slammed against the walls in that almost impossible turn. Something stuck. Sweat stood out on Nick's forehead as he gunned the motor and cursed at it to move, drag that damn stuck car round the bend and up the slope. The cavalcade moved forward with a sudden jerk.
And then he heard the shrill scream of outrage and alarm.
The tail-end of the crawling centipede turned over in the doorway and stuck fast.
Nick wrestled with the gears. Quick reverse, slam forward, and a sudden, grinding halt. Voices gabbled and screamed behind him. And the centipede stuck fast.
Thirteen minutes to go.
Nick ducked low and turned as the spurt of bullets chattered through the tunnel from the doorway. Angry sounds clanged off the metal and little chips of rock splintered about his head. He caught one swift glimpse of the scene at the doorway and reached into his pocket. Frankie Gennaro's custom-built keychain-flashlight could do a better job here than the borrowed machine gun.
His mind held the picture of the scene at the doorway: one man in full view back in the hallway, spraying the tunnel with bullets; the overturned car jamming the doorway; a second man using the car as a shield and firing from behind it.
Nick drew the pin from Frankie Gennaro's tiny brainchild and swung his arm out and forward in a roundhouse pitch.
A bullet ricocheted off the wall and bit into his arm. He winced and threw himself on the floor of the tractor with his injured arm pressing down on the accelerator and the other reaching up to hold the wheel.
A reverberating blast of sound smashed through the tunnel and pounded at his ears. There was one wild, insanely high-pitched scream, and the centipede shuddered like a dying monster. The tail lashed out violently; the heavy door screeched, tottered on its hinges, and slammed down at a crazy angle. The tractor growled viciously and shot forward with a frenzied lurch. Nick cast one lightning glance over his shoulder. The last car was a twisted sheet of metal jutting out of a gaping hole, its shattered coupling dangling like a mutilated handcuff. The two men were no longer men but scattered bits of mangled flesh.
The tractor gathered speed and careened into the tunnel he had glided along so quietly with Elena. Nick gritted his teeth and forced the tractor into top speed. The cars undulated crazily along behind.
Eight minutes to go.
He swerved around a familiar bend, the cars swaying, slamming, back and forth, and he began to whistle. Loudly, urgently, compellingly. He knew that everybody and his brother would hear this crazy cavalcade. But he had one slim advantage — his people were waiting. Their slightly open trapdoors would be the first to open wide.
"…Off we go, into the wild blue yonder…" He felt like an Air Force cadet, off on some incredible spree.
He glanced up as he passed beneath the married couples' quarters. The trap was sliding open. Rieber came down the stairway with his submachine gun, his face a study in amazement.
"In the back, Rieber!" Nick called slowing down. "Load 'em up, fast as you can. Guard the rear — we're in trouble!" He eased his writhing centipede to a stop halfway between Rieber's trapdoor and the trap leading up to the single men's quarters where Mark was supposed to have taken all the women. He hoped to God Mark had made it. And then he realized that he must have, or the tunnel would have been filled with armed guards already and all hell would have broken loose upstairs.
Up ahead he saw a brawny figure coming down a stairway leading Mrs. Adelaide Van Hassel. Pete, his face set determinedly, was guiding her with one muscular old hand and clutching a machine gun with the other.
"Wait!" called Nick. "But be ready with that gun."
The open trap behind him was disgorging anxious husbands and terrified wives. Rieber was lying flat in the last car with his machine gun covering the rear. Mrs. Rieber crouched behind him. The rear cars were rapidly filling up. He started easing slowly forward. There was one closed trapdoor between the two open ones, and he was praying to God it would stay shut. It led into the officer's quarters, and he knew that there were at least a handful of them up there.
Nick picked up speed and slowed again beside Pete. The middle trapdoor was still closed.
"Load, Pete!" Nick rapped. "On the double. Work your way back to help out Rieber. Collins — up front, just behind me. Jacoby, next to me with that gun. Julie! Help the women in. Mark. Center car. Keep your eye on the trap just above it. Hurry! I warn you all now, it's going to be a hellride."
They seemed to be moving in a slow-motion dream.
Four minutes to go.
"Everybody on? Step on it, Mac! Help the lady."
Dietz… Scheuer… the old man who ogled legs… Miss Crumm, breathing out faint fumes of bourbon — no, brandy… Uncle Hubert Hansinger, remarkably subdued… Levinson… Rogers… Lee Soo…
The middle trapdoor was still closed.
Everybody heard the sounds at the same time, and one of the women screamed like a cat on a redhot stove.
"You will kindly shut up," Mrs. Nikki's voice said cordially. "You make awful and most unhelpful noise."
An even more awful noise was the sound of running footsteps and guttural cries. They came from the rear of the tunnel, and they were coming fast.
"Ready, Rieber?" Pete roared.
"You bet I'm ready!"
A chattering burst of fire broke from the back car and was answered with a salvo of shots and screams.
"Is everybody on?"
"Yes!"
Nick threw the tractor forward.
"Down, everybody, down! Save it, Jacoby. Sit down — there's more of them up ahead. Four outside the doors."
Jacoby grunted and sat down beside Nick, clutching the machine gun with a look that meant messy death for anyone who waited up ahead.
Now there was a steady stream of fire. But even through it he heard the woman with the burnt-cat scream giving tongue again. He turned his head as he accelerated. The woman was pointing at the middle trapdoor. It was open. A sleepy-looking, half naked main was standing
on the stairway reaching at the nearest car. As Nick watched he clawed at the edge and leapt aboard.
Mrs. Nikki rose to her full height of about four foot ten and calmly grasped the man's outstretched arm. With one incredible movement she flipped him back overboard. His head smashed against the wall and he lay still.
Mrs. Nikki calmly dusted her hands and looked for more.
Two minutes to go.
The cars picked up speed and clattered heavily down the passage.
Three more half-clad men came leaping out of the trap and down the stairway, too late to grasp at the cars but in plenty of time to shoot. Their guns spat in a ragged chorus.
Mark's machine gun roared.
Collins bobbed up and down jabbing the air with his automatic and shooting with calculated precision.
Several voices cried out in agony. Some of them came from the clanking cars.
Nick drove on grimly. The camouflaged door loomed up ahead. The firing behind them was further away and very much less intense. Somebody in the rear car picked up Pete's machine gun and joined Rieber's fire.
Pete himself lay very still.
An alarm bell shrilled so loudly that it sent pulsations through the tunnel.
One minute to go.
Blood was seeping through Nick's sleeve and his arm was beginning to feel numb.
"Down, everybody, hold on tight! This is it!"
Yards to the tunnel exit… hard on the accelerator… head down low… injured arm clasping machine gun… Now!
The door smashed open and the galvanized centipede leapt out into the eerie pre-dawn light.
"Now, Jacoby!" Two machine guns roared from the twin seats of the tractor. Four guards on patrol darted into the shadows outside their swath of light and roared back their answer with four biting streams of bullets. Three. Two. Jacoby grunted suddenly but went on firing.
Nick stamped hard on the accelerator and drove like a man possessed, pulling the great long clanking worm behind him and swerving abruptly to their right and the dark road they had traveled hours before.
Now, thought Nick. Now, now!
The huge and sprawling hillock rumbled like a giant's stomach.
And then it burst with a cataclysmic thunderblast that tore into its heart and sent its rolling echoes reverberating across the valley. The centipede shuddered with the enormous vibration and its coupled parts swayed wildly. For a moment Nick thought the thing was going to twist its tail and overturn. But it kept on going down the road to the airfield and their hijacked jet.
The hillside shook and trembled. Its face crumbled slowly open and the nose of a truck appeared, thrusting its way out through the falling sod like some prehistoric creature lumbering up through the ancient slime.
It shook itself and picked up speed. There were two men in its front seat, one driving and one leaning out the window with a submachine gun. Mark Gerber stood up and fired straight into the man's face.
"Goddamn you, Lehmann!" he yelled. "Take your treachery to hell with you, you creeping bastard!"
The face crumpled into an ugly mess and the machine gun fell from the dead fingers. Mark went on firing. Bullets bit into the truck wheels and into the metal of its body. The driver clawed at the steering wheel and swerved away. Nick caught one dim glimpse of the man at the wheel as he concentrated on his own task of steering the living, the dying and the dead to the plane he only hoped would still be there.
He saw the head and shoulders of a man with stiff, square shoulders and a bullet head fronted by a flat, expressionless face that looked as though it had been carelessly stitched on.
Bronson.
He looked like his description.
But the set of those stiff shoulders and the shape of that ugly head reminded Nick of someone else.
Judas. The man he'd gone to South America to find. The arch-criminal of CLAW, Red China's Special Branch in charge of sowing hatred, murder, and the seeds of war.
A ragged burst of fire came from the airfield. Two guns from Nick's strange cavalcade spoke back. He concentrated on that last lap to the airfield, driving with all the speed and skill at his command. And their plane was there. The truck driven by the man who was built like a Prussian ox sped away in the early morning light.
Whoever he was, he was gone. Maybe Bronson was Bormann; maybe Bronson was Judas. Maybe all three men were one. Right now it scarcely mattered. He still had the second half of his job to finish.
The searchlight no longer sliced the sky, and all the guns were silent. Nick pulled up beside the plane with his cargo — the whole, the wounded, and the dead. Suddenly he was weary almost beyond words.
"Colonel Collins!" he said. The Air Force Colonel lowered his empty automatic and turned to look at him. "Do you," said Nick, "know how to fly this plane?"
* * *
The mountain was a shattered cave. Deep within its wounded belly the dust was settling over a huge structure shaped something like a silo. In a room that had once been a laboratory a wheelchair lay on its back, crumpled and forlorn. Miles away in the semi-desert valley a truck sputtered to a stop beneath the rising sun. The man known by so many names opened the hood and began to tinker underneath it with his gloved hands. He had very little hope… but he had made comebacks before.
High above, and a long way to the south, Nick Carter left the co-pilot's seat of a giant jet and walked back through the passenger's cabin. The cockpit was spattered with blood and memories, but Air Force Colonel Jonathan Collins kept his eyes away from the blood and his mind on reaching Delhi. The busy radio was silent at last.
Pete was dead. The old man who loved to look at legs would never look again. And there were others who sighed and moaned in their troubled sleep. Mark Gerber stared blindly out of a window at pink clouds he did not even see.
Nick slumped down beside Julie with a tired sigh.
She took his hand in hers.
"Hi, honey," she said softly.
