Blood Of The Falcon

by Nick Carter - [Killmaster 222]

  Namid had a car and driver waiting outside. When Khamsina was ready to go, the trio set off through the convoluted corridors of the museum.

  They were on an upper floor of an obscure wing devoted to scholarly research. To conserve power, few lights were on, and those were sparsely scattered. A heavy smell of dust tickled the back of Namid's throat.

  "Have you been to the museum before, Mr. Carter?" Khamsina asked. She seemed less interested in the answer to her question than she was in making polite conversation. The empty halls were quiet, hushed.

  "Please call me Nick. Yes, I visit the museum every time I get a chance when I'm in town. It's endlessly fascinating. There's always something new to see. Or something old, I should say."

  They passed a row of small, crowded offices, coming to a minor display hall, an intimate gallery. At its opposite end was the lighted landing of a marble stairway.

  Earlier, Carter and the major had passed through this hall on their way to Khamsina's office. Then, lights shone in the gallery. Now the lights were extinguished, illumination provided by what light leaked in from the landing.

  A broad aisle ran down the gallery's center. Rising on either side were glass display cases, their shelves filled with small items, such as mirrors, bowls, spice boxes, unguent jars, and other exotic bric-a-brac of the late New Kingdom.

  Major Namid was a moderately religious man, when it did not interfere with his official duties or his pleasures. He knew that these rare antiquities dated from what Moslems call "the Time of Ignorance," prior to the coming of the Prophet, and therefore to be abhorred. By day, he would have been the first to scoff at any superstitious fancies, but there was something about the way the glass cases emerged from the gloom, separating themselves from the shadows, that he found a bit unsettling.

  To take his mind off such thoughts, he paid more attention to the conversation between Carter and Khamsina, to which he had been listening with half an ear.

  He was pleased to note that the lady professor had ignored Carter's invitation to address him by his first name. While he had no sexual interest in her — Allah preserve him from educated women! — he disliked the American flirting with a countrywoman of his.

  Carter went on, "Yes, it's one of the great museums of the world."

  Irked, Namid said, "The collection would be even more outstanding had not your Western colonialists looted Egypt of so much of our priceless national heritage."

  Khamsina fretted at his bad manners, darting him looks that he ignored.

  They neared the landing, which lay beyond the squared portal. Flanking the wide doorway were twin sarcophagi, mummy cases braced vertically upright. The mummies had long since been removed and were stored in vacuum-sealed cases to protect them against disintegrating from exposure to air and bacteria. One case's lid was closed; the other was open to display its interior.

  Major Namid was riding his hobby horse: "I find it somehow obscene that our two great obelisks are now in New York City and London. It's high time your governments return the treasures looted from the Egyptian people. You Westerners regard our country as little more than your own private treasure trove…"

  "Major, please!" Khamsina murmured. "Mr. Carter is here to help us…"

  "Here to protect his government's interests, you mean."

  "Which happen to coincide with your government's interests," Carter pointed out.

  "The time is past when you can take us for granted and expect us to fawn all over you. Respect. You must respect a land that was civilized when your ancestors were living in caves…"

  His hand a blur of motion. Carter drew Wilhelmina as he dropped into a combat crouch. No sooner had the pistol cleared its holster, than he pumped three shots square into the closed mummy case.

  Khamsina and Namid were stunned. She spoke first. "Do you know what you've done? You've just ruined a priceless fifteen-hundred-year-old sarcophagus!"

  Namid was utterly flabbergasted. He stood stock-still while the Killmaster padded on the landing, looking up and down the stairs.

  Creaking sounded from the ventilated mummy case. That gave Namid even more of a jolt.

  Namid's mind whirled, calculating how he could convince his superiors that there was nothing he could have done to forestall the American's act of insane vandalism. He jumped when the mummy case opened.

  The lid moved, slowly at first, then faster, hinges softly squeaking. Suddenly the lid was flung open wide.

  Inside the sarcophagus stood a man. Not a mummy, but a tall Arab, all long limbs and protruding knobby joints. He must have had a devil of a time fitting his long form into the case. Carter thought.

  His dead hand still clutched a machine pistol. His chest was shattered by the Killmaster's three slugs. They were so closely spaced that the hole in his chest seemed one single wound. His shirt front was soaked a dark, glistening red.

  He finished falling, tumbling free from the sarcophagus to slam facedown on the floor.

  "What… how… who…" Major Namid sputtered.

  "This is the one they call the Camel," Carter said. "He's one of Reguiba's top guns. Or, at least, he was."

  "But… but how did you know he was in there?"

  "When we came through here before, both cases were open," Carter explained. "That put me on my guard when I saw it was closed. And when I saw the lid starting to move, I moved first. Of course" — he smiled — "if it had just been a practical joker, I guess I'd be in real trouble."

  Khamsina was unsteady on her feet. Carter's free arm, the one not holding Wilhelmina, circled the professor's slim waist, steadying her.

  "Are you all right?" he asked.

  "Yes… no. I don't know," she said. "I don't care about him, but I'm so upset about the damage to the sarcophagus!"

  Carter grunted. "I suggest we get a move on, Major. Reguiba doesn't do things by halves. There may be more like him."

  Finally waking up, Namid pulled a snazzy Beretta, the little gun looking like a water pistol in his big hand.

  "You are right — there may be more," he said. "I will go first to make sure the way is clear. You follow with the professor. We dare not risk her."

  "All right," Carter said.

  "I'll signal if all is well."

  Before going down the stairs, Namid climbed up to the next floor, making sure no lurkers waited there. None did.

  He was very upset. The joint mission was off to a terrible start. How could he have missed the detail of the closed mummy case? The agent was a smooth operator. A fast draw, too. The major had to get some of his own back, or suffer a serious loss of face. That was why he volunteered to pave the way.

  He went back down the stairs, passing Carter and the professor. The American still had his arm around her waist. She looked distraught. Her head now rested on his shoulder, though she pulled it off when the major passed by.

  The Yankee spy was a smooth operator, all right.

  Major Namid's shoes slapped their soles on the treads of the stairs. He paused to step out of them. He had his gun in one hand, his shoes in the other. He went down the stairs in his stocking feet.

  Another floor came into view, complete with landing, doorway, and darkened gallery beyond. He didn't like the look of it. Was that a furtive rustle of sound he heard, or was it only his imagination?

  Nonsense. It was his proud boast that he was not an imaginative man. If he thought he heard something, then he had heard something. Listening hard at the top of the stairs for a moment, ears pitched to keenest alertness, he heard nothing.

  He moved from the wall to the balustrade running along the stairwell, leaned over it, and tossed his shoes on the next flight below the landing, where they made a sudden clatter.

  Two men ran out of the darkened hall, thinking to surprise him on the lower flight. They weren't his men, they had guns, and he didn't like the looks of them. That was all he needed to know.

  One of them was trigger-happy and started shooting down the stairs before even looking to see what wa
s there. His partner glimpsed Major Namid out of the corner of his eye, one instant before Namid drilled a hole right through that eye, into his brain.

  The trigger-happy character had even less of a chance. Namid didn't wait for him to turn around, but punctuated his back with two snap shots along the spine.

  The shooter lurched forward, hit the edge of the rail, folded, and dropped headfirst down the stairwell, making a hell of a racket. But he didn't yell, because he was dead when he went over.

  Namid prowled the front of the dark gallery. It seemed empty, purged of all potential ambushers.

  Further investigation failed to detect menace. He called up the stairs, "You can come down now!"

  Carter and Khamsina descended. The Killmaster was holding her hand. His other hand held Wilhelmina. His eyebrows lifted when he saw the corpse. "Nice shooting."

  "The other one went over the rail," Namid said.

  "Very nice."

  Major Namid felt good. He had won his own back, restoring his lost face. It was, after all, quite unthinkable that he be bested by a foreigner here in his own bailiwick.

  "The way is clear," he said. Already he was cooking up a cover story to explain the damaged mummy case. He could hang it on the Camel. That would head off trouble, eliminate paperwork, and satisfy his superiors in case the museum trustees made an issue of it.

  They reached the parking lot without further incident.

  Namid's driver, another Bureau man, sat behind the wheel, cigarette dangling from his lip as he read a tabloid by the car's dome light, totally oblivious of the gunplay that had gone down inside Egypt's most celebrated museum.

  "Where have you been?" Namid demanded.

  "Why… right here, sir."

  "Didn't you hear anything?"

  "No, sir. Did… did something happen?"

  Namid could have cuffed his subordinate, but the presence of outsiders exercised an inhibiting effect.

  Fifteen

  Which was worse, the desert heat of Al Khobaiq on Arabia's east coast, or this inferno of Egypt's Western Desert, located just a hair south of the Tropic of Cancer? A moot point, thought Carter. As far as he was concerned, both sandy hells were equally unpleasant. At least in the emirate he was transported in long, luxurious, air-conditioned stretch limos. Here, 600 miles south of Cairo and 125 miles southwest of Aswan, he suffered and sweltered in a reconstructed mini-bus stocked with sweating soldiers, Major Namid of the State Security Bureau, Lieutenant Osmanli of the Army, and a Nefrazi brigand named Zarak.

  Carter barely had enough energy to flirt with Khamsina.

  "Is it true the Nefrazi are descended from a lost clan of New Kingdom Egyptians?" he asked.

  "Where did you read that?"

  "In one of your monographs," he said. "I have to admit, I'm no expert. I just skimmed the high points."

  "Why don't you ask Zarak?" she said. "He's a Nefrazi."

  Carter glanced at Zarak, scowling on the other side of the bus. "He doesn't seem too sociable. It's amazing that you get along with him so well."

  "I told you, I was initiated into the tribe on my last field trip out here five years ago. The ceremony made me blood kin to all the tribe. To him, I am a sister."

  Zarak looked like the kind of character who'd murder his own mother, but Carter kept the thought to himself. If ever a man looked born to be a brigand, Zarak did.

  He knew Major Namid felt the same way about the Gray Raider. Namid came from a police background. Zarak was an outlaw. From the moment they had pulled strings to release Zarak from a Kalabsha jail, Namid and Zarak had taken an instant dislike to each other.

  Khamsina said, "To answer your question, there are some strong suggestions that the tribe descends from the ancient, Pharaohnic Egyptians. Their name comes from the root word nafr, an old Arabic word that means 'hidden. Much of their culture is virtually identical to that of the Bedouins, but the Bedouins themselves hold the Nefrazi to be idolators posing as good Moslems."

  "They also call them the Gray Raiders."

  "Yes, but that does not imply a judgment," she said. "All the tribes in this area, Bedouins and Nefrazi, have made their living by raiding towns and caravans."

  The mini-bus was part of a military convoy going deep into Nefrazi territory, the tortured hills of the Sawda Hamadi, the Black Highlands, site of Egypt's newest and hottest brushfire war.

  And Reguiba looked to be right in the thick of it.

  Sadat had been a strong ruler, and paid the price for it. The current government in Egypt was well intentioned but weak. They had their hands full keeping the lid on the population pressure cooker that stocked the cities with legions of the poor, the sick, and the starving. They had recently been rocked by the Alexandria riots, and lacked the manpower and the firepower to mount a major effort to put down the troubles in the Sawda Hamadi.

  It was popularly known as the war of the Gray Raiders versus the Crime Police.

  The Gray Raiders were the Nefrazi, strongest of all tribes in this, their traditional homeland. In the last few months, they had been hit hard by the Crime Police.

  The Crime Police had actually been police not long ago, the underpaid, abused, infamous Riot Police who had rocked all Egypt by their rampage of looting and destruction in the tourist center of Giza not long ago.

  The rioting Riot Police were quelled by the military, but many thousands of them had deserted, fleeing to the hinterlands. Most had scattered to the four winds, but a small army of them had gathered somewhere in the rugged lands of the Sawda Hamadi.

  They survived and thrived by banditry, thievery, and raiding small villages. In this, they were little different from the native inhabitants, but their background combined with their nefarious activities had earned them the name Crime Police.

  Starting at the time that Reguiba accepted the contract for Operation Ifrit, what had been little more than a nuisance had taken a quantum jump into a credible threat. The Crime Police were being organized and supplied with heavy weapons, forming a small, well-equipped, elusive guerrilla army.

  Their first victims were the Nefrazi. They had taken a heavy toll of the various clans. The government could happily have wished a plague on both their houses, but the Crime Police had stepped up their actions to attacking military outposts and stations, wiping out the soldiers and looting the bases of weapons, gaining more recruits.

  A fire fight in which the Crime Police got the worst of it had turned up some interesting personalities among the corpses. Some of them were Moroccan killers known to be associated with Reguiba.

  Nick Carter's mission in conjunction with Major Namid was to establish friendly relations with the Nefrazi and, through them, seek out and destroy Reguiba and his Crime Police.

  As hot as it was in the broiling mini-bus, Hawk was making things much hotter for the Killmaster. Hawk wanted Reguiba dead. Of course, Carter did, too, but Hawk wasn't letting him off the hook for Reguiba's getaway in AI Khobaiq.

  Carter recalled his last conversation with AXE's chief before embarking on this trek west of the Nile.

  "By the way, Nick," Hawk had said, "Griff and Stanton are operating in the area independently of your group. They might be able to come up with something if you're stymied."

  That stung. But the Killmaster hadn't offered any alibis. He had had Reguiba in his sights and Reguiba got away. Actions speak louder than words. Reguiba, dead, would do all the talking for Carter.

  Of course, the important thing was not to wind up dead yourself.

  Professor Khamsina Assaf was known and trusted by the Nefrazi. That was where she came in. She was also concerned enough for their welfare to put her own skin on the line. Quite lovely skin it was, too, Carter thought, not for the first time.

  Nimad, Carter, and Khamsina had flown down to Aswan, city of the mighty dam whose relative nearness to the Sawda worried Egyptian strategists. If the Crime Police ever grew strong enough to raid the dam, the consequences could be catastrophic, unthinkable.

  From Aswan, t
hey went south via hydrofoil to Kalabsha. That was where they picked up that charmer, Zarak.

  Major Namid's sources informed him that a power among the Gray Raiders was sitting in a military jail for various crimes of violence. Khamsina suggested that freeing Zarak would incur a debt of honor on the part of the Nefrazi.

  The local authorities vigorously protested the release, but Namid had the clout to make it happen. Zarak swore an oath on his sacred honor not to break parole, to aid and assist the searchers in negotiations with his kinsmen.

  Carter and Namid both wondered what the word of a thief, outlaw, and probable killer was worth, but Khamsina argued that a Nefrazi would never violate his sacred oath, so they had to play ball. After all, she was the expert.

  And so here they were, deep in Nefrazi territory, a wild land of wadis, sinks, sand, broiling plains, and a seemingly endless series of rugged gray-black ridges.

  The convoy consisted of three jeeps and the mini-bus. The mini-bus was specially adapted to the primitive road conditions. It was fairly primitive itself, a rough ride, but at least it kept on going and didn't break down. It was equipped with a radio and a handful of hot, tired, well-armed soldiers who were so bushed that they didn't even bother to ogle Khamsina. Lieutenant Osmanli's threats to one or two of the more insolent wolves had nipped that in the bud.

  A jeep rode in front of the mini-bus, a second brought up the rear, and the third ranged ahead as a scout. All three jeeps carried mounted machine guns. The scout jeep was equipped with a radio as well.

  Extreme caution was exercised each time they approached tight gorges and blind curves. Soldiers went up on foot into the hills to search for potential ambushers. They hadn't come across any — yet.

  Zarak, whose utter contempt for all things not Nefrazi was incredible, chuckled at the precautions. "All your men could not stop my people if they wished to destroy you."