Hanoi km 015, p.15
Hanoi (KM 015), page 15
part #15 of Killmaster Series
He kept his head down and galloped energetically toward the guard post at the front gate. Men milled past him, only yards away, shouting in confusion, but they were not looking at their comrades’ faces. They were hunting for a scientist gone berserk.
There was only one man left at the great gates to the camp and two more trying to get in from the outside. Nick swung up the laser pistol.
One down. Two down. Three—the third man loosed a burst of fire through the wire-crossed gates. Nick zigzagged away like a rabbit prancing over a bed of hot coals and turned the beam full-force toward the man. There was a scream of agony and then a sudden silence from the sentry, but his gun kept up a steady stream of fire. From somewhere near the main living quarters a gun began to fire back—at the dead man’s gun.
Nick kept his head down low and ran toward the rocket center. From the lab, from the offices, from the patrol stations around the encircling fence, from the rocket center itself, men began to emerge like worms crawling out of the woodwork. The ammunition depot was making noises like a Fourth of July celebration in the heart of hell. In a brief lull between the tearing bursts Nick heard a low, familiar, chopping hum, and Ah Choy’s voice screaming out over the loudspeaker, “Rescind Maneuver B! Rescind Maneuver B! Get back to your posts! Get back to your posts. Fire Squad, to the ammunition depot, fire squad, to the—”
A gigantic explosion ripped and roared through the entire compound. Some of the guards scattered; some hesitated and turned back toward their posts.
So that was Maneuver B. All hands on deck! But those who had just emerged from the rocket center were still hesitating, still only half-turned toward Nick.
He sidled behind them and raced down a flight of concrete stairs away from them. Someone shouted. Bullets clanged into a metal railing yards ahead of him. He flung himself down a concrete ramp and onto a catwalk leading past the base of the great, gleaming rocket.
Zero plus one.
He kept on running. There was nothing he could do to the rocket itself—it was much too vast for the puny weapons at hand—and nothing that he needed to do to it. Chaos and death had been his main objective, and he reckoned he had created a fair amount of that. To blast his way into a vault of radioactive and possibly explosive Metaplast to reveal its secret was the last thing in the world he intended doing; that was the one way to almost certain ignorance by annihilation, or vice versa. The nature of the operation was, by now, ominously clear— worldwide terror and domination, or international blackmail at least—by a group of Germans under the aegis of the Chinese and their stooges, Krutch and Wiesner. Although Krutch and Wiesner were rather balky stooges, and not exactly devoted to each other, either. Ilse, though—
Shots zapped past his ear. He glanced back and saw two men running along a catwalk at right angles to him, their guns blazing. He raced for an iron ladder leading to a higher catwalk and scrabbled to the top. Something stung his leg. But the running figures were still too far behind him for effective fire. He ducked behind a thick metal shaft and peered down. The two men were still running, but no longer toward him. They were diving for a metal cage at the junction of the two catwalks, and they reached it as he aimed. He had time enough to see that one was a guard and the other was Ah Choy, but no time to fire before they were inside and shielded by its walls. It began rising rapidly. Soon it would reach a walled platform high above him, and from there they could look down on him and pick him off at leisure.
He triggered the laser pistol and turned its beam high upon the double length of cable that drew the elevator upward. The searing heat bit savagely into its thick strands, but with what seemed to Nick like agonizing slowness. The cage was almost at the top. He wasn’t going to make it.
The cable parted suddenly and whiplashed through space and the cage plunged downward. There were twin yells of ear-splitting terror, and then one shape hurled itself from the catapulting cage and clawed desperately at the catwalk rail. The other went on screaming until the sound was drowned out in the greater, jarring sound as the cage hit bottom.
Ah Choy was crawling along the catwalk. Miraculously, he was still alive. Miraculously, he was still clinging to his gun. It wavered in his hand but it was trying to seek out Nick; Ah Choy’s eyes flickered through the pain-distorted mask of his face. Nick glided out from behind the metal shaft.
“Drop it, Ah Choy,” he called. “Better to live and—”
But Ah Choy didn’t seem to think it would be. His gun spat wildly and as it spat he called upon his Chinese gods and guards for instant help. Nick ducked and scutded sideways, triggering the beam and aiming it at Ah Choy’s outstretched arm. Ah Choy’s gun barked again, but only once. It was Ah Choy’s turn to scream. He did so briefly, then he died.
Nick vaulted from his perch down to the lower catwalk. Sticky warmth was trickling down his leg and he ran with unaccustomed clumsiness, but still he ran. There was one more thing he could do, had to do, and that was to destroy the nerve center of this operation so that when all the tumult and the shouting died there would be something less than a ready-made rocket firing system waiting for a new horde of suborned scientists and their Chinese paymasters. He could not count on the men of the green berets to do that for him; theirs was a hit, mop-up and run operation, and this was his job anyway.
He ran from the catwalk to a stairway to a sloping tunnel. And dodged back hurriedly behind a circular tank as booted feet thundered toward him. He saw the men as they passed him, heading for the main missile room. They were the two guards from the control room passage. Good! Nick fingered the laser trigger. But in spite of all the killings of the night he could not make himself shoot them in the back. His cigarette lighter slipped into his ready fingers and he flicked once—twice—and saw two hands slap at their respective necks. He was down the passage before they turned. It would not matter if they followed him. They would fall on their faces in the passage.
Zero minus two.
Why was it so quiet? Must be because he was so far underground that all sounds from above were deadened.
Footfalls galloped after him. He flung himself against the control room door with laser beam and Wilhelmina eating into it. There was a shout—a shot that clanged into his borrowed helmet and sent it flying—a second shot that bit into concrete behind his head—and then two thuds. Nick hurtled into the control room and raced toward the vast panel of switches at the far end. There were no more footsteps behind him.
The hungry beam played over the main bank of switches… chewing, spitting, eating. Nick held it in his right hand like an acetylene torch while with his left he clawed at knobs and handles, slid back metal covering plates, ripped out wires.
He worked in a near silence, broken only by the sizzling of melting metal and the tearing sounds of months of deadly work coming apart under his hands … and the distant crump-boom of explosives high above him, out there in the night. Q-40 had started to mop up.
He worked savagely, ferociously, spewing heat into the heart of the control machinery and ripping out its guts until the room stank and smoke fumes curled across it.
Then there was another sound, a little hissing sound that penetrated the distant thundering and the noises of his own making, and it did not belong there in the room. He swung to face it—
One split second late. There was an opening in the wall that had not been there before—a sliding panel, his mind told him as a gun spat quickly, twice, and searing pains ripped simultaneously through his hand and shoulder—and the vast bulk of Krutch filled it from side to side. But Krutch was not just standing there. He was moving with incredible agility and his gun was spitting death. The laser beam raked past him, once, and then nose-dived to the floor. Nick heard Krutch’s deep-throated chuckle as agony ripped through his head and red darkness swirled around him. The echo of the shots reverberated through the dark corridors of his mind. Then there was black silence.
He was hot, very hot, and he could not understand it. And someone kept saying Ha ha ha, ho ho ho, and he could not understand this either. He lay there with his eyes closed, feeling the sticky warmth trickling from his body and the dry heat rising around him, and trying to remember. Memory crawled back as the Ho ho ho turned into an incoherent ramble of speech, and the ramble became a string of words that made an awful sort of sense.
“So you are stirring, hey? You treacherous pig! My aim is good, is that not so! Ha! You live so that I may kill you slowly, do you understand that? He died of the heat, that’s what they will say. Ho, ho, ho! He died of the heat, because he interfered with Krutch. I would have had the whole world in my hands—the whole world in my hands—if it had not been for you. Belts of death throughout the skies to meet every spacecraft blasted off from earth—Russian, American, the lot of them. The agony of it! The beauty of it! And who would have known what was happening to them until I, Krutch, let them know? Hey? And then, my friend, a blackmail scheme that would have thrilled the heart of Hitler. Who needed the Chinese? Who needed Wiesner? Only until the first job was done, and then it would have been mine, all mine. But then you had to come along and spoil it.”
The bellowing voice was suddenly querulous. “You had to spoil it! Open your eyes, you pig. Open!” A foot lashed out at Nick’s prone body, a foot with the weight of an enormous artificial leg. Nick groaned involuntarily and his eyelids fluttered open before he could control them. Krutch’s face loomed above him, gigantic, distorted, filling the screen of his vision. And the face smiled through the tufts of bristling red beard. “So you are with me?” the big voice rumbled. “Good. Then you can enjoy our littie game. It cannot last too long, to be sure. But long enough for you to suffer. Ah, but that is not the same as enjoying, is it? Never mind. I will enjoy. And then I will go back the way I came and wait for your littie disturbance to blow over, and then leave. Leave! Leave, and live, and start again. But you, you will not live. Do you see what I am doing, Burgdorf? Do you see? Look!”
Nick looked. But there was no need for him to look. He felt it first, and then he saw it. Heat seared through his clothes and bit a tiny fragment off his leg. Smoke and the stench of burning cloth rose ceilingward. And Ulric Krutch laughed heartily. “It is like a knifethrower at a circus sideshow,” he chortled. “Except that I am using your clever little light beam. Such a hot light beam.” He chuckled. The beam traced a path between Nick’s out-flung legs … up his side … past his shoulder … around his head. He could smell the singeing of his hair, feel the heat that licked at the sprawling outline of his body, hear the evil chuckling of a man driven mad by last-minute failure. “You see how it is,” Krutch giggled fruitily. “Close, close, close, like the circus knifethrower. But then, at the end, unlike the knifethrower… . Ah, but the end is not quite yet. We must prolong the game for full enjoyment, must we not? Perhaps you can even delude yourself that you will escape me. Think of it. Think! How will you escape me?”
Nick thought. Sweat and blood trickled to the floor. Heat-seared concrete burned beside him and wisps of smoke curled idly along the surface of his clothes. Krutch leered down at him as the beam traced a lazy path around the edges of Nick’s body. “Mustn’t move,” Krutch crooned with hideous jollity. “Think! Tell yourself that you can bargain with me and I will relent. But mustn’t move! Then there will be no bargaining … only burning flesh. First an arm, then a leg, then … we will see what next. Ho, ho, ho, ho! I have not enjoyed myself so much in years!”
Not since you were a kid pulling off the wings from butterflies, Nick thought, testing out his aching muscles one by one and ransacking his mind for inspiration, for any way out of this. But there was no way. One kick, even, and Krutch would pin him with the beam like a butterfly to a board.
His eyes darted around the ruined control room. There was no hope; no hope at all. Then his heart jumped as he saw something that Krutch could not see because it was behind him and his whole attention was focussed on Nick.
There was one small hope. The door of the control room was swinging slowly inward.
Nick gave a sudden little moan and let his head slump sideways. Then he expelled his breath in one slow sigh. And stopped his breathing. Heat licked at his feet.
“What, what?” Krutch roared. “Come back, you! Come back here! You don’t escape by dying in your own way. No!”
Fetid breath brushed across Nick’s face and Krutch’s free hand slammed across it. “Wake up, wake up!” Krutch bellowed. For a moment—for one single, dreamed-of, precious moment—the breathy sizzle of the hungry heat beam stopped. Nick lashed out suddenly with both hands clawing for Krutch’s right, grabbing desperately for the pistol and turning it away from him with a savage strength born of his certain knowledge that this was his only chance. Krutch bellowed like a gorilla and kicked out viciously with his wooden leg.
Nick grunted, almost relaxed his grip, but held on frantically. Krutch’s huge hands bent his wrists back … back and back and back until the wide mouth of the pistol was pointing only inches past his head. He rolled suddenly, still straining with all his might to thrust the thing away from him, kicking and lurching with his lower body like a wild horse at a rodeo.
Something man-shaped, man-sized leapt through the air and landed heavily on Krutch. The double weight thrust Nick hard against the floor and he fell back with a wheeze as his breath went out of him. The pistol clattered to the floor and Krutch’s great body reared back while the thick throat gave a gargling scream. And the body fell, again, on top of him.
Nick fought for breath and pushed the weight away. The weight eased suddenly as a helping hand reached down and pulled aside the enormous, bleeding body. Krutch rolled over with a thud, death’s snarl upon his face.
Sergeant Ben Taggart of Q-40 sheathed his commando knife and reached out both hands to help Nick to his feet.
“What you might call in the nick of time, huh, friend?” he said cheerfully.
“On the double, on the double! You got one hour to go and if you got any sense in your thick heads you’ll get the living hell away from here!”
Nick grinned wearily as he heard Captain Marty Rogers’ half Russian, half pig-German orders. The helicopter waiting in the shattered yard was unmarked; the green berets were absent and their owners clad in the most nondescript of khaki; the figures darting through the mess of smoke and flame gave their crisp commands in every language but their native American. If the technicians who were now streaming toward the main gate and out into the dark Vietnamese night ever found anyone to report to, they would not be able to say with any certainty just who had attacked them. But they would be spared the blast that would take place one hour from now, the massive charge laid in the laboratory for the destruction of the Metaplast … whatever it might be.
“In you go,” said Nick. He prodded Ilse lightly from the rear, admiring, as always, the neat swing of her delectable behind. Hands reached out to pull her into the helicopter. Wiesner was already aboard, deep in his own world of sleep. So was Lin Suy; but she was wide awake and kicking against the bonds that tied her.
“Man, this one is a wildcat,” Taggart said admiringly. His eyes glided over Ilse, taking in her anger, her disheveled hair, the flush of her face, her wonderfully proportioned figure. “Ah, the German lady,” he said sadly. “Reckon she turned out the bitch I was afraid she’d be. Am I right?”
‘Time will tell,” said Nick. “But I think you may be wrong. I think we’ll find that step-papa misled her, and beneath it all she has a heart of gold.” Ilse gave him an odd look of fear and anger mixed with relief.
“That’s what I like to hear!” said Taggart, his broad face beaming happily. He switched suddenly to his excellent Russian. “Come on, comrades,” he bawled. “Let’s get out of here before the Viets get onto our tails. All aboard! All aboard!”
They were in the air a minute later, pulling away from the doomed encampment in the big transport helicopter, looking down on a shambles of death and smoke and flame. Q-40’s mop-up had been quick and thorough.
Helicopter blades churned through the night.
Ilse looked at Nick. “Many people were killed tonight,” she said flatly. “Why did you spare me and Karl? And Lin Suy?”
Nick gazed back at her, drinking in her flushed, blonde beauty.
“Several reasons,” he said. “One, we need information, and between the three of you, you have it. Especially you. And two, because I don’t believe that you, at least, understood what it was all about. Other reasons can come later.”
“There will be no later,” she said quietly. “I have nothing to say to you, or anyone.”
“Yes, you have,” Nick said, just as quietly. “You will tell us everything we want to know, about Metaplast and how it works and how you got involved in this. And you’ll be glad when it’s all over.” He smiled at her suddenly, tired and wounded though he was. And through the roar of the motor he murmured, “You may even let me make love to you again.”
“No!” she said hody. “Never, never, never, never!”
“Yes!” she said hotly. “Now, now, now, now!” Her lips burned against his mouth.
New York was balmy in the spring. It was a night for love, and he was making it. There had been much talk, and now it was all over. She was in his bed and in his arms. Vietnam was very far away. She knew, now, how cruelly her scientific knowledge and her innocence had been abused. But it no longer mattered. She had lost her innocence, in many different ways. Nick was teaching her some new ones.
“Now!” she breathed again.
Now was so much better than Never. And it could also last a long, long time.
Nick made it last … a very long, long time.
Nick Carter, Hanoi (KM 015)
