The Death’s Head Conspiracy

Twenty-Three

There were plenty of soldiers and a few workers groping around the slopes above the cluster of buildings behind me. But as I sneaked forward to the embankment directly over the copter pad, I encountered no one at all.

The immediate area seemed now to be deserted and silent I did not find the absence of troops especially ominous. It could well be that having combed the vicinity of the copter, the soldiers were now concentrating their efforts in the high grounds above the center of the compound where there were many more places of concealment.

On the other hand.

Dashing from cover, I raced down the embankment to the copter pad. I looked toward the chopper. It squatted empty and unprotected, ready to leap into the sky. My electric watch told me there were fourteen minutes left — still plenty of time. Behind Wilhelmina I advanced to a point near the door of the concrete guard station. The door was closed and so I edged close to one of the narrow, steel-barred windows for a peek inside.

At that moment, the door sprang open. I fell prone and lifted the Luger to fire point blank. But my target had long black hair and wore a toothy smile of welcome.

It was Pilar! But for the pistol I had left her, which was strapped about her waist, she looked utterly feminine and desirable.

I relaxed my trigger finger and stood with a grin, then reached inside the coveralls and fed the Luger to its holster.

Pilar trotted to me with open arms. She embraced and kissed me. “Nick!” she said. “I wasn’t sure, I heard shots and I thought you might be—”

I laughed. “I’m only half dead,” I told her. “From exhaustion. Where’s Ingram?”

“They took him away. To discipline him for bringing you here.”

“You can die from their ‘discipline’,” I said.

She stepped back and gave me an admiring once over. “You look none the worse for wear, Nick.” She sighed. “You’re lotta man and I’m gonna hate to lose you.” She yanked her gun from the holster and aimed it at my chest with a hand so steady it could have been a hunk of steel enclosed in a vise. “But,” she continued, “that’s how — as the saying goes — the cookie crumbles, huh?”

“So all along you were on the other team,” I said, really stalling because I suspected that at any second she was going to kill me.

“No,” she answered, “not precisely. I am a double agent, a coin with two faces. I serve Russia, in secret, while I also pretend to be the agent of your America. Both pay me well — oh, so very well. And my love of money is more than the love of any country, you see?” She smiled mockingly.

I shook my head. “No, I don’t see. Not too clearly.”

“Russia,” she explained, “the true and official government of the USSR, assigned me to uncover this base of operations so that Warnow, with General Zhizov and his independent faction, could be restrained before they triggered a nuclear war with America. So for a time I was your ally. But then, when I saw that the good general could not fail, with the help of Warnow, to bring down the mighty U.S., I was persuaded to join his forces. It is a grand strategy for Russia, and the government in power will fall into line once the coup has been accomplished.”

She paused and now her finger tightened about the trigger.

“Besides,” she added, “the general has paid me a fantastic sum. My money belt has become a thick girdle of currency. And truly, money is the only power I worship.”

I was about to tell her that Warnow was dead, but I knew she wouldn’t believe me. And the door to that room would have to be blasted off with a powerful explosive before the fact could be proven. Besides a glance at my watch told me that barely ten minutes remained.

Anyway, these tumultuous thoughts were rudely interrupted when Pilar bared her teeth in a grimace and released a loud, shrill whistle.

Instantly, from around the back corner of the guard station, rushed three soldiers carrying machine pistols. They were followed closely by General Zhizov, resplendent in his bemedaled uniform. The Doberman and the German shepherd, straining against choker; leashes, pranced before him.

When this unholy group had surrounded me, Zhizov ordered Pilar to relieve me of my weapons. And the hand which had so lovingly caressed me stole into my clothing, found both Luger and stiletto, and took them away.

“I do admire such a formidable enemy, Carter,” said the general. “But my admiration does not include mercy. Therefore, I believe that the punishment should suit the crime. And what could be so apt as to feed one animal to others of his kind. Though, of course, these are of a higher species.” He looked meaningfully down at the dogs who, staring at me with malevolent eyes, snarled and showed me their gleaming, flesh-starved teeth.

As he said this, I began to toy with the absurdly disproportionate, oversized belt buckle provided me by Stewart in Washington. With a thought for future emergencies, I had fastened the belt supporting it around the coveralls. It gave my garb a ridiculous aspect But it also attracted special attention to the buckle.

Remembering that the belt had long been immersed in salt water, I mentally applauded Stewart for making the buckle totally waterproof.

As I made an obviously sneaky move to open the buckle, the general caught the gesture.

“Drop your hand from that buckle!” he bellowed. I obeyed with a look of having been caught with my hand in a lethal cookie jar.

“Take the belt from him and bring it to me!” he commanded Pilar.

With a scornful caught-you-didn’t-we? smile, Pilar loosened the belt and passed it to Zhizov. As one of the soldiers took possession of the dogs, he began to examine it, lifting his gaze occasionally to send me a narrow-eyed glance of smug self-approval.

“The American method of concealing miniature weapons,” he said, “is not clever enough to fool any five-year-old Russian boy. What do you have inside here, eh? A single shot pistol? A switch knife? Or the traditional cyanide pill?”

Working to find the poorly hidden spring catch, he said, “How idiotically simple. Hie catch is hidden in this scrollwork and—”

He was squinting down at the dummy buckle when the booby trap exploded with a startling report, the sound bouncing off the hills and echoing briefly through the canyon below.

The hands that held the buckle vanished and the general slowly moved one bleeding stump toward a face that had been opened as if it were a rotting watermelon. He smashed to the ground.

That was when I launched myself and chopped the neck of the soldier who held the dogs’ leashes in one hand and a machine pistol in the other. Before he crumpled, I grabbed the pistol and sprayed his buddies with a short burst that slammed them down like toy ducks in a shooting gallery. Pilar was aiming her gun at my middle, so I kissed her farewell, a kiss of lead, without regrets.

The soldier I had karate chopped was coming to life again, beginning to rise. I folded him back and pinned him to the ground with another quick burst.

I had expected the dogs to leap at me immediately. But on the contrary, they had turned on their helpless master who had so cruelly abused them, and were chewing savagely at that gory remnant of a man.

Now I peeled my coveralls and after checking to see that the stylus and the little leather code book, complete with deciphering notes, were still in the pocket of my suit jacket, I pivoted toward the monster-like boulders. Lifting and spreading my arms generously, I sent the girls a broad signal of victory and welcome.

For a moment I watched them scramble from the rocks and race toward the embankment, their wheat-blonde heads bobbing in the sun. Then I recovered the Luger and stiletto from the ground near Pilar. I stood above her and thought: how evil, how beautiful. What a waste!

I turned to leave, then with an afterthought whose purpose was not greed, I opened her blouse and removed what she had described as a thick girdle of currency — namely a money belt.

Carrying it with me, I ran toward the copter. I had checked the fuel gauge, had nearly cried with joy when I discovered the tank was full, and was warming the motor, the big blade twirling, when the girls ducked under and climbed aboard.

I brought the rotor up to speed, adjusted the pitch, and we left the ground like a great wingless bird startled by the boom of a hunter’s shotgun. Below the complex of buildings that had housed the fatal conspiracy of Knox Wamow and Anton Zhizov seemed to melt into the terrain as we rose and slipped away.

Whirling through the notch between the mountains, passing the gigantic upstretched finger of rock, we had almost lost sight of the compound.

But in another minute, it was awesomely defined for us as it was blasted, burned, pulverized by the atomic explosion that I had been expecting at any second as I kept checking my watch. As the sound reached us, so did the shock waves. The copter was lifted and bounced and spun around as if teased by a giant hand.

The searing white glare was so intense we were forced to look away. But when the cork-on-rough-water tossing of the copter ceased, we again gazed at the site of the explosion, and saw the pale-smoke mushroom of the rising, expanding cloud.

I nodded to the tortured, buttercup faces of the twins, and I said, “Yes, that’s right It was the big one, the grandaddy of explosions. And I knew it was coming. Do you wonder I saw no point in warning you? You would have been hysterical, in panic.”

“And why weren’t you in panic?” Terri asked reasonably.

“Because the threat of death is almost routine to me,” I answered. “On every assignment it walks at my elbow.”

“Assignment?” said Jerri. “What assignment? Tell us what you do. Tell us what the whole horrible business is all about.”

“Who were those people?” Terri asked. “And what was in those buildings?”

“What buildings?” I said. “What people? There were no people. There were no buildings. They never existed.”

“News of the explosion will reach the papers in headlines and then we can tell all our friends what happened,” said Jerri.

“It will never reach the papers,” I said. “And if asked, I will deny the least knowledge of the explosion and the events surrounding it. Subject closed. Period!”

“How can you be so mysterious in the face of—” Terri began.

“My work is a mystery,” I said. Then, with a smile, “And I am a phantom with no real existence — just an image of your dreams.”

I handed the money belt to Terri and I said, “I owe you, sweetheart, and there’s a little down payment. I owe you both. And I suspect that there’s enough in that filthy-rich girdle to open a dress shop.”