The Death’s Head Conspiracy

Four

We went out the back door and slipped through the shrubbery to the steep road where Rona’s car was parked.

“You’d better let me drive,” I told her. This may take some tricky maneuvering.”

She handed me the keys and moved quickly around to get in on the passenger’s side. I slid behind the wheel, noticing that the back seat was full of more of her guitar-making equipment — rosewood panels, spools of steel and nylon strings, and ebony fingerboards.

The motorcycle bunch hadn’t seen us yet, but they were milling restlessly around at the foot of the road. I kicked the engine to life and heard shouts behind us. I slammed the shift lever into low, and the car leaped up the hill. We squealed around an S-curve, momentarily out of sight, but I could hear their machines roaring up the hill after us.

We picked up speed on a short climbing straightaway, and I gave a silent thanks that Rona had herself a car with some muscle under the hood. The motorcycles came into sight in the rearview mirror, and I heard a popping sound that was not part of their exhausts. A slug whanged off the rear deck of the car and was followed by another, aimed low.

I jockeyed the machine around another curve and dug Wilhelmina out of the holster. I flicked off the safety and handed the Luger to Rona. I said, “I can’t slow down to give you a good shot at them, but keep firing and it’ll give them something to think about”

Rona leaned out the window and fired left-handed at the bikers. I was pleased to see that she knew how to handle a gun. Holding the car on the road kept me too busy to look around to see if she hit anything, but a change in the pitch of engine noise behind us told me she was at least slowing them down.

Just as I was getting a little breathing distance between us and the bikers, the sharp smell of gasoline told me they’d shot a hole in our tank. The needle of the fuel gage was already jiggling at E, so I knew we weren’t going a whole lot farther. I tramped the accelerator pedal to the floor and we swerved dangerously around two more curves.

The cycles were still roaring up the road behind us, but I had a couple of turns between us when the engine coughed and I knew we were down to the fumes. During the past thirty seconds I’d come up with a desperate plan to get us out of there alive. Rona had emptied the Luger, and there was no time to reload. The brush on both sides of the road was too thick for us to run far. There were only seconds to act before the pursuers were upon us, so my first try would be the only one we would get.

I slammed to a stop in the middle of the road, grabbed a spool of steel guitar string wire off the back seat, and sprinted to a utility pole at the side of the road. I looped the wire around the pole, double-twisting the end to make it secure. Running back to the car, I tossed the spool in through the rear window, jumped into the front seat and goosed the last ounce of power out of the machine to boost us up a small grade and out of sight behind a clump of chapparal on the other side of the road.

The thunder of the motorcycles was just one curve downhill from us when I leaned across the seat, at the same time telling Rona, “Get out and crouch down behind the car.”

“But, Nick, they’ll see us as soon as they get past the bushes here.”

“I think they’ll have something else to think about,” I said. “Now, do what I tell you.”

As Rona followed instructions, I grabbed the spool of guitar wire and yanked it taut. I opened the door, wound the wire about the window frame, and rolled up the window to hold it in place. Then I slammed the door. The bikes were roaring up the straightaway when I fell beside Rona, leaving the steel guitar string stretched across the road at a height of about four feet.

The two leaders of the motorcycle pack hit the wire almost simultaneously. It looked as though they had nodded together in agreement at something, but in the next instant the two heads stayed poised in air while the choppers roared out from under them. The helmeted heads hit the asphalt and bounced crazily along the road like grisly soccer balls. The cycles, handlebars still gripped by the headless riders, roared on up the Hill for several yards before one wobbled over to bump the other, sending them both into a spinning tangle of flesh and machinery.

The rest of the bikers attempted lurching, sliding stops on the blood-slick pavement. The result was a pile-up, a tangle of twisted machines and sprawling bodies. I grabbed Rona’s hand and we raced off. We were lying prone behind a clump of bushes when the survivors of the motorcycle gang could be heard starting their bikes, fading in the distance.

A shudder went through Rona’s lean body. “Who do you suppose they were, Nick?”

“They’ve got to be tied up with the people who blew up Mumura and are threatening New York. Probably there’s been a tap on your phone for a long time. This morning, when you called Hawk, they knew you were onto something. They waited to see who AXE would send out, then planned to dispose of us.

“Yes, but they’re only troops. Who gives the orders?”

“The leader appears to be Anton Zhizov, a real warhawk from the Red Army. One of the men with him seems to be Fyodor Gorodin. Not as smart as Zhizov, but just as dangerous. And if your hunch is right, there’s Knox Warnow.”

“So all you have to do is find them and stop them from blowing up most of the United States.”

“That’s all. But what the hell, I’ve got eight whole days.”

After a safe interval we returned to the road and walked to a clapboard-front store run by an apple-cheeked woman who looked like everybody’s mom. I bought Rona a root beer and got a handful of change for the telephone.

First I called the LA contact man for the Joint Intelligence Committee. I told him about the bodies up the road, and about Rona’s car in the bushes. I phoned for a taxi and Rona and I settled down to wait