The Devil's Dozen

Seventeen

It was three o’clock in the morning before every cut had been cleansed. Fortunately, few of the slashes required bandages, mostly on my forehead and forearms. I simply looked like a man who had fallen face first into a barrel of razor blades. In my brain was the double glow of local anesthetics and scotch, the first provided by the resident doctor and the second by Vera.

In two hours AXE would hit, and I would be alive. That realization didn’t hurt my morale either.

“You’ve proven yourself now, Raki,” Vera eased me into my room. “You even beat my father.”

Her eyes glowed with love. I’d won her. In two hours I would betray her. I’d only been doing my job: infiltrate and destroy. The job meant using her, just as her job in the beginning meant destroying me. I tried to rationalize her out of my mind as just another woman, just another enemy. It was no use. I held her face and smiled deceptively, as if I were nothing but happy. Could it have worked in another place or another time, Vera and me? The most I could do for her now was to try to keep her alive when AXE’s copters came down.

“Will you stay here tonight with me, Vera?”

“I was waiting for you to ask.”

As I said, my cuts were mainly superficial. In the dark I couldn’t see them, and, when Vera climbed naked into bed with me, I couldn’t feel them. Her breasts were cool and soothing, her body a lithe blanket. Her mouth was hot and hungry. As we kissed, my legs spread hers. Vera’s tongue found mine as I rose up into her, past her mound’s fringe and soft lips, into the female core.

“Raki,” she sighed with pleasure. “No one can stop us. No one.”

I turned her over without withdrawing and pulled her thighs around me. My guilt melted in the heat of lovemaking. Vera Cesare King was never more passionate and giving, her breasts soft pillows with stiff cones, her flanks wide and welcoming. At the end, the bed rocked under deep, rhythmic sex, and then we were locked together, holding on as if letting go would mean time would run out.

Sexual exhaustion overwhelmed my battered body. Vera left me with a kiss to go to the bathroom, and I was half asleep when my head hit the pillow. Something fell on the bathroom floor, but the sound registered faintly on my brain. I could sleep deeply, sweetly for one hour and be ready for Hawk when he came.

“You are Nick Carter.”

The voice was Vera’s, and it wasn’t in any dream. I sat up, immediately wide awake. Vera held the radio transmitter in the palm of her hand. In her other hand was her Beretta.

“I accidentally knocked your shaver on the floor. The shaver broke, and this fell out,” she bounced the tiny transmitter in her hand. “You rotten bastard.”

I could have started lying again and argued it was a bug of her father’s, but I didn’t have the heart for it. The he was over, and we both knew it. Raki Senevres was dead.

“I’m sorry, Vera.”

I meant it. Vera’s brown eyes stayed as hard as topazes. She was still naked. The bathroom’s light cast the gun’s shadow over her sleek belly, where I’d laid minutes before.

“So am I,” she said.

Vera pulled the trigger. A tinny click came from the gun. She pulled the trigger a second time and a third. The hammer came forward on the bullet in the chamber, but there was no firing pin. I’d removed the pin days before.

“Bastard!”

She threw the gun at me and ran for the door. I tackled her from the bed and climbed up her body. On the chair were my clothes. My shirt served as a gag around her mouth, and I tied her hands to her feet with my pants. Bent in a bow, she rocked back and forth furiously. I couldn’t help throwing a blanket over her to hide her nakedness from whoever might come.

There was more than an hour to go until the raid. From the closet I chose the warmest clothes, sweater and parka, and a pair of head racing skis. I bound the skis to my back with two belts. Then I threw the window open to a half-mile drop. Instead of sex, adrenalin was dulling the pain of my cuts. I took a last look at Vera. She turned her head away.

I went out the window onto the ledge. The Cascades were a hazy, deep blue like an undersea mountain range, the stars shimmered like iridescent fish, and low clouds moved across the face of the sky. I climbed up the two stories to Snowman’s terrace where I had been walking earlier in the evening.

Over the terrace wall I could make out the copters on the pad. Flying out was a temptation, but it would have alerted the entire fortress prematurely. I had to disappear another way. I ducked as a guard marched by on his patrol. As soon as he was past, I reached my arm along the inside of the wall. My hand felt a long coil of rope and a grappling hook, one of the coils I’d seen earlier placed at regular intervals along the wall for the guards to use whenever something or someone needed retrieving.

I didn’t use the coil right away, not until I’d climbed fifty feet down the lodge’s base. There I scanned my escape route. The rope I gauged at 150 feet. The mountain face was veined with ice but its very steepness would be useful for disengaging the hook. The hook should have been padded to reduce noise, I should have had climbing boots, and I should have been able to see what I was descending to, but a man can’t have everything.

The hook fit neatly around a ridge six inches deep, and I stepped off into space. Keeping the pressure on the grapple as evenly as possible, I leapfrogged backwards down the stone face. At any second I expected to hear an alarm and see an M-16 appear over the terrace. There was no alarm and no M-16. I reached the end of the rope and balanced on an ice ledge. I jiggled the rope. It went slack, and I pressed myself back against stone. The hook, freed from the ridge, dropped by my head, and, far below, hit stone with a ring. I waited while adrenalin pumped sweat out of every pore. Everything on Snowman remained peaceful. I pulled the hook up.

Dropping down the mountain by grappling hook was insane but fast. Within thirty minutes I covered the 1,000 feet to the snowline. The snow was fresh, and the slope eased off to forty-five degrees. I left the rope and switched to skis. Half an hour remained till the raid, and I was determined to put as much distance between myself and Snowman as possible.

The low clouds had lifted, and moonlight covered the snow. It was all downhill. I went into a racer’s tuck, and my skis began to sing. I don’t know what King would have analyzed the crystals as, but the snow base was perfect. My speed built to fifty miles per hour, and I could have let it reach seventy if I hadn’t been traveling over unfamiliar terrain at night. Snowman was miles back and out of sight. I flew over a crest and a whole valley of escape routes lay before me.

Another sound rose over the hiss of skis. The sky echoed with the whine of a Cobra’s turbine. The killer copter was not ahead or on my flank. I looked back and saw in the distance a white oblong shape floating over the snow, following my ski tracks. Above the eerie pursuer was the Cobra, a spotlight mounted beside its machine gun. I huddled tighter, cutting wind resistance, and let my speed start building.

I’d made a crucial miscalculation. I had realized the Snowman computer and sensors would be sufficient for tracking any intruder approaching the Mafia fortress. The approaches were uphill and difficult. Leaving the fortress I should have been able to move fast and erratically enough to confuse automatic trackers. I’d never thought of a Cobra following me with a light on my telltale tracks. A Cobra can move at over 200 miles per hour. I couldn’t outrun it, but I could keep running as long as I could.

I veered to the right as I passed a ridge. The snow sprayed beneath me, slapping my skis. I couldn’t slow down, and if I fell I was really wiped out. My turn had brought me onto a southern slope. The snow had a coat of ice. I jumped from one knoll and landed 100 feet downhill. The impact was like landing on concrete, but my speed was still building, and my tracks would be harder to find on crust than snow. Maybe I could outwit the Cobra.

My skis jerked and shook, strained by a speed no skis were designed to take. The least turn was dangerous. I was already on the razor’s edge of control. My control almost broke when the snow around me suddenly bloomed in a dazzling circle of white light. Ahead of me was my shadow. Overhead was the Cobra.

Despite my speed, I cut to the side. In the vacated circle of light, snow and ice were exploding in a machine gun rain. The Cobra didn’t fire at snow long, but it had to circle to find my new trail simply because it was traveling faster than I was. After a ghostlike circle, it found my tracks and began following me again. I cut right and left desperately, at times on one ski. The white circle enveloped me, and I leaned with my shoulder brushing the snow to steer away. When the machine gun opened up, I’d vanished onto a new course.

Two minutes later, the copter gained another sighting, and this time the Cobra sat on my head, but I dug my pole into the snow for a turn that nearly tore my arm out of its socket, and again the copter shot round after round on an empty slope.

The Cobra rose. There was no way for me to look at my watch to check when AXE would attack. The white spotlight had found me again but hung at a distance, as if the two man team in the Cobra were rethinking their strategy or getting new orders from Snowman. The Cobra rose a bit more. The strafing was over.

The rocket pods of the Cobra erupted with red flame. The missiles were not aimed at me. They passed far overhead, exploding in the snow of a high slope. The whole slope dropped, and I heard a roar growing. The sound filled the entire valley. Tons of snow fell and brought more snow down in a churning white mass. The Cobra fired more rockets. What was a white slope turned black as its sheath of ice and snow collapsed, adding its tons to the first avalanche. The Cobra kept on firing, until the entire east side of the valley was rushing down so that it looked as if an earthquake were convulsing the Cascades. The snow beneath my skis shook. A thin tree line vanished under the wave. A wind, started by the rush of snow, tore around the valley walls.

I remembered the film King had showed me. Those men never had a chance. Neither did I. The valley was ten miles long and I was moving at seventy. But the whole side of the valley was falling down in a wave that traveled almost twice my speed. As the wave grew nearer I could make out for the first time its dimensions. Boulders as big as houses bounced on top of a thirty-foot high white wall. As the wall closed in, the ground shook so badly I could barely stay up. As a last resort, I tried turning toward the upper slope on the valley’s other side. The first chunks of snow began dancing up to my feet. Larger chunks hit my back. The avalanche’s yawning roar made my ears ache.

Have you ever seen an ant in a sand pit when the pit falls in on him? I was lifted, still strangely maintaining my balance, up from the ground as if I were a surfer. For a second I rode and felt the immense, incalculable power of the avalanche almost as I were a god riding a thunderstorm. Then I became the ant again.

The wall rose over me. My legs were sucked down. Everything was black, and the avalanche kept rolling.