The Golden Serpent

Chapter 4 A Well-Preserved Corpse

The United States submarine Homer S. Jones surfaced quietly in a zone where the Bay of California meets the Pacific. Homer, as the crew called her, had waited until the moon was down. Now she came awash like a sleek, steel whale and a hatch clanged open. A young lieutenant preceded Nick Carter down the ladder to the wet deck.

“This is it. The men will have the boat ready for you in a minute.” The lieutenant peered toward the shore, half a mile away. There were a few lights scattered up and down it, dim beacons of civilization in the gloom.

“We should be dead on target,” the lieutenant said. He pointed to his left. “Those lights should be Eldorado. The ones on the right are La Cruz. My orders were to land you between them.”

By this time a rubber boat had been lowered into the calm seas lapping at the sub. Nick shook hands with the lieutenant. “Thanks, lieutenant. You’ve done a fine job. Now let’s check out our recovery plan once more.”

“Right. We he doggo around the coast here, out beyond the limit, and wait for your beeper signal. Ostensibly we’re on a test cruise. We wait two weeks. If we get the beeper signal we come to this same spot and pick you up on the recognition signal. If we don’t hear from you in two weeks we go home.” The lieutenant did not see fit to mention his private and personal orders: stooge around and see if you can find another submarine in the area. If you do, and she can’t identify herself, sink her. Ram her if you must! Those were his secret orders from the Navy and, as far as he knew, had nothing to do with this odd deal of putting a bum ashore on the Mexican coast.

“Okay,” said Nick Carter. “Fine. I’ll be seeing you, then. Before two weeks, I hope.” He went down the deck to where the rubber boat was waiting. The lieutenant noticed again that, although this man looked like a bum, he moved like a tiger. There was something about his eyes, too, which could give a man the creeps. They changed colors, those eyes, but always they were steady and cold on yours when he spoke.

The big man wasted no time. He leaped into the rubber boat, poised and skillful, and pushed away from the sub. He looked back once, raised a hand, and a soft-voiced adios came across the water. The lieutenant waved, then turned toward the conning tower. “All hands below. Prepare to submerge.”

Killmaster paddled toward the beach, a glittering evanescent white line in the star glow. Behind him he heard the swish and gurgle as Homer submerged, but he did not look back. Overhead the constellations spun and tilted, bright against a black velvet sky. A fine and peaceful evening. But for how long? Killmaster’s grin was hard. His job was to disrupt this all-pervading calm, this peaceful land and seascape. He was the grain of sand in the oyster, the irritant that might, or might not, produce the pearl the CIA and AXE were seeking.

The waves were barely thigh high. Nick landed easily and unloaded his little craft. He deflated the boat and buried it and the paddle in the sand. Perhaps some beachcomber would find it and wonder. Would get a few pesos for it. It did not matter.

When he had buried the boat and smoothed the sand, Nick picked up the heavy musette bag and slung it on his back. It contained the worldly possessions of Jamie McPherson, his cover identity. He had a tattered, stained turista card in that name, and also a bedraggled passport, both badly out of date. The passport had been cleverly aged and sweat stained until it was barely decipherable.

Nick reached a line of low dunes and slogged up them, sinking in the drifts to the tops of his high-laced shoes, both of which had holes in the soles. He had no illusions about what would happen if the Mexican police got him. A jail cell. And Mexico is not famous for its prisons, nor for its treatment of prisoners. The police must not get him. And he did not want to kill any policemen if it could be helped.

He left the beach and plunged into thick scrub, stunted sea pines and tall saw grass and maguey plants. Presently he came to the highway, a black double-laned ribbon stretching north and south. The roadway brooded, silent and deserted, with no hint that a car had ever passed over it, or ever would. Nick crossed the road and flopped into the ditch for a breather. Only ten minutes, he told himself. He must be well inland, near the tiny village of Cosala, before the sun came up. He lit a cigarette, not his gold tips now, but the cheapest of Mexican, and inhaled the harsh smoke and considered. The mission was well enough begun. His cover should prove adequate — if he could stay out of the hands of the Mexican police. If they got him, the cover would actually work against him — he was in Mexico illegally, for one thing, and he was a drifter, sort of a bindle stiff, a “gold tramp” who was panning illegally. The day of the free-lance gold hunter was long past in Mexico. One had to have a license and you had to split the take with the government. Nick had no license and he could hardly split a non-existent take. He didn’t think he would have much time to devote to actual panning. Yet he must make it look good, set up a crude camp and pretend to be looking for gold.

His clothing, Killmaster admitted now, was a thing of beauty from the AXE viewpoint. He looked exactly as he was supposed to look — a down and outer trying to pan enough gold for a new stake, a new try at life. His hat, battered, stained and torn, was an old Army campaign hat such as American soldiers had worn when they chased Villa across the Rio Grande. God only knew how the CIA had come up with it!

His shirt was Army, too, out of surplus, and he wore ragged corduroys tucked into the high boots. Beneath these he wore a dirty singlet and a pair of filthy long johns. His socks had holes in them and stank, though he did have a fresh pair in the musette bag. Also in the musette bag were a pair of high-powered binoculars — they would take some explaining if the police got him — and an ancient Webley revolver made before the first World War. It was a huge gun, heavy and awkward — Hawk had suggested that it needed wheels — and he had only a few spare rounds for it, but it was the sort of gun that a man like Jamie McPherson might carry. Nick had admitted, rather reluctantly, that his Luger would be out of place. As would have his stiletto, Hugo, and the deadly little gas bomb, Pierre. He felt a little naked without his old companions, but the CIA had insisted that he go in “clean” and Hawk and he had had to defer in the end.

His beard, which was black and coarse when he let it grow, was already itching. Nick scratched it a moment, then picked up the musette bag and climbed out of the ditch. It would be light now in four hours or so and he must make the most of the darkness. He got his bearings, plunged into a little copse of ash trees, and began to climb a long ridge that would lead him into the foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental where it pushed down into Durango.

Nick maintained a steady, rapid pace to the east. Always climbing. He crossed one secondary road and beyond it the country got wilder, the terrain slashed with deep ravines and steep cliffs and long glissades of shale. As a line of pearl began to show in the east he saw traces of mining, old shafts gaping like blackened teeth in the cliff faces, a mountain stream where a rotten flume was falling apart. Several times he passed cabins and shacks, all lonely and sagging and rotting away, but he did not stop. But the shacks gave him an idea. Nick Carter was not one to sleep on hard barren ground if he could help it.

He had been told there was a mild rainy season in this part of Mexico at this time of year. Now his information proved correct. Misty gray and white clouds gathered quickly, ignoring the golden rim of sun pushing up in the east, and soon a warm silvery shower was falling. Nick trudged on, enjoying the soft damp drops on his face.

He came suddenly to a cliff overhang. Below him was a long, narrow valley, a lush green barranca gouged out of the hills. He sensed immediately that it was what he sought. He eased off the musette bag and sat down, his boots dangling over the cliff edge, and studied the ground below. A narrow stream ran gushing and hurrying along the floor of the valley, spewing itself around boulders and rock formations in a white frenzy. Should be good panning there, Nick told himself.

He glanced about him, his sharp eyes missing nothing. Off to his right, near where the valley began, was a mountain with a flat, rock-strewn summit. It would, he thought, overlook everything in the vicinity. From it, in the shelter of the rocks, he should be able to see the coast and as far again inland. He would have the same vantage north and south. While on the valley floor he would be safe from other prying eyes. Yes. This was it.

Nick began to skirt the edge of the cliff, looking for a way to get down without breaking his neck. It was not going to be easy. The cliffs on his side of the valley were precipitous, falling away nearly sheer to a depth of two hundred feet in places. Had he approached the barranca from the other side it would have been easier; there the valley floor sloped up at an easy forty-five degrees to merge into a tree-studded mesa. Nick cursed under his breath. All very fine — but he wasn’t on the other side!

The cliff angled sharply just then and he saw the bridge. He approached it and regarded it with some distaste. Neither Hawk nor the CIA would appreciate it much if he got his brains bashed out on the bottom of the gorge. A dead agent isn’t much good. Nick tested the end of the bridge with one foot, which action immediately set the frail structure to swaying.

It was, Killmaster thought, the sort of bridge you saw in movies about adventure in the high Andes. It was narrow, with passage for only one, and drooped perilously in the middle. The floor was of wide-spaced boards interlaced with wire cable. There was a hand rope on either side, connected here and there to the floor by wooden stanchions.

A sudden gust of wind whirled down the barranca and the little bridge danced like a dervish. Nick said to hell with it and stepped out. The bridge swayed, plunged, bucked and swung beneath his two hundred odd pounds, but it did not break. He was sweating when he reached the far side, and his beard was itching fiercely. But when at last he reached the floor of the valley he was content. It was the perfect spot.

At this, the lower end of the barranca, the rushing stream had been dammed. Rotting balks and ruined planks were all that was left of a sluiceway, evidence that the spot had once been placer-mined. The sizeable pond was drained by a break in the middle of the crude dam. The pond itself looked a cool inviting green and appeared to be deep. Nick promised himself a dip as soon as he was settled in.

Snugged back against the cliff face was a rusting little Nissen hut, nearly hidden in a clump of red cedar and primavera. Nick contemplated it with quiet satisfaction. It was rusted through in several places and the door had unaccountably vanished, but it would do very well. There was an air of desuetude about the whole place that entirely suited him. He wanted, for the time being, to be very much alone. When the time came he might have to show himself deliberately, if only to draw fire, but not yet.

He stepped under the rusty carapace of the hut. The rain had ceased now and the sun drove mote-filled shafts through the holes in the roof. It was barren except for three bunks end-to-end along one wall and an ancient Sibley stove in one corner. The stove lacked a pipe, though the hole was there for it. As Nick went to inspect the stove at close hand there was a scampering and rustling and three lizards scuttled for the door.

“Sorry, fellows,” Nick muttered. “The apartment situation is bad all over.” But the lizards started him thinking and he began to hunt the hut thoroughly. He bagged three scorpions, deadly enough, and one gila monster found under a rotting floor plank. Nick brushed the scorpions out of the door with a stick and killed the gila monster with the little folding shovel he had brought along.

When he had rid his new home of pests he went back to the Sibley stove. It was full to the brim with black, greasy ashes. Nick picked up a handful and sifted them through his fingers. A look of intense concentration came over the handsome, fine-boned face as he stared down at the ashes for a long time. Either the nerves in his fingertips were kidding him or the ashes were still faintly warm!

Killmaster knew that thickly packed ashes, in a protected place, will hold their warmth for a long time. Two days? Three?

He tossed his musette bag on one of the bare board bunks and unpacked. He checked the outsize Webley and thrust it into his belt. He had never fired a Webley and doubted he could hit a barn with it, even inside the barn, but in a visual sense the weapon was formidable. A miniature cannon. Probably sounded like one, too.

From the bag he also took a shallow pan with a fine wire-sieve bottom, with which he intended to play at panning gold. Something of an improvement over the “pan” the old timers had used.

Before he got down to work he stood near the door; He did not move a muscle and a watcher could not have detected his breathing. He might have been a phantom haunting the shadowed little hut. Outside the hut he could see and hear life returning to normal — squirrels were chittering again and birds darted and sang in the green cage of trees surrounding the hut. Nick was reassured. There was nothing, no one, out there now. No creature who did not belong.

Killmaster went back to the stove and set to work. He filled the pan with greasy ashes and began to sift them. As he dug deeper into the sooty mass he knew he had been right. They were still warm. Just what that meant he did not concern himself with at the moment, though well aware of the implications. His privacy might be disturbed at any time.

When he finished he had a mass of ashes on the floor and three more or less interesting exhibits. They would have been more interesting if he could have made any sense out of them.

A — the charred remains of a man’s wallet.

B — one corner of a passport, with only part of a visa stamp visible.

C — a blackened piece of silver money which, when cleaned, turned out to be a 5 cruzeiro bit. Brazilian money.

The rest was ashes. Mute and unrevealing, though he thought he detected fibers in the stuff. Burnt clothing?

His hands and arms were a mass of sticky filth by now. Nick placed his three finds on another bunk, then took his canteen and sauntered down to the pond. He dropped a Vioformo tablet into the canteen and filled it, then stood contemplating the pond. And succumbed to temptation. If he was being watched, which was quite possible, it would be well in character for a filthy “gold tramp” to take a bath.

Killmaster stripped rapidly, chuckling to himself as he got down to the cruddy long johns. If there was a watcher he must be amused at the sight. Even so magnificent a physical specimen as Nick must appear slightly comic in the baggy-kneed drawers.

He went into the pond in a long flat dive, finding the water just cold enough to be bracing. He swam back and forth a dozen times in a beautiful, all-out racing crawl, then sounded for bottom. As he had suspected the pond was deep. A good twenty feet or more. He grabbed a handful of bottom and surfaced. While treading water he examined the specimen of bottom he had brought up, washing the mud, sand and gravel gently through his fingers. A few tiny specks of color remained in his palm. There was still a little gold around, then. Not enough to make commercial mining feasible, but an itinerant such as he was supposed to be could possibly make twenty or thirty dollars a day. So much the better for his cover. Especially as he did not have the problem of smuggling his gold out of Mexico.

Nick swam around the pond for a time, basking in the cool water and hot sun, and then sounded again. It had been a long time since he had really tested his lungs. The last time he had done just over four minutes, but underwater stamina depended on practice and exercises and he was behind in both. He hit bottom and began to stooge around idly, peering back at a couple of small fish and giving chase to a large and startled turtle.

His lungs were just beginning to pain a bit when he saw it. A stray shaft of sunlight had somehow tunneled down through the turgid green, just enough to strike a glimmer of white on the thing lying on the bottom. Nick swam toward it. It was the body of a man, naked, with arms and legs bound with wire. Around the- dead man’s waist was a rope which in turn was attached to a burlap bag full of stones. Someone had wanted to be very sure the dead would not rise again.

Pain stabbed his lungs and he had to surface. He took ten deep breaths and went down again, this time with his hunting knife. An extremely delicate electronic device was concealed in the hilt, but the Brain Boys had assured him it was waterproof.

Nick cut the rope and freed the body from its burden of stones. He brought it to the surface and towed it to shore and pulled it out on the bank. He stood dripping in the sun, his tanned pelt shining, feeling himself vibrant and alive as he gazed down at the dead flesh.

The body was that of a man in his mid-fifties. Strands of pale blond hair were plastered across the bald skull. The eyes, protuberant and staring at Nick, were a light blue. He had been a rather short man, squat and powerful, with well-developed biceps. He had been badly in need of a shave when he was killed. And he had been well killed. His chest was riddled with small blue holes. Someone, Nick guessed, had put nearly the whole of a Tommy gun clip into him.

Killmaster squatted by the corpse and went over the flesh, inanimate leather now, inch by inch. He found the tattoo immediately. It was on the left arm, high on the outside, just below the bulge of the bicep. A tattoo in the shape of twin blue lightning bolts. The infamous double lightning of the SS!

Nick sat back on his heels and whistled softly. Schutzstaffel. Hitler’s elite. As nasty a gang of perverts, criminals and murderers as ever roamed the earth. They were still being hunted down like the rats they were, but many were still at large, scurrying frantically from hole to hole. Most had had the twin lightning tattoo torn from their flesh. This one, this dead man now staring up at him, had been one of the arrogant ones.

Nick got his entrenching shovel and dug a shallow grave. He tumbled the body into it and covered it over, patting the earth flat. He did not want his pond contaminated with a cadaver.

He dressed, jammed the hunting knife into his boot, and went back to the hut. He picked up the cruzeiro piece and examined it again. There was an awful lot of coffee in Brazil. There were also, it was rumored, an awful lot of ex-Nazis. Nick flipped the coin high and caught it again. Whoever had killed the man and burnt all his clothes and possessions, had missed the coin. Now it tattled a fragment of story. What the full story was Killmaster could not guess. Probably it did not concern him or his mission. Almost certainly it did not. And yet — someone had killed a Nazi, an SS man, and buried the body where they hoped it would never be found. That in itself was of no matter. What did matter was that the ashes had still been warm!

Nick conceded, reluctantly, that he was probably not as alone as he had hoped. Still he must play out his part according to plan.

He slung the binoculars around his neck inside his shirt. Then, with the big Webley in his belt, he took a can of beans from the musette bag and ate them under a fir tree. He dug himself a small latrine back in the grove of primavera and used it, then flung the empty tin in and covered both it and the excreta. Then, with his little shovel and the pan, he began working his way back up the stream toward the far end of the barranca. He had, or hoped he had, the appearance of a gringo stiff looking for a good place to pan some illegal gold.

He found a shallow spot where the stream ran crashing around huge boulders and crossed over. He stopped to pan here and there, always working his way upstream. Now and then he found specks of gold in the pan, and these he carefully stowed away in a leather pouch. If the Mexican cops did get him he must have something to prove that he was a bona-fide gold tramp. If Authority was in a good mood they might do no worse than kick him out of the country. That in itself, of course, meant defeat. He would go back to AXE with his tail between his legs. N3’s regular features took on a saturnine cast at the thought. That had never happened to him. He didn’t think it was going to happen this time.

He spent the entire afternoon play-acting. The sun was lowering in the west, the sky riven with rainbow color, when he found what he wanted at the end of the barranca. It came very near to being a dead end, a box canyon, but at last he found a steep passage, as narrow and treacherous as a winze in an old mine, which led out of the ravine on the easy side. He left his pan and shovel by the stream and slipped through the narrow winze, slipping badly on the shale floor. The passage ended in a tumble of giant boulders not far from the mesa he had seen before. To his right, half a mile away, was the flat-topped mountain. A belt of trees and heavy brush strayed in a wavering line from the mesa to the foot of the mountain. Cover enough, he reckoned, for a man who knew how to use cover. And he did. The main thing was to get to the point of vantage before the light went.

The sun was half-drowned in the Pacific when Nick Carter reached the mountain top. He had been right — it overlooked everything for miles. He found a niche in the boulders and adjusted the binoculars.

To his right, the northeast, was the tiny village of Cosala glimmering white in the twilight. He must go there in the morning, to be seen, noticed, and to get supplies. He did not think there would be a resident policeman in so small a village.

Nick brought the glasses around slowly, counter-clockwise, sweeping the broken landscape. Here and there he spotted the gaping maws of old mine shafts, tottering stipples and derricks, all rotting away now. From one of the mining sites a rusting narrow-gauge track ran away to nowhere. Near it a donkey engine stood mute.

Suddenly Killmaster let out a grunt of satisfaction. There it was. The airstrip. The strip the CIA was betting was the one from which the drunken Vargas had taken off with his load of counterfeit. Nick examined it carefully. It was weedy and overgrown, unkempt, but he could clearly see tracks where a plane, or planes, had recently landed and taken off. At one end a wind sock lifted erratically to the evening sea breeze. There was a metal hangar and a tiny operations shack built of raw yellow wood, unpainted. Everything about it gave the impression of desolation and desertion.

A rutted track led from the airstrip to the double-laned highway he had crossed that morning. Nick adjusted the glasses again and followed the black ribbon of highway to the north, to where a dirt road shot off to the left to end at a high wire gate. There was a small stone guardhouse just inside the gate.

He put down the glasses to light a cigarette, Mex, and when he took them up again he saw a car just coming into sight on the highway. It was a sleek, expensive car, and its shiny black hide flaunted the last rays of the sun. Nick nodded in appreciation. A Rolls. Such a car could only belong to the owner of the castle known as El Mirador. The Watch Tower. That quite famous and extraordinary woman who was known locally as The Bitch.

Nick let his cigarette loll from the corner of his lips as he kept the glasses on the car. Possibly the lady had been out hanging some of the peasants, or at least whipping them. She was, if rumor was true, quite capable of both.

His orders had been specific on the subject of the lady and her famous castle. Stay clear! She was VIP. Not to be bothered. Unless in the very unlikely event that she was in some way mixed up with the counterfeiting and the Serpent Party. The CIA Director had all but stated that Gerda von Rothe, her real name, was above suspicion. He had not gone quite that far, but the implication was there.

Now, as Nick Carter followed the Rolls with his glasses, his grin was on the knowing side. Nobody was above suspicion! That was the creed of AXE, and of Hawk, and it was his creed too.

He thought he detected a flash of silver hair as the Rolls turned off the highway onto the dirt road that led back to the castle. Was the lady a platinum-blonde? Surely the CIA man had told him, though there had been no pictures immediately available. Nick shrugged. Odd that he couldn’t remember. Not that it mattered — if the lady was as clean as the CIA seemed to think.

The Rolls was stopping at the gate now. Two uniformed guards came out of the guardhouse and opened the gate. Nick smiled as he watched them salute in military fashion. The Bitch ran a tight castle.

The Rolls went through the gate and up a long, curving drive that wound into thick growing trees. Nick lost sight of it and brought the glasses back to the uniformed guards. Silver insignia of some kind glittered on their caps. They did not wear badges. Both men wore Sam Browne belts that looked well polished, and both wore buttoned-down holsters on their belts. Nick’s brow furrowed in thought — what was the lady so afraid of? His frown deepened a moment later as one of the guards went into the guardhouse and came out again with a submachine gun. He sat in a chair leaning against the side of the guardhouse and began to clean the gun with rags and oil. So powerful were the glasses that Nick could see the man’s flat, expressionless face, see the lips move as he whistled at his work.

What in hell, Nick was wondering, goes on at the castle? Tommy guns! Miles of wire fence topped with strands of barbs. That’s security, all right, but why so much of it? What has the lady got to hide?

Trees prevented him from seeing much of the castle itself, this fabulous El Mirador so often pictured and written about. Formerly, anyway. Nick could definitely remember the CIA man saying that not much had been written about the castle in recent years. Writers and photographers were no longer welcome. The Bitch lived alone among her splendor and her millions and liked it.

What he could see of the castle reminded him of a fairy tale castle he had once seen on the Rhine. He could see turrets and castellated towers and a single line of ramparts with bartizans overlooking an invisible moat. From the tallest tower, a long spire of an affair, there floated a large pennon. As the breeze snapped it taut Nick could make out the device — a single white lily emblazoned against scarlet. He could not repress a smile at the incongruity of the scene. Splendor, even grandeur in this setting, wedded to commercialism. The White Lily. Symbolic of White Lily cosmetics! Millions of jars of goo purchased annually by women all over the world. Women who hoped the white paste would make them as beautiful as Gerda von Rothe. Known locally as The Bitch.

Nick laughed softly and shook his head. It was a mad world. But The Bitch and her castle and her cosmetic products had nothing to do with his mission. She had millions, so no need for her to counterfeit. And a woman like that was not likely to mix in Mexican politics. No. It was chance, nothing more, that The Bitch and her castle happened to be squarely in the middle of things. Of the immense area he had to explore.

And yet — the plane had come from that airstrip. The airstrip belonged to the lady and so, as far as the Mexican police knew, did the Beechcraft. Vargas had been employed as a pilot by the lady. That was all the Mexican police had known.

Nick smiled. Of course they might have been a little more interested if the CIA had told them about the two bags of counterfeit found in the plane. But the CIA had not told them about it. They had sat on that, and simply reported the crash of a Mexican national in a stolen plane.

It was verging into darkness now, but not too dark for the gunner to see him. The bullet splatted off a boulder just to the left of Nick and went caterwauling around in frantic ricochet.

Nick flattened out and tried to dig himself into solid rock. We are not alone, he thought with a complete lack of piety. Goddamn it — we are not alone! With the Webley in his hand he wriggled sideways like a snake into the shelter of an overhanging rock and waited for the next bullet.