The Snake Flag Conspiracy

Chapter Two

Out in the bay, the sloop had turned sharply, cutting out its muffler. The deep chugging roar of its powerful diesel engine snarled away hoarsely at full power. Its stern settled heavily into the water. At its prow, a bow wave surged up. Whoever its captain was, he obviously wanted no part of what was going on. He was getting himself and his crew out of the action as fast as he could.

I didn’t blame him. I’d just as soon have stayed out of it myself, but after what I’d heard, I knew I couldn’t.

For a moment I was tempted to play deaf and dumb. Hell, I was supposed to be on a vacation, wasn’t I? Hawk had promised me a rest. Up to now I’d had three days of the two weeks he’d promised me. I knew that if I interfered, there’d be no more vacation for me. It would be back to Washington, back to Dupont Circle, back to AXE and an assignment to finish whatever the hell it was that was starting on this beach on the French coast.

Sometimes I like to forget that I’m not just Nick Carter, that I have a designation — N3, Killmaster — in the supersecret organization known as AXE. Known, that is, to the few that have to know about us because we do their dirty work.

If I just stayed where I was and did nothing, I could look forward to another eleven days — and nights — with Clarisse. And it was worth almost any sacrifice just to enjoy the delights of her company for even that short a time.

Hawk wouldn’t know if I didn’t tell him, would he? I asked myself the question and knew the answer immediately. The hell he wouldn’t! In spite of the stink of his cheap cigars in his nostrils, David Hawk could smell out every damn secret any one of his agents in AXE ever uncovered.

I compared the pleasures of Clarisse’s body with what Hawk would do to me if he found out It wasn’t even a toss-up.

So I gave a deep sigh and tensed myself mentally before I broke from cover, every muscle in my thighs and calves driving hard into the coarse sand, like a linebacker going in to make a low, hard tackle. I reached the collapsed body in four plunging strides, my arms reaching low.

The man was short but heavy. My fingers scraped sand. I grunted with the strain of scooping him up, one arm under his knees, the other under his broad back. Holding his body to my chest, I kept driving forward, lunging desperately for the security of the boulders just a few yards in front of us.

Around us, the sand exploded in angry spurts. The crackling bark of the Kalashnikovs echoed furiously in the confines of the small inlet. Both rifles were on “auto” now.

With one last effort, I hurled us into a crevice at the foot of two mountainous boulders resting together.

I was out of breath, panting hard. At my feet, the man I’d saved groaned and rolled painfully over onto his back. A dark bubble of froth formed and burst on his lips. I started to wipe the sweat off my chest with the palm of my hand, but the moisture felt sticky and thicker than perspiration. I was literally covered with blood.

The man whispered something. I leaned forward.

“Spasebo,” he gasped. “Thank you.”

“It’s not over yet.” I answered him in Russian.

I saw his eyes wander to the Luger in my hand.

“Make them burn in hell!” He reached out and put one hand on my arm. “Make them pay!”

“‘They’?” I asked. “Who are ‘they’?”

But I knew without his answering. “They” could only be KGB agents. No one else merited such hatred. Especially from another Russian.

“Why are they after you?”

He took a shuddering breath. “I accidentally learned more... more than was good for me.” His voice was barely reaching me. It was a cultured, slightly guttural Moscow accent. “It is supposed to... to be very secret. Most... most secret I didn’t know... how secret until too late.”

“And the boat?”

“I was trying to get away. I arranged to be smuggled out of France. Someone gave me away.” He wasn’t bitter. Slavic fatalism had been inbred in him. It was as if, all along, he had expected to be turned in, to be betrayed. “You can never trust the French,” he muttered. “They know from childhood that two payments add up to more than one.”

“You’re still alive,” I told him.

I thought I saw him smile in the dark.

“For how long?” he asked cynically. “How... long... will it take them... to reach us?”

I put my hand on his chest. My searching fingers found ripped flesh on his rib cage and a gaping hole in his shoulder, but the pulse at his neck was steady. Unless there was internal bleeding, the chances were damn good that he could pull through if I could get him medical attention in time.

That is, assuming I could get both of us out of this mess. The Kalashnikovs were silent. Yet I knew it would be mere minutes before the two of them converged on us. And when they opened up from only a few yards away — well, that would be it!

I had stood up and started to wriggle out of the back end of the crevice formed by the boulders when I heard the scream.

“Nick! Where are you?”

And then Clarisse’s second, panic-stricken scream was abruptly cut off.

I swore out loud.

At my feet, the Russian glared up at me. He, too, had heard Clarisse and my answering curse.

“Amerikanski!” he accused.

“Would you rather I were Russian?” I threw back at him. “How quickly do you want to die?”

He made no answer. I slithered quickly out into the night on my hands and knees.

They should have left Clarisse alone.

Up to now I hadn’t really felt personally involved in what was going on. Clarisse’s screams changed all that A surge of anger flooded through every part of me, but furious as I was, I still knew enough not to go charging rashly into the muzzles of a couple of Kalashnikovs. Not with just a Luger and a knife. Losing your temper is out-and-out suicide in a situation like this, and I never was the suicidal type.

I transferred Wilhelmina to my left hand and slid Hugo into my right palm. The haft of the small knife felt good to the touch. The blade was as keen as careful, deliberate honing could make it. The steel was the best. The point was razor sharp.

Hugo was made for night fighting, for battling in deadly silence in the dark, for a stealthy approach, a shadowy attack, a quick lunge that ended in death for whomever he bit in his quick, savage way.

Cautiously I circled the edges of the tiny beach. Now I was glad I hadn’t taken the time to don my slacks. They were white duck and would have turned me into an easy target. Since I had always sunbathed in the nude, my tan was not broken anywhere by a band of light skin. I blended into the shadows from head to toe.

I knew that whoever had stumbled across Clarisse was trying to use her as bait, to tempt me into making a rash move to save her.

Let him keep thinking I would do that.

I went after the other Russian first.

Ears attuned to even the smallest of sounds in the night, I finally heard the noise I had been waiting for. It came from the far end of the inlet. The careless rap of a gunstock against stone.

In a night as dark as this, it’s damn hard to move around with a gun as big as the AK-47 without banging into something unless you have the agility of a panther. The Russian was careless. The soft crack was all I needed to locate him.

I moved sideways to the base of the limestone cliffs and circled the inlet until I was as close to him as I could get without seeing him. I crouched down at an angle to the slope of the cliff. He was up there, somewhere.

Night fighting calls for patience. Assuming his combat ability is equal to his opponent’s, the man who can wait the longest usually wins. I’d been trained to wait for hours without moving a muscle or making a sound.

The Russian wasn’t as patient or hadn’t been trained as well. He came down the cliffside, heading for the crevice where he must have thought we were still in hiding.

I let him get down almost to my level. When his body loomed above me, blocking out the faint starlight, I rose to my feet and hurled myself at him. Wilhelmina, in my left hand, slashed at his grip on the AK-47. Hugo, in my right hand, stabbed upward in what should have been a deadly stroke.

But luck ran against me. The impact of the Luger striking the stock of the automatic rifle stung my hand. The barrel of the gun canted up sharply, just in time to deflect Hugo. It saved the Russian’s life.

He gasped in pain as the knife cut across his chest. His reflexes were fast He turned on his heel, swinging the Kalashnikov blindly at me in the dark.

The gun caught me across the left biceps, paralyzing every nerve from my shoulder down to my wrist. Wilhelmina fell out of my hand. I slashed at him again with Hugo. Once more the Kalashnikov slammed into me, knocking me to my knees.

Whoever he was, the Russian was powerful. What saved my life was his obvious lack of training in night combat. He should have stepped back and blasted away with the Kalashnikov. I wouldn’t have had a chance. Instead, he closed in and tried to hit me again. It was the only chance I was going to get, and I took full advantage of it. My knuckles slammed into the bridge of his nose.

Blindly the Russian dropped the rifle, grabbing at me with his hands. Fingernails raked across my back. One of his hands clamped itself around my wrist, immobilizing Hugo. I slammed my left elbow across his throat.

He tucked his chin into his chest and tried to butt me with his head. Christ! He was all hard skullbone! It was as though he’d hit me with the Kalashnikov. I took the blow on my shoulder.

His face was tucked into my collarbone so I couldn’t reach his eyes. His grasp on my wrist was like a steel handcuff. In my ear, the heavy, panting rasp of his breathing was like a roaring bellows as he sucked air into his lungs in spasmodic gasps. He tried to get a grip on me with his other hand, but his fingers kept slipping off my forearm. My chest and arms were still wet with the blood of the man he’d tried to kill earlier. It made it impossible for him to hold on to me.

And then I twisted my right wrist out of his fingers. He could feel his grip loosening. In desperation he tried to knee me in the crotch. I took the blow on my thigh instead.

Hugo was still in my right hand. And Hugo was free now. My forearm jabbed forward. Just a few inches, but that was all that was necessary. Hugo touched him and slid into him just below his rib cage, opening a small, bloody mouth in his chest. I kept driving my weight against the Russian, lifting him off the ground, my left hand finding his face in time to clamp his mouth shut and prevent him from crying out.

He grunted hard, a muffled sound, and then he collapsed, stumbling away as if he were suddenly tired and wanted to rest. He took one lurching step, and then another, and then he was falling away from me into a seemingly boneless dark heap on the ground.

Wearily I straightened up, dragging deep, painful breaths into my aching lungs. The Kalashnikov lay on the ground near my feet. I picked it up, checking it over in the darkness as best I could. At least now I was on more even terms with the other Russian.

I heard him call across the inlet:

“Petrov!”

He called again. “Petrov, answer me!”

I didn’t have time to hunt for Wilhelmina. With Hugo in my left hand, I cradled the Kalashnikov in my arms and began to trot slowly around the rim of the beach. The sand cut into my bare feet with every step I took. It was like running on a carpet of steel brushes.

I knew he could see me, but that was alright It was so dark that it was impossible for either one of us to make out more than movement That I was slimmer and taller than Petrov couldn’t be discerned. Nor the fact that Petrov had been dressed and that I was stark naked.

The Russian finally caught sight of me, because he yelled out, “Damn you, Petrov, answer me! Have you seen them?”

I was around the inlet now, less than fifty yards away from him, trotting toward the sound of his voice. In my hands, the Kalashnikov was pointed in his general direction. I still couldn’t make him out because he wasn’t moving, but I had the safety of the rifle off, the switch was on “auto” fire, and my finger was on the cold, cross-hatched metal of the trigger.

“Petrov?”

This time there was uncertainty in his voice.

“Da!” I shouted back, and the moment’s hesitation on his part before he realized that I was not Petrov was enough to get me as close as I needed to be.

My finger was tightening on the trigger when the beam of a powerful flashlight slammed into my eyes. Even as I flung myself to one side, I opened up with the AK-47. I hit the ground in a rolling tumble and stopped firing.

I must have hit him with that burst because his flashlight dropped away. It came to rest between us, its beam streaming along the sand. In its reflected glow I saw him standing with his legs wide apart, straddling Clarisse’s supine form, his own Kalashnikov aimed at where I’d been a moment before.

Furiously he pulled the trigger, racketing the night with the blasting staccato roar of the gun, searching for me with a spray of lead.

Even before he ran through the clip, I was returning his fire, keeping him in my sights as the bullets slammed him off his feet onto the sand. He lay motionless, arms wide, legs drawn up like an enormous dead insect. I waited for him to move. After awhile I rose slowly, still aiming the AK-47 at him as I approached his body.

I rolled him over. He was still alive.

Half a dozen yards away, the flashlight shone along the sand, its spreading beam giving off enough light for us to see each other.

There was an expression of surprise on his face as his eyes roamed over me, taking me in from head to toe.

“Naked...” he gasped. “B-bloody...” They were his last words. The breath wheezed heavily out of his chest and with it went his life. His eyeballs sightlessly reflected the beam of the flashlight.

I turned away from him, picked up the flashlight and went to Clarisse. She was unconscious. I felt her head gently, finding the slight swell of a contusion behind her right ear. I pried open one eyeball and shone the beam of the light on the retina. There was a normal reaction. Apparently, the Russian hadn’t hit her too hard; she’d be okay, I knew.

For the time being I didn’t try to bring her back to consciousness. I had other things to do first that it would be best Clarisse knew nothing about.

I went down to the water and washed myself clean, scouring my skin with handfuls of rough sand. I dried most of the moisture off my body with quick, scooping slashes of the edge of my palms before I donned my shorts, slacks, jersey and sandals. The leather felt cool to my burning feet.

Dressed, I went back to the first Russian I’d killed to find Wilhelmina. Finally, I returned to the crevice that had been my original hiding place. I shone the light between the boulders onto the Russian. His eyes closed against the brightness of the light in his face.

“Well...? Why are you waiting, tovarich? Shoot me quickly.” He spoke angrily in Russian.

“Wrong guess,” I told him. “It’s your friends who are dead.”

There was a moment’s pause before he answered, his eyes still tightly closed.

“Both of them?”

“Both of them.”

“Turn the light away, please.” This time he spoke in English with only the faintest touch of an accent. I moved the beam so that it reflected off the boulders. He opened his eyes and looked up at me.

“You... you are very good, whoever you are,” he said. He drew a deep breath.

I made no reply.

“And now?” he asked after several seconds.

“It depends on you,” I said. “I can walk away and leave you here...”

“Or?”

“Or I can give you the sanctuary you were trying to find when your friends caught up with you.”

He took a moment to think it over. Hurt as he was, this Russian didn’t panic easily.

“What is the price?”

“What do you care what it is? You’ve nothing to lose.”

“Sometimes the price is too much to pay.”

“Do you want to die?”

He answered with a question of his own.

“What do you want from me?”

“I want to know what it was that almost cost you your life.”

The Russian grimaced as another shudder of pain went through his body.

“I’m cold,” he said, almost in surprise.

“That’s shock. You need medical attention. Are you ready to trade?”

He shrugged fatalistically. “I have no choice, have I, Amerikanski? Not if I want to live — is that it?”

“That’s right.”

“And you...” He swallowed hard, afraid to hope. “Can you really give me protection?”

“More than that, Russian. I can promise you medical attention, hospitalization until you’re well again and a whole new identity. I can even arrange protection for you while you settle in any city in the States you’d like to call home. Is that enough?”

In the flashlight’s reflected glow, I saw his bloodstained lips twist in a smile. He let his eyes close.

“I like it,” he said dreamily. “But the irony of it amuses me. I’ve been a patriotic citizen all my life. Do you know, Amerikanski, I am a Hero of the Soviet Union? Oh, yes, I earned that medal! Now...” He drew another painful breath. “...Now I must become a traitor to Mother Russia if I want to live. What would you do in my place, Amerikanski?”

He reached out and touched my hand.

“Even... even more ironic... is the fact that I must save your country... just... just so that it can give me sanctuary! Don’t you find that... amusing?”

Amusing? Hell, I didn’t know what he was talking about.

He let go of my hand. “You have a deal, my friend.”

“The name is Carter,” I said. “Nick Carter. Now, let’s hear it. What’s this secret that almost cost you your life?”

He told me. It took him less than five minutes. He interrupted himself only occasionally to grit his teeth as spasmodic waves of pain racked his body.

What he told me was enough to make me realize that I had accidentally stumbled onto a threat to America more devastating than any atomic war could ever be!

There were no mad scientists. No atom bomb, no hydrogen holocaust, no skies full of Soviet nuclear MIRV missles. On the contrary, the Kremlin would sit back comfortably and do exactly nothing while our own country would go crazily to hell, destroying itself completely in just a matter of months!

Would you believe that the plan was created by a Soviet economist?

And there were just twelve days before the plan was scheduled to go into effect!