Ник Картер - War from the Clouds

“No problem, Senor,” he said, his voice muffled in the narrow hole. “The buzzing is only flies making a nest. I clean them out good.”

Elicia, the other two warriors and I propped our bodies in the wider channel below and waited for the intrepid warrior to clean out the nest of flies. It was good to rest, though I was conscious of the digital watch flipping over numbers as precious time went by.

From above came a louder buzzing, as though the warrior was stirring up the flies. I heard a low curse from the warrior, then a furious buzzing, then a scream from the hole.

“Aaaaiiiiii!”

The man’s feet began to thrash in the hole and the warrior slipped down until he was almost kicking me in the face. He screamed again and I reached out to support his legs. He kicked me twice alongside the head and I was ready to scream myself when the buzzing grew louder and I felt soft furry things falling down across my head, face and chest. They dropped into the gloom below.

“Scorpions!” the warrior shouted between screams. “A nest of scorpions! They’re stinging me!”

He screamed again as another scorpion obviously stung him up in that hole. I pulled on the man’s legs and brought him down out of the hole. Three large scorpions were skittering across his upper body and he was almost white with shock. I batted away the scorpions and, with Elicia’s help, we nestled him against the wall between us. He was no longer screaming, but a low moaning sound was rattling constantly from his lips. His face and arms were swollen from scorpion stings.

The poison from a single scorpion normally isn’t enough to kill a man, or even to incapacitate him immediately, but this man had received several stings. I had no idea how many and there wasn’t time to strip him there in the channel. The point was, he was of no use to us now: he was a liability. We would have to carry him, in spite of the fact that it was becoming even more difficult to continue without having anything or anyone to carry.

It wasn’t easy to generate compassion for the man who was obviously dying in my arms. I considered his great pain and the shock of the poison, but I kept thinking of him as a liability, an impossible burden.

“He is dead,” Elicia said, looking up from the warrior’s face. Her small hand was across his forehead. He was indeed motionless, his lips no longer letting out that unintelligible moaning. “What can we do now, Nick? We cannot go on and we cannot go back?”

I was about at the end of my endurance. I had no desire to climb into that nest of scorpions that still remained in the hole on our left, and the other hole obviously was too small to get through. I was sore and raw from scraping against the rough walls of the hole. I was exhausted from the day’s strenuous activities — I still hadn’t recovered from that frightening swim before we had begun the climb up this impossible chimney. And the shocks to my emotions, from the bats, from the brutal death of the first warrior and from the tightening suspense of knowing that Don Carlos Italla might start his war while we were still burrowing up through the mountain like moles were taking a rigorous toll. And the newly-dead warrior was getting heavier by the minute.

I wanted to let go, to just make my body and my mind go slack. I wanted to drop through space, back down the incredible chimney and join the broken warrior on the sacrificial platform far below.

“What can we do?” Elicia asked again.

I didn’t have an answer for her. In addition to physical exhaustion and emotional shock, I felt tremendously frustrated, as though I’d been involved in a series of impossible tests and wasn’t passing any of them. And the dead Indian being supported by Elicia and I was gradually slipping down the smooth wall of the chimney.

Thoughts of just plain giving up were running rampant in my mind. Such thoughts must be amazingly close to those experienced by a person just before he commits suicide. At that moment, giving up meant committing suicide. On the other hand, my mind told me — actually screamed at me — going on was just as suicidal.

A great deal of my past life flashed through my mind in staccato bursts, like quick images of filmed replays. I saw myself in previously “hopeless” situations, saw how I had come out of them alive and triumphant. In my many years as N3, as Killmaster for AXE, such hopeless situations were legion, but I had experienced innumerable miracles to bring me out of them.

There was no miracle at hand this time. No light in the water ahead. No retreat. No weapon that could destroy the nest of scorpions above us without destroying us in the process.

“Nick?” Elicia said, her voice rising in panic as she recognized the look of total defeat on my face. “We must do something. We must do it soon. I feel myself giving out. I can’t hold on much longer.”

“Neither can I, Elicia,” I said, looking at her sadly, helplessly. “Neither can I.”

Years ago, when I was sitting in the anteroom of AXe’s offices on DuPont Circle in Washington, waiting to report on the completion of an assignment, a secretary had inadvertently left open the intercom to David Hawks’s office. I heard my old boss tell someone in there:

“If ever AXE comes up with a truly impossible assignment, one that could not possibly be handled by a mortal with a mortal’s powers and intelligence, one that could not be handled by man s most sophisticated weaponry or technology, one that could be resolved only by divine intervention or by the gods themselves, I would give that assignment to Nick Carter and fully expect him to resolve it.”

I remember the response from Hawk’s unknown visitor: “Nobody is that good.”

“True” Hawk had said. “Nobody is that good, not even Nick Carter. But he thinks he’s that good and, after all, isn’t that all that’s necessary in any assignment, impossible or otherwise?”

Well, perched there in that filthy hole of a chimney with my body wracked with pain, my back and knees raw, a dead warrior in my arms, a nest of impenetrable scorpions just above me, a water-filled cave entrance far below me and a virtual army of fanatics on top of the mountain, I suddenly realized that that intercom hadn’t been left open accidentally. It had been done on purpose. I had been conned into thinking that, even if nobody was good enough for a particular assignment, I was fully expected to complete it successfully.

I realized something else, I really wasn’t good enough, not for this one. It had been a stacked deck against me all along. I had come this far through sheer luck and brashness and downright foolhardiness. And where had I come? To my own death trap, that’s where.

“Nick?” Elicia cried, more panic in her voice. “Nick, I’m slipping. I can’t hold on any longer.”

All right, I thought. I don’t know what to do, but I’m expected to do something. David Hawk had expected it all along and had gotten the results he desired. Elicia expected it. The two warriors waiting just below expected it. Even if my next move were a wrong move, I had to make it.

“We’ll have to drop him,” I said to Elicia. “It seems cruel, but the man is dead and won’t feel a thing. Let him go.” I looked down at the waiting warriors. “Take the body and let it fall back down the chimney.”

They were aghast at the thought, and their faces showed it, but they took their comrade as Elicia and I eased him down. They held him for a few minutes, then reluctantly let him go. We gritted our teeth and held our positions in that narrow chimney and listened to the smacking, crunching, grinding sounds as the man and his rifle dropped all the way down and slammed into the sacrificial platform two hundred feet below.