Nick Carter - The Omega Terror

The general swore aloud again and then began to run toward the clipped hedges that surrounded us. I moved the body of the orderly off me, aimed after Djenina, and fired. But I missed. I could hear him crashing through a thicket, and then his footsteps echoed, on a gravel walk that led back to the palace.

I put my hand at my side and came away with blood on it. The wound was just a flesh wound, but it burned like hell. I struggled to my feet, and Gabrielle was beside me.

“Get to the Citrõen,” I told her. “And wait there for me.”

I started after the general. By the time I got to the wide drive in front of the palace, Djenina was nowhere in sight. Then I heard the roar of the engine in the parked limousine nearby. I looked and saw the general behind the wheel. The big Rolls-Royce suddenly shot forward and came right at me.

As the black limousine hurtled toward me, I aimed the pistol in my hand and fired. The shot shattered the windshield, but missed Djenina. I dived to the ground as the car roared past, grazing my thigh as it went.

Djenina kept right on the circular drive and headed toward the road and the gate. I got up onto one knee, steadied my hand on my forearm, and aimed at the left rear tire. But the slug only dug up gravel beside it.

I got up and ran after the car. I was hoping that Djenina would not find Gabrielle on the drive or at the gate. He would probably kill her if he did.

I arrived at the gate a few moments later, holding my side and grimacing in pain. The limousine was just disappearing around a bend in the mountain road, the road we had come over earlier. I heard the Citrõen’s engine and saw Gabrielle backing the car out of the underbrush where we had parked it. I ran to her side of the car.

“Move over!” I yelled.

I climbed into the driver’s seat, strapped in, and roared off down the dirt road. In seconds I had shifted into high gear, and the car was hurtling along the bumpy bed of the road, throwing us around inside. We traveled for a couple of miles with no sight of the limousine, but we finally saw the red tail lights ahead of us.

“There he is!” Gabrielle said tensely.

“Yes,” I answered. My hand, which had touched the wound, was slippery on the steering wheel. I pushed the accelerator down all the way and the car shot forward, veering crazily around a sharp curve the general had just navigated.

In another couple of minutes, we had pulled to within twenty yards of the limousine, which could not corner like the Citrõen. On our right was a rise of rocky abutment, and on our left was a steep drop-off to a lower road. There were no guardrails and no pavement for the tires to grab. We rounded another sharp curve, and the limousine skidded and weaved and almost threw a wheel off the road as it moved awkwardly around at high speed. We followed, a little more successfully, but I felt the wheels skid under us, too.

I picked up the automatic on the console between us and steered with one hand while I stuck my left hand out the open window and aimed the gun toward the other car. I fired twice, kicking up gravel just behind the limousine.

“You are short,” Gabrielle said.

“I want to be,” I answered. I was hoping that just one of the slugs would ricochet off the gravel and up under the speeding Rolls. Just one was all I needed.

I fired again, and the gravel kicked up behind the rear bumper of the other car, and then there was a sudden, dazzling, ear-splitting explosion from under the rear of the limousine. The big car swerved wildly as flames engulfed it. I had hit the gas tank.

Gabrielle gasped as the car ahead of us swerved even more wildly, flames streaming out behind it. Then the car veered erratically to the right, hit a rocky outcropping, and bounded back to the sheer drop-off on the other side of the road. In another second it was plummeting over the edge.

We pulled up beside the spot where the Rolls had just gone over. The big car was still crashing down the mountainside, end over end, completely engulfed in flames. Finally, it smashed on the rocks far below, and there was a tearing of metal as the flames spurted even higher. The Rolls lay there, burning brightly in the night. There was little doubt about the fate of General Djenina. It was impossible to survive what the limousine had gone through.

“Did he get out?” Gabrielle asked.

“No,” I told her. I started turning the Citrõen around on the narrow road. “I’m going back to get my weapons. I don’t want anybody to know I was there. Even if the cook or the other soldier lives, neither of them will know who I am.”

“Then what, Nick?” Gabrielle asked as I headed back toward the general’s estate.

“Then we go south to Mhamid,” I said, “to the research facility of Damon Zeno and his friends. You’re going to wait for me nearby. If I don’t make it, I’ll be counting on you to get word to my contacts so they can take care of the lab.”

It was a long drive to Mhamid. Gabrielle became very sleepy about dawn, and I pulled over for a while so we could get a couple of hours’ sleep. When we started off again, the sun was high in the sky.

The wound Djenina had inflicted on me was clotting and looked pretty good, but Gabrielle insisted on stopping in a mountain village around noon to put a proper bandage and some medication on it. For a good part of the afternoon, we drove through mountains, which dwindled to hills, and finally we emerged in arid desert country. We were in the wild, almost uninhabited area around the border, the place where Li Yuen had located Zeno’s laboratory. Occasionally, there were heavy rock outcroppings, but generally the terrain was flat, dotted with twisted, ugly plant life, a land where mountain and desert met and no one cared to live except a few primitive tribes and snakes and vultures.

We reached the tiny village of Mhamid, the only island of civilization in that vast wilderness, in late afternoon. If my memory of the map was correct, we were still quite a distance from the remotely situated research facility. At first there appeared to be no place for overnight accomodations, but then we drove up to a small, white building that pretended to be a hotel. Looking at its peeling adobe walls, Gabrielle grimaced.

“Do you think we dare sleep in a place like that?” she asked.

“We don’t have much choice. I don’t want to go looking for the lab today, with dusk coming soon. And we both need rest.”

We parked the Citrõen, and a small group of young Bedouins gathered around it curiously. They obviously didn’t get a look at many automobiles around here. Gabrielle locked the car, and we went into the hotel.

It was even less appealing inside than it had been from the street. A walnut-skinned Arab greeted us from behind a small counter that passed for a desk. He wore a tarboosh on his head and an earring in one ear. There were white lines around his eyes where the sun had not reached, and he had a sparse stubble of beard on a weak chin.

“Salaam .” The man smiled at us.

“Salaam” I said. “Do you speak English?”

“Angleesh?” he repeated.

Gabrielle spoke to him in French. “We want a room for two.”

“Ah,” he answered in that language. “Of course. It happens that our best suite is available. Please.”

He took us up a flight of rickety wood stairs that I was sure would collapse under our weight. We went down a dim, dingy corridor to the room He opened the door proudly, and we entered. I saw the repulsion on Gabrielle’s face as she looked around. It was very Spartan, with one large iron bed that sagged in the middle, a broken-shuttered window that opened onto the dirt street below, and cracked plaster walls.

“If you’d rather not….” I said to her.