Nick Carter - A Korean Tiger

Bennett stared around at the sleeping gun. "Why not here? There are plenty of huts."

"Walk!"

Bennett walked. As they left the gun he put his hands over his head like a prisoner of war. "I'll keep my hands up," he said over his shoulder. "That way you won't have to be afraid that I'll try and jump you. I could, you know. I could kill you with one judo chop. I'm strong — terribly strong."

"Sure," Nick agreed. "I'll be very careful. Just keep walking."

They left the gun behind. The road narrowed even more, to a mere path, always climbing. It wound between ragged stands of bamboo and larch. The rain stopped again and a faint line of color lay along the eastern horizon. They walked on. A wild boar crossed the path a hundred yards ahead of them, stopped and caught their scent, stared with nearsighted eyes before it snorted and plunged back into the bamboo.

The path dipped into a valley, ran for several hundred yards along a brook, then lifted to spiral tightly up the next mountain. The country was becoming more rugged and broken by the minute. Great wounds of red clay bled from the mountain side, and there were numerous rock ledges and jagged outcrops. Some of the rock faces were; covered with red lichen and wind-stunted trees clung precariously from the crevices.

Killmaster noted, with sour amusement, that Bennett still had his hands up. The man had not spoken for a long time now, but he seemed determined to preserve his status of prisoner of war.

Nick said: "You can put your hands down, Bennett. It is not necessary."

Bennett obediently lowered his hands. "Thank you. I suppose you are going to observe tradition?"

"What do you mean?"

The man laughed and Nick could not repress a shudder. The sound was that of rats scuttling in a thatch. The man might be lucid enough now, but he was undoubtedly mad. Psycho, Hawk had said. Hawk had been right.

"It is customary," Bennett said, "when one spy catches another and is going to kill him, to offer him a cigarette and a glass of wine before the fatal bullet is fired. Surely you are going to abide by that custom?"

"Of course," said Nick. "Just as soon as we find some wine and some dry cigarettes. Keep walking."

After a few moments Bennett spoke again. "Is this China?"

"Yes. We're just outside Peking. We'll be there in a few minutes."

"I'm glad," said Bennett. "That woman, that nice woman, kept saying we were going to China. She said I would be an honored guest — that I would get the key to the city. Do you think she told the truth? She was nice, that lady. She did good things to me — she made me feel good."

"I'll bet." Killmaster could almost muster a little sympathy for the Yellow Widow. She must have had a rough time with this nut. Yet, even with a loony in tow, she had managed to evade the net until the last moment. Nick gave the Widow a reluctant tip of his professional hat. She had been good.

She must have used sex to keep Bennett in line. Sex mixed with cajolery and maybe even some force. The guy still had sense enough to be afraid of a gun. She had been taking him back to China, instead of simply killing him, in the hope that the doctors in Peking could bring him out of it. That the mine of information he carried in that freak, now sick, brain could still be tapped. Nick wondered if Colonel Kalinski had known about Bennett's madness. Probably not.

Bennett stopped so suddenly that Nick almost ran into him. It was just light enough now for him to make out the man's features — the dirty, stubbled face was a relief map of old acne scars. An equine face with a loose mouth and long jaw. The bald pate with its fringe of dry hair. Nick reached to rip the patch, sodden and dirty now, from the man's left eye. Even in the poor light it gleamed a bloodshot blue. The right eye was brown. Contact lens.

Bennett smiled at Nick. "Before you kill me, sir, I would like to show you some pictures of my wife. Is that permitted? If possible I would like to be shot with her picture over my heart. I would like to die with my blood on her face. You will permit it?" He sounded anxious as he craned his scrawny neck at the AXEman. He fumbled in his coat pocket and brought out a roll of wet, crumpled, stuck-together snapshots. He handed them to Nick. "You see! Wasn't she beautiful?"

Nick took the pictures. Humor the poor bastard. He riffled through the pack of snapshots while Bennett watched him anxiously. They were Polaroid prints. Some were of a fat woman, naked, taken in sprawling obscene poses. In the others he recognized Helga, or the woman who called herself Helga, from the Ladenstrasse in Cologne. Nick recognized the bed on which the pictures had been taken.

"Very nice," Nick said. He was about to hand the pictures back to Bennett, who had seemingly lost interest and wandered a few feet away, when he noticed the single snapshot of the ceramic tiger. The tiger that must have been on the mantel in the secret room back in Laurel. Nick could recognize the mantel in the snapshot now. The tiger that had somehow gotten smashed in the Hotel Dom. Nick had taken the pieces back to Washington with him and the experts had put it together again — it was a valuable piece. Korean. Wang Dynasty. 14th Century. The little ceramic was well known to the scholars. But half of it was missing. There were, and Nick had been shown a picture of the original, two tigers fighting. Half was gone. The other tiger. Now, in a wet Korean dawn, Nick Carter rubbed his rumpled, weary head and stared at Raymond Lee Bennett. How the man had come into possession of half a masterpiece, and what it meant to him, might never be cleared up now. As long as he was insane Bennett probably couldn't come up with the answer; if he regained his sanity he would have to be killed.

So who cared what the lousy tiger meant? Nick watched. Bennett wander a little way down the path toward a clump of pine. Why not just shoot the man here and now and have done with it? Nick took the Luger out of the clip and found a sodden handkerchief and began wiping it. He inspected the muzzle. It smelled like a rice paddy, but did not appear to be choked.

Nick Carter jammed the Luger back in its holster. Why kid himself? He couldn't kill an insane man.

Bennett screamed. He turned and ran back up the path toward Nick. "There's a dead man down there! In the trees. He's sitting there with a spear stuck through him!"

And Raymond Lee Bennett began to cry again.

Nick took off his belt again and passed it in front of Bennett's elbows, then jerked the man's arms back and tied them in the hangman's bind. He gave Bennett a push. "Show me."

Bennett, still weeping, went down the path to the clump of pine. Here a much fainter path led off to the right. Bennett stopped at the divergence of paths. He nodded into the pine grove. "In — in there! Don't make me look again — please don't make me look!"

"All right, goddammit, but I'm not going to have you wandering around." Nick backed the man against a pine sapling and retied the hangman's bind, this time bringing the belt around the sapling. Then he went down the diverging path.

The impaled man had been dead for some time. The; birds had been at him. The eyes and the flesh around them were completely gone. Nick, Luger in hand, drew a bit closer. The pines thinned here and gave way to sparse bamboo growing right up to a cliff face.

Nick advanced to within six feet of the dead man and stopped. Impalement was a form of death he had never: seen before. Not a pretty sight, nor a good way to go. Koreans, he knew, were a volatile people. They could be kindly and helpful — and they were the crudest of the Orientals.

The man's hands had been cut off and placed at a little distance from him. This so he could not push himself off the sharpened bamboo stake, about four feet high, which had been set into the ground. He had been stripped naked. Then he had been picked up — it would have taken at least four men to hold the screaming, crazed creature — and set down with great force on the sharpened stake. The lethal stake would have pushed up into the bowels and, after a long interval of suffering during which the man would walk screaming around and around the stake inside him, would reach the heart and kill. Mercy at last.