Nick Carter - A Korean Tiger

Nick said he didn't have the slightest idea. It was all too true at the moment. What to do with the crazy little mouse who had tried to be a tiger?

"I couldn't bring myself to kill an insane man," he told Jimmy Kim. 'T just don't know — maybe I'll have to try to smuggle him back to the States and turn him over to the head shrinkers. That's what the Chinese, or the Russians, would have done."

They were at the rock formation now. Jimmy Kim pointed to the limp straw rope lying near a rock. "Looks like the problem is academic, dad. You said you had him tied up?"

"Damn it, I — " Nick got no farther.

A shrill scream of mortal terror came from the slope above them. Nick and Kim turned and plunged upward into the thick growing bamboo. The scream was not repeated.

It was Jimmy Kim who found what remained of Raymond Lee Bennett. They had separated and were combing the bamboo, some dozen feet apart. Nick had only the Luger now and was alert and a little nervous — if those guerrillas had left a sniper or two behind? But there had been no shot — only the single scream.

"Over here," said Jimmy Kim. "I've got him. Holy Buddha! You're never going to believe this!"

Nick found him standing over the body. Bennett lay in a spreading welter of his own blood. His face had been torn away. Nothing was left but a red mask of bleeding tissue and blue-white bone. Part of the throat was gone, too, and Jimmy Kim said: "He bled to death in a hurry."

Nick Carter gazed down at the pitiful little corpse. He knew. Intuitively he knew. But he asked nonetheless. "The tiger?"

"Yes. Don't move or make any sound. It's still around someplace but I doubt if it will attack us now. Bennett must have run right into it — fell over it, maybe. The cat would be nervous and scared from all the shooting around here."

"My fault," said Nick. "I should have done a better job on those knots. He must have been back in this world for a time."

"Forget it," said Kim. "This is best — solves a lot of problems for us. But it gives me a chill all the same — that poor stupid little guy coming all this way to meet the only tiger that's gotten this far south in ten years. It's a little weird, like!"

Nick said nothing. He was staring into the tall growing bamboo. Perhaps it was only an illusion, nerves — he was never sure — but he thought he saw the tiger for an instant. A silent mass of tawny gold blending in with the bamboo. A pair of amber eyes watching him. Then it was gone — if indeed it had ever been. Had the bamboo swayed, moved? There was no wind.

Nick put the Luger away and stooped to take the dead man's shoulders. "Come on, Kim. Let's get him back. We'll bury him in the valley. I'll leave it to you to handle Pok — we're all to forget we ever saw Bennett!"

Pok was a Christian, a fact Nick had not known, and he made a cross of bamboo and placed it at the head of the shallow grave. Nick, with a great fatigue stealing over him now that the action was over, watched as they buried the little man. It would, he thought, have taken a hundred skull doctors a hundred years to figure out all the quirks that had been the sum total of Raymond Lee Bennett. Now they would never have the chance. And he, Killmaster, didn't want to think about it. All he wanted to think about were a few of the creature comforts that at times made this life endurable. He felt a fierce desire to get going, to get out of the sodden wrecked suit, the shapeless shoes, the filthy itching underwear. His beard itched, too.

"Come on," he told them. "Let's start walking out of here."

Suddenly it began to rain again, slamming down in buckets the way it does in the monsoon in Korea.

Nick Carter turned up his collar and slogged on, trying to think of a few choice lies for the military and the Korean police.

See Nick Carter — Istanbul.

See Nick Carter — The Golden Serpent.