Nick Carter - The Weapon of Night

Hakim reeled slightly and fished out another cigarette.

The man came closer and drew level with him.

“Hey, buddy, got a match?” asked Hakim.

The man looked sideways at him and shook his head impatiently.

The bar’s light spilled across his face — and Hakim knew him.

“Pity,” he said pleasantly.

His lanky right leg shot out in unison with his arm and he gave one sharp tug. The man landed heavily and rolled over like a wounded animal. Hakim was upon him instantly, his lean fingers groping expertly for the tender points of the man’s neck.

Then something stabbed Hakim sharply in the side. Not a knife, nothing so crude as that. A needle point.

He felt his senses swimming even as his hands tightened about the neck. Again the pinprick sensation. He saw the other man’s arms darting and flailing, and he knew that he himself was going under. Swift-acting drug, his brain told him coldly; and he knew that there was only one way he could win this fight. He had wanted the man alive, but now the man would have to die.

His body felt like lead and the other was squirming beneath him. Finally, he managed one swift lurch to plant a savage knee-jab in the man’s groin. Then his strong fingers squeezed inexorably.

But the man kept squirming.

So, with a great effort, Hakim lifted the thick, heavy body to a sitting position and smashed the head down hard on the concrete sidewalk.

And still the chunky body squirmed.

Groggily, Hakim groped for the fountain pen in his top pocket. Its delicate point suddenly elongated three inches at his fumbling touch. He sank it deep into the neck he was still clutching with one feeble hand.

In the growing haziness he was dimly aware of the swinging bar doors bursting open and shouting men spilling out onto the sidewalk.

“Jesus, get the cops! Christ, Curly, look — he’s killed a guy!

With a pen, by God! Willya looka that”

Hands tugged at Hakim.

“Hey, look! It’s a mask, he’s wearing a mask. Gawd, see the face? It’s one of them! Jeeze, kill the dirty bastard!”

Hakim felt the plastic mask being ripped away from his face, the rain of kicks and blows that slammed into his body. Dimly, very dimly, he heard the sound of a police whistle as his clothes tore and he felt a trickle of blood make its way wetly down his face.

“Lemme at him, Billy Joe! For Chrissake, gimme a turn, will you?”

He felt one more agonizing pain in his ribs and heard a cry of savage delight. Then he heard no more.

Mr. Judas heard about the new riot even before he reached the railroad station.

T.S. was not in the men’s room. Judas was not surprised. Savagely angry, but not surprised.

He left the station and went to the washroom of a small cafe. There, between other people’s visits to the place, he succeeded in making contact with his remaining four. He gave them new instructions.

An hour later he boarded another plane. In spite of his losses he was grimly satisfied. A few dead men were nothing to him. But the chaos he had heard about and seen made him chuckle to himself. And nothing, now — nothing — could prevent the fulfillment of his master plan.

Five down, if Hakim had been lucky. That left four plus one to go.

Ten little, nine little, eight little Red Chinamen…

Going down like ninepins, but too slowly. And no sign, yet, of the Kingpin, while the precious hours passed in tedious search.

Nick watched the indicators on the panel as he guided the AXE “copter through the night. His gaze was intent, because now at last he had something to look at. The whole craft seemed to be ticking and whirring like a bomb about to burst.

He tightened his circular flight pattern and watched the sizzling green light of the main detectorscope. It narrowed briefly and broadened again as he swung north toward the lake, and the indicator needle on the panel beneath it took a sideways dive and quivered convulsively.

About time.

It had already taken much longer than he had hoped; time enough for him to hear reports of a strange occurrence in Little Rock and for Hawk to jet Julia down to check into it; time enough to begin to wonder if he had not been mistaken after all.

But now he knew he had been right.

If there was a cache somewhere it had to be in the general vicinity of the West Valley plant for the late Mr. Parry’s convenience; it had to be accessible by road for the sake of the others; and it was probably not far, in road miles, from a fair-sized airport. Or so he had figured until he had begun to doubt and punch holes into his own argument.

The holes were plugging themselves up rapidly. The broad band of the dectorscope billowed outward in a spreading, jagged pattern that told him the cache lay down below. South of Buffalo, north of West Valley, close to the shores of Erie.

He circled again until he had the location pinpointed exactly. There was nothing to be seen below him in the darkness but a sweep of breach and a glint of pale moonlight on the water that cast the faintest of glows on a shapeless mass of trees and rocks, but his whole bank of supersensitive instruments assured him that there was something down there that did not belong.

“N3 to Hawk, N3 to Hawk”

Nick gave his report as he circled again, this time slightly to the south toward a landing area.

“If they’re down there they must have heard me,” he said, hovering low over a strip of grassland bordering a sweep of lake sand. “Suggest you put a watch on Buffalo airport and all nearby roads in case they’re sneaking off.”

“I haven’t any more men,” Hawk said tensely. “I have them checking out disturbances from here to hell and back — Hell Gate to Hell’s Kitchen. My God, Carter, I wish you knew just how much trouble we have on our hands. But we did make positive identification of the man in Little Rock, and we did find his suitcase abandoned in his hotel room. Same contents as the one you found.”

“And Hakim?”

There was a pause.

“Beaten brutally,” Hawk said grimly, “Panic victim. He’s alive, but… but let’s get on with the job. I’ll have radiation experts standing by to follow you in when you’re sure. But, you understand, I am positively unable to send you reinforcements.”

“Don’t want any,” said Nick, as the AXE craft came to a feather-soft landing on the grass. “But the roads and the airport —

“I’ll do my best,” Hawk interrupted.

Nick signed off and strapped the AXE-designed portable Geiger counter at his waist with its single earphone against his ear.

Wilhelmina, Hugo and Pierre were waiting in their usual places for the action to begin.

Now for the difficult part — finding the place on foot.

He padded along the beach and through the fringes of trees, following the fluctuating hum in his ear.

Time ticked by. The sensitive instrument sang quietly to him.

He skirted the lake shore and flitted, shadowlike, through groves of trees, cursing the waste of time and urging himself on as the humming grew louder in his ear.

The line of beach and intermittent trees gave way to a stretch of rocks and then to humps of root-tangled land jutting out into the water. He picked his way silently through the bushes, over more rocks, past a great boulder and through another small grove of trees.

He came out of the grove and rounded a pile of boulders. And suddenly the sound in his ear was almost deafening.

He was standing, now, on the outer rim of a small inlet, and his view of the inner curve was blocked by a clump of bushes. It took him a moment to pick his way around them, but when he did he could see the full sweep of the cove and the ancient jetty that jutted into it from the shore. By this time the sound in his ear was so loud that it was unbearable. He turned the instrument off, he did not need it any more.