Nick Carter - The Weapon of Night

Nick crouched beside it, waiting, meticulously wiping Hugo’s blade on the other man’s sleeve and probing the darkness with his ears and eyes. The dying heart slowed and stopped. The silence was even deeper than before.

His listening ears caught nothing but normal night sounds.

He hoisted the body over his shoulders and carried it to the nearest clump of rocks. When he had dumped it on the other side he played the thin beam of his flash over the narrow, flat-planed face and powerful body.

No doubt of it. Six down, and three-plus-one to go.

The contents of the pockets told Nick that he was searching one John Daniels of New York. Known as J.D.? He did not know; he did not care. All he cared about was six down and three-plus-one to go.

He straightened up, still listening. The instinct, the trained instinct that had served him so many times before, told him that he was now alone.

Nick walked cautiously at first and then more boldly through the pale moonlight. At the boathouse he paused briefly to double-check his instinctive feeling that his only company was one dead man, and then he glided openly along the jetty to the boat. No shadowy figures leaped at him and no guns spat.

The boat had one small cabin, with a separate wheelhouse, a lot of deck space and a tiny galley. Once upon a time it must have served a fisherman well. But now it —

Now it was a meeting place, and he could hear a car somewhere in the distance.

He boarded the boat quickly and gave it a rapid onceover. Everything else about it was old and dilapidated, but the engine was new. The small hatch in the after section held rope and canvas. After a moment or so it also held Nick. He propped the overhead door open with one hand and pricked up his ears. The sound of the car faded out as he crouched there.

Long minutes passed.

He had just about decided that the car must belong to some local resident when he heard the rustle of leaves from the shore and then the footsteps on the creaking jetty.

Wilhelmina slid into his hand. He fitted the silencer on while he waited for his guests.

Low whispers carried to him through the night air. Chinese whispers. He strained his ears to listen, and fragments came to him.

“… should be here before us… car… hidden… but where can he be? He only… from New York.”

“His orders may… changed. Perhaps Judas….”

“Surely we… notified? After all the trouble we took to meet at Buffalo air —”

“Quiet! Might be… Yuan Tong, you stay on deck… Watch…”

“Nothing to…”

Now the whispers were clearly audible “Yes, but don’t forget our losses. We must take care.”

The boat rocked as one man… two men… three men boarded her.

Nick peered through the barely open door of the hatch.

The three men were looking around the boat.

“All seems well,” one murmured. “It must be that he was delayed in New York. Perhaps by misadventure? We should make contact with him.”

“Should we not search?” the second man whispered.

“For what?” snarled the third. “Can an army hide here? Would Judas have us meet him here if he were not sure that it is safe? No, we will contact Jing Du from within. Yuan Tong will do guard duty. Not so, A.J.?” Nick heard a slightly fruity chuckle, and the second man nodded and answered in an exaggerated southern American accent. “Yeah, sure, you bet, C.F.,” he twanged, and his face stretched in an ugly grin.

Two men, carrying suitcases, went into the small cabin and closed the door. Yuan Tong, alias A.J., sat down on a coil of rope and opened his large traveling bag to haul out a gun.

Nick knew the weapon. It was a particularly nasty Chinese device, a minor mortar with a repeating action that made it more than twice as murderous and swift as the average automatic.

Yuan Tong sat still for a moment, half-listening to the soft murmur of voices through the partly open cabin porthole and feeling his gun barrel with a loving touch. Then he rose restlessly and began to prowl about the deck.

He lifted a canvas and peered beneath it. He stopped at the low side rail and gazed out over the lake. He strolled into the wheelhouse. He looked in through the cabin port. He stared back at the boathouse and the grove of trees.

And then he strolled casually toward the deck hatch within which Nick lay hidden.

Nick watched him through the narrow opening made by his own clutching fingertips. His other hand tightened reflexively on Wilhelmina — and then slackened. Even the low pop of the silencer would be heard by the others who sat so close by, and then there would be the thud of the body and the clatter of the falling gun onto the deck. Too loud; too chancy.

He would have to take another kind of chance.

He waited. Maybe Yuan Tong would not look into the hatch.

The man approached slowly, almost languidly, his weapon dangling from his hand. And then suddenly all that Nick could see of him was a thick shape blocking out nearly all of the dimly glowing light, and the weight of the hatch cover lifted from his fingertips.

It took Nick one split second to put Wilhelmina silently down upon a coil of rope and tense his body for the spring. Then the hatch cover opened above him and he made his move. In a lightning grab he caught the dangling gun and thrust it down beside Wilhelmina even as the steely fingers of his left hand went for the other’s throat. Then both of his hands were acting together, clamping themselves swiftly and savagely at Yuan Tong’s neck and squeezing with an expert viciousness born of the desperate need to do the thing right and do it quickly. He heard a tiny strangled gasp and felt the hatch cover thud down heavily against his arched back, and he offered up a small and silent prayer that the noises were not as loud as they seemed to him.

Yuan Tong’s feet were scraping along the deck like files over rough sandpaper and his mouth was working in a frantic effort to produce some sound. Nick tightened his grip around the neck and pulled down with a sudden snapping jerk that brought the Red Chinaman’s belly down hard against the edge of the hatch and almost on top of him. There was another sound, a sharp expulsion of breath, and flailing arms dug into his body from above. But they were like bugs on a beach for all the harm they could do. Nick’s thumbs had found the arteries in the other’s neck and they were pressing in relentlessly. Harder, harder, harder! he commanded himself, and poured all his strength into that one act of squeezing. The man’s body arched suddenly and then relaxed. Nick changed his hold by fractions of inches and concentrated on the windpipe. Hot breath belched into his face… and sighed away to nothingness. Yuan Tong sagged on top of him and the hatch cover sagged down with him.

Nick crawled out from under and raised the cover silently. No outcry came to meet him. There was nothing to be heard but the gentle sounds of the lake and a low tap-tapping from within the cabin.

And lots of luck to you, Nick thought grimly. Still crouching where he was, he turned and gave one final, devastating chop against both sides of the Red Chinaman’s neck. Unnecessary, perhaps, but it did not pay to take too many chances.

He retrieved Wilhelmina, wriggled out of the hatch, and lowered the lid silently over the late Yuan Tong.

Seven little Red Chinamen, gone.

Nick padded to the single open porthole of the tiny cabin. The tapping had stopped and two low voices were engaged in an animated discussion in colloquial Chinese. But it told him nothing he did not already know — mainly that J.D. was not answering from New York.

He waited. Maybe they would go on to something more illuminating.

“But Judas’s message said we were to plan to finish this tomorrow,” one said, “How in the name of Satan will we do it when we are so few?”