A Korean Tiger (19 page)

The guerrilla spokesman grew impatient. Nick knew that his pals were circling to get into the next valley and take him from behind. A lot of them would get killed that way and they knew it. If this crazy big nose could be talked into surrendering it would save a lot of bother and blood...

The plane
was
closer. Flying low, dipping and rising, following the rugged contour map of Korea. Looking for something? Someone? Nick strained his eyes — it was a light plane of some sort. A scouting plane.

"What say, crazy fool English?" The bandit was whipping himself into a lather now. "You let us go
jeepo
by God! You sonbitch sullender or we cut neck good! What say, English?"

"Truce over," yelled Nick. He sent a burst at the cliff just over the speaker. Rock dust flew. The man dived back into the hole in the cliff. A moment later he stuck his head out again to scream, "Cruddy sonbitch!" That guy, Nick thought, has been associating with GIs.

He yelled back.
"Harabachie
you!" His Korean was scanty and bad, but he thought it meant something like up your honorable grandfather's. In a land of ancestor worship it was a deadly insult.

The plane was closer now and its present line of flight would bring it over the valley. Nick sent another spray of lead at the cliff, just to hold them down, then turned to sight on the two jerricans he had so carefully placed beside the hut. The thatch was sodden from the rains, but the underside might be dry enough to catch. There should be enough smoke and flame for the pilot to sec. If he missed the signal and flew on past — well, Nick preferred not to think about that.

He sent a short burst at the jerricans. Gas spurted from holes in the metal but no fire yet. An incendiary or a tracer, damn it! He sent another burst into the cans, a long one this time. Red tracer streaked into the cans and they exploded with a
whoosh
of flame and smoke up the side of the hut. The relatively dry underside of the thatching caught and a pillar of black smoke began to mount.

Nick Carter swiveled to send another long burst of fire at the cliff. The machine gun heated and jammed. He flung it away and picked up another one.

Behind him Raymond Lee Bennett was still babbling: "I want my little tiger they gave it to me and said to keep it but they never came but the men came and shot it and it broke all those pieces and they were fighting and she wouldn't let me keep my little tiger so he will never come now because I lost the tiger and she is a nice lady but she oughta let me keep my tiger...."

The little plane had spotted the plume of smoke and was banking around to investigate. The engine was running rough, missing now and then. It had a bad cough. Nick Carter followed the incoming glide of the plane with something akin to awe — it couldn't possibly be! Yet it somehow was. That was an Aeronca 65 TL! Twenty-six years old. Held together with paper clips. The Hying Turtles had found him!

The man from AXE so far forgot himself as to stand up and wave. Fire from the cliff face whanged and screeched around him, and he dove for cover again. He sent a lance of lead at the cliff and the firing stopped as they ducked back.

The plane skimmed the ridge just behind Nick. He could make out two men in the tiny cabin. That would be Jimmy Kim and his partner, Pok. Small arms fire rattled from behind the ridge and Nick saw bits of the wing fly off. The guerrillas had gotten around behind that ridge faster than he had thought possible — if it were not for the plane they would have him in enfilade now. As it was the situation was much brighter — the guerrillas would expect the plane to radio for help.

Killmaster whipped around just in time to see them making a sortie from the cliff. They weren't giving up so easily. He nestled the Tommy gun on the rocks and shot down the screaming men like metal ducks in a gallery. He got four and the others turned and ran. Nick did not think they would try again.

The Aeronca had banked around and was coming back down the ridge. The engine sputtered and coughed gouts of black smoke. It was very low, hedge hopping, barely skimming the tops of the trees on the ridge. Nick watched with a mixture of admiration and apprehension. The Flying Turtles were a couple of kooks!

Pok must be flying the jalopy, because Jimmy Kim was leaning far out on his side and blazing away at the trees with a Tommy gun. They were so close that Nick could see the expression of fiendish glee on Jimmy's face. The boy was having a ball. Pok was firing a pistol from his side, shooting with one hand and flying the crate with the other.

As they glided overhead Jimmy Kim looked at Nick and waved the Tommy gun in salutation. He shouted something that was lost in the wind and gunfire and blast of the engine as Pok gunned it for altitude. But Kim was grinning and Nick got the idea — the situation was well in hand.

For about one more minute. He watched the plane bank around and come in for another strafing run — the engine coughed, spurted black smoke, coughed again and quit cold.

The sudden silence had a strange deafening effect. Nick's ears rang with it. There was no gunfire. The cliff was silent and no sound came from the ridge behind him. The only sound in the hush was the keening, the sibilant whistle of air around the little plane as it came gliding in.

They had a chance. A bare chance. Nick leaped out of his cover behind the rocks, a Tommy gun in each hand, and prepared to cover both the cliff and the ridge. It was all he could do. Cover them and wait for the crash.

Pok brought the little craft in over the far end of the valley, beyond the now blazing hut. He was fishtailing in, cutting his air speed, trying to pancake her in. Pok was flying her by the seat of his pants.

She cleared the burning hut and came down in a long flat slide. The undercarriage folded and exploded, matchwood now. The plane lost half a wing to a boulder, turned sideways and kept sliding, turned over once and came upright again and lost the other wing. She plowed a long furrow in the valley floor. She came to rest fifty feet short of the cliff face.

Nick was running toward the plane before it stopped moving. Pok and Jimmy Kim would be sitting ducks for the guerrillas in the cliff opening — if they were still alive. Nick ran zigzag, a Tommy gun in each hand, firing alternate bursts at the cliff. There was no accuracy that way — you had to hold a machine gun down to hit anything with it — but it made for effective spray fire.

There was no return fire. Nick ceased his own fire and with great caution, keeping an eye on the cliff face, took what cover he could find behind a jagged piece of tail section. He was about twenty feet from what was left of the main cabin.

He yelled: "Hey! Kim — Pok! You people all right?" It was, as he admitted later, rather an inane question. But he had a lot on his mind just at the moment.

Slowly, as though rising in an elevator, Jimmy Kim's head appeared in the smashed window of the cabin. His smile was broad. He appeared to be bleeding slightly from a cut on the head.

Jimmy Kim said: "Hi, dad! Nice to see you again. And why shouldn't we be all right? Why should a little plane crash bother us?" He began to climb out the window. "You can put those guns down now," he told Nick. "Your friends have taken off. Running. High tailing it for the high mountains."

Nick dropped one Tommy gun, kept the other. He went toward the plane. "I thought they might," he said. "They're smart enough — they knew you would radio for help."

Jimmy Kim reached down to help his partner from the plane. Pok was tiny even for a Korean, but his grin was as big as Jimmy Kim's. He leaped to the ground. Nick couldn't see a scratch on him.

Jimmy Kim laughed. "You hear that, Pok? He thinks we radioed for help."

"So sorry," said Pok. "Radio not work for about month now. No damned parts to fix." His English was on the broken side.

Nick Carter could not repress his laughter. "Well — as long as those bastards didn't know it was broken! Same result." And he went on laughing. It felt good to laugh, now that it was nearly over. "That was some landing," he told them. "I've seen better — but it worked."

Jimmy Kim's teeth flashed. "Like Orville said to Wilbur — any landing you walk away from is a good one. Where's Bennett?" '

Nick jerked his head in the direction of the rocks. "Over there. I've got him tied up."

He could see the puzzlement in Jimmy Kim's eyes as they met his. "I didn't carry out the original plan," Nick explained. "I couldn't — Bennett has lost his mind! He's completely gone. Babbling like a baby."

Kim nodded. "I knew something had gone wrong when I didn't find him among the train casualties. Soon as we heard about the train being attacked Pok and I flew up to Tacjon. We were there when the train came in and I i checked. Checked for you, too."

Nick handed his Tommy gun to Pok. "Keep an eye on that slot in the cliff, just in case."

He and Jimmy Kim started walking toward the rock fortress. "You didn't really expect to find me among the casualties?"

Jimmy shook his head. "No. Not really. I did expect to find Bennett's body. It would have been a good cover, that bandit attack. It's raising all kinds of hell. There will be cops and ROKs and Yanks all over these mountains — and those tiger hunters are in on it, too. They were all drunk when they got into Taejon. Drunk and mean — they told me guerrilla hunting was going to be a lot more fun than tiger hunting. So, if Bennett is alive, it looks like we've still got problems, huh? What you going to do with him, dad?"

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.