The Terrible Ones (8 page)

Tom Kee’s Oriental mind chewed things over carefully. He had believed their story; the Cubans had not sent Alonzo and they were genuinely puzzled. So—why had he come, and who had killed him? Tom Kee whacked his mount to hasten it. There was a long ride ahead, and something told him that there was a need to hurry.

“Sit up, you! Sit up!” Tsing-fu could hear the hysterical rage in his own voice but he did not care. He dashed the mugful of water into her face and shook her head from side to side but the eyelids did not open nor was there the slightest moan. She had done it again! He cursed wildly in all the languages he knew and slammed his fist against her head. For one moment, one moment only, he had turned his eyes away to take the water mug from Shang, and in that moment she had dashed her head against the wall and now she lay as silent as the grave. Now, by God, he would tie her down, and next time . . .!

He threw the mug down on the floor and screamed for rope. For a while she could rest, trussed like a chicken, and then he would be back. He watched Shang tie her up and then he left. Oh, yes, he would be back.

The trapdoor was a loose covering over the hole and they were in a stone room listening to distant thuds. Total darkness pressed down upon them like a coffin lid. Nick let several minutes pass while he sent his senses out like tentacles into the blackness and looked at his mental picture of the map. Then he touched Paula’s arm and moved down a corridor toward the sound.

Tom Kee whipped his tired horse. The feeling of urgency was growing in him. His every instinct told him that there was danger in the air.

He forced the clumsy beast to hurry.

Shang’s Second Chance

At the end of a tunnel of darkness there was a muted glow of light. Nick groped towards it, ghostlike in his dark fatigues and the special boots that Editing called “creepers.” Paula followed him like a shadow in sneakers.

Under any other circumstances Nick would have avoided the light like the trap it might turn out to be. But his main purpose was to verify the presence of the Chinese and see what they were up to, so the only sense was to head for where the action was. Also, there was the girl Evita.
If
she was here and
if
she was still alive the chances were that she would be somewhere near the center of their activities rather than tucked away in some distant part of the Citadelle.

So he padded on toward the light and the sound, expecting momentarily to run headlong into trouble.

It started even sooner than he had expected.

A sudden pool of brightness splashed upon the stone floor yards ahead and angled sharply toward him, as if a man with a flashlight had turned a corner from one passage into this. Nick could hear the dull clunk of heavy feet approaching as the pool of light advanced.

He brushed Paula back with one hand and spread out his arms along the wall in the faint hope of finding a doorway. There wasn’t one within reach; not even a niche. That left him with only one thing to do. Attack.

He went on walking toward the flashlight’s beam, one hand raised to shade his eyes and face against its light and the other hand half-clenched at his side in readiness for Hugo. He peered at the shadowy shape beyond the light and made himself grunt with irritation. A startled exclamation echoed him and the flashlight’s ray played over his body.

“Lower that light, you fool!” he hissed in Chinese, hoping he’d picked the right language to hiss in. “And the noise back there with the digging! It would waken the dead.” As he spoke he let Hugo trickle down his sleeve, and he kept moving, with his eyes still shaded from the light, until he was within inches of the other. “Where is your commanding officer? I have a message of importance.”

“Commanding off—?”

Nick struck. His right hand swung sideways and down against the throat with the Chinese voice-box. Hugo, razor-edged and icepick slender, sliced through the voice and cut it in mid-syllable, then moved on easily as if through butter and slashed the jugular. Nick grabbed the falling flashlight and struck again at the gargling sound of death in the man’s throat, thrusting Hugo’s slim length clean through the neck and out again. The body toppled in slow motion; he caught, its weight and eased it to the floor.

He listened for a moment, hearing nothing but Paula’s faint breathing and the sounds of hammering and digging from beyond the passage walls. No disturbance. But now he would have to find some place to put the body. He swung the beam of the flashlight down the hall and saw a recess several feet ahead. Wordlessly, he handed the light to Paula and heaved the limp form over his shoulders. They would have to take a chance on the light for a moment, and another chance that there was no one in that dark recess in the wall.

She held the beam down low, away from Nick and his burden, and played the light upon the opening. It led into an empty room whose rotting shelves had been ripped from the walls and piled on the floor, as if someone had been trying to wrest a secret from them. Nick dragged his burden into a corner and let it drop with a soft thud.

“Turn the light on his face,” he whispered. “One quick look, then douse it.”

She swung the beam over the body and let it linger on the head. Blood encircled the neck like a crimson hangman’s noose and the features were horribly contorted. But even in its death agony the face was unmistakably Chinese. So was the work uniform with the small, faded insignia sewn into the fabric. Nick’s face was grim as Paula flicked the switch and left them in darkness with the corpse. He knew the tiny badge for what it was, the symbol of a highly specialized company of Chinese scavengers and infiltrators whose main task was to strip a country of its spoils and prepare the way for the propagandists and military tacticians. It usually meant, as it had meant in Tibet, that the Chinese were planning to move in for a takeover, either openly or behind the scenes with a puppet fronting for them. But
here
, right under the noses of the OAS and Uncle Sam?

Nick frowned and padded back into the passage. Paula the Silent glided along behind him. Again they headed for the light.

It was almost too easy. The passage branched off to left and right. To the left was darkness, to the right, the light. It streamed through an open doorway and close to the door was a low, barred window. Nick ducked to peer through it. Four men, all Chinese, were methodically tearing apart a huge stone room. Propped against one of the walls was a device he recognized as a metal detector. No one was using it at the moment; it had a waiting look about it as though its operator might be temporarily absent. Where? he wondered. But he had seen enough to confirm Paula’s story of a Chinese hunt for treasure and some underlying motive much bigger than a simple lust for loot.

Now for the girl. Once again he pinpointed their position on his mental map. The passageway to the right must lead directly to the section of the dungeons open to the tourists. They would hardly keep her there. To the left, then. He prodded Paula and they glided into the dark left corridor.

Tsing-fu sat down on a folding chair in the room he called his office. He had eaten well from his little private supply and he was feeling very much better. Things had not gone well for the last few days, but now he was convinced that he would get something more out of the girl and perhaps even out of his balky confederates, the Fidelistas. The Fidelistas . . . . He pondered. Had the girl been lying again when she had croaked out the name? Or could they be playing a double game with him? His thin mouth tightened at the thought.

He glanced at his Peking-made watch. He would give her another hour to think her thoughts and then he would tear her apart . . . her mind first, then her body. Shang was waiting for her.

Shang was waiting. He was asleep, but his animal senses lay close to his thick surface and he would awaken at the doctor’s footfall. A lantern glowed beside his huge recumbent form. Even he sometimes wanted light in his cage. Shang growled in his sleep, dreaming animal dreams of passions to be satisfied and beings who kept on saying to him No! Not yet, Shang, not yet. Shang, you devil’s bastard! Wait! He was waiting, even as he slept. But he would not wait much longer.

“Paula. This is hopeless,” Nick whispered to the blob of darkness beside him. “We can’t wander around this maze all night. I’ll have to find someway to flush them out and then come back—”

“No, please! Please let us keep looking.” For the first time she sounded like a woman, pleading. “If we leave and they find that man’s body, what do you think they’ll do to her? We must keep looking!”

Nick was silent. She had a point, about the body. But he also knew that their luck could not hold out for ever. They had flattened themselves against the walls countless numbers of times as men tramped past them down a cross-corridor, and they had pussy-footed into endless dark cellars to risk the flashlight and a challenge. It was a fool’s errand. His brain urged him to stop this nonsense and get out.

“All right, one more college try,” he said. “Thataway. I don’t think we’ve been down there. I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.” They padded down yet another of the corridors. Nick put his brain to work on reconstructing the map. He hadn’t an idea in hell where they were. No, wait—they’d done that bit before. He recognized the curve and the rough stone. Now they were entering unexplored territory. But at least he knew where they were in relation to the conduit.

The passage branched again. Nick groaned to himself and Paula sighed beside him.

“You take one and I the other,” she whispered.

“No! We stay together. I don’t want to have to hunt for you as well. Shall we try for straight ahead?”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said: “You’re right. It’s useless. We need more help. I told you—”

“Oh, for Chrissake, cut that out,” Nick said wearily. “Let’s get out of here and . . .” He stopped. His senses tingled and his body went taut. Paula stiffened beside him.

“What is it?”

“Listen!”

They both listened.

The sound came again. It was a long, low, snuffling snore. A growl. Silence. And again a snore.

“We’ll take a look,” Nick said softly, and glided straight ahead. Paula’s breath quickened as she followed him.

Behind them, at the end of the branch-off passage, Tsing-fu contemplated the smoke of his cigarillo and planned his forthcoming session with Evita.

And outside under the moonless sky Tom Kee’s weary horse toiled toward the end of the trail.

Shang stirred in his anteroom. He was not yet quite awake, but he had heard a footfall. He mumbled in his sleep.

Nick followed the curve of the passage in the direction of the sound and pulled up short. A soft light spilled from a room with a half-open door, and beyond that door someone was snuffling in his sleep. And also beyond the door . . . there was another door. He could see it from where he stood, a solid, closed door with a bolt across it. His pulse quickened. None of the other doors had been bolted shut. And none of the other doors had been guarded by a snoring man.

He glanced at Paula in the overflow of light. She was staring at the bolted door and her lips were parted. There was nothing of hardness in her face right now; only a kind of Oh God, Please, God, look that suddenly made him like her a whole lot more. He raised a restraining hand and slipped Wilhelmina from the special holster, a Wilhelmina made long and clumsy by the silencer he so seldom used.

Nick sidled into the cell-like room and all hell broke loose.

He had no sooner seen the incredibly mountainous form and raised the Luger when the vast shape rose with fantastic speed and leapt at him from the shadows. His head slammed back against a wall and Wilhelmina flew from his hands. An enormous bare foot slammed against his throat as he sprawled back against the death-cold stone and saw lights dancing where he vaguely knew there were none. Beyond the splintering lights and the red haze he saw Paula aiming her own tiny gun at the huge blubber ball, and then he saw the creature turn and swat the pistol from her hand. Nick gulped air and shook his head. The creature had its arms around her and was squeezing her with monstrous enjoyment, crushing her slim body against his own rolls of fat and muscle and grunting with hideous delight. Nick scrabbled groggily to his feet and slid Hugo from his sheath. He pounded at the fat back, thrusting Hugo in front of him like a tiny bayonet and driving it deep into a roll of flesh. The huge man-monster released one thick arm from Paula and slammed a piledriver of a hand into Nick’s face. Nick ducked and groped for Hugo, still quivering in the big man’s body, and raked the stiletto down sharply so that it tore a deep gash in the fat behind.

The monster turned on him in a lightning move and thrust out a hand formed into an axe-blade. It glanced off Nick’s shoulder blade as he sidestepped, but Nick knew it for what it was—a karate blow designed for instant killing. He spun on the balls of his feet and shot out his right leg in a savage kick that caught the fat one under the chin and stopped him for the length of one deep breath. Hugo dropped from his bed of fat and clattered to the floor. Nick lunged for it.

“Ah, no!” A tree trunk of a leg kicked him aside. He caught the kicking foot and jerked it savagely. It swung him through the air and flung him back against the wall. But this time he was ready for the fall. He rolled back on his hips and snapped both feet up and forward into the great bulk looming over him. The creature staggered backwards but stayed on its feet.

“Ah, no,” it said again. “You not do that to me. I am Shang! You not do that to Shang.”

“How do you do, Shang,” Nick said cordially, and sprang at him with a hand outstretched like a wedge of steel. It sank into Shang’s throat and came back at him like a boomerang.

Godalmighty! Nick thought, reeling back. The fat swine knows every trick of karate, and a couple more besides.

Shang was coming at him again. No—he was pausing. A great hand scooped Paula off the floor where she was reaching for a gun and flung her sideways. She landed in a crumpled heap. Nick leapt again, driving a vicious blow at the temple and another into the fat gut. Shang grunted and slapped his great palm against Nick’s head. Nick went down heavily, rolled over once, and came up panting. Shang was standing over him, thick arms outstretched, just waiting.