Operation Starvation (1966)

  (Book 17 in the Killmaster series)

  Vesrion 0.9

  Dedicated to The Men of the Secret Services of the United States of America

  Chapter 1

  UNDER PARIS SKIES

  THE GREAT JET chased the sunset westward at a speed of something over 500 miles per hour, trembling noticeably as it bucked the prevailing headwinds. In the darkened cockpit, Captain Peter Deventer sat in the left hand seat twiddling his thumbs and staring over the curved nose of the Boeing at the fires of the sunset behind the broken clouds. Silence reigned as the crew Went capably about the routine of the flight. Then the craft shivered in a spasm of local turbulence and Captain Deventer spoke to the co-pilot in English with a trace of Dutch accent;

  “Next time you talk to Prestwick, ask for a couple of thousand feet. Let’s see if we can get above this stuff.”

  “We just acknowledged handover to Gander, sir,” the co-pilot replied. “Want me to raise Gander again?”

  “No hurry. The next time you talk to them will be fine.”

  The Captain returned to his contemplation of the Sunset. The ship was well trimmed. He could see the two port side engine nacelles hanging steadily in space, masterpieces of modern industrial design. The Captain Was not a particularly sentimental man but he thought the 707, with its power-packed, curved jet nacelles, one of the most beautiful things struck by the hand of man.

  He thought of having coffee brought in but tonight the service crew would have their hands fulL There was nearly a full load on this flight. Delegates to an international scientific congress. This flight’s point of origin was Paris. Most of the passengers had connected with it from Prague. The passenger manifest was heavily weighted with Asiatic names with Ph.D.s. In about five more hours Captain Deventer would land them safely in New York where most of the scientists would make interconnecting flights farther west.

  The Captain forgot about coffee as his thoughts drifted back to the war and the Dutch East Indies. He thought fondly of the Javanese family who had risked execution to hide him, and he thought something different of the Japs and the horrible months following his capture.

  His reverie was interrupted. A light fell across the darkened cabin. Deventer. half turned in his seat with an exclamation of irritation. The steward knew his permission was required to bring visitors to the flight deck no matter how high the VIPs rated. And never this kind of mob.

  The Captain’s eyes met those of the co-pilot which mirrored his own irritation at this breach of discipline. Then, as in a moment between sleep and wakefulness when things seem to take forever to happen and have no apparent cause, the young, handsome face of the second officer became something altogether different, something red and ghastly. Deventer noted, without truly comprehending, that his own uniform was wet with blood and that the young co-pilot now slumped lifeless over the controls.

  The aircraft shuddered again in some new turbulence but remained steady on course, controlled by the automatic pilot.

  Captain Deventer realized that he was staring into the barrel of a large-bore pistol and noted the silencer. The man holding the weapon was unusually tall and raw. boned for an Asiatic and looked surprisingly like Anthony Quinn, the movie actor.

  The man spoke clear, unaccented English.

  “Let me see now. What is the drill? Oh, yes. Request permission to approach the bridge.” The man laughed. “Granted of course. Please do not be so foolish as to attempt to use the radio, mon capitaine, or you’ll be as dead as your co-pilot here.”

  Captain Deventer was a brave man. He thought of trying for the radio anyway, but knew it would accomplish nothing. Besides, someone had to fly the aircraft

  The man with the gun moved to a position behind him. Deventer felt the nasty little circle of the muzzle on the back of his skull. Another Asiatic stepped forward and carried the body of the second officer out of the cabin. This done, the big one moved to the co-pilot’s seat without letting the barrel of the pistol move from the Captain’s face. Deventer. could usually recognize Asians but he was having difficulty placing the man’s origin. The way he was dressed, for instance, was odd, In the conservative suit, button-down shirt and silk tie popular in New York banking and marketing circles. Nothing added up.

  “Now listen carefully, mon capitaine”, the man ordered. “You will at once resume manual control of the aircraft and put it into as steep a dive as, in your judgment, the wings will take. You will level out at an altitude of approximately 1000 feet and turn to a heading of thirty degrees.”

  “I don’t understand,” Deventer said. But he did. They wanted the plane to fly low enough under the radar so as not to be tracked.

  “Understanding is not required,” the man snapped. “In case you are tempted to do the heroic thing, let me advise you that while I have permitted you and your flight engineer to remain alive, I have men with me competent enough to fill both jobs in case of your sudden demise. However, in the interests of the non-involved passengers, I will admit that my men have had no experience in the cockpits of Boeings.”

  “And the rest of my crew?” Deventer asked.

  “Dead and resting comfortably in what your directors call the VIP Lounge.” The man’s laugh was casual. “The passengers are, however, alive and well, if understandably confused. I am sure that this consideration will prevent you from plunging this aircraft into the North Atlantic.” He gestured languidly with the pistol. “To work now, mon capitaine.”

  Deventer looked back over his shoulder. Another man stared back with pitiless Latin eyes. A mercenary Cuban pilot, Deventer guessed.

  The big silver bird seemed to shudder once again and then nosed down into the obscurity of the clouds.

  The spring evening lay lightly over the city of Paris. A breeze fresh off the Seine carried the smell of growing tilings from the farmlands of the Ile de France and the sweet scent of opening buds from the trees along its great boulevards. Nick Carter had checked into a hotel boasting the highest rating in the Michelin Red Book. He had signed the register as a Mr. Sam Harmon, international admiralty lawyer of Chevy Chase, Maryland. (He could hardly put down Killmaster, Washington, or his more formal designation, N3). Nick now lingered over dinner at Fouquet’s and amused himself watching the early evening crowds on the Champs-Elysees. Presently, he finished his coffee and brandy, settled his bill and left.

  Because of the fineness of the evening and because he was in excellent physical condition, he decided to walk rather than take a taxi to the offices of the Amalgamated Press and Wire Services. There he would have a phone conversation with a man named Hawk in Washington. Then, if Hawk had nothing immediately pressing, Nick would join a young lady who, not so long ago, had been a leading mannequin for the high fashion house for which she now designed clothes. There would be the theater. Later there would be a snack at a fashionable restaurant in the market district and talk of old times. Still later, there was a very good chance indeed …

  So pleasantly was he preoccupied, Nick paid little attention to the shiny new Mercedes sports convertible idling along beside him, just keeping pace with his athletic stride. He assumed the driver was looking for a parking place on this long, secluded side street off the crowded avenue.

  “Bon soir, monsieur,” the girl at the wheel said.

  Nick turned. The well-stacked girl with the long hair swung the car expertly to the curb and stood with motor idling almost soundlessly.

  “Perhaps I can drop you somewhere, monsieur?” she said in accented English.

  “Good evening yourself,” Nick said. “I’m afraid not. You see I have an appointment.” His even, white teeth flashed in a quizzical grin. He thought with amusement of his boss, Hawk’s likely reaction if he, Nick, had neglected his check-in because he had succumbed to the charms of one of the notorious Parisian “taxi girls.”

  Her lovely features formed a moue of disappointment.

  “Tonight,” she said, “is the first night of real spring. And one becomes so lonely in the spring, do you not agree?” Then, perhaps taking Nick’s silence for indecision, she added, “It would not be so dear … so. expensive as you might think.”

  Nick’s glance took in the girl’s large clear eyes set against the expensive winter tan, the high aristocratic cheekbones and the shimmering blond hair that cascaded to the firm bare shoulders. It occurred to him that her fashionable little dress with the plunging bodice, revealing two ripe half melons of womanly pulchritude, “would be too expensive for the most successful taxi girl,

  “Besides, monsieur, you are tres gentil, very nice. With you I know it would be a great pleasure. There would be a special price.”

  Nick decided that the leering little smile of invitation did not become her. However, a great many women in an area stretching from Washington to New York and around the world back to Washington would have heartily agreed that the lean, handsome and very hard-to- figure, Monsieur Carter was indeed tres gentil and a great many other pleasant things too. Recently a man-killing, dawn-to-dark conditioning period under the merciless sun of the American Southwest had brought the big man to a peak of physical condition—one normally enjoyed only by a heavyweight contender on fight night. The same sun had given Nick a tan as deep as hers.

  He looked with some regret at the long, brown legs, the proud breasts and the aristocratic face.

  “It would indeed be a pleasure,” he said. “Unfortunately …”

  She interrupted, her tone taking on the
hard stridency of the whore pressing for business.

  “Come, come, monsieur. Fifty francs for me and ten francs for the room. It is a good price, no?”

  Nick began to smell a large, fat rat. Ten dollar tricks hadn’t paid for that Mercedes. And a whore’s eyes get a certain way after a while. This girl’s eyes were too vital, too gay. Nick smiled gently.

  “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  Her eyes flashed. “You are a fool, monsieur. Tous vous anglais …” She broke into a staccato sequence of furious French and bent abruptly to release the hand brake, accidently blowing the horn. Then she turned to shoot him a last look of withering scorn.

  “You are quite sure, monsieur?”

  Nick waved. “Another night, perhaps.”

  With a final, angry merde alors, she pulled away from the curb, leaving two-thick black stripes of rubber on the pavement. Then she was out of sight down the long empty street

  Nick stared thoughtfully after her. The price had been ridiculously low. And intelligence agents who believe in coincidences are soon referred to as “the late.”

  Not that Nick wouldn’t have enjoyed the assignation-Just to see what could be learned. He would be very interested in finding out who thought it worthwhile baiting him. Perhaps Hawk could tell him what was in the wind. .Nick had missed his primary check-in that morning. Not as had been the case once or twice in the past, through his fault, but because when the solid-state picture-phone flashed a shot of the familiar Washington office, Hawk’s secretary appeared on the screen and told him that Hawk was not available. Nick was to report in again at eight local time without fail, at which time Hawk would communicate certain weighty matters to his most trusted agent. And she said “without fail” was underscored in red three times.

  With these things in mind Nick continued on in the general direction of the Seine. He noticed a battered old Citroen CV 2 which pulled up ahead of him just as the taxi girl left. Four men in blue raincoats emerged. They conferred a moment, then started walking abreast down the sidewalk in the direction of the Champs-Elysees—dapper young fellows, each with an umbrella or a cane. Nick moved easily aside to let them pass. Nick could not see them very well because they were backlighted by the setting sun and the brilliance of its reflection on the river. They appeared to be well-to-do Orientals. He put them down as junior embassy personnel or members of a trade mission, on the town.

  At the same time that sixth sense which is born early in the career of every successful agent and which he carefully nurtures as his most prized possession was telling him something. The hair was beginning to tickle along the back of his neck. He took another look at them.

  They split to let him through. Mick edged by with a muttered pardon, thinking what an old maid of an agent he was getting to be, looking down every street and under beds for enemy agents. That was when they hit him.

  One took each arm, and one came from the front, one from the back. Efficient, pros. Hardly embassy pencil pushers. Their grips on his arms were tight as vises, and they were using their weight and advantage like professionals. Nick’s strong arms strained forward as his assailants attempted to drive them up behind him.

  Fingered, he thought in disgust. I didn’t know her but she sure knew me. Contempt for his own carelessness surged briefly through his brain, even as the pain in his arms mounted to an orange haze. The man in front of him was neither smiling nor scowling. He came at Nick with the deadly speed and concentration of a professional athlete, his sporty little cane broken to reveal a long bright stiletto. He struck at Nick underhanded with the sickening upward, gut-tearing, lung-ripping, heart-slashing cut of the experienced knife man.

  As he struck, Nick hurled his two hundred pounds plus onto the support of the men holding his arms. As the pain flowed up to blind him, both his feet fired up and out with tremendous power and caught the knife boy square in the face. Nick felt a searing ribbon of pain flash across the back of his thigh. His assailant straightened up like a man who has run full speed into a brick wall, but Nick didn’t have time to watch him sag to the pavement. He had no intention of waiting quietly for the payoff from behind. If, in the opening action, the other knife man hadn’t gotten in a shot for fear of hitting his own man, that was his bad luck. Only one chance in this league, son.

  Nick faked a lunge at one of the men and as the other braced his weight backward to take up the strain, Nick reversed and hit him shoulder first. He could feel the man’s teeth give way and the maxillary bone snap like a toothpick. Blood spurted from his nose like an uncapped oil rig. Then Nick had one arm free and the man was down and away.

  They were all pros. They fought silently. No gung-ho, no banzai, no curses. The graceful buildings looked down in silence and heard only the quick harshness of their breathing, the .scraping of their shoes on the pavement and the moaning of one of the fallen men. Wilhelmina, Nick thought, as his hand struggled toward the butt of his custom Luger. Get that old girl into action and we’ll stop these silly games.

  The second knife man danced in and out like a vengeful spirit, looking for his opportunity, while Nick wheeled, using the man on his arm for protection. The knife joker breathed an indistinct phrase to his partners, unintelligible to Nick, but recognizable as one of the many Han Chinese dialects. The man on his arm suddenly fired a vicious kick at Nick’s groin. In a fraction of a second, Nick turned half around and drew one leg up and across in the standard counter to the groin kick. Bone met stronger bone and the man stumbled back screaming. Then Nick had Wilhelmina out and from then on, he thought, sweet reason should prevail, and he would get a few answers.

  The knife man came dancing in again. Nick turned to show him the Luger. Then Nick heard two shots and a scream that soared up the scale and choked off in a bubbling cough.

  The man with the broken leg lay in a pool of his own blood on the sidewalk, having fallen into his partner’s field of fire. The first man was crawling across the sidewalk trying to get a clear shot at Nick. Nick fired the Luger; the gunman jerked once, shuddered hideously and lay still. Nick spun in a low crouch, ready to deal with the remaining knife man. It was unnecessary. He was running as fast as his legs would take him down the street in the direction of the river.

  Nick rose swiftly, re-holstering the reliable Luger. A shot in the back had never been his style. The two dead men lay in widening pools of their own blood. The other was equally silent and almost as bloody. Nick bent and poked him sharply in the solar plexus; there was no reaction. He raised one of the man’s eyelids. The eyes showed concussion. Nick was ready to bet that it would be some time before he would feel very talkative. Too bad, because Nick was getting anxious to hear some answers.

  He realized he was standing around as sole proprietor of two dead and one badly mauled thug. And if there was one thing that ran Hawk’s blood pressure up fast it was going through channels to explain the behavior of his agents and having to apologize for stray corpses.

  Nick, giving the carnage a last thoughtful glance, set off at a brisk pace toward the crowded gaiety of the Champs-Elysees.

  I only wish, he thought, somebody would tell me the name of the game.

  Chapter 2

  THE HAWK TALKS

  “ORYZA SATIVA,” Hawk said.

  Nick furrowed his brows.

  “Sir?”

  “Oryza sativa. The scientific name for cultivated rice, the basic, day-in day-out diet of most of the people in the world. Bear with me a minute, Nick, I’m still getting this straightened out myself.”

  Nick leaned back in his chair in the empty room and blew smoke at the picture-phone image of the iron gray-haired old man in Washington to whom he gave all of his allegiance and most of his affection. Missing today was the familiar dead cigar, the glint of humor in the ice chip eyes. If it weren’t almost sacrilegious to think so, he would have thought Hawk was upset. No, not that sparse, tough old man whose far-flung intelligence agency AXE covered the earth and perhaps, for all Nick knew, boasted a network or two in space by now.

  “If this is anything big,” Nick said, “I’d better tell you right now I’m blown. Blown to hell.”

  “All right,” Hawk snapped, “tell me about it. How’d it happen? Quickly, we’ve got a lot to cover.”