Then he heard the cabin door open.

  “Campbell,” Fairbanks was yelling. “I’m taking hostages. Call off the… . Where the hell is Campbell?”

  Nick stepped out from the coats.

  “Right here, Fairbanks.” Both men started to shoot and then the plane hit the ground and they were knocked down hard. Nick tried to regain some sort of balance but the big jet was bounding and rolling free across the runway and balance was impossible. Just as Nick thought he could get off a shot the pilot reversed the jets to cut his landing roll and Nick was tossed hard the other way. He saw Fairbanks crawling across the floor. By the time the plane was taxiing smoothly toward the unloading gate, Fairbanks had gained the lavatory door, crawled through and closed it after him.

  There was no window in the lavatory. Nick ordered the flight crew to keep passengers away from the area as they disembarked, and settled down to wait. As soon as the airstair was rolled up there were cops and more people aboard the plane. Looking out a window Nick could see the big jet ringed with cops, and behind them fire-fighting equipment and reporters.

  In a moment things would get out of hand and Nick still had work to do. He went up and pounded on the lavatory door. There was no answer. When he called Fairbanks’ name there was still no answer. Nick pointed to the door and two of New York’s finest and heaviest put their shoulders hard against it. Twice was enough and the door burst open.

  Fairbanks was dead. A suicide pill, Nick guessed automatically. He hadn’t heard any gunshot. The Chicom paymaster was dead and he had taken all the answers with him. Nick stared disgustedly at the slumped figure on the toilet for a minute. Then he set to work.

  He moved with an administrative speed and thoroughness that would have done credit to Hawk. Within minutes after the passengers were unloaded and long before their baggage had been delivered, Nick had thrown a cordon around the whole arrivals area.

  “Anyone who goes through customs,” Nick said, “gets searched. Yes, that means reporters and customs men too.”

  A policeman voiced a doubt.

  “Get some matrons then, or search the women yourself.”

  Within ten minutes Nick had turned the normally orderly routine of the arrivals and customs area into a battlefield where dowagers swore that they never would consent to such an indignity, businessmen threatened to sue and a small army of search and seizure experts from the FBI and the police made a shambles of everyone’s luggage.

  Nick stood by himself, chain smoking and overseeing the project with savage irritation. Somewhere on that plane had been intelligence that the Chicoms, who were not rich, had paid over a million dollars for, and only Kirby Fairbanks knew where.

  Dan O’Brien, the hearty Pan World Airlines publicity man who liked to be in the know, wasn’t so happy now that he knew what had happened. He led a small group of PWA officials who demanded that this ridiculous and unprecedented tying up of their facilities be stopped. After all, PWA didn’t want to become known as the airline that spies prefer. Very diplomatically Nick told them all to go to hell.

  They didn’t stop there. Silken strings were pulled. They managed to reach Hawk and tell him their troubles.

  “And what did my man in New York have to say about it, gentlemen?” Hawk asked politely.

  “Essentially, he told us to go to hell,” O’Brien the spokesman snapped.

  “Then I guess, gentlemen, that’s the way it’ll have to be,” Hawk said and hung up gently.

  But despite Hawk’s backing and Nick’s thoroughness, nothing was turned up. The technicians drifted back one by one, their job done. The arrivals area slowly cleared out. No one, it was plain, was trying to smuggle anything of any importance in on this flight.

  Nick sat by himself staring out over the scene of Carter’s Defeat. It didn’t make sense. There had to be another link in the chain. Maybe Fairbanks gave out the goodies with the numbered accounts and picked up information that had already been gathered, but he couldn’t be the one who prepared it for transshipment to Peking. That would have been too much like a general who fought every day on the line and raced back to headquarters in between patrols to direct the battle.

  Finally Nick had to call it off. There were no people and no baggage left to search. Nick headed for the bar. He didn’t really think he’d be welcome in the VIP Lounge.

  A passenger jet aircraft of the Boeing 707 Series or the Douglas-built DC8’s is worth in the neighborhood of six million dollars. They are treated with inordinate love and care but they aren’t earning back their purchase price sitting on the ground. It is by no means out of the ordinary that a high company official will go out of his way to find out how soon one that has been subjected to rough handling will be ready to go out again.

  In the darkened hangar where the 707 that had carried PWA Charter Flight 307 on its Tokyo-to-New York leg was being checked and repaired, Dan O’Brien, the head of publicity, and a high PWA executive were talking with the hangar foreman. That late at night there were relatively few men at work and the two kept their voices low to avoid the eerie echoes that bounced around the hangar.

  “She going to be ready to go out tomorrow?” O’Brien asked, jerking his thumb at the hulking shadow of the 707.

  “Soon as we fix that door and get a guy to replace a couple of tubes in the Omni,” the foreman answered, checking his sheet. “That must have been some nut they had aboard today, huh?”

  “Days like today, I don’t need,” O’Brien said. “There was some kind of federal cop around all afternoon looking for Mao Tse-tung or somebody.”

  The foreman grinned sympathetically.

  “Just our luck to have those Oriental skin flicks of yours caught in some kind of federal dragnet, huh, chief?”

  “That would be about my speed, today,” O’Brien said. “They in the regular place?”

  “Same as always,” the mechanic called after O’Brien. “The boys on the swing shift are getting interested.”

  “Tell ‘em the price is the same for them as for anyone else. A hundred bucks to cover expenses and we throw in the projector.”

  The publicity man climbed the airstair and disappeared inside the bowels of the plane. A minute later he reappeared carrying a square fiber box of the kind used to ship reels of 35mm movie film. He was halfway down the stairs when Nick stepped out of the aft lavatory he had been sitting in for several hours and went after him. O’Brien turned, hiding his fear between narrowed eyes.

  “You won’t mind letting me have that,” Nick said.

  “A cop, Harv. A lousy stinkm’ cop,” O’Brien yelled. “It’s the evidence he wants. Hold him off until I can get rid of the movies.”

  The foreman picked up a wrench.

  “Ain’t you cops got better things to do than go after a few dirty movies?”

  O’Brien was moving quickly out of the hangar. Nick started after him.

  “Stick around, buddy,” the mechanic said. “Mr. O’Brien don’t want company tonight.” Nick sighed. The mechanic was big and the monkey wrench was a formidable weapon. While Nick wasted time here, he could hear O’Brien’s footsteps picking up speed.

  Nick feinted in one direction and started off in the other. The mechanic swung the monkey wrench hard at his head. Nick ducked under the wrench, caught the mechanic’s arm and swung him around. Then he slammed three kidney punches home so fast the eye couldn’t see them. As the mechanic slumped, gasping, Nick caught him with a short powerful hook in the jaw that dropped him cold as a stone to the floor.

  Nick could see O’Brien ahead of him, running wildly for the gate, looking around for a place to drop the film. Nick sprinted after him. Then the Irishman changed course. It took Nick a moment to see where he was heading—a moment that O’Brien used to fullest advantage. Of course, Nick thought, the tie-down area for executive aircraft. It was too late to stop him. The Irishman was inside one of the aircraft and had the motor turning over. The landing fights flashed on and caught Nick square in their beams. Nick heard the motor being revved and then the single-engine Cessna was bearing down on him.

  Nick whirled and ran. The Cessna changed course and followed him, its motor snarling louder and louder behind him. Nick knew he wasn’t going to make it; the gate was too far away. He glanced back over his shoulder as he ran and saw the Whirling blades not twenty yards away, buzzsaws that would, demolish him more effectively than any bullet.

  Nick turned and fired a shot but it hit nothing vital in the aircraft; the propellers kept gaining on him. He dodged to the right and O’Brien slewed the Cessna around right with him.

  At the last second Nick hit the ground and fired up into the fuselage of the airplane. The propeller blades flashed by his face and the wind blew Nick back down on the pavement. In the dark he caught a glimpse of O’Brien’s face, lit by the dim light of the instrument panel, staring down at him, eyes narrowed with hatred.

  Nick fired two more shots into the Cessna. O’Brien tried to slew the plane around after Nick, but apparently he had lost him or realized that his aircraft was taking hits. Suddenly the Irishman ran the engine up to full revs and straightened out his run. The little plane leaped ahead like a roweled horse, trying to get into the air.

  Nick kept firing until his gun was empty and then watched in amazement. In his excitement O’Brien had forgotten where he was or was going to try the impossible. He didn’t have half enough runway room to clear the chain link fence. He was going to try to take off from the airplane parking area.

  Helplessly Nick watched. If O’Brien made it… .

  The Cessna made a game try. It sprinted at the fence like a champion jumper and at the last possible minute lifted its nose in the air. It wasn’t four feet off the ground when it hit the chain link and came apart, taking the fence down with it. A worm of flame uncoiled itself around the engine cowling and began to spread.

  Nick sprinted for the plane and tore open the door. O’Brien sat twisted in his seat. From the angle of his head Nick knew that he was never going to be interrogated by AXE agents or anyone else. The flame began to spread fast. Nick found the fiber film carton on the firewall and pulled it clear of the wreckage.

  Then he got the hell out of there.

  Chapter 14

  ALL WAS QUIET along the Potomac. The Capitol slept in the end of summer quiet before Congress reconvened. Two men sat high in the Amalgamated Press and Wire Services Building and talked of a quiet crisis that had just been resolved.

  “Money talks and the Chicoms were buying the best, all right,” Hawk said. “Old Italian nobility, opposition sheiks, politically minded Burmese monks, not to mention half a dozen other big fish are implicated in that master reel of microfilms you snagged.”

  Hawk glanced up with satisfaction at his wall map where the green pins indicating intelligence dominance far outnumbered the red ones indicating crises.

  “You might also be interested to know that your friend General Tsung of Festered Lily fame is in very bad shape with his bosses for mishandling this affair. So bad, I understand, that he has ‘volunteered’ to take over the building of a one-track railway in the Gobi Desert.”

  Hawk chuckled with satisfaction and then looked bleak.

  “I hate to think what would have happened if O’Brien had gotten that microfilm into the country undetected. We would have had to start all over from the beginning. Or almost the beginning. I guess it’ll be some time before a computer replaces a good man on the spot.”

  He masticated the stub of his unlit cigar.

  “Everybody’s happy, Carter. The Joint Chiefs, the CIA, the Secretary of State. Of course in future operations… . Good grief, N3,” he interrupted himself, “what in the world are you fidgeting with there?”

  A small smile appeared on Nick’s hard, tired face. “The second to the last of the Vanishing Americans.”

  “The what?” Hawk exploded.

  Nick withdrew a plastic bag from his pocket, shielding it from the view of his chief, who was craning his neck to see.

  “The last Vanishing American was left dead on the desert,” Nick said. “You see, chief, mah pahdnuh Pecos had a pahdnuh who wanted to see the world. Wal, ah’m not nacherly a sentimental man mahself but Pecos wanted Coyote to see the world whether he had anything to do with Diamond Jim or not. But Pecos died throwing a key block for me, so to speak. Wal, ah thot it was only fittin’ an’ proper that what Pecos began among the Jivaros… .”

  “Make sense, Carter,” Hawk said impatiently.

  “Ah’m gettin’ - there,” Nick said. “Now Pecos wasn’t sentimental neither but he was a good ole boy and he wanted Coyote-to have the grand tour. Now, suh, ah know yew ain’t what you’d call a sentimental man… .”

  “Hardly,” Hawk said grimly. “I know who Pecos was but just who is this Coyote you’re raving about?”

  “This is Coyote,” Nick said blandly. He dangled the shrunken head of the old prospector a moment, then tossed it on Hawk’s desk. “Found it in Pecos’ bags.”

  Hawk stared with distaste at the object on his desk.

  “Maybe if AXE ever starts a museum this could be one of the exhibits,” Nick suggested helpfully. “Now that Coyote’s seen the world like Pecos wanted.”

  “I think, N3, that you need a long vacation,” Hawk replied.

  “Oh, no, sir,” Nick disagreed brightly. “I feel fit as a fiddle. Matter of fact ah’m as mean as a bull gator in rutting time and twice as nasty.”

  “Now I’m sure you need rest,” Hawk snapped. “I’ll have the orders cut tonight. I need a rest from your sense of humor, which I find wearisome. I think that will be all for tonight, Carter.”

  Hawk pressed a buzzer and Nick rose. The old man held out a strong dry hand and Nick shook it.

  “Have a good vacation, Carter. Send me a postcard. Preferably one that can go through the mails,” he added dryly. Then his old face broke into a friendly grin and he winked.

  East Fifty-first Street in New York City is a pleasant residential neighborhood on the edge of the big lights. It is populated largely by those who are young and on the way up. Shortly after he had left Hawk, the lean, rugged young man with the face of a legionnaire strode through the five o’clock crowds carrying two heavy packages. He entered the front door of one of the pleasant houses and climbed a flight of stairs.

  A door opened cautiously to his ring and a slim Oriental girl, with blue-black hair and a face so coolly beautiful that it made some men nervous, peered around the edge. When she saw the man, the cool, remote expression on her face gave way to something fond and sweet.

  “I thought you’d never come,” she said.

  He followed her into the clean, well-kept apartment and deposited his bundles before making himself comfortable and accepting a drink.

  “What’s all this?” he asked, indicating the mosaic of many-colored travel brochures and airline schedules that littered the floor.

  “You said on the phone that you had a vacation coming,” Li said. “I do too. What do people normally do on a vacation, I asked myself. Take a trip somewhere, I answered myself. So today, Carter San, I got these for your approval and inspection.”

  Nick grinned, swept up the pamphlets and deposited them in the wastebasket. Li watched him with puzzled eyes.

  “My better idea, O Daughter of the Morning,” Nick said, “is to hell with traveling. In those bags are half a dozen prime steaks, French bread from a special bakery, vegetables, four bottles of top shelf Scotch and assorted other goodies.”

  He cradled the slim body in his arms and felt the thrilling curves beneath the silk of her robe responding to his touch.

  “After all,” he continued, “we’ve seen Paris at night, the desert at dawn and Asia by moonlight. What remains in the world for a man who has tasted the one hundred and twenty-seven postures of love with Li Valery by moonlight in the temple lake?”

  The girl’s fond eyes took on a pseudo-sexy look that matched his own.

  “There is one wonder yet to be revealed, O Carter San.”

  “And what is that?”

  The girl chuckled softly.

  “The one hundred and twenty-eighth variation of love that is reserved for His Celestial Majesty, the Emperor.”

 

 

  Nick Carter, The Chinese Paymaster (KM 024)

 

 

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