Earthfire North

by Nick Carter

  * * *

  By that night, when for the second time in twenty-four hours they had driven up the dry creek bed toward the rim overlooking the installation, Carter was ready to move. He had a debt to pay for the way Ziegler had treated them, and he meant to return it tonight.

  He parked the car well down from the lip of the rim after he had turned it around. He was not planning on coming out the same way he got in. Once he breached the fence, the alarms would sound, and the clock would begin ticking. He'd not have a lot of time to get down to the reactor site, plant the charges, and then get clear.

  The one plus point, however, was that while he was making a retreat in the opposite direction, the perimeter security people would be concentrating on his entry point.

  He shut off the car and turned to Roberta. "I want you to return to the hotel. If I'm not back by morning, I want you to get in contact with your boss. Tell him what happened. He'll contact mine."

  She had argued earlier that she had wanted to go with him. But he had told her no. She tried again.

  "I told you I wanted to be a part of it," she said.

  "And I told you that when I went after Ziegler you'd be able to help. Right now I'm just going to put a damper on his reactor, that's all. He'll come later."

  "Watch yourself, Nick. I want there to be a later."

  Carter smiled, kissed her, then got out of the car. He opened the trunk and pulled out the pack containing the plastique and detonators, as well as the large wire cutters.

  He shouldered the pack, then slammed the trunk, and scrambled up the hill where Roberta was crouched behind a rock.

  "He just went by," she whispered.

  "Wish me luck," he said, and kissed her again.

  "Luck," Roberta said as he scrambled away from the rock and down the hundred yards to the fence.

  He could hear the sounds of construction machinery below in the valley, but nothing else. Crouching next to the fence, he raised the wire cutters, hesitated for just a moment, then cut the first strand.

  There were no alarms, no sparks or lights, nothing. But as he cut strand after strand of the wire mesh fence, he was certain that somewhere within the huge compound a light was flashing, pinpointing exactly where the fence had been penetrated.

  When he had the hole large enough, he tossed the wire cutters back up the hill, waved to Roberta, then ducked through the hole and took off in a crouching run down the hill.

  "Good luck." he heard her call from behind, and then he was out of earshot as he hurried toward the first line of buildings that made up the perimeter of the vast complex.

  * * *

  Roberta watched until he was out of sight, then walked back over the crest of the hill to where the car was parked. She stripped off her jumpsuit. Underneath she wore a summer dress with a V-neck that accentuated the deep milky white of her cleavage. She smoothed the wrinkles from the dress with her hands, and from beneath the seat she pulled out a pair of high-heeled shoes. She untied the sneakers she was wearing and slipped on the dressy sandals. Her makeup was in her handbag, which she dug out and applied in the rearview mirror. When she felt she was ready, she started the car and drove back to the main road, but instead of turning left into town, she went right, toward the checkpoint into the complex.

  Halfway there she stopped the car, shut off the engine, got out, and raised the hood. She reached in and gently pulled two wires from their sockets in the distributor cap. Then she closed the hood and got back behind the wheel. When she got the car started again, the engine was sputtering and bucking.

  By the time she reached the gate, the car was backfiring every tenth or twelfth revolution, and clouds of unburned gasoline were being expelled from the exhaust. She let it bang a final time, cut the engine, and let it coast to within twenty-five yards of the guardhouse.

  She tried the starter twice to no avail. She was about to try it a third time when she heard a soft tapping at the window.

  She looked up. A guard was there, an automatic slung over his shoulder. She rolled down the window. "Where is this?" she asked in English.

  "Is something wrong with your car, miss?" the guard asked, his German accent strong in his halting English.

  "It keeps stalling. I turned off the main road. I saw the lights. I need help."

  This is a government installation," the man said, his eyes straying to her breasts.

  "Perhaps you could help me," she said. "I know nothing about cars."

  He smiled and licked his lips.

  "I would be ever so grateful," she purred.

  He went around to the front of the car. She pulled the hood release, then got out. A second guard had come from the gate. She could see no others in the small guardhouse.

  "Can you see what the problem is?" she asked, coming around to the front. She pulled her Beretta nine-shot automatic from her purse.

  "There are wires loose…" the guard started to say.

  Roberta turned around and shot the guard by the gate two times. When he started to go down she turned back. As the guard under the hood was scrambling for the rifle over his shoulder, she shot him once through the side of the head.

  He fell forward onto the engine, then turned and slumped to the pavement, hanging at an absurd angle from his rifle strap which had become tangled in the bumper.

  Working quickly, Roberta unhooked him, then dragged him by the cuffs onto the road shoulder and into the rocky field beyond. She hurried back to the gate and dragged the second guard out into the field. She took their weapons, returned to the car, reattached the spark plug wires, then drove several hundred feet off the road into the darkness.

  The guards had left the gate ajar. She slipped through the opening with a delicious, coppery taste of fear at the back of her throat. But her purse swung as she walked through, hiding the steel mesh of the gate. Inside the guardhouse a light began to flash.

  Eleven

  A siren began wailing into the night air when Carter was less than a hundred feet from the massive reactor control rod support column, and he had to duck behind a pile of concrete forms.

  Men, momentarily confused, scrambled through the work area in response to the alarm. But Carter had no doubts that they would begin a systematic search for the intruder at any minute. He didn't have a hell of a lot of time now to do what he had come for.

  One of the construction workers raced by him, and Carter reached out, tripping the man. Before the other had a chance to react, Carter was on him, knocking him unconscious.

  Quickly he dressed in the man's dark coveralls and hard hat, then jumped up and started toward the control rod base at the same moment that a half-dozen workmen and a couple of armed guards headed his way.

  He had to turn away, and he hurried off at an angle, ducking around to the front of a small wooden shed that looked like a privy. It was set apart from the other buildings, and the sign on the front door told him why: GEFAHR EXPLOSIV was painted in large red letters.

  At the moment, no one was paying him any attention, so he slipped inside the tiny shed. It was warm inside, and the still air reeked of cordite. Against one wall, cases of dynamite reached nearly to the low ceiling.

  Carter pulled one of the cases off the pile and pried open its lid with his stiletto. Below a layer of sawdust lay a row of twenty dynamite sticks. There were other rows beneath that one.

  He looked up at the other cases. There certainly was enough firepower here to level a good portion of the construction.

  Quickly he searched the other boxes and the few items on the shelves. There was, in addition to the dynamite, plenty of electrical wire, several plungers, tape, and several drills for opening blast holes in the rock. There were no blasting caps, however. For safety's sake the caps were evidently stored in another location. It made sense, but it also made things difficult.

  With great care Carter pulled off his pack and stuffed a dozen sticks of dynamite in with the lump of plastique in the square package.

  The alarm sirens suddenly sto
pped, and he went to the door and looked outside. A squad of gray-coveralled guards doubled-timed up the road past him and deeper into the construction area. They immediately fanned out and slowed down, shining flashlights into every nook and cranny. They knew someone was in the area. And they were going to find him.

  Carter slipped out of the storage shed and struck out in the opposite direction, keeping low behind the mechanized equipment and the other storage sheds. He headed toward a single-story, horseshoe-shaped building he'd seen on the way in. A patch of grass had been planted in front, and the flag of Iceland flew from a staff.

  Housing, he thought. He looked back over his shoulder toward the core support. Before he could get close enough to his objective to do any damage, he'd have to create a diversion.

  He hurried the rest of the way across the field to the building, where he looked in one of the windows. It was a barracks. Metal cots lined the walls, each neatly made, a trunk at the foot. It looked very much like a typical military installation. No one was in sight. Everyone had evidently been mustered out to search for him.

  He moved around the end of the building, along the back wall, until he came to a loading dock with cases of food stacked up. A set of double screen doors gave entrance to a large kitchen.

  He looked inside. Racks of pots and pans hung over gleaming metal counters reflected in a bank of brushed steel refrigerators that ran along the wall. The kitchen too was deserted. Apparently even the cooks were expected to muster out in an emergency. But they hadn't expected to be gone very long. At the far end of the room a stew pot bubbled on a burner of one of the ranges.

  Carter hurried across the kitchen to the stove and studied the controls for a moment or two. He smiled. If a diversion was needed, a diversion was what they would get.

  He pulled off his pack, took out the dynamite, and placed the sticks in the oven. He closed the door, then turned the oven control to five hundred degrees.

  It wouldn't take very long. Perhaps half a minute. Sixty seconds tops.

  He hurried out of the kitchen and dashed across the access road toward a cluster of buildings on the other side of a shallow drainage ditch. The front gate lay only a few hundred yards beyond.

  A lone guard ambled aimlessly up the dirt road from the construction area, his machine gun in his hands. He spotted Carter coming across the field.

  "Halt! Halten sie!" he shouted, pulling his gun around and firing.

  Slugs kicked up dust to the left of Carter as he sprinted right, racing toward one of the mobile offices perched on cinder blocks.

  He plunged under it as the guard shouted something else, then scrambled on his belly to the other side. Immediately he leaped atop the propane tanks supplying the trailer. The guard would be looking for him… or at least for his feet.

  The guard pulled up short on the other side. For a moment there was silence. "Wo ist?" the man shouted.

  A police whistle sounded in the construction area. They had heard the shooting. But where the hell was the dynamite? Hadn't the oven come on?

  Carter peered around the edge of the trailer. At least twenty men were racing up the access road by the barracks. He turned back. Behind him the nearest cover was a building a hundred yards away… across an open field that afforded absolutely no cover. Beyond that was what appeared to be a motor pool, cars, jeeps and trucks parked everywhere.

  The guard was coming around the trailer when a great roar tore the air, shoving the trailer half off its blocks. As Carter fell to the ground he had visions of the trailer falling over on him. He scrambled away from it as he pulled out his Luger.

  The sky was raining debris; starry bits of flaming wood, and bits of metal and rock and sand poured down as the entire far side of the barracks building burned furiously, flames shooting high into the sky.

  The guard who had followed him came the rest of the way around the trailer in a dead run. When he saw Carter he lifted his machine gun. In one smooth motion Carter raised his Luger and squeezed off a shot, catching the man in the chest. He went down.

  The guards who had been coming up the road were lying scattered on the gravel. They had been just behind the kitchen when the dynamite went off.

  Carter turned and sprinted across the field in the direction of the motor pool.

  * * *

  Ziegler's new secretary, a blonde who had been hired here in Iceland, stood at the window watching the fire when Roberta came into the outer office.

  "Oh," the girl said, spinning around. Her face seemed blank.

  "I'm the masseuse," Roberta said.

  The girl just shook her head.

  "I was called."

  "Oh, yes, of course," the girl said, and she sat down behind her desk and shifted through some papers.

  Roberta knew what she would find. Ziegler had a standing appointment for "massage therapy" every evening at this time… or at least he had in Buenos Aires. She had followed her hunch earlier in the day and had hit pay dirt.

  In Argentina she had even made the calls for Ziegler — to the local pimps — but here in Iceland she had had to make a dozen calls before she finally found the massage service that Ziegler was using. She told the service that she was Ziegler's secretary and requested that they cancel that evening's appointment.

  "The agency called… said it was canceled for some reason," the girl said. "He called me to come in to see if I couldn't find someone… but then, the fire."

  The girl seemed bewildered.

  "I'm the replacement," Roberta said, winging it. She hadn't thought the massage service would have telephoned. But this girl wasn't too bright.

  "You are?" the girl said hopefully.

  "Yes," Roberta said. She looked around. "Which way to…"

  The girl jumped up. "Just a minute, please. I'll tell him you've come after all." She disappeared through a door, and Roberta went to the window and looked outside. Whatever Nick had blown up was burning furiously. It would keep Ziegler's guards occupied for some time. Sooner or later, of course, it would be discovered that the two on the main gate were gone. When that happened, all hell would break loose.

  "He's just about ready for you," the secretary said. "If you'll just come with me…"

  Roberta followed the woman through the door and down a short, plushly carpeted corridor to a small dressing room, mirrors on all the walls.

  "You can change in here," the secretary said, leaving Roberta and closing the door behind her.

  Ziegler liked his sexual encounters kinky. The weirder the better. For months she had been his procurer, so she knew his likes and dislikes fairly well, as disgusting as they were. But they were his one major weakness.

  She quickly peeled off her clothes and stepped into the costume she had bought at a small shop in a seedier section of Reykjavik: metal-studded, black leather bra and panties with cutouts in strategic places, black fishnet nylons, and tall, imitation leather stiletto-heeled boots.

  From her large purse she pulled out a red wig and put it on, redid her makeup, then stepped back and looked critically at herself in the mirror. She had worked with Ziegler for some time, but she didn't think he had ever really looked at her. It had been his goons, not him, who had interrogated her. He was almost always too busy, in too much of a hurry. And now, the change in her appearance was startling. Besides, she shuddered, the holes in the costume exposed the nipples of her breasts and her pubis. She didn't think he'd even notice her face.

  From her purse she extracted a razor-sharp knife, which she shoved down her left boot, then sighed deeply and opened the door.

  "Herr Ziegler," she called out, but there was no answer. She stepped out into the corridor. To the left was the door that led back to the outer office. To the right was another door. She turned right.

  At the door she put her ear to the wood and listened. There was nothing at first, and she was about to open the door when a telephone rang from within.

  It was answered a moment later by Ziegler, she recognized his voice.

 
; "Have you got him yet?" he demanded.

  Roberta felt very exposed standing here. At any moment someone could come from the outer office.

  "I want the entire core area totally surrounded. Bring up the big lights from engineering. Whatever happens, he cannot be allowed anywhere near the core, the building, the plumbing, or especially the core support. Your life depends upon that. Do I make myself clear?"

  Damn, Roberta thought. Nick didn't have a chance of getting close now. She only hoped that he'd manage to get clear.

  "Don't call me back until you have him," Ziegler said, and she could hear him slam down the phone.

  She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then knocked a couple of times and walked in.

  Ziegler had been standing by the window. He spun around, his jaw dropping when she flounced in.

  "There you are," she squealed, shutting the door when she was inside. "I waited and waited, but you never came."

  Ziegler seemed flustered. It was very much out of his ordinary character, but then he liked to play these games.

  "I'm… sorry, my dear," he whimpered almost contritely. "There was the phone call… and…" He let his voice trail off.

  Roberta came around the desk and stood in front of him, her legs spread, her hands on her hips. She could see how excited he was becoming. Her heart was hammering. She had waited for a moment such as this for a very long time. Ever since she had learned that Ziegler was one of the men from Dachau. One of the killers there, where her mother had just barely survived with her life.

  Ziegler had been her mother's lover. She had been kept in the camp brothel for the exclusive use of General Martel Zimmerman. He had brought her presents and good things to eat at first, but later his sexual appetites began to take on a new twist.

  Painfully her mother had explained it all to her teenage daughter shortly before her death in the early sixties. It was a story she had never been able to tell her husband.