by Nick Carter
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.
* * *
notes
Примечания
1
See Nick Carter — Istanbul.
2
See Nick Carter — The Golden Serpent.