Eighth Card Stud

by Nick Carter

  My head snapped back into the headrest as he rammed us from behind. This was the opening I had been jockeying for. I slammed on the brakes and let him smash into us at full speed.

  He lost control due to the unexpectedness of the resistance in front. He spun around and around, kicking up a huge pillar of clinging, choking brown dust. I wished I had the bandages on again. They would keep my nose and mouth free of the grit.

  "He's getting away!" cried Maria. She pointed over her shoulder. I looked and sighed when I saw she was right. Sutter had more fight in him than ten men. I vowed to never underestimate those portly pencil-jockeys again. My arms ached from the strain of the driving, and my neck muscles knotted from the whiplash shock when he'd rammed us from behind. How he could be in any better condition after the pounding I'd already given him was beyond me.

  I'd just have to catch him and see.

  The acceleration pushed us both back firmly into the seats. This was a straightaway race now, no dodging for advantage. He had several hundred yards lead, but my engine still ran as smooth as silk. The deep-throated roar filled the stillness of the night. I felt renewed power surging through my veins. The stars above witnessed the race, would be there at the finish line when I finally captured Sutter.

  "Nick!" shouted Marta over the roar of the engine. "He's got a gun!"

  I saw a tiny shimmer of light, possibly off the muzzle of a gun. Then there was no question about it. A bright star blossomed on the windshield as a heavy caliber slug ricocheted off and whistled into the darkness. I saw muzzle flames from three more shots, but none connected with the car. It's more difficult firing at an automobile than they make it appear in the movies, and only a slug larger than.38 is likely to penetrate the body of any but the flimsiest of cars. But that's not to discount the danger. A man with a gun firing wildly is dangerous, damned dangerous.

  "Let him go, Nick," urged Marta, her hand gripping my arm. "He'll kill us."

  "I'm going to get him. That's what I came out for tonight. You had your chance to stay home, but you wanted adventure. This is it. Now get that pretty head of yours down or he might shoot it off."

  Frightened, she dived under the dashboard, cowering as every report echoed back to us. I bent over the steering wheel and pressed just a little more on the gas pedal. Inches separated us now. I saw the gun poking out the window again. I rammed him at an angle and sent the car careening.

  The dust cloud obscured the car as Sutter hit the shoulder of the road and slid down a small embankment. It still didn't take him out. I cursed under my breath as I spun in pursuit again. The man must have learned to drive in a demolition derby.

  Both cars were close to being totalled. His trunk lid had popped up and bobbed as he fought the wheel, the car wobbling from side to side. Both his fenders were crumpled like used Kleenex, but miraculously one of his taillights had survived the repeated rammings. One of his headlights had gone out and the other flickered as a short circuit developed. My car was hardly better off. The engine had begun to miss. I guessed that dust clogged the air filter, and the fuel line might be leaking. A nose-wrinkling odor of raw gasoline came through the firewall to tell me the chase couldn't last much longer. Either my engine would burst aflame or the line would go out entirely, pumping gasoline onto the road.

  "Is he still shooting at us?" asked Marta anxiously.

  She had composed herself and looked frightened but was trying hard to overcome it. The woman had conquered her fear enough to be able to show anger. That was a good sign.

  "He's still ahead of us, but the smoke coming from his exhaust tells me his car has about had it. Looks like he's burning oil. His engine will blow if he keeps up this pace."

  She sat up and saw the ludicrous sight of Sutter's trunk lid dancing up and down. The way he sawed at the steering wheel told me the power steering was almost dead on his car, too.

  "He's still got his gun."

  "That's something I've been trained to avoid."

  She sat primly, her eyes straight ahead, fixed unblinkingly on Sutter's car. I speeded up and rammed him again. He did the unexpected. As he began to spin, he cut his wheels in the wrong direction and accentuated his motion. He spun around and ended up behind my car.

  Everything moved in slow motion after that. I saw the muzzles of two M-16's appear on either side of the road. I saw the road behind cut off by Sutter's stalled car. I saw the muzzle flashes.

  The passenger compartment of the car filled with the whining of dozens of tumbling.223 caliber slugs from the automatic weapons.

  Chapter Six

  "Nick, I'm shot!"

  Hunkered down behind the wheel, I chanced a quick look at Marta. Blood ran across her forehead and dribbled into her eyes. A head wound bleeds like an artesian well but is seldom serious if the victim can complain about it.

  "Press this into the wound. It'll hurt like hell, but you don't want to be blinded by the blood." I passed over a handkerchief pulled from my pocket. As Marta staunched the flow of blood, I pulled Wilhelmina free. The Luger felt comforting in my hand. She would find suitable targets in the darkness.

  Another barrage of bullets whistled overhead. The M-16 is a terrible weapon for use in a jungle like Vietnam. The slightest moisture or mud jams the mechanism. And the ballistics of the small slug cause it to deflect and tumble when plowing through dense underbrush. For the jungle, it is a terrible weapon.

  For the desert, you can't find one better.

  I hazarded a quick look and almost got my head blown off. They might have Starlight scopes, but I doubted it. Their first rounds would have turned us both into Swiss cheese. They fired with open sights, but with at least four of them in front and Sutter behind, they had us boxed in like ducks in a shooting gallery.

  "We surrender!" I yelled.

  "Nick, you can't! They'll kill us!" protested Marta.

  "I know," I said. "Maybe they'll think I don't have a gun and get careless. Any way I can reduce the odds against us, I will," I told her. I peered up over the edge of the door. The glass had been shot out of the window.

  I slowed my breathing and relaxed as much as possible. Tensed muscles cause jerky finger movements on a hair trigger such as the one I'd filed on Wilhelmina. The slightest jerk and the bullet goes off too high. I wanted every single slug to find a burial site in human flesh.

  "What's wrong, Nick? They're not doing anything."

  Waiting is always hard.

  "Just be ready to run like hell when I give the word. They're closing in on us, trying to set up a cross fire. If I can take out the ones on this side, we can run for the mountains. Maybe we can lose them in the dark."

  "Okay," she answered, unsure.

  I wasn't as confident as I sounded. These men were experts at their trade. Sutter's professional handling of the car would have won approval from Mario Andretti. I should have realized Sutter was suckering me into a trap when he simply didn't give up, but hindsight is always 20–20. The present situation demanded that I call a few shots in advance and do it accurately for a change.

  I counted fifteen more heartbeats before I got my chance. A man became careless as he crouched and ran from a clump of scrub oak toward a fair-sized salt cedar. Wilhelmina spoke twice with great authority. The man took two more steps before realizing he was dead.

  This brought his partner out of hiding. He should have provided covering fire; it was his fault his friend lay dead on the desert sand. He tried to vindicate the death and signed his own death warrant in the process. Three slugs ripped through his chest and throat, spinning him around. His fingers must have jammed the trigger as he fell. The M-16 fired off its entire clip machine gun style.

  The two deaths opened up the escape route for Marta and me. Taking her hand, I opened the door on my side of the car and pulled her out. The others fired with skill and deliberation, as if potting at targets on the firing range. This added to my conviction that they were professionals. Amateurs would have been spraying lead all over the landscape. While that
would be dangerous, it was less dangerous than having cool, calculating men triggering off round after round.

  Marta yelped again. A red welt appeared on her arm and a river of blood flowed. She tried to stop and touch the wound. I kept pulling her along. If we'd stood still for even a second, we'd have been as dead as the dodo. I scooped up the first man's M-16 on the run, spun, and dropped to one knee, seeking out the dark patch on the side of a low hill where I'd seen orange muzzle flashes. Flipping the selector to full automatic, I emptied the clip into the most likely terrain. I was rewarded with an ear-piercing shriek of agony. The man might be dead or not. There wasn't any way of telling, not that it mattered much. As long as Sutter hid off to our right and the fourth man had his M-16 firing, they were our primary concerns.

  As if on cue, Sutter opened up with his.38 again. The reports were deeper, throatier, more powerful than the.223s. But if I had to be hit by one of the slugs, I'd pick the.38 every time. It didn't enter a body and begin to tumble, ripping and shredding internal organs, as the M-16 round did. And at this distance, the.223 still carried almost half again as much energy as the larger, more ponderous.38 slug.

  What it really came down to was not wanting any of that lead ventilating me.

  "Come on," I shouted at Marta. "We've got to put a lot of distance between us and them. They're not nice people."

  She crouched just inches away from the second man I'd shot. The first bullet had hit him in the eye and blown away the back of his skull in a bloody shower. It was an ugly sight. The sucking dry sand avidly drank all the blood, leaving behind only the gray brains. I shook Marta hard to get her moving again.

  "Let's run," I suggested.

  "He's dead." Her voice was like that of a zombie, dull and monotone. I shook her again.

  "Do you want to look like he does? Those men are trying to kill us. Now follow me, dammit, follow me!"

  I started down an arroyo, protected on both sides by the high banks. Fifty feet down the dry river bed I turned and looked to see if Marta had shaken off enough of her shock to obey. She had. Satisfied she would follow along for the time being, I set off with a long-legged lope, trying to put as much desert between the gunmen and us as possible in as short a time as I could.

  "Nick," she sobbed a few minutes later. "I can't go on. I… I'm so dizzy." She stumbled and fell face-first onto the sand. I went to her side and rolled her over. I sucked in my breath when I saw the flowing crimson stain on the front of her dress. I immediately hated myself for thinking she was trying to hold me back through some petty weakness on her part.

  The head wound sluggishly trickled blood, but it was just a scratch. The bullet track on her right arm had already coagulated. The dampness on her blouse continued to spread with frightening speed. I ripped open her blouse, knowing this was no time for modesty. A bullet fragment had underscored both her breasts leaving an eleven inch wound. It wasn't serious, but she had lost enough blood to weaken her. I ripped several strips from the bottom of her blouse and bandaged her as best I could. I wished then I'd had the foresight to bring along the roll of gauze bandage used to hide my hands and face. Leaving it behind had been an act of defiance on my part. Discard it, discard my hidden identity as Richard Burlison.

  "Nick," she said weakly, blinking her eyes. "What happened? I remember running and running, but my lungs burned too much. I fell, got up, and then…"

  "Just stay still," I ordered. "You picked up a third bullet back in the fracas. We'll rest here for a few minutes, but you'll have to get moving again soon or they will definitely find us. We can't fight them all off."

  "I can't move, Nick. My knees feel like they've turned to rubber. Leave me. Go and get help."

  "Help?" I laughed harshly. "There isn't any. If I leave you behind, you'll never be seen again. These are professionals. Your body would vanish off the face of the earth."

  "Then save yourself," she said nobly.

  "Sorry, but that's not part of my orders," I lied. "Protecting you rates high on the list of things to get done." Those words did more for her than any medicine could. She brightened and leaned forward, resting her bloody head against my arm.

  "Thanks, Nick. I know you're lying. Remember, I worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency for a couple years. Their agents have the same orders as you do. Mission first, everything else second. You could leave me and no one would ever say a thing to you about it."

  "Staying alive — both of us — is my mission right now."

  She started to say something, but I cut it off by clamping my hand over her mouth. I'd heard a sound that didn't fit into the normal desert nightlife pattern. Straining hard, I listened for it again. I heard rock tumbling against rock.

  "They're coming. Close, too. Just stay here in the shadows, and they won't find you. I'm going to take the war to them and be back for you before you know it."

  She shivered as she shrank back into the cold sand embankment. Because of the dirt and grit on her face and hands, she melted into the landscape as well as if she had on camouflage makeup. I scrambled up the side of the arroyo and dropped to my belly, studying the upstream area, waiting for the men tracking us.

  "They have to be nearby," said one voice. "I'm still finding spots of blood."

  "Not so loud. The sound carries a long way in the desert," came a second voice.

  Neither voice belonged to Harold Sutter. That surprised me. After the breakneck battle on the road, I figured he'd want to be in on the kill. Perhaps he was injured in the last crash, not that it mattered. The two men out there were my primary concern. They stood between me and continued life.

  "No more blood," said the first voice. "Maybe they've bandaged the wound."

  "Which one was shot? If it's the chick, we could be in for a lot of trouble. But if it's the man, we stand a better chance of offing both of them fast."

  "I know she got hit at least once. Never saw him react. Where do we go now?"

  "Keep on downstream unless we find some evidence they've circled back on us."

  "That wouldn't do them any good. Not with her back there."

  I listened intently, wondering who they were talking about. They didn't give me any more clues to the identity of the mysterious woman. Both men fell silent, slowly following the trail Marta and I had left in the arroyo. If I'd had more time, I could have disguised the trail, left false leads, done many things to slow their progress. But time worked against me now.

  Both men came into view. I resisted the temptation to dispatch both of them with quick shots from Wilhelmina. This would have to be as silent as I could make it. They had warned me of others not too far distant. I didn't want a potential army of assassins swarming over the banks of the arroyo simply because I got careless.

  The Luger vanished back into its shoulder holster as Hugo slid from his sheath and pressed solidly into the palm of my hand. I moved the hilt of the knife a little, positioning it properly so that the blade was lightly held by thumb and forefinger, the butt end of the knife shoved hard into the heel of my hand. This gave maximum versatility with both point and edge while not cramping my hand if the fight took longer than I expected.

  The first man passed less than five feet from where I lay atop the sandy overhang. The second man followed several yards behind. When he had passed my position, I rose up off the cold ground, gathered my feet under me, and launched myself.

  Hugo slashed his throat from side to side. He gurgled obscenely, pink froth boiling from the second mouth now grinning from the front of his neck. He tensed, thrashed in my steely grip, and then sagged down, limp and dead. I gently lowered him, not wanting to make even the slightest noise.

  It seldom works that way.

  The other man turned, saw the situation, and fired. The bullet whizzed past my ear, causing me to involuntarily duck. He would have fired a second shot into my guts if my trained reactions hadn't operated without my conscious thought.

  My arm came back and snapped forward, Hugo tumbling in the air toward his targ
et. The needle-sharp point of the stiletto penetrated the man's chest, some of the force lost when the blade raked across a rib. The man's fingers went numb, and he let the rifle slide from his grip. Stupidly, he looked down at the hilt of the knife growing from his chest like some deadly blossom. He clutched the handle and pulled Hugo free, falling onto his face like a sawed-through tree toppling to the ground.

  I retrieved my knife and resheathed him along my forearm, then searched both men. Disgusted, I found nothing to identify them or their employer. They were professionals, just like the one I'd killed at the deserted house while following Sutter before. Picking up one of the M-16s and taking the clip from the other, I went back to the spot where I'd left Marta.

  She slept, snoring gently. I didn't want to awaken her but knew we had to be moving again. That single shot had alerted the others back at the road. They might think one of their killers had been successful, but when the two men failed to report back with their success, it wouldn't be long before more killers followed.

  I looked around, wondering where we could hole up. We were in the foothills of the Manzano Mountains, not far from the test site used by Project Eighth Card. I didn't want to blunder onto the base, however, and alert the Security Police. Getting out of their clutches would be easy if I compromised my cover. But Hawk wouldn't like that, and it reduced my chances for success. Besides, things were taking a turn for the better. I didn't think I would have any trouble getting back to town now and making Sutter betray himself.

  "Marta, wake up," I said, shaking her. She winced and pulled away.

  "Don't wanna get up. Too early. Sick. Hurt."

  "Marta!"

  Her eyes opened painfully, took a second to focus, then she grimaced. "Nick? Is it all over? I had this wretched dream about you being killed. It was like in that movie Bonnie and Clyde. I saw the bullets moving in slow motion through your head. You danced around even though you were dead. It was horrible!"