Sea trap km 044, p.1
Sea Trap (KM 044), page 1
part #44 of Killmaster Series
Sea Trap (1969)
(The 44th book in the Killmaster series)
Version 0.9
Dedicated to The Men of the Secret Services of the United States of America
CHAPTER I
The man heard the girl scream—a short, hesitant scream. He attempted a smile and achieved a gargoylelike effect, the horrible caricature of a real smile. He used his left hand to pick up a pack of cigarettes, using the steel and leather fingers deftly and accurately. The tiny pistol built in as one finger no longer frightened him. It was so quick to go off that he had once been apprehensive about it every time he used the hand. But not any more. He’d even come to have a certain fondness for his mechanical hand. It was, after all, no less a part of him than the face—scarred, partially immobile, yet a monument to the genius of plastic surgery—or the spine held together by steel bolts. But then, Judas mused, reaching far back into memory, into his childhood, his body had never been of any real value to him. He had always been the small one, the misshapen one, the one others made fun of in their cruel play. And yet, as it had turned out, it had been that very smallness, that wiry compactness that had enabled him to withstand things which would have killed larger men. A lifetime ago, he recalled, he had vowed that though the world would scorn his body they would reckon with his mind. And he had proven that—ten times over—yet always the final success had eluded him. This time, that wouldn’t happen. Success was practically in his palm. Harold had brought him that power. Harold had found him, or perhaps he had really found Harold. No matter, really. In the mysterious ways evil finds evil, they had found each other, and now he would settle old scores once and for all.
The girl screamed again, another shortlived outcry. Harold was just warming her up. He could tell, that by the character of her screams—fright, but not the pure terror that would, of course, come in time. It always did with Harold. Harold was a genius in many things. This must be the new little one from Panama City. She had been a hostess in a third-rate nightclub and Judas recalled how he had been against bringing her. He had been so careful to set up a complex network for acquiring the girls. Both type and environment were so important. Yet Harold had seen her, wanted her, so he had given in. She wouldn’t be what Harold liked, he knew. This one wouldn’t frighten in the same way the others had. This one had been around and she wouldn’t react with the kind of increasing terror Harold liked so much to see. But she was here now, and she’d do until a better one came in a few days. Another scream, longer this time. Harold must have her in his rooms, with the door open. The experimentation cells downstairs were soundproofed. Judas got to his feet, walking with a sharp, wrenching gait that covered ground with surprising speed. He went over to a wall panel, slid it back to reveal a bank of television monitors. He pressed the button beside one, and Harold’s living room immediately filled the screen.
The girl was there, huddled in a comer, naked. Tartar stood to one side, holding the shreds of her clothes. Her screams had obviously occurred when he had tom her things from her. Tartar’s huge bulk would have filled the small monitor screen had he not conveniently stayed to one side. Harold was walking toward the girl and Judas noted she had a small figure, but compact and full breasted, with a round little belly. Her legs were short, but youthful enough to be still attractive. In ten years she would be plump and dowdy. Not that she’d have to worry about that any longer. A cackle escaped Judas at his grisly little joke. They were really doing her a favor, preventing her from getting plump and dowdy. As he watched, Judas saw Harold near the girl.
“You may wait outside now, Tartar,” Harold said in that distinct, carefully articulated voice. The giant of a man he called Tartar was absorbed in staring hungrily at the girl.
“Wait outside, Tartar,” Harold said again, each word distinctly pronounced. Tartar, his thick black hair almost a lion’s mane, turned his massive head from the girl to look at Harold. The high cheekbones and ochre skin, tight to his face, revealed his Outer Mongolian birthplace. The tremendous man was a true throwback, a contemporary specimen of the ancient Mongol hordes of Kublai Khan, those fierce, huge Tartars whose very presence terrorized friend and foe alike.
Judas briefly recalled how he had found the man in Mongolia and had brought him here, taught him his English, given him comforts he never dreamed existed. Judas was not merely a master, but a kind of God, and in his own primitive, peasant manner, Tartar knew he would be nothing without his god, Judas. When assigned to Harold, Tartar was told to do whatever Harold said, and only Judas was the higher authority. Now Judas nodded his head in satisfaction as he saw the massive Mongolian turn and begin to shuffle from the room, reluctance in his shuffle, yet obeying without question. Judas knew, of course, that Tartar was something more than a child and less than an adult. He would always exist in that twilight zone where the bodily drives of a Hercules meet the mental capabilities of a ten-year-old. It was a zone that suited Judas perfectly. On the small screen, he watched Harold take the girl by the wrist and pull her to him. She came, fear large in her eyes.
“Nothing will hurt you, my dear,” Harold was saying. “If you just cooperate. Do you understand that, my dear?” Harold pushed the girl down onto the long couch. Harold was tall, slender with a bookish appearance that under certain circumstances some women would find attractive. This little one who had met many men would never have found Harold her type under any circumstances. Harold pushed her down onto the couch and sat down beside her. He was going to try to make love to her. Judas realized he must be smiling, for he felt a little saliva dribble down the side of his chin and he wiped it away with his good hand. Harold always tried to make love to them, as though someday, sometime, a miracle would happen, a lightning bolt would flash, and he would really be able to do it. Harold was fondling the girl’s breasts, keeping up a steady patter in that careful voice of his.
“You’ll like me, my dear,” he said. “It’s much better than having to go with that huge beast of a Mongol. You be nice to me and I’ll see that he is kept away from you.”
Harold was kissing her breasts, now, letting his lips rove over her body. The girl had obviously been made love to by others she equally disliked, but she cradled his head in her arms and let him have his way. Only Judas, seeing her eyes on the monitor, realized what she was doing. Too bad for her, he realized. Harold was more than ordinarily sensitive. He wanted the girls to be terrorized, and then respond with either pure terror or the passion which sometimes erupts from extreme terror. He would know she was going through the motions as she had learned to go through them, not knowing it would do her no more good than the others. When Harold pulled her down onto the rug, a moment of fleeting realization swept over her, but she misinterpreted what it meant. As Harold slid his body back and forth across her naked form, she closed her eyes, obviously relaxing in a false security because she thought this impotent creature was essentially quite harmless.
Judas felt himself smiling again. Harold, with that fantastic mind of his, had brought sadism to a new high in scientific erotica. No stranger to the pleasures of sadism himself, Judas occasionally found he was slightly aghast at the boundless dimensions of it in Harold. Though he knew better than to pry, he was certain it was in some way connected to his impotence. Somewhere, in some past time, Harold felt a woman had injured him, was responsible for his condition. Perhaps one actually was responsible, Judas mused. Harold’s physical impotence and his obsessive desire to inflict pain on women were directly tied together. When Judas first learned that, he knew he could have free use of Harold’s fantastic scientific mind and schemes. When you find out what makes a man live and give it to him, he becomes yours. The sudden, sharp cry of pain snapped Judas’ mind back to the little television screen. Harold was twisting the girl’s arm behind her back.
“You’re not doing anything to me,” he hissed in her ear.
“I’m … I’m trying,” she sobbed. “Really, I’m trying.”
Harold let her go and she fell atop him, desperately trying to excite what was beyond excitement, to arouse what was beyond arousing. She now suddenly sensed that her attempt to go along with this impotent creature had led her into a cul-de-sac. She was perspiring, now, more from realization than effort. Harold pushed her away, raking his hand across her face in a vicious slap at the same instant. The girl cried out in unexpected pain.
“You’re not trying,” Harold said, angrily petulant.
“I am trying, I am!” she half sobbed. She began to fling herself at him again when he reached out, grabbed her arm with his hands and twisted sharply. She screamed and fell back. Harold was on his knees and he slapped her as hard as he could. It was hard enough to knock her backwards against an end table. The girl reached up to the table, her hand finding a heavy, glass ashtray. She pulled herself to her feet—short, compact body now tensed with naked fury. She held the heavy ashtray in one hand and moved toward Harold, who had also regained his feet.
“You bastard,” she breathed. “You miserable, perverted bastard. I’ll kill you.”
Judas stiffened. It was what he had been afraid of with this one. Striking back, fury, anger, rather than mindless terror. That’s why he had so carefully set up the mechanics for getting the girls. He was just about to press the alarm button that would bring Tartar crashing into the room when he saw Harold race to his closet, the girl slowly circling the table with upraised ashtray. Harold emerged with his bullwhip and sent it flashing through the air. It snapped against her flesh with the sound of a firecracker exploding. She screamed and dropped th
“This is only a sample, my dear,” he smiled at her. “There will be much more to come … much, much more. This is but a beginning.”
Harold knew the full impact of anticipation, of fearful dread. It was as terrible—perhaps more so—than the event itself, and the use of that dread was one of his sadistic refinements. Harold had proven to Judas how he could, with true Pavlovian techniques, reduce one of the girls to a wailing, quaking idiot just by the use of dread. But now he called out and Tartar came into the room.
“Tartar,” he said to the huge Mongol, “you can take her downstairs. But first, you can play with her right here for a little while … only a little while.”
Tartar picked the girl up with one arm as a child would pick up a doll, grinning down at her. A long dining table stood at one end of the room and Tartar walked over to it with her under his arm.
“You promised me you wouldn’t,” she screamed at Harold.
“Tartar will finish what you said I couldn’t do for you,” Harold said, precisely. “After all, you went to so much trouble, I don’t want to see you unsatisfied, my dear.”
She was still begging Harold when the huge Mongol slammed her down onto the table like a sack of wheat. Holding her with her legs dangling off the table edge, the giant thrust himself into her as he stood at the edge of the table. The girl screamed in pain as the massive brute took her with tearing, rending force—took her again and again. Finally, as her screams grew not weaker but hoarser, Harold called out.
“All right, Tartar, that’s enough for now,” he said. He had to repeat it twice and finally take the bullwhip and snap it in the air. The Mongol backed from the girl, grinning happily. He caught her with one huge hand as she slid from the table, tucked her under his arm and walked from the room with her.
Judas saw Harold go over to the table, pull out a slide rule and sit down with a piece of paper and pencil. He had been working on refinements of their achievement and in seconds he was industriously scribbling down figures and equations. Judas snapped off the monitor and sighed with relief. This one had had its unpleasant moments. From now on he would insist they stick to the painstaking but safer operation he had set up for the girls. He wasn’t going to have this time of times, this success beyond all successes, spoiled by man’s carelessness. Judas had always planned with caution and thoroughness and this one was the most carefully planned, most meticulously thought out of all. But Judas had never read what Robert Burns had written about the best laid schemes of mice and men.
CHAPTER II
There was a basement garage in the tall building of the Amalgamated Press and Wire Services in Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C. A tall man got out of his car and strode briskly to the elevator. The impeccable tailoring of his suit could not hide the width of his pectoral muscles, the bulge of powerful shoulders, and the easy, swinging stride of a man more used to doing than watching. In the elevator, Nick Carter pressed the button for the top or penthouse floor and watched the floor lights tick off on the indicator over the door. It was very seldom Hawk called him directly to AXE headquarters, the real organization behind the name of the Amalgamated Press and Wire Services. Even very big stuff was most often handled at outside, clandestine meetings —often arranged at considerable artifice and trouble. This had to be only one thing … whatever was up was not only big, but the time factor did not permit even the slightest delay.
The elevator stopped, the doors opened and Nick strode into a small reception room. A girl sat at the desk, a new girl he didn’t know. But hell, she might have been here for a year and he wouldn’t know. Two men flanked her, seated on small sofas on either side of the desk, leafing casually through newspapers and magazines. Nick suppressed a grin. The instant appraisal of the two men and their determined casualness did not hide their surveillance of him. Not from him, it didn’t. To anyone wandering in they would merely have been two people waiting to see someone. Nick cast a quick, knowledgeable glance at the comer where the wall met the ceiling. Two small air vents looked down at him. Behind them, Nick knew, were two instant-firing, specially adapted M-1 carbines, triggered by a button at the girl’s feet beneath the desk.
He smiled and presented his credentials. The girl, smiling sweetly, looked up at him pleasantly. She took the credentials, turned to a small machine beside the desk and processed the papers. An infra-red light flashed on in the machine and Nick watched as she compared the picture and fingerprints on his credentials to a master docket which flashed onto a small screen before her. She smiled again, this time with more interest, handed his papers back to him, nodded to the two men and pressed a buzzer. Nick smiled and walked past her toward the closed door of another office. Not a word had been spoken, but a great deal of information had been communicated. In moments, the girl had learned from the master docket that the handsome, powerfully built man was Agent N3, Nick Carter. Blue eyes, much bluer and more piercing than the docket detailed, six feet, two inches, permanent shrapnel in his left hip, scar along side of chest, right side. He was one of less than a handful of men to hold the rating Killmaster, held a pilot’s license on all types of aircraft, was an accomplished scuba diver, spoke four languages fluently and six others skillfully. The docket further told her he had won the Nationals sailing 210’s, had taken the One-Fault-And-Out International Jumping title at the Kildare Horse Show in 1966, was qualified to drive Formula One racing cars, was a member of the Societe Gastro-nomique, and was single. Quite a man, she murmured to herself, as she watched his broad back disappear into Hawk’s offices.
“Come in, N3,” Hawk said, getting to his feet. Nick saw that the Chief looked tired, very tired, yet those steel-blue eyes still crackled and his voice was crisp. Three other men in civilian clothes were in the room. They stood up also. Hawk introduced them at once.
“This is Jacques Debol, French Intelligence,” he said of a thin-faced, slender man. “And Aran Kuhl, Israeli Security Forces, and Commander Hotchkins, U.S. Navy.”
Nick shook hands all around and sat down in the empty chair obviously being held for him. Hawk chomped on an unlit cigar.
“These gentlemen are here because our nations all experienced strangely similar maritime tragedies fairly recently. I presume you know what I refer to, N3,” Hawk said. Nick nodded and a trio of events immediately leaped into his mind, through the gift of total recall which had so often saved his life. In a relatively short period of time, an Israeli, a French and then an American submarine had disappeared. The strange and unexplained disappearances had hit the press the world over.
“Then, as you know,” Hawk went on, “none of those submarines had sent out any radio message indicating any kind of problem. No engine trouble, no messages reporting anything at all, not even the most minor of problems. And not a one radioed it was in trouble at the time, nor was there any message of any kind afterwards. They just vanished, disappeared.”
Nick remembered very well. It could have happened that way once—even twice—but three times was pulling the long arm of coincidence out of shape.
“We have the answer to those disappearances, Nick,” Hawk continued. “The answer is contained in a ransom note the President of the United States has received asking for 100 million dollars for the return of our newest sub, the X-88.”
“That designation, X-88,” Nick asked, “that means an experimental sub?”
“Exactly,” Hawk answered. “And need I tell you who the note is from?”
