Dr. Death (15 page)

The dance of murder came ever closer. I could almost feel kill-fevered breaths on my face. The machetes began to lift. I waited, holstering Wilhelmina, my muscles tensing in readiness.

Now!

I sprang upward, high, using every ounce of my strength. My reaching hands grasped the wrought-iron rail of a balcony overhead, as my feet, held close together like twin clubs, swung in a vicious pendulum arc. There was a sodden clonk as my shoes smashed into a skull, and then another as they swung back.

Then I was flipping myself upward, over the railing and onto the balcony. A machete blade clanged against the railing, thrown from over-eager, frustrated hands, and then another. Seconds later, Hugo was in my hand, I slashed downward, severing four fingers from the hand of a man trying to climb onto the balcony. His scream was ear-splitting.

Then I was springing upward once again, grasping the railing of the balcony above me. The chant below had broken into a chaos of furious shouts, intermingled with moans and shrieks from the ones I had wounded. Fish costumes were being torn aside, to enable the attackers to climb the balconies as I had. But by the time I reached the roof, only one had managed to gain the lowest balcony. I swung myself over the ledge and crouched, squinting into the shadowy darkness of the rooftops around me.

Then I gasped.

The houses on either side of me all had connecting rooftops at the same level. And on the rooftop of the furthest house was a crowd of costumed figures.

In the middle of the crowd, tightly enclosed by bodies, was Michelle.

And descending toward the crowd, from the firecracker-lit sky, was a helicopter.

Wilhelmina jumped into my hand, and I launched myself forward, running in a low, fast crouch. I cleared the first parapet, jumped onto the next roof, and paused to snap off a shot. The giant pink pig with the oversized snout spun, clasped his hands to his face and gave a scream gargled with spurting blood as he fell.

"Nick!" I heard Michelle scream as she caught sight of me. Then: "Get back, Nick! Get back! They'll kill you! They have automatic…"

I slammed myself to the rooftop just in time. The brutal chatter of a Sten gun cut through the night, and bullets chipped bits of brick from a chimney just in back of me. I raised my head and squeezed off a shot. Another figure fell, but the chatter of the Sten gun continued. The helicopter was just above the roof now, settling slowly to a landing. I gritted my teeth, then decided to take a desperate chance. In another minute it would be too late; Michelle would be taken aboard the helicopter.

My muscles tensed, and I sprang forward. I ran desperately, zigzagging, hurdling the roof parapets like a track star. In front of me, I could see the deadly flashes from the Sten gun and the helicopter settling on the roof, its door being opened from within.

Then my skull exploded like Mont Pelee itself, my brain was on fire, and I felt myself pitching forward.

Blackness.

Silence.

Nothing.

Something, somewhere, was nagging me with an idea. It wasn't a clear idea, but I knew it was a very unpleasant one. I tried to avoid it as long as possible. But it kept on nagging. Finally, I had to admit I knew what it was.

Eyes, it said. You have to open your eyes.

I did. I didn't want to, but I did.

Familiar double-lidded eyes, in a familiar Oriental face, stared down at me. They blinked, then the mouth curved upward in a wholly scrutable smile of relief. Another face, this one black, and just as familiar, came into vision. Also smiling.

"Hey, Carter," the Oriental face said, "do you always go to sleep this early in the evening? I mean, we didn't even eat dinner yet."

I raised my head and groaned. Pains shot through my skull until I thought my eyeballs were going to pop out. Gingerly, tentatively, I reached hand to skull. It encountered a large bandage.

"I feel," I said, with difficulty, "like a man who's had his scalp parted by a bullet from a Sten gun."

"Probably because you're a man who's just had his scalp parted by a bullet from a Sten gun," suggested Li Chin.

"Hey, man," said Sweets mildly, "didn't anybody ever tell you that charging a man firing an automatic weapon can get you shot?"

"They were taking Michelle into the helicopter," I said, squirming to a sitting position. "I had to try to stop them."

"Well, it was a nice try," said Li Chin. "I mean, I've never seen one man try to charge an army before. Especially an army dressed up as pigs and roosters and fish. And firing a Sten gun. When Sweets and I saw that helicopter coming in to land, and came up on this roof here and got a glimpse of you pulling your Charge of the Light Brigade number, I couldn't believe my eyes at first."

"Once she did believe her eyes," said Sweets, "she was a pretty fast chick with a bandage."

"It's just a nick, Nick," said Li Chin. "You'll be okay, aside from a headache the size of the Great Wall."

"Meanwhile," I said, "they got Michelle. And they got away."

"Inconvenient," sighed Sweets. "A real inconvenient time for that to happen."

"The worst," I agreed. And it was the worst. In fact…

Somewhere in the back of my mind, wheels began to turn.

"You're not still thinking of trying to attack the boats and the volcano simultaneously, are you?" asked Li Chin. "Because, all things considered, I'd like to live a little longer. And, if…"

I motioned for her to be silent. Propping myself up on one elbow, I reached into my shirt pocket for cigarettes, dug out a crumpled one, and lit it. I smoked in silence for awhile. And thought. And the longer I thought, the more convinced I was that I was seeing things clearly for the first tune.

I didn't like the way they looked.

But I had one advantage. I was fairly certain the opposition didn't know that I knew.

I was going to play that advantage for all it was worth.

I turned back to Li Chin and Sweets, simultaneously plucking out Wilhelmina for reloading.

"The plan," I told them, "has changed. We all hit the volcano."

Sweets nodded.

"That's their headquarters," he said. "Seems to me that's where they'd take Michelle."

"It seems to me that's also the way they'd figure we'd figure," put in Li Chin.

"Exactly," I said. "And I certainly wouldn't want to disappoint them. But just as an extra bonus, we're going to throw in a little ingredient they won't be expecting."

Sweets' and Li Chin's eyebrows rose at the same time. I reholstered Wilhelmina, trying to ignore the thundering ache in my head, and began to talk. When I had finished, both of them looked at me in silence for a moment. Then Sweets gave a slow grin. He fished a chocolate caramel from his pocket, unwrapped it, and popped it into his mouth.

"I dig it," he said. "It's got real, live drama. And I always did want to be a performer."

"Yeah, but did you always want to end up in little bitty pieces?" asked Li Chin. Then, to me: "Listen, Carter, I'm all for daring action and drama, but I think there might be a few objections if we ended up blowing this whole island sky-high. And there's a pretty good probability we'll do just that. To say nothing of the fact we'd go sky-high with it."

"It's a gamble, of course," I said. "But we only have a few hours left, and it's our only chance."

Li Chin considered in silence.

"Oh well," she said finally, "I always wondered what it would be like to play Mah Jong with TNT. And I don't have anything else to do tonight anyway. Count me in."

"Right," I said. "Let's go. There's no time to waste."

Back on the street, threading our way through riotous crowds of carnival merrymakers, we found a public cab running the route from Fort de France, through St. Pierre, and on to Morne Rouge, the town nearest the volcano. With a heavy tip I persuaded the driver to start for Morne Rouge with only the three of us for passengers. We made the trip in silence, each of us engrossed in private thought.

At Morne Rouge, we got out. Li Chin and I shook hands in silence with Sweets, our eyes meeting and locking. Then we started up the road toward where the
Lady Day
was hidden. He took another road. Toward Mont Pelee.

Now Li Chin had only one earring.

Sweets was wearing the other.

In the radio room of the
Lady Day
I contacted Gonzalez and gave him my instructions, emphasizing their urgency. Then, for two hours, we waited. It was the hardest two hours of the whole operation. But we had to give Sweets time to work. And I had to hear from Gonzalez. When I did and heard what he said, the adrenalin flooded through my body. I flipped the radio switch to off and turned to Li Chin.

"Zero hour," I said. "Let's go."

Half an hour later we were on our bellies, snaking through the short scrub vegetation that lined the approaches to the crater of Mont Pelee. Aside from my usual family of Wilhelmina, Hugo, and Pierre, I was carrying an Israeli MKR Sten. It's one of the most remarkable automatic weapons yet made for it's high accuracy, low rate of breakdown, and, most remarkable of all, its silencer that doesn't impair accuracy or rate of fire to any appreciable degree. Li Chin carried its twin, both of them from Sweets' impressive weapon case.

"Hold it," I whispered suddenly, gesturing to Li Chin.

Less than a hundred yards away, the rim of Mont Pelee's crater was outlined against the night sky. I raised a pair of Sweets' binoculars to my eyes and scanned it. I already knew, from our field trip that afternoon, that a ring of electrified wire, seven feet high, ran the entire diameter of the ring. What I was looking for now was something else. When I found it, I handed the binoculars to Li Chin and gestured for her to look.

"Floodlights," I said tersely. "Mounted in twins, facing opposite directions, on each supporting pole of the fence."

"Unh hunh," said Li Chin, binoculars to her eyes, "and if anything touches the fence, they go on."

"Right," I said. "Now let's find out a little more."

I groped in the scrub and found a heavy stick, then crawled another fifty yards, Li Chin behind me. Then I threw the stick. There was a ponging sound as it hit the wire, a crackle of electricity as current flowed through the dew-moisture on it, and two floodlights went on. Only two.

"Unh hunh," said Li Chin. "The floodlights not only illuminate but also pinpoint the source of the disturbance on the fence."

"Followed," I said, flattening myself as Li Chin did the same, "by the appearance of armed guards."

As if on cue, two guards carrying rifles appeared, silhouetted against the sky. We watched, heads down, as they shone flashlights down the incline, and around the fence, and then, apparently deciding the disturbance had been created by an animal, disappeared.

I turned to Li Chin.

"How's your acrobatics tonight?"

She looked at me questioningly. I told her exactly what we were going to do. She nodded without hesitation, and we spent another five minutes crawling along parallel to the fence, to get away from the section the guards might now be keeping an eye on, before we turned and crawled directly toward it. When we were a few feet away, I turned and nodded to her. We stood up swiftly and simultaneously.

"Hoop-la!" I whispered sharply.

Her right foot was in my linked fingers, her body was springing up from them, and she was somersaulting through the air and over the fence, like a swift, almost unseen shadow. Just as quickly, she was rolling to the ground on the inside, as I went on my belly on the other side. The whole thing couldn't have taken more than three seconds. In the fourth, I was already groping at my side for another stick. When I found it I glanced at my watch and waited the rest of the thirty seconds we'd agreed on. Then I threw it.

The floodlights snapped on.

I raised the Sten to my shoulder, switched it to single action, and pulled the trigger twice.

There were two faint cracks as the glass went, then a sputtering crackle, and darkness again.

When the silhouetted figures of the guards appeared they paused, shining flashlights toward the floodlights which had just so inexplicably gone on, then off.

Again, I squeezed the trigger of the Sten.

The left guard fell, shot through the head. And, because I had used single rather than continuous fire, he pitched forward, onto the fence. Almost — in the lack of any sound from my weapon — as if he had suddenly bent over to inspect it. But the guard on the right knew better, and his rifle was already rising to his shoulder, swiveling to pinpoint the source of the bullet, when Li Chin's sharp whisper came out of the darkness at him.

"Hold it!" she snapped in French. "Don't move! I'm in back of you and there's a man in front of you. We both have automatic weapons. If you want to live, do what I say."

Even in the dim light, I could see the terror on the man's face. He lowered his rifle and stood waiting, visibly trembling.

"Call out to the man in the control unit," said Li Chin. "Tell him your partner has fallen onto the fence. Tell him to shut off the current. And sound convincingly upset!"

The man complied immediately.

"Armand!" he cried, turning and shouting down into the crater. "For the love of God, shut off the current on the fence! Marcel has fallen!"

His tone of terror was convincing even to me, probably because he was genuinely terrified. Within seconds, the faint hum which had arisen from the electrified wire ceased. The night was silent except for the trilling of insects, and then, a distant shout from within the crater.

"The current is off," said the guard. He was still trembling.

"For your sake, T hope it is," I heard Li Chin whisper. "Because you're now going to touch it. The bottom strand first. Hold it with your whole hand, right next to the pole."