Carter turned and climbed down off the wing. Whoever else was inside was going to have to be stopped. At all costs.
Across the taxiway, Carter flattened himself against the wall next to the front door. There were no sounds or lights from within.
He eased the door open, looked down the long corridor, and then stepped inside, ducking low behind a service counter to the right.
A light shone from beneath a door halfway down the corridor. No light was visible from outside. Evidently it was an inside room without windows.
The building was old, constructed in the Western style. Carter suspected it had been used as an American postwar occupation forces air operations center. It was unusual for the Japanese to waste such a field and building.
Quietly Carter made his way down the corridor and put his ear to the door. At first he could not hear a thing. But then he began to make out a soft whimpering sound, as if some hurt animal was cornered inside.
The hair stood up on the nape of his neck, and his muscles bunched up. It was Kazuka!
Carter reared back and slammed his shoulder into the thin wooden door, putting all his weight behind it. The door burst open, half off its hinges.
He took in the scene in an instant.
The room had once been an office. It was in shambles. Kazuka, nude, was lied roughly to a wooden swivel chair whose spring was broken so that it lay back against the wall.
Blood had trickled down her breasts from a series of small cuts, and high on the inside of her thighs were a dozen angry red marks from the tip of a cigarette.
A hand towel had been stuffed in her mouth and taped in place.
"Kazuka," Carter said softly.
She looked up, and desperately nodded to Carter's right as something very hard slammed into the side of his head.
He went down, his knees giving way, and crashed into the desk. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a thick-soled shoe coming down toward his face, and he managed to scramble aside.
His ears were ringing, and he was seeing a faint double image. The Russian above him was much larger than the one outside by the plane. His coat was off, his tie was loose, and his shirt sleeves were rolled up. He was sweating. He was the one who had tortured Kazuka. And he had worked up a sweat doing it.
The thought galvanized Carter. He leaped up on one knee as the Russian stepped back so that he could take another swing with a heavy coat tree.
Carter was too fast for him, though, leaping to the man's inside, the coat tree crashing harmlessly on the desk, splintering the top. Carter hit him twice in the face, the Russian's nose splitting, blood flying.
The Russian was an incredibly strong man. He reared back and shoved Carter away as a giant might swat an irritating fly.
When Carter charged again, the Russian hammered four fast flows into Carter's chest. The Killmaster thought his heart would stop; the room seemed to be filling with a blood-red haze. Still the Russian came after him, hammering his stomach, his chest, and the side of his head.
The Russian lifted Carter off his feet and threw him against the wall. The entire building shook.
Carter fell to his knees. He needed just a second or two to catch his breath, to stop the spinning in his head, the sick, broken feeling in his chest.
He looked up as the Russian turned to pick up the coat tree. The man's image seemed to be wavering back and forth.
Carter managed to get to his feet. The Russian started to turn at the same moment Carter leaped onto his back, grabbing the man's head in both arms and twisting with everything he had left.
The Russian bellowed like a wounded bull. He dropped the coat tree and reared back, slamming Carter against the wall again. Still Carter held on, tightening his grip, pulling the Russian's head farther around.
Now it became a desperate life-and-death struggle. The Russian kept slamming Carter's body against the wall, and Carter kept pulling his head around.
The last thing Carter remembered was looking into Kazuka's fear-widened eyes, and then the room began to go soft, and he was falling.
What seemed like hours later. Carter became aware of a deep pain in his chest, and of the same crying sound as before. Painfully he pushed himself over and opened his eyes.
For a long time he was having trouble focusing on anything, but then it all came back to him in a big rush, and he was able to get to his feet.
The big Russian lay dead on the floor, his neck broken, his head at a terribly unreal angle. When he had died he had lost control of his muscles, and had voided his bowels. He didn't look or smell very pretty.
Carter stumbled over to Kazuka, where with care he removed the tape from her face and the gag from her mouth. She took deep gulps of air as Carter got his stiletto and cut the bonds at her arms and legs.
"Are you all right?" he rasped, barely able to hold himself together.
"I thought you were dead, Nicholas. I didn't know…" Tears streamed down her cheeks.
"Are you all right, Kazuka?" Carter insisted, helping Her to her feet.
"They didn't break anything," she said, but it was obvious that she was in pain. "What about you? Is your chest all right?"
"A couple of broken ribs, I think. But we've got to get out of here."
"As soon as their bodies are discovered, they'll know at the embassy where we're headed."
"Someone from the office will have to come out and clean up this mess. They can dump the bodies in the river."
"What about Koji?" Kazuka cried, suddenly remembering the pilot.
"He's dead. They killed him."
"I can't fly…"
"I can," Carter said. "But we've got to get out of here — and right now!"
Five
The small airstrip at Haboro on the west coast of the island of Hokkaido was about sixty miles south of the fishing village where their AXE contact maintained radio operations.
It was nearly three in the morning before Carter and Kazuka managed to get everything straightened up at the airstrip outside Tokyo, get themselves cleaned up, and make arrangements for the special suitcase coming from Washington to be delivered.
The sun was just edging into the eastern mountain valleys when they spotted the field a half mile inland from the sea. It looked cold down there. Sometime during the night the island had had a dusting of snow. A few hundred miles across the Sea of Japan, Svetlaya would be even colder, backed by the Sikhote-Alin Mountains through whose passes roared blizzard winds.
Kazuka had managed to get some sleep on the way up, though she was in pain. Her wounds were mostly superficial, but they had been designed to inflict the maximum pain.
Carter had wanted her to remain in Tokyo, but in the end she had convinced him that he would need an introduction up here with the suspicious north island fishermen. He was tall, he was Caucasian, he would be an outsider.
He wasn't in very good shape himself. His ribs had been taped up, and it was impossible for him to take a deep breath without causing a sharp stitch of pain. And he figured he was probably suffering from a slight concussion. He hadn't said anything to Kazuka, but twice during the six-hundred-mile flight he had begun to see double. The spells lasted only a second or two each time, but they were bothersome.
The airstrip was maintained by the local fish processing companies who brought some of their catch fresh to the Tokyo market.
Kazuka got on the radio and secured permission for them to land, and Carter lined up smoothly with the broad runway.
The wind was gusting, but the 310 was a heavy airplane, and she sank nicely, at a slight crab, for a perfect landing.
Five minutes later they had taxied across to one of the private hangars used by a Tokyo air tour service, had shut off the engines and secured the plane, and had walked across to the operations office and small tearoom.