About eighty yards down from the road, Carter climbed up into a tree near the wall and looked into the Soviet compound. The house below was very large and mostly hidden in the thick woods. Carter could just see the roof line and a section of the second-story back wall. Behind the house was an extensive rock garden with a little waterfall and large goldfish ponds. Closer up the hill, the property was steep, heavily wooded, and untouched.
Carter remained motionless for several minutes as he studied what he could see of the house and the area below for any sign of activity. But there was nothing. The place could have been deserted.
He worked his way farther out on the limb, and as it bent dangerously with his weight, he stepped out on top of the wall. Several red tiles broke loose and crashed down on the rocks. A moment later a bell began ringing somewhere toward the house.
Carter swore, angry at his carelessness. The missing tiles exposed a thin red wire. The wall had been alarmed.
He jumped down inside the compound, waited there for just a moment to make sure he had not been spotted coming in, then grabbed a dead tree branch and flipped it up on top of the wall. It almost went all the way over, but then it balanced on the tiles.
Carter turned and worked his way back into the woods a little farther up the hill. He crouched behind a pile of rocks from where he could see the roof line of the house below and a section of the wall where he had come over.
Two heavyset men armed with handguns came into view. They stopped to examine the broken tiles. One of them pointed up at the branch and said something that Carter couldn't quite make out.
The other one looked up, shook his head, and then turned and scanned the woods in the direction Carter had gone. Carter ducked down behind the rocks and looked over his shoulder for a way out. Straight up the hill was out of the question; they would spot him before he got ten feet. The same was true for downhill. Directly behind him, several large boulders blocked his way. He was stuck.
He looked over the edge of the rocks. The two Russians were heading directly toward him. He ducked back. If any noise were made up here, it would alert whoever else was below in the house. If Kazuka were down there, still alive, they would use her as a hostage.
Carter reached inside his trousers and pulled out Pierre, his gas bomb. He set the firing timer for a two-second delay so that it would go off in the air, spraying the oncoming Russians as it came down.
He glanced up over the rocks again. The Russians were barely twenty feet away. They spotted Carter and started to bring up their weapons at the same moment he keyed Pierre and lobbed it overhand at them.
They ducked instinctively as the tiny object came at them. It went off with a slight pop, and Carter ducked behind the rocks, held his breath, and counted very slowly to thirty.
When he looked back down the hill, the Russians were sprawled on the ground. He hurried over to them and checked their pulses. They were alive, but just barely; their eyes were bulging, their tongues swelling from the effects of the powerful gas.
The thought crossed his mind to finish the job with his stiletto. It would be so easy now to slit their throats and let them choke to death on their own blood. They had not given Paul Tibbet much of a chance. And it was very possible that these two had tortured Kazuka like the others had at the airfield.
His hand shook with the temptation. But he stepped back. That was the way they did things. He was not the same. They would be unconscious for another ten or twelve hours. It would be cold tonight, and chances were, they wouldn't survive anyway. He would not help or hinder the process. Even if they did survive, they would be in no shape to answer questions for days afterward.
Carter took out Wilhelmina, checked to make sure a live round was in the firing chamber, then clicked off the safety as he started down the hill.
Carter came out of the woods to the edge of the goldfish pond at the same time a tall, intense-looking man armed with a machine pistol stepped onto the veranda.
Carter was standing in the shadows. For the first few moments the Russian didn't see him; he was looking up the hill toward the wall.
Suddenly he spotted Carter. "You!" he shouted in Russian. He brought his gun up.
Carter fired once, the shot taking off most of the Russian's forehead, blood, bone, and brain tissue spraying the rice-paper door behind him.
The Russian's body was still thrashing on the deck as Carter splashed across the goldfish pond. Two large Dobermans came around the corner in a dead run. He shot them both, their bodies somersaulting backward, then he was up on the veranda. He scooped up the Russian's weapon and kicked out the bloody rice-paper door just as two armed men came down a long corridor.
Their eyes went wide when they saw Carter, who raised the Russian's gun and fired a long burst, raking the hall, shoving the two men backward, blood flying everywhere.
"Kazuka!" he shouted, charging down the corridor.
He slammed open the next door, but the room was empty. He kicked in another door, which opened onto a kitchen. He thought he heard a noise, and sprayed the room with automatic fire, one bullet hitting the gas line. A huge jet of flame leaped out of the stove, and immediately one wall and the ceiling burst into flame.
Carter stepped back. Within a minute or so the entire place would be an inferno.
"Kazuka!" he shouted again.
"Nicholas!" Kazuka's voice came from the front of the house.
Carter raced through the corridor and into the entry foyer as a thick-necked Russian stepped into view. He held Kazuka by the neck, a Graz Buyra in his right fist, the barrel of the big handgun at Kazuka's temple.
"Throw down your weapon or she…" the Russian started to say.
Carter fired from the hip, at least two slugs hitting the Russian in the side of the head, taking off most of his skull.
His big body was flipped violently backward and he pulled Kazuka with him.
Carter was on top of the man a split second later, pulling Kazuka away and firing a bullet into his chest.
In the distance he could hear sirens, Kazuka lay half unconscious at his feet, blood oozing from cuts that had been made with a knife on her chest and stomach.
Two Russians came through the front door. Carter fired the last of the machine pistol's ammunition into them, shoving them back outside as flames began to roar up the corridor.
Ten
"Can you walk?" Carter asked, helping Kazuka to her feet. She was in pretty bad shape this time. It appeared as if she had lost a lot of blood; her complexion was deathly pale and her lips were blue.
"I don't know," she said weakly.
Carter put his coat around her bare shoulders, then picked her up and carried her down a short corridor he figured led into the garage.
The gray Mercedes was parked inside, along with a small Honda. Keys were in both cars. Carter hurriedly placed Kazuka in the Mercedes's passenger seat, then climbed behind the wheel and stared the motor.
Police and fire engine sirens were very close when Carter slammed the car in reverse and burst through the closed garage door, flames already eating through the rear wall of the house. He spun around in the street and headed down the block at a normal pace.
The first of the police cars screamed around the corner at the bottom of the hill, but they took no notice of the Mercedes as they raced up to the burning house.
Carter kept off the main thoroughfares and highways as he worked his way back around through the city above Kanda until he picked up the highway that went to Yoshida, the small town at the base of Mt. Fuji. Kazuka's uncle's house was in the foothills of the mountain.
"They didn't get anything, Nicholas," Kazuka said.
He glanced over at her. She seemed very weak, but she was holding herself together.