Nick Carter
Operation Snake
Dedicated to The Men of the Secret Services of the United States of America.
Chapter I
I looked down and winced as the airliner flew low over the top of the world. Mountains, huge, forbidding, frightening, fantastic peaks garnished with ice and snow. Sheer sheets of ice dipped down into mist-shrouded glaciers, and the cold reached up to grab me through the plane's windows. The top of the world was a good phrase for the place. On maps it is called Nepal, a small, independent kingdom, a tiny monarchy of isolation, a paradise for mountain climbers, a stretch of land between Tibet and India, and a thumb stuck in the mouth of the Chinese dragon. I recalled how Ted Callendar, an AXE agent who'd spent some years there when it was under British domination, described Nepaclass="underline" "A place where the certain is uncertain. Where the probable is improbable. It's a land where faith and superstition walk hand in hand, where delicacy and brutality share the same bed, where beauty and horror live as twins. It's no place for Western man who believes in logic, reason and probability."
Ted had been gone long ago but his words came back to me as the Nepalese airliner, an old DC-3, was carrying me to Khumbu, in the heart of the Himalayas, under the very nose of the towering Mount Everest, 29,000 feet high. By special arrangement, the airliner was going to land me at Namche Bazar where an area had been cleared for another plane that was due to pick up a man I had to see, Harry Angsley. After seeing Angsley, I'd be leaving the Khumbu area, though I felt like leaving the whole damned place right now. Even the stewardess, a well-stacked, friendly Indian girl in a trim uniform, did nothing for me. I was angry at being here, angry at Hawk, angry at the whole goddamned business. I was Agent N3, all right, chief AXE operative with the rating of Killmaster, and I was always on call, any time of the day or night. That was part of the job, and I knew it and had lived with it a long time, but every so often, I wanted to tell Hawk to go shove it. I had sure as hell felt like it twenty-four hours ago. It seemed like a month now.
Damnit, she was stark naked, waiting for me, stretching out that gorgeous, milk-white body, calling to me with every movement of her hips. It had taken me three baskets of fruit, four boxes of candy and two tickets for a hit show matinee. Not for her, for her mother. Donna had been ready and willing the first time we met at Jack Dunket's party but her mother, the dowager Philadelphia doyenne of the Roodrich clan, watched her debutante daughter like a scorpion watches a grasshopper. There wasn't going to be any ivy-league lothario screwing her choice little daughter, at least not if she could help it Of course, the old dowager never realized what Donna's gray-mist eyes told me right away, and what her lips confirmed at a later date. After various softening-up sallies with the old lady, I managed to get her and a friend off to a matinee for an afternoon. Donna and I went straight to my place, tossed off two martinis and our clothes, and I was just looking down at her eager, straining body when that goddamned blue phone began to ring in the study.
"Don't answer, Nick," she breathed huskily. Her hips were undulating and her arms were reaching to me. "I'll be right back," I said, hoping that maybe he wanted something that could be put off for a few hours. Looking out the airliner window at the ice-capped peaks, I remembered how cold I felt standing naked and arguing with Hawk on the phone.
"It's nearly three-thirty," he had started in his crisp, no-nonsense manner. "You can easily catch the six o'clock shuttle flight to Washington."
I cast around wildly for something to say, some reason that would be logical and reasonable.
"I can't, Chief," I protested. "Impossible. I… I'm painting my kitchen. I'm in the middle of it."
It was a great reason, or it would have been for anyone else. The eloquent silence at the other end of the line attested to that, and then the old fox answered, dry acid in his voice.
"N3, you may be in the middle of something but it's not house painting," he said in careful tones. "Come now, you can do better than that."
I had plunged and I had to play it out. "It was a sudden idea on my part," I said quickly. "I can't get all cleaned up, changed and get the six o'clock plane. How about the first flight tomorrow morning?"
"You'll be on your way somewhere else tomorrow morning," he said crisply. "I'll expect you by eight I suggest you zip up your paintbrush at once and get moving."
The phone clicked off and I swore out loud. The old buzzard could read me like a book. I went back to Donna. She was still on the bed, her back still arched, lips parted, waiting.
"Get dressed," I said. "I'm taking you home."
Her eyes snapped open, and she looked up at me. A cloud passed over the gray-mist eyes. She sat up.
"What are you, some kind of nut?" she asked. "Who the hell was that on the phone?"
"Your mother," I answered crossly, putting on my trousers. That shook her up but only for a moment.
"My mother?" she echoed incredulously. "Impossible. She's still at the matinee."
"Okay, so it wasn't your mother," I said. "But you're still going home." Donna got up and practically flew into her clothes, her face tightly set, her lips a grim, angry line. I didn't blame her. She knew only that I was in some kind of government work and I wasn't about to go into details. I grabbed my bag, always packed and ready to go, and dropped Donna off at her apartment building on the way to Kennedy International.
"Thanks," she said bitingly as she swung out of the car. "Say hello to your psychiatrist for me."
I found myself grinning at her. 'Thanks," I said. "He'll be touched." I paused for a moment to watch her stride furiously into the lobby, past the doorman. I promised myself I'd give her an explanation when I got back. It wasn't my angry mood alone that stopped me from giving her one now. Training, experience and strict orders all played a part in it. In this business one had damned few friends and hardly any confidants. A loose lip was a certain ticket to death, and you never knew what, where or how little bits and pieces of information found their way into the wrong hands. Embarking on a job, everybody was a stranger. You had to remove the word trust from your vocabulary. It became a word you used only when there was no other choice, an emotion you indulged only when unavoidable.
My thoughts were brought back sharply as I felt the airliner begin to set down carefully in the late afternoon sun. I could feel the wicked crosswinds tug at the plane as they whipped upwards off the mountain peaks. Our landing spot would be a narrow airstrip cleared of snow and ice. I sat back, closed my eyes and let my thoughts wander back again, this time to Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., AXE headquarters. I had indeed made it by eight, and the usual complement of security people passed me along to the night receptionist ensconced outside Hawk's office.
"Mr. Carter," she smiled, looking up at me with wide-eyed interest She had my file out on her desk already and had obviously been reading through it. It had a lot of fascinating information in it, not only about my past work but about my other qualities, such as winning the Nationals in Star Class sailboats, being licensed to drive Formula I cars and being black belt karate. She, in turn, was a cute, round little blonde. For someone who always frowned so on my social life, the old man always seemed to get himself eye-filling dishes at the outside desk. I made a mental note to ask him about that sometime.
"Glad you made it, N3," he said as I walked into his office. His steel-blue eyes told me he damned well expected I'd make it. His spare, New England frame rose and walked over to a movie projector facing a white screen in the center of the room.
"Movies?" I commented. "What an unexpected surprise. Something avant-garde, foreign and sexy, I hope."