The girl settled matters. She wriggled twice, three times, and snapped a drawstring loose. Both parts of the tiny bikini sailed through the air to lie on the sand. The breeze swooped and whirled them away. Nick watched them come to rest against a half-buried dune fence.
Angie was naked atop him now. Her mouth was glued to his. “Please,” she whispered. “Please take me, Nick. Teach me. Be kind and gentle and take me. I want to so much, Nick. With you.”
Nick put one big arm about her and held her close. Her small tongue was hot and sharp and moist in his mouth. He began to kiss her, really kiss her, and Angie moaned and wriggled atop him. He could feel the minute prick of tiny pink nipples against his chest.
With a swift fluid motion he got up, the girl dangling over his shoulder. He gently slapped her taut little behind. “All right,” Nick said softly. “All right, Angie.”
It was the last moment before full darkness, a last hint of purple lingering in the air. Standing there in the gloaming, with his incredible width of shoulder and narrow waist, the two strong columns of his legs, Nick might have been a magnificent specimen of primeval man bringing his bride home to the cave. The girl lay lax over his shoulder, unmoving, arms dangling and the dark hair floating like a banner in the breeze.
In the large dune, near where her bikini had lodged, the wind had hollowed out a shallow cave. Nick took her there and gently put her down. At the last moment, her arms hugging him tight and her mouth hot against his ear, she whispered: “Is... is it going to hurt much?” He felt her thin body begin to tremble.
He kissed her into silence. And he was as gentle as he knew how, not an easy thing for Nick when he was aroused.
So it was that Angelita Dolores Rita Inez Delgado came at last to womanhood. If he hurt her she made no outcry except for a gasping scream at the very end. Nick, suffused with pleasure and some wonderment, felt a genuine gratitude for the gift this girl-woman had bestowed on him.
When he got back to his bungalow at the Las Brisas Hilton there was a telegram thrust beneath his door. It could only mean one thing. His vacation was over. He ripped the yellow envelope open.
Excalibur — stop — Musty — stop — 33116 — stop — Blackbird — end—
Nick, who at the moment was traveling under the name of Carter Manning, did not have a code book with him. AXE had only a few code books and they were well guarded. But then he did not need a code book for this message. Hawk knew that, of course.
Excalibur — come at once.
Musty — Emergency — most urgent.
33116 — latitude and longitude. Nick took a small map from a suitcase and with a pencil circled the largest city in the vicinity of the given longitude and latitude. San Diego.
Frowning, because he knew how it was going to look — and how Angie was going to feel — he wrote a brief note to the girl. He called a boy and sent the note, along with a dozen roses, to her hotel. She wouldn’t understand, of course. She would never understand and she would be hurt, but there was no help for it.
Half an hour later he was at the airport.
Chapter 3
A Chinese Fist
As Nick Carter was about to leave the airport in San Diego, a compact, hard-faced man, who had been lounging about the entrance, spoke to him. The man had an unlit cigarette in his mouth and he was fumbling in his pockets. As Nick approached he said, “Pardon, buddy. You got a match?”
Nick, who had been wondering about his pickup, produced a large, kitchen-size match and struck it on his shoe. The man nodded slightly. “I’m Sergeant Preston, sir. Marine C.I.C. I’ve got a car waiting.”
The Sergeant took Nick’s bag and led him to a jazzy little sports roadster. As the AXEman tried to squeeze his big frame into the bucket seat he said, “I’ve often wondered what would happen if the wrong guy happened to be using kitchen matches on a particular day. It could result in a lulu of a mixup.”
The Sergeant proved humorless. His cold eyes flicked over Nick without a smile. “Not likely to happen, sir. Very few men use them.”
It was a beautiful July day, all gold and blue and breezy, and Nick relaxed. “Where are we going, Sergeant?”
“Not very far with me, sir. Seven or eight blocks, then I drop you off.”
A few minutes later the driver turned off Chula Vista Avenue onto a quiet side street. He stopped beside a long black sedan. “Here you are, sir. There’s a gentleman waiting for you.”
The gentleman was Hawk, looking thin and tired in the vastness of the rear seat. He appeared to have been sleeping in his seersucker suit, and his old brown straw hat was limp and soiled. His shirt collar was dirty and his tie had been pulled into a Gordian knot. His face, the color and texture of old parchment, cracked around his unlit cigar as he greeted Nick.
“You look fine,” said Hawk. “Nice tan. As though you had just stepped out of a bandbox. As usual.” Hawk was given to such old-fashioned expressions.
Nick sank into the seat beside his Chief and looked the older man up and down. “That’s more than I can say for you, sir. You look a little beat up.”
Hawk gave a command to the driver, who wore chauffeur’s livery, and closed the glass partition. “I know,” he said. “I feel beat up. I haven’t been lolling on any beach watching the bikinis go by.” He rolled his cigar to the other side of his mouth and added, “But I don’t begrudge you, my boy. You’re going to earn that vacation — retroactively, you might say.” He stared at Nick with a hint of good-natured malice in his shrewd old eyes.
Nick lit one of his gold-tipped cigarettes. “Rough one, sir?”
Hawk nodded. “You might say that, son. Maybe rough, maybe not, but sure as hell complicated. If I allowed myself profanity I would call it a many-faceted sonofabitch! That’s why I wanted to see you before we go to the briefing — get a few things straight. The deal is, Nick, we’re lending you to the CIA. They asked for you specifically and of course I had to go along.”
Nick repressed a grin.
Hawk rolled down a window and tossed away his chewed cigar. He popped a fresh one into his mouth. “Their budget is four times ours,” he said with satisfaction. “Yet they have to come to us when they get in a real jam. I knew they would, of course. What I didn’t expect was that the head man, in person, would come to us. He’s here now, in San Diego. We’ll be meeting him at the Naval Air Station in a few minutes. I thought you had better know. Better than just walking in and meeting him cold.”
Nick Carter nodded. He knew what was troubling his boss. “I’ll mind my manners,” he said gravely. “I’ll speak only when spoken to, and I won’t forget to ‘sir’ him. Okay?”
Hawk shot him a glance. “Never mind the levity, son. And you know I’m not worried about your manners. It’s just that, well, you know how CIA and AXE see things a lot differently sometimes. It figures. We’re in different lines of endeavor, so to speak. All I want you to do is listen. Listen and digest and be polite. Play along. Then we’ll do it our own way. Understand?”
Nick said he understood. It was not the first time the situation had arisen. AXE was a small, tight, compact outfit with very definite ideas on how to do its job; CIA was a great sprawling complex of men and facilities and functions, with aims and motives usually different from those of AXE. Some friction was inevitable.