Carter paused to give the go signal. He hit the switch on his wristwatch, its intricate layers of wafered microchips transmitting the alert to the action team.
As if by remote control, the dull boom of concussing grenades and the typewriter chattering of automatic weapons sounded from outside the villa.
The raid was on.
Carter dashed up the dais, eyes tearing from the choking smoke fumigating the room. He ducked through the doorway in pursuit of Reguiba, flattening himself against the wall to throw off any ambush. He remembered Reguiba's twin.45s; his magnum contained at best three more shots. He would have grabbed one of the bodyguard's pistols, but the smoke had been too thick to locate the weapons.
No shots greeted him. Reguiba had taken to his heels. Carter took off after Reguiba.
He followed a long, narrow, curving corridor, dimly lit. The secret passage was a kind of companionway, snaking behind the rear walls of various rooms on the villa's ground floor. It had no side exits that Carter could see.
Reguiba had only a few seconds' head start. His soft boots muffled his footfalls, but not so much that Carter couldn't hear them.
"Oof!"
An outcry sounded ahead, where the passage ended in an open doorway. Beyond it lay a drawing room. On the floor lay one of Girotti's hired guns, a heavyset thug whom Reguiba had knocked down in the course of his mad flight.
At the opposite end of the room was another door. Carter arrived just in time to see Reguiba slam it shut behind him.
The dazed thug sat up, cleared his head, and saw Carter. He grabbed for his pistol, which lay on the floor not far from his hand.
Carter slammed him with a front snap kick, powering the ball of his foot into the fellow's jaw. He wouldn't be getting up for a while, if ever.
Carter broke stride long enough to pick up the thug's pistol. He felt better now that he was packing two guns.
He approached the closed door from the side instead of straight on. Back to the wall, he turned the doorknob.
Three slugs came crashing through the door panel at chest height. The bullet holes clustered in a tight circle, outstanding shooting with a.45.
Carter threw open the door, clearing the way with a deafening blast from the.357. There was no answering fire.
He ducked into a narrow hall no more than ten feet long. At its far end was a wide, spacious room, racketing with gunfire, none of it directed his way.
Girotti's men were making a battle of it. Two of them crouched behind overturned furniture barricaded up close to a gaping hole where a picture window used to be. They fired rifles at commandos rushing the house.
They were startled by the apparition of Reguiba loping through the room. Before they could react, he vanished around a corner.
They saw Carter, though. He dove for the floor and shot them from there.
Before he could rise, machine-gun fire from outside ripped into the room, whizzing over his head, hammering holes out of the wall in bursts of white plaster that fell like fine powdered snow.
In this fire fight, he was as much of a target for his allies as he was for his enemies.
He crawled on his belly the rest of the way out of the room, rising when he was out of the line of fire. He was in a small tiled anteroom, thick with the smell of chlorine.
Reguiba's black-clad figure darted through the wing housing the indoor swimming pool. Carter shot at him with the pistol in his left hand, and missed.
Reguiba whirled and snapped off a shot. It imploded a beautifully engraved glass panel two feet to Carter's right.
Reguiba went down a stairwell, out of sight.
Carter followed. Metal-treaded concrete stairs tilted down into a musty storeroom below the pool. The air was so oppressive that Carter could hardly draw a breath.
The vault muted the sounds of battle. A few low-watt bulbs shed a twilight dusk over what was a kind of underground attic. Mounds of boxes, crates, and cartons were jumbled about, as well as several pieces of monumental sculpture, poor imitations of Classical statuary.
The dust was thick and that was good: it betrayed the route taken by Reguiba through the crates and curios.
Too good to be true, perhaps. Reguiba could be lurking just off the path, waiting for Carter.
Carter kept going.
Suddenly he heard a clang, like a manhole cover dropping into place. The sound was so close, Carter nearly jumped out of his skin. He continued on, scrambling in a low crouch over the tops of crates, dropping down to a clearing amidst the antique junk.
Not even the dim light could obscure the outlines of a hatchway set in the floor. In its center was an iron ring wide enough to accommodate a gripping hand.
Carter heaved open the heavy hatch.
A steep narrow flight of stone stairs dropped down to a small square chamber. The gloom cloaked Reguiba's dark body except for the pale oval of his face and his hands. He hunched over a piece of modern machinery, bent like a human question mark, making quick, furtive adjustments to what looked like switches and levers.
Firing a.45, he emptied a clip at Carter. The Killmaster was pinned down until the shooting stopped.
When Carter looked again, Reguiba was off and running.
Carter went down the stairs. The air, while thick, was moving, circulating. At the far side of the shaft, a tunnel mouth gaped. It was carved out of the living rock of the promontory. It was old, very old. Carter guessed it wormed its way through the guts of the rock to a hidden exit.
The kings of old were known to dig escape routes under their palaces and castles, and this land had been occupied since the beginning of recorded history. Who dug this tunnel? The Crusaders? The Old Testament Hebrews? The Canaanites? Or some even more ancient people?
No wonder Reguiba was able to slip through the cordon at will!
The fact that the tunnel was not the scene of a mass exodus by Girotti's cohorts proved that its existence was a closely held secret.
The square metal box bolted to the wall beside the stairs was as new as the tunnel was old. It looked not unlike a fuse box, but the fuse it contained was no circuit breaker; it was an arming device. Metal-sheathed cable sprouted from it, running vertically up the wall to disappear through a hole bored in the ceiling. Unless Carter missed his guess, the unseen end of the cable terminated in a load of explosives.
The switch inside the box was thrown to the ON position.
A delayed reaction — but how long? A second? Ten seconds? As much as a minute? It couldn't be more than a minute, Carter figured, and he wasn't going to stick around to find out.
He did what he could. He threw the switch back to OFF, grabbed the metal-sheathed cable, and tore at it. It was too tough to break with his bare hands. He doubted Hugo could saw through it. He shot it in two, recoiling from a ricochet that came dangerously close, making a crater in the rock wall not far from him.
It might be too late to stop the machine, but at least he had tried. He breathed a silent prayer of thanks that Hawk and the AXE men had been relegated to a back seat for this show.
And Eva? She would just have to take her chances.
Carter went into the tunnel after Reguiba.
It sloped downward at a fairly steep angle. The ramp did not go straight down, but made a right-angled turn every forty feet, describing a corkscrew shape as it wound its way downward.
Rubber-insulated power lines were strung along the low ceiling, held in place by metal staples, supplying current to the dim bare bulbs jutting from metal sockets at irregular intervals. There was barely enough light to see by.
Carter went down sideways, in a basketball player's stance, presenting the smallest target profile. The side stance was murder on the thigh muscles, but provided good maneuverability.
The walls glided past. The neatly square-cut section of the tunnel played out, replaced by a still older excavation crudely gouged from the rock. The walls pressed inward, narrowing, the ceiling dropping until he had to take care not to dash his brains out against low-hanging knobs.