The lights were fewer and far between, causing him to traverse long stretches in near darkness. Carter felt as if he were creeping through some giant intestine of stone.
Abruptly, that stone intestine quivered.
The explosives armed by the switch reached criticality. The villa on the bay destructed like a volcano blowing its top.
Even here, with dozens of feet of stone serving as a buffer, the impact was considerable. Carter was knocked to the floor as the lights went out.
The image of Eva, lovely Eva being obliterated in the blast flashed through Carter's being with a wrenching pang. Maybe she deserved her fate, but…
A few heartbeats later, Carter was galvanized by a choking cloud of dust and debris that gusted over him. On hands and knees, his pistol hopelessly lost, he crawled forward, following the downward slope.
It would be a hell of a note for him to get this far, only to be asphyxiated in a rocky tomb, he thought grimly.
He hadn't gone far when the floor leveled off, then began to rise. Air currents played over him. The dust clouds kept coming, but he was able to breathe.
And there was light of a sort, the faintest luminescence ahead.
Carter kept low. If Reguiba launched a bullet in his direction, it would pass overhead.
There was the click of a spring and the soft slap of Hugo's hilt sliding into his open palm. The long stiletto was a divining rod seeking not water, but blood.
The blood of Reguiba.
The tunnel ended in a cleft in the base of the hill which turned sharply right, then left. Fresh air revitalized him, making him aware of how much the fine-grained choking grit had filled his lungs, the very pores of his skin.
Carter worked his way through a thicket of tight-packed, thorny scrub, and eventually emerged on the apron of dirt and loose stones at the base of the hill.
He was on the north face of the rock knob, lonely and desolate terrain. The promontory's bulk stood between him and the city lights of Lulav, but he could see well enough. Firelight from the burning villa shed red glare and macabre shadows on the lower slopes.
There was nothing for Carter to do but watch the fire.
Reguiba had made his escape.
The Killmaster had crossed paths with a master killer.
Nine
The next day found Nick Carter en route to the quasi-independent emirate of Al Khobaiq, Saudi Arabia. He had plenty to think about during the flight.
Bar-Zohar's SB action team had one dead, two critically wounded, and a number of minor injuries. Only the stiff resistance offered by Girotti's men kept the Israeli body count as low as it was. The villa's defenders held the attackers at bay right up until the all-consuming explosion.
The self-destruct mechanism demonstrated that Reguiba was a man who tied up loose ends. It had probably been installed to serve as a surprise ending to one of Girotti's famous parties, wiping out a crowd of important and influential guests at one stroke. Faking his own death, Girotti then could have surfaced with a new identity.
Instead, Reguiba used the hellish setup to wipe the slate clean. Only two survivors were pulled from the smoking rubble, and they were what Eva had called "playmates," sexual lures, mere pawns holding no important information.
The night produced one more casualty, Lieutenant Avi Tigdal, who shot himself in the head less than one minute after the villa blew. A confession was found among his personal effects, a tragic account of how he had been forced into treason in the vain hope of saving his sister. Deborah Tigdal was never seen again, and was presumed dead.
Carter underwent an intensive debriefing session lasting well into dawn. Thanks to his description, an identikit portrait of Reguiba was constructed, the first time that his likeness had ever been captured. Capturing the likeness was easy compared to capturing the man, but thousands of copies of the composite image were circulated to every police and military unit in Israel.
Reguiba was the object of one of the most extensive manhunts in the nation's history. A small army of searchers all but turned the country upside down, but they came up empty-handed.
"There's every reason to believe that he's left the country as easily and undetected as he entered it," Bar-Zohar said. "This man moves across international boundaries as if they didn't exist."
His investigators managed to dig up the first piece of solid information relating to Reguiba. Early in the morning, a grizzled old man named Salahuddin Yizkorou — «Salah» — was brought to Shin Bet headquarters to tell his story. A translator rendered his Hebrew into English for the benefit of the AXE men.
Salah was a Moroccan Jew who had lived an adventurous life, spending a good part of it serving in the military police in the southern desert not far from the Mauritanian border. It was a harsh, forbidding land of mountains and bone-dry, flinty plains infrequently broken by oases and water holes. No less rugged were its people, nomadic tribes who still lived by the age-old traditions of raiding and blood feuds.
Most feared among the desert dwellers were the tribes of the Reguibat. Their uneasy neighbors had a saying: "The Reguibat is a black cloud over the sun." This referred not only to the tribal custom of wearing all-black garb, but also to their prowess in the arts of raiding, robbery, and murder.
The last post held by Salah before retiring from the service some twenty years ago was in the town of Goulimine, where the Reguibat came to trade. Here he heard a curious story.
A clan of the haughty Yaqbah Reguibat banished a young warrior for violating some sacred taboo. This nameless youth's unknown crime was so grievous that the tribal elders had him shorn of his manhood, that his seed would not spawn to pollute the earth.
The mutilated youth abandoned the desert for the cities, where he quickly made a name for himself as an enforcer and assassin for slave and drug syndicates. He was known only as "the Reguiba," or simply "Reguiba," the singular of the tribal name. He was a most singular character.
Feral and fearless, in no time at all he had shot his way to the top of the Moroccan underworld. Little more was known about him save that secrecy, falconry, and murder were his ruling passions.
As for the clan that had castrated and expelled him, they had ceased to exist. Most of the males died in a single night, victims of a mass poisoning at a banquet. Nor were the women and children spared. One by one, they were rooted out and exterminated by a relentless stalker, until only Reguiba remained alive of all his clan.
"There is work for you in Al Khobaiq."
That was one of the last things Reguiba had said to Girotti. It meant there was work there for the Killmaster, too.
A U.S. Air Force jet could have delivered him quickly to the emirate, but it would have attracted too much attention. No commercial flights were available on a direct route from Israel to Saudi Arabia. A quick hop by helicopter delivered Carter to Beirut International Airport, where he caught a jet to his destination on the Persian Gulf.
He was not traveling alone. With him was the 9mm antidote to the Reguiba problem, his trusted companion of countless missions, Wilhelmina.
Hawk surprised Carter with the Luger while seeing him off at the airport. "This package was just delivered by special courier, Nick. I sent for it when you turned up like the proverbial bad penny."
The package contained Wilhelmina holstered in a fast-draw holster rig. Carter did not bother to hide his pleasure as he hefted the precision-tooled pistol, savoring its solid weight and satisfying balance.
"Thanks, sir. Thanks a lot."