A distant helicopter droned somewhere behind them. Nick turned, shading his eyes. He saw the flash-flash-flash of its rotor in the morning sun over Port Canaveral.
"This way," said Candy. She crossed the highway and headed into the brush. Nick followed. The heat inside the canebrake was suffocating. Mosquitoes rose in swarms, tormenting them. The girl ignored them. Her tough, stubborn side was showing once again. They came to a drainage ditch that debouched into a wide channel which had apparently been used at one time as a canal. The ditch was choked with weeds and underwater grasses and it narrowed where the embankment had washed into the water.
She dropped her purse and kicked off her tennis shoes. "I'm going to need both hands," she said and clambered down the slope into the knee-deep muck. She moved forward now, bent over, her hands searching for something in the muddy water.
Nick watched her from the top of the embankment. He shook his head. "What in hell are you looking for?" he grinned. The helicopter's clatter had gotten louder. He stopped and glanced over his shoulder. It was headed in their direction, some three hundred feet above the ground, the light glinting on its whirling rotor blades.
"I've found it!" Candy shouted. He turned. She had moved about a hundred feet along the drainage ditch and was bent over, tugging at an object in the mud. He started toward her. The chopper sounded as if it was almost directly overhead now. He glanced up. The rotor blades had tilted, increasing its rate of descent. He could make out the white lettering on its red underside — SHARP'S FLYING SERVICE. It was one of the six helicopters that flew on half-hour schedules from the Cocoa Beach Amusement Pier to Port Canaveral, then followed the perimeter of the MILA fence, allowing tourists to snap photographs of the VAB building and launching platforms.
Whatever Candy had found, she now had it half out of the mud. "Get my purse, will you?" she called out. "I left it back there a little way. I need something in it."
The helicopter had banked away sharply. It now came circling back, no more than a hundred feet above the ground, the wind from its whirling blades flattening the scrubby bushes along the embankment. Nick found the purse. He leaned over, picked it up. The sudden silence brought his head up with a jerk. The chopper's motor had switched off. It came gliding in over the tops of the cane stalks, heading directly toward him!
He spun to his left and dived head first into the ditch. There was a gigantic, rumbling roar behind him. Heat rippled the air like watered silk. A jagged ball of flame billowed upwards, followed immediately by clouds of blackish, carbon-laden smoke that blotted out the sun.
Nick clambered back up the embankment and ran toward the wreckage. He could see the figure of a man inside the flaming Perspex canopy. His head was wrenched around, facing him. As Nick approached, he could make out his features. He was Chinese and the expression on his face was something out of a nightmare. There was a smell of roasting flesh and Nick saw that the lower half of his body was already in flames. He saw, also, why the man wasn't trying to get out. He was bound hand and foot to the seat with wires.
"Help me!" the man screamed. "Get me out of here!"
Nick's skin momentarily crawled. The voice belonged to Major Sollitz!
There was a second explosion. Nick was sent tumbling backwards by the heat. He hoped the alternate gas tank had killed Sollitz when it blew. He believed that it had. The helicopter burned to a shell, the glass fiber buckling and splitting in a machine-gun rattle of hot, exploding rivets. The flames melted the Lastotex mask and the Chinese face sagged, then began to run, revealing Major Sollitz's own features for a brief second before they, too, melted away and were replaced by a charred skull.
Candy stood a few feet away, the back of her hand pressed against her mouth, her eyes wide with horror. "What happened?" she said, her voice shaking. "It looked like he aimed directly at you."
Nick shook his head. "On automatic pilot," he said. "He was just in there as a sacrificial offering." And the Chinese mask, he thought to himself — still another false clue in case Nick survived. He turned to her. "Let's take a look at what you found."
Wordlessly she led him along the embankment to where an oilcloth package lay. "You'll need a knife," she said. She glanced back at the burning wreckage and he saw a shadow of fear in her wide-set blue eyes. "There's one in my purse."
"Won't need it." He grasped the oilcloth in both hands and pulled. It parted like wet paper in his grip. He had a knife with him, a stiletto named Hugo, but it remained sheathed inches above his right wrist, awaiting more important tasks. "How'd you happen to come across this?" he asked.
The package contained a short-range AN/PRC-6 two-way radio set and a pair of powerful field glasses — 8 × 60 AO Jupiters. "It was sticking half out of the water the other day," she said. "Look." She took the field glasses and focused them on the launching platform, which was barely visible to him. He looked through them. The powerful lenses brought the gantry so close he could see the lips of the pad crew moving as they talked to each other over their headsets. "The radio has fifty channels," she said, "and a range of about one mile. So whoever was here had confederates nearby. I think that…"
But he was no longer listening. Confederates… radio. Why hadn't he thought of that sooner? The automatic pilot by itself couldn't have brought the chopper so unerringly toward its target. It had to operate like a drone plane. Which meant it had to be directed electronically, attracted by something they were wearing. Or carrying… "Your purse!" he said, suddenly. "Come on!"
The copter's motor had shut off as he'd lifted the purse. It had still been in his hand when he'd dived into the drainage ditch. He scrambled down the embankment and felt around in the muddy water for it. It took him about a minute to locate it. He brought the purse up dripping and opened it. There, beneath lipstick, tissues, a pair of dark glasses, a package of chewing gum and a penknife, he found a twenty-ounce Talar transmitter.
It was the type used to land small planes and helicopters in zero visibility. The transmitter sent a rotating microwave beam that was registered on panel instruments connected to the automatic pilot. In this case, the landing point happened to be on top of Nick Carter. Candy stared at the tiny device in his palm. "But… what is it?" she said. "How did it get in there?"
"You tell me. Has the purse been out of your sight today?"
"No," she said. "At least I… Wait a minute, yes!" she suddenly exclaimed. "When I phoned you this morning… it was from a booth, in Enterprise. That grocery store we passed on the way out here. I left the purse on the counter there. When I came out of the booth, I noticed it had been moved to one side by the clerk. I didn't think anything about it at the time…"
"Come on."
This time he drove. "The pilot was tied hand and foot," he said as he sent the Giulia hurtling along the highway. "So someone else had to get that chopper off the ground. That means there was a third transmitter setup. Probably in Enterprise. Let's hope we get there before they disassemble it. My friend Hugo has questions he wants to ask."
Peterson had brought N3's protective devices with him from Washington. They'd been waiting for Nick in a false-bottom suitcase at the Gemini Inn. Hugo, the stiletto, was now up his sleeve. Wilhelmina, the stripped-down Luger, hung in a snug holster at his waist, and Pierre, the lethal gas pellet, nestled with several of his nearest relatives in a waistband pocket. AXE's top operative was dressed to kill.