A heavy object struck the surface above him. He glanced up. It came floating through the murky water, black smoke stringing out of its midsection. Dexter. She had dumped him overboard. A second body hit with a splash. This time Nick saw silvery bubbles as well as black strings of blood. Arms and legs moved feebly. Eddie Byloff was still alive.
Nick snaked up toward him, his chest tight from the strain of holding his breath. He had more questions for the Las Vegas hood. But first he had to get him to a spot where he could answer them. Thanks to Yoga, Nick had another two, perhaps three minutes of air left in his lungs. Byloff would be lucky if he had three seconds' supply left.
Above them a long metallic shape hung in the water. The keel of the Cracker Boy. The hull was an indistinct shadow spreading out to both sides above it. An extension of that shadow waited, gun in hand, peering into the water. He didn't dare surface — not even under the jetty. Byloff might cry out and she would be sure to hear it.
Then he remembered the concave space between the hull and the propeller. An air pocket could usually be found there. His arm closed around Byloff's waist. He kicked his way up through the milky turbulence left by the other man's descent until his head bumped gently against the keel.
Cautiously he felt his way along it. When he reached the big copper screw, he seized the edge of it with his free hand and pulled himself upwards. His head broke the surface. He took a deep breath, choking on the foul, oil-stinking air trapped in place above it. Byloff was coughing and spluttering at his side. Nick struggled to keep the other man's mouth above the water line. There was no danger of their being heard. A couple of tons of wood and metal hung between them and the girl on deck. The only danger was that she might decide to start the engine. If that happened, the two of them could be sold by the pound — as ground duck.
Hugo was still in Nick's hand. It now went to work, dancing a little jig inside Byloff's wounds. "You're not finished, Eddie, not yet. Tell me all about it, everything you know…"
The dying gangster talked. He talked without letup for almost ten minutes. And when he had finished, N3's face was grim.
He made a knot of bone out of his middle knuckle and squeezed it into Byloff's larynx. He did not relent He was called Killmaster. That was his business — to kill. His knuckle was like the knot of a garrote. He saw a recognition of death in Byloff's eyes. He heard a faint, croaking plea for mercy.
He had no mercy.
It took half a minute to kill the man.
A series of meaningless vibrations flashed through the airwaves, emerging from the complex unscrambling machinery of the receiving set in Room 1209 of the Gemini Inn as Hawk's voice.
"No wonder Sweet asked me to keep an eye on his daughter," exclaimed the head of AXE. His voice was distilled acid. "There's no telling what that little fool has gotten herself into. I began to suspect that all was not as it should be when I got a report on that sketch of the Apollo life support system. The one you found in Hammer's basement. It was a phony, traced from a diagram that ran in practically every newspaper after the accident."
"Ouch," said Nick — not in reaction to Hawk's words but to Peterson's ministrations. The man from Editing was cleaning out his shoulder wound with a swab of cotton soaked in some stinging ointment. "At any rate, sir, I'm pretty sure I know where to find her."
"Good. I think this new approach of yours is the answer," said Hawk. "The whole case seems to be shifting in that direction." He paused. "We're automated, but you'll still have to allow a couple of hours for the records to be combed. I'll have someone get down to you by this evening, though. Your transportation will have to be arranged locally."
"Peterson's already taken care of that," replied Nick. The man from Editing was spraying something on his shoulder out of a pressurized can. The spray was freezing cold at first, but it cut through the pain and gradually numbed the shoulder like Novocain. "Trouble is, the girl's already had a couple of hours' head start on me," he added sourly. "It was all very neatly arranged. We went in her car. So I had to walk back."
"What about Dr. Sun?" said Hawk.
"Peterson fitted an electronic tracer to her car before he returned it to her this morning," said Nick. "He's been following her movements. They're normal enough. She's back at her job at the Space Center now. Frankly, I think Joy Sun is a dead end." He didn't add that he was glad she was.
"And this man… what's his name… Byloff," said Hawk. "He didn't give you any further information on the threat to Miami?"
"He told me everything he knew. I'm sure of that. But he was just a minor hireling. There's another angle to pursue, though," Nick added. "Peterson's going to work on it. He'll start with the names of the dependents in that bus accident, then work back to their husbands' occupations at the Space Center. Maybe that will give us a picture of what they have planned."
"Good. That's it for now then, N3," Hawk said crisply. "I'm going to be up to my ears in this Sollitz mess for the next few days. Heads are going to roll all the way to the Joint Chiefs of Staff level for having let that man rise so high."
"Have you gotten anything out of Eglund yet, sir?"
"Glad you reminded me. We have. Seems he caught Sollitz sabotaging the Space Environment Simulator. He was overpowered by him and locked in, and then the nitrogen was turned up." Hawk paused. "As to the Major's motive in sabotaging the Apollo program," he added, "the current feeling is that he was being blackmailed. We have a team going over his security record right now. They've found a number of discrepancies regarding his POW record in the Philippines. Very minor things. Never noticed before. But that's the area they're going to concentrate on, see if it leads anywhere."
Mickey "Iceman" Elgar — puffy, sallow-faced, with a brawler's flat nose — had the tough and unreliable look of a pool hall character and his clothes were flashy enough to point up the resemblance. So was his car — a red Thunderbird loaded down with tinted glass, a compass, large foam-rubber dice hanging from the rearview mirror and round, extra-large brake lights flanking a kewpie doll in the back window.
Elgar went roaring through the night on the Sunshine State Parkway, the radio tuned to a station blasting out the top forty. He wasn't listening to the music, however. A tiny, transistorized tape recorder lay on the seat beside him and a wire led up from it and into the plug in his ear.
A man's voice came through the wire, saying: "You specified a hood just out of jail who could have a lot of dough on him without looking suspicious. Elgar will fit the bill. A lot of people owe him cuts on jobs, and he's the kind who collects. He's also a nut on gambling. There's just one thing to be careful about. Elgar was in pretty thick with Reno Tree and Eddie Byloff a few years back. So there may be others around the Bali Hai who know him. We have no way of knowing — nor what their attitude toward him might be."
Another voice broke in at this point — Nick Carter's: "I'll have to take my chances on that," he said. "All I want to know is, has the Elgar cover been worked out thoroughly? I don't want anyone checking back and finding out that the real Elgar is still in Atlanta."
"No chance of that," replied the first voice. "He was released this afternoon and the snatch was made an hour later by a couple of AXEmen."
"Would I have a car and money so fast?"
"It's all been carefully worked out, N3. Let me get started on your face and we'll review the material together. Ready?"
Mickey Elgar, alias Nick Carter, joined his voice to those on the tape as he drove along: "My home turf is Jacksonville, Florida. I teamed with the Menlo brothers on a couple of jobs there. They owed me money. I'm not saying what happened to them, but the car is theirs and so is the money in my pocket. I'm loaded and I'm looking for action…"