Nick Carter
The Casbah Killers
Dedicated to
The Men of the Secret Services
of the
United States of America
Chapter 1
The damned rubber raft wouldn’t paddle. It was like sitting on a roller coaster in Coney Island in the middle of the night. Only the roller coaster was wet, it wasn’t Coney Island but the coastline of Morocco and the pre-dawn, inky blackness of a moonless night, some five or so miles above the port of Casablanca.
I’d been told that not so very long ago, before the Delure jetty was built, steamers stopping at Casablanca always anchored far offshore. Passengers were lowered in wicker baskets to bobbing, overcrowded bumboats for the trip to shore. Capsizings were frequent, shattered nerves a certainty and I was getting an idea what they went through. Long underwater sandbars and heavy seas made most of the Moroccan coastline on the Atlantic a constant succession of towering swells and rolling breakers.
My little rubber raft rose up on the crest of every swell and then came down into the trough with a roar of wind and foam, only to be lifted up again instantly on the rise of the next one. I’d been lowered — raft, equipment and me — from one of the big Marine ’copters from the carrier Saratoga. I wore a tight, one-piece oilskin, not unlike a frogman’s suit, over my clothes. In the raft was a small knapsack and a bundle, both wrapped in the waterproof covering.
The tide and the sea were conspiring to carry me in and paddling was mostly an empty gesture. I was grateful that the coastline was sandy and not rock-bound. When I waved off the huge ’copter and watched it disappear into the blackness, its running lights turned off, it had seemed like such a simple ride into shore. And then I passed over the first of the underwater sandbars and the raft rose up and seemed to skitter out from under me. The rest had been a constant battle to stay upright. But now I could make out the dark outline of the coast, the slow rise of the sandy areas back from the shore.
Unlike the spread-out cities of the American coastline, the sprawling, overlapping areas sociologists have termed “megalopolis,” the cities of Morocco and the other north and west African lands are enclaves unto themselves. Once past the city boundaries one was in primitive land, desert or shore, where only small villages and solitary settlements dotted the land. It was such a lone and solitary stretch of coastline we had picked to set me ashore. I say “we,” but what I mean is the super-efficient planning operations staff of AXE headquarters.
I was keeping a sharp eye out for lights of any sort. Casablanca, and the adjacent area, of course, was a mecca of its own, a crossroads port where every kind of contraband found its way, where every type of smuggling flourished, where every imaginable illicit traffic found an avenue for itself. Consequently, the authorities kept two-way coastal patrols, the one onshore using jeeps and horses, the one offshore using World War II PT boats, reconditioned and refurbished. But it stayed dark and, I found out the hard way, I was too busy watching for the wrong things.
I was coining close inshore now and the raft was lifted again, swept in on a strong swell until a sandbar rose up to catch the bottom and I was pitched forward and halfway out. I managed to hang on, spit out a mouthful of salt water, and flipped over the side, pulling the raft onto the stretch of sand.
I found a ridge topped by a growth of eelgrass and sea scrub which made a convenient hedge. I sat down, pulled off the one-piece oilskin coverall, took the material from the bundle and the knapsack, piled it all into the raft and then used my lighter to set it afire. It burned quickly without flaring, a specially treated material that oxydized with amazing speed so that in minutes there was nothing left, not a burnt scrap nor a charred ash. Nothing. The stuff would self-destruct in minutes I’d been told by Special Effects, and I gave a slight nod to the efficiency as I watched the subdued flame.
It took only that, a few minutes and in that short space of time, Nick Carter, AXE Agent N3, had vanished and in his place stood Glen Travis, artist, painter, replete with paint box, brushes, palette, corduroy trousers and open-necked beige shirt. Inside the paint box was a full array of colors, tubes of the newer acrylic-based paints and each tube, in its own way, a masterpiece.
Of course, not many artists carried Wilhelmina, my 9mm Luger in a special shoulder holster, nor Hugo, the pencil-thin stiletto strapped in its sheath to my forearm. In a small knapsack I had a few changes of clothing and an American passport impeccably doctored to make it read that I’d just crossed through Algeria.
The sky was beginning to lighten ever so slightly and with paint box in hand, I walked up a sandy ridge to turn and look back at the darkness of the sea and the fading night stars. I guess Glen Travis, the artist, had taken over a little too much because all I heard, at the last moment, was the faint, whistling sound.
I whirled and got the rock smack against the temple. I glimpsed the end of a string and then all went into blazing yellows and purples. I remember thinking that this was impossible, that no one could have known of my coming.
The second blow did away with what little consciousness I had left. I went down into the sand and lay there. It was daylight when I woke, and my head hurt with a throbbing pain. I forced my eyes open, and even that slight effort hurt.
My mouth was gritty and tasted of sand, and I used my tongue to wipe some of it from my lips and gums. I spit it out and shook my head to clear it. Slowly, a room came into focus, if you could call it a room. I was alone and my wrists hurt, and I realized they were tied behind my back. A door, half off its hinges and open, was directly across from where I sat on the floor. Through it, I could glimpse the sea beyond. Obviously, I wasn’t far from where I’d arrived. I let my eyes roam around the room.
A broken-down table, two equally broken-down chairs and some worn, sheepskin hassocks accounted for most of the furnishings. Another, smaller room led from the one where I was and I saw what seemed to be rolled-up bedding on the floor.
I tried to remember what had happened but all I could recollect was a glimpse of the rock and a dim realization that it was at the end of a length of string. It was a primitive but highly effective weapon, and I suddenly saw Hawk’s face across the desk from me in his office at AXE Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
“It’s a funny place, Morocco,” he had said. “I was stationed there for a while, during the last war. I was in Casablanca when Roosevelt and Churchill met there and tried to get de Gaulle and Giraud to work together. It’s a real crossroads of the world, Morocco, where the past lives in the present and the present never forgets the past.
There are some places, some ports, that through geography or local characteristics, seem to attract everything and everyone. They’re real wastebaskets of the world’s scroungy characters. Hong Kong is one, Marseille is another, New Orleans used to be one and Casablanca is certainly one. It’s very tourist-conscious in some spots and very ninth-century in others.”
“Obviously you expect trouble,” I had said. “This cover you’ve dreamed up and Special Effects.”
“We don’t know what you might run into. All we know is that Karminian has been a top contact, always with good stuff, always reliable. Like the others of his kind, we had to pay for what he brought to us, but he was damned helpful.”
I was recalling how Hawk’s steel-blue eyes had clouded and the small furrow traced its way across the weathered, New England farmer’s countenance. “Watch yourself,” he had said. “It’s a funny place full of unexpected things.”
I winced and his face swam away and I was gazing out the empty doorway again. I yanked at the ropes holding my hands behind my back. They gave, slightly, and at once I knew that I could be free in seconds if I could get them against something halfway sharp. The rusted, broken hinge on the door would do it.