Snugged back against the cliff face was a rusting little Nissen hut, nearly hidden in a clump of red cedar and primavera. Nick contemplated it with quiet satisfaction. It was rusted through in several places and the door had unaccountably vanished, but it would do very well. There was an air of desuetude about the whole place that entirely suited him. He wanted, for the time being, to be very much alone. When the time came he might have to show himself deliberately, if only to draw fire, but not yet.
He stepped under the rusty carapace of the hut. The rain had ceased now and the sun drove mote-filled shafts through the holes in the roof. It was barren except for three bunks end-to-end along one wall and an ancient Sibley stove in one corner. The stove lacked a pipe, though the hole was there for it. As Nick went to inspect the stove at close hand there was a scampering and rustling and three lizards scuttled for the door.
“Sorry, fellows,” Nick muttered. “The apartment situation is bad all over.” But the lizards started him thinking and he began to hunt the hut thoroughly. He bagged three scorpions, deadly enough, and one gila monster found under a rotting floor plank. Nick brushed the scorpions out of the door with a stick and killed the gila monster with the little folding shovel he had brought along.
When he had rid his new home of pests he went back to the Sibley stove. It was full to the brim with black, greasy ashes. Nick picked up a handful and sifted them through his fingers. A look of intense concentration came over the handsome, fine-boned face as he stared down at the ashes for a long time. Either the nerves in his fingertips were kidding him or the ashes were still faintly warm!
Killmaster knew that thickly packed ashes, in a protected place, will hold their warmth for a long time. Two days? Three?
He tossed his musette bag on one of the bare board bunks and unpacked. He checked the outsize Webley and thrust it into his belt. He had never fired a Webley and doubted he could hit a barn with it, even inside the barn, but in a visual sense the weapon was formidable. A miniature cannon. Probably sounded like one, too.
From the bag he also took a shallow pan with a fine wire-sieve bottom, with which he intended to play at panning gold. Something of an improvement over the “pan” the old timers had used.
Before he got down to work he stood near the door; He did not move a muscle and a watcher could not have detected his breathing. He might have been a phantom haunting the shadowed little hut. Outside the hut he could see and hear life returning to normal — squirrels were chittering again and birds darted and sang in the green cage of trees surrounding the hut. Nick was reassured. There was nothing, no one, out there now. No creature who did not belong.
Killmaster went back to the stove and set to work. He filled the pan with greasy ashes and began to sift them. As he dug deeper into the sooty mass he knew he had been right. They were still warm. Just what that meant he did not concern himself with at the moment, though well aware of the implications. His privacy might be disturbed at any time.
When he finished he had a mass of ashes on the floor and three more or less interesting exhibits. They would have been more interesting if he could have made any sense out of them.
A — the charred remains of a man’s wallet.
B — one corner of a passport, with only part of a visa stamp visible.
C — a blackened piece of silver money which, when cleaned, turned out to be a 5 cruzeiro bit. Brazilian money.
The rest was ashes. Mute and unrevealing, though he thought he detected fibers in the stuff. Burnt clothing?
His hands and arms were a mass of sticky filth by now. Nick placed his three finds on another bunk, then took his canteen and sauntered down to the pond. He dropped a Vioformo tablet into the canteen and filled it, then stood contemplating the pond. And succumbed to temptation. If he was being watched, which was quite possible, it would be well in character for a filthy “gold tramp” to take a bath.
Killmaster stripped rapidly, chuckling to himself as he got down to the cruddy long johns. If there was a watcher he must be amused at the sight. Even so magnificent a physical specimen as Nick must appear slightly comic in the baggy-kneed drawers.
He went into the pond in a long flat dive, finding the water just cold enough to be bracing. He swam back and forth a dozen times in a beautiful, all-out racing crawl, then sounded for bottom. As he had suspected the pond was deep. A good twenty feet or more. He grabbed a handful of bottom and surfaced. While treading water he examined the specimen of bottom he had brought up, washing the mud, sand and gravel gently through his fingers. A few tiny specks of color remained in his palm. There was still a little gold around, then. Not enough to make commercial mining feasible, but an itinerant such as he was supposed to be could possibly make twenty or thirty dollars a day. So much the better for his cover. Especially as he did not have the problem of smuggling his gold out of Mexico.
Nick swam around the pond for a time, basking in the cool water and hot sun, and then sounded again. It had been a long time since he had really tested his lungs. The last time he had done just over four minutes, but underwater stamina depended on practice and exercises and he was behind in both. He hit bottom and began to stooge around idly, peering back at a couple of small fish and giving chase to a large and startled turtle.
His lungs were just beginning to pain a bit when he saw it. A stray shaft of sunlight had somehow tunneled down through the turgid green, just enough to strike a glimmer of white on the thing lying on the bottom. Nick swam toward it. It was the body of a man, naked, with arms and legs bound with wire. Around the- dead man’s waist was a rope which in turn was attached to a burlap bag full of stones. Someone had wanted to be very sure the dead would not rise again.
Pain stabbed his lungs and he had to surface. He took ten deep breaths and went down again, this time with his hunting knife. An extremely delicate electronic device was concealed in the hilt, but the Brain Boys had assured him it was waterproof.
Nick cut the rope and freed the body from its burden of stones. He brought it to the surface and towed it to shore and pulled it out on the bank. He stood dripping in the sun, his tanned pelt shining, feeling himself vibrant and alive as he gazed down at the dead flesh.
The body was that of a man in his mid-fifties. Strands of pale blond hair were plastered across the bald skull. The eyes, protuberant and staring at Nick, were a light blue. He had been a rather short man, squat and powerful, with well-developed biceps. He had been badly in need of a shave when he was killed. And he had been well killed. His chest was riddled with small blue holes. Someone, Nick guessed, had put nearly the whole of a Tommy gun clip into him.
Killmaster squatted by the corpse and went over the flesh, inanimate leather now, inch by inch. He found the tattoo immediately. It was on the left arm, high on the outside, just below the bulge of the bicep. A tattoo in the shape of twin blue lightning bolts. The infamous double lightning of the SS!
Nick sat back on his heels and whistled softly. Schutzstaffel. Hitler’s elite. As nasty a gang of perverts, criminals and murderers as ever roamed the earth. They were still being hunted down like the rats they were, but many were still at large, scurrying frantically from hole to hole. Most had had the twin lightning tattoo torn from their flesh. This one, this dead man now staring up at him, had been one of the arrogant ones.