“Yes, Comrade General, although he was wounded.”
“Seriously?” Kobelev demanded.
“No, sir. A leg wound. He will be fit for duty very soon.”
“Good. I want him here within thirty-six hours.”
“Sir,” Stanovich snapped, and he departed.
Kobelev went back to his thoughts. Ganin was very good, the best in the Soviet Union at the moment. His little test in Krasnoyarsk would be nothing, however, compared to the real thing that would come very soon. Kobelev could almost taste the sweet victory that would be his when, at long last, like Balachev, Nick Carter, of the ultrasecret American intelligence agency AXE, was buried in the ground, his heart stilled forever.
One
The big 747 arriving from Phoenix, Arizona, touched down a few minutes before ten on a cold evening at Washington’s National Airport. Nick Carter, a tall, dark-haired, well-built man, limped from the first-class section, through the boarding tunnel, and out into the main terminal. As far as he was concerned, he’d been too long recovering at AXEs rest and rehabilitation facility outside Phoenix. It was time for a change of scenery.
For more years than Carter wanted to count, he had worked for AXE, which, under the guise of Amalgamated Press and Wire Services, was a highly specialized intelligence gathering and special action agency. Anything too tough or dirty for the CIA, the National Security Agency, or the individual military service intelligence establishments was taken on by AXE. And among his peers within AXE, Carter was simply the best. He carried an N3 designation, which meant that when on assignment he was licensed to kill, authorized to carry out what the Soviets called mokrie dela, or wet affairs — assassinations.
As he threaded his way through the crush of late-night passengers in the terminal, he walked with a pronounced limp. He had just come off an assignment during which he had very nearly been killed. The bullet had hit low, doing some damage to the thigh bone in his right leg. AXE doctors, who were some of the best anywhere, had taken him apart and put him back together again, as they had so many times before. It would be months before he regained complete use of his leg, but for now, at least he was ambulatory.
Carter was a man unlike other men, in that within him his sense of survival, his sense of self-preservation, was very much stronger than usual. On more than one occasion he had completed his assignment half dead from wounds or exhaustion. Where other men tried and failed, Carter never failed.
At times he was bored during the gaps between assignments. But at other times, such as this moment, he was looking forward to the next thirty days.
Enforced R&R, it was called. Coming off such an assignment as he had, it was required that he rest for a month or so. Once he was released from the hospital, however, there was no real reason for him to remain in Arizona, so he had signed himself out back to Washington, and had returned. But he wasn’t planning on staying in town very long.
He took the escalator down to incoming baggage, where a few minutes later he retrieved his two leather suitcases and then swung out to the passenger pick-up area.
His timing was just right. A brown Mercedes 450SL, its convertible top up against the chill fall air, pulled up, and the trunk popped open.
Smiling, Carter tossed his bags in the back, slammed the trunk lid, and climbed in the passenger seat, into the arms of a tall, auburn-haired beauty with large, liquid brown eyes and warm, sensuous lips. They kissed deeply for a long moment, until a cab behind them beeped.
They parted, and Sigourney Veltman looked into Carter’s dark eyes. She smiled wanly and shook her head.
“You look like hell, you know,” she said. Her voice was soft, gentle, and held an upper-class Connecticut accent.
Carter grinned. “Not exactly the first words I thought I’d hear,” he said.
“I’ll fix that.”
“Promise?”
“Promise,” she said, laughing. She put the car in gear and pulled smoothly away from the curb, accelerating down the long ramp and out the main airport exit.
Carter lit one of his custom-blended cigarettes, his initials stamped in gold on the filter, and sat back in the thick, soft leather seat. He had to admit to himself that he was tired. The day before, against doctor’s orders, he had taken an exploratory run through AXE’s very difficult desert confidence course. His time was one of his slowest ever, and he had been angry with himself. The course master, however, had been amazed.
“Slow my ass, Carter,” he had shouted at the end. “An ordinary man would have been dead halfway through. What the hell are you trying to prove?”
“I just want to stay alive the next time, Roger,” Carter said.
“Won’t be a next time if you keep this up.”
Carter and Roger Caldwell went back years. The thick-necked, beefy confidence course instructor had at one time been a crack AXE agent. A particularly difficult and dirty assignment had left him with one arm missing, the bones in both of his legs shattered, and only one kidney. They had taken him off active-duty assignments, but his recovery had been nothing short of miraculous. These days he was a tough man. Carter had a great deal of respect for him.
“Get some rest, soak up some sun, drink a little, and get hold of a sweet-talking woman who won’t raise your blood pressure. Then come back in a month and we’ll see if you can challenge the course.”
“I think I’ll do just that,” Carter had said. “And I’ve got the perfect lady in mind to do it with.”
Sigourney was the divorced daughter of Karl Stearnes, a special adviser to the President on security matters. Her ex-husband was a West German. He worked as an attaché at the German embassy in Washington. They weren’t really meant for each other, and the marriage didn’t last long, but they were still friends. The man was now married to a pleasant, down-to-earth Bavarian woman, and they had two children. Sigourney had once told Carter she felt almost like the children’s aunt. It was very strange.
On occasion she did contract work for AXE. With her beauty, her poise, and her obvious intelligence she was a natural at any foreign embassy party, where she could easily gather needed information.
She and Carter had met at one of those functions — which he usually hated — and had immediately clashed. She’d be damned if any man was going to tell her what to do.
Months later they were again on an assignment, and this time the sparks flew even more. Somehow, though, by the end of the evening he had ended up at her apartment and they had made passionate, almost violent love. He always supposed she had been trying to prove something to him that night: that she wasn’t just some empty-headed, convenient woman to be used simply for adornment.
“A penny,” she said, breaking him out of his thoughts.
He looked at her. “I was just thinking back to when we first met.”
She laughed out loud. “Oh, boy, what a bastard you were. Couldn’t tell you a damned thing. You were king of the walk... at least that’s how you tried to set yourself up.”
“You know, I damned near turned you over my knee right there in front of the Belgian ambassador and spanked you.”
“If you had tried, I would have gouged your eyes out,” she shot back.
They both laughed again.
“I’m glad you could break free on such short notice,” he said softly.
She glanced at him, and reached out and touched his cheek with her fingers. “Weather’s been lousy around here lately. Where’d you say it was we were going?”
“St. Anne’s Island Resort. It’s a tiny private island in the Caribbean. In the Turks and Caicos. We’ll have it all to ourselves, and a small staff.”
“Sounds nice, Nick,” she said, and she glanced again at him, this time with a more critical eye. “You do look like hell. But we’ve got a month to make you all better.”