So they had a little difficulty getting in, Nick thought grimly. But they’d made it. Some of them. He wondered just how many.
He panned the scope from one side of the valley to the other, looking for a sign of life. There was none, but for a little ripple on the surface of the quiet pool at the far side of the valley, and a narrow stone stairway hacked out of the crude rock by the hand of man. At the foot of it there were two almost-human figures, but they were deader than the stone itself. Nick stared at them through the glass and felt slightly revolted. Their heads had been blown off. Grenades, it looked like. It was impossible to make out for certain what they had been before being smeared across the valley floor, but their mutilated bodies were wearing what looked like Cuban Army fatigues.
And that was all the telescope could tell him, except that flares had been used to light the way into and across the valley and that there was nothing to stop him walking straight in through the open door.
He padded silently across the soft damp grass, past the dead Chinese soldier with the big hole in his chest, and into a tunnellike hall. In the absolute darkness his foot kicked against something soft and bulky. Nick flicked on his flashlight. The body of a big-bellied monk lay at his feet, its black cowl sticky with blood from the bullet hole in the man’s head. A second monk lay sprawled several feet away, his cowl ripped away from his face and a look of outrage in his dead and staring eyes. An ancient blunderbuss lay on the floor beside him. And there was something else.
A Chinese in bloodied olive drabs was slowly raising himself from the floor and the gun in his wavering hand was pointing at Nick’s chest.
Wilhelmina spoke once with a muted thunk of sound. The man sighed softly and dropped like a weighted sack.
Nick picked his way between the bodies down the passage toward another sound, a distant one that suddenly pierced the stillness and rose into a shriek. He turned a corner into another passage, this one lit by the flickering light of a single candle in a holder on the wall, and stepped over another dead monk. The shriek became a frenzied string of recognizable words. He listened as he padded on, disgusted by the carnage around him and chilled by the madness in the shrieking voice.
“Every one of you will die!” he heard. “One after the other, and then you, last of all, but slowly — slowly, slowly, horribly! Tell me where it is, you son of Satan!”
Nick stepped over yet another body and stopped outside an open door. What he saw beyond it was a scene from hell.
Everything that Loves Must Die
“It is you who are the son of Satan,” the deep voice said quietly. The black robe was torn, the face was bared of its black cowl and streaked with blood, but the big man’s expression was calm. “What was left here once by evil men will be given up only when the people of my country come to claim it.”
He stood in a room that only hours before must have been a peaceful, simple chapel, facing a tall Chinese who had made it into a charnel house. The rough stone floor was strewn with the dead and dying, Chinese in drab fatigues and monks in their black robes. On each of several wooden pews was a living monk, each with his robe torn down to the waist, and each with his hands stretched above his head and tied to a wooden armrest. A sullen-faced Chinese stood over one of them, a curved knife in his hand; a machine-gunner stood in the pulpit with his weapon trained upon the supine men; a third figure in olive drabs stood several paces from Tsing-fu Shu and the only monk left standing. He, like Tsing-fu himself, was armed with a snub-nosed gun, and he also carried a carbine.
Nick clamped himself against the wall outside the door and craned his head toward the horror beyond, noting each position, every weapon, every detail of the scene.
Machine-gun, carbine, two pistols, one knife and possibly another gun in a hidden holster, and one belt-load of grenades. And four men to use them.
Versus one Luger, one stiletto, and one gas pellet that made no distinctions between friend and foe. Plus one squad of women too far away to help and whose presence anyway could only be an added complication.
The madman was still screaming at the tall, calm monk.
“Do you know what it is to die with a knife grinding into your belly?” he shrieked. “Do you think that these robed fools of yours will enjoy it?”
“Kill me, if you must kill,” the monk said calmly. “I pray that you will spare the rest of my poor brothers, for they know nothing.”
“You pray!” Tsing-fu howled with something like laughter.
“Yes, pray to me, you fool, and see if that will save them. Show me where that cache is hidden, or watch your ‘poor brothers’ swim in their own blood.”
“They are not afraid to die, and neither am I. It is better that there should be an end to this.”
“An end, yes.” Tsing-fu’s face twisted into a hideous mask of sadistic malice. “You will beg for the end, each one of you in turn. It is not yet the end. Mao-Pei!”
The man with the knife and the grenade belt looked up and grunted.
“Begin carving, if you please.”
The machine-gunner first, Nick decided swiftly, or there would be a spray of death across this room that would truly be the end for all but Tsing-fu and his men. Nick flicked his eyes away from the machine-gunner for a second and saw Mao-Pei bring his knife down against the bare chest of the nearest supine monk and begin a slow slice into the flesh and down toward the belly.
“He will be slowly disembowelled,” Tsing-fu said pleasantly.
The knife described a curving, agonizing path through the supine man’s gut.
Nick raised Wilhelmina and sighted carefully. The machine-gunner in the pulpit was watching the grim proceedings with such ghoulish fascination that he had taken his finger from the trigger and was resting the big gun lightly on the lectern. But Nick’s trigger-finger was already squeezing, and Wilhelmina’s elongated nose was pointing steadily at the inviting little scene between the gunner’s eyes. Wilhelmina spat once with her dull, thunking sound and sent her lethal message straight home in a blast that splashed blood and brains against the pulpit wall. She was already homing in on her next target as the machine gun clattered to the chapel floor and the gunner folded out of sight.
Next — the knifer with the grenades, the fellow who was carefully carving up the monk who could no longer contain his pain in silence.
There was a split second of confusion as heads swung toward the pulpit and the knifer froze. Nick grabbed the opportunity and moved forward rapidly in a low running crouch that had him ducking behind a pew in that same second, with the Luger stabbing toward the profile of the sullen-faced man with the knife. Wilhelmina spat once, twice; skimmed the back of the thick head with her first kiss and sliced away the top of it with her next. Nick was running again by the time the body dropped. Bullets sang past his head and Tsing-fu was screaming something incomprehensible.
Two down and two to go. The carbine next — but he no longer had the advantage of surprise and there was little cover. Tsing-fu was near the altar; he ducked behind the only statue in the chapel, probably a figure of its patron saint, and fired as he screamed. But the fellow with the carbine was in the clear. Unfortunately he was busy spilling the contents of his pistol in Nick’s direction, and his aim was getting better all the time.
Nick dropped down low behind a fallen monk’s body and squeezed off one shot that missed by inches. His human shield jerked with the impact of the answering fire; he sent one more fast shot toward the altar, heard it spit uselessly into either the statue or the wall, and he threw himself sideways underneath a pew. Both guns were trained inexorably upon him now. The last shot had singed him with its closeness, and Brother Whatsisname, still calm and proud and unafraid, had somehow gotten in his line of fire. Nick slithered quickly down a row of seats, briefly hidden by a clutter of wooden slats and bodies, and bobbed up yards away from his previous position with Wilhelmina poised for action. Tsing-fu Shu — he assumed that was who the fellow was — was still pumping shots from behind the statue, and Brother Whatsisname was still in line— no, he wasn’t…!