Nick Carter
The Vulcan Disaster
Dedicated to The Men of the Secret Services of the United States of America
Chapter One
They were still calling it Saigon that day. They wouldn’t for long. Within thirty hours the town would have not only new rulers but a new name — Ho Chi Minh City — and it’d be full of a lot of new things: new troops, new prisoners, new faces directing traffic. And, most noticeable of all, lots of new pairs of black pajamas. The women of the city had started sewing them when we started moving out. One might call the outfit their trousseau. Only they weren’t getting married. They were getting raped. It was still Saigon, after all, and it was a hellhole. I couldn’t wait to get out of it.
Business comes first in my racket, though, and I couldn’t leave until it was done. The wise thing to do, then, was to ignore the Cong guns banging away down the road, the scattered bursts of M-16 fire in the streets, the sounds of panic below the hotel window. Four divisions of enemy troops were reported only eighteen miles down Highway 1. I’d even seen freelance photographers and wire-service stringers bumming a ride to the Embassy, and they were usually the last rats to desert the ship. But me? I had a job to do, and that was that.
So let the weapons carriers, loaded down with anxious people, go chugging past the window, their shocks clunking audibly at every pothole. Let the refugees file past the hotel door, dragging their miserable belongings, running the gauntlet of teen-aged troops who roamed the streets, armed and leaderless, sticking up Americans and affluent-looking Vietnamese for cigarettes. They didn’t concern me. Only one man in Saigon concerned me.
So, legs crossed, back to the wall, I sat in the big plush chair in Walter Corbin’s apartment, three floors up in the Hotel Grand-Bretagne, and watched the girl across the room from me slowly taking off all of her clothes.
You could, if you liked, blame the commotion outside for the fact that neither of us was giving his undivided attention to what he was doing. But each of us had a better reason. I had one eye on the door, for one thing. And she had one eye on the cocked Luger sitting lightly at the ready in my right hand.
Those were, after all, the principal actors in the little scenario I’d sketched out for myself; only one of the participants was missing. The gun’s name was Wilhelmina; the girl’s, she’d said, was Helene. The 9mm bullet in the chamber was nameless, but its intended recipient was not. His name was Walter Corbin, and I was going to kill him the moment he stepped through the door.
The girl? Hardly more than furniture, I kept telling myself. Corbin’s girl. She called herself Helene Van Khanh, but the dossier had called her Phuong. She preferred the French style, she’d told me. But that was before the Cong had showed signs of winning. Now, I was sure, she was having second thoughts. She’d stand a lot better chance of staying alive if she forgot all about the fancy manners and fancier tastes she’d picked up at the Lycée Marie Curie and dug down into the hope chest for a nice pair of those anonymous-looking, soon to be ubiquitous, black drawers. Unless, of course, Walter could manage to sneak her out of the country before everything collapsed.
And that wouldn’t be too easy. To do that he’d have to kill me. And I take a lot of killing.
The girl was looking at me now, her full lips curving in a smile that told me she was more than a little turned on by what she was doing. She’d folded her smart French jacket and put it neatly on the bedside table. That left a lot of her visible in the smashing cut-to-fit cocktail dress with a top that was breathtakingly brief, showing off softly rounded shoulders and upper arms and letting me have a look at a lot of all-over tan. The breasts beneath the thin cloth were large and there was nothing but that clinging bodice, with its refreshing lack of interior framework between her and me. And she was feeding it to me a little at a time.
She sat lightly on the bed and took a deep breath that showed me even more of her. “Why don’t you relax, Mr. Carter?” she said.
“I am relaxed,” I said, looking her sharply in the eye. But I knew, and she knew, that I wasn’t. Not since the moment she’d said my name. The dossier had strongly implied she wouldn’t know anything about me at all except the fact — which my actions would make quite obvious — that I was somebody who meant Walter Corbin no good. “So go ahead and do your number on me,” I drawled. “I’ll probably like it. But when you’re finished I’ll still kill him anyway.”
I would, too, I thought, watching her slip off the delicate, expensive Italian pumps and stretch long, exquisitely formed legs. She wasn’t wearing stockings; the off-white polish on her toenails gleamed like pearls against that beautifully tanned skin. “Do you ever dress Vietnamese?” I said, changing hands on the gun. “You’d look nice in an ao dai.” Or out of one, I thought, giving the legs the once-over. When I looked up I caught her eyes on me, mocking, confident.
She stood and reached for the zipper at her side.
I cocked an ear at the door. Was that a sound in the hall?
The eyes, dark and liquid, were still on me with their searching, insolent gaze. A slender and delicate hand held the dress to her bosom as the other slowly tugged at the full-length zipper. I saw a flash of warm naked skin at her thigh. And she felt the air on her body. Her eyes were slightly out of focus; she was beginning to breathe hard. Her small pink tongue darted across her already moist lips. That left hand, polished nails glowing, held the dress to her breasts; it was all that held it to her bare flesh.
She took a deep breath and stepped out of it, letting the soft folds fall about her feet, holding the classic pose, one foot flat, the other raised on the toes. And it was time for me to take a deep breath.
I was getting a quick and comprehensive look at the kind of body you don’t see every day. Deeply, goldenly tanned in every part, with soft, dark-nippled breasts that jutted pertly up at me; with generous hips flaring below a tiny waist; with long legs as smooth as ivory, slim and shapely; with, at the point where they came together, a flash of curling, sensual black...
Then I heard the sound she’d heard. The light whistle at the end of the hall. The footsteps, coming closer, closer.
I got up in a hell of a hurry, the pistol ready in my hand. And when I dived for her, sex was the last thing on my mind. The free hand that might, under more promising circumstances, have come to caress, went for her mouth. I had perhaps a second to shut her up. And I was a second too late.
“Walter!” she screamed. “Walter, run! I...” And then I had her down on the bed, pinned with the gun hand, the other shoving a pillow into her face.
But he’d heard. And now the footsteps were twice as loud, and they were going down the hall away from me at one hell of a clip.
“Jesus,” I muttered. And then I said a couple of other things. I took the pillow from her face just long enough to show her the disgusted expression on my kisser. Then I laid Wilhelmina alongside her temple with a practiced swing that landed in just the right place with just the right amount of force. She went out like a light.
Fine, I thought. At least I can do one thing right, I was across the room and out the door before I could get another peek at that golden body. I reminded myself to say goodbye sometime.
The hall was empty in one direction. In the other, all I could see was a tallish man, grey-haired and with a military rigidity to his stance, standing before the elevator. He had a black patch over the eye that faced away from me, and as he turned my way I saw that he was missing his left arm.
“Did somebody go by here?” I said. I’d stashed Wilhelmina, but I still must have looked as if I meant business; the one good eye widened slightly, the brow lifted.