She took the gun. "I'll do that. Get on inside." But the man tried to intervene, grabbing me from behind. I struck backward with my elbow, scoring on his solar plexus. Cowed, he made no further protest.
We entered. The interior was not well kept; it was a vast barnlike place, with big wooden beams supporting the roof and flaking yellow paint on the walls. There were boxes with books all about. One of the rooms we passed was lined from floor to ceiling on all walls with books, and I could see sparrows nesting in the rafters. There was also an interior patio. Evidently this house was used as a temporary warehouse for literary supplies.
Hidden behind stacked boxes were some unmarked crates.
Ilunga put away her gun and handed me a crowbar. "Take a look." I wedged in the point and began to pry. The lid of the first crate squeaked up. I pried again, gaining leverage.
"What the hell is this?" a voice snapped behind me. I froze. I knew that voice. Mustapha! How soon he had come! He must have been only a few blocks away.
"All I want to know," Ilunga said evenly, "is whether this honky is in this with us. So I'm showing him the cargo for his boat. We can't conceal it without his cooperation."
"He's involved now," Mustapha muttered, covering me with his gun.
"Not before?"
He faced her angrily. "Woman, why did you do it? He was my friend, once. It was bad enough lying to him so as to trap you and your brother; it'll be worse having to kill him!" He shook his head grimly. His hand tightened on the gun. "I'm sorry, Jason. I really am. I'm going to have nightmares about this. But there's no way out—not with the Hyena."
He meant it. I braced for action, wondering which side Ilunga was on now. If I had miscalculated—
"Let's take a look at that cargo first," Ilunga said. Her right hand was on her head, her left on her hip. A large jangly metal bracelet was on her left that I hadn't noticed before. It was not her way to wear ostentatious jewelry.
"I can shoot him before you move," Mustapha said. He was suffering from no illusions about her propensities, either. "Then I'd have to shoot you—if you move."
"You'll only get off one shot," she said. I knew that was true, too; she'd have her knife out of her hair and into his body while he was firing at me.
But Mustapha didn't seem fazed. "You may not recognize my weapon," he said. I turned, slowly, to face him. He held a peculiar revolver with a bulbous barrel. "It is a cyanide pellet gun. The pellets penetrate the skin and cause instant death, no matter where they hit. The Russian secret police use these, and they are extremely effective."
"I recognize it," she said. "But you still won't have time to aim twice."
Mustapha nodded. "I don't need to aim at all well. Chances are fifty-fifty I could squeeze off the second after your knife hit me, and touch you somewhere. But I see no purpose in having three deaths. So it's an impasse. I'll compromise. We'll look at the cargo. But it won't change a thing."
I went back to work on the crate, feeling an itch on that spot on my back the cyanide pellet would strike. What would this accomplish? I had been exonerated, but there was still a gun trained on me—a more deadly one than before.
I unloaded the crate, then another. What a cache of weapons!
All captured American equipment. Naturally, I thought; Soviet-made weapons would be immediately suspicious, betraying the true origin of the "revolution." The first crate contained blocks of C-3 plastic explosive. The second had detonator caps, rolls of fuse, and similar apparatus. I handled these with extreme care, knowing how dangerous they were. The third had fragmentation hand grenades and incendiary devices. The fourth had M3 machine guns with silencer barrels, .45 pistols, and similar weapons. There was plenty of ammunition in the last crate.
I had a bright idea. I picked up a detonator cap in one hand, and a box of C-3 explosive in the other. "Guess what will happen," I said, "if anything happens to me."
"He's right," Ilunga said, and I knew that this was what she had had in mind. "Those caps are very touchy, and there's enough plastic to blow apart this whole city block."
Actually, it was a bluff. I didn't know much about plastic explosive, but suspected that the caps had to be properly prepared and inserted in the plastic before they would set it off. Ilunga surely knew this. But Mustapha didn't.
Mustapha nodded. "I can kill him, you can kill me, and he can kill us all. It doesn't really change anything."
"So we'll chat bit," Ilunga said evenly. "Maybe we can come to some sort of agreement that isn't quite as fatal." She glanced at me. "What do you think of it?"
"If these are destined for the States, it's illegal," I said. "And I'll bet they're not for the benefit of Blakrev or any other black group. These guns would be for American communists. Why should Fidel Castro arm the blacks, when communism's real aim is to take over all the world—including the blacks?"
"What would you do with these, then?" she asked.
"I'd destroy them!" I said. "And if you knew where your real interest lies, you'd help me."
"Would you destroy them, if we let you? By your own hand?"
"Yes!" I said. "I'd set fire to this house."
"Would you?"
What was she driving at? I shook my head. "No. I can't destroy property wantonly. But I could carry the weapons out to the sea and dump them."
"Listen, man, I can jostle that cargo as well as you can," Mustapha said. "So can she. My gun, her knife don't make any difference." He holstered his cyanide pistol and approached the cache. "But this looks like real cool iron."
I relaxed. He was right. Any action could destroy us all, now that the crates were open and spread out. We could not afford to fight; we all could lose. It wasn't just the plastic; the grenades didn't need primers to explode.
Ilunga's hand dropped from her head. "Yes," she agreed. Mustapha picked up a rifle and broke it open so as to fit a clip into it. Oil dripped, from it. "Hey!" he exclaimed. "They ship them oiled, stupid," Ilunga said. "They're still usable."
"I know that! But there's something inside it." He fished out a packet and twisted it open. White powder spilled out, falling to the floor.
I stared. "That just might be-"
"Horse!" Ilunga said.
"Smack!" Mustapha echoed, shocked.
"Heroin!" I said. "So that's what your boss is really shipping." Ilunga put one finger in the powder and touched it to her tongue. She nodded affirmatively. "Pure shit."
Mustapha drew out a clip of ammunition, then several more. "Look here!" he exclaimed.
We looked. The crate had only a thin layer of ammo on top; the main part of it consisted of plastic bags of powder. "Twenty million dollars street value!" Mustapha breathed. Of course there was no immediate way to verify this estimate, but I had a hunch it was close enough.
"The Hyena," I said, working it out as I spoke. "He's using Blakrev as a cover for the really lucrative trade. Heroin. He doesn't give a damn about black revolution. Hell, he's white himself. He just wants the blacks to take the rap if the scheme is exposed. He doesn't even touch the guns himself."
Ilunga's head lifted. "What's that?" She ran to the cobwebbed window. "The G-2!" she cried.
"They traced us here!" I said. "We've got to run!" I knew a fight would be futile; the G-2 would quickly have a small army of reinforcements.
"There's no percentage in this," Mustapha said. "Let's us call it quits. You two get lost; I'll talk to the G-2."
I didn't know which side he was on, now. He was no drug pusher, but he might still be loyal to the Hyena. In the circumstance, it seemed best not to argue.
Ilunga and I ran out the back way. But the Cuban G-2 was marvelously efficient. A spotlight blinded us. "ALTO!" a voice cried. I halted, knowing better than to attempt to break in such straits. But Ilunga staggered and fell to the ground. She rolled back, her legs coming up, her thighs spreading. She was wearing a short skirt so that her legs were exposed directly to the glare of the spotlight, right up to the panties.
"Coño!" the voice excl
aimed. The light wavered.
No wonder. She had no panties on. She was giving the G-2 an eyeful seldom offered outside of a harem.
Then her arm moved. Something glinted in the beam, and there was a hideous scream. The light slewed off into the sky. She had hurled one of her little shuriken at the voice. Now I realized that her heavy bracelet was not a hanging geegaw; the decoration was a deadly throwing knife, ready to pull and heave. I, like Mustapha, had thought her hair was the only place she kept such weapons, a potentially fatal misjudgment.
We ran again. I let Ilunga lead the way, as she obviously knew this area far better than I did. She jumped a low iron fence into the porch of a neighboring house, forced open the old wooden door, and ran up some rickety iron stairs. We leaped across the roof until we reached the side of a modern apartment building. There was a fire escape, and we climbed it. Then a short run, a death-defying leap to a nearby building, and we were in another city block and out of reach of the G-2, for we were among the maze-like warrens of the azotas, upper roofs. We made another short run and jumped across a narrow street, to fall on a smaller building in front. We were, I discovered in mid-air, some eight stories high; there was an auto moving far below, its headlights spearing forward through the dark canyon of the street. I was frankly terrified.
Ilunga came to a small washing shed in the azotea. The door was ajar and we crawled inside. The space was constricted, and we were practically on top of each other. The roof was actually open to the sky, but were wires strung across, full of hanging laundry that provided some concealment from the view of plane or helicopter. "We'll be safe here," she said. "For several hours, at least. Dogs can't trace us. I know a better place, when it's safe to move."
"Good enough," I said. "Actually, I should be able to talk to the Cuba authorities. I know one of their militia women—army women, I mean."
"I saw her. You mean she's your friend?"
I made myself comfortable beside her, sharing the limited cover of the laundry. Ironically, a pair of feminine panties hung right above my face. "Don't act shocked. I know lots of women, and some are quite attractive."
"She came as your friend? Not to snoop around the boat?"
"So that was it!" I said. "You saw her uniform, and thought the Cuban authorities were after the arms!"
She nodded in the dark. "I didn't know it was you until I saw you fight."
"But if this shipment was a communist plot, why should the G-2 bother it?"
"That's one of the questions," she said. "Betrayals happen. Maybe the G-2 was coming to make sure the shipment went through. I stayed to watch, just in case."
If so, we would get little comfort from the Cuban authorities. We had tried to destroy that shipment, and certainly we would expose the presence of the heroin. But it could be; I had not been in trouble until I got near that arms cache, and then trouble had come looking for me, as though the G-2 had known all along where the cache was. "So you were trying to get the arms shipment through on schedule."
"Uh-uh, honky. I was going through the motions, so the Hyena wouldn't kill my brother."
"Then why did you bother to talk with me? The worst I could have done was expose the shipment, and you didn't care about that."
She was silent for a time. "Do you know how he died?"
There was a slight accent on "he," and somehow it telegraphed her meaning. "Kobi Chija, my fiancée's father? He was ambushed by the Demons in a taxi." It was a bitter memory, seemingly irrelevant, but I knew that Ilunga had a purpose in bringing it up.
"I learned the details later," she said. "I thought you would want to know, but we never had a chance to talk."
True enough. Ilunga had been a Demon then, and she and I had been enemies in our fashion. We hadn't talked much when we met. And I had been set to marry Chiyako, beautiful daughter of the Chinese Northern Shaolin kung fu instructor, Kobi Chija.
"The Demons wanted to recruit you," Ilunga said. "They thought that if they captured your fiancée, you would have to join them. So the order went out to bring them both in, father and daughter. Alive, because they knew you would never be swayed by more killing. With the girl hostage—"
I began to see the relevance. Ilunga's brother had been kidnapped and held hostage to her cooperation, and I had seemed to be implicated. Before, it had been my fiancée Chiyako kidnapped, to put pressure on me, and I had thought Ilunga had been party to that. I had been ready to kill her. Yes I could understand her feelings, this time around.
"So they set an ambush for Kobi and Chiyako," she continued. And I listened intently, for this dreadful knowledge was vital to me. I had had enormous respect for the old kung fu sifu, and I had loved his daughter. As Ilunga spoke, in the gloom of that lonely rooftop refuge, I visualized the nightmare as it had happened.
Chiyako, dark-eyed, fair-skinned, lovely despite her bandaged breast, sat in the taxi beside her father. A treacherous broken-bottle attack had almost torn off her left breast and put her in the hospital, but now she was coming home.
The taxi stopped for a light. Suddenly another car pulled up beside it, and a gun poked out from its right window into the face of the cabbie. "Stay where you are!" a harsh voice said.
Kobi looked, and saw the blazing orange eyeballs of a Demon high on Kill-13. For an instant the Shaolin sifu tensed for action. But he knew he could not act in time to prevent that gun from going off. The cabbie would die, and so, probably, would Chiyako. No victory would be worth such a price.
So Kobi surrendered. He and his daughter got out of the cab, which drove off with alacrity the moment the Demons gave the word. Now it would be possible to fight, for there were no more than six Demons. But again he refrained, for Chiyako, though versed in martial art and possessed of discipline and courage, was not well. She could still die in the fracas, and it was not worth that risk. Also, he hesitated to initiate violence; he was a man of peace, and perhaps these Demons intended no harm. That chance was slight, after the threats they had made against him, but so long as it was a possibility...
"Into the car," the Demon-leader ordered. "Her, not you, chink!" He shoved Kobi back roughly.
Kobi almost acted then. He saw his daughter pause, on the verge of crippling the Demon with a swift blow. They could put away two of the men before the others reacted, then take out two more in the next few seconds. But the odds were still adverse. Only a fool attacked a man with a gun. He did not want to be separated from his daughter. But until he was sure of their intent, or had opportunity act without risk to Chiyako...
So he desisted, and she, acknowledging his decision, got into the first car. Kobi was taken to the second. He sat in the back seat between two Demons, with two more in front. The first car sped away.
The Demon to his right drew a knife 'Now, old man..." the addict said. Suddenly Kobi was sure they intended to kill him and use his daughter to nullify Jason Striker. There was no mercy in them. First the capture, then the separation, then murder.
They had taken the old man's acquiescence for cowardice. Had any of them fought him before, they would have known better. But none of them had, for the simple reason that no Demons had survived their previous encounter with him. Now, at least he could act without imperiling Chiyako; the Demons in her car would not know what transpired here until too late. The addicts, in separating father and daughter, had made a tactical mistake.
The knife was hovering near his face. The Demon was grinning; he was going to entertain himself with a little innocent torture before finishing the job. Demons felt very little pain themselves, but their heightened perceptions could appreciate it in others. No doubt they liked to see blood flow, to hear the music of a victim's screams of agony as the mutilation proceeded. Demons had little sexual appetite; their drives were sublimated in sadism.
Kobi had, over the past few weeks, searched for some redeeming feature of Kill-13 addiction, but apart from the immediate physical lift, he had found none. The humane qualities of the addict seemed to be suppressed, the bad ones ex
aggerated, in a kind of Jekyll/Hyde metamorphosis. Even common sense and proper caution were blunted by the drug, as now.
Kobi suddenly drove sideways with his elbow. It was a Chinese atemi blow. Its force, crushing muscle and nerve against bone with deadly precision, permanently incapacitated the Demon. Even without pain, the man could not withstand the destruction of his nervous system, and his body reacted automatically, falling forward. Simultaneously, Kobi swung his hand past the knife of the other and connected to his temple. In that hand the old man held a tiny weapon, overlooked by the Demons: a yawara stick, like a hardwood dumbbell grooved to fit the fingers. Though only a few inches long it provided a hard surface-and under the force of that blow, the Demon's temple crumpled like an eggshell. The knife dropped from abruptly flaccid fingers.
Then Kobi struck with his yawara to the neck of the driver, the wood jamming where the neck joined the head. The blow caused a massive hemorrhage of the cerebellum. The driver died instantly.
The car swerved and crashed against the curb, but the fourth Demon, with his drug-induced reflexes, had time to fire his gun. Even as the sound of the shot blasted in the confines of the car, Kobi was going down, his forehead smashing into the crotch of the Demon on his left.
The car bucked over the curb and sideswiped a building on the right. Glass shattered; the side stove in. The Demon with the gun was caught in that crush as the car slowed to a stop. From the wreckage only Kobi emerged, for only he had been trained to survive such violence. His right arm was broken, and there was a slash down his back where the bullet had grazed him. Only in storybooks and bad novels do heroes tackle superior odds and emerge unscathed, particularly where guns are involved. In life there are wounds for the just as well as the unjust.
But there was a third Demon car, behind. It screeched to a stop. Kobi ran for it—not away, for there could be no escape from their bullets—but toward the car. Two Demons scrambled out and started shooting at him, but there was no time to aim properly, and this time he actually did beat the odds and reached them without sustaining another injury. He bowled one over with his shoulder, then with his good hand grasped the throat of the other. Kobi was an expert in Northern Shaolin kung fu, the most deadly of the complex of Chinese martial arts. Though he always sought peace, he could, literally, kill a man with the strike of one finger. When he got his hand on the Demon, that Demon was doomed.