Death Island Read online

  Annotation

  When angry natives attack a secret U.S. satellite station on a remote Pacific island, Nick Carter goes undercover to find out why. The island's French governor can't be bled for information, but his gorgeous young wife is infinitely more helpful…

  She leads Carter to a nearby island-and a tribe of cannibals thirsty for American blood. Someone is inciting them to murder-and to annihilation of the satellite station. It's up to N3 to put a stop to the bloody uprisings, but first he'll have to escape a perilous trap-and do battle with an unexpected and deadly foe.

  * * *

  Nick CarterPrologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Epilogue

  * * *

  Nick Carter

  Killmaster

  Death Island

  Dedicated to the men of the Secret Service of the United States of America

  Prologue

  Handley Duvall stepped outside from the Barbarossa Hotel on the South Pacific island of Hiva Faui and squinted up at the tropical sun as he mopped his brow with his handkerchief. This certainly wasn't Boston. It was at least a hundred degrees in the shade, with a humidity that nearly matched.

  The electricity had gone out again in the downtown section of the capital city, something that happened at least twice a week, so even in the hotel barroom there had been little or no relief.

  Duvall had been promoted last month to mid-shift foreman, which gave him the privilege of hotfooting it into town once a week for the "booze and treat" run. Booze for his shift for the week, and the treat was a visit to Madame Leone's, next door to the hotel.

  This afternoon he wondered, however, if either was worth a damn. The booze was watered down and overpriced, and without air conditioning the girls at Madame Leone's would be somewhat less than appealing.

  His stomach growled, a sharp wave of heartburn rising up at the back of his throat.

  "Christ," he swore. He hated this place.

  He started next door, when he happened to look across the street to the government-run liquor store. Yun Lo, the Chinese shift boy from the site who had come into town to help Duvall, was loading the five cases of booze into the jeep. Only there were several Chinese standing around him. He was passing out bottles of the booze to his friends in exchange for other bottles that he put into the cases, which he then loaded into the jeep.

  The goddamned kid is cheating me, Duvall thought. The booze was watered down, all right, but not by the liquor store. It was being done by Yun Lo and probably by all the other Chinese who worked at the receiver site as well.

  Duvall, a large man who was over six feet tall and weighed at least two hundred pounds, could feel his blood pressure rising as he hitched up his khakis and charged across the street, the sweat pouring off him, his muscles flexing.

  "Hey, you son of a bitch!" he shouted.

  Yun Lo and the other Chinese looked up, startled, as did a half-dozen other pedestrians nearby.

  One of the Chinese — it looked to Duvall like a woman — dropped the bottle she had been holding, and it shattered on the sidewalk as she sprinted down the street.

  The others scattered as well, except for Yun Lo. He stood next to the jeep, smiling uncertainly and bowing repeatedly.

  Duvall smashed his fist into the man's left shoulder, sending him skidding up against the jeep.

  "You bastard! You son of a bitch!" Duvall screamed, charging after Yun Lo, who stepped aside.

  Suddenly Duvall was upside down, and then he was lying on his back on the sidewalk, his head throbbing where he had hit it.

  "What the hell…?" he began, and he looked up into Yun Lo's eyes. The young man was no longer smiling. He stood in a half crouch, his eyes flashing, his teeth bared.

  For just an instant something in the back of his mind told Duvall to watch himself, to hold back. Hell, he had been an All-Star halfback at Iowa State. But he was damned mad. He had another eighteen months of this place… another year and a half of pure, unadulterated crap to put up with, and already he was sick and tired of it all.

  He scrambled to his feet and charged the slightly built Oriental again, swinging as he came. Something very sharp and almost hot pierced his side, causing him to pull back and to the left.

  There was no one out on the street now. Half a block away from them was the town square and the police station. Up the hill was the governor's mansion. But they were alone here.

  Duvall stood staring stupidly at Yun Lo. The Chinese man held a long, wicked-looking knife from which blood was dripping all the way to the haft.

  "You stupid bastard…" Duvall said.

  Yun Lo turned and unhurriedly walked away. The knife clattered into the gutter as he disappeared around the comer, and a weakness descended over the American, who looked down at the great gash in his side from which his own blood was pumping.

  He had been stabbed. Yun Lo had actually stabbed him. Christ! This is ridiculous! Electrical engineers don't get stabbed on obscure islands in the South Pacific. Professor Albertson never told him anything like that at Iowa State.

  Duvall staggered sideways to the jeep, then shuffled around to the driver's side and managed to climb up behind the wheel. He held his left hand firmly against the wide wound.

  Apply direct pressure. Wasn't that what his high school Red Cross first aid instructor had told them to do?

  Somehow he managed to dig out his keys and get the jeep started. He never thought about the hospital around the comer as he pulled away from the curb and accelerated jerkily through town, going out to the seacoast highway that led fifteen miles to the other side of the island where the Hiva Faui Satellite Tracking and Receiving Station was located.

  He passed a couple of trucks on the way out, and a lot of pedestrian traffic heading out to the copra drying pits and presses. But the farther he went, the weaker he became, so that after a while he was having a lot of trouble keeping the jeep on the narrow blacktopped road.

  He had been stabbed. Even now it was almost impossible to believe.

  Blood was leaking between his fingers, down the side of his hip and leg, but the bleeding had definitely slowed down.

  Duvall glanced at the wound, and the jeep suddenly swerved to the right. At the last moment he looked up as the jeep crashed through a thick tangle of brush in the ditch beside the road and crashed into a young palm tree.

  For what seemed like an eternity, the American sat in the jeep, his head against the steering wheel, his entire world going round and round. It was as bad as being drunk, the fleeting thought crossed his mind.

  After a time he looked up. He was in the middle of a goddamned jungle.

  Duvall tried to think. He remembered passing the main copra processing sheds, and then he had safely negotiated the hairpin turns around the cliffs. It meant he was not too far from the site. Perhaps a mile or two at the most.

  He pushed open the door and stumbled out, then pulled his way to the back of the jeep. He could see the road about ten feet above him. It seemed like a thousand feet.

  He started up but fell back against the jeep, his right arm flopping against the cases of booze. He looked back, then opened one of the cases, pulled out a bottle, and opened it. He tipped it up and took a deep drink. Immediately he spat it out. It had been watered down. Probably with tea and iodine. The tea for color, the iodine for bite.

  He threw the bottle aside and opened a second, this one from a back row. He took a cautious drink. It was whiskey. He took another deep drin
k, his head spinning around for a second or two, and then he started back up toward the road.

  Twice he stumbled and fell back in great pain. Each time, he took another deep drink, then started up, finally reaching the road as the tropical sun began to go down and the voracious mosquitoes came out.

  Immediately he started up the gentle incline, staggering from one side of the road to the other.

  Once he thought he heard a siren sounding from above, and he stopped and held his breath. But the wind was blowing up from the sea, and after a while he started up again, not at all sure he had heard anything.

  * * *

  It was fully dark when he came around the last bend in the access road, in full view of the radomes and the four huge satellite tracking dishes. He was numb by now, his head buzzing. He had long since discarded the whiskey bottle, most of its contents gone. But he knew that what he was seeing was all wrong. Terribly wrong.

  There were fires everywhere throughout the tracking site, and now he could definitely hear sirens, and something else… gunfire. He was sure it was gunfire!

  "Jesus…" he swore out loud, his voice hoarse. and he redoubled his efforts, hobbling up the road.

  As he got closer he could definitely hear gunshots, and he could hear people shouting and screaming.

  The site was under attack. But by whom? It didn't make sense. Nothing that had happened that day made any sense to Duvall.

  The main gate was lying half off its hinges, the odor of cordite very strong, but the gunshots and cries finally ended. The siren, however, kept on wailing as Duvall cautiously approached.

  There were several bodies lying on the blacktop. Some of them were dark-skinned and clothed only in loincloths. But two of them, sprawled near the guardhouse, wore khaki uniforms.

  Duvall hurried over to those bodies and turned one of them over.

  Christ! It was Wolchek! They had played poker together in the group last night.

  Duvall looked up. What had happened here? What in God's name had happened?

  He picked up Wolchek's.45 automatic, awkwardly checked to make sure there was a round in the chamber, and he cocked the hammer back and entered the tracking site. Suddenly the alarm cut off and he froze.

  The silence was eerie. There were several bodies on the road ahead of him and a burned-out truck. Smoke rose from a building farther up the hill, but the dishes and radomes seemed intact.

  Someone came running down the hill from Administration, and Duvall swiveled around, bringing up the.45. But he realized it was one of the technicians. Then his knees gave way beneath him.

  What is going on, he thought as he fell to the roadway. What in hell is happening here…?

  One

  The azure sky out to sea seemed to merge with the fairy-tale blue of the Mediterranean as the yacht Marybelle worked her way northeast up the coast of France from Cannes to her winter berth at Monaco.

  It was still early, before noon, as Nick Carter, clad in bathing trunks and a short terry cloth robe, emerged onto the afterdeck where the stewards had laid out champagne and breakfast.

  "Good morning, Monsieur Carter," Henri-Rieves, the assistant chief steward said, holding out Carter's chair.

  "It is a good morning, isn't it," Carter said, breathing deeply, drinking in the sweetly scented sea air. "When are we due at Monaco?"

  "Not until after lunch, monsieur. Mademoiselle Gordon instructed that we stop for an hour or two off Antibes."

  "Another wreck?"

  "Perhaps more Roman amphorae, monsieur."

  "Perhaps," Carter said. The steward poured him a glass of crackling cold Dom Perignon, served him a bit of beluga, some toast, and shirred eggs, then retired gracefully belowdecks.

  The gentle motion of the ship easing its way through calm seas, the fine, well-chilled wine, and the comfortable surroundings were deeply relaxing at that moment. Carter sighed deeply. It had been years since he had had a vacation half so purely restful as this one had been.

  For the past two weeks he had been cruising the French Riviera aboard the Marybelle, a 210-foot yacht owned by Lady Pamela Gordon, the thirty-year-old daughter of Sir Donald Gordon, former MP and chief of the SIS back in the late fifties and early sixties. Sir Donald and David Hawk, Carter's boss and head of the United States's supersecret intelligence agency, AXE, were old friends, going back together before World War II. It was only natural that Carter had been introduced to Lady Gordon, and last month the invitation to join her for the beginning of her fall-winter cruise had come.

  He had another ten days before he had to report to the AXE Rehab and Retraining Facility in Arizona, and his plans included Lady Gordon's villa in Monaco and a bit of baccarat in Monte Carlo.

  "Two weeks, and you're already going soft on me," a mellifluous woman's voice came from behind him.

  Carter turned around as Lady Gordon, her deep, rich tan stunning against her almost nonexistent yellow bikini, came on deck. She was frowning.

  "Enough clay pots, Pamela," Carter said, laughing. "I'm on vacation."

  She came around and kissed him on the cheek, then took her place across the small table from him. Henri-Rieves glided to her elbow, the champagne bottle in hand.

  "Mademoiselle," he said.

  "Please," she said, looking into Carter's eyes.

  The steward poured her wine and brought her a lightly salted musk melon half with a bit of cream and a few strawberries on the side, then left.

  "Didn't you sleep?" she asked, sipping her wine.

  "Like a log."

  "Why were you up so early, then?"

  "You've done well for the last two weeks. Don't try to arrange my next ten days," Carter said. Lady Gordon's problem had been — and always would be, he suspected — that she did not feel comfortable unless she had arranged the lives of everyone around her. She was a natural-born organizer. Everyone in London — and half of the regulars on the French, Spanish, and Italian Rivieras — was trying to marry her off to a diplomat. She would make a perfect consul's wife or the consort of an ambassador somewhere.

  "Sorry, Nicholas," she said, turning her head. "I hope you don't mind that we're stopping at the twelve-foot ledge off Antibes."

  "Not at all…" Carter started to say, when Henri-Rieves came up. He was carrying a telephone.

  "Pardon, monsieur," he said. "There is a call for you." He plugged the telephone in the afterdeck panel and set the instrument on the table in front of Carter, who picked it up.

  "Carter here."

  "Mr. Carter, I'm so happy I was able to reach you," an excited man's voice came over the line. This was trouble, Carter sensed.

  "What can I do for you?"

  "Pardon me. I'm Roger Morton, charge d'affaires for the United States embassy in Paris, and I have a message for you, sir."

  "This is an open line, Morton," Carter said. He was looking at Pamela, who was pouting. She sensed it meant trouble as well.

  "Ah… yes, sir, I understand that. I merely telephoned to pass a message, sir."

  "Go ahead. I'll take your message."

  "This is from Amalgamated Press. You are to return home immediately. There is an important assignment for you. End of message, sir."

  Pamela had gotten up, and she came around the table to Carter and leaned over him, running her fingers through the hairs on his chest as she nibbled on his left ear.

  "Who was the signatory?"

  "D.W. Hawkins."

  It was David Hawk. "All right, Morton. Thank you for your help."

  "Any reply, sir?" the charge hastened to ask.

  "None. Thanks again," Carter said. As he put down the phone, Pamela straightened up, smiled provocatively, and sauntered back into the main salon and into the owner's stateroom.

  Carter smiled. He drank the rest of his champagne, then got up and went up the ladder to the fly deck and up the second ladder to the bridge. Captain Phillipe Jourdain, his dress whites immaculate, looked up when Carter entered.

  "Ah, Monsieur Carter, how may I be of
assistance this morning?"

  "I need to get to Nice as quickly as possible, Captain. I have a plane to catch."

  "I am so very sorry, monsieur, but Mademoiselle Gordon has issued us our instructions…"

  Carter reached out and picked up the phone, then punched the numbers for the owner's stateroom. He switched to intercom.

  "Pamela, this is Nicholas. I've told your captain to make for Nice."

  "Yes, Nicholas," Pamela said, her voice husky. "But am I to be kept waiting here all morning?"

  "No," Carter said, eyeing the embarrassed captain. He put down the telephone. "What is our ETA?"

  "It will take us two hours at full speed, Monsieur Carter," the captain said.

  "Get me to the public docks, then I'll need a taxi to the airport," Carter said, and he turned and went below.

  Pamela was waiting for him, nude on the king-size bed in the owner's stateroom. They had been going on like this for two weeks, but now Carter was almost glad that Hawk had called him away. He was beginning to feel just a bit kept.

  * * *

  Carter had no problems getting a seat on the 2:00 p.m. flight to Paris from Nice, and from there the evening TWA flight into Washington's National Airport.

  Pamela had put up a fuss at the docks, however, insisting that she come along with him and straighten out his boss about his vacation time. She had even been willing to place a call to the President.

  Carter had calmed her down, promised to rejoin her as soon as he could, and to placate her, he even left his tuxedo aboard.

  "Hurry back, Nicholas," she breathed into his ear. "We'll have a marvelous fall together. You'll see. I will have everything arranged by the time you return."

  He disengaged himself from her, they kissed once again, and he took a cab. By the time he had rounded the corner from the quay, the Marybelle was already pulling out. Pamela wasted no time.

  * * *

  A chill wind blew off the Potomac as Nick Carter retrieved his bags, hurried through customs, and went outside to look for a cab. It was just a few minutes after midnight, Washington time, but his body clock told him it was six hours later. He was dead tired.