“Nick Carter” is a registered trademark of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.” registered in the United States Patent Office.
HOLY WAR
A Charter Book / published by arrangement with The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Charter edition May 1987
All rights reserved. Copyright 1987 by The Conde Nast Publications, Inc. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.
ISBN: 0-441-57294-4
Charter Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Dedicated to the men of the Secret Services of the United States of America
ONE
The Golden Temple Massacre occurred in Punjab state in June 1984, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the Indian army to oust well-armed militants from the Sikhs’ holiest shrine. Over two thousand Sikhs were killed in that action. Soon after, Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated by Sikhs in her personal bodyguard. Vengeful Hindu mobs joined with criminal gangs to torture, plunder, and murder hundreds of Sikh men, women, and children.
Somehow the unrest was quelled, order was restored, and the citizens of the world’s biggest democracy settled into a sullen, uneasy peace. India had survived its latest crisis.
The next time, it might not be so lucky.
The struggle to stop a second Golden Temple blood bath began on a suffocatingly hot Benares midnight in June. Guptil Gucharvi kept a lonely vigil on the right bank and the wrong side of the river Ganges.
Guptil was short, stocky, owlish. The hair at his temples was prematurely gray. More than a few of those gray hairs were souvenirs of past adventures with the man he was scheduled to meet very soon.
He wore a loose-fitting white cotton short-sleeved shirt, dark baggy trousers, and sandals. Stuffed in his pants pocket was a small-caliber pistol. From time to time he patted it, reassuring himself that it was still there.
The Ganges is sacred, and holiest of all its precincts are those waters that lap the shores of the world’s oldest continually occupied city,
Varanasi, known to Westerners as Benares. Hindus hold that to die in
Benares is truly heaven. Those fortunate enough to expire in the holy city will instantly transcend to an eternity of pure bliss. Every day, from all corners of the subcontinent, thousands of aged pilgrims come to the city to die.
Benares is situated on the river’s left bank. The Hindus also believe that he who dies on the river’s right bank will be reborn as a jackass.
Guptil Gucharvi maintained his watch on the right bank. Long-abandoned crumbling terraces tumbled in stepped layers down to the oily, sluggish river. Lush masses of tropical foliage smothered the slope. The green labyrinth was honeycombed by a network of paths, walks, game trails, and rat runs.
The mini-jungle had all but reclaimed the terrace where Guptil stood. The overgrown granite oblong lay two thirds of the way down from the riverbank’s flat summit, where his car was hidden. Gaps in the brush gave him a panoramic vista of the river and the city, a splended view that nonetheless failed to enchant him. The boat for which he was keenly watching had still not appeared.
Guptil consulted his wristwatch. It was now a quarter past twelve and his contact was late.
Something rustled in the brush behind him.
Guptil, startled, slapped his hand on his pistol. He was no gunman. He was an expediter, a fixer, a cutter of red tape, a man who made things happen.
Still, he was glad he had the gun. All day and night, he’d had the feeling that he was being followed.
After a pause, the rustling noises resumed. They sounded near, no more than a stone’s throw away. The movements were too loud to have been made by river rats, even the huge local variety.
A wild dog, perhaps?
Somewhere in the bushes a twig snapped.
Guptil hauled his pistol from his pocket, dropped into a crouch, and froze.
The foliage was too thick to see through. For all he knew, a small army could be lurking behind that impenetrable wall of vegetation.
Guptil listened hard. His quick breaths rasped like two rough boards rubbed together. A fat drop of sweat rolled down his nose, splattering on the stones.
A small swift creature burst out of the underbrush-long, low, and agile to the point of fluidity. A mongoose!
Startled, Guptil jerked the trigger of his pistol, but nothing happened.
The mongoose scuttled over Guptil’s feet, across the terrace, and out of sight.
Laughing nervously, Guptil checked his pistol. It had not fired because he had neglected to throw off the safety catch.
Well, he’d be the first to admit he was no expert with firearms. And to think that a little mongoose had nearly panicked him into a shooting spree.
Guptil shook his head and looked again toward the sacred Ganges. He never thought to wonder what might have spooked the animal into breaking its cover.
A few minutes later, the sounds he’d been longing to hear came from the river: the muffled splashing of oars, and the creak of oarlocks. A narrow skiff was being rowed to shore. Guptil’s contact had arrived.
Guptil stuffed the pistol back into his pocket and went to meet the man. A stepped path, weed-choked and vine-strewn, slanted down to the water’s edge. Guptil walked with care, fearful of poisonous snakes. The steep path was hemmed by trees, bushes, and lianas. The foliage walled him in, blocking his view of the shore.
When he finally completed his descent, he saw the shallow-draft skiff beached on the muddy bank. But his contact was nowhere to be seen.
Guptil’s ready greeting died unspoken. He prowled up and down the shore but saw no sign of the man. His low-voiced, urgent calls received an equal lack of response.
Guptil scratched his head. The boat hadn’t rowed itself across the water.
Yet its occupant had utterly vanished, as if swallowed up by the night and the river.
A solution of sorts came to Guptil. Many paths and trails rose from the river to the terrace. Perhaps his contact had climbed one of them while Guptil made his descent, and they had unknowingly passed one another.
Sighing, Guptil turned and went back up the path.
Going up was far more difficult than walking down because of the extreme angle of the slope. Grabbing onto creepers and branches, Guptil hauled himself up.
Thrashing and grunting like a water buffalo in a cane brake, Guptil clambered to the terrace. When he reached it, he was a wreck. His clothes were sweat soaked His left sandal clung to his foot by a single thong.
Unused to such exertion, he clung panting to a tree, unsure whether he would throw up, pass out, or suffer a heart attack.
His agonies were forgotten when somebody grabbed his arm.
“Carter!” Guptil gasped. “Am I glad to see you!”
That same somebody shoved a gun muzzle against Guptil’s skull. “Don’t move.”
“Who are you?” Guptil asked. This was not the man he had come to meet.
The unknown assailant rapped Guptil’s head with the pistol barrel. “Keep still.”
Stunned, Guptil clutched the tree to keep from falling. For a moment he saw double, then his vision came back into focus.
The man frisked him quickly. Guptil recoiled from his touch. The gunman pressed his weapon’s muzzle against the underside of Guptil’s chin, forcing his head back. “I said, keep still!”
Guptil froze. The man fished out Guptil’s pistol and pocketed it. More confident now that Guptil was disarmed, he took a few steps back, and Guptil finally had a chance to take a look.
His wiry opponent couldn’t have weighed more than 125 pounds soaking wet.
His bony face was all angles and wedges, with brilliantined black hair swept back into a rooster’s crest. He wore cheap, flashy clothes, and twitched and fidgeted like a dope addict.
Guptil didn’t know him, but he knew the type. The fellow was a goondah, a vicious petty criminal, a hoodlum. A small-time punk, yes, but his long-barreled gun was larger than life.
The gunman grinned, his face lighting up with a crocodile like smile. His wiry form squirmed with restless energy. Even standing still, he seemed to swagger.
“You gave me a bad time for a while. I thought we’d lost you,” he said.
“Who are you?” Guptil asked again. “What do you want?”
“I want to take your life.”
“You-you’re crazy!”
His opponent was enjoying himself. “I’m Shaheed. I tell you that because it’s only fair that you know the name of the man who’s going to kill you.”
“Kill me? Why?”
“You shouldn’t have meddled in things that don’t concern you,” Shaheed said.
Guptil keyed up his nerve for a mad plunge into the brush. Even if he caught a slug or two, he still might make his getaway.
“Don’t give me any trouble, unless you want to die hard,” Shaheed said.
At this close range Shaheed could hardly miss. Guptil sagged into quivering uncertainty.
Somebody was stumbling around on the slope above the terrace. Guptil tried to pretend he hadn’t heard anything, but he needn’t have bothered. Shaheed heard it, too, but it didn’t alarm him.
“That’s my partner,” he told Guptil. “We’ll wait for him. He’d be so very angry if he wasn’t in on the kill.”
Shaheed called his partner’s name: “Eckar!”
“Shaheed!” a hoarse voice replied. “Where are you?”
“Down here!”
“Where? I can’t see you!”
“Take the path and come down here,” Shaheed said. “I have our man!”
“Good work! Is he alive?”
“Yes,” Shaheed said and chuckled, “but not for long, so hurry up!”
“I’ll be right there! Don’t start without me!”
“I won’t, but hurry!”
Eckar’s movement toward them could easily be tracked by the noise he made.
Then, suddenly, he cried out in pain.
“Curse these thorn bushes! They’re tearing me to shreds!”
“Stop being such a woman and get down here!” Shaheedsnapped.
“I can’t find the path!”
“Just keep going the way you’re going.”
“Right! I see it now,” Eckar said.
Shaheed and Guptil still couldn’t see Eckar. There was more crashing and thrashing in the bush.
Suddenly a sound rang out, a twanging not unlike that of the bass string of an electric guitar being plucked, but deeper and more resonant.
“What was that?” Now it was Shaheed’s turn to be startled. “Eckar?” They could no longer hear Eckar making his way through the undergrowth.
Keeping his gun trained on Guptil, Shaheed prowled the border of tangled vegetation, calling his partner’s name with increasing vexation. “Eckar, where are you? Why don’t you speak? Eckarl Eckar!”
No reply.
Shaheed wasn’t smiling his reptilian grin anymore.
“Maybe he fell in a hole and broke his neck,” Guptil suggested.
“If he did, it won’t save yours,” Shaheed snapped. His gun maintained its steady bead on Guptil, offering him no chance to make a break.
Guptil had the feeling that Shaheed had just reached a decision, and the outcome, for himself, would be most unpleasant.
“Can we-can we make a deal?” Guptil asked.
“No.” The thrill of imminent murder restored Shaheed’s hideous grin. He loved to pull the trigger. “Prepare to die!”
Suddenly something flashed across the clearing and hit Shaheed in the back between the shoulder blades. A narrow shaft punched its way through him, thrusting its wickedly barbed head out of his chest in a shower of blood.
Shaheed screamed and dropped his gun. His hands moved jerkily around the dripping arrowhead protruding from his shattered breastbone.
He fell, flopping facedown. The arrow was jammed back into his chest and protruded further from his back. Shaheed’s groan became a death rattle. A few kicks, a convulsion, and he was dead..
Behind the body, some bushes parted and a man carrying a crossbow stepped into view. A big American, tall, dark, and lethal.
He was Nick Carter.
The Killmaster had kept his rendezvous.
Thirty-six hours earlier, Carter had been dangling on a rope over a 1,500-foot-deep chasm in Iceland, playing cat-and-mouse games with a KGB agent. He’d barely had time to shake off the chill before he was en route to India. He made the last leg of the journey by a commercial flight, and his plane had been delayed for five hours because of a bomb threat. Two weeks earlier, an Air India jet blew up in midair, killing 332 passengers and crew members. The Khalistan Commando Force, a radical Sikh terror group, claimed credit for the blast. The delay was hardly an auspicious start for his trip, but he had made it to India all in one piece. Of course, leaving that way was the challenge.
Benares was almost unbearably hot and humid. Carter felt as if he were taking a steambath while wearing his Icelandic sweaters. Still, it was nothing compared to the heat that Hawk was putting on him for some fast results.
David Hawk was the white-haired, cigar-chomping boss of AXE, the super secret U.S. government agency that handled-as quietly as possible-covert actions deemed critically important to the national security.
Hawk answered to a very few people, one of them the President. He wouldn’t hesitate to tell any or all of them where to get off if he thought they were wrong. That was why Hawk stayed in power, though administrations came and went. He told them what they had to hear, not what they wanted to hear.
Hawk was also a master strategist who shuttled his agents around the world as if they were human pieces on a global chessboard. And Nick Carter, designated Agent N3, was his premier Killmaster, which made Carter the logical candidate to avenge the Delhi strike.
The U.S. maintains an embassy in Delhi. Salted among the State Department types are a number of CIA operatives working the local beat. A few days earlier, five such agents failed to report for work.
They all worked in the same unit and the group leader was among the missing. The outfit was strictly CIA, posing as a bureaucratic fiefdom among the diplomats. Overnight, the staffers vanished into thin air.
But AXE had learned that there had been a witness to the mysterious disappearance, and that’s how Carter found himself sweltering in Benares.
Carter had worked in India before, but he didn’t consider himself an old India hand. But Guptil Gucharvi was. This was his turf. Carter put Guptil on the case.
With his insider’s connections, it didn’t take Guptil very long to locate the witness. Carter arranged to meet Guptil on the right bank of the Ganges at a secluded spot he’d used before.
Carter never walked blindly into anything; he always checked out the lay of the land first. When his skiff grounded, Carter leaped ashore and melted into the shadows. He wanted to have a look around.
His moves were good; no one heard him prowl. But he heard and saw Shaheed and Eckar. One glance was enough to make him suspicious.
When Shaheed found Guptil, Carter had a problem.
He had to take out Eckar without goading Shaheed into blasting Guptil. He had no silencer for his gun, so shooting Eckar was out. The undergrowth was too tangled for him to rush Eckar and neutralize him with a karate chop or some adroit knife work Carter’s newest toy supplied an elegant solution. It was a Power-Slam crossbow pistol, complete with a steel-spring bow and a cable bowstring.
Even with the hand-held “goat’s-foot” cocking device, it took plenty of muscle to draw the bowstring. Fired at a fifty-foot distance from the target, the weapon could propel a six inch steel-headed bolt through a one-inch-thick pine board.
The noise that had so mystified Shaheed and Guptil was the sound of the crossbow vibrating after a bolt was discharged.
Eckar was made of stuff considerably less dense than a pine board. The razor-barbed bolt drilled him clear through and kept on going. One down, one to go.
Carter fitted a new bolt to his crossbow, sneaked behind Shaheed, and waited for his shot. And that had been that.
Nick Carter stuck his foot under Shaheed and flipped him over. The face meant nothing to him. “Who is he?”
“I don’t know,” Guptil said. “Shaheed, he said his name was. A cheap goondah, a hired hand.”
“Hired by whom?”
“By somebody who doesn’t want you to meet your precious witness,” Guptil said. “The game is getting rough.”
He went down on one knee beside the body. His gun jutted out of the top of Shaheed’s trousers, and Guptil reclaimed it. “I’ll need this.”
He eyed Shaheed’s pistol, a large-caliber, big-bore automatic. It packed a lot more punch than his own gun. He pocketed his gun and held on to Shaheed’s. “This may come in handy.
After all, a man can’t have too many guns.”
“My sentiments exactly,” Carter said as he turned out Shaheed’s pockets and inspected their contents, discovering a fat wad of bank notes. “Nice piece of change, especially for a two-bit punk. He must have been paid in advance for killing you.” He tossed Guptil the billfold of rupees. “Combat pay.”
“All gratuities cheerfully accepted, sahib,” Guptil joked, pocketing the money. AXE paid very well, but any extra was appreciated.
Apart from the money, Carter’s search uncovered nothing of interest. He stood up and turned to Guptil. “Where’s your car?”
“Not far from here. I hope those goondahs didn’t sabotage it.”
“If they did, we’ll steal theirs,” Carter said. “Come on, let’s move. And stop waving that gun around, for cris sakes You’re making me nervous.”
Guptil scoffed. “You haven’t got a nervous bone in your body.”
TWO
Guptil’s car was a battered but serviceable white sedan. Before starting it up, Carter and Guptil gave it a thorough going-over to make sure that nobody had rigged a bomb to it.
“Where to?” Carter asked.
“Mulag Gaol.”
“The witness is in jail? He’s in some sort of protective custody?”
“Not exactly.” Guptil chuckled. “She’s under arrest for theft, resisting an officer, and provoking a riot.”
“She?”
“Didn’t you know the witness is a woman?”
“I didn’t have much time for background,” Carter admitted.
“In that case, let me be the first to tell you that you’re buying a real prize package. I did some checking on our star performer, Miss. Vashti Takore. The Takore clan is not unknown in Delhi and neither is Miss. Vashti. Like the rest of her family, Miss. Vashti is a malka-sansi.” He glanced at Carter. “You know what that is, Nick? A malka-sansi?”
“I think so. Some kind of a thief, right?”
“That’s putting it mildly. It’s a hereditary caste of thieves whose members are born and bred to the robber’s trade. They consort with thieves, marry thieves, and raise their children to be thieves. My contacts in the Delhi police tell me that the Takores are skilled practitioners of their profession. Or at least they were.”
“Why the past tense?” Carter asked.
“Because the Takores were netted in a police raid two nights ago and are all under arrest in Delhi. Quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Carter said.
“In this case I agree with you, Nick. But it’s a stroke of luck for us. If the Takores were at large, their sister wouldn’t be in Mulag Gaol, waiting for a white knight to come to her rescue.”
“How soon will we get there?”
“Soon,” Guptil said, driving through the dark city, “soon.”
Carter flipped open the lid of his cigarette case. “Smoke?”
“Thank you, yes.”
They lit up, both enjoying the custom-blended tobacco, one of Carter’s personal indulgences.
Carter was well aware of the Surgeon General’s proclamation that smoking was hazardous to one’s health. But the Surgeon General didn’t have to go dodging down dark alleys playing life-and-death games with foreign agents, hired thugs, Middle Eastern terrorists, and a host of other equally deadly opponents.
Carter figured that when he reached the age of fifty he’d think about quitting smoking. If he reached age fifty. No Killmaster had yet.
Guptil’s car wasn’t followed. Shaheed and Eckar must-have been working without backup, a pair of goondah trigger men looking to make a quick kill.
It was a rugged ride. The old car and bad roads combined to give Carter a hell of a shaking. The car’s springs and shocks might have been made out of rubber bands for all the good they did.
Presently they entered a sprawling district south of the city proper, a marshy flatland crisscrossed with abandoned railroad tracks. Long, low, barracks like buildings housed weaving mills, dyers’ plants, and other aspects of the textile trade. Judging from the shabby, run-down condition of the neighborhood, business was not exactly booming.
Ahead rose the gray walls of Mulag Gaol. The grim, castle like prison had its origin as a fort built by a Mogul lord in 1689. Since then, renovations and repairs to the stone structure had been minimal. Apart from such modern necessities as searchlights, barbed wire, and machine guns, the fortress remained virtually unchanged since it was first built. Mulag Gaol housed both male and female prisoners, and Guptil halted the car in front of the gate to the women’s section.
“Everything is taken care of,” Guptil assured Carter. “I’ll go tell the guard we’re here, and then we’ll drive right in.”
Guptil got out of the car and walked up to the massive gate of iron grillwork. A uniformed guard came out of the gatehouse to meet him.
Carter could see Guptil clearly in the car’s headlights. The Indian began waving his arms angrily and shouting through the bars at the guard. The guard shouted back. Carter’s Hindustani was rudimentary but he didn’t need an interpreter to know that the two Indians were having more than a slight disagreement.
Abruptly, Guptil threw up his hands and stalked back to the car. He stuck his head through the driver’s side window and said breathlessly, “This is intolerable! It’s an outrage! The guard I bribed to let us in tonight didn’t show up for duty, and his idiotic replacement claims he knows nothing about the arrangement!”
“Don’t you have a higher-up on the payroll?”
“Indeed, yes! The deputy warden himself. He’d let us in in a minute, but I can’t reach him without going through this idiot first.”
“I guess he’ll have to be greased too,” Carter sighed. It was too hot to get angry. “How much is this going to cost?”
Guptil shook his head. “The reputation of Guptil Gucharvi is on the line.
I told you we’d get in, and we will. I’ll pay him myself.”
“Well, thanks.”
“Quite all right. You can reimburse me later.”
Guptil returned to the gate, reached into his pocket, pulled out the billfold of rupees lifted from Shaheed, and passed half the cash through the grillwork to the guard.
“You’ll get the rest when we’re inside,” Guptil said.
“As you will, sahib. It shall be done at once,” the guard said.
Guptil was soon back in the driver’s seat. The ponderous gate was unlocked and opened. Guptil drove under the archway and into a square, dimly lit courtyard. The gate clanged shut.
An ambulance was parked at the side, its motor idling. Two white-uniformed attendants sat in its cab, smoking and talking.
Even before Guptil’s car rolled to a halt, the guard from the gate showed up with his hand out. Guptil slapped the rest of the rupees into his palm.
“Thank you, sahib,” the guard said and grinned broadly.