Operation Moon Rocket (7 page)

Nick gasped for breath — but there was none. The artery-like tubes inside his suit no longer carried cool oxygen from the main intake duct at his waist. His ringers clawed at the torn rubber on his back where the Environmental Control pack had been. His mouth opened. The lips moved dryly inside the dead plastic bubble. "Help," he croaked into the mike — but it, too, was dead, the wires of the Communication Power Unit severed along with the others.

The man in the moon suit had climbed down from the lunar vehicle. He pulled a utility knife from under the seat on the control box and started toward him.

That action saved N3's life.

The knife meant that Nick wasn't finished, that one last piece of equipment had to be severed — and that was how he remembered the tiny packet attached to his waist. It was there in case of malfunctions in the backpack system. It contained a five-minute supply of emergency oxygen.

He switched it on. A soft hissing sound filled the plastic bubble. He forced his tortured lungs to breathe in. Coolness filled them. His vision cleared. He gritted his teeth and struggled to his feet. His mind started to explore his body to see what was left of it. Then suddenly there was no time for taking stock. The other man had taken a long running stride. He bounced once to become airborne and came gliding toward him, light as a feather in the reduced gravity atmosphere. The knife was held low, point down, ready for a quick upward flip that would sever the emergency lifeline.

Nick dug his toes into a ridge in the volcanic rock. He dropped his hands in a single sweep to the rear, like a man making a racing dive. Then he catapulted himself forward, throwing all of his stored-up power into the lunge. He found himself soaring through the air with frightening speed — but wide of the mark. The other man ducked his head, jackknifed down. Nick made a grab at his knife-hand as he passed, but missed.

It was like fighting under water. The force field was radically different. Balance, thrust, reaction time — all were changed by the reduction in gravity. Once a motion was started, it was virtually impossible to stop it or to change its direction. He was now gliding to earth at the end of a wide parabola — a good thirty yards away from where his opponent stood.

He swung around just as the other man launched a projectile of some kind. It slammed into his upper thigh, spinning him to the ground. It was a huge, jagged chunk of meteorite, the size of a small boulder. Impossible to even lift under normal gravity conditions. Pain knifed through his leg. He shook his head, started to rise. A thermal mitten suddenly came down, scrabbling at his emergency oxygen kit. The man was already on him.

He slid across Nick and in passing struck at his airpipe with the edge of the utility knife. It bounced harmlessly off and Nick brought his right leg up, the heel of his heavy metallic boot meeting the man's relatively exposed solar plexus on a rising angle. The shadowy face inside the plastic bubble opened its mouth in a great silent exhalation, its eyes rolling. Nick surged to his feet. But before he could follow up, the man slithered away like an eel and turned toward him, poised to attack once again.

He feinted for N3's throat and aimed a ferocious
mae geri
at his groin. The blow missed its target by less than an inch, numbing Nick's leg and almost causing him to lose his balance. Before he could counter, the man swung around, following up with a pile-driving rear kick that sent Nick tumbling forward over the jagged outcroppings of the ravine floor. He couldn't stop. He kept rolling, the razor-sharp rocks tearing at his suit.

From the corner of his eye he saw the man unzip a side pocket, pull out a weird-looking gun and take careful aim at him. He grabbed at an outcropping, brought himself to a sudden halt. A streak of dazzling, blue-white magnesium light laced past him, exploding against a rock. A flare gun! The man started to reload it. Nick launched himself at him.

The man dropped the gun and evaded the two-fisted punch aimed at his chest. He brought his left foot up, making a last vicious lunge at Nick's unprotected groin. N3 took the boot in both hands and twisted. The man went down like a felled tree and before he could move, Killmaster was on top of him. The man's knife-hand flashed toward him. Nick chopped with the side of his gloved hand at the exposed wrist. It blunted the forward thrust. His fingers closed around the man's wrist and twisted. The knife wouldn't drop. He twisted harder and felt something snap and the man's arm went limp.

At the same instant the hissing in Nick's ear stopped. The emergency oxygen supply had run out. Searing heat stabbed into his lungs. Yoga-trained muscles automatically took over, protecting them. He could hold his breath for four minutes, but no longer, and physical exertion was impossible.

Something raw and screamingly painful suddenly cut across his arm with a shock that almost made him open his mouth to breathe. The man had shifted the knife to his other hand and cut his arm, forcing his fingers open. Now he flung himself past Nick, cradling his broken wrist in his good hand. He stumbled off along the ravine, a plume of water vapor rising from his backpack.

A dim sense of survival sent Nick crawling toward the flare gun. He didn't have to die. But the voices in his ear said:
Too far to go. You can't make it.
His lungs screamed for air. His fingers scrabbled out across the ground, reaching for the gun.
Air!
his lungs kept shrieking. It was getting worse by the second, darker. Fingers closed around it. No strength, but he pressed the trigger anyway and the explosion of light was so blinding that he had to clap his free hand over his eyes. And that was the last thing he remembered doing...

"Why didn't you head for the emergency exit?" Ray Finney, the Project Flight Director, leaned over him anxiously as fellow astronauts Roger Caine and John Corbinet helped strip off his moon suit in the Simulation Building's ready room. Finney held out a small nasal-spray dispenser of oxygen and Nick took another deep swig from it.

"Emergency exit?" he muttered vaguely. "Where?"

The three men glanced at each other. "Less than twenty yards from Grid 12," said Finney. "You've used it before."

That must have been the exit his opponent in the moon suit had been heading for. There were ten of them spotted around the moonscape, he recalled now. Each had an air-lock and pressurization chamber. They were unmanned and opened into a subterranean storage area beneath the Simulation Building. So getting in and out would pose no problem if you knew your way around — and Nick's opponent apparently did.

"Lucky thing John noticed that first signal from the flare gun," Roger Caine was saying to Finney. "We headed for it right away. About six minutes later there was another one. We were less than a minute away by then."

"It pinpointed his position exactly," Corbinet added. "Another few seconds and he would have been a goner. He was already turning blue. We cut him in on Roger's emergency supply and dragged him to the exit. Christ! Take a look at that!" he suddenly exclaimed.

They had removed the pressure suit and were staring at the bloodstained inner garment. Caine poked a finger through the thermal material. "You're lucky you didn't start boiling up," he said.

Finney bent over the wound. "This looks like a knife cut," he said. "What happened? You better start at the beginning."

Nick shook his head. "Look, I feel pretty stupid about this," he said. "I fell on the damned utility knife when I was trying to get out of the ravine. I just lost my balance and..."

"What about your ECM pack?" demanded the Flight Director. "How did that come off?"

"When I fell. It got caught on an outcropping."

"There's sure to be an investigation," said Finney gloomily. "NASA Security wants a report on every accident these days."

"Later. He needs some medical attention first," said Corbinet. He turned to Roger Caine. "Better give Dr. Sun a call."

Nick struggled to a sitting position. "Hell no, I'm fine," he said. "It's just a flesh wound. You guys can bind it up yourselves." Dr. Sun was one person he didn't want to see. He knew what would happen. She would insist on giving him a pain-killing injection — and that injection would finish the job her confederate had botched up on the moonscape.

"I've got a bone to pick with Joy Sun," snapped Finney. "She should never have passed you in the condition you're in. Dizzy spells, lapses of memory. You should be at home, flat on your back. What's the matter with that dame anyway?"

Nick had a pretty good hunch. Once she had seen him naked she knew he wasn't Colonel Eglund, which meant that he had to be a government plant, which meant in turn that he'd been brought in to trap her. So what better place to send him than the moonscape? There her confederate — or was it plural? — could arrange still another convenient "accident."

Finney picked up the phone and ordered some first aid supplies. When he hung up, he turned to Nick and said, "I'm going to have your car brought around front. Caine, you drive him home. And Eglund, you stay there until I can get a doctor over to check you out."

Nick shrugged inwardly. It didn't matter where he waited. The next move was hers. Because one thing was sure. She couldn't rest until he was out of the picture. Permanently.

Poindexter had turned the storm cellar of Eglund's bachelor bungalow into a full-scale AXE field office.

There was a miniature darkroom equipped with 35mm. cameras, film, developers and microdot equipment, a metal filing cabinet filled with Lastotex masks, flexible saw blades in shoelaces, compasses in buttons, fountain pens that shot needles, watches containing tiny transistor transmitters and an elaborate communications setup featuring a solid-state picture-phone that could link them with headquarters at a moment's notice.

"Look as if you've been busy," said Nick.

"I've got an ID on the man in the photo," Poindexter replied with carefully suppressed enthusiasm. He was a straw-haired, choirboy-faced New Englander who looked as though he'd be more at home organizing a church picnic than working with sophisticated devices of death and destruction.

He unpinned a damp 8 × 10 from the dryer and handed it to Nick. It was a front-view, head-and-shoulders shot of a dark, wolf-faced man with dead gray eyes. A deep scar encircled his neck just beneath the third vertebra. "Name's Rinaldo Tribolati," said Poindexter, "but he calls himself Reno Tree for short. The print's a bit fuzzy because I took it directly off the picture-phone. It's a photo of a photo of a photo."

"How come so fast?"

"It wasn't the tattoo. That type of dragon is pretty common. Thousands of GI's who served in the Far East — particularly in the Philippines during World War II — have them. It was the scar around the neck that tipped off the ID boys. They made a blowup and studied it. Caused by rope burn. And that was all they had to know. Seems this Reno Tree was once a hit man for the Las Vegas mobs. One of his intended victims almost got him, though. Garrotted him half to death. He still carries the scar."

"I've heard the name Reno Tree," said Nick, "but not as a hit man. As a kind of dancing master to the Jet Set."

"That's our boy," replied Poindexter. "He's legit now. The society girls seem to love him.
Pic Magazine
called him the Pied Piper of Palm Beach. He runs the discotheque in the Bali Hai."

Nick looked at the front-view photo, then at the copy of the pornographic snapshot that Poindexter had handed him. The ecstatic expression on Joy Sun's face still haunted him. "Hardly what you'd call handsome," he said. "Wonder what the girls see in him."

"Maybe they like the way he slaps them around."

"He's that type, is he?" Nick folded the photos and slipped them into his wallet. "Better raise headquarters," he added. "I've got to check in."

Poindexter walked over to the picture-phone and flicked a switch. "He was licensed by the mob to operate as a Shylock and extortionist," he said, watching the screen shimmer to life. "In return he killed and did strong-arm work for them. He was known as the last resort. When all other Shylocks turned a man down, Reno Tree would take him on. He loved it when they defaulted. It gave him a reason to work them over. But most of all he loved to torture women. There's a story around that he had a stable of girls in Vegas and that he slashed all their faces with a razor when he left town... A-4, N3 on the scrambler from H.T. station," he said as a lovely brunette wearing a communications headset shimmered into view.

"Hold, please." She was replaced by the iron-gray-haired old man to whom Nick gave all his allegiance and most of his affection. N3 made his report, noting as he did that the familiar cigar was missing and also the usual glint of humor in the ice-chip eyes. Hawk was upset, preoccupied. And he lost no time in getting to what was troubling him.

"The AXE listening posts have reported in," he said brusquely at the conclusion of Nick's report. "And the news isn't good. That false information I spread at the Bali Hai has turned up — but domestically, at a relatively low underworld level. Bets are being placed in Las Vegas on the NASA moon program. The smart money is saying it will be two years before the project gets under way again." He paused. "What has me really concerned, however, is that the top secret information I gave you on Phoenix One has also appeared — and at a very
high
level in Washington."

Hawk's craggy features grew even grimmer. "It will be a day or so before we hear from our people inside foreign espionage organizations," he added, "but it doesn't look good. Someone very high up is leaking information. Our adversary, in short, has an operative placed high in NASA itself."

The full significance of Hawk's words slowly sank in —
Phoenix One was now also in jeopardy.

A light flashed and from the corner of his eye Nick saw Poindexter pick up the telephone. He turned toward Nick, covering the mouthpiece. "It's General McAlester," he said.