The Vulcan Disaster

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.”