The Vulcan Disaster

The man with the one arm and the black eyepatch stood, cool and collected, at the landing above. The thin lips were pursed in an expression of distaste; the gun was held high, pointed at the ceiling, the way a military marksman holds a pistol on the range when he’s awaiting firing orders. The one eye looked down at me.

“He would have killed you,” the deep voice said in that same unidentifiable accent. Then, eye still on me, he tucked the gun under the stump of that left arm and deftly extracted the long magazine. He put it in his pocket and quickly reloaded from someplace inside that neatly cut business jacket “You are,” he said, “in my debt I think.”

“Yeah,” I said, letting the breath out at last. “I’ll remember that.” I started to get up, feeling full of aches and pains, wondering dimly why a guy who was saving your life would continue plugging fifteen bullets into a man already dead. “I...” But when I looked up again he was gone.

It took me a few minutes to get myself together. And only when I was more or less sure that nothing was broken did I undertake the. unpleasant task of searching Walter Corbin’s body for the missing microfilm, for the little roll of plastic that had cost two — no, three — lives and had brought me halfway around the world to a city under siege and within hours of utter collapse, a city I had, perhaps, no more than an hour left to get away from.

I got my hands nice and dirty taking Corbin’s pockets apart, checking body cavities, even dismantling his shoes, before I was completely satisfied.

The microfilm was gone.

Chapter Two

I stood up slowly, feeling every ache and pain and savoring it at my leisure. My head was killing me; my chest felt like somebody had dropped an anvil on it from the roof of the Grand-Bretagne. My back was full of a variety of exquisite little cricks and twitches. Even my hands hurt; slugging Walter Corbin — pardon me, the late Walter Corbin — had been a little like picking a fistfight with, oh, Mont Blanc or something.

But the real pain was knowing that little reel was gone. Because if it wasn’t on Walter Corbin, I didn’t have the slightest idea in the world where it was.

It had been an unusual assignment. I’d come in, fresh from a job, ready to have David Hawk rake me over the coals for not having done it exactly as planned, only to have him look up, scowl, and hand me a plane ticket in an envelope, muttering something through one of those evil cigars of his.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I didn’t catch that, sir.”

“Saigon,” he said. “I thought we’d have a little more time, but it looks like the city won’t last long now. You have—” He glanced down at his watch, then reversed his wrist to look at the calendar on the band. “Damn it, you don’t have any time at all. You’d better get moving.”

“But...” I said. I looked down at him; when he looked up at me there was more than annoyance in his eyes. He was under severe pressure today. “Okay. I go to Saigon. What do I do there?”

“Man named Walter Corbin. The tickets are for the Coast There’ll be a San Francisco contact waiting for you who can let you have a look at the file on Corbin between planes... or at least as much of the file as you’ll need. That won’t be much. All you have to do is identify him, eliminate him, and bring back what he’s carrying.”

“Which will be...” I began. Hawk rushed on in that gruff cigar-smoker’s voice.

“Roll of microfilm. Saigon’s falling. The only thing worse than having Corbin deliver the film to the people we suspect him of working for is for the Cong to intercept him and beat you to the reel.” He snorted. “Hell, Corbin’s quite capable of selling out the people he works for and making his own deal with the Cong.”

At least he’d told me something. Corbin was a double agent, and an independent, a man you had to deal with on a one-on-one basis. He wasn’t one of your dedicated agent types and he wasn’t one of your hire-’em-by-the-hour flunkies, either. Moderately big cheese. I wondered if I knew him, perhaps under some other name. “What’s on the film?”

He gave me another annoyed scowl. “Just get him. Bring it back. Don’t let it get away.” I rolled my eyes to heaven and sighed. Okay, it was going to be one of those days.

And here I was. Corbin was dead. The reel was gone. The Cong were right outside of town. I didn’t have a lead in the world. And, not knowing what information I was looking for, I was in one hell of a bind.

A little dizziness made me lean against the wall of the stairwell. Think, Carter, think. I straighted up. The girl. Grab the girl, Carter, before she gets away. She ought to be just coming out from under that little slug on the brows you gave her. It’ll take her a minute to get some clothes on, and then she’ll be hightailing it for the boulevards and you’ll never see her again. And God help you if she decides to change clothes and go native.