Free The Terrible Ones by Nick Carter Page A

its light and the other hand half-clenched at his side in readiness for Hugo. He peered at the shadowy shape beyond the light and made himself grunt with irritation. A startled exclamation echoed him and the flashlight’s ray played over his body.
    “Lower that light, you fool!” he hissed in Chinese, hoping he’d picked the right language to hiss in. “And the noise back there with the digging! It would waken the dead.” As he spoke he let Hugo trickle down his sleeve, and he kept moving, with his eyes still shaded from the light, until he was within inches of the other. “Where is your commanding officer? I have a message of importance.”
    “Commanding off—?”
    Nick struck. His right hand swung sideways and down against the throat with the Chinese voice-box. Hugo, razor-edged and icepick slender, sliced through the voice and cut it in mid-syllable, then moved on easily as if through butter and slashed the jugular. Nick grabbed the falling flashlight and struck again at the gargling sound of death in the man’s throat, thrusting Hugo’s slim length clean through the neck and out again. The body toppled in slow motion; he caught, its weight and eased it to the floor.
    He listened for a moment, hearing nothing but Paula’s faint breathing and the sounds of hammering and digging from beyond the passage walls. No disturbance. But now he would have to find some place to put the body. He swung the beam of the flashlight down the hall and saw a recess several feet ahead. Wordlessly, he handed the light to Paula and heaved the limp form over his shoulders. They would have to take a chance on the light for a moment, and another chance that there was no one in that dark recess in the wall.
    She held the beam down low, away from Nick and his burden, and played the light upon the opening. It led into an empty room whose rotting shelves had been ripped from the walls and piled on the floor, as if someone had been trying to wrest a secret from them. Nick dragged his burden into a corner and let it drop with a soft thud.
    “Turn the light on his face,” he whispered. “One quick look, then douse it.”
    She swung the beam over the body and let it linger on the head. Blood encircled the neck like a crimson hangman’s noose and the features were horribly contorted. But even in its death agony the face was unmistakably Chinese. So was the work uniform with the small, faded insignia sewn into the fabric. Nick’s face was grim as Paula flicked the switch and left them in darkness with the corpse. He knew the tiny badge for what it was, the symbol of a highly specialized company of Chinese scavengers and infiltrators whose main task was to strip a country of its spoils and prepare the way for the propagandists and military tacticians. It usually meant, as it had meant in Tibet, that the Chinese were planning to move in for a takeover, either openly or behind the scenes with a puppet fronting for them. But here , right under the noses of the OAS and Uncle Sam?
    Nick frowned and padded back into the passage. Paula the Silent glided along behind him. Again they headed for the light.
    It was almost too easy. The passage branched off to left and right. To the left was darkness, to the right, the light. It streamed through an open doorway and close to the door was a low, barred window. Nick ducked to peer through it. Four men, all Chinese, were methodically tearing apart a huge stone room. Propped against one of the walls was a device he recognized as a metal detector. No one was using it at the moment; it had a waiting look about it as though its operator might be temporarily absent. Where? he wondered. But he had seen enough to confirm Paula’s story of a Chinese hunt for treasure and some underlying motive much bigger than a simple lust for loot.
    Now for the girl. Once again he pinpointed their position on his mental map. The passageway to the right must lead directly to the section of the dungeons open to the tourists. They