The Revenger 03: The Chinese Coffin

Chapter One

‘YOU KNOW SOMETHING?’ Amanda Segal said.

‘What?’ asked Stark.

‘This trip is getting to be a pain in the—’

‘Hey!’ Stark cut in. ‘That’s no language for the well-brought-up daughter of a millionaire.’

The couple were riding a bicycle along a rutted and pot-holed farm track towards a metalled main road marked by flanking rows of poplar trees. Ahead of them, the trees were all that featured the monotonous flatness of the Beauce plain. Far behind them the buildings of Chartres, dominated by the unequal spires of the city’s cathedral, formed a more substantial landmark against the night-time horizon. Between the swaying, jolting bicycle and the city was a large lake, shimmering in pale moonlight. On the far shore stood a mock-Gothic chateau.

When Stark looked over his shoulder, he saw parts of the chateau’s ground floor fleetingly illuminated by the sweeping beams of car headlights. The girl on the crossbar, who felt each bump in the track to a far greater extent than the man on the sprung saddle, shrieked a warning. Stark faced front again and jerked on the handlebars to keep from crashing into the irrigation ditch which followed the course of the track. The flash of headlights, in combination with the distant roar of a powerful engine at high revs, urged him into greater speed and he pedalled furiously towards the road.

The ancient bicycle—stolen from a gendarme after Stark and Amanda had escaped by the skin of their teeth from Henri Calbiac’s chateau ¹ —shuddered and swerved more violently than ever with the increase of speed. The girl tightened her grip on the handlebars and screwed her eyes tight shut, praying no bones would be broken when the inevitable crash came and they were pitched to the ground.

Since she had first met Stark—was it only days rather than years ago?—both had been favoured with more than their fair share of good luck. Behind them they had left a trail of destruction, violence and death: yet she had escaped with only a loss of dignity and a bruised throat: and the sole physical signs shown by Stark were a bullet-torn right thumb and sopping wet clothes. It was past the time when the wheel of fortune should stop and shower both of them with dirt. And they were sitting ducks for just such a twist of fate—to be pitched into a bone-crunching heap at the side of a field and have to wait helplessly for a bunch of merciless, hate-filled French hoodlums to find them.

‘Hold tight!’ Stark yelled, very close to her ear.

She couldn’t tighten her grip any more, but she opened her eyes. The trunk of a tree seemed to be hurtling towards them rather than they towards it.

‘Brakes have bust, let go!’

His breath was very hot on her ear. His fists unclenched from the rubber grips and his arms encircled her, vice-like across her small breasts. She screamed as he leaned sideways, canting the hurtling bicycle.

‘Jesus, let go!’ he roared.

She did so, at the last moment. Stark pushed down hard on the pedals, straightening his long legs. Amanda was lifted bodily from the crossbar and Stark thrust himself backwards. The riderless machine thudded into the tree and bounced to the ground. Shattered glass from the lamp tinkled against the buckled front wheel. Stark planted his feet hard against the ground and tried to remain upright. But momentum pitched him forward. Amanda’s scream changed its note from fear to pain as she felt herself falling, then hit the ground and was crushed, cushioning Stark’s weight. He rolled off her immediately and heard the dry croaking in her throat as she fought for breath.

‘You okay?’ he rasped, rubbing his hands together, trying to alleviate the throbbing pain caused by the impact. ‘Anything broken?’

She rolled her head to the side and looked at him. There was hurt gleaming through the tears in her hazel eyes. But also resignation, for she had learned better than to expect sympathy from the man who was looking at her so impassively. She knew the question had been asked of necessity, not feeling. She showed her teeth in a pained grin.

‘Only my heart, beautiful,’ she replied huskily. ‘First time I’ve been laid out in a country lane without being laid.’

Stark got to his feet and helped her up. She swayed, but her legs held firm. She leaned against him for a few moments, then straightened and discovered she could stand unaided. She looked down at the wrecked bicycle with its buckled front wheels and grimaced.

‘It was hell on the backside, but it beat hiking,’ she said, her voice returned to normal. ‘What now?’

Stark was looking out across the absolutely flat fields towards the chateau. Two cars were moving at high speed down the driveway, the beams of their headlights probing the night like exploratory fingers. Stark raised a hand to his mouth and sucked blood from broken skin at his thumb knuckle as he followed the progress of the speeding cars. The driveway was five hundred metres long. It finished at a gap in the white-painted fencing which marked the boundary of the chateau’s grounds. Both cars made a screaming left turn through the opening, the sounds of the tortured tyres piercing the roar of punished engines. The leading car was a black Cadillac convertible and this was trailed by a Renault R10. The road they travelled was parallel with the farm track and their silhouettes showed clearly in the moonlight. There was no way of knowing, from such a distance, how many survivors of the gun battle at the chateau rode in the cars.

Stark delved the injured hand into his jacket pocket and came up with the .357 Magnum. Amanda watched him, wanting to scream a repetition of her question, but not daring to utter a sound. For the tiny gleam of human emotion—which could on infrequent occasions expand to Stark’s entire personality and make him like normal men—had now been extinguished. And he was nothing more than a machine in human form—a killing machine. Even his movements, as he thumbed out the cylinder of the powerful double-action revolver and expertly extracted three empty shell cases, had a fluidly mechanical quality, as though his fingers and hands were as one with the gun metal. She could not see his face, but guessed it showed an expression of total coldness: as if the features had been carved from Arctic rock. So she held her tongue, not trusting him to remember or recognise her when he was in such a mood. For he was no longer John Stark the man. He was the revenger. And in such a transition, nothing and nobody within his reach was safe.

Stark was aware of his transformation, but had he known Amanda’s line of thought he would have rejected it. For although he knew himself to be a killer, he did not commit murder mindlessly. How many had died at his hand?—he had not kept count for he didn’t consider it important. But every one of them had died for a good reason: the strongest reason in Stark’s book—to satisfy his thirst for revenge. Perhaps a few innocent parties had been hurt in the process, but only by accidents over which Stark had no control. For although the need to kill stripped him of most of those qualities which distinguish the thinking human being from the wild animal, it did not rob him of such basic necessities as reason, logic and the ability to discriminate. His targets were clearly defined and, whenever time allowed, their deaths were carefully planned. Amanda was in no danger from Stark.

‘Over there, darling!’ he instructed, the term of endearment robbed of sentiment by the manner in which Stark spoke it. ‘Stay down and don’t move a muscle unless I tell you.’

Now he looked at her and although his deep-set, clear blue eyes were as dead as two stagnant pools, his lips parted beneath the bandito moustache and it was as close to a smile as he ever got when there was killing to be done. She accepted the expression as a token of reassurance and immediately complied with his order. He watched her as she ran back down the track and nodded when she stopped and looked at him. When she hesitated, he made a downward gesture with the Magnum. Amanda slithered into the ditch and shuddered as her feet sank into the ooze of mud beneath two inches of unmoving water.

The cars had reached the junction with the main road now and the friction between tyres and tarmac set up another wailing scream as they side-slid into the turn. Headlight beams stabbed through the darkness, reaching out menacingly towards Stark and the girl, sweeping crazily from side to side as the drivers fought to bring their vehicles back on to a straight course.

Stark and Amanda went down simultaneously—he into a tense crouch at the foot of a towering poplar and she, with a shudder of revulsion, into the malodorous water and mud of the ditch bed. But the roar of accelerating engines and advancing glow of headlights were far more terrifying than whatever creeping, crawling life existed in the cold stickiness that sucked at her body.

Stark surveyed his surroundings as the level of yellow light and roaring sound rose. The track joined the road between two trees, without the barrier of a gate. There was a ditch alongside the road, spanned by a bridge of heavy planks with a narrow verge beyond. Night was well advanced towards the early hours of morning—the dead time in the twenty-four-hour cycle when a man needs strong reason to be awake. On the road, seemingly stretched between two infinities to north and south, and across the vast plain spread out on either side, only Stark, Amanda and the men in the cars were awake.

Stark moved, pitching himself full-length on the ground, then elbowing his way from behind the tree. He went head first over the bank of the ditch and his feet slid out of sight just as the leading probes of light sprayed across the junction of track and road. After his recent soaking in the chateau’s lake, the discomfort of more water saturating his clothes was of little concern. As the squeal of brakes accompanied by a change of engine note signalled a sudden slowing of the cars, Stark raised himself into a crouch and ducked under the bridge. Then he froze into total immobility, the Magnum poised to swing towards a target wherever it was presented.

The Cadillac jerked to a halt with the bodyshell pitching and yawing on over-sensitive springs. The Renault driver had to swerve wide as the tyres of locked wheels lost adhesion. The engine stalled as the smaller car finally stopped alongside the convertible. Neither Stark nor Amanda could see what was happening. Stark’s schoolboy understanding of French translated only an occasional word or phrase, but Amanda knew everything that was said.

‘I don’t see them!’

‘You expect them to stand up and wave to us, idiot!’

‘What now?’

‘Look for them. Gaston—drive to the lake. Cover the other side. We’ll look this side.’

‘Kill them?’

‘No, give them enough francs to escape to South America!’

The voices were a mixture of the excited and the angry. The final comment was sardonic and it was greeted with a burst of nervous laughter almost immediately drowned out by a roar of power from the Cadillac. The big car made a tight turn and clods of damp moss showered on to Stark as the wheels bumped over the bridge. He held his breath and his knuckles whitened around the butt and trigger of the revolver. But the wrecked bicycle was hidden by the tree trunk and the sweeping headlight beams failed to find it. The car, rocking crazily over the ruts and potholes, continued to move along the track, engine growling with reserve power as it was held in low gear.

‘We leave the car here?’

‘The walk will do you good, André.’ This was spoken in a tone that was too light as the man tried to convince himself he was not afraid. A car door opened.

‘Let’s go,’ the leader of the group ordered. ‘Spread out and be careful. Stark may still have a gun.’

The lights of the Renault were switched off and two more doors opened. Footsteps were very loud on the tarmac. The doors slammed shut. There was a mere spattering of dislodged moss as the men crossed the wooden bridge. Stark strained his ears, desperately trying to decide how many men were above him. More than two, certainly. But more than three? He had only three bullets in the Magnum. Then they were across, the soles of their shoes scraping on the hard-packed dirt of the track. They halted and Stark leaned forward and raised his head above the bank. There were four.

From such a low angle, they looked like giants, standing about six feet away from him with their backs towards him. Moonlight glinted dully on the guns which each of them held.

‘André and Michael to the left. Toni, come with me.’

His voice was pitched at a whisper now, as if the roar of engines, splash of lights and excited conversation of a few moments ago had never been. As if the quartet of hunters had been dropped silently out of nowhere. The man accompanied his orders with a hand gesture, directing the split into two pairs, one on either side of the track.

Stark rested the four-inch barrel of the Magnum across the bank and crouched low to sight along it. Far off—it could have been in another world—the Cadillac’s engine died. A moment later, a man died.

The two pairs had just split and the man on the far right spotted the bicycle. His head snapped around and the revolver shot exploded the short silence. The bullet gored through the nape of the neck of the man giving the orders, its trajectory tunnelling it upwards into the brain. It still had enough power to exit through the top of the skull in a gush of blood and tissue. The man toppled like a felled tree and before he hit the ground another victim of the revenger died. This was the man who had seen the bicycle. Half-turned to examine his find, he continued to pivot as he sought the source of the shot. Stark went for the head again and the bullet exploded a gush of blood from the cheek of the terrified man. Deflected by his false teeth, the bullet spun into the roof of his mouth and lodged in the brain. The man was knocked sideways by the impact, his death rattle becoming a gurgle as blood poured into his throat.

The men had died within seconds of each other, the first retaining his gun in a death grip. The second man’s automatic spun out of lifeless fingers as a nerve spasm jerked his arm, but the gun arced away from Stark, bouncing to the ground at the edge of the track. Two more guns exploded into sound and bullets spat dirt from the bank into Stark’s face. He threw himself backwards and thudded against the opposite bank. The final bullet belched from the Magnum’s muzzle and delved deep into the stomach of the man named André. He screamed and doubled up. His trigger finger jerked and a bullet drilled into the ground between his feet. He dropped the gun and sat down hard, using both hands to try to staunch the flow of blood from his middle.

The fourth man went into a crouch, took careful aim with a two-handed grip on his revolver—and screamed. Then he pitched forward as if pushed suddenly from behind. As he fell, a spreading wet stain showed in the centre of his back. Amanda’s head and shoulders showed above the bank. She had made several yards along the bed of the ditch, scooped up the discarded automatic and, like her victim, had used a two-handed grip. Her eyes were tight shut in her slime-covered face. She didn’t open them, nor move any other muscle in her body.

Shouts, the crackle of gunfire and a renewed burst of power from the Cadillac’s engine could not spur her to action. Stark needed no such reminders that the danger had not yet been evaded. A temporary respite was all he could expect.

‘Okay, don’t waste time feeling proud of yourself,’ he yelled at her as he leapt up out of the ditch, tossing away the empty Magnum and scooping up the Colt .38 dropped by the man with a hole in his stomach. The man looked up at him, a plea for mercy shining through the tears of agony in his wide eyes. ‘Not your day, is it?’ Stark asked softly, and brought up his knee. It smashed into the man’s jaw and the pleading eyes closed as he stretched his length on the ground.

‘I’m not proud of it, I ...’

A piercing look from Stark was enough to force the words back down Amanda’s throat as she dragged herself up out of the ditch, her white sweater and black leather mini skirt running with slime. Then: ‘Get the car keys!’ he barked, whirling and jumping back into the ditch.

The gunfire was louder now, and the bullets were thudding into the ground closer at hand. At least two men were approaching at a run while the lights of the Cadillac wavered back and forth as the big car was jogged into a multi-point turn in a restricted space.

Amanda staggered over to the sprawled bodies and fought nausea as she searched the pockets of the dead and injured. Stark groaned with strain and the planking of the bridge retorted with creaks as he forced his back up against the underside. Earth and wood sprang upwards as the end of one plank was freed from where it had been imbedded in the verge. Amanda ran across, both hands cupped to hold the car keys she had found on the men. She jerked open the front passenger door of the Renault and threw herself across into the driver’s seat. Her hands trembled as she tried to force in the ignition keys. In the confined space of the car she became aware of the stink of mud and water that coated her flesh and soaked through her clothes. She began to sob in a mixture of fear, shock and frustration as key after key failed to fit the lock.

As the third plank was torn loose and reared up, a bullet smacked into it and showered Stark with wood splinters. His face sheened with sweat and his eyes stinging with the drops which trickled down his forehead, he stood upright and squeezed the trigger of the single-action revolver. The driver had turned the Cadillac around and was barrelling back along the track: but the car was still too far away for the probing beams of its lights to capture Stark. Fringe glow showed up the two men approaching on foot and Stark sent a shot towards each of them. There were no screams and the men threw themselves to the ground of their own volition.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Stark yelled over his shoulder. ‘Checking the bloody oil?’

The last two words were drowned out by the roar of the Renault’s engine. Stark vaulted out of the ditch, hearing the whine and feeling the draught as a bullet zoomed past his head. He reached the open door of the car in two strides and dived through it. ‘Go!’ he snarled and the car rocketed forward, momentum slamming the door shut.

Amanda, her