AXE chief David Hawk has a brilliant plan to lure one of the agency's most dangerous enemies out of Russia, and into Nick Carter's hands. Nikolai Kobelev has been the diabolical foe in some of agent N3's most perilous cases and N3 has to stop him before he hatches another fiendish plot.With a dead ringer for Kobelev's beautiful daughter as bait, it seems the KGB killer is as good as caught… until the tables are suddenly turned, and Nick finds himself locked in a deadly struggle to save two gorgeous American espionage agents-and himself — from certain death.

THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO KILL A MAN...Chinese assassins prefer a knife. Others use bare hands.American pros favor high-powered guns. Russian killers choose dynamite.There’s just one man who can defeat the many ways of death. His name’s Nick Carter.This time Killmaster will have to use all his predatory skills to deal with the butchers sent his way in...

Seven scientists from different lines of study have over the past year been afflicted with a strange disease that has corrupted their minds.

Dr Damon Zeno: microbiologist… American defector… a dedicated and dangerous enemy. That was about all Nick Carter knew about the man he was hunting — except that Zeno was set up in a secret lab, perfecting a chilling new weapon for the destruction of the United States.The weapon was the 'Omega mutation' — a microscopic bug. It multiplied quickly and it could not be destroyed. It would kill a man in a matter of days. Zeno planned to turn it loose in the United States — and Nick Carter had no choice but to destroy Zeno before 'Omega Day'.Soon Carter was in Tangier, hot on Zeno's trail — with his automatic snug in its holster… a beautiful girl named Gabrielle close at his side… and a death trap waiting for him at every turn.

The following story was told to the writer by Nick Carter as being the most remarkable, and in many respects, the most mysterious case in his experience. It baffled the shrewdest detectives on the regular force, and had practically been abandoned when Nick Carter took hold of it. I tell the story in my own way and in the third person, but the facts, scenes and incidents are reproduced as nearly as possible in the great detective's own words.THE AUTHOR.

How did beautiful women come to be known as ‘The Terrible Ones’?Nick Carter, top agent of AXE, sometimes known as Killmaster, had his hands full finding out.Not that he didn’t have other things on his mind. The Chinese Communists weren’t in beautiful Dominica to sun themselves — and ‘Operation Blast’ wasn’t the nickname of a drinking-contest. Tnujillo’s last diabolical joke had been to leave a hundred million dollars in potential munitions money — a fortune in gold and jewels buried somewhere on the island, tantalisingly hidden right under everybody’s nose!And as if Nick Carter didn’t have enough trouble on his hands, there was always the danger of an ecstatic death from THE TERRIBLE ONES.

AROUND THE WORLD...ON A TRAIL OF MURDERSaigonIt was the last days of the war, and in the middle of the bloodshed Killmaster has to find a man named Walter Corbin — and a roll of microfilm. He found his man just in time to see his head shatter into a million pieces...Hong KongThe trail led from sampan city, where silence was safety, to a series of brutal, vicious murders. Nick Carter was certain of one thing — the organization behind those killings had more at stake than a roll of film...WashingtonPrinted in USAKillmaster needed an update from Hawk. He called the States, but AXE had vanished! He was a “free agent”-free to die in a Hong Kong gutter while powerful men made plans for global revenge!

Under any other circumstances it would have been cause for celebration when Nick Carter’s three friends showed up in the States—• the cross-eyed Egyptian criminologist Hakim Sadek, who had so often used his devious talents and hideous appearance to such devastating effect.• the jolly peasant woman Valentina Sichikova, the Russian agent who was built like a tank but had a heart as big and warm as the sun• and the beautiful Julia Baron with whom Nick Carter is as much in love as his dangerous profession permits…— but their reunion is not to celebrate mutual admiration, friendship or love — it is a “nightmare party’, an assignment so perilous that the foundations of the free world will crumble into radioactive dust if they do not succeed. Already the whole of the United States has been gripped with panic under the terrifying rumours of drugs added to drinking water, poisons in the air — an invasion from outer space!

DEATH IN THE DESERT!The Syrian Liberation Army, a fanatical group driven by “The Hawk,” are expanding their activities — if they succeed a tanker will explode in New York Harbor wasting a million lives! And that’ll be just the beginning!Nick Carter enlists double agent Miriam Kamel to lead him to the terrorists’ desert camp under the spectacular ruins of The Tower of Lions. Miriam’s an expert in the arts of love and war — but Nick wonders if she’s as clever at deceit...Under the chilling desert moon, amid the dying cries of “The Hawk’s” torture victims, Nick is trapped in a nerve shattering battle. His Israeli friends call him Lamedvovnik — the secret saint. But as time runs short N-3 could quickly become another kind of “saint” — a very dead martyr!