The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Four (47 page)

“What do you want?” she demanded.

The German looked down at the small automatic in her hand.

“You will not need that, Fräulein,” he said gently. “What I want is of interest to us both. I want to know about
him.
” He pointed downward. “Can we trust him? What does he want? Who is he?”

Zara’s face paled. She glanced toward the door. It was locked. She crossed to the window, started to close it, and then caught her breath. The steel bars were gone!

But when she turned, her face was composed.

“I know no more than you, Herr Heittn,” she said calmly, “except he seems to have unlimited funds. Also, he is ambitious.”

Heittn nodded. “Ah!” he said seriously. “That is what I have seen, Fräulein. Too ambitious. And he has power, too much power. Sometimes”—he shook his head worriedly—“I think he is beyond us all, that man. He is not a National Socialist, yet he is too strong with the party for me.”

“But what could he do?” Zara protested.

“Do? A strong man with money, ambition, and courage—what can he not do in such times as these? Nations are rising and falling; men are discouraged, afraid. They will look anywhere for shelter. The weak admire the strong, and that one, he is strong. He is cruel. I admit it, Fräulein. I am afraid of him!”

Casually Zara Hammedan lighted a cigarette. Her eyes strayed toward the closet door, now closed. She frowned a little. The bars from the window had been slid up out of sight again, and that could mean but one thing. Ponga Jim Mayo was somewhere in the house.

She looked at the German shrewdly. “Herr Heittn, your government does not appeal to me, you know that. But I would even prefer the dictatorship of Nazi Germany to what would follow the success of these schemes in the Near East! I do not know more about that man than you do, but I do know that Captain Mayo knew, or knows, something that he does not wish anyone to know.”

“And Mayo is dead,” Heittn said slowly.

“Perhaps.” Zara flicked the ash from her cigarette. “You had better go, Herr Heittn. It grows late.”

The Nazi turned to the door and then glanced around.

“I go, but I have a plan to make our friend below be a bit more reasonable.” He smiled.
“Guten Abend, Fräulein!”

A
S
H
EITTN WALKED
swiftly down the hall he glanced over the stairs, but no one was in sight. With a quick smile, Heittn went down the carpeted stairs. He had reached the door when a voice froze him in his tracks. Something in the low, even tone sent a chill up his spine. He turned slowly.

Theron stood in the shadow near the door from the wide living room. The light fell across his face. There was something regal in his appearance. In his right hand, he held a Luger.

“I thought you left us, Herr Heittn?” he said coldly. “I do not like spies!”

“Spies?” Heittn shrugged. “Come, come, Theron! That is hardly the term. I went up to see Miss Hammedan about—”

“But searched my room in the meantime, is that it? Give me that blueprint, Herr Heittn. Give it to me, at once!”

“Blueprint?” the Nazi was puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

Above in the darkness, Zara slipped from her room and looked down. In her hand was an automatic. She hesitated and then lifted it slowly.

“Don’t!”

A hand closed over her wrist, and the voice that spoke to her was low. Demarest stepped up beside her.

“Not now,” he said. “Without him, nothing would work. He holds all the strings. The whole plot would be useless and we would be exposed.”

In the silence they could hear the words that were being spoken at the front door.

“All right, Herr Heittn,” Theron was saying. “It does not matter. But if the blueprint were to leave this house, it would matter.”

The sound of the automatic was flat and ugly in the dim hallway. Heittn’s face went sick, and the man stepped back, two short steps. Then he sat down, abruptly, with a thin trickle of blood coming from the hole over his heart.

Her face deathly pale, Zara Hammedan turned abruptly and went to her room. Nathan Demarest glanced after her and then returned to his own room.

Zara closed the door and then turned. In the dim light the man sitting on the bed was plainly visible. His peaked cap lay beside him, and he still wore the faded khaki suit and woven leather sandals. She could see the butt of his automatic under the edge of his coat.

“You—you must go quickly!” she protested. “He killed Herr Heittn. He will stop at nothing now!”

Ponga Jim lifted an eyebrow. “What I want to know is—who is he?”

“Theron,” she whispered. “He will be coming up, too, wanting to know what Heittn said to me. Go—quickly!”

Ponga Jim’s eyes were bright.

“Theron. That answers a lot of things!” He stepped to the window, put a foot over the sill, and reached for the thick branch. “So long, beautiful. Be seeing you!”

CHAPTER VII

Ponga Jim had reached the ground and was starting to slip back into the trees when he saw them. Four men closing in on him.

He knew what that meant, and he didn’t hesitate. He jumped the nearest one, hooking a left short and hard to the man’s head. It hit with a
plop,
and the man’s head flew back. He dropped like a sack of meal.

A shot clipped by his head, and Ponga Jim dropped into a crouch as his own gun came out. The big automatic roared. Once—twice—three times.

Two men dropped, a third screamed shrilly and staggered back into the building. Holding his left shoulder, Ponga Jim ran. He dodged through the trees with bullets clipping the leaves about him, ducked into an alley, and then crossed into another street. A car was waiting with the motor running. He jumped in.

“Move!” he said, and Sakim let the car into gear and stepped on the gas.

Ponga Jim glanced at his watch. It was three
A.M
. At noon the convoy would be attacked, and he had until then, and until then only. It was going to be nip and tuck if he made it.

He felt sick. Fifty thousand soldiers coming up the Red Sea toward Suez, fifty thousand Anzacs to strengthen the Army of the Nile. He knew the plot now. What he had overheard and what he had found in his ransacking of Theron’s room had told him the whole story.

Native mobs running riot in the streets, men dying by the thousand—Kernan, Arnold, all of them.

The car slowed up as it neared the American Export Line’s office on the Rue Fouad. A man stepped from the shadows, and the car whined to a halt. Major Arnold hit the running board with a jump.

“Jim! What’s happened?” Arnold’s face was tense. “When Selim found me he said all calamity was to break loose today. What do you know?”

As the car raced across town, Ponga Jim told his story quickly and concisely.

“Ptolemais Theron is the man behind it all,” he said. “He’s a bad one, William! I’ve known of him for years. He and I played poker once with two other men in the place of Mahr-el-din in the Kasbah. Ring Wallace was there and Ski Jorgenson. Theron had just sidestepped a term on the breakwater for illicit diamond buying and was working on a deal to sell a lot of world war rifles to the Riffs. We were talking of the Red Sea, and Ski—”

Ponga Jim stopped short, and his face went blank.

“By heaven, William, I’ve got it!”

“Got what?” Arnold’s face was tight, stiff.

“William”—Ponga Jim’s voice was low with emotion—“Ski Jorgenson had been working a salvage job in the Gulf of Aqaba, near Tir
n Island. He told us of finding some huge caverns under the cliffs of the islands—one room five hundred yards long, with a dozen chambers opening off from it, and water in that main chamber. He told us about what a swell smuggler’s hangout it would be. And the entrance is deep. A ship could come and go—if it had no masts!”

“You mean that’s the base of that mystery battlewagon?” Arnold’s face lit up. “By the Lord Harry, if it is we’ll blast the place in on them!”

“That’s the base. Theron wanted me killed because I knew too much. When Ski told about the caverns he also told some stuff about the ancient tombs at Adulis, and the chances are Theron’s been robbing them for the gold to put this deal over. That would be where Rudolf Burne got the emerald ring he had. Probably he was in on the deal, got cold feet, and came to me because he knew I wouldn’t turn him over to the police. But he was shot before he could talk.”

The car slid to a halt, and Arnold dropped out.

“Don’t worry about us,” he said drily. “We’ll be all set.”

“Wait!” Ponga Jim put a hand on Arnold’s arm. “Don’t say a thing about yourselves—I mean you and General Kernan. I’ve already arranged for that. I’m going to have Selim, Sakim, Big London, and Longboy standing by. They’ll get the men who’ll be sent to kill you.

“Don’t trust anyone. Somebody high up is in this, somebody close to you.” He paused. “Oh, yes! Remember Carter? He built the
Khamsin.
Built the plant for it for the Nazis.”

“Okay.” Arnold smiled suddenly and held out his hand. “I don’t know what you’ve got up your sleeve, but good luck. And in case something slips up—it’s been a grand fight!”

Ponga Jim grinned. “Listen, pal. Just to keep the record straight. Keep Zara Hammedan undercover. She means well, and—”

“Who?” William grabbed Ponga Jim’s arm. “Why, you didn’t mention her! Where did you—”

“Shh!” Mayo said, grinning. “It’s late, William, and you’ll wake up the neighbors. Zara? Oh, we’re just like that!” He held up two fingers. “A honey, isn’t she?”

Selim stepped on the gas.

“I hope you get shot!” Arnold yelled after him.

T
IRĀN
I
SLAND
, at the southern end of the Gulf of Aqaba, is six and a half miles long and in the south part is about five miles wide. Chisholm Point is steep and cliffy, but Johnson Point, the northwest tip of the island, is low and flat, of sand and dead coral. South of the point, two flat, sandy beaches afford good landing, but the coast elsewhere consists of undercut coral cliffs.

It lacked but a little of daylight when Ponga Jim Mayo stepped ashore on one of those sandy beaches. Slug Brophy scowled at him in the vague light.

“I don’t like it, Skipper. I don’t like shooting at no ship when you’re aboard it. And if they catch you they’ll fill you so full of lead you’ll sink clean through to China.”

“Forget it,” said Mayo. “I’ve got my job to do—you’ve got yours. Have the boats and life rafts ready, alright? We’ve got one chance in a million that the
Semiramis
will come out of this, but a chance. All I’m figuring on is crippling the
Khamsin
—that’s the name of the mystery battleship—so she can’t move fast. Then maybe she can be kept busy until the convoy escapes. Have the sub over right away. Jeff and Hifty from the engine room can handle it.”

The boat shoved off into the darkness, and Ponga Jim climbed the gradually shelving beach. He paused there, looking over the island: sand, decomposed coral, and rock, with here and there some grass. He was going on a memory of what Ski Jorgenson had said several years before, that there was an opening of the cave to the island itself, aside from the huge mouth that opened into the gulf.

He found it by sheer good luck, after he had looked for an hour. It was already daylight when he saw the small hole Ski had mentioned. Surprisingly, there was no one near it. He slid through and found himself in a passage where he could stand erect. He hurried, hesitated at a branching passage, and then chose the larger. It opened into the huge cavern so suddenly that he almost walked right out into the open.

Even so, he stopped in his tracks, staring. He stood in the darkness at one side of a huge cavern, its domed roof lost in the shadows overhead. But what held his gaze was the warship.

It was at least five hundred feet long, painted black, but glistening with metallic luster. The hull seemed to be built like that of any battleship, but above deck the ship was covered with a turtleshell covering. There were two turrets forward and one aft, each looking much like slightly less than half a ball where the rounded surface lifted above the shell. The turrets, obviously, could turn to cover any point from dead ahead to a complete right angle on either side.

Between, in three tiers, like guns in a fort, were smaller guns. Nowhere on the ship was there any exposed deck, any open space. The ship was completely covered with a steel housing from stem to stern.

There were lights around the ship, and men working. Ponga Jim could hear the clangor of metal and could see a great moving crane, and obviously the branch caverns were fitted with shops for the building and upkeep of ships.

Keeping in the shadows, Ponga Jim worked his way to a place where the cavern narrowed. His plan was to get aboard and keep the quarter pint of nitroglycerine he had intact—which meant keeping himself intact.

Dozens of men were working and sweating. Armed guards patrolled the area near the ship, and at any moment Ponga Jim knew he might be seen. Warily, he dodged behind a pile of oil drums, waiting.

The German who came around the corner of the pile came without any warning, and Ponga Jim looked up to see the man staring at him. He saw the man’s eyes widen, saw his mouth open, and then Ponga Jim took a chance and smashed a right hand into the man’s belly. If the fellow knocked him down with that nitro in his pocket—