Thunder Jim Wade

by Henry Kuttner

  Patek smiled. “Of course. You’re Americans, aren’t you? It’s so seldom I have a chance to talk anything but Spanish here. I hardly ever get into Lima. Let me join you, eh?”

  “You can go join—”

  Marat cut into Argyle’s mutter.

  “Yeah. Sit down if you want. We’re leaving, anyway.”

  “I meant no harm,” Patek said hurriedly. “In fact—” He hesitated. “I heard you mention you wanted a few souvenirs. As it happens, I’m more or less in that business. When I do visit Lima, I sometimes pick up a few libres that way. My souvenirs are unusual.”

  Argyle suddenly sat up in attention.

  “Yeah? That’s just what I want, fella. Something different. Say, you don’t mean heads?”

  Patek glanced around furtively

  “Yes. Not so loud. They’re illegal, of course, but I buy them from the Indians and bring them here. It’s an easy way to make traveling expenses.”

  MARAT seemed hesitant. After an instant’s hesitation, he shook his head.

  “Nope. We don’t want those things. I’ve seen ’em in the museum here. They give me the leapin’ creeps.”

  “Shut up,” Argyle said belligerently. “Nobody asked you. How much you asking for one, Patek?”

  “Forty dollars, American money.”

  “Whoa!” The giant gulped. “That’s a fortune. I’m just a sailor, Mister. A sailor trying to get a head,” he added thoughtfully and roared with laughter.

  Marat grunted disgustedly and glared at his companion. Patek was grinning politely. He leaned forward, his voice low.

  “Well, we can make a deal. Those heads are valuable, but they’re illegal, too. I don’t like to keep them in my possession. I’ll let you have one for ten bucks—or even five. You can get fifty from any tourist, a hundred back in the States. You can scrape up five dollars, can’t you?”

  “Yeah.” Argyle nodded. “Okay. Let’s see one of the things.”

  “I don’t carry them with me. They’re in my room. If you want to take a look, it’s right across the way.”

  “Sure!”

  Argyle threw coins on the table-top, rose unsteadily and picked up his suitcase. He lurched toward the door, Patek beside him. Marat followed, complaining bitterly.

  Outside, a pair of keen eyes watched from the shadows as the trio crossed the street and entered a ramshackle hotel.

  Five minutes later, the deal was completed. In Patek’s room, Argyle paid over the sum demanded. He clicked open his suitcase, revealing a messy assortment of cheap clothing. He wrapped the tiny head he had purchased in a dirty shirt and stuffed it back with the rest of the junk, afterward closing the bag.

  Patek was smiling when he looked up.

  “Well, thanks. How about a drink to celebrate the deal? Kumshaw, you know.”

  “Suits me,” Argyle grunted, glancing around. “Bring it out.”

  “Haven’t a drop here,” Patek said. “But there’s a place near here where they sell the best Peruvian brandy you’ve ever tasted—the Cuzco. It’s run by a half-breed, but his liquor has a real pedigree. How about it?”

  “Lead me to it.” Argyle grinned.

  The three groped their way down the narrow, dark stairs. Almost at the bottom, a dimly glimpsed figure, carrying a suitcase, came charging up. He collided with Argyle and the two men went down in a thrashing, violent huddle.

  The giant yelled drunken oaths. The suitcase dropped from his hands and for a moment the staircase was chaos. Then Argyle and his assailant sorted themselves out. The attacker, with a hurried apology, raced on up the steps. Argyle recaptured the suitcase and hurled a curse into the darkness.

  “Nuts,” he growled, turning back. “Let’s get along to the Cuzco, Patek. I need a drink.”

  Even in the dingy, ill-lighted dive that was the Cuzco, Red Argyle apparently could not escape annoyance. Fifteen minutes passed before he discovered that he had lost his suitcase. He’d brought it with him into the Cuzco, he was sure. He announced that fact loudly and went on to explain his insulting suspicions as he searched. Presently he remembered that he had left it under a table near the door.

  When he went to investigate, it was there. No one had noticed the tall, dark man who had wandered into the Cuzco, carrying a leather bag, ordered a drink at that particular table and deftly switched the suitcases again. For the dark man had left immediately after accomplishing his purpose.

  As Argyle and Marat had expected, their drinks were drugged. It wasn’t long before they passed out, since they did not battle the narcotic. They would have been disappointed if they had not been drugged.

  Marat had a vague impression of being carried, of bouncing over bad roads in a car. Then blackness took him.

  Patek, smiling with satisfaction, halted a few miles out of Lima, in a lonely field where a big cabin plane stood waiting. A tumble-down, corrugated iron structure, like a warehouse, showed where the plane had been concealed till now. A burly half-breed, with a knife-scar slashed from one narrow temple to the corner of his flat nose, came running across the field.

  “Ready, senor?” he called.

  “All ready, Pedro.” Patek nodded. “Two more passengers. You’ve kept the others asleep and waiting for me?”

  “Si. They are in the plane and tied, of course.”

  “Bueno. Help me with these two. The big one should please Dellera. The other’s a runt, but he looks tough. Well, that isn’t bad work for one night.”

  Argyle and Marat were carried into the plane. Pedro drove the car in the warehouse, padlocked the door behind it and returned with the suitcase.

  “What shall I do with this?” he asked.

  “Toss it in,” Patek grunted, busy at the plane’s controls. “I can keep using that head I sold ’em. It’s good bait. This must be the twentieth time I’ve sold the thing. I hope it’s good for twenty more.”

  Pedro climbed in and carefully shut the door. In a corner, he found rope and bound Marat and Argyle. Then he tested the bonds of two other men who were lying motionless and drugged on the floor of the cabin.

  The engine roared with a surge of sudden power. The plane slid forward, took effortlessly into the air and circled away from Lima. It headed to where the mighty range of the Cordilleras lifted craggy shoulders against the night sky.

  Silence blanketed the Andes—the tense, breathless silence that makes time and heartbeats stop in the terrifying moment before a hurricane strikes with all its murderous fury.

  Chapter IV

  The Scourge of Crime

  THUNDER JIM WADE, at the wheel of a rented car, glanced back to the lights of Lima, dim in the distance. No one was following.

  He turned into a narrow lane, jounced through a belt of trees and left the car on the road, where it could easily be found. There was no time to be wasted in returning it to the agency. Besides, Wade’s deposit there had been almost as much as the ramshackle car was worth.

  The Thunderbug still stood where it had landed. A rather bulky, streamlined, black craft, with stubby wings and an oversize propeller, it looked too heavy to take the air, even with its powerful motors. But under the black paint that sheathed it was a hull of extremely light alloy that possessed incredible tensile strength. That alloy no modern scientist had ever duplicated.

  There was a mystery about Wade’s past. He had come out of nowhere, traveling into the far places of the world. What he had found there had amazed him at first. There was greed and treachery. There were evil, unscrupulous, vicious men who rapaciously exploited their fellow human beings.

  There had been a master criminal in Singapore who mistakenly thought Wade was fair game. It was then that Jim’s confusion had crystallized, exploding into a deadly, remorseless fury against the human carnivores—the killers and panderers and criminals who preyed on weaker men.

  When Jim left Singapore, the crime master was dead, his organization ruthlessly smashed. Wade’s past training, his keen brain and his high ideals had made him into a fighting machine of
chilled steel, a fighter whose reputation was to penetrate into the Manga Reva, the jungles of Indo-China and Ceylon, the bleak steppes of Siberia and a thousand other spots where men lived and died the hard way. Thus James Wade had become Thunder Jim Wade, the scourge of international crime.

  Through the years the legend had grown, but the truth kept pace with it. Two men had joined Wade in his crusade—Dirk Marat and Red Argyle. And the Thunderbug, marvel of modern science, aided Thunder Jim when he went forth to answer a cry for help that no one else could answer.

  Only then would Wade’s eyes turn to black glacial ice. When they did, almost always it foretold death, for Wade was completely remorseless when dealing with human beasts who were outside the pale of law and common humanity. The men he hunted could trick and escape the law, and often did. But there was no appeal against the flaming, deadly guns of Thunder Jim Wade.

  A casual eye might have seen nothing extraordinary in Wade as he moved lithely across the meadow toward the Thunderbug. He was tall, lean and rangy, looking rather like a college boy on a vacation, with his brown, youthful face and tousled dark hair, so deep-black that it was almost blue.

  A closer inspection would have shown more significant details. There was an iron hardness underlying Wade’s face, like iron beneath velvet. His jet eyes were decidedly not those of a boy. There was a curious quality of soft depth to them, although sometimes that black deep could freeze over with deadly purpose.

  HIS hand flickered in a swift motion over the hull of the Thunderbug and the cabin door swung open. Wade climbed inside, shut the door and glanced around. The cabin was not roomy, but this was because of the variety of equipment stowed away in lockers on all sides. The Thunderbug always carried a cargo that prepared it for almost any emergency.

  Wade dropped into the pilot’s seat and turned on a special receiving set that was built into the plane. A needle flickered, quivered and steadied. A narrow-beam radio signal, somewhere over the Andes, was monotonously, automatically clicking out its cryptic message.

  Wade knew where that signal originated. A sardonic smile flickered over his brown face. Patek might be on guard against pursuit, but if the pursuer kept out of sight, that would be another matter. All the Thunderbug had to do now was stay on the beam and it would trail Patek to his unknown destination.

  Wade pressed the self-starter. With a remarkably short run the plane took the air, swooped up and turned toward the Andes. Its motors were muffled, comparatively inaudible, for the special alloy of which the Thunderbug was made had the property of absorbing sound to a great extent. Yet the noise could not be completely deadened, unless, of course, the engines were shut off.

  The plane kept on the beam. Whenever it got off, an automatic signal told Wade on which side he was. Before long he relaxed. Setting the controls and flying high, he lit a cigarette. His brown, strong face gleamed like a mask in the brief yellow flare.

  So far, everything had worked according to schedule. When Wade had switched suitcases back in Lima, for fifteen minutes he had been in possession of Argyle’s bag, which contained the shrunken Indian head that had been purchased from Patek. During that quarter of an hour, Wade had worked swiftly, having previously prepared a tiny, extremely powerful broadcasting set which automatically sent out a narrow-beam signal. It was fitted into a tiny, spherical, plastecene shell the size of a man’s fist.

  Wade had simply slit open the shrunken head, taken out the round stone inside and substituted the radio afterward sewing up the head again. At present, that radio set was aboard Patek’s plane, steadily sending out its betraying signal, which the Thunderbug was following. There was little for Wade to do, except stay at the controls and see that the treacherous Andean air currents did not cause trouble.

  Time passed….

  Wade was in no hurry. He did not think that Patek would arrive at his destination till dawn. He guessed that the other plane would land at some out-of-the-way spot, to which Patek did not wish to draw attention. It followed logically that landing lights would not be used unless absolutely necessary.

  He was right, as it proved. Patek slanted south above the Cordilleras skirting the edge of the Amazon basin. The snowy peaks gleamed eerily in the yellow moonlight. Silence filled the night. The sky was sprinkled with an incredible multitude of stars.

  It was a land of wonder and mystery, Wade knew. Long before Pizarro, in the sixteenth century, the mighty civilization of the Incas had existed here, with ancient Cuzco as its capital.

  Here, according to legend, Manco Capac and Oello Huaco, the Children of the Sun, had started the human race. They were the Incan Adam and Eve.

  Under the harsh rule of the Spaniards, the Indians had been reduced to actual slavery. Human bondage was not abolished till 1918, a strange survival of an ancient, vicious custom in a modern world.

  ONCE, against the snowy whiteness of a peak not far below, Wade glimpsed several bounding figures. Llamas, he thought, or perhaps guanacos, descendants of the prehistoric camels that once ranged the Andes before humanity existed. At that time man had been a tiny, furtive marsupial crouching on a tree-branch in the primeval forest.

  Yet this lost land was as primeval as it had been five thousand years ago. Civilization had never touched the deep fastnesses of the interior. The Spaniards had pushed forward along the rivers. Before that, the Incas had their far-flung mines and cities.

  These were superficial stepping-stones in a great Amazon. Along the Pachitea, for example, dwelt tribes no white man had ever seen and the Matto Grosso still held fast to its impenetrable secrets. From Pernambuco to Callao, from Caracas to Cape Horn, South America’s vast wilderness is chiefly a mystery, save along the narrow coasts and deeper waterways.

  The night dragged on. Wade was careful to keep out of sight of the plane he was following. At daybreak, the needle of his gauge dipped sharply and Wade knew that he had reached his destination.

  A gorge split the heart of the mountains beneath. A swift river raced out into the depths of the pathless green jungle that swept for thousands of unbroken miles to the Madeira, the Tapajoz and the Amazon. But there was no sign of human life or habitation.

  The radio didn’t lie, however. Wade circled the plane, lifted binoculars to his eyes. The Thunderbug’s presence might be discovered by the enemy, but that didn’t matter, now that Wade had reached his destination.

  In the mouth of the gorge, under the cliff’s overhang, was a curious structure. A sort of giant pill-box, it was inexplicable in this desolate land. Wade knew that no Indian had built that cement structure. It seemed unguarded. The flat plain before it was empty.

  Wade dived down, intending to land. The Thunderbug’s wheels had almost touched the ground when danger struck.

  A puff of smoke burst out from the pill-box. The roar of an exploding shell crashed into Wade’s ear-drums. The unknown marksman, in his eagerness, had fired too soon and the Thunderbug was unhurt.

  Wade instinctively jerked his hand back. Under his deft fingers the plane’s nose mounted. The engine screamed as it was fed more gas.

  He heard another shell burst dangerously close to the tail. Then he was safely out of range, skimming over the jungle a few feet above the mist-shrouded treetops.

  Morning fog made the forest below seem dim and unreal. Wade gained altitude and circled back, puzzled. Some distance eastward, the river widened to a lake, but there was no trace of habitation there. The gorge itself seemed to hold the clue.

  Where was Patek’s plane? In a concealed hangar, by now, obviously. And Marat and Argyle were prisoners somewhere in or near that pill-box fortress.

  Wade circled above the gorge, but the overhanging cliffs above it kept their secret well. At last, he headed back toward the jungle. It was impossible to land at the gorge’s mouth, yet he had to land, if he were to accomplish anything.

  IN THE wilderness of the forest, there were no natural clearings. The lake Wade had glimpsed was landing field enough, though. As he flew, he pumped out the Thunderbu
g’s pontoons and presently set the amphibian down on the lake’s surface amid a fountain of white spray. The plane drifted toward the shore. Wade waited, his keen eyes searching for danger.

  There was nothing, apparently. The water was hidden under white mist. Through the fog-veil an occasional black bulk loomed, a cayman, gliding silently through the water or lying motionless as a log. Probably Wade could have swum ashore without trouble, unless there were piranhas in these waters. It was unnecessary to take the risk. The Thunderbug touched the bank and Wade switched off the engine.

  Silent, green and mysterious, the jungle rose all about him. What menace did it hide?

  Slowly he opened the cabin door. There was a hint of motion in the distance, something so faint and cautious that another man would not have seen it. But Wade had glimpsed that betraying stirring of leaves and he dropped instantly to a crouch. A missile whispered above his head, blunted itself against a window and dropped to the cabin floor.

  Wade shut the door, locked it and bent to pick up a tiny sliver of wood. Its tip was smeared with green. It was not curare. There are other poisons, both vegetable and animal in origin, and Wade guessed that this came from the poison sac of some local venomous snake. The arrow had an infinitesimal design traced upon it. Wade’s eyes narrowed as he peered closer. He recognized an Incan symbol—the symbol of death.

  His lips formed silent words.

  “La gente del venono.”

  The Poison People!

  Chapter V

  The Sun God

  WADE had heard of the decadent, savage descendants of an ancient Incan tribe which had hidden from Pizarro in the wilderness, intermarried with local Indians and become a race that was murderously resentful of all intrusion.

  Degraded, superstitious and deadly as snakes, they kept the boundaries of their jungle home inviolate. Few men had ever seen them, for they moved like shadows, striking invisibly from ambush. A sliver of wood would appear without warning in a bronzed throat. Within minutes that man would die.

  The Poison People undeniably guarded their frontiers well.