by André Caroff
“It’s quiet, huh?” Art Baxter whispered.
“Shut up,” Bernitz also whispered, rather kindly. “Get on those binoculars instead.”
They had been there for more than two hours and still not located the entrance to the shelter. Bernitz was worried that time was working against him. Plus, there was the stifling heat. The air trembled at ground level, deforming the landscape to make it ripple. Bernitz felt like he was sitting over a frying pan. It was not a pleasant feeling.
He looked at the land again. This was where the saucer had disappeared. The experts were absolutely certain on this point, but you had to have blind faith in them to believe it. At first sight, it was unlikely that a shelter could exist on this desolate summit. And Bernitz was thinking of the huge work it would take to dig an underground shelter. It would take men and materials and carrying the debris away…
This last thought really struck Bernitz, but he could not bring himself to admit that the experts were wrong. So, the debris had not been transported elsewhere. They had spread it all around the site and this was probably why the place looked like the moon.
“I see something else,” Sammy murmured.
Owen crawled up to him and gave him an inquiring nod. Sammy pointed to a little rocky hill that looked like a sugar loaf. Bernitz focused his binoculars on the target. After a minute of inspection he said, “I’m pretty short-sighted, but I don’t see anything strange.”
“There’s a crack,” Sammy pointed out.
“And? That’s not uncommon in a rock.”
“Yes, but this one is perfectly straight. It starts at the base of the hill and goes all the way to the top. I’m sure it continues on the other side.”
“Exactly,” Lucky Simms agreed. “I see it, too.”
“Me, too,” Art Baxter chimed in.
Bernitz looked harder and finally made out the crack in question. To notice it you really had to be looking for some anomaly. Normally, no one would pay any attention to it. Bernitz groaned. The refuge might be under this hill, but nothing proved it and the problem remained unsolved. “As long as we can’t check it out on the spot, it’s a whole lot of nothing. A crack here, a bump there… not enough to be sure.”
Lucky Simms moved and his paralyzing rifle clanged against the rock. “We can stay here all day long,” he said impatiently, “but if you want, Owen, I’ll volunteer for a reconnaissance.”
“No, we got this far without being spotted and now’s not the time to ruin everything. No one usually comes up here because it’s hard to get to. You have no reason to be strolling around in a suit at 4,000 feet.”
Lucky scowled. “So, we’ll wait until night?”
Bernitz did not answer. He was swimming in indecision and more than ever was missing Smith Beffort. To attack a bank or machine gun a pack of cops on your heels was his kind of thing, but this sly and silent battle was wearing down his nerves. With Madame Atomos and her Organization, you could never predict what would happen. The enemy stayed holed up, invisible, motionless and then struck suddenly, with lightening speed, like a snake that you accidentally stepped on.
A stone rolled slowly down the slope and Bernitz turned around. 150 feet away Smith Beffort was scrambling up the last part of land that led to the rocky point. It had taken him two and a half hours to come from Chadron where a light helicopter was waiting to drop him at 3,000 feet with three engineers carrying the equipment necessary to produce a thick, artificial fog. While Smith was finishing his ascent, the three technicians went around the peak to set up in the wind. Beffort was supposed to use the walkie-talkie to give them the signal to release the protective curtain.
Bernitz whispered sincerely, “Smith, I’m glad to see you.”
Beffort dropped next to him and caught his breath. “What’s happening, Owen?”
“Um… not much.”
“The shelter?”
Bernitz swept his arm over the landscape. “Somewhere in this circus. The entrance is so well hidden that we haven’t been able to find it.”
Without saying a word, Beffort grabbed Bernitz’ binoculars, adjusted them and started examining the terrain inch by inch. He saw right away that the place met the demands of Madame Atomos for installing a shelter. Maybe out of habit, certainly because he knew where to look, in less than five minutes he had chosen four possible points for hiding the main entrance. It was obviously only guesswork, but the big rock with the crack was one of the choices.
“Okay,” Bernitz approved, “Sammy already spotted the rock, but how can we get there without being disintegrated?”
Beffort shrugged and said only one word, “Fog.”
“There’s not…”
“I thought of it during my trip. I figured that you would be stuck and I was hoping you wouldn’t do anything crazy like running around out in the open. Well, I’ve brought with me a small magic bag that comes straight from the US Army labs. In a few minutes we won’t be able to see ten feet in front of us, but the cameras of Madame Atomos will be neutralized as well. Still, we have to watch out for the microphones.”
“Where are they?” Lucky Simms asked.
“I don’t know, but they’re here, rest assured. If we’re too noisy, whoever’s in the shelter will set a fire between them and us. The rock will turn into an inferno, the flames will spring out of the ground and every escape route will be cut off.” He looked at the men around him. “I’m not trying to scare you. It’s just that you have to understand that we’re not dealing with a normal operation here. By some new process, Madame Atomos now controls fire. To escape it on this plateau would take a miracle. Therefore, we don’t attack in force, but we infiltrate slowly and silently, on tiptoes. We have to advance side by side and never lose sight of each other. We communicate by signs. The artificial fog will thin out after 30 minutes, so we have to act fast. If we haven’t found anything by then, come back here on the double. Got it?”
The five men nodded. Smith Beffort pulled out the antenna of his walkie-talkie, pressed the button and gave the order to send in the fog. A minute later the light mist started spreading slowly out on the summit. It was a very good imitation. It was hard to tell it apart from a real cloud that the wind would blow in from the east. At this altitude the phenomenon must have been common and the observers in the shelter had no reason to think it out of the ordinary. Of course, the sky was blue, but in the mountains no one could predict with certainty what the weather would be 15 minutes later.
The mist rolled in, thickened, turned into a heavy fog. Beffort looked at his watch. From this moment on his group had half an hour to find the entrance to the hideout. Then inside the shelter the battle would follow against unknown but certainly very powerful forces.
Beffort lifted his arm and the small group started walking. The G-man carried his paralyzing pistol while Owen Bernitz and his men had paralyzing rifles, incendiary grenades and explosives. The commando team had no problem reaching the bottom of the north slope and continued forward. Now the six men were in the danger zone. Behind every rock, every bump, a microphone might be hidden. After a few feet Beffort noticed that the rocks were not moving under his feet. He bent down and tried in vain to pick a muddy pebble off the hard ground. He tried harder with no success and finally realized that the plateau was one solid piece, a kind of terrace made of different mineral substances artificially welded together onto a brown concrete casting. It was art. 100 yards away, even with binoculars, the effect was undetectable.
Beffort stood up and advanced the team, which had stopped with him. Farther along Bernitz waved. Beffort joined him and saw the mic on the ground. It, too, was painted brown to look like a pebble. Beffort waved them on. On the hard ground the men could walk silently, easily, but the thick fog made their search difficult. However, they reached the cracked rock without too much groping around. Lucky Simms examined it, straightened up and shook his head—the crack was natural.
The commando team continued its slow march. Beffort looked at his watch: 12 minute
s had gone by. All of a sudden Art Baxter was waving and pointing at the ground at his feet. Everyone gathered around. By some undreamed of luck, Baxter had just discovered one of the air vents of Madame Atomos’ shelter.
Chapter XIII
The air vent was around two feet in diameter, covered by close-fitting bars and stuck in a gentle slope in the ground. It was visible, but a rock was set to roll over on top of it in case of an alert. The fact that the vent was still open was reassuring. This proved that the Atomos Organization had not yet detected the presence of the men walking around on the shelter’s roof. By signs Beffort asked Owen Bernitz if he had any tools among his things. Bernitz signed back that it had not been thought of and they would have to go all the way back to Alturas to get some. It was too far. In fifteen minutes the artificial fog would become useless and they would have to wait until nightfall. In the meantime, anything could happen.
Just then Art Baxter pulled out of his pocket a small leather case. Baxter had been the best safecracker in the USA before being recruited into the Green Dragon Force and his jailbreaks were legendary. A bar was as secure against Baxter as a bottle of booze against an alcoholic. Like any good craftsman he could not bring himself to leave his tool kit in the closet when he joined the service of order. Today his tiny tools looked ridiculous, but the 6-inch file with which he attacked the first bar was made of the finest steel and it was almost completely silent as it bit into the metal and cut through quickly.
There were 11 bars, two inches apart. Fortunately for the commando team, they were no thicker than a pencil. The grill had been made as a kind of filter but it was the rock that was supposed to protect it. In a few minutes the file had cut through the left half of the bars where the metal was fixed into the concrete and Baxter moved on to the second part of the operation.
Smith Beffort anxiously watched on and kept an eye on the second hand of his watch. If Baxter finished the job, it would be in the nick of time. The fog was already starting to lighten up, disappear in large patches and the sunrays were becoming visible again. Beffort looked around. The fog was still thick at ground level, so he motioned to his men to lie down in order to escape the cameras.
Over the grill, Lucky Simms was taking out the seventh bar and laying it carefully down by the rock before turning back to hold the eighth for Baxter, who was already working on it. Bernitz stared thoughtfully at the air vent. He was wondering if his belly would be able to fit through the opening. Three minutes later the last bar was sitting in the hands of Simms. Beffort gave a friendly pat on Baxter’s shoulder as he put away his tool kit. Right away Beffort sat on the edge of the hole and slid down on his back. He was quickly buried in darkness and when he looked up he saw Bernitz and Sammy coming down behind him. Then it was the turn of Baxter, Stutton and Simms. From here, the commando team could not be spotted by a camera on the surface.
Beffort continued his descent in the narrow tunnel until he ended up on a flat surface in front of another grill separating the shaft from a corridor that was only partly visible. A blue, indirect light seeped out of the walls. The air was treated and the silence total. The group huddled together on the platform while Baxter brought out his tool kit again. He picked out a small monkey wrench and with a midwife’s care he removed the four bolts that were holding the grill to its frame.
Beffort swung open the grill, slipped through and jumped into the corridor. The others were quick to join him, armed with their paralyzing rifles and as they followed him, they continued watching their backs. Beffort walked fast. Of course he knew nothing about the layout of the place, but he figured that the corridor must be circular, although he had no idea what level they were on with respect to the heart of the shelter. At a junction he stopped and asked his men (still with hand gestures) to get the explosives ready because now they could hear the dull hum of a nearby machine room. Beffort turned the corner, but when he saw the cold eye of a camera on the wall, he leapt back.
The camera captured the fleeting image of Beffort’s face and sent it instantly to the nearest relay, which in turn transmitted it to Atomia Island where the Great Brain received it, sorted it and compared it with the files of the enemies of the Organization. The two files ran through the selector, fell into the housing at the same time and the information went back into the computer. The Great Brain was not startled because it was a machine, but it immediately set off the alarm in the Alturas shelter.
The sirens started wailing and the commando team knew they had been spotted. Beffort turned to Bernitz. “Now, we have to hustle, Owen. Shoot at anything that moves. Let’s go, boys!”
The six men ran into the corridor and straight into two servants armed with their formidable disintegrator rifles. Beffort paralyzed the two human robots with one shot from his gun, threw it away and grabbed one of the disintegrators while Bernitz took the other. The firepower of the team had suddenly been exponentially increased. For the third time, Smith was holding the ultimate weapon, but he did not think he would be able to save the reservoir for a laboratory analysis. What had been relatively easy for the paralyzing ray turned out to be much more complicated for the disintegrator. It was as if fate refused to even the odds between the United States and Madame Atomos.
“Watch out!” Lucky Simms shouted from the back of the pack.
Smith and Bernitz turned around and were horrified to see that a torrent of fire was charging down the underground corridor. In desperation Beffort pressed the trigger of his weapon. The ray flashed out of the transparent barrel and passed through the flames with no more effect than a spray of water. As Beffort had expected, the fire could not be disintegrated.
Bernitz turned to the wall and disintegrated it. A gaping hole was opened before the team and they jumped through, landing in a huge room almost entirely occupied by a giant machine. But the flames were also twisting through, rushing at the small group stuck between the machine and the concrete walls.
Vaguely conscious that this machine was the one controlling the fire, Beffort turned his arm on it and swept across it with a long shot. The machine disappeared into nothingness like it had just been erased, and at the same time, the flames vanished into thin air. Simultaneously, all the fires in California went out and everywhere there was no fuel to feed them, the flames died.
At the other end of the shelter, Madame Atomos was stupefied watching the destruction of her infernal machine. Thanks to the cameras, she knew that Beffort and a team from the Green Dragon Force had managed to enter her hideout and get a hold of disintegrator rifles. This petrified the sinister woman for a long minute. The war had just been brought home to her and her own arms were turned against her. Beffort could easily disintegrate the entire shelter, pulverize the flying saucer and the 50 servants of the Organization… Madame Atomos shook herself out of it. She tried to program her personal computer, but was thrown into a foul panic when she saw it was not responding. Glancing at the nearest TV screen, she saw that the relays to the Great Brain were nothing but a pile of ashes. Beffort and Bernitz were showing no mercy—they were mercilessly disintegrating every machine in the shelter.
Madame Atomos found herself suddenly alone. She had no way of contacting the Great Brain, which could not even control her servants anymore. They were standing motionless where they were at the very second the relays were put out of service. With their motor-brains stopped, they were free men again. For them it was like the neutralization hour and it would take some time for them to become fully conscious. Anyway, Madame Atomos could not count on them.
In fact, she could count on no one but herself and on the range of the flying saucer that was still sitting on the launch ramp. Like a crazy woman, she ran out of her command post and scurried up the ladder leading to the saucer room. She was just climbing onto the landing when a ray from Owen Bernitz ran up and down, disintegrating the whole upper part of the refuge, the flying saucer, the terrace that formed the roof and the artificial ground of the plateau. All of a sudden, sunlight flooded in on Madame A
tomos. Completely lost, she looked up, saw the blue sky and recoiled in terror. Now all she could do was run. It was the worst moment she had ever experienced. Cut off from Atomia Island, from the Great Brain, whose programming was limited, she was as vulnerable as any other human being.
She leaned over the chasm. Beffort and his men were 60 feet below, masters of the place but unable, at the moment, to reach the upper levels of the underground hideout. The reserves of their disintegrator rifles were empty, so all they had left were the paralyzing weapons and the explosives.
Beffort looked up by chance. When he saw the outline of Madame Atomos, he yelled loudly. Madame Atomos jumped back to avoid the paralyzing ray and ran down an emergency tunnel. The electricity was not working, so she grabbed a flashlight and jogged into the darkness. The tunnel came out on the other side of the mountain, on an old, abandoned farm. In the house were supplies and a good deal of cash and in the nearby barn was a Chevrolet in perfect working condition. If Madame Atomos could get there, she could escape to the coast on Highway 299.
With the walkie-talkie, Smith Beffort had informed the men on the surface that Madame Atomos was spotted in the ruins of the shelter. Therefore, the Green Dragon Force closed in around the plateau and threw down a rope ladder so Beffort and his team could climb up. All this took time and almost 30 minutes had gone by when Beffort arrived at the level of the tunnel. At the time he thought it was a branch of the shelter that probably led to an armored room where the Japanese woman might be hiding. When he dragged his team down the tunnel, he finally understood that it was one of the famous escape routes and Madame Atomos was about to get away, but the walkie-talkies did not work underground, so it was impossible to inform the men on the plateau.
