Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth

by Max McCoy

  "Hard to tell," Sparks said. "It appears to be wavering in strength, and I'm sure it isn't strong enough for Goodwin to pick it up in Iceland. We're ten thousand feet in the air and two hundred miles closer."

  "So we can't triangulate it," Indy said.

  "No, sir. All we can do is follow it and hope it lasts."

  Sparks took off his cap and headphones and ran a hand through his tangle of hair. His ears ached from the strain of constant listening.

  "This is a different target than the tin balloon, isn't it?" Sparks asked. A cloud of vapor from his breath hung between them. "If you don't mind my asking, sir, what is that thing?"

  "It's a canister," Indy said. "Probably bobbing around on the waves. Swept into the Arctic Circle by the North Atlantic current."

  "What's in it?"

  "It's classified." Indy was too tired to explain; besides, he didn't think Sparks would believe him.

  "What about the zep, sir?" Sparks asked. "Do you want me to keep trying to locate them?"

  "Not if it means losing this signal," Indy said.

  "I think I can do both." Sparks replaced the cap and the headphones. "But what if the zep goes one direction and your target goes another?"

  "They won't," Indy said.

  Sparks pushed the intercom button. "Hey, Captain. It's cold back here. Are those heat ducts working? ... Yeah, that's what I thought you'd say."

  "What did he say?" Indy asked.

  "He told me to drink more coffee," Sparks informed him. "I don't drink coffee, but it may be time to start."

  Thirty minutes later the signal had grown weaker.

  "Dr. Jones, I'm afraid we're going to lose it," Sparks said. "I've done everything I can, but it's just fading away."

  "You said that higher is better, right?"

  "Well, yes," Sparks said. "But we're already high enough. Any higher would just put more distance between us and the target." He paused to adjust the receiver. "There, the signal is gone. I can't find it."

  "But the sea is pretty rough down there," Indy said. "Suppose the tops of the waves are chopping off the beacon, or some icebergs or something are in the way. Wouldn't going higher help that?"

  "Yeah," Sparks agreed, "but then we have another problem."

  "What's that?"

  "The loop antenna is on top of the aircraft," he said. "The higher we go, the more we are increasing the angle from the ground, and eventually the body of the plane is going to be blocking the signal. Ordinarily that wouldn't mean much, but with a target this weak it could be the difference between finding it or not."

  "Why didn't you put the antenna on the bottom?" Indy asked.

  "Honestly, sir, I didn't think of it," Sparks said. "The antenna is really designed to locate powerful targets that are above the deck, not something bobbing around in the sea giving off maybe a watt or two of power."

  "What if we flew high and upside down?"

  Spark's eyes got wide.

  "We can't turn this tub over," he said. "I mean, sir. This isn't a fighter. The wings would snap right off."

  "Well, it was just a thought," Indy said.

  "But you may be onto something," Sparks said. "If we went up to our ceiling, and then dived back down to cruising altitude, that would pitch the nose down and give the antenna a more or less right-angle approach at the target. That, we can do."

  "Terrific," Indy said.

  Sparks called Blessant and told him the plan, and the pilot announced it over the intercom. Then Sparks reached beside his seat and produced an oxygen bottle and mask.

  "What're you doing?" Ulla asked.

  "You can't breathe at twenty-seven thousand feet," Sparks said. "You'll black out."

  As the Penguin climbed, Ulla and Indy strapped on their masks and cracked open the valves of the oxygen bottles. A few minutes later the aircraft was high enough to catch the rays of the sun, just about to reappear over the horizon. Then the aircraft nosed over and began a dive that got progressively steeper. The sound of the air whistling over the wings became louder than the sound of the engines, and the plane began to vibrate.

  Sparks, breathing through his mask, listened through his headphones and cranked knobs frantically. A few seconds later he looked back at Indy and nodded.

  "All right," he told Blessant. "I've got it again. Soften this curve."

  "Good advice, son," Blessant shot back. "I've been trying, but the aircraft doesn't want to cooperate."

  The wind grew to a shriek and the plane began vibrating so badly that Indy was afraid the rivets would pop out. Ulla reached out and clasped his arm—the one that had been shot—and squeezed. Indy winced, but did not remove her hand.

  "Stop fighting the wheel," Clarence told Blessant.

  "What do you want me to do?" the pilot snapped.

  "Let me have it," Clarence said.

  "It's yours."

  Clarence eased the yoke forward a notch. The vibrating stopped, but the plane was pitched even more steeply down. Suddenly Indy felt himself rising above his seat as gravity lost its hold on the interior of the plane. Every loose object began to float: coffee cups, pencils, the papers on the radio console.

  "This is unusual," Ulla said.

  "Clarence," Indy shouted as he tore off his oxygen mask. "What're you doing?"

  "He's going to kill us all," Blessant said over the intercom.

  "Naw," Clarence said, letting his mask dangle from his face. "You have to smooth everything out first by pitching forward into the dive, then you bring it out."

  "This isn't a Jenny!" Blessant screamed. "What do you think, this is some air show? You'll never be able to pull out of this."

  "I do it all the time in my big ol' plane back home," Clarence said as he watched the sea rushing up to meet them. "The trick is to ease back on the yoke and do a slow roll to one side—"

  Gravity reasserted itself with a vengeance as the nose came up. A coffee cup broke on the floor between Indy's feet as he was slammed back down into the seat. By the time the Penguin was level again, they were skimming the wave tops.

  Sparks took off his oxygen mask.

  "Whew," he said. "Remind me to put the damn directional loop on the bottom next time. I mean darned loop, sir."

  "No problem," Indy said. "Did you get a bearing?"

  "Yeah," Sparks said excitedly. "Ninety-two degrees, a fairly strong signal this time. I think your target must be drifting with the current."

  "Ninety-two?" Blessant asked. "Are you sure?"

  "No, I mean twenty-nine degrees," Sparks said. "I'm sorry. I tend to transpose numbers or otherwise get things backward when I'm under pressure."

  Clarence returned the controls to Blessant, who adjusted the heading and trimmed the aircraft.

  "Did you feel something at about ten thousand feet?" Clarence asked.

  "Yeah, the end of the world," Blessant said. "My seat was shaking so much I couldn't tell what was happening. My butt feels like it's been strapped to a Missouri mule."

  Three and a half hours after leaving Iceland, over the vastness of the Barents Sea, Sparks called Indy and offered him the headphones.

  "What is it?" Indy asked.

  "Listen for a couple of minutes."

  The signal was clear, with no warble, but each dwit! seemed lower in pitch. The signal was also a little softer each time, as if somebody were steadily turning down the volume on a table radio.

  "What does that mean?" Indy asked.

  "We just passed over it," Sparks said. "About six minutes ago, I think. I charted it on the log."

  "Then we go back," Indy instructed, and moved up to the cockpit.

  "How can you guys see out of these windows?" he asked. Although the heating ducts were working, the visibility had been reduced on each side to a hole about the size of a basketball.

  "It ain't easy," Clarence said.

  "Listen, Sparks just said he thinks we passed over the target, about twenty miles back. We need to make a U-turn and go back."

  "No problem." Ble
ssant began to bring the plane around. "But we've picked up a lot of weather down there. We're going to have to be right on the deck to see anything."

  "Then do your best," Indy said.

  "Dr. Jones?" Sparks called. "I've lost the signal. Completely. Not a trace of it left."

  Four minutes later the Penguin had descended through the clouds and fog to five hundred feet. The air was warmer at the lower altitude, and most of the ice had broken away from the windscreens.

  "This is no good," Clarence said. "I still can't see a thing."

  "Then we go lower," Blessant said.

  At a hundred feet, they were still in thick fog.

  "This is no good," Clarence repeated. "We're flying nearly blind. I can't even see the water, can you?"

  "Nope," the pilot answered.

  "I'm going down into the nose," Indy said. "Maybe I can see a little better down there."

  Ulla followed him down and sat at the navigator's desk while Indy took the gunner's chair. Enough ice had melted off the Plexiglas that Indy had a good view of nothing but cloud vapor. The sun was well above the horizon now, and the fog seemed to glow.

  "This should be the spot," Indy said. "For all the good it does us. I can't see a thing down there. To be so close and—"

  "What happened to the sun?" Ulla asked.

  The fog in front of the aircraft had gone dark. Then, suddenly, the cloud vapor cleared and Indy had a razor-sharp view of the sea—and of the nose of the Graf Zeppelin hovering above them, blocking out the sun and clearing the fog from an area the size of a football field with the wash from her engines.

  From his vantage point in the nose of the Penguin, Indy was close enough that he could see the astonished expressions on the faces of the passengers and crew in the glass-windowed control cabin, which was slung underneath the nose of the airship like a giant double chin.

  "My God!" Indy shouted into his microphone. "Pull up, pull up! No, wait, don't pull up!"

  The Penguin dipped and throttled back but still passed close enough to the underside of the control cabin that Indy could see the cleats for the lines and the instructions printed in English and Portuguese for the benefit of foreign mooring crews. Then they were past the cabin and sailing slowly beneath the belly of the leviathan, and Indy noticed that there was a kind of fighter plane he'd never seen before secured to a trapezelike mechanism amidships.

  "I think we found the zep," Blessant said calmly over the intercom as he pushed the Penguin down to within a few yards of the water. Indy gaped upward. The aft cargo hold was open in the Graf's belly, and from it a yellow canister swung from a slender cable. The canister was a few yards above an inflatable raft with a couple of men on board, and obviously had just been recovered. In as much time as it took Indy to recognize the scene in front of him, the Penguin had overtaken the raft.

  "This is going to be interesting," Ulla said as she drew her knees up and braced for impact.

  Confronted by the twin-engine bomber barreling at them, the men in the raft jumped overboard into the sea. Blessant pulled up and tried to veer away, but the starboard wingtip snagged the cable and the yellow canister vaulted into the sky.

  The Penguin lurched to starboard from the drag of the cable while at the same time the canister was shot toward the wingtip as the slack in the cable was taken up. The canister wedged itself between the wing and the underslung fuel pod with a sickening crunch. Then the cable snapped, and the aircraft seemed to wallow through the air. Fuel began to spew into the sea from the ruptured tank.

  The yoke was slammed backward into Blessant's hands.

  "Throttle up!" he shouted to Clarence as he struggled to push the yoke forward. "We've got to get some airspeed or we're going to stall."

  Clarence slammed both throttles forward. The port engine screamed, but on the starboard wing the engine backfired and began to sputter. The nose rose in the air as the Penguin chewed at the air and began a sickening spiral.

  "Lean it out," Blessant ordered.

  "I'm trying," Clarence said, adjusting the fuel mixture. The starboard engine coughed, as if clearing its throat, and then began to smooth out. Within a few seconds it was at full power again.

  Blessant slammed the yoke forward and the aircraft skimmed the sea with its starboard wingtip before pulling back into the air. But they were still beneath the tail of the zeppelin. Indy saw the leading edge of one of the dirigible's stabilizing fins knifing toward them. On the side of the fin was a huge black swastika in a red circle.

  "Are you blind?" Indy screamed. "There's a swastika the size of my house coming right at us!"

  The Penguin rolled hard to the left, narrowly missing the massive fin, then whipped back to level.

  A moment later, when he discovered Penguin was still flying, Blessant shook his head and asked: "Do we still have flight control?"

  "I think so," Clarence said. "We've got one wingtip that's pretty boogered up, but the flaps and gizmos seem to be okay."

  "Gizmos?" Blessant asked.

  "You know," Clarence said. "Ailerons."

  "We're dropping fuel like crazy from the starboard pod," Blessant said. "Shut it off so it doesn't drain the rest of the wing."

  "Check," Clarence said.

  By the time Indy popped his head up from the nose compartment, the Graf Zeppelin was a shadow far behind them. "I'm not sitting down there in the nose again," Indy ranted. "What are you guys trying to do to me? Clarence, you did that last thing on purpose. Just wait until we get on the ground, I'm going to—"

  "Settle down, buddy," Clarence said. "Nobody did anything on purpose. That was the purest example of luck I've ever seen. In the middle of nowhere we dang near crashed smack-dab into the most famous airship in the world, which would have killed us and thirty or forty people on board it. Probably would have started some kind of war, too. As it is, we're pretty lucky—maybe all we did was kill ourselves."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Look out this here window," Clarence urged. "You see that thing wedged under our wingtip and that stuff spilling out from the tank? That's our reserve fuel."

  "The canister," Indy said. "It won't fall off, will it?"

  "You've got some strange priorities, Jones," Clarence told him. "Now you get back down there in the nose and plant your butt in the gunner's seat."

  "I'm not going back down there."

  "You'd better," Blessant said. "The Graf Zeppelin just dropped a pursuit plane on our tail. Sparks and Sergeant Bruce will have to take the waist guns."

  "I'll take one of the waist guns," Ulla offered as she climbed through the cockpit and went aft. In her excitement, her English began to deteriorate. "Leave Sparks at the radio. Besides, I shoot good, no?"

  "I've got a really weird feeling," Indy said as he reluctantly dropped back down into the nose. His companions, however, could not have guessed what that feeling was—it was the feeling he had had when he walked into the library of the British Museum and stared into the hypnotic eyes of Alecia Dunstin for the first time: a curious combination of fear and fascination.

  On board the Graf Zeppelin, Alecia Dunstin pressed her hands against the cold panes of the observation window on the starboard side of the dining room and watched as the damaged American bomber passed out to sea.

  "Indy," she whispered.

  Reingold pulled her roughly back from the window, causing her red hair to spill over her eyes. She was wearing the black tunic of an officer, but devoid of any insignia except the lightning bolts at the collar and the red-and-gray piping of a specialist. On the black velvet band of her cap was a grinning skull and crossbones, the Totenkopf of the SS.

  The dark uniform made her eyes and skin look even paler.

  "Don't get your hopes up," he said.

  "Why shouldn't I?" she asked, brushing her hair back.

  "Because you're on the other side now," Reingold said. "For whatever reason, it was the right choice. It is the side that God Himself is on."

  Alecia crossed her arms.

/>   "Wait till Indy gets his hands on you," she said.

  "Ah, your talents are amazing," Reingold said. "I was unsure myself whether Jones was on that aircraft, but your reaction leaves little doubt, doesn't it?"

  "It was just a guess," she said. "Not a divination."

  "I know you better than that," Reingold said. "You never guess. Your powers should prove quite useful in the coming struggle."

  "The deal is off," she said.

  "Once you make a deal with us," Reingold said, "you can't back out. It's like a marriage—until death do us part."

  He reached out and rubbed a strand of her hair between his finger and thumb. She slapped his hand away.

  "We are near our goal," Reingold said. "Too bad Dr. Jones won't be around to share your triumph. But I will."

  "You promised you wouldn't hurt him."

  "Ah, we promised we would leave him alone," Reingold said. "But now that he has come looking for us—well, that's another matter. Besides, we thought he was dead."

  "You thought—" Alecia stammered. "You mean you agreed to leave him alone because you thought he was already dead?"

  Reingold took a cigarette from his silver case, tapped it on the crystal of his watch, and put it in his mouth—but did not light it. Then he motioned toward the observation window, where the dirigible's fighter plane was thundering over the waves in pursuit of the bomber.

  "We cannot allow this American gangster to jeopardize our well-laid plans," he said, "or to get away with the canister, for that matter. I think it was a stroke of brilliance when our captain decided to hang an escort plane beneath our belly for this expedition, no?"

  9

  Lost!

  The fighter was an experimental Messerschmitt specially designed to be light enough to be dropped from a dirigible but fast enough—thanks to a growling, twelve-cylinder engine—to counter any potential threat to its mother ship. It had a top speed of 342 mph, a 34,450-foot ceiling, two machine guns, and two 20mm cannon. In short, it could fly rings around the Penguin. But because Germany was still forbidden to rearm by the Treaty of Versailles, only the Nazi leadership and the fledgling Luftwaffe knew of the existence of the prototype Messerschmitt Bf.l07a. About to join the circle of initiates, in a rather spectacular fashion, was the crew of the Penguin.