Sword in Sheath

by Andre Norton

  “Well?” van Bleeker challenged the rest of them. “What do you say?”

  “I say try it now!” That was Sam.

  “Guess I’ll go along with that.” Kane came in a moment later. “What Watson says sounds like sense.”

  “Go now.” Lorens added his voice.

  “My men are ready to move,” promised the Moro.

  “Very well,” van Bleeker gave in. “We shall go now. I make every man responsible for his own arms and do not forget your torches — ”

  Without Watson’s patient insistence about keeping their eyes open they might have missed the back door to the mountain. As he had said, it could not be sighted even a few feet away. But they were welcomed by a waiting sentry, a sentry who looped herself lovingly around Kane’s ankles and almost tripped him up.

  “It’s that fool cat!”

  “Sure. Didn’t Watson say she’d been roosting with him.” Sam looked down at the sleek form. “Look out — there she goes — ”

  Go the Sumba’s cat did, into a narrow slit, with the party from her ship and the Moros right behind her. The fault in the rock through which they struggled was so narrow that at times it was necessary to turn sidewise and scrape through. The big Samoan and the tall Kane fared the worst at these spots, and the American wondered if he would have any skin left across shoulders and hips when this little trip was over.

  He began to envy the cat who had four feet and no baggage to encumber her in the scramble over the uneven floor of the passage. The light of their electric torches, strong as it was, could not show all the pitfalls, and someone was continually stumbling.

  “No wonder Watson looked as if he had just gone ten rounds with a champion,” commented Kane. “It’s the worst footing I have ever seen. This beats even the New Guinea mud trails!”

  “Shut up and get on with it!” snapped Sam from behind. “We haven’t all day before us — ”

  After a particularly nasty climb they pulled themselves into the round mouth of another cave, one of such size that their torches only made a circle of light where they stood. The ring of their boots on the stone echoed loudly, and a formation of bats began dive-bombing their position. The cat was thrown into a frenzy and leaped wildly into the air in pursuit, yowling in fury when she missed.

  “Well, where do we go from here?” asked Sam. “Isn’t this where the guide was supposed to show up?”

  The Moro leader pointed to the right. “There is one who hides there,” he stated matter-of-factly.

  Jungle wise as they were, none of them could see what Kuran had noted. Van Bleeker moved toward the wall.

  “Can you speak with him?” he asked softly of the Moro.

  The man shrugged. “I can try.” He lapsed into a slurred speech of which Kane could not understand a word.

  They waited in silence, then the Moro called again. This time something scuttled away, back into the thick darkness. Kuran sped forward in chase, his men at his back. The party from the Sumba, taken by surprise, were slower starters, but they made up for it with a burst of speed which brought them up to jostle the Moros.

  “He is afraid of us,” the tall Moro leader explained. “But even so he leads us.”

  “Sure we aren’t following a Jap?” demanded Kane.

  “No,” Fortnight’s deep voice boomed out, to be taken up and repeated weirdly by the walls, “it is no Japanese we follow.”

  They were in a passage now, but this one was relatively smooth under foot. Kane flashed his light at the nearest wall. He had been right in his surmise — the marks of the tools which had been used to break off the rougher projections were still plain to see. At some time and for some reason this had been a thoroughfare for the men of the mountain.

  The passage sloped upward gently, in fact they had been climbing ever since they had entered the mountain. Kane tried to figure out whether they were close to the crater, but it was impossible to judge distances when underground.

  But it was not into the crater cup that they plunged at the end of the passage. Instead they found themselves on a wide ledge overhanging another cave of large dimensions. The smoky flare of a large fire made a splotch of raw color which lighted up the fantastic scene on the cave floor below.

  “Good lord!” gasped Sam. “Arabian nights!”

  “It’s incredible!” Lorens echoed him.

  There were men below, men with steel in their hands and mad contrasts of color in the rags of clothing they wore. Several were capped with helmets from which hung veils of fine chain mail to guard neck and throat. And two carried small round shields on their left forearms.

  “Spears — and swords!” Lorens edged to the lip of the ledge. “But it is utterly fantastic!”

  There was a shout of warning as someone below sighted them, and the whole unbelievable throng faded into the dark mouths of several passages.

  “Now what?” asked Kane. “Do we go below and risk a spear through the gizzard before we have a chance to negotiate properly?”

  “Wait!” Lorens still held his point of vantage. “Here comes someone now. And look at the white flag!”

  One of the iron-capped warriors crept out, his two hands before him gripping a spear from the shaft of which drooped a rag which had once perhaps been white. As he came around the fire he turned not toward the center of the ledge where they now stood but toward the far end.

  “That must be the way down.” Kane made his way cautiously along and was not surprised to find a flight of shallow steps hewn from the rock.

  The cave dweller was waiting at their foot, his pathetic flag of truce very much in evidence. Kane, Lorens, and the Moro captain started down.

  “Okay,” Sam called. “I’ll keep him covered. Let him make a wrong move and he gets it right through that tin hat of his!”

  But the caveman made no move. And as they came closer Kane saw that he was a very old man, in spite of his erect carriage. The thin beard along his jaw was as white as the eyebrows above the sunken pits of his dark eyes. His mouth was shrunken and puckered, and when he opened it to speak the American saw that his teeth were missing. This must be “Toothless”, the chieftain who had Watson’s regard and trust. But Kane could make nothing of the slurred and lisping words the old man spoke.

  “This speech is old, very old,” said Kuran. “He asked why we have come down the road of the gods and what do we wish of him.”

  “Tell him that we seek to attack the pirates and that Watson told us of this route. We mean no harm to his people.”

  Haltingly the Moro translated. The chief looked from the three fronting him to the others waiting above before he answered.

  “He says,” interpreted Kuran, “that the evil ones have many strange weapons and deal death in many wicked ways. Even brave men may rightly fear to face battle with them. But if we do not, then shall he show us the other end of the gods’ old road for we must be those of whom the white man spoke, the men who bring fire and sword to cleanse this land.”

  “Tell him we’ll take the gods’ road,” Sam called. “I’d like to see the Jap or Nazi who can face us down! We’ll cleanse the land all right!”

  17

  OPERATION CAVEMAN

  “And this passage takes us to the main cave held by the pirates? Ask him that again, Kuran, we must be sure,” van Bleeker urged the Moro.

  “He says that that is so. But there are many stones there — a wall which must be broken through —”

  “I wonder —” Van Bleeker tapped his teeth with his thumbnail. “What about it, van Norreys? Could we use grenades? You know about such things.”

  “I would have to see the target before deciding that. No use bringing the roof down on our heads. But we must get into the principal cave first.”

  Old Toothless, somehow Watson’s nickname stuck in spite of the dignity of the spare old man, had courage enough — though it was plain that he was no fighting man by choice. He not only guided them into the last stretch of the “road of the gods”, but he insisted upon a
ccompanying them.

  Dust swirled out under their feet. It had been a long time since any but ghosts had passed this way. The bare Walls gave way to a series of niches in each of which leered or postured a demon-headed godling. There was a glint of metal in the trappings they wore under a cloak of dust and bat droppings, and from their eye sockets glistened what could only be precious or semi-precious stones.

  “Did someone mention treausre!” Sam whistled. “Looks as if we hit the jackpot in this robbers’ den.”

  “Devils,” the Moro leader spat in disdain. “Abominations in the Sight of Allah.”

  “In anybody’s sight, I would say.” Kane snapped his eyes away from a cruelly obscene figure. “If these are gods — what must their worshipers be?”

  Toothless suddenly cut his pace from trot to walk and caught at the arms of the nearest two of the party, pulling them back as he mumbled a warning he had to repeat twice before Kuran could understand.

  “He says that we are close now to the wall of many stones and that it would be well for us to go quietly, since he does not know whether sounds made here carry to the cave beyond.”

  They crept on, rounded a curve, and found themselves fronted by a mass of loose stones which looked to be the result of a cave-in. Lorens, Kane, and Sam ventured up to it, although the whole mass looked insecure enough to slide out and engulf them. Tentatively Sam poked at a sharp rock. To his surprise it remained as firmly fixed as if it had been set with cement. With more courage he pulled at another.

  “Tight —”

  Lorens was making his own investigations. “Yes. Explosives will be needed to start this.”

  Kane turned his torch up at the roof of the passage. Smoothed by man’s work it ran without crack or blemish.

  “What about it? Will this hold if we use a grenade?”

  “If we use one of the special ones, I think so. At any rate we have no choice but to try.”

  The main party moved back around the curve to the comparative safety of the passage. Lorens’ fingers closed once more about the familiar smoothness of a small grenade one of the Sumba’s men produced at van Bleeker’s order. As he had many times before, he swung, threw, and dashed for cover, pressing his body against the floor of the passage.

  But the sound of the explosion was oddly muffled and did not reverberate through the walls as they had thought it would. They edged forward, weapons in hand.

  There was a break in the wall, showing murkily through the swirls of dust. Kane crawled up to it, fighting rolling stones. He coughed and choked in the dust and grit which clogged nose and throat. Then he looked through the hole into what Toothless said was the central headquarters of the cave-dwelling pirate forces.

  The explosion had blown most of the barrier outward into the large cavern. And it must have come as an unnerving shock to the men gathered there. Watson had said that the cave dwellers had lights, but apparently the shock of the blast had put them out. Above the rattle of still falling stones there was no other sound. Then a beam of a flash, yellow and weak, sprouted by the far wall. Theirs answered, to catch and hold a small group of white-faced men.

  One of the men in the light made a sudden movement. The crack of a rifle answered him, and he slid down to the floor, his face still a wild mask of horror and surprise.

  “Achtung!” At the barked order the other two men instinctively came to attention. And, in answer to the stream of guttural syllables which followed, they turned their faces to the wall and stood with their hands high over their heads, pressed flat against the rock.

  “Good!” Lorens ended in English, then added in Malay, “Keep the light on them as we go down. At any move, shoot!”

  Kane, Sam, Lorens, van Bleeker, and some others picked a cautious path over the rubble. Lorens and Kane swung their lights along the walls and found three exits to the cave. As soon as their torches picked these out, they held steady. There was going to be no chance of surprise.

  In one corner they found a pile of boxes and matting-covered bundles. Against the wall nearby two rude bunks had been built. But that was all. And in due time their search brought them to the captives whom van Bleeker’s men had been making into neat packages.

  Quietly, almost disinterestedly, Lorens began questioning them in German. One of the men, a tall youngster, as stiff as steel and a willing martyr if Kane ever saw one, rapped out a single sentence in reply. Lorens smiled and shrugged.

  “He says that they do not give information.”

  Kuran pressed forward. He was armed, but he made no parade of his weapons. Nor was there anything unpleasant in his calm face. But when he spoke Kane had little liking for the unholy promise in his voice.

  “Let the Tuans give this eater of dirt to me. We shall speedily learn then whatever we wish.”

  Lorens laughed and the sardonic amusement which had brought that wolfish sound out of him was plain to read on his lips and in the upward quirk of his eyebrows.

  “Quite appropriate,” was his comment “Well?” he spat at the captives.

  The martyr did not answer, but his companion was fashioned of more malleable stuff. He gushed forth such a stream of information that Lorens was hard put to catch it all. Then at last the Netherlander nodded to a Moro standing behind the man and a brown hand was clapped expertly over the still babbling lips.

  “Fortune favors us. This is the center stronghold, and all the caves these swine are using can be reached by these passages. The majority of the Nazis and all the leading Japs are at sea — seems that our friends do not trust one another. This is the guard of the treasure chamber. They are to be relieved in about fifteen minutes. The Japs are not allowed in here at all. If we capture the relieving guard, we’ll only have a dozen Japs and six more Nazis to pick up. Three of the Nazis are up in the crater watching our ships —”

  “Who is in command here?” demanded van Bleeker.

  Lorens pointed to the corpse against the wall. “Watson’s ‘Red Turban’ is at sea. So I gather that the late unlamented was.” He stopped to examine a badge on the worn coat which clothed the body. When he lifted his head again Kane saw his look of puzzlement.

  “There is something familiar about this one —”

  Van Bleeker crowded up to see for himself. He shook his head.

  “Never saw him before. Just another Hun —”

  “But I have seen him!” It was Sam’s turn to take a second look and after a deliberate survey of the dead man’s face he whistled.

  “You know him?” Lorens asked.

  “Not personally. But we hit the jackpot with this one, brother. That’s Ludwig Baumer!”

  “What?”

  “Certain sure. His ugly face was on posters all over the place — in the papers too. This is the guy who was supposed to have skipped with all of Hitler’s secret dope — the one who was never satisfactorily accounted for. Boy, oh, boy — have we done it, or have we done it!”

  “So? Well, that we can discuss later. These two we shall put where they can do no more mischief and then we will take the other caves.”

  Under van Bleeker’s orders the two captives, gagged lest they try the heroic role and attempt to warn the guard, were pushed into a niche behind some of the boxes they had been guarding and the invaders settled down to wait for the relief to arrive.

  “What about the lights being out?” questioned Kane. “Won’t they be suspicious about that?”

  “I think not,” Lorens answered him. “The lights must fail many times because of their faulty equipment. And I have a plan —”

  They heard a sound then, the smack of boots against rock. Lorens called out in German, sharply as if giving an order. The answer came cheerily enough; apparently the newcomers had no premonition of danger.

  “I have told them,” Lorens whispered, “that there has been a fall of rock and that they must come carefully lest they trip over the debris. Also to come one at a time. Now — we take them!”

  They allowed the guard to come into the cave. The li
ght of the single torch the Nazis carried picked out the rubble of the barrier, and their voices arose in excited cries. But then those shadows which had been creeping between them and the entracne sprang. There was vast confusion for a moment or two in the dark before torches snapped on and tried to keep in their circles of light the three separate battles being waged on the floor.

  Fortnight arose from one such struggle, leaving his opponent a limp bundle of torn clothes and flaccid limbs. “This one —” he reported to Kane apologetically — “I think that I hit him too hard — he is dead.”

  But the other two had breath enough remaining in their battered bodies for them to be stowed with the first catch and left there under guard.

  “So far, so good.” Sam wiped his hands on his slacks. “Does it strike you that all of this is a little too easy? I am going to walk softly the rest of the way — no use tempting fate.”

  A little judicious questioning of the new captives revealed that the enemy forces were more or less scattered. A Japanese ambush was in place along each of the two known trails by which one might descend from the crater. Of the remaining men, several snipers were posted in the jungle to pick off rash invaders, and the rest were in a sort of general outer headquarters for both Japanese and Nazis which was maintained in one of the three entrance caves.

  The allied force split into three parties, leaving four of their men to guard prisoners and loot. Kane, Sam, and Lorens headed one, van Bleeker and a picked handful of seamen comprised the second, while the third was mostly Moro with Kuran and Fortnight at its head.

  This last combination, trained jungle fighters that they were, volunteered to backtrack on the crater road and account for the ambush parties and any observation posts. Since they unslung their rifles and the two tommy guns they possessed and drew knives, Kane imagined that the toll of prisoners taken in their operation would be very few — if any.