ron Goulart - Challengers of the Unknown

by Ron Goulart

  "Exactly what I'm trying to tell you." His shoulders hunched. "I was an old man when I came over here more than thirty years ago, unlike you, Herr ... excuse me. When I fled Berlin in forty-four I was fifty-two years old. Do you realize how old that makes me?"

  "I'm capable of simple arithmetic, Gonsalves."

  "My age is catching up with me. The Process is losing, time is winning. Soon, very soon, I'll look like the old man I actually am. Worse, I'll be old, ancient. Inside me, everything will turn old and rot. I'll be in my grave soon."

  "When this facility was built three decades ago and after . .. we'll call him Escabar as he does himself . ..

  after Escabar perfected the Process, he promised us all we would never age. That none who'd been loyal to the Reich would grow old. We would come to look like vigorous men in their middle years, would remain that way indefinitely. And someday, someday, we would move again to control the—"

  "I remember all the promises made," cut in the impatient Gonsalves. "And I know what General Cuerpo plans to do here in Ereguay."

  "Cuerpo and I depend on the Process, too," Shuster reminded. "If we didn't have the periodic treatments here, we'd probably be long dead. In a sense we're dead men, living beyond our time." He paused, smiled faintly. "Much like these intruding Challengers of the Unknown."

  "Thirty years and more," said Gonsalves, paying little attention to what the other man had been saying.

  "They've been good years, for the most part, haven't they? You've lived very well, comfortably, on the various investments you were able to make in Ereguay when the Third Reich was still in power."

  "Good years? Yes, I suppose so," admitted Gonsalves. "The only problem has been having to move on occasionally, changing my name, when too many outsiders began to wonder why I never age. Now, however, I—"

  "I'll confide something in you. Several of our brothers suffer moods of depression immediately prior to returning here for their periodic treatments."

  "Really? Do they all believe, as I firmly do, that this time Escabar's Process won't work, won't take hold? Do they dream of grave worms burrowing into their flesh and—"

  "Enough of this." Shuster held up a hand. "When you leave here next week, you'll feel as young as ever."

  "If there is a next week," said Gonsalyes. "If this lake creature doesn't destroy us, if these Challengers don't find us and destroy our whole—"

  "The Challengers know nothing about us, nor will they learn a single thing."

  "Their reputation suggests otherwise."

  "At this very moment," Shuster told him with a glance at his wristwatch, "three of these much-touted Challengers are being destroyed. The remaining members of the organization will very shortly suffer a similar fate."

  Gonsalves eyed the man on the other side of the metal desk. ""You're usually more pessimistic than this," he said. "Are you perhaps hiding your own doubts and fears with brave talk?"

  "No," lied Shuster.

  n

  The beam of intense light sliced the tree trunk in half.

  "Impressive," said Prof, who was leaning over the van's control panel and watching the jungle road ahead.

  The thin beam of light materialized again; one more felled tree was sliced swiftly in half.

  "I'm willing to bet," said June, "this isn't the Automobile Club coming to help us handle that roadblock."

  "They want to demonstrate their weapons to us," said Ace. "Scare us a little."

  "They're succeeding." Prof checked the rear viewport. "No action from the big black truck as yet."

  A great thumping came from up ahead of them. Another log had been cut by the light beam and the whole blockade had gone rolling and tumbling. A man was visible now, making his way across the spill of logs. Small, about forty, with a strange-looking rifle cradled in his arms.

  Three other men, larger, climbed after him through the path he'd cleared in the huge fallen trees.

  Ace asked, "Our turn now, do you think?"

  "Only sporting," said Prof. "They show us theirs, we show them ours."

  "Right." Ace flipped a toggle on the control panel.

  A very slight clicking sounded from the van roof, followed by a faint whirring.

  The small man in the lead of the approaching group sensed it first, swung his rifle up into firing position.

  But Ace had long since activated the sonic weapon which was mounted under the concealing panel on the roof. A quiet hum was all that indicated its operation.

  The man with the laser rifle jerked; like a jumping jack whose string is suddenly pulled, his rifle flipped out of his grasp. He himself stiffened, swayed and fell over.

  "Works pretty good in the field, too," said Ace with a smile of satisfaction.

  "Glad to hear it." Prof ran to the rear of their vehicle. Three men had emerged from the black truck which was blocking their retreat. They were lugging what appeared to be the latest thing in antitank guns. "A threat to our backside, chief."

  Ace was concentrating on using the sonic stuncan-non, an invention of his own, on the front-end attackers. "More lasers?"

  "Heavier stuff." Prof opened the panel which covered the van's rear defense control panel. "We'll try a number six on these lads for a starter." He depressed a button with his forefinger, then grabbed a direction switch and aimed the weapon which had sprouted out of the van's left rear fender.

  "Huff," said the weapon as it launched a miniaturized missile.

  The missile sought, and quickly found, the antitank gun which was being set up.

  The gun glowed an unearthly blue for five seconds before it melted like a chocolate toy in the sun.

  "I know it's vain," said Prof, "but I do feel elated when I view such startled expressions on those chaps' faces."

  "You got the set," June was saying to Ace, "they're all down."

  "Appears so," he acknowledged. "Let's be sure there aren't any more coming out of the woods."

  "Don't I get any credit for the deft way I . . . oops! Hold on." Prof pressed another panel button. "Hold on tight, gang."

  The men from the black truck had climbed back into it, and they were barreling straight for the back of the Challenger van.

  The van wasn't there when they arrived.

  It had risen straight up into the air, was hovering some thirty feet above the jungle trail.

  Prof, meantime, had flattened out on his stomach to observe the ground action through a spyhole in the van's flooring. "Unfortunate, unfortunate," said Prof. "They ran over a couple, at least, of their fallen comrades before the brakes took hold." He put his hands over his ears. "And then they go smack into what's left of the roadblock. Isn't going to help then front end at all."

  "I'm glad I'm not their insurance agent," remarked June. "Imagine filling out an accident report on all this."

  Prof was back at the controls. "I'll lower away, if it's okay by you, Ace?"

  "Yeah, okay," said Morgan. "I got a good look at the surrounding countryside; those lads in the truck are the only ones left of the surprise party."

  Prof brought the van, which had been designed by

  Ace to convert instantly into a Hovercraft, down to the jungle road directly behind the disabled black truck. Taking up a foot-long length of metal rod from a shelf beneath the rear control panel, he opened the van's back doors.

  Birds were calling again; a cluster of upset and excited monkeys were chattering high above the trail. Head tucked in, Prof ran for the cab of the large truck.

  A door flapped open, a man threw himself out at Prof, crying, "Devil!" in German.

  "You're another," responded Prof in the same language.

  The man had him around the waist, was exerting considerable pressure.

  Prof said, "Haven't time for a fair fight, mein Herr." He managed to tap the man on the skull with metal rod he'd brought.

  There was a sizzling, the man went limp and slid down Prof to .slump unconscious into the foliage beside the road.

  The other two men had a
pparently been knocked cold in the crash.

  Nevertheless, Prof reached into the cab to give each a whack with the stunrod. This was an invention of his own, utilizing a different principle than Ace's stun-cannon. It was, he felt, equally effective. The only flaw was you had to get damn close to use it.

  "Impetuous," said Ace behind him.

  "It's the fabled Haley hot blood, chief." He slipped the rod into the wide white belt of his royal purple Challenger jump suit. "The next time we're ambushed by a band of crazed Teutonic types, I'll strive to exhibit more caution."

  Ace was searching the man who'd fallen by the wayside. "Teutonic?"

  "That lad made a snide remark in the German tongue."

  "Lots of people speak German in Ereguay."

  "And he's one of them," said Prof. "Might mean nothing, could be part of a neo-Nazi plot."

  "Why," inquired June as she joined them, "did they ambush us?"

  "A very interesting question, boys and girls," said Prof. "A free Popsicle to anyone who can answer it."

  "They wanted to kill us," said the blonde girl, impatient. "I know that, and it's not what I mean. What I mean is, why don't these people waiit us to find the monster?"

  "Could be a bunch of nature lovers who consider lake monsters an endangered species," said Prof. "Or it could be there's something else in these parts nobody wants us to stumble onto, lass."

  Ace stood. "No identification papers," he said, nodding at the unconscious man. "But this is sort of interesting." He bent and rolled up the sleeve of the man's shirt. In the hollow of the right arm was a small tattoo depicting a two-headed eagle. "That's the identifying mark of all the members of the Achtzig, an elite group within the SS."

  "The Schutzstaffel? But this lad can't be much older than thirty-five," Prof pointed out. "I know things got rough in Nazi Germany toward the end of World War Two, but they weren't recruiting four-year-olds into the Storm Troopers."

  "He's probably," said June, "simply a Hitler bulf; had himself decorated the last time he was in San James."

  Ace frowned, rubbing at the faded tattoo. "This tattoo looks old, more than forty years old."

  "You don't often find people whose skin is older than they are," observed Prof. "I learned that from a mail-order biology course I once took."

  Shrugging, Ace said, "Let's look over the rest of the gang. After that we can ask some questions." "And, hopefully, get some answers," said June.

  Nothing.

  A vast, hot emptiness. Flat and dry, all the countryside the color of weathered brownstone. And a haze everywhere, a thin yellow haze hanging over the hot, flat Tierra Seca desert, making the declining sun a blurred, glaring disc.

  "There's a sign of life finally." Rocky let go the steering wheel of their closed jeep to point at the hazy, late-afternoon sky. "Some kind of birds flying around over there."

  "Vultures," said Red after a glance at the distant, circling silhouettes.

  The big ex-wrestler snorted. "It figures," he said. "This is the deadest, dullest stretch of country I've ever been in."

  "You should try Glendale, California, on a Sunday." Both men were wearing their Challenger uniforms. Red stroked the hourglass emblem on his chest with his thumb several times before checking again the ordnance map spread across his knees. "Things may

  liven up when we reach the Fortaleza area," he remarked. "We should be there before nightfall."

  "Can't figure why this Escabar guy, whoever the hell he is, would want to live out here. This desert makes the boondocks look like Times Square on New Year's Eve."

  "Cheer up, Rocko, we ..." A frown touched Red's face. "Slow up a minute." He was staring to his right, eyes narrowing.

  "You spot something?"

  "Can't be sure." He reached behind his seat for a pair of binoculars.

  Rocky had let up on the gas pedal, was looking in the same direction as his Challenger partner. "Something moving over that way," he decided. "Unless it's one of them mirages."

  "Mirages don't usually have wheels." Red had the glasses to his eyes.

  Rocky stopped the jeep, "Ain't no road out there."

  "So I notice. Whatever that thing is, it's coming straight across the desert at us."

  "At us?" Rocky scowled. "Then maybe we oughtn't to sit on our duffs waiting for it."

  "This is odd," said Red. "It's some kind of truck, but . . ."

  "What's so odd about a truck?"

  Red lowered the binoculars. "There doesn't seem to be anybody driving it," he said.

  The name he was using was Gallegher and he would soon be dead.

  Not dead on paper, as certain intelligence agencies in Europe and elsewhere had him, but dead in fact. A tall man, deeply tanned, not quite forty in appearance.

  He wore khaki clothes, heavy hiking boots and his belt held both a pistol and a hunting knife. A powerful hunting rifle was slung across his back.

  There were three other men with Gallegher. All moving closer to death, none aware of it.

  A muddy green glow was spilling through the jungle as the day waned.

  Gallegher had hunted almost every kind of game. He'd hunted men, too, a long time ago when he'd had a different name. Now he was searching for this monster which was supposed to haunt the jungle.

  He agreed with General Cueipo. It was most likely a lot of nonsense. Shuster, and many of the others on the staff of the underground facility, worried too much. He held up his hand, his three companions halted.

  Gallegher stood sniffing at the twilight air. "Over this way," he told the others. "Follow me; go carefully." Out here in the wilds he could speak German.

  "What is it?" asked one of the others.

  "Something dead." Gallegher worked his way through the underbrush, between the immense trees and into the new clearing the falling helicopter had torn out of the jungle. "Yes, a man it was."

  Behind him Ortega, who'd got a look at the remains, was retching. "Awful, awful," he gagged.

  The body was no longer a single entity. One of the hands Gallegher couldn't locate at all. The torso and head were, more or less, together.

  "What happened to him?" asked another of the men, not coming closer.

  "Animal got him," said Gallegher. "Clawed him to pieces."

  "His insides," murmured Ortega, "his insides are ..."

  Gallegher scraped his forefinger along one of the dead man's legs. A twist of slimy green material came off the shredded cloth of the pant leg. "Lake plant," he said, holding his finger out toward the others.

  Ortega was retching again, the other two men trying to avoid him without stepping any closer to the torn body.

  "PetroSur." Gallegher noticed the oil company name painted on the side of the mangled helicopter. "One of their troubleshooters ran into more than he could handle."

  "There's no animal," said Ortega, panting, "there's no animal in these jungles does that to a man."

  "Perhaps it did come from the lake." Gallegher slid his thumb over the shred of green water plant. He circled the torso and its impossibly twisted neck, scrutinizing the ground. "Yes, here are some interesting footprints."

  "Night's almost upon us," said Ortega. "Let's get back to our truck."

  "Not human footprints," said Gallegher. "No, these appear to have been made by the feet of a large, a very large, reptile."

  "Plenty of time tomorrow," urged Ortega. "We ought to leave here now, right now, before darkness catches us.

  "The pattern of these prints indicates the creature walked upright, on two of its feet." Gallegher detached a flashlight from his belt, clicked it on. "We'll follow his trail."

  The other two men produced flashlights.

  Ortega, after wiping at his sweating forehead with the back of his hand, did likewise. "All right, so long as we get away from this particular spot," he said. "The smell of . . . It's awful."

  Gallegher laughed. "All these years of indolence in a warm climate have softened you, Ortega," he observed as he began to follow the tracks on the jungl
e floor. "You didn't used to be so fearful."

  "I'm old," admitted Ortega. "Too old, inside. No more do I have the stomach for this kind of thing."

  The lake was turning black when they reached it. Incredibly wide, its farther shores were lost in the dusk. On this side, trees and a multitude of plants grew nearly to its edge; some intricately twisting roots extended out into the black waters of Lake Sombra. Swirls of pale mist were rising from the darkening surface.

  "If we're to believe the evidence of these very odd footprints," said Gallegher, the beam of his light shining on the mushy ground, "our reptile returned to the lake here after destroying the oilman."

  Ortega said, "Then the stories are true."

  "All we've determined is that some sort of large reptile came here from the site of the wrecked plane," said Gallegher. "We haven't yet proved—"

  "What?" Ortega was staring at the jungle behind them. The daylight had abruptly gone. There were only stripes of darkness between the trees.

  Gallegher asked him, "Now what's alarming you?"

  "I heard . . . yes, listen!"

  The beams of all four flashlights turned toward the jungle, crisscrossing.

  There was a crackling and a thumping coming at them.

  Ortega tugged his .38 revolver out of its holster. "It's coming to get us, it's coming to get us." The circle of light from his flash was dancing from side to side.

  "Calm down, damn it," ordered Gallegher. He propped his light on the ground, unsnapped his rifle and settled the butt against his shoulder. He sighted through the nightscope, then exclaimed, "Good Cluist!"

  Gallegher saw it before any of the others.

  Another minute went by before the flashlights caught it.

  A man, but not a man. The body was roughly hu-manoid, a green scaly skin covering it. Green, streaked with slashes of pasty yellow. Ropy veins ran along the creature's sides, twisted across the wide, powerful chest. The hands were yellowish, each scaly finger tipped with a vicious black claw. The head was not human at all; it was the head of a huge reptile. Some impossibly large lizard perhaps, with a quivering pouch of skin at the jaw and great popping eyes. The mouth cut halfway around the head; when it opened there were sharp, twisted teeth showing. It had been out of the water for a time; there were dry, blackening patches blotching its huge body. Walking like a man, moving rapidly toward them, it was nearly seven feet high.