by Ron Goulart
Red said, "I'm pretty sure he's dead."
Hands above his head, Prof said, "Very convincing."
"Don't mug," cautioned Ace.
They were moving along an initial entry corridor into the underground complex. Both the purple-clad Challengers had their hands up; the small Nazi marched behind them with a pistol aimed at Ace's back.
"I must admit," admitted Prof, "that knowing we're being watched by hidden cameras does bring out the ham in me. Should have combed my hair before we came down the rabbit hole into this Nazi playground."
"They can probably pick up what we're saying, too, so hush."
"It's my fondest hope the control bug of yours doesn't fall off the little chap's brain again. Then we really will be in the proverbial bouillabaisse."
Two new corridors intersected with the original. "Go to the left," said the Nazi in his droning voice.
"Tell him he doesn't sound authoritative enough," Prof whispered over his shoulder.
At the next forking of corridors, the little man droned, "Turn to the right."
"Ah, new members being added to the cast," remarked Prof sotto voce.
Standing in front of the metal doors at this corridor's end were two large men in pale-green overalls. Each wore a .45 automatic at his belt.
"You are not supposed to bring prisoners here, Sullivan," one of the guards called to the approaching little Nazi.
"There is no admittance to the Central Control Room," said the other burly guard.
"There's a slipup," said Prof, ticking his head in the direction of the sturdy door. "Printing Central Control Room in German like that. Changing your names to Sullivan and the like doesn't help if you're going—"
"Be silent, swine," said one of the big guards in German.
"Devil is the preferred insult," said Prof, grinning. He was only inches away from the two men now. Unexpectedly he reached out, caught both of them by the ear with his raised hands and forced their heads to bang together with considerable force. "Saw Leo Gorcey do this in a film once; been dying to try it."
As the guards tottered, Ace leaped forward. He gave one a series of incapacitating chops to the neck.
Prof was dealing similarly with the other guard.
Before his man oozed out unconscious on the metal floor, Ace had the door handle gripped. He turned, shoved and dived into the room beyond.
There were four men working in the large, domed-ceiling place. They were scattered at the various control banks, monitoring desks, computers and scanning systems.
"Very slowly," suggested Ace, an odd-looking pistol in his hand, "very slowly take your hands off what you're doing and hoist 'em high."
Prof came in with their thought-controlled Nazi in tow. "Let me second that motion." He also held a strange pistol.
"Those are odd-looking and strange guns you have there," observed the nearest control room technician.
"Stylish, too, don't you think?" Prof shut the heavy doors behind them. "Humane as well, since they don't kill you. No, they merely cripple you for about fifteen hours."
Ace, as they'd planned before descending from the jungle, ran across to the address system, picked up a microphone. In fluent German he ordered, "All personnel will report immediately to Auditorium One. All personnel will report at once to Auditorium One. There are no exceptions; this is an extreme emergency!"
Prof, meantime, had located the communications control desk which their little Nazi had described when they'd questioned him earlier. "Ah, yes, there's the toggle I seek." He flipped the yellow one in a bank of twenty multicolored switches. "Now Herr Shuster can't use his own mike to cancel our order." He hopped sideways, located a blue switch on another panel of toggles and tinned it off, too. "Nor can he see anything at all on his own TV screens. Poor lad's going to suffer media withdrawal almost certainly."
"It's working, it's working." Ace was grinning, eyes on the row of television screens on the far wall.
"You sound like a . . . oops! Mustn't do that, old man."
Zizzle!
A technician, noticed out of the corner of Profs eye, had been moving toward the door. Now he was collapsed on the floor, lying in a stiff, folded-up position.
"You other three chaps better huddle over there," Prof told the other technicians, "beneath the TV screens."
"I admire that weapon of yours," said the technician who'd spoken before.
"Why, thank you, it's really only a little thing I happened to—
"Hush up," advised Ace.
The dozen control room screens showed them the various levels of the large underground complex. On the screens, men, some looking fearful and others simply puzzled, were hurrying along corridors.
Prof turned his attention to a different control desk. "Is this the one?" he asked their little Nazi guide.
"Yes, it is."
"Okeydokes." Prof clicked a switch. "Well, isn't that nifty. The June Robbins Show."
A small television screen had come to life before him, showing the room June had been placed in.
Twisting a dial, activating another switch, Prof picked up a hand microphone from the desk. "This is the voice of Christmas Past, June Robbins, and I'd like to complain about the ski sweater you gave me back in 1974. I mean, a pattern of leaping ballerinas, while fetching, isn't exactly—
"Prof?" On the screen the blonde girl's eyes went wide; she was glancing around her cell.
"Currently doing business as the U.S. Cavalry to the rescue," Prof spoke into the mike. "You okay, princess?"
"Yes, but... don't come in here. Are you right outside my cell, or what?"
"In the neighborhood, let us say. Why can't we spring you?"
"It's Denny Yewell; he is one of them," explained
June. "When he tossed me in the prison wing here, he implied there was some kind of booby trap awaiting you if you tried to bail me out."
"No specifics?"
"Nope."
"Fear not, we'll find out. Hang on."
"It's disconcerting trying to talk to you like this, Prof. I don't know where to look."
"Look heavenward, my child, and you can't go wrong. We'll get to you soonest. Bye." He flipped a switch; the pretty girl's image faded away. "What kind of booby trap might they set in those cells?" Prof asked the small Nazi.
"I do not know."
"They're all in the auditorium," announced Ace, "except for a guy who must be Shuster, and Denny Yewell ... he is a double agent."
"So I hear." Frowning, Prof went over to stare up at the multiple images. "Looks like Yewell and Shuster are heading for elsewhere."
"They must have," said Ace, "tumbled to the fact something's wrong."
"Marine Exit Room," Prof read off one of the screens. "They're hurrying into the room. Hey, what's in there?" he called toward their controlled Nazi.
The talkative technician supplied the answer. "We keep several miniature subs there, to be utilized in the event all other escape routes are cut off. The subs can be launched directly into the waters of the lake."
"Ace, can you handle locking the rest of the gang in the auditorium?"
"Doing it now," Ace answered from another of tine control desks.
"I'll tag Yewell and Shuster." Prof ran for the door. "June's cell is booby-trapped, so go easy." "Right."
"You," said the helpful technician, "better be careful yourself, my friend. There's no telling what you may encounter in the deeps of Lake Sombra."
"Oh, it's probably the monster's day off." Prof gave them all a mock salute before sprinting from the room.
"First time I've ever had a host do that."
"Kee-rist! What do you think did the poor bastard in?"
Red, clutching the bars of their cage, and watching the fallen body of the late Escabar, said, "He was bragging about playing some sort of trick on the illustrious General Cuerpo. Could be Cuerpo played one on him."
"Politics," said Rocky. "It's worse in South America than it is in the U.S.A. even."
Red tu
rned, leaning his back against the bars. "Feel strong enough to bend a few of these?"
"I can try, but I don't guarantee anything." Tentatively, the big man took hold of one of the iron bars. After more than a minute of straining and grunting, he relaxed his grip. "Going to take a lot of time."
Red moved to the lock mechanism in the cell door. "Very complicated lock," he concluded after a hunkered examination of it. "Going to be rough to pick without any of our tools."
"Wait now." Rocky poked a thumb in the direction of the corpse. "Somebody, sooner or later, is going to miss this bird. They'll come looking, we'll wait our chance and jump 'em."
"Who?"
"Us. We jump 'em when they show."
"I meant who do we jump, even if we got a chance?"
"Escabar's gang, his flunkies."
"Rocky, we don't even know for sure if he had a
gang-" "
"He's got to have somebody else here in this joint."
"The only other inhabitant of this castle we've seen, besides our recently deceased host, was a robot dog."
"Okay, so maybe his servants and staff are robots, too. We wait till they come in and we jump them."
"Nobody may ever come here."
Rocky's head tilted back on his thick neck. "Aw, that's a spooky thought, Red. I don't want to hang around here with no corpse."
Red unbuckled his belt. "Then we better get out."
"What you going to try, picking the lock with your belt buckle? That'll take as long as me bending the bars."
"Give me your belt, too."
"Two belt buckles won't work any bet—"
"Hand it over; come on." When Red had both of the wide white belts tied together, he made a loop at the end of one. "We'll see now if the defunct Escabar, AKA Otto Wenzler, has anything on him which will aid our cause."
"A cowboy trick, huh?"
Red flung the looped end of the belt toward the supine body. The loop hit the stone floor several inches from Escabar's foot. Two more pitches were even less successful.
"Kee-rist, let me do that."
"Hell, I can—"
"111 do it." Rocky shoved his partner aside, assumed the manipulating of the improvised lasso. "There she goes. Ha! First try."
"Remind me I owe you a cigar. Or would you rather take a Kewpie doll?"
The loop had hooked over the toe of one of Escabar s shoes, slid down as far as the instep. Brows knit, the big ex-wrestler began, very slowly and carefully, to pull the dead man across the floor to them.
"That's a boy, Escabar, come along now. That's it," Rocky crooned to the corpse as he reeled it closer.
All at once Rocky went bicycling backward.
Thunkl
"Loop came loose," said Red.
"Yeah, I deduced as much." Grunting up, Rocky returned to the bars. "Aw, I don't need this lasso no more." He thrust an arm through the bars, extended his thick fingers and managed to catch the tip of one of the dead man's shoes. "Come on, come on. That's the boy, we're moving again. Come on, Eskie. That's the way to go."
Rocky succeeded in getting the body lined up against the bars.
Red said, "I'll search him. I've got a light touch."
Rocky got out of his way. "Go ahead. I ain't no ghoul."
"Gold cigarette lighter, box of Turkish cigarettes, bottle of some sort of pills, six keys on a chain . . . yeah, this may do it." Red's grin grew smaller and smaller as he tried the keys on the lock. When he reached the sixth key, he was grinning not at all. "None of these works."
"Okay, let me frisk him." Down on his knees, Rocky set his big hand to exploring the dead man's clothes. "Now this is more like it, a key all by itself." Chuckling, he stood to toss the key to Red. "Don't stand to reason he's going to keep the dungeon key with the others since it ain't probably one he's going to use as much. See, you got to figure—"
"This is the right one."
The lock gave a satisfying click, the door swung outward with a push from Red. "Amnesty time."
"We ain't out of the woods yet," reminded Rocky, following his Challenger teammate out of the cell. "We maybe still got to tackle a bunch of Nazis or a whole castle full of goofy robots before we get out of here."
The dog didn't stir.
It was lying on its side beside the deep fireplace. The last of the logs was now only glowing fragments.
Rocky, attempting to walk on tiptoe, approached the German shepherd. "Didn't Escabar build this one to jump people?"
With a final scan of the empty hallway, Red came into the beam-ceilinged living room. "That's a real dog."
"Naw, can't be." Rocky bent, poked a finger into the animal's furry side. "Kee-rist, it is . . . and the damn thing's dead."
"Then this is probably how they killed Escabar, too." Red tapped the dinner plate which rested on the rough-hewn wood table next to a substantial leather armchair. Tire bone from a steak sat on the gravy-smeared white china. There was a similar bone on the hearth stones near the dead dog's front paws.
"Poison, huh?" Rocky straightened up, shaking his head. "But who did it?"
"Imagine Escabar got his supplies from outside someplace. Either he trusted his delivery boy completely or they caught him with a poison that got by whatever safety measures he used to check out his food."
"Politics," repeated Rocky. His face brightened. "Hey, there's our gear."
Strewn on a marble-top coffee table were the weapons and tools which had been taken from them while they were out cold.
Red, rubbing at his chin, crossed to the leaded window to look down at the night desert and the castle grounds. "We're been through all the castle between the downstairs dungeon and here, without encountering anything except a few robot servomechanisms."
"Escabar was an oddball," said Rocky while he sorted his belongings out of the pile and redistributed them on his bulky person. "He really must of got a bang out of living alone."
"We better check the rooms above this one," said Red. "Then we can head out of here."
"Can we join Juney and the rest of the gang now?"
Red shook his head. "I think we have a stop or two to make first."
A milky blueness laced with green.
Seated in the control cab of the minisub, Prof Haley caused the stroboscopic lights mounted on the nose of his thirty-foot-long submarine to sweep the deeps of the lake through which he was traveling. Beyond the reach of the twin beams loomed watery blackness.
By the time Prof had reached the aquatic escape area, Shuster and Yewell were gone. The direction of their departure was obvious, and Prof had swiftly used the advanced equipment to place another of the minisubs in a position to be launched through the exit tube deep into the shadowy waters of Lake Sombra.
"I trust I've got this control board figured out correctly," Prof said to himself as he guided the small, two-man sub. An indicator gauge near his left elbow told him he was 107 feet below the surface of the lake. "Now, let's give this gadget here a try."
He activated a sonic tracking device, which should show him the location of the minisub he was pursuing on a tiny screen directly in front of him. Circles appeared
in the blue-black screen, along with one fuzzy round dot.
After Prof calculated where the slowly moving dot was in relation to his ship, he adjusted his course accordingly.
"Not a bad little sub," he remarked. "If it had a CB radio and a racing stripe, I'd seriously think about buying one for . . . Good golly, as we used to say in my long-ago, tenth-grade daysl"
Something had gone shooting through the water within the range of his lights. It flashed up and was gone. A creature roughly shaped like a man, but it wasn't a man. Green and reptilian and, such was Prof s impression from the brief glimpse he got, incredibly vicious.
"Well," he said, slouching back some in the control seat, "I guess I've seen the Monster of Lake Sombra."
His sub continued through the shadowy waters. All underwater life had vanished since the creature had passed through his
ken. The probing lights showed only the milky-blue water and twists and tangles of aquatic plant life.
Shortly thereafter came bubbles. Spilling back into the reach of his lights, swirl after swirl of huge bubbles.
Prof slowed his craft, directing it to circle the source of the underwater agitation.
It was the other sub.
The lights had been torn from its hull, water was shoving into the cabin. The heavy, shatter-proof glass had been smashed out.
As Prof's sub circled, he got his second look at the creature. It was straddling the ruined control cab of the other craft. After smashing in the glass, an incredible accomplishment, the creature was reaching for the drowning men inside.
Yewell was torn out first. His body, with the creature grasping it by the throat, came jerkily out of the floundering sub. The shards of glass left in the metal frame of the window sliced and tore at Yewell, knifing his clothes into shreds and starting ribbons of red swimming through the milky-blue water.
The young American agent seemed to come apart now, like a puzzle the monster was suddenly tired of. Clawed hands ripped at Yewell, blood spewed and turned the agitated water black.
"Nothing I can do," said Prof. "Better get myself up and away."
He set the sub's controls for a rise to the surface.
As the craft began to rise, the lights gave him a clear view of the monster.
It had let go of what was left of Yewell; its head was raised, staring up at the departing Prof.
Ace Morgan closed the cover of the brown leather notebook. "That must be it," he concluded.
Dropping the book on the desk which had belonged to the man called Shuster, he left the office and moved down a corridor.
Outside a door in the prison wing, Ace halted. "June, it's me."
"Don't barge in, they set some kind of trap," the girl warned from the other side of the heavy door. Her anxious voice sounded very far away.
"Know what it is," Ace assured her. "Been going through the headman's papers." From a pocket in his wide white belt, the Challenger took the key and the small bar of metal he'd located in Shuster's desk. "Everything in this place is carefully planned, so I'm guessing the trap Yewell used is a prearranged one."
He went down on one knee, ran his hands over the lower portion of the door. "Yep, here she is." A small panel, its presence indicated by hair-thin lines, snapped open when he tapped it thrice.
