by Mike Lee
Hetty looked pointedly at Kahn, then at Gordon, then cast a sidelong glance at the open view port. Before he could reply, however, Morton interjected. "There!" she said, pointing with an outstretched hand.
Kahn wasn't sure what she saw at first, but then he noticed the black stain, a subtle dark shading against the green jungle canopy. Gordon shouldered past Hetty and stared out at the island. "What is it?"
"The Chinese zeppelin," Kahn answered. "Or what's left of it." He pointed to the black outline against the slope of one of the island peaks. "She crashed against the hillside there, and someone set fire to her later, hoping the jungle would conceal the evidence. Looks like the local South Sea rabble isn't so harmless after all."
They found the crew in a mass grave, not far from the zeppelin's charred and twisted skeleton. Kahn had landed the Machiavelli at the closest beach and led a landing party up to the site. He'd entertained little hope of finding the gold amid the wreckage, and he was right. What he hadn't expected to find was a freshly cut trail, leading to a lagoon on the other side of the island.
The pirates had hacked out a crude airstrip at the edge of the lagoon, and sometime in the past had built bamboo huts to house machine shops and living quarters. "Not all that different from our setup in the I.S.A," Kahn observed, crouching with the landing party in the dense undergrowth alongside the landing strip. There were a mix of fighters parked haphazardly on the packed ground, some with their engine cowlings open but covered with tarps after the pirates had found something better to do. Judging by the sounds emanating from one of the larger huts they were in the middle of a raucous party.
The landing party formed a rough crescent around Kahn, clutching shotguns and pistols and watching closely for any sign of movement amid the huts. Kahn had brought Morton, Corbett, O'Neil, Scales, and Jones, plus Gordon and his men. He counted ten planes on the strip. If the pirates had any ground crew, there could be anywhere between fifteen and twenty men between them and the gold, possibly more. He cradled a Tommy gun in his arms and rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
"Looks like they haven't been here too long," Morton mused. "The jungle's had enough time to start reclaiming the strip, so no one's been using it in the last few weeks, at least."
"They've probably got little bases like this scattered all through these islands, and just shift from one to the other," Kahn suggested. "I bet the Chinese pulled in, and were in the middle of making repairs when the pirates showed up. They jumped the zep more out of self-preservation than greed, probably. Once it crashed, they settled in here at the base, and eventually put together a salvage party."
"And hit the mother lode," O'Neil whispered, shaking his head in wonder. "Why can't stuff like that happen to us once in a while?
Gordon frowned. "I don't understand why they're still here, then."
"Their boss has probably been trying to figure out how he's going to turn all that gold into something he can actually use," Kahn replied. "He needs a fence to turn the gold into cold cash. Judging by the celebration, it sounds like he's finally got that part of the problem licked."
"Is the gold still here, do you think?" Gordon asked.
"Absolutely," the pirate leader replied. He pointed to a well-made hut, separate from the rest. Two men stood outside, holding shotguns. "Those boys wouldn't be missing out on the fun without a damn good reason."
"Right. Right," Gordon said, putting it all together. "The only problem is that they most likely outnumber us."
Kahn surveyed the landing strip carefully. His eyes settled on a concealed ring of sandbags, partially covered by the tarp. He nodded to himself. "Sit tight," he told the Englishman, and crawled over to O'Neil and Jones. Kahn whispered instructions to the two men, and they set off silently through the undergrowth. He returned moments later. "Okay. Get ready," he said, checking his weapon.
The pirates quickly followed suit, readying for action. Morton shared apprehensive looks with Gordon. She looked at Kahn. "What do you want us to do?"
"Just follow my lead," he answered. "When I give the signal, we're going for the gold. Shoot whoever gets in your way."
Morton snorted. "With what? My finger?"
Kahn stared at her for a moment. "Under other circumstances, I'd say rely on your razor tongue," he said, "but-" He reached into his jacket and pulled out a pistol, a battered but serviceable Colt. "Here," he said, handing her the gun.
She took the weapon-and immediately checked to make sure it was actually loaded. It was. Morton looked at Kahn strangely. "I take it you've got some master plan to sneak in there and get the gold, with no one the wiser?"
Kahn smiled. "Not at all, Comrade. I learned my lesson at Deadwood." He turned to Hetty. "What was it I said to you?"
She grinned. "Stealth is for the birds."
As if on cue, O'Neil and Scales broke from cover. They sprinted across the strip and dove into the sandbag emplacement. Moments later Scales threw aside the tarp, revealing a .60-caliber machine gun mounted on a tripod. He swung the heavy gun around and cut loose with a long, roaring burst, sending armor-piercing rounds scything through the hut where the pirates were holding their celebrations.
"Now!" Kahn cried, leaping to his feet. The rest of the landing party fell in behind him, howling like banshees as they rushed the camp. The guards standing watch over the gold froze momentarily, but recovered quickly and brought up their weapons. Kahn fired a wild burst from the Tommy gun. Both guards collapsed.
Kahn and his people stumbled to a halt in front of the hut. Scales' machine gun fired another burst, then went silent. There were no cries, no answering shots. The building where the pirates were celebrating had been torn to pieces by the heavy .60-caliber rounds. The ambush had been sudden, deadly and ruthlessly effective.
There was a padlock on the hut's door. A quick burst from the Tommy gun took care of the problem. Kahn kicked the door open, still wary, but the one-room structure was empty. Save for six chests, the size of footlockers, one of which had been thrown open by a machinegun round, to reveal a gleaming mass of golden coins.
Kahn looked around at the awed faces of his crew and couldn't resist a triumphant grin. "We've got to do this more often."
The gold slowed the return trip considerably. Even with a freshly-cut trail it took them nearly four hours to cover the five miles back to the Machiavelli's landing site. Kahn noticed along the way that the wind was picking up, and clouds were scudding fast across the sky. By the time they reached the edge of the beach there was an angry, black overcast looming overhead. The typhoon, it appeared, was headed in their direction.
"Step on it!" Kahn yelled to the landing party. "Let's get this stuff on board!" There was supposed to be a ground crew waiting for them, but the beach was deserted. Evidently they had gone back inside the zeppelin to avoid the coming storm. "We're not out of the woods yet!"
The team surged across the sands, and shots rang out from the treeline only fifteen yards away. Bullets kicked up sand all around them, and a loud voice ordered them to halt. "Put down your weapons!" came a shout, in accented English.
The pirates froze as a wave of brown-uniformed Japanese soldiers emerged from their hiding places, rifles leveled. Behind them came the proud figure of Saburo Murasaki, naked sword in hand.
But that wasn't the sight that made Kahn's blood run cold. It was the man who walked beside Murasaki, idly clutching a pistol of his own and grinning like the devil.
Artemus Hayes shook his head sadly. "Told you you're getting slow, partner," he said over the rising wind.. "Now it looks like the end of the line."
Chapter Twelve: Owning Up
Jonathan Kahn let the Tommy gun fall from his hands as the soldiers closed in. One by one, the rest of the landing party followed suit. The Japanese soldiers charged across the sand and formed a firing line barely six feet away. Lighting flickered against the purple-black clouds overhead.
The pirate leader glared balefully at the architects of the ambush-Saburo Murasaki, the ruthless spymas
ter who had kidnapped Chiang Liu-Mei in Manhattan, and Artemus Hayes, the man who'd approached Kahn to rescue her in the first place.
"Long time no see, partner," Kahn snarled at Hayes. "You're looking pretty good for a dead man."
Hayes gave Kahn a roguish grin. A gust of wind plucked at his jodhpurs and ruffled his salt-and-pepper hair. "People see what they want to see, Johnny-boy. I thought I taught you that years ago."
"I saw the Japanese shoot at you, and I saw the blood on your hand when you told me to leave you behind."
"You saw them shoot, but you didn't actually see me get hit, did you?" Hayes said, clearly proud of himself. "The blood came from that scalp cut I got when you pulled that damnfool stunt in the Embassy basement." He shook his head ruefully. "You just about ruined the whole plan right then and there...but then, you always were something of a loose cannon."
Murasaki took a step forward. "Back away from the gold!" he ordered. His men advanced purposefully, bayonets at the ready.
Kahn and the landing party fell back. His crew looked calm; they'd been on the wrong end of a gun many times. Morton glared defiantly at the Japanese, but backed away with her arms held high. Rupert Gordon and his men-the "bureaucrats" sent by the British Embassy to recover the gold-backed away warily, like cornered wolves. Pete O'Neil stumbled and fell; one of the soldiers grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and hauled the flailing pilot to his feet, then sent him stumbling along with the rest.
"How long have you been a patsy for the Japanese?" Kahn asked Hayes. He struggled to control his anger. Now that he thought about it, the clues had been there, but he'd missed them in the confusion.
"A long time, old son," the mustachioed smuggler replied. "Pretty much from the minute I left Hollywood. Murasaki-sama found me in Hong Kong, where I'd gotten into some...difficulties with the local authorities. He bailed me out, and we've been business associates ever since."
"You mean he blackmailed you into spying on the Chinese-or whatever other dirty work he could think of," Kahn said coldly. "What I can't figure is why he'd involve a moth-eaten old dog like you in something this important." The pirate's eyes narrowed appraisingly. "Wait. Let me guess. He used you to intercept the gold shipment in the first place, only you screwed it up. The Japanese didn't put a bomb on your zep-you got it shot down tangling with the Chinese."
Hayes' grin faded. "Murasaki-sama didn't want to risk antagonizing the Brits by sending a Japanese airship, so he decided on a pirate attack instead." He shrugged. "The Chinese put up a hell of a fight. I had to break off, and lost my ship just off the coast of Hong Kong."
Kahn nodded thoughtfully. "You must've thought Murasaki was going to skin you alive after you'd botched the job. But then the Chinese airship failed to show up in Manhattan, and neither one of you knew why. So you grabbed Chiang Liu-Mei, hoping to shake loose some answers."
Deep, distant thunder rumbled to the west, and a warm, damp wind gusted through the trees. Murasaki suddenly barked a string of orders in Japanese, and half the troops shouldered their rifles. Most ran back to the tree line and pulled away crudely-made camouflage screens to reveal two medium-sized autogyros. The troops pulled them from cover and began preparing them for takeoff while the rest began wrestling with the crates of gold coin.
Murasaki paced around the crates, glaring officiously at his men. Hayes gave the officer a sidelong look. "He was sure Liu-Mei would break," the smuggler said with a sigh. "But I knew better." Then he looked at Kahn and winked. "And that's where you came in, Johnny-boy. I figured that if she were loose, she'd run right for the gold."
Kahn felt his cheeks burn. "And you needed a sucker to come along and 'rescue' her," he said, angrily biting out each word.
"Oh, don't be so hard on yourself, Johnny," Hayes said with a cruel smile. "You were the perfect choice. I knew you'd go to hell and back if it squared things between us, and that's exactly what you did." The smuggler let out a laugh. "I've gotta admit, though, you sure threw us some curve balls here and there. I had no idea you'd move so quick getting to the Empire State. You didn't give me any chance to warn Murasaki that we were coming. I had to send those soldiers we ran into in the basement to go find him so we wouldn't get killed on the way out!"
"And you had to make it look good enough, so that you could fake being shot in the confusion." Kahn gritted his teeth. "Not, bad, Hayes. Not bad at all. But how did you manage to follow us from Hawai'i?"
Hayes laughed. "Hell, Johnny-boy, we've been tracking you since you left Manhattan! That was all Murasaki's baby, though. When his fighters tangled with you on the way out of New York, they hit you with a couple of experimental rockets the boys in Tokyo came up with.
Hayes paused, clearly savoring his control of the situation...and Kahn's anger. "They work kind of like the beeper units we use for beeper-seeker rockets," he continued, "only they use the metal skeleton of a zeppelin like a big antenna to transmit a low-power radio signal in timed bursts. We were tracking you even when you were on the other side of the Rockies, Johnny-boy. You were out of your league from the get-go."
There was a cough and a rattle from across the beach, and the first autogyro's engine sputtered to life. Murasaki noted this, and smiled grimly. He turned to Hayes. "There is no time left. The weather is worsening. Finish things here and then get underway." The officer then faced Kahn and gave a deep, mocking bow. "I told you we would meet again, Mister Kahn," he said. "But now we part forever. You were an excellent tool, and it is a pity my country will not be able to make use of you again." He gave the pirate leader a brief, mocking smile, then turned and ran for the waiting autogryo. The troops handling the gold redoubled their efforts to haul the cargo over to the second machine.
Kahn shook his head. "You know he's never going to give you a cut of that gold," he said to Hayes. "You're just another pawn to him."
"Gold? Who said I was getting any of the gold?" Hayes smiled. He jerked a thumb at the Machiavelli. "That's my prize right there, and I've got enough troops on board to make sure the crew behave themselves. If they get me to Hong Kong without any trouble, I might even let them go."
"I'm not stupid, Hayes." Kahn snarled. "Your boss isn't going to be happy with any witnesses to what happened here. You're going to kill them-just like you're about to kill us."
Hayes paused. There was a bright flash of lightning, and then, distantly, a hammerblow of thunder. "You catch on quick, old son," he said, almost sadly. "It's not personal, you understand. None of this was. Not that it matters much, I suppose."
Murasaki's autogyro roared down the beach and hopped into the air, wavering momentarily in the crosswind. Morton suddenly stepped forward, hands thrust into the pockets of her flying jacket. "Hey! Hold on! I'm not with these guys, and you know it! Can't we come to some kind of arrangement?"
Hayes looked her over. "You know, normally I wouldn't be able to resist that kind of invitation," he said with a sly wink. "But Murasaki was very specific. Sorry doll...but this just ain't your lucky day."
Morton's face fell. "Yeah," she said with a sigh. "That's what I was afraid of." She started to turn away-then pulled Kahn's pistol from her pocket and fired wildly into the cluster of Japanese guards. Men screamed and fell. Hayes threw himself to the ground, firing a couple of wild shots of his own.
"Run!" Kahn bellowed.
Everyone scrambled, kicking up plumes of sand. "Kahn!" O'Neil yelled, and threw a small, dark object at his boss. Kahn plucked it out of the air. It was a grenade, lifted from the pocket of the guard who'd grabbed the wiry little thief when he made his phony stumble.
Kahn pulled the pin-and at the last second remembered to strike its base against the heel of his boot. The fuse sputtered, and he threw it. The grenade sailed over the heads of the troops and rolled under the remaining autogyro, almost twenty yards away. The troops carrying the gold scattered, and the little bomb went off with a flash and a sharp bang, blowing out the autogyro's tires and windows.
The pirate leader turned and sprinted afte
r his men. Rifle shots rang out behind him, and a bullet hissed past his head. He plunged into the gloomy depths of the jungle and put as many trees as he could between himself and the surviving troops.
People seemed to materialize out of the shadows around him as he ran. "What do we do now?" Hetty asked, gasping for breath.
"For now, just keep running!" Kahn said, hardly slowing down. "If we get deep enough in here, they won't bother to follow us. They're running out of time to get underway before the storm hits...and they know it. They won't waste time chasing us."
O'Neil's voice came from the shadows to Kahn's left. "If you hadn't completely blown that grenade toss, we wouldn't have to run at all. I swear, you hardly dinged the paint on that bird!"
"I put it right where I wanted it, smart aleck," the pirate leader replied. "That autogyro can't taxi without wheels, so the gold isn't going back to Murasaki's airship. They're going to have to load it onto the Machiavelli...and fast."
"A fair lot of good that does us, old chap," came Gordon's cultured voice. The man didn't sound the least out of breath. "Either way, it's still going to wind up in Japan."
"Not if I've got anything to say about it," Kahn snarled.
"And how do you propose to catch them? Fly?"
"As a matter of fact, yes," the pirate replied.
They got back to the pirate base in record time. Kahn suspected that the storm brewing overhead helped encourage them to pick up the pace. Each flash of lightning felt like another tick of a bomb timer...and everyone knew that time was running out.
All ten of the pirates' planes were airworthy, and two of them were two-seaters, so no one had to be left behind. The British agents, it turned out, were competent-if not especially combat-worthy-pilots.
Once airborne, the ad hoc squadron conferred as to what direction the two zeppelins must have taken. The consensus was south by southwest, figuring that they would try to skirt the edge of the typhoon and head for Hong Kong. They opened the throttle and sped through the steadily darkening sky, knowing full well that they were gambling their lives on being right.
