And, if the water was any indication, this new passage led straight out into the sea.
The insulation in his protective suit was beginning to smolder by the time the jade-hued giant replaced the forty thousand pounds of seemingly ruined spaceship on his back. He stepped into the flowing stream and waded slowly through the bubbling, boiling water.
The tunnel slanted upward almost immediately, sloping gradually enough for the big green man to keep his footing. His feet sank deep into the soggy dust floor making walking even more difficult.
“Come to me, Hulk,” buzzed in his ear. “Bring me the prize from the center of the Earth!” the voice urged softly.
The man-monster plodded steadily on with his burden, climbing back up toward the light of day from the Stygian darkness of the volcano.
The water level began to rise as the wide passage leveled after over two miles. Then, suddenly, a heavy stone wall marked the end of the tunnel.
A pool of water rippled before the natural barricade, seeping into a channel eroded into the rock by ages of flowing water. The Hulk bent his thick body forward and dumped the charred remains of StarLab into the pool. The still-red-hot metal sizzled loudly as it sank into the clear, deep water, sending up plumes of steam that swirled through the cavern. The silver-suited colossus dove in after it.
The man-monster swam straight down the underwater tunnel, one great hand pushing the satellite before him. A hundred yards down, the passage gave way to the open sea.
“To the boat, Hulk,” the soothing voice commanded.
The green-skinned behemoth kicked his powerfully muscled legs and headed to the surface with one hand dragging the twisted wreckage behind him. Seconds later, his head poked out of the sea into the air, a quarter of a mile from the waiting tanker.
The pilot of the hovering chopper spotted the burst of sunlight flashing off the man-brute’s protective headgear and pointed it out to Dr. Irvine. The scientist smiled, picked up a pair of binoculars, and focused them on the bobbing figure below. He saw the image of the blackened hull of the space laboratory undulating beneath the waves.
“I am proud of you, my hulkish helper,” he beamed. “All that remains to be done is to take your cargo to the boat and then we may all go home!”
Sixteen
“Now that is kinky,” the curly-blond-haired man nodded approvingly as the front door to the Purple Circle opened and the muscular youth in a dark-blue-and-red costume walked in.
“Glad you like it, chuckles,” Spider-Man mumbled as he glanced around the private club on Greenwich Village’s Christopher Street. His face twisted into a grimace of distaste beneath his thick mask. The single large room was painted black with dayglow patches of dark purple scattered about the walls and ceiling. A long bar ran along the wall adjacent to the door. The rest of the floor space was taken up by small circular tables clustered around a ten-foot-square dance floor. Light was supplied by black light bulbs that seemed to give the dingy bar an eerie, phosphorescent glow.
Several colorfully dressed men sat at the bar alone or in pairs and four tables were occupied. A Judy Garland song blared from the jukebox.
“Can I help you, friend?” the blond man asked pleasantly.
“I’m looking for somebody,” Spidey said, his eyes roaming over the dozen or so occupants in the club for a clue to the man named Sunshine.
The man sighed. “Aren’t we all?” he said wistfully. “Are you a member of the PeeCee?” His eyes traveled doubtfully up and down the Web-slinger’s colorfully garbed figure.
“Heavens no,” Spidey answered. “I’m looking for a guy named, er . . . Sunshine. Know ’im?”
The man frowned at Spider-Man. “Maybe.”
“Look, I’m . . .”
“Really,” the man said. “I read the Daily Bugle. I know who you are.”
“Some people tell me Sunshine hangs out here. Is he here or not?”
The blond man chewed thoughtfully at the inside of his cheek, rubbing a slender hand across his forehead. “Well, I suppose you’re all right,” he said at last. He indicated a table at the very rear of the room, one situated in shadows. For the first time, Spidey noticed a man seated in the shadows.
“Thanks.” He nodded to the blond man and walked toward the back.
“Uncool, Spider-Man,” Sunshine tsked as the Web-slinger stepped up to his table. “I mean, walking up to me after announcing your presence to the whole world! Don’t you have any subtlety whatsoever?”
“Sorry, Sunshine. I don’t have the luxury of subtlety,” Spidey said, pulling a chair over from another table and sitting with his arms folded across its back. “Mainly ’cause I ain’t got time!”
The slender dark-haired man with a neat, closely trimmed beard leaned forward in his chair. His chocolate-brown face was shiny with perspiration, his black eyes squinting at the Wall-crawler. Spidey could see he was wearing a white silk shirt that seemed to glow in the black light. He also wore a single gold stud in his right earlobe.
“Everybody’s got time, brother,” Sunshine said. He lifted a glass of amber liquid to his lips and sipped it slowly to prove his point.
“Not the folks who ripped off StarLab. I’m betting they’re planning something for real soon now.”
Sunshine stopped with his glass halfway to his mouth. “Who said it’s been ripped off, Spider-Friend? I haven’t heard any such news flash on my little transistor radio.”
Spidey’s head tingled slightly. Ah-ah! I seem to be getting close to something here. Momma’s little boy Sunshine is sure as shootin’ nervous about something I just said; except he doesn’t plan on telling.
Unless I appeal to his better instincts!
“Something’s been going on for a couple of days now, Sunshine. NASA’s been hit by two, count ’em, two robberies in as many days involving flight information and programming on their next unmanned mission. Then anywhere from twenty-five to fifty tons of plummeting NASA hardware is suddenly not recovered by the navy after disappearing from their radar. I want to know what all those separate numbers add up to!”
Sunshine shrugged elaborately. “Well, I’m sorry, Spider-Person, but I . . .”
Spider-Man leaned closer to the table. “I get nervous when big things are happening and nobody fills me in on them, friend,” he said softly, menacingly. “And a little birdie tells me you’re one of the nobodies not filling me in on this.”
The slender black man tried to stare the costumed youth down, but the eerie, white orbs of his mask made him nervous. He averted his eyes. “I’ve got to cop the Fifth,” he whispered through clenched teeth. “I mean, okay, there is something up, but there’re some big, powerful people messed up in it. People who can get me hurt!”
“I hate to resort to a cliché, Sunny, but I can do some hurting myself if necessary.”
“No,” Sunshine said quickly. “It won’t be necessary. Listen, Spider-Man, my stock in trade is words, information. I don’t like to soil myself with the seamier aspects of this business. Okay, some real heavies have got something going, but all I can tell you is to look outside of Niagara Falls, along the river.”
Spider-Man stood. “That’s a lot more than I knew before, Sunshine,” he nodded. “Thanks.”
The black man looked up. “For what? I never said a thing.”
Seventeen
The sun shone bright in the cloudless sky over the city of Niagara Falls, New York. The evening before, the temperature had begun to rise, reaching, by late this morning, the upper forties. The two feet of hard, icy snow was melting slowly into piles of soggy slush. Even the frozen-over Niagara River was thawing under the bright sun. Trickles of water flowed silently downriver toward the now-silent, stilled falls.
Lovely country, Spider-Man mused. Too bad I’m not here to admire the scenery.
The Web-slinger clung upside down to a branch from a tree that stood within four feet of the high chain-link fence surrounding the private industrial complex several yards off the shore of the Niagara
River.
A truck hauling a flatbed trailer was roaring up the road to the fence’s one gate, black diesel smoke puffing from its exhaust pipe. The truck’s bulky cargo was hidden from view beneath a tarpaulin.
A piercing tingle flashed through the Wall-crawler’s head.
My goodness gracious, what have we here that makes the old spidey-sense go buzz-buzz?
A pair of guards dressed in gray uniforms stood inside the compound behind the gate, their hands resting easily on the pistols at their sides. They looked carefully at the identification presented by the truck’s driver and conferred with the man for several seconds through the fence before electronically opening the gates to allow the truck through.
Now you aren’t gonna let that big, bad, mysterious truck just vanish off into the sunset, are you, Mr. Parker?
Nope!
Spider-Man pulled himself upright and perched on the tree limb to survey the setup. Ten feet beyond the fence stood a squat concrete bunker, several feet lower than the top of the fence. Five more bunkers ringed the perimeter of the enclosed compound, all facing the much larger, four-story structure set at the far end of the area. Behind the hangarlike concrete building, the Niagara River wound its way to the famed falls.
The smoke-belching truck rolled slowly through the compound toward the large, windowless hangar.
Signs dotted the fence at regular intervals: DANGER. ELECTRICAL FENCE. 10,000 VOLTS. INSTITUTE FOR RADIATION RESEARCH.
Well, dis mus’ be da plaze ’cause dere ain’t no udder plaze dat looks like dis plaze! There’s nothing else along the river that fits in with what Sunshine told me, and my spidey-sense going off as soon as that truck came along cinches it for this little Web-head! The Institute for Radiation Research definitely ain’t what it’d want people to think it is—whatever that is!
The armed guards were two dozen feet to the Wall-crawler’s left. They were talking, their attention directed away from Spidey’s portion of the fence.
That fence is real hot stuff. If I don’t do this trick just right, I’m liable to wind up one overdone little superhero!
Spider-Man stood on the branch, bouncing up and down gently on the tips of his toes. Then he jumped up and landed on the tree limb which gave under his weight, and then sprang back up, propelling the Web-slinger through the air. He arched over the fence in a curled position and straightened as he neared the bunker. Flipping over in a somersault and landing on the edge of the bunker’s roof, he quickly dropped flat against the surface.
Spidey peered cautiously over the edge. All’s quiet on the western front, which I take to mean as nobody spotting my rather sensational entrance. And here I was hoping to be discovered by the coach for the Olympic gymnastic team!
He crawled to the other side of the roof and looked down the gap between the bunker he was on and the next one over. It was deserted.
In fact, the entire compound seemed deserted.
Either everybody’s out to lunch at McDonald’s right now or I managed to get here in time for some kind of big event!
As he approached the larger building at the end of the compound Spider-Man could make out the sound of the diesel engine coming from around back. He ran in a crouch to the nearest wall and leaped up on it, climbing as fast as he could to the top. He pulled himself up on the roof and ran along the edge to the rear of the hangar.
Now that looks like it could be interesting!
Hidden from view of the main gate and the road that passed a hundred feet from it, at the rear of the building was a pair of hangar doors, now standing open to admit the cumbersome truck and trailer.
Those doors are big enough for a jumbo jet to fit through. So why is it I doubt they use this place as a 747 parking garage?
A dozen men in orange jump suits watched the truck back into the hangar. While their attention was on that, Spidey dropped quickly on a strand of webbing to the top of the doorway and swung inside. He scurried swiftly to the steel-beamed ceiling.
The Web-slinger secreted himself behind a beam and looked down forty feet to check out the interior of the hangar.
Below him stretched a vast concrete floor. In the center of the massive room was what appeared to be a steel cover, some thirty feet wide. Several men in laboratory smocks stood on the metal plate with a man in an expensive suit, watching silently as the truck squealed to a stop before them.
And the prize, for best guess without a single clue to go on, goes to the wonderful, all-purpose spidey-sense! Don’t leave home without that, Karl Malden!
Several technicians rushed over to the truck from the sidelines and began to peel back the tarpaulin. Within moments, the charred, half-melted remains of StarLab I lay exposed on the long flatbed.
Well, it may not look like much anymore, but there’s obviously something of great value left in all that wreckage for those dudes to want it bad enough to swipe it like they did.
“Well, Prof. Warner? Are you satisfied?” The well-dressed man’s voice echoed up through the huge, high-ceilinged hangar so that Spider-Man could hear him as well as if he stood next to the speaker forty feet below.
“Oh, yes. It’s in far better shape than I’d anticipated, Mr. Pendergast,” one of the men in a smock said. “And thank God my calculations were correct. The main crew compartment, being the most vulnerable spot on the ship because of its human cargo, would be the most heavily shielded and insulated against great heat, impact, et cetera, thus enabling it to survive the heat of reentry even though better than a quarter of it was totally incinerated.”
The second man in white said, “I’m still amazed you were able to snatch it out of orbit.”
“Well, Daniel,” the man called Warner said, “it really wasn’t all that difficult. We could have overridden NASA’s control of the vehicle’s systems with our computers, but that would’ve been practically worthless since StarLab’s own engines were inadequate to save the ship. So, we launched a series of drone rockets which rendezvoused with the ship while it was still in orbit, attached themselves to it and flew StarLab from the navy’s target area.
“Not only that,” Warner said, “the drones set up an electronic field to interfere with their radar to make it appear as if StarLab had suddenly just vanished.”
“How much time will you need to get things ready, Professor?” Pendergast asked.
Warner toyed thoughtfully with his scraggly white beard as he regarded the partially melted space station being lifted from the truck with a crane. “Two days,” he said. “I’ve got to strip the on-board computer of all its programming and components and then refit them into our satellite and navigation system.”
Pendergast consulted his watch. “It is now noon. Can you have the completed package on the pad and ready for the final countdown at two o’clock the day after tomorrow?”
“I said two days, Mr. Pendergast. Yes.”
Satellite? Completed package? Pad? Final countdown?
Confused by what he had just heard, Spider-Man took a closer look at the hangar. For the first time, he noticed hydraulic pumps on either side of the ceiling; there, he reasoned from their location and looks, to swing open the ceiling. A narrow crack ran down the center of the steel cover in the floor, as if that was where it separated when the cover was rolled back
Hydraulics to open the roof.
Some kind of pit in the middle of the floor.
Now, I know space shots are supposed to take place in Florida with a lot of palm trees waving all over the place and Walter Cronkite supplying the running commentary, but something tells me nobody ever told these guys that’s how its done!
Pendergast nodded curtly to the two scientists and left, his heels clicking loudly against the concrete floor.
“Between you and me, Abraham,” Dr. Irvine said when the tall man was out of earshot, “do you think it’s going to work?”
“Why not?” The bearded scientist shrugged. “With the equipment we can cannibalize from StarLab, our satellite will have one of the finest gui
dance and navigational systems currently in use.”
Irvine waved his hand impatiently through the air. “I know the rocket and satellite are going to function, Abraham. What I’m worried about is the microwave transceiver.”
Warner stiffened indignantly.
“I’m well aware that you created, designed, and built it, old friend. After all, who put you in contact with Pendergast and his combine and helped convince them to back the project?”
“I appreciate that, Daniel. You know that.”
“I don’t want gratitude, Abraham. I just want to be sure your satellite will do what it’s supposed to. There’s too much at stake here to risk . . .”
“I am sure,” Warner said coolly, “my microwave transceiver will perform exactly as it was designed to: it will link our satellite with the output circuits of every communications, weather, and intelligence satellite in orbit around the planet and transmit every bit of data that passes through them back to us.”
I think this is the part where I’m supposed to whistle in surprise and say “So that’s what these dastardly fiends are up to!”
“Calm down, Abraham,” Daniel Irvine said. “You know I have complete faith in your abilities. I’m just nervous, I guess. Prelaunch jitters or some such.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his smock. “No, damn it, I’m nervous because everything’s gone so well up till now. I mean, considering the risks we took breaking into that computer office in New York and NASA in Houston, as well as getting StarLab, we’ve been extraordinarily lucky. I just can’t help feeling that our good luck can’t last much longer.”
And that’s all I need to hear from these bozos!
“You’re so right, Doc!” Spider-Man slid rapidly to the floor on a strand of webbing. “ ’Cause your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is here to tell you that as of this very instant, your luck has been officially recalled by the factory. And wouldn’t you know it? The warranty’s expired!”
Marvel Novel Series 11 - The Hulk and Spider-Man - Murdermoon Page 11
