“Hello?” Lew whispered. “Hello? Clabbinger?”
There was no answer. Lew groaned. Why hadn’t they included a two-way connection? But who would have thought there’d be any need, with the tight-beam signaler tucked in his sarong to pinpoint the target for the missile strike? And anyway, Clabbinger wouldn’t move a foot to help him; he’d told him that. He was on his own.
Lew took a deep breath and concentrated, the way he always did when slipping into a demanding role.
“All right, Russkies,” Daredevil Jack breathed. “You started it. Now get ready for a counterattack by the Free Enterprise system!”
4
Ten minutes later, Daredevil Jack, free of his amateurishly tied bonds, raised his head and peered past the fronds at the half dozen figures grouped before a small tent from which the yellow glow of a lantern shone on a map table where a brightly colored eighteen inch disk lay. If he could get a little closer, make out the markings . . .
Flat on his stomach, Jack inched nearer. The men around the table seemed to be engaged in a heated argument, although keeping their voices low. One shook his fist under another’s nose. A third man stepped between them. No doubt a dispute over the details of their treachery. Jack studied the palm trees just ahead. From the top of one, it might be possible to make out the details of the chart, using the small ‘tronscope Clabbinger had supplied.
It was the work of another sweaty five minutes to reach the trees, shin up the curving trunk, and take up a position among the coconuts. Swiftly, Jack unclipped the scope, fine-focused the UV beam, adjusted the aperture. There! The red-orange coloring of the target leaped into clarity, a maze of complex markings. It was obviously a detailed relief map, the roughly circular shape indicating the island’s outline, with mountains, valleys, rivers all delineated in vivid pigments. And there—that was doubtless the location of the illegal site. Jack studied the black circle, nestled between a sardine-shaped lake and what appeared to be a sliver of salami. The circle itself showed a remarkable resemblance to a slice of ripe olive.
“I told you, I can’t eat pizza!” A vagrant breeze wafted a scrap of conversation to Jack. “I hate Mexican food!”
“Damn!” Lew Jantry muttered. He scanned past the disputants, surveyed the remains of a camp fire, a heap of empty TV dinner cartons, settled on a huddled figure lying in the shadows of a flowering bush. He made out a vividly colored sarong, a mass of dark, wavy hair, a pair of slender ankles, bound with rope.
“It’s a native girl,” Lew muttered. “They’ve got her tied up, the rats!” He lowered the scope, frowning thoughtfully.
Maybe, Daredevil Jack thought, she’s been in the camp long enough to have heard something. And even if she hasn’t, her people will be grateful enough for her release to give me a hand in finding that Russian installation . . .
Suddenly, smiling a grim smile, Daredevil Jack descended to the ground, began a circuitous approach to the spot where the captive girl lay.
* * *
She watched him with wide eyes as he sawed at her ropes with a bit of sharp-edged seashell.
“Shh!” he admonished as he pulled away the gag to reveal a remarkably pretty face, olive brown, pert-nosed, red-lipped. She looked around fearfully, then at Jack.
“Aholui thanks you,” she breathed.
“Time for thanks later,” Jack said kindly but firmly. “We’re not out of this yet.” He took her hand, helped her to her knees. “The coast is clear this way.”
They had gone approximately ten feet when a bush parted just ahead, and a man appeared, buttoning his clothes. For an instant, his eyes and Jack’s locked.
“What th—” he started as Jack’s head rammed him squarely in the belt buckle. He went down hard as Lew Jantry staggered to his feet, rubbing his neck and uttering small cries.
“Let’s get out of here!” Aholui grabbed his hand and hauled him off down a winding path into the deep jungle as questioning shouts rose behind them.
* * *
“I don’t care . . . if they do catch us . . . ” Lew gasped, flopping down and sucking air into his lungs. “I’m all in!”
“Not much farther now,” the girl said. “You must have been living soft out there in the great outside world, or wherever it was you said you’ve been.”
A gusty wind had risen; a sudden heavy splatter of rain rattled on the palmettos. Lew got to his feet, rubbing at the gooseflesh on his arms.
“What a place,” he carped. “One minute you’re broiling, the next you’re freezing. Where are we going, anyway?”
“To a place where we’ll be safe from the white-eyes,” Aholui said. “Up there.” She pointed. In the sudden vivid glare of a flash of lightning, Lew saw a rugged volcanic peak thrusting up above the wind-lashed palm trees. The rain struck then, like a battery of fire hoses. Stumbling, colliding with trees in the dark, his hide rasped by sharp-edge tropical shrubbery, Lew followed as the girl led the way toward the high ground.
It might have been half an hour later—or half an eternity—before Lew dragged himself over a rocky ledge and lay flat, breathing heavily. Before him, the dark mouth of a cave opened. With his last strength, he crawled to it, and inside. With the girl tugging at his arm, he managed to negotiate a sharp turn, and was in a low-ceilinged chamber twelve feet on a side. He propped himself against the wall and wiped the water from his eyes. Aholui seated herself beside him.
“Now, tell me again,” she said. “What were you doing down there in the outlanders’ camp?”
“You remember—about the plot they’re hatching. You never told me why they had you tied up.”
“They caught me snooping.”
Lew put a sympathetic arm around the girl’s shoulders. “The rotters!” he said. “Just because you were curious about a bunch of foreign devils invading the place.”
Aholui shrugged his arm off. “Can’t blame them,” she said. “I was outside the tribal turf.”
“Nonsense! The whole island belongs to you. Now”—he reinsinuated his arm—”if you’ll just take me to your leader . . . ” He leaned over, zeroing in on the girl’s half parted lips.
A light bulb exploded in his ear, accompanied by a ringing sound.
“Carla,” Lew mumbled dazedly. “I just had the craziest dream . . . ”
The girl was standing by the wall, fumbling with a bump on the stone. With a soft whine of well-oiled machinery, a panel slid back to reveal a well-equipped laboratory. A broad-shouldered young man in a white coat and a white-haired oldster looked up in surprise.
“Grab this cluck, George,” Aholui said, jerking a thumb at Lew. “He’s some kind of Interpol fink, or I’ll eat a bunch of bananas, insides and all!”
5
Strapped to a chair, with a lump on his head that throbbed in time with his pulse, Lew Jantry stared from the grim-eyed girl to the square-jawed young man to the elderly one, who returned the look through a set of half inch thick trifocals.
“You think you can kidnap a federal agent and get away with it?” he demanded in a tone that quavered only slightly.
No one bothered to answer the question.
“It was pretty slick, the way he handled it,” the girl said. “He pretended to be rescuing me, as if anyone could really sneak into that campful of Feds, with guards posted every ten feet, and cut somebody loose. Then, as soon as he thought I was in the clear, he started pouring on the oil and pumping me for information.”
“I did not!” Lew cut in. “I only wanted to kiss you. I thought they were the crooks.” He broke off, staring at the old man. “Say, don’t I know you?”
“Maybe.” The white head nodded. “Lots of people used to, before I decided to Get Away from It All.”
“Rex Googooian, the Armenian Valentino!” Lew gasped. “You used to be the biggest draw on the whole early mid-morning sector! Every middle-aged housewife in American was in love with you! And then you dropped out of sight a few years ago, blop, just like that!”
“Yes indeed.” Googooian nodded. “It dawned on me one day that I had only a few years left in which to expiate the crimes I’d been practicing for thirty years.”
“Crimes?”
“Did you ever notice the dialogue on the early mid-morning sector?” the aged actor inquired succinctly. “So I came here—secretly, of course—bringing with me my daughter, Baby Lou.” He nodded toward Aholui, who was vigorously scrubbing away her tan makeup.
“—And my assistant, George. And a considerable stock of equipment, of course.”
“But—that must have cost a fortune!”
“I had one. And what better way to employ it than in putting an end to the pernicious plague that for the better part of eighty years had been rising like a flood of materialistic mediocrity, drowning our culture in its infancy?”