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Spy Ships Over the Andes
By WILLIAM O'SULLIVAN
Hell began to pop over the Andes when Bick Nelson went into action in an effort to uncover the spy ring operating in the airlines
"BICK!" "Chubby" Qualters quavered. "For cripes' sake, man, take it easy!"
Only one man was calm in the uproar that had built up for twenty minutes on the Annapolis waterfront. Only one man sat almost unmoving as the giant Consolidated patrol boat laid a threnody of roaring cylinders peace had once been.
That man was "Bick" Nelson—Bickford Nelson, Lieutenant, J Grade, U, S. Navy, the records had it—and he sat at the controls of the twenty-five ton flying boat that been laying siege to the peaceful waters where the Severn flows into the Chesapeake Bay. Where the United States Naval Academy goes about its dignified business of sending men down to the sea in ships—in warships.
Bick restrained a grin with difficulty when his gray eyes touched on the stricken face of Ensign "Chubby'5 Quakers, co-pilot and Bick's junior in command of the great Navy boat. Quakers was sitting frozen in the seat at Bick's right, his brown eyes incredulous as Bick pulled out of a terrific dive and started a screaming ascent into the skies again.1
1: The patrol boat here mentioned is the new twin-motored (4,000-h.p.) Consolidated flying boat, Model 31. It is still in the experimental stages as to ordnance.-Author.
"Bick!" Quakers quavered, his eyes bulging. "Er—I mean, Lieutenant Nelson, sir! My God, you'll be bilged! Fired out of the Service, sir!"
Quakers swallowed hard when the great, winged boat screwed its twin three-bladed propellers in the arc of a wingover and nosed down for the sun-flecked, copper dome of the Chapel, inside the Naval Academy yard.
"Good God, sir—you're—you're diving at the tomb of John Paul Jones!"2
2: After his bitter service under Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, where he served as an Admiral of the Russian Navy following his starstudded days in the Colonial Navy, John Paul Jones dited in Paris and was buried in an unmarked grave, Many years later the body was identified beyond doubt, carried home on a warship, and in 1913 placed in the crypt of the beautiful chapel at Annapolis.-Author.
Bick could have said, "Sorry, kidorders. Orders from the Navy Intelligence Office!"
But instead he remembered the sallow, quiet man who waited for him in Carvel Hall, famed old hotel of Maryland's capital city. Commander Dawes. Ledbetter Dawes, the Navy's feared, little-known, almost legendary ace Intelligence operative.
So all Bick said was, "Pipe down, Chubby."
He eased the Deperdussin control wheel back slightly and felt the electric "booster" take hold and help him nose the boat up, scant yards from the Academy's—and the Navy's!—shrine.3 He hurled the 50,000pound load of metal and wood and men and torpedoes down along the Yard, skimmed the bandstand, roared along the canyon formed by high-walled Bancroft Hall and the opposite Mahan Hall, and tortured the air with a screaming climb up over Dewey Basin.
3: These electric "boosters" for the plane's elevators are electrically operated, ease the strain on the pilot. The booster gear takes hold and works with the pilot's movements of the elevators.-Author.
The roadstead of satiny-blue water was a mess for the gods to behold!
The Matapeake ferry stood heeled at a rakish angle on a sandbar. A halfscore of small shipping floated with hulls turned up to the mild November sunshine. Across the Severn, wires dangled brokenly from two of the tall masts of the Naval Experimental Station with its huge radio apparatus.
Spa Creek, where the bridge reaches across into Eastport, was a welter of drifting crab and oyster boats. And along the waterfront sea-wall was massed the entire population of Annapolis that could run, not walk, to the scene of carnage!
Bick blinked, impressed even at the extent of his own damage to Annapolis. He turned his eyes and stared down at the gray cruiser that rode at anchor, below. Two Navy scout planes were starting into the air from it, and a third plane was already taking its place in the catapult.
"They're after me!" Bick knew. He grinned slightly, to Chubby Quakers' horror. Then he twisted his head and stared back into the control cabin behind him.
"Sparks" Malone, the radio man, was clutching at his equipment and trying to make sense out of the crackling earphones. Gunner's Mate Oshinsky and 0'Kelley were where they had been for the past twenty minutes: hanging to the .37-millimeter cannon in the after-turret and trying to keep the three of them—Oshinsky, O'Kelley and the cannon—in their respective component parts.
"Stand by to land!" Bick sang out in his best quarter-deck voice.
"Aye, sir!" came the choked but obedient answers to his roaring-voiced order. O'Kelley turned his Irisb-blue eyes to Oshinsky's not-Irish-blue eyes and murmured:
"Th' Saints be praised this day! 'Tis the foinest words have ever been spoken—'Stand by to land!' "
OSHINSKY shrugged. "The guy's gone balmy. They'll get him for this!" Sparks Malone said, "Shut up!" and listened to his earphones intently.
He saluted Bick in the mirror and said, "Admiral Pillsbury orders you to land, sir." He licked his lips. "Er—he's been ordering you to land for twenty minutes, sir."
Bick yawned and thought of Ledbetter Dawes, down there in Carvel Hall. He cut the throttles of the four great motors and eyed tire air-speed indicator as he nosed down for a landing near the sea-wall. But there was misgiving in his heart when he said:
"Tell the admiral I'm ready to come in now, Sparks. Just that way, say it!" He slanted his gaze at Chubby Qualters and ordered, "Take over, Mister."
"Aye, sir," Qualters gulped. He reached for the big Dep wheel in front of him. That message was insult added to injury!
The sun was shining on Bick Nelson's red hair when the rangy pilot stepped out onto the patrol boat, with its squad of armed Marines. A Devil-dog captain saluted briefly, grudging curiosity in his eyes. But he didn't ask any questions. All he said was, "You're under arrest."
"Sure," Bick agreed pleasantly. "Why not?" The way he acted, it was an expected pleasure. He eyed his crew and grinned. "Happy landings, gang. I'll be seein'you!"
"He'll be seeing the brig!" Oshinsky told O'Kelley and Sparks.
"God!" Chubby Qualters whispered brokenly, his eyes tragic on Bick Nelson's retreating back. "The guy is washed up. And—a good guy he was, too! Now, what got into him to make him do that—?"
* * *
ADMIRAL PILLSBURY asked the same question, repeatedly.
"I can't say why I did it, sir," Bick answered as repeatedly. And with the utmost truth. He couldn't say, because he had given his oath to Ledbetter Dawes not to say!
"Beached," the old sea dog growled, his clear blue eyes boring at Bick from under shaggy, white brows. "Removed from the flying list, until further orders."
And then he grinned, suddenly.
Bick, incredulous, blinked—and then he heard the steady ah-whoo, ah-whoo, ah-whoo-o-o-o-o! of the Matapeake ferry's distress whistle. The ferry that shuttled from Annapolis to Matapeake, a distance of eight miles across the Chesapeake, had few friends at the Academy: the ferry's fates for passage were as notoriously high as the Naval officers' pay was notoriously low I There was, after all, a saving humor in the situation, with the ferry grounded on the sandbar.
"You're at liberty until further notice, Mr. Nelson," Pillsbury dismissed him gruffly.
Bick went along the Yard and headed for a gate. He grinned when one of the "Jimmy-legs" on watch there stared at him in wonder. He walked Maryland avenue for a block, then bent his steps toward the State House.4 He winced at the crowd that followed him; but those were orders, too—the orders of hard-eyed, thinlipped Ledbetter Dawes.
4: Annapolis, a beautiful old Southern town, besides being the seat of the Nayal Academy is also capital of the sovereign state of Maryland.-Ed.
"Let plenty of people see you come into Carvel Hall."
Bick bought some newspapers, among them the Baltimore Star. "I'll have plenty of time to read, waiting for dark!" he knew.
He went up the steps into Carvel, and made a flourish of registering. He tried to be nonchalant about it when he asked for a certain room—a room that would be directly under that of the Navy's ace espionage operative.
"Don't disturb me," he told the clerk. "I want quiet."
The man grinned. "I hope you'll have better luck getting it than the rest of Annapolis did, today!"
ABOVE stairs, Bick looked out the window at the fire-escape, and he mentally saw himself climbing up it to the room above, once dark had come. He sank down into a chair and picked up a paper. The Star had a screamer that read:
ANOTHER TRANS-CARIB
AIRLINER CRASHES
Bick grunted when he saw it was the American-owned Trans-Carib Line that was in trouble again. The Trans-Carib flew from New Orleans to South America.
"Hell, why don't they put some pilots on that line!" he murmured. "That makes five—or is it six?—crackups they've had in a couple of months! And all aboard it dead!"
He scanned the article and saw the crash had happened in the Andes, between Valparaiso, Chile, and Buenos Aires, the Argentine. A flying boat fooling around over the Andes mountains, with their treacherous winds and freezing temperatures!
"They musta been drunk!" Bick growled. "Six Trans-Carib Clippers down in two months!"
Then he started, his eyes riveted to the following news item:
Curiously enough the radio operator at the Valparaiso base, which the big boat had left only a short time before, swears to having established communication with the ship some ten minutes o/ter the fatal crash had been reported. He has been relieved of duty and confined to the Strangers' Hospital, at Valparaiso, for observation.
"Wacky," Bick judged. "The whole Trans-Carjb outfit is wacky." He turned a page and summed it up with: "Too much imagination."
* * *
AND 4,500 airmiles to the southeast, those same words were being repeated in a sound-proofed, secret room of a great European embassy.
"Too much imagination!" the Herr Undersecretary growled gutturally, as he paced the gloom of the thick-walled room. He stopped, his weight balanced evenly on his spatted, patent-leather shoes.
"That mock-radio trick of yours would have fooled nobody but the stupid Americans! Pah!"
A blob of black stirred in a corner of the room, and a hissing breath sounded—an apologetic, contrite hissing, it was supposed to be.
"So Ver-ry sorry," a weary voice purred. "So ver-ry sorry, Excellency."
The Herr Undersecretary relieved himself of a guttural curse.
"I have no confidence in you, anyway," he said brutally. "Your people are an inferior people!"
He came to the center of the room and a light clicked on. A table light that was carefully designed to throw no illuminating rays to the upper part of the room—or to faces that might be revealed in that upper part of the room!
"I am only just arrived here at Buenos Aires," resumed the official, "and it takes time. But before I am here another week, not a solitary one of you brown Johnnies—"
The Herr Undersecretary stopped at the new hissing breath that filled the small room. His manicured hand went rigid at the changed tone of that hiss—a hiss that was more menacing than apologetic. On his hand was a heavy gold ring of the "signet" type, only no initial or emblem was represented on the golden circlet. Instead, it was criss-crossed by geometric lines, and for its center had a solitary moon of plain gold.
"Dumkopf! Stop that insane hissing!"
The hissing stopped, and after a moment the Herr Undersecretary went on.
"I—er—do not know much about you—er—people, but I have no confidence in you," he said bitterly. "None! This is your last employment with my great government. Your last! Pah, that silly radio trick, to make the Americans think their flying boat was still in the air!"
"So sorry," the voice from the dark corner murmured again, but the weariness had gone out of it. The figure in that corner stirred imperceptibly and came closer to the table with the light.
"BUT it did fool the Americans, Excellency. For two hours, they thought they were hearing from their flying boat. For two hours, Excellency—while your compatriots were leading them to death—Valparaiso thought they were in communication with that boat. Then, the hidden warplanes from the secret field at—"
"Silence!" The Herr Undersecretary smashed the table with his fist, and the light jumped. "That you should dare to speak the name of that place!" He stood rigid a moment, his eyes peering into the gloom.
"Come into the light, my man! I have a feeling I have seen you before, some place. Come into the light, I say!"
The hissing started again. "First time my humble eyes have been honored by sight of Excellency," the voice said. "So sorry, so ver-ry, ver-ry sorry—"
"Come into the light!"
"—ver-ry sorry... for you!"
Flame spurted from hip level and stabbed swiftly and accurately for the immaculate left breast of the Herr Undersecretary's frock coat. The foreign diplomat fell with the roaring echo of the automatic—but an echo that the "ver-ry sorry" little man evidently knew would not be heard beyond those walls.
The dim figure came full into the light then, his flat, black almond, eyes expressionless as they studied the ring hand of the dead man—and the ring on that hand.
The brown face was impassive as brown hands darted to the other's hand and nimble brown fingers swiftly removed the circlet.
A small, soiled chamois bag was produced from the little brown man's pocket, and the ring tinkled when it fell into the open neck of the worn pouch.
"Seven!" the little brown man hissed. "Seven rings now, in all. There is but one more to get. So ver-ry sorry—only seven. So ver-ry sorry must get one more ring. Ver-ry, ver-ry difficult, that one other ring!"
At the door of the small room, the little brown man turned, "So ver-ry sorry," he murmured, his eyes impassive in their regard of the dead Herr Undersecretary. "But men like Excellency himself, men like Honorable Commander Dawes, men like—like me—Ito Katsiburo!—are bom to die. Man like 'Crash' Cassidy—born to die, too—born to die!"
The little brown man, Tto Katsiburo, faded into the quiet gloom and was one with the black walls.
* * *
LEDBETTER DAWES paced the room again and again, and that monotone that had been going on in the corner ceased. The top-flight Navy espionage agent stopped in his tracks.
"Damn it, you! Keep saying it! Say it until I'm convinced! Say it until you're convinced! Say it until you can go out into the world and convince everybody. Say it!"
Bick Nelson stood at attention in the corner and started saying it again.
"I'm Crash Cassidy, I'm Crash Cassidy, I'm Crash Cassidy—"
CHAPTER II
Strictly Solo
BICK started up, hours later, when Ledbetter Dawes came back into the room." The Navy pilot's forehead whs wrinkled in the concentration that it had taken him to master half a hundred photographs of pilots, mechanics, hostesses and radio operators. He'd shed his uniform for a suit of worn tweeds.
A score of maps, detail of transportplane personnel and regulations, a book of Spanish .idioms—all these were on the table that the Navy operative had set them out on. Bick started to say something but Dawes held up his hand. His eyes approved the fit of the strange tweeds.
"Hold it—Cassidy!" He reached a photograph from the table—a photo of a sloe-eyed, sensuous-lipped girl in trim uniform. "Who is this?"
Bick licked his lips. "That's Mercedes Voltar," he said. "One of the hostesses. But, look, Commander—"
"And who is this?" Dawes asked, breaking in on him with a photo of a grinning youngster with a mop of wavy, dark hair.
"'Skid' Harris, my co-pilot on the Gaucho Clipper. He's twenty-two, isn't married, both parents dead, he hails from Indiana, and drinks a bit when nobody is looking or minds!"
"And this?"
"Norton Phillips, one of the owners of Trans-Carib. That photo of a harbor is Valparaiso, Chile. That other is Cartagena, Colombia. That's the hangar at Lake Pontchartrain, outside New Orleans. That's 'Sparky' Seemon, my radio man. And listen, Commander, did I beach myself just to fly for a lousy outfit like Trans-Carib?"
Dawes lighted a cigarette and took a long drag on it.
"Maybe you'd like to know what Trans-Carib is, son—besides being what you term a lousy outfit. Maybe you don't know that Trans-Carib, in addition to being a transport airline, is a potential string of bases—of military bases—for American defense of the Americas. Or for foreign attack on the Americas, if those babies can get in! And get in they will, if this series of disasters keeps up!"
Bick gestured with his hands expressively. "Then why don't we fire that bunch of kiwis manning it now, and take it over ourselves? Why don't we—" He paused, his eyes widening on Dawes' tolerant smile.
"My God! Sabotage!" Bick blurted out.
Dawes nodded. "Sabotage on the ground and in the air. Hangars burned mysteriously; ships crashing without any plausible explanation; men vanishing; passengers attacked by thugs on the way to airports. And the personnel of Trans-Carib?" Dawes shrugged. "A honeycomb of unsung heroes and undetected spies!"
Bick was on his feet, fists clenched. "Why don't we smash them?"
Dawes blinked. "Smash who? Who has seen them—and lived to talk? Where do they operate from? How do they operate? What are they doing now, and what will they do next?"
Bick considered. "But wouldn't it be easier, cheaper for them to start a line of their own in South America? Why should the boys do all this?"
Dawes explained. "Trans-Carib's charter specifies that they shall have exclusive rights to certain key harbors for bases, so long as they carry their passengers safely, and without detriment to the peaceable relations of the various South American countries with one another. Get it?"
Bick nodded slowly. "So we are being muscled out! And we can't act officially?"
"FOR two reasons, we can't act officially, First, those South American republics are very itchy over Uncle Sam's acting as Big Brother to them. Let us make one move officially, and half of them will line up against us!"5
5: Latin American relations with Uncle Sam have been greatly improved in the past seven years, but before that considerable suspicion existed because of our so-called "dollar diplomacy." As for unfriendly foreign penetration in South America, Uncle Sam's answer to that has been the establishment of a separate military area of the Caribbean, with headquarters at San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the appointment of Admiral William D. Leahy, lately Chief of Naval Operations, as Governor of Puerto Rico.-Ed.
"And the other reason?"
"It's touch-and-go over the foreign situation down there, now! If the fear we have is even rumored, half of those countries would play safe by jumping into those babies' laps tomorrow!" Dawes chuckled, "Even now, gauchos and peones report gunfire over the Andes! Volcanoes, of course! That section is dotted with them, and some of them still rumble a bit."
But he sobered again. "One more disaster on Trans-Carib, and we're through. And the day that happens, the defense of South America from the air is through, too!"
"Over my dead body!" Bick growled, his hand outstretched to seal a pact with Commander Dawes.
"I hope," Dawes said slowly, "that you're wrong about that, son. I hope it isn't 'over your dead body!' But if it is, die like an officer and a gentleman!"
Without turning his head, he raised his voice and spoke at the closed door adjoining his room.
"Come in now—Nelson!"
The door swung and Bick gasped. There, facing him and grinning at him over a uniform with Junior Grade stripes, pilot's wings and all, was a man who was a total stranger—but Bick's exact counterpart, his double. There, for all Bick Nelson could say to the contrary, stood "Bick Nelson!"
Dawes said, "Call it luck, call it anything you will. But the minute I saw your face in the Lucky Bag6 I was thumbing through, I had the answer. Half of the answer, anyway!" He was looking at the real Bick. "The stunt was to wait for Crash Cassidy to get knocked off, and then bring him back to life in your person. Get it? But I decided not to wait! No time to wait for the man to get himself killed. Well, here he is!"7
6: The Lucky Bag-a Naval Academy publication; the graduates' annual Year Book.-Author.
7: Bick Nelson, then, is to take the part of "Crash" Cassidy, while Cassidy is to assume the role of Nelson. The fact of double identity is not so strange as it might seem. Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, to cite two examples, have reportedly used doubles for years, apparently to escape assassination; or, on the other hand, to be relieved of tedious public appearances. Some time ago a book came out in which it was stated that Hitler had been assassinated by high Nazi officials and his place taken by a double, but there has been absolutely no proof of this assertion.-Ed.
"Very thoughtful," the new "Bick Nelson" observed dryly. "And I like it better this way. It'll be nice, stepping out for a time and taking it easy!"
He lighted a cigarette and put his match out with a peculiar mannerism—by snuffing it between his thumb and index finger.
"Safer to put them out that way, when you're flying," he grinned, when he saw Bick watching.
"I won't smoke in the air," Bick said sharply. "Against regulations! "
"Oh, yes, you will smoke in the air," Dawes corrected him. "Crash Cassidy does and you'll do just what Crash would be expected to do."
The man in Bick's uniform grinned. "I hope your petting is up to par, boy! I have a reputation to maintain."
"I'll bet," Bick murmured, but his mind was on something else. He voiced his curiosity. "What's your angle in this, Crash? Er—I mean Bick! How come you want to step down?"
Dawes nodded his head. "Good, son! That's what I've been asking myself. Not that I care. This lad will be under my scrutiny from now on out! But he has been acting sort of scary lately, so I finally braced him with a proposition to see he was safe—for a time!"
He faced the man. "Well?"
Bick's double shrugged. "I'm—tired," he said lamely. But his eyes didn't meet those of the master Intelligence operative. "I've been around a lot!"
"I'll say," Bick agreed,.remembering the history of Crash Cassidy's past, as it had been laid out for him to memorize.
The Foreign Legion... Prospecting in the West... Flying in China and Manchuria... Sailing "Down to Rio" on a windjammer... Barnstorming through South America in an ancient Waco... and finally drifting to TransCarib....
DAWES said, "There's a hole or two in Crash's past. An interval that I can't make quite fit." He frowned. "But don't worry, lad, I'll watch him. Closely! You've got to know who's who in this man's navy!"
"He's grounded, too," Bick pointed out. "So there's not much chance of his doing any damage in the air."
Cassidy gave a short laugh. "Where's your 'date' book, and which of the gals pet and which do not?" the adventurer asked irrelevantly.
Dawes made a grimace of distaste and said to Bick, "Of course, you are on your own. You're strictly solo in this! I warn you now that I'll deny any queries made to me about this thing, if it should come up!"
The adventurer in Bick's uniform looked at Dawes, then shifted his eyes front again. Neither of the Navy men noticed it, because Bick was looking at Dawes. Meanwhile, Cassidy pulled on white gloves unobserved.
"You're sure we'll get away with it? The two of us?" Bick asked.
"Why not?" Dawes asked reasonably. "You've only been here two weeks, at Annapolis. Nobody knows you well enough here to notice any change. As for your passing for Cassidy, the Trans- Carib outfit should be pleased at any change!"
Crash Cassidy laughed. "Mercedes Voltar might not like it," he said. "Mercedes is a little cuddle-bunny after my own heart!"
Even Dawes grinned at that. "Er—need I caution you about doing your duty, son?" he asked Bick. But he sobered quickly. "You have your orders: report to Lake Pontchartrain for duty day after tomorrow. You leave tonight by plane from Baltimore. Right?"
"Right, sir." Bick started a salute, then remembered and shook hands instead. "I'll look for instructions, sir!"
Dawes said, "I told you, Cassidy, that you're on your own. Solo! There will be no instructions. None! It's you alone!"
But the new "Bick Nelson" came to the door and grabbed the real Bick as he was leaving.
"Hold it, boy," he said flatly. "Haven't you forgotten something? That ring on your hand, pal!"
"My God!" Dawes said, his face blanching. "Your Naval Academy class ring. I'd forgotten that!"
The adventurer smirked at some private joke and took the ring that Bick passed him so reluctantly. An Annapolis class ring is a treasure next only to a Navy man's honor. But Bick stared at his hand when it came away—with a substitute ring in it! It was a signettype, but instead of initials or emblem, it was crisscrossed by geometric lines, and for its center there was a solitary moon of plain gold.
Dawes had been turning away, but he saw Bick slipping on the new ring. He pushed past the real Crash Cassidy, gasped when he saw what it was Bick had replaced his class ring with.
"Hold it!" he snapped. And then went rigid as the false "Bick Nelson" closed in and stood right up behind him.
Bick looked, and wondered at the white lines around Dawes' mouth.
"Yes, sir?"
"Never mind, son," the Navy man said gently. "Just—happy landings, son! Glad to have—had you aboard! "
"Glad to have been aboard, sir," Bick said simply and took his leave.
* * *
THE real Crash Cassidy didn't fire the automatic be held against the Navy man's back until after Bick Nelson had closed the door. Then he caught Dawes as the man toppled forward and lugged his inert body across to the bed. He listened intently, head cocked, then murmured:
"Probably sounded like a door slamming. If anybody heard!"
HE snapped the lights out, although the shades were lowered. It wasn't much later when he slid the window up slowly and eased out onto the fireescape. He went down by the same route Bick had taken to come up.
His gloved hands fluttered lightly and whitely, like some escaped soul drifting through the air away from a tortured body.
* * *
BICK sat on the bed in the Grunewald Hotel at New Orleans, telephone in hand, and felt like a fool when he got the Academy at Annapolis and asked:
"Let me speak with Lieutenant Nelson. Yes, that's right—Lieutenant Bickford Nelson."
But he had thought of many things, since his eyes fell on the glaring headlines in the Record. Many things that were disturbing had he thought of; but he fought for sanity as he waited on the telephone.
"Hell, I can prove by fingerprints what I'm saying! Maybe he isn't the one who did it! Maybe someone else did it, and Crash—er, I mean 'Bick'—will come through and play this game with me! "
But his hopes were shattered by the voice that broke in on him, roughly.
"Listen, you," came over the wire from Annapolis, "you don't have to say a word! I know who you are, and what you are calling about. But just you get this: are ya listenin', sonny boy?"
"Spill it!" Bick said tensely.
"That room is just full of fingerprints, and not one of them is mine!" came the stunning reminder. "Me, I was wearing gloves, son—or don't I make myself clear?"
Bick's silence told him that he made himself very clear.
"Okay, then, pal—you go push your crummy crate around the sky, and me, I'll peddle my papers here at Annapolis! Now, if you don't like those arrangements, pal, maybe you'd like to interview some people about a funny little 'crime' charge—or do you know what I mean?"
Bick felt the world tumbling about his ears but he fought grimly for sanity and tried to use Ledbetter Dawes' eyes. Tried to think with Ledbetter Dawes' brain that had been. Tried to see it the Navy way.
"I'm up for murder if I spill it!" he said. "And the Trans-Carib mess stays bad for all time! Dawes told me I was strictly solo on this—and solo I am, though only God knew how much Dawes meant that!"
He steadied himself and asked aloud, "And what are you going to do?"
"I'm grounded," came the reply over the telephone, "for two weeks. Just two weeks, pal! After that, it's every man for himself!" And the telephone connection clicked off with grim finality.
The operator's "Are you waiting, sir?" brought Bick out of his trance. He cradled the instrument and stared at the bitter headline again—the headline that had screamed:
NAVY INTELLIGENCE OFFICER SHOT DEAD!
Ledbetter Dawes Is Mysteriously Killed While on Leave From Duty
Bick groaned. "That's what they think," he said bitterly.
After a moment, he started to dress. He was still Navy, even if he was under a cloud and on his own! Duty called—the duty of a Navy espionage agent on his own against unknown enemies. The duty of a synthetic "Crash Cassidy" with no backing other than his fists and his wits. And the sure knowledge that within two weeks, a certain impostor posing as Bickford Nelson, U. S. N., would be on the loose to do—what?
* * *
THE girl with the sloe eyes and the all-but-pursed lips spoke to Bick Nelson twice, languidly, and then her voice sharpened, a voice that had a curiously lilting lisp.
"Crash, dear! I am speaking to youl"
"Oh!" He yanked himself out of his preoccupation and looked at the duskycheeked girl. "Hi, Mercedes! How's tricks?" He twisted his head to speak to the co-pilot standing next to her. "Skid. Hey—Skid Harris! Got the weight charts figured, and the center of gravity set?"
THE co-pilot lifted his cap to scratch his wavy hair.
"Well, spin my prop if the Big Guy isn't getting interested in his job!" But he went away to do Bick's bidding.
Another girl came along—a girl in hostess uniform, and her figure did things to her trim outfit. She had cool hazel eyes, very blond hair, a nose that turned up slightly, and fair skin. Bick blinked and racked his brain for her picture among those at Annapolis, on that table in Carvel Hall. But he couldn't. He tried to laugh it off.
"Hi, beautiful! How long is it since we flew together? It seems a lifetime!"
The girl's eyes went cold with contempt. "It is a lifetime," she said brusquely. "I've never seen you before—Mister Cassidy! In fact, I've never been with Trans-Carib before. In fact, I'm a new hostess, and this is my first trip on the Gaucho Clipper."
Sparky Seemon, the radio man, twisted his head to stare at Bick, and then stood very still. Mercedes Voltar stared at Bick and the new girl with narrowed eyes. Bick covered his annoyance at his slip with a rasping cough and turned away. Skid came over and nudged him and said,
"How do you like those potatoes, pal? She's snubbing you!" Later, Skid volunteered, "Her name is Carla Mendoza. One of those beautiful-but-arrogant Argentinians, my friend. Do not get fresh with her—unless you crave some cold steel from her relatives! Or do I need to tell a scarred-up veteran like yourself?"
Bick didn't answer, because a new and stunning thought had struck him, and driven the problem of the Gaucho Clipper from his mind for the moment.
"What if those Navy Intelligence men investigating Dawes' murder come across my prints, without any word from Crash?"
And the answer to it was equally baffling.
"Heck, I'm not only solo against certain Europeans and their agents! I'm pitted against the real Crash Cassidy, also—and the United States Navy on top of all that! I've got them to fight, too, if they come after me!"
CHAPTER III
First Blood
BICK Nelson knew the set-up of the personnel of the Gaucho Clipper9 from hours of studying the regulations over.
9: This is a Boeing job, with a total horsepower of 6,000 gasoline steeds.-Author.
There were ten in the crew, including himself. Skid Harris was the executive officer and co-pilot, and as such was responsible for the carrying out of Bick's orders. Then there came Art Hudson, a tall, somber man who was navigator and also a pilot. Hudson was second officer.
There was a third officer, stocky, sandy-haired Scotty McLane, who was a junior pilot. Either Bick or Skid had to stand the bridge or be at the controls, always; but otherwise, they alternated so that they handled the controls one hour, and had two hours away from them.
Sparky Seemon ranked as first radio officer, and under him was an assistant, a rotund, surprised-efyed man called "Pop" Dunkin. The flight engineers, responsible for the functioning of the four motors, were Larry Horn and "Punky" Dreems. These last two it was who calculated the power and fuel required, after the weather charts were gathered and studied for wind direction, atmospheric conditions along the route, and the altitude determined by the commander for the flight.
The two hostesses prepared the food for the entire complement of passengers and crew—74, when full up!—and otherwise looked after the needs of the passengers.
A stiff physical examination preceded everything else for the crew; and then started the complicated weighing of baggage and cargo and the proper distribution of weight of passengers and baggage and cargo. It was a hard rule, Bick realized, that the maximum gross weight of the entire flight must not exceed 82,500 pounds.
Flight 915—the flights were indicated by the number of crossings that had been made by the company—New Orleans to Valparaiso via Cartagena, Guayaquil and Iquique—Captain C. Cassidy, commanding—ticketed 34 passengers, 4000 pounds of express and 2185 pounds of mail.
This was the western leg of the air lanes that looped South America as far south as Buenos Aires, on the east coast, and Valparaiso on the west coast. And both routes had to be covered for Trans-Carib to hold its precious charter! The Coffee Clipper—New Orleans to Rio de Janeiro via Cartagena, Paramaribo, Pernambuco and Bahia—would weigh anchor on the following day under an old Army pilot, one "Slats" Hollidge.
Bick had talked briefly with Hollidge at the Trans-Carib hangar, the night before. He had asked a question, almost carelessly—a question he didn't feel like asking his own crew. It was:
"What do you suppose happened to 'Sonny' Crowell, on Flight Nine-Fourteen? How come he got smeared up in the Andes?"
The ex-Army pilot stared. "Oh. I forgot. You were on leave a few days." He considered before he said slowly, "There was a storm, but still—" He broke off and looked keenly about him. "Still, the radio beam was working when we started north! So how in hell he got snarled up away south of Valparaiso beats me, too!"
Bick nodded, his thoughts busy with it. He waved a negligent hand when he started away.
"The beam doesn't always work," he said.
"You think so?" Hollidge stared at his hands, then up at Bick again. "Yours always works, doesn't it, kid?" And he swung and went away.
Bick was thinking about that now, when a single bell sounded and his crew stood aside at the gangplank and waited for him to board the giant boat. He stepped to the head of the line and went silently and soberly inside the Gaucho Clipper. He went directly to his seat, on the left of the forward control-cabin and up a ladder from the passenger compartments.
SPARKY SEEMON dropped down in front of his complicated radio apparatus. His assistant ganged around, getting earphones ready and testing the two-way service set, and the emergency set. Art Hudson busied himself with his navigation charts. Skid Harris plopped down into the seat alongside Bick, and Scotty McLane came forward to watch the senior pilot handle the take-off.
The flight engineers went about taking the sixty-two readings of the idling motors—a requirement every half hour of the flight. The two hostesses should have been below deck; but they weren't. One of them was coming up behind Bick, was smiling coyly. It was Mercedes. Bick felt the scruff rise on his Navy neck at sight of a woman walking calmly on his bridge! He twisted in his seat and spoke sharply.
"Below decks, where you belong, Mercedes," he said with heat. Tension took hold of the entire working crew, and Bick felt he had made a mistake. But he wouldn't swallow the thing.
"Did you hear me, Mercedes?" he asked, as the girl came on, but more slowly.
"Crash!" the girl said, icily, spots of color staining her cheeks. "You always let me come up!"
"That's quits," Bick snapped. "From now on this boat works like any other boat. On regulations." He added lamely, "I've been taking too many chances."
The girl turned without a word, and Bick turned, too; but he lifted his eyes to the mirror in time to surprise pleasure in the faces of Pop Dunkin and Scotty McLane. Hudson merely looked stupefied. But Bick saw also the long, eloquent look that passed between Mercedes and Sparky Seemon.
Two bells sounded and the passengers started aboard. Bick had already seen them: a strangely assorted consignment of human cargo. Diplomats from Latin America; flashy super-salesmen; smug-faced playboys; quiet business men; some eager-eyed college students. There were only four women, and they were obviously Latin American, obviously the wives of the diplomats, and just as obviously bored.
The sound of the ground crew hauling in the gangplank came above the purr of the motors. The passenger hatch slammed shut with a bang. The patrol boat that snaked the big ship out to the runway barked alive and Bick ruddered after it, using the boatrudder under the hull. The patrol boat guiding the big Clipper eased up at the buoy-marked channel.
Ready for the take-off!
Scotty McLane went down the spiral ladder gingerly, sang out:
"All watertight doors secure, sirl Passengers all in their compartments, sir!"
Bick nodded and leaned forward to flash the signal that would go on in all compartments: Passengers fasten safety belts, please.
Larry Horn twanged, "Motors all ready, sir."
And Sparky, unpleasantly: "Ready!"
The skipper of the patrol boat megaphoned, "Take-off channel clear!"
Skid Harris stood calmly and eyed everything. "Ready, sir!"
"Normal flap setting," Bick said evenly. "Start the motors three-quarters throttle, then ease to full-throttle when she gets her head."
"Aye, sir." But Skid looked at him queerly. Bick felt Sparky's eyes on him again, but he didn't say anything when Skid murmured:
"You are taking things gently, aren't you—sir?"
THE engines roared throatily and the huge boat glided, rather than jumped, forward. Slowly, the hull eased up to the water-step, lightened under Bick's expert touch. Dark water cascaded over the stubby seawings. Bick eased the wheel back, exulting as he always did to the blasting power of a great boat. The hull lifted cleanly and the roar of the engines hit a smoother note.
The clock marked it a thirty-onesecond take-off.
Skid's eyes were on Bick curiously, but all the co-pilot said was:
"Well, Crash, your little holiday certainly taught you a lot about flying!"
Their eyes met briefly, and then Bick turned front again and watched the waters of Lake Pontchartrain sweep back beneath the wings.
"Cartagena bound," he murmured, as he banked gently and dug for the delta of land that stretched from New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico, nearly a hundred miles south. "Cartagena bound—and maybe Hell-bound, too!"
Bick thought of the careful routine of the flight, and he wondered for the first time how such a thing as sabotage was possible, with such smooth efficiency and such careful guarding on all hands. And then the thought of Ledbetter Dawes struck him harshly—of Ledbetter Dawes, the Navy's most efficient Intelligence operative lying dead in that room back in Carvel Hall. Bick leveled off high and set the gyropilot on the controls.
"It's not up to me to wonder, it's up to me to find out! " he knew.
Two hours out over the sparkling Caribbean Sea, he signed to the watchful Skid Harris.
"Take over," he said, with a studied yawn. "I gave you an hour break, as it is. I'm going to have a look around down below deck.
"Give Mercedes a kiss for me, too," Skid murmured. He patted the gyropilot. "Me and Iron Mike wil1 hold the fort while you're gone."
Bick felt a bit guilty when he saw Mercedes standing in a narrow companionway.
"Crash wouldn't have treated her that way," he knew. He lighted a cigarette carelessly and put the match out with his bare fingers. But his eyes never left those of the Latin-American girl, who watched him wordlessly and with pursed lips.
Slowly he went forward, slowly took the girl in his arms. He kissed her, intending to do it only lightly at first. But the full sense of his aloneness hit him with the warmth of the girl's lips on his own. He seized her roughly and held her hard to him and pressed his lips down on hers. Harder. And harder. And he held them there.
He held the kiss even when he became aware that they were no longer alone—that the girl Carla Mendoza had come upon them suddenly, was standing as if transfixed. He wondered at his motive when he only laughed and held Mercedes cradled in his arms.
Carla went away, and Bick released Mercedes with a sudden guilty feeling. But the Latin-American coquette stared at him and asked, with spirit:
"Crash? Who has taught you so much love, while you were away from me? Never, nev-air have I been kissed so!"
So Bick groaned as he went up the spiral steps to his snug office on the bridge deck.
"Even when I'm right, I manage to overdo it!"
A slight squall struck unexpectedly an hour later. Bick felt the heavy lurch of the boat, and stood to go forward. But a sudden sense of danger seized him. He stopped, frowning, and wondered what it was.
"Nerves," he judged it, and started for the door again. But again he halted, unable to overcome the feeling of danger. He walked to the porthole of his small cabin and stared out at the gray rain that streaked from the skies.
He shifted his gaze, suddenly, shifted it to where a heavier fall of liquid was coming, apparently, across and under the starboard wing. And then it hit him with explosive force I He realized what it was!
"My God! The starboard jettison gear has been turned on. The fuel is being dumped from the right wing!"
HE leaped for the door, but turned A for his desk. From the drawer he jerked his automatic, broke the clip out and satisfied himself that it was fully loaded. Quietly, silently, he eased the door open and stepped out onto the rear of the bridge. His eyes went first to the control room.
Skid was working hard at the controls, perplexity clear on his face in the rear-view mirror. Iron Mike was disengaged, as Skid struggled to hold the boat on an even keel in the buffeting squall, Bick came close, saw the starboard gas gauge was stationary, that it showed no sign of the heavy jettisoning of gas to the waters below.
"The gauge has been fouled," he realized. "And whoever figured this timed it nicely, timed it so the squalls would bump us around a bit and cover the fuel dumping until too late to do anything about it!"
The two at the controls didn't look up, Scotty McLane watching with fascination as Skid muscled the controls of the boat. Bick swung, concealing the gun in his hand. Sparky wasn't in sight. Pop Dunkin sat frowning at the radio board, and repeating over and over:
"Flight Nine-one-five calling New Orleans... Flight Nine-one-five calling New Orleans..." Then, "New Orleans? Nine-one-five flying Track Four, Cartagena, seven thousand altitude... Sou'easterly squalls, winds are--" Bick turned his head at a movement near the navigation table. Art Hudson was looking at him somberly.
"Funny we weren't given this information before the trip," the navigator said sharply. "How about it?"
Bick stared around him, watchful. The gas was jettisoning out; but there would be more than enough for the flight to Cartagena, with a rearrangement of the fuel load, even if all the starboard gas was lost. At the worst, they could land after the squall and radio for help if it was needed.
"What counts is to get the rat that is doing this!" Bick told himself. "If he is aboard—and I have a feeling he is!"
Larry Horn showed from an inspection trip of the port motors. Bick said: "Where's Flight Engineer Dreems?"
"Starboard wing, a minute ago," Horn said. "I saw him going in—"
"Not me, you didn't," a voice interrupted mildly. "I've been in my cabin, Larry." It was Dreems, coming from an opposite direction.
"I'll be damned!" Horn murmured. "I could have sworn you were working around in your denims. Yep, I'll swear I saw you in your denims! "
Hudson was thumbing over some charts. Bick nodded with his head to Horn and said, close to the second flight engineer's ear:
"I've got a gun here, Mister! I don't want it to go off in the wrong direction. And I don't want any noise about what I'm telling you. Do I make myself clear?"
"Let's hear it, the rest of it," Horn growled, his eyes steady.
"I'm counting you out of this work, Horn," Bick said tightly, "because you wouldn't be fool enough to be walking around the wings if you had fouled the jettison gear! Our gas is being dumped!"
"Unh!" Horn grunted, but kept his eyes mild.
"And you didn't see Dreems, in my opinion, but somebody who looked like Dreems! Somebody who, in the quiet press of business on the bridge here, sneaked into the starboard wing in Dreems' denims! You wouldn't wonder about that, would you—if you saw a map in denims step into a wing? Fix that up now—and leave the hatch open later!"
"Ha-ha-ha,Horn forced a laugh, as if at a funny story. "That's a hot one, Crash! Well, I'll be seem' ya!"
He walked slowly to the starboard wing hatch and climbed through. The hatch slammed after him.
BICK stood very still, his eyes watchful on the others. Sparky Seemon was missing; and the two girls. He recalled Sparky's curious glances at him, his apparent silent communication with Mercedes on one occasion when Bick had acted as Crash Cassidy would never have done. Bick walked slowly away when he saw Larry Horn come through the hatch again, white-faced and grim but with the tension gone out of his eyes.
The hatch on the starboard wing was open, and the roar of the motors came loud. The men on the bridge worked quietly on. Skid and Scotty McLane, at the controls, held a whispered consultation and then stared at the fuel gauges. Pop Dunkin labored on—
"Flight Nine-one-five... Flight Nine-one-five... calling Cartagena, Colombia... Flight Nine-one-five, calling Cartagena—"
Bick went through the door into his own cabin, but he left it open the faintest of cracks. He watched, knowing that the guilty man—if the guilty man was aboard!—would become nervous, curious, even concerned for his own skin.
"Probably the stunt is just to force us down and out of commission," Bick realized. "That way, the Trans-Carib would have another black mark on her record!" But he wondered, "Why not go whole hog, though? Why not blow us to bell out of the sky, if that's the game?"
He shut off the thought and bis scalp crawled under his peaked, white-drill cap. A man was moving suspiciously, out there in the long, narrow business heart of the boat—a man who was standing now, was making his way to a starboard porthole. He was craning his neck to look out at the wing when Bick stepped out from his cabin.
"What are you doing there?" he rapped.
There was a guttural oath and the man whirled, his hand darting to his armpit. Bick fired from the hip, a staccato crack! that was all but lost in the roar of the motors through that opened hatch. Pop Dunkin didn't stir in his seat.
"Cartagena? Flight Nine-one-five—"
Skid and Scotty were ranging the instruments in mild concern, and Dreems stood close behind them, bent forward in concentration. Larry Horn's face was visible, watchful, in the shadows beyond the open portwing hatch.
While on the floor near the starboard porthole lay Art Hudson, his neck twisted and a stream of blood creeping from his stertorously breathing lips to the carpeted floor of the bridge. Bick held his automatic at a cautious angle and went forward.
"Ach, mein Kopf, mein Kopf, mein Kopf!" the man moaned, stopping his labored breathing for a moment. Then the gasping, retching sound started again, but more faintly, more fragilely. In another moment, it had ceased altogether.
"Mein Kopf!"—"My head!"—had ceased to pain Art Hudson.
Bick Nelson motioned silently to Horn, and the two of them lifted the inert corpse and carried it back to the Master's cabin. Horn scratched his head and said:
'"My, my! Hudson, eh? Who'd have thought it? You can never tell what you're talking to, down in South America! Never go by a name, they say. A girl adds her mother's name on to her father's, as you know. Probably what Hudson did, too.
"His name was probably 'Arturo Schmidt', and at an early age he added the 'Hudson'. One of those LatinAmerican- German combinations so common in those parts."
Bick covered the man's face with a hand towel. A crimson stain pressed through the towel and spread slowly.
"First blood," the ex-Navy ace mused, "for me. But maybe next time it will be my blood!"
Horn was saying: "—so you never can tell from a name."
"No," Bick said, the ghost of a grin coming over his taut face, "you certainly can't tell by a name! Take mine now, Horn—take Crash Cassidy, huh?"
Horn said, "Hell, everybody knows you, Crash!"
THE squall died as quickly as HudA son had. The boat eased its bucking, but it rode at an uneven keel unless the ailerons were set with plenty of port flap to them. Horn worked quickly, methodically, and soon the gauge at the controls dropped rapidly to its proper place. Under the astonished gaze of Skid and Scotty, Dreems and Horn lugged equipment up through the wing hatch and took over the dangerous task of transferring fuel from port to starboard so that the balance of the great boat was equalized.
Bick ignored the searching looks the two gave him. He asked, quietly:
"How are the readings?"
"Air speed: one sixty-two m.p.h.; manifold pressure, three-naught; r.p.m.'s, nineteen-fifty; using nine-sevenfive horsepower per motor!" Skid sang out, his eyes on the instrument panel. Bick nodded. "Nice going, lads." He kept his voice steady. "I'm navigator, for the rest of the trip."
Skid's eyes raised slowly and met Bick's in the mirror. It was the younger of the two, Scotty McLane who asked:
"Where's Art Hudson? Sick?"
"Very," Bick said simply. "Lead poisoning." His eyes met and held with Skid's for a long moment and then he turned away.
The wide Caribbean unfurled endless miles of shimmery-blue water under the wings of the big boat—while Bick wondered what the real Crash Cassidy was up to at the moment!
CHAPTER IV
Chilean Jest
AT old Cartagena, some 1350 miles airline from New Orleans, Bick Nelson took charge at the controls and circled the harbor, studying the waters for the wind-pylon markers and the runway channel.
The old city was a pretty picture in the long sunset, its red-tiled roofs and gray walls contrasting sharply with the green-clad hills that mounted like a rampart to 500 feet above the harbor.
There were two mouths of entry to the old port but, a sorely beset city in the days when Morgan and Drake strode the Spanish Main with iron-fisted ships and black- hearted pirates manning them, the Cartagenans had wisely filled the larger mouth of entry—Boca Grande—with rock, and forced the fighting to Boca Chica, the smaller entry, where the defenders had a better chance.
But the straggling population of mainly blacks and mulattos was evidence enough that Cartagena still slumbered four centuries after Drake had given her a knockout punch.
Barranquilla, to the northeast, was a better city from many respects; but Bick, looking down on Cartagena's old fojt of San Felipe—now the city's reservoir—realized the defense possibilities that had perhaps actuated TransCarib's choice.
"And it is one more port nearer the Panama Canal that won't be in the hands of any potential enemy airmen," he realized. "If I can fight this thing out and win through for Uncle Sam—and for Ledbetter Dawes!"
He turned to watch Scotty McLane make an entry in the ship's log—the allimportant record book. Bick signalled him, saw the notation:
Cartagena leg, elapsed time flight, 7 hrs. 50 min.
Bick nodded but said, "Do you always take things for granted, Scotty? We don't log our landing until we've made that landing."
He cut the big boat down and found the patrol boat, got its signal that all was clear. Slowly, he dropped her down, flashing the warning to the passenger compartments:
Belts on, please!
Bick leveled off over the water and let her cut along fast, then eased her down until the hull was cutting a wedgeshaped spray. With the contact of the water, he clipped his throttle open a bit so as to bring it to a gradual, instead of a sharp, stop. The patrol boat cut in close and threw out a line.
Skid yawned and shook his head. "The Big Guy must be taking a correspondence course," he murmured. After a moment, he added: "And some lessons on how to be a good guy, and an—officer!"
"Sitting next to you is contagious," Bick said. He added thoughtfully, "So is lead poisoning, my friend!"
He went ashore with quick step and supervised the loading of the cargo bound from Cartagena to Guayaquil, Iquique and Valparaiso.10 Then he made his way to the American Consulate and reported "Hudson's" death. "I should hold you for an inquiry," the official said.
10: Guayaquil is the chief port of Ecuador, on the Pacific Coast. Iquique and Valparaiso are both Chilean ports.-Ed.
"Put it down to mutiny," Bick suggested, "and I can stand my hearing when I drop anchor at New Orleans."
"Done," the man said. He stared at Bick a long time. "Funny business, what?"
"Not," Bick pointed out coolly, "from Hudson's viewpoint. Not so very funny!"
He went back to the boat and signed the manifest for cargo and passengers, then studied the weather charts. He came ashore again and spoke with a customs officer about a triviality. He lighted his cigarette Crash Cassidyfashion, and was surprised at the startled look the customs man gave him. One of the others murmured:
"That ring of the señor's—it is strange, indeed!"
BICK realized the peculiar ring was in bold relief of his lighted match for a long moment.
He said casually, "An old keepsake." The others murmured flowery Spanish farewells and turned away after Bick's "Mil gracias"—"a thousand thanks." But something stopped him as he went his way—something soft that hit on his shoulder and fell, a ball of pale something, on the wharf.
Bick stooped low and saw it was a hastily rolled wad of paper. He palmed it swiftly and opened it when he was alone. The paper, spread out, carried two words only—but they were words that sent the blood to pounding in the ex-Navy ace's temples.
Evidar Guayaquil, those words were. Avoid Guayaquil!
Bick turned back into the wharf, remembering the customs man's look of surprise. But one of the others—Bick didn't know which—had made the remark about the ring! He shrugged and started up the gangplank but stood aside when he heard hurrying footsteps.
The two hostesses were coming aboard.
Bick frowned after them; but he noted that Carla Mendoza's face was a mask of hostility to Mercedes.
"No love lost there," he mused. He went above deck and asked Skid:
"How many passengers and what cargo for Guayaquil?"
Skid said, "Three passengers; one bag of mail; four hundred pounds of cargo."
Bick made a swift decision, even as he realized that the very warning to pass up Guayaquil might be in itself a trap!
He said, "The Guayaquil passengers and cargo stop here and go by boat, or the next plane down. Gur next port of call is Iquique! We—"
"But—" Skid tried to break in, puzzled.
"—load with fuel here, and supplies," Bick went on, ignoring the attempted interruption, "and we radio—from above Guayaquil!—that the mail is to be dropped in a watertight sack, with floats attached!"
His voice left no room for argument, so Skid Harris gave him a mock salute and said:
"Aye, sir!" in perfect sailor fashion.
Involuntarily, Bick fell into his old Navy ways. He gave the youngster a correct Academy salute and said:
"Carry on, Mister!"
Skid's eyes narrowed; but all he said was: "Pretty soon, now, the only surprise I'll have will be when there are no surprises! Do you understand me—er—sir?"
When the boat was under way and winging down- coast in the growing dark, Bick turned the controls and the bridge over to Skid. He said,
"I'm going below, to the lounge!"
The flight across the sea had heightened his normally good appetite, and the sight of a case of pheasants being loaded aboard at New Orleans was a pleasant reminder to him. The hostesses met him as he stepped into the perfectly appointed room, and it was Mercedes who made the introductions to the passengers who were there.
Bick met them easily, although his eyes were on the two hostesses. He wondered if, perhaps, one of them had scribbled him that warning Evidar Guayaquil. And if so, which one of them? And why?
The passengers for Iquique and beyond were playing cards, or just sitting back and reading or talking. Many of them were in their compartments waiting for the second call to dinner. Only fourteen could be seated comfortably at one time for the elaborate eightcourse menu that the Gaucho Clipper offered.
Bick had acknowledged the introduction to a Señora Eccheveria, the wife of an important Chilean diplomat, and was turning away but the woman gave a cry and clutched at his left hand.
"Mire!" she cried, turning to her husband. "See!"
SILENCE fell over the assmbled passengers, and Bick stood rockstill while the woman explained.
"Mi capitan—excuse," she bubbled, in mixed Spanish and English. "But de ring which you wear. She ees one like it I have seen but rarely before!"
Señor Eccheveria was frowning ominously, but the woman apparently did not notice.
"Ah, yes, it was while in Germany. But of course!" Her English improved with her regaining of composure. "That ver-ry nai-ees young man w'at had been around de world, de sol-daire. And again de official in Vashington."
The woman's eyes flew suddenly wide, and her hand leapt to her face.
"And—both are now—dead!" she whispered. "Herr Undersecretary Max von Weigstaffe—he who was murdered in Buenos Aires this past several days ago, no?—it was he who had one, too. And—"
"If Señor a will permit?" her husband growled, but with a courtly bow.
His left elbow jammed, not accidentally, into the woman's ribs, as he offered his arm. Eccheveria bowed to the assembled company—but there was abject fear in the oily eyes which he darted at Bick Nelson,—as he strode majestically way.
One of the hostesses hovered near, and a venomous voice said in perfect English:
"You fool! Why do you wear it!"
Bick twisted his head and saw both girls standing there—both looking in opposite directions—and with faces sweetly innocent of guile.
He dropped down into his chair at the head of the table and unfolded his napkin.
"Nice menu," he complimented Trans-Carib's home-port chef. But what he was thinking was:
"Nice guy, that Crash Cassidy! The ring he left with me certainly means plenty. And it means it in a foreign language, too! I'll have to nose into this further!"
To each of the girls, as they passed him things for the first time, Bick murmured:
"Thank you—for the warning. But I'm not a fool!"
Both managed genuine surprise, so far as he could make out.
GUAYAQUIL was a thousand miles, and the giant clipper boat turned up the beacon-marked harbor at 1:15 A. M. Sparky Seemon listened with a surly face to Bick's orders, then pushed his message through as the landing lights bloomed alive on the dark surface below.
"Flight Nine-one-five calling Guayaquil... Flight Nine-one-five calling Guayaquil... Hello, Guayaquil!... Not landing this trip... Stand by for sack of mail to be dropped in landing channel... That's right... Huh?"
The rest of the talk was spoken close to the radio mouthpiece; but Bick caught what was said, and grinned:
"—by order of His Honor—Crash Cassidy, to you! "
The boat peeled off from its flight line and circled until the patrol boat's winking lights said "Ready!"
Bick cut the throttles and Scotty McLane lugged the watertight bag and the secured floats to a port and forced them through. Bick circled again, his hand raised for the signal when to cut away. He estimated a fairly close drop to the patrol boat, then mused:
"It's like bombing," as he said, "Drop it, Scotty!"
The bag was a dark blur in the strong lights from below. It hit the water and a splash arose, a splash that ceased to be just a normal splash after a moment and became a boiling, roiling, spouting geyser of foam and of other things—of men and splintered parts of what had once been the Guayaquil patrol boat!
The roaring detonation of a terrific explosion followed swiftly, and the Gaucho Clipper rocked crazily in the tortured air. The lights blanked out along the waterfront, and the rumbling echo of the giant blast came clear above the throttled motors.
BICK reached for the wheel and dragged it to him, and snapped the full six thousand horespower housed in the four motors alive. The boat speared high into the air, rocked heavily, and then settled on a normal keel again.
The harbor of Guayaquil11 showed clear in the bright mass of flames that spread rapidly from the Trans-Carib hangar-quay—
11: Guayaquil Harbor is only 18 feet deep, inshore. Big steamers anchor well out.-Author.
The looks that the men on the bridge exchanged were mute but eloquent.
Bick said, "Someone must have thought this was belligerent waters, and mined the runway."
Skid said dryly, "Someone knew these were belligerent waters—thank God!"
Bick grinned and chuckled at Sparky, "Well, well, well, that makes two of you cookies who think I am the Lord High Executioner!" He sobered suddenly at the sound of steps on the stairs.
"Back to your posts!" he snapped at his men.
Sparky was saying over and over, "Guayaquil, Guayaquil, Guayaquil! Flight Nine-one-five calling... Flight Nine-one-five calling!"
A voice from the rear of the bridge asked, "Is something wrong—Crash?"
Bick turned and stared full at Carla Mendoza. Mercedes was visible as to the top of her tousled head, slightly below her. Carla was in a frilly sOmething that told Bick it was Mercedes who had been on duty when the explosion, the mine in the runway back there, had been set off.
He was amused at her calling him "Crash," after her cold treatment of that day. The amusement spread to the gang on the bridge when Bick shook his head and said to the girl, in mock seriousness:
"No, honey, nothing is wrong. Something—just backfired, that's all!" He winked at Skid. "Nighty-night, TransCarib's winged angels! "
The gang roared when the two girls retreated in confusion.
Bick turned front again and set the course for the 1,800-mile leg to Iquique and pondered the warning he had received—the warning that had saved the lives of all of them on board.
"Is it one of the girls, who knows something? Or was it one of that bunch at the customs' wharf?"
He wondered about the strange ring that Crash Cassidy had given him, about the ring and about Crash, himself, and Crash's reasons for wanting "out" for a time.
The memory came back to him with a jolt that Mr. Crash Cassidy—"Bick Nelson," under temporary arrest at Annapolis—would be on his own again in a few weeks.
Bick had a feeling of dark foreboding when he contemplated the real Crash Cassidy's questionable background; the sinister business of the ring he himself now wore; Crash's undoubted murder of the Navy's ace Intelligence operative, Ledbetter Dawes.
"I can ruin the whole game Crash might have in mind, by spilling what I know!" Bick thought. "But—that wouldn't be saving Trans-Carib; and it wouldn't be helping me any, either! No," he realized, "I've got to stick it out and hope for the best. After all, we have thirteen days more! Oh boy—thirteen!"
But what a lot could happen in thirteen days—and "What a lot has happened in the last thirteen days!" Bick recalled, almost dazedly. "Thirteen days ago, I was just fresh into Annapolis with a 'cushy' job pushing that Consolidated Patrol Boat around. And with my record and my reputation safer than the U. S. Treasury. And now look at me!
"A pilot on a job that might blow up any minute; a man who might this very secohd be hounded for murder; a man under another man's name, and a slightly bad name at that! And in my place back home sits as brazen and coldly scheming an adventurer as everlooted a poor-box!"
THE Gaucho Clipper raised Iquique, the longest leg of the trip, at noon. The passengers were testy at the long stretch, although Bick pointed out to Señor Eccheveria:
"You certainly wouldn't have gone ashore at one in the morning, at Guayaquil, would you, Senor?"
The man regarded him darkly. "I would go shoreward," he said stiffly, "whenever there appeared to me to be danger to myself." He added hurriedly, "And to the Senora Eccheyeria, also, of course!"
"Of course, the Senora also," Bick agreed with a straight face.
"Of a certainty," Eccheveria smiled. "And, of course, mi capitan, you will not deny that there was trouble last night, at Guayaquil?"
Bick shrugged. "No trouble for me," he said. But he'd already had the radio reports: three killed on the patrol boat, and nearly a mile of waterfront destroyed by the fire that had followed. "Not any trouble with us."
Eccheveria astounded him with his next words. "No, not for you. Only for others, there is trouble, no? Do not deny, mi capitan, that this is a trouble ship! I have felt it, that tension of the entire crew. I have seen it in your peculiar actions, your strange decisions, your mysterious refusal to land at Guayaquil—and there was trouble at Guayaquil, of a certainty!"
Bick shrugged and excused himself.
His eyes drifted to the steep climb the Andes made from the Peruvian coastline. He wondered about the Trans-Carib boat that had been lost so far off its course—south of Valparaiso, when it should have been north; and of Slats Hollidge's cryptic:
"'Your radio beam never fails you, does it?'"
Bick glanced questioningly at Sparky, and then turned to look east at the Chilean coastline. He took the controls to set the big boat down in the harbor. The huge nitrate works for which Iquique was noted sprawled along the skyline like a grotesque skeleton.
A half-hour later—"Valparaiso right on schedule," Bick muttered to Skid Harris, as he lifted the great boat into the air from her refueling. "We'll be there for supper."
Sparky came over some time later, a grin on his normally sour face.
"Look at this, Crash," he chuckled. "Those Chilenos have a great sense of humor! "
He passed Bick a scribbled message that had come in over the Clipper's set. Bick read, chuckling at first, and then came erect with a bang.
CHILE SUGGESTS MYSTERIOUS BLAST IN GUAYAQUIL HARBOR CAUSED BY A FOREIGN SUBMARINE. UNITED STATES, ALARMED, RUSHING WARSHIPS FROM CANAL ZONE TO PATROL COASTLINE.
It was the next few lines that transfixed Bick, that nailed him into his chair, stunned and motionless. Sparky laughed and pointed out the joke.
" Guayaquil is in Ecuador, as we know. Well, the Chileños hate the innards of the Ecuadorians and the Peruvians, to the north of them. So they scare Uncle Sam into sending part of the fleet down to mess up the Peruvians and the Ecuadorians. Get it?"
But Bick was busy getting something else. The bulletin went on:
NAVY ALSO SENDING CRACK SQUADRON OF PLANES FOR DEMONSTRATION PATROL, BAN ON GROUNDED NAVY ACE, BICKFORD NELSON, LIFTED BY SPECIAL ACTION OF SECRETARY OF NAVY ON ACE'S PLEA. SQUADRON LEAVES NEWPORT NEWS VIRGINIA TOMORROW FOR ATTEMPTED NON-STOP FLIGHT IN GIANT CONSOLIDATED PATROL BOATS.
BICK slumped the controls forward and then signed quickly to Skid to take over. He pushed past the surprised Sparky Seemon and signed Scotty McLane into his place. In hie cabin, Bick tried to tell himself it wasn't true; but he knew it was.
"A Chileño joke," he groaned. "And—what a joke! But they don't know. They don't know of this foreign menace, and of Crash Cassidy, with his suspicious foreign tie-up through this ring, leading a squadron of big planes right down into their home waters! And, God help me, I can't tell them who the joke is on! "
When Bick came on watch again, he was still cheerless. Not even the sight of Valparaiso nestling in its beautiful semicircular bay—the Pearl of the Pacific—roused Bick from his gloom.
"Chilean jest," he muttered, as he looked down on the handsome suburb of Vina del Mar, twisted his head to stare at the Chilean Naval Academy high up-on the hills over the city.
"Damn Ledbetter Dawes, anyway!" he whispered huskily. "I'd be at my own Naval Academy now, if it hadn't been for him."
His face was grim when he whipped past Punta Angeles, angled back to Punta Gruesa, and slid down the skyway for a landing into the cup-shaped harbor.
"Someone will pay for all this," Bick Nelson promised himself, as he throttled the patrol boat forward.
CHAPTER V
Death's Gage
ONCE the Gaucho Clipper was safe in its hangar and the ground crew was swarming over the huge, 152-foot wing and grease-monkeys12 were treading the walkways inside the wings, Bick slumped wearily into a chair and contemplated his next move.
12: "Grease-monkey" is the correct term applied to a mechanic in overalls by airmen. And by the mechs themselves. Call the man a "greaseball" and you'd better grin! Or you'll get a sock in the schnozzola. A greaseball is-well, a greaseball. A term of derogation.-Author.
His mind slid to the strange report of the Trans-Carib radio operator who had been confined to a hospital for observation, following his insistence that he had communicated with the great plane—ten minutes after it had crashed in the Andes.
"No harm in asking him a few questions," Bick thought. He slipped away and soon was inside the Strangers' Hospital.
"Sure! Radioman Foster," an attendant said. He led the way along a hall and pointed to a room. Bick rapped sharply on the door.
He was still rapping when a nurse came and suggested, "Perhaps the patient is alseep." She smiled and added, "He seems completely rested, although he has been very nervous. Keeps talking about that tragic wreck, you know!"
The nurse opened the door gently, and instantly her face changed. She darted a swift glance at Bick.
"You haven't been in here, have you?"
Bick felt the blood quicken in his veins and he eased the girl gently to one side. He stepped into the room. And gasped. The radioman was lying with his back to the open window, and the face that was presented to Bick and the girl was a face twisted in hideous pain. But one look at the bulging, motionless, flat eyes of him told Bick that whatever it was the man had felt, he was beyond all pain now.
Bick said rapidly, "I'll wait here. Get a doctor, quick." But he knew the doctor could do Radioman Foster no good. And he wanted a moment by himself with the man.
He glanced at the window, saw the slit in the screen, saw the hilt of a vicious dagger that protruded from the sheets—and from the man's back. Bick stared at the curiously carved handle of it and muttered.
"If that isn't an Oriental weapon, then I just don't know a thing."
The nurse bustled back with a doctor, and Bick withdrew after giving his name and agreeing to testify to the police. He went out into the pleasant, balmy air of the perfect Chilean summer12 day.
12: Summer in South America-that portion of the continent which lies far below the equator-is, naturally, the reverse of our summers in the north of the Americas. Thus in Chile, around Valparaiso, the hot weather comes in November, December, January and February. Conversely, it is cold in June, July and August.-Author.
"Poor Foster," he murmured. "Killed for what he knew—and couldn't tell!"
Bick pondered the thing as he bent his steps to the hangar again.
"I wonder. I wonder how Foster could have heard those poor fellows radio after the crack-up—and why he was killed, murdered, because he insisted he had heard their signals!"
The answer burst on him like a thunderbolt. "It was faked! Faked by another ship! Probably their own radio was disabled and—" Bick quickened his steps. "Another ship faked the wrecked Clipper's radio! So—why couldn't those babies, in some way, have faked a beacon-signal that pulled our Clipper off its track? Faked a beacon-signal and led them back and beyond Valparaiso—into the Andes—and finished them by snuffing the faked beacon off?"
It perhaps wasn't the answer, Bick knew; but he felt he was getting somewhere. Ihere was only one way to get the rest of it. If he could get it—by hopping to the scene of the crash for a look around, himself!
At the hangar, he told Skid Harris his plan. And his reasons.
"I guess it sounds wacky to you, Skid, my being so excited over this thing. But there's something hidden here, and I've got to know what it is!"
"I'm curious, too," Skid said flatly. "Curious; about a lot of things, Crash. But—this comes first. What is your plan?"
"To hop over that area in a small seaplane," Bick said simply. "It's tough, I know. But there are a score of lakes dotted through that section. We could make it."
"Or a damned good try at it," Bick agreed. He added pensively, "I guess you've been around a bit in your day, Crash." He stunned Bick with his next query. "Were you ever at Annapolis, fella?"
BICK faltered in his stride, but he managed to keep his voice even.
"Huh?" He thought fast. "Annapolis, Nova Scotia?"
"Skip it," Skid said with a laugh. "Just a crazy idea I had. I have a buddy name of Craigman who graduated the Naval Academy. Annapolis, Maryland. I'd never noticed before, but you have a way of slinging your orders and handling yourself that reminds me exactly of him!"
Bick's grin was genuine. "I don't think Crash Cassidy would last long at the Naval Academy, Skid." But he still felt warm inside when they got to the hangar.
"We want a joyride," Bick explained. He said more slowly, "Funny sort of joyride, I guess—but we want full equipment; landing flares and all the rest of it. Also, we want the radio beacon to stay with us the full way!"
The Trans-Carib port official shrugged. "I'm used to wacky requests from you pilots," he said. "I've got a speedy little job I keep for any special patrol work that might come up. It's a Laird, a pontoon job."
Bick whistled. "That fast, eh? So much the better! Let's go!"
Twenty minutes later they were off. Skid looked at Bick and gave it up, as the Navy ace whipped the roaring bit of racing plane off the water and corkscrewed it in a graceful climb into the painted colors of the sunset.
"You hex me, pal," Skid said softly. "You beat my time! Big or little, they all sing when the Big Guy gives them his attention." He grinned. "Even the gals. Even little Carla! "
Bick whipped the crate into a steep turn and then climbed it hard against the towering Andes.
* * *
THE hangar chief turned at the footsteps and stared hard. A little brown man hissed apologetically and said:
"Missa Cassidy, you know where he live by? What address? He here now, no?"
"No," the hangar chief said roughly. "And cut out that damned hissing. I thought one of these jobs of mine had a leaky valve, when I first heard you."
"Sor-ry, so ver-ry sor-ry," the brown man said. He smiled so that his almondshaped eyes all but disappeared in his face. He hissed again and started away.
"Who'll I tell him was here—his valet?" the hangar man asked rudely.
The hissing stopped abruptly; but the hangar chief backed an involuntary step at the venomous glitter in the little man's eyes.
"You say to Missa Cassidy," he said slowly, coming a pace forward and standing lightly on catlike feet, "you say to Missa Cassidy that brother of old friend—in Orient!—come to pay visit."
Then the little man was smiling again and the hissing seemed to reecho lingeringly in the air of the big shed. "He's out joy-hopping it," the hangar man said, mopping the perspiration off his face, a perspiration that had started with the savage look on the brown man's face. "I dunno when he'll be back."
"Same Missa Cassidy," the brown man murmured. "Always—hopping it. But not always—with joy! So sor-ry. So ver-ry sor-ry—"
* * *
BICK clocked his flight and computed the distance traveled, and then when he knew he was about right, he circled; but carefully. Under him loomed the white-clad peaks of the Southern Andes. It was almost dark, down below; was dark, entirely, at sea level. But the altimeter showed him well over 10,000 feet, and the peaks of the Andes scarcely a thousand feet below the fleeting wings of the ship.
Bick pulled the landing-flare release, and a colorful parachute of sparkling color hung suspended in the cold air. He 'whipped in a hard turn and throttled down to spiral after the flare. He yelped exultantly when he saw the scarred peak where the giant Clipper had plowed in. A mass of wreckage was still there, marking the tragic spot with a pilot's memorial. He looked at Skid.
"Now to get a lake to set down on!"
They found it, not two miles away, but around on the other side of the peak. Bick released another flare, and another; then swifted down and skimmed his pontoons on the water before the light had died. He taxied to shallow water and stared down at the footing they would have to walk over.
"It'll be colder than hell, even with our Sidcott suits," he told Skid. "Even with our boots, we'll nearly freeze our feet off! "
But he dropped down from the small plane and Skid came after him. They found the wreckage, and in another moment Bick's flashlight was playing over it.
"Just another wreck," he was saying, as he probed the twisted metal and the charred woodwork that had once been the proud cabin. "I guess I was—"
"Hey!" Skid cut in on him. "What's this?" He held up a splinter of blueblack metal—heavy and sinister in appearance.
Bick's knowledge of ordnance, of guns and shells, was enough to tell him what it was, at a glance.
"A piece of shell," he said flatly. "A sliver of—of—" He paused. "No! No, it's not an archie fragment. It's—by God!"
"What?"
"It's a piece of shell fired by one of those new thirty-seven or forty millimeter cannons! The type the new combat planes are using. It's—" Bick stopped, again shaking his head. "But it can't be! The Chileños aren't using them, yet. And we have no planes of this type down here. So—"
"Listen," Skid asked patiently, "what is it all about, Crash?" He came closer. "And if this is a sliver of shell, why didn't the others find it when they picked up the bodies and examined the wreck?"
"Because," Bick said slowly, "they weren't looking for anything like this. Because they knew they'd find hunks of metal in all sizes—stuff that they couldn't carry back down the Andes!—so they didn't examine it closely!"
Skid said, "But Crash—how could this Clipper have been shot down? Who did it? Where did they operate from? From a battleship, out at sea?"
"No. That's out," Bick judged swiftly. "The Chilean Navy would spot anything of that kind. Or the British patrol. I can't make it out—quite. If—"
He shook his head in annoyance at the angry buzzing that was coming into his ears, a buzzing that grew persistently louder with each passing second.
"If there was any chance of their having a port, some place—"
"But who?"
"Hold it! Listen!"
From far away the buzzing noise came louder—louder—louder! And then it was a distinct rhoom-rhoomrhoom-rhoom-rhoom that beat at the air, bore down on the two men there, got steadily louder. Bick stood transfixed.
"Foreign motors!" he whispered, "Foreign motors are the only motors in hell's broad acres that feature that uneven beat!"
SKID gasped and pointed. In the dying light of the skies a swarm of planes was drilling close over the whiteclad peaks, drilling steadily on toward where the two American pilots stood. Bick didn't realize for a full minute what it might be. And then it was too late.
"Skid! Down, Skid! They're headed for us, headed right this way! My God, there must be a hundred of them!"
"But cripes!" Skid sputtered. "Do you think they saw us?"
"No; maybe they haven't seen us! Maybe someone has been thinking about this, the way I have! Or—maybe someone has told them that we are snooping around—we, the U. S. Navy Intelligence Service!"
He silenced Skid's gaping mouth with: "My guess is they are afraid we might find something just like we found. My guess is they're coming over to blast this spot to kingdom come!"
As if in answer to his words, a dark form dipped suddenly and screamed down in a dive. Flares launched themselves in the air, to send the two Yanks cowering back away from the wreckage there; but they were caught squarely in the glare of those floating flares.
A whistling shriek grew in the motortortured air and punctuated itself in a crashing explosion. Dust flew up and blinded the Yanks. Before they could move in their tracks, another roaring motor thundered loud, and another detonation—nearer this time—crashed out. And then all hell cut loose!
Wham-boom! Wham-boom! Whamboom-boom-boom-boom-boom!
Bick and Skid lay still as death, and they continued to lie still for minutes after the crashing died in the air. It still lived in their ears. Then the faraway rhoom-rhoom-rhoom-rhoom of the receding motors told them the raid of obliteration—the raid to erase the marks of the unbelievable attack on an American Clipper plane—was over.
"Let's get that plane and get out of here," Skid said. "Hell, I still can't believe it!"
"Let's get to that plane and see where those monkeys are heading for," Bick corrected him. "Hell, man, that's the angle! We know what they are now! And we know they must be nested around here. But—where? How?"
"If that Laird is still okay," Skid amended.
In their anxiety, they ran the full way back to where the speedy little ship was snuggled close to the shoreline of the lake. They nearly screamed their relief when they saw the plane was in good condition.
"They missed it by a few yards!" Skid said, pointing to some craters nearby with his flashlight. "What a close call that was!"
"Still is close, Skid," Bick told him tightly, as they piled into the small plane. "But I can't tell you about it now. We've got to get up and after those fellows while we can still see their exhaust flames. Get going!"
The Laird roared into the dark in a reckless take-off, and zoomed high. The bright moon looked down on them from opposite the peak they soared over, and far in the distance was the cherry-red glow of a mass of exhaust stacks.
And then those firefly streaks flecked out!
Bick flew in a straight line toward where he had last seen them. He said to Skid:
"Listen, they can't be outdistancing us with that heavy stuff they're flying. They must be—Skid!" he interrupted himself with a shout. "Those lights! Look!"
HE wrenched the Laird in a tight turn and held it. Far in the distance, but only slightly below their own level, glowed the ringed lights of an airport, turned on for landing ships!
Bick held to his tight turn, hugging close to a high peak so he wouldn't be seen from that area of light. He held it long after even those lights faded, held it while the moon climbed higher- and higher. His eyes ached with the strain of watching that one area; but he managed it.
And then the moon was shining on that area—on that flat, shiny, watercovered area where only a short time ago had been lights and warplanes. Understanding kindled then in Bick's brain, and he sighed with relief.
"Got it!" he said slowly. "I got it!" He whipped the plane in a short arc and hurled it back across the Andes for the seacoast and faraway Valparaiso. "Now to do something about it!"
Skid sat in silent thought for some time, then stirred and put a hand on Bick's arm.
"Listen, Crash. You said something about the—the U. S. Navy Intelligence Service, back there. Are you in the Navy Intelligence, Crash?"
Bick said, "Not exactly, Skid. In fact, I'm not exactly even Crash Cassidy. Now, bend your ear to my tale, while we head back for Valparaiso. There'll be no time to waste in talking once we get there."
* * *
BUT Bick was wrong.
The hangar chief talked with him, when he slammed down to a landing.
"Some Oriental guy wuz here askin' for you," he said. He scratched his head and thought. "Said he knew your brother in Asia some place. I think that's what he said. Or maybe he said you knew his brother, come to think of it."
The port superintendent came from his lighted office and motioned the two pilots inside. He closed the door carefully, then faced them.
"Bad news," he said succinctly.
"Spill it," Bick said. He thought there wasn't any bad news left to hear, after what he'd been thrdugh in the past few days. But he was wrong.
"'Slats' Hollidge and his gang were killed," the super said slowly. He sucked on his cigarette and looked at them woodenly. "The Coffee Clipper exploded in Bahia13, after discharging its passengers."
13: Bahia, Brazil (whose port is Salvador adjoining this city of 350,000 people.-Ed.
"So they got Hollidge!" Bick scowled, his eyes bitter. "The lousy skunks!"
"Yeah," the super said, his eyes tragic. "But that's only part of it. The rest is, our charter is through. TransCarib is no more. The Big Boss himself had me on the telephone, with the bad news. Just ten minutes ago."
"Like hell!" Bick roared. "They can't do that!"
The super shrugged. "Maybe you'd like to argue about it, Cassidy? Help yourself to the telephone. Those wires stretch a long way! The name," he said, still flatly, "is Norton Phillips, and r the name lives as you know, in New Orleans. The Trans-Carib's Big Boss!"
But for all the man's hard, flat talk, there were tears standing out in his eyes. He turned his head away and dropped down in a chair.
Bick was stunned. He pulled Skid aside and said, "Well, that seems to do it! Remember what I told you—one more disaster and we were through?"
Skid nodded. "And there are our European friends, all ready to step in! And you can't move without opening yourself up to murder charges, and maybe worse! And that heel, Crash Cassidy, coming closer every hour!"
Bick nodded; but a new thought struck him. "Hey! Hollidge being wiped out with the crew was no disaster in the sense that is usually meant. Sure, it's a terrible thing—and especially for Hollidge's family. But—no passengers killed!"
He swung to the super. "I'm taking you up. I'm calling the Big Boss!"
"Luck to you," the man said without turning.
Bick slid down on a chair and grabbed the phone.
* * *
IT was a tight knot of men who ganged A into the office and listened to Bick's orders—and tight in more than one sense of the word. It was three o'clock in the morning, and the crew of the Gaucho Clipper had been relaxing at Valparaiso's justly praised night-spots. But Bick's words snapped them to attention, and they listened.
"—so the Big Boss says we can take a crack at it! How about it?"
Sparky said, "Nuts! If the charter calls for mail to be delivered by the Clipper to Rio, then we're out. Be sensible, Crash!"
Bick said, "A technicality that the Brazilians are being forced to use." "Yeah? Who is forcing them?"
"Who do you think?"
"Little Bo Peep!" Scotty McLane said.
"Sober up!" Bick snapped. He stared at Sparky. "That stuff about the mail is a technicality; but we've got one to get around it with. Know what we're going to do?"
"Write to Mister Farley?" Sparky asked derisively.14
14: Sparky Seemon is referring to the Hon. James A. Farley, Postmaster General of the United States.-Ed.
"Get this—the charter says: 'Mail must be delivered to Rio by TransCarib.' Yes; it says that. But it doesn't say mail from where! Get it? It doesn't say from where!"
Bick looked around defiantly. "It specifies the crew. It specifies the type ship. And it says 'mail'. But it doesn't say where that mail must come from. That mail is going to be delivered," he said slowly, "this morning. It's going to come from here. It's going to be carried by us!"
Sparky was on his feet, his eyes wide. "By us? Around Cape Horn? Count me out!"
"By us—over the Andes!" Bick told him steadily. "And you'll be counted out—permanently—if you act up."
A gun was somehow in Bick's hand. Skid Harris hauled out his own automatic and ranged up at Bick's side.
"Well?" said Bick Nelson.
"Blow me down if I can see the choice," Sparky said. "Death in this hangar—clean, quick, easy death by a gun. Or a trip over the Andes in a giant flying boat, with the chances favorable for starvation and freezing!"
"Make your choice," Bick snapped. "But fast!"
"I'm your Sparks," the radioman said simply.
Bick turned to Skid. "Just for fun, I'll hold the gang here. You get out and tour the town for the girls. They go, too."
"Not on your life!" Sparky snarled savagely. "Mercedes doesn't come on a wacky jaunt like this. That's out, and I'm not kidding!"
"I don't like making war on women any more than you do, Sparky," Bick said patiently. "Not a bit. Maybe less, even, than you do. But war is being waged on us—and I have a strong hunch that women are being used to do it. France had its Mata Hari. Maybe the Trans-Carib Clippers have their editions of women spies—as well as men wreckers."
His eyes ranged them all—Dreems, Horn, McLane, Sparky Seemon. "Do I make myself clear?"
Horn shifted in his chair and said, "Like arrest, huh?"
"Not like arrest," Bick corrected him gently. "It is arrest. It's arrest by Skid Harris and me, until further notice. Skid or I will ride herd on the mob of you, through this whole trip. And with drawn guns. One move out of any of you—just one move—and you'll be playing tickets in Hell's Sweepstakes before sunset!"
The super came in and said, "She's fueled and ready, Crash. Waiting on the line."
"Wait for Skid to come back," Bick said, his eyes never leaving the men in front of him. "Next—rip out the telephone wires. I don't want to chance any telephone calls to—interested parties!"
"Right, Crash."
The big clock on the wall ticked loudly in the silence of the room. Death had hurled its gage—and Bick Nelson had accepted the challenge!
CHAPTER VI
Navy Born
BICK'S face was heavy with care as the big boat hurtled for the pale cones that were the Andes. He stood in the rear of the bridge deck, where he could watch the prisoner-crew. At the controls, alone, Skid Harris looked apprehensively into the south—the south, where that swarm of planes had so magically materialized to bomb them those short hours ago; and as mysteriously disappeared into the mirror-clear waters of an Andean lake.
A cloud formation drifted a shapeless, pale mass at them, and suddenly Skid went into a terrific zoom. Biclt's knees buckled and he went forward heavily, a new fear in his heart. But the crew were as helpless as Bick, fought only to hold to their chairs and keep from spilling across the cabin like upset chips.
A sharper, higher peak drifted yards from the portholes of the Gaucho Clipper, and Bick understood. They had all but crashed into a cone that lay hidden in that cloud formation! The flying boat thundered on through the growing dawn.
Bick had taken care to block the ladder from the empty passenger compartments: he was taking no chances on stowaways! But he stood so he could command a view of every door and every man and woman in the plane. On the floor at his side were two tommy guns, and the service belt strapped to his slim waist was heavy with two additional service automatics. Another gun was in his hand, ready for action.
Scotty McLane stirred and looked again at Bick. "Listen, Crash, how about letting me help at the controls? It's nearly four hours to Buenos Aires, at top speed!"
"Yeah," Larry Horn seconded It. "And Dreems and me can nurse the motors. How about it, Crash?"
Bick's quarter-deck manner was as inflexible as his voice was low and determined.
"Steady on, all of you! This is my party, and I'm calling the turns. Skid pilots the boat to Buenos Aires, and I take over for the other twelve hundred miles. Just one wrong move—and I let this toy cannon go boom!" He shifted his eyes to the girls. "Any of you!"
Sparky licked his lips, and then Mercedes was screaming as a dark form hurtled through the space separating Bick from the crew. There was a swift arc of gleaming metal in the bridge's light, a solid, thwacking sound that came from blunt, heavy metal on a human skull, and then Sparky was lying at Bick's feet, breathing stertorously.
The girl Mercedes continued to scream, and now there were words with it. She was screaming:
"Sparky, you fool! I told you to let me handle this! Oh, Sparky, you fool!"
Bick shot her a quizzical glance. Then he motioned to Scotty and Dreems.
"Drag Sparky back there where he belongs. And sit tight, all of you!"
Sparky's breathing eased when Mercedes cradled the unconscious man's bleeding head in her arms and rocked him gently. Bick's eyes widened on the scene; but he didn't speak again. The sun came up round and brassy and the giant boat thundered on.
Silence fell over the group in the cabin, a silence broken only by Skid's nervous cough as he steered the dangerous course through the hungry cones that stretched up for the wings of the clipper. A strained, taut silence broken by Sparky's incoherent mumblings and Mercedes' soothing whispers to the unconscious man.
WHEN the fabled Rio de Janeiro showed in the distance, Bick Nelson let his eyes touch over it all: the circular harbor, with its "Sleeping Giant" of ramparts that made an impressive background; the rough outline formed by Pao de Assucar, Corcovado and the farther Gavea.
"Pao de Assucar," Bick murmured, as he nosed the great boat down and let her have her speed. "Sugar Loaf! And Corcovado—the hunchback! What an expressive language. His eyes raised to the rear-view mirror and he met the steady gaze of Carla Mendoza. "And what beautiful people!" he finished, to himself.
The girl rose in her chair as if she had heard him. A slight smile softened the weary lines around her mouth.
"Please," she said, her voice softly husky. "Please, Crash, may I sit beside you?"
Bick heard a signal gong ring in his brain, a signal of danger; but Carla was so frail looking, so tired. He looked at Skid, nodded slightly, and bent his eyes down to the harbor in the distance. Botafogo Bay is one of the most beautiful ports in the world—
The girl slid into the chair alongside him and touched over Bick's profile with her eyes. After a moment, she said almost in a whisper.
"Do not go back, please." She waited for a long moment, then tilted her head closer. "Did you hear me—Bick Nelson?"
Bick gasped and twisted his head; but he held the boat steady on her course. After a moment, he was able to say: "What? What name did you call me?" The girl smiled and turned her eyes away.
Rio de Janeiro's suburbs and parks and beautifully paved avenues were roaring up under their wings.
Carla said, "There are many, many beautiful spots in Rio—Bick. Many of them. You would love them. Perhaps as I do, even. Perhaps even, we could love them together!"
Bick wondered how this strange girl knew his name; but he felt the powerful attraction of her, and he loathed the thought of breaking the spell of her soft-spoken words, of shattering the dreamy visions that she was building up inside his head. He sat silent, this time, as she talked on.
"Do not deny that you like me, Bick. I know it; because I liked you, too, that first instant I saw you."
Bick grunted. "You certainly didn't act it!"
"Not," the girl told him, "at Lake Pontchartrain. Not then. At the Azores, two years ago, when you were on your flight around the world with the Navy squadron!" She smiled again at Bick's start. "Oh, yes; I knew you at Pontchartrain. But I had a sadness, that very day—a sadness, and I also thought you were—too fresh!"
Bick felt Mercedes' eyes on him in the mirror, but he didn't care. His loneliness of the past days, his sense of being one man pitted against a hostile world, came over him. And the sweet voice and the soft words and fragile fragrance of this girl's skin and hair got into his blood.
"I—I guess I like you, too, Carla," he said unevenly. "More than I care to admit. I'd enjoy Rio, with you. I'd enjoy—almost any place, with you!" Then he looked at her curiously. "What were you doing in the Azores?"
"Visiting my brother," Carla said slowly. "My brother who is now—dead!"
Bick murmured the conventional thing, then started at a low whistle from behind him. Skid was eying him with disapproval.
"Listen—Crash," Bick's co-pilot said bitingly, "do we land here? Or do we go on a gabfest clear to Bahia?"
BICK colored when he saw he had overshot the harbor. The girl Carla was smiling at him and saying:
"We could have such good times—Bick. You know it. If only you stay at Rio."
"Later," Bick stipulated, "when my job is done. Later we can have those good times. We'U fly. We'll swim. We'll dance, laugh, play, shout together. But first I must do my job!"
"If you leave Rio today," the girl said calmly, "there will not be any good times, Bick. If you leave today, Bick—or ever again, in a Trans-Carib plane!—you will die, Bick! You—or I!"
"You're lying, Carla," Bick told her. "Say you lie! Say you don't mean that!"
"I'll say I—love you," the girl said, her heart all in her eyes. "I would not lie to the man I love."
And she came to her feet and walked slowly back to join the crew.
Bick's head was swimming with it all when he slithered in a fast bank and hammered in for the landing, settled in a cloud of white spray.
"So she knows me—but hasn't spilled anything. Why?" He made the guess himself. "Because she can't tell how she knows! She can't admit anything like that!"
A patrol boat skimmed the waters and drew up alongside. Bick stepped to an open port and grinned down at the surprised faces. He singled out the Trans-Carib port superintendent.
"Mail," he said evenly. "TransCarib's mail—to keep that charter!"
The super winked and looked at the astounded Brazilians in his boat. "Yeah," he said. "The Big Boss called me on the telephone. Nice flying, Crash! You're not getting down?"
"Sure we're getting down. I just wanted to let you know the good news. So you can sprint to the Embassy and put the squeeze on the proper parties to hold our charter!"
The super chuckled and cast a line aboard. "Great flight the Navy made, eh?" he added. "Bick Nelson and his gang just pulled into Valparaiso two hours ago. They leave again tonight."
Bick was very still. "Why tonight?" he asked.
"Danger over, I guess," the super said. "Nelson's idea, they say, anyway. Seems he's sold the government on a Valparaiso-Honolulu demonstration flight. Starting tonight!"
It hit Bick like lightning, and his mind grappled with the hidden significance of the thing.
"Crash is in there working! He has made his contacts, has sold us out, sold the Navy out! But maybe I can still get back there and stop him—stop him before those foreign warplanes hop off with dawn tomorrow morning and—muscle the Trans-Carib charter away from us!"
Skid guessed what was in the other's mind, for he came nearer and said, "Remember, kid—you're headed for trouble if you go back and try to get Crash 1 Crash has the drop on you! He'll be away, anyway, after you are cooped in jail on a murder charge. And there isn't any way you can stop it!"
"But he's selling the Navy out, man!" Bick whispered hoarsely. "You see the play, don't you? He's contacted the right people and is calling the' Navy off! He's selling the Navy out, do you hear?" Bick stormed.
"Yes, but—" Skid started.
"And when he sells the Navy," Bick told him, "he's selling me—and you—and the United States. And the independence of these South American republics!"
"But you—" Skid tried.
"Me, I'm Navy born! I was born for the Navy, and by God, I'm ready to die for the Navy!" Bick roared at the port super: "We fuel now and hit the air! Step on it!"
"Huh?" The surprised superintendent frowned. "Listen, Crash—"
"Step on it!"
He stepped.
THE big boat was lifting clear of Botafogo Bay when there was a sudden flurry near the open port. Mercedes was tearing and clawing at Carla's face; and the Mendoza girl was fighting back like a fury—while something white fluttered and fell through the air near a waiting speedboat.
Skid slammed the two apart, and Bick snapped, "Tie her up! Tie Mercedes up, Skid! I'll cover you through the rear-view mirror!"
"You fool! You blind, blithering fool!" Mercedes was screaming. "Can't you see what's happened? You fool!"
"Gag her!" Bick roared, as he screwed around in a fast bank. "Gag that hell-cat so she can't talk!"
Later, Carla slid down into the seat next to Bick, and Mercedes watched with murderous eyes.
"Bick," Carla said, "it's the last chance. Turn back, please!"
"No."
"I'm—sorry, Bick. It could have been so—so very nice. Just we too, and the world for us to roam in and play in and work in!"
Bick sat silent.
"And—love in!" Carla whispered.
Bick's hands tightened on the wheel until the knuckles showed white. He turned his head so he wouldn't be looking at her smiling mouth and her clear, hazel eyes.
"No!"
Carla sighed and stood up. With a quick motion, she stooped and kissed him lightly on the cheek.
"It would have been so very nice—Bick!" And she was gone back to the others.
CHAPTER VII
Guns Over the Andes
DARK had fallen over Valparaiso, Chile, but the waterfront was seething with activity. Lights along the quay brought the day back and outlined the hundreds of American Bluejackets who paced waterfront on guard, their bayonet-tipped rifles alert.
In the roadstead, a squadron of destroyers crouched watchfully near two cruisers. Nearer in, a battleship sprawled its bulk in the water and fingered the dark skies with piercing searchlights. Riding at anchor alongside the Trans-Carib hangar was a huge 25-ton Consolidated U. S. Navy flying battleship, its wing lights winking intermittently as the crew raced the last-minute check-up for the Honolulu flight. A tight flock of Navy Curtiss SBC-4's huddled close nearby.
Flight officers hurried along the quay, swarmed over the pits, walked the wings of the warplanes. Fuel was rushed to the waterfront and swiftly transferred to the hungry tanks of the planes. Gunner s mates checked ordnance, examin,ng thousands of rounds of ammunition and inspected machine guns and smallcaliber cannon.
Suddenly, everything went still as a faraway drone lay over the subdued bustle. Louder and clear, it came, and the warships came to life with a bang and shot their lights into the eastern sky. They probed deep into the black, limned the near cones of the Andes in a bright glare, and stopped abruptly on a single plane that hurtled out of the black and drilled hard for the harbor of Valparaiso.
Inside Trans-Carib's boat-shed, a hard-boiled superintendent screamed his relief and roared:
"He's done it! But God, man, who else could do it other than Crash Cassidy! He's done it! They're back!"
One of the Navy pilots looked over his shoulder at a lank, red-headed, spare man who stood watching with tight eyes.
"The boy isn't bad, Nelson," he said. "The boy isn't bad at all!"
Clash Cassidy grunted something unintelligible and eased out of the door. He was heard yelling:
"Get a move on, you punks! Hell, you're slower than syrup in winter!"
Sparks Malone eyed Gunner's Mates O'Kelley and Oshinsky.
"How do you like it?" he asked flatly.
"I don't," Oshinsky answered roughly. "I don't like any heel, and that's what Nelson has been lately."
"Ever since they grounded him for blasting the waterfront at Annapolis!" O'Kelley put in. He sighed. "Oh, well—he was a good guy, once!"
A muffled roar of sound came from the massed gobs and officers when the giant Gaucho Clipper came down fast and kicked over into a dive. It hurtled across the brilliantly lighted water and swayed recklessly in a fishtail landing.
"He's crashing!" someone yelled.
And just then the Clipper straightened and touched the water in a baby'skiss landing. A roar of appreciation went up. But it was lost in the thunder of the Clipper's four motors as the giant plant careened over to the boatshed at a dangerously fast pace.
INSIDE the cabin, Bick said over his shoulder to Skid:
"Here's the dope, fella. We try and talk that other bird—you know?—into sense. But if he gets tough, we jump him and try to get his flying battleship. Complete with crew!"
"Why?"
"Maybe we can't stop the take-off for Honolulu. But one thing is certain—and that is, we can do a little roughhouse work back in the Andes for as long as we can steal that boat. Get it?"
Skid said, "I got it!" without turning his face from the Gaucho Clipper's crew. He raised his voice and spoke sharply when he said:
"Get back there. I say to get back! You, Carla! Don't come any closer!"
"I just want tell—er—Crash something," the girl murmured.
"It'll save. You look more like you are trying to butt in on our talk! Trying to interrupt. Or to listen!"
Carla ignored him. Her face was drawn. "Bick," she said gently. "Bick! It's our last chance—yours and mine! It will be too late, in another minute."
"Back, Carla," Bick said, as he swung the boat neatly alongside the shed. "You hold these birds, Skid, while I take a look around!" And he was scrambling down the spiral ladder.
He came out of the shadows into the shed and the super roared:
"You did it, boy! You did it!" And then he stopped. "Look, Crash—that heel, Bick Nelson, wants to see you. In my office." He said, "You know, that guy is a ringer for you, son."
"You're telling me!" Bick murmured, as he stepped past the man and went into the office.
Crash Cassidy waited for him behind the door, and locked it swiftly when Bick had come in. Crash shook his automatic like a warning finger and asked:
"You going to behave yourself?"
Bick stared at the man and tried to control his breathing.
"What's your game, Cassidy?" he asked coldly. "You're selling out the Navy!"
"Oh, no," Crash said. "I'm just fattening my bank account, sonny boy. I know the set-up down here—and I know our European pals are going to win out anyway." He grinned. "Looking at it the right way, I'm a patriot. I'm saving our government money and lives. That's a lot of Who-Struck-John about those guys wanting to establish military bases, now. Sure, they want the Trans-Carib airline. But that's all!"
Bick laughed mirthlessly. "And the secret base in the Andes, with all those war planes ready to strike at dawn! That's a lot of hot air, too, eh?" He waved Crash's surprise down. "Cut the act, Cassidy. I've seen them, even been bombed by them!"
Crash's gun wavered. "Huh?" And then he grinned. "You nearly got me that time, pal. I'm after money, sure; but—well, I still got a little love for the old U. S. A. ticking in my heart!" He laughed outright. "Especially after my very illuminating last few days in the Navy!"
"I'm telling you," Bick said gravely, "that they have a secret base up in the Andes. In a lake! Figure that one out! And that when you leave here, you leave South America wide open to an attack by these babies; wide open to the destruction of the Panama Canal, even!"
"You'd better shut your_face, now," Crash told him icily. "I've found out that your rep for being a smart hombre isn't all bilge water. I'm not taking chances on being talked out of my hardearned dough, and into any Navy frame-ups. Shut up—and don't move until I have you tied hand and foot." He chuckled. "And then you can't move, until it's too late!"
A HISSING sound interrupted his movement toward Bick, and Crash Cassidy stood stock- still, unbelief widening his eyes. The hissing came from behind a packing case, and the snout of a tommy giin followed the hissing and came into view. Over the ugly barrel of it, a smiling little brown man said:
"So ver-ry sor-ry, gentlemen, to disturb. I must ask you to put your hands very quietly up—so ver-ry sor-ry to ask, gentlemen!"
Bick stared in stunned wonder. "And just who the hell are you?" he gasped.
Crash dropped the gun he was holding and raised his hands. On his face was genuine stupefaction. The Oriental moved to where the gun was and kicked it clear. He pocketed it without moving his eyes from the all-buttwin men.
"So ver-ry sor-ry," he hissed again. "I look for Crash Cassidy. I find not one Crash Cassidy, but two. So I must kill both!"
In the silence, his eyes came slightly open and then dropped to the men's ringhands—the left hands. He blinked when he saw two almost identifical rings on the ring-fingers of those hands.
"So ver-ry sor-ry," he hissed. "But—I do not understand! Two—rings! So sor-ry, but must ask you to hold hands near, so I can see rings—Yes, thank you, like that—"
The almond-shaped eyes hardened when they lit on the curious design of the ring Bick wore—the ring that Crash had switched for Bick's own, back there in Carvel Hall. He hissed his pleasure, and bowed at the same time to Crash Cassidy.
"I salute honorable Navy ring," he said politely to the adventurer. He slid his hand into his jacket and brought out a wicked-looking, ivory-handled dagger.
"Navy ring so much like that of my late friend, Ledbetter Daw', I salute!"
Then he said to Bick, "Turn head, please, so that neck show. So ver-ry sor-ry. I wish not noise, please. Knife kill quick—like it kill radio man at hospital. So ver-ry sor-ry, gentlemen. So sor-ry for you, Crash Cassidy—" he said, his hand coming up and his eyes measuring the distance to Bick's jugular vein.
It was then Crash Cassidy made the mistake of his life. The last mistake of his entire, mistaken life, and the greatest one.
"Get him proper, Katsiburo," he said with a grin.
Realization dawned in the brown man's eyes and in Crash Cassidy's mind at one and the same instant. They moved simultaneously, but the blade of the dagger sped true and hard in the room's light. Crash gasped and tried to tear the thing from where it was quivering in his neck. Blood gushed down inside his tunic and soaked into his shirt and underclothes. He sank down to his knees.
Ito Katsiburo turned to Bick Nelson with a low bow. "So ver-ry sor-ry," he said. "My honorable brother's spirit rests with this revenge. The last of his murderers—" the man hissed—"the last one is dead!"
The little man didn't see Crash get the dagger loose from his torn throat, didn't see the man struggle to his feet with the last of his life's blood ebbing from his torn jugular vein, the blade held outward in his fist.
He didn't see nor even feel the slide of the dagger as Crash Cassidy ripped it into his side and his heart at one and the same instant.
Crash Cassidy and the brown avenger fell dead at Bick Nelson's feet.
BICK stepped from the darkened office, back in his old uniform again. It hadn't been much fun, stripping it off Crash Cassidy's blood-soaked corpse. He walked quickly to the Clipper boat and called to the co-pilot.
"Skid? Skid? Come down here, fella! I want to show you something." He went up a step or two into the well of the bridge and winked at Skid Harris's goggling eyes. "Easy, Mister! Don't give it away! I'm Navy again! Everything depends on these last few minutes!"
"What about the crew?"
"We'll chance it," he said. "It'll only be a minute. Step on it, over to that big Consolidated flying battleship. We're going—joy-hopping!"
As they went out on the wing, there was a splash on the port side of the big Clipper, and a woman's scream from the bridge. The sound of someone swimming frantically came to them both—someone swimming for the Consolidated, desperately.
"What the—" Bick started to say. And stopped as suddenly. One of the sentries on duty at the boatshed had his rifle poised, was yelling:
"Halt!" Once he called it, and a chill of apprehension went over the whole waterfront. "Halt!" came the warning again. Then: "Halt! Or I fire!"
The swimmer strove on for two more strokes, was reaching for the step of the great Consolidated boat loaded with torpedoes and bombs and ammunition. Bick stood transfixed, unable to move or speak. A hand came out of the water—and the other hand jumped to join it. A figure started out of the water.
Crack! Crack! Crack-crack!
The figure stiffened, slid back into the water. The sentry lowered his smoking rifle. A roar broke across the bay and sirens screamed out in wailing chorus. Signal lights leaped alive on the warships. But Bick, his face set and his eyes agonized, was speeding to a Navy crash-boat. He pulled Skid after him and barked:
"That Consolidated. And hurry!" A bugler stood in the stern-sheets. Bick motioned to him. "Sound formation call," he snapped. "The entire squadron!"
"Aye, sir!"
The sweet notes of the bugle lay over the uproar. Another and another bugle picked it up. Lights winked on wingtips, motors smashed alive, hatches slammed in the big flying battleship, and the squadron of warplanes leaped ahead over the water after the racing shape of the big Consolidated.
Skid Harris stared at O'Kelley, Oshinsky and Malone and back again at Bick Nelson. Oshinsky blinked and asked:
"What th' hell goes on?"
"I don't know,' O'Kelley said, his face a study.
"Hell," Malone spoke suddenly. "Did Nelson get hurt? His eyes? Look! You'd almost swear he was crying!"
It was a weird sight the squadron made, as it fled on ghostly wings of incredible speed through the moonlight. Like a sight from distant Mars, it was, with the pale, buttery moon looking down on the white, conical peaks of the Andes.
Bick peered below, turned once and stared at Skid. The co-pilot squinted his eyes and shook his head.
"Not yet, fella. Not yet!"
A watery crater slid by, glassy-black in the revealing moonlight. Then, suddenly, an ugly gap of black showed against the snow of a higher peak. Bick snapped to Malone:
"Sparks! Signal the squadron: drop flares, circle after me, stand by for orders—when I give you the signal!"
"Aye, sir!"
TENSION came over them as Sparks spoke into the mouthpiece of his set:
"Attention all planes—Attention, all planes! Orders! At a given signal, parachute flares are to be released—"
He droned on with it, got the winked lights for acknowledgment, saluted Bick.
"Orders received and acknowledged, sir."
"Stand by for orders," Bick said.
"Aye, sir!"
"Oshinsky! Man the after gun!"
"Aye, sir!"
"Sparks? O'Kelley? Man the bomb releases!"
Both men blinked, but moved at lightning speed. "Aye, aye, sir!"
"You, Skid—drop down alongside me. I may want help."
Skid couldn't help the instinctive "Aye, sir!" that he answered.
For another tense minute, the formation flew in an echelon of echelons; and then a larger crater lake loomed. From above, it was a bit of long-forgotten water at peace with itself and with the surrounding peaks of the Andes. But Bick knew better!
He sighed at Skid's nod of agreement and moved his hand forward to his instrument panel. His lights blinked knowingly and the lonely peaks bloomed in the birth of half a hundred flares. But still the surface of that lake remained calm, peaceful.
Bick called, "All ready?"
"Aye!"
"Back to your post, Sparks! Orders: Stand by to observe. Bombers ready for any sign of attack! All guns to be manned."
He explained to Skid: "I'll try that water out with a bomb and see what I can stir up, fella. Maybe, after all, I am guessing wrong. Maybe!"
O'Kelley's face mirrored the amazed blinks of wing-lights with which the orders were acknowledged.
"Balmy!" he whispered. "Clean balmy, looking in the Andes for an attack!"
But in the Navy, orders were orders, and you didn't question them even if you thought the superior officer who dealt them out was ready for the goofyhouse.
Bick understood; but he said nothing. Instead, he watched the echelon of echelons climb high, then banked the big Consolidated in a smart peel-off and screamed down for that lake below.
"O'Kelley," he called calmly, "release one 500 lb. bomb. We'll hit that crater lake dead center!"
"Aye, sir!"
O'Kelley tripped a toggle and the Consolidated exulted in the relieved weight with a rocking jump. In the light of the flares, the bomb was a black tear-drop plummeting toward the blacker, shiny waters. Then it disappeared without a splash! A sheet of flame leaped skyward and then subsided.
For a long minute, nothing hapr pened; a long minute in which Bick's strained face grew tauter, more lined. Then the whole surface of the lake seemed to rise—was rising!—and with it came a ring of lights and the stab of powerful beams searching the sky above.
Orange-red flame belched from two spots and the shattering roar of it lay over the Andes loud above the drone of motors. Antiaircraft guns!
"Got it!" Bick screamed in triumph. "That's no lake! It's a false top-construction, built to look like a lake—a false top, and under it is a fullymanned warport!"
He swung in a slewing turn and yelped: "Sparks! Orders: Drop all flares; bomb objective in echelon of sections! First section, peel away and start firing!"
"Aye, sir!"
A FLIGHT of European-made planes scudded through the eerie light and rose against the conical backdrop of snow. A section of Navy dive-bombers nosed in and peeled off in rapid succession. Flame rippled from wings and after-pits and fore-turrets as the Navy fighters poured a rain of destruction down on the surprised invaders from across the Atlantic.
The flight that was taking off broke in confusion, some planes crashing hard into the peak dead ahead, others fluttering to the ground, to burst into lurid flames as the bombs rained down and geysered up again in torrents of screaming, piercing metal.
The big Consolidated became a diving maniac of a plane, dipping low to loose shattering bombs, which, in their vicious explosive power, churned the water into a raging turmoil that blasted the foundations of the cunningly rigged airdrome. Then it dived recklessly through the turmoil of smaller planes, wing and fore-turret guns yammering a threnody of vengeance.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat! chattered the machine guns through the hell of noise. Bulky archie fire joined it, heavy at first, then spasmodically, as the life's blood spilled out of those men down below. The place was a chaos of smashed ships and burning pyres, with mangled bodies of men strewn through it all.
For another ten minutes, guns roared over the Andes as the Navy's ace pilot led his men in a war of extermination—that Peace, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness might live on in the Americas!
Then finally, all was still below—Still in the death that was the burial ground of the Andes—Still as the silent, high-peaked cones that had long since ceased to pulse and to smoke and fume hatred and despair on those who lived in their shadows—Still and dead and motionless for the damning judgment of Eternity—
Bick turned and gave wordless orders to Sparks Malone.
"Aye, sir!"
"Cease firing!" went out over the air to the rest of the squadron.
The guns over the Andes stilled, and only a faint spiral of smoke marked what had once been the warport of an aggressive European nation. The steady drone of the motors faded in the distance and became one with the cold, high peaks.
CHAPTER VIII
The Big Guy
BICK NELSON stopped in his tracks outside the room where the body lay. He stared at the sallow, somber, taciturn man who faced him.
"You!"
Commander Ledbetter Dawes nodded his head slightly. There was contrition and apology in his eyes, and more. There was a plea for understanding.
"I always wear a bullet-proof shirt next to my skin, Nelson," he said gently. "I had to play 'dead' when Crash Cassidy tried to kill me. I had to, before he got wise and aimed for my head!"
"But you didn't have to stay dead!" Bick said coldly. His eyes swung to the door, as if trying to see that still form that lay beyond the door, and beyond everything mortal. "You didn't have to stay dead!"
"I did," the Navy's ace Intelligence operative told him gravely. "I had to let Crash Cassidy have his head, or he would have spoiled the whole game. He could have given you away in a minute! And that would have spoiled the show! You, Nelson, were America's one and only hope. I had to let you take your chances and play it alone."
Bick nodded wearily. "That Oriental? And the ring?"
"My mistake," Dawes admitted. "I told you there was one interval in Cassidy's life I couldn't make fit? That was it! Look!"
Dawes pulled the ring from his pocket, gave it to Bick to hold, while he took a vial from another pocket and poured a bit of the liquid in it on the surface of the ring.
The plain gold moon of the ring turned red—red as the red of that Oriental emblem—the Full Moon. And from the network of lines that surrounded it, some stood out clearly, in solid black.
"A secret Europe an-Asiatic spy ring," Dawes said. "There were ten of those agents working in Mongolia. Two Orientals, and seven Europeans. And Crash Cassidy! The Europeans made a secret deal with the Russians,15 and the gang was in a tight spot. Crash and the Europeans saved themselves, at the expense of the boys from Asia. They framed the Asiatics to get rounded up, and left them holding the bag. Those poor suckers were tortured to death by Mongolian bandits!"
15: There is a certain similarity between this fictional situation and the actual deal that Nazi Germany made with Soviet Russia a few days before Hitler invaded Poland. Prior to this deal, Nazi Germany, Italy, Japan, Hungary and Spain were all partners in the "anti-Comintern front"-a kind of political alliance directed against the Soviet Union. But as soon as Hitler and Stalin made their peace, the anti-Communist front blew up. The Japanese cabinet fell, to be succeeded by a more moderate regime, and Japanese openly charged that Hitler had double-crossed them.-Ed.
"My God!"
"One of them was Saumi Katsiburo. Saumi was Ito's brother—the brother of the man who killed Crash Cassidy. Ito had sworn vengeance, and he got it."
"And died himself."
"We," Dawes said patiently, "are born to die, Nelson."
Bick's face went tragic again. "You've got the others? You have Mercedes under arrest?"
Dawes said, "Well, hardly. Mercedes is one of my best little workers. It was she who came across Cassidy, and I figured out the deal to slide you into his place. Only I didn't realize that Crash had got wind of Katsiburo's Blitzkrieg and was trying to get an out! I didn't know he was setting you up for Katsiburo to knock down until it was too late to act."
"And—and—" Bick looked at the closed door again. "Carla?"
"One of the best, son! Though she was on the wrong side. Carla von Weigstaffe Mendoza, to give her the full of her name. Her brother was Herr Undersecretary Max von Weigstaffe—killed by Katsiburo at a certain foreign Embassy in Buenos Aires."
Bick said, "Hell, but she put it over on me, too! Until I saw her swimming for that Consolidated—and realized that she was out to stop me that way if she couldn't any other."
"Carla," Dawes said slowly, "is one of those proud European aristocrats. She would rather be dead, son, than live to see what her people are coming to."
HE looked at Bick quizzically. "Be that as it may, Mercedes tells me you did a fair job of winning her over. It was Carla, you know, who warned you that time at Cartagena. Evidar Guayaquil—but it was Carla, too, who dropped a note as the Clipper pulled out of Rio—a note that we got, or you wouldn't be here!"
"What was it?" Bick asked.
"A request that this European airfleet blast you all out of the sky, as you fought your way back here from Rio! We got it, Nelson. That's how close you came to not getting here. But even so, I have a hunch that kid liked you!"
Bick turned away and went into the room with the dead—his dead. When he came out again, he was resigned, clear-eyed. He looked at Dawes.
"And Sparky Seemon?"
"Mercedes' husband," Dawes said. "And, Lord, is he jealous!"
"And crazy about Mercedes, too," Bick said, remembering the man's desperate attempt to stop the flight to Rio. "They're married," Dawes pointed out.
"Yes," Bick said. "They're married." He looked at the closed door again. "And—and other people might have been married, too. If—"
Dawes said gruffly, "You're married to the Navy, son! Now, get out there and do your job!" He stuck out his hand. "Glad to have you aboard! And like the others, you're sworn to secrecy in this thing!"
Peace dawned again in Bick's face. He said simply:
"Glad to be aboard, sir."
IN THE big cabin, Oshinsky murmured, "Notice anything different about the Big Guy?"
"Naw!" O'Kelley said scornfully. "Nelson's always been the same."
Sparks said, "Well, now, I don't know. I tell you—"
"Sparks! " Bick Nelson cut in.
"Aye, sir?"
The huge motors roared an even note of peace as the flight winged over the broad Pacific for Honolulu.
"Orders: Entire squadron getting ten days' leave at Honolulu."
"Aye, sir!" Sparks flashed a scorm ful look at Oshinsky. "The Big Guy will never change. He'll always be—the Big Guy!"
The End