Enemies & Allies (23 page)

T
HOUGH FREED FROM THE CHAINS AND SHACKLES, KAL-EL
still felt a crushing weight dragging him down. He could barely stand, let alone fly. And now the Soviet guards were shooting at them.

As he staggered along, his cape dragging behind him like a wet rag, Kal-El had to lean on Batman just to keep himself upright and moving. His vision, which should have been able to project heat beams or penetrating X-rays, now left him with only a blur.

Guards rushed out of the barracks, hastily grabbing their Kalashnikovs. Deafening sirens pounded his skull. Batman ducked from a renewed spray of gunfire and pulled Kal-El into the meager shelter of some large rocks that had slid down the quarry bank. Bullets stitched the ground around them, pockmarking the wide gravel path. Several ricocheted loudly from the boulders.

“I hope…you’ve got a better plan than this,” Kal-El managed to croak.

“I’ll improvise.” Batman grabbed at his utility belt and hurled a handful of small spheres that exploded on impact, releasing clouds of noxious purple smoke. The Soviet soldiers opened fire, and bullets punched through the curling wisps of gas.

“Get away from…green rock,” Kal-El said. “If my strength returns, I can help.”

“I wasn’t counting on your powers. I’ve got it under control.”

From the quarry’s edge, another group of riflemen shot down at them. Kal-El tried to shelter his unexpected rescuer with his own body, but now that he was without his powers, he didn’t know if he was bulletproof. Nevertheless, his uniform was made of fabric from Krypton; perhaps that would be good enough. He felt—yes, felt!—three shots hit him in the back. It was as though he’d been punched hard, but the bullets didn’t penetrate the suit or his skin.

Bullets also struck Batman, and though he staggered from the impacts, his suit seemed nearly as impervious as Kal-El’s. “We need to get out of this camp,” Batman said.

The guards assigned to the work crew in the crater turned to help their fellow soldiers above. The hollow-eyed prisoners, already poisoned from exposure to meteorite radiation, knew they had no chance of survival. Condemned to work themselves to death, with nothing to lose, and seeing Superman and Batman as their only chance, they attacked the surprised guards with pickaxes and shovels. One guard went down as a shovel blade split his head open, his
ushanka
tumbling onto the cold, muddy ground. His rifle discharged, and the bullet spanged off a boulder.

A pickax struck a uniformed man in the chest, and the maddened workers managed to murder a third guard before a hail of bullets cut them down.

It was all over in a few seconds, before Batman could make a move to save them. Kal-El’s heart ached as he said, “They were dead…when they got here.”

Batman pulled him along toward the top of the quarry. “And it’s my job to make sure you’re not. I have a way out.”

When they encountered more guards at the edge of the pit, Batman detonated his flash mines, and bursts of blinding light sent the Soviets reeling. Extending one gauntlet, Batman activated a nozzle, and a thin, high-pressure stream of instant-set epoxy squirted out, splattering the guards and their guns, tangling them in a sticky, rubbery mass, like a silkworm’s cocoon.

During this brief reprieve, he dragged Kal-El past the struggling guards tangled in the epoxy web. “Now all we have to do is get past the rest of the camp’s defenses, and we’re home free.”

THE ALARMS BROUGHT GENERAL CERIDOV OUT FROM HIS
warm quarters. As he ran outside, still pulling on his fur coat and shielding his eyes against the glare of spotlights, he saw not only the red and blue figure of Superman but another man in a more sinister outfit helping to rescue him. The dark-cowled man looked like a devil—no, a bat. He kept pulling strange things from his belt, throwing-darts, incapacitating gas bombs, small explosives.

Two
super heroes? Where do the Americans get them?
he wondered.

He heard gunfire, saw the searchlights, but somehow the two ridiculously costumed men evaded capture, always one step ahead of the gulag guards. Superman was still barely able to stand, but since his weakness was brought on by the green meteorite, Ceridov supposed the effects would likely diminish as the two got farther away from the quarry. He figured he had only a limited time to stop them from getting away.

The Soviet Union had its own supermen…less refined, perhaps, but almost certainly more powerful. As the two escaping figures raced toward the stunted forest, the general smashed open the locks of the thick-walled blockhouse. Inside, the restless monsters continued to rumble and pound. As soon as the locks fell away, the heavy doors exploded outward, and Ceridov sprang back, calling his own guards to stand close, rifles aimed and ready.

Endovik and Dubrov—or rather, what they had become—were the first to emerge. Their bodies were swollen, muscles not so much bulging as bloated, visible beneath their torn garments. Cords of sinew twisted at their necks. Tufts of spiky hair as sharp as porcupine quills protruded from random spots on their bodies. Their lips were curled back in a rictus of constant agony, and their eyes glowed an emerald green.

Only five of the mutated creatures remained alive. Three more had been torn to bloody pulp within the bunker, but nobody had dared to go in and clean up the cells. The maddened mutants had fed upon the flesh of their dead comrades, and the stench was appalling. The five creatures lunged out into the open, coiled with pent-up energy as though their blood had become boiling nitroglycerin. The five glared at Ceridov, but he saw a dim remnant of intelligence and awareness on their faces.

He raised his voice. “I know your minds are still there—I know you can understand me!” He could not let them doubt the bald-faced lie he was about to tell them. “I have the cure you need. I have the antidote to the meteorite radiation—but first you must earn it!”

The furious creatures flexed their arms, simmering, staring. Ceridov could not give them time to think. He pointed toward the two costumed figures disappearing into the forest. “Them—capture them! Bring them back here, and then you shall be free!”

With uncontrollable bloodlust, the mutated creatures raced into the night.

W
ERNHER VON BRAUN WOULD HAVE PROVIDED AN INTERESTING
interview, and under other circumstances, Lois might have been eager to press the former Nazi scientist about the American rocketry program and the mysterious destruction of Sputnik. But she had to do
something
to save Superman, whether or not Perry White approved. That was her top priority.

She would not stand by and let her beloved hero hang in chains, crippled and paralyzed, while diplomats and ambassadors squabbled. She knew what a great man he was, with such a large heart and all the devotion any woman could ask for. She could not just leave him to rot in a Communist prison camp.

Over the past several months, she’d built up quite a case against Lex Luthor, but she’d been unable to grab the brass ring of “proof” that Perry White demanded. She knew Luthor hated Superman because the hero had upstaged him at every turn, and Luthor was enough of a genius that he
could
have set this up. It reeked of him, all of it.

Lois was a good enough reporter that she intended to catch Luthor in the act.

Rather than going to Huntsville to talk with the rocket scientists, she took a connecting flight to Miami, then another to Havana. Cuba was filled with enough unrest to inspire a dozen newspaper stories—Batista battling Castro’s rebels in the jungles, and all those pasty-white Russian visitors who clearly weren’t there to soak up the Caribbean sun—but Lois was fixated on a tiny island that appeared on no map. She was going to catch Luthor and get him to tell her where Superman was being held. Then she would help rescue Superman, even if it killed her, though she hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

She went down to the docks in Havana Bay and talked to the fishermen using broken Spanish and a pocket dictionary. She looked for a volunteer to take her to a place she had sketched in her notebook, a close approximation of what she remembered seeing in Luthor’s headquarters and the somewhat blurry photo she had taken of the map.

The grizzled men spoke in a mixture of Spanish and English. Some thought they recognized her sketch as Crab Key, but others denied it. Three of the men clearly knew the place she was talking about, but they were frightened. They shook their heads. “The dragon lives there,” one man insisted in broken English. “We have seen smoke from his lair and fire shooting into the sky.”

Lois smiled. “Yes, that sounds exactly like the place.”

She had to bribe and flirt and beg, but she finally found a cocky young Cuban man who agreed to take her out there. He remained shirtless, possibly for Lois’s benefit, but she was focused only on finding Luthor’s hideout so that she could help Superman.

They left the dock at sunset with beautiful romantic splashes of color across the western horizon. Lois remained at the bow, listening to the hum of the engine and the slosh of the waves as the young man steered his boat out to sea in the deepening darkness. It was the only way they could arrive unseen.

She wore deck shoes, khaki trousers, and a short-sleeved blouse. She had her own camera, a model much smaller than Jimmy Olsen’s, but it would be enough to get pictures, to get proof.

Since it would take hours to reach the small island, she forced herself to catch a nap on the way. When her young captain finally shook her awake, Lois glanced at her watch—4:00
A.M
., an hour before dawn. She had to get ashore and situated for cautious surveillance. Also, her boat captain friend needed time to get far enough away that Luthor’s observers wouldn’t spot him.

He had turned off the engines, and the boat made no noise as it approached. The island was a silhouette outlined by stars and the Milky Way, but it also shone with constellations of its own—industrial towers, brightly lit buildings, and factory structures built up in the hulking ruins of an old Spanish fort. She turned to the young fisherman. “Meet me here this time tomorrow for the other half of your money.
Comprende?
”

“Sí, señorita.”
He smiled at her, but she couldn’t be sure how much enthusiasm he really had about coming back. Though he’d been blustering and confident when setting out from Havana, he seemed much more anxious now as they drew closer.

She stepped off the boat and waded the rest of the way to the beach as quietly as she could. When a jet of flame belched up from one of the industrial centers—perhaps exhaust gas burning off or a rocket test firing—the young man turned the boat around and, keeping the engine at low power, crept out to deeper water beyond the cove, then sped away. The foaming, glistening wake settled quickly.

Lois splashed onto the sand, where she found shelter in a cluster of leaning palm trees at the edge of the beach. She kept to the cover of the trees as she approached the complex. Dawn had begun to brighten the sky.

After sunrise, when she saw the secret base that Luthor had built, Lois allowed her curiosity to get the best of her. She snapped photographs of the ruined old fort connected to the modern control building. Most curious was a set of giant towers topped with suspicious-looking dish-projectors pointed toward the sky, rocket launchpads, industrial hangars, a sprawling construction yard along the coast, a shipbuilding dry dock. Though many of the high-tech installations baffled her, she took photographs anyway.

She could not determine just what the bald genius was up to. Did Luthor think he was in a spy novel or something?

Suddenly Lois heard a hissing hum and a strange throbbing noise, and several large shadows fell upon her. Three flying men loomed overhead: guards wearing thick green armored suits, like the shells of iridescent beetles. A large crest or collar protected their heads, and they had absurdly thick gauntlets and boots made of an unknown purple metal; jetpacks kept the men suspended in the air.

She recognized the square head and blond crew cut of Lex Luthor’s ever-present bodyguard Bertram. Lenses telescoped out of the smooth purple gauntlets, and thin heat beams strafed the ground at her feet, turning the sand into a line of smoking glass.

Bertram’s voice boomed from a speaker set in the armored breastplate. “Surrender, or we’ll tear you to pieces.” He moved forward, intimidating. “You don’t belong here.”

“A little full of yourself, aren’t you?” Lois said flippantly. “I was just looking for a nice beach for sunbathing.”

Maneuvering with the backpack jets, spreading the thick purple boots in an imposing stance, Bertram landed in front of her. His two cohorts dropped on either side of her, hemming her in. She was tempted to take a photograph but decided it would just provoke them.

She swallowed hard but tried to remain aloof. Lois was very annoyed to have been caught so quickly, and she didn’t want to show any weakness in front of these goons. “I’d like to see your boss—I’ve got another interview request.”

Bertram clomped forward, seized her camera, crushed it into a handful of jagged fragments, and unspooled the exposed film. He placed his hands under her armpits with powered metal gloves and roughly picked her up off the ground. “Believe me, we’ll take you right to Mr. Luthor.”

Together, the three guards accelerated into the air with their jetpacks. As she dangled uncomfortably in Bertram’s grasp, Lois suppressed a grimace of pain and decided that she much preferred to fly with Superman, cradled safely in his arms.