ron Goulart - Challengers of the Unknown (13 page)

"Oh, it's probably the monster's day off." Prof gave them all a mock salute before sprinting from the room.

"First time I've ever had a host do that."

"Kee-rist! What do you think did the poor bastard in?"

Red, clutching the bars of their cage, and watching the fallen body of the late Escabar, said, "He was bragging about playing some sort of trick on the illustrious General Cuerpo. Could be Cuerpo played one on him."

"Politics," said Rocky. "It's worse in South America than it is in the U.S.A. even."

Red turned, leaning his back against the bars. "Feel strong enough to bend a few of these?"

"I can try, but I don't guarantee anything." Tentatively, the big man took hold of one of the iron bars. After more than a minute of straining and grunting, he relaxed his grip. "Going to take a lot of time."

Red moved to the lock mechanism in the cell door. "Very complicated lock," he concluded after a hunkered examination of it. "Going to be rough to pick without any of our tools."

"Wait now." Rocky poked a thumb in the direction of the corpse. "Somebody, sooner or later, is going to miss this bird. They'll come looking, we'll wait our chance and jump 'em."

"Who?"

"Us. We jump 'em when they show."

"I meant who do we jump, even if we got a chance?"

"Escabar's gang, his flunkies."

"Rocky, we don't even know for sure if he had a

gang-" "

"He's got to have somebody else here in this joint."

"The only other inhabitant of this castle we've seen, besides our recently deceased host, was a robot dog."

"Okay, so maybe his servants and staff are robots, too. We wait till they come in and we jump them."

"Nobody may ever come here."

Rocky's head tilted back on his thick neck. "Aw, that's a spooky thought, Red. I don't want to hang around here with no corpse."

Red unbuckled his belt. "Then we better get out."

"What you going to try, picking the lock with your belt buckle? That'll take as long as me bending the bars."

"Give me your belt, too."

"Two belt buckles won't work any bet—"

"Hand it over; come on." When Red had both of the wide white belts tied together, he made a loop at the end of one. "We'll see now if the defunct Escabar, AKA Otto Wenzler, has anything on him which will aid our cause."

"A cowboy trick, huh?"

Red flung the looped end of the belt toward the supine body. The loop hit the stone floor several inches from Escabar's foot. Two more pitches were even less successful.

"Kee-rist, let me do that."

"Hell, I can—"

"111 do it." Rocky shoved his partner aside, assumed the manipulating of the improvised lasso. "There she goes. Ha! First try."

"Remind me I owe you a cigar. Or would you rather take a Kewpie doll?"

The loop had hooked over the toe of one of Escabar s shoes, slid down as far as the instep. Brows knit, the big ex-wrestler began, very slowly and carefully, to pull the dead man across the floor to them.

"That's a boy, Escabar, come along now. That's it," Rocky crooned to the corpse as he reeled it closer.

All at once Rocky went bicycling backward.

Thunkl

"Loop came loose," said Red.

"Yeah, I deduced as much." Grunting up, Rocky returned to the bars. "Aw, I don't need this lasso no more." He thrust an arm through the bars, extended his thick fingers and managed to catch the tip of one of the dead man's shoes. "Come on, come on. That's the boy, we're moving again. Come on, Eskie. That's the way to go."

Rocky succeeded in getting the body lined up against the bars.

Red said, "I'll search him. I've got a light touch."

Rocky got out of his way. "Go ahead. I ain't no ghoul."

"Gold cigarette lighter, box of Turkish cigarettes, bottle of some sort of pills, six keys on a chain . . . yeah, this may do it." Red's grin grew smaller and smaller as he tried the keys on the lock. When he reached the sixth key, he was grinning not at all. "None of these works."

"Okay, let me frisk him." Down on his knees, Rocky set his big hand to exploring the dead man's clothes. "Now this is more like it, a key all by itself." Chuckling, he stood to toss the key to Red. "Don't stand to reason he's going to keep the dungeon key with the others since it ain't probably one he's going to use as much. See, you got to figure—"

"This is the right one."

The lock gave a satisfying click, the door swung outward with a push from Red. "Amnesty time."

"We ain't out of the woods yet," reminded Rocky, following his Challenger teammate out of the cell. "We maybe still got to tackle a bunch of Nazis or a whole castle full of goofy robots before we get out of here."

The dog didn't stir.

It was lying on its side beside the deep fireplace. The last of the logs was now only glowing fragments.

Rocky, attempting to walk on tiptoe, approached the German shepherd. "Didn't Escabar build this one to jump people?"

With a final scan of the empty hallway, Red came into the beam-ceilinged living room. "That's a real dog."

"Naw, can't be." Rocky bent, poked a finger into the animal's furry side. "Kee-rist, it is . . . and the damn thing's dead."

"Then this is probably how they killed Escabar, too." Red tapped the dinner plate which rested on the rough-hewn wood table next to a substantial leather armchair. Tire bone from a steak sat on the gravy-smeared white china. There was a similar bone on the hearth stones near the dead dog's front paws.

"Poison, huh?" Rocky straightened up, shaking his head. "But who did it?"

"Imagine Escabar got his supplies from outside someplace. Either he trusted his delivery boy completely or they caught him with a poison that got by whatever safety measures he used to check out his food."

"Politics," repeated Rocky. His face brightened. "Hey, there's our gear."

Strewn on a marble-top coffee table were the weapons and tools which had been taken from them while they were out cold.

Red, rubbing at his chin, crossed to the leaded window to look down at the night desert and the castle grounds. "We're been through all the castle between the downstairs dungeon and here, without encountering anything except a few robot servomechanisms."

"Escabar was an oddball," said Rocky while he sorted his belongings out of the pile and redistributed them on his bulky person. "He really must of got a bang out of living alone."

"We better check the rooms above this one," said Red. "Then we can head out of here."

"Can we join Juney and the rest of the gang now?"

Red shook his head. "I think we have a stop or two to make first."

A milky blueness laced with green.

Seated in the control cab of the minisub, Prof Haley caused the stroboscopic lights mounted on the nose of his thirty-foot-long submarine to sweep the deeps of the lake through which he was traveling. Beyond the reach of the twin beams loomed watery blackness.

By the time Prof had reached the aquatic escape area, Shuster and Yewell were gone. The direction of their departure was obvious, and Prof had swiftly used the advanced equipment to place another of the minisubs in a position to be launched through the exit tube deep into the shadowy waters of Lake Sombra.

"I trust I've got this control board figured out correctly," Prof said to himself as he guided the small, two-man sub. An indicator gauge near his left elbow told him he was 107 feet below the surface of the lake. "Now, let's give this gadget here a try."

He activated a sonic tracking device, which should show him the location of the minisub he was pursuing on a tiny screen directly in front of him. Circles appeared

in the blue-black screen, along with one fuzzy round dot.

After Prof calculated where the slowly moving dot was in relation to his ship, he adjusted his course accordingly.

"Not a bad little sub," he remarked. "If it had a CB radio and a racing stripe, I'd seriously think about buying one for . . . Good golly, as we used to say in my long-ago, tenth-grade daysl"

Something had gone shooting through the water within the range of his lights. It flashed up and was gone. A creature roughly shaped like a man, but it wasn't a man. Green and reptilian and, such was Prof s impression from the brief glimpse he got, incredibly vicious.

"Well," he said, slouching back some in the control seat, "I guess I've seen the Monster of Lake Sombra."

His sub continued through the shadowy waters. All underwater life had vanished since the creature had passed through his ken. The probing lights showed only the milky-blue water and twists and tangles of aquatic plant life.

Shortly thereafter came bubbles. Spilling back into the reach of his lights, swirl after swirl of huge bubbles.

Prof slowed his craft, directing it to circle the source of the underwater agitation.

It was the other sub.

The lights had been torn from its hull, water was shoving into the cabin. The heavy, shatter-proof glass had been smashed out.

As Prof's sub circled, he got his second look at the creature. It was straddling the ruined control cab of the other craft. After smashing in the glass, an incredible accomplishment, the creature was reaching for the drowning men inside.

Yewell was torn out first. His body, with the creature grasping it by the throat, came jerkily out of the floundering sub. The shards of glass left in the metal frame of the window sliced and tore at Yewell, knifing his clothes into shreds and starting ribbons of red swimming through the milky-blue water.

The young American agent seemed to come apart now, like a puzzle the monster was suddenly tired of. Clawed hands ripped at Yewell, blood spewed and turned the agitated water black.

"Nothing I can do," said Prof. "Better get myself up and away."

He set the sub's controls for a rise to the surface.

As the craft began to rise, the lights gave him a clear view of the monster.

It had let go of what was left of Yewell; its head was raised, staring up at the departing Prof.

Ace Morgan closed the cover of the brown leather notebook. "That must be it," he concluded.

Dropping the book on the desk which had belonged to the man called Shuster, he left the office and moved down a corridor.

Outside a door in the prison wing, Ace halted. "June, it's me."

"Don't barge in, they set some kind of trap," the girl warned from the other side of the heavy door. Her anxious voice sounded very far away.

"Know what it is," Ace assured her. "Been going through the headman's papers." From a pocket in his wide white belt, the Challenger took the key and the small bar of metal he'd located in Shuster's desk. "Everything in this place is carefully planned, so I'm guessing the trap Yewell used is a prearranged one."

He went down on one knee, ran his hands over the lower portion of the door. "Yep, here she is." A small panel, its presence indicated by hair-thin lines, snapped open when he tapped it thrice.

Carefully Ace inserted the metal bar into the opening. The electromagnet beneath the metal surface took hold of the bar. He heard a faint click from the wall next to the door. "Going to open up now, Juney; stand back."

Ace used the key and the door opened outward.

"Well?" June watched him hesitating on the threshold.

"Come on out."

"Thanks." When the slim blonde girl was next to him in the corridor, she said, "What was supposed to happen?"

"They figured we'd go breaking in, either try to force the lock or break the door," explained Ace. "That would have released a gas out of jets up in the ceiling and inside your cell."

"Deadly gas?"

"Deadly."

"I'm glad this particular trap didn't spring." She took his arm. "Where's Prof?"

"Chasing Yewell and the headman."

"What about all the other underground Nazis?"

"All locked inside their auditorium, with all the exits electrified to prevent anybody from bolting till we get some troops out here."

"The army's crooked, too," reminded June.

"There are troops and there are troops," said Ace. "We should be able to round up a peacekeeping force to take care of this many old-school Nazis."

The girl said, "Do we wait down here for Prof?"

"Better meet him upstairs. Since he's out in the lake now in a minisub, hunting for those guys." "Lake Sombra? That's where the monster is." "Profs handled many a monster," Ace told her. "Don't worry."

"But I will worry."

The minisub broke free of the black surface of the lake. Its lights made the beads of water it was shedding glisten and sparkle in the night.

"Is that him?" asked June.

"We'll have to wait and see." Ace and the girl were crouched in the underbrush near the shore of Lake Sombra. "Don't wave hello till we see who comes out."

The amphibious sub came rolling clear of the lake to go crashing several yards into the surrounding jungle. When the hatch on the control cab flapped open, Prof came popping out. Pie slid down the wet side of the sub, landed on the mossy ground with his stunpistol already in his hand. Pie stood for a few seconds watching the lake he'd emerged from, then pivoted and started jogging away.