The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Four (69 page)

Squatting on his haunches, he studied the ends of the sticks the fire had left unburned. Several of them were fresh, white and newly cut. But several were older, older and yet as he dug into the bark with his thumbnail, he saw they were still green.

It could mean but one thing. Someone had been here more than once. Someone had built a fire here before. Turning, he walked back to the tracks, and working carefully, he moved across the plain. He found two more sets of tracks.

So that was it. A patrol plane. A plane that flew along this bit of coast, stopped here occasionally while the pilot and his companions cooked and ate a warm meal, probably loafed awhile, and then took off again.

It meant more than that. It meant the Americans had slipped in but a short time after the patrol plane had left. That the fact they were alive at all was due to the fact that Turk Madden had touched the coast south of the San Tadeo River. Had he come right in over the coast they would have met the fighter plane! Or have missed it by the narrowest of margins!

Turk turned quickly, but even as he turned, something whipped by his face and hit the tree behind him with a
thud
!

M
ADDEN HIT THE GROUND
all in one piece and rolled into the brush. Instantly, he was on his hands and knees and crawling. He made a dozen yards to the right before he stopped behind the trunk of a huge beech and stared out across the open.

Almost at once there were four more quick shots. Four shots openly spaced and timed, and Turk heard one of them clip through the trees on his left, and the second flipped by him so close that he dropped flat and hugged the ground, his face white and his spine chilled by the close escape.

The other two shots clipped through the woods some distance off.

“Smart guy, eh?” Turk snarled. “Two shots evenly spaced on each side of where I hit the brush! You’re not so dumb!”

Straightening up, he stood behind the tree and studied the situation. It was late, and it was cloudy. By the time he had skirted the plain it would be pitch dark, and he could find no tracks, while he was certain to make some noise and the chances of his being shot, if his assailant waited, would be great.

W
ALKING BACK OVER THE COUNTRY
between the campfire and the hidden base, he scowled over the problem. Who could be in the vicinity? Had one of the men with the plane remained behind? But if so, why? That didn’t make sense, for even if the enemy were expecting something of the kind, they would never expect it right here. Quite obviously, the entire coast was patrolled, probably as much against their own people, if any, as against foreigners.

If someone had remained behind in that vast and lonely country it could mean but one thing: They had been betrayed.

And if it wasn’t a stranger, it could be only one of the men of his own party! Yet, if so, why shoot?

When he stepped through the door into the shelter under the trees, they were all there. Shan Bao was stewing something in a kettle over the fire. He glanced up, but said nothing.

Runnels grinned at him. “Well, we beat you back, but not by very long!”

Turk looked at him for a moment. “You were out, too?”

“Yeah, all of us. We decided it was as good a time as any to have a look around. We just got back. I went south along the river. Nothing down there.”

“I didn’t find anything either,” Panola said. “Not a thing but some marshy, wet country.”

“That seems to be the consensus,” Winkler agreed. “Nothing around.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Turk said slowly.

Winkler got up, frowning. “You found something? What?”

“The tracks of a patrol plane—a fighter. Evidently this region is carefully patrolled. The plane lands over in a little plain across the ridge. It has landed there more than once.”

“How could you tell that?” Panola demanded.

“By the tracks. Also by the ends of the sticks used to make a fire. A good woodsman,” he added, and he knew if there was a guilty man here he would sense added meaning in what he said, “can read a lot of things where the average man can see nothing.”

Turk Madden sat down suddenly. He was mad all through. Maybe one of them had taken a shot at him, but if he had, there was no way to prove it. He would just have to wait. He felt the weight of the .45 automatic in his shoulder holster, and liked the feel of it.

Winkler stared thoughtfully into the fire. “So they are patrolling the coast? That means we’ve got to go very slow.”

“Well,” Panola suggested, “the test comes off in three days. If the plane comes back, let’s knock him off. It would be at least two days before they’d be able to get down to investigate, and by that time, we’d be gone.”

“Why two days?” Runnels asked. “They might have a radio on that ship. Probably have, in fact.”

“Even so, I doubt if there would be any search organized for a couple of days. You know how bad the storms are down here. It would be all too easy for a plane to get caught in one of those terrific blasts of wind.”

“It won’t do,” Winkler said. “We’ve got to keep out of sight.”

“That’s right,” Runnels said. “We’re to get our information and get out, and if we can do it without suspicion, so much the better.”

T
HAT MADE SENSE
. And yet? Suppose Winkler was the one? Suppose it was also a method of keeping them from finding anything more? And what about Panola?

“As though we were at the end of the world here,” Runnels remarked. “Everything still as death except for that wind. A man would starve to death if lost on this shore.”

“Yeah, and we’re not so far as the crow flies from Buenos Aires. And what a town that is!”

“Have you been there?” Turk asked. “I thought I was the only one who knew South America?”

“Been there?” Panola grinned. “Shucks, man, I lived there for three years! Runnels has been here, too! Weren’t you here during the war?”

“Uh-huh. I was on duty as military attaché for a couple of months.”

Turk ate in silence. So Panola and Runnels had both been to the Argentine? It was easy to be influenced by all that wealth and glitter. The sixteen families or so that dictated the life in the Argentine could entertain very beautifully. Perhaps one, or both, of the two men had been influenced? Persuaded?

M
ORNING CAME
, and he went down to the ship. Shan Bao joined him after a few minutes. He looked thoughtfully at the Manchu, then glanced around to make sure no one heard him.

“You keep your eyes open, Shan,” he said softly. “Watch everybody you see. Anybody do anything wrong, you tell me.”

He was working over the plane when he saw Runnels and Winkler come out of the shelter. Turk turned and swung ashore. Panola was taking some weather observations, checking his instruments atop the ridge. It was as good an idea as any.

Stepping quickly over the logs, he got to the shack. None of the men had taken their carbines, and he picked up the nearest one, that of Winkler. A quick examination showed it clean. Runnels’s checked the same. Then he picked up Panola’s carbine. A quick glance into the barrel.

It had been fired.

Panola.

Turk went back outside and returned to the plane, his mind rehashing everything he could remember on Panola. All of them had been checked very thoroughly by the FBI, yet something had been missed.

Panola was of Italian parentage. He had been born in Brooklyn, raised there, had gone to college, and his war record had been excellent. He knew nothing beyond that, that and the fact that Panola had lived in Buenos Aires for three years sometime during this period.

Another thing remained. How had Panola, if he was the marksman, returned to the shelter so quickly the night before? There must be another route than that over the ridge.

“I think,” he said musingly, “a little trip around by plane would do more good than anything else!”

Major Winkler was coming down through the trees.

“Major,” he said, when the tall, narrow-faced man had come closer, “I think I’ll take a cruise around. This country needs some looking over.”

“You think it’s wise?” Winkler asked thoughtfully. “Well, go ahead, but be careful!”

A
HALF HOUR LATER
, when Turk taxied the ship out from under the overhanging trees and the camouflaged shelter built for the plane, Shan Bao was ashore. Madden turned the ship down the pool and, after a run, lifted it into the air, banked steeply, and swung away up the coast.

After a few minutes he lifted the plane into the mists under the clouds. As he swung back and forth up the coast, he studied the terrain below. Suddenly, he saw a house!

It was a huge, gray stone building, back of a little cove with a black sand beach. A yacht was anchored in the cove, and a motor launch was at the small wharf. Easing back on the controls, he shot the amphibian into the clouds. Out of sight.

There was a chance he had not been seen, not recognized, as at the moment he had passed over the cove the mists through which he had flown were thick.

He circled the ship higher, puzzling over the situation. That house was no more than five miles from their own base! Also, it was no more than three miles from where he had been fired upon! Could he have been wrong? Perhaps it wasn’t one of his own crowd, but one of these people? And perhaps Panola was in the clear!

Turk scowled grimly and hunched his big shoulders. Then he turned the plane inland toward the Dome of St. Paul. Coming up to the mountain, he pulled back on the stick and climbed to get more altitude. He was still climbing when the fighter shot out of the clouds and came toward him with all her guns spouting flame!

Turk pulled away in a climbing turn as the fighter shot beneath him, he fell away and let go with a burst at its tail assembly. Evidently he missed, for the fighter whipped around and came back at him!

Flying like a wild man, Turk put the amphibian through everything he knew, and suddenly made a break and got away into the heavy gray clouds. It was a momentary respite only, for he knew now that he dared not let the plane return to its base.

The other pilot was obviously not used to fighting, for he had missed several good chances that no member of the Luftwaffe would have missed, or a Japanese, either. Turk swung around and dropped back toward the mountain, and then suddenly he sighted the fighter again.

They saw each other at almost the same instant, but even as they sighted each other, Turk whipped over and dived straight for the rounded top of the Dome.

And behind him, the wind screaming in its wings, came the fighter! Desperate, Turk was remembering something from his own experience, a stunt he had tried long before, in the South Pacific. He was remembering, too, that curious gap in the trees atop the Dome. Heading straight for the Dome in a wild, desperate dive, he saw tracers streaming by him, and then he whipped over and cut through that gap in the trees!

A few yards in either direction and he would have crashed into the trees, and as it was, he cleared the top of the Dome by no more than four or five feet! Then, behind him, came a crash!

He took the stick back and reached for altitude, and glanced to the rear and down. A cone of leaping flame was mounting toward the sky, and he could see something he took to be the pilot’s lifeless body, lying off to one side.

Thoughtfully, he turned toward home, flying high into the heavy clouds. If they searched, and they probably would, they would find the wreckage. A cursory examination would show only that the plane had crashed, and they might accept it as an accident.

Yet, if they examined closely what wreckage there was left, and one wing, at least, had fallen clear of the flames, they might find bullet holes. Still, the chances were he had missed. For the first time in his life, he found himself hoping he had missed.

He was gliding in for a landing on the pool when he saw the path, a dim trail along the rocky edge of the brook leading from the river. A path that would be a shortcut to the house on the cove!

When Turk Madden put the plane down he was worried. He got up from the pilot’s seat and swore softly. Then he slid the Colt from its shoulder holster and checked the magazine. It was ready. “I think,” he said softly, “I’m going to need a gun!”

Shan Bao came out in the rubber boat and took him ashore, after which he left Shan the job of snugging the ship down and checking her.

Runnels looked up when Turk walked in, then his eyes sharpened. “What happened?”

“That fighter showed up. I tricked him into a crash on top of the Dome.” Turk spoke quietly, but even as he spoke he was trying to see all their expressions at once.

Panola wet his lips slowly. “Then they know we’re here. Or they will. That doesn’t leave us much chance, does it?”

“Maybe they won’t know,” Turk suggested.

“What would prevent them?” Winkler demanded. His long, lantern-jawed face had sharpened with worry. “My heavens, man! They aren’t that dumb.”

“If they actually send somebody to the top of the Dome to check, I doubt if he’ll find evidence of anything except a crash. They’ll think he collided with the peak in a cloud. I doubt if he has any bullet holes.”

“They may check his guns,” Winkler suggested. “Had you thought of that?”

“I hadn’t,” Turk said. “But if they do, guns often fire in flames, and I doubt if there will be much left to examine. There was gasoline over everything.”

“I’d say you were lucky, mighty lucky!” Runnels said. “Great stuff, old man!”

Then he told them of the yacht and the house. They watched his face curiously, but it was Winkler who seemed most worried. He paced the room thoughtfully.

“T
HIS THING SCARES ME
,” he said. “They might find us!”

It was just daylight when Turk Madden slipped from the cabin. He took his carbine, and went toward the Goose, then turned away among the trees and started for the trail that led along the creek, the trail seen from the plane.

This was it. He could sense the building up of forces around him, could sense an intangible danger. Someone in his own group, he felt sure, was a traitor. It could be Panola, and yet, it might be either of the others. Winkler had been a good leader, and Turk could understand his natural worry. The atomic tests were to be tomorrow, and if it was to be witnessed and checked, everything must move smoothly and easily. The explosion, unless the time was changed, was supposed to be at ten in the morning.