Raiders Invisible Part 3

"So that's the secret!" Chris muttered. He pulled the microphone of the radio-telephone to his lips and angled with the dials for connection with the fleet hundreds of miles behind, meanwhile noting his exact position on Azuero Peninsula. But before he spoke, some sixth sense bade him glance below once more.

An icy shiver gripped his body.

A thin slit had appeared in the roof of the left-side hut. A spot of bright blue light was winking evilly inside it. And, though he could not hear it, Chris knew with terrible certainty that a shrill, impatient whining was piercing from the machinery of a weapon inside that hut--a weapon whose fangs had forked close to him once before--a weapon which the winking eye of blue presaged.

It struck. But at the same instant Chris leaped desperately from the c.o.c.kpit of the scout.

He leaped almost into the teeth of the blue-tinged ray which knifed up with uncanny accuracy from the slit in the roof of the hut. He was conscious of a flash of unearthly light, of terrible heat which came with it. Only the force of his jump saved him. He pulled the ripcord of the 'chute strapped to him and jerked to a pause; then he was swinging beneath a mushroom of white, trembling as he stared at the fate he had missed by a hair's breadth.

A web of spectral blue light had enveloped the abandoned scout. The plane appeared to shudder, hanging almost motionless in the wraith-like mist. Then, with a crackle, the wings and tail shivered into countless fragments; the stripped fuselage nosed over and plunged earthward, a roaring ma.s.s of flames. A fiery comet, it screamed past the man who swayed beneath his 'chute, coming within a few hundred feet of him and searing him with its hot breath. Then it drove into the dense flanks of the jungle growth.

Soon only a charred skeleton marked the last landing field of a scout of the dirigible ZX-1.

"And now, I guess," Chris whispered, "they'll turn that ray on me...."

But he had only been a thousand feet up when he jumped. Already he was close to the top of the jungle. The clearing and its huts disappeared from view; he was out of range of the swift-striking ray. And, he reflected, though the scout was gone, he was still free--and could get to the Ca.n.a.l....

But tropical growth is difficult to land in.

A moment later his swinging body crashed through the branches of a tree, and he pitched forward, unable to control the impetus. A sudden shock of pain stabbed through his head and everything spun dizzily before him. He knew he was falling, jerking down as the parachute ripped on the boughs. There was another impact which drove all remaining consciousness from him.

Darkness washed over Chris Travers, lying limp beneath the shreds of a silky white shroud....

Electric light. A strong glare of it somewhere. A dull throbbing in his head. Then, a voice, with queer, hissing s's, speaking very close to him.

"Ah, yess. Look you, Kashtanov. He will be conscious soon, I think."

"You're a d.a.m.ned fool, Istafiev, to let him wake up," said another voice, cool and of easy correctness. "He'll see the machines. And these Americans are tricky--one can never tell."

"Tricky? Bah! This fellow is a service man; there are things I can learn from him. Come, now, wake yourself properly, you! That gla.s.s of water, throw it on his face."

Kashtanov--Istafiev. Names that could belong to only one country, to that huge power overseas which was hovering, so said rumors, on the brink of war, waiting only for a favorable opportunity to strike--the country which the war game around the Ca.n.a.l had been designed to impress. Chris Travers' mind cleared just then with complete comprehension of who had schemed to send both dirigibles down and who had built this secret lair on Azuero Peninsula.

Inwardly, he groaned. It was all too plain. The destruction of the ZX-2 and the thwarted destruction of her sister had only been the first step of some gigantic plan which was to provide the opportunity for the mighty fighting machine overseas to strike. And he, who might have balked it, had made a rotten landing from the scout and delivered himself, helpless by his own clumsiness, into the hands of these men.

The self-accusation was bitter.

With their secret of invisibility, their deadly blue rays, what havoc couldn't they wreak, working from their cunningly concealed base?

And now they were waiting for him to recover consciousness--waiting to question him before killing him....

But as he lay there, apparently still senseless, Chris was grappling with the seemingly hopeless problem. So, even when he felt the tingling coldness of a spray of water on his cheeks, not one line of his face moved, nor did the tiniest flutter of eyelids betray him.

Although the fumbled landing in the jungle had been a catastrophe, it had granted him his only weapon. He was believed to be genuinely unconscious.

"Another--he iss stubborn," hissed the voice of the man called Istafiev. "His senses will soon come. I can bring them back--oh, yess!"

"Enough of this!" complained the suave, beautifully modulated voice.

"Darkness is coming; there's a lot to be done. Shoot him and throw him out!"

"It iss I who am in command here, comrade Kashtanov. Remember that. I desire to speak to this man. There! No? No sign yet? Well! We will see if this helps those eyes of yours to open, my American!"

Then began sheer torture.

It was an ordeal of silence. By no motion, sound or slightest sign of consciousness could he seek relief. Inanimate Chris Travers lay, holding his pose st.u.r.dily, although it seemed that the sweat was spurting from the pores, while a thin, cruel knife-blade drove into the quivering nerves beneath his left thumb-nail.

Deeper and deeper it inched, accompanied by the soft breathing of the man who guided it, until Chris felt one great sob of pain welling up inside him, struggling to break past his lips; felt a tremendous urge to writhe, to break away from the digging steel. His tongue seemed to be trembling, shivering; but no other part of his body, not even the smallest flicker of eyelash, betrayed him. At long last there came a voice, sounding as if from miles away, and the disgust in it was very good to Lieutenant Christopher Travers.

"Bah! It iss no use. His thick skull must be fractured. I could cut him open and he would not awake. He might be conscious for minutes after some hours--no, do not shoot him. I shall learn a few details from him then. Throw him over there. Now--Zenalishin iss dead, but the mask and cylinder on him should be returned to visibility. Well, we will return him, too. Then, Kashtanov, to your instructions and your work."

Hands gripped Chris's body. He felt himself thud against a wall, and slumped into a heap, head lolling over. The cessation of pain was sweet, though his thumb was raw, but sweeter still was the knowledge that he had won the first tussle: that he was deemed to be harmlessly unconscious for hours.

And carefully, through his lashes, he permitted himself a glimpse of the room he lay in, and the men whom he had heard and felt but not yet seen.

It seemed more like the belly of a submarine than a room, that maze of tubes, levers, wheels, switchboards and queer metallic shapes; and the blur cast upon his vision by barely raised eyelashes made it appear doubly unreal and grotesque. It might have been another world.

Some of it was recognizable. A ma.s.sive radio-telephone set, by which, he judged, all communications between the fleets in the Pacific were overheard; a squat dynamo; a set of huge cylinders, from which, probably, had come the highly expansive gas that had snuffed out the crews of the two dirigibles. But there were other things--strange, monstrous. One of them, the tapered tube of metal that angled up to the hut's ceiling, its base a ma.s.s of wheels and dials and tubing, was evidently the weapon of the ray that had struck the scout down.

There were three men visible in the room, and Chris switched his attention now to them.

Two were standing by a table in the center of the room, directly under a shaft of light from a powerful electric bulb. The shorter of them was saying to a third man, who knelt in front of the dynamo:

"On full." Then, as a full-throated drone pulsed from it: "Zenalishin iss there? Yess. Put him in."

The voice of the hissing s's--that was Istafiev. Short, stocky, black-haired, he was a direct contrast to the tall figure next him of one whose pointed black beard gave elegance to sharp, thin features.

He carried a gun at his waist, and he identified himself as Kashtanov by saying languidly:

"Better strap him in. He'll fall, otherwise. Get some cord; I'll lift him."

The other man, by the dynamo, apparently a subordinate mechanic, dull-faced, drew a loop of cord from a box nearby, while Kashtanov went through actions that seemed fantastic. He stooped, groped along the floor, and then gripped what looked like thin air with his fingers and lifted upwards. But it wasn't air, Chris knew; it was the invisible body of a man--the man who had destroyed the ZX-2, the man whom he had shot at in the cubby of the ZX-1--whose invisibility was now to be stripped from him.

By what? Carefully Chris swivelled his gaze around until it caught on an object which dwarfed Istafiev, now waiting by its side with one hand on the small panel of a switchboard.

A strange thing, truly, to find in a little hut on Azuero Peninsula!

Row upon row of slender curved tubes, describing a three-quarter ovoid so that there was an opening for entrance in front, rose to a height of some eight feet, the whole topped by a curious gla.s.sy dome which was filled with creamy substance. There was room inside the layers of tubes for a man's body to stand upright--and a man's body was upright in it now, held by cords strapped to his unseen arms.

Invisibility! The dream of scientists for years! Here created, here taken away--by the simple manipulation of two levers on the control panel.

Intently Chris watched Istafiev pull down the right-side lever.