Two Thousand Miles Below Part 24

Rawson did not know when he called the girl's name. But he knew the instant that he had done it and he knew it was a mistake. He should have crept quietly, seized the weapon--and now his feet tore madly on the white rock floor as he raced toward the shining implement of death. From beyond, the red figure, whirling at his call, leaped wildly for the same prize.

The taloned hands were on the flame-thrower first. Rawson saw the red body straighten, saw the weapon swing, glistening in air, swinging over and down. From its tip green fire made a straight line of light.

He leaped in under the descending flame, felt the nozzle of the projector as it crashed upon his right shoulder and the green fire spat harmlessly beyond his back. That last spring had thrown him bodily against the red monster. They were both knocked off balance for a moment, then Rawson caught himself and swung with his left. He set himself in that fraction of a second, felt the first movement of that shining, crook-necked tube that meant the green flame was being drawn back where it could reach him; then his fist crashed into a yielding jaw.

Not five feet from the brink of that nearly bottomless shaft he stood wavering in the rush of air. He knew that the ugly red figure had toppled sideways, that the weapon had fallen with him, the blast swinging upward in a vertical, hissing arc--then man and weapon had dropped silently into the pit.

He was alone, save for the girl, who, her eyes wide with horror, threw herself upon him and clung trembling, while she murmured incomprehensible endearments in her own tongue wherein his own name was mingled: "Dean, dear! My own Dean-San!"

But the mole-men! Dean Rawson's mind was aghast with the horror of it: the mole-men had now found the way.

CHAPTER XXI

_Suicide?_

Gordon Smith, sometimes known as Smithy, was to remember little of the happenings that followed the crash of the big Army dreadnought. It was Colonel Culver who dragged him from the pilot-room wreckage, Colonel Culver and one of the pilots whom he had restored to consciousness.

They lowered Smithy carefully to the ground, then explored the rest of the ship.

Their hands were red when they returned--and empty. Captain Farrell and the rest of the crew had ceased to be units of the United States Army Air Force; henceforth they would be only names on a casualty list grown ominously long.

"Stood plumb on her tail," said the pilot, staring at the wreck. "They hit us just once, and the left wing crumpled like cardboard. Last I remember was pulling her up off the trees." He stared at the ma.s.s of twisted metal and the center section where the wing had torn loose; it stood upright, almost vertical, resting on the crushed tail.

"Funny," said the pilot in the same flat, level tone that seemed the only voice he had since that last pull on a whipping wheel. "d.a.m.n funny--mostly we get it first up there."

"Come here!" snapped Colonel Culver. "Lend a hand here with Smith; we've got to carry him. And don't talk so loud--those red devils will be out here any minute."

Smithy was taking a more active interest in his surroundings when he sat a week later in the Governor's office.

"There's a detachment moving in there from the south," said the Governor. "We're going to follow your advice, to some extent at least.

We're sending troops to Tonah Basin. If the top of that dead crater is closed they will blast it open; then a scouting party's going down.

Call it a reconnaissance, call it suicide--one name's just as good as the other. Colonel Culver, here, is going. But you know the lay of the land there; you could be of great help. How about it?"

"Are you asking me?" Smithy inquired.

He stood up, flexed his arms, while he grinned at Colonel Culver.

"Hinges all greased and working! As a flier, Colonel, you're a darn good first-aid man. I'll say that! When do we start?"

Which explains why Smithy, some time later, hidden under the grotesque disguise of a gas mask, was one of fifty, similarly attired, who stood waiting about the black open maw in the great cinder-floored crater of one of the peaks that surrounded Tonah Basin.

Night. And the big stars that hang so low in the black desert sky should have been brilliant. They were lost now in the white glare that streamed upward. The crater was a fortress. Around the circle of the entire rim, on the inner side of the rough crags, men of the 49th Field Artillery stood by their guns. Lookouts trailed their telephone wire to the higher peaks, where they perched as shapeless as huddled owls; and, like owls, their eyes swept the mountain's slopes and the desert at its base, where the searchlight crews played long fingers of light incessantly--and where nothing moved.

But the empty silence of the desert was misleading, as the men in the crater knew.

They had begun arriving with the earliest light of morning. Smithy had come in with the first lot. And when the first big auto-gyro transport had settled and risen again from the crater, another had taken its place, and another and many others after that.

That first crew had been a machine-gun battalion, and Smithy had smiled with grim satisfaction at the unhurried way in which their young captain had snapped them into position without the loss of a second. And their guns, Smithy noticed, were trained inward upon the crater itself.

Inside that protecting circle the other transports landed one by one: men, mobile artillery, ammunition cases, big searchlights, and a dozen engine-generator outfits. The last transports brought in strange cargo--short sections of aluminum struts with bolts and splice plates to join them together: blocks, and tackle and sheaves; then spools of steel alloy cable at least ten miles in length.

From the last ship they took a hoisting engine and an a.s.sortment of aluminum plates and bars which were bolted together by waiting mechanics, and which grew magically to a crude but exceedingly substantial elevator, on which fifty men, by considerable crowding, could stand.

Only a floor of bolted plates, with corner posts and diagonal bracing and a single guard rail running around the four sides--but for the first time Smithy began to feel that he was actually going down; that this was not all make-believe, or a futile gesture. He would stand on that platform; he would go down where Dean had gone. And then.... But what would come after he knew he could never imagine.

A little crane swung the first metal work into position above the shaft. One end of the a.s.sembled framework of aluminum alloy dragged loosely on the ground; the other end swung out and projected above the shaft, swayed for an instant--and then came the first direct knowledge of the enemy's presence. The end of a metal strut, though nothing visible was touching it, grew suddenly white hot, sagged, then broke into a shower of molten, dazzling drops that rained down into the pit.

"Good," said Colonel Culver, who was standing beside Smithy. "Now we know they are there--but it means we will have to go down there with our gas masks on."

To Smithy it was not immediately apparent how gas masks were to protect them from the deadly invisible ray. He got the connection of thoughts when a bomb was slid over the edge. The dull thud of the explosion quickly came back to them.

"They popped that one off in the air--hit it with their heat ray,"

said a cheerful voice beside them. "But the phosgene will keep on going down. Give them another!"

The interval this time was longer. "Now for a dirty crack," said the cheerful voice. "Time this one."

A youngster nearby snapped a stop-watch as the bomb was released. He held some printed tables in his hands. Odd receivers from which no wire led were clamped over his ears. This time the dull thud was long in coming. It was hardly perceptible when the young man with the stop watch announced: "Fifty thousand feet, sir."

"Give 'em another. Time it again." A second high explosive bomb was released.

"Fifty thousand feet, sir."

"Good. That measures it. And those last bombs have knocked the devil out of whatever machinery they've got down there. Now we'll give them a real taste of gas. Two of the green ones there, men. Put ten miles of cable on the drums. Get that hoisting frame into place."

But night had come, though searchlights outside the crater and floodlights within had robbed the night of its terror, when Smithy, with Culver beside him, climbed over the guard rail of the lift that hung waiting just over the pit.

A gas mask covered his entire face. Through its round eye plates he looked at the others who crowded about him. Grotesque, almost ludicrous--twenty men, armed with clumsy sub-machine guns; the others would follow later. A searchlight was on a tripod at the center, and a spool of electric cable.

The light sizzled into life and swung slowly about. Then the platform jarred, and the spool of cable began slowly to unwind. Beside him Colonel Culver was returning the salute of an officer outside on the ashy ground. Smithy raised his hand, but the brink of that pit had moved swiftly up--there was nothing before him but a gla.s.sy wall.

Reconnaissance? Suicide? One word was as good as another. But he was going down--down where Dean Rawson had gone--down where there was a debt to be paid.

CHAPTER XXII

_The Red-Flowering Vine_