Читать книгу The Flying Legion - George Allan England - Страница 15

The night was moonless, dark, warm with the inviting softness of late spring that holds out promises of romance. Stars wavered and wimpled in the black waters of the Hudson as a launch put out in silence from the foot of Twenty-seventh Street.

This launch contained four men. They carried but little baggage; no more than could be stowed in a rucksack apiece. All were in their old service uniforms, with long coats over the uniforms to mask them. All carried vacuum-flashlights in their overcoat pockets, and lethal-gas pistols, in addition to ordinary revolvers or automatics. And all were keyed to the top notch of energy, efficiency, eagerness. The Great Adventure had begun.

In the stern of the swift, twenty-four cylinder launch—a racing model—sat Captain Alden and Rrisa. The captain wore his aviator's helmet and his goggles, despite the warmth of the night. To appear in only his celluloid mask, even at a time like this when darkness would have hidden him, seemed distasteful to the man. He seemed to want to hide his misfortune as fully as possible; and, since this did no harm, the Master let him have his way.

The bow was occupied by the Master and by Major Bohannan, with the Master at the wheel. He seemed cool, collected, impassive; but the major, of hotter Celtic blood, could not suppress his fidgety nervousness.

Intermittently he gnawed at his reddish mustache. A cigar, he felt, would soothe and quiet him. Cigars, however, were now forbidden. So were pipes and cigarettes. The Master did not intend to have even their slight distraction coming between the minds of his men and the careful, intricate plan before them.

As the racer veered north, up the broad darkness of the Hudson—the Hudson sparkling with city illumination on either hand, with still or moving ships' lights on the breast of the waters—Bohannan murmured:

"Even now, as your partner in this enterprise—"

"My lieutenant," corrected the Master.

"As second in command," amended Bohannan, irritably, "I'm not wholly convinced this is the correct procedure." He spoke in low tones, covered by the purring exhaust of the launch and by the hiss of swiftly cloven waters. "It looks like unnecessary complication, to me, and avoidable danger."

"It is neither," answered the man at the wheel. "What would you have done? What better plan could you have proposed?"

"You could have built your own flyer, couldn't you? Since money's no object to you, and you don't even know, accurately, how much you've got—nobody can keep track of figures like those—why risk legal interference and international complications at the start, by—"

"To build the kind of flyer we need would have taken six or seven months. Not all my money could have produced it, sooner. And absolute ennui can't wait half a year. I'd have gone wholly stale, and so would you, and all of them. We'd have lost them.

"Again, news of any such operations would have got out. My plans would possibly have been checkmated. In the third place, what you propose would have been tame sport, indeed, as a beginning! Three excellent reasons, my dear Major, why this is positively the only way."

"Perhaps. But there's always the chance of failure, now. The guards—"

"After your own experience, when that capsule burst in the laboratory, you talk to me about guards?"

"Suppose one escapes?"

The Master only smiled grimly, and sighted his course up the dark river.

"And the alarm is sure to be given, in no time. Why didn't you just buy the thing outright?"

"It's not for sale, at any price."

"Still—men can't run off with three and a half million dollars' worth of property and with provisions and equipment like that, all ready for a trial trip, without raising Hell. There'll be pursuit—"

"What with, my dear Bohannan?"

"That's a foolish statement of mine, the last one, I admit," answered

the major, as his companion swung the launch a little toward the

Jersey shore. "Of course nothing can overhaul us, once we're away.

But you know my type of mind weighs every possibility, pro and con.

Wireless can fling out a fan of swift aerial police ahead of us from

Europe."

"How near can anything get to us?"

"I know it all looks quite simple and obvious, in theory.

Nevertheless—"

"Men of your character are useful, in places," said the Master, incisively. "You are good in a charge, in sudden daring, in swift attack. But in the approach to great decisions, you vacillate. That's your racial character.

"I'm beginning to doubt my own wisdom in having chosen you as next in command. There's a bit of doubting Thomas in your ego. It's not too late, yet, for you to turn back. I'll let you, as a special concession. Brodeur will jump at the chance to be your successor."

His hand swung the wheel, sweeping the racer in a curve toward the Manhattan shore. Bohannan angrily pushed the spokes over again the other way.

"I stick!" he growled. "I've said the last word of this sort you'll ever hear me utter. Full speed ahead—to Paradise—or Hell!"

They said no more. The launch split her way swiftly toward the north. By the vague, ghostly shimmer of light upon the waters, a tense smile appeared on the steersman's lips. In his dark eyes gleamed the joy which to some men ranks supreme above all other joys—that of bending others to his will, of dominating them, of making them the puppets of his fancy.

Some quarter hour the racer hummed upriver. Keenly the Master kept his lookout, picking up landmarks. Finally he spoke a word to Captain Alden, who came forward to the engines. The Master's cross-questionings of this man had convinced him his credentials were genuine and that he was loyal, devoted, animated by nothing but the same thirst for adventure that formed the driving power behind them all. Now he was trusting him with much, already.

"Three quarters speed," ordered the Master. The skilled hand of the captain, well-versed in the operation of gas engines, obeyed the command. The whipping breeze of their swift course, the hiss at the bows as foam and water crumbled out and over, somewhat diminished. The goal lay not far off.

To starboard, thinning lights told the Master they were breasting Spuyten Duyvil. To port, only a few scattered gleams along the base of the cliff or atop it, showed that the sparsely settled Palisades were drawing abeam. The ceaseless, swarming activities of the metropolis were being left behind. Silence was closing in, broken only by vagrant steamer-whistles from astern.

A crawling string of lights, on the New York shore, told that an express was hurling itself cityward. Its muffled roar began to echo out over the star-flecked waters. The Master threw a scornful glance at it. He turned in his seat, and peered at the shimmer of the city's lights, strung like a luminous rosary along the river's edge. Then he looked up at the roseate flush on the sky, flung there by the metropolis as from the mouth of a crucible.

"Child's play!" he murmured. "All this coming and going in crowded streets, all this fighting for bread, and scheming over pennies—child's play. Less than that—the blind swarming of ants! Tomorrow, where will all this be, for us?"

He turned back and thrust over the spokes. The launch drew in toward the Jersey shore.

"Let the engines run at half-speed," he directed, "and control her now with the clutch."

"Yes, sir!"

The aviator's voice was sharp, precise, determined. The Master nodded to himself with satisfaction. This man, he felt, would surely be a valued member of the crew. He might prove more than that. There might be stuff in him that could be molded to executive ability, in case that should be necessary.

The launch, now at half-speed, nosed her way directly toward the cliff. Sounds from shore began to grow audible Afar, an auto siren shrieked. A dog barked, irritatingly. A human voice came vaguely hallooing.

Off to the right, over the cliff brow, a faint aura of light was visible. The eyes of the Master rested on this a moment, brightening. He smiled again; and his hand tightened a little on the wheel. But all he said was:

"Dead slow, now, Captain Alden!"

As the cliff drew near, its black brows ate across the sky, devouring stars. The Master spoke in Arabic to Rrisa, who seized a boat hook and came forward. Out of the gloom small wharf advanced to meet the launch. The boat-hook caught; the launch, easing to a stop, cradled against the stringpiece.

Rrisa held with the hook, while Bohannan and Alden clambered out. Before the Master left, he bent and seemed to be manipulating something in the bottom of the launch. Then he stepped to the engine.

"Out, Rrisa," he commanded, "and hold hard with the hook, now!"

The Arab obeyed. All at once the propeller churned water, reversed.

The Master leaped to the wharf.

"Let go—and throw the hook into the boat!" he ordered.

While the three others stood wondering on the dark wharf, the launch began to draw slowly back into the stream. Already it was riding a bit low, going down gradually by the bows.

"What now?" questioned the major, astonished.

"She will sink a hundred or two yards from shore, in deep water," answered the Master, calmly. "The sea-cock is wide open."

"A fifteen thousand dollar launch—!"

"Is none the less, a clue. No man of this party, reaching the shore tonight, is leaving any more trace than we are. Come, now, all this is trivial. Forward!"

In silence, they followed him along the dark wharf, reached a narrow, rocky path that serpented up the face of the densely wooded cliff, and began to ascend. A lathering climb it was, laden as they were with heavy rucksacks, in the moonless obscurity.

Now and then the Master's little searchlight—his own wonderful invention, a heatless light like an artificial firefly, using no batteries nor any power save universal, etheric rays in an absolute vacuum—glowed with pale virescence over some particularly rough bit of going. For the most part, however, not even this tiny gleam was allowed to show. Silence, darkness, precision, speed were now all-requisite.

Twenty-four minutes from leaving the wharf, they stood among a confused, gigantic chaos of boulders flung, dicelike, amid heavy timbers on the brow of the Palisades. Off to the north, the faint, ghostly aura dimly silhouetted the trees. Far below, the jetty river trembled here, there, with starlight.

They paused a moment to breathe, to shift straps that bound shoulders not now hardened to such burdens. The Master glanced at the luminous dial of his wrist-watch.

"Almost to the dot," he whispered. "Seventeen minutes to midnight. At midnight, sharp, we take possession. Come!"

They trailed through a hard, rocky path among thick oak, pine, and silver-birch. Now and then the little greenish-white light will-o'-the-wisped ahead, flickering hither, yon. No one spoke a word. Every footstep had to be laid down with care. After three minutes' progress, the Master stopped, turned, held up his hand.

"Absolute silence, now," he breathed. "The outer guards are now within an eighth of a mile."

They moved forward again. The light was no longer shown, but the Master confidently knew the way. Bohannan felt a certain familiarity with the terrain, which he had carefully studied on the large-scale map he and the Master had used in planning the attack; but the Master's intimate knowledge was not his. After two and one-half minutes, the leader stopped again, and gestured at heavy fern-brakes that could just be distinguished as black blotches in the dark of the woods.

"The exact spot," he whispered. "Take cover, and follow your memorized orders!"

He settled down noiselessly into the brakes. The others did likewise. Utter silence fell, save for the far, vague roar of the city. A vagrant little breeze was stirring the new foliage, through which a few stars curiously peeped. The four men seemed far, very far from any others. And yet—

Were there any others near them? the major wondered. No sign, no sound of them existed. Off to northward, where the dim glow ghosted up against the sky, an occasional noise drifted to the night. A distant laugh diffused itself through the dark. A dog yapped; perhaps the same that they had heard barking, a few minutes before. Then came the faint, sharp tapping of a hammer smiting metal.

"They're knocking out the holding-pins," thought the major. "In a few minutes it'll be too late, if we don't strike now!" He felt a great temptation to urge haste, on the Master. But, aware of the futility of any suggestion, the risk of being demoted for any other faux pas, he bridled his impatience and held still.

Realizing that they were now lying at the exact distance of 440 yards from the stockade that protected the thing they had come to steal—if you can call "stealing" the forced sale the Master now planned consummating, by having his bankers put into unwilling hands every ultimate penny of the more than $3,500,000 involved, once the coup should be put through—realizing this fact, Bohannan felt the tug of a profound excitement.

His pulses quickened; the tension of his Celtic nerves keyed itself up like a banjo-string about to snap. Steeled in the grim usages of war though he was, and more than once having felt the heart-breaking stress of the zero hour, this final moment of waiting, of suspense before the attack that was so profoundly to affect his life and the lives of all these other hardy men, pulled heavily at his nerves. He desperately wanted a smoke, again, but that was out of the question. It seemed to him, there in the dark and stillness, one of the fateful moments of time, pregnant with possibilities unlimited.

The Master, Alden, Rrisa, mere vague blurs among the ferns, remained motionless. If their nerves were a-tingle, they gave no hint or sign of it. Where might the others of the Legion be? No indication of them could be made out. No other living thing seemed in the woods encircling the stockade. Was each man really there and ready for the predetermined role he was to play?

It seemed incredible, fantastic, to suppose that all these adventurers, each separate and alone, each having no contact, with any other, should all have taken their assigned posts. That each, with luminous watch on wrist, was even now timing himself, to the second, before striking the single note calculated to produce, in harmony with all the rest, the finished composition. Such an assumption partook more of the stuff of an Arabian Nights tale than of stern reality in this Twentieth Century and on the outskirts of the world's greatest city.

The Master, crouching, whispered:

"Two minutes more! Keep your eyes on your watches, now. Get your lethal guns ready! In 120 seconds, you will hear the first capsule burst. Ten seconds after that, Alden, fire yours. Ten later, yours, Bohannan. Ten later, yours, Rrisa. Listen hard! Hold steady!"

The silence drew at them like a pain. Rrisa breathed something in which the words: "La Illaha ilia Allah" transpired in a wraith of sound. Alden nestled closer into the ferns. Bohannan could hardly hold his poise.

All three now had their capsule pistols ready. The self-luminous compass and level attached to each gun gave them their exact direction and elevation. Glimmering watches marked the time, the dragging of the last few seconds.

The Master drew no weapon. His mind, directing all, observing all, was not to be distracted by even so small a detail as any personal hand in the discharge of the lethal gas.

If he felt the strain of the final moment, on which hung vaster issues than mere life or death, he gave no indication of it. His eyes remained fixed on the watch-dial at his wrist. They were confident, those eyes. The vague shimmer of the watch-glow showed them dark and grave; his face, faintly revealed, was impassive, emotionless.

It seemed the face of a scientist, a chemist who—having worked out his formula to its ultimate minutiae—now felt utter trust in its reactions, now was only waiting to observe what he well knew must inevitably happen.

"Thirty seconds more," he whispered, and fell silent. Presently, after what seemed half an hour: "Fifteen!"

Another long wait. The Master breathed:

"In just five seconds the first capsule will burst there!" He pointed with assurance. "In two—in one—"