Читать книгу The Dagger in the Sky: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 7
ОглавлениеBLADE OVER JUNGLE
There is a saying that when you visit the most Godforsaken outlands of the world, you will invariably find two inhabitants, one of them a Chinese storekeeper, the other a Scotchman operating a bank. Which may or may not be gospel, but at least illustrates a nomadic proclivity of the Scotch race; incidentally, one that is not exclusively modern.
The first MacNamara—meaning the first to reach Cristobal; the MacNamara clan went as far back as Scotch history, one of them helping slay MacBeth at Lumphanan in Aberdeenshire in 1057—came to Cristobal in 1650. He was old Angus MacNamara, whom Cromwell ran out of the forcibly united commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. Old Angus was the first Scotchman in Cristobal. He started a bank, naturally.
By 1930, the MacNamaras had owned most of Cristobal, and lost it, several times. In 1930, they staged the revolution which made old Gatun MacNamara president, and he had been doing fairly well since. Not too well. Just fair. For the MacNamaras had become, in somewhat less than three hundred years, as native as any inhabitant of Cristobal. And the inhabitants of Cristobal were inclined to take more pride in the beauty of their women than in the business efficiency of their government or the business efficiency of anything else.
Sanda MacNamara was a girl worth anybody’s pride. She was long and well-shaped—well-shaped was putting it very mildly indeed—and past generations of Castilian mothers had given her marvelous honey-blond hair, and the pleasant sun of Cristobal had contributed a delightful sun-tanned complexion. The finest schools in Massachusetts, London, Paris and Vienna had given her manners and a rounded knowledge of the world. The best modistes on the Rue de la Paix furnished her with frocks that contributed to her beauty, which did not need any contributions.
Being the daughter of old Gatun MacNamara had given her poise, because when you are the daughter of a president, you just naturally have poise. She had learned riding at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, had learned tennis from Lenglen, had been taught to fly a plane by one-eyed old Prop Jackson who, if the records had been straight, had shot down more planes than Rickenbacker and possibly more than von Richthofen, in the World War.
She was flying now, in her private plane. It was a little low-wing job, honey-colored like her hair, a neat and fairly fast little ship that could cover long distances and descend, as necessity required, upon land or water—or on the leafy mat of a jungle if it came to that—with some chance of safety, since its landing speed was low.
Sanda flew alone, mostly watching the jungle which stretched to the horizons, almost like a sea, except that it was a darker and more ugly green.
She used, every so often, binoculars. The glasses were to enable her to see her brother’s plane, which was flying directly ahead. She was, in fact, following her brother.
She was not particularly tired, although they had left Cristobal City, the capital, yesterday afternoon. They had not flown through the night; that was too tiresome. The night had been spent in a good-sized city which had two airports; she had landed at one field, her brother at the other. That morning, they had taken off at a predetermined time.
While flying, Sanda MacNamara had had time for a good deal of thinking.
She was still almost completely baffled.
She switched on the little radio transmitter in her plane, held the microphone close to her lips, said, “Hello, Profile ... are you listening?”
She hoped this—calling her brother “Profile”—would get a rise out of him. It had always been a fighting word between them. Juan Don, like all MacNamaras of Cristobal, was more handsome than any male had a right to be. He resented it bitterly. Once, when he was young, his sister was sure he had picked a fight deliberately to get his nose broken, only to have a plastic surgeon do a repair job that was an improvement on the original.
Her brother’s voice crackled angrily in her receiver diaphragms.
“Stop trying to talk to me!” he snapped. “We can be located with a radio direction finder, you know.”
“By whom?”
“I don’t know,” her brother snapped.
They began to follow a thin string of water far below in the jungle, and it grew larger, became a sizable river that was yellowish in the sunlight. Heat waves made the horizons deceptive, but it seemed to Sanda that she could distinguish the sea, far ahead. She consulted her chart. They should be reaching the coast before long, so the vague difference in the horizon ahead must be the sea.
She was thinking about switching on the radio transmitter and asking her brother if it was really the sea, when his voice clattered in her ear with abrupt violence.
“Go back, Sanda! Quick!”
His voice was full of ripping excitement.
“What’s wrong?” Sanda cried, then realized her transmitter was off, and switched it on and waited frantically for the tubes to warm so that the set would radiate.
She stared ahead, and her eyes widened with horror.
“Don!” she screamed. “Oh, Don! What happened?”
She got no answer except the one her eyes gave her. That was ugly. Puzzling. For her brother’s plane was going down now, spinning slowly around and around, and turning over. Its descent looked slow, but that was due to the distance. Actually, it must be falling at terrific pace.
The black dagger appeared in the sky while the plane was still falling. The girl was watching, saw it come into existence, could not explain how it got there. The interval of its coming—it wasn’t there; then a finger-snap later, it was—occupied an incredibly short time.
The dagger stood in the superheated tropical air near the falling plane. The length of the thing was perhaps two hundred feet, the span of the hilt a fourth of that, and its color was deepest jet.
It faded, and was gone, before the girl’s plane reached the spot. By then, her brother’s ship had hit.
Sanda always believed that she kept her eyes on her brother’s plane while it was falling, and while it crashed. She saw—and she was biting her tongue and screaming by then—the ship wobble out of its spin, enough for it to hit the river on its pontoons, as it should. There was a splash. Water flashed out and glistened in the sun like sheets of tin.
The plane bounced, hit, bounced; each time, less water flew. Its speed dropped to a hundred, eighty, sixty, forty miles an hour. Later it hit the sand bar. It was a steep bar. The floats stubbed into the sand, and the plane flipped over on its back.
It lay there, the floats sticking up, like a dead bird.
Sanda MacNamara’s lips moved but no words came from them, and she jammed the control stick forward, sent her plane shrieking down toward the river. Her apprehension was a pounding frenzy inside, and she had to force herself to level the plane out and land on the river. After the ship was on the water, she kept it riding fast, on the rear of the floats. Long wake spread out behind her, a rolling wave that climbed onto the bank and broke into suds among the tangled mangrove roots. The fact that mangroves were on the banks told her she must be near the sea, because mangroves grow in salt water. Strange that she should think of such a thing as what the mangroves meant, she decided.
Her plane beached on the sand bar. She sprang out. There was no movement around the plane. Her eyes swept the sand bar. There were no human footprints on the sand.
She ran to the plane, looked inside.
The plane was empty.
“He’s safe!” she thought. Wild delight bounded through her.
She looked around for tracks, and there were none. At first that was a little hard for her to realize. She breathed, “But—but there have to be!”
She stood very still and stared at the sand until she was finally convinced that there was no trace of anyone having left the plane. Nor could anyone have quitted the ship without leaving prints.
She took a small automatic out of her jacket pocket. There was nothing to be seen. Nothing to be heard. Except the jungle and its sounds.
The ship had not been damaged noticeably. If righted and put afloat, it would probably fly again. The cabin door was closed, she noticed. It opened readily. She climbed in. And when she climbed out again, she was puzzled more than ever.
There was nothing, absolutely nothing wrong inside the ship as far as she had been able to find. Even the ignition of the motor seemed to be intact. There were no bloodstains in the cockpit, no trace of violence.
For a moment, while inside the ship, she had thought that some kind of robot or radio-directed control might have been attached to the craft, but she had looked and found no such gadget. She knew enough about such things to be sure that the plane did not contain one.
She stood on the edge of the sand bar.
“Don!” she called. Then, “Don! Don!” louder and louder until her throat was raw with the effort.
A few tropical birds were frightened away by the terrified incredulity of her voice, but there was no trace of her brother.
She ran to her plane, very scared. It had beached hard on the sand, and she had to take her hands and scoop the wet grains out from under the floats, then rock the craft and shove before she got it out in the river. There were a few alligators in the river, and she hit one while the plane was gathering speed, but it did no more than jar the craft and give Sanda another bad moment.
