Thunder Jim Wade

by Henry Kuttner

  Abruptly he remembered. Hilarion was the Port Said representative of Thunder Jim Wade.

  Harding’s gray brows drew together. His seamed, harsh face, burnt mahogany-brown by desert suns, seemed a little paler under its bronze. He guessed now that this had been no mere border raid by marauding Arabs. It was much more important than that, or Hilarion’s name would not have been mentioned.

  The captain stood up, eyes narrowed. He’d have to arrange relief. It was necessary that he fly back to Amman to report to his superiors, the General Staff, which wouldn’t be difficult to arrange. The staff would want to know exactly what had happened at the fort, anyway. Before sundown, Harding was flying over the desolate, sun-baked country toward the capital of Transjordania.

  HIS reception was more than a little disappointing. At Staff Headquarters, Harding gave his report and more. He told of the strange, disguised white man who had come riding desperately out of Saudi Arabia and whose last words had been so significant.

  Colonel Morton, a red-faced, white-mustached oldster who commanded the post, thrust out his lower lip and glanced at his staff.

  Although the sun had set, it was stifling in the bare, big room. An electric fan buzzed in a futile attempt to dissipate the heat. All it accomplished was an aerial attack on the swarms of flying insects which always managed to get through the screens.

  Harding sat quietly, favoring his injured leg. The wound had not proved to be a serious one. The bone had only been grazed, instead of shattered, as he expected. But he would need a crutch for a little while.

  “I think you give this incident too much importance, Captain,” Colonel Morton said. “This man, whoever he was, got himself in trouble. But it certainly isn’t of international proportions. A border raid, after all….”

  He let the sentence die away unfinished.

  “I’m not suggesting a punitive expedition, sir,” Harding explained.

  Morton fingered his mustache.

  “Of course! Of course! We’ve been at peace with Saudi Arabia since the treaty in Nineteen-thirty-three. But there was a feud and there’s still bad blood. With world conditions as they are today, we can’t provoke trouble. The Bedouins are lawless raiders. Some of them, at any rate. They’re jealous of their customs. They resent intrusion.”

  “You mean that man may have been a spy?”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s possible, of course, but he must have done something to arouse antagonism. You say a mu’min led the Arabs?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, we never interfere with religious problems unnecessarily. A Jihad’s bad business and the holy cities of Islam are in Arabia. We’d best leave this to the Sultan of Nefud. It’s in his jurisdiction.”

  “What about the message, sir?” the captain urged.

  Morton pondered.

  “A report will be made.”

  Harding’s lips drew back angrily.

  “May I remind you, sir, that Alex Hilarion is known to be an agent of ‘Thunder Jim’ Wade?”

  “Who is a civilian, if not a legend,” the colonel retorted. “I’ve heard too many stories about this man Wade. He’s an adventurer, a soldier of fortune.”

  “Not exactly,” the captain said. “He’s done good work. As a civilian, true, but he smashed that opium ring in Turkestan and the slaving empire down in Indo-China.”

  Morton made an impatient gesture.

  “I know all the stories. I read the newspapers. But the man’s a civilian and this is official business. I fail to see why matters should not be handled in the regulation manner.”

  Captain Harding’s smile was grim, mirthless. Colonel Morton, he knew, was an excellent man, a good soldier and strategist, but he lived in Amman. He had not spent years in the desert country, in close contact with the natives, and he did not have that strange sixth sense for trouble which Harding himself possessed.

  Superficially this was merely a border raid. The dead white man had carried no identification in his garments. He might have entered Mecca, forbidden to whites, or otherwise offended the religious tenets of the Arabs. Yet the Mohammedans were not savages. They were a cultured people and so were their priests.

  The nomadic tribes were fierce enough, but, even so, Captain Harding knew that he faced a mystery, probably one of vital importance. Transjordania was a buffer state, where peace was important.

  “Very well, sir,” Harding said. “I’ve made my report. Now I’d like to apply for a leave of absence.”

  Morton was shrewd.

  “Port Said, eh?” he asked. “Well, that’s not my affair. You’ve a leave coming up and I’ll arrange it immediately. Perhaps I can get a plane for you. We’ll see.”

  The colonel was as good as his word. Perhaps he, too, felt secretly that Harding was right, though officially he could not admit it. Matters had to be handled in accordance with regulations.

  But at dawn a plane took off from the Amman flying field. Heading north and west, across Palestine, it flew over the blue waters of the Mediterranean toward Port Said.

  Chapter II

  Strange Civilian

  THUNDER JIM WADE was in Smyrna, eating shish kebab and drinking coffee of incredible strength when tile message reached him. The wire was, of course, in code. Translated, it meant that Alex Hilarion, in Port Said, had received important information.

  Wade lit a cigarette and called a waiter.

  It was not far by air from Smyrna to the Egyptian delta. Thunder Jim had plenty of time to ponder on the meaning of the message. His business in Turkey was finished. It had not been important enough to require the aid of his two assistants, Dirk Marat and Red Argyle, who usually accompanied him on his adventures.

  Wade had discovered a sabotage plot involving the oil fields by the Sea of Marmora, but all that had been necessary was to put the information in the hands of the authorities. He had to do it in person, for his name carried weight. Now the conspirators were under arrest and the job was done.

  Wade had planned to return to his South Sea island home, where he maintained a laboratory hidden from the outer world and where Marat and Argyle were waiting. Now, however, his plans were changed.

  Adventurer and soldier of fortune he had been called, yet Wade was more than those. Only the few who knew his past realized what had made Thunder Jim a crusader against crime and evil. Others saw the results alone—a vice-lord of Singapore smashed, a slaving empire broken up, a gang of paid assassins brought to justice by Wade’s deadly guns.

  The scars on his hard, lean-muscled body would have made a history of battle and high adventure. He bore healed bullet wounds, the white, crinkled slashes of kris and scimitar, machete and Jivaro arrow. But at first glance Wade would have seemed merely an ordinary tourist, not long out of college. He was older than he looked, in experience if not in years.

  His childhood and youth had been spent in the heart of Africa, in a lost, forgotten civilization that had been sent out, ages before, by the Minoans of ancient Crete, where science and a strange culture had once flourished. Ever since, in a locked African valley, that alien tribe had remained, worshiping the Minotaur, living a life apart. Then one day a plane had crashed in the City of Minos and the king-priest of the city made Jim Wade his foster-son.

  Wade had learned strange arts there—a muscular control that was amazing, though not to the gymnasts of Crete. He had undergone the arduous training of a Minoan priest, learning secrets of hypnotism that later were to be valuable to him. He was an expert at sleight-of-hand, a fine marksman and an idealist, for Minos was a kindly, peaceable land.

  When Jim Wade finally reached the outside world, he had had no experience of hatred, greed, or evil. He encountered it the moment he encountered civilization, At first he was amazed and incredulous. Then suddenly a fierce flame of resentment and anger began to burn within him.

  The youthful idealist turned into a relentless, avenging Nemesis, bringing justice to those who had long evaded it. The son of a scientist, trained by an alien civili
zation and with a body that was a well disciplined fighting machine, he was a man to be feared.

  On an unknown island in the South Seas he had built a strong citadel, a secret hideout where he worked and rested with the two companions who had thrown in their fortunes with his, Dirk Marat and Red Argyle. The scheme had taken years to perfect. But now, in key cities all over the world, were certain men who were Wade’s agents. They could get in touch with him at a moment’s notice by special short-wave radio.

  Alex Hilarion was such a man. It was his message, sent to the South Sea island citadel, that had been received by Arygle and Marat and forwarded to Wade in Smyrna.

  Wade adjusted his safety-belt as the plane landed. He would have preferred his own craft, the famous Thunderbug, but that was at the citadel. The amphibian glided, motors idling, toward the landing jetty. When it was made fast, Wade was the first passenger to alight.

  A hot sun blazed down from a blue sky that was like an oven. He wiped the perspiration from his bronzed forehead.

  Hailing a taxi, he presently found himself before the drug store of Alex Hilarion. Hilarion was a registered pharmacist, but his real work was the task of representing Thunder Jim in this vicinity.

  He met Wade at the door, a short, squat man with a chocolate-brown face and grizzled gray hair. There was surprise in his eyes as he gripped the taller man’s hand.

  “This is quick work,” he said, without a trace of accent. “How are you, Wade?”

  “Fine—I was in Smyrna,” Thunder Jim explained. “What’s up, Alex? It must be trouble, or you wouldn’t have called.”

  Hilarion led the way into the dim recesses of the store. He called an order to his clerk and ushered Wade into the back room. After carefully locking the door, he set out cigarettes and liquor. Then he explained in terse, vivid sentences. Wade listened.

  “Okay,” he said at last. “Now where’s that officer?”

  “Harding? I don’t know. He wouldn’t stay. I’ve an idea he meant to follow up this business himself.”

  “Whatever it is.” Thunder Jim frowned. “Let’s get it straight. A white man, disguised as an Arab, was chased out of Saudi Arabia. He took refuge in a Transjordanian fort. The only message he gave was something about Basra and a man named Eric Godoy.”

  “And somebody called Klett,” Hilarion supplemented. “I’ve been investigating for you. Godoy is a fairly well-to-do merchant in Basra. I don’t know anything about Klett.”

  “A merchant?”

  “He handles practically everything, but most of his money came from the Bahrein Archipelago.”

  “Pearls, eh?”

  Wade knew of the independent Arab state of Bahrein, in the Persian Gulf off the Arabian coast, where pearl-fishing was the chief industry.

  “He has some petroleum interests there, too,” Hilarion added, “I didn’t get in touch with him directly.”

  “Just as well. What else?”

  Hilarion shook his grizzled head.

  “Nothing definite. I’ve been getting stories of unrest around this neighborhood, even talk of a Jihad. There’s a mullah who seems to have been stirring up a lot of trouble around Nefud.”

  THE telephone rang sharply. Hilarion lifted the receiver, with an apologetic glance at Wade. After a moment, he sucked in his breath sharply.

  “What? But how—”

  Wade felt a warning premonition of danger. He didn’t move, but his eyes seemed to grow cold and fixed, like chips of black ice. When Hilarion hung up, Thunder Jim was waiting.

  “Well?”

  “That call was from Basra. I had a man checking up.” Hilarion moistened his lips. “That army officer, Harding—”

  “Yes?”

  “He’s been murdered, shot in the back. And Eric Godoy has been arrested for killing him.”

  “Okay,” Wade said. “I’m flying to Basra as soon as I can get a plane. Alex, I want you to send a message to Marat and Argyle. Use the scrambler code. Tell them to join me at Basra in the Thunderbug, immediately.”

  Hilarion was already on his feet, moving swiftly. Wade flipped a hand in salute and turned to the door. So Captain Harding had been killed! His investigations must have proved dangerously successful. Well, the next step logically would be an interview with Eric Godoy, the Basra merchant, provided, of course, that the game was really worth the candle.

  Wade had a reputation as a trouble-shooter. A man in his position was often troubled by cranks, who would take advantage of some incident like this Arab raid to get in contact with him. Yet a British army officer would scarcely act thus. More than likely, there was something of interest behind this mystery, but how important it would turn out to be, Wade could not yet afford to guess.

  By air, Basra was about a thousand miles east of Port Said, just above the Thirtieth Parallel. From the Arabian Sea, the curved finger of the Persian Gulf probed up to meet the Tigris-Euphrates. There, south of Baghdad and Isfahan, was Basra, with its mosques and colorful bazaars.

  Wade arranged to board the next plane east. Though luck was with him in getting a ticket, he still had several hours to wait. He spent the interval in checking up on Eric Godoy, but learned little of significance.

  A Port Said oil man, whom he knew slightly, riffled through his files and finally supplied the information that Godoy’s reputation was that of an honest merchant. He had been in business for a score of years and invested, as the mood struck him, in everything from petroleum, the date groves of Qurna and iron, to the wool industry of northern Iraq. He subsidized, to a great extent, the pearl fishers of the Bahrein Islands in the Persian Gulf.

  “So what?” Wade asked himself. “Why should Godoy kill a British army officer? It might be that the Basra merchant is a crook, and that he murdered Harding to keep the man’s mouth shut. But if Godoy was shrewd enough to pose as an honest, reputable business man for so many years, he surely would be clever enough to avoid suspicion of murder. No. There is something manifestly suspicious about this whole business.”

  WADE picked up his traveling bag at the hotel where he had checked it, took a taxi to the airport and boarded his plane.

  It wasn’t the Basra plane. It went to Baghdad, but from there Wade could take the train south to the Persian Gulf. It was too bad he didn’t have the Thunderbug, he thought. But as matters stood, this was the quickest way.

  The trip to Baghdad was uneventful. The new railroad took Wade swiftly down the Tigris, to where the Twin Rivers joined.

  A yellow tropical moon silvered the river and the date groves bordering it, yet there was tension in the air—tension that Wade had begun to sense in Baghdad.

  It was nothing definite, merely the furtive glances of natives and a surreptitious excitement that seemed to pervade the atmosphere. The place was unbearably hot and the wind that blew in through the open windows was like the blast from an oven. A silvery mosque-dome gleamed in the moonlight and was gone as the train sped past.

  Wade felt eyes fixed upon him. He glanced up quickly, but not quite quickly enough. Apparently no one was looking at him. The man sitting opposite him shifted uneasily in his seat.

  “Whew!” he gasped, scrubbing a pink, plump face with a sodden handkerchief. “Never seen it so hot! Have you?”

  Wade shook his head. Mentally he classed the stranger as a tourist. No one who knew this country would have traveled in jodhpurs. They were too hot. Even the lightest clothing clung to one’s sweating skin.

  The fat man toyed with a light riding whip he was carrying. Then he inserted it in the book he held in his lap, to mark the place. He stared out the window.

  Wade’s eyes searched the train. There was the usual motley collection and, curiously, a native. Usually these rode in their own cars, but this was seemingly a Hadj of high rank, with a green turban betokening his pilgrimage to Mecca. He was a dwarfish, shriveled old man, with beady little eyes that were almost lost in a nest of wrinkles, from which a beak of a nose jutted out.

  There was an unusually gaunt, thin man, with
a jaundiced, yellow complexion and a nervous tic under one eye. He met Wade’s glance, lifted one eyebrow and stared inquisitively before he looked away. Perhaps it was one of these two who had been watching him. Perhaps it was not.

  The train’s wheels rumbled noisily. The whistle hooted mournfully in the night. Across the silvery river, Wade glimpsed an Arab, sitting silently on his camel, face shadowed by his burnous.

  A strange land, this birthplace of civilization! It had remained basically unchanged since Ur and Nippur and Nineveh, cryptic with the mysticism of the East. Though outwardly placid, under that surface seethed a flame of violence that sometimes burst out in the red madness of Jihad.

  The fat man opened his book again and began to read. Wade, struck by a thought, rose and dragged down his Gladstone bag from the rack overhead. There were still many hours to be killed before the train rolled into Basra and Wade had a half-finished novel in his bag. He sat down, the case in his lap. Glancing up suddenly, he met the eyes of both the thin, sallow man and the Hadj, fixed intently upon him.

  He clicked the lock, opened the bag, sliding it to the seat beside him. A shifting of sinuous, gleaming motion within the Gladstone warned him, barely in time. He caught a glimpse of sliding coils and the spectacle markings on a scaled hood.

  The angry, red-eyed head of a hamadryad cobra rose to confront him!

  Chapter III

  Resourceful Enemies

  THE fat man didn’t see the snake at first. He was still immersed in his book. But the motion caught his attention and the volume dropped from his shaking hands. Wades voice clipped out sharply, commandingly:

  “Don’t move! It’ll strike if you do!”

  The hamadryad was angry after its imprisonment, but it was confused and probably blinded by the sudden bright light. Its neck and head swayed back and forth in short, erratic arcs, the forked tongue flickering.

  No one else had seen the cobra. There was a chance—a bare chance—that the snake would not strike, provided it was not irritated. Wade sat like a statue, his brown face immobile. Only his eyes had changed. They were like chips of dark, glacial ice, deadly as the cobra’s.