Indiana Jones & the Sky Pirates

by Martin Caidin

  Konstantin LeBlanc Cordas was a billionaire many times over. Not in terms of currency or stacked ingots of gold and platinum, of which he also had many, but in the real wealth of the world. He owned shipping lines, factories, mines, railroads, huge agricultural holdings on three continents. His closest friends were the power magnates of their homelands: owners of steel mills and ironworks and vast munitions plants. Chemicals, synthetics, trucks, shipyards; they had it all.

  Cordas was blessed with a powerful, keen and inquisitive mind. His thoughts probed like cold lances through problems and challenges. His memory was phenomenal, and he made a voracious daily study of global affairs. He was also blessed, although he had come to regard this

  sense of mood as possessed, with a curse that would not let him rest. It was the feeling—no; the absolute certainty

  —that it had been ordained he assist the world through torturous times to stave off, hopefully to avoid completely, the Ultimate War that he and his closest associates knew was inevitable. It was wildly ironic: the War To End All Wars that ended in a final gory burst in 1918 had simply created the breeding ground for even greater and deadlier conflicts to come.

  These were the men—Cordas and his closed circle— who knew of the terrible massdestruction weapons formulating in the minds of soulless scientists and evil, grasping men coveting the ultimate of all pleasures: power.

  The Great War with its submarines, bombers, poison gases, automatic weapons, tanks rumbling like ironclad dinosaurs across the battlefields—all this had been but a portent of what was already boiling in the cauldron of the next war.

  It must be stopped now, Cordas had finally concluded two years before. It must be stopped by the only means possible. Overwhelming power exerted along every front: political, military, industrial, economic. The minds of men must be controlled, or they would one day respond to the blaring trumpets and waving banners that had sent millions of them to agony and death, and now promised to repeat that horror.

  Cordas and five of his closest friends, five of the most powerful and wealthy people on the planet, agreed with one another. They would sacrifice their families, their friends, their very lives in order to gather unto their control the ultimate power that could manipulate the destiny of their planet.

  The preparations were meticulous, exacting, shrouded in the tightest secrecy.

  They knew of the most advanced systems of the military, of science and engineering and flight, many of which were yet unknown to the public.

  And when they were ready, they knew they must be ruthless. Six people were paid handsome sums to assume the personas of Cordas and his group. They underwent surgical changes to their faces. Their dental makeup was altered to match exactly the six for whom they would become doubles. Their families were sent to distant parts of the world, provided with homes and financial security. When they were safely out of the way, a grand trip was arranged for Konstantin LeBlanc Cordas and his five best friends.

  For their doubles. A grand trip, indeed. Cordas Mountain Industries chartered a huge fourengined Dornier Super Wal II flying boat. In two expansive cabins, located fore and aft in the hull, were twentysix people: the industrialists, a few family members, and friends from across Europe. Tremendous publicity was afforded the occasion. The Super Wal would take off from a Swiss lake on a tour from Norwegian fjords southward beyond the Mediterranean to an African safari.

  A huge banquet launched the festive event. The most powerful group of industrial leaders in the world entered the Super Wal with family and friends.

  Newsmen by the hundreds were on hand to record every moment of the final goodbyes, the famous men and women waving to the newsreel cameras. Fireworks flared over the launching dock and two bands played furiously to be heard above the barking roar of four Bavarian Motor Works engines. The Super Wal taxied to the far end of the lake so that it could take off directly into the wind. Conditions were perfect, with a mild breeze and an open water run of at least four miles. As the flying boat began its final turn the music stopped, so everyone could hear clearly the growing thunder of engines going to full power. Faster and faster it rushed across the lake, a great winged wonder about to grasp lift from the air. Faster, faster; a breathless rush and then—

  The explosion began as a searing point of light from the fuel tanks in the wings. In a moment flame lashed outward, and the great quantity of fuel transformed into a searing fireball that covered the tumbling, disintegrating, exploding airliner, its hapless human cargo being incinerated and ground into bloody pulp. The newsreel cameras ground away, recording the horror, capturing the screams and gasps of the onlookers.

  Later, the few scattered parts of flesh and bone either floating on the lake waters, or dredged up from the deep bottom, were identified positively as Konstantin LeBlanc Cordas and his select entourage. Funeral services, speeches, sobbing, and statues rushed to completion slowly wound down the aftereffect. But Cordas was satisfied.

  Completely. He and his elite group were "dead." Six dead; six alive, but the latter unknown to the world except as Cordas planned the slow leakage of information about their names and their control of staggeringly vast resources.

  Five men and one woman. The loss of Wilhelmina von Volkman was especially a tragedy to her following. She had sponsored musicians, poets, scientists —young men and women of every walk of life seeking an opportunity to become skilled in their arts and professions. And now she was gone.

  Unknown to all, of course, reborn as Marcia Mason.

  He stared through the thick plateglass window in the High Tower of the Chateau of Blanchefort, several miles from a second heavilydefended ancient structure, rebuilt within to provide structural strength and add the most modern scientific and technological devices available for world communications. The second great edifice was RennesleChateau, a virtual duplicate, internally, of Blanchefort.

  Halvar Griffin had made a rule that the Group of Six, as he had named them, must never be all in the same place at the same time. It was simple enough to communicate by telephone cable and wall speakers; watching lips move and faces going through various expressions was superfluous.

  Halvar Griffin missed his wife and children, and wondered how they fared now that their husband and father, none other than Konstantin LeBlanc Cordas, had been sliced and seared in that awful tragedy of the flying boat.

  But each day Madelon became less real, more ethereal, as did the children, for that was how it must be. They belonged to another life, another time.

  The program to assemble the many elements of international power, despite its success, continued to wind a torturous and at times rocky path. Halvar Griffin had been known in his former life as a financier and industrialist, but at heart, and throughout his days at schools and universities, he had become an extraordinarily gifted evolutionist, a man mixing everything from history and anthropology to the psychological and social sciences into a single frame of reference for what constituted the human race. It was not, despite what the moralists claimed with such shrill vehemence, a single race. It was not true that all men were created equal, or that they thought alike, or yielded to the same desires and dreams, or enjoyed the same opportunities for health and wealth.

  Mankind was a polyglot of fierce and demonizing emotions, a great field of reeds able to be bent by the slightest wind, poisoned by greed, avarice, selfishness, and, above all, that eternal and infernal need for the power to dominate as many other men as possible, no matter what the cost in lives and destruction. The very survival of the race was at stake.

  It was Griffin—and he was slowly disconnecting the final traces of his former self from even his manner of thinking and speaking—who understood that the key to the success they sought as benevolent masters of the planet's future lay in mastering the workings of the social sciences. They must develop the means, through semantics, lust, reward, fear, and every other emotion available, to bring all men to believe that survival and their greatest rewards could come only through this b
enevolence.

  That was their goal. So long as none of the members of the Group of Six sought open recognition as power brokers, their task, attempted so many times by so many great empires in the past, had every opportunity to succeed. And they had planned well, and so far had executed very well indeed their opening moves to command the attention, then the fear and wonder, of the world. Acquiescence and obedience would follow.

  There is nothing so deeply believed, accepted, feared, and even revered more than what Griffin knew had been a dominating power through all history. The Great Lie. Calculated disinformation could disintegrate powerful armies, suck the energy from national drive, turn millions of people as easily as a shepherd and his dogs drive a flock of sheep. You did not have to prove to the masses what you wished them to believe; you needed only to bring them to a condition of acceptance. Then they would believe in whatever they wished, from sorcerers and witches to gods and goddesses.

  And an alien race of vast scientific, technological, and military superiority, come here to Earth.

  At first the concept seemed ridiculous. Would people really be brought to accept space aliens as real? Griffin laughed at the idea, but his laughter, soon joined by that of his elite group, was one of belief rather than rejection.

  "Think of what people believe," he told the others.

  "There are spirits in the water, the air, in wheat and temples and lightning and clouds. There are powerful, fullbosomed women who carry dead heroes on winged horses to Valhalla. There are gods who rise from the waters, gods who dwell in the clouds, spirits of trees and bears. Millions of filthy little cats are demonic messengers and servants of Satan. Men turn into werewolves. Vampires are men by day and winged horrors at night. If you lack the wooden stake or the silver bullet, you cannot kill them. The world is flat and you may fall off its edge; millions of people still absolutely believe this is so.

  "Ah, our aliens. Yes, yes; but they will not be imaginary. They will be real—seen, heard, visible, and lethal. They will play with human lives as easily as do the winged messengers from Hades, but they will negotiate with the human race.

  After all, they will impose only discomforting rules, but to break them is to risk destruction.

  Fair enough! If the people of the world come to believe this is heavensent protection to avert the slaughters of future wars, they may well rally to the cause we set. Of course," Griffin grimaced, "they may do quite the opposite. But I believe if we plan carefully and execute precisely, we shall succeed."

  Griffin's disciples, three of them in the chateau with him, the other two listening by radio speaker, yielded more and more to his spellbinding oratory.

  John Scruggs—a terrible name for a wily Spaniard who was the dominant dealer in opium and narcotics in global trade—motioned for attention. Griffin nodded.

  Scruggs, with the cunning of an underworld figure who had amassed enormous power and influence, always cut to the heart of annoyances.

  "Several matters, Griffin." He smiled. "How long, my friend, do you believe the governments we deal against will accept the charade of aliens from space blasting their way around the world?"

  "The governments? As for the scientists, engineers, military men, leaders—not very long at all. Quite a few do not believe it now. They do not know what they face. They are baffled, angry, frustrated, but they have suffered these problems before and before too much time passes they will decide that the rest of this solar system remains uninhabitated." He locked his eyes on Scruggs. "But I tell you this. The masses will believe. They believe now, and we shall sustain that belief."

  Scruggs shook his head. "You stretch the truth too far. You offer a fairy tale and—"

  "Damn you," Griffin snapped. "Don't you ever observe what people really believe in? Chicken entrails and the tossing of bones to tell the future so they may know what to do, and when to do it. Do you trust your life to tarot cards, John?

  No? Well, then, how about crystal balls? Or the muttering of a gypsy reading tea leaves or your filthy palms! Do you wonder about the wheeling and juxtaposition of planets and moons that will foretell your ulcers or your love life?

  Anyone who believes in such things, in luck and charms and amulets and all that idiotic nonsense, can be led to believe in aliens! Especially in aliens, as you put it, blasting their way around the world. So far, I remind you, with spectacular effect and unstoppable fury which, I assure you, we will magnify a thousandfold for those superstitious wretches we must guide to their own future." "Another question, then, Master Griffin." Griffin ignored the surly title.

  "Go on, go on." "Tell me why you have been unable to rid us of that pestilence in our plans."

  "I assume you mean the American, this Jones individual."

  "You assume correctly. You have tried, how many times now? Three, maybe four, to eliminate him? And failed?"

  "Twice, I remind you, with your handpicked assassins," Griffin snapped.

  Scruggs smiled and bowed to acknowledge his own failure. "I submit. Then what keeps this person alive? And why are we so determined to kill him?"

  "Let me answer," broke in Marcia Mason. She explained the meetings she had attended, across the table from Professor Henry Jones, including her verbal entanglements with that insufferable man. "What bothers me is that I have not found it possible to identify so many of the people with whom he works. Certainly that doddering old fossil, Pencraft, from the London university, is hardly a person to coordinate the investigations under way. So there are others. I am convinced Filipo Castilano will sooner or later have to be eliminated. But the others," she clenched her fists in sudden fury, "we still do not know all of them. I am convinced they communicate by codes which we cannot break, and no one knows for certain the entire list of the top people involved."

  They turned as a long sigh came from Griffin. "There is more. I have learned of it only recently. Jones and his group crossed the Atlantic in a Ford airplane. A trimotor with very special modifications for range and performance."

  Scruggs was puzzled. "So?"

  "Jones and his group encountered our ship on the high seas.

  "So they saw the ship." Scruggs shrugged.

  "They did more than that. They dove out of the clouds and they flew right alongside our vessel, even lower than its decks, and from what the deck crew could tell, took many photographs. From those I believe they will be able to divine the nature of the vessel."

  The shrug had become a frown. "That is not good. Our ship can become a target. Even with the undersea boats for protection, it is vulnerable. This is most upsetting, Griffin." Scruggs thought deeply for a moment. "Why didn't you have the discs take care of them? You said their machine was a Ford? The discs are faster by hundreds of miles an hour. Why wasn't their machine destroyed? You also said it was over the ocean. What a perfect opportunity! They would have gone down at sea and been swallowed up in the vastness of the Atlantic."

  "The people flying that machine seemed able to anticipate what the discs would do, how they would fly, and what might be their limitations."

  "By the homed toads of my ancestors, how could they know this!"

  "I do not yet know. But Jones either knows or has deduced far more than what I thought was possible. Remember, he is allied with the keenest technical minds of England and America. But I believe it is his own marvelous grasp of the past and his proven ability to meld many small details into larger facts and conclusions that is so troublesome to us."

  "How can you find out what he knows? The woman has already said their most vital communications are in code."

  "That is simple enough. We will invite him to visit us here," said Griffin.

  "The time for games is behind us. We have consolidated our position just as we planned originally. So it is time to get rid of Jones, to break apart this group behind him."

  "I thought you were inviting him here," Scruggs said angrily.

  "I did. And we are."

  "If you kill him here it would be the worst mistake yet—"<
br />
  "He will not reach here," Griffin answered. "Jones is going to be at the university in London. We know that. We also know he plans a visit to Paris."

  "Which only means," Mason warned, "that if we know his plans, once again we are being allowed to know them."

  "Perhaps. Even likely. He will cross the channel by scheduled steamer. He will have some of his people with him.

  That ship will never reach France, and neither will Jones."

  15

  The passenger ferry Barclay eased from her slip at Portsmouth and moved along the northern coastline of the Isle of Wight, slowly gathering speed for the crosschannel run to Le Havre. The Barclay carried two hundred and nine passengers, thirtyeight crew members, and various vehicles as well as baggage, mail, and freight cargo. She was a solid vessel, well known on the run between England and France, and the late afternoon passage promised to be especially comfortable with a mild breeze and a sea surface unusually gentle for the English Channel.

  The passenger manifest included the names of Professor Henry Jones of the University of London, his secretary, Frances Smythe, and their servant, Jocko Kilarney, who hovered protectively about Jones and the woman. Anyone catching sight of the trio found it obvious that Jones suffered from a terrible cold, bundled as he was in a heavy overcoat and muffler, a warm hat pulled fully over his head and ears. He sneezed and coughed in a dreadful manner, keeping a large handkerchief by his mouth as he breathed fitfully. Considerate of the other passengers, Jones and his two traveling companions remained by the