Indiana Jones & the Sky Pirates

by Martin Caidin

  stern rail, using a protective curving wall to reduce the wind of passage.

  The Barclay was in midchannel when excited calls and shouts rang out through the ferry. Passengers rushed from the interior to the outside decks, pointing at the sky. In the late afternoon sun, gleaming golden, reflecting light, cruised the mystery airship. The incredible giant seemed utterly silent against the rumble of the Barclay's engines, the wind from her speed, and the sounds of the channel surface against her hull.

  Frances Smythe watched with the others. "I do wish we'd sent up fighters to dispose of that thing," she said to the two men. "Rid ourselves once and for all.

  People are beginning to believe we can't touch it."

  Intense light flared beneath the golden machine so high above them. In the same instant, a beam of blinding light snapped into being, a pillar of eyestabbing radiance from the airship directly to the Barclay. The passengers had never seen a light so incredibly bright. It lit up the ferry with the effect of a physical blow, bringing people to cover their eyes, crying out in alarm.

  The light was seen by dozens of other vessels, small and large, at that moment moving across the channel. It flared long enough to bring heads turning for many miles around, and then the onlookers stared in disbelief as a huge ball of flame erupted from the Barclay. From a distance there was yet no sound. Seconds later the force of an enormous explosion boomed across the channel. Moments later the boilers of the Barclay ripped the ferry in two, the secondary blasts claiming most of the people who'd survived the terrible initial explosion.

  The light from the airship was gone, as if a switch had been thrown. There was still unexpected light on the surface of the channel as the flaming remnants of the Barclay began to slip beneath the water, taking more than two hundred men and women with her.

  Pencraft's secretary crossed Dr. Pencroft's office to his private telephone on a side table. On the third ring she picked up the handset. "Yes?"

  Then she turned to the group and nodded to Thomas Treadwell. "Sir? It's your office."

  Treadwell went quickly to the phone. Watching him, Indy, Gale, and Pencroft remained silent as Treadwell listened to the caller for several minutes, interrupting only with terse questions. Henshaw, who had arrived in England by ocean liner only that morning, paced nervously. Foulois and Cromwell were occupied at the aerodrome nearby.

  Finally Treadwell said, "Right. I'll be at this number for a while. Call me immediately with anything new."

  He slowly replaced the telephone on its stand. A subdued click was followed by a tired exhalation. "That ruddy well does it," he said, his face reflecting inner anguish. "It's the Barclay. She was blown apart by that airship. No ghost that. Sent down some kind of light beam, extraordinarily intense from the initial reports, and the Barclay was torn in half. Took most of her people with her."

  Sir William Pencroft trembled from age, fatigue, and the blow of the news. He looked from Treadwell to Colonel Harry Henshaw. His eyes traveled to Gale Parker, whose impassive look concealed her own feelings. Her eyes were like deep glass marbles, and she sat like a stone.

  Treadwell turned to his side. "You're dead, you know," he said to Professor Henry Jones.

  Indy didn't answer for the moment. He knew the minuscule odds of Frances Smythe and Jocko Kilarney surviving the ghastly explosion and swift sinking of the Barclay. Indy shook off the pall of death hanging in the room.

  "Any word? I mean, about our people?" he asked finally.

  "Your double is confirmed," Treadwell said, forcing himself to remain distant from personal loss. "He was one of our best men. One of the ships that picked up some of the survivors found his body. With your identification, of course."

  "Frances?"

  "No word. I'm sorry, Indy. As soon as we hear anything—"

  Gale Parker emerged from the selfinduced isolation that she used to finally subdue her emotions. "Jocko. Has anybody had any news about Jocko? He'd be impossible to miss, and—"

  "Miss Parker, we have every available person and search team out there right now," Treadwell said carefully.

  "Many of the people aboard the ferry were, well, they were—"

  "I'm well acquainted with death, sir," Gale said stiffly. "You're trying to tell us that many of the people were blown apart, or incinerated, or were trapped in the wreckage, and they're at the bottom of the channel."

  "Yes," Treadwell said. There was no need to elaborate.

  Indy turned to Treadwell. "A great many people died this afternoon because this insane group is after me," he said, painfully aware of the grievous loss. "If they didn't believe I was on that ferry, they would never have blown up that ship."

  "You're wrong, Professor," Treadwell said quickly.

  "How?" Indy demanded. "You know they set me up with that invitation to meet with their top people.

  Why, I don't know, but we all agreed to go ahead anyway." Deep furrows lined his brow. "But why would they destroy the ferry? They didn't need to kill all those people. And I could just as well be one of the survivors." He looked from Treadwell to Henshaw for answers, then returned his gaze to the British intelligence agent.

  "The attack this afternoon had a double purpose," Treadwell said. "We've been aware that this group has been setting up a very public demonstration of their power—"

  Pencraft coughed for attention, trying to speak, but his throat emitted only a feeble rattle. Immediately someone held a glass of water to his lips. Gale rested her hand on that of the elderly man. "May I?" she said. Pencraft nodded.

  "I've stayed out of most conversations," Gale said stiffly. "But now it's time for a question. I've heard you discussing the how and why and the means these people use when they strike at us. And Indy—Professor Jones—

  has more than once made it clear that one of the flaws in their operations has been that they use the same weapons we use. Until now, that is."

  Pencraft had found his voice. "What do you mean by that?"

  "Tonight they used some kind of radiation beam!" Gale said with a burst of anger. "I've listened to the reports Mr.

  Treadwell repeated for us. That airship, whatever it is, still races about the sky without a sign of any engines. But with the ferry, the airship aimed some kind of ray, a beam of energy, I don't know," she said, exasperated, "and it blew up the Barclay!" She was pleading for an answer. "We don't have anything even remotely like that!"

  "We know what it was, Gale," Henshaw said quietly, bringing surprise to the group. Henshaw turned to Treadwell.

  "This is your ball game, Tom. Sorry."

  Treadwell nodded. "The only energy in that beam, that socalled raygun apparatus as some of the press are already describing it," he said, "was ordinary light. Oh, it was boosted to a rather extraordinary intensity, but that was all. Strictly for effect."

  Gale was taken aback. She looked to Indy, but he was paying close attention to every word Treadwell was saying.

  "We had sufficient observation of the event today," the Englishman explained.

  "The Barclay was torn up by a huge amount of explosives that had been placed in the engine compartment. It was rigged to be set off by a discreet radio signal.

  Today was their big show, so to speak. They picked a time with good visibility, so that what happened would be seen by a great many people. They turned on their beam—consider it an extraordinarily powerful searchlight—and focused as tightly as possible, and when that light attracted enough attention, they transmitted their radio signal to detonate the explosive charges."

  He leaned back in his seat. "A ghastly sort of demonstration, I admit, but that is all it was. Forgive me for being seemingly uncaring. I'm not. But my job is to discover just what happened. What I've told you is what happened. Oh, we'll have confirmation. We immediately sent an aircraft—we've kept several ready to go at a moment's notice—into the smoke from the blast, and I'm quite sure when we do a particulate study, spectrographic and all that, that we'll find quite ordinary remnants of common explosives.
Now," he pulled himself upright in his seat, "do let me go on."

  He looked to Indy. "This charade has worked very well, Indy."

  Gale couldn't help a bitter interruption. "Charade?"

  "Let me," Indy told Treadwell. "I don't want even a hint of mistaken credit here." He turned to Gale and Pencroft.

  "You see, for a great deal of what's been going on, I was way over my head.

  I'm not a pilot, but," he smiled thinly,

  "you already know that, Gale. Everything I've done has been calculated to mislead this group we're after. The more we could get them to concentrate on us—you, me, Cromwell, and Foulois, and for a while, Tarkiz—the more they were led to believe I was the kingpin in all this. Figuring out what was going on, confirming that this idea of alien spacecraft was so much baloney—"

  "Rubbish, all right," muttered Pencroft.

  "Exactly like the artifacts. The cube and the pyramids," Indy stressed.

  "Actually, we had a bunch of them to be used if we needed them, but the trap worked right from the beginning. In fact, the cube with those South African diamonds had nothing to do with this group flying the zeppelin and those discs, because we didn't even know about them at the time. But Treadwell has also worked with the De Beers outfit and others, just like I have. That, in fact, is how we first got together."

  Treadwell nodded affirmation and picked up Indy's thread of explanation. "So we also made certain that the people we were after, even if we could not yet identify them, would know of the existence of one Professor Henry Jones and his great skills in deciphering cuneiform inscriptions. That meant they must go after Indy, and, in doing so, might well reveal themselves to us. At first, of course, they would want him alive and cooperative. But once they found out we'd slipped them the old Mickey and were playing a bit on the dirty side, why, then they were sure to try to eliminate our good friend, here."

  "You all seemed very fast and easy with his life!" Gale said angrily.

  "That was my choice, Gale," Indy emphasized. "Nobody went into this wearing a blindfold. Besides," he grinned,

  "I had you along to protect me, right?"

  "The point, Miss Parker," Treadwell followed hastily, "is that Indy's cooperation was really our only quick way to get this crowd to show some cracks in their anonymity."

  "Ah," Pencroft said pleasantly, more and more pleased with what he judged to be his own role in the affair. "That's one of the reasons behind our arranging that trimotor machine. On the record, you see, the university, as well as our museum, accepted the cost for that aircraft. It, too, was bait. You can hardly hide a corrugated clanker like that when it traverses the Atlantic! Pack of fools, too, I say. That's what I told them when they laid bare their schemes."

  "But it has worked," Treadwell offered.

  "Then why haven't we figured out those golden discs!" Gale countered.

  "Oh, but we have, miss, we have," Treadwell assured her. "Most of that is attributed, by the by, to Colonel Henshaw. He is a very close and old friend of mine.

  And our government, I should add. We've worked together for years."

  "Do you mean to tell me," Gale said with her eyes wide, "you know what those discs are?" She glanced at Indy. His sudden sly smile was infuriating to her.

  "Oh, we really had some ideas. Right from the beginning, I mean," said Henshaw. "We have some pretty sharp boys in our technical intelligence programs.

  Research and development stuff. I was doing that back in the war. I worked with a Frenchman, some fellow named Coanda—um, Henri Coanda—who had developed a rocket gun for aerial combat. A couple of things we'd talked about buzzed around in the back of my head for a while after I heard about the discs. It just took me longer than it should to start putting two and two together. Well, sometimes even the experts miss the obvious, or memories leak away, like mine seemed to do. Then our group, a bunch of us, seemed to come up with the same conclusion at the same time.

  As if we'd all been thunked on our skulls simultaneously."

  "Which was?" Gale asked, wishing Henshaw would hurry.

  "The weapons those things were using. They weren't any more advanced than the best we had. Or that were in use by several other countries, for that matter. We contacted old Treadwell, here, and then we really started doing some digging into past experimental programs."

  "And that's how they started coming up with answers," Indy picked up the explanations. "They brought me into the picture to look over their shoulders. When they had what they judged were some solid leads, they pounded it into my head.

  That's how I sometimes seemed to be so knowledgeable on the matter. It wasn't what I was figuring out. It was all memorizing what these people taught me, and we figured if I made public statements about the discs, it would simply be more bait added to the effect of the artifacts. It would start to appear as if I was behind stripping away the cover of this group."

  "We did some highspeed photography," Treadwell added. "That was an enormous help. It was touchandgo for a while because we had to stumble across an opportunity to film the discs. We used still pictures and highspeed films.

  Would you believe that out of some sixty cameras we set up with the Americans, only two produced results?"

  "And—" Gale let the query hang.

  "Hydrocarbons," Treadwell said with triumph. "That was the clue! I felt like Sherlock Holmes. You see, there is an exhaust trail behind those infernal devices.

  The films, and those pictures you people took while you were waltzing across the Atlantic, proved it. Remember that huge ship you encountered at sea?"

  "Hard to forget," Gale murmured.

  "Your photographs confirmed what we'd suspected. That monster mother airship, easily fifteen hundred feet from one end to the other, could hardly be concealed in Europe. Population density and all that. The key was that any kind of aerial vessel of that size needs servicing, and a lot of it. Refueling, supply replenishment, engine tuneup, liftinggas refills. That ship took care of that. Those side booms extending out on each flank? When the dirigible came down to the deck of that vessel, a mooring mast and the booms came up to snug down the big zep—well, I see by your expression you've already figured it out yourself."

  "Wait; wait!" Gale broke in. "All right, you have this evidence of hydrocarbons and all, but I still don't know what that told you!"

  "That Frenchman I mentioned?" Henshaw said. "That Coanda fellow. I recalled he told me that if you designed an engine that worked like a blowtorch—suck in huge i gobs of air at one end and set it aflame so you're compressing it, then blast it out the other end—why, you could power just about anything with it. An aircraft, or that great dirigible.

  An engine like that would even fit neatly into a disc shape."

  "No propellers?" Gale asked, amazed.

  "Oh, there's some kind of propeller, but it's inside the engine," Henshaw answered. "We had our people test different fuels and the chemistry crowd said we were dealing with the exhaust from superrefined kerosene."

  "Which blew away the theory that we were dealing with meanspirited ugly little green fellows from Mars,"

  Treadwell added.

  "And which let us force the hand of this group," Indy said.

  "And how, Jones, did that happen?" Pencraft said testily.

  "Well, sir, for starters," Jones spoke gently to his aged friend, "those artifacts are paying off in a way I hoped they would. Whoever is running this group, or at least is

  one of the top people, made a decision that the cube and the pyramids were fakes. But he could do that only by coming to a dead end with the cuneiform inscriptions. They were nonsense, of course, but I made certain they appeared to be real. You, of all people, Doctor, know how much time must go into working with unknown cuneiform.

  And whoever was examining those things came to a conclusion much too fast for your ordinary researcher."

  "Which means," Gale said suddenly, "he has archeology experience! Of course!"

  "That," Indy went on, "and als
o deciding that as unknown as was the metal that Treadwell had made in the secret metallurgical lab, it could be fashioned by any really competent people in the metalworking business. In short, they knew too much in too short a time."

  "Enter one Filipo Castilano," Treadwell added. "Do you recall, or perhaps you never had the chance to notice, the stories that made all the papers about that place in France? That some biblical historians are claiming was the final resting place of Christ?"

  "Do you mean the little French town of Arques?" Pencroft asked.