“Coffee,” said Peg. She got up and went to the door of the shack where she’d spent the past few hours resting. Morning light showed at the window.
Eric was a few yards from her doorway, heating a pot of coffee over a campfire. “Morning,” he grinned. “They’ve got a kerosene stove, but I thought coffee brewed over an open fire would be more in keeping with the surroundings.”
A look of disappointment touched the girl’s face. “He hasn’t returned?”
“No, Devlin is still out there somewhere.”
“You didn’t have any trouble during the night watch?” She came close to the campfire.
“No,” he answered. “Both our prisoners are still securely tied up in their hut. In a little while, I’ll fix them breakfast. A continental breakfast is all we’ll be able to manage probably.” He poured her a mug of coffee. “Heard something prowling out in the dark last night, but nothing that wasn’t supposed to be prowling.”
Peg seated herself cross-legged on the ground. “You know a lot more about Bangalla than I do,” she said.
“Glad you’re finally beginning to believe that.”
“What I’m wondering is do you have any idea who Devlin is?” she asked. “Is he, I mean, some kind of InterPol policeman, or a private detective, or what, ‘I'm not sure,” replied Eric. “I have a vague hunch, but not enough hard facts to confirm it.”
“It seems, I don’t know, somewhat odd,” the girl said. “He’s almost like a guardian angel, showing up when we need him.” She took a sip of die black coffee. “What is your hunch?”
“Well, this may sound a little foolish to you,” he began. “When I first came out here I wouldn’t have believed any of this either. Now, though, I’m not so sure.”
“Don’t tell me you think there’s something supernatural about our Devlin?” Her eyebrows went up. “He looks pretty substantial to me.”
Eric poked a stick at the embers of the fire. Sparks flickered up into the morning air. “There’s a story they tell, a legend,” he said, “about a man who sort of looks after all of Bangalla. His purpose in life seems to be getting rid of as many crooks, bandits, pirates as he can. The natives have several names for him. They call him the Man Who Cannot Die, and the Ghost Who Walks.”
“That sounds pretty supernatural to me.”
“The idea seems to be this guy’s been around for centuries,” Eric went on. “That part is probably a folk tale embellishment.”
“Probably?”
“Things are different out here, Peggy. I wouldn’t absolutely rule out the possibility that...”
“Devlin doesn’t look two or three hundred years old to me.”
“I’m not saying that part of the story is true. I am saying maybe there is a man known as. . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. Rising quickly, he grabbed her arm.
“What’s wrong, Eric?”
“Someone’s coming,” he said, guiding her toward the shack where he’d hidden some supplies and weapons. “And I don’t think it’s Devlin.”
It wasn’t.
CHAPTER 26
Otter was lost.
“But that’s impossible,” he said aloud. “I know this swamp. I know this swamp better than anybody.”
He’d been wandering most of the night, ever since he made his run from the masked man.
“Who the hell was that guy? Dressed up like that. Who is he?”
Around his wounded hand, the big, blond man had tied a handkerchief. The Phantom’s bullet had dug a track across the back of his hand. The bleeding had stopped, but the hand kept on throbbing. He could even feel the throbbing in his teeth, in the bones of his skull. The fingers on that hand didn’t work right anymore, some of them he couldn’t even move.
“I’m going to see that guy again,” Otter promised himself. “I’m going to see him again and kill him.”
The trees were stunted and knobby, their trunks and branches a pale, sickly white. The branches twisted and interlocked in a complex tangle, hiding most of the hazy, morning sky. It was as though hundreds of giant, skeletal fingers were interlaced and mixed together.
The short grass was black in color, spotted with tiny flecks of scarlet blight. Everything here looked dead or dying.
“Cheer up,” Otter told himself. “Cheer up, this is still the Great Swamp. I know this swamp and like it.”
Yet he felt uneasy here, and felt certain he’d never been anywhere near here in his life before.
H moved more cautiously. A wind was blowing. Otter hadn’t noticed it before. A cold wind.
The morning had been warm. This wind, such a cold wind, didn’t make sense.
“Heyl” exclaimed Otter aloud.
He dropped to all fours on the swampy ground.
“A footprint,” he said. “Yeah, a footprint that’s fairly fresh. Somebody made this within the last day or so, going in the opposite direction from me.” Carefully he put his blunt fingers into the print. “Guy wasn’t one of us. He’s wearing a pair of really old, beatup boots, not walking any too steady. Drunk? No, more likely, old.”
Otter sat up, slapping his palms on his knees. “An old guy, living around here, maybe,” he said, chuckling. “I just wonder if I finally found him.”
He stood, laughing.
“I bet I have,” he said. “I bet I have.”
The breakfast tray had apparently been sitting there for some time. Colonel Weeks only now noticed it. He touched the coffee cup. “Sgt. Geiss,” he called.
Geiss appeared at the half-open doorway. “Yes, sir?”
“How long ago did you bring me this breakfast tray?”
“Half hour, sir.”
Weeks nodded, looking down at the cold, scrambled eggs. “Get the airfield boys on the phone,” he instructed. “Tell them to get a chopper ready.”
“You’re going back to the Great Swamp, sir?”
Colonel Weeks picked up a half slice of toast. “Just tell them to get it ready,” he said, “for take-off in fifteen minutes.”
“Yes, sir.” The Sergeant left.
The Colonel took a bite of the toast. It didn’t taste like anything. He pushed away from his desk, crossed to a window of his office.
The Commander, their mysterious Commander, had ordered him to stay out of the Great Swamp. Colonel Weeks looked out at the morning, not really seeing anything. ‘1 can’t disobey an order from the Commander,” he mused. “But he didn’t actually say anything about not flying over the place. I can’t keep on sitting here and doing nothing.” He shook his head.
He left his office, walked to the plane field. The halfslice of toast was still in his hand. He ate it while waiting for the helicopter to be made ready. But he didn’t remember eating it.
“These are much better,” the copter pilot was saying. He tapped a finger against his wraparound dark glasses. His name was Yates, a sergeant, and he had a faint drawl. “Now your regulations shades don’t really keep out the sun’s rays good enough. Leastwise not to my way of thinking.”
The Colonel grunted, puffing on his pipe. He reminded himself that Sgt. Yates was an excellent pilot.
“My old pappy,” continued Yates, “always smoked a pipe. He had a favorite chair, favorite footstool and, I mean to tell you, he had a favorite pipe. Now, one time, that favorite pipe of my pappy’s got itself lost. He dang-near ripped up the floor hunting around for it. Turned out, it had slipped down behind the cushion of his favorite chair. It was a corncob pipe, this favorite pipe of my pappy’s. You ever smoke a corncob, Colonel?”
“No.” Weeks lifted his binoculars from his lap and began scanning the countryside below.
“We’re about a mile south of the Great Swamp,” said Yates. “Now my pappy always maintained you had to age a corncob just right. What he’d do, he’d tie a string around his and lower it into a jug of . . .” “Sgt. Yates,” said the Colonel, “you do realize, don’t you, that Sgt. Bamum and Corp. Mchanga are still missing?”
Yates’ eyes blinked behind his dark gl
asses. “Well, now, Colonel, I’ll tell you something else my pappy told me,” he answered. “Pappy said, of all the things that didn’t do no good in this world, fretting was at the top of the list. I reckon as how I’ve known both Bamum and Mchanga ’bout as long as you have. If I figured fretting and sighing would find them, well, I’d do a powerful lot of it. But it won’t.”
Colonel Weeks glanced at him, then went back to his binoculars. “Sorry, Sergeant,” he said. “I forgot we all react to trouble in different ways. Say, look there.” The helicopter was over the swamp now. “You spot something, sir?”
“I think so,” replied the Colonel. “That damned mist, though, makes it difficult. But, yes, look there. That looks like a column of smoke rising up.”
“Let’s get us a better look at that,” suggested Yates.
CHAPTER 27
A single fly walked along the window ledge. It buzzed angrily, rose up and banged against the blurred pane of glass.
“You’re sure,” asked Peg, “you heard something?” Eric was standing near the window, looking out. ‘Yes, they’re out there someplace.” He was holding a rifle.
With the girl’s help, he’d moved the room’s few pieces of furniture against the walls of the shack. The walls were thin, and Eric was hoping the wooden table, the two rickety chairs and the old cot would serve as partial shields if any shooting started.
“We’ve been huddled in here for a half hour,” said the blond girl.
“Closer to fifteen minutes.”
“I should have brought the pot of coffee in.”
Eric pressed his back flat against the wall, watching the morning out of the comer of his eye. “They must have noticed the campfire.”
“For all they knew that was simply the two they left behind.”
“No, something gave us away,” said Eric. “Otherwise, they would have come right into camp.”
“How many of them do you think there are?”
“Not absolutely sure. I heard at least two men coming through the brush,” said Eric. “So I dragged you in here. But I haven’t heard anything else out of them.” “Do you think my uncle could be one of them? If he is, r might be able to . .
“Your uncle’s not in charge of the gang,” Eric reminded her. “He has to do what he’s told. There’s already an order out to kill both of us.”
The window exploded. Fragments of jagged glass splashed into the room. A bullet thunked into the low ceiling.
A second shot followed, slapping into the wall. “Stay down, Peggy. Keep behind that table.”
The table was on its side, the top serving as a shield.
“Can you hear me, jungle cops?” called someone outside.
Eric didn’t answer.
“You two come out of there now, hands over your heads!”
“They know how many of us there are,” said Eric. “Know we don’t have re-enforcements around.” “Probably they untied the two men we wrapped up.
“Come out and nobody will get hurt!”
Peg shook her head. “I don’t believe they’ll keep that promise.”
“No, I’m sure they won’t,” said Eric. “Still, we may be able to hold them off until Devlin gets back.”
“We don’t know when that will be.”
“We’ve only got two choices,” said Eric. “Fight or quit.”
Half of the window on the opposite side of the room was shattered.
Eric thrust the barrel of his rifle out the new opening, fired three random shots before ducking.
“I guess I didn’t hit anyone,” he said after a moment.
More shots came whizzing in through the glassless windows.
The walls of the shack were splintered.
“This isn’t the ideal place to make our last stand.” Peg selected a rifle from the scatter of them on the floor.
Eric watched her load the weapon she’d picked. “I forgot to ask you before,” he said. “You know how to handle a rifle?”
“Some,” she replied. “I took lessons at a gun club in Connecticut before coming over here.”
She waited until another volley of shots had come slamming in from outside. She calmly stood and fired out at the besieging Swamp Rats.
A man screamed out there.
“Sounds like a hit,” she said as she huddled down next to Eric.
“Let’s hope.”
“You got one minute to come out!”
“That’s not a very long time,” observed Peg. “Especially if it’s all the time we have left to be alive.”
“It’s not, don’t worry.” He put his hand on hers for a moment.
Something thumped against the outside wall of their shack.
“What was that?” said Peg.
Eric, frowned, sniffing. “Damn,” he said. “It smells like kerosene.”
“You mean they’re going to ...?”
An explosive wooshing sounded outside. The shack began to bum.
Colonel Weeks put the binoculars to his eyes again. The Jungle Patrol helicopter was stuttering low over the swamp. A wind had come up, and now and then, it would wipe a stretch of swamp free of mist.
“Huts,” said the Colonel. “Some kind of huts. One of them’s on fire. That’s where the smoke’s coming from.”
“That has to be the Swamp Rats’ camp,” said Yates. “I’m certain of that,” said Colonel Weeks. “I can make out one man lying on the ground. Three others are circling the burning hut.” He clenched his fist. “Somebody must be in that hut, Yates.”
“Somebody like Bamum and Mchanga maybe.” He inclined his head. “There’s a place I think I can set her down, sir. Over there, ’bout a quarter mile or so from those shacks.”
The Colonel set the binoculars aside, took his service revolver out of his holster. “Good, land us then.” The helicopter began its vertical descent.
CHAPTER 28
Peg came out of the burning shack first. She was coughing violently, hands over her mouth.
“Keep those hands up in the. air,” shouted the tall Kitambaa. He was thirty feet from the crackling wooden walls, his rifle trained on the doorway.
Peg ignored him and continued to cough.
Further off, stood the two other Swamp Rats who’d returned with the black man. One held a pistol in each hand. The other clutched a rifle, with the stock against his shoulder. The other two men, the ones who’d been tied up and left in a shack were free again, and armed. They also watched from a distance as the black, sooty smoke billowed'up.
Kling, the old man, was the one Peg had hit with her shots out the window. He was on the ground, moaning and muttering to himself. Blood covered most of his right arm. His left hand was pressed tight against it just above the elbow. None of his comrades had done anything to help him as yet.
Stumbling, coughing, Eric appeared out of the smoke.
“I’m not going to tell you again to keep your hands way up high,” warned Kitambaa.
The blond girl, a smoky streak cutting down one side of her face, continued to cough.
Eric caught up with her, put an arm around her shoulders.
“What’d I tell you.” Kitambaa fired his rifle.
The slug kicked up moss and dirt a few inches from Peg’s foot.
“She inhaled a lot of smoke,” Eric said, watching the long, black man with narrow eyes.
“That ain’t no fault of mine. If you’d come on out of there when I first told you there wouldn’t have been ' any fire or smoke.”
Peg straightened up, breathing deep through her mouth. Tears ran down her cheeks, washing away some of the soot. After one final cough, she shook her head, brushed at her long, blond hair. “And now?” Kitambaa strolled nearer to them. “I didn’t know they had ladies in the Jungle Patrol.”
“We’re not JPs,” Eric told him. “We’re simply exploring the Great Swamp.”
“Just happened to drop into our camp and start shooting it up,” said Kitambaa. “Just happened to be passing by and figured to tie up a couple of
my men.”
Eric asked him, “Are you the leader then?”
“Right now I sure am.”
After wiping her eyes, Peg looked around at the other Swamp Rats. None of them was her uncle. She looked, once again, at the wounded old Kling, and suddenly gasped. “Oh,” she said.
“What’s wrong?” Eric asked her.
“I just realized I might have hit my uncle, firing out J of the window like that,” she answered in a weak voice. “I got so excited, I never even thought of him.” “He’s not one of the others, is he?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
Kitambaa moved closer to them. “Where’s the other guy?”
“Who do you mean?” said Eric.
“I mean the guy with the dark glasses and a moustache,” said Kitambaa, “who came here with you and helped you lay out a couple of my men.”
“Oh, he’s probably back in Nyokaville by now,” said Peg. “He was only someone we hired to lead us part way into the swamp.”
“No, he didn’t head back that way at all; not according to what my boys tell me.”
“They . . began Peg. She suddenly had to make a tremendous effort to keep her face from giving away anything. Because the black man was facing them, he was unable to see what was going on back among his men. But Peg could see. “. . . may be right at that. I never did quite trust that Mr. Devlin. Devlin, that’s the name of the man.”
There were only three Swamp Rats watching them now. The fourth man had disappeared. Just as Peg had begun to speak to Kitambaa she’d seen an arm come out from around the comer of one of the huts. The arm had wound around the neck of the furthermost Swamp Rat as a second arm clapped a hand over the man’s mouth. It was like watching television with the sound off. The man had been lifted off his feet, his gun taken away from him and then he was carried behind the hut.
Peg was not certain who had done it. She had the impression of someone in a tight-fitting costume and a black mask. As to who he could be, she had no idea. Maybe someone who’d jumped from that helicopter they’d heard flying over minutes earlier.
Lee Falk - [Story of the Phantom 11] Page 8