Red Finger E-Book

Arthur Leo Zagat

• Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 268

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Red Finger by Arthur Leo Zagat is a gripping detective novel that delves into the sinister world of crime and deception. When a notorious gangster is found dead with a mysterious red mark on his finger, Detective Jack Vance is thrust into a web of corruption and danger. As Vance digs deeper, he uncovers a trail of clues that leads to an underground syndicate with deadly secrets. With each revelation, the stakes grow higher and the danger more intense. Can Vance crack the case before the syndicate strikes again, or will he become the next victim of the elusive and dangerous "Red Finger"? Dive into this taut and thrilling mystery that will keep you guessing until the last page.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Red Finger Stories

Caged Horror

Death Rides the Sound

Death's Red Finger

Death's Toy Shop

Envoy of Doom

Locked in with Death

Death Dealers

Red Finger Meets His Match

Red Finger's Murder Messenger

Spy Poison!

Second-Hand Death

The Spy Who Sold Death

Landmarks

Table of Contents

Cover

Red Finger

Twelve Horror Short Stories

By: Arthur Leo Zagat

Edited by: Rafat Allam

Copyright © 2024 by Al-Mashreq Bookstore

First published around 1935

No part of this publication may be reproduced whole or in part in any form without the prior written permission of the author

Caged Horror

First published in Secret Service Operator #5, April 1935

LONG-LIMBED, gawky, Ford Duane leaned against the dust-filmed doorjamb of his second-hand bookshop and blinked sleepily out at Fourth Avenue, asphalt-paved and deserted. Elsewhere New York was just awakening to its hectic evening of pleasure, but here the day was ended and the yellow glimmer of the storelight behind him was a futile gesture at inviting trade. Passersby now would be too few and too hurried to browse among Duane's musty shelves.

Yet, as a man's figure was silhouetted against a corner street lamp's blue-white cone, Ford's young-old face seemed almost imperceptibly to tighten, and the narrow slit of his eyes seemed to glimmer with a queer expectancy. An odd readiness for instantaneous action quivered in his gaunt body like a leashed spring. It was as if some inner alarm suddenly had been set off. As if Ford Duane had heard the rattle of Death startlingly along this dormant street.

Now the distant form pounds purposefully along the sidewalk, comes opposite Duane's vantage point, pauses. Ford can see now that the man has a pipe in his mouth, that he is fumbling in a pocket of his topcoat, evidently for a match. He finds and strikes one, lifts it to the pipe bowl.

The tiny spark flares up; vanishes as the stranger pulls the flame into the tobacco he is igniting; flares again, vanishes once more. Queerly the little spurts of light seem to make a pattern of dots and dashes—the flashing letters of the Continental Code! P-A-T. And again P-A-T. Then the match is flicked away, and the smoker starts off once more on his interrupted progress toward a subway kiosk.

But the bookman, blue eyes aglow with a strange light, shoots a quick glance up and down the empty street, and shifts his position, lifting a long, angular arm to rest a hand on the doorjamb above his head. Those three letters, of all the alphabet's twenty-six, have time and again come to this somnolent bookshop and its languorous owner. And each time those letters came men have died, obscure soldiers in the underground war of spy against counter-spy, of saboteur against secret service agent, that never ends.

For a nation's existence depends on the secret, perilous labors of unsung heroes like Ford Duane; upon men like the nameless messenger who, getting Duane's signal that the coast is clear, turns at the next corner to cross Fourth Avenue and deliver whatever it is he has for the undercover ace. Something of extreme importance it must be, that it is being brought so openly. Little muscles make a lumping ridge along the pseudo-shopkeeper's gaunt jaw. The blood pulses more warmly in his veins, sings in his ears...

But that sound is not the blood in his ears. It is the sudden, shrill hum of a buzzing gas engine. A motorcycle flashes out from the sidestreet where the courier is crossing, skids around, strikes the man squarely. He arcs, a limp, sprawling figure, high in the air; thuds down head first, sickeningly. The motorcycle sputters a machine-gun-like protest at the collision; weaves drunkenly about, its goggle-masked rider fighting to control it. And before Duane can start his frantic dash the murder-machine has straightened, is hurtling away, arrowlike down the long dim reach of the Avenue, its roar fading out in the dull grumble of the unknowing city.

Ford pounds toward the flaccid dark heap in the gutter. If there is thought at all in his frozen brain at that moment it is that his unknown colleague may be dead, but that the message has not been touched, that it is still waiting for him. Unless it was verbal—unless it is locked forever in a silenced brain!

He drops to his knees beside that pitiful, broken heap, staring into the blanched face which is turned sightlessly toward him, and from mouth and nose smears of vivid scarlet tell their own tale. But it is the crushed-in skull that finishes any slight hope Duane might have that his comrade may still be alive. Ford's long, pallid fingers search swiftly through pockets, through the various secret interstices of the courier's daubed, torn, gore-clotted clothing. Nothing!

The undercover man rocks back on his heels. That, then, is why the murderer did not stop to search his victim!

A VIBRATION, an almost unheard footfall, the sixth sense those gain who walk always with danger, something, jerks Duane around, heaves him erect in a single lithe movement. Just in time! A shadow grows, changes into a man's shape, and hurtles at him. Ford glimpses the flicker of a drawn knife sweeping thirstily for his throat, glimpses a high-cheekboned, saffron face. His fist smashes that face and bone crunches under the steelknuckled impact. His left arm launches another pile-driver blow, and the assailant lifts on the end of the white man's arm. His weapon spirals away, clatters into darkness. The Mongolian sinks down alongside the dead American.

Duane's countenance is now a marble mask, expressionless but somehow dread-inspiring as the visage of a basilisk. A pulse throbs in each temple, and his pupils are tiny, feral. Not many who have seen his features so transformed have lived to remember it. And yet, somehow, he seems puzzled.

The knifer's open attack on him was unnatural, not consistent with the usual tactics of under-cover combat. If They had penetrated his disguise as an innocuous vender of old books, then They would have found some more subtle way to encompass his destruction. The assault must have been inspired by some other motive. For what other reason than to dispose of an interloper who interfered with the recovery of something for which this other agent had been slain?

But there isn't anything on the corpse, not where it could have been gotten at quickly and transmitted with a minimum risk of discovery. The poor fellow had been almost at his goal, would have had the missive at his fingertips...

At his fingertips! Involuntarily Duane glances to the dead hands, at the pipe that is still held in the left, at the fingers of the right hand, fastened so curiously over the bowl. Duane's tight lips twitch; he pulls the pipe gently from between those stiffening fingers.

The briar is still warm, the blackened flakes it cups are still smoldering... And from the left, heavy approaching footfalls thump.

Duane thrusts the pipe into his own pocket, brings his hand out with a small metal cylinder that goes to his lips. The sound of his breath evokes the piercing, blood-exciting shrillness of a police whistle. It seems to echo from out of the dark canyon of sleeping lofts and office buildings. Then a big-shouldered, blue-uniformed patrolman pounds into sight, running...

THE front door of Duane's Secondhand Bookshop was locked now, the volume-filled shelves behind it abandoned to black, dust-smelling darkness. In the rear of the long store, behind curtains slung over a sagging pole, Ford Duane sat on his creaking cot and looked drearily at the gnarled, large-bowled pipe.

He rapped out black ashes, a wet dottle, onto the floor, peered into the receptacle whence they came. There was only char within, and the single hole at the bottom through which smoke might enter the stem. Duane thrust his thumb into the bowl, hooked it and twisted. The inside of the bowl made a quarter turn, slid out of the shell within which it was contained.

The undercover man grunted with satisfaction. The inner bowl still thimble-like on his thumb, he poked a little finger into the place where it had been, fished out a folded bit of thin paper. He grunted in admiration. It was not only a good hiding place, but if a man was captured, a twist of that bowl while the pipe being smoked would burn up any incriminating evidence.

Then he was unfolding the message and squinted in amazement to find it in clear English, not in any of the many ingenious codes used by the Service of which he was a part. Haste! Desperate haste. Time to encipher, to decode the epistle was lacking; it must be written, delivered, read in desperate haste.

And acted then in greater haste than even the writer could have known. The corpse that would lie in the Morgue for weeks, and finally find an unnamed grave was in itself a sufficient warning.

A HUGE ocean liner warped into its pier. In the great, flood-lighted shed, trunks, valises, gaudily labelled grips were being piled around columns bearing placard letters, and their anxious-eyed owners were seeking them out, keys in hand. Seeking them out also were jutting-jawed men in peaked caps and blue uniforms—Uncle Sam's Customs inspectors.

A hand-truck, piled high with luggage, rumbled down a gangplank but did not stop at any of the lettered pillars. It rolled straight down the long concrete passage to the big iron gates at the pier-front, and the guard there swung those gates open for it. Black letters on a white background, pasted on the three big trunks that the truck carried, explained its privilege of free passage:

Diplomatic Baggage

So these three trunks are passed out, quite uninspected, to the broad, cobbled expanse of West Street. And, following the loaded truck a short, wiry individual whose black eyes were slanted in a tinted, emotionless countenance, but who was as dapper as any other rising young diplomat, cat-footed silently out of shadows between the Apgaria's pier and that next to it.

The stalwart deckhand who brought the hand truck thus far tipped the device dexterously, so that the trunks slid off with a minimum of jar. He turns to the Oriental. "Needn't tell me ter be careful, sir. I could 'ear they was somefin bloody well aloive in that top box."

The other's lips moved in a smile, but his eyes were somehow narrower, colder than before. "You are mithtaken," he lisped. "Oh, quite mithtaken." He thrust a slim hand at the seaman; a crisp, green bill passed from it to the cockney's capacious paw.

"Thankee, Sir. Guess I was a bit h'off thinkin' I 'eard a scutterin' an' athumpin' as I come along."

"Yeth, you were," the diplomat sighed. "By the way, would you mind thtepping down to that thecond pier from here and telling my man I am ready for him?"

The deckhand took another look at the banknote, has seen the numeral in its corner, and he became all obsequiousness. "Yes, sir. Of course, sir."

The Englishman starts off to the left, darkness swallows him. The yellow man made a peculiar gesture; a motorcycle pudded softly out of dimness to the right and stopped briefly beside the three trunks. One handlebar seemed a trifle askew, and there was a red stain at the front wheel's fork. The haunched-over, goggle-masked rider listens to a few swift words from the almond-eyed man, then slid away after the seaman who has talked too much.

Almost immediately after that a small black Ford truck purred into view, following the motorcycle out of the gloom. Three short, wiry men leaped from its front seat, slung the three trunks into the enclosed body, slammed doors and jumped back to their seats. Curiously enough, the diplomat had vanished into the dark interior of the truck with those uninspected trunks.

When the first taxicabs started coming out of the Apgaria's pier the only sign left on West Street of all this was a single, untended handtruck. That wheelbarrow-like device was to be still there the next morning.

WITHIN the truck driven by the three yellow-skinned men, the darkness was absolute. But there was sound, queasy sound, and somehow blood-chilling. The scratching of tiny feet, and the shrilling of half-muffled squeals. The rubbing of fabric on fabric, and a low, infinitely evil chuckle.

Wood scraped. A small rectangle of light showed just above the truck floor. It faded and came again as the vehicle lumbered past street lamps. There was the tang of coffee and the heavier smells of meats, of cheeses. Feet padded softly and key grated in a lock, clicked over.

"Just a minute," a voice said, very low, but diamond hard and cold as steel itself. "You die, Maturo, if you make a move to lift the lid of that trunk!"

"Who... who are you?" the diplomat whispered. "How did you get in here?"

The responding voice, coming out of blackness where the light from that opening did not reach, was emotionless, icy. "Look!"

A click, and faint radiance sprayed over an awesome form, a tall dark threatening shape. It towered seemingly higher than the very ceiling of the truck-body, a torso that was an amorphous fluttering black robe, bat-like; a gray-masked head through whose eye-twin slits menace glinted.

But that which focused Maturo's gaze was neither black body nor gray mask. It was the hand that held the snout of a revolver point-blank at him. A hand ebony-black in its glove—but for the finger curled around the trigger of that gun. That finger was not black but vividly, awesomely scarlet.

The Asiatic stared, his lips twitched, a name slid almost soundlessly from between them. "Red Finger!"

In Asia, in Europe, even in America itself there were those—governments or individuals—who would reward with untold wealth him who brought proof that Red Finger is no more. Many have tried to win that reward, but the very manner of their death remains to this day unknown. They vanished without trace, into the limbo of darkness.

"Yes!" The steel-hard speech of the master counter-spy replied to the exclamation. "Yes, Maturo. You did not really think that you could liberate those rats inoculated with bubonic plague here in New York's provision district without running up against me? We are not asleep, Maturo. We never sleep."

If the gray hungry rodents once got loose, through the little hole in the truckside and into the warrens here of grain and cheese and vegetables and meat, no earthly power could keep the dread plague from sweeping the country. Of all the schemes Red Finger had checkmated, this was the worst. Women, infants—none will be safe...

And after a month of the plague, that Oriental power could do what she would in a world where there was none but America strong enough to stand in the way of her mad dreams of conquest.

"No!" The Mongol, still motionless, still leaning atop that chest of Black Death, let the monosyllable slide from his lipless mouth. "No. It was too—"

RED FINGER'S eyes glittered with triumph. "Get away from that trunk!" His words dripped into the swaying silence of the moving vehicle. "Get back!"

Maturo paid no attention. "It was too much to hope for," he repeated, "that I might serve my country so much better than I planned... die, Red Finger!" He heaved upright. The trunk-lid came open with his lifting arms and a noisome wave of scuttering, squealing furry gray bodies poured out. Snarling, viperish bearers of the Black Death.

Red Finger's gun flared. Maturo pitched head-first into the chest whence age-old horror was surging—his protective armor forever useless. But the rodents, scenting the food-odors, darted for the opening.

The American hurtled through the dimness. His lank body crashed down, along the truck-wall. The foremost rat squealed wildly as that weight pounded down on it; the counterspy felt the sharp nip of lethal teeth through the folds of his black robe. But that foremost rat could not get out through the hole in the truck-side. For Red Finger's flesh stopped the hole which Maturo has opened for his exit, for the exit of those rodents. Red Finger's flesh—and his soul—writhed in uncontrollable revulsion at the noisome wave of living foulness engulfing him.

Even then, Red Finger's senses were slipping under the sting, the constant, awful sting of the ravenous, angered vermin. The Orientals out front would soon discover what had happened, and release the rats. Even if they did not, someone would open the doors...

Red Finger's gun was still in his hand. He lifted it, and furred rodents scuttered away at the movement. He aimed the weapon carefully at the front of the dark truck body, low down. Too low to strike the men on the front seat beyond that unseen partition. Too low to strike anybody but the gasoline tank.

Orange flare sliced the darkness. Again the gun spat. The crash of Red Finger's shots was thunderous in the confined space, and the pungent, choking stench of gasoline filled it. The American's scarlet digit pressed the trigger again.

And the interior of that small truck was an instantaneous holocaust of flame, a blast of blue horror. Then there was no longer any truck at all. There was only a shattered heap of flaming wood and steel in the center of Gansevoort Street. There was only a shambles of charred small bodies of dead rats; of three flaming cadavers. And farther away, blasted to the sidewalk by the force of the explosion, a lank, writhing, flaming figure.

A teamster, inspired, lifted a huge box of damp sawdust in his brawny arms and dumped its contents over Red Finger. It was the one thing that could have saved the American's life—that and the thick wool of his robe, the padded felt of his mask. There was no saw-dust box near enough to save the saffron-skinned men.

Later, a mummy on a hospital bed, bandaged out of all human semblance, whispered weak words to a startled physician. Yes, there was a serum for the bubonic plague. In New York, enough perhaps for two or three cases, not more.

Enough to send Ford Duane back to his Fourth Street bookshop—months later—scarred, crippled, but ready to go again when the next call comes, as inevitably it must.

THE END

Death Rides the Sound

First published in Secret Service Operator #5, November 1934

THE shabby stores along lower Fourth Avenue are somehow furtive despite the apparent frankness of their decrepit outside-boxes of "Bargains in Used Books." A film of gritty dust grimes these bedraggled offerings, smuts the unwashed window-fronts, seeps into the gloomy interiors of the shops and spreads gray haze over the absorbed browsers and somnolent attendants within. Those who frequent the vicinity know, or think they know, that its air of hangdog stealth cloaks neither sly criminality nor high intrigue, that it is rather the pitiable camouflage of outlived writings, and of men who have never known life.

Nowhere, perhaps, is there a drowsier back-eddy of musty quiet and stagnant uneventfulness than this. Yet, over one of the drab shops in this sleepy row the scythe of Death is suspended by a spider-filament taut to the breaking point. The merest whisper of suspicion into the ear of one of a half-score thin-lipped, stony-faced men sitting behind the guarded doors of secret rooms in far-off capitals would map that thread. The slightest hint reaching one of a hundred others; ghostly wraiths waging unacknowledged war in the dim underways of a world ostensibly at peace; and eager fingers would reach thousands of miles to sever its tenuous fibre. For something more than the life of a man hangs by that easily parted strand. A Nation's fate depends on its strength.

Death, and the fear of death are silent, invisible sentinels at either side of the pamphlet-hung doorway in which Ford Duane folded his lanky limbs into a broken-backed swivel chair. Beneath their drooping lids his very blue eyes freeze suddenly to icy points and the scalp tightens under his brown shock of unruly hair. The glance of a passerby has lingered a fraction of a second too long on his spare frame!

Lithe muscles coil like steel springs, thin nostrils flare imperceptibly... but the paunchy man with the rusted-black derby shambles on and Duane relaxes. He knows there is nothing to fear from this particular individual; but how he knows, he cannot tell you. There is a sixth sense common to a hunter and hunted by which they recognize each other's presence. And as both hunter and hunted, Ford Duane possesses that sense to a marked degree...

His head turns slowly to a tinny rattle from up the avenue. Its source is revealed as a leisurely approaching pushcart, piled high with gleaming kitchen utensils and shoved by a stocky, shirt-sleeved and sweating man. As Duane spies the portable store a raucous voice calls out: "Pails, axes, teenvare. Pails, axes, teenvare." The corner of the bookseller's mouth quirks.

A bent old woman, Victorian bonnet fastened to the straggly gray remnants of her hair by that almost obsolete instrument, a hat-pin, appears from the interior of his shop. One almost transparent claw grips a dog-eared volume of Jane Porter's Thaddeus of Warsaw and a professional gleam comes into Duane's eye as he slouches erect, scenting a sale. "I can let you have that for..." he begins, but his face falls as the supposed customer squeaks, "Oh, I just want to get a pail from the man; my old one sprang a leak this morning."

"By Jove," the bookseller exclaims, "so did mine! Maybe we can get them cheaper if one of us buys two at a time. Here, you wait and let me get them."

"Pails, axes, teenvare," the peddler's shout is repeated. He has other items in his cart, but his cry is unvarying. Does it convey any meaning to Duane? Is it merely coincidence that the same initial letters recur now in the pushcart man's shout? "Pails, axes, teenvare." Perhaps. But the shopkeeper's stroll to the curb is too nonchalant, too open to have an ulterior meaning. Duane scarcely glances at the pails the peddler hands him at last, certainly they are twins, and the one he turns over to the old woman in exchange for her twenty-two cents is taken at random.

DUANE moves through his shop with no apparent haste. He pauses to straighten a shelf and the shining bucket whose bail he has thrust over his arm clangs against its edge. But, veiled by the lax droop of their lids, Duane's eyes slide over the idlers in the shadows, discreet challenge in their hazed depths. Only the old, familiar figures lurk in the shadows. A tiny muscle twitches in Duane's smooth cheek and he reaches the half-open curtain swinging before the narrow alcove. There, only a rumpled camp cot and a two-burner gas plate indicate his living quarters. He turns to the right, is momentarily hidden from the store-room beyond. A slender wall of tight-packed books moves suddenly on well oiled hinges, swings back into place. The incident is lightning-fast. The musty alcove is just as it was before. Except that Ford Duane has vanished from it.

Behind that wall of shelved books is a cramped, windowless cubicle, not more than a yard square. When Duane seats himself on a high stool and sets the pail, top down, on a narrow wooden ledge attached to the inner wall, a fair-sized rat would have trouble finding room to squeeze in. A switch clicks and a powerful light, high up in the ceiling, pours down its radiance. The man's sharp-edged face is no longer impassive. His eyes are ablaze with excitement and eagerness, his thin lips half parted. His long-fingered hand trembles slightly as he pulls out a drawer beneath the shelf and extracts from it a jeweler's magnifying glass.

Fitting the lens into his right eye, Duane bends over the tin bucket, and scrutinizes its upturned bottom. Faint breath hisses from between his teeth and his hands tighten on the shelf edge. But the powerful light beating down on the tin disk reveals only a number of almost microscopic indentations, scattered at random over its shiny surface, tiny, pointed scratches such as no polished surface can escape, no matter how carefully it be handled.

The pseudo-bookman reaches for the drawer again, brings out a pencil, a sheet of paper, and another object. It is a disk of transparent celluloid, and as Duane places it on the pail bottom he sees that it is engraved with a series of close, concentric circles and radiating lines. Around the outermost circumference a series of letters are etched, and a circular space at the center is blank, except for three scratches very like those on the pail, triangularly arranged. Strangely enough a little juggling of the celluloid makes the three tiny markings in the center of tin coincide with the trio on the transparent disk. Duane grunts with satisfaction.

Each of the other scratches, seen through the engraved film, falls exactly within one of the tiny arcs marked off by the whitish circles and straight lines, and no two are between the same two circles. Duane catches up his pencil and jots down letters, swiftly.

In seconds, he is staring at this cabalistic line:

SBTRS * PLN * DSTRY * GSMSK * PLT * B * T

and his face is suddenly bleak, his mouth a straight, thin gash. His pencil moves again, swiftly, putting in omitted vowels:

SABOTEURS PLAN DESTROY GASMASK PLANT B—T

Duane's lids narrow to hairline slits, and two white spots appear either side his pinched nostrils. Why has the mysterious individual known only as "T," head of the American Counter-espionage Service, sent it to him?

For a long time there is no movement in the hidden chamber, no slightest sound except the deep, even breathing of a man sunk in deep thought. On the ancient continent that lies over the blue curve of the earth and sea armies are on the march, their grim weapons charged and ready, while the dictators who have set them moving mouth-phrases about "usual maneuvers" that they do not expect to be believed. The ranks are forming, but in each bristling front there is a vacant space. Holocaust waits for America, and America, remembering what Europe would have her forget, smiles with veiled eyes and says quietly, "Not again. Once was enough!"

On a still more ancient continent another race waits with inscrutable patience for the Day when the lowering Western sun shall be bathed with the hue of blood. But some among them are not content to wait...

IN MOONLESS, misty darkness two figures paced the lightless margin of Long Island Sound. High above them the vault of a great bridge sprang in a soaring arch, behind them gigantic cylindrical tanks loomed ominously. Squat buildings leered at them from red-glowing windows, seeming somehow diabolical in the murk. But those were only the huge containers for illuminating gas that supply New York, the fires that encarnadined those windows only distilled that gas in long iron retorts of heated coal. Why then are blue-barreled rifles slanting across the shoulders of these slow-moving sentries; why should the men peer so tensely into the low-lying river haze? Why are soldiers on sentry going with loaded guns in a land at peace with all the world?

"Gees, Sarge," one of the guards voiced this very question. "I'm gettin' the gimmicks watchin' for somethin'—I don't know what. What's the big idea, haulin' the battalion off Governor's Island an' shippin' us over here? Labor trouble?"

"No. No-o-o." The free hand of the other rasped the graying bristles on his square jaw. "I dunno as I ought to tell you, but if you can keep your lips buttoned mebbe I will. You should ought to know what you're looking for. Know what you're guardin', Jenkins?"

"I'm askin' you."

The sergeant's voice was a hoarse whisper. "Gas-masks—six million gas-masks!"

"Yeah! What would we do with six million gas-masks? Hell, that's enough for every man, woman an' child in Noo Yawk."

"That's just who they're for."

The private chuckled. "Good stuff! But I ain't a rookie. C'm on, what's th' straight dope?"

"I jest give it to yuh."

"But what th' hell would we want to be puttin' masks on civvies for? Women an' kids ain't goin' to do no fightin'!..."

"But they're goin' to git gassed in the next war. Judas Priest, wake up! Don't yuh read the papers?"

"Aw, those tabloids is all guff!"

"You'd know if you'd been on guard at staff meetings, like me. I'm tellin' yuh the next war is goin' to see whole cities wiped out by gas before we get a chance to shoot off a rifle. But Uncle Sam ain't asleep. We've got gas-mask plants an' warehouses all along both seaboards, an' at the first sign of trouble the masks gets put out to everybody, damn quick. This Plant B's the biggest. Maybe they got a tip-off that it's goin' to be blown up or somethin' tonight. That's why we're here. Orders is take any suspicious characters alive so that we can find out what country's trying the stunt."

Jenkins was convinced. "Hell," he spat. "Any country pulls anything like that, we're going to hop all over 'em. We ain't goin' to take any more Black Toms layin' down!"

"Put my name on that detail too. I—Hell! What's that?"

The sergeant whirled, his rifle barrel slapping into his left palm, its butt jerking to his shoulder. "Who is there?" he challenged, the sharpness of his voice flatting at the river-mist.

The private was taut, his gun also at the ready. "Whatja hear?" he muttered from the corner of his mouth.

"Sounded like an oar. But I don't see nothin'. Guess mebbe it was a water rat..."

"Or some sailor heaving garbage overboard from that Eyetalian tramp over there by Ward's Island. Wonder to me they let her stay there."

"We can't tip our hand by shyin' every boat away from here. That would be a dead giveaway. Now, as I was sayin'... G-gaw..."

The sergeant choked suddenly; the rifle dropped; his hands came up to claw at his throat, were reddened by a gush of blood from a gaping hole where an instant before his neck had been. He slumped to the gravel, the private's lifeless form thudded atop him. And gray mist rolled over two twisted, gory corpses; a hazy mist-shroud that hid them with a softness more merciful than that of the men who had done this thing.

For an instant the night held its breath in shocked silence, then stone grated against wood. The shadowy keel of a rowboat dug into the gravelly beach. It rocked a bit, and two stocky figures came over the gunwale, waded ashore. One slithered to the entangled bodies, bent swiftly to them, rose as swiftly. "Both dead. That was fine shooting, Dominic."

"And the silencer worked beautifully; the alarm has not been given." The other hesitated a moment, then went on. "But I do not like it, Angelo. I tell you I do not like it. There is no war between our country and theirs. I am befouled with the murder of two brave soldiers."

"Dominic!" Angelo's voice was sharp. "You forget yourself. It is not for us to question orders, for us only to obey. Our leader, the all-wise, has set this task for us. But hurry! We have ten minutes to get our bombs from the boat, plant them and return to the Santa Maria."

Dominic still temporised. "There were two sentries, not one as we were told. Perhaps there has been a leak, and the plant itself is also more thoroughly guarded."

"Bah! If I had known that you were such a coward I should have come alone. One of these is a sergeant, he but chanced to be here at the crucial moment. Come."

The two saboteurs returned to grope in the dark bulk of their boat. They straightened, each lifting a shadowy bag. And froze as cold, hard words vibrated behind them.

"Stay just that way, you two." That sudden voice was keen-edged with the threat of sudden death. "Put those bags down in the boat, gently, and your guns beside them."