Return to Skull Island (5 page)
Read Return to Skull Island Online
Authors: Ron Miller,Darrell Funk
“I doubt if she’ll need any help from us, but I suppose we ought to do what we can. Who’s the gink scowling behind you?”
“Him? Not much, but I guess we can’t leave a white man behind if we can help it.”
“Thank you very much,” said the count, with a snide little bow. “I appreciate your great generosity.”
“Yeah, well try not to mention it any more than you can help. You got any idea where they might have taken Pat?”
“The governor’s palace, without doubt. Culebra has been living there ever since his revolution. It is up on the side of the hill opposite the harbor.”
“That big white place with all the lights?”
“That’s it.”
It was lit like a Monte Carlo casino and I, for one, couldn’t imagine how we could get anywhere near it without being seen. We’d just have to get as many men from the
Venture
ashore as we could manage and rush the governor’s palace by main force. And hope for the best, I guess.
There was no shortage of volunteers, of course, once I’d made it clear that Pat was in danger, there not being a man jack of the crew who hadn’t fallen for her, the poor saps.
The idea that Englehorn and I’d come up with while making our way back to the ship was to sneak as quietly as possible to the palace, surround the place and then see what happened. It seemed like a pretty good plan to me. But then, so had bringing Kong back to New York.
While Englehorn distributed arms, I gave the boys the layout of Las Los. If we kept to the perimeter, we shouldn’t have any trouble getting to the palace unseen. Which, as it turned, out, was exactly what happened.
I had two dozen of the toughest thugs this side of Sing Sing scattered around the palace, which was a dump like the rest of the town, as it turned out, distinguished only by being freshly whitewashed. Most of the lights that’d been blazing earlier were off now, leaving the ground floor dark. In fact, the only windows that were lit were a couple up in one corner of the second story.
“Say,” I said, nudging Englehorn, “you don’t . . .”
“Yeah. I know what you’re thinking. That must be one of the bedrooms.”
My fingers closed on the grip of my pistol until the knuckles turned white. “The dirty bastard—”
“We’d better get going, Denham. It might not be too late yet.”
I snuck up to the front door with Englehorn, Phipps and Bart behind me. I put my ear against the thick wooden panel and listened. I couldn’t hear a thing.
“I don’t hear a thing,” I said.
“Stand back,” said Bart.
I did, since whatever the big ox intended to do was bound to be violent, which it was. The door exploded in a shower of splinters from one kick from a size fourteen work boot. It sounded like a cannon going off, so there didn’t seem much point in sneaking around any longer. I leaped into the entry hall, scanning the space with my pistol.
“Here’s the stairs!” the captain shouted.
Before any of us could make a move toward them, there was a piercing, high-pitched scream from somewhere above us.
“Jesus Christ!” I yelled. “It’s Pat! She’s being killed!”
We almost fell over each other trying to be the first up the broad, curving staircase, but I beat them all, taking the steps two at a time. The stairs ended at a kind of mezzanine that went off to the right and left and I paused for a moment, not sure which way to go. Then there was a kind of low, ululating wail—a whimpering cry of sheer horror and pain that sent an icy shudder down my spine. I’d forgotten that the lit windows we’d seen from outside would’ve been in a room to my left. I ran down the hall in that direction, Englehorn, Phipps and Bart hot on my heels.
The corridor ended in a door. Light streamed through the space beneath it and I could see shadows moving. I grasped the knob and it turned, but the door didn’t budge. I threw my shoulder against it, but it might as well’ve been a brick wall for all the good that did. At the sound, though, there was another horrible wail from within the room, a cry of such animal pain and despair I nearly went blind with rage and helplessness. I didn’t wait for the mate’s big hoof this time, but instead poured slugs into the door until the air was filled with acrid smoke and the doorknob and lock had disintegrated into splinters. The three of us piled into the room as one man, pistols drawn, ready for anything.
“I thought I recognized the pitter patter of little sailor feet,” said Pat.
She was leaning against a big, ornately carved sideboard, a glass of wine held carelessly between two slim fingers. She looked, as usual, like an ad in
Vogue
.
I glanced over at the bed. Culebra was spread-eagled on it. He was in his underdrawers and his arms and legs appeared to have a couple more joints than seemed strictly correct, anatomically speaking.
“The General’s got a pretty well-stocked bar here,” Pat continued. “Any of you boys want a cocktail?”
I said, sure, and I really needed one, too. Englehorn accepted a stiff shot himself and didn’t say a word against Phipps and the mate taking a drink, even though he normally was dead set against his men imbibing while on duty, which just goes to show how shaken he was.
“You fellows just couldn’t be sweeter,” Pat said, “but things were going along swimmingly. Not only has the General decided to take that long vacation to Belgium he’s been craving, he’s also agreed to let Espumoso have the shipment we’d brought all the way from New York for him. Isn’t that just the most generous, big-hearted thing you’ve ever heard?”
CHAPTER SIX
“Shanghai? Why in the world are we going to Shanghai?”
It seemed a reasonable question. I mean, I was safely away from Dewey’s clutches, I hoped, and Pat had successfully delivered her cargo of contraband and Shanghai was halfway around the world. So I asked again, “Why Shanghai?”
“You don’t think I just gave away all those weapons, did you?”
“Well, I—”
“That wouldn’t make very good business sense, would it?”
“I suppose not. But
Shanghai
?”
“Look, what else do you expect me to do with a bunch of seaplanes?
I had no ready answer for that. She’d gotten the planes from Espumoso as payment for the arms she’d delivered. There were two antiques and a modern job the general had seized from an unlucky round-the-Caribbean flyer. At the moment they lay dismantled in the hold.
“Maybe the Smithsonian’ll take two of the kites. They’re old enough.”
“There’s a lot going on in China right now. I can make a good deal for the planes, whatever condition they’re in. Besides, we’ll have all the time it takes to get there to fix em up.”
“Well, why not, Denham?” said Englehorn. “What else’ve you got to do, anyway? Might as well come along with us as do anything else. I can pick up a cargo in Shanghai. All in all we oughta do pretty well for ourselves. Like Miss Wildman says, there’s a lot going on in the East right now.”
I wanted to say that I already had plenty going on in my life, but held my tongue. I could see that any argument from me wasn’t going to make a load of difference. The
Venture
was going to China with me or without me. And, well—and there
was
Patricia Wildman, after all, so I figured it ought to be
with
me.
It’s a long way from San Serif to Shanghai but I can’t say the journey was particularly unpleasant. Pat continued her daily routine on the foredeck, which certainly never bored
me
—and kept the crew so entertained that Englehorn finally had to get tough with the men. She did this rain or shine, which seemed more than a little obsessive to me, not that I’m complaining, understand. After all, I could see her as easily from inside the bridge as outside. You’d think that I’d’ve gotten to know her better, given that we spent so much time together for something like a month, but she was just too damned good at skirting questions that seemed to cut a little too close to her personal history, about which I still knew but next to nothing. Not that she didn’t talk—she talked all right. She would rattle on for hours, God knows, about every damn subject in the world—but once I was back in my cabin, when I started sorting through everything she’d said, I’d realize that she’d in fact said very little. Well, little enough about herself at any rate—she had pretty definite opinions about everything else on the planet, and there didn’t seem to be many subjects she didn’t know something about. Maybe she got all her money winning radio quiz shows.
We ate all our meals together, but I don’t mean to suggest that we had private little tête-à-têtes, if tête-à-tête is the word I want. We invariably ate at the captain’s table, joined by whomever of his officers weren’t on watch (and, brother, was the competition ever hot for that privilege!). This pretty much put a damper on any more intimate qualities toward which I might have otherwise liked to see the conversation tend. Instead, it would usually turn out that Pat knew as much or more about such things as celestial navigation, diesel engines and the right-of-passage customs of the Solomon Islanders as any man aboard, Englehorn included. She could even tie a bowline with one hand, which was something none of the crew could do. So I was usually relegated to the role of silent onlooker while the crusty old salts fawned all over Pat as though she were Davy Jones’ own sister. Which she might have been for all I knew.
Our first port of call after leaving the canal was Honolulu, where we stopped to refuel and pick up a load of pineapples and sugar. Pat and I succeeded in eluding the captain and his officers and spent a pleasant couple of hours strolling through the town. It was nice being someplace where no one knew who I was—and even nicer doing so with a very pretty girl on my arm.
“Have you been to Hawaii before?” I asked.
“Honolulu
is
the loveliest little city, isn’t it?” she said, which was the kind of non-answer I’d pretty much come to expect.
“Well, I haven’t been here in years. It’s sure changed a lot since then. Hell of a lot of sailors everywhere,” I added, nodding at a group standing in front of a barber shop, ogling Pat.
“I noticed that. Schofield Barracks is around here somewhere, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
I suggested a ride up to the top of Diamond Head, which Pat readily agreed to. I hired a cab from the line at the beach and we started tooling along the road that wound toward the mountain. We didn’t get very far, though.
“What’s this?” Pat asked as the cab squealed to a stop.
“Looks like a road block,” I replied as an MP came up to the driver’s window.
“Where you folks headed?”
“Thought we’d take a drive up to Diamond Head.”
“Not today, I’m afraid, sir.”
“Why not?”
“Maneuvers, sir.”
“Maneuvers? Maneuvers for what?”
“That’s all I can tell you, sir. Orders direct from General Moses himself. I’ll have to ask you to turn around. Sorry to spoil things, sir, ma’am.”
“Well, that’s that,” I said, settling back into my seat as the driver worked at backing the cab around on the narrow road. “I guess we’ll have to have that picnic somewhere else.”
“Say, Carl, look at that, will you?”
She was turned around, leaning on the back of our seat, looking out the rear window. I craned my neck to look in the direction she was pointing. About a quarter mile past the roadblock a line of trucks was towing what looked like cannons.
“Those look like cannons,” I said.
She squinted her eyes at them and said, “One hundred and fifty-five millimeter GPF howitzers, I would say.”
“Uh, yeah, that’s what I thought,” I lied.
“Those babies could lob shells right over those mountains, square onto the beach, easy as anything.”
“Why in the world would they want to do that?”
“It
does
make one wonder, doesn’t it?”
I wanted to drive in the other direction and take a look-see at the harbor, but the driver told us we’d probably run into pretty much the same problem. All the military on the island had its wind up over something. Whatever it was sure beat the hell out of me.
Once back in town we decided to abandon the idea of a picnic and opted for lunch at a little place near the beach I’d remembered from my last visit. It was filled, not unexpectedly, with sailors and marines, all of whom noticed Pat with unconcealed enthusiasm. We found a corner table and Pat sat with her back to the room. The groans of disappointment were audible. I opened the paper I’d picked up at the news stand outside and handed Pat half of it.
“Say, look here,” I said, “Don Budge beat von Cramm at Wimbledon!”
“Yeah? Well, look at
this
: the Chinese are threatening to bomb Shanghai.”
“That’s great! It sounds as though they don’t need our help at all.”
She glared at me with those weird eyes of hers, which was her usual answer when I said something she thought was stupid.
“Well, all right then. So the Chinese need your planes to throw the Japs out of China. But why go to Shanghai? That’d be the last place we ought to show up. It must be crawling with Japs.”
“I have no doubt but that it is. But the man I’m supposed to meet has a place in the International Settlement. We should be safe enough there, I would think.”
“You would, huh? We’re not smuggling in kewpie dolls, you know—the Japs are hardly going to overlook a pair of seaplanes.”
“I’ve got that all figured out, don’t you worry.”
“Yeah, you’ve never given me anything to worry about. Say, you seemed to know an awful lot about what was going on up on Diamond Head, now that I’m thinking about it.”
“Sure I do. It’s all part and parcel with my mission to Shanghai. The Japs are threatening the entire Pacific, that should be clear to anyone with half the brain to see it. If they can be stopped short in China—well, it can’t hurt, that’s all.”
“You think that’s what all the fooferaw around here is about? The
Japanese
? Hell, there ain’t nothing going to happen around here—the Japs’d be nuts to attack Honolulu, for Christ’s sake, even if they could manage it, which they can’t.”
“Here’s our lunch. Let’s eat—I’m starving!”