His heart sank. He was in a cell, no different from his own. He rose to his feet and tiptoed across to the door. He took the iron ring in his hand and turned. It moved easily, and the door swung open!
A faint movement in the shadowy hall outside stopped him. Carefully, he moved himself into the doorway, and glanced along the wall.
He caught his breath. A dark figure crouched before his own door and, slowly, carefully, opened it!
Like a shadow, the man straightened, and his hand slipped into his shirt front, coming out with a long knife. Turk’s eyes narrowed. In two quick steps he was behind the man. There must have been a sound, for the man turned, catlike. Turk Madden’s fist exploded on the corner of the man’s jaw like a six-inch shell, and the fellow crumpled. Madden stepped in, hooking viciously to the short ribs. He wet his lips. “That’ll hold you, pal,” he muttered.
Stooping, he retrieved the knife. Then he frisked the man carefully, grinned when he found a Luger automatic and several clips of cartridges. He pocketed them, then turned the man over. He was a stranger. Carefully, noticing signs of returning consciousness, he bound and gagged the man, then closed the cell door on him, and locked it. Returning to the cell from which he had escaped, he put the stones back into place, then put the key out of sight on a stone ledge above the door.
Turning, he walked down the hall. The back door was not locked, and he went out into the night. For an instant, he stood still. He was wondering about his own ship. He knew what there was to do. He had to fly to the Coast and see for himself. He thought he knew what was wrong, but on the other hand—
Also, there was the business of Lutvin’s killer. He had flown a plane. He might still be there, and if he saw the Grumman—
Turk Madden smiled grimly. He crossed the open spaces toward the hangars, walking swiftly. Subterfuge wouldn’t help. If he tried slipping around he would surely be seen. The direct approach was best. A sleepy sentry stared at him, but said nothing. Turk opened the small door and walked in.
Instantly, he faded back into the shadows inside the door. Not ten feet away Commissar Chevski was staring at Shan Bao. The Manchu faced him, standing stiffly.
“This ship’s motors are warm!” Chevski said sharply.
“Yes, Comrade,” Shan Bao said politely. “The Colonel Granatman said to keep it warm, he might wish to use it for a flight.”
“A flight?” Chevski said. He looked puzzled. From the shadows, Turk could hear his heart pounding as he sensed what was coming. “What flight?”
“Along the coast,” the Manchu said simply. “He said he might want to fly along the coast.”
Chevski leaned forward tensely.
“The coast? Granatman said that?” He stared at Shan Bao. “If you’re lyin—” He wheeled and strode from the hangar. As he stepped past Turk, his breath was coming hard, and his eyes were dilated.
* * *
THE INSTANT THE door closed, Shan Bao’s eyes turned to Turk.
“We must work fast, comrade. It was a lie.”
Madden stepped out.
“A shrewd lie. He knows something, that one.” Turk hesitated, then he looked at the Manchu. “You don’t miss much. Have you seen a man with a Berdianka? You know, one of those old model rifles. You know, with a soshki? One of those wooden props to hold up the barrel?”
“I know,” Shan Bao nodded. “There was one. A man named Batoul, a half-breed, has one. He meets frequently with Comrade Chevski in the woods. He threw it away this day. Now he has a new rifle.”
“So,” Turk smiled. “The ship is warmed up?”
Shan Bao nodded.
“I have started it every hour since you were taken and have run the motor for fifteen minutes. I thought you might need it. Did you have to kill many men getting away?”
“Not one.” Turk smiled. “I’m getting in. When I give the word, start the motor that opens the doors. I’ll be going out.”
Shan Bao nodded.
“You did not kill even one? It is bad. But leave the door open in the cabin. I shall go with you. I was more fortunate—I killed one.”
Turk sprang into the Grumman. The motors roared into life. Killed one? Who? He waved his hand, and the doors started to move, then the Manchu left the motors running and dashed over. He crawled into the plane as it started to move. From outside there was a startled shout, then the plane was running down the icy runway. A shot, but the Grumman was beginning to lift. Another shot. Yells, they were in the air.
He banked the amphibian in a tight circle and headed for the mountains. They’d get him, but first he’d lead them to the coast, he’d let them see for themselves that something was wrong.
In the east, the skies grew gray with dawn. The short night was passing. Below him the first ridges of the mountains slid past, dark furrows in a field of snow.
Shan Bao was at his shoulder. Two planes showed against the sky where he pointed. Turk nodded. Two—one was bad enough when it was a fast pursuit job. One was far ahead of the other.
Madden’s eyes picked out the gray of the sea, then he turned the plane north along the coast to the mouth of the Nahtohu. That was the place—and that long reeflike curving finger. That was it.
Ahead of him a dark plane shot up from the forest and climbed in tight spirals, reaching for altitude. Turk’s jaws set. That was the plane that got Lutvin. He fired a trial burst from his guns and pulled back on the stick. The two planes rose together. Then the pursuit ship shot at him, guns blazing.
Turk’s face was calm, but hard. He banked steeply, swinging the ship around the oncoming plane, opening fire with all his guns.
* * *
SUDDENLY THE GRAY light of dawn was aflame with blasting guns as the two ships spun and spiraled in desperate combat. Teeth clenched, Turk spun the amphibian through a haze of maneuvers, side-slipping, diving, and squirming from position to position, his eight guns ripping the night apart with streaks of blasting fire. Tracers streamed by his nose, then ugly holes sprang into a wing, then he was out of range, and the streaking black ship was coming around at him again.
In desperation, Turk saw he had no chance. No man in an amphibian had a chance against a pursuit job unless the breaks were with him. Like an avenging fury, the black ship darted in and around him. Only Turk’s great flying skill, his uncanny judgment of distance, and his knowledge of his ship enabled him to stay in the fight.
Suddenly, he saw the other two planes closing in. It was now or never. He spun the ship over in a half-roll, then shoved the stick all the way forward and went screaming for earth with the black ship hot on his tail. Fiery streams of tracer shot by him. His plane shot down faster and faster.
The black, ugly ridges of the mountains swept up at him. Off to one side he saw the black shoulder of a peak he remembered, saw the heavy circle of cloud around it and knew this was his chance. He pulled the Grumman out of the power-dive so quickly he expected her wings to tear loose, but she came out of it and lifted to an even keel.
Then, straight into that curtain of cloud around the mountain he went streaking, the black pursuit ship hot on his tail. He felt the ship wobble, saw his compass splash into splinters of glass as a bullet struck, then the white mist of the cloud was around him, and he pulled back on the stick. The Grumman shot up, and even as it zoomed, Turk saw the black, glistening shoulder of icy black mountain sweep below him. He had missed it by a fraction of an inch.
Below him as he glanced down he saw the streaking pursuit ship break through the cloud, saw the pilot grab frantically at his stick. Then the ship crashed full tilt into the mountain at three hundred miles an hour, blossomed into flame and fell, tangled, burning wreckage into the canyon below.
The Grumman lifted toward the sky, and Turk Madden’s eyes swept the horizon. Off to the south, not a half mile away, the two Russian ships were tangled in a desperate dogfight.
* * *
OPENING THE GRUMMAN up, he roared down on them at full tilt. Shan Bao crouched in his seat, the straps tight abou
t his body, his face stiff and cold. In his hands he clutched a Thompson machine gun. The nearer ship he recognized instantly. It was the specially built Havoc flown by Arseniev. The other—
The pilot of the strange ship sighted him, and, making a half roll, started for him. Madden banked the Grumman as though to escape, saw tracer streak by. Then, behind him, he heard an angry chatter. He made an Immelmann turn and swept back. The pursuit ship was falling in a sheet of flame, headed for the small bay at the mouth of the Nahtohu. The other ship swung alongside, and Turk saw Arseniev raise his clasped hands.
Shan Bao was smiling, cradling the Thompson in his arms like a baby.
“He thought he had us,” he yelled. “Didn’t know you had a behind gunner.”
“A rear gunner, Shan,” Turk said, grinning.
Hours later, the Grumman landed easily in the mouth of the Nahtohu.
“See?” Turk said, pointing. “A breakwater, and back there a stone pier, a perfect place for landing heavy armaments. It was ideal, a prepared bridgehead for invasion.”
Arseniev nodded.
“Lutvin, he was a good man, but I wonder how he guessed?”
“That Chevski,” Arseniev said. “I knew there was something wrong, but I did not suspect him until he ran for a plane when you took off. But Granatman found the photographs in his belongings, and a code book. He was too sure of himself, that one. His mother, we found, was a Japanese.”
Turk nodded.
“Lutvin suspected him, I think.”
Arseniev shrugged.
“No doubt. But how could Chevski communicate with the Jap who flew the guarding pursuit ship? How could he communicate with Japan?”
Shan Bao cleared his throat.
“That, I think I can say,” he said softly. “There was a man, named Batoul. A man who wore unty, the native moccasins, and one with thong wrappings about the foot. He came and went frequently from the airport.”
“Was?” Arseniev looked sharply at the Manchu. “He got away?”
“But no, comrade,” Shan Bao protested gently. “He had a queer gun, this man. An old-fashioned gun, a Berdianka with a soshkin. I, who am a collector of guns, wished this one above all. So you will forgive me, comrades? The man came prowling about this ship in the night. He”—Shan Bao coughed apologetically—“he suffered an accident, comrades. But I shall care well for his gun, an old Berdianka, with a soshkin. Nowhere else but in Siberia, comrades, would you find such a gun!”
About Louis L’Amour
“I think of myself in the oral tradition—
as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, the man
in the shadows of the campfire. That’s the way
I’d like to be remembered as a storyteller.
A good storyteller.”
IT IS DOUBTFUL that any author could be as at home in the world re-created in his novels as Louis Dearborn L’Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally “walked the land my characters walk.” His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L’Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.
Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L’Amour could trace his own family in North America back to the early 1600s and follow their steady progression westward, “always on the frontier.” As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family’s frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.
Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L’Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, miner, and an officer in the transportation corps during World War II. During his “yondering” days he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in the Mojave Desert. He won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. He was a voracious reader and collector of rare books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.
Mr. L’Amour “wanted to write almost from the time I could talk.” After developing a widespread following for his many frontier and adventure stories written for fiction magazines, Mr. L’Amour published his first full-length novel, Hondo, in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 120 books is in print; there are nearly 270 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the best-selling authors in modern literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.
His hardcover bestsellers include The Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel), Night Over the Solomons, Last of the Breed, and The Haunted Mesa. His memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, was a leading bestseller in 1989. Audio dramatizations and adaptations of many L’Amour stories are available on cassette tapes from Bantam Audio publishing.
The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. L’Amour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life’s work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.
Louis L’Amour died on June 10, 1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique, carry the L’Amour publishing tradition forward.
Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour
NOVELS
Bendigo Shafter
Borden Chantry
Brionne
The Broken Gun
The Burning Hills
The Californios
Callaghen
Catlow
Chancy
The Cherokee Trail
Comstock Lode
Conagher
Crossfire Trail
Dark Canyon
Down the Long Hills
The Empty Land
Fair Blows the Wind
Fallon
The Ferguson Rifle
The First Fast Draw
Flint
Guns of the Timberlands
Hanging Woman Creek
The Haunted Mesa
Heller with a Gun
The High Graders
High Lonesome
Hondo
How the West Was Won
The Iron Marshal
The Key-Lock Man
Kid Rodelo
Kilkenny
Killoe
Kilrone
Kiowa Trail
Last of the Breed
Last Stand at Papago Wells
The Lonesome Gods
The Man Called Noon
The Man from Skibbereen
The Man from the Broken Hills
Matagorda
Milo Talon
The Mountain Valley War
North to the Rails
Over on the Dry Side
Passin’ Through
The Proving Trail
The Quick and the Dead
Radigan
Reilly’s Luck
The Rider of Lost Creek
Rivers West
The Shadow Riders
Shalako
Showdown at Yellow Butte
Silver Canyon
Sitka
Son of a Wanted Man
Taggart
The Tall Stranger
To Tame a Land
Tucker
Under the Sweetwater Rim
Utah Blaine
The Walking Drum
Westward the T
ide
Where the Long Grass Blows
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Beyond the Great Snow Mountains
Bowdrie
Bowdrie’s Law
Buckskin Run
Dutchman’s Flat
End of the Drive
From the Listening Hills
The Hills of Homicide
Law of the Desert Born
Long Ride Home
Lonigan
May There Be a Road
Monument Rock
Night over the Solomons
Off the Mangrove Coast
The Outlaws of Mesquite
The Rider of the Ruby Hills
Riding for the Brand
The Strong Shall Live
The Trail to Crazy Man
Valley of the Sun
War Party
West from Singapore
West of Dodge
With These Hands
Yondering
SACKETT TITLES
Sackett’s Land
To the Far Blue Mountains
The Warrior’s Path
Jubal Sackett
Ride the River
The Daybreakers
Sackett
Lando
Mojave Crossing
Mustang Man
The Lonely Men
Galloway
Treasure Mountain
Lonely on the Mountain
Ride the Dark Trail
The Sackett Brand
The Sky-Liners
THE HOPALONG CASSIDY NOVELS
The Riders of the High Rock
The Rustlers of West Fork
The Trail to Seven Pines
Trouble Shooter
NONFICTION
Education of a Wandering Man
Frontier
The Sackett Companion: A Personal Guide to the Sackett Novels
A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, compiled by Angelique L’Amour
POETRY
Smoke from This Altar
NIGHT OVER THE SOLOMONS
A Bantam Book / April 2005
Bantam edition / December 1986
All rights reserved.