The New Adventures of Richard Knight Page 12

  “I saw your theory,” the General growled. “And I’m telling you right now that I can’t let you follow it up. My job as Chief of Intelligence is to keep this nation safe from enemies foreign and domestic and that’s what I’ve got to do. So here’s an order: drop this.”

  Knight paled and doubled his fists, but his discipline held. “Sir.”

  Brett pointed at Knight and Doyle. “I know you two guys feel bad about Benita. Maybe there was something going on. But you just don’t have a lead.” He turned to the smart aide who hovered at his shoulder. “Give me the Norway file.”

  The efficient assistant had the manila dossier ready. Brett handed it over to Knight.

  “What’s this?” the agent asked. He’d not heard of a Norway operation.

  “We suspect the Germans are spying out Lake Mjosa,” Brett summarized. “There’s been lights in the skies and some local reports of engine noise at night. I want you headed out there tomorrow.”

  “What about Benita?” Doyle blurted, unable to stay quiet any longer. “If she’s been snatched…”

  The General slammed his hand down on his desk. “If she’s been snatched then there’s nothing I can do! You’ve got twenty four hours to get yourselves sorted out, ladies. Then we’ve all got to do our duty. Clear?”

  “I think so,” Richard Knight answered. He had a large envelope in his hand but he didn’t give it to the Chief of Army Intelligence.

  “Mason, see these boys out. Cut ‘em orders to travel to Norway tomorrow.”

  The aide returned a crisp “Yes sir,” and showed Knight and Doyle the door.

  ***

  Outside, the ex-Leatherneck kicked a chair over. “I thought Brett was one’a the good guys! I thought he was a straight joe!”

  Knight hooked his friend by the arm and dragged him away. “He is,” he told Doyle. “Didn’t you hear what he told us?”

  The bootneck frowned. “That chasing lights over some Norwegian lake is more important than finding Benita?”

  Knight shook his head and hauled Doyle away to seal the Norway file in his secure locker. He selected a Colt Single Action Peacemaker from the collection of arms he’d stashed there and loaded it.

  “What’s going on?” Doyle demanded. He knew Knight. He knew when his friend had picked up on something that he’d missed.

  “Like I said, Brett was helping us. All he could.”

  “Sure didn’t seem that way.”

  “But he was.” Knight tossed the other envelope he was carrying over to his pal. “Take a gander at that.”

  Doyle pulled another 8x10 photo out. Another pretty girl smiled back at him. And next to her…

  “Senator Alden?”

  “Yep. That’s Alden all right. Alden with his granddaughter Honey, just before she disappeared.”

  Doyle frowned. “But that’s not Honey. There were publicity shots of her in her cabin.”

  “No. We saw publicity shots of someone who called herself Honey, who’d broken off all ties with her family and anyone who knew her, who was getting regular paychecks to live in seedy obscurity far away from Maine.”

  Doyle stared at the picture. The beauty who grinned back had a close resemblance to the Honey from the cabin portraits but there was no way they were the same girl.

  Knight pulled a typewritten timeline from the envelope. “Over a year back Honey – the real Honey – took a trans-American flight to visit the West Coast. While she was there, the story goes, she met a guy, disgraced herself, quarreled with her family, headed for Hollywood, never looked back. Her father’s dead so her grandfather, Alden, headed across to try and straighten her out. He came back without her and never saw her again.”

  “You’re saying… Honey was switched, maybe when she flew out west?” Doyle tried to think that through. “But Alden would know when he saw her.”

  “Sure. And right after that the Senator changed his position on a lot of things. Voted against U.S. military contracts. Blocked defense projects. Reversed a whole lifetime’s support of a strong army and navy. Wanna guess why?”

  “Because he knew someone had his grandkid!” Doyle concluded. “Holy smokes! Those mask faced guys were holding the real Honey to coerce a U.S. Senator!”

  “Until he died in an accident – a genuine accident,” Knight supplied. “Then one brave smart girl went to try and chase up on what had happened to Alden’s favorite granddaughter.”

  Doyle stared at the photograph. “If the real Honey’s a hostage then she’s useless now that Alden’s dead! They got no reason to keep her around.”

  “Right. And now they’ve got Benita as well. Benita, General Brett’s ward.”

  Doyle swallowed hard. “But Brett told us not to go after them! Why would…?” He fell silent as it hit him. “They’re using Benita to control the General now?”

  Knight shook his head. “They’re trying. Didn’t you hear what he said in that meeting? ‘I can’t authorize you to go’. ‘I can’t let you follow it up.’ ‘My job as Chief of Intelligence is to keep this nation safe from enemies foreign and domestic and that’s what I’ve got to do’.”

  Doyle was appalled. “A square guy like Brett, he wouldn’t buckle under and give away national secrets or betray his country, even if they had Benita! He’d have to stay loyal to the U.S. of A., no matter how much it tore him up - even if they killed her!”

  “Right. But why couldn’t he just tell us that, there in the meeting we just had?”

  Doyle’s jaw dropped. “That new aide? Mason, or whoever he was? The guy who was hovering at Brett’s elbow the whole time?”

  “Yeah, he’s got a watchdog,” Knight confirmed. “Remember what else he said? ‘So here’s an order: drop this.’”

  “He never said it was his order!”

  “And there’s more. He said ‘you just don’t have a lead.’ And then he turned to Mason.”

  Doyle sat down. “But if we rough up the aide we’ll blow the game and Benita’s dead for real!”

  “Yep. So we’ve gotta play this subtle, pal. We don’t have much time before Brett can’t keep Mason from military secrets anymore and has to turn him in. He told us we had twenty four hours to get ourselves sorted out. I’m guessing that’s how long he can hold out. After that it all goes to hell.”

  “So what do we do?” Doyle was baffled.

  Knight pocketed the Peacemaker. His eyes were colder than that Norwegian lake. “We give that spy something to report.”

  ***

  Mason occupied a desk right outside Brett’s office. Nobody could get to see the General except through him.

  “I’ve got to see him,” Knight argued. “It’s important.”

  “The General’s very busy today,” Mason answered. “You can leave a message.”

  Knight leaned over the desk into the aide’s face. “When I say it’s important I mean it. So you better make sure this message gets through.”

  A bead of sweat broke out on the spy’s forehead. “Sure. What is it?”

  “Tell General Brett that I’ve got a breakthrough on the Benita case. I’ve got the link to Senator Alden. I know about the real Honey Hogan. I know how the Senator was blackmailed. I know about the jokers in the black masks. I’ve even got someone who can tell me where the bad guys are hiding out right now.”

  “You have?”

  “Yep. In fact I’m flying out to pick up the information – alone – at an abandoned airfield at 2230 tonight. I’ll radio the General with the coordinates of the enemy base as soon as I’ve got ‘em. Just make sure he knows to have troops standing ready to storm it, wherever it is.”

  “You don’t know now?”

  “Like I said, I’m going to get that intel tonight. I know you’re new so you probably haven’t seen my record as an agent. I guarantee that I’ll know by midnight exactly who’s behind this and where to find ‘em. All you’ve gotta do is tell your boss.”

  And if that didn’t bait the trap, Knight wasn’t sure what would.

  CHAP
TER V

  THE GHOST FIGHTERS STRIKE!

  The light aircraft came down through the cloud cover, dropping like grey ghosts, hoping to take Knight unawares. They were modified Sparrowhawks, tiny, light killing machines with underslung Browning machine guns, and they spread out to bracket the blue Northrop that headed low shadowing the cornfield highway.

  Knight was ready for them. Even if he hadn’t been expecting possible ambush, the experienced flyer knew better than to ignore his six. He pulled back his finely tuned airplane into a Zimmerman roll that made a mockery of his attackers’ tactics. He flicked the safety off his own mounted weapons.

  There were no less than six Sparrowhawks hunting him. Knight was flattered. Clearly Mason had read enough of his file to realize that he was a force to be reckoned with.

  The Northrop jinked aside to avoid a hail of lead from the lead hunter. Knight ignored him – returning fire was the obvious choice but would have set him up for a flanking attack from the second pair – and dived low to come up under the tail flier and his wingman.

  A bright spray of .30-06 Springfield bullets hammered into the enemy at 2,800 feet per second. The tailman’s rear section became confetti. A spark ignited his gas. The plane jerked once, then detonated in a globe of flame.

  As Knight had expected, the wingman veered hard away to port. That put him right in the Northrop’s sights. Another stutter from the Browning M1917 machine guns and that bogey too was perforated with 450 rounds per minute of aerial death.

  The pilot must have been hit. The Sparrowhawk went into a spin dive. It crashed hard into the corn below, breaking up on impact, detonating to turn the whole field into a blazing grave.

  Return enemy fire forced Knight low. He dropped quickly to avoid the remaining pairs of attackers, now ranged above him on either side. It wasn’t a good position. Knight swung the Northrop down to a hundred feet, deliberately steering right through the black fumes from the burning cornfield.

  Without even looking, Knight reached out and flicked on the dash radio. While he steered his plane at lethal speeds through the choking fog with one hand on the column he tuned the frequency dial to pick up any chatter between the attacking squadron.

  With a rude static squawk he hit paydirt: “Ghost Leader to Ghost Three. Come round and keep high. We’ll go in low behind him. If you get a clear shot, then take him from above!”

  Knight allowed himself a grim smile. They expected to take him as he emerged from the smoke. He grabbed the pull cord that ejected his own smoke canisters, dropping the shells to shatter on the road at the cornfield’s edge. As he squirmed the Northrop round, turning it on a dime, fresh black fumes billowed out over the battlefield.

  The Northrop’s engine screamed as Knight took her into a vertical climb. He shot out of cover right below Ghost Three, reversing the ambush the raider had hoped for. Knight thumbed the button that uncovered the larger .50 caliber weapons in his plane’s wing roots. The automated systems discharged their payload in a wide forward arc, tagging the Sparrowhawk even as it tried to roll aside. The enemy’s starboard wing and ailerons were shredded. The pilot lost control and went down hard.

  “Ghost leader! It’s Ghost Four! He’s got Kaufmann! He’s after me!”

  “Ghost Leader to Ghost Four! Get a grip! He’s only one guy! He’s outnumbered three-to-one. He’s a dead man!”

  Knight decided it was time to shut the leader up. He gave away the fact he was listening in on their communications. “Hey, Ghost Leader, it was six to one five minutes ago! Guess the odds aren’t looking so good now, hotshot? Your big mistake was trying to fly against a US pilot in my skies.”

  Ghost Leader and his wingman powered up above the smoke cloud. Knight reacted by diving down into the billowing bank of fumes again.

  Ghost Four was rattled. Ghost Four followed him in.

  Knight was low. He was flying blind, counting on the endless crop fields to be level and cleared of trees. He could hear the Sparrowhawk’s droning Wright R-975-E3 radial engine close behind him. Ghost Four had to be at least as low as Knight, using the fragile Sparrowhawk’s maneuverability to close on its target.

  Knight activated the dorsal panel that uncovered his air to surface bombs. He unshipped one of his two 250 pound payloads then throttled the Northrop forwards and up with everything she’d got.

  The detonation behind him was deafening. The plane rocked as the shockwave caught it. The pursuing Sparrowhawk was right on top of the explosion. It was swatted over and barreled into the ground, shattering like matchwood across the fume-swathed field.

  Knight broke from cover right between Ghost Leader and his wingman, forcing them to veer aside to avoid mid-air collision. Knight slid back the small service window on the side of his canopy. His hand reached for his cockpit holster, pulled out the Peacemaker, and let off a neat double-tap at Ghost Two. The first shot went wild – it was a long range shot and the velocities were wild – but the second bullet caught the enemy pilot right in the side of the face. The pilot’s eerie ebony mask shattered. The Sparrowhawk went out of control to splash across the countryside below.

  “Ghost One, looks like we’ve got ourselves a fair fight now,” Knight snarled into the radio. “What’ve you got when you’re not shooting down an unarmed Bellanca, you piece of crud?”

  Knight was disappointed but not surprised when the lone marauder peeled off and tried to fly away.

  The Sparrowhawk was a parasite fighter. It was small and fast, deadly at short range, but designed to launch from a heavy bomber or airship. Knight wondered where it had staged from and whether there was a bigger crate somewhere up there in the clouds. He hoped that whoever had staged the attack was also monitoring the radio chatter.

  He slammed the Northrop to full throttle and closed on the fleeing raider. “You guys made okay air pirates when you’re forcing down civilian flights to kidnap and substitute hostages,” he told Ghost One and whoever else was listening. “Like all bullies, you’re cowards up against someone who can fight back.” He gunned the Northrop’s Pratt & Whitney R-1535-11 two row air cooled radial engine to its maximum 750hp and came in after the enemy.

  “Hey, it was nothing personal!” came a desperate call over the radio. “Listen, I surrender. Don’t shoot. Let me put down and I’ll tell you everything. Everything!”

  An unseen commander was definitely listening in. Knight heard the radio squawk of a detonation signal being broadcast. The remaining Sparrowhawk erupted into a fiery ball. Ghost Leader was confessing nothing! That pilot was a ghost for real now.

  Knight checked the skies for any sign of a command aircraft but there was nothing to see. He dipped low, waved a hand at the black Sedan that was motoring after him along the cornfield roads, and headed west to his destination.

  ***

  It was almost dark when Knight brought the Northrop in at an abandoned Kentucky field. The airstrip hadn’t been used for ten years. Grass grew through the tarmac. The control tower and site buildings were stripped out shells. Knight knew the site, though. He’d used it before when he needed a quiet landing strip.

  He flicked on the carriage lights so he could see the ground. The motion brought his hand within inches of the concealed apparatus someone had added to his plane only hours before. Knight and Doyle had checked the plane thoroughly for mechanical tampering. They’d found the radio detonation device and had detached the wires. Whoever pushed the button on Ghost One must have wondered why a similar circuit for the Northrop had somehow failed. Knight had left the tracking device working though. How else would his enemies find him?

  Doyle was waiting for him. The Sedan he’d driven there was well set up, including an empty briefcase that looked like it had brought incriminating papers that might betray the black mask kidnappers. Now under cover of the gathering darkness the two men got ready.

  Knight entered the wrecked control tower and waited. Doyle joined him.

  “Any trouble?” the ex-Leatherneck asked.

  “Nothing I
couldn’t handle.”

  “Yeah, I heard the explosions and saw the smoke. So when they couldn’t take you out with a planted bomb they tried using their planes?”

  “Their mistake. Now they’re going have to come find me the hard way.”

  Doyle peered through the glassless windows at the desolate darkened airstrip. “If this were us, how would you do it?”

  “They’re tracking the Northrop. I’d come in with my auto lights out, cruising quietly, position guys round the perimeter so my informant couldn’t get away, then send a squad in to search here.” Knight checked his watch. “In the next quarter hour if they’re any good.”

  “Better get ready then,” Doyle said.

  Knight doffed his flight jacket and passed it to the Irishman. “Thanks for doing this, pal. You know the risks.”

  “Hey, I’d’a been offended if you hadn’t let me in on the caper.”

  Knight’s head turned suddenly. “There they are. Their engines are off but there are stones on the road. They’re here.” His grin was savage. “Showtime!”

  CHAPTER VI

  THE MASKS ARE OFF

  Less than two hours later, the show was on. Doyle stood in a cavernous platform before the gaunt vicious Nadalmetzger and listened to him gloat. Doyle was a prisoner of the Hostage Academy - but not the prisoner the triumphant doctor expected!

  “I have studied you, Captain Knight. Or do you prefer Mister Knight these days?” Dr Nadalmetzger told his prisoner. “I am actually gratified that you survived my initial attempts to eliminate you. You will offer a fine subject for my experiments and the information you ultimately surrender will be of some value to your enemies – the Four Faces, for example.”

  “Laugh it up, Hermann,” snarled Doyle. “While you can.”

  “There are dozens of people here,” Benita warned. “Hostages while they’re useful, then after that victims in his mad brain experiments.”