The Sulu Sea Murders by Van Wyck Mason

Author:Van Wyck Mason [Mason, F. Van Wyck]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: adventure;mystery;crime;spy;james bond
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIII

DEATH STRIKES AGAIN

Up the stairs three steps at a time leaped a furious and badly shaken Captain North, in his hand the .32 automatic and at his heels the two brawny infantrymen who, cursing like madmen, threw off the safety catches of their Springfields as they dashed upwards. Flood or Esteban Ortega—which had shot?

The answer was quickly found. At the summit of the staircase and frozen in a gesture of uncertainty stood Don Esteban Ortega, a silver-mounted revolver glittering in the claw-like fingers of his right hand.

North, standing in the instrument room, drew a bead on the Spaniard’s thin white form.

“Manos arriba!” he snapped in staccato Spanish, “and keep them up.”

As Ortega turned on hearing North’s command, the expression in his eyes defied description; they glowed and glittered like the eyes of some animal seen by firelight, but Manuela’s father seemed too excited to understand what had been said.

“No es posible,” he was snarling. “El comandante es muerto! May dogs devour his entrails, may devils rend—”

“Put up your hands!” Sharp as the crack of a drover’s lash, the angry captain’s warning rose to the head of the stairs. “Bungler! Bungler!” Reproachful inner voices clamored in his brain.

“Eh? Pero sí.” Slowly Don Esteban’s long arms rose above his head, and the big silver-mounted revolver he still clutched glittered like a beacon.

“Get up there, one of you men,” directed North, now precise and unemotional as a piece of machinery. “Take his gun and bring him down here.”

“There is no need, señor,” stated the old man with dignity. “I will come down by myself. I have nothing to fear.”

“Look down that gat’s muzzle,” Captain North directed the blond guard. “Is it fouled?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Watch him carefully, then; keep everybody below the instrument room except O’Connell, Major Denver, and Captain Macy.”

From the depths of the fortress arose excited voices, and running feet began to pound along corridors which carried the reverberations throughout the whole sun-soaked structure.

“Oh, it’s the sergeant—let him by, soldier.”

O’Connell, ludicrously startled, had appeared—pistol in hand.

“What’s happened, sir?” he gasped, staring at the somber old Spaniard. “Did this old guy get him?”

“Don’t ask fool questions,” snapped Captain North, swiftly passing his hands over Ortega’s almost emaciated figure. He never quite forgot the look in Don Esteban’s black eyes—how they shone with a kind of bewildered exultation, an emotion greater than excitement. “O’Connell, get your wits together and come with me.”

“Did—did they get him, sir?” demanded O’Connell in strained, hoarse tones.

“Yes, they got him.”

“Shot?”

“Looks very much like it.”

It seemed as if all this was unreal—a daydream—to Hugh North when he strode hurriedly across a series of glaring yellow-white flagstones to the spot where the body of Major John Flood lay flat on its back, sprawled in an ungainly attitude.

Despite all his long familiarity with violence and death, North shuddered, for the right side of Flood’s blond head was shattered and shapeless, and blood had already formed a wide, glistening pool which, escaping along joints in the stonework, was creating a growing network of small red canals.

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