Martin Caidin - Indiana Jones and the Sky Pirates

THEY CAME TOGETHER TO SOLVE A DEADLY MYSTERY AND STOP AN

INVINCIBLE ENEMY ..

INDIANA JONES Whether slogging through steaming jungles, investigating ancient ruins, or chas-ing grave robbers, the world-renowned archaeologist and adventurer has faced death many times. But he's never confronted anything quite so bizarre as the deadly "aircraft" terrorizing the skies.

WILLARD CROMWELLThe portly, hard- drinking former RFC fighter pilot is known for his quick wit and command of languages. Armed to the teeth, he vows to protect Indy anywhere he goes from back alleys to the Tibetan mountains.

GALE PARKERThe red-haired Ph.D. just happens to be the daughter of an English witch and is herself an expert in the black arts. Beautiful and dar-ing, she has only one slight problem: taking orders from Indy.

TARKIZ BELEM A former professional wres-tler and bodyguard, the huge, swarthy man was as alert as a cat and eager to work any kind of deal. This time, however, has he sold Indy out?

RENE FOULOISThe famed WWI fighter- pilot ace had a dozen passports and his own personal arsenal. The darling of the international social set, he would find this mission "most amusing."

They watched the first train go by, laboring upslope, its wide stack spewing thick black smoke and glowing em-bers. It was a rolling fortress consisting of, first, an ar-mored car built of inches-thick steel pierced with slits for machine guns, with a revolving turret on top mounted with a 57mm rapid-fire cannon. Then came the roaring locomotive, and trailing that two flatcars built up with metal barricades and sandbags, behind which eight men manning machine guns scanned the heavy growth to each side of the train.

It was a killer train ready for anything, an advance scout meant to assure the safe passage of the second train a thousand yards behind, maintaining the same speed along the southwestern coastal flank of South Africa. The sec-ond train held within an armored car a thick safe, triple-locked, bolted to the floor and wrapped with chains. Within the safe was a single bag, triple-lined with water-proof sealskin and thick leather. A bag holding more than a billion dollars of diamonds. Almost a hundred incredible stones, huge, perfectly formed, their destination for-tresslike shops within a walled enclave of Amsterdam.

Diamonds were normally shipped directly from Cape Town. At least that's what the mine owners had everyone believe. But they might depart from Port Elizabeth or East London, or farther up the southeastern coast from the ports of Durban or Maputo. Troops of heavily armed soldiers always accompanied such shipmentsagain, so everyone was led to believe. Often the shipment was

"ru-mored" to be gold, and attacking well-armed gold ship-ments was an exercise in futility, if not stupidity, because of the defending firepower as well as the bulk and weight of the gold.

The name of the game in diamond shipments was sub-terfuge. One man could carry on his person a greater value in diamonds than several railcars jammed with gold bars, and Christian Vlotman, the Afrikaner charged with the safe passage of such bounty, always moved in mysteri-ous and deceptive ways.

It was he who had sent the two trains rumbling north-ward toward Alexander Bay, edging the border of Namibia, what had been in earlier times South-West Af-rica. Alexander Bay lay at the spillage of the Oranje River.

Vlotman had had a deep bay entrance dug long before this moment, and waiting for his train would be a power-ful, heavily armed cruiser that would continue the ship-ment to Amsterdam.

The warship captain would have a long wait, one that would not be rewarded.

As the lead train, its armed guards with trigger fingers at the ready for the slightest interference, came about a turn and began crossing a trestle spanning a rocky riverbed several hundred feet below, a man nestled be-tween boulders on a nearby steep slope twisted a T-handle in his hand. Two hundred pounds of dynamite, wrapped with cables about the thick wooden beams of the trestle, vanished in a blaze of violent light and a massive concussion. Thick beams splintered, tearing away from one another, and even before the glare of the explosion faded away, the trestle began its collapse from the explo-sion and the weight of the heavy train above.

Thunder boomed down the riverbed and rolled between the flanks of the hills, and in a terrible slow-motion sunder the train twisted, rotating and shaking madly. Thin screams sounded above the growing roar of the downward-plung-ing trestle, pursued by the cars of the train now on their sides, still rolling, spilling bodies haphazardly in the fall.

The earth shook from the blast, shook again from the roiling shock waves, and seemed to heave painfully as the locomotive and the massive armored car smashed against the boulders below. Smoke and dust spewed upward, and then new blasts tore between the hills as the steam boilers exploded.

Well behind the catastrophic eruptions the ground rose and fell, moving the steel rails beneath the second train like writhing spaghetti. The train held, the shock waves passed through, but there was no mistaking the disaster that had taken the forward guard train. Immediately, the engineers slammed on the brakes, sending sparks shower-ing away from steel wheels sliding along steel rails. The chief engineer tugged on the cord that blasted a steam-driven shriek to warn everyone aboard the train that disas-ter had struck and danger was immediately nearby. Mo-ments later the train stood still, the engine puffing in subdued energy.

Then the guards looking down the tracks behind them saw the trap closing, as a series of fiery blasts ripped apart the railbed over which they had just traveled.

Now the train was caught. It could not go forward where there had been a trestle. It could not retreat, for its tracks were gone. It lay pinioned like some ancient dinosaur, its deadly spikes in the form of machine guns and other weapons. But like even the greatest predator it was frozen by its own mass.

The guards waited for the attack they knew was imminent.

No bullets; no mortar shells. No bombs. Instead, white smoke poured down from the high ridges inland of the railway. There was nothing to be seen at which they could shoot. Just... smoke? It made no sense as the smoke, heavier than air, rolled and flowed down the ridges to envelop the entire train.

Men breathed in the smoke that was not smoke. They gasped and struggled, hands clutching at their throats and chests, as the phosgene gas spilled into their noses and mouths and savaged their lungs. The cloying sweetness of new-mown hay was everywhere; the sweet fragrance of choking death as the gas spasmed muscles and nerves. Men fell, convulsed, and died.

Phosgene poison gas in its persistent form dissipates in less than thirty minutes. But the men atop the ridges had no time to waste. Colonel Hans Stumpf spoke calmly but sharply to the men awaiting his commands; each man re-ceived the colonel's orders by radio through an earpiece clamped to his head.

"Move out now," snapped Stumpf. The men rushed from concealment, protected by bodysuit armor they no longer needed, wearing gas masks to fend off any inhala-tion of residual phosgene. They scrambled down the em-bankment in well-rehearsed and perfectly executed

moves.

Small packages of nitro blew open the heavy doors to the armored car. Inside, submachine guns at the ready, they found eight men in the twisted death agony of as-phyxiation. They dragged one body aside, set explosive charges about the safe, and retreated outside. Again a handle was twisted and the muffled roar of an explosion sounded within the armored car. They went back inside immediately, ignoring the smoke boiling out the opened door.