Warbirds of Mars: Stories of the Fight! Read online

  Mr. Mask kept the portal open as Hunter Noir checked his parachute harness one final time, then dropped out into space. The tall silent commando followed him, and the heavy alien metal door slammed shut behind them.

  Captain Paris gripped his controls and thought, And here goes nothing!

  Hunter Noir tumbled over twice before controlling his fall; his fedora was secured beneath his trench-coat. He pulled his ripcord and felt the tug on his back indicating the silk parachute had deployed. He readied himself for the sudden jerk that would soon follow. A brave man, Hunter never liked jumping. If man had been intended to fly, the Almighty would have created him with wings. A giant white handkerchief was in no way as efficient or as comfortable as wings.

  Even prepared, the now billowing chute above him yanked him hard, ending his freefall and transforming it into a slow, lazy descent. Holding on to one of the straps tied about his shoulder, he looked about hastily. He saw another white flower bloom to his right, and he knew it was Mr. Mask. The question was, would the alien space fighter see them?

  The answer was quick in coming. He heard the soft whir of the Martian aircraft, and then two green beams of energy sliced through the air just below his dangling feet. He’d missed being fried by only a few feet. He watched in anger as the Martian crescent plane swooped under him and started to bank, as if to come at them again.

  Which was when Captain Paris pounced on it, his own energy rays blasting away. One beam hit the Martian ship dead center. It exploded with a tremendous bang. Shrapnel flew everywhere, as a puff of gray smoke appeared and then dissipated within seconds.

  Paris swung his alien machine around, and moving past his two comrades, gave them a final wave. Hunter Noir offered the pilot a thumbs-up signal and then watched the flyboy accelerate, leaving a barely visible vapor trail behind him.

  Hunter Noir and Mr. Mask continued to fall, each hoping the flash-bang of the enemy ship’s destruction wouldn’t bring more Martians before they had time to rendezvous with the Range Rider.

  The ground rushed up at them, and those thoughts were forgotten as each Martian Killer concentrated on landing properly and in one piece. Now was not the time to suffer a broken leg…or a broken neck.

  Both spies hit the dirt in the proper folded position, allowing their knees to absorb the shock. Hunter Noir was toppled to the ground in his hard roll, only to look up and see Mr. Mask had managed to maintain his footing.

  “Show off,” he said under his breath, fighting to pull in his crumpled parachute while rising to his feet. There was a breeze moving over the plains and it threatened to inflate the silk, dragging him off.

  “Just cut it loose,” a voice advised from the darkness behind them. Both the bandaged agent and his tall, weird companion turned around clawing for their hand guns.

  Out of the night, sergeant Charlie Three-Feathers rode up to them, in one hand he held the reins to two other horses trailing behind his own. In the other he gripped a sawed off, twin barreled shotgun, and though there was very little visibility, both commandos could see it was leveled at them.

  “Go on,” Three-Feathers said again. “Cut the strings and let them fly off. If nothing else, it will lead the Martians and their pets on a wild goose chase into the desert.”

  Seeing no reason to argue that logic, Mr. Mask reached behind his back and pulled a long machete from the leather scabbard it rested in. In one powerful swing, he cut the lines to his flapping silk. It instantly took flight like a runaway kite. He moved to Hunter Noir and repeated the act, allowing the agent’s chute to go chasing after his own.

  “Left the Jap sword at home this time?” Hunter asked his silent partner. Mr. Mask simply looked at him. Hunter smiled and turned to the Range Rider.

  “You must be Sergeant Three-Feathers,” Hunter Noir said as he pulled his fedora out of his coat, carefully reshaped it, and then fitted it onto his head. Then he rested his right hand casually over the butt of his .45 automatic in the holster on his hip. Hidden under his jacket in a shoulder harness was a German Mauser.

  “That depends,” the Sioux warrior retorted.

  “On what?”

  “How you like Rita Hayworth’s million dollar legs?”

  Under his gauze bandages, the master spy grinned at the absurdity of his superiors in choosing code phrases. “Hey, I’d never sneeze at those gams, my friend, but I believe it’s Betty Grabble with the million dollar stems.”

  Satisfied with Noir’s proper response, Three-Feathers lowered his shotgun and held out his hand with the reins. “Mount up, gents. We have to put some distance between us and this place, fast.”

  Hunter Noir took one set of reins, belonging to a palomino, while Mr. Mask climbed into the saddle atop the back of a big, brown stallion. He looked awkward astride the animal, and Three-Feathers doubted either of these fellows could ride worth a nickel.

  “Follow me, and try not to fall off.” He kicked his horse lightly in the ribs and started back toward the hill country. His two charges mimicked his actions, and their mounts followed behind the Ranger’s horse. Mr. Mask held his saddle horn tightly. Hunter Noir, riding before him, looked back to make sure he was okay, and had to do everything he could not to laugh. Mr. Mask was certainly no Roy Rogers.

  The top of the scorching sun was erupting out of the eastern plains by the time the three horsemen rode into the hidden cavern. Originally from Indiana, Hunter Noir had been captivated by the raw beauty of the harsh southwestern landscape the first time he’d seen it. Having grown up on the films of Tom Mix, Buck Jones and many others, it was all too easy for him to envision the West as it must have been when tribes like the Sioux, Crow, and Comanche roamed the vast untamed wilderness.

  Coming out of the black passageway, the bandaged spy sniffed food being cooked, and sure enough, once in the main grotto, they found young Darcy Randon carefully extracting sourdough biscuits off a hot skillet that was suspended over a firepit; the smoke rose up and disappeared through cracks in the vaulted rock roof. He also spotted a battered pot giving off the wonderful aroma of fresh coffee.

  Dismounting, Three-Feathers called the girl over and introduced her to the new arrivals. Hunter Noir saw her look of apprehension and realized he and Mr. Mask looked like something out of a Halloween party. He pulled off his fedora, bowed slightly and reached out for the girl’s hand. “How do you do, Miss Randon. My name is Hunter Noir. Please excuse my appearance, but it is necessary that my true face remain concealed. I’m sure you understand.”

  The girl hesitated for a second more, then extended her own hand to shake his, a shy smile accepting his obvious gallantry. “Pleasure to meet you, sir.” As they shook hands, she eyed Mr. Mask, who was now coming up behind the spy.

  “My friend here is simply known as Mr. Mask,” Hunter explained, releasing her hand. “I’m afraid he doesn’t say much. But I assure you, he is on our side.”

  To that, Darcy turned to Mr. Mask and offered him her hand as well. The half-human Mr. Mask awkwardly took her hand, held it delicately in his massive three-fingered mitt and bowed slightly.

  “Sergeant, I figured you all would be hungry,” Darcy continued as she took the reins from all three riders. “Go ahead and have some biscuits and coffee. I’ll see to the horses for you.”

  “Thank you, Darcy.” Three-Feathers indicated the campfire and led his guests forward as the girl pulled the three horses to the corral by the water pool.

  Three-Feathers grabbed an old rag and wrapped it around the pot’s handle. Hunter picked up a tin cup off a flat rock covered with bags of cooking ingredients. He let the Range Rider fill his cup while Mr. Mask merely sat down on another, larger boulder.

  “What about your friend?” the sergeant asked while filling his own cup.

  “His eating habits aren’t exactly normal to us and he prefers to satisfy those needs in privacy.”

  The burly Indian warrior studied the strange elongated gas-masked hybrid, then nodded. “I see.” He took a sip of his coffee and then o
ffered Hunter a warm biscuit.

  “This place is impressive,” the spy commented after chewing a piece of tasty biscuit. “How long did it take you to set up?”

  “Almost a year. It was a slow process and I had to make many trips to properly stock it for whatever contingencies might arise.”

  “Such as this one?”

  “Yes.” Three-Feathers pointed to one of the many tunnels cutting deeper into the cavern. “I’ve more than enough TNT back there to blow up the Martians’ new base of operations.”

  “But first we have to find it, right?”

  The Range Rider smiled. “I did that two days ago.”

  As Hunter Noir stretched out on his belly, he lifted his binoculars to his eyes and aimed them at the compound a mile away, in the center of the flat desert. He started to fiddle with the focus wheel when a piercing howl shattered the night’s eerie quiet.

  “Brother Coyote crying out his loneliness,” Three-Feathers whispered on his right side. Mr. Mask had opted to remain at the base of the small escarpment with their horses.

  “If you say so,” Hunter whispered back. He hefted the heavy glasses and once again set out to examine the isolated Martian facility.

  The base itself was exactly as Three-Feathers had drawn it on a crude paper map back at his secret cavern; it was constructed in a square fashion with a high cyclone fence on all four sides. It was lit up by four giant klieg lights atop corner guard towers, where machine guns were manned by both Nazis and Martian troopers. Squinting through the lenses, Hunter was reminded of a giant Christmas store-window display. Within the compound were four pre-fabricated Quonset buildings that would house the prisoners taken from Adobe Wells. There were also two giant canvas tents to either side of the front gate, which the American assumed were used as the enemies’ bivouac.

  As he carefully studied the layout, he counted half a dozen snake-men patrolling the camp: four inside the wire parameter and two outside. Even at this distance they looked as horrifying as Three-Feathers had described them.

  The whole thing resembled the Nazi concentration camps Hunter had witnessed in Poland, where thousands of Jews had been methodically exterminated before the Martians had appeared and altered the course of the war. Now it seemed the Martians were adapting the Nazis’ programs for their own twisted purposes.

  “You said there were two Martian aircraft?” he recalled the sergeant’s briefing.

  “They’re behind the Quonset huts,” Three-Feathers elaborated. “You can’t see them from here, but they are there. I watched them take off and land at least five times during the course of a single day.”

  “Providing aerial security, no doubt.”

  “On the back side beyond the fence, they’ve a wooden corral with about a dozen horses. That’s where you’ll find the two buckboards they used to transport the Adobe Wells folks.”

  “Good to know. Hopefully we can use them to free the people. Anything else we should know, Sergeant?”

  “There’s a deep ravine between that pen and the fence. It runs for about a half mile to either side of the compound. You should be able to use it to hide your approach.”

  Hunter Noir put down the field glasses and looked at the grizzled Sioux. “This isn’t going to be easy, the three of us against all of them.”

  “War never is, my friend.”

  “But you’ll be the one playing sitting duck.”

  “Not exactly as colorful as Sitting Bull, is it?”

  Hunter Noir blinked, caught off guard by Three-Feathers’s wry sense of humor. Unable to contain himself, he began to chuckle. The Ranger Rider slapped him on the arm and began to move away from the edge of the bluff.

  Carefully, they made their way down through the narrow path in the rocks to where Mr. Mask waited, guarding their horses.

  “It shouldn’t take you more than an hour to ride around to the back of the compound,” the savvy desert fighter directed. He raised his left wrist and pulled his sleeve back to expose his wristwatch with its luminescent radium digits. “It is now 3:15.” Both Hunter Noir and Mr. Mask synchronized their own watches to match Three-Feathers’s time. “I will hit them at exactly 4:15. The rest will be up to you.”

  Both Hunter and Mr. Mask shook the sergeant’s hand and then climbed onto their horses. Without a further word, they rode off into the stygian blackness of the night.

  Sergeant Three-Feathers patted his horse’s neck, then sat on the ground with his back against a smooth boulder. Then, looking up at the millions of stars overhead, he began to pray in silence.

  Having fought in dozens of missions around the globe, Hunter Noir had no problem acclimating his eyesight to the black gloom of the terrain. He assumed Mr. Mask had also adapted as easily. They rode along at a deliberate and steady pace, cautiously avoiding moving too fast. The danger of one of their horses stepping into a gopher hole and breaking its leg was a realistic threat to be avoided at all cost.

  Thus, by the time they had circumnavigated the enemy camp and found the dry gulch Three-Feathers had described, their hour was almost up. The ravine bottom was dotted with loose rocks, and more than ever, they had to allow their animals to move carefully, all the while keeping their own attention to the rear of the fenced-in Martian facility.

  When they had come to the middle ground equidistant between both the wooden guard towers and their bulky search-lights, Hunter Noir pulled up gently on his reins and dismounted. As Mr. Mask did likewise, they heard other horses snorting to their left, obviously from the corral they could barely make out. Both dismounted, untied their knapsacks filled with explosives from behind their saddles, and hefted them on their backs. Lastly, Hunter pulled the M1 carbine rifle from its saddle quiver and checked its fifteen-round detachable box magazine. He marveled at the cache of weapons the Range Rider had stocked within his cave armory.

  Mr. Mask had brought along a Thompson M1928 sub-machine gun, which looked like a kid’s pop-gun in his hands.

  Together, the two American commandos crawled up to the lip of the ravine and examined the compound’s rear yard. All of it was exactly as the Ranger Rider had laid out for them, including the two grounded flying machines within the enclosed facility behind the huts. As they watched from hiding, three snake-men slid from around the corner hut and menacingly moved through the empty yard under the shifting beam of the tower Kliegs. This close, Hunter Noir couldn’t help but shiver slightly. They were indeed nightmarish creatures.

  From this distance he could discern the German guards in the gun-towers. They appeared as blackened silhouettes behind the glare of the hot spotlights.

  He looked down at his wristwatch. The time was 4:10. Somewhere far away he heard another coyote call. In five minutes that critter’s habitually quiet existence was about to be shattered all to hell.

  Sergeant Charlie Three-Feathers rode out of the hills fifteen minutes before the scheduled assault to allow himself ample time to reach the Martians’ camp at the agreed upon hour. He held his roan to a leisurely pace and directed her to move along the dirt path that led directly to the closed main gates of the garishly lit base.

  A veteran soldier, he had done enough guard duty in his career to know after many long hours of inactivity, people tended to get bored and tired—less alert. By riding at a slow trot, he hoped to be less conspicuous to the personnel, human and alien, stationed in the twin towers at the corners. Had he come charging up the road, just the noise of his horse’s pounding hooves would have alerted the sentries long before he even came into view.

  Thus he was able to come within a quarter of a mile of the targeted station before arousing any attention.

  Of course, he knew it wouldn’t last. After all, his being seen was the crucial part of the plan from the beginning. He was to be a diversion for the others, and that meant being spotted and creating a noticeable commotion his enemies could not ignore.

  He saw the human and Martian guards on the left tower begin to scramble. The tall grayish alien with his three eyes bul
ging from his fat forehead was pointing frantically at Three-Feathers, while the Nazi soldier was yelling into a portable two-way radio. Sure enough, a siren began to blare deafeningly, shattering the night’s quiet completely.

  Then things happened fast.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Three-Feathers saw two snake-men appear from around the right corner in answer to the wailing alarm. They sighted him immediately, and both massive Klieg lights were put on him.

  Looks like my cue, he thought, as he pulled the long stovepipe-like weapon off his lap and adjusted it onto his right shoulder. All the while, he’d turned his horse rightward and kneed her into a faster gallop.

  Hot lead fired down at him from the tower machine gun being manned by the freakish Martian. It was a wasted effort as the Range Rider was still out of the weapon’s effective range. The bullets chewed up the dirt yards away from his moving figure.

  Almost aligned with the enemy tower, Three-Feathers pulled back on his reins with his left hand, and his superbly trained mount came to an instant halt. He then gripped the front handle of the M1 Bazooka launcher and aimed it at the wooden guard-post, high above him. For a split second, the Nazi, standing next to the Martian, recognized what it was the horseman was pointing at them. He screamed at his alien companion.

  Three-Feathers fired the M6 rocket grenade, and with a loud pop, it shot out of the Bazooka straight upward and hit the top of the tower, just beneath the spotlight’s bracing.

  The entire tower exploded in a bright yellow and red fireball; pieces of debris flew everywhere.

  A second siren began to blare.

  Three-Feathers threw away the empty rocket launcher, reached down, and pulled his rifle from its saddle-scabbard. At the same time, he was turning the roan back to the flat road, directly into the path of the two scaly snake-men. Holding the lever with his right hand, he spun the rifle around like a baton and chambered a round.