The Hydra Monster (7 page)

The Phantom, with Devil trotting close behind, slowly circled the factory. The mist was thinning considerably, lights from the houses which dotted the low hills showed as yellow blurs.

At the rear of the complex he once more shed his outer clothes to return to his mask and costume. Leaving the grey wolf to stand guard over the neat pile of civilian attire, he headed for the back fence of the factory grounds.

He halted three feet short of the interlacing of wire. From out of his belt he drew a small metal tool and tossed it against the fence. Nothing happened, no sizzle, no buzz of alarm.

The masked man backed up for a running start. He vaulted the fence, landing wide-legged on the gravel beyond. Like the Hydra's death house, the factory was dark.

Up ahead, clearly visible in the thinning fog, yawned the open, rear door of the nearest factory building.

"Too convenient," decided the Phantom. He ran swiftly across the gravel, avoiding the inviting open entryway. As he ran by, at a distance of about twenty feet, he caught a glimpse of packing cases inside.

On a windowless side of the middle brick building the Phantom spotted a metal ladder leading to the roof. He tested it, determined it wasn't electrified and climbed up. He crossed the tar- paper roof toward a curving skylight. Down on the Bay the lights of dock restaurants and shops were clearly visible.

The masked man crouched beside the skylight, looked down into the factory. It was too dark to see much of anything, but his keen sense of hearing told him there was no one below.

He got the skylight open, dropped straight down ten feet to the floor. He brushed against a low stack of cardboard boxes. From between two of them a piece of paper came fluttering.

The fog was thin enough now to let through

moonlight. The Phantom was able to read

the slip of paper. A page from a memo pad with the words "Be sure to ship to V" scrawled across it There was also a date, a date only a few days earlier.

He folded the small sheet into his belt.

" I wonder if they've abandoned this place, too," the Phantom thought as he roamed the dark and deserted warehouse.

He came next to an office. Here it was evident someone had made a recent and hasty retreat. The smell of cigarettes still lingered in the air, all the desk drawers and file drawers were pulled out and empty. Even the wastebasket had been upturned.

The Phantom righted it, noticing a spec of white at the bottom. He retrieved it, a small scrap of airmail paper. The only words written here were "no mistakes!" followed by an initial signature. The initial was "V".

"V again," said the Phantom to himself. He put the fragment with the memo he'd found.

Then he entered a corrugated, metal passageway which connected this building to the next.

The moonlight was bright in here, flowing down through the skylights. This was another warehouse, nearly empty save for a few packing cases. On his immediate right stood a workbench containing a large tool box, a sprawl of wrenches and a blow torch.

There was no one in the vast room.

The Phantom took three more steps.

Then a booming voice ordered, "Don't move Stay exactly where you are!"

The voice continued, "You are covered from all sides."

The Phantom spun, scanning the entire room. It still appeared to be empty.

"Where are they?" he asked himself as he drew one of his .45 automatics from its holster.

"You are a disturbance," the loud voice went on. "You are causing trouble. We cannot permit that."

His acute sense of hearing developed in the jungle, told him the voice was coming from the right of him.

"You must be destroyed," it continued.

"A speaker planted someplace in that wall," the Phantom determined. "And a taped voice at that, judging from the way it sounds."

He hurried to the work table, picked up the tool chest. "Looks like they've taken off again," he said. "But I'd like to have a look at that tape."

"You cannot escape," droned the mechanical voice. "You will be destroyed."

"So you mentioned."

Nearly six feet up the wall, at the masked man's eye level, was the speaker. It was small, mounted in the wall and covered with a circle of fine, mesh wire. An empty light socket and switch was placed just above it.

"You cannot defy us and live. We are all powerful," the voice told him. "Destroy one branch, two will take its place."

"That's Hydra all right."

"Now," announced the voice, "the hour of reck
oning
has come. You must die."

Th Phantom became aware of whirring sliding
noises
all around him. The now bright moonlight showed him what was happening. Panels were sliding back in various parts of the walls and ceilings. Gun barrels moved out of the openings. The whole sequence, the spoken messages and the guns, must be part of a cycle set off when he entered the warehouse.

"Machine guns planted all over the place," said the Phantom. "Rigged to start shooting automatically."

"You cannot escape," repeated the voice.

The guns in the ceiling began firing first. Short, choppy bursts, which missed the Phantom in his position against the wall.

He plucked a nail out of the tool chest which he had set down beside him. Reaching up, he placed it in the light socket with one gloved hand. He clicked the light switch, then rammed the metal nail into the socket with the wooden handle of a hammer. "The guns must work electrically," he said. "So . . ."

Guns along the far wall commenced shooting.

"Maybe the switch was already on." He clicked it the opposite way. Blue light sizzled in the socket for an instant. There was a loud, clumping sound.

All the guns fell silent. The Phantom had succeeded in shorting out the electrical system.

"Now to get on with the tour."

In the front office of the warehouse, he discovered the control room. It, too, was abandoned.

One wall contained a dozen television monitoring screens. These had been smashed. Below them ran an intricate control panel, which was now a ruin of twisted metal and tangled wires.

"They probably,'*' reflected the masked man, "have other quarters around the area. All kept under surveillance from their so-called control tower here. I wonder if I can find out, from what's left here, where their other hangouts are."

After opening the door to the outside and whistling to the waiting Devil, the Phantom made a methodical search of the Hydra control center. Nothing had been left behind to tell him where the Hydra men had gone.

After an hour, he picked up the phone, which was the only instrument still working in the ruined office, and made a call across the Bay to Lt. Gores of the San Francisco police.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"Yeah, they found him," said Lt. Gores in his early morning office. "Right where you said he'd be, Walker."

The Phantom sensed something was wrong.

"But?"

"Cisco was dead," said the policeman, tilling hack in his swivel chair. "Somebody'd cut his throat."

In the chair opposite, the Phantom nodded. He was dressed again in trenchcoat and dark glasses. "A very effective way of keeping him from talking."

The lieutenant rubbed at his grizzled, close- cropped hair. "You wouldn't know anything about who might have done that to this Cisco guy?"

"I know Hydra did it," replied the Phantom. "They're willing to destroy anything, property, or people, to keep anyone from learning about them."

"Maybe," said Gores. "Or maybe we just got us a simple war among hoods, and you're trying to make it look fancy."

The Phantom said, "Everyday hoods don't usually have a three story house full of implements of torture, plus their own electric chair and gas chamber."

"No, that's not usual," admitted Gores. "And from what the sheriff's office over there tells me, they're finding the remains of some pretty oddball stuff in the place that burned down last night."

"Do you know yet who rented the house?"

"Sure," answered the police lieutenant, picking up a yellow memo. "It was taken on a year's lease by a Mr. Johnathan Smith. A little fancier than John Smith, but no easier to trace. Security deposit, first and last month's rent all paid for in cash. And the real estate agent remembers Johna- than as being an average-looking, middle-aged man."

"They had to move all that equipment in," said the Phantom. "Anything there?"

"It's being looked into. So far, no mover's been located who hauled any iron maidens or electric chairs to Tiburon." He let the memo drop back to his desk top. "It's awful easy to rent a van, you know. It'll be checked out, but I'm willing to bet the most we'll find out is that Johnathan Smith rented himself a truck a few months back."

"What about the factory set up in Sausalito?"

"That's a little more complicated." The lieutenant consulted a sheet of blue paper. "According to a preliminary check by the Sausalito authorities, that factory is supposed to be abandoned. The realtor who handles it claims he hasn't even had a query on it this year."

"Difficult to use it as a Hydra control center without someone knowing it," said the Phantom.

"Further inquiries are being made," said Gores. "I got a hunch we'll draw another blank. These guys are real good at covering their tracks. Even that tape you say you heard is blank."

"Fixed to erase, once it played," said the Phantom.

"Could be."

"What about Cisco?"

"He's got no local criminal record, and Sacramento doesn't have anything on him," replied Gores. "They rolled prints off the body soon after they found him in the field where you left him,

Walker. We're waiting to hear if Washington has something."

The door opened and Sgt. Pronzini came in. "Good morning, Walker." He had a morning paper, open at an inside page, folded under his arm. "Seen today's
E
XAMINER?
"

"Haven't had a chance yet," replied the Phantom.

Pronzini cleared a space on the lieutenant's desk and spread out the newspaper. "Story here about the big earthquake yesterday down in Santa Florenza, South America. It says here . . ."

"Wait, wait." Gores raised his hand in a stop gesture. "Is this going to be some new, nutty theory?"

"Walker's theory wasn't nutty," reminded Pronzini. "He found that Hydra layout over in Tibu- ron, didn't he? And the factory where . . ."

"He found a house," cut in Gores. "A house with some funny stuff in it. That doesn't prove there's any such thing as an outfit called Hydra."

The Phantom asked Pronzini, "What's in that story that's got you excited, Sergeant?"

"Well, maybe it's nothing," answered the young policeman. "But I remember when you said how Hydra, in times past, went in for crimes like looting and such,"

"They were very good scavengers, yes."

"So here in this story about what's happening In the little country of Santa Florenza after the quake," continued Pronzini, "there's a mention of looters."

"Every time you have a disaster," said Gores. "You get looting."

"These looters are sort of different. They're described as wearing black clothes and hats, and they seem to show up right after the trouble hits. I mean, they don't worry about risks. They come right in and start taking."

"Can't the police and the troops stop them?" asked the lieutenant.

"Right after a major quake, with half your capital city in ruins, cops and soldiers are busy elsewhere," said Pronzini. "Besides, these looters are armed and well-organized. Almost like commandos, or guerrilla fighters." He pointed to another paragraph in the newspaper account. "Says, so far, they've caught only one of them. Before they could question him, though, the guy took some kind of poison. When they examined him, and this is sort of weird, they found out he was wearing a wig. And tatooed on his bald head was the letter 'V'."

"What?" The Phantom came over to look down at the paper.

"Right here," said the sergeant. "The guy had a V on his head. Now, I don't know if this ties in ..

"A 'V'," repeated the Phantom, mostly to himself. That memo he'd found in the factory last night, and the fragment of a letter . . . both had alluded to someone, or something, designated by a V.

"Don't tell me," asked the lieutenant, "this rigmarole means something to you, Walker?"

"I wonder," said the Phantom. "I think I'd bet

icr Rnd out." He moved to the door. Til keep in iouch with you about developments here in the Hay Area."