Falcon fished his lighter from a pocket and struck the flint wheel. The orange tongue of fire threw scant light in the gloom, but it was enough for him to accurately assess the depth of his troubles.
The chamber into which he had fallen was long and narrow, a trench or a dried up canal; the pervasive mustiness was evidence for the latter explanation. Holding the flame before him like a torch, with his trusty, razor-sharp hatchet at the ready in his right fist, he advanced in the direction from which the shouts had come.
The voice did not repeat, but after a few strides he heard a different sound, barely audible in between the slap of his boot soles on the damp cobble floor. He froze in place and pitched his voice just above a whisper. “Is it a trap?”
The answer came immediately, a muffled affirmative. Then his world was abruptly filled with light. He shaded his eyes reflexively with one hand, snuffing out the lighter with the other. It took only a moment for his eyes to adjust to the sudden glare of the overhead klieg lights, but even through the haze he could distinguish the forms of his friends bound and gagged like sacrificial victims awaiting their fate.
Nathan “the Padre” Hobbs was held in place with only a simple wrought iron chain affixed to shackles at each extremity. The bonds had been pulled taut, forcing him into an immobile spread-eagle against the wall, and a length of rope had been forced between his teeth like a bit, to prevent him from calling out. Somewhat more strenuous measures had been required to subdue Hurricane; the burly soldier looked like King Kong trussed up for his New York debut. When his fierce eyes fell upon his leader, the giant found an untapped vein of fury and renewed his assault on the triple strand of rope that kept him from speaking. With a single, massive effort, he succeeded in biting the ropes apart. He spat out the fibers with an unprintable oath.
Falcon remained motionless, studying his compatriots in their bonds. The Padre and Hurricane had been gagged; there was no way they could have called out to him. “Then who…?”
“A trap indeed, Herr Hauptmann.”
A weasely laugh fluttered down from a parapet overlooking the junction in the trench where the two men had been secured. Falcon didn’t have to look to identify the voice. “Von Heissel.”
Baron Otto Von Heissel eased his corpulent form out over the railing. “I knew your loyal men would never lure you into my snare, so I had to use something more innovative: A phonograph recording. Very clever, nein?”
“What do you want, Baron?”
A smug expression contorted the Prussian noble’s porcine countenance. “What I have always wanted, Hauptmann Falcon: to humiliate you, and when your humiliation is complete, to bring about your utter destruction.”
“That’s why you’ll fail,” Falcon retorted, his voice barely louder than a whisper. “Every minute you waste crowing over your victory, brings me a minute closer to escaping your trap. And when I get free, I won’t hesitate to wipe you off the face of the earth.”
The bald baron’s gloating grin slipped a notch. “Perhaps you are right. Very well then, I shall have to settle for simply killing you.”
Falcon knew that Von Heissel’s pronouncement was absolute. The Prussian warlord was no fool; death loomed just around the corner. As the baron moved away from the parapet, Falcon hastened to the two bound men. He snapped Hobbs’ bonds apart with a simple twist of his hatchet blade, but the multiple shackles holding Hurricane were more problematic; anything less than elephant chains would have been broken apart, as easily as cobwebs, by the tremendously strong giant. Already, Hurley’s struggles had succeeded in wrenching one of the shackle rings loose from the masonry, but the others remained firmly fixed.
Before Falcon could even begin to conceive of a solution, a tremor shuddered through passage, vibrating the stones beneath his feet. He exchanged glances with his men; Hobbs shook his head gravely. “That doesn’t sound good, Cap.”
“The sound you are hearing,” announced Von Heissel, now only a disembodied voice issuing from a loudspeaker mounted on the parapet, “is fifty thousand gallons of water rushing through the aqueduct toward you. It will hit with the force of a freight train. In the unlikely event that you survive the impact, you will be washed into an underground river where you will certainly drown, if you do not first die shattered upon submerged rocks.”
The rumble beneath their feet grew ominously louder, until even Hurricane had to shout to be heard. “What now, Cap?”
“You’ve been a worthy foe, Falcon.” The baron’s electronically amplified laughter cascaded above the tumult. “I can’t think of a better way for your adventures to end.”
…to be continued!
CHAPTER 1
PARTY CRASHERS
“Gosh. What happened next? How ever did you escape?”
David Dalton — “Dodge” to both his intimate friends and the thousands of Americans who eagerly devoured his Sunday syndicated feature “The Adventures of Captain Falcon” — glanced over at the breathless young woman and the man with whom she was conversing, curious to see how the question would be answered.
The mountainous hulk that was “Hurricane” Hurley shifted nervously in his chair and averted his gaze, glancing down at the newspaper clenched in his massive paws. He had been reading aloud the latest installment of Falcon’s adventures — as one of Captain Falcon’s trusted confidants during the Great War, he was not only a contributor to the ongoing serial, but also a key player — eager to impress his pretty young blonde tablemate with this most recent tale of derring-do.
It wasn’t at all like Hurricane to be caught with nothing to say. Dodge considered letting the big fellow suffer a little longer, but then decided to affect a rescue worthy of Falcon’s chronicler. “Sorry miss,” he interjected, gesturing with his champagne flute, “but you’ll have to wait a week like everyone else.”
The blonde girl’s lips turned down in a pout, but Hurricane seized the opportunity and recovered his composure. “We had been in situations a good deal worse than that. I remember the time Jocasta Palmer nearly drowned us in fish eggs.”
Dodge smiled absently and took a sip of the bubbly, letting his attention wander. He felt partly responsible for Hurley’s embarrassment. In the past year, the Falcon adventures had relied less heavily upon the historical account inarticulately recorded in Hurricane’s unpublished — some would say ‘unpublishable’ — memoirs, and more on Dodge’s own imagination. Hurley had not objected; the Falcon stories had never been more popular, and ostensibly as the only member of Falcon’s coterie of heroes still in circulation, he was more than happy to be the sole focus of attention at sporting events, county fairs and other public gatherings frequented by attractive, starstruck young ladies. Unfortunately, the hero of the story didn’t have a clue about how some of these latest adventures would end.
Dodge didn’t feel too guilty over taking creative control of the serial. It wasn’t like he was rewriting history. Hurley’s magnum opus read exactly like what it was; a pulp adventure worthy of the Sunday comics. While the man was certainly an imposing physical presence, and had probably served with distinction in the Great War, the outlandish exploits of Captain Zane Falcon, Father Nathan Hobbs and Brian “Hurricane” Hurley were simply too unbelievable to be anything but fiction.
It had been pure serendipity that Dodge, a sportswriter for The Clarion, had been buttonholed by an editor too intimidated by Hurley to say no, and given the task of cleaning up the meandering prose for publication. In only a few short months, “The Adventures of Captain Falcon” six column inches times two, and a single cartoon illustration — also Dodge’s work — had been picked up by King Features and now ran in every major Sunday newspaper in the country. Now, three years later and at the height of their popularity, all of Hurley’s stories had been told. The well had dried up, and it was up to Dodge to fill the void, which he had done admirably, boosting readership to a new peak. All of which had brought him here, to a garden party in the most famous garden in America.