“Good.” Stevkovsky rubbed his palms together. “We’ll kill all the birds with one blast.” ..
“Bloodthirsty so-and-so, aren’t you?” I said. “Why can’t we wait until the women come out, at least?”
“Just such decadent sentimentalism is the reason I am still holding this gun on you, Mr. Victor. Left to your American soft-heartedness, S.M.U.T. would succeed in conquering the world.” He weighed the gun in his hand contemptuously. “Now get busy and connect up those wires,” he instructed us.
We did as we were told. Then Stevkovsky motioned us to stand aside as he put his free hand on the plunger. He pushed it down.
The roar was horrendous. The building seemed to come apart and fly into the air before our very eyes. The stench of goat-flesh being torn asunder by the blast reached our nostrils. There was human flesh mixed with it, I knew. With an effort, I didn’t let myself think of Leslie or Mavis.
“That should take care of Palaro and his organization, Stevkovsky said, surveying the rubble with the clouds of smoke still rising from it.
I could see that he was right. He’d mined the place with twice as much dynamite as would have been needed to destroy it. There was no possibility that anyone anywhere near it would have survived the explosion.
“Now the sheds,” Stevkovsky said.
Once again Bruce and I hefted the equipment and brought it where he told us. He’d left the lead wire hidden in a clump of bushes about 200 yards from the sheds. Another blast, and the S.M.U.T. storehouses were completely destroyed.
We moved fast now. Those of the S.M.U.T. underlings who were left were thrashing about the woods in confusion. Somehow we managed to avoid them and get back to the main house. To my surprise, Stevkovsky had us cross the verandah and go inside the house itself.
“I need a little more wire,” he explained. “It’s in the basement.”
But he changed his tune when he had Bruce and myself down in the cellar. “Get in there!” He pointed toward the bin where we’d found Bruce before.
“What’s the big idea?”
“The big idea is simple, Mr. Victor,” he explained smugly. “When the Philippine Constabulary arrive to investigate the destruction of S.M.U.T.-—for which Russia shall get full credit, I assure you—-they will find the bodies of an American agent and an Ethiopian agent in the ruins. This will prove to the World that the capitalist governments of the United States and Ethiopia were the ones who were really behind S.M.U.T.’s plot to take over the world. Ingenious, isn’t it?”
“It might be if it was original,” I told him indignantly. “But it’s not. That’s exactly the story that I made up for S.M.U.T. back in Malta. I insist on full credit.”
“You won’t be alive to insist on anything,” Stevkovsky assured me as he closed the door on Bruce and myself.
“Copycat!” I yelled after him.
The only answer was the sound of the chain being drawn across the door. Then there was the sound of a furnace poker being wedged into the chain to hold it fast.
“What now?” Bruce asked.
“I guess we can’t do anything but give it the old college try,” I told him.
The two of us got back as far as we could, and then slammed into the door as hard as we were able. It didn’t budge. We gave it a half-dozen more tries, but still it showed no signs of giving.
“We’re running out of time,” Bruce reminded me as we paused for breath. “And this is getting us nowhere. We’d better think of something else before he sets off his powder-keg.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Let’s have a look around. Maybe there’s something we can jimmy the door with.”
We looked, but there wasn’t. I was just about resigned to our fate when Bruce called something to my attention. “Hey! Look at this.”
I looked. It was a thin wire cable running through a tiny knothole in one of the walls. We traced it along the base of the wall to the corner. It went up to the ceiling there. Bruce gave me a boost and I found three sticks of dynamite there. The wire continued through another small hole in the ceiling.
“He didn’t miss a trick, did he?” I said.
“Nope. Yank it, will you? While there’s still time.”
I yanked it. Getting the dynamite sticks disconnected was nothing. But the wire was another matter. As thorough as Stevkovsky was, those three sticks probably didn’t make much difference. We’d still be dead pigeons if I couldn’t sever the wire conductor set up to ignite all the other dynamite he’d stashed around.
“What are you doing?” Bruce asked, his shoulders sagging under my weight.
“I’m trying to bite through the damned wire. But I can’t do it. It’s too strong.”
“Wait a minute.” Bruce let me down. He crossed over to the opposite wall, stooped down, and ran his finger along the floor. “Here it is.” He stood up with a bent and rusty nail in his hand. “I spotted it before,“ he explained. “Maybe I can work through the wire with it.”
Now it was my turn to boost him up. The seconds ticked by like years. Any minute I expected the explosion to go off before Bruce cut the wire. The sweat poured off me as I stood there with my feet braced and his weight on my shoulders.
“Got it!” Bruce announced jubilantly.
His announcement was all but lost in the sound of the blast which followed it. Three quarters of the house blew sky-high. But Bruce had saved us. The dynamite planted in the section of the house where we were imprisoned was deactivated. It didn’t explode.
The door to our makeshift prison was still shaking as the sound of the series of blasts subsided. Bruce and I tried ramming it again. On the third try it gave way and we went hurtling into the cellar. We picked our way through the debris and emerged outside.
We figured Stevkovsky might still be in the neighborhood, so we quickly took to the cover of the woods. We stayed in the brush even after we’d made our way to the road. Only after we’d put a couple of miles between the devastation and ourselves did we emerge from the under-brush and begin trekking up the road itself. Bruce assured me that we were heading in the general direction of Manila.
We’d been on the road about an hour when the patrol car pulled up alongside us. Two members of the Philippine National Constabulary got out and came up to us with their guns drawn. They seemed very angry about something. Both of them were gesticulating and shouting in Tagalog.
“What are they saying?” I asked Bruce.
“As near as I can make out, they say that you’re under arrest,” he told me.
“Under arrest? What for?” I figured they’d identified me as the Steve Victor who was wanted for murder. I figured wrong.
“For indecent exposure,” Bruce told me. He was fighting hard not to laugh and losing the battle. “They say you must be some kind of pervert walking down a public road with your private parts exposed this way. They want you to get into their car so they can take you to jail.”
“Tell them I’m an American citizen.”
He told them. If they’d seemed angry before, that only made them more furious. One of them stuck a billy in my ribs and prodded me toward the car.
“Call the American consul!” I yelled over my shoulder to Bruce.
He could only nod that he would. He was laughing too hard to get the words out. He was still sitting in the middle of the road doubled over with laughter as the cops drove me off to the calaboose.
I stayed there two days. It took that long before a representative from the Embassy found the village where I was jailed and arranged for my release. He came to my cell with a distasteful expression on his face and a pair of pants over one arm.