Ник Картер - War from the Clouds

I awoke and was on my back. There was no cloud-filled blue sky above me. There was a network of vines, expertly thatched into a roof. Around me were walls of the same jungle material, showing the hand of man. To my left was a door, open, showing a small clearing and then green jungle beyond. It seemed to be dusk out there. Or dawn.

The weakness was still with me, but my mind seemed to be functioning clearly. I couldn’t feel any pain in my side or my ankle, yet I didn’t feel as though I’d been drugged.

The room formed by the thatched walls and roof was small, as though designed for keeping a man or an animal in captivity. It reminded me of a hut used in an African prison camp in which I once spent a few months before Hawk found me and rescued me. But it wasn’t hot in this room, the way it had been in the African version.

I started to sit up, to get my bearings a bit better. Something held me and I realized then that I was tied securely. My hands and arms were outspread and tied to stakes driven into the clay earth. Even my head was tied, with soft vines wrapped around it and attached to a stake somewhere behind me. Beneath my torso was a soft pallet of thatched jungle growth.

Strangely, I felt no fear at being tied up in this small, low-ceilinged hut. It was the drugs that made me feel safe, the same drugs that had taken away my pain. But I didn’t know that yet.

In place of fear was the whimsical, almost comical, feeling that I was Gulliver reincarnated, that a jungle version of the Lilliputians had tied me in this small hut. I half expected to see tiny, six-inch Indians tippy-toeing into the hut to laugh at me, to point with triumph at the giant they had captured and tied with their little vines.

My first impulse, then, was to call out, to find out if tiny creatures had really brought me here — and why. I thought better of it, knowing that small creatures like the Lilliputians existed only in literature and in the minds of demented people. Something large and real had done this to me. My last memories had been of scudding down a path into a ravine. Yet, I felt no pain in my face and hands that must have been abraded badly in that fall.

Although natural fear didn’t build in me — again because of the drugs — I did have a natural suspicion that no sane man, or no friend, would have brought me to this hut and staked me to the ground. Why I hadn’t been killed, I didn’t know. My mind began to conjure up all sorts of grisly plans my captor might have for me.

I was once again toying with the idea of calling out, to get to the bottom of this mystery if only to satisfy my curiosity and get the atrocities over with, when a shadow fell across the open door. I heard a scuffling footstep outside.

And then a huge, hulking figure appeared in the doorway. It was so tall that I could see only its legs. The figure knelt, and kept on kneeling. I guessed the man’s height at around seven feet.

He was staring at me from the open doorway. The light behind him kept me from seeing his face and clothes clearly. But it was obvious that he was a giant and, in that dim light of dusk (it was growing darker, so I knew it wasn’t dawn), I could see his eyes sparkling and shiny.

With a sharp drawing in of my breath, I remembered the description I’d been given of Don Carlos Italla. I could hear old Jorge Cortez’s words as though he were in the hut with me:

A giant of seven feet, a mountainous specimen of three hundred pounds, eyes like ingots of burning phosphorus, hands that could shred stainless steel slabs. A fury of a monster with a booming voice like the rumble of thunder.

In that moment I knew that Don Carlos Italla’s men had found me in that ravine, had brought me here to this hut and staked me down. They had also drugged me to keep me docile.

I knew this for a fact. But I felt no real fear. My only regret, as I peered back at the giant with the massive hands and red, sparkling eyes, was that I hadn’t given in to my earlier urges to buy and operate a truck garden along a quiet highway in Ohio.

Soon, there wouldn’t be any quiet highways. And no Nick Carter either.

“Good evening, Don Carlos,” I said, trying to sound flip even though my heart was pounding with a renewal of fear. “Are you doing your own surgery these days?”

The giant said nothing. He had something in his right hand, but I couldn’t see what it was. Gun? Knife? Scalpel? He began to crawl into the hut, moving slowly toward me. The thing in his hand got scraped along the clay floor.

Even before the giant reached me, I could smell the overpowering odor of him. It was body odor to the Nth Degree, and it filled the small hut to overflowing. Was Don Carlos Italla soap-shy, along with his other talents?

“Eat, my friend,” the giant said in excellent Spanish. “Eat and sleep again. Night comes and I do not talk at night.”

He said nothing more. The thing in his hand was a bowl. In the bowl were vegetables cooked in a kind of savory broth that was not from an animal. The giant fed me the gruel with his massive fingers, poking tidbits through my lips. I was too hungry to consider the fact that those hands probably hadn’t been washed in a year. And the gruel was excellent. It was also drugged.

In five minutes after eating, I was sound asleep again. When I awoke, sunlight had turned the clearing outside into a bright, shiny avenue. I could even make out flies and spiders on the walls and ceiling of the low hut.

And the giant came again to kneel in the doorway and peer at me.

It was not Don Carlos. I could see his face more clearly now and it was an old face, full of wrinkles, with a scraggly, undernourished beard. His eyes, though, seemed young and sparkled like agates. He also was not as big as I had thought last night. His bulk came mainly from several layers of coarse clothing that looked as though he might have woven the fabric himself.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“The question, Senor, is who are you? I found you on the trail, lying with your head in a bush and your body burning up with fever. I found nothing on you to say who you are.”

“Well, I’m hardly someone to be staked out like an animal,” I said, jangling the vine ropes that still held my arms, legs and head.

“There is no law,” he said, “that says only the good and the friendly can be wounded and lost in the jungle. You could be one from the mountain. Your wound could have come from one of his enemies. Until I know who you are, you remain tied, as you say, like an animal.”

I began to breathe easier then. He was obviously referring to Alto Arete and Don Carlos. Just as obviously, he was an enemy of Don Carlos. Even more obvious, he was a highly educated and articulate man. His Spanish was of the academic class.

I saw no reason to lie to this man. I told him who I was and described my mission to him. I told him about the Cortez family and how I had saved Elicia and Antonio, only to see Antonio’s friends killed in an ambush while following my directions. The old man listened patiently, fixing his attention on each word, regarding me with those glowing eyes. The glow, however, seemed to become warmer as I talked. When I was finished, he remained in his crouch just inside the doorway. I hardly noticed the odor of his body now; I was becoming accustomed to it.

“So I am not an enemy,” I continued. “I need your help. The people of Nicarxa need your help. We have only six days to stop Don Carlos from virtually setting the country on fire.”

“Four days,” he said. “You have slept for two days.”

“I was afraid of that,” I said. “Why did you drug me?”

He smiled through his wrinkles. “For the healing,” he said. “I made a poultice of herbs for your wound, but you were thrashing about in your fever. You would have offset the good of the herbs. I gave you peyote to make your muscles calm themselves.”