Tom Swift and His Jetmarine (5 page)

"You fool, you’ll kill yourself!" Tom muttered.

Dansitt hopped the barn deftly and disappeared up a narrow valley. Bud hung on his tail, the
Kub
showing its agility. The valley narrowed further, splitting off in two directions ahead of the racing jets.

"Which way’s he going to go?" Bud asked.

"When he starts to show his hand, pretend to follow," Tom answered tensely. "Then at the last second, flip to the other valley."

For a chilling instant both jets seemed to be headed straight into the first of the low hills that separated the left extension of the valley from the right. Then Dansitt banked rightward with the
Kangaroo Kub
hot on his tail. Just as the Eaglet appeared committed to the rightward course, Bud pulled back on the stick and veered left. The
Kub
seemed to barely clear the hillside brush, but when Bud shoved the stick forward and leveled off, they were safely shooting down the leftward valley. Bud whooped as he saw that Dansitt’s craft had made the same risky maneuver at the same moment, and was still in view ahead of the Enterprises craft.

The little valley continued to narrow, and for a few moments they followed a sparkling creek. But the valley was becoming shallower as well as narrower, and Tom and Bud knew that their quarry would soon have to break off and gain altitude.

Suddenly the radio burst to life.

"Hey there, Tommy, long time no see!"

Tom activated his microphone. "Dansitt, you know this jet can fly rings around yours, and I’m prepared to follow until I can force you down. Why not save yourself some trouble and cooperate?"

There was a pause as the Eaglet gained altitude, the Swift jet following tight.

"Say, Tommy, sorry about burning that nice blond hair o’ yours. Probably ruined that stylish striped t-shirt, too, hmm? Send me the bill if you want."

"What I want, pal, is the digital output from that spy camera," replied Tom heatedly.

Dansitt’s response was brief.
"Forget it, Swift."

Tom switched off his headset and turned to Bud. "How ’bout we make Mr. Dansitt reach for his air sickness bag?"

Bud gave a wicked smile and leaned forward into the controls. In a burst of energy the
Kub
suddenly leapt like an aerial jackrabbit, thrusting over the top of the Eaglet and resuming level course just ahead of it. Then, guided by the jet’s rear-scanning radar, the
Kub
began bobbing and weaving right and left, up and down, whipping Dansitt’s jet with wave after wave of backwash. The boys burst out laughing as the scope showed the Harrigan Eaglet tossing like a buoy in rough seas.

Tom switched his helmet back on. "Say there, Sidney, the beautiful blue sky may be looking a little green to you about now. Ready to set her down?"

"Ready,"
came back Dansitt, weakly.
"Back to your airfield?"

"Not a chance. Just follow me on a new heading. The Fowler drainage control channel is ahead. It’s got a nice flat concrete bottom, and it’s dry this time of year. Once we get there, you set down first and get out. Then I’ll circle back and land next to you."

"Affirmative,"
replied Dansitt.

"Sounds a little shaken up, doesn’t he?" commented Bud, gleefully shaking hands with his pal.

Dansitt landed in the channel as directed. As the
Kangaroo Kub
flashed by overhead, Tom and Bud could see him below, a forlorn ant-sized figure next to his parked Eaglet. He had taxied toward the left side of the channel, and as the channel was more than one-hundred feet wide, there was sufficient room for Bud to land the
Kub
nearby.

Tom was the first to exit the jet, but Dansitt didn’t wait. By the time Bud had begun to climb out, Dansitt had taken to his heels and was sprinting away from his plane.

"Stop!" Tom cried. "I want those pictures!"

Dansitt paid no attention to Tom. The young inventor darted after his enemy, and being more fleet-footed than Dansitt, soon overtook him.

Dansitt, however, wheeled about suddenly and lashed out viciously with his fist. But Tom nimbly dodged the intended blow and knocked the other to the ground with a cross-body block.

"Where’s the cartridge?"
Tom gasped as he pinned down his adversary’s arms.

Instead of answering, Dansitt gave a sudden upward lurch, forcing Tom to loosen his grip. But before his wiry opponent could slip completely from his grasp, Tom clamped Dansitt’s arms in a steel-like vise of muscle. This time he straddled the other pilot. In doing so he felt a hard square object press against his thigh. Was it the digital cartridge holding the image files?

Bud trotted up next to Tom. "Tee him up, Tom—I think I can manage a field goal!"

"Give me the pictures!" Tom demanded fiercely.

"Okay," snarled Sidney Dansitt, sullen. "Let me up and you can have the cartridge."

Tom bounded to his feet and waited. Dansitt took a small object, the size and shape of a book of matches, from under his jacket and handed it over. Tom recognized it as a giga-density image file memory cartridge.

Handing the cartridge to Bud, Tom said he wanted to look inside Dansitt’s pockets. The disheveled young man leered at Tom.

"Why
sure,"
he replied, showing a row of jagged teeth. "Whatever floats your boat, Tommy."

Tom felt inside his pockets and patted him down. No other cartridges were evident.

"Satisfied?" he snapped. "I haven’t run out of hidin’ places yet."

"Okay for now," Tom conceded. "But you had no business flying over Swift Enterprises," he added hotly.

The other sneered. "The air’s free and I was just having a little fun. It’s not like I dropped a bomb on that baby boat of yours. Anyway, you got the files, so what are you moaning about?"

"There’s another matter I want to settle with you, Dansitt," Tom said. "Your little performance the other day, trying to fry me—what’s up with that?"

Dansitt smirked and looked off into the distance, running a hand through his dark auburn hair. "Too much time on my hands, I guess, huh?"

Just then, startlingly, the concrete ravine echoed with the growl of jet engines! Tom and Bud whipped their heads around behind them.

"The Eaglet!" Bud cried. "He’s got a crony inside!"

The distraction was just enough for Dansitt to take quick advantage. His eyes gleaming cold and cruel, he lunged at Torn and drove a smashing uppercut to his chin. The young inventor staggered backward, and for several seconds everything was lost in a foggy whirlpool. Tom’s vision cleared in time to see Dansitt scramble into his jet, assisted by an unidentified man in the cockpit.

Bud, shirtless, was running full speed toward the Harrigan Eaglet. He had peeled off his shirt and bunched it under Tom’s neck before bounding after Dansitt.

But Bud was too late. He could only rear back and watch helplessly as Dansitt’s jet roared away down the flood control channel and took to the air.

"But the important thing," said Bud when he had returned to Tom, "is that I still have that little cartridge in my pants pocket!"

Tom scrambled to his feet. "Still, I would have liked to have examined that camera—and the cockpit. It’s just possible Sidney is mixed up in the Sea Snipers somehow."

Bud growled. "Now
there’s
somebody I’d just
love
to feed to the sharks!"

Tom and Bud flew back to the plant, anxious to examine the image cartridge. But when they did so, they were in for a disappointment. The cartridge was blank!

"We were rooked," Tom groaned. "The guy’s always one step ahead of us. I’ll bet running away from his jet was carefully calculated to make us assume that what he had in his pocket was something valuable."

"Wait a sec, Tom," said Bud. "I may not be a phenomenal young scientist-inventor with deep-set blue eyes, but I do know that when computer files are erased, the data isn’t really gone, not right away. It just gets written over as the disk is used. If he palmed an old used cartridge off on you, maybe there’s still something we can get from it."

"Maybe," said Tom. He didn’t want to hurt his friend’s feelings, but he had already scanned the cartridge for such pre-overwritten files. Then a further idea came to him. This was a new kind of storage medium, not a conventional computer disk. Could there be hidden files of an entirely unexpected sort?

Tom gave Bud’s shoulder a squeeze. "I’ll try some new methods on this cartridge before I give up. And—stupid not to have thought of it—I’ll have Harlan take fingerprints and look for other traces first."

"In that case," said Bud, "let’s fuel our brains with a little grub."

When they reached Chow Winkler’s kitchen, the cowpoke took one look at Tom and cried, "Brand my lariat, you sure ran into a tough critter. Who was he?"

"A pirate with a bolo punch."

"You jest don’t know how to stay out o’ trouble, do you?" The cook wagged his head.

He prepared a hearty early supper for the boys, telling Tom a good square meal was the best way to restore one’s fighting strength.

"But what do you do when it hurts to move your jaw?" Tom countered.

"You hand your plate over to me," Bud spoke up with a grin. "Three squares a day is hardly enough to keep me at fighting strength."

After supper Tom parted from Bud and paid a call on Harlan Ames, and then went to his hangar-annex laboratory. When he arrived, he noticed that he had received a video-email message from Rita Scheering.

A few clicks later, he was viewing the stored message. "Well, Tom, here I am again, and you can look me in the eye if you need to. I just thought you’d like to know that I’ve discovered a little more about that area of the Gulf that I mentioned the other day. I said there was nothing there, just some rocks. But that’s not entirely true. According to the most detailed maritime atlas I could get my hands on, there’s a real island there—if you call a few dozen acres of swamp grass and palm trees a real island. It’s called Isla Espaniella—Spaniel Island. And I have a reporter’s hunch it has something to do with the Sea Snipers!"

TOM WASTED no time in contacting Rita Scheering. Intending to leave her an email message, he was surprised when she came on-screen.

"So what’s the connection between this tiny island and the Snipers?" he asked, facing his web-camera.

"You mean, besides the obvious?" Rita blew a luxurious puff of white smoke. "It’s the only piece of solid ground in that region that’s bigger than a houseboat."

"It’s uninhabited?"

"Let me read you the blurb from the atlas. ‘Isla Espaniella, mistranslated into English as Spaniel Island. Recorded 1543, Spanish Royal Claim. Approximately 25 acres extent with tidal variance. No habitation or permanent structures as of 2001. Deep anchorage, southeast quadrant only. Class L approachable. Possession Cuba.’ And no photo."

"All right," Tom agreed, "it sounds like it ought to be visited. But I’m sure we’ve had satellite photo coverage of it for decades, as it’s owned by Cuba."

"No doubt," she nodded.. "But the relevant branches of the U.S. government don’t share that data with their sister branches that easily, much less with young inventors, much
much
less with reporters."

"Maybe it isn’t important," said Tom. "I’m within days of going on an underwater scouting mission in the Caribbean and the Gulf. I’ll make Spaniel Island a port of call."

Rita smiled at Tom challengingly. "Can I come too?"

"Nope," Tom replied.

"Didn’t think so. But remember our agreement, young man."

Tom worked late into the evening, studying the tenth-second burst of static that had interrupted the plant’s security radar. Carefully analyzed, the burst had peculiar phase and frequency characteristics that Tom found intriguing.

It was after eleven when Tom finally arrived home, physically exhausted but mentally racing. He found Sandy reading a book in the living room.

"Hi, Sis," he said. "Is that one of those bare-chested romance novels?"

Sandy set the book down on her lap. "Nonsense. And so what? Anyway, it’s pretty dull. Have you found the pirates…or…?" Her voice trailed off sadly.

Tom lowered himself onto an ottoman. "A little progress, maybe—I hope. That reporter, Rita Scheering, contacted me again. Looks like Bud and I will be paying a visit to Spaniel Island, a luxurious ocean resort—if you’re a seagull!"

"Do you know how those blackbeard types make everyone black out?"

Tom tried to grin, but found himself yawning instead. "I think so. You know what keeps you awake, San?"

She pondered the question. "Lima beans with anchovies?"

"You have a structure in your brain—all primates do, I think—that regulates your waking and sleeping patterns. Right now we’re both yawning—" And they both did. "—because that little organ is telling our bodies to conserve oxygen and start shutting down. See?"

"Uh huh. So the Sea Snipers shoot deadly rays at the sleep organ?"

Tom chuckled. "That’s kind of a simplification. It looks like the Snipers use pulsed electromagnetic waves in the ultralow frequency range to induce an entrained resonance effect in the body’s natural electrical—"

Sandy interrupted with a vigorous shake of her head.
"No,
brother, this is
not
the time to try to impress me. Speak English, not Swiftish."

"Okay. One Hertz means one cycle, or beat, per second. AM radio broadcasts in kilohertz—‘kilo’ means ‘one thousand.’ With FM radio you start into the megahertz range—one million. Then you have radar frequencies, optical frequencies, X-rays, and so on."

"This I know."

"Well, scientists have been studying the effects of very
low
frequencies on living organisms for years now, mainly to determine if living near power lines is bad for health. What they’ve found is that some low frequencies can affect how the brain produces the neurochemicals that make it go. My guess is, the Snipers have discovered a frequency that induces a chemical ‘flood’ that overstimulates the part of the brain that controls consciousness."

Sandy frowned. "If it
stimulates
it, wouldn’t we become sharper—not fall over?"