Suddenly the lead tank bogged down. The road had taken a hidden turn under the marshy terrain, and without a ninja guide the machine had blundered off the built-up support. The other vehicles halted, and the men got out, poking about to locate the road. This was only a delay, not a setback.
Then the arrows started flying. Each was tipped with deadly nerve poison; the slightest scratch meant death. A dozen men were dead before the others realized what was happening. Then the cry went up: "Ambush!"
The men dived for cover of their vehicles. The turret of the stalled tank spun about, its machine gun raking the jungle in a semicircle. But it seemed to have no effect.
The arrows continued to fly. They were few but highly selective; virtually every shaft scored on a soldier. The effect was disproportionate to the damage: these weapons made no sound, so the first evidence of their presence was the mortal strike. When the men faced about and watched for the source, the arrows stopped, only to rise silently from the obscurity again when attention wavered. Some shot high into the morning sky, to plummet down on those people taking refuge behind what little natural cover there was.
"And we waited till morning to start our march!" a sergeant gritted. He had known that was folly, but had been overruled by the officers. He was Genaro Cabral, a leader of men, formerly of Major Lima's battalion. He had dropped the TNT bomb into the privy, destroying the dwarf ninja. "Well, we'll stop that! First platoon, face out in a circle, watch the horizon, fire on the level through the brush when and only when you see an arrow rise. We're bound to nail some of them!" He hoped. This brushy clearing had evidently been chosen by the ninjas because of the cover it provided them; they were probably dug in.
The men of his platoon obeyed with alacrity. A sergeant is the core of any army unit; when crisis comes, he acts. No more arrows came. "All right," the sergeant bawled. "Second Platoon, hitch a chain to that stalled tank and haul it back onto the road." Strictly speaking, he lacked the authority to give such directives, but no one challenged him.
Now the disciplined troops began to function. The arrow-ambush had seemed devastating at first, but there were actually only twenty casualties, and the psychological effect was being dissipated. Still, the spasms of the dying men had been unnerving; the poison threw one big cramp, and some suffered broken spines, writhing and screaming before their hearts failed. So there was horror in the ranks, but a few primitively armed warriors could not, it seemed, successfully oppose a modern army.
The tank was brought back to the road. Now soldiers went ahead with poles, tapping the ground under the marsh, locating the firm foundation. The convoy moved ahead again.
Unfortunately, the men now fell into the traps laid for the vehicles. There were a lot of traps; evidently the ninjas had worked all night, as the sergeant had feared they would. He had learned something from his experience with the dwarf ninja, but he was the only one here to whom that experience was firsthand. The others thought the stories of the ninjas were exaggerated. Now they were learning the hard way. Five of them dropped into a huge pit, to be speared on the sharpened stakes below. But at least their sacrifice saved the tank. Another masked pit contained a dozen poisonous snakes, who quickly bit the unfortunates who dropped in to visit. Trees had been felled across the road, their surfaces covered with poison so that those who moved them suffered terrible burns and lingering death. Further along, a huge tree toppled right on top of one of the personnel carriers, ruining it; the tree had been cut and propped so that a slight push would bring it down. This sort of thing kept progress slow.
The column entered a thickly wooded section, where the trees were smaller but so close together it was impossible to see far. Here the ground was firm throughout. The vehicles picked up speed. Then more arrows came—this time spearing the tires of the jeeps. The tanks and halftracks were impervious, but the officers weren't in them. The column slowed to a halt.
"Keep moving!" the sergeant yelled. "It's another ambush!" He knew that it was possible to drive on flat tires, and that this was much safer than stopping exactly where the ninjas wanted them to stop. "Push for that hill! Make a circle at the top! We can defend that better."
His leather-lunged volume made itself felt. The officers, concerned for their health, kept their mouths shut and let the man on the spot handle it. It was not that they were timid or inferior men; they merely yielded to the exigencies of the situation.
The jeeps lunged up the hill, their deflated tires flapping and bumping, while the troops clung tightly to the accompanying vehicles. They lurched into a rough circle at the top, and the men poked their rifles out.
Nothing happened. A crew got out to start fixing the tires, and then a few arrows drove them back. "They're nickel-and-diming us to death!" the sergeant observed in his own vernacular. The officer in charge thought so too. Small but steady attrition could bring them down in time; it was a tactic used in many parts of the world, even humbling the mighty U S of A in Asia. "Cabral, take a company and clear the area," he ordered. "We'll take some casualties, but it's better than being struck sitting like ducks for their arrows."
And so Sergeant Cabral moved out with his men, alert and wary. They carried Garand M-1 rifles at the ready, and some M-3 submachine guns shooting at anything that moved. They encountered no resistance. They did not realize yet that they were entering the mouth of hell.
"Come out and fight like men!" the sergeant bawled. He was a tough old veteran whose words were mainly to keep up morale. He knew the ninjas would never attempt to match the firepower of conventional troops in the open, but if he made them look like cowards, his own men would gain confidence. As Major Lima had stressed (and what a loss his death had been!): the key to success in the jungle was not in the rifle but in the mind.
Amazingly, his challenge was answered. Abruptly green and brown-splotched ninjas showed from behind trees, like so many apparitions. Each loosed a deadly arrow. One of the arrows brought down the bold sergeant; the others took out the remaining noncoms of the company. The nervous soldiers let off a volley of shots—but, confused by the number of targets and trying to duck the incoming arrows, they missed. The figures disappeared; not one had been hit.
Now the company was leaderless. But, aware that there was no way out, the men dropped to the ground and aimed at the trees. There had actually been no more than a score of ninjas, and almost two hundred soldiers remained. "Try that again, why don't you!" one yelled.
And the ninjas did. They manifested before their trees like spirits of the wood. This time the troopers aimed more carefully. Their rifles fired, and the bullets sang around each ninja. Yet not one of the robed figures fell. Like ghosts they advanced upon the soldiers. Ghosts with bows, for the arrows winged into the faces of the prone men.
"It can't be!" one soldier cried, firing first at one figure, then another. He knew himself to be a dead shot, yet his efforts had no effect.
Now the ninjas opened their hoods—and gaunt skulls were revealed. It was only paint, but it had demoralizing effect, for many of the troops were superstitious. The shots stopped, giving the ninjas time to close the gap.
The ninjas were upon the soldiers. The bows had disappeared; other weapons took their place. Some were katanas, the Japanese Samurai warrior swords. On the ground, in close quarters, the troops were at a disadvantage. The swords slashed down, cutting arms, legs and heads in half. The men raised their rifles as shields, unable to take effective aim at such close range. But the finely tempered swords sliced right through the metal barrels, rendering the rifles useless even for this.
The soldiers, with the courage of desperation, rose up to grapple their adversaries. But the ninjas were demons in close combat. Their weapons moved devastatingly: spears, halberds, war clubs, maces, tetsubi iron bars, a naginata like a spear with a blade in the end, chained sickles—each ninja had his favorite death dealer. The weapons were lacquered in black so as not to reflect light. But soon a more deadly aspect manifested: the blades and clubs, like the arrows,
were poisoned. The slightest break of skin allowed that potent coating to enter the body, and death followed in seconds. Thus the ninjas were doubly dangerous, despite being outnumbered ten to one. They spread a wide swath of death, merely by nicking as many soldiers as possible. The two hundred became a hundred and forty, then one hundred, and the odds were reduced to five to one.
Among the ninjas was a small man, really a boy, who nevertheless wielded two swords: one long, one short. Yet those two blades were the most devastating of all. For this was Fu Antos, Lord of the Ninjas. He had come late upon the scene, having been occupied with the fortification of the Black Castle and the development of the first oil well. But this subversion of his arms shipment during his inattention had caused him to take a personal interest in rectifying the situation, and to seek a bit of exercise in combat.
Fu Antos whirled this way and that, a dervish of death. Here he lopped off the face of a gaping man; half that face went flying away. There he brought his blade down straight, cleaving a head in twain like split wood. Another he decapitated with a single stroke; the corpse stood there a moment spouting blood. Fu Antos was a miniature berserker of slaughter, never tiring; his ki gave him the strength of several grown men.
Now three men pressed in on him. With incredible power, the ninja master brought his two swords together in truncated arcs, cutting the two side men in half at the waist and meeting in the torso of the center man. For an instant the tableau remained; three surprised soldiers staring at the little ninja. Then the two side bodies toppled, rolling apart, and the third sank down with a kind of squish.
Another soldier was leveling his rifle at Fu Antos' head. The ninja's two swords whirled. The short one lopped off the tip of the rifle; the long one swished by the front of the soldier's face. The man's nose flew off. A flick of the wrist, and Fu Antos speared that nose in the tip of his short sword. Then he returned it to the man, pinning it to his face by means of the blade. Ungrateful for this cosmetic favor, the man collapsed and died.
The numerical odds were down to four to one. "Run!" someone cried. The soldiers panicked. In a mass the survivors rose up and charged through the jungle toward their convoy.
The ninjas did not follow. Instead they brought out their bows again and loosed a shower of arrows at the fleeing body of men. And by the time the troops made it back to the trucks, only twenty remained.
"Ghosts with swords!" they gasped. "They cannot be killed! Our bullets won't touch them!"
"Bullshit!" a lieutenant snapped. "They must be wearing bullet-proof cloaks. All you have to do is grapple with them, smother them in their own folds." But he looked nervous.
Meanwhile, the tires had not been fixed, and the convoy remained stalled. It had a good defensive position, and the machine guns and tank-mounted cannon could destroy ninjas no matter what they were wearing.
"Radio for reinforcements," the officer said. "We need special equipment to deal with this. Flame throwers, bazookas. We'll clean them out, all right."
Again, Fu Antos agreed. The elimination of Major Lima had blunted the Brazilian army's jungle-fighting capacity, but here and there competent officers remained, and they tended to surface at awkward moments. The bulk of the convoy sat tight; the battle had only begun. Those six hundred soldiers could overrun the Black Castle's incomplete ramparts, and there were reinforcements coming for the army, none for the ninjas. They had to be stopped here in the jungle. It was necessary to destroy the personnel, not the equipment, so that the ninjas could use the weapons they had expected to obtain.
The ninja leader, contemplating the convoy from his forest cover, smiled. The infiltration of the ninja's own shipment by the soldiers had been a brilliant tactical stroke. He should have anticipated it and taken precautions, but he had been so busy with the construction of the castle and related matters that he had not paid proper attention to the opposition, and could blame no one but himself. Once this youthful body grew to manhood, he would make fewer such mistakes. And he had to give credit to the leader of the opposition: Fernando Mirabal. That was the man who stood most in need of assassination—and Fu Antos had let him go free after having him in his power. Calamitous misjudgment!
Well, perhaps he would get another chance at Mirabal. If the man showed up anywhere near the Black Castle, and he was bound to. He would not escape the reckoning of the ninja. Though in a way it was too bad, for in certain respects Mirabal had a mind that was worthy of respect. In a curious way, that mind was similar to Fu Antos's own.
But at the moment there was more urgent business: to wipe out this formidable force before it came within range of the castle. The cannon, mortars and bazookas could devastate the stoneworks, once they oriented on a clear target. But they would be equally potent in defense of the castle, if they could be captured intact. Yet the soldiers might well blow up their own equipment rather than turn it over. So a proper strategy was called for, to separate men from equipment without damage to the latter.
It was time to initiate the sequence of the elements: Air, Earth, Fire and Water. Air was gentle; it would accomplish this critical separation. The other elements were more brutal, and would have to wait upon the defense of the castle itself.
Fu Antos raised his hand in a signal: AIR. And a ninja runner moved quickly to the ninja smoke-expert, who even now had prepared a wagonful of fine, dry wood shavings. He would move his wagon directly upwind from the convoy and proceed.
Soon it began, for the ninjas were always efficient. The flame crackled up, then dampened as special potions were poured into it. This infusion of Water into Fire had its effect on Air; the smoke thickened, too heavy to gain much altitude. Instead it rolled like a bloated python across the landscape, through the forest toward the convoy. The wind shoved it along, making twists in the snake's giant torso, but the thing kept growing from the muted fire. The ninjas, alert to their own devices, gave that dark vapor a wide berth. The head of it crossed the convoy: perfect aim. The long torso slithered by, infiltrating the trucks and tanks, curling around the soldiers. It had a sweet, tangy flavor, not unpleasant.
But the officer caught on. "Gas!" he cried.
He was right: this was a ninja form of nerve gas. Many of the same mushrooms that had polluted the town's water supply, bringing madness, were in this smoke. To breathe it was at first exhilarating, but that was the onset of disaster.
There were few gas masks, for this tactic had not been anticipated. Major Lima would have come prepared, but Major Lima had been removed for that very reason. The officers and tank crews had masks, but not the soldiers. A sergeant had a better alternative: "Run!" he bawled. "Get out of the gas! Hold your breath—don't breathe it!"
The men needed little urging. The tank and crews and officers donned their masks; the others fled into the forest.
Then hell broke loose. Vicious animals charged among the soldiers: wolflike dogs, jaguars, and boars. The beasts looked rabid, for several of them foamed at the mouths. This terrified the soldiers, who did not know that the ninjas had carefully squirted foam into the animals' mouths as they were released. The men fired wildly, but the creatures were already in their midst, and the shots only brought down other soldiers. In addition, several men had inhaled too much of the smoke, and now were enjoying themselves firing right at the handiest targets: their associates. The animals themselves slashed randomly with their tusks, teeth, and claws, seeming to exist only to kill. It was a thorough melee.
Small bags flew through the air to burst at the feet of the men. Small poisonous snakes emerged. They slithered around the feet and legs of the men and started biting. Other bags loosed little wasps, scorpions and stinging flies, with similar effect. Then monstrous bat-forms swooped down from the trees. They were ninjas, employing gliding kites. In moments they too were among the panicked soldiers, slashing, hitting and mauling. Then they were gone again, leaving many more soldiers dead.
Now only the gas-masked men remained with the convoy.
The ninjas ran toward it, and
the vicious animals let them pass because they wore a special repellent.
The turrets of the two tanks swung about as the ninjas approached. But it was difficult for the men to orient well while wearing gas masks, and vision from inside a tank is seldom ideal anyway. The ninjas gestured at the tanks, drawing their fire, then dropped out of sight before the aim could be adjusted.
But even a confused tank is dangerous. The lead one charged forward, its treads crunching the ground where the ninjas had disappeared, grinding up the turf. The ninjas could no longer be secure in their invisibility; they had to scramble out of the way. One was too slow, and the tank crushed his legs. Destroyed but not dead, the ninja reached inside his uniform, grabbed a packet of poison, and popped it into his mouth. Then he died, satisfied that he could not be interrogated.
Meanwhile, Fu Antos quickly got in under the guns and clambered onto the moving tank. He emptied a bag of itching powder into the vent.
Like all ninja products, it was superior grade. The men inside went wild as the fine material sifted down into their uniforms, aggravating the skin intolerably. If there is anything worse than ants in the pants, it is itching powder in a tank. In moments the tank, too, was vacant, the masks off.
The second tank was orienting its cannon on Fu Antos. He jumped down and used the other vehicles of the convoy as cover, so that it could not fire. The other ninjas had already dispatched the officers in the jeeps, but the tank crew could not know that. Then he skated two tonki, little throwing knives, in through the forward apertures of the tank. No other man could have made such accurate throws.