Return to Skull Island by Ron Miller, Darrell Funk Read Free Book Online

both of you.”
    So I was right, I thought. He sure enough is a Russian, no doubt one of the thousands of aristocrats who fled the bloodbaths following the Glorious October Revolution. I’d run into them in every port in the world. Most of them were bums. I decided to keep a close eye on him . . . and my wallet.
    Interesting as all of this was, it brought me no closer to an answer to my immediate concern: What was going to happen to us? And Englehorn and the Venture , for that matter? Nothing good that I could think of and I was thinking mighty hard.
    We were left entirely alone for most of the remainder of the day—no one even brought us any food, though the lack of water quickly became the most serious issue. Pat had given herself a little privacy by hanging from the bars of her cell the ragged blanket that had covered her cot, though she spent little enough time behind it. She seldom broke her monotonous pacing, hands clasped behind her back, chin sunk onto her chest, face scowling, deep in thought. There was no light provided us either, other than what came through the small windows. As evening fell it quickly grew dark as a cave inside our prison. There was only a brief flare whenever the Russian lit a cigarette, but even that ceased when he fell asleep (on the only cot, too, which he had already claimed as his own), eliminating any possibility of conversation on my side of the prison.
    “Pat?”
    “What?”
    “How’re you doing?”
    “I’m all right. I’m sorry I got you into this, Carl. I really am.”
    “I’ve been in worse scrapes.”
    “What do you think’s going to happen?”
    “Not much. I don’t think that Culebra’s going to want to take many chances with getting Uncle Sam on his back. We’re Americans here—well, two of us are anyway—so there’s not much he’d risk doing beyond letting us stew in here for a while and then throwing us out of the country. You’ll probably lose your cargo, though. He’ll seize that as contraband. Maybe the Venture , too.”
    “I’d hate that—he’d just use the weapons against the poor people who want to overthrow him.”
    “Yeah. That’d be tough all right.”
    “There’s no need to be sarcastic.”
    I could see that Pat was working up a mood again, so I left her to stew while wondering to myself just what sort of jam we’d really gotten ourselves into. There was no American embassy we could turn to—Uncle Sam hadn’t recognized the new government and had recalled the consul when Culebra had taken over (San Serif had only rated a consulate—it was too dinky an outfit to have rated a full-fledged embassy). I didn’t know if there were any American businesses I could ask for help—not that I had any reasonable expectation of receiving any if I did ask. And if there were any foreign businesses still operating in the country, they were doing so entirely at Culebra’s pleasure and sure weren’t about to rock the boat on the account of a couple of out-of-luck Yankees. I couldn’t think of a thing to do except hope that I might be able to fast-talk the General if and when I ever got a chance to meet him. How smart could the dictator of a backwater dump like this be , anyway?
    It must have been well past midnight when I heard the locks rattling. I hadn’t been asleep, so I saw the first crack of yellow light as the door opened. Half a dozen men came in, a couple of them holding kerosene lanterns. I didn’t say a word and, although I knew he was also awake, neither did the Russian. I had no idea if Pat was sleeping or not—I couldn’t see her behind her curtain—but I would have bet the only dollar I owned that she’d been aware of the opening door long before I had. That sort of cat-like attention would have been just like her. I thought the men had come for me; after all, surely someone would have recognized my name by now, but instead they went straight for Pat’s cell and unlocked it.
    “Say,” I asked, and a couple of the men jumped at