The Phantom by Rob MacGregor Read Free Book Online Page B

as several patrolmen hustled two prisoners from the rear compartment.
    One of the prisoners, a smart-mouthed fellow named Morgan, cursed as he was led to the main building. The other one, Breen, was injured and being held up by two patrolmen. Both were bonos, a local term for the foreigners who hung around Zavia. Over the years, the bonos had turned the fishing village into a denizen of depravity, and Weeks was grateful he didn’t have to patrol the place.
    Patrolling the jungle was another matter altogether. Just when you thought nothing interesting was ever going to happen, something unexpected turned up. That was the case today. A tribesman had stopped their patrol vehicle and relayed a message from deep in the jungle that looters had been seen breaking into an old burial site.
    They had no trouble finding the one named Morgan. He was battered and crazed when they had arrested him and babbling about a purple giant. Some of the men thought he had jungle fever, but Weeks took his comments seriously. He asked Morgan to describe the so-called giant. All the details fit what Weeks knew, but he didn’t bother to tell Morgan.
    The official policy was to ignore all reports about anything related to the Phantom, the legendary Ghost Who Walks. The theory, Weeks supposed, was that if you ignored something long enough, it eventually would disappear. But it was a theory to which Weeks didn’t subscribe.
    Morgan had led them to his buddy, Breen, and they’d recovered two sacks of jewels and gold artifacts, which Weeks now slung over his shoulder. Their arrival set off a flurry of activity in the usually sedate outpost at the jungle’s edge. Weeks dropped the sacks and saluted his commander, Captain Philip Horton, who had just stepped out of the main building to see what was going on.
    “What do you have here, Corporal—poachers?” Horton’s disdain was evident in his voice, in his sour expression. He was a broad-shouldered man with a thick mustache and dark bulging eyes. Weeks was thin and wiry.
    “Looters, Captain. They broke into an ancient burial cave and stole some jewels.” He opened one of the bags for the captain. “Really upset some of the natives. They revere their ancestors, you know.”
    “So I’ve heard.”
    Weeks turned to the patrolmen. “Put them in the guardhouse.”
    Morgan struggled and two other patrolmen rushed forward to subdue him. “You got a problem, Captain!” Morgan yelled. “You got a ‘thing’ out there, a big, strange-looking purple thing! On a horse . . . with a wolf!”
    Horton motioned for Morgan to be taken away. “Get him out of here.”
    Horton turned on his heels and walked toward a drab wooden one-story building. Weeks picked up the sacks and fell into step beside him. “That man’s been chewing on the wrong kind of jungle growth,” Horton said. “He’s out of his mind.”
    “You know what he’s talking about, Captain. We both do.”
    “Not now, Weeks. I’m not in the mood.” He took the sacks of jewels from the corporal. “I’ll see that these artifacts are returned to tribal authorities,” he said and walked on.
    “The Ghost Who Walks,” Weeks called after him. “The Phantom.”
    “It’s nonsense!”
    “When you’re in the jungle long enough, anything is possible,” Weeks muttered.
    In the two years that Weeks had spent patrolling the tribal territories, rarely a month went by without word of a sighting of the notorious purple marauder. Weeks figured that the Phantom was real enough, all right, but he wasn’t sure how much of the legend was true. As far as he was concerned, no one lived four hundred years.
    He didn’t know if people could fly around outside their bodies or do all the strange things the tribal people said the Phantom could do. A lot of that was folklore, but he’d heard other things that people had actually seen.
    One night when they were sharing a bottle of Bangalla blue brandy Horton had told Weeks that the Phantom had once taken out