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| Art by Jack Kirby & Marie Severin |
Read the Previous Chapter HERE
Chapter Twelve: Desert Danger
For many wasted hours, Captain America had been searching the vast Sahara desert.
“Three and a half million square miles,” rode the nagging thought with him; “or almost as big as the United States. It’s like searching from the East Coast. to the West Coast, and from Minnesota down to Texas, for the Storm Satellite Launcher of Karzz.”
First he had made wide sweeps over the great desert in the Quinjet, peering down. But when fuel. ran dangerously low, he had landed at a central spot, and then broke out the emergency jeep inside the plane. It’s six wheeled drive easily negotiating even loose sand, he had made overland forays in all directions, until even the jeep’s nuclear power unit—another Anthony Stark invention—ran low.
Finally, he had unpacked the radar gear stowed in the rocketplane to slowly scan outward in a radius of 500 miles--again by virtue of a Stark invention using radar waves that “bent” around the Earth’s curvature.
Cap heard a clicking from the parked jeep. His two-way world-wide radio phone was ringing. Cap picked it up and heard Henry Pym’s voice from a transoceanic liner. “Wasp and I are heading back. for Avenger headquarters.” He gave a quick resume of their skirmish against Karzz and the Vulcan Machine.
“Hmm. So it was another android double of Karzz in the South Seas, as well as in Antarctica.”
“Right, Cap. That means you’ll run into the genuine Karzz. After we reach headquarters and rejoin Iron Man and Hawkeye, we’ll all four of us rush to the Sahara.”
“Okay,” responded Cap. “But meanwhile, I’ll be searching for him myself. Over and out.”
Cap’s thoughts were not pleasant as he returned to his radar scan-of the Sahara. Three incredible future machines had triggered. off three ghastly earth dooms. Even if Cap did succeed in halting doom number four, Earth was hardly saved. Warning the authorities was hopeless. Who could stop the giant comet plunging through space toward Earth? Or the mile-deep heat device that would melt the colossal Antarctic ice cap and flood the world? Or the world-wide fusillade of volcanoes that would erupt, started off by the Vulcan Machine?
“But I still want to get my hands on that world-wrecker,” Cap grated -through his teeth. “He won’t escape to the future and finish his conquest of space. He’ll stay here to share the end of the world with us...so help me!"
With that vow burning through his veins, the star-spangled champion turned back to his radar screen, which now showed the outlines of an old abandoned fort, completely deserted, within a straggling oasis of drooping palms. Even the well had dried up, and the place was shunned by desert travelers. All this Cap knew from the comprehensive Sahara guidebook he had foresightedly taken along.
But where were Karzz and his rocket? Out in the hot open desert itself, where the sun’s blazing. glare made radar images faint and undeterminable?
Suddenly, remembering an odd thing, Cap swung the screen back to old Fort Shahib. How could that one slender tower he had seen shine like bright metal? All the rest of the fort was stone grey with age.
Peering closely and tuning the image sharper, Cap sucked in his breath. That was no tower; it was the huge nose of a rocket sticking up within the high outer wall of the fort.
He tossed away the dehydrated K-rations he had been eating, which had been reduced to compact lozenge size by Anthony Stark’s science magic. Slinging his survival kit over one shoulder, his shield over the other, he jumped in the jeep and spun off across the wasteland.
With smooth sand before him like the natural race-tracks of Daytona Beach or the Utah Flats, Cap was able to shift his nuclear jeep into its top speed of 100 miles an hour for the three-hour trip to Fort Shahib, some 300 miles south.
It was the south-central Sahara, the most desolate area, spotted with just a few widely scattered Bedouin camps and crossed by only one long-unused camel trail of the old Arabian nomads. It was doubtful if anyone from the outside world had been here in fifty years.
Endless burning sand, rippling in the wind, stretched before Cap’s squinting, sun-dazzled eyes. He fumbled beside him and slapped a pith-helmet on his head; otherwise he’d go glare-blind in an hour.
Heat rose in invisible, suffocating waves from the shiny sands. Cap kept telling himself the temperature was only 120 degrees. He did not dare look at the windshield thermometer. If he found it registered 150 degrees, the shock might undermine his grim determination to endure the hell-hot inferno he was crossing.
He drank sparingly from his water supply, but when he picked up the canteen again and upended it, it was empty, dry. Hurling it down, he licked his leathery lips and drove on for what was another eternity, though his lying watch said only two hours had passed.
The noonday sun pitilessly poured its furnace heat down on him. Cap suddenly jerked up and swung the jeep around.
“A Nazi machine-gun nest!” he exclaimed. “What’s it doing here today, long after the war? They’re opening fire. . . .”
As at the Avenger memorial ceremonies, Cap leaped out of the jeep, shield forward, and charged. Sand flew under his feet as he warded off the hail of bullets and hurled himself headlong, his fist cracking on...nothing.
He sat up, spitting the sand out of his mouth, dazed.
“A mirage? Delusion? Take hold of yourself, boy. You're cracking up.”
He drove on, but images again swam before he eyes...and faded. Once he glanced beside him in happy astonishment to see Bucky sitting there. But that image, too, faded....
“I'm an Avenger,” he ground out between clenched teeth. “An Avenger does not crack up, hear me? if I flip my lid now, I’ll let down my Avenger pals...and the whole world...and twenty thousand future worlds.... Hang on...hang on!
He was singing “twenty thousand future worlds, baked in a pie.... What will Karzz do with them? My, my, my!” when the ramparts of the tort rose over the horizon before him. His maniacal laughter choked off.
“Karzz’s hangout,” he muttered, and once again he was Captain America, the First Avenger, alert for danger and tuned for action.
Cannily, he drove up behind the screening palms of the oasis, cutting off a direct view from the fort, hoping to surprise Karzz. He belly-crawled through, the sand, brushing aside lizards and other creatures of the desert. Soundlessly, he wriggled among stone debris where one portion of the old fort’s wall had collapsed.
Skilled in the tactics of unseen and unheard approach, Cap congratulated himself that he could have surprised a platoon of Nazis in the fort it they had been there, as he raced silently through the front gates.
“Bon soir, Captain America! Why did you go to all that trouble sneaking in?” a mocking voice greeted him. It was Karzz, pointing at a monitor screen atop an electronic box. “You have been under surveillance ever since your vehicle first approached the old fort.”
Cap conquered his first surge of disappointment. Swiftly his eyes took in the wide courtyard and the tall rocket standing on end with a gantry tower around it. Turning back to Karzz, Cap’s eyes narrowed. Was the faint purplish aura of his force-shield missing for some reason? Was he vulnerable?
Suddenly he plunged forward in a crouch, to find out.
Karzz stood unperturbed. “You are the incomparable man-to-man, face-to-face, toe-to-toe slugger that no other man on earth is a match for…except one,“ he said.
He touched a stud on his belt and a figure dashed out of a barracks doorway nearby.
Cap’s driving plunge had ground to a halt, in utter shock. The man coming toward him in a crouch, legs churning powerfully, had a round shield in front ...a uniform of red, white, and blue design . . . a winged cap...
“It’s me!” choked Cap. “Another Captain America!”
“Your android double. While you were supposedly sneaking in, my electro-scan ray was X-raying you inside and out, feeding the data into a bio-computer, which then built up a carbon copy of you, so to speak. His body and mind are exactly like yours. So, in a sense, my body-guard is...Captain America!”
Karzz finished with a devilish laugh. “Now see if you can defeat...yourself.”
Recovering from his first shock, Cap sprang forward to meet his twin’s charge. Like super football-players, two powerful figures came together with bruising. impact, their shields clanging together so loudly that the vibrations made a dozen loose bricks fall out of the crumbling wall nearby.
They both reeled back. It was almost like a parody in pantomime, the two actors doing everything the same, and reacting exactly alike.
In unison, they swung the world‘s mightiest fists at each other, to meet the world’s toughest chins. When Cap suddenly flung his shield to slice at his opponent’s legs, the second Captain America also sailed his shield in a perfect block shot, knocking Cap’s shield aside.
When Cap ran to retrieve it, his double leaped head-long to tackle him around the legs and they both crashed to the ground. Both without shields, they wrestled and tumbled. in the dirt. When Cap pulled a judo trick to hurl the android back, his double promptly rolled on his back and footed Cap away as he charged.
Karzz had watched the furious battle with an amused grin. “Very entertaining, but I have work to do. While you’re busy fighting with yourself, Captain America, I'll start the countdown for my Storm Satellite.”
The alien flipped over switches on a control board near the rocket then began counting: “Ten...nine...eight...”
It was now or never for Cap, if he hoped to stop earth doom number four—whatever it was—from being launched.
He tried a desperate ruse, facing his android double and gripping his shield as if to sling it at him again.
“Seven...six...five ...”
Cap flung the shield, but not at the android. It went to the side, at one of the stone walls of the courtyard.
Puzzled at this move, the android hesitated a moment, watching the flying shield. It was at this instant that Cap hurled himself forward, taking the android unawares and flattening him with a driving shoulder in his solar plexus. He heard synthetic bones crack within the artificial man.
“Three...two...one...”
Cap went over the fallen android, straight toward Karzz at his controls, with a flying leap.
“Ignition!” Cap heard, just before he smashed into the control box and tipped it over with a crash, staggering Karzz back.
Did Cap Stop Karzz?
Or, Will Thursday's Chapter Live Up to its' Title...
The Avengers' Darkest Hour!
You Know You'll be Here to Find Out!
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