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

she thought was stupid.
    “Well, all right then. So the Chinese need your planes to throw the Japs out of China. But why go to Shanghai? That’d be the last place we ought to show up. It must be crawling with Japs.”
    “I have no doubt but that it is. But the man I’m supposed to meet has a place in the International Settlement. We should be safe enough there, I would think.”
    “You would, huh? We’re not smuggling in kewpie dolls, you know—the Japs are hardly going to overlook a pair of seaplanes.”
    “I’ve got that all figured out, don’t you worry.”
    “Yeah, you’ve never given me anything to worry about. Say, you seemed to know an awful lot about what was going on up on Diamond Head, now that I’m thinking about it.”
    “Sure I do. It’s all part and parcel with my mission to Shanghai. The Japs are threatening the entire Pacific, that should be clear to anyone with half the brain to see it. If they can be stopped short in China—well, it can’t hurt, that’s all.”
    “You think that’s what all the fooferaw around here is about? The Japanese ? Hell, there ain’t nothing going to happen around here—the Japs’d be nuts to attack Honolulu, for Christ’s sake, even if they could manage it, which they can’t.”
    “Here’s our lunch. Let’s eat—I’m starving!”

CHAPTER SEVEN
    “You know, I just remembered I got an old pal who ought to be around Shanghai somewhere.”
    I was talking to Pat. We were leaning against the railing on the foredeck of the Venture , watching the foaming waves breaking around the bow. We were only a couple of days out of Shanghai. She’d been taking pot shots at a flotilla of jellyfish with an enormous antique Colt she told me was a kind of family heirloom. She had let me take a look at the monster. It must have weighed four pounds and, I’d noticed, had a fanning spur welded to the hammer.
    I noticed she never missed.
    “Yeah?” she said, not taking her eyes from her target.
    “Fella named Buck. Frank Buck.”
    “Not the bring-em-back-alive guy?”
    There was a BANG! and a miniature geyser of water where an innocent jellyfish had been floating.
    “Sure. He’s got a place in the city, a kind of warehouse for the animals he collects. And, ah, well, his other business interests.”
    “Other business interests?”
    “Well, Frank never was one to pass up a good opportunity.”
    “An entrepreneur, is he?”
    “Yeah, if entrepreneur means what I think it does.”
    She turned and looked at me speculatively.
    “So . . . you think Buck can help me?”
    “That’s exactly what I had in mind. If anyone knows his way around China, he does.”
    *****
    Shanghai wasn’t exactly as I’d remembered it from the last time I’d been through there, on my way to Indochina to shoot Man-Eaters of Angkor Wat , and what a picture that was, too, boy oh boy! The Japs were running the city, with the Chinese gnashing their teeth on the other side of the Whangpoo River, in Pootung. Pat and I checked ourselves into the Cathay Hotel, which was owned by an old acquaintance of mine, Ellice Victor, a British millionaire who’d built at least a dozen modern buildings in the International Settlement—which was now, I understood, controlled like everything else by the Japanese, a fact that must irk Ellice no end. I’d cherished the hope that the place’d be so crowded with foreigners that Pat and I would have to share a room, but no such luck. With people evacuating the city in droves, the hotel was practically empty and we stood out like big white thumbs.
    “Look,” I told Pat, “you go on up and get yourself settled. I haven’t got anything other than what I’m wearing on my back, anyway. I’ll go look up Frank. If he’s in town, he’ll be sure to give us a hand.”
    “All right. Take it easy, though. The Japanese are suspicious as hell. No one’s inspected the Venture ’s cargo yet, what with all the confusion in the harbor, but they’re going to get around to it