accentuated her long, elegant fingers, and a pair of matching handguns were strapped to the swell of her hips. The compact pistols were modified versions of the Beretta Model 1915, and their silver handles were engraved with the columnlike symbol of the Fascist party along with the motto Viva La Morte, or Long Live Sacrifice. Octavo’s tight-fitting ensemble left only her head uncovered, but for the moment her striking features remained hidden behind the binoculars.
Octavo’s skin was tanned to a wonderful bronze shade from hours spent reclining on the beautiful golden beaches of the Mediterranean, and she had carefully painted her lips a luscious, rich color known as falu red. Her long, dark hair swung freely behind her, cascading over her delicate shoulders like a waterfall, loose strands catching now and then on the island breeze. Her hair was a shade of brown so dark as to be almost black, and her tresses held a slight kink that was pleasing to the eye.
Demy Octavo was on a mission, sent to the South Pacific by her government under the auspices of Benito Mussolini himself, tasked to acquire important American military secrets. And yet, hidden in the natural cover of the island’s green-and-yellow ferns, the gorgeous Signorina Octavo did not watch the naval base. Instead, she had turned her binoculars to the skies above, where a single-seater airplane cut through the air, its engine buzzing like an angry hornet. The airplane was an experimental model, one not yet in general production. Sleek lines swooped back from the aircraft’s pointed nose cone, where an intake unit sucked in a stream of air to hurry its passage through the cloudless blue skies above the rolling waves of the Pacific Ocean. A glass blister protruded midway along the sharpened length of the dartlike aircraft, like a bubble on a stream, and a figure could be seen sitting within, piloting the strange vehicle with grim determination.
Demy Octavo knew that plane and she knew the figure who guided it through the azure sky. The pilot’s name was Abraham Flag, a gifted scholar and full-time adventurer who had done more for the American government in the past five years than any other man.
Tales of Abraham Flag’s exploits were splashed across the front page of every newspaper in America with alarming regularity, but those stories could only scratch the surface of Flag’s true contribution to the well-being and sanctity of the Land of the Free. However, Flag himself was no government employee. He worked for an even more noble cause, one he had described in his few rare interviews to the gentlemen of the press as “the continuance and evolution of mankind.”
The beautiful Signorina Octavo had clashed with Flag on several occasions in the past when her goals had conflicted with his own. They had met on the moonlit streets of Paris, Octavo armed with only a stiletto blade hidden in her stocking top beneath a cerise evening gown, and Flag armed with nothing but his keen intellect as they vied for possession of a meteorite of breathtaking mineral worth. They had become close then, as they found themselves in the romantic City of Lights, but, when he had realized the wicked government that Octavo represented, Flag had resisted the woman’s abundant charms. Instead, Professor Flag’s determined spirit had remained focused solely on preventing the invaluable meteor from falling into the wrong hands.
Even now, as Demy Octavo tracked Flag’s plane with her binoculars, she recalled those tender moments in Paris, before Flag had discovered the nature of her real mission. He had left with the meteor, and she had been forced to report her absolute failure to Mussolini. A man not renowned for his even temper, Mussolini had erupted with rage at the news.
Octavo watched the remarkable plane as it swooped around in a long, banking curve, almost as though its extraordinary pilot was taking one last, long look of the tiny Pacific island before deciding to land. Octavo knew that was not the case—Italian intelligence operatives had learned of the discovery in question three days ago when they had intercepted an urgent message that had been wired to Flag’s New York apartment, requesting his assistance as swiftly as possible. Flag himself had been out of the country at the time, working in his fabled Laboratory of the Incredible, where he was not to be disturbed, and so two of his frequent colleagues had gone in his stead. It had been two full days before Flag himself had responded to the U.S. Navy’s summons to confirm this appointment with mystery, a further day for him to reach the island from his laboratory in the Antarctic. Octavo smiled wickedly at the thought—Flag’s other commitment had given her time to charter a mail plane via New Zealand, which had brought her close enough to the tiny island to drop in the waters and swim ashore, unseen by the patrolling military.
The island itself was barely more than a pinprick on the map, a little-known territory of the United States of America called Isle Terandoa. Less than a decade before, the whole structure had been below the water, but a shift in the tectonic plates had revealed the atoll, and the U.S. had been quick to organize a small naval presence there. Tucked away between New Zealand and the western coast of South America, Terandoa had been used as a test site for the Navy, a place where they could try out prototype seagoing vessels well away from public scrutiny. More recently, the tiny island, which was no more than four miles square, had played grudging host to a team of archaeologists whose tedious excavation work had been seen as a dangerous compromise to security by the local Navy commander, a proud man called Edmond Kinver. Against Kinver’s requests, the brass in Washington had insisted that a small team from Harvard be given access to Terandoa, and so he had curtly accepted them, fencing off each area that they studied and hurrying them along in their painstaking work. That was, at least, until the head of the archaeological team, a man called Ross Moorcroft, had made an unexpected discovery. Moorcroft had brought his discovery to the attention of General Kinver, and soon after the call had gone out for Abraham Flag’s expertise.
The steady drone of the airplane’s engine grew louder to Octavo’s ears as Flag brought the sleek one-man craft in to land on the single airstrip inside the naval compound. The powerful lenses of Demy Octavo’s binoculars followed the aircraft’s descent and landing, and she waited patiently to see what would happen next. Five seconds passed, then ten, until finally that strange glass bubble that rested atop the arrow-shaped craft sprang open, flipping to one side on a hinged arrangement until it hung at the starboard side of the aircraft. A moment later, the pilot’s hand emerged and the powerful form of the mighty man of adventure vaulted from the cockpit, his booted feet gliding down the short run of steps that had been molded into the side of his unique aircraft.
As Flag’s toe struck the black tarmac of the landing strip, General Kinver, who stood to attention, offered the fabled adventurer a brisk salute. Two dozen sailors wearing smart dress uniforms stood to attention behind their general in the blazing midday sun, and from the end of the baking runway two men in civilian dress watched the proceedings. The first of these men had bright red hair and his shoulders were so wide that he reminded one of a football player still wearing his shoulder pads. The wide man’s name was Barnaby B. Barnaby, and he was an archaeologist of some renown. Beside Barnaby stood a much shorter man who wore an ill-fitting suit with a dark, sombre tie and a fedora hat. The man’s name was Anthony Pontfract, though he was known to his friends as “Little Ant.” Little Ant was a master linguist who was able to speak and read several dozen languages fluently and instinctively apply that knowledge to numerous others. Both men had a long history of accompanying Flag on his endeavors, and their companionship dated back to a period in the Great War when all three men had been incarcerated in a notorious prisoner of war camp.
Crouched amid the foliage almost one thousand yards away, Demy Octavo, the glamorous Italian secret agent, was unable to discern the words that were spoken. Thus, she simply watched in silence as Kinver exchanged pleasantries with Flag, patting him on the shoulder like an old friend as the smartly dressed squadron of his best men stood rigidly to attention at the side of the airstrip. Barnaby and Little Ant made their way along the airstrip to meet their friend, with Little Ant hurrying along to keep up with Barnaby’s distance-humbling strides.
It had been just a few months since Octavo’s most recent encounter with Abraham Flag, but the adventurer’s appearance still surprised her, making her heart flutter for just a moment like that of a giddy schoolgirl. Flag was an immense man, over six feet in height, with wide shoulders, muscular arms
