San Francisco, Chinatown
United States of America
April 14th, 1940
Four men crouched behind some trashcans in the black, unlit and stinking alley behind the Chinatown flophouse, where the rustle of fat rats carousing in the garbage cowering the pavement like a blanket of leaves broke the eerie silence in the midst of the metropolis. They were just waiting for an opening, for that locked back door to open so that they could enter without giving the warning of breaking down the door.
‘Will it be right this time?’ the Shadow growled, threat and irritation evident in the booming voice.
James Bond cringed inwardly from the sinister crime-fighter his father had introduced him to. Despite the implicit trust in him professed by “Wild Bill” Donovan and shared by Indiana Jones, who seemed to suffer from a bad case of hero-worship, Bond could not help feel uneasy in his company. It was as if that tall, dark man, always, it seemed swept in shadow and always covering his face with that black hat and that red scarf, somehow could see straight into Bond’s soul, laying bare the crimes and misdeeds that festered there, some since a few years back, some just recently sunk to the bottom of the black pond of his sins. When the Shadow’s horrible eyes bore into him, Bond felt like a man of wanton lust, pitiless cruelty and scant mercy, a murderer, a lecher. He didn’t like that one bit.
‘I sincerely hope so!’ Bond answered. ‘This is the last of the addresses I forced from that Pan-Asian agent in Moscow. If it’s not right, either he was lying or Siwan Khan has been warned and moved his base of operations. I still wish we had contacted the FBI though. They could have raided all these places faster than us and there’s no telling how many men he has in there.’
‘No’ The Shadow answered with finality. ‘Far to often, I’ve found Hoover’s outfit to be corrupt – not all the agents, not even most of them, but many enough that you can almost count on Siwan Khan being given a warning. He must not escape this time, and this Secret Weapon of his must be found and neutralized!’
‘Look…’ Bond began, trying to sound reasonable, but was interrupted by The Shadow’s gigantic henchman, Jericho, who carried a heavy and brutal-looking custom made 8-gauge pump-action shotgun.
‘The boss is right, limey!’ the colossal black man answered, his shaved scalp and eyes shining in the darkness. ‘Just too many bad cops among the Feds, and besides, who needs them?’
‘That’s the spirit!’ Indy agreed. ‘Now, stop complaining kid, and be ready, because I believe someone is unlocking that door!’
The four men grabbed their weapons harder and got ready to rush the back door when it opened. The party was small, but heavily armed. Besides his monster pump action, Jericho toted a military flare pistol loaded with a 10-gauge shotgun shell. It was a one-shot weapon, but a very deadly one indeed. Bond and Indy carried Winchester M12 12-gauge pump-action shotguns and had their pockets stuffed with shells. Bond had also armed himself with a M1911 Colt .45 Automatic from The Shadow’s stores, to supplement his dear little silenced Beretta which never left the special holster at the small of his back and Indy as always carried his trusty Webley Mk VI .445 revolver in a hip holster. Only The Shadow had not equipped himself beyond the two Colts he usually carried. He had never needed more.
The back door opened, letting out a shaft of yellow light and a man in jeans and leather jacket stepped out, leaned his Tommy Gun against the wall and faced it. To deem by the stench of urine in the alley, he did not usually bother with visits to the WC, probably it was too far, in his mind, from his post. While he was fumbling with his zipper, The Shadow flowed more than sneaked up to him and felled his unsuspecting victim with a karate blow to the neck. Siwan Khan’s henchman collapsed like a house of cards.
‘Well done boss!’ Jericho hissed, smiling fiercely as he moved forward quite silently despite his great bulk. The raiders moved out of the alley to find themselves in a narrow hall. To judge from the smell of Chinese cooking, it led to the kitchen.
‘Now, remember!’ whispered Indy. We need to take Siwan Khan alive! Only he can answer some questions I have about the coffin of Genghis Khan!’
‘There are other things too, of far more practical use, that he could answer’, the Shadow whispered, and the others nodded in agreement.
The group sprung into the kitchen, in which two Chinese cooks were preparing dinner for Siwan Khan’s men. Bond and Indy gestured to them to be silent, threatening them with their guns, but at the sight of The Shadow and Jericho, the Asians panicked and ran screaming for the door in the other end of the room.
‘So much for silence!’ Indy grated out between his teeth and ran to follow them.
The group now emerged in what looked a lot like a cheap Chinese restaurant, where about half a dozen Chinese men in dirty workman’s clothes were having dinner, spread out among the tables. Upon seeing the intruders, they shouted and began to draw an assortment of guns. Pandemonium reigned, as Jericho screamed a fierce war cry and fired the first shot with his gargantuan gun, which reverberated like cannon fire in the dining hall. The Shadow, Indy and Bond fired too, a deadly fusillade of well-aimed fire hitting the men of the Golden Master and dropping them amid screams and spurts of blood. Tables and chairs toppled, chinaware exploded into fragments as it was hit by buckshot. Suddenly, after fifteen chaotic seconds it was over and silence reigned once more, the only sound being groans from the wounded and some items of china and cutlery which finally succumbed to gravity and crashed into the floor after having been put in a precarious position by the throes of dying and wounded Tong crooks.
‘Reload and move on!’ shouted the Shadow. ‘We can’t let them get organized!’
With frenzied speed, Bond, Indy and Jericho loaded new shells into their weapons while The Shadow deftly changed clips and cocked his automatics. Then, at the head of the party, the Nemesis of Crime moved out from the dining hall into a hotel lobby. The receptionist, a young Chinese girl was on the floor, cowering under the reception desk, and running steps from a large group of men thundered from the staircase. Two guards were in the lobby, and they immediately opened up on the raiders with their Tommy guns. All but the Shadow dove for cover. With bullets whistling past him, with incredible cold blood, he fired a single shot with each of his two guns, and the two thugs dropped like stones, their weapons thumping dully on the carpeted floor.
‘The stairs!’ he shouted, standing wide-legged and aiming both his guns with outstretched arms. Indy, Bond and Jericho quickly picked themselves up from the floor and aimed their shotguns, bracing them against their shoulders.
The Tongs descending the stairs in leaps stumbled straight into a deadly ambush. Indy, Bond and Jericho fired their weapons as quickly as they could pump them, and The Shadow, wide-legged and laughing his eerie laughter, alternated shots between his right and left gun and felled a man with each one. The gunfire was so intense it turned into a kind of continuous, deafening roar, rather than the staccato of a series of individual detonations. Tong henchmen recoiled and fell in a bleeding, ruined mess down the stairs, pushing and tripping each other over, stumbling, screaming, swearing, dying. Some managed to get off a shot or two with pistols and revolvers before succumbing to the storm of well aimed lead, but none hit his mark. And still they came. Spent cartridges rained like hail over the dirty carpet.
Bond had exhausted the seven round magazine of his shotgun and dropped it, drawing his Colt from its shoulder holster. An instant later, Indy and Jericho also went for their side arms. With the elegance of well-rehearsed choreography The Shadow ejected the magazines from his automatics and drew new ones from his utility belt. Jericho fired his unorthodox gun, which seemed to have the recoil of a battleship cannon. Another thug went down, almost cut in half by the huge 10-gauge slug. Then Bond and Indy, aiming with both hands for greater precision held up a withering fire with their handguns, while Jericho and The Shadow reloaded their weapons. By the time they were done, it was all over. Twenty of Siwan Khan’s men lay dead or dying at the foot of the stairs while a growing pool of blood spread from the mound of corpses to stain the carpet.
As quickly as possible, and almost chocking from the acrid cordite fumes hanging thick in the air in the lobby, the raiders reloaded their guns. The receptionist girl fled crying out through the main entrance without any of them trying to stop her – they had bigger fish to catch.
‘Upstairs?’ Indy asked, and received a nod from the Shadow.
‘Let’s go, I’ll take point!’ Bond offered, and moved ahead before his father had time to protest.
They advanced up the stairs, guns held ready. Halfway up, a screaming Tong in Chinese dress and his scalp shaved save for one long braid jumped out into the staircase with a Tommy gun in his hands. Bond's shotgun cut off his screaming before he had time to loose one shot.
Reaching the top of the stairs, Bond quickly looked up, his head level with the floor. On both sides of the staircase, a hotel corridor extended with rows of doors on both walls. There was no one in sight. The floor was covered in a thick blue carpet, which in contrast to the carefully maintained untidiness of the lover storey was spotless and doubtlessly expensive. Everything else, the restrained but tasteful dark yellow wall-paper, the stylishly art-deco brass lamps on the wall, the dark wooden doors with polished brass fittings, spoke of money and taste. Apparently Siwan Khan did not like to live in the squalor he hid behind.
‘Corridors left and right!’ Bond whispered. ‘Which way?’
‘Let’s split and go both ways’, The Shadow answered. ‘Jericho and me will go left.’
‘Right, boss!’ the Herculean black answered.
Bond and Indy slowly advanced down the corridor, checking each door as they went. They all lead to unoccupied hotel rooms, which however showed clear signs of recent habitation. In one of the rooms a young Chinese girl, presumably naked under the sheet she held up before her chest sat in the bed with wide fearful eyes. Bond smiled comfortingly at her and moved on.
Suddenly a lone shot from behind made Bond and Indy jump in fright and whirl. The girl, who had been naked all right, lay dead on the carpet, a bullet wound between the shoulder blades. A short .38 was on the floor, right next to her right hand. In the opposite corridor, The Shadow lowered his smoking .45.
‘What made you think the girl wasn’t dangerous, Mr Bond?’ the masked crime-fighter asked. ‘Siwan Khan’s followers are fanatics. I’d thought you would have noticed by now.’
Shaken, Bond just shook his head and received a pat on the shoulder from his father. ‘Don’t worry about it kid. We’re just hardwired that way, you and I. Let’s move on.’
A few rooms down the hall, Bond and Indy came into a spacious penthouse that seemed to occupy fully one third of the area of that wing of the building. It was furbished in Chinese style, with gold and red wallpaper and showed clear signs of having been inhabited recently. An open cupboard, as if the resident had hurriedly grabbed some item of clothing from it, displayed rows of golden silk robes.
‘No doubt about it, this is the lair of the Golden Master!’ whispered Indy, his eyes sweeping the apartment again and again for threats. None appeared. After securing the place, Bond put down his rifle on a glass table and began closely examining the walls. It was not like a master criminal to inhabit a room with no second exit.
Sure enough, he soon found a segment of sliding panel. Once the gold-patterned panel had been pushed aside, Bond and Indy found themselves staring into an elevator shaft closed off with an – inevitably golden – grating.
‘Shadow! Hey Shadow! Look what we’ve found!’ shouted Indy. Soon the other half of the raiding party joined them.
‘It goes down it seems, but not far. We could probably slide down the cable to the roof of the cabin’, The Shadow commented.
‘Dare we climb down?’ Indy asked. ‘They could be waiting for us downstairs. We’d be sitting ducks.’
‘Dare we not?’ Bond countered. ‘Remember the Secret Weapon!’
‘Mr Bond is right’, The Shadow agreed, and after shaking the bar door added. ‘It’s locked. Jericho!’
The huge Shadow agent leaned his shotgun against the wall and stepped up to the grating. He grabbed two bars with his ham-sized fists, inhaled and pulled apart with all his might. The muscles in his arms and neck twisted and bulged like snakes under the ebony skin, and his black T-shirt looked like it might rip at any moment. The centimetre-thick gilt-covered bronze bars groaned, curved under the assault and then snapped like dead twigs. The black exhaled lightly and straightened.
‘Done. Go ahead, boss!’ He again picked up his weapon.
Scarcely able to believe his eyes, Bond looked at the cleanly snapped bars while The Shadow’s pushed himself between them. Inside, he pulled out a short piece of steel cable from a pocket and wound it around the elevator cable.
‘Wait here!’ He ordered. ‘I’ll send up the elevator for you!’
‘Bullshit!’ Indy protested, but the Nemesis of Crime had already jumped, holding on the coil of cable to slow his descent.
The Shadow landed easily on the wooden roof of the cabin and opened a hatch to peer into the interior. He spotted a lever, which being the only visible means of control, was sure to be used to go up or down. A grating similar to the one in the penthouse above was open, inviting. Certain that the men of Siwan Khan had taken up position in front of the elevator, The Shadow untangled his piece of cable, made a coil with it and carefully lowered it down into the cabin to hook around the lever and pull it upwards. Immediately, the cabin began to rise and shouts were heard from inside the room below, which had a quality that made him think it was large and spacious.
They would be ready when the cabin returned, but not before. With lightning speed, The Shadow dropped through the hatch onto the floor of the cabin, and the instant before the opening was closed by the wall descending like the blade of a brick guillotine, he rolled out of the diminishing opening to fall on his feet, cape outstretched like the wings of a giant black bat. His guns were already in his hands, and spat death at the surprised henchmen of Siwan Khan who had ran forward towards the elevator shaft as soon as the cabin began to rise.
Gunfire and the eerie, demented laughter of The Shadow echoed through the large, dark and grimy room, by the looks of it a kind of workshop or assembly hall, as he coolly cut down half a dozen men who fired, screamed or tried to turn and run, all of which did them no good whatsoever. When Bond, Indy and Jericho jumped out of the cabin, guns swinging in all directions, The Shadow was already running through the great room, where machine benches held heavy tools for metalworking.
‘They assembled it here!’ Bond shouted. ‘Look at those pieces of sheet metal, it looks almost like segments of an enormous bomb shell!’
‘Quickly! They’re getting away!’ The Shadow shouted, running towards a door at the far end of the assembly hall. He pushed it open and found himself in a spacious garage, with place for half a dozen trucks. The far wall opened into another alley than the one the raiders had entered through. A smell of engine exhausts still hung in the air.
‘They’re gone!’ Bond shouted with chagrin. ‘The damned coward Siwan Khan has escaped us!’
‘Not yet!’ The Shadow said grimly. ‘I suspected it would come to this so I had Moe circle around the block with my special pursuit car while we were inside. He should be here shortly, and with any luck he will have seen what way they went…’
Moments later, the Shadow’s driver, New York yellow-cab pilot extraordinaire Moe Shrewnitz drove a very special vehicle into the garage, braked to a screeching halt and threw up the doors.
‘Well, move on then! They’re getting away!’ he shouted, making place for The Shadow in the drivers seat while Jericho folded up to go through the door on the passenger side. Bond and Indy stood flabbergasted for an instant, looking at the fantastic-looking car before jumping into the back seat.
AUTHORS NOTE: In order to be consistent with the pulp style of the thirties and forties, I have used the denomination "black" for the African-American Jericho. This is not intended to be derogatory in any way. The term African-American would feel, to me at least, anachronistic in a 1940 setting. If anyone is offended by this, I apologise profusely.