Killer's Town by Lee Falk

something he had seen in an old building on the grounds. Koy chuckled approvingly. The hour passed. Returning to the roof, they could see that the Patrol cars were still there. Koy nodded with a cruel grin.
"Do it," he said.
About an hour later, Colonel Weeks was awakened by the telephone on his desk. It was a direct report for him from one of the Patrol cars at the site of Killer's Town. What the Colonel heard made his eyes smolder with fury.
A cage had been put up on the side of the inn, hanging from the roof, near the sign: Killer Hilton. Inside the cage was a figure, a girl. Caroline Weeks, alive and weeping. Weeks slammed the phone back on the receiver. He looked about wildly, then rushed to the rifle rack on the wall. If the Patrol, police, army, and navy were helpless, he wasn't, he assured himself. Two patrolmen burst into the room as he pulled the rifle from the rack. Despite his angry commands, they forcibly led him back to his desk. He glared at them.
"They've got Caroline in a cage!" he shouted.
They nodded. They'd heard the report.
"They want our men taken away. But that won't end it. Then they'll want something else. That's the way it is with blackmailers," he said brokenly. The patrolmen stood silently, watching their leader wrestle with himself.
"But she's in that cage. Those rats won't stop at anything —they know we're helpless." He suddenly stopped and stared at the men, then slapped his hands together.
"I want to be alone," he said.
"Colonel, are you sure ?"
"Don't worry. I won't do anything foolish."
The men left the office. Weeks grabbed his phone. "Why didn't I think of him at once?" he told himself. Then, into the phone. "Radio, put me on the X band at once."
What if he wasn't there? He could be anywhere. Waiting for the call to go through, Weeks kept his fingers crossed. He had to be there.
Excitement erupted in the Patrol radio room. The X band was the only contact with the Jungle Patrol's unknown Commander, the figure at the top of the Patrol organization chart. There was an office next to the Colonel's. On the door was the lettering: "Office of the Commander." The door was always locked. Only one man had the key, Colonel Weeks. The few who had peeked inside this office, when the Colonel went in, described it as a bare room—no windows, no furniture, no rug, only a heavy iron safe set into the wooden floor. Inside this safe, in some unknown way, orders from the Commander appeared. Their arrival was signaled by a light outside the door. When the Colonel opened the safe—he alone had the combination, there was a note, always brief and to the point, seemingly materialized out of thin air. Replies back to the Commander were also placed in the safe, where after a time they vanished.
There were also other ways to reach the Commander: by radio, by mail through a post-office box under the name Walker, by homing pigeons at cotes at the jungle's edge, or by the swift falcon, Fraka, also kept at the cote. Radio was the swiftest, and now Colonel Weeks waited at his phone impatiently. Maybe the Commander wouldn't be there, wherever there was. No one knew where the Commander's transmitter was. Somewhere . . . out there. There had been a Commander ever since the Patrol was founded two hundred fifty years ago. He had always, it seemed, remained anonymous. Patrolmen speculated. Was he one man or many? Why was he unknown? Who was he—or they? There were never any answers.
Now, the Colonel's phone rang. He grabbed it anxiously.
"Hello, Colonel Weeks here," he said.
A voice replied, deep, pleasant, but with the ring of immense authority, the voice he had heard many times, of a man he'd never seen.
"This is the Commander. How are you, Colonel Weeks? What can I do for you?"
The man speaking, and the place where his voice was coming from, was far stranger than anything any of the patrolmen had ever imagined when they discussed the mystery of their unknown Commander. At the eastern end of the jungle, near the remote