Hell's Legionnaire Read online

  SELECTED FICTION WORKS BY

  L. RON HUBBARD

  FANTASY

  The Case of the Friendly Corpse

  Death’s Deputy

  Fear

  The Ghoul

  The Indigestible Triton

  Slaves of Sleep & The Masters of Sleep

  Typewriter in the Sky

  The Ultimate Adventure

  SCIENCE FICTION

  Battlefield Earth

  The Conquest of Space

  The End Is Not Yet

  Final Blackout

  The Kilkenny Cats

  The Kingslayer

  The Mission Earth Dekalogy*

  Ole Doc Methuselah

  To the Stars

  ADVENTURE

  The Hell Job series

  WESTERN

  Buckskin Brigades

  Empty Saddles

  Guns of Mark Jardine

  Hot Lead Payoff

  A full list of L. Ron Hubbard’s

  novellas and short stories is provided at the back.

  *Dekalogy: a group of ten volumes

  Published by

  Galaxy Press, LLC

  7051 Hollywood Boulevard, Suite 200

  Hollywood, CA 90028

  © 2012 L. Ron Hubbard Library. All Rights Reserved.

  Any unauthorized copying, translation, duplication, importation or distribution, in whole or in part, by any means, including electronic copying, storage or transmission, is a violation of applicable laws. Mission Earth is a trademark owned by L. Ron Hubbard Library and is used with permission. Battlefield Earth is a trademark owned by Author Services, Inc. and is used with permission.

  The Barbarians story illustration from Dime Adventure and Story Preview cover art from Argosy are © 1935, 1936 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission from Argosy Communications, Inc. Horsemen illustration from Western Story Magazine is © and ™ Condé Nast Publications and is used with their permission. Fantasy, Far-Flung Adventure and Science Fiction illustrations: Unknown and Astounding Science Fiction copyright © by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Penny Publications, LLC.

  ISBN 978-1-59212-571-5 eBook version

  ISBN 978-1-59212-355-1 Print version

  ISBN 978-1-59212-262-2 Audiobook version

  ISBN 978-1-59212-462-6 eAudiobook version

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2007903536

  Contents

  FOREWORD

  HELL'S LEGIONNAIRE

  THE BARBARIANS

  THE SQUAD THAT NEVER CAME BACK

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  STORY PREVIEW:

  WHILE BUGLES BLOW!

  GLOSSARY

  L. RON HUBBARD

  IN THE GOLDEN AGE

  OF PULP FICTION

  THE STORIES FROM THE

  GOLDEN AGE

  FOREWORD

  Stories from Pulp Fiction’s Golden Age

  AND it was a golden age.

  The 1930s and 1940s were a vibrant, seminal time for a gigantic audience of eager readers, probably the largest per capita audience of readers in American history. The magazine racks were chock-full of publications with ragged trims, garish cover art, cheap brown pulp paper, low cover prices—and the most excitement you could hold in your hands.

  “Pulp” magazines, named for their rough-cut, pulpwood paper, were a vehicle for more amazing tales than Scheherazade could have told in a million and one nights. Set apart from higher-class “slick” magazines, printed on fancy glossy paper with quality artwork and superior production values, the pulps were for the “rest of us,” adventure story after adventure story for people who liked to read. Pulp fiction authors were no-holds-barred entertainers—real storytellers. They were more interested in a thrilling plot twist, a horrific villain or a white-knuckle adventure than they were in lavish prose or convoluted metaphors.

  The sheer volume of tales released during this wondrous golden age remains unmatched in any other period of literary history—hundreds of thousands of published stories in over nine hundred different magazines. Some titles lasted only an issue or two; many magazines succumbed to paper shortages during World War II, while others endured for decades yet. Pulp fiction remains as a treasure trove of stories you can read, stories you can love, stories you can remember. The stories were driven by plot and character, with grand heroes, terrible villains, beautiful damsels (often in distress), diabolical plots, amazing places, breathless romances. The readers wanted to be taken beyond the mundane, to live adventures far removed from their ordinary lives—and the pulps rarely failed to deliver.

  In that regard, pulp fiction stands in the tradition of all memorable literature. For as history has shown, good stories are much more than fancy prose. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas—many of the greatest literary figures wrote their fiction for the readers, not simply literary colleagues and academic admirers. And writers for pulp magazines were no exception. These publications reached an audience that dwarfed the circulations of today’s short story magazines. Issues of the pulps were scooped up and read by over thirty million avid readers each month.

  Because pulp fiction writers were often paid no more than a cent a word, they had to become prolific or starve. They also had to write aggressively. As Richard Kyle, publisher and editor of Argosy, the first and most long-lived of the pulps, so pointedly explained: “The pulp magazine writers, the best of them, worked for markets that did not write for critics or attempt to satisfy timid advertisers. Not having to answer to anyone other than their readers, they wrote about human beings on the edges of the unknown, in those new lands the future would explore. They wrote for what we would become, not for what we had already been.”

  Some of the more lasting names that graced the pulps include H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Max Brand, Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein—and, of course, L. Ron Hubbard.

  In a word, he was among the most prolific and popular writers of the era. He was also the most enduring—hence this series—and certainly among the most legendary. It all began only months after he first tried his hand at fiction, with L. Ron Hubbard tales appearing in Thrilling Adventures, Argosy, Five-Novels Monthly, Detective Fiction Weekly, Top-Notch, Texas Ranger, War Birds, Western Stories, even Romantic Range. He could write on any subject, in any genre, from jungle explorers to deep-sea divers, from G-men and gangsters, cowboys and flying aces to mountain climbers, hard-boiled detectives and spies. But he really began to shine when he turned his talent to science fiction and fantasy of which he authored nearly fifty novels or novelettes to forever change the shape of those genres.

  Following in the tradition of such famed authors as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, Ron Hubbard actually lived adventures that his own characters would have admired—as an ethnologist among primitive tribes, as prospector and engineer in hostile climes, as a captain of vessels on four oceans. He even wrote a series of articles for Argosy, called “Hell Job,” in which he lived and told of the most dangerous professions a man could put his hand to.

  Finally, and just for
good measure, he was also an accomplished photographer, artist, filmmaker, musician and educator. But he was first and foremost a writer, and that’s the L. Ron Hubbard we come to know through the pages of this volume.

  This library of Stories from the Golden Age presents the best of L. Ron Hubbard’s fiction from the heyday of storytelling, the Golden Age of the pulp magazines. In these eighty volumes, readers are treated to a full banquet of 153 stories, a kaleidoscope of tales representing every imaginable genre: science fiction, fantasy, western, mystery, thriller, horror, even romance—action of all kinds and in all places.

  Because the pulps themselves were printed on such inexpensive paper with high acid content, issues were not meant to endure. As the years go by, the original issues of every pulp from Argosy through Zeppelin Stories continue crumbling into brittle, brown dust. This library preserves the L. Ron Hubbard tales from that era, presented with a distinctive look that brings back the nostalgic flavor of those times.

  L. Ron Hubbard’s Stories from the Golden Age has something for every taste, every reader. These tales will return you to a time when fiction was good clean entertainment and the most fun a kid could have on a rainy afternoon or the best thing an adult could enjoy after a long day at work.

  Pick up a volume, and remember what reading is supposed to be all about. Remember curling up with a great story.

  —Kevin J. Anderson

  KEVIN J. ANDERSON is the author of more than ninety critically acclaimed works of speculative fiction, including The Saga of Seven Suns, the continuation of the Dune Chronicles with Brian Herbert, and his New York Times bestselling novelization of L. Ron Hubbard’s Ai! Pedrito!

  Hell's Legionnaire

  Hell's Legionnaire

  BEHIND them, the ambush was sprung with the speed of a steel bear trap. One moment the Moroccan sunlight was warm and peaceful upon this high pass of the Atlas Mountains. The next lashed the world with the sound of flaming Sniders and Mannlichers and flintlocks.

  Gray and brown djellabas swirled behind protecting rocks. Bloodshot eyes stared down sights. Scorching lead reached in with hammers and battered out lives with the gruesome regularity of a ticking clock.

  Ann Halliday’s shrill scream of terror was lost in an ocean of erupting sound. Her terrified Moorish barb plunged under her, striving to dash through the jamming corridor of the peaks.

  Horses fell, maimed and screaming. Men died before they could reach their holsters, much less their guns. The two auto-rifles in the vanguard had been jerked from their packs but now they were covered with dust and blood and their gunners stared with glazed, dead eyes at the enemy, the Berbers.

  John Halliday, Ann’s father, tried to ride back to her. Within five feet of her pony, he stiffened in his saddle, shot through the back. The next instant his face was torn away by a ricocheting slug. He pitched off at her feet.

  Muskets and rifles rolled like kettledrums. Black powder smoke drifted heavily above the pass, a shroud to temporarily mark the passing of twenty men.

  A voice was bellowing orders in Shilha and, dying a shot at a time, the volleying finally ceased. Then there was only dust and smoke and the blood-drenched floor of the pass.

  Two Berbers, blue eyes hard and metallic in the hoods of their djellabas, jerked Ann Halliday from her barb. She struggled, but their sinews were trained by lifetimes spent on the Atlas and she might as well have tried to break steel chains.

  Her boots made swirls of dust as she attempted to impede their progress. Once she looked back and saw a Berber delivering the death stroke to a wounded expedition aide. She did not look back again.

  The Berbers half lifted, half threw her to the saddle of a waiting horse. Other mountain men were coming up, their arms filled with plunder. As though in a nightmare, Ann saw them mount their ponies.

  They filed down the pass, up a slope, and trotted toward a mountain peak which loomed brown and sullen before them. The rapidity of the events was too much for her. They dazed her and made her slightly ill. But she had not yet realized that her party had been slain, that she was in the hands of revolting tribesmen. Mercifully, a sort of anesthetic had her in its grip.

  Almost before she realized they were on their way, they stopped. Teeth flashed in laughter. Men were patting rifles and ammunition and bulky sacks of loot. Some of them pointed to her and laughed more loudly. She did not understand, not yet.

  She did not struggle when they led her to the square block of a house. She thought that within she might have time to rest and collect herself, that she might be able to devise some means of escape. But when the cool interior surrounded her, she stared across the room and knew that her experience had not yet begun.

  A Berber was sitting there, knees drawn up, djellaba hood thrown back. His eyes were gray and ugly. His cheeks were thin and his strong arms were bundles of muscle as he extended them before him. He was white, true, and his hair and beard were brown. But from him there exuded a web of evil, almost tangible in its strength.

  “Get thee from me!” snapped the crouching one to her two guards. They went without a backward glance, doubtless glad to be free and able to take their part in the loot division.

  The bearded one on the mat looked appraisingly at Ann. He saw her delicate face, her full lips, her dark blue eyes. His study swept down. She was clothed in a cool, thin dress which clung tightly to her beautifully molded body.

  Her breasts were firm and tight against the cloth. The material clung to her thighs, outlining smooth, mysteriously stirring indentations and curves.

  The Berber licked thin lips, scarcely visible through the thickness of his beard. His eyes came back with a jerk to her face.

  “I,” he said slowly, “am Abd el Malek, the man who shall soon sweep the Franzawi from the plains and mountains of Morocco.” His French was flawless. “I wonder that they did not kill you, but now . . .” He let his metallic eyes linger on her thighs. “Now I am overjoyed that they did not.”

  She threw back her head, her eyes alight with anger: “Abd el Malek, dubbed ‘The Killer.’ It might please you to know that I am not a Franzawi. I am an American and if anything should happen to me . . . I suppose you think you can wipe out an expedition and fail to have la Légion after you.”

  “La Légion!” He spat as though the name tasted bad. “What do I care about la Légion? There is no company within five days’ march. Resign yourself, my little one, to the time you pass with me.”

  Her eyes lost a little of their rage. Something of terror began to creep into them. “But . . . but there might be . . . ransom.”

  “Ha! Ransom! What do I care for ransom? In my stronghold over the Atlas I have the price to buy every man, woman and child in Morocco. No, sweet morsel, I am not interested in ransom. Ordinarily I would not be interested in you, Christian dog that you are. I would not touch you.”

  He stood up, towering over her. She backed up against the mud wall.

  “No,” he said, “I would not be interested. But this campaign has been long, rather boring. My women are far away, and . . .” He smiled, fastening his hot eyes on her body.

  Reaching out he tried to hold her wrist. She jerked it away and aimed a slap at his leathery cheek. He laughed, displaying discolored, uneven teeth. “So,” he said, “you will have it another way.”

  He stripped a bundle of thongs from the wall. Taking one, he wheeled on her and, before she could dodge, he had placed his arm about her shoulders, holding her there powerless. She strived to writhe out of the grip, but he held her as though she had not moved. His fingers stroked her body and he laughed.

  Taking the thong, he wrapped it quickly about her hands. Throwing it over a beam, he pulled it taut and lashed it there. She was held rigidly upright, unable to move. Her trimly shod feet barely touched the floor as she swung. Her brown hair cascaded down over her shoulders.

  Languidly, as though this was something to be mouthed and enjoyed like a morsel of food too good to swallow, he reached up to t
he throat of her dress.

  He brought his hand down with a wrench. The frail cloth ripped with a loud, rasping sound. Most of the dress fell in shreds on the floor.

  Then, seizing a crude riding whip, he commenced to lash her body with all the lustful, sadistic passion one finds in the Riffs, the Berbers and the Jebel Druses—a lust to slay, to punish.

  Ann threatened him, insulted him, but did not plead for mercy. As a member of a geographical expedition she had been in tight places before and knew that whining was not a way out of this predicament. Besides, she knew only too well that the agony she was undergoing was but child’s play compared to the unspeakable mutilations and tortures inflicted by the desert women on deserters or captured prisoners of the Foreign Legion.

  Suddenly he reached up and crushed her swinging body to him. The djellaba was like sandpaper against her skin. His beard was so many copper wires. She watched with horror-arrested eyes, her throat too tight to loose a scream.

  Then, seizing a crude riding whip, he commenced to lash her body with all the lustful, sadistic passion one finds in the Riffs, the Berbers and the Jebel Druses—a lust to slay, to punish.

  His hand was going up to the thongs. His hot foul breath beat in waves against her bosom. Abruptly, a Berber’s scream pierced the hot dry air. The scream was followed by a rattle of machine-gun fire.

  Head up, eyes eager, Ann Halliday listened. From close by came the staccato, stirring notes of a bugle sounding the charge. La Légion! The racketing snarl of an auto-rifle hammered the compound. Slugs, maimed by rocks, shrilled as they twisted through the air.

  The babble of Berber voices was shrill. A face jutted through the doorway.

  “La Légion!” shrieked the Berber. “Thousands of them! There is no escape!”

  Abd el Malek’s features were contorted with anger. He snatched a rifle from the wall and ran outside. The blast of the auto-rifle was quickening. A man fell in front of the door, digging agonized fingers into his waist.

  Abd el Malek’s shout was distinct above the others. “It is the vanguard! Mount! We still have time to escape!”