Captain Midnight #20

When a distress call reaches Port Moresby from three downed fliers lost in the Indo-China jungle, the Air Service Command springs into action—and Corporal "Carrot" Jones, an Iowa mechanic who resents his grounded duties, finds himself part of the rescue mission alongside Captain Albright and his latest invention. As their transport plane fights through enemy skies and crash-lands in hostile territory, Captain Midnight appears to help salvage what they can and push downriver into the jungle, teaching Jones that keeping planes flying is every bit as vital to victory as flying them. With Japanese patrols closing in and the lost fliers finally spotted, the real test of the ASC's courage and skill begins.

When an anonymous threat warns the Evans Gold Mining Company against purchasing the Salt Cliff Mine, the directors vote to proceed anyway—and one by one, they're mysteriously strangled by an animate Manila rope that leaves no trace. Captain Midnight investigates the eerie murders and uncovers an electronic horror born from secret experiments at the mine itself. As the killer's plot tightens around the remaining directors, Midnight must stop a weaponized rope controlled by radio waves before the strangler claims its final victim.

Ichabod Mudd arrives in town for supplies and ends up locked in a closet when underworld racketeer Scarface Mike schemes to smuggle a Nazi fugitive into America using Mudd's hotel room as a hideout. When Captain Midnight's suspicions are aroused, he springs into action—but it's Sergeant Twilight who tears through the hotel room to stop the plot, setting off a chain of chases and confrontations across town and into the sky. Scarface Mike's modern racket meets its match when two heroes converge to dismantle this treasonous operation.

Captain Midnight faces his match when the blind arch-villainess Frau von Sade shoots down his plane over Norway and captures him aboard her advanced aircraft. Held prisoner in her remote chateau, Captain Midnight discovers she's engineered an insidious plan: a massive underground shaft beneath England designed to drain the island's thermal support and cause it to collapse into the sea. Now he must find a way to stop her before she can put her catastrophic scheme into motion.