The Avenger 11 - River of Ice (14 page)

She might have acted like an automation, but she still could handle a plane. She came down on the Pacific’s slowly heaving surface like a gull.

“The ship,” said Lini.

Nellie taxied the plane to the ship, and men came from the rusting tramp in a boat. They moored the plane and grinning, motioned for Lini and Nellie to get into the small boat.

They were the same type as the crew of thugs and murderers back in New York, men who looked like rats and acted like professional killers. They took the two girls to the tramp. On the bridge, they left the two alone with a figure as weird as if it had stepped from a bad dream.

A man with a long, loose overcoat that swathed his body almost to the ankles and made it unidentifiable. The collar of the coat was high, and the brim of a drooping hat was pulled low so that only his nose and eyes could be seen. And the eyes were covered with dark glasses so that even they were partially concealed.

Lini gasped a little, and a rare shadow of emotion touched her wooden face. The emotion was fear—a horror penetrating the devilishly induced veil of forgetfulness that had been thrown over her conscious mind. This was the man who had stood over her with an odd hammer and a sinister needle in the room whose temperature and walls made it seem like an ice cave.

Nellie gave a similar faint show of emotion. This man had not held hammer and needle before her, but he had marked her scalp for another. The man’s nose moved just a little, so that you could tell that his lips, though hidden in the encircling coat collar, were smiling. Almost hidden eyes peered at Nellie through the dark glasses. “Very good,” came a muffled voice from the unseen lips. “I had been afraid that the man to whom I detailed the delicate job of operating on you had either been killed before he concluded the job, or had missed the precise spot. I see now that I needn’t have worried on either score.”

Nellie said nothing. She stood and stared without expression at the disguised body and face. It was certain that she was looking at the head and brain behind all this murder; but if the knowledge penetrated her dulled senses, it didn’t show in her empty eyes.

“However,” said the man, “just to make sure—” He raised his right hand toward Nellie’s head. The hand was nut-brown, almost like that of a person belonging to a race other than the white race. A scrap of his hair could be seen, and that was pure white, indicating that he was very old. But the hand seemed not to tell of age. It was as if he were very old—and yet, somehow, ageless.

The hand stirred in Nellie’s thick, silky hair. Felt for a spot over the left ear, not quite halfway to a point in the exact center of the head. The man nodded as his finger lightly touched a tiny protuberance there, like the head of a pin—with the body of the pin down under the bone.

“Right!” came the muffled voice. “The wedge is there. I am the master and you the slave. You will do everything I tell you and answer every question I ask you.”

“I will do everything you tell me and answer every question you ask,” Nellie repeated, parrotlike.

The man who seemed very old, yet ageless, nodded his head. “First, where did you leave this man Benson? And who was with him?”

“We left him at a lake, about seven hundred and fifty miles east. With him were the Negro girl called Rosabel and the large man called Smitty.”

“They will be stranded there indefinitely, no doubt?” said the man.

Nellie shook her head. “Mr. Benson had the radio on just before crashing. I believe he was in touch with Vancouver, giving his location from moment to moment, with orders for a plane to leave for the last location if his radio stopped.”

“Then he suspected—” snarled the man.

“I don’t think he suspected anything,” said Nellie, voice machinelike. “I believe he was just playing safe, so that in case anything happened to the plane, such as a normal accident, he would be able to arrive here with little delay to aid the Negro and the Scotchman you hold prisoner.”

The man paced the bridge in short, nervous steps. “So he will be coming on in spite of the delay. Well, that’s fine. He’ll find a nice reception at this end. Captain!”

The master of the small, battered freighter came from the charthouse. He was as disreputable looking as his ship and his crew.

“We will not load the things from the caves at once, as we had planned,” said the man with the dark glasses. “There will have to be a slight delay.”

The captain scowled and looked toward the wall of glacier ice. “That stuff ain’t going to stay up forever,” he protested. “Look at it! Ready to come down if you breathe on it. It’s a wonder it ain’t collapsed already.”

The man in the shapeless overcoat straightened up, and his voice was steely. “I’m giving the orders here. And I’m giving them now. Turn half your crew over to me, to row ashore and join my men. With the other half of your crew, up anchor and stand off from shore. Proceed north at slow speed and keep on going till I radio you to return.”

“But why—”

“The man who has been fighting us all along is due here in a short time. He must land so that we can get him. He is apt not to land if he sees a boat and a strange plane here. But if he sees an ordinary freighter up the coast from here and proceeding in a normal manner away from the glacier, he will figure that the boat has nothing to do with the caves. Now, hurry!”

“Guy comin’ down in a plane, huh?” said the captain thoughtfully.

“Yes.”

“What you goin’ to do to him?”

“Capture him! Leave him in the caves when we have loaded and are ready to go. You know what happens then.”

The captain rasped at a jaw that needed washing as well as shaving. “Yeah, I know. But I got a better stunt. You know, we take seal hides sometimes when the good little boys in Washington don’t want us to. When that happens, we’re apt to look up and see a seaplane lookin’ around for us. So we have a stunt that fixes ’em when they land beside our ship.”

He bellowed an order to a seaman to bring the red case from the hold. The man came back in a moment with a large box painted a warning red. The captain lifted the cover. “We just let ’em land,” he said. “But we scatter these around for ’em to land on.”

“These” were a lot of little tubes painted dull aluminum, with other small tubes fastened to them. “TNT,” said the captain, pointing to the secondary tubes fastened to the aluminum painted ones. “The aluminum cans keep ’em up like a float. We throw a flock of these overboard—like this.” He tossed three of the things as far as he could toward shore. “What do they look like?”

“Why,” said the man with dark glasses, “they look like floating bits of ice.”

“Right,” said the captain. “That aluminum paint looks just like ice, even close up. And what’s more natural than ice in this latitude? ’Specially near a glacier. Any plane would set right down on a section with a coupla hundred innocent lookin’ little chunks of ice floatin’ around. And when it does—zingo! It lands on a coupla hundred little bombs.”

“An excellent thought, captain,” said the other man. “Strew your bombs. You’ll get a bonus for this.”

The contents of the red box were scattered over the water inshore, where a landing plane would be almost sure to settle down. Half the crew went ashore, concealing the small boats when they landed. The freighter stood out from the glacier’s wall and steamed slowly north, out from the coast.

From a point right beside the glacier’s white ribbon, the man with the dark glasses stood hidden by firs, peering out at the fatal landing area. Lini and Nellie stood with him, their faces expressionless.

Far away, to the east, could be heard the faint drone of a fast approaching plane. There had been very little delay back at the lake, where Rosabel, Smitty and The Avenger had been stranded. Once more the man with the pale, flaring eyes and the dead, awesome face had showed how little he ever left to chance.

Nellie had said he’d had the radio on, giving constant location to a man in Vancouver. But Benson had actually done better than that. A thousand miles back, the plane had
left
Vancouver, with orders to fly northeast on a tangent that should bring the plane on a line with Benson’s ship. There, the other plane was to parallel the course of The Avenger, and hang around at the highest possible altitude, to fly back for aid if anything should happen to Benson’s plane on landing at the glacier.

But Smitty didn’t know any of this methodical plan.

When a plane roared down onto the lake in less than an hour and a half after they’d been stranded, he regarded it as a sheer miracle. However, he had seen the chief work so many seeming miracles that he was not too surprised.

The pilot of the plane, a pleasant faced young Canadian who was one of thousands of friends of The Avenger, ready at any time to drop what he was doing at Benson’s request, gave a military salute when the three swam out to the ship.

“Good! Fast work,” said Benson. It was more than a book of praise from anyone else. The youngster reddened with pleasure.

“We may run into trouble where we’re going,” said Benson. I’d advise you to parachute down as soon as we’re over an Indian settlement and be guided back to—”

“I’d like to stay with you, Mr. Benson,” said the pilot earnestly. “It’s an honor to share even trouble with you.”

Benson hesitated, then nodded. “Very well.” He gunned the motor of the relief ship and sent it slanting upward at the last possible degree of climb. The pilot nodded to himself with instant recognition of a master’s touch.

Smitty stared curiously at Benson. The Avenger was winging along, seeming to have no hesitation about where he was going. The radio-direction line on the map to the spot where they’d heard words from Lini’s brother was not quite
that
accurate. Benson had said their goal must be a glacier. Sure. But there were
two
glaciers within a short distance of where that line came out on the British Columbia coast. How did even The Avenger know which glacier they wanted?

Far off, a tangled ribbon of white appeared, hemmed in by twin rows of hills. “There it is,” said Benson quietly.

The young relief-ship pilot was staring in awe at the man who was rapidly becoming a legend in the land. He could see how that legend had originated. Hardly a man, this youthful figure with the virile white hair, but a machine, geared to the destruction of crime.

The plane slanted down. “Nice place to land,” commented Smitty. From their height, they could see the different colors produced in the sea by the outthrust arms of two shallow bars pushed out from shore. The bars made a sort of small harbor. “Mush ice in the bay,” said Smitty a moment later, peering down.

The young pilot nodded agreement. Strewn over the water in the spot offering itself as the best landing area, were gray-white flecks indicating that a chunk of ice had recently broken from the glacier and fragmented in the sea.

The pontoons would be bound to strike some of these when the plane landed; but none of the fragments were big enough to do any damage. The plane settled swiftly toward them!

Anyone outside the cavern system under the glacier would have seen no people, no activity, nothing at all. To the eye, it would appear that there was no one within hundreds of miles. Even the rock-slab door was shut. One would have to examine it closely, eyes within a yard of it, to realize that there was an entrance at all. But inside it was humming with industry.

The big cave which opened directly on the outer door was larger than the other seven combined. And it was now rapidly receiving the contents of the other seven. Or, rather, the first five of the seven. Men were busy carrying stuff from the other caves. Fur costumes, ancient records, examples of the machinery used by the old, old race that had perished with the ice age, gold statues and ornaments. One of the men carrying the latter set down his load and furtively stuck a hand in his pocket.

“All right, Danny, dig it up!” barked a red-haired fellow with weasel eyes.

The man addressed tightened his heavy shoulders, then relaxed. “Oh, all right,” he snarled. He pulled a small golden mask from his pocket and tossed it sullenly on the pile.

“Whatta we goin’ through these motions for, anyhow?” he demanded of the red-haired straw boss. “We lug stuff from the other caves into this outer cave. Then a little later we gotta lug from this cave onto the boat. Why don’t we just wait and lug it direct to the boat?”

“Because,” snapped the red-haired man, “by carrying stuff here and arranging it to be hauled methodically, we save a little time. And time’s somethin’ we ain’t got too much of. You saw the ice over the entrance?”

“I’ll say I saw it!” snarled the thick shouldered one. “That stuff’ll fall any minute—”

“Well, that’s why we gotta save time, dope. So you just go right on bringing the stuff out here to this cave.”

Like ants, the men went back and forth, back and forth. One of them suddenly yelled. “Hey, the dead guy in here, guardin’ this cave! The dead Indian, or whatever the hell he is! He
moved!”

“Aw, you’ve gone cokey,” jeered another of the men. But most of them looked distinctly uneasy. Most of them were prepared to swear that they had seen one or another of those long-dead sentries move a little. And it had them jittery.