The Avenger 20 - The Green Killer (9 page)

“No, Mac. I’ll handle this.”

Almost as he spoke, the steely fingers of the man with the cold, pale eyes worked the trips of his guns. One short burst. Nellie and Smitty saw the plane to the left, at which The Avenger had suddenly darted like a cobra from heaven, fall away in a spiral that didn’t straighten for thousands of feet. Then it flattened out into a limping but safe course and made for an emergency landing.

Like a supermarksman calmly shooting birds on the wing, Dick had managed to disable the tail assembly of the plane in that one short burst of gunfire, without rendering the ship utterly helpless and thus dooming all in it.

Nellie looked out at their right wing and saw holes leap into being in it. Then The Avenger dealt with that enemy, too. A swing that almost blacked them all out, another short burst, another wild spiral just managing to straighten.

Then The Avenger calmly tilted their nose down and circled to watch results. They saw both planes land. They were crash landings, but no one aboard either ship should suffer more than a few bruises and cuts. Indeed, through glasses, Nellie saw at the bottom of their swing that a tiny, monkeylike speck was out of one ship and shaking its fist up at them in miniature fury.

Benson went on, as though there had been no interruption at all.

They were a hundred miles farther along their course when The Avenger reached what he seemed to consider a good altitude—thirty-two thousand feet. Now, far below, like a map unrolled, they saw the south-center of Florida, like soft green velvet patched with silver. This was the swamp section with gloomy greenery laced here and there by water.

Here the man with the colorless, infallible eyes began circling like a waiting condor. Now and then, he cut the motors, gliding and listening to his new-type sound detector. He couldn’t cut the motors long; the modern precision engine would not stand much cooling off. But it was long enough to narrow Benson’s eyes tensely on the fourth try. He handed the earphones to Mac, who had come back from the rear turret.

Mac listened. After a while he nodded.

Motors had sounded faintly, and swinging the detector showed that the motors were east of them and behind them. Even with glasses, they couldn’t see the source of the sound.

Benson headed for another cloud bank. The plane circled behind this for half an hour. He flew out of it—and there was the other plane.

Eight or nine thousand feet below them, cutting south, was a good, but rather old, transport that, like the two attackers of an hour ago, had neither military nor airline markings.

It wasn’t half the ship The Avenger’s was. And the pilot evidently knew that, because when Dick swung his twelve-ton fortress toward the transport, the pilot dropped frantically like a wren trying to drop away from a hawk.

Smitty saw Benson’s hand go toward a button. The button was the trigger release for two 37-mm cannons with which the fast ship was equipped.

Smitty gaped at that. The Avenger hadn’t broken out with those cannons when two fast, last-minute-type fighters had attacked him at once. But now, against one old crate he should be able to lick with a sling shot, he prepared to fire the deadly things. The giant saw Nellie looking at the button with wonder in her eyes, too.

Diving straight down on the ship, The Avenger pressed the button. And now the three with him had even more occasion for wonder.

They’d have sworn Dick had made a direct hit with the two cannons. But nothing whatever happened to the other plane!

The Avenger’s plane seemed to falter, as if Dick were as surprised at this as the rest. Surprised and disconcerted. Instantly, the pilot of the transport seized what seemed an unexpected opportunity.

He nosed down, swung up toward the belly of the faster ship as it overtook him, and blazed away.

It was silly—one of those things that shouldn’t ever happen. This was no battler; this was an old transport, with one futile little machine gun installed crudely in its nose. But at the end of a burst from that one machine gun, amazing things happened to The Avenger’s big fortress.

It seemed to shiver like a stricken bird. Then it faded off to the right and went into a spin. Nellie and Mac and Smitty saw The Avenger fighting the controls. Then they saw something else.

A great and growing plume of black smoke billowed out from the fuselage behind them, near the tail!

There was a tense moment of speechlessness, after which Smitty burst out, “It’s impossible! That old crate can’t do that to us.”

“No?” said Nellie, staring at the earth, which was spinning like a plate in a kid’s game and rushing up toward them.

“No! Only a freak shot from that peashooter, only a thousand-to-one break could bring us down.”

“Looks like the thousand-to-one chance was given them by Lady Luck, then,” Nellie said. “Me—I’m strapping on a ’chute right now!”

The Avenger’s voice sounded, as cold as ice and twice as still.

“That’s not necessary.”

They stared at him. He stopped fighting the controls. The ship straightened. It kept on plummeting to earth, and the black smoke kept pluming out behind it, but The Avenger seemed to be having no trouble any more.

“You won’t need parachutes,” Benson repeated.

Coming up at them now with meteoric speed was one of the larger specks of water in the Florida swamp. Overhead, the triumphant transport circled and watched.

The smoke feather grew worse. The water jumped up at them.

“Brace yourselves!”

The Avenger set down the ship.

He set it down hard, with a great twin column of spray rising from her bows. Dick had judged to the last ounce the maximum strain the hull would take, and he had taken that last ounce. The smoke covered the plane, rolling up to the sky.

Far overhead, they saw the transport stop its circle and swing serenely, victoriously south again, like an eagle resuming its flight after an easy kill.

The smoke stopped after a moment, and Mac and Nellie and Smitty stared in increasing wonder at Benson.

“Weren’t we hit?” demanded Mac, after a moment.

“I presume we must have been,” said Benson indifferently. “At that range, it would be hard to miss. But we weren’t hurt.”

“Then why in the worrrld—” burred the Scot.

He stopped. The Avenger was obviously in one of his uncommunicative moods. He’d tell nothing till he felt like it.

Dusk was falling. While it fell, placid on the still surface of the swamp lake, they had a quick but excellent dinner that Nellie prepared over a chemical burner.

Then The Avenger took off again. He headed along the line followed by the transport after it had apparently shot them down in flames.

The chief put glasses over the glacial, colorless eyes that were scanning the world below. Only then did Mac begin to get it. The glasses had special lenses that made visible ultraviolet light.

The Avenger had the motors cut off and the plane was gliding silently down on a long slant. It was going fast, however. But even so, when Benson handed the glasses to Mac, it was several minutes before the Scot could see through them the thing The Avenger had already glimpsed.

Ahead, and below, he saw a faint patch of purplish-blue in the blackness of night.

The night was black, too. In that blackness it should be easy to get very close to something without being seen.

“So that was why you used the cannons,” said Mac.

The Avenger nodded.

“They were loaded with thin lead shells that splashed chemical on the plane. I didn’t want to hurt it. I just wanted to mark it so I could see where it landed after nightfall. Now, we can get hold of Heber.”

The whole scheme dovetailed, now, for all of them.

You can’t very well take a man out of a plane in midair. And if you shoot the plane down, you run the risk of killing the person you want. But you can fake a disaster; to throw the enemy off guard, you can mark his plane and then you can get your man when it lands.

Only how they were going to land in this pitch darkness was more than all but Dick Benson could figure out.

Then it developed that they weren’t going to try.

“Take the controls, will you, Smitty?” Dick said.

The giant did so. The Avenger put on a ’chute pack, and nodded for Mac to do the same.

“Hey!” said Nellie.

The calm, chill eyes swung her way. “You and Smitty will stay in the plane. Mac and I will get Heber. Circle back, Smitty, till you’re directly over them. Give us about fifteen hundred feet.”

“But the whole gang’s probably in that big transport,” protested Nellie. “What can you do against maybe fifteen men?”

The Avenger didn’t answer. The plane was gliding as slowly as Smitty could make it without fading down. Dick had the door open.

“We’ll radio results on the belt radios,” he said. “Their range is small, so keep close.”

Then he stepped out, with Mac close behind, right over the rather pretty, faint patch of purplish-blue that revealed where the transport lay in darkness.

The transport, as they’d noted before, was also an amphibian. And it had set down on a lake, too. This was a larger lake, with lights of cottages showing far off at one end.

The parachutes that lowered the two men were black, so there wasn’t much chance they’d be seen. There was going to be a splash, though; and Mac would have felt better about it if he’d known how near the transport was.

He hoped it wasn’t near enough so the splashes would give them away. But he didn’t know because The Avenger had the special glasses, and without them Mac couldn’t see the plane.

The water rose rapidly toward them like a dark mirror. There was practically no breeze, so the ’chutes gave no trouble. They slipped out of their harnesses just before they hit.

“All right?” came the calm, cold voice of The Avenger, in a tone barely audible.

“All right,” Mac reassured him in a half whisper.

Benson started through the water in an easy, fast crawl, with Mac trailing. They went about half a mile; then Mac sensed that Benson was slowing. At the same time he went more noiselessly.

The transport loomed ahead suddenly out of the night.

It was all dark, without even riding lights. But there was emphatically no sleeping being done aboard. The port over the wing was open, and Mac heard low voices come from it.

“If we take off about one in the morning, it’ll get us to where we want to go at about the right time.”

“Why’d we land on a lake where there are people in cottages around?”

“Only place I could arrange for refueling without the whole world knowing,” said the first voice. “The boat ought to be along any minute now.”

Far overhead and to the north came the drone of a plane’s motors for a little while. Mac nudged Benson. That was Smitty, circling up there, giving her the gun occasionally to keep altitude, gliding noiselessly the rest of the time.

“Hey,” came the voice from the transport, “what’s that plane?”

“Who cares?” was the indifferent reply. “We know that it’s not Benson’s plane. We saw him crack up in smoke.”

There was a pause. Then: “That guy has a bad reputation. I don’t know whether to trust that crack-up or not. If he was pulling a fast one—”

“Don’t be dumb. Of course he cracked up.”

The chugging of a slow, fairly large motor launch sounded from the north shore.

“That’ll be the boat.”

Mac was right next to The Avenger, as both trod water noiselessly a few yards from the transport. Mac felt Benson move toward the ship. He followed. As he did so, he shivered with more than the water’s chill.

There would be quite a crew for two men to take care of. A crew that would like nothing better than to bump them both off, once and for all.

Then Mac noticed that, while Benson had moved toward the transport, he had moved toward the sound of the approaching boat, too.

The boat came on, moving slowly, furtively. A long way off, the motor noise stopped. It was drifting toward the transport. There was the wink of a flashlight for an instant to guide it.

The bow of the boat loomed up, and Benson caught onto the blunt prow. So did Mac. The Scot was beginning to get the drift of this.