The Avenger 21 - The Happy Killers (16 page)

“Yes. You see why I wanted it so badly. And you see why Brown couldn’t tell the police—or you, for that matter. He was legally implicated, even if not morally.”

“I see. You wanted it so badly that several men have been killed at your order.” Baleful as they were, Xenan’s eyes dropped a little before The Avenger’s icy stare. “This seems to clear up Miss Brown’s part, too,” Benson said. “She knew about the confession; that’s plain from her actions. She didn’t want Justice, Inc. in on the case. She was sure you had had the safe robbed yourself, to get the confession back. Playing one enemy against another, she led us to a lonely spot on Long Island where you had been previously told to come with your gang, isn’t that right?”

Xenan shrugged. “She had me come there, all right. Very mysterious about it. I went, with some men, and all I got was a fight with you. But while I was there, I took the girl away to hold as a hostage. Then your man freed her,” he added sourly.

MacMurdie began to sweat. He looked at The Avenger.

“Muster Benson, isn’t this mon talkin’ pretty freely?” he said. “He’s not the kind to admit things so easy!”

Xenan grinned icily at the Scot. Benson paid no attention.

“I told Brown his daughter was kidnapped,” The Avenger said. “He suspected at once that you had her, though he insisted she was safe. He raced to your house with a gun. Your men captured my man, Josh, and broke in and rescued you. One of them hit Brown too hard. You sent the servants away and faked a trip to Florida, so you could hold him there till he got better. You didn’t dare take him to a doctor. Then we came, and you had to take us prisoner and start that act about being snatched by your own men.”

“Right,” said Xenan, very airy and arrogant about it. Mac perspired more. Something was distinctly off key here.

The Avenger’s eyes impaled the man.

“This all makes Brown out an honorable but very foolish man. But
you
—you took his foolish story about the drug, which was only to enlist my aid, and made a murderous, terrible thing of it. Now you’re going to pay for it. You’ll die a murderer’s death.”

“No,” said Xenan harshly. “I won’t.”

And he stood up, with his phony bonds falling in loops to the floor.

“You’re the one who will pay, for your recklessness in walking into this trap even when you knew it was a trap. And bringing Tate with you. How very convenient.”

“Ye skurrlie!” Mac burred. He crouched for a leap at the man. But it was never made.

The cabin door opened abruptly, and a man backed in. He was so big that he had to crouch to get in. It was Smitty, facing something in the corridor, and holding his hands carefully up.

Following him came Josh and Wilson. After them filed a dozen men—the ones from the other cabin—each with a machine gun leveled at the heads of The Avenger’s crew.

“If one of them winks an eyelid,” said Xenan, “let them all have it.”

They were herded helplessly into a corner—Benson, Tate, Mac, Josh, Wilson, Smitty. It was a roundup of the entire male membership of Justice, Inc., including the leader. There was deadly triumph in the eyes of the men whose guns could have made hash of the lot with the twitch of a dozen trigger fingers.

Xenan strutted to the door like a minor dictator.

“This has been interesting and instructive, Benson,” he sneered. “You were curious about what was in the safe. I, too, was curious about just how much you knew. Each of us has satisfied the other’s curiosity; so now the play can end.”

“There was a concealed door in the corridor,” spluttered Wilson. “They got out behind our backs.”

Xenan laughed. He went out, leaving Benson and his men to stare at the muzzles of death. In a moment, there was a vibration through the boat that told of its engines being started. Then there was the slight movement of passage through a calm sea, increasing a trifle as the yacht left shore.

Xenan came back. He stood a generous distance from the doorway.

“You know where to take them,” he said to the triumphant gunmen.

They herded The Avenger and the rest out of the cabin and down the corridor. It was a good-sized boat. Under the cabins was a hold about five feet deep. This was split into three compartments, watertight. The hull was steel; the bulkheads were steel. The latest unsinkable type of construction.

Crouched down to keep from hitting their heads in the cramped little hold, the beaten members of Justice, Inc. emerged into the rear compartment. The gunmen backed them into the center one, then started them through that.

Benson said suddenly, “Your orders are to shut us up in the bow?”

“Yeah,” said one of them.

“I see,” The Avenger said calmly. “So that’s how Xenan planned to get rid of you.”

The man looked startled, then angry and suspicious.

“What do you mean?” he snarled.

“Xenan can’t let you live, with what you know,” Benson said. “He’s wealthy. You’d blackmail him for life.”

“
Aww
, cut the comedy,” another growled. “Get up in the bow with the others.”

All but Benson had stepped back over the combing into the forward compartment, leaving the gunmen in the middle one. Benson stepped back, too, face masklike, eyes unreadable. His calmness, in fact, rather jarred the second speaker.

“What you got in your mind?” he demanded. “What do you mean about Xenan planning to get rid of us?”

“All of us are in the fore compartment,” The Avenger said evenly. “All of you are in the middle compartment. The sea valve is in the stern.”

“Hooey!”
The man laughed, but it got rather shaky toward the end. “The guy wouldn’t have the gall to try—”

There was a slam, heavy but not loud, as if a safe door had shut! The gunmen whirled. Then they began racing back, bent down to clear the steel beams overhead, to the center bulkhead door. All there heard a laugh come faintly through the steel panel. A mocking, inhuman laugh!

“He
did
it!” screamed one of the gunmen. “This guy called the trick. He did it! He’s going to sink the lot of us!”

The middle compartment was suddenly an inferno. The men screamed and raved and cursed. They shot at the steel door, pouring lead at it in a clanging avalanche. A useless avalanche! The door began to look like a sieve; but it was still a thing no man could break down. And there was no lock to shoot out: the bulkhead door was fastened with a heavy steel lever that clamped down into place.

Benson calmly closed the heavy steel door of the fore compartment, locking them off from the crazed gunmen. Each band, one of criminals and one of crime fighters, was locked into its own cubicle.

“ ’Tis a lesson that crime does not pay,” said Mac, voice almost even. “They’ll drown like the rats they are.

“It’s a lesson that crime fighting doesn’t pay, too,” Cole shrugged. “We get the same as they do.”

Harry Tate stared with terror-glazed eyes at these men, keeping their composure by sheer iron will. Tate cracked.

“How can you just stand there and talk?” he screamed. “Why don’t you do something? Try something?”

He ran to the porthole and battered the glass out. As if that would help. It was barely ten inches in diameter. Nothing bigger than a cat could get through there. He stuck his face next to it and began to shriek into the night, incoherently, insanely.

“Oh, shut up!” said Smitty. “We’re miles from shore, by now, and going farther every minute. Nobody can hear you.”

Tate shrieked again. Then his head rocked as he received a deliberate, backhanded slap from Mac. That brought him out of it. He cowered on the steel floor, paralyzed with panic but not bursting everybody’s eardrums with it.

“Wait a minute,” Josh said suddenly, hopefully. “It’s clear that Xenan means to run out farther into the ocean, open the sea valve, and sink the boat with all hands. But there are two watertight bulkheads besides the one in which the seacock is set. The ship won’t sink with two compartments out of three in working order.”

In answer, Mac pointed a bony forefinger. All eyes followed. In a corner of the steel partition between them and the center compartment was a ragged hole a foot square, burned away recently with a torch.

“Our kind friend, Xenan, thought of that,” the Scot said. “The water can get into all the compartments.”

In the next cubicle there was suddenly a redoubling of insane shouting. And a few seconds after that, water began trickling in through the ragged hole.

“He’s opened the sea valve!” screamed Tate. “Plug up the hole! Tell the men next to us to do the same!”

“Sure,” Smitty said ironically. “Just hold your hand over it. That’ll stop the pressure of a sinking hull as big as this—easy!”

The lights went out.

Smitty growled in a terrible anger. This was sheer, uncalled for cruelty, for Xenan to throw the master switch and leave them to die in darkness. He could just as easily have left the lights on till the water stopped the engines, which were carrying the boat out to sea with the steering mechanism automatically set for a straight course.

The gunmen were already crazy in the next compartment. They went crazier. It sounded like some of them were trying hastily to learn to pray.

“Hey!” Mac’s puzzled voice came abruptly from the corner where the hole had been cut. “The water seems to be slowing down!”

“Quiet!” The Avenger’s voice cut like a knife through the darkness. Then he went on in a lower tone: “Don’t any of you say a word about that. It might be heard above decks through that open porthole. You understand?”

There was obedient, if bewildered, silence. The ship kept thrumming out to sea. Out, out. And then there was the sound of another motor, smaller, with a higher note than the smooth thunder of the yacht’s engines.

“The motorboat!” snapped Wilson. “Xenan’s cast off. He’s getting away. That fiend! That monster can condemn a boatload of men to certain death and laugh about it!”

Benson went to the shattered porthole and looked out. Several hundred yards off, circling back toward shore, was a blotch in the blackness. It was the small boat, heading for the land some twenty or more miles distant. Did the lone, ruthless figure in it wave once, triumphantly? Too dark to be sure of that.

“He’s gotten away!” rasped Wilson. “I think I’d go down contented if only he went with us.”

“He hasn’t gotten away,” Benson said quietly. “And we’re not going down. At least I don’t think—Mac, is the flow of water still small?”

“Yes,” said the Scot, sounding puzzled about it.

“Good. There was just a chance that the vibration of the motors would shake it out— Now that Xenan is off the boat with no chance to overhear and correct it, I can tell you. The sea valve is plugged. We won’t sink.”

“What?”

They snapped questions at him. His calm voice came back in the darkness.

“I came out here pretty sure it was a trap. I went ahead to look the boat over and see what kind of a trap. The boat was stripped of everything valuable. There was a small boat in which a man could escape. There was just enough fuel to drive the yacht a way out to sea. It was plain as print: Xenan meant to scuttle it, with us on board, and get away in the small boat. The remedy was easy, too. I dived under the hull, located the vent to the sea valve, and stuffed my undershirt into it as hard and high as I could. When Xenan opened the seacock, water gushed in. But not many seconds after he left, the undershirt was sucked into the valve; it clogged there and reduced the flow to a trickle. We’ll float for many hours. But Xenan won’t.”

His voice became cold, inhuman, like the voice of doom.

“I left Xenan’s fate to Xenan, himself. If he relented, showed pity and didn’t try to kill us, all would be well. If he went ahead with his plan, he would be the one to die.”

Then came the words of fate in the darkness.

“Before we came below, I dropped a vial of concentrated sulphuric acid on the bottom of the small boat.”

It was all he had to say; it told the story.

Xenan would have less than ten minutes before the boat sank. Then, twenty miles or so from shore, in water cold enough to paralyze in a few minutes— The finest swimmer on earth couldn’t have made it back to land. He’d be in the water now, screaming, floundering, thinking perhaps of the score of men he had coldly sent to
their
deaths.

Smitty drew a deep breath. It was The Avenger’s usual justice. Always he placed the criminals he fought, at the end, in a position where they could live if they acted like decent humans, but would die by their own acts if they continued on their murderous course.

Xenan had joined the fateful list of those who had thought they were deadlier than Dick Benson.

Suddenly, a needle point of blue light showed in the darkness. It showed overhead, and in its reflected light they saw the tense face of Benson, eyes slitted against the terrific though tiny glare. Mac knew what was happening.

Mac had once turned out a miniature acetylene torch. It was no bigger than an atomizer. In its glass base was a grayish lump which, when wet a bit with saliva, generated a gas that would burn into steel like any large blowtorch. Dick was cutting through the yacht’s deck plates with one of these.

It took a long time before he was done, and once Tate quavered: “Listen!”

They listened.

“I don’t hear anything,” Mac growled. “What’s the matter with ye?”

“I thought I heard Xenan cry out.”

They listened again. Nothing.

“Imagination,” said Cole. “He’d be too far away to hear, by now.”

But his own voice was not quite steady. And when they were able to hoist themselves up on deck through the fresh-cut hole, his sigh of relief was loud.

Benson’s face was as masklike as ever, his voice as calm.

“Smitty, go to the wheel and turn us back on our course, to land,” he said. “Josh, radio the Long Island police to meet us and pick up a load of murderers. Tell them to send a boat out with fuel; I don’t believe we have enough to get us back.”

The two went off.

“Won’t this gang tell the police about the confession and drag Brown into it after all?” Cole said thoughtfully.