The Avenger 24 - Midnight Murder (2 page)

The radio man had his eyes glued to the binoculars, mounted on a tripod nearby. Worry was in his face as he watched the plane.

Worry changed to fear.

“Get the crash wagon,” he snapped.

His assistant stopped chewing his gum, almost swallowed the wad.

“Huh?”

“Get the wagon!”

“Look,” the assistant remonstrated. “Those guys know what they’re doing. I tell you Wayne Carroll’s the best—”

“Get that wagon!”

It seemed as though you could hear it from here, though, of course, you couldn’t, since the Knob was miles away. But seen through the binoculars, it all seemed so intimately, terribly close that such was the impression.

The plane hadn’t changed its mad course a foot. Straight as an arrow it had sped for the cliff, rising hundreds of feet above it.

And straight as an arrow into a target, it had struck!

From the moment of impact, the impression of speed vanished, and everything seemed to move with a horrible slowness.

The nose of the ship seemed to sink deep into the solid rock, though what was happening of course was that the fuselage was collapsing. It was crinkling into itself like an accordion, driving the nose back and back.

Both wings broke off and slowly slithered down the cliff ahead of the cabin. A propeller rose up high in a lazy arc like a whirling boomerang tossed by a child. The tail broke off, hinged upward, then fell as the cabin did.

Leaving rock dust in a plume behind it as it rasped down the face of the cliff, the whole hideous mess crashed to the ground.

The airport siren shrieked. The crash wagon, violent red, with its chemical extinguishers and its first-aid equipment, wheeled out.

There was a road from the port that led past Bald Knob. The wagon zoomed to this and started down it.

A car passed it, going at least eighty miles an hour. At the wheel was scientist Chester Grace, from General Laboratories.

It didn’t look as though it was going to do anybody any good to get there fast. Or slow, either. Giant flames were streaking up above the trees from where the remnants of the plane had struck. There’d be little left of the ship and its passengers.

Though it was only four miles to the Knob by air, it was nearly six by road. Close to ten minutes passed between the wail of the siren and the crazy, skidding stop of Chester Grace’s car near the spot.

The wagon got there two minutes later. The four men in it joined Grace—in doing nothing but stare helplessly.

The wreckage was a mass of flames. There was no chance of getting the bodies out. And if they could have gotten out, it would have done no good.

Minutes passed before the men could even get near with their extinguishers. Then the only thing they could accomplish was to put the last flickers of flame out and cool the mass off a bit.

Grace kept hopping around, more in the way than helping. He kept running in toward the mass, then being driven back again. He was evidently frantic to get something out of the wreck—if it was there to be gotten.

The sound of another plane made them all look up.

A single-motor job, with the roar of at least two thousand horsepower and the stubby wings of terrific speed, was soaring overhead in a circle, like a bird of prey about to pounce. Each circle brought it lower.

Adjoining the spot of tragedy was a glade in the trees, no more than twenty yards wide and sixty long. It looked, incredibly, as though the roaring plane were going to try to land in this glade.

“Why the guy at the controls of that thing is crazy!” gasped one of the crash men. “You couldn’t set a butterfly down in that handkerchief-sized hunk of dirt.”

“Aw, he ain’t going to land,” said another. “The ground ain’t even level. He’s just circling down for a closer look at the wreck.”

But the circles kept on getting lower, and though the plane was obviously going at its slowest, its speed was still terrific. It was the kind of plane needing half a mile of runway to take off from or to land in.

Or so it would appear at first glance.

Then something very odd seemed to happen to the plane.

The stubby wings twisted like outstretched arms in shoulder pockets, until they were vertical instead of horizontal. Presenting their full area against the forward drive, instead of only the thin leading edges, they braked its speed to the stalling point in a few seconds.

The wings changed again, taking on opposing slants so that they looked like the two blades of a giant propeller. This change made the fast flier into a gyro plane. The speed had now slowed so amazingly that a running man could easily have kept in the shadow it cast as it floated over the glade.

Floating almost straight down, it descended toward the glade. It hit with a little bounce of lowered retractable wheels, ran forward perhaps five feet, then stopped.

“Whew!” whistled one of the wagon men. “That’s a new-type buggy to me. What a ship!”

It was a new-type ship to all the world, save the man who had invented it and his few associates. The man who had invented it was Richard Benson, which explained a lot, because Richard Benson had invented a great many things.

Richard Henry Benson was best known as a crime fighter. A constant and violent fight against the underworld, to which he was known fearfully as The Avenger, gave him more publicity than he wanted. But, great as his value to humanity was in this respect, other benefits he bestowed on mankind, the products of his phenomenal versatility, would probably have more lasting value.

He had devised new operational methods and many new instruments for surgery. He was a composer, sculptor and artist of rare merit. As a military tactician, he rated so high that the United States Army’s general staff often asked his opinion.

And as an inventor, he frequently turned out revolutionary contrivances, such as this special plane.

In spite of all this ability—plus wealth which probably made him the world’s richest man—The Avenger was young. Very young. He was in his twenties, though his habit of command, his level, dominating voice and vibrant power of personality gave him the impact of a man much older.

He was giving his unique little ship its final test today before turning the design over to the army. With him was Smitty, one of the ablest of The Avenger’s little group, which called itself Justice, Inc.

Smitty was colossal. Six feet nine, he weighed nearly three hundred pounds, and all of it was bone and sinew. His chest arched so that his arms couldn’t hang straight at the sides. Over this awesome bulk, his face was moonlike and very good-natured, his light-blue eyes so naïve that you were fooled into thinking he was nothing but a big kid.

Actually, he was one of the best electrical and radio engineers alive.

“The biggest headache about this crate was getting a wing-pinion joint that would stand the shock of turning the wings flat at high speed, wasn’t it?” said Smitty into the little transmitter that made talk possible over the motor’s tremendous howl.

“Yes,” said Dick Benson, at the controls.

He was only average-sized, this man with the superhuman ability. He weighed probably no more than a hundred and sixty-five pounds; but the odd quality of his muscle was such that even the gigantic Smitty couldn’t have forced him off his feet. His face, rather handsome in its classic regularity of feature, was utterly still. It was always that way—so still, so composed under all circumstances, that it seemed more like a mask than a face.

From this immobile, inscrutable countenance, peered eyes so light as to be almost colorless. The pale eyes were inscrutable, too, and as clear and cold as glacial ice under a polar moon.

“Well, looks to me like you have everything in this can,” Smitty said. “You can jump-start from a rooftop, and land in five feet at twelve miles an hour, like a gyro. Because you don’t have to bother with landing speeds, you can make the wings so stubby that she can go like a rocket ship. She’ll take more armor and cannon than anything else this size because, again, you don’t have to bother about weight-wing ratios in landings and take-offs. She’s the best—”

He stopped, and stared down and ahead.

The plane was streaking toward a secondary Pennsylvania airport near the Alleghenies. Two hundred and ten miles from New York, they had made it in less than half an hour. How much less, is a military secret.

“That plane down there is acting kind of funny, chief,” Smitty said.

The Avenger had already seen the plane. The colorless, terrible eyes seldom missed anything out of the ordinary.

Smitty relaxed. “Looked for a minute as if the crazy fool in that plane meant to ram right into that cliff,” he said. “But they turned away just in time.”

The giant would have dismissed it. But it seemed that Dick didn’t feel that way about it. They’d overshot field, plane, the whole scene, by many miles, now; but The Avenger banked his plane steeply, turned and came screaming back.

They saw that the plane was now headed for that cliff again. And heading very straight!

“There’s a maniac at the controls!” exclaimed Smitty. “He’s going to hit! He’s going to hit! He’s—”

They were past Bald Knob at their rocket speed before the actual crash. But looking back, Smitty saw the red glare of burning gasoline and knew that the wreck had occurred, all right.

Again, they overshot the scene many miles. And again, they turned and came back. It was then, after soaring a while, that The Avenger had changed his high-performance ship into the slowest of slow gyros and, with wings placidly whirling, settled slowly down on the impossibly small landing field.

He and Smitty jumped out and ran to the wreckage some fifty yards away.

By now, the men from the crash wagon had begun to do some good. The flames were out, and the chemicals were hissing on hot metal as streams continued to be played.

Chester Grace, the scientist, leaped in. He was a bulky man with a heavy, determined jaw and humorless, sullen dark eyes. He looked like a very determined sort of person. And he must have been as determined as he looked, or he would not have approached the wreck so soon.

His shoes began to smoke from the heat. The skin of his face perspired terrifically; then the perspiration dried and the skin turned reddish and began to crack.

Still, he messed frantically around in the pieces.

It was here that Smitty and The Avenger joined him. The big fellow said, “Hey, you’d better wait a while, till this cools off. You’re getting toasted to a cinder.”

Grace threw Smitty’s vast hand off his shoulder and kept searching. His nostrils quivered with fearful anxiety, and his eyes were maniacal in their intensity.

The Avenger’s pale, cold eyes roved the scene.

Benson saw rather horrible evidence of three human beings who had been passengers. Charred and half-molten lumps indicated the spot where the instrument board had come to rest. A huge blob, like a cindered porcupine, was the motor, minus propeller.

“Fortunate,” said Benson evenly, “that there were no more than three in the plane. It had a capacity twice that large.”

The effect of the words on Chester Grace was amazing.

“Eh?” he snapped. “Eh? Three?”

“Why, yes. Three,” The Avenger said, colorless eyes drilling into Grace’s heavy, contorted face.

“There were four when the plane took off. Four! You hear? Where is the fourth body?”

He fairly screamed this out, glaring at The Avenger as though he suspected him of hiding the fourth corpse in his pocket.

“Which of those four got out of this plane?” he yelled. “And how? Who is missing? One of the officers? The pilot? Or was it Aldrich Towne—damn him?”

He added, in a terrified bellow: “And where’s that detector?”

The Avenger said nothing in answer. His pale, infallible eyes narrowed as if he had already forgotten the scientist and were recalling, detail by detail, something else that had not fully registered at the time.

This, indeed, was just what he was doing.

“Coming down,” he said to Smitty, “I thought I caught just a glimpse of a formless bundle of something some yards up the foot of the cliff from here. Let’s go and look.”

They went up along the foot of the sheer rock.

Trees grew clear to the cliff and sprouted in places from cracks in the stone a few feet up the ascent. They pushed through these. The Avenger, in the lead, paused an instant and then hurried on.

He had seen the formless bundle. It was what was left of a human being—the fourth passenger in that plane.

“How,” marveled Smitty, “did the guy get away from the thing and land clear off here?”

It did seem odd, till Smitty saw a weird and grisly sort of collar around the dead man’s neck. It was a square plate of duralumin, through the approximate center of which the man’s head had been thrust with great force.

“Thrown clear,” nodded Smitty.

The Avenger said nothing. His pale, observant eyes were taking it all in methodically.

“But why was he thrown clear when the rest weren’t?” the giant worried. Then he noted a few more details.

In the dead man’s hand was a queer thing, rather shattered now. It looked like a small megaphone. This was clutched in his right hand by a sort of handle. It had been clutched so tightly in life that even the battering fall, and death, had not dislodged it.

The man’s left hand was tangled in the loosened ripcord of a parachute, strapped to his back.

“Oh, oh!” muttered Smitty. “The picture’s clearing up. This particular plane passenger wanted this thing badly, whatever it is. He either arranged the plane crash or foresaw that it was coming. He intended to grab this thing and bail out, leaving the rest to die. But he waited a half second too long and got caught in the crash, too. However, he got thrown clear, instead of being mashed flat in the cabin with the rest; got thrown right through the top of the cabin.”

“That’s what it looks like,” said The Avenger, without expression.

He bent to pick up the megaphone-like thing from the dead hand.

Something like a bolt from the blue shot under his reaching fingers. The bolt was Chester Grace’s body. The scientist had left the ground in a flat, football dive, sliding headfirst under Benson’s reaching aim. He got the megaphone contraption first, hugging it to him like a football. Then he got to his feet, clothes ripped and dirty, and glared at The Avenger.