The Avenger 5 - The Frosted Death (18 page)

The Avenger’s pale eyes probed around. From a locker he got a collapsible rubber raft. He took it above, inflated it, and tossed it into the water. Then he dragged the two men up, laid them on it, and floated them toward shore. He went down the iron ladder one more time.

Benson opened the submersion tanks of the underseas craft, and darted back up the conning tower. Water was just beginning to slide over the rim as he got out. The submarine lurched downward, settled at a crazy angle, and sank in forty-five feet of water.

At the Sangaman-Veshnir Corp., Veshnir tilted back in his swivel chair in a pleasant mood. He had never looked more kindly, more benevolent. He coughed. He’d caught cold or something, and it was bothering his throat. But aside from this minor detail the world was perfect.

Things could not have gone better. Mickelson, by incredible luck had gone mad when he discovered what had happened to him; so that even if he wished to tell what little he knew, before death took him, now he would be unable to do so. Soon Sangaman would be out of it, a victim of his own plotting, as far as the world knew.

He had a million. Vast additional sums were to come for the frosted death and later, for the antidote. There were Taylor’s millions to be paid into the coffers of the company when it was found that the insurance people would never be able to prove their claim against Sangaman. The company would be all his when he tended to Claudette Sangaman.

That had been Veshnir’s sole defeat so far. He hadn’t eliminated the girl who was to inherit her father’s share of the business. Eventually, he would. But for the moment that was the sole fly in the ointment—

Fate proceeded to hand him another one. For it was right then that his phone rang, and a guttural voice insolently informed him that the purchase price for the white death was to be cut in half and if he didn’t like it he knew what he could do about it.

Up in the north woods a man with icy, inhuman eyes and a brain that burned with the flame of genius, had pulled the wires of psychology. This man knew how to play on the basic emotions—fear, greed, hate. He had chosen greed as the organ stop, this time, and down here, several hundred miles away, the man named Veshnir danced to the music—exactly as The Avenger had foreseen.

When the phone clicked off, shutting from his ears the harsh, guttural insolence of that voice, Veshnir leaped to his feet. All his plans were crashing. It was incredible, but they were. And in his skull one big question mark burned and seared.

Why?

The arrangement had been concluded to everyone’s satisfaction. The price had been agreed on with no quibble at all. Now the country he had dealt with was welshing.

Why?

What had occurred to make that country think it could treat him like this? What had made them feel independent of him?

Veshnir was running while the thoughts coursed through his brain. For he knew the answers at once.

Fool that he was, he had come down here to New York, leaving his little factory in the woods unguarded. He had not dared to hire guards; he had felt he’d better be on deck in the city most of the time for an alibi. And he had taken a chance on leaving his plant alone, with a submarine full of men nearby.

They had stolen the capsules already made. That’s what they had done. It was probably all they really needed. Now, with what they wanted already theirs, they could slash the price on the balance! Perhaps they’d refuse
all
payment.

Veshnir was in his limousine now. The chauffeur, at the snapped order, raced down Fifth Avenue with the tires screaming under the acceleration.

They were double-crossing him! They were trying to gouge him out of some of his millions! But he’d stop that when he got up there. He had a weapon in reserve. The antidote.

The men from the sub would either bring back to the plant all the capsules they had taken and promise to go on with the payment, or he would release the antidote at once, in New York and to any European country who wanted it! That would show them!

Veshnir got to the airport in eighteen minutes. In another six he was up in the fastest plane available, with his own hands on the controls. He was not a very expert pilot; one of the many wealthy amateurs who could just barely handle a ship and that was all. But he was good enough to get about two hundred and sixty miles an hour out of the roaring motor as it headed for Maine.

It had all worked out as the man up in the north woods had planned—like a master’s chess game. But the man with the icy, colorless eyes, who had so deftly pulled the strings of psychology, was still sitting on a powder keg that might blow up under him at any moment.

He had sunk the sub. No wholesale death would cross the Atlantic in
that
vessel, at least.

But surrounding the death factory that was still the vital point of the whole game, and in which Mac and Josh lay dying, were almost the entire crew of the submarine, in full possession. Close to thirty of them, all skilled at fighting and military tactics, all picked men on a mission for which any one of them would fanatically give his life.

Fergus MacMurdie was not only brave in the face of death, but also he was resigned to it as a man would naturally be who has no human ties to make him want to live. The Scot had always known he’d die with his boots on if he fought crime under The Avenger. But he hadn’t cared. The loss of his wife and the little boy in the racket explosion some time before had made him indifferent to fate.

Now, when he slowly came to in the tarpaper building, and looked down to see his bound hands taking on the appearance of powdered sugar, he wasn’t too frantic. He was somberly desperate at the thought that he, alone, had in his head the secret of an antidote that would save New York—and that he was going to die with that knowledge unused. But there was little personal emotion involved.

Josh, next to him, had more to live for. He had his pretty wife, Rosabel, who adored him and whom he adored. He had a good life under Benson, whom he looked on as superhuman.

Josh wasn’t nearly as resigned as Mac. But the Negro was a brave man, too. There was no complaining.

“Whoosh!” said Mac. “I itch all over. And I feel like a cold blanket was slowly pressin’ tighter and tighter around me.”

“It feels more like a warm blanket to me,” said Josh quite calmly.

“That’s right—argue me to death, at a time like this!”

The pessimistic Scot was a curious person. When things were going smoothly, he was the gloomiest soul alive. When everything was against him, and he couldn’t conceive of a possible way out, he was the soul of optimism.

“You’ve experimented with this stuff,” said Josh. “You know something about it. How long will it be before we sink into a coma—and don’t come out again?”

Mac craned to see his hands. They were the only part of him he could see, so tightly was he bound. He estimated the stage of advancement.

“About half an hour, maybe three quarters,” he said.

“It looks for once as though the chief were licked, doesn’t it?” reflected Josh.

“Mon,” said Mac, shocked even at such a moment, “how can ye burble such a thing? No livin’ mon will ever lick the chief!”

“But a whole military corps, from a warlike, military nation?” said Josh. “What can even the chief do against a force like that?”

“Ye’ll see,” said Mac. “Though,” he added “ye may have to see it from a pearly cloud, instead of from on earth. Unless it happens awful fast—”

The door of the plant was thrust open.

The submarine crew, with the bleak efficiency of their tribe, had combed the woods around the shack for miles in every direction. They had searched till it would seem no rabbit could escape their dragnet. In the search, they had come upon the log cabin belonging to Veshnir. Naturally, they had searched that, too. And in it had been Sangaman.

The sub captain was puzzled. Veshnir had mentioned the existence of the cabin, but he had said nothing about a tenant. The captain didn’t know whether Sangaman was dangerous or not. But he took no chances.

He tied the old man’s hands behind him, lashed his arms to his sides, and marched him at pistol point to the shack in the woods.

In the process, he noticed a little too late that Sangaman’s right arm, to an unguessable point up under his sleeve, was whitened with the deadly mold. But he was pretty sure he hadn’t touched the stuff in binding Sangaman.

It was to shove the old man roughly into the building that the door had been opened, as Mac and Josh had observed. They bound Sangaman’s legs, then, and propped him against the wall in a sitting position, next to the other two.

Sangaman stared at the whitening features of Mac and Josh.

“Good heavens!”

“Ye’re right with us, in more ways than one, it seems,” said Mac, who had seen the frosted hand.

“Yes. I— Oh, my heavens!”

Sangaman had taken in his surroundings, then. The rack on rack of deadly glass capsules. The ten automatons, back at their work, filling the tiny containers while, slowly, they died on their feet.

“So
this
is the final answer to all Veshnir’s doings,” Sangaman said hoarsely. “We’ll pray that
he
can do something.”

“He?” repeated Josh sharply.

“Richard Benson,” said Sangaman.

Mac writhed convulsively in his bonds, though the smothering white blanket had weakened him a lot.

“The chief!” he grated. “Here! What did I tell you, Josh?”

“Nothing he can do to save us,” sighed Josh.

“Maybe he can’t do anything for
us.
But he’ll beat this frosted death before he’s done. We’ll see—”

There was the tramp of feet outside. The door opened. The commanding officer of the submarine came in.

The man was a maniac. His face was white with fury. His eyes had a glaze to them, like the eyes of a mad lynx. He tried twice before he could speak. Then, it was in his own tongue. English was utterly beyond him at the moment.

“My boat has been scuttled!” he raved. “Sunk in the harbor! My fine boat! Do you know anything about that, any of the three of you?
Do
you?”

Mac didn’t know the language used. But Josh, honor graduate of Tuskegee Institute, had a working knowledge of it.

He translated to Mac, voice vibrant with triumph.

“The sub’s sunk, Mac. This gang’s marooned here. Now, who do you suppose would have done such a thing?”

“I wonder,” said the Scot, frosted lips grinning.

The sub captain screamed in rage. He kicked Josh.

“Speak up! Answer! Do you know anything about this? Are more of your men around here? Was it the man who said he was Brocker? Tell me! I want that man. I’ll cut him to pieces with my own hands.”

Josh said nothing. In the first place, he had nothing to say, since he knew no more about it than the frenzied captain. In the second place, he wouldn’t have talked if he
had
known.

The officer pulled out a knife. His voice sank to cold calmness which was more menacing than shouts.

“Speak,” he said, “or I’ll cut
you
to bits first!”

Josh stared up at him, calmly, a man as good as dead anyhow.

The knife went down toward his ear.

“I wouldn’t!” came a quiet but compelling voice.

It had the effect of a bomb explosion.

The voice had come from above. Everyone stared up at the ceiling.

Up there, a hole about the size of a silver dollar showed where the tarpaper had been punched out above a knothole.

Through this could be seen an eye. It was pale, inhuman, as cold as ice under moonlight. It seemed to transfix the sub captain like a bayonet, and hold him motionless for a moment. But only for a moment.

He yelled out a curse, and dove for his gun!

The icily flaring eye was suddenly staring at the man over a small, blued barrel. The captain, to whom no gun smaller than a battleship’s cannon had much meaning, pulled out his gun. A little thing like that might give him a flesh wound in the shoulder, or a small hole in the arm, but that would be all—

Mike lisped out a silenced bullet, and the captain went down. Slanting down the back and top of his skull, was a gash where the slug had creased him.