The Avenger 5 - The Frosted Death (19 page)

He fell just as two men came in with trays of the capsules in their arms. They had taken them to the shore, found no boat to put them in and had brought them back, not knowing what else to do with the things.

They had barely presence of mind enough to set them on a table instead of just dropping them, before they charged out again and began climbing to the roof, through which had come the shot.

That was all right with Benson. One or two at a time, he could handle this mob of foreign fanatics. He waited till a head showed over the roof edge, and fired again. The man clumped to the ground.

The second man didn’t make the same mistake. He put his gun hand alone over the-roof edge, and began firing blindly but methodically, slowly fanning the roof with bullets.

Mike equally methodically spat a neat, small bullet that shattered the wrist that barely showed. The man yelled and dropped back beside his unconscious companion.

However, that was the end of that kind of fighting. The whole crew came, drawn by the commotion and the sound of the second man’s shots.

At all times, The Avenger carried around his taut waist the thin but marvelously strong silk cable, attached to the little collapsible grappling hook, which enabled him to climb things you wouldn’t dream anything but a fly could ascend.

The hook was embedded in the fork of a great tree, thirty feet from the ground. The cable trailed from it to the roof.

With the approach of the other men, Benson grasped the thin cord, shoved powerfully out from the roof, and sailed off in a great arc in which he almost touched the ground at the center, and landed in another tree many yards away at the end of the swing. The men streamed after him. This time they would get this wilderness will-o’-the-wisp!

Benson had carefully swung to the north. This was because the secret landing field was to the south of the death factory.

He crashed north through the tree-tops for three or four minutes, with the men following him easily because of the noise he made. They were insane with rage. Several tried to swing up into the branches and follow in the same manner in which Benson fled.

The results were rather unfortunate. No man there could travel that way. So they picked themselves up off the ground and trailed along on foot again.

But then, abruptly, there wasn’t any more crashing noise to follow. The woods were as still as the tomb.

“Here! He stopped here, in this big fir!” one of the men called. He had been nearest the sounds when they stopped.

They ringed the tree. There was enough of a clear space around it to see if anyone swung to the next tree. And they saw that no one did. They shot up into it for a while, and then several started cautiously to climb it.

Benson watched them for a few seconds from two hundred yards to the south, then swung silently on. Toward the landing field. He had left the big fir well before the first of his pursuers had got there.

The Avenger’s amazingly keen ears had caught something that wouldn’t be audible to the rest for another minute or two. That was the sound of an airplane motor.

Whatever plane was propelled was being catapulted at top speed. The motor in the far distance sounded like the buzz of an enraged wasp. Benson’s eyes glinted. He increased the pace of his aerial journey, passing swiftly through trees bare of leaves, catching his poise again in the shelter of evergreens.

By now the noise of the plane was quite loud. Over it Benson could hear the men yelling far in the distance as they heard it also. At least half of them would race to investigate it too. But, Benson thought, at the speed at which the ship was settling, he would get to the pilot before any of them did.

He increased his pace, swinging onto the edge of the field just as the plane’s wheels touched.

It made a bumpy, inexpert landing. It had scarcely stopped rolling when a man jumped out. And the man was Veshnir.

Benson had slipped over his colorless eyes the eye-lenses with the gray-brown pupils on them. He hadn’t Molan Brocker’s overcoat any more; he had tossed it into the hollow tree. Brocker’s derby had long since gone. But over his thick white hair The Avenger still had the wig simulating Brocker’s closely-cropped hair, and the lifts were still in his shoes. Once more he would take the place of the man who was held prisoner at the moment at Bleek Street.

He marched up to Veshnir, shoulders rigidly erect, walking in a heavy-footed, military fashion.

Veshnir grabbed him by the shoulder, coughing.

“You—” he sputtered, with the promised loss of millions of dollars in his mind. “You— Where is your superior officer?”

Benson’s “superior officer” wasn’t in circulation. But a lot of his men were going to be here in about two minutes.

He said swiftly, in guttural, accented English:

“There has been a plot. Some of our organization wanted to keep half the payment due you, for themselves, and pretended that our government was responsible. The rest of us feared our whole glorious military plan might suffer, and we refused to agree with them. There was a fight. They won. I, alone, got away, without hat or coat. Come with me. Hide before they catch us. There! You hear? They are nearing the field even now! Hurry!”

“I’ll cable your government,” raved Veshnir. “I’ll tell the whole thing. They’ll behead your fine friends who try to cheat an honest man out of his money.”

He was running as he spat this out, however. Running toward the coast, and then veering north and toward the tarpaper shack, in a wide circle around the men.

The submarine crew were split two ways. About a third of them were still ringing the great fir tree in which the sounds of Benson’s retreat had last been heard. It was a big tree and took a lot of searching if you wanted to be methodical about it. And it was a characteristic of these men’s training that they were extremely methodical.

All the others were investigating the unexpected arrival of the fast plane, fanning out around the field to try to locate whoever had come in it.

Around the little factory there was no one at all.

Benson urged Veshnir in. The first thing Veshnir saw was the sub captain, unconscious on the floor.

“He was one who fought against the plot?” he began. Then he stopped. A fit of coughing racked him.

Mac and Josh and Sangaman, bound, were glaring up at him—with Mac and Josh hardly conscious any more. And the marks of fire scarred the wall near the refrigerator, while the racked, completed capsules were all disarranged.

“What’s been going on here?” demanded Veshnir. “Why is Sangaman here? What—”

He stopped. A knifepoint like a needle had touched his throat. Then the edge of the blade, razor-sharp, settled with steady menace against his jugular.

“The antidote, please, Veshnir,” Benson said, abandoning Brocker’s guttural accent.

“Why— What in the world—I don’t know what you’re talking about. What antidote?”

Benson’s hands were going over Veshnir, however; and they paused at a lower vest pocket. The Avenger drew out a slim glass vial, tightly stoppered, filled with a bluish-green substance.

He stared at Mac. The Scotchman could hardly see, and he couldn’t talk at all; but he made out the color of the vial; and his lips moved.

“Yes,” was the word they formed.

There were tremendous stakes involved in this great game of the frosted death. But Benson’s first allegiance was to his aides. That was the way The Avenger always worked.

“Untie Sangaman,” he said to Veshnir.

Veshnir fumbled with the knots.

“Faster!”

Veshnir completed his task in a hurry. Meanwhile, Benson reached behind him and fastened the door. There was an inner, as well as an outer, bolt.

“Mac, does this antidote go through clothing the same as the mold it attacks?”

Again Mac managed to form the word: “Yes,” with his numbing lips.

“Sangaman, take this vial. Shake some of the stuff in it over these two men. Save some for yourself and put it on your arm. I don’t know whether it will act fast enough—”

But the profound relief in Mac’s dimming eyes answered Benson. The Scot knew that it
would
act fast enough to save them, and his eyes showed it. The tensity of The Avenger’s flaming, terrible orbs ceased somewhat.

Veshnir was coughing again. And Josh was staring at him with a very curious look in his eyes. A look that was calm, grim, knowing, inexorable—the way a judge might look at a prisoner being led to the gallows.

“Cut them loose, please, Sangaman,” Benson said.

Sangaman slashed Mac’s and Josh’s bonds. Benson nodded and then suddenly whirled.

The sub commander had regained consciousness, and cunningly concealed it till he had a little strength back. Then he had leaped from the floor, like a crouching cat, at The Avenger’s back. But The Avenger had heard the light rasp of his shoe just in time.

He braced to the charge of the man, and battered him down with one lightning blow to the throat. But the action took just long enough for Veshnir to escape.

Moving faster, under the stimulus of fear and greed, than anyone ever would have thought he could move, he got to the door, and tore the bolt back.

“Everybody! Here!” Benson heard him shouting, as he leaped outside.

The Avenger raced after him, but he was too late!

The sub’s crew had returned from the big fir tree where, to the last, they’d thought Benson was hiding; and from the landing field where Veshnir had just set his plane down.

They swarmed around Veshnir and Benson. The Avenger’s hand darted out to close the door again and bolt it from the inside, but a crashing boot was fast enough to prevent that.

The commander of the sub came unsteadily up behind Benson, shoved him savagely aside and strode out among his men.

“Well? Well?” he snapped. “Reports! What has happened?”

One of them spoke up. One who had just come from the landing field.

“We found two planes on the field. One has been here for some time. It is the plane that has been here before. At the controls is divisional commander Buehlow, unconscious. The motor is cool; so that plane has been here for some time. The other plane is empty. The hot motor shows that it has just landed a few—”

“I came in that,” said Veshnir. He was glaring at The Avenger in grim triumph. “I got here just in time, it seems.”

“How it is that you came at all?” the sub captain growled at him.

“There was a phone message to me in New York leading me to believe that your nation was thinking of trying to cut the final payment to me for the frosted death—”

“What?” howled the officer, glaring at Veshnir. “You dare to think my nation would do such a thing? It is an insult!”

His voice was all the louder for the very fact that he, personally, had had just those thoughts in mind when he gave orders to load on the sub whatever capsules were already completed.

Veshnir cringed.

“It was a plot, of course. I should have known.”

The captain was pacing back and forth in front of the tarpaper shack. The men ringed Benson and Veshnir stolidly but watchfully.

“So!” the captain said. “These men up here know of our plans! At least one man in New York—the one who alarmed you into coming here—knows of them. We must act fast.”

“I would suggest,” ventured Veshnir, “that you load the submarine—”

“We have no submarine,” cut in the captain, looking murderously at Benson. “But—there are two planes on the landing field. Buehlow’s is the largest?”

“Yes,” said Veshnir. “It’s a twelve-passenger job.” His body suddenly shook with coughs.

The captain looked a little puzzled by the violence of the attack. So did Veshnir—a little worried. However, the captain had plans more important than the fact that Veshnir seemed suddenly to be catching a hard cold.

“You!” he snapped to one of the men. “Go with ten of the men to the large plane. You are a good pilot. Refuel with whatever petrol there is in the smaller ship—”

“No, no!” bleated Veshnir. “That will leave me stranded here!”

“Not for long,” the captain reassured him. He turned back to the man. “Go to New York. Report at headquarters there. Get a big transport plane and return. The rest of us will leave here in that, taking the glass capsules with us. We can carry them to whatever ship of ours is closest on the Atlantic.”

The eleven men started off.

“Wait,” said the captain. “One more thing. While you are draining the tanks of the small plane into the larger, one of you return with five gallons of the petrol—here.”

Veshnir stared quickly at the man.

“We leave no tracks,” the captain explained. “We shall burn this shed where the capsules have been filled.”

Veshnir nodded swiftly.

“Of course! Just the thing to do. And we’ll lock this man, Benson, and all the others, in it when we set fire—”

“No,” contradicted the captain, “we will not. See, now: the fire may be reported, and people come to investigate. If nothing is found but charred embers, they think only a trapper’s shack or some empty storage shed has burned. They think nothing of it, and go away. But if they find the skeletons of a dozen men—immediately there is much commotion, much search. And searchers
might
pick up our trail in time to stop us before we can get offshore.”

Two of his men went into the shed. They began roughly bundling the occupants out—Mac and Josh having to be carried.

A man came from the landing field with a can of gasoline. On order, he poured it over the shed floor, and the walls and worktables. The volatile, high-test stuff soaked into the dry wood.

All this time The Avenger was standing quietly, acting like a defeated man. Which, had his enemies known it, was the time when he was most dangerous of all.

Benson was watching with hawk eyes everything that went on.

“But the capsules!” said Veshnir.

“We shall take those to the cabin,” said the captain. “Or, better yet, direct to the landing field. There we will await the transport—”

From the field came the sudden roar of a motor. The plane which Buehlow had piloted down here, was taking off. They watched it soar up over the trees, and head south to the big city.