For almost a minute Agent “X” didn’t attempt to move. He rested in his cramped, contorted position, breathing in great lungfuls of musty air. The last few seconds had been the most desperate of his entire career. He was still in the shadow of destruction suspended in a canvas sack under the fuselage of a madly racing bandit plane, flying toward an unknown objective.
But he was closer to the killers than he had been since their terrible raids started — closer perhaps to learning the secrets of their fiendish organization.
He began slowly limbering his cramped muscles while the plane hurtled on. The sweeping rocking movement of the tightly clamped sack told him that the air was rough, stirred by stormy winds. Only the lure of gold would have influenced any pilot to make such a daring pickup on a night like this.
THE Agent freed his left hand from the place where it was pinned under his own body. He worked it up toward the top of the sack.
With both hands he tugged at the cord fastening. But it was impossible to undo it, useless even to try, with the top of the sack wedged against the underside of the plane.
The Agent freed his right hand from its hold on the cord. He worked the fingers down to his pocket; fumbled for seconds in the numbing cold that was beginning to seep into the sack in the hundred-mile-an-hour slipstream.
His fingers came out at last holding a jackknife. With infinite effort he succeeded in opening it. Cautiously he drew the blade up until it was on a level with his eyes. He turned it, edged it sidewise, cut deftly through the canvas, making a small peephole. But he could see nothing.
A blast of wind struck his face with the force of some solid substance. He made the hole wider, edged the knife blade down. To stay in the sack in his present position until the plane landed would be suicidal. The killers who had snuffed out the lives of a dozen men would unhesitatingly butcher him.
But he had no definite plan of action. His one thought had been to find where the plane was going, who was piloting it, and to what secret hideout the stolen money was being taken.
He worked the slit in the sack until it was large enough for him to thrust an arm out. Feeling in the icy darkness and cutting blast of the slipstream, he verified what he had already guessed.
The ship was a seaplane, equipped with twin pontoons. It was the same plane from which the bullets had been fired that had shot Rosa Carpita from the skies, killed her pilot. The sack was snugged between its pontoons. He reached up, felt the cable on top. It disappeared through an eyelet in the fuselage of the plane, connecting with a reel somewhere in the pilot’s cockpit.
For seconds he deliberated. The wind blast was getting terrific. The air was growing more and more bumpy. Wisps of chill fog whipping past, beaded his face with icy moisture. What should he do?
HE felt around the mouth of the sack with tense, groping fingers — felt for the rings that were sewed to the canvas. There were many of them; but if the stitching should become loosened, if the sack was gone when the plane landed, its loss would be attributed to the jerking, whipping lash of the wind. And the loss would cover his tracks. First, however, he must get out of the sack himself.
With the blade of the knife he slit the sack from top to bottom, and, regardless of the tearing blast of the wind, slowly crawled out, wrapped his legs around pontoon struts. Minutes passed before he was entirely independent of the sack for support.
Bracing himself in the full blast of the slipstream, with the hungry fingers of Death seeming to reach for him, he began systematically cutting the stitches around the metal rings.
Not until they were free, with no trailing thread whose cut end would tell that a knife had been used, did he stop to rest.
Not until he heard the empty sack whip back between the pontoons and go sailing off into the darkness behind the plane.
Then, braced and panting, he rested after his terrible exertions. Yet it was hardly a rest that a man would choose. For the force of the wind seemed bruising, and the numbing beat of the cold was making him ache all over. There were moments when the lulling voice of Death seemed bidding him to let go — find relief in a swift fall into the dizzy spaces below.
Suddenly he felt the ship’s nose tilt downward. A sensation came like that of going earthward in a fast elevator. A cloud of mist beat up against his face. Holding tightly to the struts, he waited.
Minutes seemed to pass as the plane lost altitude. Suddenly lights showed through the swirling masses of vapor beneath. They were lights stretching in a semicircular ring, lights that the Agent had seen before. This was the harbor over which Rosa Carpita had circled in her hired plane.
The Agent’s pulses quickened. The plane was coming down for a landing. There was purposefulness in the way it was descending.
It swung around in a great bank. The riding lights of ships, the lights strung along the shore, whirled in a strange kaleidoscope of luminescence. The hidden pilot above switched off the engine. For a moment he flicked on a searchlight — the same searchlight whose ruthless eye had picked out Rosa Carpita’s plane in those terrible seconds when her pilot had been killed.
Looking down, Agent “X” saw storm-tossed water. Great swells were coming in from the open sea. The harbor seemed too rough for a landing. The pilot of the engine seemed to think so too. He hesitated, switched on his engine, came nearer shore. But, driven on by the lust for gold, men will do desperate things. The Agent knew this. It was evident that the pilot intended to land.
The Agent held his breath. This killer above him possessed infinite skill. No doubt of that. He handled the little plane like a master. His flying spoke of long experience in the air.
The plane circled again, descended till its long pontoons were almost touching the tops of the swells. The roar of breaking waves mingled with the beat of the throttled motor.
The Agent wrapped arms and legs around struts. Then the plane came down, touched.
To the Agent it seemed to crash with the force of a battering ram. The water seemed to have a rocklike hardness. An icy crest drenched him, battered him. But the plane was only on its first step. It settled still more, nosed into a breaking swell, driven by the gale. A half ton of water smacked against Agent “X.” No man living could withstand it. It tore at his arms and legs. He felt himself slipping. Frantically he clutched, but a second wave followed the first. With a smothered, choking cry the Agent was swept from his precarious hold, swept into the black water as the plane settled to its landing.
Chapter XVI
HIS head flicked a strut as he was swept by. For an instant he fought the blazing, whirling lights that flashed in his brain. Then he struggled with the mountainous seas that seemed to crash in on top of him in glittering cascades. He sank beneath the surface, bobbed up in the wake of a hissing swell.
With numbed muscles and dazed brain he began the battle of his life. The sense that he was drowning spurred him on to fight with the water as though it were a living thing. He’d come too far to go under now, even though it would be easy to slip beneath the waves. Who would be the wiser? No one — but Agent “X” had work to do.
On the crest of a wave he gazed shoreward. The seaplane had disappeared in the blackness, its motor sound sinking to a low rumbling mutter, then ceasing entirely. It was somewhere resting on the water, but he couldn’t see it.