“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.
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?”