“They’re shooting at us. They can see us!”
Two more red spots bloomed like angry measles from the city below. The Glassite plane was uncontrollable now.
Every surface was reflecting moonlight. Like a great, sinister jewel, flashing in the sky, it rolled and twisted with the tearing shocks of the close-bursting anti-aircraft shells. There was one more boom. The tail of the ship wavered and dropped off.
Four angry screaming army planes rushed on the two big fragments, diving after them as they fell, with twin machine guns on each ship drilling the “enemy” with a hail of .50 caliber slugs.
The disintegrator fell into the lake, followed shortly by gleaming pieces of Glassite and figures that were as limp and shapeless-looking as scarecrows.
The Avenger was listening, head a little to one side. Anti-aircraft guns make a lot of noise, and noise is transmitted a long way over water. It was seventy miles in an air line to the city, slanting over the lake end.
But Benson heard, faintly, the roaring boom of the opening shot, then two more, then a fourth.
He nodded for Josh and Rosabel and Nellie, Mac and Smitty, to crowd into the blue sedan.
“It’s over! By their own plans, they destroyed themselves.”
The others were too awed by the lambent flame in his colorless eyes to speak. Again The Avenger, playing with shrewd murderers, as if they were chessmen, had maneuvered them into a position where they had brought down vengeance on their own heads.
Face white and dead, unable to express the glacial triumph steadily flaring in his terrible eyes, The Avenger drove back toward a city that had been saved from horror and death.