The Avenger 20 - The Green Killer (13 page)

There followed some nerve-racking hours.

The two planes had everything to be done to them. The time dragged unmercifully as the two men and the foreman worked on them.

Meanwhile almost anything could happen to upset the apple cart. If someone in authority came along who would know that nobody by the name of Drach had any right here, Dick and Smitty would be washed up.

But no one came. The conditioning went smoothly. It began to be apparent that the two planes would be ready before three o’clock.

The Avenger came back to the office and took out his little microphone.

“Mac. Benson calling. Mac.”

“Yes, Muster Benson,” came the Scot’s voice.

“Come at once with Nellie and Marge Stahl. Bring the parachute packs.”

The Avenger put the microphone away—and then stiffened like a panther.

“Someone’s out with those planes who doesn’t belong here. I can hear him.”

Smitty listened till his ears hurt. But he couldn’t hear anything. The Avenger reached a window with a single move so fast that you could scarcely follow it with the eye.

He looked out, and at once his hand darted for the calf of his right leg.

Benson had two very curious little weapons which he carried with him as his sole arsenal. One was a slim, needle-sharp throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle which he called Ike. The other was an equally slim, streamlined .22 revolver with a silencer of his own invention on it. This was Mike. Both were holstered below the knee, where a casual search rarely was made by an enemy.

The Avenger whipped out Mike. He aimed through the window. Smitty was behind him, now, and saw what the commotion was about.

Stealing toward the plane was a little, dark monkeylike man. His face was twisted with savage hate, but there was enough sophistication and knowledge of the ways of the world of machines for the little native to have in his hands a sack. It could have only one meaning:

Sugar!

If that were slipped into the gas tanks without anyone knowing about it—

The Avenger seemed scarcely to have aimed at all. But Mike whispered something like
phhhht!
And the creeping little ape form suddenly stood stock-still.

Richard Benson didn’t take life. It was a cardinal principle of his career. What his aides had to do if they got in a deadly mess was their own business. He himself did not kill.

With Mike, he had attained such proficiency that he shot to crease a victim—glance a bullet off the top of his skull so that it knocked the man unconscious.

But even The Avenger was human. Now and then he missed. This was one of the times.

The little gnarled Indian was thirty yards away and was moving. When he suddenly stood still it was not to fall unconscious in the next instant. It was in extreme bewilderment, while blood spurted from his ear.

Like an animal, not stopping to wonder where the bullet had come from, only reasoning that unseen danger was near, the monkey man dropped his sack and ran. And now he was an utterly impossible target for that skull shot at that distance. Benson tried again—and missed again.

“Oh-oh!” Smitty said softly.

The giant knew the full significance of this as well as Benson did.

Where there was this one deadly little ape man, there would be more. Many more. Either the natives Benson had shot down had repaired those two fine planes of theirs enough to follow, or they had engaged others. They were here, in Cayenne; they had learned of the plans to get the army planes and were going to stop it—if they could.

The Avenger’s eyes were deadly pale holes in his immobile face.

“Go to the gate, Smitty. Tell the guards a band of jungle natives is about to attack. Warn them of poison darts. Stay there till Mac and the girls show up.”

The giant loped from the building and across the crushed shell and gravel of the field. The two guards jerked to their feet as he came.

Benson went back to the repair shop. The foreman came up to him and Wassmuller as he got inside. The foreman hadn’t seen the creeping Indian.

“The two planes are ready,” he said. “You know the cruising range is small—”

“I know,” said The Avenger rapidly. “Get guns. Warn your men that a band of jungle natives surrounds the place and may try to give trouble. If there are asbestos suits around for fire, put them on. The natives shoot poisoned arrows.”

The foreman stared with his jaws open in amazement.

“Jungle natives! Nothing like that has ever happened here.”

“It’s going to happen now,” said Benson. “Hurry!”

His pale, deadly eyes swung toward Wassmuller.

“You are armed, of course?”

“I am armed,” said Wassmuller, drawing an automatic from his pocket.

There was a lot of noise and shots sounding at the gate.

“Come along,” snapped Benson.

He and Wassmuller raced for the gate. Outside it were Mac and Nellie and Marge. And around them was a band of the little monkey men led by one a bit larger than the others and with a different look about the way he wore European clothes. This was the leader Heber had mentioned—the one strangely educated abroad.

Deadly bamboo tubes were being raised to lips to discharge their poisoned doom as Benson reached the gate.

“You!” The Avenger’s voice snapped out. And there was in it such dominance, such vibrant compulsion, that movement beyond the gate was frozen for an instant.

The Avenger’s word had been fired like a shot at the native who was obviously the leader. The man stared at him with sullen ferocity and no sign of understanding.

“What are you doing with my friends out there?”

The leader said nothing. He started to raise his hand in the death signal again.

“I know you speak English,” The Avenger’s voice cracked out. “But if you prefer, I will address you in whatever dialect you choose.”

Reluctantly, angrily, the monkey-like leader faced the colorless, awe-inspiring eyes again.

“Yes, I speak English,” he said. The syllables were meticulous in their pronunciation. His eyes were no longer deliberately uncomprehending. They flamed. And Benson knew suddenly that he had a high order of intelligence to deal with here. Now and then, a great brain is developed in a most unexpected place. There is a black Napoleon, a red Caesar—or a jungle Ghengis Khan.

This man was one of these.

“What are you doing to my friends?” Benson demanded again.

The bent little leader’s look showed that he wouldn’t have bothered to talk except that he knew he was master of the situation and could afford to take his time.

“I am going to kill them,” he said, meticulous English sounding bizarre and out of place from his lips. “I am going to kill you, too.”

“It is needless,” said Benson. Beside him Wassmuller, eyes no longer quite so dulled, was stirring restlessly; but The Avenger had no time for him. “I know your purpose. And I can sympathize with it. You want no white man to find your land and live to bring others to it.”

“That is right,” said the leader.

“It is not necessary to kill to keep us from exploiting your realm,” Benson said.

“I know that it is.
No
white man must know where our land lies, and what is in it. I had myself educated in your schools to make sure of that, and to learn how to prevent it. When the white man comes in, the native is dispossessed and dies. So I will kill you all.”

“You have one white man living with you now. A prisoner. He is an old friend of mine. I want him. When we get him, we shall leave your land and never come back and never tell any others where it is.”

The leader smiled. It was a fiend’s smile.

“We want that man. He is an engineer. We need his skill. But we learn that he wrote to his niece, this girl here. So we went north with a double purpose: to kill Heber and his men, and you and yours if Heber should succeed in enlisting your help, and to kidnap this girl and bring her to Stahl to help keep him contented in the jungle. All these we will now do.”

The bamboo tubes were rising again. Behind the fence, the men of the field were raising guns, but the guns would never get all the natives in time. Benson’s hand twitched and from his sleeve dropped something that no one noticed.

“Again, I say we want nothing from you but my friend Stahl,” The Avenger’s voice rang out. “I give you my word, and I do not break my word.”

In answer, the leader rattled out something in dialect that was known to Benson if to no others. It was the death command!

Benson’s hand flashed out, and from it went a shining thing about the size of a plum!

And suddenly the little monkey men began screaming, and Marge Stahl began screaming, too, and sagged toward the ground. Mac and Nellie suddenly had little clips over their noses.

“Mac—bring Marge in! And the ’chutes! Don’t forget the ’chutes.”

Benson jammed the gate open. The Indians were writhing feebly on the ground from the gas released by the broken grenade. It was one of Mac’s best knockout gases. Anyone whiffing it would be out for an hour after a painful sort of semi-strangulation. Mac and Nellie had instantly known to guard against inhaling it. Marge, of course, had not.

There was a snarl from beside Benson. It was Wassmuller. He had broken out of the trance, with the excitement and the noise. He backed like a leopard from Benson, hand jerking out his gun as he did so.

“You! Orders to take two planes and get men at Paramaribo! And you have two women to take with you!
Get these men!”

The last order was bellowed at the men of the airfield. Their guns swung. Wassmuller’s gun cracked out, lined straight at The Avenger’s head.

Benson shot earthward, throwing another gas bomb as he did so. Wassmuller’s bullet plowed an inch over his skull. The Avenger spoke through the sleek little muzzle of Mike; and this was no thirty-yard shot at a moving target.

Wassmuller fell with a shallow gash in the exact top of his head. The field men began reeling and dropping from the gas.

“Planes!” ordered Benson.

Two minutes later two planes roared over the field and lifted. In one were Benson and Smitty; in the other, Nellie and Mac and Marge.

Each had a parachute firmly strapped on, because that was the only way they were going to be able to land when they reached their destination.

The Avenger had Heber’s map. That was fine. Maps are handy things to have around on a trip; but a homemade map through an impenetrable jungle is not of much use to anyone but an expert and a person who is already slightly familiar with the terrain it depicts.

Benson was capable of using this map. He had been in this territory before, prospecting for tin and rubber. And he had heard vaguely of the ancient Indian city in the jungle, the city Marge had referred to when she said “towers” in answer to the word “radium.”

The Avenger knew within several hundred miles where the city was supposed to be. He couldn’t have found it on that general knowledge, because jungle can do strange things in the way of covering old buildings; but with the map, the knowledge was enough.

With about three-quarters of the fuel in the army plane’s tanks gone, he saw a spot where the jungle seemed thinned out a bit and where, instead of constant great trees, there were thicker, almost as towering shapes that he knew were old buildings. But it would take eyes like his to spot them because they were completely covered with lush greenery and blended with everything else in sight.

Around these irregular shapes was a sea of solid jungle with the Negro River showing as a far silver thread to the south from their twenty-thousand-foot elevation. That is, in parts, the river showed; in others, it was grown so completely over that it showed only as a greener line in the green.

Benson dipped his wings as a signal to the plane flying just behind him. Mac acknowledged the signal with a dip of his own. The Avenger pointed the nose of his ship down.

In a few seconds before the hurried start, Benson had given all the orders there were time for.

They’d have to bail out and let the planes fly on to crash in the distance, since there was no way to set them down and take them off again. They were all to land in as nearly the same spot as possible, not scatter through the jungle.

Benson circled the green spires of the city. Even from here, he could see it was the shell of an entirely lost civilization. It was pre-Inca, looking like nothing he’d ever seen before. The Avenger looked back at Smitty and nodded.

The giant looked rueful. A standard ’chute lowered him a little faster than most men because he weighed half again as much as the average. But there’d been no opportunity to get his special parachute, so he’d have to chance this one.

He stepped out.

The Avenger circled, watched the white flower of the ’chute blossom, then stepped out himself. He saw the plane dwindle in size as he fell from it at about a thousand feet. It roared on over the green sea, unattended. Somewhere in the distance, it would crash. After it would come the plane Mac was in.

Benson felt no compunction about it. Better to use these two ships in a good purpose and crash them than have them lie and rot at Cayenne, useless to the world.

In Mac’s plane, Marge was first to jump. Nellie and Mac were experienced at this, but the Stahl girl wasn’t. And there was a chance that, if Nellie jumped first, Marge would instinctively balk; and Mac, needed at the controls, would have trouble.

So Nellie urged her out first. Mac circled. Nellie jumped. Mac circled again and stepped out, and the plane went on alone.

Mac hit farthest from the target. It was five or six minutes before he got to the group, after hiding his ’chute. All were okay save Marge, who was biting her lip with the twinge of a wrenched knee. The knee wasn’t bad enough to keep her from moving around, though.

The jungle was without a sound. The noise of the planes had stopped the myriad birds and small animals from their chattering for a moment, and there was no sign of larger life.

Smitty, for one, didn’t look reassured. He knew the subtle woodcraft of the jungle men. He knew there might have been a thousand close around him right now—and he wouldn’t know.