The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker (11 page)

He opened the throttle wide. The twin motors screamed as they sent the big plane forward at four hundred miles an hour.

East and a little north. Toward the weird sound in the sky. And toward a low-hanging cloud bank on the horizon that hinted at weather on the morrow less clear than the present amber dusk.

“Keep a close watch ahead, Mac,” Benson directed.

The Scotchman nodded. He heard the weird sound increasing in the earphones. Coming from an empty sky! He stared hard ahead, blinked, stared again.

“See anything?” said Benson, whose pale eyes had caught the blink.

“I don’t know,” Mac said slowly. “I thought I did. But maybe it was only spots before the eyes—”

“Or a man walking fast in the sky,” suggested Benson.

“Now, Muster Benson! How could a mon walk—” Mac broke off sharply. “There is somethin’ ahead. Two little dots, close together, goin’ about as fast as we are, right for the cloud bank.”

He pressed the earphones to his head.

“The noise has changed,” he said. “It was a drone. Now it’s a kind of whistlin’. Like somethin’ big and alive might make if it was flyin’ along in misery—
Chief! Look! A ghost ship!”

Mac’s cry was unnecessary. Benson’s telescopic eyes had caught the bizarre sight before the Scot’s had.

At the fringe of the cloud bank, several miles ahead of them, the ghostly outlines of a plane were slowly appearing in empty air. But it was a plane, it seemed, that was made of fog—or was materializing from a world of dead planes and dead pilots.

Thin and gray, like the cloud-stuff itself, the thing briefly showed at the edge of the mist. A ghost plane! A Flying Dutchman of the air. Then it slid into the cloud bank, mist returning to mist, and disappeared from view.

The whistling noise disappeared from the earphones, too. The drone had faded into the eerie whistling; now that had faded into nothingness. The sky was empty of sound save for the background noise of their own motors.

“It’s gone!” exclaimed MacMurdie, freckled face screwed up. “If ye could say a thing has gone when it was never properly here in the first place. Because, d’ye see, a ghost isn’t really here to begin with—”

Benson said nothing. He was hurtling the ship toward the point where the thin and wavering outlines of the ghost plane had last been seen. He passed it in about ten seconds, and entered the clinging cloud bank.

Nothing could be seen in there. And the detector, swing it as they would, picked up no more of the odd droning or bizarre whistling.

Benson settled to three thousand feet, under the cloud bank. His pale and icy eyes had the glitter in them that came from sudden, valuable knowledge—and which meant disaster for someone in the very near future.

“We’re in familiar territory,” said Mac.

Ahead a few miles was an oblong small dot on the scalloped edge of the lake. But its tininess was obviously the result of distance. A glance told that in reality it was immense.

“The abandoned ferry,” nodded Benson. He had known precisely where they were before the sight of the barge told them. “Keep the detector turned back toward the cloud bank. Hear anything? No?”

The Scot kept shaking his head.

Benson sent the plane in a long slant toward the ferry. It was almost night, and the great scow showed only an oblong blackness on the vague white of the beach.

Even Benson could not know that the blackness had been much relieved, from the lake side at least, a moment before.

In the ferry, Smitty was sitting with his big broad back against the side of the hull. A little in front of him, placed so that he could get all too plain a view of what went on, Nellie writhed in the grasp of two men. Her slim, round arms were reddened and bruised. There was a blue patch on her cheek from the blow that had knocked her out.

She was watching the man with the battered felt hat. Smitty was watching that man, too, and straining at his bonds in a way that made the others highly uneasy, in spite of the size and strength of the rope.

The man with the battered hat was smoking a cigar, and puffing the end hard till a glowing red cone could be built up.

“You’ll answer,” he said coldly to the girl. “Or that big clown over there will answer for you. And you know what we want to hear, too. What does this guy Benson know about us, so far? And what is his next move?”

Nellie straightened to all her five feet, and she laughed in the man’s face.

“Why you little hellcat—”

The man with the cigar stepped savagely toward her.

Then a loud buzzing filled the hull of the ferry.

“The siren,” one of the men said. “They’re back—”

“Hey! This is somebody that ain’t got any business around here!” called a man from the machine shop corner of the improvised hangar. He had earphones on; he was listening to a detector a little like Benson’s only much less effective.

It had been effective enough, however.

“Strange plane!” he yelled again.

The man with the battered hat promptly forgot all about Nellie. He threw his cigar into the water, where it hissed and went out.

“Lights!” he yelled. “Everybody down. Douse the lights on the boat. Get tommy guns!”

Every light in the place winked out as the man near the diesel cut the switch. An instant later the lights on the cruiser went out, too.

“No, leave the doors open,” the man in the battered hat called as the hangar portals started to close. “Anybody coming this near must know something. We want to catch ’em, not just stay hid till they go away. With the doors open, they might be dumb enough to walk right in.”

Smitty, leaning bound against the hull, felt torment tear at him. He knew those motors. They were Benson’s. The chief was near here—coming here probably. And the place had suddenly and effectively been turned into a death trap—

The leader of this hell crew wasn’t dumb.

“Gag the big guy, and the girl,” he snapped.

Smitty got out one roaring yell as a man approached with a piece of dirty waste. But the warning was premature, he knew. It could never be heard on the plane, still far off, and insulated from sound by its own motors. Then the waste was gagging his lips; and Nellie was similarly silenced.

The giant could only sit there, sweating, with the knowledge that from every vantage point in the darkness the snouts of submachine guns pointed toward the hangar door. If the chief attempted to wade through there—

“Ye’re goin’ down to their hangar?” Mac said, in the big plane. “Why, if ye don’t mind the question?”

Benson’s dead, white face could never express an emotion. But his pale eyes looked as though they might have smiled a little.

“Even a ghost plane, Mac, has to have a hangar,” he said. “And the doors in the end of the ferry, I see, are open and inviting.”

“Then ye’re not only goin’ to land, ye’re goin’ into the ferry?”

Benson nodded.

“Ye’re goin’ to taxi the plane in?”

“Yes, Mac. And don’t ask why. The reason is obvious. The ghost ship disappeared near here. Maybe, as I said, even ghost planes can use hangars. But this one couldn’t use this hangar if another ship already plugged the room in it, now could it?”

Mac gnawed at his lip, and stared doubtfully at the innocently inviting hangar portal as Benson set the plane down on the water with a smoothness that few pilots could have equalled.

The big ship slid toward the ferry, slowed, spurted forward as the motors blipped.

In the dark hull, gun snouts poked forward with grim eagerness.

Benson slid the big plane into the hull with miraculous deftness, considering there was less than a yard of clearance at the end of each wingtip and less than a foot of clearance at the top.

The amphibian crunched gently to a stop on the slanting bottom of the ferry’s hull—

And lights burst out in every angle of the place.

At the same time the hangar doors began to close. The trap had been entered—and sprung.

But Smitty, the instant he had seen the chief piloting the plane in, instead of entering the place personally, had relaxed with a happy grin on his battered lips. And in an instant the gang in the ferry knew why.

Trapping that plane was a little like catching a tiger in a muskrat trap.

“This,” said Benson, with Mac in the pilot’s compartment, “is a little unexpected.”

“But a guid surprrrise,” burred the Scot. “Look—they got Smitty, the big numbskull. And ’tis here they came with Nellie. ’Twill be a nice party gettin’ them out of here.”

“We’ll loose a few of those special gas melons of yours, Mac—”

They couldn’t hear each other any more. The gang, inflamed with grim pleasure at the lucky fluke that had brought the enemy, plane and all, into their trap, had cut loose with every gun in the place. And for a moment they felt quite satisfied with the result.

Holes leaped into being in a dozen places in the all-metal wings and fuselage.

But only in part of the fuselage.

The pilot’s compartment was in a second metal shell, cupped within the fuselage proper, that could have turned even .50 caliber army machine-gun bullets. The submachine gun slugs were no more effective against it than so many dried peas.

They could and did drill the rest of the plane. But in there, Mac and Benson sat in serene safety.

Two glass spheres dropped from the rack under the fuselage. They hit only water; but they were so delicate that even that cushioned impact shattered them.

Within the glass melons was a gas of MacMurdie’s own clever inventing. It had such an affinity for oxygen that it rushed to fill the great cavern of the ferry in a quarter of a minute. It had such anaesthetic properties that the persons in there breathing it began to feel as if serpents coiled around their agonized throats, in another five seconds.

Not till then did the gangsters realize that their trap had been deadly only to themselves. Not till then did they see that their streaming slugs did no real damage; that slugs had passed through those wings before, and their passage been easily and quickly repaired by small duralumin disks fused over the holes.

As if in concerted answer to a raised baton, all the guns stopped at once. The gunmen were unconscious.

The pale-eyed, immobile-faced man stepped from the pilot’s compartment, with Mac close behind. A glance sufficed to show the hangar door controls. Benson threw the switch that opened them, and went to where Smitty and Nellie lay.

Unfortunately, they’d had to breathe the air of the ferry, too. But Mac’s gas wasn’t lethal; just knocked people out for a time.

Benson stooped, shouldered Smitty’s great bulk and walked back to the plane with it. Smitty weighed nearly twice as much as the gray fox who carried him. But Benson walked easily erect under the weight.

Mac came with Nellie in his arms. But the Scot rebelled as Benson closed the cabin doors, after they’d pushed the ship till she’d float slowly backward into clear water.

“Ye’re not just goin’ awa’ and leavin’ these skurlies!” he protested. “The murrrderin’ fiends!”

“What do you suggest doing with them?” said Benson quietly. It was uncanny—the complete lack of emotion in The Avenger’s voice, and the icy rigidity of his dead face in the midst of menace and destruction.

Mac pulled at his bony fingers in impotent anguish.

These men were just tools of the shrewd brain behind the gigantic destruction-plan. They could be turned over to the police—but they’d never talk, and they’d probably be out on bail very soon.

“We could kill them all,” said Benson, icy eyes reading the Scot’s every thought. “That is, we could if I hadn’t my old-fashioned ideas against executing people. But if we did—it would only delay the man behind them in his plans till he could get together another gang. And we don’t want delay.”

The cold-eyed man started the motors.

“No use staying around now. Those shots will have been heards for miles out over the lake. The ghost plane will never land now—if, indeed, it meant to before.”

Mac shrugged helplessly as the big ship took off. Odd as it seemed simply to go off and leave these murderers free, he knew in his heart it was the course of wisdom.

At the Gary laboratory of the Missouri Steel Corporation, Benson straightened from an analysis of two bits of steel. With him, respectfully watching the conclusion of a bit of laboratory work far beyond his own capabilities, was the head metallurgist of the plant.

The two pieces of steel had come from the ruins of the collapsed skyscraper.

In that deathly debris had been some steel girders that were whole and unflawed—among the many that were as cracked and rotten as brittle glass. Benson had analyzed a bit of the whole steel, as well as a bit of the rotten steel.

“Steel for that building,” said the metallurgist, “was supplied by us. Some of the girders were of ore from our own Pennsylvania mines. Some was of ore from the Catawbi Iron Range in Michigan. Your analysis will give a hint as to which steel failed.”

Benson was ready with the analysis now.

“In the steel that did not fail,” he said quietly, “there is a slight trace of low-grade chromium. Perhaps a thousandth of one percent. That would have placed the ore the steel came from, even without your sales records. For traces of chromium in raw ore are only to be found in a few localities, of which Michigan is one. Therefore, the steel which endured was of Catawbi origin.”

“You think that was due to the trace of chromium?” the metallurgist said eagerly. “Because it would be very easy to add the right percentage of the alloy to all our steel, and—”

“I don’t know yet,” Benson cut in. “You say you obtained access to the America Steel Corporation’s books and found out the same thing about the collapsed pavilion? That two types of steel had been used in the girders, and one fell down while the other remained all right?”

“Yes!”

“So,” Benson murmured, pale eyes flaming in his white, dead face. “Catawbi steel is not affected by these catastrophes, and ordinary steel is. Tell me a little about the Catawbi setup.”

The metallurgist explained.

“Up in Michigan there is an entire small range of hills which is almost solid iron ore. Easy to mine, near the surface, near Chicago. But the ore is so low-grade that the cost of processing it makes it a little more expensive than other ores. Therefore, most steel companies, like our own, prefer to get ore from their own mines. So the Catawbi Range is a losing proposition.”