The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker (20 page)

“So careful, they were, to build up that horror of an enemy invasion,” Benson was saying as all of them went out of the ferry to the blue sedan so generously left for them by Darcey’s overplayed plotting. “So successful, that under cover, Chicago is almost in a state of military rule. There are nine anti-aircraft guns of the latest type concealed in strategic spots through the city. And there are four of the fastest army battle planes ready to take off the instant detectors hear the droning noise. All training their deadly forces on the sky, waiting for the skywalker.”

“But what good will that do,” said Mac gloomily, “if nobody can see the plane?” The dour Scot, freed from death, was his pessimistic self again, sure that everything would go dead wrong in this worst possible of worlds—

The Glassite plane had wheeled from the strangely purposeful drive of the four fast army ships. The vibrator cone was no longer centered on the doomed building because of the maneuver.

“Swing it back,” ordered Darcey.

“Something’s gone wrong,” retorted Carlisle, eyes narrowed and venomous instead of deceptively calm and sunny. He countermanded Darcey’s order to the pilot. “Beat it! Out over the lake. The hell with the Insurance Exchange.”

“Carlisle—I’m giving the orders around here—”

“Look!”
screamed the man with the wounded shoulder suddenly, glaring with horror in his eyes at the cabin wall.

That wall was glistening a little with reflected moonlight.

“That stuff you dipped the plane into!” the man yelled—
“something’s gone wrong with it!”

“If the plane couldn’t be seen,” The Avenger replied to Mac, “the guns and army planes would be useless, of course. But Darcey’s plane, you see, isn’t going to remain invisible.”

“The barium stearate—” began Mac.

“The barium stearate,” said Benson, paralyzed lips barely moving in his white, dead face, “is adulterated. There was a small can of aviation gasoline near that drum. Probably to prime the diesel generator when they wanted to start it. I poured it into the barium stearate. It’s highly volatile stuff. It permeated the contents of the drum in a few seconds. This time the coating on that plane will dry and crack off in about a third of the time it usually takes.”

The terrified men in the Glassite plane saw a red spot burst in the city below them, heard a boom an instant later, and then felt the ship bob and twist in a gigantic rush of air.

“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.

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