The Avenger 19 - Pictures of Death (17 page)

U.S. Zinc 8¼.

Carolina Chemical 19.

Philadelphia Die Casting 3½.

Gas Products 45.

“Carolina and Philadelphia,” said Benson. “How do they tie together?”

“They don’t,” said Nellie.

But Mac, eyes suddenly narrowed, said: “There’s a big navy yard at Philadelphia. In the yard is one of our newest battleships, the
Carolina.”

“Right. And what can happen to ships?”

“They can sink.”

“Hey!” said Smitty. “Zinc—sink. I get it!”

“So we have, Sink (battleship)
Carolina
(at) Philadelphia (navy yard). Now for the numbers. 8¼ 19 3½ 45. The fractions are only window dressing to make the stock quotation prices look authentic. These quotations are nowhere near correct, by the way, for the stocks listed. So we take out the fractions. We get 8 19 3 45. Date, and hour for action. August 19th, 3:45
P.M.
or
A.M.
?—almost certainly
A.M.
An attempt at sabotage could be made much more easily in the pitch darkness of 3:45 in the morning than in the broad daylight of afternoon. So there’s the message.”

“My gosh!” exploded Smitty. “ ‘Sink battleship
Carolina
at the Philadelphia Navy Yard at 3:45 on the morning of August 19th.’ My gosh!”

“Exactly!” said The Avenger, looking at his watch. “And it is now one o’clock in the morning of August 19th!”

He took over the controls again and tried for another mile or two of speed as the plane winged toward Philadelphia.

“It’s impossible,” Nellie kept murmuring. “There’s no way they could do a thing like that.”

“There was no way to destroy the King Dam and powerhouse, the Lorenville, Indiana, powder mill, and the four ships at the Hoboken dock,” retorted Cole. “But they did it. And they’ll do this, too, if we can’t stop them.”

“We’ve got to stop them!” said Mac. “We can’t let a battleship be blown up.”

“There’s more at stake even than the
Carolina,”
said The Avenger. “This gang knows now that the painting racket is washed up. They’ll never try that again. They’ll disperse, after this job, till a new code system is worked up. Then they can start all over again on another round of sabotage. The fate of the country may depend not only on our stopping this act but also rounding up that bunch—Addington, Teebo and all.”

“Teebo!” squawked Smitty. “But we saw—”

“Oh, stop it!” said Nellie. “Sure, we saw Teebo fall out a window. Or somebody else did. So what?”

“Wait a minute!” said Cole suddenly. “There’s another point here. That last item. Gas Products. Was that used only to get the number, 45?”

“I think not,” said Benson. “I think that has its place in this. There is a Gas Products Corporation in Philadelphia that does a large business supplying gas and oil to boats. It has a big dock off Camden. I believe that is to be used as a base.”

He looked at Nellie and Smitty, and in his pale cold eyes was fear, the only kind of fear The Avenger knew, for the safety of his aides—never for himself.

“You two go to the Gas Products wharf,” he said. “It’s a nasty assignment. There may be thirty or forty men there who will stop at nothing. But the place has to be watched. On your way, you can tip off the Federal men to send a force to surround the place as soon as they can get a dozen or so operatives rounded up.”

“Right,” said Nellie, blue eyes glowing.

“Take care of yourselves,” said Benson tensely. “And—good luck.”

The battleship
Carolina
, moored at the navy yard, looked like something painted by a designer of mammoth stage sets.

The giant hull had slid down the ways months ago. Now hundreds of workmen were finishing the towering superstructure. It was a hive of activity.

Electric engines ran cars of material along the dock; electric cables and air hoses, like a multitude of snakes, ran from compressors and power plants to the boat. Bathing the whole thing was a glare of lights almost equalling the sun. Day and night, they were working on the ponderous floating fortress. Soon she’d be finished, a thirty-five-thousand-ton monster.

The commandant of the yard, a man with white hair and a strong, lined face, stared at this glaringly illuminated picture of activity, and then at The Avenger.

“I’ve heard of you, Mr. Benson,” he said. “I know your reputation. Yet, I can’t believe sabotage of the
Carolina
could be attempted on a large scale. A small fire from thermite smuggled aboard, a cable shorted with a phonograph needle—that sort of thing, perhaps. But nothing really disastrous.”

“I wish I could believe you were right,” said Benson.

“Look how it’s illuminated,” argued the commandant. “And it’s the same below decks. A rat couldn’t sneak aboard. All the workmen have identification badges and are known by sight, besides, to their foremen. The foremen are tested men. So a saboteur couldn’t slip aboard disguised as a toolmaker, machinist or electrician.”

“There is one angle of attack you may have overlooked,” Dick said.

He pointed at the water, lighted like a polished plate above—but dark and mysterious and unfathomable below.

The commandant smiled.

“We have sonic devices constantly on guard,” he said. “No underwater craft could get close, and perhaps discharge divers with explosives, without our hearing the noise of the propeller.”

“Nevertheless,” said The Avenger, “my friends and I would like to do a bit of diving of our own. Where can we submerge near the hull so that we won’t be noticed? We have self-contained oxygen units—air hose and pumps are not necessary.”

Three men came up to the little group. Each had his hand on a gun butt.

“Oh, it’s you, sir,” said one of them, looking at the commandant. “These men are with you?”

“Yes.” The men left. The commandant turned to Benson with a shrug. “You see? There are guards all through here. But if you want to look around below—”

He led the way to the end of the dock. Two gondolas on rails were there. In the shadow, out of sight of any of the men swarming near the
Carolina
’s massive bulk, Dick and Mac and Cole put on the diving helmets, adjusted the little oxygen tanks, and fixed lead weights.

They descended on steel rungs, down, down, into cold blackness. And was it black! The person who talks of “Pitch darkness” will never know what that means till he has gone into sixty feet of water in the dead of night.

In the icy ooze of the bottom, The Avenger turned back toward where the
Carolina
was berthed. He had counted three hundred and seventy steps from the bow of the battleship. He went slowly back three hundred and seventy steps, with Mac and Cole holding hands and trailing behind. Then they went another two hundred steps which should bring them well under the hull.

Mac thought he could fairly feel the colossal weight of the floating steelyard above him, but he knew this was imagination. Water pressure remains constant.

Cole’s clutching fingers pressed code on Mac’s wrist. “Now what?”

Mac tapped the code for a question mark. He didn’t know, either.

Then the Scot felt The Avenger’s arm tighten.

Dick’s weighted feet had touched something that might have been a length of electric cable, fallen by accident from a workman’s hands—or that might not be here by accident.

He bent and touched it with his hands. And he touched it very gently indeed. He began following it, with Cole and Mac still trailing and never losing physical contact with each other. If they ever got separated in this blackness—

“It must be about a quarter of three,” Mac thought.

That meant they had an hour to work. Meanwhile, the dour Scot wondered where Benson was leading them. He hadn’t felt that length of wire as The Avenger had.

Benson reached the end of the electric cable. Mac felt him stand as still as stone, and, now, The Avenger’s arm under Mac’s fingers was like a bar of iron.

Benson tapped to Mac: “Move forward. Very slowly. Feel very carefully.”

Mac followed instructions. And then he felt his hair literally stand on end, and he struggled for breath as if some one had kicked him in the stomach.

His questing fingers touched metal containers.

There were large round drums and smaller square cans. They were in a compact mass, as though someone had erected a barrier of cans and drums. A wall of them.

The wall reached up as high as Mac could stretch, and there seemed no end to its thickness and length.

Explosive! Tons of the stuff! Carried here slowly and laboriously; piled up night after night for no guessing how long.

So they had sonic detectors at the yard? Maybe. But, somehow, Addington’s gang had worked around the detectors.

There was enough stuff here to blow half the bottom out of the
Carolina!
If it were touched off, it would take many months to repair the damage. Many months, and many millions of dollars.

But it would be worse in its general effect on the morale of the country. The nerve of the man in the street would be battered as badly as the giant ship.

“So they can sneak right into a navy yard and blow up a battleship, huh? Say, if they can do that any time they want to, what a pushover we’d be in a real war!”

A nation can’t fight with ideas like that prevailing.

Mac started to tell Cole about this with rapid finger pressures. But suddenly Cole’s hand wasn’t there.

Cole wished fervently that it was!

He had known that something momentous was up, as he stood just behind The Avenger and Mac, but he knew better than to press forward to investigate without instructions. Then Mac had touched him with his other hand.

Anyhow, it had felt like that.

The Scot’s left hand was extended backward, in Cole’s light grip. But Cole felt a touch at his right hand. It felt like a fish at first, but then he made out fingers.

He started to tap a question, and the fingers of this extra hand tightened and he was yanked back in the inky blackness!

His loose grasp on Mac’s hand was torn free before he could tighten his fingers. He lunged forward against the unexpected pull, trying to reach Mac and warn him. But he couldn’t stretch that far.

He was still hauled backward as if at the end of a steel cable. He writhed and groped for whatever was tugging at him. He felt arms, shoulders. Then he felt something else—the sharp sting of a needle jabbing his arm.

In the blackness around him, Cole thought he saw colored flares suddenly burst, though this was ridiculous down in sixty feet of water. Then he wasn’t wondering about the flares any more—or about anything else.

He was all through.

Mac was trying to reach Cole, during this time, and still keep contact with Benson. The Scot’s arm searched hastily in the blackness.

“The mon’s insane,” he told himself, inside his helmet. “Leavin’ loose of me in this blackness. Doesn’t he realize—”

Then Mac was yanked backward, too, just after he touched what he thought was Cole’s figure. It came at a very bad moment. Mac, to reach back further for the erring Cole, had momentarily loosed his clutch on The Avenger’s wrist, thinking this would be all right for just an instant if he didn’t move from where he stood.

So, when Mac was drawn backward, The Avenger didn’t even have the slight warning of slipping fingers that Mac had had. But Benson didn’t need that warning.

Alert as a tiger, sensitive as a cello string, he had felt something wrong.

The water had whirled a little, giving much the sensation of a slight breath of air on a still day. Instantly, he groped backward. But he felt neither Mac nor Cole.

The Avenger stood very still. No need to think anything out; he knew instantly all about it. Men were still bringing more containers, more explosive, to add to the terrible pile. These men had touched Cole and Mac in the dark—and had captured them.

What then? Either death at once, sixty feet from the clean fresh air of night, or death later, in some unnameable place and manner.

It is possible that at that moment the face of The Avenger was for once not a mask, that it expressed as much emotion as though he were an ordinary person instead of a crime-fighting machine. For certainly his was a horrible choice.