The Avenger 19 - Pictures of Death (18 page)

He could try to locate his aides in the blackness and help them. Or he could ignore them and try to make the huge pile of explosive harmless, quite possibly failing, because if there was more than one detonating cable he could all too easily miss finding the spare in his blind groping in blackness.

The members of Justice, Inc., were not professional heroes. They did not take unnecessary risks just to enhance the glamour of their exploits.

The Avenger had told Smitty and Nellie to get in touch with the Federal investigators on their way to the wharf of Gas Products Corp. They’d have done this even without orders. The more of Uncle Sam’s men they could get to help in this, the better they’d like it.

The first thing Smitty and Nellie did on hitting the Camden shore line—The Avenger and Mac and Cole went on to the navy yard—was hunt a phone.

But phones along the waterfront are scarce at two o’clock in the morning. And Nellie and Smitty, as well as the rest, were racing desperately against time.

“There isn’t a light for a mile,” groaned Smitty. “And we’re almost to Gas Products. See? Down the line two blocks.”

A street light showed on the sign. Also a moment later, it showed a solitary figure swinging lithely along with an occasional whistle.

“Certainly cheerful for this time of night,” said Nellie resentfully. Then she said, “Oh, it’s a boy.”

The young fellow, about sixteen, with a clean, boyish face, drew near them.

“Looks O.K.,” said Smitty. “Hey!”

The boy came over to them. He looked alert and smart. Smitty liked his appearance. The giant swiftly decided to take a chance on him.

“Want to earn five bucks?” he said.

“Sure, if it’s legal,” said the boy promptly.

“It’s legal. And how! Know where the F.B.I, office is in this town?”

“I sure do.”

“Well, go there, fast, and tell them to rush a bunch of men—a lot of men—to the Gas Products wharf. Tell them it’s on the advice of Richard Benson, of Justice, Inc. They’ll know who that is.”

It was apparent from the awe on the boy’s face that he knew who that was, too.

“Gee!” he gulped. “B-Benson? The Avenger? I’ve read about him. I think I’ve read about you, too. The big fella. Smitty?”

“Correct,” said the giant. “Beat it, kid!”

“I don’t want money for this,” said the boy, trying to give the five back.

“Keep it. On your way—fast.”

“O.K. A bunch of Federal men at Gas Products wharf quick.”

He pounded down the street at an excited run, a lithe, alert youngster.

But not alert enough to notice when two shadows detached themselves from the gloom of an areaway when Nellie and Smitty had turned their backs. One of the two shadows silently pursued the boy. The other went down the next areaway to approach Gas Products’ vast wharf from the rear.

The first shadow caught the boy three blocks away. Without sound and without mercy, the man clubbed down with a blackjack! The boy fell, and lay like a dead thing—

Nellie and Smitty were in a hurry, but not in so much of a hurry as to barge right into their destination. There was no percentage in making such haste that they would be captured without having a chance to strike at their enemies.

So they stood in a dark warehouse doorway across the street from the Gas Products building and looked it over.

The building was immense, running out into the water and with, no doubt, a spacious wharf behind that.

“How do we get in this joint without waking everybody up?” mused Smitty.

Nellie’s small white hand came to rest on his arm.

“The third floor,” she said, “looks like the office part of the building. Anyhow, the second window from the end is open a foot.”

Smitty nodded. “O.K. Fire escape to the roof, then lower ourselves to the window.”

His hand went to his waist. Coiled there was thirty feet of cord, hardly thicker than heavy fishline but so strong that it would support even Smitty’s weight. A tiny steel grappling hook went with this, and small cross bars to hang onto.

They started across the street.

“Wait a minute,” said Nellie. “This place seems outwardly respectable, but it is probably secretly owned by the enemy. If there’s a lookout, we don’t want to walk right to the building. Let’s go up the street, then sneak back.”

They walked to the corner, swung close to the building wall and stole back again. They got to the fire escape.

Half a dozen men swarmed silently around the right-hand corner of the building and ran toward them. Half a dozen more rounded the left-hand corner.

“Of all the lousy luck,” groaned Smitty.

But it wasn’t too bad. His hands jammed into his pockets and came out with some of Mac’s anaesthetic pellets. They could bowl over every man here in about twenty seconds.

“Oh!” said one of the men advancing toward them. He kept his voice low. “I get it. You’re the two who sent the message. We thought you were part of the gang.”

“Message?” said Smitty.

“To the bureau,” said the man impatiently.

It was neatly done. And, besides, circumstances had combined to give the appearance of logic. About eight minutes had passed since Smitty had dispatched the boy.

“Say! You guys are sure fast,” said Smitty. He put the pellets back in his pockets. “Your office must be right around the corner for the kid to get there so fast. And you guys must have been playing pinochle right in the office to—”

“Smitty!” Nellie yelled suddenly. “These men are not—”

They leaped, then. Smitty tried to get the pellets out again, but he was just too late. Guns jabbed him all over; Nellie, too.

“Their heads,” snarled one of the men. “This gang wears bullet-proof underwear, or something.”

That relaxed the giant’s muscles, tensed for a fighting trust in the celluglass undergarments.

The gang herded them toward the door, into it, and down a flight of stairs. At every second the guns were leveled at Nellie’s blonde locks and at the giant’s head. There was no chance to try for a break. They were hopelessly caught!

The room was hardly larger than a clothes closet and was of solid steel. Its walls, curved at the side, were straight at front and back. Through the center of the room ran a pipe about eighteen inches in diameter, and the outside of the pipe was sweating.

Cole Wilson opened his eyes, closed them again, then snapped them open a second time and stared in bewilderment.

“What’s all this?” he demanded.

Mac had been conscious for several minutes. He said: “We’re in a submarine. The sub that brought the divers and the explosive.”

There was silence. Cole listened hard. All he could hear was a faint hum like that of an electric fan.

“Say, this is a sweet boat,” he exclaimed. “I can’t hear a motor, can’t even feel the throb of the propeller.”

“I don’t think there is a propeller,” said Mac. “I think a silent worm-gear pump forces water through that pipe, that runs the length of the sub. That pulls the sub along on a kind of cable of water. They’d get very little speed out of her, but she’d be so silent that the sound devices wouldn’t give an alarm.”

“Then she is a sweet boat!”

Even the faint hum ceased, now, and the two men sensed that the submarine was slowing. They had been out quite a while.

“Now what?” wondered Cole.

Mac shrugged as well as he could. Both men were bound so they could hardly move a finger.

“A bigger question,” said the Scot, “is why we’re alive at all? Why did this murrrderin’ bunch take us alive and go to the trouble of bringing us into the sub through their air lock?”

“I think I can guess that,” said Cole thoughtfully. “They want to know how much damage, if any, we did to their plan. They’ll probably hold us till after the hour when the explosion is due. Then, if it doesn’t come off, we’ll be tortured into telling what we did to stop it, so they can fix it up.”

A steel bulkhead door swung open and into the steel room came a man they had come to hate with everything in them. A man with dark, sleek hair and a face that looked like that of an amiable playboy—Richard Addington.

Behind him came four men.

“Up with them,” said Addington, nodding to the bound two. “Take them to the basement. I understand they’ll have company down there.”

Mac and Cole were picked up, carried out of the submarine and along a dimly lit tunnel. The bearers didn’t bother to keep them from scraping along the rough stone sides.

They were carried into a well-lighted, huge room, and they saw what was meant by “company.”

“Smitty!” groaned Cole. “Nellie!”

The giant and the tiny blonde looked glumly back at them.

“So they got you, too,” said Smitty.

Then he was silent. They were all silent, all prayerfully thinking the same thing: Just one of their number was free, now. That was The Avenger himself. But it was doubtful if he alone could do anything, back there in the darkness under the vast
Carolina,
to prevent this ruinous enemy act.

Mac hated to ask even this small favor of any of this crew. But he simply had to know.

“Would ye mind tellin’ me the time?” he asked in the general direction of this modern pirate band.

Addington did the answering.

“I’d be very glad to tell you,” he said, grinning balefully. “It is now twenty-five minutes of four.”

Ten minutes till the explosion time. If there was an explosion. They clung to the hope that, somehow, The Avenger, single-handed, had managed to take the sting out of that pile of metal containers.

Then they had all hope knocked from them.

Two more men came in the doorway that led, through the tunnel, to the concealed underground slip where the electric submarine was moored.

With them, they had Dick Benson!

The Avenger was bound even more securely than his aides, for, by now, Addington’s gang knew more about the pale-eyed man’s deadliness and were taking no chances of his escape.

“Chief!” wailed Nellie.

One of the men said in answer to Addington’s perplexed but triumphant expression: “The guy got too smart this time. You know what? He managed to follow us back in the blackness to the sub. He rode her here to the wharf. But there we got him. We saw him just after you’d carried these two out”—he nodded to Cole and Mac—”and we nailed him.”

They dumped Benson down beside his aides. He sat there, back to the wall, not a big man, weighing no more than a hundred and sixty-five pounds, securely bound—and yet, still seeming dangerous.

His pale and terrible eyes sent their probing stare at first one and then another of the score of men in the basement. And they looked uneasy at its cold impact.

All but Addington. The dark, sleek man stepped to the bound crime fighter and prodded him with his toe.

“So for once,” Addington said, “you come up against a force you can’t beat, just as your country has. I suppose you think you have rendered our mine under the
Carolina
harmless?”

“I know I have,” said Benson quietly.

Mac and Cole stared triumphantly at each other. Smitty and Nellie sighed contentedly. Then anything that happened to them personally was all right. They all knew they’d sooner or later be killed in their dangerous work. Now was as good a time as any, since they could go out knowing they’d done this important job for their country.