The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard (18 page)

“Benson!” exclaimed Borg with a satisfied oath. “We’ve got ’em now. We’ll leave them down here for the ants to feed on when we go north with the first load of that gold.” He stared at the man with the reddish hair. “Come on, Pete. You and me’ll take a little trip around the ridge with the guide. And the rest of you—no fire. The smoke could be seen. Eat your grub cold.”

The three set out through the low but almost impenetrable jungle, with the Indian gliding ahead. It took them nearly an hour and a half to get around the ridge and near the small cleared space on which was Benson’s plane.

In their close-covered glade, Benson was staring at the rising sun. More particularly, he was staring at a long shadow cast by the sun—a shadow cast by the great rock shaft atop the ridge.

“Secret hiding places for treasure fall into patterns,” he said, lambent gray eyes watching the creeping shadow of the shaft. “About half the time a central object is used for the starting point of measurements one way or another. The other half—the shadow cast by the conspicuous object—points to the cache. We’ll try that method now.”

“But we’re after that gang, not treasure,” said Nellie.

“By locating the treasure, we can ambush the gang with the most chance of success,” said Benson. “We’ll go to the end of the shaft’s shadow, and follow it as it shortens under the rising sun.”

They walked slowly after the shortening shadow, in a line, watching for any sign of man’s age-old handicraft in the thick tropic growth. Spiders as big as a man’s fist peered at them from red and gray-barked trees. Tiny lizards scuttled carefully out of reach of the spiders.

There was a low mound with trees all over it and a small sunken area in front of it. The shadow led them to this mound, and Smitty stumbled over something and almost fell.

The thing that had caught his feet was a stone, lichen-covered. But it was a peculiarly regular, square stone.

Benson stared at the mound. “This is it, I think.” He dug a little, parting overhanging roots. A hole appeared.

“All that’s left of an ancient door.”

He squeezed in. The others followed, with eyes shining and breath coming fast. Benson had his flashlight going.

A rough, crude hole was the entrance here. But once inside, the roughness and crudity disappeared. They were in a stone chamber, perfectly preserved, at least twelve feet high and thirty square—part of an old temple.

From this chamber led four openings. Benson went to one after another of them, playing his flash. The light went on and on down each, showing no end.

“Which?” said the giant Smitty.

“I’m thinkin’ we’d better take no one of them till we have a ball of yarn,” said MacMurdie dourly. “Whoosh! ’Tis a labyrinth we’re in!”

“He’s right,” said Chandler. “We’d better not go down any of those black holes too far.”

Benson paced to the center of the chamber.

“Your flashlight, Nellie.”

He set Nellie’s light on end, with the white beam playing up on the dimly carved ceiling.

“Now, we’ll go down one after another till we lose the light. At that point we’ll stop, assuming the tunnels themselves haven’t already stopped.”

In the side wall of the old temple room there was a rock, a little rougher than the surrounding dressed stone, sticking out several inches. Nellie was looking at it, and her hand went out.

“Don’t touch it!”

Benson’s voice was like a whiplash. Nellie drew her hand back from the rock and stared at him in surprise. Benson said, less urgently:

“It’s known that the Aztecs left clever and deadly traps for enemy raiders. Touch an innocent-looking stone outcropping, and tons of rock are released by a lever action to crush you. Or the floor falls away from you. Or a chasm opens under your feet. They were pretty good engineers, the old Aztecs. They knew their weights and counterweights. It might mean nothing to touch that stone knob—or it might bring the whole roof down on us.”

Nellie retreated hurriedly from the projection. Benson went on.

“You stay here with the light. Mac, take the tunnel in the left wall. Smitty, the one in the right. I’ll take the left rear tunnel; Chandler, the right rear. Anyone finding anything, call out. But not too loudly! Sound vibration might bring this old temple down around our ears.”

They split up. Benson went into the tunnel he had selected and down its smooth floor, with his pale and icy eyes piercing the gloom at the end of his flashlight’s ray, almost like the eyes of a cat.

He felt the coolness and dampness after he’d gone less than a hundred yards, with the light still visible behind him in the central chamber. He went very slowly after that. A subterranean lake or stream was nearby.

He got to it in another thirty yards. He stood on a stone ledge and peered down—straight down.

There was a chasm about thirty feet wide. Filling it from wall to wall was black water that rushed swiftly but soundlessly. It came out of blackness and went into blackness. Across from where Benson stood was blank rock. The tunnel ended in this deadly stream.

Behind him, in the temple chamber, Nellie’s wild scream suddenly rang out. There was a dull, grinding
boom!

The solid floor of the tunnel trembled. There was an avalanching roar from the temple chamber. And suddenly Benson was not standing on anything.

He had warned of the deadly Aztec traps, but he had not paid sufficient attention to his own warning. The ledge he’d been standing on was part of such a trap. The explosion in the distance had set off some rock lever, perhaps a dozen feet away, that acted on the ledge.

And the ledge had dropped suddenly from under Benson like a sprung trapdoor.

He plummeted down through darkness, with his flashlight hitting the water and winking out. He heard the stone ledge splash into the ebony stream. Then he hit the rushing depths himself.

As he struck, he was thinking of something. From the plane, there had been no glimpse of the lake or river anywhere near. Wherever this stream came above ground—if it ever did—the intervening distance would drown a man a hundred times over before air and open sky could be reached again.

He went down and down into the icy water which bore him on its smooth and silent rush—toward blackness.

The entrance to the temple room was blocked so that an army of elephants could not have gotten through to outer air. Several dozen monolithic slabs, each weighing tons, had slid from the ponderous temple roof and shut the temple forever from the outside world.

Smitty got from the depths of his tunnel first. He was running, for all his vast size and weight, like a fleet youngster. He emerged into the rear two-thirds of the room, which was all that was left.

“Miss Gray!” he yelled. “Nellie—”

He stopped. She wasn’t under the rock pile locking them in here forever. She was crouching at the rear wall, with her hands over her face. The slide had missed her by only a few feet.

She looked up at Smitty’s cry, gray eyes wild.

“Borg!” she cried. “It was Borg. I saw him, at the entrance. He set off one of those little bombs and trapped us in here.”

“So—the gang got the jump on us!” said Smitty, hard-eyed. “We weren’t as smart—or as fast—as we thought we were. Chief! Oh, chief!”

MacMurdie stumbled from the tunnel he had been exploring, followed within a few seconds by Chandler. They were white-faced and shaken.

Dick Benson did not come from his tunnel.

“Where’s the chief?” said MacMurdie, anxiety for his boss overshadowing fear for himself. “Why doesn’t he come out of there?”

They watched the tunnel, breathlessly. There was no sound from within, no sight of the white, dead countenance, and the icily flaming pale eyes.

“We’d better go down—”

They hurried down Benson’s tunnel—all of them, with Nellie’s hand clasped in Smitty’s great paw to keep her from tripping. They got to the black death of the river. And there was no sign of Benson.

“He must have . . . fallen in,” faltered Nellie, swaying.

“The chief?” said Smitty. “Not him! He could walk a tightrope over Vesuvius and not fall.”

“There’s no place else he could be,” said MacMurdie, frosty-blue eyes filled with a dreadful certainty.

Chandler pointed to the brink of the twenty-foot drop down to the water. There, the outline of the place where the overhanging ledge had been could be plainly seen.

“A stone slab collapsed under him,” said Chandler. “A mountain goat would fall, if the ledge he stood on fell under him.”

There was a vast and horrible silence, while the wind fanned up from the narrow chasm, stirred by the noiseless rush of the water.

Smitty, voice strained and hoarse, said:

“Maybe we can get out ourselves. Better to try than just stand here looking into that river.”

“There’s no way out of
here,”
said Chandler, eyeing the blank wall across the deep crack in the rock. “And my tunnel ended in a little tomb, with solid walls. No way out there.”

“The one I was in just stopped,” said Smitty.

MacMurdie, peering at the river with suffering blue eyes under sandy ropes of eyebrows, shrugged a little.

“I didn’t get to the end of mine. There might be a way out there. I couldn’t tell.”

“Then we’ll go down that one,” Smitty said. “Take it slow, everybody. Keep close together. And hang onto your flashlights!”

They went back to the central chamber, which had become a tomb with the rock seal over its mouth. They went down the tunnel MacMurdie had explored a little way.

Long before that tunnel ended, they would have gone back—if there had been any hope to go back to. The underground tunnel twisted and turned until they were hopelessly lost. Every few yards, some other tunnel laced into it. Methodically they explored each of these, finding an end after a dozen or a hundred steps. Many of them became natural fissures instead of artificial tunnels, after a few feet. The ground here was honeycombed with caves and runways.

“We’ll never get out!” cried Nellie.

“Maybe a little farther on,” said MacMurdie. As usual, when things really looked desperate, the dour Scot was optimistic. When things were normal he gloomily predicted disaster; when they looked impossible, he grew almost cheerful.

“We’ll be comin’ to a way out—” he said. And then he stopped talking. And the rest stopped walking. They were at the end of the parent tunnel—their last hope. And that end was black.

They looked at each other, ghostly in the fading light of the flashlights. Then, as the illumination faded a little more, Chandler cried out.

“At the very end there! Where the tunnel goes to a blunt point! Look!”

They all stared, and Nellie’s gasp was audible.

They could see a tiny scrap of light there; a postage-stamp-sized square of daylight. They scrambled forward.

There had been blank rock wall at the end of this tunnel. The wall of some low cliff. But, ages past, a tree had got its roots in crevices near the tunnel. Roots had swelled through the years, chipping off rock slabs, till now there was an opening.

But the opening was plugged by the tree itself, a hardwood, over a foot in diameter, with a mass of tangled roots filling the end of the tunnel.

Chandler’s shoulders drooped. His voice was quiet but resigned as he said:

“We’re still stuck. We can’t bore up through the heart of that tree with nothing but penknives. And to remove the tree we’d need dynamite.”

Mac turned his frosty-blue eyes on Smitty’s massive bulk.

“We’ve got dynamite,” he assured the engineer. “Only it walks on two legs and calls itself Smitty. Whoosh! Ye can tumble that thing, can’t ye, Smitty? The trunk of it must slant out of balance on the other side, growin’ out of a wall as it does.”

Smitty was looking thoughtfully at the roots.

“Dig under ’em so I can crawl in there, and we’ll see,” he said doubtfully.

Working with their hands, they hollowed under the ball of tree roots. There was earth as well as rock, which made it possible. Then Smitty writhed under the base of the tree, and worked his body upward against the roots till he was on hands and knees.

“It’s impossible!” said Chandler, staring. “A man can’t tip an eighteen-inch tree over!”