The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard (19 page)

“Catch hold of the big roots that stick out,” said Smitty, “and heave when I do.”

Chandler and MacMurdie grasped roots.

“Now!” said Smitty, and heaved.

They could hear his tendons cracking with the effort. Mac and Chandler were doing a little cracking, too. The tree quivered, but that was all.

“Again!” grunted Smitty, arching his vast back.

The tree swayed a bit.

“Again, in rhythm.”

They began to rock it—lifting, relaxing when the tree outside settled back, lifting again. With each lift, Smitty heaved explosively, putting back and legs and arms into it, expending twice the power of the other two men put together.

“I tell you it’s impossible—” panted Chandler.

There was a crack, a creaking sound, a moan as if the tree were a thing alive. Then the roots which stuck into the end of the tunnel slowly pulled themselves out as the bole of the tree tilted. There was a moment when the whole leaning bulk seemed to hang frozen, then it went on its way with a crackling of breaking roots and a final crash. And a hole was torn where the tree base had been that was almost big enough to walk through.

“We did it!” yelled Mac to the panting giant. “Smitty—Nellie—we are free—”

He stopped as they stared into light and freedom. They were near the low rock table on which the plane had been.
Had
been! It wasn’t there any more!

There was a shallow crater in the rock. All around this was fragments of branches and bits of plane. The men with Borg had planted one of the peanut bombs under the transport ship and rained it in bits from the heavens.

“Sure, we’re free,” said Chandler heavily. “But Benson is gone, and the plane is smashed, so we’re marooned here, and we have no food or supplies.”

“The skurlies!” MacMurdie muttered, bony fists clenching. “If I ever get my hands on them—”

“We won’t, if they can get to us first,” said Smitty. “We’ve got to hole in. And not in any tunnel or cave where the entrance can be sealed to bottle us up! We’d better build a barricade in the open. Logs. That’s the ticket. We’ll all scatter into the jungle and bring logs. There. Where the big tree stands. There must be water near it, or it wouldn’t tower so high above the rest. We’ll build a log wall around that tree, and see what comes. We’ve got an automatic apiece and a few extra clips. We’re not done yet.”

They started getting logs. Chandler went farthest afield. And then they heard his cry.

“Help! They’ve got me—”

The cry came from near the base of the ridge. Smitty and Mac dropped their logs and ran toward the spot. Nellie, behind a tree, was aiming her automatic toward the place—but wasn’t seeing anything to shoot at.

Smitty and Mac got four yards—and dropped. From the tangled greenery ahead of them had sounded something that was grimly familiar. The deadly riveter’s song of a machine gun.

Lead sprayed over and around them, snipping leaves from the trees, cutting small branches. From a lot farther off they heard Chandler cry out again. Then they heard him no more.

Smitty and Mac, grim-lipped, snaked their way back toward the huge hardwood tree they’d selected as a base. Nellie, with the woodcraft of a man, after her experience on expeditions with her father, slid through the thick growth and joined them there. With the solid bole between them and that pounding tattoo, they were safe even from a machine gun.

They looked narrow-eyed at each other.

“The chief gone. Chandler gone!” Smitty said. “It doesn’t look too hot for the rest of us.”

“Whoosh, mon!” said Mac, with his cockeyed cheerfulness in the face of the impossible. “We’ll get ’em yet!”

From the side, another machine gun opened up on them. It crept farther around, searching for them behind the bole. And then from the opposite side a third machine gun opened up.

“What’s after us—the whole Mexican army?” Smitty said, staring.

Nellie looked upward. The huge tree presented a thick globe of greenery above them. Impenetrable greenery.

“I think we can climb to the lower branches before they really see us,” she said. “Up there, they couldn’t get a line on us for quite a while.”

Something like a small pineapple crashed to the ground not far from them. It burst with a dull plop, and greenish vapor came from it.

“Gas!” exclaimed the Scotchman. “Now, where would the skurlies get all this stuff?”

The gas bomb decided them. Smitty, with his great height and reach, got his hands over the lowest branch and swarmed up to it. Mac lifted Nellie to him. He hauled her up one-handed, as if she had been a feather. Mac followed. They climbed forty feet, and then stopped.

The machine guns were drumming out lead—but still around the base of the tree. Two more gas bombs had released their deadly load, but the phosgene wasn’t rising to anywhere near their height.

They were out of sight up there, and safe for at least a little while.

But they didn’t dare come down, and they couldn’t stay up there forever.

In the pitch darkness of that underground river, Benson was carried at least a dozen yards before he came up to the surface again. When he did rise at last, with powerful strokes, he bleakly expected that there would be no surface to rise to—that the water would fill entirely the underground natural tunnel through which it silently raced.

His life was saved, though he did not realize it for a while, by just one thing—it was the dry season, and the subterranean river was not swollen to capacity.

He came up to free air, and when he reached up with his arms he felt about a two-foot space over his head.

Treading water, he let himself be borne swiftly along in an upright position. He kept his arms stretched up. Now and then the roof of the tunnel raised till he felt nothing. Now and then it narrowed till he had to duck under water so that his head could clear it.

As he moved, chill things touched his legs, coiled around them with slimy and eyeless tenacity till he could kick them loose.

The current suddenly slowed, showing that, ahead, the river bed was much wider. At first, Benson took the slowing as a good sign. But in a moment it became clear that it was a bad one. The roof over him rapidly dipped down, not in any short intervals, but inexorably and endlessly.

He had six inches clear, then four, then no more than two. But now the current was slow enough so that he could stay his forward rush with his hands. He held himself motionless for a moment, with just the tip of his nose between water and roof, breathing in air.

The pitch blackness seemed mysteriously to have lifted just a little. You could
feel
the faint relief of it more than actually see it. Taking a deep breath, Benson dipped beneath the surface to try to locate it.

Ahead, an unguessable distance, there was a vague light spot. A very small spot, in the top of the watery tunnel. Benson raised again, with his nose out for air.

He could hang on there, alive, for several hours. But there was no hope in the end. He could go forward toward the light with a fractional chance of getting to upper air again. Ninety-nine chances of drowning, to one of escape.

The bleak, colorless eyes hardly changed expression. Benson had been up against hundred-to-one odds many times, and hadn’t hesitated. He didn’t hesitate now. He drew as deep a breath as his capacious lungs would hold, ducked down and began sliding through black water toward the faint patch.

In the jungle above, a stolid-faced Indian was squatting beside a small pool whose surface, mysteriously, was never still. Things appeared on that surface continually, moved to the other side, bobbed down and were never seen again. But the Indian was not concerned with this. He was getting a drink, scooping up ice-cold water in his hands.

In the black depths of the pool something moved. The Indian darted back. Two hands came up from the water, then a head and face. The Indian stared in a mixture of horror and superstitious awe.

The face was as white and still and dead as something carved from limestone. In the face were awful, colorless eyes that transfixed the Indian like lances of light. A god! An evil god! Or a monster!

Yelling, the Indian clubbed down toward the head with a length of wood his hands touched at random. And then the Indian knew it was a god. No man could have moved so fast.

White, steely fingers caught the descending club easily, jerked. The Indian toppled forward toward the pool, and the figure drew itself dripping from the water with the same move. A right hand clubbed against the side of his jaw, and the white, steely fingers of the dripping figure’s left hand caught him by the throat.

The Indian consigned himself to his fathers as he felt consciousness leave him. A monster had arisen in the Pool-to-the-heart-of-the-world, and killed him.

Dick Benson released the nerve pressure at the Indian’s throat that should hold him unconscious for several hours but would mercifully not kill him. He looked around. He was in a shadow caused by something other than the trees. In a moment he saw that it was caused by a rock wall shutting off the sun. A rock ridge that was like, and yet unlike, the ridge they had seen when he set the plane down.

He was at the foot of the ridge on which the huge natural statue was set—but on the other side. The underground river had borne him clear under it.

Off a little distance, Benson could see the spiral of smoke marking a fire. That would be the camp of Borg and his men.

Benson stared at the unconscious Indian. He was one of the seedy modern descendants of the once lordly Aztecs. He wore the ragged remnants of pants he had gotten long ago from some village store, and an even more ragged jacket of cotton. He carried with him an ancient rifle.

Benson didn’t seem to think out his next move at all, so instantly did he set to work. Yet the plan was suddenly in his mind to the last detail.

The red-barked trees were plentiful nearby. He stripped yards of the shaggy bark from the trunks, soaked them in the water of the pool. Hot water would have been better, but he didn’t dare build a fire. And enough of the cold suffice. It softened the inner layer of bark to a sort of slimy skin.

Looking into the pool, Benson rubbed the softened bark on his white, still face and tanned body. He got the color fairly well, reddish-brown. Then he appropriated the Indian’s pants and jacket and the ancient gun.

A native of the poorest nomad sort, he started toward the fire of Borg’s camp. As he went, he had recourse to a trick that had saved him once in Tibet among dark-eyed people. He jabbed his eyes with his thumbnail till they were bleared and reddened and their pale flares were a little disguised.

Across the ridge, he could hear the spatter of machine-gun fire. It was puzzling, quite out of place here. Where would several machine guns come from? Brought with Borg in his plane? Benson didn’t think so. He knew most pieces of ordnance by ear; and he spotted these, not as sub-machine guns, but the full-grown army variety, six hundred or more shots to the minute.

He gave up the puzzle. Those guns were being turned against Smitty and Mac and Nellie and Chandler, of course. But there was nothing Benson could do about that just then.

The camp showed before him—a plane camouflaged as his own had been; a clearing with a fire in it, and three men. Two of the men were at a distance from it because of the heat. The third was sweltering and cursing as he made coffee.

One of the three was Borg. Another was the man with the reddish hair. The third, near the fire, was one of the ratlike brothers.

Borg was saying: “How they got outta that rat hole I bottled them in, I can’t figure out. One of these natives said he saw a tree fall down, and they came up from the roots. Baloney! Anyhow, they got out. But we’ll get ’em with the guns and gas.”

“We better!” snarled the man with the reddish hair. “Hey—visitors—”

Benson walked calmly and evenly across the little clearing and up to them. There was an Indian with them, vicious-looking, squatting on his hams near the fire and seeming impervious to the heat. Benson kept his gaze on the Indian. It was from him that the greatest danger lay.

Benson directed a stream of native dialect at Borg, gesturing with his hands as he did so. The squatting Indian stared hard and listened harder.