The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard (21 page)

But Nellie had an idea that was quite similar. Branch to branch, treetops intermingling, the jungle crowded together. Might not a small, strong person like herself give a pretty good imitation of a monkey and swing through the trees to the ridge wall?

Smitty couldn’t do it, for all his great strength. His vast bulk would be too heavy for some of the smaller branches. She didn’t think Mac could do it; he wasn’t supple and lithe enough. But
she
could try. As supple as a dancer, with muscles under her satiny skin as tempered as silver coils, she could negotiate the monkey road through the trees, if any human could.

She knew, though, that neither Mac nor Smitty would allow her to try, if she said anything. So she resolved to say nothing and go her way.

She edged out along the branch she was on. In ten feet she was lost to the two men, still discussing their plans. In twenty she could hardly hear them any more, and was at the end of the branch.

Half a dozen branches of other trees invited. She took one and swung like a trapeze expert to the neighboring tree. And now she wouldn’t know if Smitty and Mac missed her or not, for they wouldn’t dare to call very loudly for fear of giving their positions away to the machine gunners.

Less than twice the length of a football field intervened between the great tree and the wall of the ridge. But it took Nellie nearly an hour to traverse it.

One reason was that many times she had to retrace her way a dozen feet when she got to the end of a branch and found no branch to the next tree big enough to hold her weight at that spot.

Another reason was that midway she started to put her hand on a branch and discovered just in time that it was an eighteen-foot boa. She stayed motionless till the head of the great snake stopped weaving around, and then cautiously went back to another spot.

The main reason, however, was that toward the end of her journey she heard a slight crackling noise and looked down and to her right to see a native with a full-throated machine gun on a tripod before him. The native was gazing upward—had heard her moving, but could not quite place her.

Nellie remained stone-still for twenty minutes, that time, before finally going on.

She got to a shoulder up the face of the ridge that was between her and the sight of the big tree. With that to keep her out of view, she scaled the cliff like a professional mountain climber. Then she was on the ridge, with the natural rock statue towering before her.

There were scattered, stunted trees and bushes on the ridge. She went from the cover of one to the shade of another, cautiously.

A hieroglyph meaning both setting sun, and gold! Would she find the guarded-entrance to the treasure under the right hand of the statue? She got closer.

Now she noticed a strange thing. It was something to make her scalp crawl a little with an instinct of terrible danger, though the thing didn’t look too frightening at first glance.

Along the top of the ridge, cutting it into two long strips, the narrowest of which was toward the side where Smitty and Mac clung to the big tree, was a little crack in the rock.

The crack varied from a mere half inch in width to three or four inches. It was in such a straight line that it seemed artificial. It started at some distance far behind Nellie and out of sight, and extended ahead of her as far as she could see. Apparently the little crack bisected the whole top of the table-like ridge for its entire two miles.

She looked at it more closely, and the impression that it was not a natural fissure increased.

Here and there she could see what seemed to be holes crudely sunk into the stone, always along that crack.

When primitive people want to blast stone, they have an age-old way of doing it. They bore holes along a straight line, pound round wooden rods in it, with the wood very dry, and then pour water on the wood. The wood swells with the moisture, setting up an incalculable pressure—and the rock cracks and falls all along that line.

It almost seemed here, as if the old Aztecs had once decided to crack a third off the entire ridge and send it thundering to the ground on the side where Smitty and Mac were. Then, apparently, something had interrupted their plans and they had abandoned the idea.

Nellie thrust the crack aside in her mind, and started toward the statue again. Then she stopped and crouched low in the cover of a stunted bush.

There was someone else on the ridge.

Moving with the agility of a great ape, a man’s figure was shuttling around the base of the statue. The rock shaft had hidden him from Nellie when she first got up here. Now his activities had brought him around where she could see him.

He was prying around the bottom of the huge natural-rock figure—which, Nellie had just noticed, was on the edge of that long, thin crack. She thought for a moment that someone had beaten her to the idea of the treasure being at the base of the statue. Then she saw that he was not digging for treasure.

He was boring a little hole and dropping something; boring another, and dropping something. Like a man planting kernels of corn by hand. But it was not corn.

Nellie’s hand suddenly went to her throat as she saw at last what the man was planting.

Into each little depression he was scooping near the base of the rock shaft, he was placing one of the deadly little peanut bombs!

In the centuries-old underground chamber where the colossal yellow hoard of the Aztecs lay, Benson had acted like a streak of leaping flame when Pete, the man with the reddish hair, leveled that gun at him.

The man’s hoarse yell, the shot from his automatic, and Benson’s explosive action, had all seemed to come together. But actually Benson had moved about a quarter of a second in advance of the other two sounds. The slug whistled over him as he fell to the treasure-strewn floor. And as he fell, he mashed out the flaming strip of cloth under his body.

Positions were reversed. Benson had been illuminated by the wicklike torch, and Pete had been in the dimness of the entrance. Now Benson was in darkness, and Pete was outlined by the vague daylight behind him.

The man shot three times in quick succession, searching wildly, blindly, for the body of the man with the awful, colorless eyes. Then there was an answering shot.

This was not a thundering crash. It was a venomous, crisp little spatting sound, as if a bare wet foot had smacked lightly on stone. It was the businesslike whisper of Mike, the silenced little special gun Benson wore at his calf, directed a second time at this man.

Pete went down without another move or sound, with his skull creased by The Avenger’s uncanny marksmanship.

Benson went up out of the treasure chamber, and at the head of the crude rock stairs lifted that ponderous rock manhole cover over it again. He strewed dead leaves and branches, and the place was hidden.

He had gone fifty yards when Borg confronted him, gun in hand. Borg glared at Benson. The real Indian was behind Borg.

Benson burst into the dialect of northern Yucatan.

“What’s he yapping about?” snapped Borg. “I heard shots—”

“Him say man with sandy hair shoot at big snake,” the Indian translated Benson’s oratory. “Go on, that way.”

Benson had pointed into the jungle behind him.

Borg still glared suspiciously. He yelled: “Pete! You okay?”

There was, of course, no answer.

Borg started to yell again. Then there was a hail from camp.

“Frankie! The boss is here.”

Borg chewed his lip uncertainly.

“Find Pete and bring him in,” he said to the Indian with him. “I’ve got to get back. And You!” He stared at Benson with narrowed black eyes. “Keep your nose out of camp for a while. There’s something about your face I don’t like.”

Benson turned questioningly to the Indian, who translated the command to keep out of camp. Benson shrugged, and squatted with a resigned air where he was.

Borg went hurriedly back toward the gang’s jungle headquarters. Benson gave him five minutes, then crept after him.

He didn’t get into camp; there was a small clearing that he couldn’t cross unseen. But if he couldn’t see what went on there, he could hear from his ambush.

He heard Borg say: “Now, honest, I didn’t try to cross you. How’d I know where you were?”

Then another voice, crisp, cold, commanding, spoke up. It was not the voice of any of Borg’s gang. It was, at last the real leader of this murderous crew; the man who had lurked in the background all along and used Borg and his gang merely as tools of his own superior intelligence and ruthlessness.

“All right. Forget it,” this voice said. “We’ll take it up later. What is important is that I’ve got a way to smash that crowd after us in one stroke. With one blow I can kill everything on the other side of that ridge. And I’m going to do it. In half an hour our troubles will be over.”

“Look,” said Borg, “three of these coffee-bean natives we’ve got working for us are over there, too. They’re holding them steady with the machine guns. If you do what you say—however the hell you expect to do it, I don’t know—you’ll knock off those three, too.”

There was a little pause. Then the cold voice said:

“So what? Do you really care?”

“Well, no,” mumbled Borg. “I guess they got it coming.”

“Then shut up about it.”

“Yeah, but look. How about the gold? If we don’t get that last plate they got, to show us where the stuff’s hidden—”

“We can find it without it. Hang tight, and in a few minutes you’ll see how a lot of men can die!”

It was all Nellie could do to keep from screaming as she saw what the man at the base of the shaft was doing. For the purpose was only too clear. Too terribly clear!

A deep fissure dividing the ridge. A great rock shaft along the fissure, weighing hundreds of tons. Explosives around the base of the shaft!

A shattering explosion, and the fall of that great weight, would almost certainly send that whole side of the ledge, hundreds of thousands of tons of stone, avalanching down on Smitty and Mac. The slide would reach the great tree, sweep it down like a twig, cover it, and go on for another hundred yards or more. They were doomed—everything on that side of the ledge was doomed, if those explosives went off.