The Avenger 20 - The Green Killer (8 page)

The rest followed out and down the stairs. She had her husband’s head on her knee when they got to the rooms Heber had had. Josh was just coming out of it, but he had a nasty gash on the back of his head.

“Heber?” Josh said, in a minute, looking around.

“He’s gone,” said Nellie. Josh groaned.

“Sorry. My fault. He acted like a maniac. I should have watched him. Turned my back just for a minute—”

“Hey, here’s a note,” said Smitty suddenly. He picked a folded sheet of paper from the bed and read it. It was from Heber.

“Sorry to run out on you after all you’ve done. But I have a hunch if I stay here another minute, they’ll catch up to me and kill me. So I’m going. I’ll get in touch with you as soon as I can without being traced. The antitoxin is wonderful stuff. I’m much better already.”

Josh rubbed his aching head and nodded, when the giant read that part.

“He
was
better, too,” said the Negro. “He wasn’t walking so bent over, and he said his joints didn’t ache so much.”

“That would seem to prove it,” said Benson, pale eyes like diamond drills in his expressionless face.

Smitty thought of something. “Doggone it!” he said. “We were going to have Heber guide us to where Stahl is. Now the guy’s gone. How’ll we get to the right place?”

“We’ll have to wait till we get our hands on the mon,” sighed Mac.

But Nellie had another idea. “That little native!” she exclaimed. “He’s from the region we want to visit.” She looked confidently at The Avenger. “You know most dialects,” she said. “Maybe you can worm the location out of him.”

“That is possible,” Benson said. “I know most of the dialects of Brazil, at least. We’ll see what he has to say.”

What the native had to say was—nothing.

Smitty had thought he’d searched the little dark monkey man pretty thoroughly. But it seemed he hadn’t. There had been one more poisoned dart, not in the regular quiver. And while they were all down in Heber’s room, the bent little Indian had used it.

Calmly, stoically, he had pricked himself with it, and he died as The Avenger tried to inject some of the curare antidote into his veins.

“So it’s Heber or nothing,” said Mac.

The Avenger nodded. “We must find him. He must guide us. Otherwise, we might search the jungle north of the Negro River for years and never find a trace of Stahl. I have been through there. I know how immense and impenetrable that region is.”

“But where,” gloomed Nellie, “can we find the guy? He’s hiding in fear of his life. And there are an awful lot of places in New York to hide in.”

The first thing they did was look all through the rooms Heber had occupied for twenty-four hours to see if there was a clue as to where he’d gone.

There wasn’t. And really none of them had expected to find one. It was probable that Heber hadn’t known, himself, when he clubbed Josh down in his terror and fled, just where he would go to hide.

They found several other things, though.

For one thing, he had taken that bottle of Pinkish stuff with him. But, then, it would have been funny if he hadn’t. Naturally, he’d want to keep up the injections till he was completely cured.

For another thing, he had cut off some of his hair, or something. On the dresser, The Avenger found half a dozen wiry, flaming-red hairs of about the length to have grown on the man’s head. Which seemed very odd.

“Where,” wailed Nellie, “could he be? We don’t even know where to
start
to look.”

“Yes, we do,” said The Avenger quietly.

“Huh?”

“He will not be hiding out,” said Benson.

“But—”

“If there is one thing certain, it is that this place has been carefully watched since Heber entered. He couldn’t get away without being seen. He won’t be hiding out. They’ll have got him by now.”

“So?” said Smitty.

“So they’ll be starting for Brazil as soon as possible and as fast as possible.”

Smitty nodded. “I get it. They wanted him for the same reason we did—to guide us to that place where all the radium lies around. That was why they tried to kidnap him in the first place at Mac’s store, instead of killing him as they did the Indian.”

Nellie said, “The fastest way is by plane.”

“Right,” said Mac.

“So if we watch the airfields—” Nellie began. Then her shoulders drooped. “But they could have a plane of their own, hidden anywhere within a thousand-mile radius. Looks to me like we can’t possibly locate them in time.”

Benson went to his big desk. He took out a map of the western hemisphere and drew a straight line from New York, U.S.A., to Manaos, Brazil.

The line went almost straight south—a little east of south. It passed near Trinidad and other former bases of the United States.

“They won’t try the airlanes close to army and navy airfields,” Benson decided. “They’ll probably ride the coast line down, and jump to Brazil from Florida or Cuba.”

“That takes in a lot of territory,” said Mac gloomily.

The Scot was the worst pessimist alive, except when circumstances would warrant pessimism. Then, when it looked inevitable that death or disaster should overtake them, Mac became so illogically cheerful that the rest wanted to crown him.

Dick didn’t answer. He said, “They’ve probably started already. We’ll take the big amphibian.”

“All of us?” Josh asked hopefully.

“Your head isn’t in shape for possible trouble,” Dick said, looking at the Negro’s bandaged skull. “You and Rosabel stay here. Smitty, you and Nellie and Mac will come. And the girl.”

“The girl?” said Nellie incredulously. “Why, she’d be just dead weight. She doesn’t know what it’s all about. Wouldn’t it be best to come back for her?”

“With luck,” The Avenger said, “we may not have to come back for her.”

They went for the plane. On the way, Nellie murmured to Smitty:

“I don’t quite get this. Why is the chief so certain that Heber has already been captured? Why is he so sure Heber will give in to that gang of cutthroats and consent to guide them to the radium field? How can he feel there is more than a hundred-to-one chance of locating the gang’s plane in all the empty sky over the Gulf of Mexico? And why is he taking the girl with us?”

“Ask the chief,” Smitty said sardonically.

Naturally, Nellie had no idea of doing that. When The Avenger was ready to tell why he did certain things, he told, and not before. If you asked him, he would say nothing. If you persisted, the calm, cold eyes would swing on you—and you would be quiet.

The big plane Benson referred to was a twelve-ton army type with two two-thousand-horsepower motors and a top speed that no one yet had been allowed to clock. The speed was sixty miles better than when it had left the factory, however, due to a revolutionary type of supercharger which The Avenger had devised, and plans for which were in the vaults of the War Department, now.

The Avenger took the controls. He swung south and a bit west. And he flew high. Thirty thousand feet. Then he set the robot control and began opening a crate which the rest had noticed when they entered.

He put together a thing that looked like a double gramophone, of the old-fashioned kind, with four oversized horns on it. Assembled, it filled the central part of the cabin.

“A sound detector,” said Smitty, staring at the horns and the complicated mess of amplifying tubes in the center. “But I’ve never seen one quite like that before.”

“It’s new,” said Benson.

“Yours?”

“Yes. It is particularly sensitive, but it’s a little better than previous types because you can tune out any noise you please. Such as your own motor and air-friction noise.”

Mac whistled. “I’ll say it’s better than previous types! If you can do that, you can cut out your own plane noise, and listen for other planes. And at a high altitude—”

“At thirty thousand feet,” said The Avenger, “we should hear another plane at a distance of more than four hundred miles. Unless its motor speed by chance is so closely synchronized with our own that it could not be tuned in as separate sound. To avoid that slight chance, we will cut off our motors at regular intervals and listen for the gang’s plane.”

Smitty looked at Nellie. One of the little blonde’s questions, at least, was answered—how The Avenger hoped to spot a plane in “all that empty sky over the Gulf of Mexico.”

The big ship, with The Avenger’s supercharger, was knifing along at least four hundred miles an hour. Even so, it is quite a distance from New York to Florida. There were a few hours with not much to do. In that time, Nellie reflected, looking around, that Benson had enough supplies in here to do the lot of them for a couple of weeks.

The supplies put the accent on tropical demand. There were sun helmets, back pads, specially canned foods for equatorial heat.

Mac spoke suddenly.

“There’s been a speck in the sky way behind us and a couple thousand feet below us for ten or fifteen minutes.”

“Huh?” said Smitty.

“Another plane,” said Mac, “following us.”

“It would take an awfully good plane to keep up with this job,” Smitty said. “You sure it isn’t just a spot before the eyes?”

“Look yourself,” snapped the Scot.

Smitty looked through binoculars. He could just make out that the speck was a plane.

The Avenger, without comment, veered far to the west. The speck behind did the same thing. He veered east again, saw a cloud, and plunged in. He spiraled in the cloud for two or three minutes and came out; and there was the speck, marking time in lazy circles till he should emerge.

“Following us, all right.”

“Look here,” said Nellie peevishly. “We’re supposed to be trailing the gang, not the gang trailing us.”

“It isn’t necessarily the gang’s plane,” said Benson evenly.

“It’s private. No military’s markings.”

Nellie made the next report. She stared through the plastic at the bow.

“Look there. Another plane, coming up ahead of us and swinging our way.”

The Avenger’s pale, deadly eyes took in this second plane. It was climbing fast, and as it rose it darted straight toward them.

The combined speed of these two machines hurtling at each other approached the speed of sound. In seconds the plane ahead was on them. Eight little rosebuds of flame appeared at its wing edges!

“They’re firing at us!” Smitty yelled. “Why, the—”

Benson kept ahead till it seemed he must ram the plane. Then he pulled the nose of his ship up gently, and the two rocketed past each other.

But for an instant he saw the goggled face of the enemy pilot.

The face was dark, and the pilot’s body had been small, almost monkeylike. The pilot of that plane was one of the monkey men, not a white man from the gang that had Heber.

Smitty had glimpsed the dark, goggled face, too. He said to Mac, “What do you know? An Indian! Where’d he get the dough for a plane like that?”

“Where’d he get the skill to run it?” was Nellie’s retort.

“Remember what Heber said?” Mac joined in. “Heber said the leader of the natives in the spot where Stahl was captured was educated in England. That must be him, tryin’ to shoot us down before we can go to his jungle kingdom and ‘ruin’ his subjects with white mon’s ‘civilization.’ ”

“We don’t want his doggoned kingdom,” said Smitty. “All we want is Stahl.”

“Apparently, he can’t read minds enough to know that,” Nellie said. “Oh-oh! Here we go again.”

The ship with the little dark man at the controls had banked at maximum steepness after passing The Avenger and was coming back on their tail, little flowers of fire again twinkling from the leading edges of the wings.

There probably wasn’t a better pilot in the air than Richard Benson. Promptly, he fell off to the left, rose again in a steep loop, and reversed positions.

The Indian began frantically to wiggle out of the line of fire. And then Mac shouted, “The one behind! Watch it!”

The Avenger had already seen the new peril.

While the two planes had been maneuvering, the ship that had been following them had caught up. Now, both bored at them from each side.

Mac had started for the rear gunner’s blister with his first glimpse of the second plane. He had his hands on the machine guns there when The Avenger’s calm voice came through the earphones.