The Avenger 11 - River of Ice (11 page)

Right over her was an awful thing with great horns, like a caricature of the devil himself. And this also stared at her out of glassy, immobile eyes, like a strange, deadly god staring down at a victim who lay on a sacrificial slab beneath its swollen snout. Nellie made a violent effort to get her arms free and failed. Her elbows were bound by cord that went around her arms and body several times; and her hands, folded at her waist, were clamped together by more adhesive tape.

“She’s prettier’n the other one, even,” said a man. There was regret in his tone but not too much regret. “Too bad the boss couldn’t pick ’em plainer lookin’.”

Nellie rolled her eyes to the side as far as she could. Now she saw four men, from about the chest up. The sight wasn’t any treat. The chests were scrawny. At the left armpit of each was a bulge indicating a shoulder holster replete with gun. And the four faces were those of rats more than of humans. A nice quartet of mobsters, Nellie decided. She tried again, frantically, to free her hands. But they could only flutter harmlessly at her waist.

“Here he comes,” said another of the four, in a low tone.

Nellie heard the door open, heard measured steps. Into her range of vision came the upper half of a body completely swathed by a loose overcoat so that you could not make out any single feature of it. There was a face, but because of upturned coat collar and low-drawn hat brim, you could see only the nose and eyes. And the eyes had dark glasses over them.

The man stood over the helpless girl, staring down at her. Nellie wished she could see the shielded eyes, then decided it was probably better that she couldn’t.

The man took a queer, divided thing from his pocket. Each leg of it had a needle point. A measuring compass, Nellie saw. The man leaned over her. His fingers experimentally parted her shining blonde hair from her scalp. He poised the measuring compass, with one sharp point just touching her left ear. The other point was lightly pressed at the exact top of her skull.

The man calculated a moment; then he drew a pen from his pocket. Nellie felt a slight sting as the point was pressed firmly against her head, and a fleck of ink released to dry almost instantly. The point marked was not quite halfway between left ear and center of the skull. It was a little nearer the ear than the top of the head.

Nellie’s hands began to beat wildly as, with sudden horror in her blue eyes, she sought to shift the binding adhesive tape. The tape didn’t shift. Her fingers could only flutter fruitlessly at her waist.

Richard Benson possessed two of the world’s oddest weapons. Pitted against criminals who went armed as heavily with machine guns and high-velocity short arms as was possible to obtain, The Avenger trusted to only these two. One was a little .22 revolver, silenced, so streamlined for compactness that it looked like little more than a blue length of slim pipe with a slight bend for a handle. This he called Mike; and Mike was holstered at the calf of his right leg, below the knee. The other weapon was an equally slim, razor-sharp little throwing knife. This he called Ike; and Ike was holstered at his left calf.

Faced with a submachine gun and two automatics in the doorway of Mallory’s office, The Avenger had wasted no time in words or false moves.

“Burn him down!” one of the three had said.

With the words, the machine gun began its deadly clatter. But just before, Benson had bent down like a court attache making a deep bow to royalty. The slugs went over his head. The man jerked to get the gun down; but a machine gun tends to tilt up and up, with the constant hammer of bullets passing from its muzzle. So that by the time the gun was lined down again, Benson was a yard to the right, with Mike and Ike in his hands.

The two men behind the machine gunner fired at the gray, shifting shadow that was The Avenger. Both hit!

But Benson stayed upright. The Avenger had devised a plastic, tougher than most steel, pliant as yarn, which he called celluglass. From this marvelous stuff, he had fashioned bulletproof garments for himself and his aides. The celluglass stopped the automatics’ slugs now.

The machine gun swung toward him again. Benson’s left hand flashed forward. Ike left the hand like a pebble from a catapult. The machine gunner screamed and tried to drop the gun and could not because his left hand was pinned to the hardwood stock like a butterfly pinned to a cork with a needle.

He flopped around, trying to get his hand loose, and screaming as each wrench at the knife produced more and more unbearable agonies. But no one paid attention to him. Mike’s silenced little muzzle had spat out a tiny leaden pea. And one of the two with automatics went down. But he wasn’t dead. The Avenger himself never took life. He deftly creased the gunman with Mike, slamming a small slug so that it glanced from the top of his skull, producing unconsciousness instead of death.

But the other man didn’t know that. He saw one pal trying to jerk his impaled hand from a machine gun, and the other lying on the floor, apparently dead. And this in a spot where the three of them were going to kill the one—the fellow with the dead-pan face and blazing, colorless eyes. The guy had on a bulletproof vest or something. The third man yelled hoarsely and sent three shots at the head with the virile white hair on it. But a head is a poor target, particularly when it is moving as rapidly as Benson was shifting his.

Mike spat a second time, and this third man went down. Then Mike served as a club, while Benson tapped the wildly screaming machine gunner where it would do the most good. The Avenger went to the telephone on the desk nearby, staring dispassionately with icy, pale eyes at three still forms as he did so. He reported to the police that they could pick up three burglars at this address and hung up.

He walked from the building to see Smitty sitting in one of their cars at the curb with a look of horror on his moon face. “Chief!” the giant gasped. “I came to get you. But just as I pulled up here, after missing you at the other two places, I began to get a message. It was from Nellie, chief! She’s in an awful mess.”

Benson listened to Smitty’s tiny radio. From it was coming, not a voice, but fluttering kind of tappings. Morse code.

“Nellie calling. S. O. S. Held in place with beam ceiling; thing with horns over me. Don’t know where. Come fast—”

The fluttering of her fingers at her waist had not been entirely fruitless. She had been tapping like that for minutes. Praying that it could be heard in time; that the man with the infallible brain would be able to figure out where she was and come to her.

Had Benson been piloting the plane in which Mac and Josh sped to British Columbia, it would have followed the map line of Smitty’s direction-finder with rulerlike precision. But Mac was piloting it. Mac was an excellent pilot; but he hadn’t the genius of The Avenger. Hence, he came out at the Pacific coast nearly a hundred miles north of the line. He spotted it quickly enough, with the sun’s rise. And he found that the mileage wasn’t wasted after all.

Two glaciers, Benson had said, within a hundred and ten miles of the line. They were almost at the most northern of the two; so Mac swung still farther north, and they located it. The glacier, from twelve thousand feet, was like a wide ribbon of white in the dark earth. But it wasn’t that smooth when they zoomed down. It was a tumbled mass, with great hillocks and slashing cracks. It poked its foot into the sea itself; and even as the two winged down, a huge section splashed off into the sea.

“Very interestin’,” said Mac indifferently. “But I don’t see what we’re lookin’ for, Josh. Signs of recent crackin’ that might expose somethin’ long hidden.”

Josh shook his dark head. He didn’t see any such signs, either. Of course, any of the crevasses in the white ribbon beneath them might have been freshly formed. But from a low altitude, they could see that none of them were accessible. Had Brent and Lini Waller discovered something in any of them, they’d never have been able to climb out to tell about it.

Mac flew low along the foot of the glacier, where the clear ice of its middle mass was to be seen. But that’s all there was at the foot of the glacier—just ice, no openings of any kind. He turned the plane’s nose south, and gunned the twin motors. They rocketed along the ocean. Josh caught the Scot’s arm and pointed down.

Mac looked down too, banking so he could see out a window. What he saw wasn’t very exciting. It was a little collection of a dozen or so huts in a clearing in the fir forests. An Indian settlement. Instantly, Mac started to spiral down, with the same thought in mind that Josh had. Perhaps through the Indians in this vicinity they would get a closer line on the Wallers’ last movements.

There was a long cleared spot near the settlement. Mac swooped low, judged he could land all right, came back and settled down as lightly as if the plane had been butterfly weight instead of weighing nearly two tons.

Men came from the settlement, wearing the mackinaws of the North Woods. Indians. They stared curiously at Josh. It was seldom they saw a Negro here. “Probably think ye’re a second cousin, Josh,” Mac grinned out of the corner of his mouth.

A big Indian with a scar under his left ear was in the lead. It developed that he knew a few words of English, and that planes were no novelty to these natives.

There was none of this big-devil-bird-from-the-sky business. Instead, the big Indian said, “What you want? We no got gas here.”

“We don’t want gas,” said Josh. “We are looking for a friend. A man who was probably guided by one of you who live in this section.”

The big Indian’s eyes narrowed a very little, though in no other way did emotion express itself on his stolid face. “Friend?” he said. “Here?”

Josh had caught that slight flicker of eyelids, and followed it as deftly and swiftly as any psychology professor. It told him he was on a very hot scent. “Yes. You guided him yourself, maybe? His name is Brent Waller.”

“Me guide him?” said the Indian, looking stupid. “No guide. Hunter. Trapper.” And he looked askance at MacMurdie.

Josh Newton’s brain was as quick as a mongoose. He said to Mac, softly, “Take a walk, will you, Mac?”

“Walk?” said Mac, staring.

“Yes. I have a hunch this man knows something. And I have a hunch he might talk to me because I’m black and rather akin to himself. But I don’t think he’ll talk with you around.”

Had The Avenger some such thought in his amazing mind when he sent Josh with Mac? The Negro knew that it was probable. “You guided Brent Waller?” he asked the big Indian when Mac had gone back to the plane in the clearing.

“No guide,” said the Indian. “No guide down there. Next ice river.”

“Along the shore?”

“No guide near water,” said the Indian, nodding. He was trying to be very, very shrewd about it, with rather unsuccessful results. He had left the man whose name sounded like Waller. A guide should not leave anyone in the forests. He might get in trouble for that. At the same time the Indian felt inclined to answer this man whose skin was even darker than his own. So he was quite specific about the exact place to which he did
not
guide the man. Thus, later, this black man could not accuse him of anything.

“No guide near water—other side of ice. No fix tent hard against storm. No tell about bad spirits. Old spirits. No leave when he not come too.”

Josh nodded. “I get it. Well, I wish I could set you up with a nice maple-nut sundae or something. Thanks. Other side of the glacier, on the shore. You haven’t been back there?”

“No go back ever,” said the Indian. “Bad danger! Old spirits. You say I say; I say I no say,” he concluded, promising to deny he had admitted anything if Josh should try to make trouble for him.

Josh went to the plane. “Glacier, south, Mac.”

Mac took off, and in twenty minutes they were over the southern-most glacier along the coast. In three more, Josh exclaimed and stared at the foot of the ice stream. “That’s it!” he said. “See that low cliff? I’ll bet that hasn’t been exposed for a long time. The Indian said something about a storm. Probably a big chunk of it was cracked off then.”

“I don’t see any cave entrances in the cliff,” objected Mac.

But when they had landed the amphibian on the water and taxied in to the shore, Mac’s bleak blue eyes caught the thing Lini Waller had seen: worn spots on a rock slab set flush with the cliff, where countless fingers had pressed, countless ages ago.

He pressed on the two spots, and the slab swung. “We’ve hit it right on the nose!” he exulted. “This is it!”

Josh didn’t say anything in answer. He was walking in, and instantly being astounded by something the Wallers had not noticed at first. “Light in here!” Josh said. “Light, Mac! It isn’t possible!”

“Say, there is, at that,” the Scot said. “And ’tis na comin’ from the entrance, either.”

Josh climbed up to look into the rock niches, so like concealed lighting ledges, that Brent Waller had investigated.

“Hexagonal rods, like fused quartz,” he said. “They give off a fluorescent glow. They’re stone-cold.”

They knew the final meaning now of Lini Waller’s babble concerning ice caves with a “bright white light.” But they couldn’t figure out what made the light. The seven doors beckoned. They opened the first and went into the cave piled high with gold. Ornaments and statues and slabs of the stuff.