The Avenger 30 - Black Chariots (13 page)

“Stand by,” Nellie said quietly out of the side of her mouth to Jennifer. She walked toward the tray-carrying guard.

“Please to stand back until I place—”

Nellie kicked. Her foot swung up incredibly high. The toe of her shoe hit the bottom of the tray dead center.

The hot coffee splashed back into the guard’s face. The milk slurped up out of the pitcher and splotched the front of him. Cups and bowls clacked together, spun to the floor, and smashed.

Nellie ignored all that. Her eye was on the gun. And she got it before the man did.

“What have you done?” he yowled, both hands pressed over his burned face.

Cereal crackled under foot as Nellie reached out and caught the man’s wrist with her left hand. “Over against the bunks, my friend.”

“I’m injured, miss. I may be maimed for life, do you not—”

“On the bunk, sweetie, or your life won’t last much beyond this morning.”

“Nellie, maybe he is seriously hurt,” said Jennifer, biting her thumb knuckle, watching the two of them.

“I doubt it.”

“The young miss is right, I am mortally injured.” The guard, hands still over his face, stumbled back against the bed. Unavoidably he sat down on it. “Just look.”

Nellie hesitated a second, then crossed to him.

“See?” He dropped his hands and made a lunge for the gun.

Her foot snapped out again, not so high this time. “Malingerer,” she said.

“Yow!” She’d caught him in the kneecap. He clutched at his knee with the hands he’d meant to use on her and the gun. He sat down again. “What a pity, what a pity. To hobble for the rest of my life.”

“Over on your frontside,” ordered Nellie.

“I’m too pained to move.”

“Over.” She caught his foot and half flipped him.

“Such unfeminine conduct,” protested the guard, “for so small and sweet-seeming a young lady.”

“Jenny,” said Nellie, “take out his belt. Then tie his hands behind his back with it. Tight.”

“Okay, Nellie. And then what?”

“Then we get out of here.”

Cole spat out a mouthful of sand. He had managed to get on the other side of the chariot, with it standing between him and the man with the tommy gun.

Getting rid of the last of the sand he’d taken in while rolling and tumbling to this position of relative safety, Cole shouted to the man, “Let’s negotiate, old fellow.”

“We advise you to surrender.” The pilot had joined the other man. “There is no possibility of escape.”

“I have your good chum, Herr Dirks, here with me,” lied Cole. “If you chaps don’t give up, I’ll be forced to blow his brains out.”

There was silence, no more slugs, no further talk, for a full minute.

Then the pilot called out, “Go ahead, Mr. Wilson. We cannot be swayed by emotional blackmail.”

“Cold-blooded rascals,” said Cole to himself. He waited a few seconds before replying, in a fairly good imitation of Dirks’s voice, “Hey, this guy ain’t kidding. He’s going to lay me out.”

“We are sorry, Dirks.”

“Aw, don’t let him do it. Have a heart, you birds. Ain’t we been pals and comrades in arms?”

“It is no use, we must take him in,” shouted the pilot. “And we must quickly hide this fallen ship of yours.”

“Oof,” said Cole suddenly in his own voice. “Say old boy, you can’t . . . oof.”

“Take that, you wise-mouth jerk,” he bellowed in the Dirks voice.

He thumped his fist against the side of the chariot and groaned.

Then he allowed a silence to ensue.

The machine-gunner took the bait. “Dirks, what’s happened?”

Cole counted off ten seconds before answering. “I got the gun. He had the drop on me, but I decked him anyhow. Come on over and grab him.”

They fell for it. Both of them came unsuspectingly around the chariot, the pilot with his revolver still in his belt holster, the machine-gunner with the weapon casually aimed at the sand.

“Never underestimate the power of illusion,” said Cole, grinning, his borrowed automatic pointed at them.

Early that morning, when the wind began to die and let the sand fall back to earth, the Avenger had opened the cockpit of the chariot he’d been piloting. A few yards away were the other two craft they’d borrowed from the Oasis’s underground hangar.

Smitty popped up out of his craft nest. “Are we ready to get back in the air, Dick?”

Turning away from the wind, the Avenger answered, “Yes, I think this is the last of the sand storm.”

They had traveled about ten miles last night, with Benson’s chariot in the lead, when the force of the wind and swirling sand had forced them to put down for the duration of the blow.

“We hae lost a good bit of precious time,” observed Mac as he emerged into the morning.

“So has everyone else,” reminded the Avenger.

Smitty came all the way out of his ship and slid down the top of the thing onto the sand. “Before we take off, Dick, I got to know what these guys have been up to. You asked most of the questions back there under the Oasis whilst me and Mac was mopping up.”

“Out in the desert, some way beyond the place we’re bound for,” explained Benson, “is a large preserve of government land. No one is allowed near the area, not even the local law. No commercial or military flights are allowed to pass over that ten-mile square.”

“Some kind of government hush-hush government deal, huh?”

MacMurdie had joined Smitty next to Benson’s ship. He scratched his chin, saying, “They must be testing something out of doors then, a new airplane, or maybe some kind of artillery piece.”

“I think it’s more important than that,” said Benson. “None of the men I questioned with the truth gas knew the specifics. I suspect our government may be using this particular site to work on some kind of atomic weapon.”

“Whoosh,” exclaimed Mac, “ ’tis the atomic bomb we’ve ourselves mixed up with?”

“You know an atom bomb is inevitable, Mac. And it will be either us or the Germans who get it first.”

“Aye, though the English mot have a long-shot chance.”

“Unlikely that either the British or the Russians are in a position to put forth the required effort now,” said the Avenger.

Smitty said, “So that’s what all this mumbo-jumbo is about, these flying chariots. To spy on this desert project.”

“You’ll notice each of these crafts is equipped to take aerial photos both day and night, Smitty.”

The giant shook his head. “And Ralph must have run into one.”

Benson nodded. “One of the men I questioned knew something about your friend’s death, Smitty.”

“You should have told me then, Dick. I’d like to have taken the—”

“The man himself wasn’t responsible. It was apparently Danker himself, the head man, who was piloting the chariot in question,” said the Avenger. “It had a temporary malfunction and was forced to land. Ralph Stevenson happened by at just that moment. He went to offer help. Danker didn’t want help, he wanted anonymity. So he killed Ralph.”

“How?”

“Some sort of poison gas was used,” said Benson.

Smitty pressed his lips tight together and nearly closed his eyes. “Damn,” he said at last. “Of all the stupid ways . . . it was just a coincidence that Ralph was there. He was trying to help and—”

“Take it easy, lad,” said Mac, touching the big man’s arm. “The world and its way kin be strange some times, lad.”

Smitty took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s get going.” He pulled away from MacMurdie and stalked back to his ship.

“Smitty,” called Benson.

“Yeah?” said the giant without turning around.

The Avenger watched Smitty’s hunched back. “Nothing,” he said.

“You were,” said Jennifer in a whisper, “very effective with our guard, Nellie.”

“Yep.” The little blonde was leading the way along a stone corridor. “That’s the door to the place where they have the chariots stored.”

“I’ve always thought of myself as being sort of stubborn and feisty,” continued Jennifer, “but you—”

“I grew up a tomboy,” said Nellie. “Now let’s concentrate on getting out of this joint.”

“Off we go into the wild blue yonder,” sang Cole as the commandeered airplane lifted off.

“I heard about you,” said the pilot, who was tied up behind the seat. The machine-gunner, also tied, Cole had left behind, propped against the chariot.

“Yes, my notoriety seems to have spread from the rockbound coast of Maine to the sun-drenched shores of—”

“You’re the guy with the big mouth.”

“You didn’t do so bad yourself, old man, telling me all about how to get to your other secret hideaway.”

“What choice did you give me? Either talk or get left to dry up in the desert. Or get eaten by wild animals.”

“Let us fervently hope you told the truth. Otherwise . . .”

“I didn’t lie.”

Cole set the plane on the course the pilot had given him. “I notice you fellows don’t go in for radios in your planes.”

“We can’t afford to get spotted that way. So there’s absolutely no radio communication.”

“How do you get landing instructions, then?”

“I don’t. We got a lookout stationed up in a place in the rocks. He signals them to open up the underground hangar lid when he sees one of us.”

“Ah, very efficient,” said Cole, grinning. “In other words, my fallen Icarus, when this lookout sees our plane fast approaching he will signal them to open up and let us in?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Very good,” said Cole, patting the object on the seat next to him.

He’d left the machine-gunner behind, but brought the machine gun.

The cliffside opened. Three hovering chariots showed up in the bright midmorning.

Danker, a new pair of binoculars to his narrowed eyes, watched them. “What does this mean?”

“Trouble, Herr—sir,” suggested Kurt.

“Those idiots should not be traveling in broad daylight.”

“Perhaps there was some new trouble at the Oasis, which caused—”

“Shut up, you’re another idiot.” Danker lowered the glasses and slapped them against his leg.

One by one, the three disk-shaped craft dropped down through the opening. They landed side by side. Then sat there, no one emerging.

Danker had the binoculars up to his eyes again. “Who is that in the nearest ship? I can’t quite make him out.”