The Avenger 30 - Black Chariots (9 page)

Jennifer’s uncle gave equal emphasis to each word. “Good . . . evening . . . Mr. . . . Danker.”

“Sit down opposite me, Doctor, if you will.”

“Yes . . . I . . . will.”

“You may leave us, Kurt.”

“Very good, Herr . . . sir.” The heels clicked together once more, and the blond young man was gone.

“Now tell me, Dr. Hamblin, how are you feeling?”

“I . . . am . . . fine.”

“It gratifies me to hear that,” said the thin, dark Danker. “Frankly, and I’m sure you, as a man of science, will appreciate this, the drugs we are using to control you are quite new and, therefore, have not been as thoroughly tested as one might hope for. Well, this war . . . we must sometimes cut corners.”

“I . . . am . . . fine.”

“Very good. Did you recognize that girl this afternoon, Doctor?”

“She . . . is . . . my . . . niece.”

“Yes, exactly. It does not bother you to see her here, to know she is our prisoner?”

“It . . . does . . . not . . . bother . . . me.”

“I am most glad to hear that.” Danker set his brandy glass on an end table, rose up, and walked to a white cabinet that stood beneath an imitation Renoir. “Well, then, Doctor, if you will oblige me by rolling up your sleeve, I will give you your evening injection and then you—”

“Herr Danker, come at once!” Kurt had burst back into the room. “Herr Dirks wishes it!”

Leaving the cabinet open, Danker crossed to the doorway. “What is it?”

“A radio, the prisoners have a sending set,” said Kurt, breathing through his mouth. “Herr Dirks just noticed it when he looked through the spy hole to—”

“Fools, I have none but fools on my staff!” cried Danker. “Remain here with Dr. Hamblin.” He ran down the corridor.

“Do you hear me, Richard? This is Cole. They’ve got us underneath the Manzana Oasis. Some kind of bomb shelter sort of set up. Richard, are you there?”

Only silence came out of the belt-buckle radio.

“Repeating the message, Richard. This is Cole. Nellie and I and Jennifer Hamblin are being held under the Oasis. I suggest—”

“Please, drop that,” ordered Dirks.

“This? Come now, Dirks, I was merely amusing the young ladies with a little parlor magic,” said Cole, grinning at the approaching man. “You know, old man, pretending this is a radio. I was talking about how we were locked up under the Manzana Oasis in a—”

“Enough, that’s enough.” Angrily, Dirks swung out his pistol to knock the buckle and belt from Cole’s hand.

As the man lunged, Cole stepped to the right, thrusting his leg between Dirks’s. “Watch your step, old fellow.”

“You—”

Dirks fell.

Nellie leaped.

“Atta girl, pixie!”

The little blonde had hold of Dirks’s gun hand and was twisting the weapon from his grip. She came up with it in her own hand. “Stay right down there, buster.”

Cole dropped down next to the fallen man, “Hands behind you, Dirks. Come on, come on, let’s not tarry.”

“You can’t get out from here,” warned the prone man. “We have many men, they will cut you down.”

“All I need is your thumbs,” said Cole, ignoring the threat. He undid one of Dirks’s shoestrings and used it to tie his two thumbs tightly together. “Now, we’ll utilize the other shoestring to tie your ankles. This is an old woodsman’s trick I learned from a Dan Beard handbook my maiden aunt in Grosse Pointe once gave me.”

“Let’s get going, Cole,” suggested Nellie.

Cole hopped to his feet. “Ready when you are. We have only to gather Miss Hamblin into the fold and . . . oh.”

Jennifer was standing in the doorway. Immediately behind her, with one hand around her throat and a gun pointed at her temple, was Danker.

“You’re very resourceful, Mr. Wilson.”

“As I was telling your sidekick there, I used to be a Boy Scout.”

“Your activities have caused me to change my plans,” said Danker. “Since there is a possibility your message reached its intended recipient, you must all be moved from here at once.”

“Could I have a room with a southern exposure next time?” asked Cole.

“You will enjoy your new quarters, Mr. Wilson,” promised Danker. “As well, I am more than certain, as the means by which you are conveyed there.”

The Avenger had caught up with the running MacMurdie and held him back with a restraining hand. “Not so fast, Mac.”

“Smitty’s nae doubt hurt, mon!”

“If he is, there might be another trap for us.”

“Damn,” complained a voice up ahead in the darkness. “I got cactus needles all over my hind end.”

“Smitty!” said Mac.

They saw him now. “Gee, I hope I didn’t give you guys too much of a scare,” said the giant as they approached him.

“Hoot, I expected to find ye resembling a great large jigsaw puzzle.”

“I thought I spotted a trip wire across the pass while I was sneaking up on the joint,” explained Smitty. “So I tossed a hunk of cactus at the wire. Darned if my surmise wasn’t right. Some fireworks, huh?”

“Aye, most impressive. And ye’re nae hurt?”

“Concussion from the blowup tossed me a little farther than I expected,” said Smitty, looking back over his shoulder. “Knocked me backside foremost into one of them prickly trees.”

The Avenger had been watching the silent castle. “No one has emerged to see what his booby trap did,” he said.

“I think, Dick,” said the giant, “they all skipped.”

“Probably so, but they quite probably left other traps behind. We’ll proceed with caution.”

The three men, alert and watchful, moved along the remainder of the flagstone path.

When they were quite near the stone stairway that led to the rear entry door, Benson halted once more. “I think there’s another small surprise waiting at the top of those stairs.”

Squinting, Mac said, “Aye, mot be another wire.”

“We can use the Smitty method of defusing,” suggested the giant as he reached up and, gingerly, broke off the arm of a cactus.

The Avenger said, “Okay, go ahead, Smitty.” He and Mac backed away and flattened out on the ground.

Smitty, adding a baseball-pitcher windup to the procedure, threw the cactus and then ran.

It was a second before the cactus hit the trip wire that the two-way radio in the Avenger’s belt buckle signaled that someone was trying to contact him.

Then there was a huge explosion. It shook the castle and the ground around it. The stone stairs, in great broken chunks, went spinning up into the air, and a whole section of brick wall came tumbling down. Smoke and dust rolled over the three of them.

Seconds went by. There were no further explosions.

“Geeze, they get bigger and better,” remarked Smitty, getting to his knees. “If there’s one more, it’s going to be a beaut.”

Benson, standing up, clicked on the radio receiver. “Quiet a minute, Smitty.”

“. . . pretending this is a radio. I was talking about how we were locked up under the Manzana Oasis in a—” came Cole’s voice.

That was all. The Avenger tried to contact Cole, but could not.

“Sounds like he’s in some kind of pickle,” observed Smitty. “I wonder what interrupted him.”

“We’ll find that out,” said Benson. “But I want to check this castle out first. Smitty, you and Mac get over to the Oasis right now.”

“How you going to travel?” asked the giant.

“Don’t worry about that,” said Benson. “Get going. I’ll go through this setup and join you there later.”

“The lad said ‘we,’ ” mentioned MacMurdie. “Which mot mean Nellie’s in the soup with him.”

“Yeah, we better get rolling.” Smitty turned away and began walking for a way out of the grounds. “That Jennifer Hamblin dame was staying there, too.”

“We’ll see ye soon, Richard.” Mac followed the giant.

The Avenger encountered no further traps. In the basement of the castle he found the real Old Man Guptill.

The old man was slumped on a dirty cot in a stone-walled storeroom. The room’s wooden door had been padlocked. “It’s about time, dangburn it,” muttered the old man as Benson let himself into the room. “I like my meals regular, you know.”

“Who are you?”

“Well, who in blazes do you think I am, you sawed-off idiot? You locked me in here, didn’t you?”

“No,” said the Avenger. “I’ve come to let you out. Are you Mr. Guptill?”

“Dang right. I’m Old Man Guptill, the meanest and orneriest galoot in six counties.” He tried to sit up, but fell back against the stone wall. “Leastwise I uster be. You boys ain’t been feeding me right, that’s it.”

“How long have you been locked in here?”

“Seems like forever,” said Old Man Guptill slowly. “Let’s see . . . must be a couple months, at least. It was a dadburned surprise, I tell you that. My own guards turning on me. See, it’s danged hard, what with the war, to get any kind of guards. So I kind of had to lower my standards. Dang, was that a mistake!”

“What can you tell me about the men who did this?”

“A bunch of goons they are,” said the old man. “Big as heck, ugly as sin, all four of them. Now I used to, before this dangblasted war started, always have twelve guards at least. But now, I was lucky to get even four when the other bunch up and quit me.”

“And you’ve been down here all the time?”

“Course I have. They didn’t let me out for no vacations.”

Benson put an arm around the old man’s shoulders. “Then they’ve had someone impersonating you.” He helped him to sit up.

“Impersonating me? You mean some galoot’s been posing as Old Man Guptill?”

“Yes, and giving out orders to a gang of hoods.”

“My treasure!” said Old Man Guptill. “That’s what they must be after. I told them that from the first. It’s my treasure you want, but I ain’t never going to tell you where it is. And I never did, neither.”

“Did they try to make you tell them?”

Scratching at his beard, the old man said, “Funny thing, mister. They never did. It don’t make no sense.”

“It makes sense if you realize they wanted to use your castle as a way station.”

“Fer what? Who are these boys?”

“Foreign spies,” the Avenger told him.

“Well, I’ll be hogtied and dipped in sheepdip, if that don’t beat all,” said Old Man Guptill. “I didn’t even know they had spies these days. I figured that all went by the board when we trounced Kaiser Bill back in ’18.”

The Avenger to the old man to his feet. “I’d better get you to a doctor.”

“Not on your life, young feller. Old Man Guptill never leaves the vicinity of his treasure,” the old man insisted. “Bring the doc to me.”

“Do you have a car?”

“Nope, can’t see the need of one. Long as a man’s got a few good horses, he got no need for an automobile.”

Benson almost smiled. “I’ll borrow one of the horses, then.”

“Welcome to it, if them goons didn’t steal them all,” he said. He suddenly took hold of Benson’s arm. “Am I right in figuring they done took off?”

“Yes, I’ve been through the entire castle. There’s no one else here.”

Nodding, Old Man Guptill said “Well, sir, that’s good to hear. Sure, you go around to the stables and pick out my best horse. You know how to ride, don’t you?”

“I do,” said the Avenger.

Footsteps echoed on the metal floor. The huge oval room was chill, smelled of oil and fuel. Metal ribs fretted the walls and the ceiling.

“Uncle Val’s ships,” said Jennifer in a low voice as they were ushered into the underground hangar.

There were six of the craft in this particular room, each resting on small, fragile-seeming landing gear.

“This is the first time you’ve seen one, eh, Miss Hamblin?” asked Danker.

The girl didn’t answer.

“Though from what your uncle tells me, you were allowed to see his various working models.”

Cole surveyed the row of disk-shaped craft. “How many miles to the gallon do you get?”

“Very droll, Mr. Wilson.” Danker consulted his pocket watch. “Soon the three of you will have the rare opportunity of riding in these airships.”

Cole whistled a little of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

“What,” inquire Nellie, “is the exact purpose of these things?”

“That need not concern you, Miss Gray.”