Free The Avenger 3 - The Sky Walker by Kenneth Robeson Page B

swallowed a sip or two—a highly dangerous thing to do with a doubtful chemical.
    However, he got away with it. The stuff was water. Just plain water. The same ordinary H 2 0 as had been in the shallow little pans in the Gant brothers’ laboratory.
    So the gang here dipped something carefully into plain water, with the aid of painstakingly erected hand-cranes! It seemed a kind of reasonless thing to do.
    Beyond one of the tanks, Smitty saw several drums, about the size of the gasoline drums but set apart from them. He went to them, and saw that the tops were removable. There had been labels painted on the drums, but these had been scratched away.
    A few letters on one could faintly be made out. They were: “. . . IUM . . . EARA . . .”
    Smitty lifted the top of one of the drums and played his flashlight down into it. The steel cask was half filled with a whitish, fatty-looking stuff not unlike lard. Again Smitty, brilliant in electrical research but no chemist, was baffled.
    He took an old envelope from his pocket, put a pinhead dab of the whitish stuff in it, and folded the paper many times around it. Benson would know what it was. The chief, Smitty had long ago decided, knew everything.
    The giant wandered over to the machine-shop corner. There he found a short-wave radio transmission set operated by batteries. It wasn’t equipped to handle the special, ultrashort-wave band used by Benson, but Smitty enlarged the transmitter’s scope by a few deft, homemade additions that would have made an ordinary radio engineer’s eyes bulge with admiration.
    He called the chief at temporary headquarters, and got no answer. There wasn’t any answer because MacMurdie and the chief were at that moment taking off from Yacht Harbor. And Josh Newton, at headquarters, had not yet been familiarized with the secret radio code. But Smitty didn’t know that.
    He put the transmitting set back in the condition in which he had found it, and started toward the broken-plank door.
    He stopped just short of it and listened hard.
    Out on the lake, somewhere near, was sounding the smooth roar of a marine motor. And about two seconds were enough to tell that it was heading rapidly this way.
    Smitty had prowled the bears’ den unmolested—but now the bears were coming home.
    He jumped to the entrance, splashing in the breast-high water, as light-footed as a sixteen-year-old stripling, for all his giant bulk. But he saw at a glance that he was too late. He couldn’t get out of the ferry’s hull now without being seen.
    Only a few hundred yards away, and skimming fast, was a large motor cruiser, with riding lights gleaming like jewels in the gathering dusk. But Smitty didn’t pay any attention to the pretty lights. He was staring at the cruiser’s deck.
    He saw at least a half dozen men there, and in addition got a glimpse of a head bobbing down a hatch aft.
    The giant paddled back away from the door. It was all he could do. He couldn’t get out. The best remaining course was to try to hide somewhere till he had a chance to slip away unobserved.
    He chose the drums of gasoline as a convenient barricade, and slipped behind them. He barely made it when he heard the cruiser stop outside, then grind forward again at low speed and under a load.
    The load, he saw, from between two close-placed drums, was the swinging weight of one of the great doors at the end of the ferry. The cruiser’s nose had been bunted against the left-hand one, and was pushing it inward. Smitty guessed that when the diesel generator was functioning it worked the big doors on motors. When it was off, the doors had to be opened like this.
    The cruiser crept in till the prow grated on the ferry’s bottom timbers, which was at a point just far enough inside for the door to be closed again.
    But the men on the boat didn’t close the door. They left it open, and began swarming off the cruiser.
    Smitty’s brow wrinkled in disgust at the lousiness of his luck. There were even more