Free The Avenger 5 - The Frosted Death by Kenneth Robeson Page B

Fifth Avenue, while behind him the original three closed in.
    “ ’Tis an arrrmy,” he groaned to himself.
    In the distance, clear at the corner of Fifth, a cop appeared and began running to help. A man down there stepped out, and with no expression on his face, clubbed the cop down.
    Mac began to feel utter hopelessness. In the face of this kind of organization, he began to feel that a dozen cops, wading in shooting, couldn’t save him. And he was pretty close to right!
    However, he couldn’t be downed, now. Not with the precious jar of antidote in his possession. He hit the two men ahead of him, running at full speed. One whirled to the curb and sprawled at full length. The other was knocked out of the way.
    Still another man stepped from a building entrance; one Mac never did see. With the grim coolness of a military machine instead of a human being, he clubbed the Scotchman. Mac fell! Before he had hit, two of the robotlike men had him by ankles and shoulders and were carrying him toward a sedan. A car that sagged on its tires like an army tank.
    The second jar of antidote was gone!

CHAPTER XI

From The Depths
    Far up in the Maine woods, miles from even the smallest villages, there was a cleared glade that, from the air, appeared to be just what it was: a landing field.
    The landing field was about a quarter of a mile from the Maine coast. It was in the heart of over a thousand acres of almost impenetrable timberland which was privately owned and hence seldom trespassed upon.
    On each corner of this field, tonight, there was a landing light that was strong, but so shielded, that it merely glowed without sending rays up into the sky. Like four huge glowworms, they bounded the space.
    A plane coasted for this space. Motors were cut off so that, with its minimum landing speed, it made hardly more noise than a gigantic moth. It hadn’t made any noise for quite a while previously, either. The pilot had started down from twenty thousand feet, and from that altitude you can coast silently for many miles with your motors cut.
    At the controls was a man who was tall and lean, but otherwise bore the same stamp as the foreign-looking fellows with the phlegmatic countenances. His face wasn’t exactly cruel. It was simply hard, humorless, unhuman. He wouldn’t inflict pain just to get pleasure from it; he would inflict it because it seemed necessary, and because it simply didn’t occur to him to get excited about the pain others might feel.
    In the passenger seat was Carl Veshnir.
    The man at the controls spoke, and his tone brought out another fact about him. Whoever he was, he was very highly placed in some sort of occupation other than business. For he treated Veshnir, who was rich and usually kowtowed to, as if he were some sort of inferior errand boy.
    “I hope, for the comfort of all concerned, that this will be soon successfully concluded.”
    His English was precise, but his accent was guttural.
    “We ought to be done in a week,” Veshnir said.
    The man’s eyes took on a fanatic look.
    “Let us hope you are correct. For if you are, you will be rich beyond your dreams. As for us”—his harsh voice took on a biting edge—“we shall change the course of history in a month!”
    Veshnir stared at him, eyes genuinely puzzled.
    “I can’t understand you fellows,” he said. “And I can’t understand what you hope to gain. Say you capture all the area you wish. The people originally owning it are still there. You can’t execute twenty, thirty, fifty million people. All you can do is hold them in slavery. But you can only hold them while your power is at its peak. The minute a flaw appears—and every system shows a weak spot somewhere, in time—your slaves rise and overthrow you. Then the map is as it was before, and eventually all the blood and steel you’ve spent is forgotten as if it had never been.”
    The man’s eyes flamed in a way that made Veshnir a little sorry he had spoken his thoughts