Free The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker by Otto Binder

diamond point was driven by a tiny transistorized electric motor. It could drill its way through ten inches of armor plate while barely being slowed down.
    When it met the hull below, it poised on end, grinding away while upheld by the torque of the spin. But gradually its speed diminished. Wobbling like a top that was running down, it finally fell flat.
    Hawkeye’s face also fell, while a string of imprecations came from his lips. His fury was not lightened by the mocking, amplified voice of Karzz from his plastic bubble: “Why waste your ingenious arrows, bow-twanger? My machine is coated with a layer of neutronium, a metal made of densely packed neutrons, and ten times harder than mere diamond. Your Stone Age devices are pitiful toys.”
    “That clown from the outer cosmos doesn’t know it,” rasped Hawkeye, “but his deadliest weapons are those cornball clichés. If people heard enough of them, the human race would commit mass suicide.”
    “My turn,” said Iron Man, jetting them both away from the mighty machine. “See that glacier ahead? Karzz is going to skirt close past one side of it…and I’ve got ideas.”
    Before reaching the glacier, Iron Man deposited Hawkeye on a flat snowfield. “I’ll leave you here. This is a one-man job.”
    “Give him the works,” Hawkeye called after the flying figure.
    The Golden Avenger soared above the gigantic glacier, beside which even Karzz’s great machine was a tiny mite. All the while, Iron Man had been rheostating up his power-units. His finger poised over a push button on his chest controls.
    “Here goes,” he muttered. “An ultrasonic sound wave above the range of human hearing, but rated at a million decibels. Nothing crystalline can stand up against it.”
    As the invisible vibrations struck the glistening glacier, giant cracks appeared at the top and spread fanwise down the sides. Awesomely, in majestic slow motion, the colossal chunk of ice split with a thunderclap, collapsing into a landslide of pieces bigger than houses.
    Countless megatons of the crystalline debris crushed down squarely on top of the Infrared Beamer as it churned past, until it was buried from sight.
    Circling in the air, Iron Man held his breath and listened. Not a sound came from under the ice heap. “I think you hit the jackpot,” came Hawkeye’s thin shout from the distance. “You put Karzz on ice—for good!”
    RrrrRRRRR…
    The silence was broken by the sound of tractor treads grinding powerfully. Ice chunks were hurled aside as the seventieth-century tank came crawling out from under the broken glacier.
    “I—I don’t believe it,” gasped Iron Man, in devastating disappointment. “Not even a dent or a scratch.”
    A derisive chuckle, amplified into stentorian volume, came rolling from the machine. “Was there something in my way?”
    But now the alien’s voice turned ugly. “I see I’ll have to eliminate you two. You annoy me, like mosquitoes.”
    The huge machine suddenly wheeled around and headed straight for a small figure standing unprotected in the snowfield. The treads crunched forward, gathering speed.
    “Hawkeye!” screeched Iron Man in horror.
    “Great balls o’ fire!” choked Hawkeye, rooted to the spot as the machine loomed closer, like a juggernaut. “Karzz is going to run me down!”
    The archer broke from his paralysis of fear and began running, futilely. The churning behemoth behind him gained steadily.
    Like a comet, the Golden Avenger was streaking down from the sky, piling on all the jet power he could muster. But he had a longer way to go than the machine, to reach Hawkeye.
    Death flew alongside Iron Man. Which of them would reach Hawkeye first?

chapter 9
    Sunken Sabotage
    Meanwhile, Captain America was driving the rocketplane away from the South Pacific. He had left Goliath and the Wasp on a centrally located island, whence their search for the third earth doom would begin.
    As the speck disappeared in the blue skies, the Wasp turned to