Raiders Invisible Part 6

He was up in a flash, but the damage was done. The monkey-wrench curved through the darkness in a vicious swipe that landed it flush against his jaw; swung back, pounded again like a trip-hammer--again and again and again....

Chris reeled back, teetered on the edge of nothingness, then went tumbling crazily down into the sand-trap behind. One leg was doubled underneath him as he crashed.

A voice floated down out of the darkness. "That is the end of you!" it said. But Chris Travers did not hear it....

Pain. Agonizing pain. The whole lower side of his face was a burning, throbbing, aching lump of flesh, and his left leg seemed on fire. What had happened? Where was he?

Then came remembrance, and it was far worse than the fangs of pain that were gnawing him. Chris cried out--a cracked, twisted cry.

Kashtanov, the dam--the box of the ray! How much time had pa.s.sed?

He hunched his body over and stared up. Limned against the starlight were the wings of a plane, still standing where it had landed beside the sand-trap. He clutched his thoughts. The plane meant--it meant Kashtanov had gone on his errand, had not yet returned? Only minutes had gone by since the blows from the monkey-wrench. But was the box placed yet? Was Kashtanov already hurrying back?

He listened. From far away came a drone that was separate from the throbbing of his head. The drone of waters, controlled waters. The normal sound of the spillway of Gatun Dam. The box had not yet unleashed its disintegrating bolt of blue.

"I've got to stop it!" he whispered.

He tried to rise. Only one leg held. The other twisted awrily with a rasp of broken bones. A spearing pain tore through him. Useless! His fall had broken it. He could not rise, could not walk, much less run.

He was no more than a cripple.

"Oh, G.o.d!" he groaned, "How can I, how can I?"

Then his eyes fell on the plane resting above him.

"I've got one leg," he muttered, "and two hands and two eyes....

They're left me. Yes!"

He rolled over. He shoved with his right leg and clawed at the bank of the sand-trap. Inch by inch he wormed up, slipping, sc.r.a.ping. The sand grated into his battered face and seeped through onto his tongue; he coughed and spluttered, groaning from the effort and his feebleness.

Spots of blood showed black against the crazy course he left behind him; ages seemed to pa.s.s before he thrust his head over the top of the bank, dug his chin into it and pulled onto level ground. Ages, but in reality only seconds, and the whole Ca.n.a.l--America--lying at the mercy of what each one of those seconds might unloose!

But the plane was near now, and it almost seemed that some unseen force mightier than the strength of men hauled Chris's broken body to it and up the stretch of its fuselage-side into the c.o.c.kpit.

Ordinarily, he should have been delirious from the pain of jaw and leg, but the controls of the plane were before him and he saw nothing else. Wings and propeller were better than legs! He was in his element: by the sixth sense of born airmen, he knew and could handle any flying machine, no matter how foreign.

In a second, his fingers had fumbled onto the starting b.u.t.ton. The choke of the motor and then its full-throated roar were sweet to his ears.

The lonely golf course and the night re-echoed with the bellow of twelve pistons thrusting in line; watching, one would not have dreamed that a cripple was at the controls of the plane that now swung around with a blast of power, leveled its nose down the course and raced smoothly over close-clipped gra.s.s. Its wheels b.u.mped, spun on the ground and lifted into air.

A mile to the dam! Istafiev's words came back to him. It would take Kashtanov twenty minutes at least, for he would go cautiously. But how long had pa.s.sed--how long? That was the agonizing question.

Staring forward through the hurtling prop, the night rushed at him; the dark hills melted away to either side; clear ground swept into view and then a long black thread that was the spillway channel.

Behind was the bubbling, leaping flow of the spillway itself, and Gatun Dam. The smooth cement sides were as yet unharmed.

"Thank G.o.d!" Chris muttered. "Now, where--where?"

A stream of light flowed out from the hydro-electric station on the left side of the spillway channel. The opposite bank was bare, running right up to the face of the dam beneath the spillway's seven gates.

There the box was to be placed. But from the air, the light was uncertain, deceptive--and a little two-foot-square box was all he had to go by!

"I can't see!" Chris said hoa.r.s.ely. "I can't see!"

Like a roaring black meteor the plane hurtled over the banks of the spillway, the eyes of its pilot scouring the ground. It zoomed just in time to miss the wall of the dam, banked, doubled like a scared jack-rabbit, dove down again, coming within feet of the spillway channel. Mad, inspired flying! But what good could it do?

Then from its c.o.c.kpit came a yell.

"There! There! By heaven, I can make it!"

Two or three hundred feet--it was not clear just how far--from the face of the dam, on the bare right bank of the channel, a tiny pin-p.r.i.c.k of black was moving slowly along. It seemed to move by itself through the air. And now, as the screaming plane banked again and came rushing closer, the pin-p.r.i.c.k grew into a black box that suddenly stopped its advance, held motionless some four feet off the ground. Though the man who held it was not visible, Chris could fancy him staring up at the plane, could fancy the look of consternation on his unseen face.

Two hundred feet was the range of the rays! Was Kashtanov that close?

Obviously the controls had not yet been set, for he still held the box. But he could switch them on in a second and fling the deadly machine up toward the dam, if he were at present just out of range. A second--a second!

"d.a.m.n you, here goes!" roared Chris.

He wrenched the stick way over. The plane appeared to hang crazily on one wing. Then it leveled off and stuck its nose down, flipping its tail up, and down--down--down it bellowed; with no hope in the world of ever coming out of its insane plunge.

What he saw in that last momentary glimpse was burned forever into Chris Travers' memory. There was the black box, hanging in the air straight before the plane's thundering nose; there, behind it, the black tide of the spillway waters; and, still further behind, he could see the other bank and the hydro-electric station, and a few tiny figures that rushed out from it just then to see what some fool flyer was doing.

All this flashed into his sight, etched against the sable night as if in flame. Then the plane's snout smashed into the black box hanging before it, and the propeller crunched through a naked, invisible body.

A ragged scream that marked the pa.s.sing of Kashtanov split through the air for a flash of time, and the dark, blurred ma.s.s that was an airplane teetered clean over and flopped into the rushing spillway channel.

The men who had scrambled out from the hydro-electric station stared at each other blankly. One of them stuttered:

"But--he did that deliberately! Nothing went wrong with his ship! I saw him! He seemed to be diving at something!"

"Come on!" snapped another. "We might be able to get him out. A mad fool like that's just the kind who'll live through it."