Banton went back to the pilot house. For nearly an hour the speed boat rocked in the swells, its engines muttering idly, while Banton swung it in slow circles.
Banton’s voice came down from the open window of the pilot house at last. He gave an order that his assailants understood. They walked among the men on deck, marshaling them like soldiers.
Agent “X” saw the gleam of hidden weapons being brought out. Four submachine guns were taken from a locker. One of Banton’s men manned the tripod gun up forward.
“All you mugs get ready,” Banton said.
Off on the night-darkened horizon, in the mouth of the harbor, Agent “X” saw a shape moving, a boat slipping out, showing no lights. His nerves tingled with excitement. It came toward them like a sea ghost.
For an instant, as it was silhouetted against a short light, he saw that canvas still mantled its deck, that it was the same covered yacht he had seen tied up. It passed them a half-mile away, slipped out to sea. And then he heard the engines of the speed boat beneath him throb into life. Its bow swung, it seemed to leap ahead across the dark waters. The chase of death had begun.
Chapter XX
Killer’s Pack
LIKE a snarling gray wolf of the sea Banton’s speed boat lunged ahead. Its prow was the snout of a wolf worrying a bone in bared fangs. The wake it kicked up was the lashing plumed tail of a marauding sea beast.
And Banton, wide-legged in the pilot house, was the man-demon who urged the beast on to the kill.
A tenseness had crept over that murderous crew. Agent “X” saw clawlike hands fondling gun butts; he saw the blood lust in the rolling whites of eyes. He heard short, barking sentences hurled from beneath bared teeth. A huge wolf with a pack of lesser wolves! There was blood on the moon tonight.
He was glad that the girl was below decks, glad that she was to escape the horror that lay ahead. For the whole fantastic outline of the deathly enigma he had been fighting was beginning to take shape. His own pulses were racing. His eyes were points of shimmering light.
The sea itself was silent, seemingly deserted. It was the silence before a storm—the dreadful silence that bore in it the threat of doom.
The covered yacht ahead was speedy. But Banton’s gray speedboat was faster still.
The distance lessened minute by minute. The white ghostly canvas covering the yacht’s deck showed. Those on board, whoever they might be, were keeping up the farce that the vessel was empty. What would Banton’s method of attack be?
The answer came soon.
“Stand ready to give ’em hell!”
It was Banton’s voice calling down from the pilot house. Agent “X” caught a glimpse of the man’s red face. Banton’s eyes were gleaming slits of wolfish cruelty.
“Rake her from stem to stern,” he bawled. “Now!”
One of Banton’s men crouched behind the tripod-mounted machine gun, pressed the firing lever. The gun leaped on its fastenings. Bronze-jacketed bullets sped across the night-shrouded waters. The cartridge belt writhed like a gleaming snake uncoiling, spitting its venom. The man behind the butt had once handled a Tommy gun for a mob of rumrunners. His fingers were practiced. His aim was true.
The bullets were riddling the canvas covering in a death-dealing stream. If men were there they would meet their doom. But the covered yacht sped on. There was no sign of life on board, only that grim white wake.
Cursing, as though steeled to something expected which did not come, Banton ordered two of the submachine gunners to open fire. The deathly, bone-rattling tattoo of the Thompson guns joined the clatter of the heavy-caliber weapon up front. Their snouts sprayed lead on the craft ahead.
THEY were close astern of it now. Banton twisted the wheel. Like a huge gray wolf circling its prey, the speed boat heeled over and went around the larger yacht. It tore past the yacht’s side while Banton’s henchmen kept up their withering fire.
Behind the bows of the yacht, the pilot house showed. The leaden spray from the muzzles of the Tommy guns concentrated there. Glass smashed. Sheet metal crumpled. Boarding was ripped as with a thousand fangs. The yacht suddenly heeled over. Its white spray lessened. It lay wallowing in the trough of the seas like a still gray ghost.
There was something ominous about its stillness. No moving thing showed. Banton began to swear like a madman. He bellowed another abrupt order. A man dived into a locker of the ex-rumrunner. He reared up clutching two corrugated missiles—hand grenades, “pineapples.” These were Banton’s aces in the hole.
“Give ’em hell,” he said again, and the man with the grenades hurled one across the space that separated the two craft. With unerring aim it dropped on the yacht’s deck.
A blast of orange flame came. A roar sounded. Pieces of wood and strips of canvas rose into the air. The bomb left a gaping black hole in the yacht’s deck, but Agent “X” doubted that it had penetrated below decks.
The yacht seemed to wallow like a great, still beast, watching, crouching.
Banton circled her again, making the engines of the speedboat roar as though by this display of sheer speed and power he could cow those on board the yacht.
“Get the grappling hooks out,” he shouted.
From another locker, two-pronged hooks were brought with ropes attached—relics, too, of rumrunning days—relics that had been used by hijackers.
With a burst of speed Banton cut into the yacht’s stern again. This time he didn’t sheer off. He held the speedboat’s bow straight for the other craft, turned slightly and ran alongside, so close that the metal sides of the two vessels scraped. Then he reversed the engines, backed water in a smother of foaming spray.
“Fling ’em,” he snarled.
The grappling hooks dropped on the yacht’s decks, caught in scuppers, hatchways, and capstans. The ropes were made fast. Then a gangster shrieked a hoarse warning. Like rats, the men, ready to board the yacht, fell back.
For a point of brilliant flame stabbed out from the yacht’s superstructure. It was a hissing, scorching will-o’-the-wisp of fire, that dropped like a lightning bolt on the speed boat’s deck.
Where it fell, sizzling flame burst up. The deck boards smoldered, crackled, flamed. The gray enamel turned black. The frightened yells of men mingled with the hissing of the flames.
Banton alone seemed calm. He had snatched up a submachine gun himself. He sprayed lead at the spot where the flame came from. The jet of flame flickered, forked out. It touched the cruiser’s pilot house.
With a howl of fear Banton left his perch, clattered down the iron stairs into the boat’s interior. The wicked tongue of flame licked the pilot house. It heated the metal sheathing, turned varnished boards and framework into crackling embers. It reduced the pilot house into a smoking ruin.
Banton’s men had taken refuge in the offside of the cruiser. Here, protected by twenty feet of the boat’s cabin, they were safe. Banton appeared among them, sweat streaming from his face, his lips curled back from his teeth, his eyes the eyes of a devil. He still held the machine gun in stubby fingers.
“We’ll get ’em,” he said. “Stand ready to board her, you rats.”
He walked stiff-legged through the cabin, smashed a port, and thrust the muzzle of his machine gun through. As a police lieutenant he had had practice with Thompson guns. He was a dead shot.
His fingers tightened on the trigger of the Tommy gun again. Its muzzle bobbed and clattered.
There came a sudden scream from the spot on the yacht where the flamethrower had sprayed fiery death. The jet of flame lowered, went wild, hissed into the sea, sending up clouds of white steam.
In the light of it the men on the cruiser seemed like crouching demons. Banton, with his clattering submachine gun, was the high priest of hell.
Agent “X,” climbing up an iron ladder to the sleek cruiser’s top deck, saw a man pitch headlong from the bridge of the yacht. He saw the strange, horrible weapon in the man’s hand clatter down.
“I got him!” howled
Banton exultantly. “Now, you rats, come on—we’ll board her.”
Like a pack of howling, bloodthirsty wolves the gunmen and murderers of Banton’s assembled gang followed their leader. Up over the sides of the yacht they swarmed, a living wave of death.
Chapter XXI
Strange Signal
IN the mad tumult of the raid no one noticed the actions of Secret Agent “X,” the man they supposed was Tony Garino. He was on his hands and knees on the top of the cruiser’s cabin now. He was fastening two black cylinders to the gray-painted woodwork, thrusting them, into the hard pine boarding with needle-sharp spikes.
They pointed aloft like miniature gun muzzles, pointed toward the black night sky. He pulled a wire on the top of each, struck a hidden sparker, and, in the interior of the black cylinders, foot-length fuses sputtered and glowed.
Then he dropped back off the cabin roof, leaving the cylinders where they were, black, silent fingers lifting to the clouds.
He started for the deck of the yacht, then stopped. Banton and his gangsters had boarded her, but they had not won the battle.
Like a waiting, wounded beast, the yacht came to life again. One of the men on board had been killed, but others remained. A round porthole along the top deck snapped open. Another black snout projected.
Agent “X” saw the streak of light that hissed from it. He saw the light burst into flame, heard the gangsters howl with rage and fear. Like rats taking cover they fled to the yacht’s stern deck and crouched there behind metal life boats and capstans—behind any refuge they could find.
One, a burly gunman with the face of an ape, knelt behind a coil of rope, trying to level his Tommy gun. The man in the open porthole saw him. It was the gunman’s undoing and death.
The gushing flame from the hideous Flammenwerfer leaped across space to the coil of rope. The rope became a mass of seething flame. The man behind it, jumping to his feet, shrieking with fear, became a human torch. He stumbled across the deck, then dropped, an inert, horrible mass of smoking cloth and flesh. The flame played over him until he no longer resembled a man.
A gangster, losing his nerve, screaming with terror at what he had seen, jumped from his place of hiding and dived over the yacht’s rail. Banton cursed like a madman.
He was crouched behind a heavy capstan. The flaming torch killer sought him out. The Flammenwerfer splashed liquid flame on the rounded metal surface of the capstan. Flame hissed on both sides of Banton, hissed over his head. He crouched, cursing, palsied with fear, until one of his men turned a Tommy gun on the open port where the liquid death came from.
Then the head of the flame-thrower disappeared. The flaming jet dribbled off, ceased. The gangsters stole out of cover again. A man with a pineapple bomb hurled it, and the side of the superstructure where the flame-thrower had been became a twisted mass of iron.
Banton, jumping from behind his capstan, white and trembling snatched two of the hand bombs from his henchman’s fingers. He dropped his machine gun held the pineapples at his sides, and crept forward like an enraged gorilla.
But the jet of liquid flame appeared in another spot, farther astern, sending the gangsters running like scared rabbits. They fled along metal alleyways, fled beneath the canvas, while the flame sought to follow them, burning the canvas covering above their heads. Another went down, wrapped in flaming shrouds. But the rest reached the forward deck of the yacht.
Banton hurled his pineapples. They missed their mark, struck a lifeboat, bursting it apart like the pod of a pea. The other fell into the water, sending up a geyser of white spray. Then Banton cursed and leaped forward with a gloating light in his eyes.
A strange, squat weapon lay at his feet—a weapon with a blunt muzzle, a pressure tank behind it, another tank where concentrated, inflammable liquid was stored.
Agent “X,” on board the yacht now, saw Banton lift the thing up. Banton held one of the flame-throwers in his hands. He gave the curved lever that served as a trigger a tentative press. The thing spouted a clot of flame that hissed and splashed on the deck. The pressure tank roared like escaping steam.
“Come on,” bellowed Banton, “we got ’em now!”
As though in answer, a jet of liquid fire sprayed down from an open window. Banton leaped aside just in time. Where he had stood the deck boards seethed with flame.
Banton, crouching behind a steel stanchion, turned the muzzle of his own weapon upward. The jet of flame wavered, went true. The other flame-thrower ceased firing. The port where he had stood became a circle of hissing fire.
The fear-stricken gangsters took fresh courage. The staccato beat of the submachine guns sounded again. A gang of men, under the direction of Banton, who held his flame-thrower ready, began tearing at a battened-down hatchway. Others struck with axes on the steel doors of the nearest entrance.
A WINDOW smashed in. A gangster hurled a pineapple bomb into the gorgeously furnished interior of the yacht. The explosion lit up the inside of the boat so that its ports looked like the red eyes of a monster.
Then a man pointed.
“What the hell’s that!”
From close by in the darkness a sputtering crackle sounded. A gangster screamed in fear as something rushed upward as though an imprisoned ghost of the sea were escaping.
They could hear the thing screaming higher and higher up, into the dark sky. Then, far above their heads, almost in the clouds it seemed, the darkness was ripped apart. Balls of fire, brighter than the flame-throwers, made a dazzling glow over the whole face of the sea.
“A rocket!” gasped Banton. “It’s that girl—she’s sending ’em. She’s signaling.”
He started for the side of the cruiser, stopped. Another rocket went up. But it rose from the top of the cruiser’s cabin. It left a visible trail behind it. The girl was not there. No one was there. The coming of the rocket seemed uncanny. It howled upward like a banshee, burst at last into red balls of fire that the sea wind whipped into myriad sparks. The sparks fell seaward in a shower, dimmed, faded, went out.
“It’s some double-crosser,” hissed Banton. “We’ll get him later! Now—”
He turned his flame-thrower on again as a shadow moved behind another port. He squirted liquid death along the superstructure of the yacht, until an answering jet of flame sent him howling back.
Like a battle of demons in the mouth of hell the two Flammenwerfers competed with one another, while the gangsters cowered back. The hideous flaring glow of the gushing jets of flame lit up the whole deck of the yacht. Banton’s face was the face of a devil, a man driven on by hate and greed.
Agent “X” caught sight of a hideous goggled head. The men on the yacht were fighting to keep their ghastly secret intact—fighting to retain the mysterious cargo below decks. Agent “X” knew what that cargo was. He could guess the identity of these men who fought with liquid flame, these men who spread terror and death behind them, leaving a trail of charred and blackened corpses.
But Banton was hardly better. He drove the other away at last, silencing the hissing snout of the Flammenwerfer above him.
Agent “X” was watching the fight, seeming to take part in it. The automatic in his hands gave barking reports from time to time. His bullets clanged off the steel sides of the yacht’s superstructure. He hadn’t forgotten that he was Tony Garino, gangster. He gave the appearance of being one of the battlers. But he was watching, waiting, his eyes sweeping the dark waters.
BANTON’S men were swarming into the luxurious cabin now. One of the steel doors had given in, loosed on its hinges by a pineapple bomb. At the head of the stairs, leading down to the saloon below, a helmeted figure appeared. Then the worst carnage of the battle took place.
Three gangsters, murderous rats from the city’s water fronts, were caught off their guard. Agent “X,” looking through a window, saw what happened. The jet from the Flammenwerfer reached them as they made a rush for the stairs.
It struck the foremost of them in the chest, and the man’s
body seemed to disintegrate before the seething gush of flame. He stumbled backwards, his features disappearing. The others went down, too, became huddled hulks of men. The cabin’s interior was filled with the sickening odor of scorched flesh.
Then a submachine gun chattered from one of the cabin’s rear windows. Its quick death leaped across space before the man with the flame-thrower could change the direction of his jet. He dropped his weapon, stood at the head of the stairs for a moment like some goggling, hideous apparition. Then with a cry he threw up his arms and fell backwards, riddled with bullets—dead.
Banton was almost master of the ship now. His big face was bloated, red, his eyes bloodshot. The fear and carnage around him seemed only to whet his appetite for the thing he sought. He ran across the cabin, callously leaping over the grotesquely slumped forms of what had been three of his men. He started to plunge down the stairway, a flame-thrower in his hand. Then he paused. A shout had come from outside. It was a cry of fright and warning.
Above the crackle of automatics, above the sharp tattoo of a Tommy gun still playing, came another sound. It was a sound that sent prickles of fear racing up Banton’s spine. It was the eerie, wailing note of a siren—a note that he had heard often before in his life. Words came to his lips.
“The cops!” he gasped.
The siren’s note was joined by another—a third and a fourth, Banton stood trembling, white as a sheet. The sirens outside seemed to be clamoring like dogs, like hounds on the hunt—the hounds of the law.
He staggered to a window, looked out. From all sides it seemed, across the face of the dark waters, searchlights were stabbing, converging on the two boats that rolled and wallowed side by side.
He heard the throb of powerful motors, heard sharp bows cutting the swells. A gray shape like a leaping hound cut through a searchlight’s beam. It was a slim, fast coast guard patrol boat, and its decks were black with armed men.
With a hoarse cry of fury and fear Banton fell back.
“We’re trapped,” he said, and the words came from his lips as though wrenched by the quivering hands of Greed.
Secret Agent X – The Complete Series Volume 1 (Annotated) Page 40