Grant, Maxwell - The Shadow 218 - The White Column by Maxwell Grant

Author:Maxwell Grant
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Detective, Mystery, Crime, Suspense, Adventure, Thriller
Publisher: Street & Smith Publications
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THROUGH the smoke screen, the three foreign agents darted unseen to the metal chest near the window. From it they snatched smoke helmets, donned them quickly.

The three honest workmen who had been knocked unconscious were dragged through the dense smoke toward the machines in charge of Brownson and his two helpers. They were dropped there in a crumpled huddle.

If smoke didn’t kill them, flame would. Their charred bodies would provide a false alibi for Fifth Columnists. Firemen, poking in the ruins, would find what they believed to be the bodies of Brownson and his two helpers, burned to a cinder at their posts of duty.

Protected by their smoke helmets, the three conspirators raced through the choking black fog and up the stairs to the office of Peter Kirk and Ralph Jackson.

Brownson darted into the office. His two assistants waited outside, to kill anyone who might interfere. But no one challenged them.

Presently, Brownson reappeared from the smoke-shrouded office. His voice was a thick, slobbering bellow from under his helmet.

“Dismissed! You know where to go.”

Carrying the dispatch case which Peter Kirk had removed from the office, he jerked off his helmet, and so did the other two. They scattered to different windows. Swift leaps brought them downward to the paved surface of the factory yard outside. It wasn’t a dangerous jump, barely twelve feet.

The factory yard was a scene of confusion. Men milled in a confused mass, yelling with excitement and terror. Their fear increased as an ominous sound rose in the black heavens overhead. A noise like a descending hurricane. The shrill plunge of an airplane in a power dive!

The plane was a thousand feet above in the darkness. It had leveled off and was climbing aloft again. But from its steel belly a black dot dropped earthward - a dot that swiftly became an enormous bomb!

Workmen tried to run. Their yells were dwarfed by a more hellish shriek from the falling bomb. It was a siren bomb! It struck in the courtyard and lay where it had fallen, without exploding. Men stared over their shoulders at it in paralyzed terror.

The siren in the fallen bomb continued to shriek. Its sound got higher, shriller. Gradually, it vanished into silence. The noise of that bomb siren was at too high a pitch for human ears to hear. It was approaching the pitch of the sound mechanism in the metal cylinder concealed in the doomed factory.

Suddenly, there was a roar that seemed like the end of the world. The factory building quivered like a wounded animal. Then it erupted. Bricks flew, glass shattered. Flame spouted upward in enormous pillars topped with black smoke.

The government bombsight plant was doomed. No human activity could now save it.

Frederick Brownson watched it, flat on his belly in a dark corner of the factory yard. Darkness protected him. So did smoke. Through that darkness came a weird figure. It was a man dressed in bulky ski pants tucked into hob-nailed shoes. A cloth helmet masked his face except for the twin slits of eyeholes.

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