Doc Savage: The Ice Genius (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 12) (14 page)

The boxy ice slab was quite substantial, but Doc Savage was powerfully muscled. Visible tendons sprang out like the metallic cables of some mighty machine. It had already commenced a slow process of melting in the sun, so the icy foot now stood in a modest puddle of melted water.

Impelled by the bronze man’s exertions, the block started horsing around in place.

Chinua immediately became agitated. He barked out gruff orders.

“Stop him! Stop him from tipping the ice tomb over!”

For that was the bronze man’s clear intentions—to tip over the great chunk of ice, and shatter it.

Mongol minions rushed in, took hold of the chipped edges, attempted to stabilize the shifting hunk of frozen matter.

Although chained, Doc Savage had some freedom of movement. A hard elbow smashed into one stupefied face, while questing bronze digits sought the throat of another.

Punishing fingers made that Mongol squawk, and he pulled himself away, stumbling off, hacking and choking and trying to get his windpipe clear.

Johnny lashed out with a foot, which impacted someone’s ribs with enough force to send that person stumbling off, clutching his sides.

Other Mongols charged up, but Doc Savage focused on his strenuous exertions.

The ice block lurched, teetering. It doubtless helped that the ground was uneven, although not considerably so.

What truly aided Doc’s plan was that he had been chained in such a way that the upper and lower portions of his body spilled over the edges of the top of the ice cake. This gave him considerable leverage.

Too, the heavy links holding him were insufficient for the job, since they appeared to have been welded for some lesser person than confining a modern Samson such as Doc Savage.

Taking a set of links in one hand, Doc exerted pressure. The linkage creaked, began to part. Narrowed Mongolian eyes grew comically round. Some began chewing their lips uneasily.

Normally, the bronze man, when working to free himself from similar chains, employed more science, selecting a weak link and applying slow, steady pressure.

But the dire situation afforded him no such luxury. So Doc simply grasped and exerted sudden yanking force. Possibly the urgency of the situation imparted to the mighty bronze man more muscular power than usual.

Whatever the case, the groaning chain snapped, one end swung free, and Doc used it to lay about any approaching Mongols.

He was not gentle about it. Blunt steel collided with equally blunt skulls, creating havoc and sending bodies and weapons flying.

One attacker drew a blade, and Doc lashed out, snapping the loose chain around the man’s wrist.

Screaming, the Mongol dropped his blade, seized his own wrist, and tried to free himself from the snapping python of steel.

This only added to the leverage Doc needed. He exerted a powerful tug.

Suddenly, the great ice block toppled, Doc Savage and Johnny Littlejohn coming down with it.

The noise it made was a little like the sharp sounds small icebergs emit when seasonal changes cause them to fracture. Arctic trees, bursting from the intense cold, also produce a similar report.

In any event, the ice cracked in several places. And when it fell, the frozen extrusion landed in three large chunks.

“Kill them!” roared Chinua, enraged such as he had never been in his entire lawless life.

Chapter XVII

ALIVE, ALIVE, OH

CADWILLER OLDEN HAD been an eyewitness to all of this, of course.

The minute man watched the torment of Johnny Littlejohn and Doc Savage with approval written all over his diminutive features.

But when Doc Savage commenced his Herculean exertions, that expression changed demonstrably.

Seeing the great ice block start cracking, Cadwiller Olden rushed forward, this time screaming, “Stop! Hold on! Stop!”

Chinua and his Mongols had no ear for this. They were intent on punishing the foreign bronze devil and his skeletal assistant for the desecration they had wrought upon their revered ancestor.

With the flat of his blade, Chinua swept backward, and slammed the midget away as if he were nothing more significant than a camp dog.

Stamping around to where Doc Savage struggled free of his chains, Chinua brandished his curved Mongol
kilij
sabre, and was looking for an opening through which to remove the bronze man’s head.

Kneeling, Chinua grasped Doc’s bronze hair, in an effort to yank his head back and expose the vulnerable throat. To his everlasting astonishment, the entire scalp came free, and then a bronze fist snapped out, rocking his head backward.

Chinua stumbled back, seeing stars.

Other Mongols stepped in, but by this time Doc Savage was climbing to his feet. The chains, which had been driven into the ice with spikes, were no longer holding him to that now-shattered block.

Swinging a length of chain over his head, Doc Savage produced a sound similar to a bull-roarer, and the eerie noise, as well as a threat of the whirling blade of loose chain, caused the Mongols to keep back.

Johnny, too, found his ropes loose, although he had to struggle to pull free. One leg was still looped in a coil of rawhide, and that piece was still affixed to a fang of ice.

No one gave any thought to the figure that now lay half exposed by the fractured ice. They were too busy trying to survive.

A squat Mongol with an antique revolver stepped up and attempted to shoot Doc Savage in the back.

The revolver was a .38-caliber, and so when the bullet smashed into the bronze man’s broad back, he staggered only slightly, turned and swung the whirling chain at his attacker.

The blurred links found the revolver, smacked the gunman’s hand with such force that he lost his trigger finger as well. The Mongol went running off, maimed hand pumping crimson.

The combination of this bulletproof giant and his Samson-like manipulation of the chain cooled the Mongols’ heated desire for vengeance.

Just to make sure, Doc brought the chain around and behind him, where it bisected a rifle clutched in another Mongol’s white-knuckled hands.

The rifle was a fine one, but it snapped in two as if it were a dry twig.

This last feat impressed the Mongol band that this foreign man of metal was something more than an ordinary human being.

Then the metallic giant reached down to reclaim his scalp, which he replaced on his bronze skull. Everyone saw that the foreign devil dropped one layer of hair atop the other as if it were a perfectly normal thing to do.

The secret behind that was easy explained. Doc’s ingenious skullcap that was cunningly designed to mimic his own bronze hair. The protective shell of sheet steel had come loose when Chinua had violently taken hold of it.

In this lull, eyes shifted around from man to man, as if asking, what do we do next?

Chinua the Mongol chieftain lay sprawled in the dirt, out cold with nothing to offer.

That was when shifting eyes went to the fractured cake of ice over which Doc Savage stood guard. Through the rifts and crevices of the damaged slab, portions of cracked red leather clothing and beaten-iron armor plates could be seen.

Entranced, the Mongols drew close, as if the mighty bronze man was no longer there. Pointing, gesticulating, they fell to murmuring and muttering among themselves.

One word passed from lip to lip. “Timur.”

Then, unexpectedly, a long, rusty-sounding groan issued from within the broken ice.

A chorus of gasps rolled around the circle of Mongols, and they reflexively shrank from the shattered chunks of ice.

Doc Savage’s trilling sprang forth like a feral cry, containing a startlement that reflected his inner agitation.

Only one person had the presence of mind to speak coherent words. That was Johnny Littlejohn.

“I’ll be superamalgamated!” the gangly archaeologist bleated. “He’s alive! He’s really, truly alive!”

Chapter XVIII

THE OGRE SPEAKS

ANOTHER GROAN ISSUED forth from the broken block of ice that had for centuries encapsulated the body of Timur
il-Lenk,
known as Timur the Lame, Scourge of Humanity.

This ugly utterance was somewhat more pronounced, as the form within gathered strength. It shook, wobbled, as if the trapped being were attempting to free himself.

This was impossible, of course. Both legs were still fixed in one unit of ice. The left arm was likewise trapped in another.

The head, which could not be seen clearly, stood between two separate pieces, the breaking of the ice having fortunately occurred around his head.

Johnny turned to Doc Savage and husked, “We must do something.”

The look in Doc Savage’s eyes then was strange and stark. The gold flakes that often whirled continuously were now eerily still, as if paralyzed. Doc Savage may have been as shocked as he had been in his entire life.

Wrenching himself out of his momentary paralysis, Doc Savage lowered the chain, and approached the broken figure sprawled in slushy ice.

Shifting around so he could discern the face, Doc saw that the warrior wore an ornate conical helmet that covered much of his crown and the sides of the head. The face itself was shielded by an iron mask, forged in a likeness of an Asiatic warrior, replete with metallic mustaches. It was a face of a ferric ogre. Through ornate holes, the eyes were open and visible. They were an awful hue—a pale, canine yellow.

They locked with the bronze man’s golden gaze as if perceiving it clearly. Beneath the mask, through open mouth and quivering nostrils, the man struggled to breathe the first fresh air to reach his laboring lungs in untold years.

Carefully, Doc Savage examined the iron countenance with its brutish features. It appeared to be an Asiatic battle mask, the surface weathered to an unbelievable degree. The bronze man recognized that it had been forged of meteoric iron.

Cadwiller Olden was saying, “You have to save him. You can’t let him die. He’s too important.”

Doc Savage ignored the little man, and instead scrutinized the figure in the fractured ice as if calculating all the possibilities that lay before him.

Here was one of history’s worst despots. A cruel conqueror who had put to the sword untold millions of innocent persons. Death claimed him five centuries ago. His fate had been sealed. Yet now he breathed. Tamerlane lived!

Doc Savage watched the awful eyes burning into his own, and suddenly the man fixed in the ice broke into a violent shuddering while his exposed flesh at hands and throat commenced turning a cyanotic blue. He was soon gasping like a beached fish.

“He’s dying!” cried Olden in a tortured voice. “You can’t just let him die. You’re a doctor! Where is your humanity?”

Whether Doc Savage was moved by the tiny man’s pleas, or by his own strong sense of right and wrong, the bronze man stepped into the shattered ice, extracting from his equipment vest the same syringe charged with stimulant that he had prepared to use on Cadwiller Olden.

Tearing at the leather-and-iron armor, seeking exposed flesh and a visible vein, Doc Savage grasped the old man’s arm, and drove the plunger home.

This had an almost immediate effect. The gasping man ceased gasping. His breathing returned to normal rhythm. The horrible blue cast of his exposed skin soon became the normal coppery hue of the East.

Doc Savage stood up, watching this process with eyes like diamond points.

Then, to the astonishment of everyone, the man from the frozen tomb abruptly started flinging aside odd chunks of ice from his upper body.

He was not entirely successful at this. His right arm did not seem to work properly. So Doc Savage brought down a length of chain, cracking apart the section that transfixed his left arm.

The man sat up, peered around, blinked twice, and asked in a croaking voice, “Where am I?”

Doc Savage responded in the man’s own language. “First, who are you?”

Hearing this, the hideous man looked startled, then fell to laughing uproariously in a deep register.

“Do you not know me, gold eyes?” he croaked.

Doc said calmly, “I have heard of you. I am merely trying to ascertain your correct identity.”

In a tone that sounded the way rust looks, the other intoned, “I am he of whom it has been rightly written, ‘If I still lived, mankind would tremble.’ ”

AT THOSE words, a great roar of approval came from the throats of the assembled Mongols. Those who had swords thrust them in the air. A few fired revolver shots skyward.

One approached and handed his curved blade to the seated man, saying, “Here, sire. Take my unworthy sabre as your own.”

The revived warrior accepted the
kilij
sabre, and used it to attack the ice imprisoning his legs. He showed remarkable strength in doing so. The ice came apart under the flashing steel.

Johnny Littlejohn looked at Doc Savage and made gulping sounds like a fish.

“He—he—”

“Yes,” Doc told him in English. “This individual, to all evidence, appears to be Tamerlane.”

Johnny Littlejohn didn’t seem to know whether to cheer or faint. A wave of conflicting emotions took hold of his gaunt features. His hollow eyes seemed to want to cry, but his mouth appeared to wish to laugh.

It was clear to Doc Savage what was going on in Johnny’s mind. Here was a man five hundred years dead, resurrected and able to tell his story of days long gone by. This, in itself, was a triumph of science. Or at least of survival. History could be rewritten by this man’s testimony.

Yet here, too, was one of history’s worst criminals. A monster who richly deserved his demise, but not this subsequent resurrection.

No doubt the bony archeologist was torn by those very same conflicting thoughts.

Johnny looked to Doc Savage and gulped, “What will history think of us now?”

It was an excellent question. Although Doc Savage had been pledged to preserve and safeguard life wherever he found it, his actions had restored to the world a person entirely undeserving of that rescue.

It was impossible to say whether the bronze man had done right or wrong.