Doc Savage: The Ice Genius (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 12) (47 page)

Long Tom Roberts fared no better. Complaining under his breath, he dived for the Mongol’s left leg, thinking to take hold and bring him down to the ground, there to pummel him with his hard fists.

Manfully, he clutched at the thick limb, got hold all right, but the Mongol did something powerful with his big body that caused the undersized electrical genius to be shaken off without any effort.

Long Tom also ended up in the brush. He took hold of his head, and sat up, making eye contact with Renny Renwick, who looked similarly dazed.

“What hit me?” Renny thumped.

“That man-mountain,” Long Tom told him.

“He was too much for you, too?”

“Let’s try him again,” Long Tom gritted.

They picked themselves up, and resumed chase.

LEADING the main group, Prince Satsu was the first to plunge into the safety of the Mitsubishi transport. His much-thinned contingent of Marines piled in after him. Next came the Mongols, who formed a protective human shield so that their armored leader could enter.

Bringing up the rear, the mountainous Mongol abruptly reached out and took hold of Tamerlane.

Taken by surprise, the Iron Khan was lifted bodily. His hitching jackleg way of running had slowed him down. The bodyguard appeared to be attempting to rush him into the waiting plane. He halted, turning.

The giant barked out something to the Mongol horde who, after a moment of confusion, scrambled aboard ahead of their leader.

It seemed the bodyguard had berated the Khan’s followers for dallying.

They disappeared inside, leaving only the hulking bodyguard and his armored charge.

Renny and Long Tom rushed up, knowing that only seconds stood between them and the transport plane taking off.

The giant Mongol strode up to the cabin door and, employing one booted foot, slammed it shut.

Ahead in the cockpit, the Japanese pilot took this abrupt noise for the signal to take off. He released the brakes, and howling propellers dragged the bouncing ship along the dusty runway.

Renny bellowed, “They’re taking off without Tamerlane!”

“Why the heck did the big guy kick the door shut?”

The individual in question was backpedaling madly as the aircraft took off in haste. In his burly arms, Tamerlane kicked and struggled, but he was helpless against the giant’s overpowering brawn.

Evidently, the pilot became aware that he had taken off without his prized passenger. Prince Satsu no doubt noticed the omission, for his screaming orders to cut the engines lifted over the motor roar.

Flustered, the pilot applied the brakes, with the result that the lumbering transport plane careened out of control and executed a disastrous ground loop.

Somehow, it managed to land upside down. One wing burst into flames. The aircraft ruptured along its fuselage and the hatch sprung open, leaving a clear opening for the disoriented passengers to escape.

The first person out of the plane was, predictably, Prince Satsu, clutching at his scabbard, and beating at his swallowtail coat whose long tails had caught fire.

He was forced to shuck the garment as he ran away. Another explosion took hold as the other wing gas tank burst into vaporous flames.

After that, the Mitsubishi commenced melting. No one else emerged, nor was it possible to rescue anyone. The conflagration was too great.

Not that the big Mongol did not try. One arm thrown across his face to shield it from the blistering heat and dense black smoke, he circled the fast-melting aircraft, looking somehow gigantic and helpless at the same time.

Renny and Long Tom came up from behind and attempted to jump him again.

The results were no more productive than before.

The monster Mongol did not pause to lay down his burden, but employed booted feet to trip first Renny, and then Long Tom, off balance. They landed flat on their backs, the wind expelled from their lungs.

“This big bozo is no pushover,” Renny rumbled.

“He’s almost a match for Doc Savage!” Long Tom concurred.

Monk and Ham arrived about that time. And when they saw their comrades sprawled prostate at the feet of the hulking Mongol, they came charging in to administer appropriate punishment.

They, too, found themselves in over their heads.

Transferring Tamerlane to one hand, the mighty Mongol put out a beam of an arm. Ham ran smack into it, and rebounded as if he had unexpectedly collided with a war tank.

Growling, Monk Mayfair took a running leap, and attempted to slam both feet against the Mongol’s great chest.

The results were remarkable. Long arms flailing, Monk bounced away while the giant Mongol staggered back barely a pace.

The hairy chemist found his feet and, bellowing, came in for more.

What stopped him dead in his tracks was not physical. It was a voice. The voice said, “That’s enough, Monk.”

It was the unmistakable voice of Doc Savage.

“JOVE!” Ham said excitedly. “So that was not you back there dressed as the Mongol bodyguard?”

Doc Savage shook his head. “I swapped clothes with him a second time, after Johnny had banged him loose of his senses. In all the violent commotion, no one noticed.”

“Bless me!” grunted Monk. “So you pulled a double switcheroo?”

Doc nodded. “It was necessary to force the combatants toward the plane, so I could separate Timur from the others. Regrettably, the results were not what I desired.”

Doc unscrewed a vial, and splashed it on his face, which served the purpose of eradicating the last of the Mongoloid cast of his bronze features. Wiping them with a bit of waste rag he carried, he was left looking like Doc Savage once more.

They turned to watch the plane blaze up one more time before settling down into a slowly diminishing holocaust.

Among the observers was Prince Satsu, trembling in his dress shoes.

Doc Savage had set Tamerlane on his feet, and now removed his helmet and mask of meteoric iron. The fat-seamed face revealed was hideous, eyes glaring with hatred.

“Hold him,” Doc instructed the others.

Monk and Renny took a firm grip on either of Tamerlane’s arms, fixing him in place. The Iron Khan attempted to resist, but his strength was not sufficient for the task. While ferocious of face, he was weakened of limb. He trembled from head to toe.

Face purposeful, Doc Savage strode over to Prince Satsu and said, “I will accept your surrender now.”

Prince Satsu began spitting vituperatively. The words coming out of his mouth were not understandable, so great was his rage and frustration.

Without regard to formalities, Doc Savage reached out and withdrew the man’s ceremonial sword from its scabbard.

Prince Satsu swiped a fattish hand out for his blade, which was an ancestral heirloom. He missed.

Doc Savage took the blade and broke it over one knee, tossing the two segments in opposite directions.

At sight of the magnificent sword coming apart, Prince Satsu did the same. His tea-colored face broke with shock; tears streaming down his eyes. He sank to his knees, writhing in anguish.

“Consider yourself a prisoner of war,” Doc Savage told him.

The aircraft soon burned down to a heap of blackened slag, after which Doc and the others poked at it with sticks. But it was evident that no one could have survived its destruction. The last of the Iron Horde was no more.

Suddenly, Doc Savage surged in the direction of town. He moved like metallic lightning.

“What’s that racket?” Long Tom wondered aloud.

“Wild dogs,” grunted Renny.

“Sounds like they got hold of something, too,” snapped Long Tom.

“Johnny!” declared Ham.

Homely features scowling, Monk Mayfair yelled, “Habeas!”

There was a concerted rush for the awful clamor, with Renny remaining behind to watch over Tamerlane and Prince Satsu.

But it was neither Johnny nor Habeas Corpus who thrashed at the center of the pack of starved-looking canines. It was Cadwiller Olden.

The midget had been left behind in all the ruction, and had been discovered by a roving pack of dogs. The teakwood casket in which he had been kept had been knocked over and the limbless little man had spilled out.

He resembled a big-headed baby wrapped in swaddling silk clothes. Snarling yellow dogs had clamped on his torso and were pulling in different directions.

Cadwiller Olden was screaming at the top of his tiny lungs.

“Save me! Save me! Oh, I don’t want to die after all!”

Doc Savage swept in, booting the canines this way and that. Snapping and snarling, they gave ground, slinking way.

The bronze man reached down, and took hold of the blood-soaked windings that concealed the midget’s truncated limbs. Olden looked up into Doc Savage’s face and his lips writhed. He appeared to be trying to speak, but his voice was not up to the task.

“What is it?” asked Doc, bending an ear.

Without warning, Olden snapped up his head and attempted to clamp ratlike white teeth onto the bronze man’s ear.

Doc flinched, evaded the snapping incisors in the nick of time.

“The Devil!” blurted out Ham, his eyes horrified.

Caught off guard, Doc Savage lost his hold. Olden fell and the hovering dogs lunged for him anew. One cur was swifter than most, seized the stump of a leg, and managed to carry off the bundle with a wide-eyed head atop it.

“I did so want to die!” screamed Cadwiller Olden. “I just wanted to take a piece of you with me, big boy! When I was Monzingo Baldwin, you tricked me into thinking you were my friend. I loved you then. Now I hate your guts!” And the miniature man started laughing maniacally.

For a fateful moment, Doc Savage stood rooted. They all did. Stark horror rode their astonished faces. It was unbelievable what had transpired.

Doc Savage shook off the spell first. He started after the fleeing dogs. Before he got far, the others of the pack turned on him, and the bronze giant had his hands full fending them off.

The bronze giant seized canine necks from behind, and squeezed hard, rendering two curs insensate. Others yipped at him, snapping at his ankles.

Doc still retained a last string of firecrackers on his person. Pulling it out, he got the fuse lit and dropped the sizzling package into their snarling midst.

The popping detonations and resulting smoke scattered the remaining pack in all directions.

By the time Doc and his men got organized, there was no sign of Cadwiller Olden, or the ravenous cur that had carried him off.

Chapter LXXIV

DOKU

ONCE THE FRUITLESS search for Cadwiller Olden had been exhausted, Doc Savage and his men sought out Johnny Littlejohn, who still reposed on a litter of looted clothing. He was stirring. At the sound of their approach, he sat up.

The bony archaeologist looked confused, but at the sound of voices, his working eye fluttered rapidly.

Doc Savage knelt, looked to the dressings that Ham Brooks had applied, and appeared satisfied with what he found.

Johnny was murmuring incoherently.

Doc Savage listened, seemed to understand what the dazed geologist was attempting to ask, and said, “The battle is over.”

“Tamerlane?” Johnny breathed, good eye snapping wide.

“Our prisoner—along with Prince Satsu,” Doc Savage informed him.

Johnny attempted to smile, but his gore-smeared lips writhed into a gruesome grimace.

“I disobeyed your orders again,” he gasped out.

“We can discuss that later,” the bronze man said.

Johnny shook his shaggy head. “All my fault. Everything that has happened hangs over my excerebrose, morosophic head.”

Doc Savage said nothing. Everyone knew there was more truth to that confession than otherwise.

While the bronze man was tending to Johnny Littlejohn’s injuries, Monk Mayfair stumbled over to the mountainous Mongol whom Doc Savage had twice impersonated.

There was something about the way the man lay sprawled in the dark that caused the apish chemist to kneel down and examine him.

Monk came back muttering, “That big goliath up and died on us,” he revealed.

“I must have struck him harder than I intended to,” Johnny murmured, the long lineaments of his face etched with horror.

No one spoke. It was perhaps a small thing amid all the carnage they had encountered, but it was regrettable nonetheless.

After a bit, the bony archaeologist remembered something. “Doc, I left Olden ensconced in a house nearby. Regrettably, I do not clearly remember which one.”

No one said anything for a long moment.

Johnny noticed that no one was in a hurry to fetch the missing midget.

“Is something wrong?”

More bloodthirsty than the others, Monk Mayfair volunteered, “A pack of wild dogs got to him first, and one of them made off with the little runt.”

Johnny rolled his eyes up in his head and did not seem to know what to say in response. The crestfallen geologist appeared to be overwhelmed by all that had transpired.

Not long after that, Monk Mayfair called out for Habeas Corpus. He used the type of hog call common among farms throughout the American Middle West.

“Soooeeee!”

Grunting excitedly, Habeas trotted up many minutes afterward, his long ears erect.

After a boisterous reunion, homely Monk got an idea. He found a bloody piece of rag that had been torn off Cadwiller Olden’s swaddling clothes.

Holding this foul fragment under the porker’s snout, he let Habeas sniff it and then said, “Go fetch, boy!”

Eagerly, Habeas put his snuffling anteater snout to the ground and sniffed about. He quickly picked up a scent, then vanished on long, spindly legs.

Doc attempted to follow, but he could not keep up, for the pig wriggled into cracks and crannies too small for a grown man to enter.

Not ten minutes later, Habeas Corpus returned with a larger fragment of bloody garment in his tusks. The shoat dropped this unpleasant rag in the dirt.

Monk stooped, examined this. Stuck inside the cloth with a reddish paste was a sanguinary trophy. A tiny ear, rather well-chewed.

Standing up, Monk concluded, “Guess that’s about all that’s left of the rascal.”