Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace (28 page)

He went straight to the trailer which he had, during the day, seen Cass enter and leave. It was unlocked. He clambered inside, after listening, and began to feel around. He came across a flashlight, and used it, covering most of the lens with a hand.

When he found a radio set, he failed at first to recognize what it was.

It was portable, and not exclusively a receiving set, he comprehended, after thinking at first that it was. It was both transmitter and receiver, one of the all-wave outfits used for long-distance telephonic conversations. They were effective over immense distances, capable of communicating with other continents, he remembered reading.

The cameras interested him, too. Particularly intriguing was the fact that they were the most expensive of miniatures, the type which, with the kind of lenses these had, cost as much as a small automobile.

There were two extremely powerful and compact monocular-type telescopes. Also, a surveyor’s transit.

There was a box. In this box were five glass vials, and Gull uncorked one with particularly dirty looking liquid contents. He put the cork back with wild haste, then sat on his heels and breathed heavily. “Holy murder!” he gasped. He felt of his forehead and it had become wet with sudden sweat of fear. Magicians are confirmed experimenters with chemicals, so he’d been able to recognize the vial as hydrocyanic, one of the deadliest of poisons.
⁵

The box also held several common pins—uncommon pins, rather. For closer inspection showed their points were daubed with something. He decided it was poison, although he had no proof, and no desire to experiment.

As if to drive home the point, three triangular-bladed daggers of the type that had been used to knife the telegrapher up in La Plata were in evidence. They appeared to be wickedly sharp.

Convinced it was a box of death, Gull closed the lid and got away from it. He would have been hard put to describe his reaction to what he had found. He did know that his skin felt as if small things were crawling on it.

He got out of the trailer more cautiously than he entered it. A feeling kept growing inside him, a feeling he did not like. For he recognized it as terror. Some of it must be the thing the dictionary called horror. He had never practiced reducing his inner sensations to such realities as words. But it was appalling to come upon such concrete evidence of evil and death and mystery….

Spook Davis would have to be warned—told that there was more than the incredible in this affair. Such seeming impossibilities as Christopher Columbus being alive and a girl who claimed to be a genuine mind-reader and a great deal of desperate maneuvering to keep something a secret—all that was puzzling. But that box in the trailer was death. More than death—it indicated something hideous and not quite understandable. The irrepressible Spook should be made to understand that, in order that sobriety might keep them out of trouble, if possible.

He bumped into someone.

Gull made his voice deep, like Cass’ own voice. He had decided to do that if he was found.

“Why the hell not look where you’re going?” he growled.

“Anybody find Greene yet?” the other asked, deceived.

GULLIVER struck with a fist. A man went down, cursing. A flashlight ray popped on. Gull socked it. The beam became a corkscrewing comet in the dark. The owner howled for help. He got yelling response.

Gull ran.

Powder flame began working out of the gun behind him. The lead missed, which was understandable in the darkness. More men began arriving.

“Clear out! Get the girl! Clear out quick!”

That was Ivan Cass.

Gull angled for the voice. He ran more silently, straining his eyes, and shortly he saw a burlap-clad figure—it was a large man—hauling a bound figure out of a trailer. The trussed one’s face became visible. A flashlight showed this briefly. Christopher Columbus, his longish hair askew.

“Take him ahead,” Cass’ voice ordered. “We’ll follow if we can’t get that damned magician.”

“Douse that damn light!” someone ordered.

Darkness descended over the confusion of struggling forms.

The revival meeting audience was jamming out of the great tent to see what it was all about, bringing more noise and confusion.

Gull jumped into the crowd, mingling with it, trying to blend in. He succeeded, thanks to his disguised hair.

Not far away, a man suddenly sneezed. Then, he sneezed again. Or was it a different man sneezing?

Soon, there was an epidemic of sneezing, coming from different compass points.

“Spook!” Gull murmured to himself. “That old trickster!”

Placing two fingers into his generous mouth, Gull produced a piercing whistle, which he blew one long, then two short. It was a signal they used.

An answering whistle came through the darkness. Two long. That meant Spook was free!

Gull threw out another whistle, and broke away from the milling confusion, leaving the Promised Land behind.

Chapter XXVIII

PREDICAMENT UNPARALLELED

DOC SAVAGE’S MEN were ferried to shore and driven at gunpoint to what looked from the outside to be a small aircraft hangar.

A door in the blind side was opened and they were shoved in, and out of the blinding rain.

Once inside, there was no question of the building’s purpose.

There were faint zones of light here and there. Lightbulbs of modest wattage hung from cords in all four corners of the barn-like interior and these showed an aircraft sitting idle, propellers still. It boasted three motors, an egg set into each wing, and one in the nose.

Renny appraised this with the canny eye of an airman.

“Foreign job,” he thumped.

“Yeah,” muttered Monk. “This is gettin’ interestin’.”

“It is about to become more interesting,” said the thick-bodied man who seemed to be in charge of the proceedings. They noticed for the first time that he had a trace of an accent. Only a trace, however. European.

“Parle-vous Francais?”
inquired Ham.

“Nein,”
the other retorted.

“I didn’t think so,” said Ham thinly.

“You men are to sit on the floor with your hands over your heads until it can be decided what to do with you,” the soaked straw boss directed.

“Doc Savage isn’t going to like this,” bluffed Renny.

The other stepped up and stared at Renny for a very long interval.

At length, he grunted, “It does not matter. Doc Savage is dead, never to return.”

“Holy cow!” boomed Renny. “What makes you say that?”

“Your thoughts tell me this, large ox.”

Renny, Ham, Monk and Johnny all swapped uneasy looks in the gloomy hangar.

“You sound rather confident of your facts,” challenged Ham.

The other sneered. “Thoughts do not lie. You four will remain here under guard while a consultation over your fate takes place.”

They sat down. Ham began peering about for a spot that was not speckled with motor oil. Finding none, he pulled out a monogrammed handkerchief and sat upon that.

They were obliged to keep their hands clapped over their heads.

Twenty minutes passed and the straw boss who seemed to possess an abundance of knowledge he shouldn’t own came back and made an announcement.

“They are to be taken to the island, with the others.”

“What island?” asked Ham.

“What others?” wondered Renny.

“Why don’t you read my mind and find out?” countered the straw boss coolly.

And for some reason, their captors began laughing among themselves.

Monk watched them enjoy themselves and picked his moment. He sprang for the straw boss—for his rifle, rather.

Hairy hands seized the long barrel, yanked hard.

The rifle swapped ends and Monk trained it on the stunned man.

“Guess you kinda forgot to read my mind,” he gritted.

From behind him, a disembodied voice came gutturally.

“He did, ape man. But I did not. Give him back his weapon or I will shatter your spinal column with a single bullet. It is a dum-dum.”

The hard roundness of a gun barrel prodded Monk’s lower back, grinding painfully into his vertebrae.

“Where’d you come from?” grunted the hairy chemist.

“I sensed your intent, ape.”

“You a mind-reader, too?”

“Most of us that you see here are.”

Renny rumbled, “I’m beginning to think they aren’t tellin’ tall tales.”

Reluctantly, Monk Mayfair handed the straw boss back his weapon.

The other examined it, as if looking for damage. While Monk watched this operation, the rifle butt was suddenly thrusting in and slamming against his ridiculously small forehead.

Monk went down, landing flat on his back. All breath was consequently knocked out of him. His eyes bugged out.

Renny lunged for the weapon, but another man got between them, blocking roughly.

The straw boss growled, “Place this man-monkey in the plane first. The rest of them must be trussed before they can be loaded. Then we will wait for the others.”

Everyone wondered what others, but they were not mind-readers and so remained in the dark.

Outside, the thundering rainstorm did not contribute to their peace of mind.

IT was less than a hour later, when a new prisoner was brought in at gunpoint.

He was tall, easily six feet in height, wore his hair long and full after the style of the old-time Quakers. The new arrival looked as dejected as a church deacon in a pool hall.

The quaint-looking man was loaded into the aircraft, also bound hand and foot.

Doc’s men regarded him at great length until Ham Brooks inquired, “Who are you?”

“I was born Christoforo Columbo,” he said flatly. “I am known to the court of her majesty, Queen Isabella, as Don Cristóbal Colon. History remembers me as Christopher Columbus.”

A chilly silence filled the plane interior.

Renny breathed “Holy cow!” in a voice so uncharacteristically soft that it might have been a prayer.

Johnny Littlejohn sidled over to the new arrival by inching along on the seat of his pants—the only way the gangling geologist could move, tied as he was.

“In what year were you born?”

The man hesitated.

“1451?” prompted Johnny.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Did you know Francisco de Bobadilla?” Johnny asked sharply.

“I did, the scheming dog. But forgive me, for I speak ill of the dead. Don Francisco was appointed governor of New Spain in the year 1500. He perished after refusing to heed my warnings not to sail to Spain at a time when I recognized the sea air was heavy with impending storm. A hurricane swamped his fleet of caravels, but a lesser ship carrying my personal gold survived the disaster, for which I was accused of sorcery by some. Wrongfully, I might add.”
⁶

“In what year did Queen Isabella die?”

“I did not live to see that year,” Columbus returned softly.

“What was the last year that you recall?”

“That was two years ago by my recollection—1503. My crew and myself were shipwrecked on the island of Santiago.”

“That is what the Spanish called Jamaica,” Johnny mused. “His story lines up with what Herman Bunderson told us.”

Renny demanded, “What year is this?”

“I am reliably told that it is the Year of Our Lord,1937,” Columbus imparted. “How I came to be here is a miracle, although a fearful one. I merely entered a strange house that appeared on the island one day. I entered. Then I lost my senses.”

“Miracle!” boomed Renny. “Sounds like a durn nightmare to me!”

His voice rising, Johnny put other questions to the weird stranger.

“One of the great mysteries of the life of Christopher Columbus,” he began, “was his almost supernatural ability to unerringly navigate great tracts of ocean. How was this accomplished?”

Christopher Columbus hesitated. “In my day,” he said quietly, “I was a very prayerful man.”

“That fails to explain the uncanny success of Columbus as a seaman,” Johnny pointed out.

“Today, moderns would credit my navigational prowess to what is called extrasensory perception.”

They took in that remarkable statement without utterance. It floored them.

Ham Brooks was eyeing the purported Christopher Columbus skeptically.

“This man,” he sniffed at last, “does rather resemble in a general way, portraits of the Great Navigator I have seen. Yet you say that there are no authentic likenesses of Christopher Columbus in existence. Every one was painted without reference to the living man. Then how is it this person resembles those portraits?”

“That discrepancy is easily elucidated,” remarked Johnny in his best professorial voice, not taking his eyes off Columbus.

“Yes?”

Johnny made baffled faces. “But I fail to conceive how that might be,” he confessed at last.

“Then this man is an impostor, passing himself off as a likeness to someone whom history cannot describe,” spat Ham.

But Johnny Littlejohn was not convinced. At length, he said, “Tell me, what caused your ships to be wrecked upon Santiago island?”

The long-haired man answered without hesitation, “Shipworms.”

“Correct. What is your actual birthdate, which history does not record?”

“October the twelfth,” replied the man without hesitation.

Johnny did not react to that. Addressing the captive, he drew himself up and said, “It is a distinct pleasure to meet with your excellency, the Great Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Christoforo Columbo.”

“Holy cow!” rumbled Renny. “You mean this is the character we’ve been searching for?”

“I am virtually certain of it. My own researches, which have never been published, arrived at that exact birth date.”

“A lot of good it does us now,” said Renny miserably, straining at his bonds.

Christopher Columbus hung his head heavily.

“What do they want with you?” asked Johnny.

“They thought I knew the location of a certain treasure. A solid gold table was lost when the galleon captained by de Bobadilla went down in the savage storm about which I earlier spoke. This sinking took place in the year of Our Lord, 1502, in the Mona Passage.”