Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace (41 page)

“Not much to work with here,” Long Tom muttered.

“The contrary. There is just enough.”

“Enough for what?”

Doc began to take his flashlight apart.

“How did the spider catch his dinner?” he asked.

Tiny lights of understanding came into Long Tom Roberts’ eyes. He smiled thinly. Then he began to disassemble his flashlight as well….

MONK MAYFAIR was coming to. His gimlet eyes jumped open. He peered around warily.

“What in blazes?” he muttered through crushed lips.

Johnny Littlejohn offered, “As a thespian might say, the superultimate act is commencing.”

“Johnny means that it’s curtains,” Renny said dryly. “These mutts are about to execute us.”

Ivan Cass strode up to the hairy chemist and gave him a fearful kick in the ribs.

“One last chance before lead slugs dash out your brains,” he snarled. “What is the secret of unlocking these weapons?”

“I don’t think I should tell you,” Monk mumbled vaguely. The hairy chemist appeared dazed. He glanced toward Ham Brooks. “What do you say, shyster?”

Ham Brooks made a thoughtful mouth.

“They say they’ll let us live if we talk,” he ventured.

“Do we believe them?” mumbled Monk painfully.

“Hard to tell,” rumbled Renny, shrugging giant shoulders.

“It is a foregone conclusion that our utility will prove of diminutive duration,” offered Johnny.

Monk gave his bullet head a shake, as if to clear his mental machinery. He winced in pain.

This byplay seemed to bring out the innate impatience of Ivan Cass. He lifted his voice.

“Form the execution squad.” He said it much louder than necessary. Everyone noticed that.

Men assembled themselves into a line and raised their rifles. A few leveled revolvers.

“Ready!” shouted Cass, hard eyes ranging the rocks above the beach. They stood not far from the surviving tri-motor plane.

Monk clambered to his feet. He looked shaky from the beatings he had endured. One eye was turning purple, while the other showed a greenish discoloration. He spat out a loose tooth. It clicked against one of Cass’ shoes.

Monk growled. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had a bellyful of all this.”

Ham glared at him. “You don’t mean—”

“You wanna know how to operate these hoot guns,” the apish chemist said defiantly. “There’s a trick to it, and I know the trick.”

Cass stepped forward. “What is the trick?”

Monk opened his wide mouth to speak.

Ham and Renny and Johnny started to object loudly.

“Don’t listen to him,” roared Renny. “He’s punch drunk!”

Cass silenced them with a dark glare.

“Let this ape speak his mind,” he ground out.

Monk struggled for words, made simian faces, but finally said, “I—I can’t do it. I can’t betray Doc’s memory.”

Cass leaned in, as if to peer into Monk’s homely features. He was very silent as he did so. No one spoke. It became very quiet.

“I have it!” crowed Cass. “I have the secret.”

“Blazes!” said Monk, jaw dropping.

“He read your mind!” thumped Renny. “Now we’re in for it.”

Seizing one of the compact superfirers from an underling, Ivan Cass took it in both hands.

“According to this dull ape’s mental pictures,” the spymaster stated, “one merely has to press this stub and slide this hornlike projection forward.” Cass did so. Distinct clicks came. Taking the weapon properly in hand, Ivan Cass wrapped his trigger finger around the firing lever. He aimed the weapon’s snout at the prisoners. Into his crow-black eyes came a wicked gleam.

“I will now demonstrate the proficiency of this remarkable weapon,” he announced.

Instead, Ivan Cass began howling and hopping in circles as the supermachine pistol suddenly began to smoke and grow hot. Soon, it was incandescent. The barrel drooped, falling off like ashes from a long-burning cigar. It sizzled when it struck sand.

Moaning in pain, Cass dropped the weapon, where it commenced melting into liquid slag.

“Thermite!” grinned Monk. “Burns, huh?”

“Nice bit of acting, you misbegotten tree-dweller,” Ham undertoned.

The others kept straight faces. Built into these intricate pistols were two small charges of the chemicals which, when combined, constitute thermite. When two studs were simultaneously engaged, the incendiary substances—iron oxide and aluminum powder—mingled and were ignited, producing terrific heat, melting the weapon in a matter of moments, as they all witnessed.
¹⁰

Enraged, Cass barked, “You tricked me!”

“Guess you read my mind wrong,” countered Monk, displaying missing teeth in a wide grin.

Cass seemed not to know what to say to that. His dark eyes kept searching the surrounding rocks, as if he expected visitors.

But Doc Savage did not show himself.

“We will shoot one as an example to the others,” Cass decided at last.

Monk, Ham, Johnny and Renny all rushed to volunteer to be the one shot. Ham took up a position before the much-battered Monk, protecting him. Johnny leaped in front of Ham. Then Renny stepped before all three of the others, making hard blocks of his bound fists behind his back and growling, “Do your dead-level worst.”

This astounded Ivan Cass, who did not know what to do then. He ground his teeth in impotent rage.

The problem was solved when one of his men approached and whispered in Cass’ ear.

“One of the men senses that Doc Savage has entered our secret darkroom.”

Cass grinned. “Send three to seize him. Now!”

This was done.

Addressing the prisoners, Cass announced, “We will see how brave you are when we stand Doc Savage before the rocks and shoot his eyes out.”

The others said nothing. They stood stunned. This was the first glimmering they had that their bronze chief was alive and active in the Twentieth Century. Fighting back wild hope, keeping their demeanors subdued, their thoughts churned.

Doc Savage was no man’s prisoner until he was produced in chains. They did not think for a moment that Doc Savage would be captured by a mere trio of men—even if some of them were sneaky mind-readers.

THE THREE Ivan Cass underlings moved up to high ground, seeking the rock ledge that concealed the darkroom cave.

They slipped up to it, saw that the door was ajar, but could not see in, the pivoting panel having nearly closed tight.

Cautiously, they approached.

The man in the lead paused, and seemed to be concentrating.

“I am sensing the bronze man’s brain waves. He has entered the darkroom, and has concealed himself there in order to ambush us.”

As if to confirm that, their alert ears picked up the muffled sounds of a man’s voice coming from within the hollow ledge.

Although pitched low, it had the unmistakable ring of Doc Savage’s outstanding voice. Another voice, less powerful and more querulous, joined in from time to time. The Cass crew did not recognize those sour tones as belonging to Long Tom Roberts, but they did not need to know the identity of the second man, only the first.

Carefully, they crept up to the ledge.

One man set himself on the rock-sheltered side of the pivoting door, while the leader—the one who claimed to sense the bronze man’s mind—put his weight against the portal. With a gritty grinding, it turned ponderously.

All together, they rushed into the hollow work space.

From his prone position atop the ledge, Doc Savage leaped down and slammed the door shut, then rolled the huge rock into place, blocking egress.

Muffled shouting came from within the darkroom. The trio was trapped, and they knew it. Fists pounded futilely. Profanity crackled.

Long Tom emerged from the prickly concealment of the brush. He was grinning so hard his gold front teeth gleamed.

“Your ventriloquism fooled them good. They were dead sure you were inside.”

Doc nodded. “They may also have perceived the false mental pictures I endeavored to create that illusion.”

“Next move?” asked Long Tom.

“If any of those men is a mind-reader, he will soon settle down and summon the others telepathically.”

“We want that?”

“Very much,” replied Doc.

Retreating to the underbrush on either side of the narrow upward path, they took out their dismantled spring–generator flashlights and a great deal of wire harvested from a tool box, and got to work.

IVAN CASS was not a patient man. He waited, paced and fretted, his rock-like face working darkly. From time to time, he unleashed a stream of fluent profanity.

“What is keeping them?” he raged.

Cass glanced toward one of the others.

The man closed his eyes and seemed to go into a reverie. When they snapped open, his face was unpleasant.

“Doc Savage has trapped our men in the darkroom.”

Cass ground his molars as he spoke. “Take four men. Release them. Locate Doc Savage! And be sure to shoot him very dead!”

Monk, Ham and the others saw that the ranks of Ivan Cass’ operatives were growing thin. They exchanged glances.

“Still too many to rush,” Renny muttered.

“You will rush no one,” Ivan Cass snapped. “Soon you will all be kaput.”

“Don’t count your corpses just yet,” returned Monk.

THE FOUR Ivan Cass operatives worked their way along the narrow path with their weapons held before them. Their gaze grew very sharp. They meant business. Rats raced to get out of their way.

They were so concentrated upon the possibility of ambush from either side that they failed to notice the snare lying across the way.

This was understandable. The snare was all but invisible.

As they walked into it, utterly oblivious to the danger, the cautious quartet heard around them a whizzing or whining sound that might have been produced by drowsing insects. They halted, then advanced more slowly.

Thus it was that they blundered into a haze of unseen stinging things that made them believe they had stumbled upon a wasp’s nest.

The first man encountered something thready but unyielding with his pistol barrel.

He received a shock from his own weapon, and doubled over in agony. The revolver fell.

The others, right behind him, slammed into the same strange stinging phenomenon.

Soon, all four were twitching and contorting and moaning as pain shot through every atom of their paralyzed bodies. Weapons hung frozen in their fingers, which began clutching spasmodically.

Crouched on either side, Doc Savage and Long Tom continued winding their spring-generator flashlights, out of which tiny wires trailed.

After a bit, Doc said, “Enough.”

Long Tom stopped, leaped up and socked a man in the jaw. He went down.

Emerging from concealment, Doc Savage wrapped massive fingers around the heads of two stunned foes and brought them together with an audible
bonk!
The pair collapsed into a pile of loose burlap gunnysacks.

That left one foe remaining. He was still recovering from his shocking experience.

Doc Savage took him by the back of the neck and made kneading motions that rendered him unable to move a muscle. Eyes remained open, able to see, but not to move.

“How many men does Cass have left?” demanded Doc.

The man stuttered out a number in his thick voice.

“Call for help,” directed Doc Savage.

The man made strangling sounds, indicating he had little control over his vocal apparatus.

Doc kneaded spinal nerve centers some more, permitting movement above the neck.

The man found his tongue, and started howling his head off.

“Cass! Come quickly! Hurry!”

At a nod from Doc Savage, Long Tom returned to his station in the tangled underbrush. Doc bundled his hapless prisoner under a massive arm and sank from sight. The man went silent, a victim of the bronze man’s surgical touch.

There, they checked the wire connections between the spring-generator flashlights and the web of tiny superfine wires they had strung across the trail, spider-web fashion.

“More flies for the web,” Long Tom murmured as the tramp of footsteps came near.

But the puny electrical expert was overconfident. For the footsteps, they soon recognized, were not coming up from the beach, but from inland.

Doc Savage realized this first, and a flicker of concern animated his flake-gold eyes.

A moment later appeared a contingent of Ivan Cass’ men, driving Gulliver Greene, Spook Davis, and Saint Pete before them by gunpoint. Gulliver was packing Christopher Columbus over one shoulder. Leading the group was whale-like Harvell Braggs, his big stomach swinging from side to side.

Chapter XLIII

TABLES TURN TWICE

DOC SAVAGE, MAN OF BRONZE, took in the unexpected and unwelcome sight of the procession of captors and prisoners coming down the path without a change of expression.

His flake-gold eyes read the situation in flash parts of a second. Gulliver Greene had been seized in the act of freeing the prisoners, or shortly thereafter. This complicated an already involved picture.

Long Tom Roberts yanked his supermachine pistol from its underarm holster, trained the muzzle upon the oncoming parade, and awaited word from his bronze chief.

A rat scampered across the path, looking almost as large as an alley cat. Another followed it. They were foraging for food.

The group drew near.

Doc Savage told Long Tom, “Hold your fire, unless you obtain a clear shot at Cass’ men.”

“Right,” said Long Tom, who had no such luxury at the moment. The prisoners would catch most of the mercy slugs he sent their way. Although they would not prove fatal, the bullfiddle roar of the tiny superfirer would attract Cass and his men, who would no doubt execute the helpless prisoners if he lost the upper hand.

Motioning for Long Tom to fade back into the underbrush, Doc Savage stepped into view, revealing himself.

Doc Savage had once been described by a journalist with a flair for a colorful turn of phrase as resembling a well-oiled machine of muscles, sinew and cables. In the mid-morning sunlight, he perfectly fit that description. Caught unprepared, Cass’ men froze.