Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace (42 page)

In that breathless moment before his foes could get themselves organized, the bronze man extracted from a pocket the trick fountain pen he had earlier purloined from the cache of espionage tools.

Holding it high, he let the others see it clearly. Like a conjuror attempting a trick, Doc made certain they got a good look at it.

Then, making a show of tripping in the ink-charging lever, he let fly.

The celluloid pen turned end over end as it covered the intervening space. Eyes popped. Jaws sagged. Instinct and reflexes took over.

The first person to dash madly for cover was balloon-bodied Harvell Braggs. He literally careened into the brush, body parts seeming to fly every which way, as if his overstuffed arms and legs were all seeking shelter at different compass points.

The others, alarmed by Braggs’ wild action, quickly followed suit. Gulliver Greene urged Saint Pete into some nettles.

Amid the frantic scramble for cover, the bronze giant made his move.

Pitching forward, he surged for the Ivan Cass confederates. Every one was armed, but shooting was the last thing on their minds. Their feet all but struck sparks as they flung themselves into the hard rocks, seeking protection from the innocent-looking infernal device.

In his wild haste, one dropped the heavy machine gun he had been toting.

Doc Savage moved like a thunderbolt unleashed, but the Cass operatives were no sloths. Their skins were at stake.

Doc Savage managed to seize one of them by the collar. The man gave out a sheep-like bleat, and tore away. Simultaneously, the bronze man seized the wrist back of the man’s revolver, then grasped the weapon by its cylinder, his steel-strong grip preventing it from turning, effectively paralyzing the pistol.

As a result, Doc found himself holding the gun and the man’s burlap garment. The frightened individual had literally ripped free of his coat, so great was his fear of the impending explosion.

From prone positions all around—everyone understood that flight from shrapnel was futile—men plugged their ears to protect sensitive eardrums from concussion and held their breaths.

But no detonation came.

“Now, Long Tom,” rapped Doc.

The slender electrical expert popped up and began hosing the underbrush with mercy bullets. The hollow capsules—for that was what they were—began worrying nettles, splashed chemical contents harmlessly against gray rock.

Very quickly, Long Tom’s drum ran empty.

“I think I got one over there,” he called to Doc, pointing west.

The bronze man surged in that direction, but discovered that Long Tom had managed to bag an overfed island rat, not a man.

From the beach came angry shouting and commotion.

“Cass will investigate without delay,” warned Doc.

Clipping a fresh drum into the superfirer receiver, Long Tom said, “I’ll pick them off when they do.”

Brave words. But at that moment, the Cass operatives lying flat in the surrounding brush realized that the devilish pen gadget was not about to detonate.

Two of them jumped up, looked about like upset gophers. Each had Winchesters.

One drew a bead on the big bronze man. The other picked Long Tom as his target.

Both rifles emitted sharp reports. Their noise blended into one spiteful snarl of sound. The riflemen displayed a precision that spoke of military training.

Almost together, Doc Savage and Long Tom Roberts toppled off their feet and lay still.

Letting out a yell of victory, one of the Cass agents called upon the others to investigate the result of their marksmanship.

It was a tribute to the bronze giant’s reputation that there was some considerable hesitation before nerves were summoned up.

In that brief interval, a coiling dragon of black smoke erupted in the vicinity of Doc Savage.

“Trick!” yelled a man.

Winchester rifle barrels trained toward the smoke. Levers worked. Bullets began lacerating it.

It was impossible to say what, if anything, those pellets struck.

For the black pall began swirling as if alive—or something was disturbing it from within.

Down at the beach, the sounds of combat had reached Ivan Cass’ ears.

“Leave the prisoners here!” He charged up the path, his men following.

IN the squirming ball of chemical smoke, Doc Savage used his ears. Sounds bounced off the surrounding rocks. A shotgun blatted. Buckshot punctuated the roiling blackness, whizzing close by.

Doc kept low. His chainmesh undergarment would turn most anything a shotgun could hurl at him, but his head was unprotected except for the bulletproof skullcap he wore over his natural hair like a helmet of hammered metal.

The bronze giant cut through a brushy tangle, feeling his way. His plan to overcome his foes with various gas bombs had been thwarted by the confusion created by the arrival of the new prisoners, and the scattering of forces that resulted. He paused only once, crouched behind a large bush. What he did there was obscured by the smoke.

Doc Savage soon found Long Tom in the sepia swirl. The puny electrical wizard was coughing violently—the result of a lead slug catching him in his chest.

Doc sank at his side. “Hurt?”

“No,” wracked out Long Tom. “But my ribs ache like blazes.”

Doc helped Long Tom to his feet and urged him in the direction of the camouflaged photographic darkroom—the only high ground, as well as the best shelter on the island.

“Cass is on his way here,” Doc undertoned. “He told his men to leave the prisoners behind, so they are unguarded. Work around and free Monk and the others.”

“What about Gulliver and his group?”

“They have scattered. Collecting them would be like going after stray cows. Dispersed, they will present less tempting targets.”

“In other words, they’re on their own.”

“In other words,” Doc clarified, “they can fend for themselves until you organize Monk and the rest of our friends.”

“You going to create a distraction?” asked Long Tom.

“If possible. But it is imperative that Christopher Columbus be conveyed to safety. His demise could irrevocably alter human events leading up to the present day. That single fact may well be more important than the lives of anyone on this island.”

With that disquieting statement, the bronze man melted into the swirling smoke, seeking the unconscious Columbus.

GULLIVER GREENE was crawling through the blackest smoke he had ever breathed. It made his lungs feel scratchy, but the ebony stuff didn’t seem to be poisonous. He had attempted to carry Christopher Columbus to safety, but in the darksome miasma that had proven too risky, so he had deposited the unconscious man in a cluster of rocks, trusting to fortune that he would be safe there.

Gull called out Spook Davis’ name, low and urgent, but this produced no response. Likely Spook had fled.

In the brush, he discovered Harvell Braggs, also crawling.

“I think Doc Savage was shot,” Gull breathed.

Harvell Braggs was too busy trying to climb to his feet to comment on that announcement. He was so ponderous, his wide body such a linkage of loose, teetering balloons, that he had to struggle to get all of his component parts organized.

Finally, he found his feet.

“I believe I can navigate,” Braggs allowed.

“Know how to work an airplane-type machine gun?” Gulliver asked. “They dropped the big one when Doc Savage spooked them.”

“During the late war,” Braggs said bombastically, “I did my share of shooting.”

Picking up the machine gun, the mechanism of which was completely a mystery as far as he was concerned, Gull said, “I’ll carry this piece of artillery. You better stick close to me and be ready to pull the trigger, or whatever it is you pull to make it talk.”

Saint Pete came over, offered, “I’ll carry the ammun—”

“No,” Gull interrupted hastily. “There’s another job for you. Cass has a speedboat on the island. You must get to the boat, and be ready to get the motor going. We’ll make our getaway in the speedboat if we have to.”

The girl hesitated. “But—”

“Please,” Gull urged. “To make a go of this, we’ve each got to do a separate part. Won’t you cooperate on yours?”

“Well,” she said, “I—yes.”

Pete went away toward the beach to the speedboat Gulliver had conjured up in her mind, casting anxious glances over her shoulder until she was out of sight.

Gull and Braggs crept up toward the ridge of the island. Gull did not head for the plane, but led the way cautiously up the steep slope toward the hidden darkroom.

“Good idea to get the girl away from the trouble,” Braggs breathed softly.

“Thanks,” Gulliver whispered.

“Look, Greene, I’ve been plenty rough on you two magicians a time or two. Forget it, eh?”

“Sure,” Gulliver said. “Let’s keep our eyes open for Doc Savage and his men.”

They stepped in carefully selected spots to avoid cracking twigs, and finally Gull pointed at the newly-arrived Cass reinforcements, who were gathered around the ledge which contained the secret door. The men were arranged in a semicircle, guns trained on the concealed portal. It looked as though they had been there for some time. Furthermore, they seemed to be getting impatient.

The reason for their interest was plain to behold. The pivoting door was closed, but in closing, it had clamped on a fragment of someone’s shirt, which hung like a limp rag. From within, increasingly weak voices called out, so muffled they could not be distinguished.

“Looks like Doc Savage or Long Tom ducked into that darkroom,” breathed Gull.

Braggs nodded vehemently. “Cass has no intentions of taking the bronze man alive, I will wager.”

“We have to do something.”

An argument was taking place. The reinforcements were insisting that Doc Savage was inside the darkroom, while others were equally insistent—apparently based on their extrasensory perception—that he was not.

The shirt sleeve fragment flapped in the breeze, taunting both sides. It was one of Long Tom’s.

Cass, dark rage on his hard face, suddenly made a number of imperative gestures for his men to charge the darkroom. He stood back, rifle ready for anyone who might come out of the hideaway.

Three men strained mightily, and muscled the rock aside. The door received encouragement to open in the form of prodding rifle stocks. The portal swung on its pivot, revealing the cave-like interior.

Out stumbled the Cass men Doc Savage had earlier imprisoned. They emerged with their hands raised high. Consternation followed. Someone belatedly realized that Doc Savage could not have rolled the rock into place after he had secreted himself within. It was an impossibility.

Gulliver got set.

“Cass! Lay down your arms!” he roared.

Cass was the only one who dropped his weapon. He was so startled that he lost his rifle. All his men jerked about, seeking the author of the command.

“Shoot over their heads, Braggs,” urged Gull.

When no racket came, he spun.

Lying there was the big machine gun—but Harvell Braggs was gone!

“Vamoosed!” gritted Gull. Seizing the cumbersome weapon, he found the firing trips, opened up, shooting over their heads. The machine gun blared intermittently. Then it went silent.

“Surrender!” Gulliver yelled again, blindly. Gun smoke was a haze before his vision, defeating it.

Answer was a sharp bark from a Winchester rifle. Gull returned fire ten-fold.

Then Gull swiped powder fumes out of his eyes, peered, and was astonished at his success.

One Cass man was down, somehow shot through the legs. The others had flung away their weapons and uplifted their arms.

“Stay still!” Gulliver roared.

They became as rigid as trees. They didn’t much resemble vicious killers who had terrorized Gull’s existence for some days. They were just men at the end of the rope, and scared of death. A machine gun will do that.

Ivan Cass’ wrath seemed to foam up within him until no room remained for words; at any rate, he fell into an about-to-burst silence.

Gulliver worked his way down and collected their weapons, which he tossed into the unoccupied photographic darkroom. He searched the prisoners for concealed weapons, which he also flung into the darkroom. He then closed the darkroom door and rolled the convenient rock in front of it so that it could not be pivoted open in a hurry. The captives glared, some sullenly, and Cass did some of his best swearing. Gull thought stagehands in the theaters where he had played as a magician were the only real masters of profanity, but that was an error. Cass had them stopped.

“You want to keep your teeth?” Gulliver asked.

Ivan Cass went silent. His stony countenance burned whitely.

Then Spook Davis came stumbling sheepishly out of the underbrush.

“I THOUGHT I’d wait until you got all those guns put away,” Spook exclaimed, then grinned vaguely. “I don’t lay any claims to being a brave man,” he added needlessly.

Spook was disheveled, and seemed unsteady on his feet. He kept pressing his fingers over his forehead, snapping crimson drops off on the surrounding leaves.

“Wounded?” Gulliver asked.

“Almost annihilated,” Spook groaned. “Listen, do you know what happened to me after you left me to—”

Leaping, Gulliver caught Spook by the arm, rushed him to a nearby bush, and shoved him down in its concealment.

“Stay there a minute!” Gulliver hissed.

A crashing of the brush that Gull had heard now came closer, and as he waited for the maker of the noises to appear, Gull gripped a revolver he had collected.

Harvell Braggs came out of the brush. His eyes seemed about to fall out when he saw the situation. He stopped. His mouth opened and shut. Sheepishly, he managed a grin while he fumbled with a Winchester rifle he had discovered somewhere.

“I thought I was ready for anything,” he grunted uncertainly. “That is, my spirit was ready. But my poor body was— Well, I heard shots.”

“Yes,” Gulliver agreed. “There was some more shooting. It’s all over.”

Braggs made a wan smile. “That’s—that’s—”

“We seem to have everybody,” Gulliver said flatly.

“Uh—well—that’s wonderful,” Braggs muttered. “You were doubtless wondering where I had gotten to.”