Dragon in the Snow

by Forrest Dylan Bryant

  Early Wednesday morning, a head-turning, blue-on-blue, custom-built Delahaye roadster cruised into view of San Francisco Bay, six hours ahead of schedule. Sonny, Professor Armbruster and Captain Doyle were all accounted for and in good spirits, and the car was in excellent shape: aside from the incident in Kansas, there had been no adventures. Doyle had made good on his promise to get the car’s engine running at peak efficiency; indeed, they could have made the crossing in half the time if not for the scientists’ frequent tinkering breaks.

  Not knowing their enemy’s situation in the city, the trio decided to leave the flashy car in Oakland and make their way to the rendezvous through the anonymity of streetcars and ferry boats. They arrived at the gleaming white Ferry Building just as the tower clock struck ten, and stepped into a long, narrow space with ornate mosaic floors and an elegantly arched steelwork ceiling. Crowds jostled in and out, and the trio had to elbow their way down to their destination, a tiny coffee shop at the far end of the hall.

  When the Baroness emerged from behind a copy of Spy magazine to greet them — without Hank, Sid or Rosie anywhere in sight — they were concerned.

  When she told them about the train, and the nature of their masked enemy, they were horrified.

  And when she told them of Hank’s bizarre plan for a rescue operation, the Professor nearly quit on the spot.

  “This is madness!” he said. “Madness! We were fortunate to get away from just one of those fiends in New York. Now we’re going to walk up to five of them, tweak their noses, and abscond with Rose and Sidney?”

  The Baroness countered heat with ice. “That’s precisely what we’re going to do, Professor. If you’re not up to the job...”

  The Captain interjected: “My dear Professor, you have the backbone of an amoeba and the brains of a flea.” Then to the Baroness, “What you propose is quite insane. It is sheer, unadulterated folly. Count me in.”

  “Myself as well,” said Sonny in his crisp manner. “And I think, if Sid is still alive, he particularly will appreciate the inventiveness of this plan. Doc Savage would be proud.”

  The Professor huffed for a moment, lips pursed under his graying mustache. “Very well,” he said at last, “You can’t possibly succeed without me. But there’s one thing you still haven’t told us, my dear. Where exactly is Mr. Martin?”

  The Baroness’s coy smile was back. “Oh, Hank? He’s just out making some new friends.”

  * * *

  A few hours after this conversation, Sid Friedman sat dejectedly on the edge of his cot, having just been handed his twenty-four hour ultimatum. Should he take the “deal,” as the tall man kept calling it? He was sure the man could not be trusted; his gang would take the cylinder — what did he call it? The singing stone — and kill them all anyway. And Rosie had not been in on the conversation. Surely she deserved a say in her own fate.

  Sid was still brooding when there was a knock at the door. That was strange; in two days, nobody had ever knocked before entering. The door opened, and all at once Sid understood: how his train had been intercepted, how they knew he was coming to San Francisco, how the tall man knew his name.

  Hank Martin stood there, holding a gun in his hand.

  Sid drew in his breath to yell, to scream at the traitor standing before him. But Hank was too fast. A huge, bearlike hand flashed out, knocking the wind from Sid as he fell backwards onto the cot.

  As the gun lifted, Sid looked up into Hank’s glaring eyes and awaited his fate.

  Chapter XIII

  TAKING YERBA BUENA BY STRATEGY

  —

  “SSHHHH!” HISSED HANK, “You wanna get rescued or not? One false move and we’re both sunk.” The huge detective glanced back toward the door, then continued: “Jeez, some friend you are. Remind me never to get rescued by you.”

  Sid sat up, rubbing his ribs where Hank had hit him. It was hard to speak at first. “Thanks... I guess. There’s just you? How’d you get in?”

  “I joined the gang last night. It was easy. All I had to do was find the right bar, then stand around yakkin’ about how many guys I’d bumped off and how I was lookin’ for some action. They ate it up, signed me on, an’ here I am. Oh hey, I found this downstairs...” He tossed Sid’s wallet onto the cot. It was completely empty, except for Sid’s membership card from the Authors’ Guild. Sid couldn’t blame them for leaving that; he’d never found a use for the thing either.

  Sid smirked a little. “They aren’t the brightest bunch, are they? But there’s a lot of them: I count at least nine American goons, plus the spooks. I think the spooks are smarter. And they have flamethrowers.”

  “Well, we got a plan. But we can’t move ’til tomorrow: the Professor and Cap’n Doyle got a long night ahead of ’em. Can you hold out that long?”

  “That tall guy — the boss — just told me I had twenty-four hours.” There was a moment of silence from both men.

  “Say,” said Sid, “I think I know how you might even the numbers a bit, take some of the goons out of commission. There’s a store of drugs somewhere in the house. They’ve knocked us out a couple of times; probably trying to keep us off balance, get us to talk. If you could find those and get ’em to Rosie, she’d know what to do...”

  “I think I catch yer drift,” said Hank.

  Hank entered Rosie’s room a few minutes later — unlike Sid, she knew a rescue when she saw one and gave Hank a big kiss — then he went back to memorizing the layout of the house. He never saw the tall man, who had sequestered himself on the top floor with his two Shadow guards, sending out reports via radio and awaiting instructions.

  The drugs were in the kitchen. Someone had scrawled a misspelled note: “Not for pesonal use.” Hank had no trouble sneaking a few potent-looking bottles and a syringe to Rosie, who scrutinized the labels and gave him another kiss on the cheek in exchange. By late evening, they were ready. Only one more task remained, and then all they could do was to wait for the others to arrive.

  * * *

  At ten o’clock the next morning, Hank sidled up to another member of the gang, a mean-looking Chinese kid with an ugly scar on his cheek who was trying to cook noodles in a fireplace.

  “Psst,” he said quietly, “Boss wants you. Secret mission.” The kid glared, but followed Hank obediently up to the second floor, to Rosie’s room. As soon as he was through the door Hank caught him with a terrific blow from behind, then Rosie jabbed him with the needle. He was out instantly. Hank hefted the kid over his shoulder and carried him silently to his bunk. Rosie picked up the kid’s gun and placed it next to the one she and Hank had taken from her own guard fifteen minutes earlier.

  A quarter of an hour later, Hank returned with a stubble-faced, cigar-chewing fellow dressed in a purple pinstripe suit like Al Capone’s flamboyant cousin. He got the same treatment. By noon, all but two of the hired goons were fast asleep in their bunks. Instead of fifteen opponents, there were now eight. But five were members of the Shadow Order, and the tall man was still a walking question mark. On the other hand, Hank, Sid and Rosie now possessed a veritable armory, with eight guns between them.

  “Y’know,” Rosie said, as Hank left her room for the last time, “This nutty idea of yours just might work.”

  * * *

  A short time later, Sid stood at the window of his cell, surveying the scene. It was a bright, cool day. The usual colors were on the water: gray tugs, black steamships, green freighters, and one bright splash of red from a fireboat meandering up the bay. A small airplane buzzed lazily in the distance. Below, he could see one of the two spooks on perpetual patrol in front of the house. A third was somewhere out back. The man below Sid looked bored.

  The man was bored. For six months, he and his Shadow Order associates had been given the run of this house, while the Master slowly developed his west coast organization. The Master’s agents — they called themselves Chenggi — would come and go every few weeks, making their covert “business” deals in San Francisco while leaving the
Shadow men alone to dabble in drug-running or other small crimes as they saw fit.

  But this preening Chenggi on the third floor was something else entirely. He had come swooping in like he owned the place, with his own pair of Shadow attendants, and kicked the three soldiers out to guard duty — guard duty! — a chore they could hire American dogs to do! It was demeaning. And pointless: who would attack an old house on some scrub of an island in broad daylight? Who even knew they were here?

  The soldier gazed angrily across the bay, letting his eye drift up to the silver airplane buzzing over San Francisco’s waterfront. If only he had an airplane, he would fly back to China, give up this Shadow warrior nonsense and become a decent, hardworking thug for some syndicate with a real boss, not some mythical, unseen demigod on a mountaintop. True, the Master had given them those amazing flamethrowers, and the soldier had heard rumors of dragons and even greater wonders. But something about the whole operation smelled wrong. If the rumors were true, the Master wasn’t even Chinese. I bet he’s just another one of these self-important Chenggi, thought the soldier; what a laugh that would be.

  The plane was closer now, arcing gracefully in the direction of the island. But the soldier had stopped watching; down on the water, the fireboat had started up its hoses in a decorative display of splashing water. It was a jolly, cheerful sight, and the Shadow man smiled as he watched the bright red boat meander about. The soldier was still looking down when the sound of the plane grew suddenly louder. He glanced back up and saw the silver form flying directly over his head, a slender arm emerging from the pilot’s window, something falling...

  The front porch erupted in flames.

  * * *

  As Hank had said, Professor Armbruster and Captain Doyle had endured a long night. While the Captain dealt with a mechanical matter down by the waterfront, the Professor sat in the Baroness’s hotel room solving a problem of chemistry: how to turn ordinary, everyday substances gathered from hardware shops and drugstores into an effective airborne bomb. He produced four of them, and the Baroness had just unleashed one. Now she was circling the island and preparing her second strike.

  Going back to the plane that morning had been an enormous risk. She could see that the enemy had found it sometime in the preceding days: the hold had been searched and emptied. But they had not bothered to sabotage the craft. Nor, apparently, had they maintained their watch on the airport. Sid and Rosie were probably taking up most of their attention now; the Baroness had been lucky once again. But as the plane lifted over the bay, she wondered how many days — or hours — remained until her luck ran out for good.

  As the Baroness grabbed the second bomb and swung back into view of the house, she could see three of the black-clad spooks outside, scrambling in confusion. But one had recovered his wits enough to point an ornately decorated orb in her direction. He crouched, aimed, and prepared to shoot her down.

  He fired, and the sky filled with white flame and dark smoke.

  * * *

  In the minutes before the attack, Sid and Rosie had one gunman each in their rooms, awaiting the arrival of the tall man and his entourage of Shadow soldiers. Sid had prepared his response to the ultimatum. He cocked a grin at his attendant goon, a squat dullard with a battered hat and a large bulge poking out from under his ill-fitting jacket. The guard did not smile back.

  At the sound of the door opening, Sid pulled himself away from the window, pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose and faced his enemy, standing tall.

  “Great sir,” he began, trying his best to imitate the man’s own strange manner of speech. “I have considered your offer and I accept. It is a good deal. A simple matter of business, as you say. You shall have the stone, and in exchange you will let us all go free, yes?”

  The tall Oriental man’s mouth widened slightly: it might have been a smile.

  “I told the Master you would take the deal. Why fight when you may walk away? We want only the singing stone; you mean nothing to us.” He turned, told the little guard to round up a crew for the gang’s boat, and then barked instructions in Chinese to his two escorts. Sid and the Chenggi were left alone in the room.

  The man turned back to Sid. “Now, business. You will deliver the stone in six hours or we kill the girl. Bring it to—” But the sentence died on his lips as the thunderous throb of airplane engines filled the room, followed by the sounds of an explosion and cries of alarm from the front of the house.

  The Chenggi man whirled, just in time to see Hank Martin’s huge fist fly into his face. The man sprawled across the floor, knocked cold.

  Footsteps echoed up the corridor, along with the squat gunman’s voice: “Boss, somethin’s wrong! Everybody’s asleep!” That’s all he managed to say before Hank had him laid out beside his employer.

  Down the hall, Rosie was in a staring contest with the thug she’d dubbed “Fish Face.” When the tumult began, the man looked at the door, then at Rosie, then back at the door before finally deciding to run to the window. He had just reached it when he felt the cold, hard jab of a pistol barrel in his back, and heard the click of the hammer. He froze instinctively.

  “Hiya, Fish Face,” said Rosie, right in his ear. “Don’t move, I wanna show ya somethin’.” She reached up and grabbed the base of the goon’s neck, adjusted her fingers just so and squeezed down hard. Fish Face dropped like a stone, his arms numb, his shoulders and neck burning as if aflame. He could not turn his head in either direction without experiencing a searing stab of agony.

  “See? I told ya,” she said lightly. “Don’t ever mess with a nurse.” Rosie patted Fish Face on the head, grabbed his gun and skipped out of the room.

  Chapter XIV

  EARTH, AIR, FIRE, WATER

  —

  THE STREAM OF WHITE fire hit the Professor’s second bomb squarely, setting off a bizarre electrochemical reaction that momentarily blinded the men on the ground. But the plane was not hit, and the Baroness swung back around the island for a third approach. As she returned from the far side, she saw that the situation had changed. The front of the house remained in flames, but there were now five black-suited men outside instead of three. Two were still shaking off their temporary blindness, but the others had taken up crossfire positions. There was no time to get out of range; at least one blast was sure to hit her.

  The Shadow Order soldiers leveled their weapons at the plane, ready to strike from three angles, when all at once the man farthest forward was lifted from the ground and flew sideways into a tree. A moment later his cohorts joined him, tossed bodily through the air in confusion as the third bomb landed and shook the house.

  One hundred feet below this extraordinary scene, Captain Doyle stood atop the bright red fireboat, aiming its uppermost water cannon at the bluff above.

  “That’s three... four... Ha! Got ’em all!” he shouted, as he picked off the last of the five black figures, sweeping a large jet of water across the bluff as if firing a machine gun.

  “Good show, my dear Captain!” replied Professor Armbruster. The Professor swung the boat’s wheel to the left for a fresh angle of approach. “Now douse those flames; we want to confound the enemy, not kill our friends!” Armbruster’s homemade bombs had been perhaps too effective; the entire façade of the house was now engulfed in flames.

  Captain Doyle’s overnight modifications to the fireboat’s pumps had been equally successful. They threw a phenomenal surge of water from San Francisco Bay all the way up to the house, quickly bringing the fire under control. Doyle spotted a radio antenna on the house’s roof, and toppled it for good measure. He still had a twinge of regret at hijacking Fire Department property like this, but on the other hand, the owners would find the boat in much improved condition when they got it back. And he was fighting a fire, so in a way, stealing it had been a public service.

  The Shadow Order was in complete disarray: those still on their feet were running for a boat docked at the foot of the island, abandoning their injured or unconscio
us comrades at the house, not stopping even to pick up their exotic weapons.

  “I see them!” shouted Doyle. “They’ve slipped out through the rear of the house.” Doyle watched as Hank emerged from behind the building, followed closely by Sid and Rosie, all apparently unharmed. The three friends scrambled down the hill leading away from the house, in the opposite direction from the soldiers, and slipped back out of Doyle’s view.

  Doyle now turned his attention to the enemy boat, which was cutting clear of the island with two black-suited men on board. As Armbruster swung the stolen fireboat in pursuit, the fourth and final bomb rained down just shy of the enemy stern, capsizing the vessel. Doyle followed up with a cannonade of water that wrecked the boat’s motor, leaving the Shadow soldiers swimming back to the island in utter defeat.

  * * *

  Up on the bluff, Hank, Sid and Rosie thrashed wildly through tall brush, making for the vast gray bulk of the Bay Bridge at top speed. The trio dropped over a steel railing onto the deck of the bridge, and in response came a loud growl from the dark tunnel on their left, like the warning snarl of some mighty, feral beast. Sid was alarmed for a moment, fearing some new menace, but let out a cheer as he saw the streamlined blue nose of the Delahaye emerge into the daylight. Sonny Hampton waved from behind the wheel, urging them on even faster, and a minute later the three friends fell, tired and sweating, into the auto’s expensive leather seats. The tires squealed and Sonny was off, even before the passenger doors had closed.

  They were clear of the house, but the adventure wasn’t over yet. Down on the water, Professor Armbruster looked back to see a small armada of boats converging on his position: a pair of Coast Guard cutters swung around the south end of the island, setting out to investigate the frantic radio reports that their island was under aerial assault. And from San Francisco came several police craft, in hot pursuit of the stolen fireboat. The gap was closing fast: Doyle’s work had focused on the boat’s water pumps, not its engine. The sound of distant sirens also began to drift down from above as police from Oakland drove onto the Bay Bridge, following a tip that someone had slipped around a security fence and driven onto the unfinished span.