The Land of Terror ds-2

by Kenneth Robeson

  "Of course you can join us," Doc replied generously. "But perhaps I had better warn you that being with us will not be exactly safe. We seem to draw death and violence like honey draws bees. You might be more secure from danger if you went into hiding somewhere."

  Bittman’s large jaw set firmly. "I am not a coward who runs to a hiding place! I wish to assist you in my feeble way. Jerome Coffern was a friend of mine! I beg you to permit me to do my bit to bring the man who murdered him to justice! That is all I ask. Will you not grant it?"

  This speech moved Doc Savage. Bittman had voiced Doc’s own motives in pursuing the devilish Kar.

  "You shall become one of us," Doc declared.

  He knew, however, that in accepting Bittman’s presence, he was taking on added responsibilities. Bittman’s life would have to be guarded.

  * * *

  JOHNNY, the elongated, gaunt geologist and archaeologist, now appeared. He came in bearing a sizable box. It seemed quite heavy.

  "The rock specimens from Thunder Island," he announced. "There’s a lot of them. Jerome Coffern’s made a complete collection."

  Doc Savage gave the specimens a swift inspection. But he did not put them under a microscope or start analyzing them.

  "No time right now to examine them intensively," he explained. "That can come later."

  He locked the specimens in a safe which stood in the outer office. This safe was rather large. In height, it came above Doc’s shoulder.

  Taking fresh clothing from the concealed locker, Doc put it on.

  He got from the laboratory a large sheet of cardboard such as artists use to make drawings upon. A cabinet yielded pencils.

  "If you’ll just lend me some assistance," he requested Oliver Wording Bittman, "I am going to make a sketch of Gabe Yuder, as you described him. I want you to watch me and point out any differences between my sketch and Yuder’s features."

  Doc’s steady, sensitive bronze fingers moved with a rapidity that defied the eye. On the cardboard took form, as though by magic, the features of a man.

  "A little fuller in the cheeks," said Bittman, "and a smaller jaw."

  The work came to an end.

  "That is a remarkable likeness!" said Bittman.

  "This is for the police," Doc told him. "We will have them put out an alarm for Gabe Yuder. If we get him — we will — "

  "We will have Kar!" Bittman said fiercely.

  Calling a messenger, Doc dispatched the drawing to the nearest police station.

  Soon after, the voices of Renny and Ham were heard in the corridor.

  "Poor Monk!" Renny’s voice rambled. "We found nothing but a bootblack who saw Monk forced into a car. That means those devils took him for a ride. He’s done for!"

  There was the trace of a sob in Ham’s reply.

  "I’m afraid you’re right, Renny. It’s a terrible thing. Monk was one of the finest men who ever lived. I actually loved Monk!"

  Monk heard this. Devilment danced in his little, starry eyes. He looked like he was going to explode with mirth.

  For Ham, the waspish, quick-thinking lawyer, had never before expressed such sweet sentiments. He was wont to call Monk the "missing link" and other things even less complimentary. To hear the sharp-tongued Ham talk, one would think nothing would give him more pleasure than to stick his sword cane in Monk’s anthropoid form.

  This peeve of Ham’s dated back to the Great War, to the incident which had given Ham his nickname. As a joke, Ham had taught Monk some French words which were highly insulting, telling Monk they were the proper things to flatter a Frenchman with. Monk had addressed the words to a French general, and that worthy promptly had Monk clapped in the guardhouse for several days.

  But within the week after Monk’s release, Ham was hailed upon a charge of stealing hams. Somebody had planted the evidence. Ham had never been able to prove it was Monk who framed him, and it still irked him to think of it. He blamed Monk for the nickname of Ham, which he didn’t particularly care for.

  * * *

  HAM and Renny entered. They saw Monk.

  "Haw, haw, haw!" Monk let out a tornado of laughter. "So you love me, eh?"

  Ham carefully wiped from his face the first flash of joy at seeing Monk.

  "I’d love to cut your hairy throat!" he snapped angrily.

  Doc advised Ham and Renny what had happened to Monk. As he finished, the telephone rang. Long Tom’s voice came over the wire.

  "I’ve traced the phone wire from that tenth house," he advised. "And also the one from the Jolly Roger."

  "We’ll be right up!" Doc declared.

  Monk, Renny, Ham and Johnny were plunging through the door as Doc hung up. They had buckled on bulletproof vests. They had seized the small, deadly machine guns which were Doc’s invention.

  Oliver Wording Bittman seemed dazed by the suddenness with which these men went into action. Swallowing his astonishment, he dived in their wake.

  Doc summoned an elevator.

  "Better take two taxicabs!" he advised when they were on the street. "If Kar should turn that Smoke of Eternity on one carload, it wouldn’t get us all."

  "Pleasant thought!" Monk grinned.

  The two cabs wheeled up Fifth Avenue. Doc rode the runningboard of the foremost machine. He habitually did this, for his very presence was a charm which magically gave him right of way through all traffic. New York City’s traffic policemen had been instructed by their chiefs to give every assistance to this remarkable man of bronze.

  Too, Doc preferred to be outside where his keen eyes missed nothing. For this reason also, Doc’s personal cars were always roadsters or convertibles, the tops of which could be lowered.

  The trip uptown turned out to be uneventful.

  Long Tom, thin and sallow and looking like an invalid, but in reality as tough as any of Doc’s entourage, stood at a corner on Riverside Drive. His two boxes of apparatus were at his feet.

  Doc had his cab pull up beside Long Tom.

  "Where’d the wires go?" he asked.

  Long Tom made a wry face. "I’m afraid we’re out of luck. The wires led from that tenth house, along the rear of other houses and went under Riverside Drive through a culvert. From there, they led underground down to that pirate ship, the Jolly Roger. They went aboard through a hawser, down to the keel, then into the water to — "

  "To the tanklike submersible!" Doc said disgustedly. "So the wires in the room and on the boat were one circuit!"

  "That’s it," Long Tom agreed.

  * * *

  DOC SAVAGE now shook his bronze head. "This is strange, Long Tom! When Kar talked to Monk, the fellow would hardly have been reckless enough to have done so from that room. He knew I had discovered the place."

  "The secret phone circuit didn’t branch off anywhere," Long Tom said with certainty. He pointed at his instruments. "My thingamajig would have shown it if the wires were tapped anywhere."

  Doc’s golden eyes ranged along the landward side of Riverside Drive. Apartment houses fronting the Drive were new and tall, although those on the side streets were not nearly so opulent. The Drive apartments commanded a view of the Hudson. They brought neat rentals.

  Doc’s low, strange, trilling sound abruptly came from his lips. It was hardly audible now. Probably no one but Long Tom heard it. And Long Tom grinned. He knew this sound presaged some remarkable feat of Doc’s, for it came at the bronze man’s moments of greatest concentration. The sound with the weird, melodious quality of some weird jungle bird always precursed a master stroke.

  "Let us do some investigating, brothers," Doc said softly.

  He led them into the tenth house from the corner, which held in an upstairs room the end of the secret phone line. But Doc did not go upstairs. He guided the group out through a rear door.

  Here was a long, narrow court. The place was untidy. Rickety old wooden fences marked off backyards hardly larger than good-sized bedspreads. Rusty clotheslines draped like old cobwebs.

  The court resemb
led little else than a brick-walled pit. At the Riverside Drive end, the rear wall of a great apartment house towered many stories. At the opposite end was a lesser building. And on either side, the shabby sterns of old tenements buttressed each other solidly.

  Evening was near. The hulking buildings threw shadows into the pit of a court.

  Doc moved along the court, toward Riverside Drive. His sharp eyes soon located the secret phone wires. These followed the chinks between bricks for the most part. They had been coated with a paint the exact color of the brickwork.

  They reached the wall of the immensely larger building which fronted Riverside Drive. Turning here, the thin, hardly visible strands traced along the rear of the structure.

  At one point, a loop abruptly dangled out — a very small loop.

  Doc pointed at this. "Notice anything peculiar about that?"

  Long Tom stared.

  "The insulation is gone at that point!" he ejaculated. "The naked copper of the wires shows!"

  "Exactly. Note also that there are many windows directly above the spot."

  "You mean Kar tapped them there and — "

  "By reaching down and clipping the ends of other wires to them," Doc replied. "That means he did it from the window immediately above! Those loops are too small to be fished for from a greater distance."

  To Renny and Johnny, Doc breathed a command. "You two stay here. Watch that window. Shoot at the slightest hostile move.

  "The rest of you come with me!"

  He led them swiftly around to the front of the apartment building which overlooked Riverside Drive.

  * * *

  THEY shoved past a bewildered doorman. The foyer was decorated elaborately. Deep carpet swathed the floor. It seemed quite a high-class establishment.

  Doc described to the doorman the location of the apartment they suspected.

  "Who lives there?" he asked.

  "No one, yet," replied the doorman. "It was rented some time ago, but the tenant has not yet moved in."

  Doc, Monk, Ham, Long Tom and Oliver Wording Bittman hurried up the stairs. Luxurious carpet made their footsteps noiseless. They reached the suspicious apartment.

  Halting the others with an uplifted arm, some yards from the door, Doc advanced alone. He did not want them near enough that the sound of their breathing would interfere with his listening. For Doc’s ears were keen enough that he could detect the faintest respiration noises of men within the apartment.

  He listened. Lowering close to the threshold, where there gaped a small crack, he used his nostrils. The olfactory senses of the average man are underdeveloped through insufficient use. He has no need for a super-keen organ of smell. Indeed, city life is more comfortable if the multitude of odors present go unnoticed. But Doc Savage, through unremitting, scientific exercise, had developed an olfactory sense far beyond the common.

  Doc’s ears and nostrils told him no one occupied the apartment. He tried the door. Locked! He exerted what for his great muscles was moderate pressure. The door swished inward, lock torn out.

  Not only was the place untenanted, but it held no furniture. The bare, varnished floor glistened faintly in the light of approaching evening.

  Doc glided to the window. He waved at Renny and Johnny in the brick-sided pit of a courtyard below. His gesture advised them to stay where they were.

  Back to the door, Doc whipped. His movements seemed effortless for all their speed.

  Although there was no sign of a wire by which the secret phone line had been tapped, Doc was not satisfied. His trained brain told him where to look.

  He tugged at the corridor carpet immediately outside the door. It came up readily.

  The ends of two fine wires were revealed.

  "They used a splice long enough to reach from these through the window!" Doc told the others.

  Wrenching up the carpet, he followed the wires down the corridor.

  Oliver Wording Bittman was white-faced. The flesh on his big jaw looked hard as rock. But he was not trembling.

  "I am unarmed," he said jerkily. "C-can one of you loan me a gun? One of those c-compact machine guns! I want to do my part to wipe out those fiends!"

  Doc reached a quick decision. It was his duty to take care of Bittman’s life, a repayment for the man’s service to his father.

  "We neglected to bring along an extra gun," he said. "If you wish to help, you might hurry down and call the police."

  Bittman smiled. "I see through your ruse to get me out of harm’s way. But, of course, I will call the officers."

  He retreated down the wide stairway.

  Doc continued to follow the wire. It terminated at a door of a front apartment.

  Hardly had he determined that fact when a storm of bullets crashed through the door.

  * * *

  ONLY Doc’s instinct for caution, which had urged him to keep clear of the door, saved his life.

  "They’re inside!" Monk howled. "Now for a rat killin’!"

  Monk’s compact machine gun coughed a blatting roar of sound. He literally cut the door off its hinges. It fell inward.

  More lead came out of the apartment of the besieged. The slugs hit nobody. But they gouged plaster off the walls. The plaster dust became a blinding cloud. A machine gun equipped with a silencer was doing most of the shooting from within the apartment.

  "That sounds like Kar’s typewriter!" Monk bellowed. "He’s in there!"

  Doc abruptly backed from the door.

  "You handle this end!" he directed.

  He glided down the stairs to the foyer.

  Oliver Wording Bittman stood in a telephone booth, speaking rapidly into the instrument.

  "Yes! Send a riot squad!" he was saying.

  Doc’s bronze form slid outside. Excitement had gripped the street. A cop was coming from the corner, tweedling vigorously on his whistle. Upon the thoroughfare, the shots within the apartment building sounded like clamoring thunder.

  To the apartment window, Doc’s golden eyes flashed. What they saw was about the most disappointing thing possible.

  A rope made of knotted bedclothing dangled from the open window! This makeshift cord hung to within ten feet of the walk.

  Doc’s gaze raked right and left. They ranged far up and down Riverside Drive. Nowhere did they detect trace of any one who might have escaped down that rope.

  Running lightly and leaping, Doc grasped the rope end. Powerful fingers clamped an ornamental fresco and helped the bedclothing support his weight. He went up rapidly.

  An ugly face poked out of the window. A pipestem arm brought an automatic pistol into view. But before the weapon had a chance to discharge, an incredible vise of bronze fingers clamped the killer’s scrawny neck. They jerked.

  The man came out of the window with a snap. Screeching, he fell to his death far out in the street.

  An instant later, Monk, Long Tom and Ham charged the room. Their compact guns stuttered briefly. Two of Kar’s men collapsed. They had been among those assembled by Squint. One fell and leaked crimson over the muffled machine gun which had been used by Kar at the pirate ship, Jolly Roger.

  Of Kar, there was no sign.

  "He got away — down the rope of bedclothing," Ham declared regretfully. "Although it is possible he was never in the room!"

  A brief examination showed the secret phone line terminated in the apartment of death. Glancing from the window, Doc also ascertained another thing.

  "You can see the Jolly Rogerfrom here," he informed Monk. "That accounts for Kar’s appearance. He saw us capture those men of his from the underwater tank."

  * * *

  DOC returned with his friends to his skyscraper office downtown.

  The police received from Doc Savage an account of what was happening. Doc, however, withheld all reference to the plan to steal the gold destined for the Chicago banks.

  This puzzled Ham.

  "We’ll stop that robbery ourselves," Doc explained. "Kar will use his infernal Smoke of Eternity.
The police have no defense against it. Many of them would be killed."

  "Well, won’t Kar use it on us, too?" Monk snorted.

  "If he applies it to you, I want to be watching!" the sharp-tongued Ham told Monk. "I’ll bet the cloud of smoke it turns you into will have a spike tail, horns and pitchfork!"

  "Maybe. But it won’t make a noise like this!" And Monk gave a boisterous imitation of a pig grunting.

  Ham reddened and shut up. All Monk had to do to get Ham’s goat was make some reference to a porker. Monk often made those piggy, grunting noises just to see Ham swell up with rage.

  Long Tom suddenly emitted a howl of surprise. Wandering about the office nervously, he had chanced to look behind the safe.

  A large hole gaped there! The solid steel had simply been wiped away!

  Doc hurriedly opened the safe.

  The rock specimens from Thunder Island were gone!

  "Kar, or one of his men, opened a hole in the rear of the safe with that Smoke of Eternity, and got the specimens!" Doc declared.

  "But how did he know they were there?" Monk muttered.

  It was Oliver Wording Bittman who suggested an answer. He indicated the spire of a skyscraper some blocks distant. From an observation tower which topped this, it was possible to see into Doc’s office.

  "They must have had a man watching from there!" he offered.

  Doc drew the shades, saying, "It won’t happen again."

  "Doc, that shows you were on the right trail with those specimens," Johnny, the geologist, spoke up excitedly. He adjusted his glasses which had the magnifying lens on the left side. "Otherwise, Kar would not have taken so much trouble to take them away."

  Night had fallen. In the great buildings surrounding Doc’s high perch, only a few glowing freckles marked lighted windows.

  The police commissioner of the City of New York paid Doc Savage’s office a call in person to express his appreciation for Doc’s services thus far in wiping out the fiendish Kar and his gang. Shortly after this, Doc received a telegram, also expressing thanks, from the New Jersey police official in whose jurisdiction the murder of Jerome Coffern had occurred.