Читать книгу Pirate of the Pacific: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 7

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Practically every wharf in New York City was watched by newspaper reporters that night. The return of a submarine which had ventured under the polar ice was big news. The fact that those aboard the submarine wished no publicity made the story bigger. Each paper wanted to be the first to carry it.

Forty or so men had gone into the arctic—only six were coming back. A whale of a yarn! City editors swore over telephones at reporters. Photographers dashed about, answering false alarms turned in by news hawks who had mistaken rowboats and mud scows for the sub. Everybody lost a lot of sleep.

In a remote corner of the harbor, a rusty old tramp steamer swung at anchor. The captain of the ancient hulk, who was also the owner, happened to be an acquaintance of Doc Savage.

Shortly after midnight, this captain turned all of his crew out of their bunks. They fell to and made the submarine Helldiver fast alongside the tramp steamer. No one from land noted this incident.

A launch now sped ashore. It bore a small fortune in gold and diamonds—a load of the treasure Doc had brought back from the arctic. An armored car and a dozen guards with drawn guns met the launch and received the wealth. This also escaped the notice of the reporters.

The launch made more trips—until the whole treasure was on its way to an all-night bank.

Doc and his five men came ashore with the last load. Newspaper reporters would discover the submarine tied alongside the tramp steamer in the morning, but the tramp captain would profess mystification as to how it got there.

The whole arctic submarine expedition business was destined to be a mystery the news hawks would never solve.

A taxicab took Doc and his five men uptown. Doc rode outside, barehead, standing on the running board. He habitually did that when danger threatened. From this position, Doc’s weird golden eyes missed very little—a sniper had hardly a chance of getting a shot at them before he was discovered.

The cab halted before the most impressive building in the city. This skyscraper stabbed upward, a great white thorn of brick and steel, nearly a hundred stories.

Few people were on the sidewalk at this hour. But those who were, stopped and openly stared, such a striking figure did Doc Savage present. The big bronze man was a sensation wherever he went.

Doc and his five men rode an express elevator to the eighty-sixth floor of the skyscraper. Here Doc had his New York headquarters—a richly furnished office, one of the most complete libraries of technical and scientific tomes in existence, and an elaborately equipped chemical and electrical laboratory.

Doc had a second headquarters, fitted with another library and laboratory which were the most complete in existence. This, however, was at a spot he called his “Fortress of Solitude.” No one knew its whereabouts. To this retreat Doc went at frequent intervals for the periods of intense study to which he devoted himself. At such times he vanished as completely as though he had dropped from the earth. No one could get in touch with him.

It was these periodic disappearances, as much as anything else, which had given Doc repute as a man of mystery.

Monk planted his furry bulk on a costly inlaid table in the office and began rolling himself a cigarette.

“Did you make arrangements by radio about the treasure?” he asked Doc. “I mean—about what the money is to be used for.”

“That’s all taken care of,” the bronze man assured him.

They knew what that meant. The money was to be spent enlarging a weird institution which Doc maintained in up-state New York—a place where Doc sent all the criminals he captured. There, the lawbreakers underwent an amazing treatment in which their brains were operated upon and all memory of their past wiped out. Then they received training which turned them into useful citizens.

This unusual institution was Doc’s own idea. He never sent a criminal to prison. They all went to the institution, to be operated upon by specialists whom Doc had trained. They were turned loose entirely reformed men—they didn’t know they had ever been crooks.

“It’s a little stuffy in here,” complained Ham.

He crossed over and threw up the window. He stood there for a moment, staring at the impressive panorama of New York City spread out below. Then he turned away.

A moment later, a slate-colored pigeon fluttered up and landed on the window ledge. Doc and his men paid no particular heed. Pigeons were plentiful around the skyscrapers.

“What’s our next move?” Ham wanted to know.

“You fellows scatter and attend to such of your private business as needs it,” Doc suggested. “We’ve been gone several weeks, and no telling what we’re headed for now. It may last longer.”

“I got a secretary who takes care of my business,” homely Monk grinned. “Better let me go with you, Doc.”

Monk was proud of his secretary, maintaining she was the prettiest in New York.

“Nothing doing,” said Doc. “There’s no need of any army of us interviewing Juan Mindoro.”

The slate-hued pigeon on the window ledge had not moved.

“You know where to find Juan Mindoro?” questioned Monk.

“His wireless message said he had gone into hiding at the home of the man who was with him when I saw him last,” Doc replied. “I last met Juan Mindoro in Mantilla, the capital city of the Luzon Union. The man with him at the time was Scott S. Osborn, who is a sugar importer doing a large business in the Luzon Union trade. Osborn has a home near the north edge of the city. I’ll go there.”

Johnny had been squinting owlishly through his glasses which had the thick left lens—studying the pigeon. He took off his spectacles. As a matter of fact, he saw very well without them.

“That’s what I call a sleepy pigeon!” he grunted. “It hasn’t moved.”

Doc glanced at the pigeon—his gaze became fixed.

Suddenly, a weird sound permeated the interior of the office; a trilling, mellow, subdued sound. It might have been the dulcet note of some exotic jungle bird, or the sylvan song of wind filtering through a leafless forest.

The strange trilling had the weird quality of seeming to come from everywhere within the office.

Electric tension seized Doc’s five men. They knew what that sound meant. Danger!

For the sound was part of Doc—a small, unconscious thing that he did in moments of mental stress, or when he had made some astounding discovery, or when death threatened.

The pigeon abruptly flipped backward off the window sill.

Doc reached the window with flashing speed. The bird was some yards away, flying sluggishly. Doc watched until it was lost in the moonlight.

“That pigeon was where every word we spoke could reach it!” he said dryly.

“What if it was?” Monk snorted. “Pigeons can’t tell what they hear.”

“That one could.”

“Huh?”

“It had a small microphone attached to its tail feathers.”

Monk gaped after the departing pigeon. “For the love of Mike! But the thing flew away as though no wires were attached!”

“The wires were very small, about like silk threads,” Doc declared. “They had to be small, or we would have seen them. A sharp jerk broke them, and left the bird free.”

Leaning out of the window, Doc glanced up the sheer side of the skyscraper, then down. Only darkened windows met his gaze.

He examined the window ledge, noting bits of grayish powder. In a crack, he discovered a particle of cracked corn.

“The bird has been fed on the ledge!” he declared. “Either the office door was forced, or the grain was lowered from above. That was how it was taught to fly here.”

He spun from the window, crossed the office. The speed with which his big bronze form moved was startling. He entered the corridor, glided down it to the end elevator. At his touch upon a secret button, the elevator door leafed back.

So quickly had Doc moved that his five men were still in the office. They piled out, big-fisted Renny in the lead, and joined Doc in the lift.

The cage sank them. It was a special installation, used only by Doc Savage, and geared at terrific speed. Such was the pace of descent that their feet were off the floor for the first sixty stories. Monk, Johnny, and Long Tom were wrenched to their knees by the shock of stopping.

“What I mean, that thing brings you down!” Monk grinned, getting up from all fours.

Monk had nearly worn out the high-speed elevator the first week after Doc had it installed, riding it up and down for the wallop he got out of it.

A cop was twiddling his nightstick out in front.

“See any one leave this neighborhood in a hurry within the last few minutes?” Doc demanded.

“No, sor,” said the cop. “Sure, an’ the only lads I’ve seen come out av a buildin’ around here was two slant-eyed fellers. ’Twas in no hurry they were.”

“Where’d they go?”

“Took a taxi.”

Doc eyed his five friends.

“They must have been the men who sent us the pigeon,” he told them. “They knew we’d discovered their trick, and fled. We’d be wasting time to hunt them.”

Doc whirled back into the skyscraper.

His five men milled uncertainly, then trailed Doc. But the speed elevator was already gone. They rode a slower lift up to the eighty-sixth floor aerie, only to discover Doc had gotten whatever he had wanted from his laboratory, and had departed.

The home of Scott S. Osborn, sugar importer, was a castlelike stone building perched atop a low hill in a wooded section of Pelham, one of the northern residential suburbs of New York City. The medieval castle architecture was carried out in a water-filled stone moat which surrounded the walls. A replica of a drawbridge, large enough for heavy automobiles to be driven across, spanned the moat.

Doc Savage arrived alone, driving a roadster which had the top entirely removed. The car was a reserved gray in color, but expensive, sixteen-cylindered. On a straight road, the machine could better a hundred and fifty an hour.

Doc alighted, crossed the drawbridge, and rang the bell.

No answer. An electric fixture cast pale light on the drawbridge.

He thumbed the bell again, received no response. The vast castle of a building was quiet as a tomb. The gatelike door was locked.

Doc returned to his roadster, got a black box somewhat larger than a good-sized suitcase, and carried it into the shrubbery near the drawbridge. On one end, the mysterious box had a cameralike lens. He pointed this at the drawbridge entrance, then silently plucked enough branches from near-by bushes to cover the box, hiding it thoroughly.

The moon shadows in the shrubbery swallowed his big bronze form. He made practically no sound, no stirring of leaves.

He reappeared again near one wall of the castle. The masonry was rough. He climbed to the top as easily as an ordinary man would walk a flat surface, although only the narrowest of ledges offered purchase to his tempered fingers.

For a moment, he poised at the top and reconnoitered. The same deathly silence gripped the mansion.

On either side were long, two-story buildings, their outer walls formed by the castle walls. In the center was a tiled court, a fountain, shrubbery, flowers. None of the windows were lighted.

Directly below Doc was a sheer drop of perhaps twenty-five feet. He sprang down—and so tremendously powerful were his leg muscles that the great leap hardly jarred him.

Moving swiftly, Doc tried a door. Locked. He sought another, then the rest, in quick succession.

Every door facing the court was secured.

Doc glided noiselessly into the shadows of the fountain. His fingers touched a box of an affair strapped under his coat. This was a bit greater in size than a cigar box. A switch on it clicked at his touch.

Doc plucked back his left coat sleeve. The object thus revealed looked at first glance like an enormous wrist watch. Closer scrutiny would have revealed a startling fact about the crystal of this watch.

It mirrored a very pale moving picture!

The scene was the drawbridge outside the castlelike dwelling of Scott S. Osborn, friend of Juan Mindoro. A shadowy figure stood on the drawbridge. His arms windmilled, gesturing orders to other vague forms.

The castle was being surrounded!

The oversize edition of a wrist watch on Doc’s wrist, together with the box inside his coat, was a television receiver of marvelous compactness. It was tuned to the wave-length of a transmitter in the black box he had hidden under the brush outside the drawbridge.

Doc continued to watch the apparatus on his wrist. More slant-eyed men joined the one on the drawbridge. They carried revolvers, swords, knives. Two had deadly submachine guns.

One fitted a key in the lock of the gatelike door.

The faint click of the lock operating reached Doc’s sensitive ears.

They must know he was inside. Probably they had seen him atop the wall. They were coming in, the murderous horde of them.