Читать книгу Quest of Qui: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 6

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It was a rocky region, but there were stretches free of boulders. The snow was deep, and obviously covered with a hard crust. The wind—it was a fair breeze—was picking the loose flakes up and carrying them along in small, detached clouds. Johnny looked at the plane thermometer and saw that it was very close to zero—cold for this time of year, even this far north, since down in New York, it was early summer.

Johnny landed by the simple expedient of cranking the streamlined landing gear up. He absent-mindedly cranked it partially down before he thought—and sat the plane down on its belly. The craft was designed for that, but the nose had to be kept up throughout to protect the propeller. Johnny had not landed on snow for a long time, and he miscalculated the distance the plane would slide, with the result that he almost, but not quite, coasted into a nest of boulders.

The minute the plane stopped, the crust on the snow collapsed, letting the ship sink down to its wings, and Johnny got out muttering big-worded imprecations. He foresaw some trouble in leaving the place.

Had he known exactly how much trouble he was going to have, the knowledge might conceivably have turned his hair white.

Johnny walked to the wounded man.

One peculiarity about the man’s face struck Johnny distinctly. It was a full, crude face equipped with a horse’s mouth, small bird eyes, and a nose of no consequence, but that was not what stood out distinctly. Many men have ugly faces. Not so many, however have their forehead, nose and eye area weather-beaten until the skin resembles the top of an old shoe, while the rest of their cheeks, jowls and neck remain the pale-blue color of skim milk.

Johnny absently decided this man had worn a very heavy beard for a long time, and had only recently shaved it off. Then Johnny began his examination.

The man had collapsed, and with good reason, for he had been shot three times. No, four. Johnny found the fourth through the man’s foot, where he had not bled much. The other bullets were in his body, and they had bled plenty of scarlet blood.

The bullet victim’s parka of fur, bearskin pants and big, pliable high-top moccasins looked extremely new, and Johnny, curious, twisted back the hood until he could see the collar band. Nothing there. He looked at the parka skirt. No Eskimo squaw had made these garments. They bore the label of a high-class sporting goods house on New York’s Madison Avenue.

There was nothing else on the wounded man’s person to give the slightest indication of who he was or what had befallen him.

Johnny ran back to the plane, saw it had sunken even deeper in the snow, expressed his opinion of that happening with several glossologic gems, and got a first-aid kit out of it.

The bullet victim was talking quite calmly when Johnny skittered across the snow crust to him.

“The secret of Qui is twelve hundred years old, Kettler,” he said. “You got the breaks when you found the place the first time, but you’ll never find it again without that golden-haired girl.”

In a rational sounding, measured voice, the man talked to the one named Kettler, and he looked straight at bony Johnny as he talked, as if he had mistaken Johnny for the person, Kettler. But it was not that. The man was delirious, out of his head. He would talk for a while, then he would collapse. Johnny knew how it went.

“Kettler, I tell you I didn’t let her go deliberately,” the man said earnestly. “She banged me on the head with a rock. Look, you can see where she hit me.”

He did not point, but Johnny looked, then blinked, for there was a fearsome bruise on the man’s forehead. But the wounded man was still talking.

“She ran away,” the man said. “I don’t know where she went. I think she went north, back toward—Qui. She ain’t normal, that dame. But what else can you expect from—Qui?”

The man stopped and breathed a little deeper than usual, and the result was a gurgling explosion that shot a crimson spray through his teeth and over the surrounding snow. From the number of blood spots frozen in the snow, that must have happened before. It was more than a minute before he went on.

“Kettler, you can’t find Qui again without the golden-haired dame.”

He had said that before.

“I couldn’t help her scramming, Kettler,” he said. “Don’t shoot me.”

He said that much too calmly.

“Damn you, Kettler,” he said. “You’ve shot me. You left me here to croak. I hope you never get a smell of Qui again.”

It was like listening to a story from fully conscious lips. But it was horrible, because of the dead quality of the tone. The man was dying, but dying so slowly that he might go on thus for hours, for days if he got proper treatment. He might not die, even.

“You won’t find Qui, Kettler,” said the man. “Don’t like that, do you? Too bad, ain’t it? Qui will go on like it is for maybe another twelve hundred years. Sure it will, when you don’t get back to do your killing. Damn your killing, Kettler. I didn’t like that part of the scheme.”

Then, so suddenly that it surprised Johnny a little, the wounded man’s mumbling became unintelligible. A gout of scarlet had worked up in the fellow’s throat, and it bubbled there, making the words inarticulate.

Johnny turned him over, and as one would drain out a drowning man, cleared the victim’s bronchial passages so more words could come.

“Newspapers full of stuff about that Viking ship,” the man said. “Lot of guessing—nowhere near truth—never connect it with Qui——”

Johnny again tried to clear his throat, but it was no go, for the internal wounds must have opened. With bandages and opiate, Johnny went to work.

It was cold. He had some trouble keeping snow from blowing into the wounds while he bandaged them. The wind in the rocks sounded like violins playing far away.

Out of the fiddling of the wind in the rocks, the moan of the airplane motor came so gradually that it was quite loud before Johnny noticed it.

It was a low-wing monoplane, fitted with pontoons for landing on water, and the pontoons in turn equipped with skilike runners. The ship had two engines, fitted with shutter cowls, and their exhausts must be carried through some cabin-heating attachment, judging by their hissing quality. An all-metal ship, Johnny concluded.

The plane was coming down the wind, and Johnny, staring toward it, was bothered by snow which the wind swept into his eyes. He stepped backward to get in the lee of a boulder only somewhat smaller than a suburban garage, where there was some shelter. It chanced thus that he saw two grooves in the snow, deep grooves, and more than a dozen feet apart. There was one point where they had not filled with snow, although they must have been made hours ago. Johnny looked at them closely.

“I’ll be superamalgamated,” he murmured.

The grooves had been made by the landing gear of the plane above, or one amazingly like it. The particular marks of the ski runners attached under the pontoons could be picked out.

The other plane moaned overhead. Its color was the aluminum alloy of its natural metal, and it looked new. Men in the cabin—they numbered several—were all looking down.

The men all wore masks.

The instant he saw the masks, Johnny sprinted for his own plane. He had suddenly become in the greatest of hurries. He was in a jam. He did not need the twang of a bullet off a near-by rock—a sound he now heard—to tell him there was trouble.

Johnny reached his plane, which had broken through the soft crust. Its nose was almost against boulders. He grabbed the tail and tried to turn the ship around by main strength. No go. He only broke through the crust and floundered.

The aluminum ship had spun away, but now it came streaking back again, and men were cocked out of its windows, using high-powered rifles. Johnny could see their shoulders jerk as the rifles recoiled. He heard characteristic little patting noises of bullets into the snow about him.

Johnny crawled under the tail of his own ship, burrowing deep into the snow, got under the cabin, scrambled up, and was inside. Bullets hitting the cabin sounded like firecrackers exploding. The cabin was encased in a membrane of armor alloy which, due to the metallurgical genius of Doc Savage, was light and proof against ordinary missiles.

The aluminum plane went over with a gusty whoop, so low that its air disturbance rocked Johnny’s plane a little, and sucked up a vortex of loose snow. Bullets came down like rain.

Johnny jacked the self-starters and got his engine going. His propeller was not only adjustable pitch, but could be reversed. He reversed it, not sure that it would do any good, but not wanting to be pulled forward into the rocks where the prop would club itself to pieces.

The aluminum ship was coming back. Johnny produced a weapon which resembled an oversized automatic pistol, with a big drum of a magazine. This was a supermachine pistol perfected by Doc Savage, and its chief wonder was not its incredible rapidity of fire, but the variety of bullets which it could discharge.

Johnny searched through a case which held ammunition drums, all neatly designated with numerals. He was hunting one which held bullets charged with a particular chemical that vaporized, even in air as cold as this, and gave off a gas that, when drawn into a carburetor, rendered the mixture unexplosive. The chemical was another of Doc Savage’s gems.

Who-o-o-m! The plane jumped a full twenty feet in the air. Its back broke in the middle. It fell in two parts. Smoke and snow made a cloud all about it.

Johnny was out of the plane. He was not sure how that had happened. Too much flame, smoke, noise. He was in snow up to his neck. Outflung arms supported him on the crust. The smoke fumes stung his nostrils.

“Dynamite!” he mumbled.

The other plane boomed off. Wind pulled the smoke away. Parts of the plane, its contents, were scattered about. The other ship stood on a wingtip, came about in a vertical bank, and started back.

Johnny hoisted himself out of the snow. Handfuls of snow jumped up around him. Bullets! He ran. He saw a metal case to the left. It had spilled out of the ruined plane. He recognized it, whipped to it, gathered it up with both arms, and sprinted.

A big rock lured him. Snow was encrusted near it. He went through, under. But the stones sheltered him. Plane, guns, bullets, made a hell of a noise. Then the plane went on.

Johnny burrowed deeper. Snow among the boulders, he discovered, ranged from six to fifteen feet in depth. It was soft, cold enough to be dry.

The metal box which Johnny carried was heavy. He used it to ram through the snow. That pleased him. He could make fair progress.

He heard the plane come back, picked out the ratty sounds which rifle slugs made running around from rock to rock in the snow drifts. Then came a great roar and the earth shimmied, as more dynamite was dumped out of the other plane.

Johnny kept going. Conditions were perfect for what he was doing. He encountered a rock, and worked around that. His flying suit was full of snow. So were his ears, nostrils. He stopped finally and listened.

The plane motor had dropped in volume of noise. At first, he thought it was far away. Then it blasted out. A grating and rasping, quite distinct, came through the snow. The ship had landed.

They would have trouble finding him, Johnny decided grimly. Why were they trying to kill him? Because he had found the wounded man, obviously. But what was behind their action? What were they up to? And could he, Johnny, finally escape? He thought so. But just in case, there was a precaution he could take.

Johnny worked himself from side to side in the snow, and made a small cave. There was not much light, but he did not need much. He opened the box. Some snow fell in. He brushed it out carefully.

The box held a radio outfit which transmitted and received on an extremely short-wave length. Despite its compactness, the apparatus had a range, under favorable conditions, of a good many hundreds of miles.

Johnny turned a switch. A generator, operated by a very sturdy, light storage battery, made some little noise. He fumbled with the microphone and head-set.

He set the dials to the wave length employed by Doc Savage and his men in their communications.

Then he heard about the most unpleasant sound possible under the circumstances. Dogs barking! The other men had landed their plane. They had unloaded dogs, probably sled dogs.

Johnny let out a long word expressive of disgust. The dogs would smell him out like a partridge under the snow.