Читать книгу The Terror in the Navy: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 5

Table of Contents

The man in New York did not replace the telephone on its stand after hanging up. He held the instrument close to his chest and thought deeply.

It was night, and the man was in bed.

He reached over and touched a tiny jack-switch concealed under the telephone stand. This apparently connected the telephone with a private wire. The man jiggled the hook.

“Yeah, chief?” said a sleepy voice.

“We have received what is sometimes called a bad break,” said the man in bed.

“Yeah?”

“You have the file of information which we gathered about Doc Savage?”

“Yeah,” said the sleepy voice, not so sleepy now. “But I still don’t see why we went to the trouble of finding out so much about Doc Savage.”

“Doc Savage is logically the one man we have most to fear,” reminded the man in bed. “In short, we learned everything we could about him because he might menace our plans. I thought it would be a wise move. Now I know.”

“You mean that Doc Savage has an inkling of what we’re going to do?”

“Lieutenant Toy sent a radiogram to Doc Savage before he—ah—before Toy met a mysterious fate, as the newspapers will put it. That is the bad break I mentioned. We’ve got to stop that message before it reaches Doc Savage.”

“Was it a radiogram?”

“Yes.”

“Leave it to me!” said the man on the other end of the wire, and listened until he heard his chief hang up. Then the fellow put the receiver on the hook and began to remove his pajamas.

He was a long, snaky man with an almost animal growth of black hair on his chest and up and down his back. It is a popular theory that eyes have to be small to be mean. This man’s eyes were big—and mean.

When he had dressed, he glanced about the close and rather untidy room, took two nasty-looking flat pistols in holsters off a wall hook, fastened them under his coat, and walked to the door. He passed into another close and untidy room, in which six men lay on cots.

One of the men on the cots opened an eye and said, “What a conscience you must have! Don’t it ever let you sleep?”

“Get dressed!” The snaky, hairy man shook the others. “Get dressed, you Davids—we’re gonna sally forth after a Goliath!”

Half an hour later, they were tying shoestrings and ties and yawning, as their car moved through downtown Manhattan. The snaky, hairy man was talking, explaining. When he finished, one of the others addressed him by what seemed to be his nickname.

“Fuzzy,” said the man, “this Doc Savage is big-time poison.”

“Keep your shirt on,” said the hairy “Fuzzy.” “We’ll do this so Savage will never know a thing about it.”

The driver stopped the sedan, and they all looked out. They saw a giant office building which hurled itself upward until it was lost against the cloudy night sky.

Fuzzy pointed a limber, hairy finger almost straight up into the night.

“Top floor,” he said. “Eighty-six stories up. Sort of an eagle’s nest.”

They got out and went into the giant building—it was admittedly the most imposing in New York City. An elevator let them out two flights below Doc Savage’s floor, and they climbed stairs, so as not to be seen.

On the last flight of steps, Fuzzy waved the others back.

“Kind of erase yourselves,” he directed. “Let me look the ground over.”

Fuzzy then ran up the final flight of stairs. There was a door which seemed to be made of bronze. Letters on it were so unobtrusive as to be almost difficult to locate.

Clark Savage, Jr.

There was no knob on the door, no handle; it seemed to be just a slab of bronze. Fuzzy happened to know it was a slab of armor steel, bronze-plated.

Repeated pressings of the button beside the door got no answer, and Fuzzy went back to his men.

“Coast clear,” he grinned. “The bronze guy ain’t in.”

“How we gonna get into that place?” asked the pessimist. “It’s more burglar-proof than a bank vault.”

Fuzzy held out a hand to one of the men. “Gimme that package I gave you to carry.”

The packet which the man handed over was the size of a pocket match box. Fuzzy tapped it with a finger.

“This holds a piece of radioactive metal,” he said. “Watch what happens.”

He walked toward the door of Doc Savage’s office. The door opened mysteriously.

“Hah!” said Fuzzy, pleased. “What’d I tell you? There’s a sensitive electroscope hidden beside the door. When a piece of radioactive metal is brought near it, the electroscope causes a relay to close and that makes a machine open the door.”

He walked through the door.

“You guys wait outside,” he directed.

The room in which hirsute, serpentine Fuzzy found himself seemed to be a reception room. Principal items of furniture were an enormous safe, a number of comfortable-appearing chairs, and a rather remarkable-looking inlaid table.

Fuzzy ignored everything in the room, and went into a library which held thousands of tomes.

Libraries are traditionally gloomy places, but this one was not. The windows along one side were so large that the wall seemed almost solidly of glass.

Fuzzy looked at the windows and grinned. It was by watching through these that a great deal had been learned about Doc Savage. The method employed had been ingenious, and Fuzzy was particularly proud of it because he had thought it up himself.

He picked up a telephone and called the office of the concern handling radio messages.

He asked, “Has a message come for Doc Savage, signed by Lieutenant Bowen Toy? This is Doc Savage’s headquarters. ... No? Will you telephone the message as soon as it arrives? Do not send it by messenger. Telephone it. Thank you.”

Fuzzy hung up and gave every sign of being ready to wait as long as necessary. He wandered over to the window.

In the night sky, some distance away, blazed an electric sign advertising a little-known variety of beer. In fact, the variety of beer did not even exist!

The sign was held in the air by a balloon, which was in turn moored to a barge in the Hudson River.

Fuzzy waved both arms. The electric sign on the balloon promptly blinked. Fuzzy grinned. His men, with extremely powerful astronomical telescopes trained on Doc Savage’s office, had recognized their straw boss.

Some time elapsed before the telephone rang. Fuzzy sprang to the receiver, lifted it, said, “Doc Savage’s headquarters!”

“This is the radio office with a message,” the voice said.

The voice read Lieutenant Bowen Toy’s message.

“Thank you,” said Fuzzy. “Do not bother to send a copy by mail, or by messenger. It won’t be necessary.”

“Very well,” replied the radio office clerk. “We will not.”

Fuzzy hung up, went out, let the trick outer door close behind him, and shoved his chest out triumphantly at his men.

“That fixes it!” he said. “Doc Savage will never know a message was sent to him!”

They walked toward the stairs.

A young woman came up the stairs. She pointed on old-fashioned six-shooter at them—a six-shooter with a barrel so big that any man present could have put his little finger in the barrel with ease.

“They gave me this thing to cut my teeth on!” the girl said, jiggling the six-shooter in her hand.

The men goggled.

The young woman would have gotten a monopoly of male attention anywhere. She was tall and had every curve necessary to make an exquisitely moulded feminine form. Her features were what the old literary masters would have called finely chiseled, with an outdoor skin.

One remarkable quality was the unusual bronze hue of her hair and the almost matching color of her eyes. Or perhaps her eyes tended more to golden.

Her frock and accessories—it was a silver and white evening creation—were the ultra in fashion.

Fuzzy gulped, “Who’re you?”

“Patricia Savage,” the woman said. “Oh, you’ve never heard of me, probably. Doc Savage is my cousin. I have a beauty establishment uptown where I charge outrageous prices, and the customers like it.”

Fuzzy swallowed. The mouth of the six-shooter seemed incredibly big.

“Uh—well—uh,” he mumbled.

“You gentlemen look like a bunch of crooks to me,” Pat said brightly. “And why were you pussy-footing around? While you think up some lies to answer, you can back into Doc’s office, with your hands in the air.”

A man appeared silently on the stairs behind Pat Savage. He threw a gun which he held. It hit the back of Pat’s head.

Fuzzy, the others, lunged forward. Pat was dazed. She tried to get her gun up. Fuzzy kicked it out of her hand.

Another man drew an automatic pistol.

“Let her have it?” he wanted to know.

“And get Doc Savage on our trail for murder!” snorted Fuzzy. “Don’t be like that! Here! We’ll do this!”

He picked up Pat’s big six-shooter, measured her, and hit her over the temple. She fell. Fuzzy dropped her big six-gun beside her.

“Amscray, as Cæsar would say!” he ordered.

They went down some flights of stairs, entered an elevator, and, looking very innocent, rode down to the street.

As they got into their car on the darkened street, the man who had thrown the gun reminded every one, “It was lucky I saw this dame and hid me out while she passed me up!”

“Don’t worry, you’ll get your bouquets!” said Fuzzy. The men did not drive away fast enough to attract attention from any cops who might be around.