THE TUNNEL
Long Tom Roberts had studied the red van intently through binoculars, before dropping down close to it. He had searched particularly for possible loopholes, but had seen none.
Too late, he learned they had been covered by clever covers—caps disguised as the heads of rivets that held the van body together.
A procession of lead slugs, gnashing angrily at his left wing, was his first warning of disaster. The leaden stream made a quick march for the cockpit.
It was the hammer of these slugs which Doc Savage had heard over the radio.
Long Tom was not flying a gyro, but another of Doc Savage’s ships—a rather nondescript-looking biplane. Doc used this type of craft when not wishing to attract attention by being seen in his distinctively-designed speed ship, or the gyro.
The crate heaved over on a wing tip as Long Tom trod the rudder and cornered the stick. It got away from the hungry lead.
He jerked a lever in the cockpit. On the cowl, hatches rolled back; a disappearing machine gun jumped into view. This was synchronized to fire through the prop.
Out of the van top, more bullets climbed. Every third or fourth slug seemed to be a tracer. The metallic threads waved like a deadly, windblown gray procession of raindrops.
Long Tom’s gun fired from Bowden controls on the stick. He ringed the van in his sight; his hand clamped the Bowden trip. The gun on the cowl shook its iron back, and smoked.
Like cobweb spun by an invisible spider, Long Tom’s tracers ran down through the late afternoon sunlight to the van. Against the steel van body, however, they only made splotches of chemical fire, or spattered into shapeless blobs.
Long Tom felt his ship jar under him. The stick waggled in his hand as bullets lashed at the control services. He jockeyed the stick madly to evade the fire.
His plane had never been intended for combat. It handled sluggishly. A procession of slugs beat against the engine. Their sound was like rapid hammer blows.
The engine stopped.
Long Tom booted the ship into a flat glide, then looked overside. What he saw made him grind his teeth.
The only field suitable for a landing was one near the road. To plant the plane anywhere else would mean an almost certain crackup, for all around were trees, rocks and abrupt hills.
Long Tom slowed the plane by fish-tailing. He three-pointed perfectly on the clearing. While the ship was still rolling, he dived out and ran for the nearest bush.
He had hardly taken a dozen leaps when a machine gun stuttered behind him. He saw hazy tracer lines near his head. Dust gushed on a hillside in front of him. A dozen feet to the left he saw a shallow ditch. Long Tom dived into it.
The machine gun stilled its noisy chatter.
“Take the guy alive if you can!” shouted a man.
Take him alive they did. The ditch was not deep enough to permit Long Tom to crawl away. It chanced that he was at the moment unarmed.
Four men ran up. They were unsavory fellows, men who had followed the path of crime so long that it was reflected in their voices and actions.
“Lamp the guy!” snorted one of the quartet. “He looks like a case for the hospital!”
This statement about Long Tom was caused by the electrical wizard’s unhealthy appearance. Long Tom was slender and only fairly set up. He was very pale, as if no sunlight had reached him for a long time. His appearance, however, was deceptive. Few men were healthier than he.
The four men pointed machine guns at Long Tom. These weapons were an airplane type, firing full-sized cartridges. Recoil was taken care of by an elaborate bracing device, which each man wore harnessed about his middle.
Long Tom arose from the ditch. He was searched.
“Who are you?” asked one of the gang.
The electrical wizard ignored the query. A man lunged forward and gave him a painful kick.
“Maybe that’ll give you a voice!” the fellow growled.
The last word was still rattling his vocal cords when Long Tom’s fist collided with the point of his jaw. The blow had the sound of a loud handclap. The man’s eyes rolled, showing the whites. He sagged to hands and knees and began shaking his head foolishly.
“I ought to snuff your wick!” one of the other men snarled, and jutted his rapid-firer at Long Tom.
“Keep your shirt on!” growled a red-necked thug. “We’ll drag him along. The boss may want to juice him for information. The punk had some reason for taggin’ us with the sky lizzie.”
“I’m in favor of giving him a lead pasting, Hack,” grumbled the blood-thirsty one.
“Dummy up!” said Hack. “The big shot may not want him rubbed.”
They placed stout handcuffs on Long Tom’s wrists and his ankles. Then hurried him over to the big red van.
A man stood beside the machine, dancing about in his impatience. He was tall and waspish, and had freckles and dark hair and a mustache.
Doc’s story, coming to Long Tom over the radio, had included a description of this man. The fellow was the murderer of Carl MacBride, the electrical wizard realized.
“Why didn’t you smear him?” he yelled, indicating Long Tom.
“We thought the big greezer might want to put the screws on him, Caldwell,” said the florid-necked Hack.
Caldwell—he had evidently not troubled to give Carl MacBride a fake name on the plane—considered this.
“No good! Too risky. Croak ’im!”
The men lifted submachine guns. For an instant Long Tom stared death in the face.
“Wait!” Caldwell rapped. “We’ll plant ’im in the truck. That’s better.”
The van cab was commodious. It accommodated Long Tom and the four men who had seized him. Caldwell clambered into the rear.
The engine started; the van swung into motion. It traveled swiftly, taking tremendous runs at the hills.
* * * *
The electrical wizard listened. The monster, whatever it was, which had broken through the floor of Griswold Rock’s house, must be in the rear of the van. He hoped to ascertain, from some sound, what the thing might be.
He heard nothing in the nature of a clew.
Hunched down in the seat, Long Tom surveyed the heavens. Twice, he saw planes. They were too distant for him to tell whether they were Doc’s ships.
The setting of the sun came about abruptly, due to the rising of a bank of clouds in the west simultaneous with the descent of the blazing orb.
“I don’t think we’re doin’ the brainy thing!” said one of the men in the cab.
“Nobody asked you!” growled Hack.
“Maybe not. But I don’t get the idea of finishin’ off the thing in the truck. After all the trouble we’ve gone to——”
“Sh-h-h!” hissed Hack. “It might hear you. This one ain’t workin’ so good. You know that. So the boss has decided to get rid of it. We’ll bring up others for the big push on New York. Damn it! We’ll have to get another headquarters.”
“I hope that explosion got the bronze guy!” growled another.
“Dummy up!” said Hack, scowling at Long Tom. “This guy’s got his ears unpinned.”
“O. K., O. K.,” the other muttered. “What are we gonna do after we get rid of our load?”
“Light out for the Trapper Lake country,” replied red-necked Hack.
Night clamped down blackly. Long Tom kept accurate check on their progress, and their whereabouts. They followed the State highway for a time, then turned off. He could see the highway markers.
Long Tom made no attempt at a break. His captors kept eyes upon him all the time they were on the ferry. Hands remained in gun-bulged pockets. His slightest move would have meant sudden death.
The van rolled on—for hours, it seemed. The terrain became hilly. At almost every brook they stopped and added water to the radiator.
At last, the van halted. There was a stirring in the rear. Long Tom peered through the window.
Caldwell appeared from the after regions of the van. Ahead of him he propelled the steel-haired girl, Jean Morris.
Her wrists were handcuffed at her sides; adhesive tape crisscrossed her lips. She could only glare rage with her metallic eyes and make angry noises through her nostrils.
The pair were illuminated faintly by the backglow of the van’s headlights.
Caldwell stared at Long Tom. He spat disgustedly.
“Don’t let this guy get away!” he warned. “He’s probably been listening to you guys talk, and knows plenty.”
“We ain’t been talkin’,” lied the red-necked Hack.
Long Tom kept his pale face expressionless. In his listening, he had garnered one really important morsel of information. This gang seemed to have a headquarters in the vicinity of Trapper Lake, Michigan.
“How do we dish it out to him?” asked Hack.
“Just tie him in the van cab,” said Caldwell. “Two of you birds come along with me. The other two are enough to do the job.”
“Sure,” said Hack. “I know the spot. I was raised in this country. The place is right ahead. It’ll work swell.”
“It’d better,” Caldwell said grimly.
The van rolled ahead, leaving Caldwell, the steel-haired girl, and the two thugs behind. The ponderous vehicle covered perhaps two hundred yards, then angled into a disused side road.
The headlights picked out a tunnellike hole which slanted down into the side of a hill. Some time in the past, an attempt at mining had been made here. The tunnel was rather large—big enough for the van to be driven in.
The mumble of the engine became terrific thunder as the van entered the bore.
For the first time, Long Tom detected the vibration of something of great size moving in the van rear. The monster was apparently disturbed by the roar of the engine.
“I hope the thing don’t try to get out!” Hack muttered.
“The van will hold it,” grunted the other.
Long Tom tested the handcuff links uneasily. He was stronger than nine out of ten run-of-the-street men. His muscles, however, were unequal to snapping the stout steel links.
“Gettin’ uneasy, eh?” jeered Hack.
The fellow drew another set of handcuffs from his pocket. He grasped Long Tom’s leg.
The electrical wizard kicked and pitched about violently.
The driver cursed. His attention was distracted; the van crashed into the tunnel wall and stopped.
Both men seized Long Tom. Clubbing him with pistols, straining, grunting, they managed to link his ankle manacles to the steering-post.
“Let’s go!” snapped Hack.
They piled out of the cab.
Long Tom heard scraping sounds, then saw the reddish flicker of match-light. He leaned out. Although his feet were secured, he could see the two men. They were applying a match to a fuse which led into a large steel tool locker slung under the van body.
The fuse hissed, and spat sparks. The two men whirled and ran.
* * * *
The van motor had killed itself when the machine collided with the tunnel side, and inside the tunnel there was comparative silence, except for the noise of the running men. Somehow, to Long Tom, it was as if the receding steps were in actuality the departure of his own life-ghost.
He wrenched madly, fighting the handcuff links. The steel circlets scraped skin off his wrists and ankles, cut flesh, and rasped tendons. And they held him.
Back in the van interior, the monster stirred uneasily.
On the faint chance that he might arouse the thing and cause it to break free, and in some manner accomplish the saving of himself, Long Tom began to yell.
“Bust out!” he shrilled. “They’re trying to kill us!”
There was a violent stir, a terrific impact inside the van; then great blows.
The thing realized something sinister was under way. Either it had understood Long Tom or had sensed the danger.
Long Tom peered out of the cab, stretching as far as the handcuff links would permit. The sparking fire had crawled along the fuse until it was lost to view inside the box.
The monster’s struggles caused the van body to rock slightly on the springs.
Long Tom widened his mouth to yell again. The shout, however, never came. Instead, he sealed his lips and listened.
He had caught a sound, a sound so weird as to defy description. A fantastic trilling note—it might have been the plaintive cry of some exotic feathered thing lost in the umbrageous depths of the ancient mine.
It was the sound of Doc Savage.
“Doc!” Long Tom yelled.
The giant man of bronze came plunging down the declivitous mine tunnel, flashlight in hand. He moved the beam occasionally to avoid larger lumps of rock which had fallen from the roof of the abandoned diggings.
The bronze man wrenched at the underslung tool locker into which the fuse ran. It was of steel, heavily constructed like the rest of the van. Opening it was work for a key, or for a steel-cutting torch.
Inside the van the monster struggled futilely.
Doc Savage leaped to the rear. A huge padlock secured the doors, too strong to break! He whipped to the cab and grasped the stout handcuff chain which linked Long Tom to the steering column.
Long Tom had battled that chain futilely. His best efforts had not even elongated the links. The chain parted under Doc’s fingers as if it were cheap, soldered watch linkage.
Long Tom was yanked out of the cab and borne toward the tunnel mouth at a dizzy speed.
Doc Savage’s flashlight funneled white, and in the incandescence, stony outthrusts of the tunnel walls cast weird, squirming shadows.
Here and there lay lumps of coal which had disintegrated from long exposure to the air. Grayish shale floored the tunnel, this still bearing depressions left upon the removal of tramway ties. Through these, the van tracks rutted deeply.
Long Tom gnawed his lips. He was holding his breath, unaware of doing so. Would the explosion come before they got out?
It did not. Doc Savage dived through the entrance, and veered to the right. In his haste he made some noise. Rocks rolled; bushes whipped.
Drawn by these sounds, from a spot at least a hundred yards distant, a powerful hand-searchlight protruded a white tongue. Doc and Long Tom were embedded in the glare. From behind the light, angry yells volleyed.
“Hell—it’s the bronze guy!” Hack howled.
Two gun muzzles, lipping flame, became like winking red eyes above the white-hot mouth of the hand-searchlight. The bullets passed Doc and Long Tom so closely that the ugly sound was not the conventional zing, but more like the snap of glass rods.
From the tunnel mouth came a great, whooping roar. The big hole spat shale, dust, and lumps of old coal.
It might have been the mouth of a gigantic cannon.