AFTER MONK YELLED
The skeleton-thin man barked out in agony as Doc Savage slammed him into the sedan. He floundered down on the floorboards at the feet of the girl and the Khan Nadir Shar, and lay there, stunned.
“Two blocks north, one west,” Doc rapped. “Drive there and wait for me!”
The girl, comprehending instantly, scrambled out of the rear door and into the front one, inserting her slender form behind the wheel.
The Khan began, “But who—what the——”
“That was Monk, one of my men,” said the bronze man. “Watch this ham actor here. He knows more than he has told us, if his manner is any indication.”
The Khan removed an automatic from under his jubbah. It was a thin-snouted foreign weapon which fired a bullet with the penetration force of some rifles. He put the snout against the temple of the bony prisoner.
“Be careful,” Doc warned.
“Your warning is not necessary,” the Khan said, his English still unnaturally perfect. “We well know the hideous power of this Mystic Mullah.”
It was doubtful if the bronze man heard the last of that, for he had faded into the fog and wet darkness. He went directly to the entrance of the warehouse, but did not touch the door, which was closed. He paused there, entirely immobile.
He was using his ears, organs which had been developed by years of scientific treatment and exercise until they had a sensitivity that was far beyond the normal. There were sounds inside, low and uneven, as if something were rubbing against something else with short strokes.
The bronze man did not touch the door, or go closer. He moved away. Those sounds were made by men waiting on the other side of the panel, men who were trying not to breathe loudly, and as a result, made occasional strained gasps.
The bronze man searched in the darkness, found a ledge on the face of the building where mortar had weathered out, and lifted himself up. A projecting window ledge furnished his next grip. He used a handkerchief to wipe off the damp stone. The city grime, soaked with the fog and rain, made a paste only slightly less slick than grease.
He tried the window. Glass was gone from it. Inside, there were boards planked over.
Down in the street, the sedan departed, making very little noise.
The bronze giant set himself on the window ledge and struck a sudden, violent blow. The impact seemed more than human knuckles could withstand. He struck again instantly. The plank split, caved, and he grasped the edges and wrenched it out; then, although the adjacent boards were nearly three quarters of an inch thick, he tore them aside as if they had been shingles.
The crash of wood, the scream of nails drawing, echoed through the old structure. There were other sounds, too. Men were running on the stairs. Voices were shouting.
The language they spoke was the gobbling, clucking dialect—weird to the unaccustomed ear—common to certain remote areas of central Asia.
Then lights burst into the room, white-hot, stingings rods of brilliance from powerful flashlights. A man babbled out in the strange language. Then powder roar slammed and plaster, loosened by a bullet, ran off the wall in a gray stream.
* * * *
The bullet missed Doc Savage. He was far to the left when it struck.
The room was enormous. Humped here and there over the floor were foundations for heavy machinery. A few still supported bulky machines. They were like a forest, and excellent shelter.
The bronze man got down behind the machine foundations. Instead of continuing to the left, he went straight ahead. The attackers were cackling profanely in their dialect. A moment later, Doc Savage saw one of them. A switching flash beam outlined him distinctly.
The man was wolfishly lean, with very black hair and eyes, the latter with the merest of slants, and his skin was the color of a gunnysack. He was clad immaculately in clothing which would not draw a second glance on New York streets.
He carried a thin-nosed automatic, similar to the one produced by the Khan Nadir Shar. The weapon could drive a slug through half a dozen human bodies.
Doc saw others of the attacking party a moment later; and they were similar in appearance to the first. Central Asiatics, all of them, men from a land where life was cheap.
Alert, deadly, they prowled the big room, spreading out, twisting the heads of their flashlights to cause them to throw wider beams. Some fell back to watch the stairway and the door.
It was toward these latter that Doc Savage directed his attention. Monk and Ham were here somewhere. Finding them was the bronze man’s goal. And it would have to be accomplished by some means other than brute force, or an open gun fight, for Doc carried no firearms.
He never carried a gun. He had a specific reason for this, maintaining that a man who carried a firearm came to depend upon it; and once it was taken from him, that man would tend to feel completely helpless.
The bronze man touched rusty lengths of iron. They were bolts, heavy things, piled together. He raised up with one of them and threw it. His target was not one of the men at the door, but one on the far side of the large room. He did not want them to think he was near the door. The bolt struck the victim between thigh and knee and he screamed and fell down.
Instantly, there was a rush for the spot. They thought the man must have been struck at close range, not realizing the ability of the bronze man’s great muscles to throw far and accurately.
From below, downstairs and to the rear, a voice bellowed out. It was Monk again.
“Watch out, Doc!” he howled. “They made me yell that first time to draw you inside! I didn’t know that!”
The bronze man knew it now. His discovery of the waiting men behind the door downstairs, had told him it was a trap. He scuttled swiftly, taking advantage of the uproar at the other end of the room.
A dark-skinned man sighted him, let out a yell. The cry choked off suddenly as a heavy bolt glanced from the man’s head to the wall. Man and bolt hit the floor together.
Gunshots whoom-whoomed! in the cavernous room. Lead clanged on machinery or slapped the walls fiercely. But Doc Savage was already at the stairs. He went down swiftly, reached the bottom, took a step forward—and stopped.
A light gushed. It was not a bright, blinding light, but a mellow one, designed not to blind. It came from the head of a flashlight, which someone had wrapped in a single thickness of handkerchief.
The light was brilliant enough to reveal four slant-eyed brown faces, their very inscrutability something terrible. Each of the men held one of the spike-nosed guns. But to these had been fitted ram’s-horn magazines, and the gears in the mechanism were no doubt filed so that the guns were continuously automatic in operation, capable of emptying thirty or so shots in a single blast.
“Wallah!” one rasped in his native tongue. “It would be good to take this bronze devil alive, that we might show the Mystic Mullah we are sons of the mountain fox.”
Doc Savage stood very still. The next word would decide his fate.
“It is a good thought,” agreed another of the four.
* * * *
The four men came close. They held their doctored automatics at waist level, gripping them with both hands. This showed they knew what they were doing. Only an inexperienced man will try to fire an automatic altered so that it discharges as long as the trigger is held back, for the recoil will kick such a weapon up, possibly blowing out the brains of an unwary individual.
The gun snouts pressed hard against the bronze man. Hands reached out, ripped his pockets open, spilling the contents, and slapped places where weapons might be concealed.
“His muscles are as hard as the rock walls of Tanan,” murmured one of the party in his strange language. “Watch him closely. He must have terrible strength.”
Doc Savage asked, “Why do you seek my life?”
The gun muzzles jiggled against his side as the men started. They were surprised, for the bronze giant had spoken their mother language as perfectly as they themselves.
“It was not an idly wagging tongue that said this man knows all things,” one of the four muttered. “Even in Asia, few men speak our tongue as well as he does.”
“It is said that the man who faces danger quietly lives to face it again,” said another. “He is too calm. Watch him closely.”
Men began coming down the stairs. They cackled in their excitement. Those who had been hurt were helped by others.
The man who had given orders upstairs faced Doc Savage and showed black teeth. He did not speak at once, but slowly prepared a chew of betel nut, the ingredients for which he drew from a pocket of his neat business suit. The chewing of betel had made his teeth black. He watched closely; and discovering no trace of fear on the bronze giant’s features, seemed disgusted.
“A wise man knows when to be frightened,” he said.
“There can be fear without shaking and wailing,” Doc Savage said in the tongue of Tanan.
“You are a strange one,” said the man in English. “I can understand why the Mystic Mullah should come from the other side of the world to dispose of you before you heard the story of the Khan Shar and the white woman, Joan Lyndell.”
“I am curious about this Mystic Mullah,” the bronze man stated quietly. “Who is he?”
“He was dead and sat for a thousand years in one spot, thinking,” the other said matter of factly. “He knows all things and can do all things. After he had meditated, he detached his spirit from himself and sent it to earth, to Tanan, to enlighten men and lead them to their proper destiny.”
“You,” Doc Savage told him, “sound like a coolie who has partaken too freely of the product of the poppy.”
The other smiled fiercely. “The Mystic Mullah is greater than the Genghis Khan, greater even than Allah, or Buddha. Beside him, Confucius was as the child scholar who puzzles over his first books. These things, you will learn.”
“Here in America, they have a word for such talk,” said the bronze man.
“What is it?”
“Hokum!” answered the bronze man.
All of the men were down from upstairs now. They had gathered in a close ring. None of them had faces of morons. Rather, their features were those of intelligent men. But they were also the faces of killers, men who took life for a purpose they considered right and just.
“Watch!” rapped the bronze man.
He lifted both hands above his head, began to knot and unknot the fingers in a slow, fantastic fashion.
“Stop it!” grated the chief of the brown-skinned men. His eyes were on Doc’s hands. So were the eyes of his companions. They could not understand it.
Nor did Doc expect them to understand. The strange movements of his hands were simply to draw their attention from his feet as he stepped on one heel with the toe of the other foot and strained. The heel of his shoe was dislodged so easily that it was evident it was equipped with some type of hinge. A yellowish powder spilled out, making a small mound on the floor.
Doc stepped back, turned half around, put his hands over his face and bent double.
There was a terrific, eye-hurting white light. A plop of sound accompanied it, not unlike the setting off of a photographer’s flash light gun. The light burned for perhaps a full two seconds, dense white smoke pouring from the mound of powder. The light went out.
Only then did guns begin going off.
* * * *
It was too late. Doc Savage had lunged with the first burst of light. He knew what would happen. The chemical mixture was infinitely stronger than magnesium; it made a light so strong that it produced almost complete blindness for a few moments. The stuff was ignited by a small pellet of another chemical compound which burst into flame shortly after it was exposed to the air.
The brown men milled about, cursing in their dialect. Fully twenty shots were fired wildly. Two men fell, knocked down by the bullets of their fellows.
Doc Savage did not linger, or try to make any capture. The blindness would not last long enough for that. It was momentary, as if a flashlight had been splashed into eyes accustomed to intense darkness.
The bronze man moved toward the rear. It was from there that Monk’s yell had come. He found an open door. It gave into an alley.
On the alley pavement were tracks, faintly discernible in the fog slime. Doc followed them, and came out on a street. The tracks crossed a sidewalk. Recently, there had been work done on the street pavement, necessitating the use of sand, and a film of the stuff still remained.
Doc Savage knew the footprint sizes of Monk and Ham. He found them both. Monk had a peculiar shambling gait and large feet. Ham’s shoes were small, almost feminine, and he put his feet down straight, without toeing in or out. The tracks ended on the sidewalk. Across the curb there were other marks, made by automobile tires. These were still practically dry, the moisture having been forced aside by the weight of the car. The machine had left only a moment ago. It must have had a quiet engine not to be heard inside the abandoned factory.
The brown men of Tanan were yelling; some dashed out and splattered their flashlights in the alley, then came running toward where Doc stood.
The bronze man faded away into the damp night. He reached the main thoroughfare, turned north two blocks, then went one west. It was there that the Khan Nadir Shar and the girl should have waited in the sedan.
Doc found the sedan. It was dark, with the headlights and the dome light extinguished. He stopped a few yards away, listened, then went on. He did not call out. He splashed his own flash beam into the machine.
There was only a body inside, a body with a twisted, grotesquely broken neck. It was the skeleton-thin man who had claimed he was a ham actor hired to play the part of William Harper Littlejohn.
Of the Khan Nadir Shar and Joan Lyndell there was no trace.