THE SECRET SERVICE MAN
The time was two days later.
The plane had three motors, each of them supercharged with nearly a thousand horse power and all labored in unison, hurling the big ship ahead at a speed which very seldom fell below two hundred miles an hour. A time or two, when the ship was very high, seeking out stratospheric air currents that were favorable, the speed had been far above three hundred an hour.
The wings of the ship were streamlined into the fuselage; the landing wheels drew up in the hull, also shaped so as to serve as a big pontoon for landing on water; and nowhere did a strut or a brace wire show outside the streamlining.
It was quiet in the cabin, almost unnaturally so. The brawl of the big engines was but a peaceful murmur. The silencing job on that cabin was remarkable. Aëronautical engineers had come from some of the world’s most advanced plants to inspect it.
It was warm in the cabin, too; warm, although there was snow below, vast whitenesses of it. It seemed as if the plane had shifted to another world, for there were no rivers visible on this terrain below, no mountains. There was only smooth whiteness.
Had the ship dropped to a lower altitude, however, the ground would have taken on some resemblance to an earthly domain, for this was tundra below, the amazing expanse of near-swamp which covers parts of Siberia.
Renny was at the plane controls, nursing the air-speed meter, endeavoring to get it up a bit higher without racing the motors unnecessarily.
Monk and Ham, as usual, were quarreling.
“You missing link!” Ham snarled. “I’ll cut you open and see if you look any more like a human inside than you do on the outside!”
The slender, waspish lawyer carried a sword cane, not the one with which he had started out to investigate the tug Whale of Gotham in New York, for that one had been lost. This weapon was one from a stock of spares which Ham kept in his club apartment.
Monk, the homely chemist, scowled fiercely at Ham.
“Just a big mouth and a lot of noise,” he sneered. “You keep your hands off that hog, or I’ll give you a good wringing and hang you up to dry.”
Between the two belligerents, an interested observer to the argument, was Monk’s pet pig, Habeas Corpus. Habeas had been named in a manner calculated to aggravate Ham. He was a remarkable specimen of the porker race, this Habeas Corpus. He was predominately ears, with a generous proportioning of snout and legs, the rest of him being thin and scrawny.
Habeas Corpus and Monk had joined company in Arabia so many months ago that it was by now evident that the shote would never grow much larger. He ate prodigiously without gaining an ounce. But Habeas had also demonstrated that, as a mental specimen, he was no ordinary porker. He learned tricks with the ease of a show dog, and Monk spent most of his spare time training the shote.
The immediate cause of Monk and Ham’s quarrel was certain damage Habeas Corpus had done to Ham’s immaculate traveling bag. Habeas had gnawed practically the entire end out of the cowskin bag.
“Habeas don’t like cows,” Monk explained. “When you pick your next bag, don’t have it made of cowskin.”
“It’ll probably be pigskin,” Ham gritted, and eyed Habeas meaningly.
The plane hit a down current and pitched sickeningly, so that they all were forced to grasp the arm rests of the seats to retain their positions.
“Such flying,” Ham said.
Renny called, “You start razzing me and I’ll pick your arms and legs off.”
The Khan Nadir Shar looked on with drowsy interest. He had been a long time without sleep and he seemed on the point of dropping off.
Joan Lyndell sat across from Oscar Gibson, and they both looked straight ahead, neither giving attention to the other or even acting as if the other existed.
Renny made some calculations, put figures and words on a paper and passed it back.
“There’s our position,” he advised. “We’ll have to land in Novo Sibirsk for refueling.”
* * * *
Doc Savage, secluded in the rear of the plane, received the message without comment, read it, then advised, “Better radio ahead so that gasoline will be ready.”
“You think the Mystic Mullah’s men are still ahead of us?” Renny called.
“That is difficult to say,” Doc replied. “They had fast planes.”
Doc and his men had made inquiries before taking off from New York and had learned that two planes laden with the brown men of Tanan had actually taken off from a Gotham airport. The ships had been heard from in Nova Scotia; they had landed in Iceland, and had refueled at the point of guns. Next word of them had come from Finland, where they had again refueled by force. It was that phantom trail which Doc Savage was following.
That the Tananese were still ahead, Doc had reason to believe, for his own ship, delayed in starting some hours, had hit bad weather which the other craft must have missed. The North Atlantic had been disturbed, and there had been head winds, even up into the lower stratosphere as far as the big speed plane could penetrate.
The bronze man closed the door of the compartment in the rear of the plane and continued what he had been doing—taking his exercises. These exercises, over a period of years, were entirely responsible for his amazing physical development. He had been taking them now for almost two hours, and not yet was he done. He had gone through the same intensive routine each day since childhood. Not only did Doc develop his muscles, but his five senses as well, using complicated apparatus for that purpose.
The aluminum hue lent by the chemical bleaching agent had faded, allowing Doc’s bronze color to return.
Doc was completing his exercises when the plane tilted sharply and the changed note of the motors indicated a descent. He left the compartment and went forward.
“Novo Sibirsk,” Renny said.
* * * *
Novo Sibirsk, situated on the navigable Ob River, was a typical metropolis of southern Siberia. The river was off to the left now, with its nine spans plainly distinguishable, and the thin thread of the trans-Siberian railway stretching away into the infinite distance. There were large buildings below, grain elevators and flour mills, probably, and everywhere was a bright newness. Columns of smoke curled up from the iron smelting plants.
Renny cut the motors and opened the cabin windows in order to see better. At a very low altitude, they scudded over the fringe of the town. They were so low that the odor of a tannery was plainly distinguishable as they glided above it.
The airport appeared, its modernity a mark of the industrial efforts of the Soviets. The hangars were substantial, and snowplows had boosted the field clear of deeper drifts. The air lashing in through the plane windows was bitterly cold.
Renny cranked the landing wheels out of their streamlined recesses and planted the ship with a skilled ease on the field. Whooping gusts from the propellers pulled the plane toward the hangars and the little flags on flexible staffs which marked the location of the gas tanks.
Renny cut the motors when close to the hangars. In the silence, the snow squealed under the wheels; it wailed louder when he applied the brakes, and the craft came to a stop.
Monk arose, stretched his furry arms and announced, “I’m gonna stoke the human machine with some food.”
He opened the cabin door.
Out of the near-by hangar popped a squad of men. They held rifles. Obviously they had been concealed, awaiting the moment the plane would stop.
“Something wrong!” Renny rapped.
He snapped on the ignition switches, made passes at the starter buttons. The hot motors crashed into life. The plane veered around, began moving.
To the right, the left, on the front and rear, men sprang out of the huge piles of snow which tractors had pushed aside from the airport runways. They gripped the ends of thin wire cables. They yanked these, disclosing the fact the cables were buried in the snow. The men, tugging on them, got them waist-high and in the plane’s path.
One cable snagged across the landing wheels, high enough that it was above the streamlined pants, where it would not slip off.
“They can’t hold us!” Renny boomed.
He was wrong. The men did not depend on physical strength alone to hold the plane; for they tied the ends of the wire cables around steel rods which had been previously driven into the frozen earth.
There was a jar as the plane snubbed against the lines. The cable gave a little, the spring effect cushioning the shock of the stoppage. Then the big ship lay helpless.
* * * *
The uniformed men dashed forward, rifles slanted across their chests. There was military precision in their movements. They wore the metal helmets of the Soviet military, with knitted winter covers over the helmets and protecting their ears from the bitter cold. Their overcoats were very long, their boots huge. There was not an unshaven face among them.
The leader trotted up alongside the plane door and lifted his voice.
“You will come out,” he said in excellent English. “You are under arrest!”
Monk angrily hauled down a window and demanded, “Just what the hades is the meaning of this?”
“We have orders to search your plane,” imparted the Soviet officer. “It has been reported that you have been taking pictures of Soviet fortified areas.”
“Is that all you intend to do—search the plane?” Doc Savage put in.
“Yes,” said the officer.
“Go ahead,” Doc told him. “But what I should like to know is what instigated this. Who reported we had been taking pictures?”
“A cablegram came from Omsk,” advised the Soviet commandant. “It was signed merely by one who called himself a ‘Friend of the Soviet’.”
Monk breathed, so only Doc could hear the words, “The Mystic Mullah!”
The Soviet soldiers entered the plane and directed all of the occupants outside. Their manner was firm without being roughshod; they kept their rifles ready, but did not aim them.
The commanding officer and two assistants did the searching. They went through each item of baggage, not scattering the contents, but carefully repacking after examination. They came to the last of the items of baggage without finding anything. After that, they began going over the plane itself, carefully prying at wall paneling to see if it had been loosened recently. They found nothing.
Two men clambered out on the wings and opened the large caps of the gas tanks. Flashlights were brought and thrust down into the apertures.
“Shto’!” exploded one in his native tongue. “E’ta tako’ye? What is that?”
They tried to fish in the tank, but the opening was too small. Finally, they summoned a small boy, and the urchin, peeling his sheepskin koortka, inserted a thin arm into the tank and brought it out dripping gasoline and triumphantly clutching a long glass bottle in which was a curl of photographic prints.
The officer examined these.
“Bes samneneeye!” he said grimly. “Without a doubt! These are photographic prints of some of our fortified area.”
Monk yelled, “Say guy, there’s something screwy——”
“You will have a chance to tell it at the trial,” the Soviet officer said grimly.
* * * *
The jail was very modern, except for the heating arrangement. It was bitterly cold in the large, white cell. The naked walls echoed back the steady tramping of a sentry somewhere down the corridor.
Monk, a gloomy expression on his homely features, sat on a low bench and scratched the ears of Habeas Corpus, his pet pig.
“There ain’t no doubt of it,” he said, disgust in his small voice. “Back there at one of them places we got gasoline, somebody put that glass jar of pictures into the gas tank. Some airport attendant was bribed to do the job. If this ain’t a swell note!”
Ham requested unkindly, “Will you shut up! We can all guess what happened. But the important thing is—what to do about it?”
Monk went on as if he had not heard. “That picture business is the fine hand of this Mystic Mullah. There ain’t no doubt about that, either. Say, what do these Soviets do with spies? Do they shoot ’em?”
“Shooting is employed only in time of war,” Doc told him dryly. “They usually send them to Siberian prison camps for thirty or forty years.”
“Pleasant thought,” Monk muttered.
Oscar Gibson stood to one side, against the barred door of the cell, and watched the pacing sentry. Gibson had said little. As a matter of fact, he had spoken only when necessary since they had left New York. Not that he had been left alone, for Monk, Ham and Renny, as well as Doc Savage, had had tries at questioning him. But Oscar Gibson, where information about himself was concerned, had the characteristics of a clam.
Just who Oscar Gibson was, what connection he had with the affair of the Mystic Mullah, was a complete mystery.
Monk lifted the pig, Habeas Corpus, by both ears and swung him back and forth, a procedure that Habeas seemed to enjoy immensely.
“What do you say, Doc—shall we try a break?” he demanded.
Doc Savage shook his head slowly. He was watching Oscar Gibson, who still leaned against the barred door. The pacing sentry had stopped outside. He leaned close to the bars. Oscar Gibson said something. His voice was so low that it did not reach Doc Savage.
Then Gibson reached into his mouth and withdrew a bridge of false teeth, the first indication any of them had that some of his molars were artificial. He held the bridgework so that only the guard could see it.
The guard’s start was plainly distinguishable. Gibson said something further, and they could tell only that he was speaking Russian fluently.
The guard whipped out a key and unlocked the barred door.
Monk came to life suddenly, dropped Habeas and lunged headlong for the door, hoping to bowl Gibson against the guard and thus open the way for an escape. But Gibson was too fast for him. He got through the door, slammed it, and the automatic lock clicked securely.
Monk took the force of his charge with a shoulder, bounced back, and glared at Gibson. “What’s the idea, guy?” he growled.
“I believe the proper Yankee terminology is ‘Nuts to you’,” Gibson said airily.
* * * *
Gibson marched away in company with the guard, and Monk stood for some moments by the door, grumbling to himself.
“Danged if I can make that guy Gibson out,” Monk finally announced, disgustedly.
“He is a mysterious person,” Joan Lyndell agreed.
“He is one of the Mystic Mullah’s agents, I am convinced,” rumbled the Khan Nadir Shar, and the tattooed serpent coiled around the jewel on his forehead, glowed redly with anger.
Doc Savage seemed to be listening.
“The guard went outside with Gibson!” he rapped. “Now is our chance!”
The bronze man flung to the window. This was a tunnellike opening through which very little light came, for the wall was fully five feet thick. The glass panes closing the window were at the outer extremity, so that prisoners could not reach them and use the glass for stabbing purposes.
The inner bars were almost an inch thick and bedded deeply in stone. Removing them was beyond the ability of naked hands, as Doc found out when he grasped them and wrenched; they barely groaned in their sockets.
The prisoners had been searched most thoroughly, the men being forced to remove their clothing in the process. But they had been given back their own garments.
Doc still wore his necktie. It was loose about his neck. He stripped it off, inserted a thumb in the large end and ripped it open. The lining was a yellowish, stiff cloth which looked like the usual lining put in neckties. Doc pulled the lining out.
He picked several buttons off his coat, including the ornamental ones on the sleeves. These crushed with surprising ease, became a brownish powder as he ground them between his corded fingers. He placed the powder along the necktie lining, as if he were making a cigarette of strange nature, then rolled the lining, inclosing the powder.
His movements became swifter. He tore the long cylinder he had made into four pieces. He bound these around the lower and upper ends of two bars.
“What on earth are you doing?” Joan Lyndell breathed wonderingly.
Monk grinned and cackled, “I get it! I get it!” He ran forward, fishing in a pocket.
“They left me one match,” he chuckled. “That’ll speed it up.”
“It will,” Doc agreed.
The bronze man struck Monk’s match carefully, applied it to the yellow rolls of necktie lining, and the results were surprising. Came a loud hiss. The cell became blindingly white from the light of the burning substance. They all felt the tremendous heat.
Doc backed away and waited. The substance he had secured to the bars continued to hiss. It was burning with a violence that rivaled the heat of an electric torch. There was the same flickering. The light became too brilliant for their eyes and they squinted, covered their faces.
“What is it?” Joan Lyndell gasped.
“Ever hear of thermit?” Monk asked her.
“No.”
“A mixture of aluminum powder and iron oxide,” Monk told her. “It is used in welding, principally. That necktie lining was impregnated with the aluminum powder, and the buttons were the oxide. There were some other chemicals mixed in with it to make it more efficient than ordinary thermit. It generates a terrific heat when it burns.”
Doc Savage was balling his coat about his hands, forming a pad. Using this as a protection, he lunged at the bars. These were white hot at the ends, red in the middle, and were bending slightly of their own weight.
His impact against the first bar caused it to break. He knocked the second one out. Using the coat, he brushed the thermit and molten steel away, as much of it as he could. Then he threw the coat over the glowing bar ends, and before it burned through or burst into flame, scrambled over and got into the tunnellike aperture of the window.
He knocked the glass from the outer end. There was snow heaped on the sill. He scooped that up in his hands and used it to cool the bar ends so that the others could clamber up.
* * * *
The prison, although its interior was modern, had been built centuries ago, possibly having once served as a fortress, for there was a moat surrounding the wall. This was now banked full of snow, and Doc Savage, dropping down, sank considerably over his head. Lying in the pit he had made, he looked upward and made sure there were no guards on the high walls.
The others followed him down. There was harder snow under the fluffy upper layer, and they managed to work across the moat and scramble out on the other side. They ran across a stretch of park where naked trees reared up around them, their hurried feet kicking up clouds of snow.
Some one yelled in Russian: “Stoi! Stoi!”
“This way!” Doc rapped. “They’re yelling for us to halt.”
The fugitives dived into a small creek which wound through the park and descended a hill toward the river Ob. This sheltered them. A few bullets searched them out with vicious squeals.
The Soviet prison guards yelled a few more “Sois!” and then began ringing a bell. The bell must have been tremendous. Its reverberations shuddered out and undoubtedly carried for miles.
The creek was frozen over, packed with snow; but here and there ice was uncovered. Monk, hitting one of these slick stretches with too much speed, slipped and fell, much to the discomfort of Habeas Corpus, whom he had thrust inside his coat for easier carrying. The pig began squealing.
“Knock him in the head,” Ham suggested.
Monk only snorted.
They passed under a bridge, and the driver of a kareta crossing over the stone structure saw them, reined up and began to yell at the top of his voice. This frightened his wild Siberian ponies, and they promptly ran off, so that the driver’s yells, if they were heard, would probably be construed as directed at his steeds.
“That was a lucky break!” Renny boomed.
They reached another bridge, climbed up beside it, and trotted down a road. A few moments later they saw the airport ahead, the hangars looking larger than they were because of the expanse of snow.
“Lookit!” Monk exploded. “I’ll say we’re getting the breaks. There’s our plane, with the motors turning over!”
The big plane stood on the field, slightly away from the nearest hangar, in a position as convenient for their purpose as could have been wished for. The three propellers were spinning disks of alloy, and the exhaust stacks spilled occasional gusts of oil smoke.
“This can’t be real!” Renny thumped.
They raced toward the plane. Eyes were alert. But no one appeared to head them off. No alarm was shouted.
Doc bounded into the plane, plunged forward to take the control bucket. The others piled into the cabin. Ham barked something unintelligible but glad when he discovered his sword cane reposing on the plane floor where he had left it. He pounced upon it. Monk clambered into the ship, carrying Habeas by one oversize ear, then banged the door.
Doc sawed the throttles open; the ship lifted its tail and nearly three thousand thundering horsepower sucked it across the field and up into the cold sunlight.
* * * *
The windows were open, and Doc closed them. They were double-paneled, equipped to thwart frost formation and to keep out sound. The cabin became quiet as the interior of a hearse.
“Holy cow!” Renny rumbled gloomily. “We were nearly out of gas when we landed. What’re we gonna do for fuel? We’re still a good thousand miles from Tanan.”
Doc said, “Have a look at this instrument panel, Renny.”
The big-fisted engineer ambled forward, his long face wearing an expression slightly more sorrowful than usual—if that were possible—and eyed the board. At first, he caught nothing of significance. And then he saw.
“Fuel gauge!” he barked. “Our tanks are full!”
Joan Lyndell came up behind him and said, “That is strange! And isn’t it unusual that we should find the plane at the airport with the engines running. It was as if it had been made ready for us.”
“It was,” said a new voice.
They whirled. The tone was distinct in the soundproofed cabin. They all recognized it.
Oscar Gibson, thin-waisted and narrow-lipped, stood in the rear of the cabin. His lips had a faint upward warp at the corners, and there was a small sparkle to his eyes. He had been stowed away in the rear compartment.
“I must say that I barely reached the airport in time to have them prepare the plane for you,” he said dryly. “I felt sure, once word spread that you had escaped, that you would head for the airport. But how did you get out of that prison cell? It is supposed to be one of the strongest in Russia?”
Nobody answered him.
“You had this plane arranged for us?” Renny boomed unbelievingly.
Gibson bowed slightly. “I would have arranged your release, as well, if you had allowed me a little time.”
“I don’t believe you would’ve!” Monk snorted. “Just who are you, anyhow?”
Gibson inserted a little finger between his lips and worked out the bridge of false teeth. He turned this over, presenting the rather unusually wide gold bar for their inspection.
Engraved on the bar was a peculiar design. It incorporated the hammer and sickle of the Soviet There were a few engraved words of Russian. Doc read them and studied the design.
“Secret Police,” he said.
“Exactly,” said Oscar Gibson. “I am a member. More correctly I am one of the four highest ranking officers.”
“But you’re English!” Monk exploded.
“I was born in Texas,” Gibson said gravely. “Some day, when I get tired of adventuring, I shall go back there. In the meantime, I shall make every effort to stamp out one of the greatest curses ever afflicted upon the human race, the Mystic Mullah.”
“You are working for the Soviet on this?” Doc asked.
Gibson nodded. “Secretly and without official public acknowledgment, of course. The Soviet wants peace in the Orient. This devil, the Mystic Mullah, is hungry for power. He is slowly taking over Tanan. He practically has it in the palm of his hand now. After Tanan will come Tibet, Afghanistan, Mongolia, China and, eventually, Russia.”
“This thing must be big,” Monk said slowly.
“It is,” Gibson agreed. “Big—and horrible!”
Doc Savage turned back to the control wheel and the big plane pointed its baying snout at the sun and climbed toward the lower zone of stratosphere.