THE SUBMARINE QUEST
New York is a city of many races. All nationalities are seen on her streets.
Hence, four brown-skinned men walking down Fifth Avenue attracted no unusual notice. They wore business suits, neat and new, but not gaudy. This helped them to escape attention.
They kept in a tight cluster. Their eyes prowled alertly. They were nervous. But strangers from far places, overawed by first sight of Manhattan’s cloud-puncturing skyscrapers and canyon streets, often act thus. Their subdued excitement failed to draw more than casually amused glances from pedestrians.
Slight smiles aimed at the quartet would have faded to glassy, loose-jawed stares, had their real character become known. The four were as vicious a bevy of throat-slitters as ever sauntered along one of New York’s cracks of brick and glass. Gotham’s machine-gunning gangsters were babes compared to these four nervous brown men.
They were on a mission—a mission which, had slightest hint of it reached the police, would have drawn a howling swarm of squad cars.
The slightly stiff-backed manner in which each man walked was due to a long, flat sword in a sheath strapped tightly against his spine. Thin, spike-snouted automatics were concealed expertly in their clothing.
Within the past hour, the tip of each blade and the lead nose of each bullet had been pressed ceremoniously into a piece of raw meat. The chunk of red meat was one into which a highly venomous serpent had been goaded to sink its fangs repeatedly, loading it with poison.
On other occasions, these men had proved that a scratch from weapons treated thus was sufficient to cause nearly instant death.
It was night. Clouds scraped spongy gray flanks against the sharp tops of the tall buildings. Flashing signs on Broadway splashed pale, colored luminance against the wadded vapor. A thin gum of moisture covered streets and sidewalks. It had rained at sundown, an hour before.
The four men turned into a side street, reached a darkened doorway, and stopped before it. The entry was shabby; its frame was scratched and grooved where heavy merchandise had been taken in and out. A large packing box, obviously empty, stood in the gloom.
Out of the big box came a voice.
“Qawam, bilajal!” it growled. “Make haste! Conceal yourselves in this place! Our quarry may soon appear!”
The quartet started for the box, evidently with the idea of wedging themselves into it.
“Not here, sons of dumb camels!” gritted the man in the box. “The doorway will be shelter enough! It is best that I remain hidden here throughout, not appearing at any time. Do not, by your glances or actions, betray my presence. Anta sami? Do you hear?”
In guttural Arabic, the four muttered that they understood. They arranged themselves in the murk.
Reaching under their coat tails, they produced their long swords. The sheaths were tight enough to hold the weapons in place, and they could be drawn downward in handy fashion.
“Fools!” their chief hissed from the box. “Replace those! There is to be no killing until we have the information we desire!”
Back into the spine scabbards went the blades, each man being careful not to prick himself with the deadly tip of his weapon.
* * * *
“He is coming soon?” one man asked in Arabic.
“At any minute,” replied the man, remaining unseen in the box. “Watch the street to the left, my sons.”
“How will we know him?”
“He is a big man. Wallah! He is the biggest man you ever saw! And his body is of a color and seeming hardness of a metal—bronze. A giant man of bronze!”
The four peered down the street, then drew back.
“It is a dark street and full of bad smells,” a man muttered. “You are sure he will come this way?”
“Directly across the street is a great steel door. See you it?”
“Na’am, aiwah! Yes!”
“Beyond that door is a garage where this bronze man keeps many cars. In this street one is permitted to drive in only a single direction. Therefore, he will come from the left.”
The four men peered at the giant steel doors across the thoroughfare. For the first time, they noted the towering size of the building above it. The structure was of shiny metal and expertly fitted gray masonry. It shot upward nearly a hundred stories.
“The bronze man lives there?”
“On the eighty-sixth floor,” said the voice in the box.
“Wallah! This fellow must have great wealth to live in a place like that!”
“He is a strange man, this bronze one! He is a being of mystery, one about whom many fantastic tales are told. His name is familiar to every one in the city. The newspapers carry feature stories about him. Yet he is almost a legend, for he does not show himself to the public, and does not seek publicity.”
“But he has that which we want?”
“He has. We have but to find where it is kept. That is your job.”
Squatting like four brown owls, the quartet kept unwinking eyes fixed to the left, down the somber street.
“Have you found aught of the escaped white-haired girl?” asked the man in the packing case.
“No trace, O master. But our comrades search everywhere!”
“Taiyib malih! Very well! She must be caught and brought back to my yacht!”
“It is well none in this city can understand the language she speaks,” a man said thoughtfully. “Only you, O enlightened one, can converse with her. And it took you, even with your learning, many days to master a few words of her tongue.”
“Watch the street!” snapped the hidden man. “Draw your guns! But use them only to produce fright!”
One fellow muttered: “The girl should be slain——”
“Fool! We may need her to guide us to this Phantom City! We keep her alive and unharmed. Understand that if something happens to a hair of her white head, Allah help the man responsible!”
The four squatting men drifted uneasy glances at the box, as if it held a dangerous monster. They feared this master of theirs.
“The bronze man whose arrival we await—is he the only one we have crossed the ocean to see?” one fellow mumbled.
“He is the one,” said the voice in the box. “He is Doc Savage!”
* * * *
Two blocks distant, a limousine cruised to a street intersection and turned left. The car was long, expensive, somber in color. There was nothing flashy about it. The windows were up.
The traffic cop on the corner glanced at the license tags. He snapped erect. In New York, low license numerals designate the cars of the influential—this one was a single figure. The officer squinted to see who was in the machine. He smiled widely and executed a brisk salute.
Several pedestrians who chanced to gaze at the car fell to staring, jaws slack. Each of them recognized instantly the limousine occupant.
At the next corner, a fat man stepped back to the curb to let the big machine pass. He got a good look at the man behind the wheel. He nearly dropped a bundle he was carrying.
“For the love of mud!” he breathed.
An enterprising newsboy, witnessing the incident, rushed up and offered the portly man a newspaper.
“Wanta read about that guy mister?” he asked eagerly. “Buy an Evening Comet! It’s got a feature story about him! Tells how he just cleaned up a gang that was terrorizing a manufacturing town!”
“Who is he?”
The newscarrier looked disgusted. “Mister, I thought everybody knowed that man! Why, he went into this manufacturing town of Prosper City with his five helpers, and mopped up an outfit that had murdered no tellin’ how many people! He does them kind of things regular! Helpin’ people who need it, and punishin’ wrongdoers is his profession!”
The stout man blinked. “Was that Doc Savage?”
“You said it!”
The limousine rolled on two blocks, and turned into the gloomy side street which led past the giant spire of gleaming metal and gray stone which housed Doc Savage’s quarters. It neared the recess where the brown men lurked.
“Ta’al!” grunted one of the swarthy quartet. “Come along!”
The four leaped into the street, spread fan fashion, and rushed. They flourished their long-barreled automatics.
“Wallah!” hissed one. “Truly, this man is of amazing appearance!”
A faint glow from the dash was sufficient to disclose the man at the limousine wheel—the only occupant of the car. The features of this individual were striking—so remarkable that it was very apparent why, a few seconds ago, the fat man had been awed by his single glimpse.
The figure behind the wheel was that of a giant sculptured from solid bronze. In the metallic man’s neck, in the great hands on the wheel, huge sinews stood out in repose like bundled cables.
The bronze of the hair was a shade darker than the bronze of the skin. The hair lay straight and smooth, like a metallic skullcap. The unusually high forehead, the lean, corded cheeks, the muscular mouth, advertised a rare power of character.
Most striking were the eyes—like pools of flake gold glistening in the vague light. Their gaze seemed to have a hypnotic quality, an intensity almost weird.
“Get your hands up!” gritted one of the Arabs in fair English.
* * * *
Doc Savage studied the four. His bronze features did not change expression; the quartet might have been putting on some kind of a show, for all the excitement he showed. His hands remained on the wheel.
The body of the limousine was armorplate steel, although the fact was not evident to the casual glance. The windows were an inch thick, of the latest bullet-proof glass; it would take a steel slug from a tank rifle to get through them.
He spoke in a low voice, not moving his lips. His words were distinct.
“Four men!” he said. “They look like Arabs. They popped out of a doorway with pistols.”
The dark gunman quartet saw no lip movement indicating speech. They heard no words. The limousine was soundproofed against normal noises.
“Anta sami’!” rapped the spokesman. “Do you hear? Get your hands up!”
Doc continued, still without moving his lips. “These fellows are strangers. Think I’ll play along, and see what’s on their minds. You men can cover us, if you crave a little action.”
Once more the Arabs failed to realize words had been spoken. Had they heard, they would have been puzzled at the brief descriptive speech. It was unlikely that they would have understood its purpose.
Reaching over slowly, Doc unlocked the door. He started to get out.
“La!” grunted one of the men. “No! Stay where you are!”
The fellow eased into the front seat, gun alert. The other three clambered in the back.
They did not notice the bullet-proof glass or the armor plate, and did not guess the bronze man’s surrender was deliberate. They were jubilant.
“Talk freely, and you will not be harmed!” one advised.
“Shu biddak?” Doc asked in excellent Arabic. “What do you want?”
The four looked somewhat surprised.
“So you speak our tongue!” one muttered.
“Slightly,” Doc admitted. He used the dialect peculiar to the part of Arabia from which these men hailed—the southern coast. He neglected to add that he had a fluent command of dialects from almost all other sectors of their native land.
This business about the language was the first contact the four had with the bronze man’s remarkable knowledge. This giant, metallic man was something of a mental marvel. The fact that he could converse fluently in the tongue of nearly any race on the globe, was only one of his fantastic accomplishments.
“You have a submarine,” said one of the Arabs. “A submarine with which you once went under the ice of the north pole!”
“That is right,” Doc admitted in Arabic.
The brown man reached under his coat tail, squirmed, and drew his flat sword. He indicated the poison on the tip.
“We want that submarine!” he declared. He put the sword point against Doc’s chest. The steel slit a few threads of the bronze man’s coat fabric. “You will take us to it!”