The Land of Terror ds-2

by Kenneth Robeson

  Squint fired from within the superstructure. He was hasty and missed. As Doc’s bronze form bore down upon him, he fled.

  Across the first cabin in the deck house was a solid bulkhead and a door. Squint got through the door ahead of Doc. He closed the panel and barred it.

  Doc hit the door once. The thick planks were too much for even his terrific strength. A great battle-ax reposed among the array of weapons in the first cabin. Doc could have chopped at the door with it. He didn’t. He went back to the ratty fellow who had lost a hand.

  * * *

  THE man still groveled on the deck. Doc’s golden eyes gave the fellow one appraising glance. Then the big bronze head shook regretfully.

  Doc, above all his other accomplishments, was a great doctor and surgeon. He had studied under the masters of medicine and surgery in the greatest clinics until he had learned all they could teach. Then, by his own intense efforts, he had extended his knowledge to a fabulous degree.

  Doc’s father had trained him from the cradle for a certain goal in life. That goal was a life of service. To go from one end of the world to the other, looking for excitement and adventure, but always helping those who need help, punishing those who deserve it — that was Doc Savage’s noble purpose in life. All his marvelous training was for that end. And the training had started with medicine and surgery. At that, of all things, Doc was most expert.

  So Doc knew instantly the ratty man was dying. The fellow was a dope addict. The shock of losing the hand was ending a career that would have come to its vile termination within a year or two anyway.

  Doc sank beside the man. When the fellow saw he was not to be harmed more, he quieted a little.

  "You were hired to kill Jerome Coffern?" Doc asked in a calm, compelling voice.

  "No! No!" wailed the dying man. But the expression on his pinched and paling face showed he was lying.

  For a moment, Doc said nothing. He exerted the full, strange quality of his golden eyes. Those eyes were warm and comforting now. Doc was making them exert a command for the truth.

  It was amazing, the things Doc could do with his eyes. He had studied with the great masters of hypnotism, just as he had studied with famous surgeons. He had even gone to India and the Orient to gain knowledge from the mystic cults of the Far East.

  By the time Doc asked his next question, he had exerted such a hypnotic influence upon the dying man that the fellow replied with the truth.

  "What is the strange substance that dissolved the body of Jerome Coffern?" Doc prompted.

  "It is called the Smoke of Eternity," whimpered the dying man.

  "Of what is it made?"

  "I don’t know. None of us know. None of us little guys, that is. The Smoke of Eternity is just given us to use. We never get more than one cartridge at a time. And — and we get — get orders of who to use it on."

  The man was about gone. Swiftly, Doc questioned, "Who gives it to you?"

  The thin lips parted. The man gulped. He seemed to be trying to speak a name that started with the letter "K."

  But he died before he could voice that name.

  * * *

  OF the five who had gone to New Jersey to slay Jerome Coffern, only Squint was now alive.

  A bronze giant of vengeance, Doc made for the stern of the strange old buccaneer ship. Squint was back there somewhere.

  A time or two, Doc paused to press an ear to the deck planking. To his supersensitive ears, many sounds came. Wavelets lapped the hull. Rats scurried in the hold. Animal rats, these were.

  Finally, Doc heard Squint skulking.

  Doc reached a companionway. He eased down it, a noiseless metal shadow that faded into darker shadows below. He came upon a long, heavy timber. It was round, a length of an old spar. It weighed nearly two hundred pounds and was a dozen feet in length, thick as a keg. He carried it along easily.

  The spar promptly saved him death or serious injury. He was thinking of what he had read in the Sunday paper. He never forgot things he read.

  The article had said there was a trapdoor in a passage which let the unwary upon a bed of upturned swords. He figured Squint might put that death trap in operation again.

  Squint had.

  So, when a passage floor suddenly opened under his weight, it was not an accident that the twelve-foot spar kept Doc from dropping upon needle-pointed blades below. Probably some old pirate had constructed this trap to bring death to one of his fellows he didn’t like.

  With a deft swing, Doc got atop the spar. He ran along it to solid footing. Then he picked up the heavy spar again.

  Squint had been waiting behind a door at the end of the passage. At the crash of the sprung trapdoor, he let out a loud bark of glee. He thought Doc was finished. Doc heard the bark.

  To accommodate him, Doc emitted a realistic moan. It was the kind of a moan a man dying on those upturned swords might have given. It fooled Squint.

  He opened the passage door.

  Before the door could swing the whole way, Doc hurled the spar. He purposefully missed Squint. The spar burst the door planks with a resounding smash.

  Squint spun and fled. He was so terrified he didn’t even stop to use his gun.

  He must have been surprised when Doc’s powerful hands did not fall upon his neck. Probably he considered himself quite a master of strategy when he reached deck without seeing another sign of Doc.

  He did not have the sense to know Doc had purposefully let him escape.

  Almost at once, Squint quitted the pirate ship. He left furtively. He looked behind often. But not once did he catch sight of the terrible Nemesis of bronze.

  "Gave him the slip!" Squint chortled, almost sobbing in his relief.

  As he crept away, he continued to look behind. His elation grew. There was no sign of Doc.

  Actually, Doc was aheadof Squint. Doc had reached the deck and gone ashore in advance of Squint. When the ratty man appeared, the bronze giant kept always ahead or to one side.

  Doc hoped Squint would lead him to the sinister mastermind who had ordered Jerome Coffern slain.

  * * *

  Chapter 4. THE NEST OF EVIL

  SQUINT climbed up to Riverside Drive. He dodged limousines and taxicabs across the Drive. Turning south a few blocks, he strode rapidly east until he reached Broadway, the sole street which runs the full length of Manhattan Island. A subway lies beneath Broadway nearly the whole distance.

  Into this subway, Squint scuttled. He cocked a nickel into the entrance turnstile and waited on the white-tiled station platform. The light was dim. At either end, dark gullets of the tunnel gaped.

  Squint felt safe. He had been listening to the entrance turnstile. The turnstiles always gave a loud clank when a customer came through. There had not been a single clank since Squint entered.

  A subway train came howling down the tunnel, headlights like bleary red eyes. The roar it made, to which New Yorkers are accustomed, was deafening. At the height of the noise, the entrance turnstile clanked behind Doc Savage’s giant, bronze form. Nobody saw him.

  Doc saw Squint wait in a car door until the other doors in the train, operated automatically, had all closed. Squint held his own door open against the gentle pull of the automatic mechanism. When he was satisfied no bronze giant had boarded the train, he let the door close. The train moved.

  Running lightly, Doc reached an open car window. He dived through it. The train plunged into the tunnel with a great moan.

  Squint alighted at Times Square, which might easily be dubbed the crossroads of New York City. He mingled with the dense crowd. He went in one door of a skyscraper and out another. He changed taxis twice going back uptown.

  Unseen, his presence even unsuspected by Squint, a great bronze shadow clung to Squint’s trail.

  Squint wound up on the street which had the long row of houses exactly alike.

  Before the tenth house from the corner, a considerable crowd milled. Long since, an ambulance had taken away the body of the ratty man wh
ose neck Doc had been forced to break. However, the police had found the cache of machine guns beneath the floorboards of the touring car. Curious persons were inspecting the vicious weapons.

  A cop was getting the motor number of the car.

  Squint chuckled. The officers would never trace that machine to him. It had been stolen in a Middle Western State.

  "Let ‘em try to figure it out!" Squint sneered.

  Then his gaze rested on Doc Savage’s big, efficient roadster, and his ugly glee oozed. He could see the license number of the car. This was a single figure. Only personages of great importance in New York had such low license numbers.

  Squint shivered, thinking of the fearsome giant of bronze. He wondered who that awesome personage could be.

  Squint had never heard of Doc Savage, largely because he never read anything but the newspapers, and Doc Savage never appeared in brazen newspaper yarns. In truth, Squint’s intelligence was not enough to rate a knowledge of Doc.

  But some of the brainiest, most upright citizens of New York could have told Squint amazing things about the big bronze man. More than one of these owed Doc a debt of deepest gratitude for past services.

  The leading political boss, the most influential man in the city government, owed his life to Doc’s magical skill at surgery. An extremely delicate operation upon the very walls of his heart had taken him from the door of death.

  * * *

  SQUINT did not enter the tenth house from the corner. He sidled into another several doors distant. He felt his way up a gloomy succession of stairs. A trapdoor gave to the roof. He eased out. Quietly, he closed the trapdoor behind him.

  He did not notice it open a fraction of an inch a moment later. He did not dream a pair of flaky gold eyes were photographing his every move.

  Squint scuttled across rooftops to the tenth house from the corner. He entered through another hatch on that roof.

  He had hardly disappeared when Doc’s bronze form was floating over the roofs in pursuit. Doc pressed an ear to the hatch. His aural organs, imbued with a sensitiveness near superhuman, told him Squint had walked down a top-floor passage to the back.

  A moment later, a window at the rear opened. Doc was poised above it in an instant. Squint’s relieved whisper reached him.

  "No chance of anybody listenin’ from here!" Squint had breathed.

  The window grated down.

  With silent speed, Doc was over the roof edge. Even a bat, master of clinging to smooth surfaces, would have had trouble with the wall. Grooves between the bricks furnished the only handholds. Doc’s steel-strong bronze fingers found the largest of these.

  At the window, there was no perch. But Doc hung by little more than his finger tips. His tireless sinews could support him thus for hours.

  A shade had been drawn on the other side of the window. But it was old and cracked. One of these cracks let Doc look into the room.

  The window sash fitted poorly. It gaped open at the bottom. Through this space, conversation seeped.

  More than a dozen men were assembled in the shabby room. Some were thick-necked and burly. More were thin, with the look of drug addicts in their vicious eyes. And every one had the furtive manner of the confirmed criminal.

  They were as choice a devil’s dozen as ever held unholy conclave.

  Squint stood before them. He was swaggering and punctuating his talk with curses to cover his nervousness.

  "Now you mugs pipe down while I call the big shot!" he snarled.

  He strode to one wall. The old plaster was a network of jagged cracks. He pressed a certain spot. A secret panel, the edges cleverly disguised by the cracks, opened. Squint took out a telephone instrument.

  The phone obviously was not a part of the regular city system, since Squint did not give a number, but began speaking at once.

  "Kar?" he asked. "This is Squint."

  Outside the window, Doc Savage’s strong bronze lips formed the word "Kar." The dying man on the pirate ship, in trying to name the master mind who had given them the mysterious dissolving substance called the "Smoke of Eternity," had started a name that began with a "K."

  Kar was that name!

  "Yeah," Squint was saying over the secret phone line. "We put old Jerome Coffern out of the way like you ordered." Squint paused to wet his dry lips nervously, then added, "We — we had a little tough luck."

  Squint was surprisingly modest. His four companions had died violently and he had barely escaped with his life — and he passed it off as a little tough luck!

  Replying to a sharp query from Kar, Squint reluctantly explained the nature of the insignificant misfortune.

  The outburst the information got from Kar was so violent the rattling of the receiver diaphragm reached even Doc Savage’s ears.

  There followed what was evidently a long procession of orders. These were spoken in a low voice by Kar. Doc’s ears, sensitive to the extreme, could not hear a single word.

  * * *

  SQUINT hung up at last and replaced the phone. He closed the secret panel. Lighting a cigarette, he drew deeply from it, as though seeking courage. Then he faced the assembled thugs.

  "Kar says I’m to tell you guys the whole thing," he said, making his voice harsh. "He says you will work together better if you know what it’s all about. He says it’ll show you birds where your bread is buttered. I guess he’s right, at that."

  Squint paused to blow a plume of smoke at the ceiling. But the smoke apparently reminded him of the weird dissolving of Jerome Coffern’s body. He made a face and flung the cigarette on the floor.

  "This is the first time you guys have been here!" he told the men. "Each one of you got the word from me to come to this room. I sent for you. I know every one of you. You’re regular guys. That’s why I’m ringing you in on the best thing you ever saw."

  "Aw, cut out the mush an’ get down to talkin’ turkey!" a thick-necked bruiser growled.

  Squint ignored the contemptuous tone of the interruption.

  "Sure, I’ll talk turkey!" he sneered. "You just heard me jawin’ to the big shot. His name is Kar. That phone leads to his secret hangout. I don’t know where it is. I don’t even know Kar."

  "You dunno who the chief is?" muttered the thick-necked man.

  "Nope."

  "Then how’d you — "

  "How’d I get hooked up with him?" Squint chuckled. "I got a telephone call from him. He said he’d heard I was a square shooter, and did I want to get in on the best thing in the world? I did. And I’m tellin’ you it’s good. This proposition is the best ever."

  "What is it?" queried he of the beefy neck.

  "How does a million bucks to each of you within a year sound?" Squint demanded dramatically.

  Jaws fell. Eyes popped.

  "A million — "

  "That much anyway!" Squint declared. "Maybe more! The million is guaranteed. You draw fifty thousand of it tomorrow. Fifty grand for each guy! But before I say more, I gotta know if you’re comin’ in.

  "I know you mugs can’t afford to run to the police and talk. You’re sure to be rubbed out if you do. And if you come in, you gotta take orders from me. And I get my orders from Kar. I’m sort of a straw boss, see!"

  "Count me in!" ejaculated the thug with the ample neck.

  Like flies to sugar, the others offered eager allegiance.

  "Here’s the lay!" announced Squint. "This fellow Kar has got something he calls the Smoke of Eternity. It’s something nobody ever heard of before. A few drops of it will dissolve a man’s body — make it turn into an ugly gray smoke. The stuff will dissolve brick, metal and wood — almost anything."

  For some seconds the villainous assemblage digested this. It was too much for them to swallow. The big-necked fellow voiced the thoughts of the rest.

  "You’re crazy!" he said.

  * * *

  REDDENING, Squint swore and shook his fist.

  "I ain’t nuts!" he ranted. "The Smoke of Eternity works like that! I dunno what the st
uff is. I only know it will dissolve a man. It will wipe the front right off the biggest bank vault there is. Enough of it, about a suitcase full, could turn the Empire State Building into that queer smoke."

  The others were still skeptical.

  "Don’tcha see what havin’ such a thing as this Smoke of Eternity means?" Squint snarled. "It means we can walk right into any bank vault in town and take what we want. And listen, you apes! I ain’t crazy — and I ain’t lyin’!"

  At this point, a newsboy’s shout penetrated faintly to the room. The news hawker was crying his papers to the crowd of curious in front of the house.

  "Body of famous chemist vanishes!" he was screaming. "Mystery baffles police!"

  Squint laughed nastily. He leveled an arm at one of his listeners.

  "Go buy a paper from that kid!"

  The man left obediently. In a moment he was back with a pink tabloid newspaper.

  Emblazoned in black scare-type was the story of the finding of Jerome Coffern’s right hand and forearm on the grounds of the Mammoth Manufacturing Company plant in New Jersey.

  "I guess you’ll believe me now!" Squint sneered. "I used some of the Smoke of Eternity on old Jerome Coffern. It dissolved all of his body but the hand. Probably the hand didn’t go because there wasn’t quite enough of the stuff."

  The expression on the evil faces surrounding Squint showed the thugs had changed their minds. They no longer thought Squint was lying or crazy.

  "Why’d you rub out this Jerome Coffern?" one villain asked.

  "Kar ordered it," said Squint. "Kar told me why, too. Kar believes in lettin’ his men know why everything is done. The only thing Kar don’t tell is who he is. Nobody knows that. Kar had Jerome Coffern killed because Coffern was the only man alive who might tell the police who Kar is."

  "Jerome Coffern knew Kar, huh?" muttered a man.

  "He must have." Squint fired another cigarette. "Now, I already got orders for you mugs. A shipment of gold money is goin’ to Chicago tomorrow. Some banks out in Chi are hard up and need the jack. There’s about two million dollars’ worth goin’. A hundred miles out of New York, we jerk up the tracks. We use this Smoke of Eternity to wipe out the bullion guards and get into the armored express car. And out of that two million, each of you guys gets paid your fifty thousand. The rest of the gold coin goes into Kar’s workin’ fund."