Kenneth Robeson - The Land of Terror

"Exactly," Doc agreed. "It is possible Gabe Yuder discovered this new element, or whatever it is, on Thunder Island. He may be Kar."

They relieved their prisoners of arms, throwing the waterlogged weapons into the river. The pockets of the men disgorged nothing that might lead to Kar.

One by one, the villainous group regained consciousness. One or two tried to escape. They didn’t have a chance against Doc’s flashing speed. And Monk, for all his anthropoid appearance, was a hairy blur when he wanted to move quickly.

The prisoners were herded forward. Doc forced them down in the fore hold, which held the unnerving display of pirate bloodthirstiness. He wanted them to have a good look at the three of Kar’s men who were already dead there. The sight might loosen their tongues.

The gruesome exhibit proved to be potent medicine. The captives shuddered. They became pale.

"Where can Kar be found?" Doc demanded, his powerful voice holding a ring of command.

He got no answer. He had not expected one yet.

Monk picked up a big, gleaming cutlass. He whetted it suggestively on a soggy shoe sole, then whacked an ear off a papier-mвchй likeness of a bearded pirate, just to show Kar’s men how it might go.

"Only say the word, Doc!" He slanted a great arm at a wizened fellow who looked the most cowardly of the lot. "I’ll start on the little one, there!"

The man in question whimpered in fright.

Doc’s golden eyes came to rest on the cowardly one. The play of flaky gleamings within those orbs seemed to increase. The golden eyes gathered a compelling, hypnotic quality. They searched the very soul of the quailing captive.

"I — I — " the fellow frothed.

There was no question but that in a very few minutes he could have been made to tell all he knew.

But he never got the chance.

A DECK planking creaked above their heads. Some one lurked up there!

"Duck!" Doc breathed.

He and Monk faded into shadowy corners of the hold with the speed and silence of men accustomed to danger.

The man at the deck hatch must have caught a fleeting glimpse of Doc’s bronze form.

A machine gun erupted down the hatch. The reports of the weapon were surprisingly mild — it was fitted with a silencer of some sort. The hosing metal torrent tore great, splinter-edged rents in the floor planks. It reduced a papier-mвchй replica of a corsair victim to a chewed pile of paper-and-glue pulp.

Sudden silence fell.

Kar’s men milled under the hatch, not knowing what to do. They looked up.

"Kar — "

The cowardly man of the group had started to speak. But he got no further than that one word.

Bur-r-rip!

A machine-gun volley poured into him. His wizened body seemed to lose all its shape under the murderous leaden stream.

The rapid-firer did not stop with his death. It ripped into the other members of Kar’s gang.

Doc Savage knew that the first man to die had seen Kar at the hatch above. Kar was slaying the whole group so none of them could give information concerning him.

It was one of the most cold-blooded, fiendish things Doc had ever witnessed.

In a half dozen ticks of a stop watch, every man of Kar’s in the hold died under the gobbling machine gun.

Then Kar ran wildly away from the hatch, across the deck. Both Doc and Monk heard the master murderer’s leap to the wharf.

Doc’s bronze, giant form flashed from the shadows. It seemed to slide upward on invisible wires. Powerful fingers seized the hatch rim. Doc looked out.

A man raced furiously shoreward along the wharf. He wore a dark raincoat. It enveloped his form down to the ankles. He had a large, nondescript, concealing hat.

Kar — for he it must be — still carried his submachine gun. He whirled suddenly and let fly a volley of bullets.

Doc dropped back into the hold an instant before slivers flew from the hatch edge. But he had seen that Kar’s face was wrapped in a great mask of dark cloth. It covered even his neck.

Whether Kar was Gabe Yuder it was impossible to tell. The fleeing figure could be Gabe Yuder, though.

Doc did not try to leave by the hatch again. He raced aft. Monk trailed him.

"What a cold killer!" Monk grated.

"There should be guns in the deck house!" Doc breathed.

They found the guns. A rack held quite an arsenal of modern weapons. Kar had prepared well. They sprang out on deck.

But Kar was something of a sprinter. Already, he had scampered well up the bluff which was surmounted by Riverside Drive. He kept to the concealment of scrawny shrubbery.

Doc saw a bush shake and fired into it. Machine gun missiles came screaming back in a second. They forced Doc to cover.

Kar reached the low stone wall at the bluff rim. He dived over it.

Doc and Monk found no trace of the fiendish killer when they reached Riverside Drive.

"

KAR must have had an automobile waitin’ here on the Drive," guessed Monk. "Did you get a look at his face, Doc?"

"No," Doc replied slowly. "He was quite thoroughly masked. Whoever he is, he is taking pains that his face does not become known."

Monk and Doc soon found themselves the object of many eyes. A crowd began to gather.

Monk’s clothing was still wet and clung to his great, beam-like limbs, making their anthropoid nature more prominent. He looked like a monster gorilla beside Doc.

Doc Savage had not donned the garments he had removed to dive from the Jolly Roger into the river. He stood clad only in shorts. Pedestrians on Riverside Drive got a glimpse of Doc’s amazing bronze form and stopped to stare in awe.

That giant, metallic figure was a sensation. A passing motorist sighted the bronze man and was so held that he forgot his driving and let his car jam into another.

"We better clear out before we start a panic," Monk snorted.

Hailing a taxi, they got inside. Doc directed the chauffeur to turn into the street which held the row of houses, each of which was so closely like all the others.

Doc entered the tenth house quickly. He soon found Long Tom’s electrical apparatus which put the high-frequency current on the secret telephone line.

Glancing from the rear window at which he had listened, Doc discovered Long Tom working along the back of the houses with his sensitive electrical "ear" mechanism.

Doc tarried to note that the body of Squint had not been removed from the room. Evidently the other rooms in the house were untenanted.

Then Doc slid through the window, descended the wall as easily as a fly, and consulted with Long Tom.

"There is a telephone line from a tanklike submersible sunken near that old pirate exhibition vessel," he explained. "The line enters the pirate ship, then leaves inside a mooring cable. When you trace this line down, you might trace that one also."

"O. K.," said Long Tom.

"And watch out for Kar. The man is a devil."

Long Tom nodded and drew back his coat to show that he had donned a bulletproof vest. Belted to his middle, he also wore a singular pistol. This gun was fitted with a cartridge magazine of extra capacity, curled like a ram horn for compactness. The weapon was one of Doc’s invention. In operation, it was what is known as continuously automatic — actually an extremely small machine gun.

"I’m prepared," Long Tom said, his rather unhealthy looking face set grimly.

Retracing his steps to the taxi, Doc directed the machine to his skyscraper headquarters downtown. He and Monk went inside in haste to avoid attracting undue attention. An elevator wafted them up to the eighty-sixth floor.

They entered Doc’s office. Surprise stopped them.