Лестер Дент - The Fantastic Island

He dived out and lifted the hood. He could see at a glance what was wrong. Wiring had been torn loose and ignition parts smashed. Jans Bergman obviously had used a monkey wrench before entering the house.

The gunfire had ceased inside the house. But it soon cracked from close outside. Lead skidded off the armor plate of the gunmetal coupe, mushroomed against the bulletproof glass. Hoarse shouts sounded.

Doc Savage — a bronze flash — streaked from the other side of the car and melted into the fog. Bullets came hunting him, chopping through wet branches. Doc twisted running low, changed his course, crashed on through fog-drenched trees, and came out on the automobile highway.

A truck headed toward New York City pounded past. The bronze man left the ground in a headlong leap and got a grip on the end-gate of the wheeling truck. He crawled over the gate and made his way forward.

From behind, he had been sighted by his enemies. Machine-gun slugs crashed out of the gray murk but fanned harmlessly past as the heavy truck swayed around a curve. Doc reached the truck driver.

"Faster," he ordered.

The driver took one startled look and jammed the accelerator to the floorboards. The truck stepped up to 55, weaving ponderously on the wet pavement. They covered a mile-or-two.

55 mph was not fast enough. At that speed, they could be overtaken by Jans Bergman. A sleek sedan bored from behind doing a few miles more than the truck. It was not Bergman; just a motorist. As the motorist swung left to pass around the truck, there was a thump on his sedan which gave the driver a badly startled moment. A bigger moment followed for him when — unceremoniously — a door of his car opened.

Doc Savage had left the truck with a gauged leap, landing on the speeding sedan.

"Let me have the wheel," he ordered.

The bulging-eyed driver shot one gasping look at the bronze giant and complied. Doc took the wheel. The speedometer needle went to 80 … 85 … 90 miles-an-hour.

They were out of the fog now. Doc looked behind. There was a car tailing them. Doc recognized it. Jans Bergman's. The pursuing car was coming up fast.

They were running through traffic now. Doc did not want to subject pedestrians or his drafted driver to the dangers of speed and machine-gun bullets.

He said to the man who had been driving, "Slow down ahead there. I'm going to the subway station. I'm leaving you."

"Okay, D…Doc Savage," the other stuttered. He had recognized the bronze man. He would brag about this experience for the rest of his life. And so would the truck driver.

The brakes squealed like stuck pigs and tires slithered as the sedan buckled in toward the curb.

"Thanks!" Doc flung and plunged down the subway stairs. A second afterward, Jans Bergman's car — rubber smoking — careened to the curb. Bergman stayed in the car, but three of his men burst out and followed Doc down the stairway.

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

The automatic steel doors of a Manhattan-bound express train were sliding shut as the bronze man flashed through the subway turnstile. A split-second before the door hooks caught, Doc's outstretched hand fastened on the rubber-cushioned door edge and yanked the door open again. He disappeared within the brightly lighted car and let the door slide shut at his heels.

The doors to cars in New York subway trains are connected by a safety mechanism to the motorman's controls. When Doc stayed the closing of one door, it delayed the starting of the train. This gave Jans Bergman's men time to squeeze through the windows of another car.

The train started. It roared its way through the black tube.

The train was crowded. Passengers were standing closely packed in the wide aisle, some of them with hands reaching up to hold white-enameled grab-irons.

The cosmopolitan population of New York City is less observing, perhaps, than the citizenry of any other city in the United States. People crowd the streets, subways, towering skyscrapers of the metropolis with blank looks on their faces, immersed almost wholly in their own business. It is doubtful if even as commanding a personality as Doc Savage would have been noticed in the closely packed subway except for the fact that the bronze man over-topped by a head the tallest man in the car.

People were beginning to murmur, to point, to gasp with recognition when suddenly there was a crash of sound. A blindingswath of greenish-blue light enveloped the train.

With an ear-piercing shriek of brake shoes on wheeling metal, the train bucked to a violent stop, flinging many of the people in the car to the floor. Following the blinding greenish glare, darkness shut down — the darkness of underground places, jet and utter. Acrid smoke fumes drifted through broken windows, causing the panic-stricken passengers to shriek and struggle in mad frenzy against each other.

A uniformed trainman switched on a flashlight and bawled at the top of his voice. "There's no danger! Short circuit, that's all!"

The light was knocked from his hand by somebody's thrashing arm. But he kept on bawling to the milling passengers: "No danger! Take it easy! No danger!"

The New York underground is as safe as any railway in the World. The passengers knew this. Gradually the panic subsided as the hoarsely repeated words "No danger! No danger!" penetrated through the din to their consciousness.

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

For one person in that car, there was danger however. This had been no ordinary short circuit. The unscheduled stop had been promoted by one of Jans Bergman's men. As the subway went back and the cars lurched to a standstill, Doc's great form was jostled to the floor with those others. But it was not alone the jolting car which had taken Doc off his feet. In the darkness, 2 hard swung blackjacks had thudded against his head.

Before the lights went on under cover of the confusion, it was a relatively simple matter for Jans Bergman's thugs to lift Doc's limp body through a window and carry it down the black passageway. They cursed under their heavy burden and stumbled often, being careful to feel their way by scuffing their shoes along the cold rail at the opposite side of the track from the hooded death of the live third rail.

They came to a place where a red light glowed, marking an emergency exit in the massive expanse of dusty, reinforced concrete. Onto the catwalk platform they lifted Doc and carried him with effort up the steep steps.

Out on the street with their limp burden, they ran slam into a stick-twirling policeman. One of the men cursed under his breath and his hand jerked toward his coat pocket. Before he could draw his automatic, his quicker-witted companion had knocked his hand aside and blurted to the policeman:

"Subway accident — train stalled — this guy we're carryin' out overcome by gas! Lot more of them down there in the same fix. S'awful! You better report it."

Deceived and conscious of his importance in being the first to turn in a report of a first-page headline accident, the copper rushed for a call box.

Doc's captors rushed for a taxi and shoved the bronze man inside.

One of them clipped to the driver, "Nearest hospital." He spoke loudly for the benefit of spectators crowding close.

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

It was not in a hospital room that Doc opened his eyes . He was lying on his face on a brick floor, his wrists handcuffed behind him. He turned sidewise, maneuvered his legs under him, and got to his feet. Light filtered wanly through a sidewalk grating, illuminating the bare, brick-walled room. The place was damp, musty-smelling. A single steel fire door, tightly closed, was the only exit.