Лестер Дент - The Fantastic Island

Doc tried his weight against the door. His ramming shoulder attack shuddered the rusty sheet steel. With time, he might break through. Then he heard voices outside and paused, listening. He could not catch the words at first.

While the muffled mumble of voices approached, Doc tried his strength on the handcuffs which bound him. Other times in his life, he had broken the connecting link on a pair of handcuffs by utilization of sheer strength and wrist leverage.

Muscles bulged and rippled now as he bent forward, exerting a terrific tug on the steel cuffs. He tried only once. Then he knew what he was up against. His enemies were taking no chances with him. His hands had been locked behind him with the most modern of tempered chrome handcuffs. A sledge and chisel would not have sufficed to get the cuffs off his wrists. It was work for a cutting torch.

Another appalling feature was that the cuffs contracted — took up slack — when pressure was exerted against them, forcing a saw edge into lacerating contact with the wrists. Crimsondripped from his skin where the steel points had gouged.

The bronze man bent his fingers upward till they could touch the end of his coat sleeve. His fingers moved deftly, unraveling a thread. From a pocket in the coat sleeve, his hands received a small metal envelope, flexible as lead foil. Doc opened one end of the envelope with his fingernail and carefully maneuvered his hands to pour the liquid contents — a few drops only — on the handcuff links.

The talking men outside had now approached close enough to the door that Doc could hear what they were saying. He recognized one of the voices. It was Jans Bergman's. The blond, bullet-headed leader with the skull-tight skin had apparently just come in. His glib pronouncements sounded strange, when uttered with that foreign accent.

Doc heard him saying "You left his clothes on? You fools!"

A sullen voice answered. "We frisked him … got everything he had."

"You couldn't have gotten half of it! Savage has a thousand pockets. You could yank out his teeth, shave his head, and pull out his nails and he'd still have enough chemicals hidden on him to blow up a battleship."

The other curved nervously. "I don't like it … monkeyin' with this bronze guy!"

"You're getting your cut."

"What good's heavy sugar if I croak before I can blow it?"

There was a silence, heavy, oppressive.

Then Bergman asked, "Has he come out of it yet?"

"Look through and see for yourself," the other snarled. "I ain't even lookin' at him any more. He's like a poisonous snake to me."

There was a sharp, metallic rasping as Bergman slid back an eye-slit in the door and peered through.

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

He saw Doc lying on his back, feigning unconsciousness.

"He's still out," Bergman said.

"He ought to be. We both of us give him a tap that would have busted a cable on Brooklyn Bridge."

There was another silence, more ominous than the one before. When Bergman spoke again, it was in a hoarse voice, curiously hushed.

"We've got to kill him," he said.

"Maybe you're right," the other muttered. "But how would we kill him? A gunshot would bring one of them thousand-legged bugs crawlin' down our necks."

"A gunshot, yes. But a slit throat makes little noise."

"Get close enough to that bronze guy to cut his throat? Not for mine."

"He's handcuffed."

"Suppose he skins out of them cuffs?"

"How can he?"

"How can he do a lot of things he does?"

"All right, suppose he gets out of the cuffs? He can't … but if he does, look at the knives. We won't have to get so close to him as you're thinking."

Bergman tiptoed aside. From under a litter of boxes and excelsior packing, he lifted 2 huge knives, bone-handled, with blades nearly half-a-foot in width and close to a yard long.

To Doc's ears came the gasped words "Sugar cane knives, ain't they?"

"Right. I'm going to cut Savage's head off!"The heavy door swung open with ponderous creaking and Jans Bergman — followed closely by his companion — advanced across the damp bricks toward Doc's prone form. The assassins walked in a crouch, their machetes raised high.

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

Once in reach of Doc, they paused.

"If I don't make a clean job with the first stroke," Bergman muttered, "dip your own knife in the blood. Then follow me out in a hurry."

The other's teeth started chattering. The massive knife wavered and he grasped it with both hands.

"I'm practically out on the sidewalk now," he husked.

Bergman's knife lifted higher … then down it chopped, the wide blade glinting dully in the half light.

The first stroke was not enough. It was not even a starter. As the blade swished close, Doc — whose muscles had been tensely braced against the floor — wrenched his head and shoulders forward.

It was too late for Jans Bergman to change his stroke. The frightful blade slammed past Doc's head and sank inches deep in the mortar.

Before Bergman could pull the blade free — before his companion could chop down with the other knife — Doc sprang an even greater surprise on them.

His arm — free from the handcuffs — struck out and down against the back of the mortar-imprisoned blade, knocking it forcibly from Bergman's grasp. At the same time, his other hand streaked forward and grabbed the handle.

"No handcuffs!" the other man shrieked in terror as he chopped down, holding his knife in both hands.

Doc parried the down stroke with the knife he had taken from Bergman. Steel met steel with grinding clangor . The knife aimed at Doc skittered in the air, glinting like water heaved from a bucket and clattered on the bricks at the other side of the room.

"No handcuffs!" Bergman echoed. The skin was drawn so taut across his face in his terror at the spectacle of the bronze giant wielding that slab of razor-blade steel that it seemed his cheekbones must poke through.

The explanation of Doc's handcuff escape was simple. The liquid he had released from the flexible metal envelope had been an acid which made short shift of steel such as composed those handcuff links.

From outside the room sounded excited voices and approaching footsteps. Doc bolted for the door, brandishing his fearful weapon in the faces of the newcomers and scowling ferociously.

Doc made no attack on these enemies. He was looking for bigger game now. He took the basement steps in a series of bounds. From above, he hurled the unwieldy cane knife down since he preferred to depend upon his own scientifically developed weapons.

Locking the solid door at the top of the landing and bolting it against the aggregation below, he stalked away in search of the master schemer he knew to be somewhere in the building. In search, too, of Renny and Long Tom whom he surmised must have been captured.

It was this last objective which had brought Doc to this building. Back in the subway, the bronze man had not been knocked out by those thudding blackjack blows.He had only feigned unconsciousness, reasoning that the quickest way to locate his aides — if they were still alive — was to maneuver to get himself taken to their place of imprisonment.

Mounting from the basement flight-after-flight, Doc Savage was not long in discovering the type of building he was in. It was one of those ancient tenements — condemned and abandoned — on the upper West Side of New York City near the Hudson River. It was a sore spot among the surrounding modern buildings. Its windows blanked out with time-chipped whitewash.