Лестер Дент - The Fantastic Island

As he raced upward, his senses were alert to catch the faintest sign of human habitation. His footfalls sounded hollowly against the worn, splintery floor, revealing wooden laths like the ribs of something long dead.

On the 6 thfloor, Doc paused. Here, plaster on the hall floor had been ground under many feet. Doc went up another flight. Here, too, plaster had been crushed underfoot. This building was several stones taller than most of its kind. Doc went up 2 more flights to the top floor — the 9 th.

There were signs of recent passage on the stairway leading to the roof. Doc went up. At the top landing he had a mild surprise. A fire door of modern steel construction had recently been built in. It was solidly placed.

For the present, Doc contented himself with peering through a lookout slit in the door. His almost inaudible trilling sound, weirdly traversing the musical scale — that small, unconscious manifestation of Doc Savage in moments of stress or surprise — tremored in the dead air of early evening as the Man of Bronze focused his eyes on the rooftop.

He saw a plane— a gyro of ultra-modern design — lashed down on the roof under a collapsible silk-cloth shelter. Huge silencers were attached to motor exhaust stacks. The roof had been leveled, patched and reinforced; and a raised apparatus — a Navy-type catapult — erected. There was also a conventional cable device to kill landing speed.

That the roof had been used for landings was evident by the wheel marks. The district was a mercantile one, virtually empty after business hours. Surrounding buildings were low. Quite evidently, the gyro did not operate from this base by municipal permit. But it must have been able to go-and-come by night undetected. Luminous paint markings on the roof were commencing to glow in the twilight. A clever scheme for night landings.

Doc turned — noiseless, a shadow in the failing light — and silently descended the stairs. On the 6 thfloor, he paused for a detailed search. Tracks in the plaster dust led to closed doors of several rooms. Before each door Doc paused … listening. He made no sound. He might have been a bronze, floating cloud.

Suddenly a screeching, splintering noise crashedthrough the shadowed hallway! It was a screeching of hinges rent from doors and the splintering of the door itself under the terrific force of Doc's lunge.

Listening in the hall, Doc had caught the sound of human breathing inside the room. As he smashed through the door, a man who had been bending over — twirling the dials of a modern safe — straightened up with a guttural curse.

From the crashed-in door, all that was visible of the man was a bulky body with a blunt, close-cropped head. Jans Bergman!

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

In the time it took for Bergman to jerk his bullet head around to look, Doc Savage had cleared the width of the room and locked a steel-thewed arm around the man.

Bergman struggled, trying to get at the automatic in his pocket. He was a big man. During his youth in his native country, he had won recognition as a wrestler. But with Doc's arm holding tighter and tighter, strength flowed out of Bergman's body until — if Doc had not held him up — he would have fallen to the floor.

Doc appropriated Bergman's automatic and tossed it clattering onto the writing surface of an old-fashioned roll-top desk. Then he allowed Bergman to slump into a chair.

Doc indicated the safe. He said, "Greed brings many men to ruin. You did not leave when you had the chance. You came back here to help yourself to more money."

"Yes! Let's get out of here … while we're alive!"

Jans Bergman was staring up at Doc with panic creeping into his slitted eyes. Sweat was beading his brow and glistening in the close-cropped hair on his head.

"Who is your boss?" Doc questioned.

Bergman's thin lips pressed so tightly they disappeared in the stretched smoothness of his skin. He shook his head.

Doc shrugged. "All right. But here is one you will answer. Where are my 2 men that were brought here before me?"

Bergman's lips writhed. "I have nothing to say!"

Doc settled himself on the large roll-top desk and said, "We will stay here until you talk."

"Savage, you're nuts!" Bergman jabbered. "It's as dangerous for you in here as it is for me! Sometimes a man drops dead with nobody near him. What has killed him is a little hole in his temple about the size you could poke your thumb into."

"What makes that hole?" Doc queried, curiously.

"I don't know. But I'll tell you where your men are … "

In the twilight murkiness of the room leaped a peculiar sound — a kind of fleshy crunch . Bergman's words died in his throat. His head flopped sidewise. His shoulders followed it with flowing motion. His head thumped hollowly against the floor. His body lay there in a twisted huddle.

Doc leaped from the desk and made a quick examination. His fingers encountered a bone-crushed depression in the left temple — a smooth, white wound — in its size and contour the same as a man's thumb would have made if jabbed into white lard.

Even as Doc looked, the wound commenced to ooze scarlet in red pinpoints which quickly built up an overflowing red puddle. Bergman's flat ear divided the 2 streams which ran onto the floor.

Jans Bergman's racketeering days were over. He was a victim of what he had called the "thumb-hole death".

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

A voice sounded in the room, precise: "The same thing could have happened to anyone — anyone!"

No one had come into the darkening room. There was no one standing outside the doorway. There was only that mocking voice rebounding from the walls.

Doc turned and fastened his gaze on the roll-top desk.

A laugh floated mockingly into the room. "Congratulations, my dear Savage. You have located my voice. Almost any second now, you may look toward the doorway where you will be confronted by a second menace. Not so mysterious, but fully as deadly as that thing which Jans Bergman so quaintly called the 'thumb-hole death'."

Shoe scuffling sounded from down the hall. Doc turned to see 2 men loom inside the doorway. They were clearly none of Bergman's men. They were squat Mongol types — massive of shoulder, heavy of jowl. They carried equally heavy, squat weapons — short guns with stubby barrels flared at the muzzle.

"Meet my personal bodyguard, Savage," the voice sounded. "Their weapons will interest you. They are instruments of my own designing, combining the features of a sawed …"

A faint whirring sounded and a stout oak panel in the side of the roll-top desk slid hack. A man stepped out into the room and the panel closed behind him. He stood there with black glittering eyes — a little man with an Old World manner and a black Czar-of-Russia beard.

It was Boris Ramadanoff!

Doc evinced no surprise.

Ramadanoff said suavely, "Why should you wish to be here?"

"To secure the release of my 2 men."

As he spoke, the bronze man commenced sliding the toe of his right foot toward the cuff on his left trousers leg.

Ramadanoff's beady eyes caught the movement.

"Hold it!" he slashed angrily, and then in throaty Asiatic speech barked an order to his bodyguard.

The 2 squat assassins — Mongol eyes closing to slanting penciled slits in their broad faces — moved closer with their fantastic guns.