Лестер Дент - The Fantastic Island

"West Street!" he barked.

Riding toward the river, Ramadanoff took the ends of the blanket and wrapped them more snugly about the object which he carried.

West Street skirts the Hudson River and is lined with docks. When Ramadanoff let his taxi go, he walked a block down the dimly lit riverfront street till he came to a large, roofed-over pier.

The huge, brick building was smoke-stained and old-looking. There was nothing to distinguish it in appearance from any of a thousand other piers in New York accommodating the World's shipping.

A sign over the corrugated metal door read:

HIDALGOTRADING COMPANY

As Ramadanoff very well knew, there was something unusual about this pier. It was not, practically speaking, a "pier" at all. It was Doc Savage's waterfront hangar. It housed an assortment of heavier-than-air craft as remarkable as the ultra-modern land vehicles garaged in the basement of Doc's skyscraper Headquarters .

Ramadanoff made no attempt to force an entrance into the sprawling bulk of the hangar. He had scouted the locale before. He knew that the hangar — protected by photoelectric eyes and magnetic fields — was as impossible of entrance as a bank vault would have been.

What he did was ridiculously simple. On each side of the driveway door was head-high, rather scrawny shrubbery. Ramadanoff moved along the dim street until his dark figure merged with the shadows of the shrubbery.

Anyone watching could have observed that his figure did not show again on the other side of the shrubbery. But there was no one watching. The little man squirmed into the very center of the concealing branches and crouched down. He pulled the blanket wrapping from his parcel, exposing a submachine-gunof non-glinting blue-metal finish.

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

When Ramadanoff — weaponless — had ducked out of the taxi into the 10 thAvenue doorway, it was to make a lightning quick call on one of Jans Bergman's men who had a room at the address. Bergman's demise was not yet known to his men, so it had been no trouble for Ramadanoff to arrange for the use of the machine-gun. \

Ramadanoff knew that Doc Savage would waste no time in arriving at the hangar to take off for the Galapagos. Of course, Doc would go by plane.

But Ramadanoff was determined that the bronze man would never even enter that hangar! He would drop before a withering blast of ambush lead.

After a while, a sedan rolled down the street and nosed silently in the Hidalgo Trading Company's driveway.

Ramadanoff's pulse quickened … then slowed. He had expected Doc to stop the car, get out, and open the hangar door. But the car ran on without slackening of speed, pointing head-on for the closed roll-down door. At the instant Ramadanoff expected a collision, the door rolled silently upward, actuated by a shortwave radio beam transmitted from within the car to a detector-relay device connected to an electric door-opening mechanism.

Doc's car disappeared within the hangar … and the door closed down.

Ramadanoff's face was purpled from his rage at missing the last chance he would have to prevent Doc from flying to the island. He had a ferocious impulse to empty the machine-gun drum against the corrugated metal door in sheer insane frustration.

A moment later, he was glad that he had not wasted those bullets. Amazingly, the door opened again.

Ramadanoff could hear a scuffling of shoe leather against dusty concrete. Then a huge bronze figure became visible in the door.

The drowsy quiet of early evening was smashed by thunderous, macabre rattle as Ramadanoff held the trigger and swung his stream of leaden death back-and-forth. Mindful of bulletproof garments, he aimed high for the face.

A great many bullets sprayed harmlessly against the corrugated metal surface of the hangar front. But fully a score were direct face hits on the bronze man's figure in the doorway.

There might have been more hits. But suddenly the machine-gun silenced. A crashing weight had descended into the shrubbery — apparently from the clouds — grinding the underbrush, the assassin, and the machine-gun into the ground. Ramadanoff's finger was broken before he could clear it from the trigger. But the finger was the least of his troubles. He felt himself lifted and slammed. He knew what had him …

… Doc Savage!

Doc had leaped from a hidden door high in the warehouse side directly on top of Ramadanoff. Doc dragged Ramadanoff inside the hangar door and said to Long Tom, "Haul 'Robbie' in and get the door shut."

Long Tom chuckled. "Robbie will be needin' a new paint job on his face, Doc."

"Yeah," Renny boomed. "And a set of new teeth."

Ramadanoff stared bleary-eyed as Long Tom and Renny pushed the huge bronze figure — which had appeared in the doorway and taken the bullets — inside and closed the hangar door.

"A dummy!" he ejaculated.

"Sure," Long Tom said. "A mechanical likeness of Doc. 'Robbie, the Robot' ."

"And can Robbie take it!" Renny rumbled.

"Has had his face shot off him 4 times so far," Long Tom added.

Ramadanoff was muttering profanely to himself.

"Don't you get it, Whiskers?" Long Tom demanded.

Ramadanoff scowled.

Renny explained sardonically. "Doc likes to cooperate, so he provided the shrubbery outside for guys like you that want to pot him from cover. Doc ordered the bushes big so as to give plenty of room for a man with a gun to hide inside."

Long Tom continued, "And the bushes are wired so that anyone crowding inside of 'em will cause a signal to flash."

Doc was already penetrating deep within the hangar.

"Come on," he called back.

Dragging their prisoner, Renny and Long Tom hurried after Doc Savage.

The bronze man was swinging inside the cabin of his large speed ship — a 3-motor job with streamlined alloy hull. The wings tapered into the fuselage for minimum wind resistance. It was a combination land-and-sea plane and had a speed of nearly 300 mph.

"We taking this one, Doc?" Long Tom queried, hand waving out to indicate the plane before them.

"Right," the bronze man said.

Renny and Long Tom shoved their prisoner inside and piled in after him.

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

With the 3 supercharged motors delivering their full quota of power, the big speed plane hurled south through the Atlantic seaboard darkness.

They caught the slumberous twinkle of early morning lights in Cuba and roared on, doing better than 300 mph as they climbed high and rode the stratospheric air currents to the Canal Zone.

At Colon, they got a surprise.

They set down for refueling. A dark-skinned man in a white linen suit popped out of the directional radio station operated by the Department of Commerce and ran across the field toward Doc's plane. The man was waving a radiogram.

"For Doc Savage," he called.

The dark-skinned man leaned against the low-slung cabin with a hand resting on the ledge of an opened porthole. His black eyes were centered in rapt admiration on Doc as the bronze giant opened the envelope and read the radiogram.

Have discovered Boris Ramadanoff is working with his brother Count Ramadanoff Stop Disregard our other radiogram Stop Alive but may not for long Stop Better do things

Monk

Doc handed the radiogram to his aides.

"Huh!" Renny snorted. "We got Boris's number before they did, I guess."

"They're still alive," Long Tom said, tensely.

"Yeah. And we'll be there in a few hours," Renny thumped.

"Watch the plane," Doc instructed Renny. "Do not let Ramadanoff out or let anybody else come near."