Doc Savage: The Ice Genius (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 12) (13 page)

There were a few times in his life where Doc Savage regretted not carrying a supermachine pistol; this was one of them.

Bullets were snarling overhead with alarming regularity. It was impossible to stand up, without risking death.

Then it became a moot point.

THE entire camp was aroused. Hollering Mongols came streaming from all directions. When their bullets started cutting down their own fellows, Chinua’s voice ripped out, ordering them to employ blades alone.

That gave Doc Savage confidence that he could stand up. He did so, but his situation was not greatly improved. The bronze giant could not see in the sepia pall, but knew that he was under attack by the close-by swishing of Mongol blades probing for his vitals.

Doc Savage’s senses were probably the most remarkable of any human who had ever lived. He could not see in the weird murk, however—although his training was such that he could operate amid utter blackness where another man would be paralyzed by sightlessness.

The point of a blade struck him in the back.

Doc pivoted, measuring the probable place in which the head of the man wielding the blade must stand, and metallic knuckles collided with the side of the other’s face, knocking the swordsman out of his boots.

Edge of another blade slashed down and the angry swish of it before it cut into his shoulder made Doc think for a moment that he had lost an ear. The edge dug into the chain mesh undergarment he wore. Like the sword tip that had done no great harm, it failed to penetrate flesh.

Doc threw himself backward, and landed on that swordsman, his over two hundred pounds of muscle, bone and sinew causing the air to rush out from the grunting Mongol’s stunned lungs.

Springing to his feet once more, Doc crouched low and reached out for moving legs. As swords clashed and collided over his ducking head, terrible bronze fingers dug into the flesh of thighs and shins. Doc yanked, upsetting more Mongols.

In the swirling blackness, it appeared that he was doing more than holding his own, when the flat of a blade came out of nowhere, colliding with his left temple.

Doc was briefly staggered, but spared mortal injury due to the fact that he wore over his natural hair a sheet-steel skullcap, to the outer surface of which was affixed a realistic semblance of his own close-cropped bronze hair.

Doc swung more wildly than he intended, and so failed to connect with anything.

Another blade drove in for his back; still another sought his vitals.

The powerful voice of Chinua, the bandit chieftain, was bellowing out harsh orders.

“Take the foreign devil alive!” he roared.

That was all well and good, but his minions had been getting the worst of it, and now their anger was impelling their actions.

“He fights like a demon!” one Mongol barked.

“We need him alive!” Chinua insisted.

This made no sense, of course, but orders were orders and the Mongols did their level best.

There was hardly any wind, only a little breeze between the hills. So the rolling dragon of black smoke simply spread outward and did not thin appreciably. Fighting in this disagreeable murk became next to impossible.

True, there was a lot of hacking, slashing and kicking—not to mention other strenuous activity—but Doc Savage was like a formidable phantom in the midst of it.

Weaving this way and that, ducking frequently, he managed to avoid any decisive blow.

His frustrated foes, redoubling their efforts, chopped off pieces of their fellows, unwittingly. This only added to the general chaos in the ferocity of the fight.

Mongols howled as they lost fingers, pieces of scalp. In one case an unfortunate man’s sword hand, still clutching its weapon, dropped lifelessly to the dirt.

ABOVE the fray, Johnny Littlejohn watched as Doc Savage was swallowed by the oily smoke and fierce Mongols. He could not see what was happening. For all he knew, Doc Savage was being chopped to pieces.

Face twisting with fury, Johnny rose up to his full scarecrow height, and sprayed the sepia stuff with his supermachine pistol. Its bullfiddle moan swelled and reverberated, as the tiny weapon spat out innumerable mercy capsules, while ejecting streams of brass empties from the receiver. In operation, the intricate weapon seemed to be trying to shake itself apart.

Having nothing to guide him but rank guesswork, the bony archaeologist sprayed mercy slugs into the coiling dragon of impenetrability.

Doc Savage was well armored against the tiny slugs, which were after all only hollow capsules filled with a potent potion. But Johnny full well understood that Doc was exposed to their fury, at least so far as his face and hands were concerned.

There was nothing that could be done for it. If the skeletal archeologist happened to bring down the bronze man, so long as he quelled Doc’s murderous foes at the same time, it was worth the risk.

So Johnny Littlejohn pulled back on the firing lever, emptied his drum, reloading as rapidly as possible in an effort to probe the swirling dark mass.

When he was entirely out of bullets, the human beanpole stood erect and tried to peer down into the spreading pall.

So intent was he upon discerning the fate of Doc Savage that Johnny failed to see Chinua rush out of his colorful tent with a traditional Mongol composite bow and quiver of arrows hanging off one hard shoulder.

Withdrawing one shaft, he nocked it, aimed at the bony archaeologist, then let fly.

The iron tip of the shaft struck Johnny in the left shoulder, and would have inflicted a severe wound, possibly leading to the inevitable amputation of that shoulder, except that Johnny also wore his armored union-suit underwear.

As it was, he was knocked backward, separated from his now-empty weapon, and generally stunned. He went rolling down the sandy hill, stopping only when he encountered a stony obstruction.

Johnny lost consciousness shortly after that.

Chapter XV

JOHNNY’S CALAMITY

WHEN JOHNNY LITTLEJOHN awoke, he felt cold in a very strange way.

Blinking baffled eyes, he rotated his shaggy head, and attempted to ascertain his situation.

Flat blank brassy faces regarded him without warmth or friendliness.

Johnny attempted to move, and saw that he was pinioned by coils of heavy rope. He appeared to be on his back, but atop something very high off the ground, because even though he was lying prone, he hung above eye level of the surrounding Mongols.

The bony archaeologist gave out a groan of miserable defeat. Shaking his elongated body, he attempted to test his bonds, and in doing so discovered that Doc Savage was tied at his back, also a prisoner.

Unlike Johnny, Doc was in chains. Evidently, the frame of the mighty bronze man had caused the Mongols to take that extra precaution.

To all appearances, the bronze man was unconscious. Glancing over his titanic form, Johnny saw no signs of significant blood, but the back of one hand was red and swollen, and Johnny recognized at once that several mercy bullets had struck Doc Savage there.

These wounds were not deep, nor had they bled very much. The design of the small capsules was engineered so that they broke on impact with the outer skin, introducing the powerful anesthetic into surface blood vessels. Doc Savage no doubt had succumbed immediately. The stuff was amazingly fast acting.

Again, Johnny gave out an awful groan that made his lathy ribs ache.

But there was worse yet to come.

“What are you going to do with us?” he demanded of Chinua in the latter’s own language.

The bandit chieftain grumbled, “We have found a use for you.”

“Use?”

“We have no fire, no matches—no method of making heat.”

Talk of heat caused Johnny’s eyes to gaze skyward, and he saw that the sun was approaching the noon hour, and while there were stratocumulus clouds in the sky, they were also breaking up.

The solar rays are beaming down upon them. This caused Johnny to remember the sturdy block of ice in which the Mongol conqueror known to the west as Tamerlane stood imprisoned.

Frantically, Johnny glanced about, looking for that icy extrusion. He could not locate it, which puzzled him. It had been very near this spot only recently.

Then the skeletal geologist remembered how cold his back felt. A fresh chill overtook him. This impelled him to wrench himself around in his thick, ropy web and look downward.

Only then did Johnny discover the missing chunk of ice. It was not missing. He and Doc Savage were tied to the top of it!

A LOOK of utter horror washed over Johnny’s long, drawn features. This brought hearty laughter from the throat of Chinua the Mongol. His bandit tribe joined in the full-bodied hilarity.

Johnny blinked furiously as the awfulness of his position dawned on him.

“The heat of your circulating blood will be the stove that frees the Terrible One,” confirmed Chinua.

“Doc! Doc!” yelled Johnny excitedly. “Wake up! Please, wake up!”

But the mighty bronze man appeared dead to the world.

To add insult to injury, Monzingo Baldwin then bustled up, and caught Johnny’s gaze. The look in the midget’s eyes was very wise.

“What are you doing here?” Johnny demanded hotly.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” the midget snarled.

The sneering vehemence of the small man’s words took Johnny entirely aback.

“What has come over to you, Baldwin?” he demanded.

“Don’t call me that.” He drew himself up to his full, if rather ridiculous, height. “My name is Cadwiller Olden.”

This was the final blow. Johnny lay back, shut his hollow eyes, and seemed at a loss for words—or even the strength to respond.

“My memory came back,” Olden said unnecessarily. “I got suspicious back at that hospital when I overheard that damned Doc Savage talking about my case. He wanted to do a brain operation on me. I thought he was my friend. But now I know he’s my enemy. Now that I remember who I am, thanks to these bandits banging me up after I landed, I know for sure he’s my enemy. I remember everything. Everything. Get me?”

None of this exchange appeared decipherable by the Mongol tribe, since none of them appeared to speak English. But they seemed to tolerate the presence of the angry little man. Johnny decided to do something about that.

Turning his head to address Chinua, he began speaking the man’s own lingo.

“This truncated man is an awful criminal. He has done great evil. It is dangerous to have him around.”

Chinua looked interested. “You say he is a bad man?”

“The very worst,” assured Johnny.

“Good!” exploded the Mongol leader. “I need such men in my band.”

The other Mongols broke into raucous laughter. Cadwiller Olden joined in, although the conversation thus far was lost on him.

Johnny was at a loss for words. He said nothing. He tried to shake himself free of his ropes. What the gangling archaeologist expected to do if he succeeded, surrounded as he was by well-armed Mongol warriors, was impossible to say.

But Johnny gave it his all. He used his teeth, tried to chew on the heavy rope over his left shoulder. He managed to chip a front tooth in his ferocity.

This evoked more ribald laughter from the circle of Mongols surrounding the block of ice that contained one of the most terrible human beings ever to have lived.

It was as the uncouth hilarity was dying down that Doc Savage roused back to consciousness.

Chapter XVI

BATTLE OF THE BLOCK

OWING TO HIS tremendous constitution, Doc Savage was normally quick to emerge from any period of unconsciousness or stupor.

But the concoction with which he filled his mercy bullets was an extremely powerful formula, calculated to drop a man as soon as possible by entering his bloodstream and keeping him down for a period of hours.

Doc’s golden eyes were strangely dull as he looked about him, and came to rest on Johnny Littlejohn.

The look on Johnny’s face told a lot. Doc rotated his head, took in the Mongols, realized that he was in chains, and seemed, if not exactly bewildered, slow to process this situation.

The bronze giant said something that might have sounded foolish under any other circumstance. “Prisoners?”

“Worse,” Johnny told him.

Doc Savage must have felt the coldness of the ice through his alloy metal undergarment, because suddenly he was thrashing about, attempting to ascertain the nature of the frigid seat on which he was lying. The golden flakes in his uncanny eyes resumed their illusion of active animation.

That seemed to complete his return to consciousness. The bronze man saw fractured ice, and his melodious trilling came into being, tentative at first, hesitating over its tuneless melody, until it suffused the air with its unusual ventriloquist quality.

This unexpected sound caused the Mongols to stare into the sky. Some produced antique revolvers with which to bring down the rare bird they thought was flying overhead.

But no bird appeared, so they looked to one another, shrugged, visibly suspecting one or the other of authoring the eerie cadence.

Eventually, Doc got control of his senses, and the trilling trailed off into a vague nothingness.

Johnny told him urgently, “They are using the warmth of our bodies to melt the ice.”

Doc nodded. “That should take considerable time,” he stated matter-of-factly.

This casual comment produced a short laugh of surprise from the bony geologist. He had, in his time, seen the bronze man face everything from a small army to a charging Tyrannosaurus rex, without a change of expression. But this was something new.

“We might,” said Doc without emotion, “hasten the process.”

“Hasten? I’ll be superamalgamated!”

Johnny had no idea what the bronze man meant until Doc abruptly flexed his mighty musculature, grasping the imprisoning chains with metallic fingers where he could. By this leverage, he began rocking the cake of ice beneath them.

SEEING this, Johnny understood the bronze man’s intentions. He commenced rocking, too. He timed his rocking to the bronze man’s muscular rhythms.