Doc Savage: The Ice Genius (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 12) (15 page)

Chapter XIX

THE MASK DROPS

AS TAMERLANE—assuming that the man in the metal mask was the genuine article—hacked himself free of his icy cage, Cadwiller Olden rushed a canteen of water over to Chinua the Mongol bandit, dashing it in his face.

This produced the desired results. Shaking his head like a wet dog, Chinua jumped to his feet. He was without weapons, but charged into the clutch of Mongols surrounding the resurrection in progress.

Chinua barked out gruff orders, but when his eyes fell upon the tall Mongol emerging from the shattered and melting ice, his tongue froze in his mouth.

“Lord Timur!” he breathed. Then he fell to his knees in fealty.

“What are you called?” croaked the armored man.

“I am Chinua, chieftain of this clan.”

“No,” returned Timur. “You are
Tarkhan
Chinua, chief among my generals.”

Tears streaming down his face, Chinua bowed even lower. He bumped his forehead to the dirt, kept it there.

“In that case, what would you have me do with these foreign devils?” asked Chinua.

Timur looked to Doc Savage and Johnny Littlejohn, and apparently did not like what he beheld. For his citrine eyes narrowed malevolently.

“Slay them,” he said sternly.

Every Mongol heard these words, and took them to heart.

They rushed the bronze man, who immediately reached for his discarded length of chain and begin whirling it about his head, producing a low, ominous moan.

One Mongol attempted to slip up on Doc from behind. The bronze man dipped the whirling arc of chain slightly and laid him low with a glancing blow to the attacker’s skull that spun the unfortunate man around three times before he fell.

Chinua lifted an arm, and yelled, “No, they are mine. It is my privilege to slay them.”

A warrior’s blade jumped into the air, and Chinua caught it in his right fist.

The Mongol band stepped back, forming a circle around Doc and Johnny to prevent their leaving camp.

Johnny put up his dukes, which resembled little mallets consisting more of bony skin-encased linkage than padded flesh.

“We don’t stand much of a chance!” he undertoned to Doc.

By this time, Timur had clambered painfully to his feet, stamping about in a circle because he could not feel anything below his waist. The overlapping plates of his lamellar iron armor clinked and jingled, and it could be seen that his limbs shivered as if palsied. Evidently, his body still reverberated from his long, icy imprisonment.

The eyes of the Mongols flicked back and forth between him and the impending fight, as if not certain which was of greater importance.

Doc said to Johnny, “Hold your breath.”

Johnny did so. He knew what was coming.

Reaching into his clothes, Doc removed a flat silver case, which he flipped open. It resembled a cigarette case, although larger. Nestled within were tiny glass globes, like liquid-filled marbles. The liquid was the color of water.

Doc began pegging these in all directions.

The Mongols flinched, not knowing what to expect. But when the glass capsules shattered, nothing much seemed to happen. Then they relaxed momentarily.

Unbeknownst to them, the oily liquid instantly vaporized, producing a colorless and odorless gas that soon overpowered them.

Mongols simply started falling asleep on their feet. Chinua was the first to drop, landing on his broad sword.

Others were collapsing, too, and before a full minute had elapsed virtually everyone was in the dirt, breathing heavily, even snoring here and there.

The man who had been in a bygone era the feared Tamerlane was not immune to the anesthetic gas. Behind the battle mask of meteoric iron, yellow orbs closed. He fell back into the broken and melting ice, as heavy as a sack of concrete covered in leather-and-iron armor. His spasmodic shivering increased in its intensity.

Other than Doc and Johnny, only one individual failed to succumb to the strange slumber. That was Cadwiller Olden. He had encountered the gas in the past, was familiar with it. When the marble-like bombs had shattered, he knew enough to hold his breath, running away as he did so. The little man disappeared into a colorful tent.

After about a minute, the gas dissipated and became harmless. It was safe to breathe again. Doc and Johnny resumed normal respiration.

The bronze giant went among the fallen, checking that no one had injured themselves, lastly examining the figure of Tamerlane, whose chest was rising and falling with his shuddery breathing.

Bending, Doc Savage removed his mask and helmet. The massive head thus revealed made Johnny Littlejohn gasp audibly.

There was an Oriental temple down near Mott Street in New York’s Chinatown. And in it a squat idol which was not Asiatic of feature, nor any other race either, but simply as fiercely ugly as human lineaments could conceivably be made. It was said that an Oriental artisan had spent years making it—a statue of an Asiatic ruler who had caused his legs to be cut off for some crime.

Tamerlane made Johnny think of the Celestial image down near Mott Street. The fellow’s face did not wrinkle, but bulged out in pencil-sized rolls; in repose, he showed his teeth in a fierce smile, and it could be seen that the teeth were like large yellow-white kernels of corn.

If the ornate mask had resembled a metallic ogre, the features they formerly concealed were those of a gargoyle, hideous and inhuman.

“Ugly as a burnt boot,” breathed Johnny. “What disposition do we make of him?”

Doc Savage seemed to be at a temporary loss for words. The sight of the gargoyle face fascinated him. His hypnotic eyes searched the unlovely features.

“If we leave him behind, his story will be lost to posterity,” reminded Johnny.

“But what would we do with him?” asked Doc.

“In his day,” expounded Johnny, “he was a murderous tyrant. If he committed crimes in the present day, you would consign him to our College. Let us take Tamerlane to America for safekeeping.”

Doc Savage eyed Johnny skeptically. “If we do that, we will have to erase his memory, in which case his story will be lost to history.”

Johnny cleared his throat noisily. “We won’t have to perform the brain operation right away. We can learn many things from him, then erase his memory.”

Doc nodded. “It is a reasonable solution to the conundrum which Tamerlane’s survival presents.”

The bronze giant reached into a pocket, and pulled out another flat case. This one was studded with dials and knobs, surrounding a loudspeaker grill. It was a wonderfully small radio micro-wave transmitter-receiver with a range of several miles.

Doc switched it on. The device was already tuned to the frequency used by his men for communication. He spoke into the loudspeaker, which doubled as a microphone.

“Doc Savage to Monk Mayfair. Come in, Monk.”

A squeaky voice answered excitedly,
“Doc! We found a salt water lake to alight on. Did you find that Monzingo Baldwin?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” replied Doc. “Take the plane into the air and land as close to the camp as practical. We are getting out of here.”

“How did everything work out?”
Monk wanted to know.

Doc Savage told him, “That remains to be seen. Hurry.”

THE PLANE’S throaty engines disturbed the distance a half hour later, while Doc was occupied scouring the camp for Cadwiller Olden. He found tiny footprints, but they led to an assemblage of ponies, where they disappeared. The ground was sandy in spots, hard and tough in others. Evidently, the midget had taken great care to walk where he would leave no spoor. The bronze man lost the trail in hard turf that retained no impressions short of horse’s hooves.

“Baldwin is nowhere to be found,” Doc told Johnny Littlejohn, sounding slightly puzzled.

Johnny looked a little sheepish.

“What is it?” Doc prompted, noticing his expression.

“In all the uproar, I forgot to tell you. He appears to have suffered several blows to his head after he landed. He remembers that he’s Cadwiller Olden, not Monzingo Baldwin.”

Again, Doc Savage’s trilling piped up, weirdly startled. He stifled it at once.

“This compounds our complications,” he admitted.

Johnny looked around uneasily, saying, “The gas should have knocked him out, too.”

Doc said slowly, “If his memory has returned, so would his recollections of how we operate. He would have had the presence of mind to hold his breath.”

“Then the rapscallion could be anywhere,” said Johnny morosely.

Doc nodded. “It is urgent we find him.”

BUT the search produced nothing, and soon the mighty roar of the flying boat reached their ears. It began descending, silencers turned off.

Monk put the plane down hard, but it was a serviceable landing. No damage was done.

Doc Savage tied the iron-bound body of Tamerlane to an appaloosa packhorse, and used it to convey him out of the camp.

Chinua and his Mongols were still sleeping. By the time they returned to consciousness, it would all be over. And there was nothing any of them could do about it, being merely wild horse nomads and not aviators.

Everything seemed to go well. As Doc and Johnny approached the plane, they saw that Monk kept the motors turning, so that they could take off instantly.

What spoiled everything was a simple rifle shot.

The passing of the bullet made a noise that was distinctive and is known to all men in war. It sounded unpleasantly like a glass rod breaking very close to their startled ears.

Knowing that noise and what it meant, Doc and Johnny naturally ducked their heads, then turned, eyes sharp.

They scanned the surrounding hills.

Another bullet snapped past, even closer.

Johnny had yanked out his recovered superfirer, but it was empty. The gesture was pointless.

Doc Savage’s gaze went to the top of a low sand hill, where he spied, thanks to a telltale puff of smoke, a tiny figure cradling a rifle much too large for it.

The bronze man directed Johnny’s attention to the gunsmoke with a pointing finger.

“Olden!” hissed Johnny.

There came another puff of smoke, and the packhorse gave a jump, having been stung in the rump.

Doc Savage reached out for the reins, but the appaloosa would have none of it. Whinnying wildly, it charged off, Tamerlane still tied to its saddle.

“He’s getting away!” Johnny bleated.

More bullets began arriving. They were coming dangerously close.

To chase after the horse would be a fool’s errand. And they had no way to return fire without reaching the waiting plane and obtaining rifles.

There was nothing to do except seek the shelter of the flying boat. They did so with alacrity.

Bullets stormed all around, but Cadwiller Olden appeared to be a poor shot. Nevertheless, the snarling bullets came close enough that they respected the deadly slugs.

At their approach, Monk flung open the door, and they piled in.

“Who’s shootin’?” demanded Monk.

“Cadwiller Olden,” Doc told him grimly.

“You mean Monzingo?” said Long Tom.

“Not anymore,” snapped Johnny. “He has shed that identity. He knows who he is now.”

“Holy cow!” thundered Renny. “What more could go wrong?”

“You haven’t heard the worst of it,” said Johnny, slapping at his dusty tweeds.

Doc Savage went forward to kill the engines.

“Ain’t we takin’ off?” demanded Monk.

“We must capture that appaloosa,” the bronze man called back.

Muttered Monk, “I noticed that there was a man tied to that nag. Who is it?”

“The worst person imaginable,” said Johnny glumly.

“You mean Chinua?”

“Tamerlane makes Chinua look like a piker,” Johnny retorted. He was pushing a fresh drum into the receiver of his superfirer. The expression on his hollow face was one of great determination. If he had to do it single-handedly, the spindle-limbed archaeologist was going to run down the pony and its unconscious rider.

“Who’s Tamerlane?” asked Monk.

“Do you recall the story of Rip Van Winkle?” countered Johnny.

“The old graybeard who went to sleep in the Catskills and woke up twenty years later? Sure, I do.”

“Tamerlane is like that,” snapped Johnny. “And we must recapture him with alacrity.”

It seemed like a simple plan. But Cadwiller Olden continued to stymie it. He must have dragged a great store of ammunition up onto his hill, because he kept peppering the plane with whining slugs.

True, most of them missed and none of them did any harm. But every time Monk or Renny flung open the hatch door, a fresh fusillade came their way, causing them to bang it shut with haste.

“Anyone have any bright ideas?” grumbled Renny in a frustrated tone.

Starting the engines, Doc urged the plane forward, and threw it around in a half circle, shielding the hatch from any and all sniping fire.

This maneuver did not solve the problem of how to leave the shelter of the big plane without being sniped at. But it was a start.

The problem was that precious minutes were flying by, and the plane’s diminishing store of gasoline, which had been seriously depleted over the course of the last day, was assuming alarming proportions.

Then, to further complicate matters, a cloud of dust appeared in the midst of the hills encompassing the bandit encampment.

Johnny was the first to notice this. He had exited the plane and was hunkered down by the tail, attempting to slip out from the shelter. He was having no luck. Every time he poked out his mop of a head, a bullet snapped in his direction.

Once, a long lock of hair was clipped off, showing that the diminutive sniper was learning to adjust for windage. Foolishly, Johnny grabbed for the falling lock, but another snarling slug discouraged that aimless action.

The cloud of dust soon turned into a group of horsemen, and that was when Johnny experienced true despair.

Rushing back into the plane, he yelled, “It’s Chinua and his bandits! They came to. What do we do now?”

Renny rumbled, “I vote we mow them down with our superfirers.”