Doc Savage: The Ice Genius (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 12) (29 page)

There were only thirty warplanes sitting in the open, and a large transport plane. It was the transport to which they turned their attention. The ship was a twin-engine Kawasaki Ki-56, modeled after the Lockheed Super Electra.

Still clutching the compact container holding his portable chemical laboratory, Monk muttered, “That Jap bus is big enough to take us wherever we want to go.”

“Not back to the states, it won’t,” thumped Renny.

“We can hike back to Mongolia in it,” insisted Monk.

“First,” grumbled Long Tom, extracting his superfirer, “we have to take it.”

That turned out to be the easiest part of the undertaking.

The airbase did not have much of a fence, and this was easily breached in the darkness. Doc employed a pair of wire cutters tucked into his special vest. They left their ponies behind, of course, giving them their freedom by removing the saddles.

Doc Savage moved first, drifted up behind a Japanese sentry, and dropped him with a single blow to the side of the head. The man went down like a sapling, his rifle ending up in the bronze men’s lightning-quick hands.

Doc Savage went to the next sentry and accomplished the same thing. His men noticed that he used his fists liberally, something he preferred to avoid, not wishing to damage his hands since his highest calling was that of a surgeon. No doubt the bronze man’s anger over the bombing of the naval base at Pearl Harbor prompted this rough treatment.

Doc reached the transport plane, got the door open, plunged into the cockpit, began snapping switches. He had the radial engines turning before his men even reached the plane.

Batting the throttles, Doc got the plane turning into the wind while his men scrambled aboard the cabin.

Last to board, Johnny pulled the hatch shut, the Kawasaki lifted its trim tail and flung itself eagerly into the night.

On the ground, the rudely awakened Japanese airbase got itself organized. It wasn’t long before three nimble-winged Nakajima Ki-27 fighters were in hot pursuit.

As it happened, Doc had taken off in the direction of Russia to the north. With the Nakajimas buzzing after them, it was not practical and moreover very dangerous indeed to try to turn west toward Inner Mongolia.

Running all engines to their maximum, the bronze man sent the transport hauling south.

The Nakajimas soon overtook the Kawasaki and one appeared on either side of the cockpit. The pilots threw back their canopies, waved frantic arms, pointing to the ground, demanding that the transport land immediately.

In the co-pilot seat, Monk Mayfair opened the window, aimed carefully, and put one Japanese pilot to sleep in his seat.

Slumping forward, the pilot rode his careening warplane into the ground.

“One down!” Monk shouted gleefully.

Doc Savage said nothing. Normally he would upbraid the hairy chemist against inflicting unnecessary loss of life. But the bronze giant seemed in no mood for such admonitions tonight.

Another Nakajima popped up and Monk fired once. This time he missed, clipping the cockpit combing. That Nipponese pilot hastily closed his canopy and drove away, wings flashing.

The third Nakajima stole up from behind and attempted to fire what might have been a warning shot.

Red tracers made fiery webs in the night. No sound of lead striking the fuselage came, however.

Doc sent the transport into a sudden sideslip, and the enemy pilot who pulled alongside suddenly was staring at a winged monster seemingly about to ram him.

Japanese pilots are well-disciplined by reputation. This one was not. He panicked. Bringing himself out of his seat, he seemed poised to bail out.

His aircraft immediately lost control, and went into a screaming dive, to smash itself to bits against the side of a low mountain.

They never saw what became of the pilot. The last sight of him was a khaki dot disappearing from view, for he had been thrown out of the open cockpit.

“I do not see a parachute,” commented Ham.

Renny replied casually, “Japanese don’t believe in giving their pilots parachutes.”

Doc simply righted the plane and kept going south.

Johnny bustled up and demanded, “Are we not returning to Mongolia?”

“No,” returned the bronze man.

“Why not?”

“Have a listen.”

Doc handed over his radio headset and Johnny pressed one earphone to an ear. He quickly became excited.

“The Japanese airbase commander is issuing phony orders to fly into Mongolia to create a provocation!”

Doc said, “He wants to trick the Mongolian Air Force into shooting us down if we cross the frontier.”

Monk grunted, “So that means we can’t enter Mongolian skies, right?”

“Correct,” Doc Savage told him. “And if we fly south into Nationalist-held China, we will surely be attacked by the Free Chinese air forces.”

From the back, Renny grumbled, “Holy cow! So what do we do now?”

Doc Savage said, “It will be difficult if not impossible to refuel. We will fly as far as we can manage, and then abandon this ship and attempt to find refuge somewhere.”

They flew along until they passed over the meandering stone snake that was the Great Wall of China. It stretched out in an east-to-west line, climbing rolling green hills and dipping into verdant valleys.

Johnny remarked, “This fortification was constructed to hold at bay foreign invaders such as the Manchu and the Mongol armies. The current version dates back to the Ming Dynasty.”

Ham observed, “Perhaps it will be enough to keep Tamerlane’s forces from burrowing too deeply into the Chinese interior.”

“Don’t bet on it,” scoffed Long Tom.

Looking down at the inhospitable terrain below, Monk wondered aloud, “How the heck did we wind up in the middle of China?”

It was an excellent question, for which no one had any sensible answer. Fast-moving events had seized them by their throats and carried them all into present circumstances, which would have been unimaginable mere days before.

THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA, which constituted the vast interior of the sprawling Asiatic nation, was under the control of a certain Generalissimo, who had as his provisional capital the city of Chungking, on the winding Yangtze River.

Knowing that Nationalist air forces were concentrated around that city, Doc Savage avoided it. He did not desire an air clash with friendly forces, especially as their stolen Japanese transport was unarmed. In aerial combat, they would be virtually defenseless.

The American Volunteer Group had, early in the conflict with Japan, established a spidernet of aircraft spotters and ground communications. Doc Savage had a good—but not perfect—understanding of this network. Doc employed this knowledge to avoid being spotted.

When they ran low on fuel, their future began to look grim.

Turning the controls over to Monk, Doc Savage and Johnny consulted Japanese military maps they discovered. They were very complete.

“It would be possible to land here, or here,” suggested the gangling geologist.

“Here would be best,” said Doc, folding the map.

Johnny looked puzzled, but did not question his bronze chief. Doc Savage always had a sound reason for his decisions, even if they sometimes baffled his men.

They landed at dusk in a wide valley. Doc immediately exited the plane and started foraging for tall cane plants that only Johnny recognized.

“Sorghum?” commented the perplexed archeologist. He was helping with the gathering, as were some of the others.

A pile was created. Monk came out of the plane, carrying his portable chemical laboratory, which he had managed to lug all this way. Setting this down in the dirt, he examined the long green stalks, and pronounced them satisfactory.

“Satisfactory for what?” complained Ham.

“For brewin’ up moonshine.”

This only caused the dapper lawyer’s perplexed brow to darken.

Long Tom explained it to him. “They’re going to try to distill something that will pass for aviation fuel.”

“Can this be done?” Ham questioned.

No one replied. Doc and Monk were too busy rigging up a crude still from the cargo of the Japanese transport plane, which was crammed with handy odds and ends, that could be transformed into the appropriate apparatus.

It took more than a day before they had decanted sufficient ethanol to fill the tanks. This was combined with the unused fuel in the hope that the unorthodox mixture would work.

Doc fired up the engines, which caught with noisy explosions. When both radial motors ceased vomiting malodorous smoke, the bronze man released the brakes and engaged the throttles.

Everyone held their breaths as the air wheels bumped along. When the bumping stopped, they released relaxed breaths.

Climbing into a clear blue sky, Doc Savage said, “We should be able to make it to Burma.”

As a prophet, Doc Savage was no Cassandra. They encountered a patrol of Republic of China fighters, a gang of outdated Curtiss Hawk biplanes and Boeing P-26 Peashooters, painted brown with blue-and-white stripes on their tails. They were easy to evade and Doc quickly left them behind, but at a price.

Inexorably, they were forced to fly south, farther away from their intended destination. The mood in the cabin became grimmer. South of China lay French Indo-China, which had fallen into Japanese hands. They would receive no welcome there….

Chapter XL

THE DOODLEBUG

HE HAD A kind of streamlined masculinity, and he was in a hurry. He had walked from his hotel, although it was raining, briskly waving aside a jinrickshaw because it was not far, and already he was late; furthermore he was anxious—keen, on edge—to come to grips with the trouble that had intruded itself into his confident, two-handed life, like a piece of bitter wormwood falling into a good tangy wine.

He had arrived in Hanoi less than an hour ago. His first discovery was that the telephones were not working. So he sent his valet with a message to Anne. He was proud of his dignified Filipino valet. He had a valet because—well—once in every man’s life, he buys a cane, too.

Striding across the lobby toward the tiny tan bar, he looked like an oilfield roughneck, dressed up for Saturday night—well, not completely like an oilfield roughneck—just enough like one that anybody could tell that was where he got started in life, a little less than thirty years ago. The rain outside had put a fine dew on his rough, expensive tweeds. A few drops as small as mustard seed had fallen on the solid brown face when he looked up, with utter carelessness, at the Japanese searchlights that were suspiciously fingering the Indo-China sky.

The Japanese had changed Hanoi, all right. The city had gone grim. Not that this worried him. It didn’t. From his plane, he had looked down at slate bulldog shapes of river gunboats at leash in midstream, and naval seaplanes on the rusty water of the River Song-koi, like dried insects mounted there with pins. The Japanese. The arrogant little uniforms with the sandstone faces that had been coming down from the north for a long time now. They didn’t worry him. He had an attitude for them. He paid no more attention to them than to the coyotes chasing jackrabbits over the Oklahoma flats. He was Bill Saxon and he had another million dollars to make. Another million, maybe twenty. He had climbed out of an Oklahoma pipeline ditch the hard way, with his two fists. It had taken a long time to make himself a gold skyrocket, but now there was no top.

There was no rotary mud under his fingernails tonight. No photographic chemical stains from the recording truck on his square, strong hands. Head up, jaw angular. He was not thinking of geophone jugs, contrasting velocities, elastic earth waves, velocity of sound—6890 feet per second in Cretaceous lime—and the propagating sensitiveness of dynamite, sprung holes, salt domes, Napierian logarithms, computing. He wasn’t concerned with these, or any of the other thousand things you have to know about to doodlebug for oil. He could doodlebug for oil, too. His bank balance proved that.

Saxon strode confidently into the bar. He remembered the pocket bar with the golden mirrors often during the past weeks when he was buried in the Mindoro jungle, doodlebugging. It had a Vandyke brown carpet, and saffron candleflame against the backbar, and a little door with a picture of Mickey Mouse, and another door for Minnie, and a round barman who did magic tricks with matches, and mixed American cocktails that would take hair off a dog.

His eyes swept the place. A rack that normally held newspapers from home—
The New York Times, The Kansas City Star, The Tulsa World—
was empty. But he took little notice. Immediately, he began to have a cold bath, for he was tall enough to look over the heads of everyone. His eyes were not finding Anne.

The barman who did magic tricks saw him, and hailed, “Good evening, Mr. Saxon. Very glad to have you back.”

“Hello, Joe,” he answered. “Seen any sign of Anne?”

“No, sir.”

Frowning deeply, Saxon turned away. He took out and lighted his pipe. Then, he moved toward the hotel lobby, feeling vaguely disturbed.

He checked with the front desk, was told Anne had checked out several days ago. This further disturbed him.

“I received a message to come see her here.”

“We have not seen the lady,” said the Annamese man. His eyes shifted in a look that might have been guilty.

Saxon went back out. It stopped raining.

A object lay in the street, dry in spite of the recent rain. Its striking familiarity caused him to stoop and snatch it up. A matchbook. Green. He closed his horny fist over the thing.

He rode through the rain-washed night in a jinrickshaw. It was a two-man jinrickshaw, and the pair of Tong-king boys between the shafts had rounded backs and the bare sturdy legs of draft horses.

There were no civilian automobiles on the streets, only Japanese military ones. No gasoline was to be spared these days for civilian machines, because the United States had put an export restriction on gasoline to Japan, and the Japanese had found themselves frighteningly short of it. So you became old-fashioned and took a jinrickshaw.