Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 140 - Jiu San

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JIU SAN
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2003 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I
? Chapter II
? Chapter III
? Chapter IV
? Chapter V
? Chapter VI
? Chapter VII
? Chapter VIII
? Chapter IX
? Chapter X
? Chapter XI
? Chapter XII
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
Chapter I
THE little Jap, the one they got to calling the Flying Dutchman, was not important looking. He seemed
innocent, if one will admit that any Jap can seem innocent these days.
The point was that he certainly didn’t look like an earthquake hunting a place to happen, which in a
figurative sense was what he proved to be.
He first appeared flying a Mitsubishi 96 "Karigane" MK II near Dutch Harbor. The 96 is the Mitsubishi
which was copied from the U. S. Army Northrop A-17, the Japs putting in an 800-horsepower radial
engine.
An ex-sheep rancher from Texas shot him down pronto. Dutch Harbor, Alaska, was no place for a Nip
plane to appear. There was a string of fire and smoke in the sky, a splash in the sea, and a gray patch of
bubbles as if a cotton ball were sinking. They thought the Jap pilot was killed.
A half-dozen navy ratings in a launch rushed to the spot hoping to find souvenirs. Carlta Trotter, the lady
war correspondent, the blonde bomber of the press, climbed into the boat with them.
The launch prowled around for a few minutes in the oil slick from the downed Jap plane. Then Trotter
pointed and yelled, "Oh, look! The Jap pilot!"
Everyone grabbed for a gun or a club. They circled warily, but what Trotter had seen—a Jap if it was a
Jap—had vanished.
"I tell you I saw a Nip," Carlta Trotter insisted.
She was angry, because she wanted very badly to see a Jap, a real, living, uncaught one. Trotter
considered that her career as a war correspondent was a mess, because all the Japs she had seen so far
had been either fettered or demised.
"There he is! Over there!" a sailor yelled.
About half those in the launch saw the Jap this time. The Nip pilot, with only his head sticking out of the
water, looked like a small brown walrus, because the fellow had a pair of mustaches as impressive as the
horns on a buffalo.
Like an owl, the Jap batted his eye at the Americans in the boat. Then he quietly sank. And for another
ten minutes the sailors and Trotter hunted vainly for him.
"It couldn’t have been a seal we saw, could it?" Trotter asked.
The waves were running about six feet high, with enough wind blowing to now and then pick the top off a
wave. When the wind got a wave crest, it would turn it to spray and the blowing spray would look like
pale smoke from a campfire. The sea was so rough that spotting a man was a difficult matter.
The sailors steered the launch around and around. They actually saw the swimming Jap another half
dozen times, and each time he went out of sight like a seal. It became funny. They began shooting at the
walrus-mustached head whenever they saw it, not trying to hit the Nip, but rather endeavoring to frighten
him into surrendering.
They had no luck. The shooting brought a crash boat and a P.T. out to investigate. The three boats
churned around and around like cats hunting a mouse hole, but the little Jap with the big mustaches was
not seen again in the sea.
"Drowned himself," Carlta Trotter said.
That night, a P-38 pilot had his sheepskin-lined flying suit stolen.
CARLTA TROTTER filed a story on the incident. The incident was pretty tame stuff, so she needled it
up all she could. "For two hours this afternoon, our sailors chased a Flying Dutchman," she wrote.
"He was a little Jap pilot with a pair of mustaches you could hang your hat on, and he committed
hari-kari by water rather than be taken prisoner."
Sort of dumb journalism, Trotter thought wryly. Later she wondered how many of the plug-headed
readers of the New York Blade would know what she meant by the Flying Dutchman reference.
So Trotter wrote an add to the story, explaining that the Flying Dutchman was the spectre-ship which
haunted the sea, and the sight of it portended disaster. A phantom ship commanded by a German named
Herr von Falkenberg, condemned to sail the storming seas forever, without a helm or a steersman, while
the skipper played dice for his soul with the devil, endlessly.
She heard about the P-38 pilot losing his sheep-lined suit the next morning, and thought it funny.
Over in Honeymoon House, officially Barracks Three, two fellows lost their K rations during the day.
The next morning two soldiers woke up without their blankets.
The cook of Company C got together a fine big platter of fried chicken as a special little dinner for the
cooks, something the cooks weren’t supposed to do. The platter disappeared, chicken and all.
Honeymoon House was again the victim when a soldier lost a box of chocolates sent him from home.
Now pilfering was singularly scarce about the place, and news of the vanishings began to get around and
cause comment.
A boy from Missouri awakened during the next night—again Honeymoon House was the victim—and
found himself looking at a Jap. A Jap with a pair of mustaches like the horns on a Texas steer. The Ozark
boy figured he was dreaming, and he closed his eyes to go back to sleep before it soaked into his
drowsy brain that dreams weren’t that real. He came off his cot with a howl of alarm. The next thing he
knew, or didn’t know, he was asleep again, but this time from a punch that was like the kick of a
Missouri mule.
The Missourian came out of it in five minutes or so, and made an impressive uproar dashing up and down
the barracks in his shirt tail, shouting about a Jap with handlebar mustaches. A phantom Jap.
From that minute, the big Nip hunt was on. There were more beds looked under than there would have
been at an old maids’ convention, and there was no very sound sleeping the rest of the night.
And in the middle of the turmoil something else happened that was very amusing to everyone except the
shavetail to whom it happened. A second lieutenant lost a quart bottle of Scotch whiskey from under his
pillow.
Carlta Trotter, the war correspondent, filed a story that began, "The Flying Dutchman rides again. A
rooting, tooting whiskey-drinking spook in a fur-lined suit has come to haunt this American base."
Trotter was rather proud of the yarn, and she was grinning when she handed it to the censor.
A strange thing happened to the story. Trotter got it handed back to her. Thumbs down. No can send.
TROTTER complained violently. Trotter’s tongue could handle swear words adequately and with the
dignity of a duchess—this being something a gal acquires when she learns her business in the city room of
a tabloid newspaper.
The censorship officer looked as if a hot towel had just been lifted from his face when Trotter finished
with him.
"And don’t get kittenish with me!" Trotter said. "Why didn’t that story go out? Give me an explanation or
don’t give me one, but don’t get kittenish."
"Nuts!" said the censor bitterly. While in his cups one night he had made a pass at Trotter, something he
had been aching to do while sober. Having made the pass, he learned why some of his brother officers
got that funny look on their faces when Trotter was mentioned. Until a guy had made a pass at Trotter,
he hadn’t learned how quick he could be buried six feet under the ice.
"What’s wrong with the story?"
"Nothing," the censor said. "A trifle childish, but then I suppose you have to write down to the mentality
of your readers."
"Too many of my readers got in the army and were made censors," Trotter said. "Come on, come on,
what’s wrong with my little opus?"
The censor grinned at her. "Is this making you mad, Trotter?"
"Not in the least. If I let you wolf-puppies get me mad, I would have had hydrophobia months ago."
"That’s fine."
"Are you going to tell me what’s wrong with my Jap story?"
"No."
"That’s what I thought."
"You’re not mad?"
"No."
"Then we’re still friends."
"We are not!" Trotter said.
"Get out of here, pal," the censor said, grinning sheepishly. He tossed a couple of sheets of copy paper
toward Trotter, adding, "And you might as well take that along."
Trotter picked up the copy and looked at it. Then she shrieked, "My first story about the mustached
Jap! Didn’t that one go out either?"
"No."
"God bless us, why not?"
"When you yell, Trotter, you sound like a little walrus barking. Did you know that?"
Trotter folded her two stories, the first one and the second one, and put them in her bag. She jerked her
parka hood over her blond head.
"There’s more to this than meets the eye," she said, and left.
TROTTER took a walk. She took a walk to reflect about herself and the war. The war was going very
nicely, she understood from the radio. Great thing, radio. At least it told you that a war was still going on.
Trotter felt she was in a blind alley as far as the war was concerned. She wondered how many journalists
had grabbed hats and a War Department clearance and had dashed off to the shooting, and landed in a
hole of monotony and rotted there. Not many, she hoped. It wasn’t pleasant. She should know, because
Dutch Harbor was certainly a hole of monotony.
The aggravating part was that Alaska had seemed such a logical war theater. The Aleutians—Dutch
Harbor was on one of the Aleutians, practically—was on the shortest route from Seattle to Tokyo, or
vice-versa. Trotter had foreseen action all over the place. There hadn’t been any action worth the name.
She was disgusted.
Lately she had begun to suspect she was the victim of a snide deal from her paper, the New York Blade,
one of the ranker and more successful tabloids. Trotter was trying to make up her mind whether coming
to the Alaskan theater had been her own idea, or whether Pot Johnson, managing editor of the Blade,
had pulled a smarty on her. Pot was a little guy with a big ego who hired only beauty and brains in
combination when he employed females. Then they always had trouble with the silly side of Pot. Pot
Johnson fancied himself a lover. He was a little guy who could sigh like a furnace.
When Pot failed to make a conquest, he didn’t give up. He just changed his interest from love to
psychological sadism. He became an unholy experimenter. In other words, he would set out quietly and
deliberately to give the death of a thousand cuts to the gal who had spurned him. There was something
devilish about his system. His victims never seemed to realize what was happening to them, Trotter had
noticed. They wound up married to guys they didn’t like, or something like that, without knowing why.
Trotter was stuck in Dutch Harbor, where nothing was happening. Pot Johnson had a suave answer
every time she demanded another spot, in the South Pacific, Italy, anywhere. Something would pop
eventually.
I’ll pop, Trotter thought bitterly. Here I am, stuck in this God-forsaken hole while my career rots.
Another six months of this, heaven forbid, and the newspaper business will have forgotten there ever was
an up-and-coming journalist named Carlta Trotter.
She suspected the worst from Pot Johnson. Any girl who’d spit in his eye had better watch out. Trotter
had done just that, verbally.
And now they weren’t even letting her send little color stories about a downed Jap flier. Could that be
Pot’s fine hand?
AT this point, a group of soldiers came out of the C. O.’s office with the Jap in question. The escorted
prisoner was obviously the little man with the handlebars on his lip.
"They caught him!" Trotter gasped.
She hurried forward. She could speak a little Japanese, unless her brother’s houseboy in New York had
misled her.
"O hayo!" Trotter said, addressing the prisoner.
The little Jap looked like a baboon. "Arigato!" he said, and grabbed Trotter’s hand and shook it like an
insurance salesman meeting a client.
"O namaye wa nan’ to moshimasu?" asked Trotter.
"It’s John Doe, sister," said the Japanese in first-class English.
One of the officers demanded, "What’d you ask him, Trotter?"
"His name," Trotter admitted sheepishly.
"It’s John Doe, sister," said the Japanese. "Anything else you want to know?"
The American officers all laughed. Trotter’s eyes snapped, and she said, "A Jap wise-guy."
They led the Nip off to toss him into the klink. Trotter stared after the fellow sourly. Trotter hated being
made a fool, which she felt was what the Jap had done to her.
A funny-looking Jap, she reflected. Funny-looking even for a Jap. The fellow would have to stand on
tiptoes to look into Trotter’s top parka pocket, and Trotter wasn’t a tall girl. It must have been the
thought of her parka pocket that made Trotter absently feel there.
Her gold fountain pen was gone.
Trotter swore bitterly over losing the pen. The pen was a gift from the Blade, a token of esteem
bestowed by the ribald tabloid for a particularly salacious job of reporting which Trotter had done on a
paternity case involving a motion-picture star. She hated to lose the pen. Today was one darned thing
after another.
Another officer, a Captain, came out of the Colonel’s office.
"Hello, Fred," Trotter called to the Captain. "When did they catch the Flying Dutchman?"
"About ten hours ago."
Trotter said, "Ten hours! Did they spend all this time questioning him?"
"I couldn’t say."
"I’ll bet they got some sassy answers out of him."
"I couldn’t say."
"Weren’t you there?"
"How about singing a number at the camp show tonight, Trotter?"
Trotter wrinkled her nose at him. "Giving me the run-around, aren’t you? Look, Fred, I buy you drinks
every night, and with the price of Scotch what it is, it would be cheaper to support a gigolo. What is this,
an anti-Trotter campaign around here? Or do you just bite hands that pet you?"
The Captain grinned.
"Take it easy," he said. "What about singing the number?"
"Okay. It’ll serve you right."
The Captain laughed and left.
TROTTER was thoughtful. Getting news was her business and she had a sixth sense about news. She
had never particularly analyzed her ability to feel a news story when it began to develop around her, and
there probably wasn’t anything mysterious about her perceptive skill. It was probably a combination of
many small things, things like voice tones, the expressions on faces. Excitement is a difficult emotion to
conceal.
Right now, Trotter had a hunch that something was brewing.
I hope I’m not getting mental williwaws, she thought. If something isn’t developing around here, I’ve lost
my nose for news. And if I’ve lost my nose, that’s bad. Very bad. It would make Pot Johnson too
happy.
She decided to see the C. O., Colonel Rieger. She would use the loss of her fountain pen as an excuse.
She wouldn’t get any information out of Rieger, she foresaw. The Colonel wasn’t talkative. An oyster
was an orator alongside big, flat-cheeked Colonel Rieger.
Trotter went into the Colonel’s office as innocently as a cat entering a room where there was a goldfish
bowl.
The Colonel was behind his desk. He was standing. He had a perplexed expression, and was searching
his pockets with both hands.
"You know, I seem to have lost my gold cigarette lighter," the Colonel complained.
"That Jap!" Trotter cried angrily. "He’s a pickpocket!"
Chapter II
TROTTER was right. She didn’t get any information out of Colonel Rieger.
But she left headquarters feeling very sure her hunch was right. Something was stewing. There was
tension in headquarters, an atmosphere as tight as a fiddle-string about to snap. No one said or did
anything. But Trotter got the feeling.
In fact, Trotter grew alarmed. Maybe, she thought, we had lost the war, and the news was being
smothered. That was foolish, but it gave some idea of the ever-present tension.
"I’ll have that Jap searched for your fountain pen and my lighter," Colonel Rieger said vaguely.
There were one hundred and sixty-two Jap war prisoners in the Dutch Harbor holdover. Most of these
were sailors from the Imperial Japanese Navy.
The holdover was a group of Nissen huts surrounded by a high woven-wire fence topped by barbed
wire and a charged wire carrying a discouraging amount of electricity. The wooden guard towers were
equipped with machine-guns and lights. It was a standard prison camp. The Japs in it now would be
transferred to the States later.
Trotter’s room was situated so that she could look into the prison yard, the area inside the wire. This was
an accident.
But it was not an accident that Trotter watched the little Jap with the mustaches. She was interested in the
fellow.
Trotter was astonished at what she discovered. The other Jap prisoners treated the little fellow with the
mustaches with respect. A great deal of respect.
Trotter paid Colonel Rieger a call.
"I think I’ve got a trade-last for you, Colonel," she said.
"Eh?"
"Our Flying Dutchman is a big-shot."
"What makes you think so?"
"I’ve been watching the way the other Nips kowtow to him. They fall over each other to lick his boots.
You’d think he was the Mikado himself. Maybe he is."
Colonel Rieger pushed out his lower lip and examined the ceiling, not meeting Trotter’s rather entrancing
blue eyes. "So you’ve been watching the Flying Dutchman," he said.
"Yes. Did you know he was somebody important in Jap-land?"
Colonel Rieger cleared his throat. He took his attention from the ceiling, and put it on his desk drawer,
from which he removed Trotter’s missing fountain pen.
"Here." Colonel Rieger tossed the pen across the desk. "Somebody found this where you lost it."
"I know where I lost it," Trotter said. She got out a cigarette. "Do you have a light, Colonel?"
Colonel Rieger grinned. "If you mean did I get my lighter back too, I did."
"Who is he, Colonel?"
"Who is who?"
"The little Nip with the mustaches."
Colonel Rieger shook his head wryly. "Trotter, the censor tells me he suggested you forget about this
particular Jap. I think it would be a good idea."
TROTTER left headquarters determined not to forget about the Flying Dutchman. This was partly
training. When you worked for a scandal rag like the Blade, people were always trying to keep you from
getting stories. The harder they tried, the more certain you could be that the yarn was a dilly.
The other part of Trotter’s interest was curiosity. This was the first thing that had happened to break the
monotony. Trotter decided to play it for all it was worth.
She decided not to overlook the chance that it might have a Washington angle.
So that afternoon she filed a story, a yarn that read as innocently as a sabbath lesson, but which actually
contained a privately coded message to Lee Carl Copeland, political editor of the Blade. Trotter’s code
text advised Lee Carl there was a mysterious Jap big-shot prisoner at Dutch Harbor, and to check
Washington sources on it. She added a postscript not to tell Pot Johnson.
That postscript was Trotter’s way of getting sure-fire action. Lee Carl Copeland and Pot Johnson were
mutual gut-haters, although otherwise they were cut from the same cloth: both were chasers. Both hired
lovely, brainy females on to the Blade staff, then took out after them. Frequently they were in
simultaneous pursuit of the same female, which probably accounted for the nasty feelings around the
office.
Trotter was pleased with herself. If there was a Washington angle, this would shake it out of the bush.
Pretty slick, Trotter thought. Maybe I’m not going to seed as fast as I thought.
In a happy frame of mind, she spent the next two hours writing a letter home. Her parents lived on a farm
in Iowa, where they made barely enough to live on. They were perfectly content. Her father had once
amassed a total of fourteen million dollars, which he’d lost spectacularly in the nineteen-twenty-nine
crash. The loss hadn’t made her father give up. It had just made him philosophical. He said he had
always wanted to know what it would be like to have fourteen million dollars, and now he knew, and so
he was perfectly happy. He meant it, too. He was a great guy. He was writing a book on psychoses of
hogs.
Trotter’s brother, Bill, was a discontented inhabitant of an advertising office which had a reception room
like a Rajah’s palace. He was 4F, and not pleased about it. Trotter felt sorry for him. He was a great
guy, too. His book was about a farmlot bull who wasn’t any Ferdinand, and it was practically as funny as
his father’s opus on hogs.
We’re just a bunch of pixyish farmers at heart, Trotter thought gleefully.
A few minutes later, Colonel Rieger sent for her, and proceeded to bat the glee out of her.
COLONEL RIEGER used words that were in the dictionary, all of them. But he gave the slashing
impression that he was a skinner taking the hide off a mule.
An Army bright boy had transcribed Trotter’s code message.
Trotter became meek. She was scared. She had never had a man give her such a peeling as Colonel
Rieger handed out.
And when Colonel Rieger had scared the devil out of her, he proceeded to blow Trotter’s career higher
than a kite.
"I am cabling Washington to cancel your clearance as a war correspondent," he finished. "You will be
returned to the States as soon as transportation can be arranged, probably in a day or two."
Trotter stumbled out of there. She didn’t cry. She wanted to. She didn’t swear, which would have
helped. She didn’t kick things around in her room, which would also have been an aid.
She was sunk. Punctured, deflated, disgraced, a flop. She could see now where she had it coming, and
that made it worse. Covering a war wasn’t the same as covering a trunk murder on Park Avenue. She’d
confused the two, and tried to use the same tactics. It hadn’t been the thing to do. She should have
known better.
She sat there in her room, thinking: Pot Johnson would be happy to see me now, the amorous
polecat.
About an hour of that, and Trotter began to get mad. This was the regular road her ego followed. When
she got a blow, it would knock her flat for an hour or two, then she would get mad and get up on her two
feet and do something about it.
She went for a walk. She liked to walk when she was mad.
And that was how she happened to be on the beach when the Catalina came in with the mysterious
sergeant aboard.
THE Catalina was one of the original PBY-5s which were now relegated to transport duty. This one
arrived on its regular run from Seattle with mail, emergency parts for Supply, and a quota of brass hats.
Trotter was scrutinizing the brass hats to see if there was anybody with stars on his shoulders, and she
nearly missed the sergeant.
Trotter’s discovery of the sergeant was a queer experience. The sight of him closed a switch in her head.
But the circuit didn’t complete itself—she couldn’t identify him. He was familiar. But who was he?
The sergeant was big. Very big. Actually a giant, but you weren’t quite aware of this until you were close
to him. He was a man with enormous physical strength, because there was a symphony of sinews in the
backs of his hands and in his neck when he was moving. Something made you look at him repeatedly. He
had something special. Personal power, probably, because personal power is something that is very hard
to hide.
Trotter knocked her small fist against her forehead. Her memory picked the darndest times to collapse.
The big, impressive sergeant moved away from the plane and disappeared into Dutch Harbor. If he is
trying to be inconspicuous, Trotter thought, he is certainly doing a good job of it.
She kept thinking about him. The fellow haunted her mind. He kept dashing through her thoughts like a
headless ghost. That was exactly what he was, a headless ghost. Trotter played with that thought, and
came to the conclusion that the man’s body—his size, unusual proportioning and great muscular
strength—must be what she had recognized. That didn’t quite make sense, unless the man was disguised,
but nobody went around disguised these days. Or did they?
TROTTER ran into Colonel Rieger in the officer’s bar that evening.
A pixyish idea hit her, and she said, "Colonel, that is quite a hunk of sergeant you acquired today."
It rang a bell. It was a wild shot, but it hit a bull’s-eye.
Because the way Colonel Rieger acted convinced Trotter he was thinking up a quick lie.
"I have no idea who you mean," the Colonel said, putting the lie he’d thought up into words.
Trotter winked at him derisively. "Could I interest you in a nice first-rate correspondence course for
prevaricators? Sent you in a plain envelope, Colonel."
Colonel Rieger winced.
"Trotter, you would be a lovely girl—if you didn’t have brains," he said.
"I shouldn’t have noticed the big sergeant, eh?"
"Exactly."
"But I did."
"Hm-m-m-m."
"And now I want to know about him."
Colonel Rieger looked up at the ceiling thoughtfully. Trotter knew he absent-mindedly did that when he
was disturbed.
"Forget it, Trotter," he said quietly. "Forget it, before you get into worse trouble than you’re in."
"How could I get in any worse?" Trotter asked reasonably. "You’re kicking me out of Alaska. My paper
摘要：

JIUSANADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2003BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI?ChapterII?ChapterIII?ChapterIV?ChapterV?ChapterVI?ChapterVII?ChapterVIII?ChapterIX?ChapterX?ChapterXI?ChapterXIIScannedandProofedbyTomStephensChapterITHElittleJap,theonetheygottocallingth...

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