Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 138 - The Shape of Terror

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THE SHAPE OF TERROR
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
? Chapter XIII
? Chapter XIV
? Chapter XIV
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
Chapter I
HERE is what happened:
Five dignified men in R.A.F. officers' uniforms came to the table where Doc Savage and Monk Mayfair
and Ham Brooks were eating breakfast.
“Could we have a word with you, Mr. Savage? It's important,” said one of the officers. “We have a
private room.”
“Naturally,” Doc said, and went with them—went with three of them only—to the private room.
The other two officers sat down at the table and talked chit-chat with Monk and Ham.
So that was what happened. That was how it was done. It looked as innocent as could be. Ham Brooks,
who was a lawyer and so suspected everybody of being a crook, didn't suspect a thing for about five
minutes.
The two R.A.F. officers talked easily. One of them told about a bomb that had hit near him last night.
The bomb blew out the front of a tobacco shop, and something hit the officer in the chest, and he ran like
the devil thinking he had been wounded. When he stopped and looked, he found it was a pack of his
favorite tobacco that had hit him. He had the tobacco pack to show for it.
The restaurant was on the Strand, about a block off London's Trafalgar Square. Charing Cross Station
was across the street, big and smoked and looking more like a moth-eaten palace than a railway depot,
and the river Thames was within a good baseball pitch. Spread over everything outdoors was one of
London's best fogs.
Monk was gobbling down a typical English breakfast dish, small fish about the size of minnows fried in
deep fat the way a doughnut is fried.
Monk, a wide and square apish man with a very big mouth, practically ignored the talk. When he was
eating, he ate. Only lightning striking, a pretty girl passing, or some other great event would interfere.
Ham Brooks had shoulders, not much waist, and an almost fantastic conviction that he had to dress to fit
the occasion. Besides being a Doc Savage aid, one of five such, he was a really great lawyer. Famous,
not notorious.
When he got suspicious finally, he didn't show it.
“I believe,” he said, “that I shall see what is keeping Doc.”
He was using his best Harvard accent, exaggerating it so that it out-Englished even a Salmon Lane limey.
“Don't bother, really,” one of the R.A.F. men said hastily.
“But I want to know what's up.”
“In that case, old chap, by all means let us go see how long he will be busy.”
“You would?”
“Oh, definitely.”
“Thank you,” Ham said.
The two R.A.F. men strolled away, and Ham gave Monk a shin-peeling kick under the table.
“I think something is wrong,” Ham told Monk. “Come on.”
Monk said, “But my breakfast—”
“Fish tails are sticking out of your ears now,” Ham said. “Come on.”
The two R.A.F. men went into the same room into which Doc Savage had earlier gone with the other
three. Monk and Ham went into the same room. The door was unlocked. They just pushed the door
open and went in.
Monk stopped chewing his French-fried minnows and said, “My God! You were right!”
DOC SAVAGE was not in the room, and there was no sign of anyone else.
An open window, through which wind shook the curtains playfully, seemed the answer.
The window admitted to a bricked-in canyon of an alley, then the alley conducted them to a side street.
“There!” Monk grunted. “There they go!”
The two R.A.F. men were sprinting for Bedford Street, one of the streets that branched off the Strand
like ribs.
Monk, whose legs were actually shorter than his arms to a noticeable extent, could run amazingly. His
gait was something to convulse an onlooker, but it left Ham, who could sprint himself, far behind.
The two R.A.F. men had a car parked on Bedford. The car, a dinky pre-war Fiat, was a touring model
minus a top. The R.A.F. pair got in, one in front, one in back.
The one in back saw Monk coming. “Blimey!” he gasped. “Get going, Tod!”
Tod got them going, but not fast enough. Monk landed on the back bumper of the peanut-sized Fiat, the
shock making the front wheels jump off the pavement briefly.
Monk wrapped his arms around the R.A.F. man in the back seat. The victim gurgled with pain, punching,
scratching and trying to bite Monk. Tod, in the front seat, turned around and hit Monk over the head with
an ordinary monkey-wrench. The blow didn't seem to bother Monk especially.
Monk stood up on the bumper with the man he had grabbed. Apparently his plan was to throw this one
bodily at the man in the front seat. But the bumper broke off the toy car, and Monk and his prey fell into
the street.
Tod threw the wrench at Monk, missed, and broke a shop window which was carefully taped against
bomb damage.
The Fiat raced down the street, the lose bumper dragging and making considerable noise and knocking
sparks off the cobbles. It disappeared into the ghoulish fog.
HAM arrived then, and because it had been his policy for years not to speak any pleasant words to
Monk, he complained, “You run like the striped ape you resemble.”
“If you knew something was wrong, why keep it a secret?” Monk asked him indignantly. “I thought you
were just having one of your overdressed dreams, you fashion-plate shyster.”
“How did I know what was going to happen?” Ham yelled.
“Well, what did?”
“I don't know. Somebody snatched Doc right out from under our noses, it looks like.”
Monk looked up and down the street. Cars were not abundant on London streets these days, because
gasoline, in addition to being rationed, mostly just wasn't. Not another car in sight.
There were only two pedestrians. Both these were standing on the corner of Bedford Street and
Chandos Street, staring at them.
Monk said, “I'll show you how to get words out of an Englishman.”
The R.A.F. man was still sitting on the pavement where he had landed with Monk when they fell off the
collapsing bumper.
Monk picked him up bodily. Monk slammed him down on the cobbles. Then Monk landed on the man's
belly with both knees, took the man's throat with one hand, took one of the fellow's ears with the other
hand, and began to tear the ear off. “I'm going to take you apart a piece at a time,” Monk said. “You
think I can't do it?”
Monk, in operation, didn't look like an industrial chemist with a nearly world-wide reputation. He looked
like something out of a Stone Age cave, something completely fearsome.
“Oh, please, God!” the R.A.F. man gasped.
“I'll kill you, blankety-blank you, I'll kill you right here!” Monk said. “What happened to Doc?”
The R.A.F. man turned noticeably pale. “I can't—I don't dare—“ Then he shut his lips so tightly that
muscle knots gathered around them.
Monk got the ear again, set himself, and pulled and twisted.
A shriek finally came out of the R.A.F. man as if something had split in his throat. There were more
shrieks and then mixed in with them, words saying, “Tottn'm flying field!”
“What?” Monk demanded.
“Tottingham Flying Field,” the man gasped.
“What about it?”
“They were taking Savage there.”
At this point, the two pedestrians at the corner of Bedford and Chandos turned and ran out of sight.
Monk happened to see them.
“Those two guys!” Monk yelled, pointing. “The way they ran. I know they're in it, too!”
Ham said, “I'll see about them.” He dashed up Bedford toward the corner.
Monk shouldered the trembling, sweating R.A.F. man and galloped after Ham.
At the corner, they ran into the arms of a policeman. The two pedestrians had merely run to get the
bobby.
“Here, here, wot's goin' on?” the bobby said, and grabbed at Monk and Ham.
Monk shoved the R.A.F. man into the officer's arms.
“Arrest this fellow! Lock him up! We'll question him some more, later!” Monk yelled.
The policeman, taking one look at the manhandled R.A.F. man, made a natural mistake. “You two have
been footpaddin' this poor flier. You can't get away with that!” He jerked his coal-scuttle helmet over
one eye and twirled his white nightstick menacingly. “You're in custody, both of you.”
Monk, his voice even louder, said, “We can't spend all day explaining things to a cop! Our boss was just
kidnapped and this guy had a hand in it. Take him in and lock him up while we see if we can find Doc.”
The bobby, not impressed, said, “Don't get 'airy-chested with me, bloke. You come along quiet, or—”
Monk opened his mouth to say what he thought. Ham elbowed him out of the way.
Ham said, “Officer, this ape is Monk Mayfair. I am Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, U.S.
Army, detached service. We are aids of Clark Savage, Jr., better known as Doc Savage. And Doc
Savage, as my bull-mannered friend just said, has been made away with. We chased the fellows who did
it, and caught this one. He just told us, under duress, that Doc was being taken to Tottingham Airport.
We want to get to the airport at once, naturally. So will you hold this man for further questioning in the
matter?”
The bobby was impressed. “You 'ave any documents of identification, sir?”
Ham had. He showed them.
“Very good, sir,” the bobby said hastily. “You want this one held. Yes, sir. I am officer Kilgore. I will
hold him.”
Monk and Ham ran toward the Strand, where they had left the car they had been using.
“Another minute and he would have split that nightstick over that rock you call a head,” Ham told Monk.
“Use diplomacy in such cases.”
Monk snorted. “Diplomacy gets people into more things than it gets them out of. You know where this
Tottingham Airport is?”
“I think I can find it,” Ham said.
TOTTINGHAM AIRPORT proved to be one of the system of R.A.F. airports which comprised the
London defense. From the air it probably resembled a few cultivated fields and some farmhouses, and
from the ground it was certainly no La Guardia Field.
Monk and Ham arrived at the head of a procession which included two British road police cars and one
Yank M.P. on a motorcycle. They had not been inside the legal speed limit but once, which was when
they were backing out of a field after failing to make a corner, since leaving London via old Edgeware
Road.
“What the heck, it's an R.A.F. field!” Monk said. “Why would Doc be brought here?”
He didn't get an answer, because Ham was yelling and pointing at a group around a plane. The ship, a
medium bomber, had its two motors turning over, and men were climbing into it. Doc Savage was
undoubtedly one of the men.
“Doc!” Monk roared.
There was a commotion around the plane as Doc was hastily forced inside. The last of the crew got in,
and the plane was already rolling.
Monk said, “Hang on! Maybe I can ram the tail of that thing and ground-loop it!”
The sentries at the gate were yelling and aiming their rifles threateningly. Men were pouring out of the
hangars which were disguised as haystacks and farm buildings.
The bomber was a Handley-Page Hampden, two 1,000-h.p. Pegasus XVIII engines, speed two
hundred sixty-five miles an hour at around fifteen thousand feet. An old crate, as modern bombers went.
But it outran Monk and Ham.
The ship went into the air.
Monk and Ham stopped their car, feeling like a pair of pups who had chased a robin unsuccessfully.
Shortly they were surrounded by angry R.A.F. personnel, the most indignant being a red-faced fellow
with the crown and stripes of a flight sergeant on his sleeve. What he had to say about their attempt to
ram the plane was in no part printable, but worth remembering.
When he stopped to suck in a breath, Monk said ominously, “Doc Savage was in that plane. He has
been kidnapped.”
The flight sergeant popped his eyes. “Are you mad?”
“You're right, I'm madder than I've been for years,” Monk said. “What do you fools mean, letting them
take Doc Savage right off an R.A.F. field like that?”
“Their orders were correct.”
“What?”
“Everything was in order. The pilot of that plane, his papers—” The flight sergeant stopped and
swallowed, almost audibly. “What—what's going on here?”
“That's what I want to know,” Monk said grimly.
THE plane crashed then. The plane which had just taken off with Doc Savage aboard. It fell.
No one on the field saw it fall. The fog prevented that. No one at all saw the craft fall, it developed later.
But they heard. Suddenly, so suddenly that it was weird, there was silence around the car. Ghastly
stillness where a moment before there had been clamor, indignation and bewilderment. These men, fliers
and mechanics, had an instant feeling about something wrong with a plane. They could tell. When an
engine went bad, they knew it as if a heart had stopped beating.
“'Is hengines are 'aywire!” a Surrey man gasped.
It didn't take long. The engines stopped entirely. There was another sound then, one that came into being
gradually, a banshee moaning of air against wings, with a kind of siren quality that came from twisting as
the plane fell. Up and up the sound rose, up and up and—Umph!
Just an umph! of a noise, but it shook the ground, and with it a flash that lit the dull lead fog-crammed sky
itself.
“Gord, they had a thousand-pound bomb on 'er,” someone croaked.
Monk and Ham began running toward the place where the plane had hit. Running was foolish. It must be
a mile or two away. But they ran, and ran blindly, and there was sick hurting in their throats and no space
for air in their lungs. They ran. Someone in a lend-lease jeep overhauled them and told them to get in and
ride, and they did, but not as if they knew what they were doing.
Chapter II
AT first Monk and Ham were not allowed near the crash scene. Their status was not exactly clear; they
were not Army men in uniform, and they had dashed onto the field without passes, and it was all
deucedly strange anyway. That was what they were told.
The practical fact was that they were under arrest.
They sat there in the jeep, in silence.
Crash wagons roared past, and ambulances, and command cars. There was efficiency and profanity. The
crashed plane, what they could find of it, was not burning. The explosion of that big bomb had snuffed
out any flame the way nitroglycerine blows out an oil-well fire.
None of the ambulances were in any hurry to leave.
That meant there was nobody who needed patching.
That meant everybody was dead.
A man, an R.A.F. officer, approached Monk and Ham. He wore a cap with a patent leather peak and
one row of gold oak leaves. A group-captain.
“Jones-Jones,” he said. He extended his hand. “Met you once in Washington. Remember?”
Monk and Ham didn't remember. They looked at the man dully.
Jones-Jones looked at the hand they hadn't taken and shrugged.
“I have been assigned this thing,” he said. “Quite a bad thing. Deuced strange one, too.” He glanced at
his untouched hand again. “Don't go away,” he said.
He walked off.
He was a tall man. There was range and length in his walk, a kind of pell-mell haste, as if he'd learned to
walk back of a leash pulled by a large and energetic dog. His shoulders seemed as square as a carpenter
could have made them.
He was back soon.
He had four small capsules and a canteen of water.
“Take this barbital,” he said. “Shot of brandy is a bit more popular, but this is really the thing.”
Monk thought that he and Ham just looked so bad that the man was offering them a sedative, the way
pilots are sometimes given something to let down their nerves after a tight go.
But Ham suddenly realized differently. “What are you doping us up for?” he demanded.
Jones-Jones winced. They saw his hand tremble so that the little capsules tumbled about.
“Bit of a bad show ahead,” Jones-Jones said.
Ham, hoarser than he had been, asked, “What do you mean?”
“We want you to identify some thing,” Jones-Jones said reluctantly.
“You—Doc's body.”
Jones-Jones was silent. He closed his hand to keep the capsules from bouncing out of his shaking palm.
“What is it?” Ham asked, almost shouting.
“A bit of an arm, some scalp with skull and brains attached, and other oddments,” Jones-Jones said.
They went and had their look.
“Nobody but Doc Savage would have bronze hair quite like that,” Monk said.
“It's a piece of Doc, all right,” Ham said, and then was doubly sickened by the conviction that what he
had just said was calloused and brutal and altogether horrible. And for a long time he couldn't speak
another word.
CENSORSHIP passed the news of Doc Savage's death immediately. They could hardly have sat on the
lid, anyway, because the news was too hot, and they would have had trouble convincing the public the
information would aid the enemy. Doc Savage was not even in the active army, nor were any of his aids.
Doc's position with regard to the war had always griped him. Washington had insisted from the first that
his status should remain pretty much what it had been before the war—that of a free-lance
trouble-shooter—with an unusual organization which took on the weird, the unusual, crimes and criminals
which for one reason or another seemed beyond the reach of ordinary justice.
Doc's insistence that he and his aids wanted to see a piece of shooting war always got a hearty laugh. It
was then pointed out to them that they were probably shot at twice as often as the average Marine
commando. Someone with stars on his shoulder in Washington had said, “Put it this way. You fellows are
a particularly powerful medicine and you seem to be able to cure just about anything. But there aren't
enough of you to cure this war. There're only six of you, Savage and five aids, and six men in a war aren't
even a drop in the bucket. But you can be used to cure specific cases. When a new disease breaks out
somewhere, you can be used to fix it quick. That's why we're keeping you on tap. You're a small supply
of a very potent cure which we have for unusual troubles.”
Which didn't appeal to Doc particularly, because it seemed to him that he and his aids were pretty much
lost in the shuffle of the giant that was war.
The general public had not forgotten the bronze man, as Doc was sometimes called in print. Doc had had
for a long time a somewhat spectacular reputation. Unlike most reputations, it was not confined to New
York, nor to Hollywood, nor even the States. He was as well-known in Cairo, Brisbane and Buenos
Aires.
So the news of his death traveled faster than word of a phony armistice.
There were very few newspapers on which it did not make the front page, war or no war.
One thing was strange about all the death stories, though. There was nothing in any of the stories about
the death being unusual.
MONK and Ham collared Jones-Jones about that. They were pretty grim.
“What's the idea?” Monk demanded. “Doc was kidnapped. Not a word has been said about that.”
Jones-Jones got out a cigarette, then put it back in the pack. He was uncomfortable. He stalled around
for a while, then got it out.
“We have only your word for that,” he said.
Monk and Ham gave him pop-eyed looks.
“Come again,” Monk said. “What'd you say?”
“We have only your own word, no other proof, that there was a kidnapping,” said Jones-Jones.
Monk's roar should have rocked the House of Parliament.
“What?” Monk bellowed. “No kidnapping! But we caught one of the kidnappers!”
And Ham screamed, “An officer named Kilgore took him into custody!”
Jones-Jones sighed. “I have looked into that.”
“Huh?”
“There is no London bobby named Kilgore,” said Jones-Jones.
Monk howled once. Then he sat there with a dazed expression.
It was Ham who voiced both their thoughts. “Maybe the bobby was a fake, one of the gang.”
Jones-Jones nodded quickly. “Quite possible.”
Monk, who was no respecter of persons, reached over and got Jones-Jones by his well-tailored uniform
lapels. “Brother,” Monk said ominously, “the gang who brought Doc to the airport, and put him into that
plane, and took off with him, wore R.A.F. uniforms. They had papers admitting them to the field, and
giving them permission to take off in that plane. What about that?”
“Everything was in order there,” Jones-Jones said.
And he stuck with the story. And Monk and Ham were not able to prove otherwise. They even went to
the Air Ministry itself, and they gave a verbal going over to a flock of Air-Marshals, Vice-Air-Marshals,
Air Commodores, and right down the line. All they got out of it was the relief of letting off steam—plus a
horrible and growing conviction that something infernally clever and complicated had been perpetrated.
Because officially the death of Doc Savage, world-known adventurer, was down in the books as an
accident. He had died in a plane crash which had taken four other lives. That was the record.
The R.A.F. was coöperative. So was the Royal Navy and the King's Army and everybody else.
Coöperative, and, as Monk and Ham began to see, somewhat sympathetic.
The sympathy—the peculiar kind of sympathy it was—horrified Monk and Ham.
“They think the shock of Doc's death has mentally unbalanced us,” Ham said furiously.
JONES-JONES was more coöperative than anybody. They found him everywhere. He seemed to have
attached himself to them as if he were their shadow. It got so, as Monk put it, that he was afraid to take
the warming-cover off his toast of a morning because Jones-Jones might be under it.
Then Ham got another idea. Ham put this thought up to Monk, very seriously.
“I wonder if that Jones-Jones could be one of the reasons we're not making any headway?” he said.
Monk chewed on that mentally for a minute or two.
“Now that you mention it,” he said. “I wonder.”
The thing bothered them, and they watched Jones-Jones with that in mind. Pretty soon, they were fairly
sure they had something.
“We've got to prove Jones-Jones is blocking our attempts to find out who killed Doc,” Ham said.
“How?”
“I'll think of something,” Ham said.
But it was Monk who thought of something.
He told Ham what had hatched out in his head. “Don't believe a word of this,” he warned.
“Word of what?” Ham demanded.
“What I'm going to tell Jones-Jones.”
What Monk told Jones-Jones was: “By golly, we've finally got a clue to something!” Monk sounded
serious and grim. “We've found a man who knows something. His name is Elwood Riggs, and he lives at
thirteen-two Downheath Street. He's a cab driver. He's not at home right now, but he'll be home from
work at five, and Ham and I are going to be there to question him.”
Jones-Jones seemed properly happy. “What does he know?”
“He telephoned us. He said he overheard something that would tell us why what happened to Doc did
happen.”
“Jove, I hope you do have a clue,” said Jones-Jones heartily.
Rather soon, Jones-Jones made an excuse to leave.
“Come on, overdressed,” Monk told Ham.
Ham had gotten the idea by now. “There isn't any such person as this cab-driver. That the idea?”
“That's the idea,” Monk agreed. “Now, we'll rush to that address, and see if this Jones-Jones is trying to
get rid of our witness before we talk to him.”
They hurried to the Downheath address, and sure enough, there was Jones-Jones.
Jones-Jones seemed piqued at their catching him red-handed.
He tried a lie. He said, “I was so intrigued by your information that I thought I would be here when you
got here and stand right in on the ground floor of your discovery.”
Monk grabbed Jones-Jones. “Search him, Ham,” he said. “We've got the guy who has been blocking
our search for information.”
Ham was searching Jones-Jones when fully a dozen British officers appeared. Monk and Ham stared at
them, unbelievingly, for they were genuine. They were very high officers. Intelligence, all of them.
“You caught me,” Jones-Jones admitted.
“Yes, we caught you,” Ham admitted. “But now we're caught. Now what do you do with us?”
Jones-Jones smiled at them gravely.
“This isn't at all what you think,” he said. “Not at all.”
“What happens to us?” Ham demanded.
摘要：

THESHAPEOFTERRORADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2003BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI?ChapterII?ChapterIII?ChapterIV?ChapterV?ChapterVI?ChapterVII?ChapterVIII?ChapterIX?ChapterX?ChapterXI?ChapterXII?ChapterXIII?ChapterXIV?ChapterXIVScannedandProofedbyTomStephens ...

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