Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 120 - Waves of Death

VIP免费
2024-12-23 1 0 426.29KB 83 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
WAVES OF DEATH
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2002 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I. TIDAL WAVE
? Chapter II. SMALL DARK MAN
? Chapter III. THE SCARED CLAY
? Chapter IV. SOME SLIGHT MYSTERY
? Chapter V. ISLAND SIEGE
? Chapter VI. THE WAVE MAKER
? Chapter VII. WHEN DEATH STOPPED FOOLING
? Chapter VIII. USEFUL AS WELL AS ORNAMENTAL
? Chapter IX. THE LAWYER PLATE
? Chapter X. FLIGHT
? Chapter XI. MONSTER
? Chapter XII. CANS ON THEIR TAILS
? Chapter XIII. PATH MADE OF LIGHT
? Chapter XIV. DEATH WAS A FLASH
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
Chapter I. TIDAL WAVE
ITEM in the newspapers that bright morning in the month of August:
TWO DROWN IN MYSTERY TIDAL
WAVE ON LAKE MICHIGAN
NAHMA, MICH., Aug. 12th.—Two persons were drowned this morning in a large and strange wave
which swept down upon the Lake Michigan shore near this lumber town.
The dead are two brothers, Ted and Ned Jones, twins. According to witnesses, they were bathing on the
beach in calm water when a great wave came rolling in for no explained reason, and engulfed them.
The cause of the tidal wave is still a mystery, since instruments have shown no earthquake shock.
This was the extent of the item in the New York Dispatch, which was a conservative sheet and closely
edited. In some of the other papers there were a few more paragraphs to the story, but they did not add
anything of value, since they consisted of additional statements about the mystery of the affair. The fact
that the Nahma, Michigan, region was not one subject to earthquakes, and that nothing in the nature of
tidal waves had the habit of piling up on the beach unexpectedly, was emphasized.
Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett (Monk) Mayfair, the noted chemist who looked slightly like a
Congo ape and who had a pig for a pet, drew the newspaper item to the attention of Doc Savage.
“Here's a screwy one, Doc,” Monk said.
Monk did not call the item to Doc Savage's attention solely because it was a curiosity.
Doc Savage's business was strange things. Things like this. Or perhaps this was not exactly correct. Doc
Savage's business was actually the righting of wrongs and the punishing of evildoers, in instances where
the regularly constituted law officers and courts were asleep, or outsmarted, or in regions so remote there
was no law except the cruel hard one of the armed fist.
But Doc Savage was always interested in the inexplicable, the mysterious. The inexplicable and the
mysterious—particularly when connected with death—had a way of demanding his attention.
Doc Savage read the item about the tidal wave which had drowned the Jones twins.
Doc was interested. He did not look excited, but then he almost never showed excitement. Calmness and
control were part of the training he had received when he had been placed in the hands of scientists in
childhood.
(The strange training which Doc Savage received, the education which made him such a remarkable
individual, is familiar to the hundreds of thousands of individuals who have read the bronze man's fictional
adventures previously. Doc, as a child, was placed by his father in the hands of scientists and underwent
intensive training until he was almost twenty. This somewhat bizarre upbringing is responsible for the
sometimes strange, always unusual, often of almost inhuman ability, combination of qualities which is Doc
Savage, the Man of Bronze.—AUTHOR.)
“Get Ham,” Doc said, “and get busy on the telephone and learn more about this. Have Johnny check the
seismograph.”
“Sure,” Monk said.
MONK MAYFAIR spoke with some pleasure over the telephone to Ham Brooks. Ham Brooks was
Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, eminent lawyer, product of Harvard, and earnest pursuer of
the reputation of best-dressed man in the nation.
“Hello, you overdressed shyster,” Monk said. “I just dug up something. You better get down here and
give me a hand.”
“Dug up something, eh?” Ham said. “I'm not surprised.”
Monk became indignant. “What's that? An insult?”
“A statement of fact.”
“You keep riding me,” Monk said indignantly, ignoring the fact that he had started the trouble, “and some
day I'm gonna dance on your grave, sure enough.”
“Then I trust I'm buried at sea,” Ham said. “What do you want with me? I'm working on a brief.”
“You see the papers this morning?”
“No. Too busy.”
“A thing about a mysterious tidal wave in Lake Michigan. Drowned two.”
“Oh,” Ham said. “Is Doc interested?”
“Enough that he wants me and you to get on the telephone and see what we can dig up.”
“Be right down,” Ham said after a moment.
Ham Brooks arrived wearing a morning outfit which would have done credit to an ambassador. He was
twirling the innocent black cane which was a sword cane. The chimp, Chemistry, followed him and made
an incongruous note which Ham didn't seem to mind. Chemistry was Ham's pet, and also Monk's pet
hate. He was a rather runt specimen of chimpanzee or dwarf ape, and Monk's dislike of the animal
sprang from Chemistry's remarkable physical resemblance—mental also, Ham insisted—to Monk
Mayfair.
They got busy on the long-distance telephone and, two hours later, laid their findings before Doc Savage.
“We learned,” Monk explained, “a lot that adds up to nothing. The thing seems to be a mystery.”
Ham said, “I called Johnny, and he says there positively could not have been an earthquake large enough
to cause any kind of a tidal wave or it would have been recorded by his seismograph gadget.”
“There was nothing phony,” Monk contributed, “about the tidal wave. The darn thing was at least fifteen
feet high, which for a Great Lakes wave isn't a mouse.”
“There seems to be just one suspicious thing,” Ham said.
Doc Savage showed interest. “What was that?”
“A man turned up in Nahma,” Ham explained, “and asked a lot of questions of the relatives of the two
drowned men. This fellow said he was a newspaperman. He told them he worked for the Escanaba
Press. It turned out he didn't. He was a fake.”
“How did you happen to dig up that item?” Doc said.
“Well, in gathering information, I talked to the managing editor of the Escanaba Press as a matter of
course. He mentioned this thing about the stranger. It struck him as unusual.”
“Any description?”
“Not much. Short and dark. Fast talker. Smoked a short pipe.”
“What happened to him?”
“He disappeared.”
Doc Savage was thoughtful.
“You two had better take Johnny, and fly up there and investigate,” he suggested. “That is, if you have
nothing more important to do.”
Monk grinned. “It'll be cool up there, and it's plenty hot here in the city.”
“Johnny mentioned wanting to go,” Ham said. “He is intrigued by the earthquakeless tidal wave.”
“Then what are we waiting on?” Monk asked.
THEY took an amphibian plane, got the necessary military clearances for flying in restricted areas and
took off. Ham handled the controls and Monk did the navigating, and spent his spare time heckling Ham.
Monk inquired, “Listen, why do you part your hair like that for?”
“It looks better,” Ham said.
“It wouldn't be because every block has an alley, huh?”
“Your jokes,” Ham informed him, “are remarkably stupid.”
Monk said smugly, “I have to adapt myself to the company I'm in.”
They went on from there.
William Harper (Johnny) Littlejohn rode back in the cabin and pored over geophysical charts of the
Great Lakes area, using calipers to measure and pencil and paper for figures.
Johnny was a remarkably tall man who was astonishingly thin. Being so thin, he wore his clothes with all
the aplomb of a beanpole against which a sheet had blown. He kept, attached to his left lapel, a monocle
which he had not worn in years, and which he sometimes employed as a magnifying glass.
He was accepted as one of the world's great archaeologists and geologists, although his reputation as a
user of words nobody could understand was almost as extensive.
He got up now and went to the cockpit.
He indicated his map.
“An unbathycolpian hydrographical euripus,” he remarked.
Ham winced. Monk made vague gestures of fighting off something, and said, “Yes, I think so, too.”
“You think what?” Ham demanded.
“Whatever it was he said.”
Ham turned to Johnny and said, “Look. Just once would it be asking too much for you to use little
words? Play like this is a vacation or something.”
“Yes, play like you are visiting among the feeble-minded, and have to speak very simply,” Monk
suggested.
Johnny said, “I wouldn't be far wrong at that.”
“That's fine,” Monk told him. “Now we understand you. See how we smile?” Monk smiled for him.
“Now what the hell was it you said the first time?”
Johnny was patient.
“I said,” he explained, “that it is a large body of very shallow water.”
“What is?”
“Nahma, Michigan, is located on Bay de Noc, which is a shallow arm of Green Bay, which in turn is
attached to Lake Michigan.”
“So what?”
“A most unlikely spot for a tidal wave.”
“That's why we're heading up here,” Monk reminded him. “It was an unlikely tidal wave in the first
place.”
Disgusted, Johnny said, “Go back to your fighting.” He returned to his seat.
Before they resumed their quarreling, which was what they did with their spare time, Monk and Ham
held a consultation about where they would land. According, to their chart there was a landing field near
Nahma, only a mile or so from the little town.
“Maybe it's not used much, though,” Monk said. “We'd better check by radio and see.”
There was no radio station at Nahma, so they had to contact the nearest government airways station,
which in turn telephoned long-distance to Nahma, and obtained the information that the airport was
usable. This data was relayed to the plane by radio.
“We're all set,” Monk said.
THEY flew directly across Lake Michigan from Charlevoix and picked up the small islands at the mouth
of Green Bay, Summer Island and St. Martin Island. Because Johnny wanted to look over the district
from the air they flew south past Chambers Island in Green Bay, almost to Menominee, then turned north
again. By now it was getting dark. There were a few clouds, low on the western horizon where they were
packed in rolls against the setting sun.
“The Nahma airport isn't lighted,” Ham reminded Monk.
“That'll be all right,” Monk said. “We've got plenty of lights on the ship.”
They picked up the airport, locating it by the smudge from the chimneys of the big sawmill in Nahma.
Monk sent the ship down and set the flaps.
“Aren't you going to drag the field first?” Ham asked.
“Why?”
“Well, it's a strange field.”
“If it was a pasture I'd drag it,” Monk said. “But it's a waste of time. This is an airport.”
Johnny Littlejohn, using small words, said, “Better drag the field. This might not be a picnic.”
Monk eyed him strangely. “You got a hunch?”
“Maybe. And maybe I've been around Doc enough to get his habit of never taking a chance.”
Monk nodded and brought the plane in low, leveled off, and instead of landing, flew across at an altitude
of a few feet, inspecting it. At the end of the drag, Johnny was a little pale.
“Put a flare over,” he said.
Monk nodded again. He wasn't pale but his mouth was as tight as if he had tasted a lemon.
They dropped a flare and it shed white glare, struck the field and cast a spreading and dancing whiteness.
In this whiteness there were thin upright shadows and even thinner festooning ones.
“Well,” Johnny said. “What do you make of it?”
Ham said, “Steel rods driven into the field and barbed wire tied between them, it looks like.”
Monk said, “We'll land on the bay. It's not far, and the water is smooth.”
They came down on the water, very carefully, and landed without incident, then taxied inshore.
They turned on the lights in the plane cabin and moved about ostentatiously. The cabin was
bullet-proofed, but nobody shot at them. They went ashore then, still being cautious. They walked to the
airport without incident, except that they were barked at furiously by someone's dog.
The steel rods were ordinary iron fence posts, and the wire was ordinary barbed wire, but if they had
landed in it the result would have been destruction of their plane certainly, and probably their death.
“Somebody was anxious to welcome us,” Monk said dryly.
Chapter II. SMALL DARK MAN
THEY examined the fence posts.
“New,” Ham said.
“Wire is new, too,” Johnny pointed out.
“Let's get some fence-post dealers out of bed,” Monk said.
They put flashlight beams on the soft earth and found numerous tracks.
“I'll get a camera and photograph these when it comes daylight,” Johnny declared.
“Road over this way,” Monk announced. “Come on.”
The road became blacktop after a while, and was lonely, then houses began appearing. They were
barked at by more dogs, crossed a bridge of wood, and were in the town proper.
“Look at the sidewalks,” Johnny said, astonished. “Wood.”
Not only the sidewalks, but every building seemed to be made of wood. The place was obviously a
lumber-company town, the lumber concern owning all buildings.
Their feet made thumpings on the wooden sidewalks and pleasant trees made a canopy overhead. To the
right they could hear the sounds that a large sawmill makes in the night.
Close by and to the left were other noises, music and mirth. These came from a large building which
seemed to be the only place that was open at this hour.
They went in, and it was a little strange, not as commercialized as they had expected. They stood at a
door and listened to accordion music, watched dancing.
“It's a lumber-company recreation hall,” Johnny decided. “Let's find that telephone.”
They located a telephone booth and found telephone directories of the larger nearby towns—Gladstone,
Escanaba, Manistique—and began calling hardware stores and asking about recent purchases of metal
fence posts and barbed wire. They got no results.
“Lumber yards handle that stuff, too,” Ham reminded.
It was Monk who came up with the information they were seeking.
“Gladstone,” he announced. “About twenty-five or thirty miles from here. Lumber yard there says man in
a truck rushed in there in a heck of a hurry and bought all the metal fence posts on hand and a half dozen
spools of barbed wire. That was this afternoon.”
Ham was interested. “Any description?”
“Short and dark, fast talker, smoked a stubby pipe.”
“Blazes!” Monk said. “I've heard that description before. Isn't that the guy who was pretending to be a
newspaperman and going around Nahma asking questions of the relatives of the two drowned men?”
“That's him.”
“There was more than one man's footprints at the airport,” reminded Johnny. “One man didn't haul those
iron posts up here and drive them and string the barbed wire. It took several men.”
“All right, so there was several,” Monk said. “They don't like us. They don't want us here. They don't
want us here bad enough to try to kill us. Now what does it add up to? Why? Don't try to answer
that—we don't know. But how'd they know we were coming?”
Ham thought for some time, and then said, “The radio inquiry we made about the usability of the airport,
you knothead. That's how they knew.”
THEY talked to the telephone operator in Nahma and she was frank enough.
“He was a small dark man who talked very fast,” she said. “And he smoked a short white pipe. He gave
me five dollars to let him know if any strangers were coming into town who might be interested in the
strange tidal wave.”
“He didn't seen interested in the Jones twins, who were drowned in the wave?”
“Not particularly.”
“What reason did he give for wanting the information about strangers.”
“Said he was a newspaperman.”
“That's hardly an explanation.”
“It seemed like one to me,” the telephone operator said, not embarrassed. “Newspapermen are always
gathering facts, aren't they?”
“You told him we had made an inquiry about the usability of the flying field?”
“Yes. The government airways telephoned and said you wanted to land here if the airport was usable. I
relayed the information to this fellow, this short dark man.”
The girl was attractive, and Monk and Ham, who had an eye for a pretty girl, were not inclined to doubt
her. But Johnny Littlejohn was more immune to feminine charm. He frowned at the girl, asked, “That the
only piece of news you gave him?”
She looked at Johnny steadily.
“I'm sorry you don't like it,” she said. “No. That wasn't the only information I gave him. Two traveling
men came to town, and there have been some strangers walking around and I told him that.”
“I see.”
“I'm not a crook, you know,” the girl said pointedly.
“We're sure you aren't,” Monk said gallantly.
Johnny snorted, told the young woman, “Monk will next show you his pet pig, following which he will ask
you for a date.”
“My pal!” Monk said disgustedly.
They left the telephone office, stood on the wooden sidewalk and debated their next move. It was not
too late, they concluded, to make some inquiries about the Jones brothers, who had drowned in the tidal
wave. The attendant at the soda fountain informed them that a cousin of the Jones brothers worked as
bartender in the tavern which was under the same roof as the big recreation hall.
The cousin was a fat, red-headed man with a prominent jaw and a free flow of words. He had known his
deceased relatives very well, he insisted.
An enemy? Not a chance. Not an enemy on earth. Ted and Ned Jones had been the friends of humanity
personified.
Monk and Ham and Johnny, listening, discounted the man's loquacity and read between the lines and
decided that Ted and Ned Jones probably had not had any enemies in actuality. At least not any enemies
who would be making tidal waves to murder them.
“They must have been innocent victims,” Monk said.
“We better wire Doc about this,” Johnny remarked. “He'll be wanting to know about it.”
The telephone operator, it developed, accepted telegrams at this time of night.
They wrote out a message to Doc Savage, a complete report that contained all developments, and gave
it to the operator.
“We'll stand here and watch you telephone it in,” Johnny told her dryly.
“All right, keep on thinking I'm a crook,” the girl said wearily.
She telephoned in the message.
“There,” she said.
“Good,” Johnny said. “Don't tell anybody about that, if you don't mind.”
“Of course not!” the operator snapped.
THE man on the telephone pole had been very busy. He was a short and dark man. The telephone pole
was one that stood in the thick woods, and they had been using it to eavesdrop on the conversations—all
of them—which passed over the wires which the pole supported.
It was an expertly efficient job of wire-tapping, and it had gotten results.
The man put the tip of his tongue against the roof of his mouth and made violent hissing noises.
A man below answered this signal with a “Yeah?”
“Come up here and take over.”
“Sure, Stub,” the voice said. A man climbed a tree and stepped over onto a crude platform which had
been rigged for the eavesdropping on the tapped telephone wires. He wore a net and heavy gloves,
complained, “Whoever said these mosquitoes were as big as eagles was a liar. They're not much larger
than robins. But they're sure fierce.”
Stub said, “Doc Savage's men just filed a telegram to Savage. A report.”
“It get through?”
“Of course not. I pulled the little switch here and cut the wire, and made the telephone operator think the
telegram had gone through O. K.”
“Then Savage won't get it?”
“Not unless he gets it by mental telepathy.”
“And his men won't know it had been intercepted?”
“I don't see how they'll find it out.” Stub pulled in a deep breath. “Stick on these wires. Watch
everything.”
“Where you going?”
“We're going to have to get rid of Savage's men.”
“Have they got any idea what is behind this yet?”
“No, but with their luck they're going to find out,” the man called Stub said. “We'll have to shut off their
water while we can.”
He went away through the timber.
Chapter III. THE SCARED CLAY
TWENTY years or close to that ago this country had been logged over, so that trees which grew now
were second growth, none much more than a foot in diameter, most of them six inches. And thrusting up
everywhere was the short verdant undergrowth, springing rank out of a mulch of dead leaves that was
like walking on a mattress. Mosquitoes and night bugs swarmed in multitudes and there was the sound of
animals feeding or hunting.
The man called Stub kept walking with grim purpose, using a flashlight with a blackout lens at times,
cursing the bushes which whipped at him and the trees against which he jarred.
Suddenly, in the darkness, a man had a gun against his chest and was saying, “Who is it?”
“Listen, don't be so damned free with the guns,” Stub snarled. He was irritated at the thought that the gun
might be cocked, might have been jarred into exploding. “Suppose I was just some local citizen.”
The other said, “O. K., O. K., I guess I'm nervous.”
“Well, get un-nervoused,” Stub said.
There was a shack ahead. He shoved inside after prudently tapping a signal on the door and cursing
those inside in a friendly tone by way of giving them his identity.
There were nine men in the shack, all of them dressed for the woods in summer, although they did not
look or talk like men who knew too much about the bush country. There was not one of them who did
not have hold of a gun, and visibly.
Stub delivered a profane opinion of them, the opinion including his conviction that their ancestry included
snakes, worms and insects, but only the more obnoxious insects. “Standing around here like Kid Wild
West, all of you!” he snarled. “What in the ring-tailed hell do you think would happen if some local
citizens barged in? They'd take one look at you and ring in the law just on general principles. Get those
guns out of sight! Keep them out of sight.”
“You mean we're not to carry guns?” a man asked.
“Of course I don't mean that. Just don't go around acting as if you were loaded for bear.”
One of the others said, “Loaded for bear isn't even enough if Doc Savage is on this.”
“He isn't.”
“But three of his aides—”
“Savage isn't here, I mean,” Stub snapped. “He sent the three aides to investigate. Just a check-up on
general principles.”
“What general principles? What made him suspicious?”
Stub was almost insultingly patient. “Look, what we were afraid might happen is what happened. We
were afraid that damned tidal wave would bring an investigation by somebody who would be dangerous.
It did. It aroused Savage's curiosity, probably, and he sent his three men up here to look around.”
“When they report an attempt was made to kill them when they landed on the airport he's going to have
more than his curiosity aroused.”
“They won't report. I just took care of that.” Stub told them about the intercepted telegram.
“Sure, but what about the next report they make?”
摘要：

WAVESOFDEATHADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2002BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI.TIDALWAVE?ChapterII.SMALLDARKMAN?ChapterIII.THESCAREDCLAY?ChapterIV.SOMESLIGHTMYSTERY?ChapterV.ISLANDSIEGE?ChapterVI.THEWAVEMAKER?ChapterVII.WHENDEATHSTOPPEDFOOLING?ChapterVIII.USEF...

展开>> 收起<<
Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 120 - Waves of Death.pdf

共83页,预览17页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：83 页 大小：426.29KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-23

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 83
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注