"Which way they go?"
"West!"
Reservoir Hill shouted, "Heading for Oklahoma!"
"Come on!" Doc said, sharply.Doc"s big armor-plated sedan was carrying them toward the water front a few minutes later, a siren moaning under the hood, to request police to clear traffic. This courtesy was extended to Doc Savage because of past services to law and order.
The clammy smell of the river was soon soaking into their nostrils.
HIDALGO TRADING COMPANY.
The sign decorated the front of a building that was ancient, and of brick. The structure had a colossal hugeness about it, and it carried also the outward air of a building disused. The moribund aspect was deceitful, for this was Doc Savage"s giant water-front hangar and boathouse.
A red light on the front of the car served the double purpose of police light and infra-red projector. The invisible ray which it transmitted caused concealed photoelectric eyes to actuate machinery that opened the big hangar door. After the sedan was inside, the door closed.
Reservoir Hill gazed at the interior of the big building as lights came on, and his eyes popped a little.
"Durndest place I ever saw, or I hope to have rings around my tail!"
The interior proportions of the warehouse hangar were much greater than it had seemed from outside. There were several planes, varying in sizes and types, speed boats and a cabin cruiser, and even, over to one side, what seemed to be a submarine.
"The rest of you follow in the large plane," Doc Savage directed Johnny, Renny and Long Tom. "We want to lose no time. Contact Monk and Ham and pick them up."
The three aids nodded. Contact could be established by the short-wave set that was handy in all the cars and planes, and Monk and Ham had used one of the cars to trail the thugs who had kidnapped the girl. The car had been standing near the entrance of the building.
In conclusion, Doc added, "Reservoir Hill will go with me in the small speed ship."
"You hombres sure work fast!" Reservoir Hill offered.
AN hour later, Reservoir Hill"s opinion had not changed.
By that time, Doc"s plane had traversed a slice of Pennsylvania which would have surprised even an airspeed expert. The ship was a small one, consisting of a c.o.c.kpit for two, radio equipment and a tiny fuselage and wing a.s.sembly-the rest of it was motor. Almost two thousand horse power!
The largest cities of the United States have police departments equipped with radio receiving and transmitting stations, and Doc Savage just finished communicating with a number of these, with the result that a net was now spread over Pennsylvania, and other States over which a plane bound for Oklahoma might fly.
"I"ll be whiskered if I knew the law was fixed up so elaboratelike for catching crooks!" said Reservoir Hill.
It was not long before they picked up a report that the fleeing plane had been sighted over the town of Clarksburg, West Virginia.
Doc Savage"s little ship, setting a pace that would have won any national air race of recent years, overhauled the quarry near the town of Middleport, on the Ohio River.
The fleeing ship was a big modern low-winged job, with two motors. She was of standardized aluminum color.
In ordinary company, she would have been fast, but Doc Savage"s small racer buzzed around her like a fly around a chicken.
The c.o.c.kpit of Doc"s machine was completely enclosed.
The bronze man slid the hatch back, stood up against the rip of the whipstream and waved for the other shipto land. There was farmland below, level enough to be used for that purpose. The answer was rifle muzzles poked out of the other plane.
The bronze man sank hastily into the c.o.c.kpit. There was little chance of ordinary rifle slugs penetrating the skin of his ship, which was of a new type of alloy.
Fully a dozen bullets. .h.i.t the little plane in the next few minutes. Reservoir Hill heard the sounds they made, and knew what they were.
"I wish this fight was on the ground, with Winchesters!" he snorted.
DOC SAVAGE drove his little ship for a spot ahead of the other ship. While he was jockeying for a position ahead of the nose of the other craft, he made adjustments with certain k.n.o.bs and controls.
"What"s them jiggers?" Reservoir Hill asked, pointing at the gadgets which Doc Savage was adjusting.
"The valve controls for a tank of gas in the real," Doc explained. "The gas, when released in the air, is invisible, but causes a chemical reaction with the air which makes it noninflammable. In other words, a plane flying into this vapor will stop, because the air gas mixture sucked into its motor became nonexplosive."
Reservoir Hill craned his neck, looked back.
"They must suspect your game!" he grunted.
The other plane had whipped into a sharp dive, almost standing on its nose. Doc sent his little ship down after it.
The Ohio River, running high and muddy, was crooked, wide, and yellow below. In some places, the river overran its banks. The hills had a scrubbed look, as if recently rained upon.
"Hey!" Reservoir Hill squawled.
The yell was caused by the action of the other plane in suddenly wrenching level. Men leaned from its cabin windows with rifles. Their bullets rapped the armor of Doc"s ship.
"Viddy!" Reservoir Hill yelled. "See her!"
Doc Savage made no comment, but he could see the girl distinctly. She looked attractive, even from that distance, and apparently had not been harmed. She waved at them, then put her fists up in a fighting att.i.tude.
"Viddy"s quite a gal!" Reservoir Hill yelled. "Blast them rascals! May their craws fill with c.o.c.kleburs!"
Doc worked into a position ahead of the other ship, but again the other craft dived. The pilot was wary, taking no chances whatever. The other ship leveled out several hundred feet below. Doc arched down toward it.
In the west, clouds hung in the sky, thick clouds, black, with occasionally a long, red lightning spark dropping from them to the earth.
"Look!" Reservoir Hill pointed.
The men below had opened the door of their plane and were hurling a figure bodily out of the ship.
"Viddy!" screamed Reservoir Hill. "They"re throwing her out!"
The falling, skirt-clad figure did not wear a parachute.
"WE gotta do something to save her!" Reservoir Hill screamed.At the moment, that did not seem an entirely sane suggestion. The form was falling. In movie cartoons, they dive planes down and draw falling men and women aboard; but in actual life, it is not so easy.
Doc put the plane"s nose down. A falling human body does not acquire speed which cannot be bettered by a fast plane, due to the resistance of the air. There was a chance of the plane overtaking the falling body.
Reservoir Hill did not know this.
"Don"t follow her!" he screamed. "I don"t wanta see her hit! I don"t wanta see Viddy die!"
Doc Savage knew, split seconds later, that he had wasted his time. The body was going to hit before he could possibly overtake it-was going to hit in the river.
"Maybe-hitting the water-won"t kill her!" Reservoir Hill croaked.
Doc Savage had no such illusion. Water, struck at the speed at which that body was falling, had the demolishing force of a solid wall.
The pitiful, twisting figure hit the muddy, flood-bloated river.
Doc Savage pulled his plane out of the dive so close to the surface that water splashed up from the falling body and actually slapped the plane"s body like so much shot.
He hung the plane"s nose in the sky until it lost momentum and was about to stall, then arched off on a wingtip and came back, looking overside for any traces of the body.
They cruised for several minutes, and nothing came to the surface.
"We gotta land and see if we can find her!" Reservoir Hill yelled.
"There is no chance of any one surviving a fall like that," Doc explained quietly, and pointed the bawling nose of the plane into the sky.
RESERVOIR HILL swore in the other seat. He made his fists into b.a.l.l.s of hard gristle and reared up angrily.
"Viddy may not have died!" he screeched. "You"re gonna land and look for her! You"re gonna land-"
Doc Savage grasped the old man"s arm. He did not speak, but something-it might, of course, have been the evidence of terrific strength which his grip conveyed-caused Reservoir Hill to sink back, limp and defeated.
"Yeah, you"re right," the old oil man muttered. "Viddy"s dead. The swellest little girl Oklahoma or any other durn place ever saw!"
Doc climbed his plane after the other craft, which had made good use of the delay. The other pilot had flown directly toward the immense ma.s.s of clouds that was the distant thunderstorm, and the ship had covered a good part of the distance.
"They"re gonna beat us to it!" Reservoir Hill groaned.
They did. The clouds, the thunder, the lightning and the rain swallowed the plainload of killers like some harridan, symbolic monster tossing in the sky.
Chapter VII. PREPARATION.
THEY never found the plane carrying the killers. The craft vanished thoroughly, completely. Doc Savage and his aids even flew over the path covered by the thunderstorm, on the chance that the vanished plane had been struck by lightning and fallen in flames. They found nothing.
That afternoon, the air over the States of Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Tennessee, as wellas Illinois and Indiana, became filled with planes, all searching. Radiograms from Doc Savage, addressed to the war department in Washington, caused every available plane to be ordered to take up the search.
The army planes found nothing, either.
Doc Savage and all his aids, when the latter arrived in the big plane, dragged the Ohio River and searched the banks for hours, but likewise found nothing.
"Poor Viddy!" groaned Reservoir Hill.
"Her body probably got caught under a snag, and has been buried with mud," a river man told him. "Reckon you"ll never find her!"
EARLY next morning, a small boy going out to get his cows, found an abandoned airplane in a meadow on his father"s farm. The spot was near Cleveland. The plane had evidently landed there the previous day, and it had been raining so heavily that no one had seen it.
The farm boy noted something peculiar the minute he stuck his head into the plane. Some one had dipped a finger or a stick into dirty oil-later examination showed the oil had been drained from the plane"s motor-and printed a name on the veneer lining of the cabin: TO DOC SAVAGE.
Below the name was a series of the strangest kind of marks-circles, dashes, half-moons, stars, crosses.
Just about everything. It had an obvious resemblance to some kind of a code.
The farm boy lost no time. He had read the newspapers, had listened to the police broadcasts about the plane over his short-wave radio, and his dad"s telephone connected with the long-distance system.
The lad telephoned Doc Savage. And he was on hand when the man of bronze with his aids sank his big amphibian plane expertly on the meadow. They had left the little ship behind.
Doc talked to the farm boy for some time. The bronze man then took a casual look around the clearing, and one glance at the writing in the plane-if writing it was. Then he went back and talked awhile to the boy.
The lad was bright. He knew something about radio, was an amateur photographer, and interested particularly in planes. He had, he admitted, been studying books on aeronautical engineering. He had even been experimenting along those lines himself, having built a streamlined kite.
Doc Savage got a case from his plane, one of the metal boxes employed to transport his equipment. He removed a number of objects, some of which he did not unwrap, and presented them to the boy.
Monk, Ham and the others, much more interested in the abandoned plane, gathered around it. They paid little attention to what Doc was telling the boy, and when the bronze man joined him, they were full of questions.
The farm boy went toward home.
"Look!" Monk said, and pointed.
He was indicating the interior of the plane.
But the bronze man made another tour of the clearing. Apparently he found no tracks. He came back.
By this time, the farm boy had reached his home. A few moments later, his kite was in the air. It was a trim-looking streamlined kite.
Monk nodded approval. Doc, of course, had asked to see the kite in the air. The real purpose of that was to get the boy out of the way, in case there should be danger.
Monk decided the kite was a good job. The lad surely must be interested in airplanes.Doc examined the hieroglyphics painted inside the abandoned plane with cylinder oil.
JOHNNY had already been poring over them. Johnny had translated a Chaldean tablet which n.o.body else could read, except Doc, and Egyptian hieroglyphics were almost English to him. But this time, he was baffled.