Doc Savage: Death's Dark Domain (15 page)

In a flash, it came out, holding a hypodermic syringe. Setting the needle’s point
against the bronze man’s shoulder, she used her thumb to press the plunger home, discharging
the contents of the syringe into Doc’s bloodstream.

Doc Savage reacted. His head jerked around. Whirling eyes fell upon the woman. Shock
seemed to freeze the minute flakes in his animated irises. A long breath escaped his
parted lips.

Then those eyes rolled up into his head, and Doc slumped over the controls.

Venting a shriek of horror, Fiana Drost jumped out of her seat.

“Look! He has fainted!”

Monk and Ham leaped from their seats, eyes wide and unbelieving.

“Blazes!”

“Great Scott!” howled Ham.

No longer under control, the amphibian slid off one wing, falling into a tailspin.

After that, all was chaos in close confines.

Monk and Ham battled to be the one to reach Doc. Fiana was in the way. This complicated
rescue operations. Ham pulled her aside—not gently, either.

Fiana Drost retreated into the cabin of the plane, huddling by the cockpit door. Her
eyes were fierce.

Monk and Ham got themselves untangled from one another. Only Monk was strong enough
to haul Doc off the controls. He did so.

Ham dropped into the co-pilot seat and seized the dual controls. He began wrestling
with the yoke, while working control pedals with his feet.

It took some time, but the dapper lawyer got the big amphibian straightened out. Soon,
it was flying level.

Once the craft had been righted, Monk and Ham took stock of the situation.

It was the apish chemist who noticed the glass tube sticking out of Doc Savage’s shoulder.

“For the love of mud! Doc’s been doped!”

“That infernal woman!” howled Ham.

Just then cold slipstream filled the cabin, causing their heads to jerk around.

Monk and Ham were just in time to witness Fiana Drost’s feet exit the cabin by the
gaping door.

“Not again!” wailed Ham.

MONK MAYFAIR WAS bellowing, “She jumped!”

“What did you expect her to do—wait to be handcuffed?” snapped Ham. “She stuck Doc
with that needle!”

A horrified expression roosted on the apish chemist’s homely face. “Do you think it’s
poisoned?”

“How would I know?”

Monk reached over. With a hairy paw, yanked the syringe out of Doc’s arm. He held
the tip to his nose, sniffed curiously.

Ham asked, “What does it smell like?”

“Sedative,” Monk decided.

“Not poison?” blinked Ham, relieved.

“I said it smelled like a sedative!” Monk yelled back. “I can’t say for sure without
runnin’ a chemical analysis. And keep your eyes on your flying. We don’t need to crash
right now.”

Neck reddening, Ham turned his attention back to his course. He banked the big plane,
banked again, bringing it around in a great sweeping turn.

Laboriously, the giant amphibian began circling back.

“What are you doing?” demanded Monk.

“I want to see where that devil woman landed.”

“Good thinking, for once. Why didn’t you keep an eye on her?”

“Why didn’t
you?”
Ham shot back waspishly.

“I thought you were watching her,” Monk growled. “You sat closer to her than I did.”

After that, they were too busy raking the terrain with their eyes to argue the issue.

Ham sank the airplane lower, to aid in their reconnaissance.

They were skimming over open rolling hills. These looked peaceful. It was a beautiful
winter’s day. The skies were clear and the exact hue of blued steel.

“I don’t see any parachute bell,” Monk muttered. He had produced a pair of binoculars
and was using them to sweep the ground below.

“She must have landed all right,” Ham decided.

Monk shook his bullet head. “Not at this altitude. It would take longer. And there’s
no sign of a chute draggin’ along in the dirt. Or hung up a tree, for that matter.”

Ham gasped in horror. “Perhaps it failed to open.”

“Would serve her right.” Monk craned his blunt head around. “But by now I’d see the
bell. And I don’t.”

Suddenly, Ham spoke up. His voice was thin and unreal.

“Look up,” he said.

“Huh?”

“I said, ‘Look upward,’ ” repeated Ham.

Monk Mayfair crabbed his upper body around and endeavored to gaze in the direction
Ham was indicating.

There were two things fluttering up there in the clear blue sky.

One was Fiana Drost’s Caracul coat. It was falling. No one was wearing it.

The other was the dark-haired woman herself.

She was a sleek black apparition. From head to toe, her body gleamed like wet skin.
Stretching from each wrist to her ankles was a ribbed wing of some leathery kind.
Another similar membrane connected her legs, which were flung wide.

Employing these appendages, she was holding herself loft.

“She looks like a big vampire bat!” Monk howled.
“And she’s flyin’!”

Not flying perhaps, so much as gliding, they saw in the fleeting moment the aircraft
swept under her. She appeared to be flapping her leathery wings. But it was difficult
to tell. They caught only a glimpse of her.

What was certain was that instead of falling to earth, Fiana Drost was swooping along
as if the open sky were her natural environment.

“No wonder she kept her coat buttoned up all the time!” Monk said, aghast.

“Could she—she—” Ham stuttered.

“Don’t say it,” muttered Monk. “All my life I ain’t believed in vampires, and I don’t
want to start changin’ my mind now….”

Ham flew on, face rigid, apparently stunned by what he had witnessed.

Monk shook him hard. “Ain’t we gonna follow her, shyster?”

“What? Oh, yes!” said Ham, snapping out of his trance of incredulity. He began turning
the great bronze bird around.

THE dapper lawyer was destined never to complete that turn, for out of the sun dropped
a trio of monoplanes. Gray smoky lines ran past their windscreen. They resembled long
cobwebs.

“Ain’t that—?” Monk started to say.

“—Tracer bullets!” yelled Ham, throwing the amphibian into a sideslip.

Slamming the control yoke forward, Ham attempted to evade the attackers from above.
He jockeyed about in the sky, performing chandelles, Immelmanns, and other acrobatic
maneuvers that slammed them about in their seats.

Other aircraft climbed up to meet them. Two flights of modern fighters.

Soon, they were surrounded on both sides by formidable-looking warplanes. They were
painted in the national colors of Egallah, whose night-black flag was emblazoned on
their stabilizers.

“Better get on the radio before they shoot us out of the sky,” Ham warned.

Monk rushed to the radio and worked it frantically. Normally fearless, his concern
was for his insensate leader, Doc Savage, who lolled in the control bucket, helpless
and unaware of their predicament.

“Doc Savage plane to Egallah fighters,” he chanted. “This is Monk Mayfair transmitting.”

A crisp response crackled out of the headphones,
“Doc Savage plane, do not resist. You are prisoner of the Republic of Egallah. You
will follow us to military air field.”

Monk repeated this to Ham, “They want to lead us to an air drome.”

Ham scowled back.
“Do we have any choice?”

“I guess not,” mumbled Monk. Into the microphone, he said, “Lead the way and we’ll
follow. We got a wounded man on board.”

“Who is wounded?”
demanded the voice.

“Doc Savage.”

“We will have an army surgeon meet us at the air field.”

Ham fell in behind the squadron of warplanes, his handsome face wearing a worried
frown.

ONE of the reasons Doc Savage painted his super-speed planes a distinctive bronze
was not ego, but to identify them when flying over foreign countries. The uniform
metallic color made them unmistakable in the air, or when spotted from the ground.
This precaution was because the bronze man was sometimes forced to fly over disputed
territory, as was the case here.

The bronze hue was to signify that this was not a warplane, but an unarmed aircraft.
Possibly, this precaution had kept them from being shot down from the beginning.

In any event, it was possible that they had been intercepted in order to avoid misunderstandings.

“They sounded reasonable,” Ham said to Monk as they approached the air drome.

“Yeah. Let’s hope they stay that way.” He was pulling on Habeas’ long ears absently.

The amphibian came in smoothly, wheels dropping electrically. Ham taxied the big plane
to the far end of the field where a knot of soldiers in mud-brown uniforms were assembled.
They stood with rifles at the ready.

“Welcomin’ party,” Monk grunted.

Ham snapped off the engines while Monk threw open the cabin door.

As the Egallan warbirds began landing one by one, an officer came aboard and introduced
himself.

“I am Captain Bela, commandant of this air drome. Where is Doc Savage?”

“There,” said Monk, pointing to the bronze man, who had been laid out in the aisle.

Captain Bela proved to be the base surgeon, for he began making a careful examination
of Doc Savage.

“He is not dead!” Captain Bela sounded surprised.

Monk supplied, “He’s doped or something. A woman did it. Name of Fiana Drost.”

Interest flickered in the surgeon’s dark eyes. He seemed to know the name; possibly
he was only searching his memory.

Sticking his head out the cabin door, Captain Bela called for a stretcher to be brought.

“Doc Savage will be conveyed to the military hospital in Danla,” he said firmly.

“Where is that?” Ham demanded.

“Nearby. He will be in excellent hands.”

They stepped outside the plane. An ambulance wheeled into view. It was rather out-of-date,
but the orderly who took possession of Doc Savage seemed efficient. It took four of
them to lug the bronze colossus out of the plane and into the open ambulance bed.

Ham addressed the commanding officer. “We insist on going with him.”

“That will be quite impossible,” returned Bela. “You must be interviewed first. There
is the matter of your flying over sovereign Egallan territory without official permission.”

Ham explained, “Our friend, Long Tom Roberts, has disappeared in Tazan. We were on
our way to locate him.”

Monk added, “That’s right. Only we ran into engine trouble and had to set down.”

The captain nodded. “Yes, in Ultra-Stygia. This has been reported. A detachment of
the Tazan Elite Guard was sent to seize you, but you apparently escaped.”

“Could be,” said Monk. “Thanks to Fiana Drost. She warned us. Then she up and did
dirt to Doc.”

Captain Bela gestured to a low building. “We will talk in my office. I assure you
that your leader will be in good hands.”

Having no other real or reasonable choice, Monk and Ham followed the commanding officer
to his office. It proved to be in the building that also served as the operations
shack. It was not a big air drome. There was more runway than anything else.

Arriving warplanes were lining up on either side of the tarmac. There were a lot of
them. None were very old. So these were not surplus planes bought from other nations.

“Expecting a war?” Ham inquired.

“Maneuvers,” returned the captain crisply. “We must be prepared in the event General
Consadinos and his Tazan dogs attack.”

“We understood that Egallah was preparing to invade Ultra-Stygia,” said Ham, frowning.

“Here in the Balkans,” said the captain, “the wind changes direction several times
a day.”

IN the commandant’s office, they were served hot coffee and invited to tell their
stories.

Ham took the lead. He left out a lot. The unbelievable matter of the invisible things
of many eyes and presumed heads was one morsel the agile-tongued lawyer chose to keep
to himself. Ham did not wish for his credibility to suffer.

Captain Bela listened intently to it all before commenting. “Fiana Drost, you said
the woman’s name was?”

“Yes,” confirmed Ham. “We know nothing about her, other than the fact that she presented
herself to us as a friend.”

“But she stabbed us in the back once we got into the air,” added Monk.

“And you say that she jumped from your aircraft after stabbing your leader.” The commandant
snapped his fingers. “Just like that?”

“She appeared to be a cool customer,” allowed Ham.

Monk put in, “If you search, you might find her parachute. Or her body.”

“We have searched,” returned the commandant. “And I regret to inform you that we found
neither.”

That was all they said about the cold-blooded woman. Monk and Ham left out the apparent
fact that she had turned into some kind of human bat after leaving their amphibian.
That, too, was a gesture toward maintaining their credibility.

At the end of the interview, Monk and Ham were told, “We must detain you until we
ascertain if your story checks out in all particulars.”

“Say, who do you think—” Monk started to say.

Ham elbowed him sharply. “This is a reasonable request, commandant,” he said smoothly.
“We only ask that we be permitted to see Doc Savage as soon as practical.”

“Rest assured, you will join your bronze chief before the night comes on.”

Monk subsided. He had brought Habeas Corpus along with him. As they were escorted
from the office, he toted the shoat by one oversized ear. Habeas seemed not to mind
at all. Actually, seemed to enjoy it.

Armed guards arrived to escort them to another building. And only when they saw iron
window bars did the pair understand that it was what passed for a stockade or brig.

“Is this necessary?” Ham demanded sharply.

The commandant returned in a reasonable voice, “We hardly have hotel accommodations
here. And besides, there is someone you would like to meet who is also our guest.”