Doc Savage: Death's Dark Domain (35 page)

“I see,” said Ham. “So when the music started that first time we flew over Ultra-Stygia,
it was a signal to activate the darkness machine, hoping to cause a crash landing?”

“Baron Karl feared we would reclaim the device,” said Doc, “so naturally he desired
to thwart our arrival in the region. Doubtless the music commenced due to Egallan
agents reporting that our plane was spotted over Ultra-Stygia. Karl assumed that we
would intervene in their plot, and reclaim the blinding ray.”

Ham asked, “Is that the Dark Devil everyone feared?”

Doc nodded. “So it would appear.”

Monk Mayfair groused, “My head hurts from tryin’ to make sense of all this.”

“It’s elementary, simplewits,” declared Ham. “Both sides were using the superstitions
of the region to frighten the other nation into staying out of Ultra-Stygia.”

“That, I get,” said the homely chemist. “But what flummoxes me is what all the fuss
is about. Anyone can see that Ultra-Stygia is a barren wasteland. Fit for a bone yard,
but that’s about all.”

Doc called back to Long Tom, “Did you bring your special vest?”

“I’m wearing it,” said Long Tom.

Doc nodded. “We may need it later.”

“If there is a later,” murmured Fiana Drost disconsolately.

In back, she and all-but-invisible Simon Page were seated apart. They were not speaking.
The wire-service reporter still smarted from the sharp words Fiana Drost had inflicted
upon him. It was clear that Page’s ardor for the mysterious woman with ice water running
through her veins had cooled considerably.

“It is very unpleasant to be seated next to such a malodorous monstrosity,” Fiana
remarked carelessly at one point. “Do you others not agree?”

“Invisible men are old stuff to us,” boasted Monk, “but I’ll admit the last bunch
we fought didn’t need baths.”

Pained green eyes squeezed shut, and remained that way.

“So these midnight rodents and their octopus-ink discouragers are just some Balkan
inventor’s notion of a terror weapon,” Monk was musing.

“It would appear so,” agreed Doc. “The pilots are garbed to resemble human bats, even
to leather flying suits equipped with underarm membranes that allow them to glide
for brief periods in the fashion of delayed parachute jumpers. Fur-and-leather flying
helmets replete with squirrel ears and smoked goggles completed the illusion.”

Ham glared back at Fiana Drost. “So she was only wearing a trick suit under her coat
to make us think she was a vampire. You,” he accused, waving his cane at the woman,
“are nothing but a patent fraud.”

“I am suddenly overcome by an urge to taste your neck, fastidious one,” Fiana drawled
back.

“You might dispense with the bloodthirsty act,” Doc suggested. “It has worn very thin.”

Fiana shrugged elaborately. “What can I tell you? I am the daughter of my father.”

Which reminder of her unholy parentage caused a hush of unease to settle over the
plane cabin. Fiana still wore the sable cloak wrapped around her person, which brought
difficult memories rushing to their recollection. The evil John Sunlight had often
cloaked himself thus.

No one spoke again until Doc Savage overhauled the warplanes carrying the anthrax.
There were three of them, flying in squadron formation, their wing lights resembling
fast-traveling stars. Twin-engine jobs.

“Long Tom, tune in to the Tazan military frequency,” instructed Doc.

Long Tom dialed the receiver below two hundred meters until he found it, swiftly displaying
an uplifted thumb.

Doc Savage engaged his own microphone. His lips parted.

Out of his mouth issued a familiar voice. It was known to them all. But now it sounded
ghoulish, for these were the living tones of a dead man.

“Consadinos!” Fiana gasped out.

Doc spoke at great length in the exact voice and manner of the late Tazan war minister.
Urgent words crackled back. Doc responded crisply.

There was a brief silence. Static hissed.

Then, one by one, the three Tazan bombers broke off and started to circle back.

“What’s going on?” asked Ham, head swiveling between windows.

“They are returning to their country,” explained Doc. “I just ordered the counter-attack
canceled.”

Monk whistled admiringly. Behind them, Ham and Long Tom exchanged congratulatory handshakes.

Then, another voice blistered from the radio speaker. It was an unfamiliar one. It
rattled out harsh words in the thickly-accented language of Tazan.

Doc attempted to interject. But the other voice kept talking, shouting him down. Some
of it had the vehemence of profanity.

Ahead, the trio of night bombers again altered course. This time, they returned to
their original heading.

Jaw dropping, Monk demanded, “What just happened?”

“A high official in the Tazan government has informed the bomber pilots that General
Consadinos is deceased,” Doc informed them. “The anthrax attack is back on.”

“Obviously someone found his corpse,” Ham said unhappily.

“It is the will of the Devil,” commented Fiana Drost.

Long Tom removed a shoe and hurled it back, barely missing the woman’s ducking head.
“Did you have to cut his throat!” he snarled.

A gloomy funk filled the cabin.

Doc kept the thundering amphibian following in the wake of the bomber trio. They were
approaching the area of the caves, now white with snow.

Strange activity could be discerned below. Dead trees, stumps and boulders had toppled
here and there. As they watched, others followed suit. The ground seemed to be convulsing
in scattered spots, exposing black holes in the earth. Burrows.

Amid the snow cover, strange footprints began appearing magically. They formed snaky
lines, as if an invisible centipede were progressing through the drifts. Every line
of tracks progressed outward from one of the newly-exposed holes.

Monk yelled, “A lot of them stumps and things are fake! Hairy goons are crawlin’ out
of trapdoors everywhere!”

So it appeared to be. Each fresh disturbance in the snow moved toward a cave mouth.
And there were scores of these tracks. It was an eerie sight, down there in the frosted
expanse of Ultra-Stygia.

“We’re too high up to spot their eyes,” Ham observed. “But it appears that the forces
of Tazan are invading the Marea Negra pocket.”

“Won’t take long till we see fireworks,” Monk added.

Nor was it. No sooner had the first bare footprints trickled into one cavern, then
the inhabitants began reacting. Footprints which had disappeared into one entrance,
came scrambling out, pursued by men garbed in the regalia of human bats. Gunflame
stabbed sporadically. The bat-men were firing pistols and rifles. The ogres had arrived
unarmed, apparently preferring to rely upon their invisibility to provide the element
of surprise. The attack became a rout.

From every other cave, waves of great black-winged bat-ships began rushing out into
the night to meet the onslaught in full force.

The harridan craft lifted, canted around, and began laying down long gray worms of
vapor. The footprints of the invisible ogres of Tazan began scattering in confusion.
Hollows began making themselves in drifts, signifying the fallen. These churned briefly—only
briefly. Then they were still.

Over the radio, a frantic bomber pilot was reporting that the tide of battle was turning
against the legions of Tazan. Fiana translated this for them.

“Big battle brewing,” Monk warned. The homely chemist turned anxiously to his bronze
chief. “What do we do, Doc?”

“Brace yourselves,” warned the bronze man. And reaching down, he lifted the darkness
machine onto his lap. It still reposed in its heavy steel container.

Monk eyed it warily. “You gonna turn it on?”

“No choice in the matter,” Doc said firmly.

The thing was in the manner of a great coil—the operating principle being primarily
short electrical waves mixed with sonic vibrations, which paralyzed the light receptivity
of the optic nerve and thus cause the eye to see no light at all—in other words, blackness.
Storage batteries powered it. There was a lot of black insulation visible on its bulky
steel housing.

Doc slanted the amphibian upward, gained as much altitude as possible in the night-time
sky. He turned off all lights in the cabin. It became as thrilling as riding a roller
coaster skyward while blindfolded. Fear of falling became uppermost in their minds.
But this prepared them for what came next.

A bronze finger snapped a switch.

A humming was the only preliminary sign of the device warming up.

Then the
black
clamped down.

No matter how many times they were exposed to its awful influence, it remained a terrible
thing to experience. All light ceased. It was as if the world had been folded up and
put away by a sinister something that controlled all illumination.

But the truth was much simpler. Their eyes no longer worked. They could move them
about in their eye sockets, but that was about all. It was impossible to see, or focus,
or perform any act that included processing light rays. The rays were still there,
of course. It was just that the eyes could not receive them. They might as well have
been blind.

Fiana moaned, “The Dark Devil is loose again!”

“Feeling blind as a
bat?”
sharp-tongued Ham accused.

“Don’t sweat it,” Monk reassured her. “Doc invented this gimmick. He can turn it off
any time.”

“Quiet,” rapped Doc Savage.

From the sound of the radio chatter, panic had overcome the bomber pilots. They did
not know what to do. It became clear that they had no idea what had taken all sight
away.

“They are requesting permission to bail out and ditch their planes,” Doc related.

Another exchange crackled through the ether. Doc listened intently.

“That permission has been denied,” he reported. “They have been told to dump their
loads onto the bat caves.”

“Good grief!” Ham croaked in horror. “Doc, if they do, it will contaminate this entire
area with anthrax!”

“But if they don’t,” interjected Long Tom, “the bombers will fly on to a big city
and spread their pestilence there. Thousands will perish.”

All understood what that portended. The tiny white spores were fatal if inhaled. And
should one enter the bloodstream through a break in the skin, the awful black sores
would soon appear, signaling imminent, horrible death….

IN THE dark, with laboring engines making the still-climbing amphibian vibrate, no
one spoke. Doc Savage was obviously considering options.

Snapping the master switch, he turned the device off. Moonlight filled the cabin.
They looked out every available window. Doc helped by tilting the plane.

Below, bat-ships were careening around crazily. Some had already crashed. Others simply
hovered in place like dark hummingbirds, awaiting developments.

The three bombers began dropping their noses in a power dive.

Several bat-gyros rose to greet them. Now that they understood what the ugly craft
actually were, Doc’s men were able to distinguish in the dark the whirling vanes mounted
over the fixed bat-shaped glider wings.

Frantic exchanges between the bomber pilots and their Tazan leader volleyed back and
forth.

Fiana said, “The pilots are saying that they are under attack, and outnumbered. The
leader is telling them to crash their aircraft, if they must.”

Doc turned on the darkness machine, ending the argument.

Throwing the aircraft into another steep climb, Doc said, “This should not take long.”

It did not. Reaching the amphibian’s service ceiling, Doc waited for the engines to
begin coughing from lack of air. This they soon did. Then he let the ship slide off
one wing. A jarring drop followed, eliciting grunts of surprise.

That was when the bronze man turned off the darkness machine for the last time.

Doc leveled off. Below, the three bombers had already impacted the ground. One had
the misfortune to strike a cave, turning its entrance into leaping flame.

The others had made tangles of burning duralumin metal here and there. In the natural
darkness, they resembled smoldering witch cauldrons. Beyond any doubt, their deadly
cargoes had been violently expelled into the surrounding terrain.

The bat-ships had fared better, some of them. They were settling down to the ground
to investigate.

One by one, the bomber pilots began landing via parachute. They were immediately set
upon. Watching with a pair of binoculars hastily clapped to his eyes, Monk reported,
“Looks like the man-bats are slashin’ the bomber pilots’ throats with their trick
medallions.”

Doc rapped out, “Long Tom. The Egallan military frequency, please.”

“Go!”

Immediately, Doc began warning the Egallan high command that the Marea Negra region
had been infected with anthrax bacteria and was too dangerous for habitation. He repeated
this several times in their language.

Word must have gotten though to the bat pilots because several took off hastily and
winged in the direction of the Egallan frontier proper.

Doc circled. Worry etched his normally composed features, stabbed deep into his flake-gold
eyes.

Below, all was a weird pale panorama in the moonlight. It was exactly the hue of anthrax
spores—except that the latter were too small to be visible. Still, the suggestion
that doom lay like a leprous blanket over the Marea Negra impressed itself strongly
upon their minds.

“Whatever’s down there worth fightin’ over,” opined Monk, “nobody will be able to
claim it for a very long time.”

Long Tom suddenly snapped his fingers. “I get it!”

“What?”

“Uranium is what’s down there!”

“I say it is gold,” insisted Ham Brooks. “Only gold motivates men to wage war.”

“No,” said Doc Savage. “Another substance entirely.”

“What is it?”

Instead of explaining, Doc said to Long Tom, “Time to ferret out that secret radio
broadcast station.”