"044 (B077) - The South Pole Terror (1936-10) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

Monk ran to a briefcase which belonged to Ham, opened it and dug out a small mirror which the vain Ham carried. They used this to get a glimpse outside. The door itself was of bulletproof steel, so they were safe from lead as long as they kept behind it.
"Blazes!" Monk gurgled.
ALL three of them could see what the mob outside had wanted them to seeЧa pale-faced man.
The man was bound and gagged, and a knife was being brandished before his face, but that did not account for his paleness. His was a natural pallor.
He looked unhealthy, as if he had spent his entire life in some one's mushroom cellar. He was, furthermore, underweight, and there was no healthy amount of color in his hair and eyes.
"Long Tom!" Monk gulped.
"Exactly!" snapped the man outside. "The other member of your crowd! Watch what that knife does to him!"
"Wait!" Doc Savage rapped.
There was a startling power to the bronze man's single wordЧan arresting quality that seemed impossible for a mere vocal tone to possess.
"If we surrender, will you guarantee Long Tom will not be touched?" the bronze man continued.
"That's just what we were getting at," growled one of the men outside.
Doc Savage's flake gold eyes drifted over Monk and Ham, who looked very uneasy.
"Take it easy," Doc said, and opened the door.
The men with the rifles advanced. They were elated, none too cautious. In a compact body, they came through the door. One man remained behind, gripping the puny-looking Long Tom.
Doc Savage retreated before the men as they entered the office. The bronze man's hands were in the air; his attitude was one of complete surrender.
Derek Flammen, bony hands clenching a revolver, his ponylike face alight with nervous triumph, appeared in the hallway.
"This is wonderful!" he chortled. "This is what I really call progress!"
DOC SAVAGE stopped. He spoke, and there was something in the crispness of his voice, the power of it, that arrested developments for the moment.
"You engineered this?" the bronze man asked Flammen.
Derek Flammen wet his lips, seeming nervous.
"Exactly," he said. "And I would advise you to try nothing queer!"
Doc Savage asked, "Flammen, just what is your connection with this affair?"
Derek Flammen answered promptly and levelly.
"I was involved innocently, at first, not knowing what it was all about," he snapped. "Since then, I have learned some things. I still do not know what is behind this. But I do know that a great many millions of dollars and a number of lives are involved. That money interests me. Indeed it does. If any one gets hold of that wealth, it is going to be Derek Flammen."
The girl, Velma Crale spoke up sarcastically.
"Some one is going to get disappointed in this game of snatch-grab!" she snapped.
"Let us hope," Doc Savage said, quietly, "that is correct."
The bronze man casually continued his retreat. He seemed to pay no particular attention to where he went, but he stepped heavily on certain parts of the reception room rug.
There was an abrupt swish of mechanism. Something seemed to flash in mid-air between the bronze man and the advancing mob.
Derek Flammen's men stopped as if they had run into something invisible. They began to curse.
"There's some kind of plate-glass wall dropped down!" a man squawled.
Instantly, confusion descended. Guns whooped, and bullets flattened weirdly on the glass, which in turn cracked slightly in places, but did not break.
Long Tom, the puny-looking prisoner out in the corridor, began to squawl something. His words did not at first penetrate the din.
"Behind you!" he yelled. "More men hidden in the laboratory!"
Doc Savage read the thin electrical wizard's lips, spun. He was a bit tardy. Men were coming out of the library and laboratory. They had rifles. Plainly, they intended to shoot.
The ceiling of the reception room, which to the eye appeared to be an ordinary ceiling neatly ornamented with modernistic strips of metal, was actually quite a remarkable ceiling.
Past attempts on his life had moved Doc Savage to install the descending sheets of bulletproof glass, which could be dropped with great speed by the application of pressure on certain spots in the floor. Other sheets protected the center of the reception room from the library door. Doc now dropped these panels.
But the attackers were not without means of coping with the unusual defense. They produced explosive grenades, plucked the firing pins, and heaved them. The first opened with a detonation that threatened to complete the demolition of the skyscraper's top.
Other grenades landed. They were loaded with some modern explosive which detonated with an eye-hurting white flash. The blasts set the ears ringing, made it impossible to hear other sounds. The glass plates collapsed. Bullets came storming in.
Doc Savage and his aides were outnumbered several times by heavily armed and prepared men.
DUE to the perilous nature of the peculiar work which he was following, Doc Savage habitually made use of every conceivable precautionary measure. Otherwise, he would have long ago lost his life. This skyscraper headquarters was a mechanical labyrinth.
In it was every defensive measure which the man of bronze had been able to devise. In the high aыrie, he was as safe from would-be killers as he was anywhere else on earth.
The place was a maze of hidden recesses, runways and concealed doors. The bronze man made gestures, indicating that Monk and Ham should position themselves close to him. They did so. The bronze man stooped, and his fists rapped sharply at different portions of the floor.
There was a loud reportЧsharper than the blast of the grenades. It was accompanied by a flash of white light infinitely more intense than that from a photographer's flash gun. Moreover, this flash had some peculiar quality which caused it to blind all completely for a moment.
There ensued an interval of fully ten seconds when none of the raiders could see a thing except queer lights in their eyeballs. During that time, there was some rapid moving about and a lot of cursing.
A man got his vision back and immediately saw that Long Tom, the puny-looking electrical wizard, had vanished from the corridor. That was not even the start of it. Doc Savage, Monk and Ham were gone.
In the ensuing confusion, the girl, Velma Crale, got herself untied and made a break. They shot at her, but she ducked into the stairway and made good her escape.
Derek Flammen suddenly lost his nerve.
"Beat it, guys!" he yelled, and set an example.
They had the elevators waiting, the operators cowed by guns held in the hands of more of Flammen's men. Cramming themselves into the cages, the raiders descended.