"064 (B063) - The Submarine Mystery (1938-06) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

"Maybe it would help," Doc said, "if you explained about the submarine."
"Can you speak Arabic?"
"Yes," Doc said.
The admiral said, "Swell. I worked in Arabia long enough to learn the language, and I'll use it to explain about that submarine. Chances nobody who overhears will understand."
He went on talking and told Doc Savage that the U. S. navy had no idea who owned the submarine or what had caused it to sink. However, he stated, the U. S. navy was sure it hadn't lost any submarines.
And he added that, although officially the affair was being dropped to avoid an international incident, nevertheless navy officials would much like to question the mysterious girl wearing ancient armor who had been saved from the sub.
"Now," the admiral ended, "it's your turn. What got you into this crazy thing?"
Doc Savage said, "The rather interesting angles."
"You're not kidding me," the admiral said. "But don't be explicit if you don't want to."
"Thanks," Doc said.
"To satisfy my own curiosity, though, I'd like to know what you finally find out about it."
"That is a promise," Doc said.
The admiral gave a disgusted snort. "Find out why the girl wore armor. The blasted army is already beginning to kid us about any girl on one of our boats needing a suit of armor."
That was about the extent of the conversation.
Climbing back into the rear seat of the car Doc Savage went to work on the spinal nerve centers of the prisoner, and by massage and realigning of spinal vertebrae, relieved the congestion which was keeping the man helpless. The fellow began to groan and roll his eyes.
Doc said, "That was an American-built submarine which sank off Boston."
The captive must have understood, but he did not say anything.
"Descriptions of the sub," Doc continued, "were too accurate to be mistaken. The submarine which blew up was named the Swordfish, and it was identical with the U. S. navy submarine named Swordfish. The Swordfish design is distinctive. There were two Swordfishes. Yet there is not supposed to be.
"No other nation has a Swordfish type boat, nor one that could be mistaken for a Swordfish. No other sub, for instance, has a streamlined forward superstructure housing a seaplane."
The captive's red face grew a little redder. All of him looked as if it had been exposed to a great deal of sea weather. He was stubbornly silent.
"Do you know what truth serum is?" Doc asked.
"Faith, do'st thee think to frighten me?" the prisoner asked quietly enough.
China Janes, driving with concentration, took a corner, then threw a remark over her shoulder.
"Another thee-and-thou guy," she said.
Doc Savage took hold of the prisoner, and the man fought until Doc crowded him down on the floorboards and got the fellow's hands and feet bound and a wad of cloth between his teeth.
Then the bronze man took the steering wheel and drove to his private garage in the skyscraper's basement. Doc and the girl rode the private speed elevator upstairs, taking the prisoner.
When they came near the hall door of the bronze man's headquarters, the prisoner suddenly kicked, made animal noises. Doc studied the captive. He took another step toward the door. The prisoner came as near having a fit as he could, bound as he was.
Doc Savage glanced at China. "You had better go back."
The girl looked blank. "Why?"
INSTEAD of answering her, the bronze man stacked the captive in a corner, then took the girl's elbow and steered her inside the speed elevator, shut her up inside the cage, then pressed an external control button which sent the cage plummeting down.
Doc ignored the office door, went on down the corridor, and stopped close to an apparently blank wall. Here he went through what would have been an insane procedure, had it not been for a mechanism concealed inside the wall. The contraption inside the wall could best be described as a lock worked by a combination of soundsЧfinger tappings in this case.
The bronze man tapped the combination, carefully counting out the fractional-second timing. A sensitive amplifier, a relay and an electric motor did the rest, and a panel opened.
Without hesitating, Doc stepped through into a passage which was narrow because it occupied space between two false walls. It served the double purpose of a secret passage in or out of headquarters, and storage for stuff which the bronze man wished to keep out of sight. Doc got into the laboratory through another secret panel.
Laboratory, library and reception room were empty of human presence. The man who called himself Prince Albert was gone. And so was Habeas Corpus.
The pile of tinned trinitrotoluene against the headquarters door probably contained over a hundred quartsЧnot enough to blow the city off the map, but enough to make a decided impression on several square blocks.
The stuff was hooked to an electrical detonator which would have been set off had Doc opened the door.
Doc Savage disconnected the detonator and put it to one side. Then he moved the T. N. T. After that, he went out and put a metallic finger on a button which brought the speed elevator back.
China had evidently been trying to get out of the cage. However, it locked automatically when the external control buttons were used. She was a trifle discomfited.
"You might," she snapped, "give a girl some idea of what you intend doing next!"
Doc Savage looked amiable, but did not answer. One of the earlier bits of knowledge he had acquired was that the less conversation you had with an aggravated woman, the less your grief. He hauled the captive into the reception room, and China followed.
China said, "Mister, I'm getting darned tired of unexpected things happening!"
Still looking amiable, Doc Savage went to the radio, warmed the tubes, then said, "Monk!" into the microphone.
A minute later, he said, "Monk!" again. In the next two minutes, he asked the microphone for Monk or Ham almost a dozen times. And by then his metallic features had stopped trying to be amiable. The weird effect of motion in his flake gold eyes had become more pronounced.
To China, the bronze man said, "It might be the best idea for you to stick with me. These men may be convinced you know enough about them to be dangerous. They cannot be sure how much the Duchess Portia told you about them."
China frowned. "You think it'd be dangerous for me to walk around loose, eh?"
"Conceivably."
"From what I've seen," China said, "being around you doesn't make anybody a good insurance risk. But if you say so, I'm game. Where do we go first?"
"To see what has happened to Monk and Ham," Doc said.
He sounded concerned.
DOC SAVAGE took twenty minutes for the trip to the Long Island farmhouse where he had left Monk and Ham, the distance being nearly that many miles. The fake doorman bounced around a good deal in the back seat during the trip.