Ds188 flight into fear d.., p.1
DS188_Flight_Into_Fear.doc, page 1
Doc Savage: #188- "Flight into Fear"
Doc Savage Magazine #188 - "Flight into Fear" by Will Murray - July/1993
An ultra-secret mission propels Doc Savage into the frozen heart of cold war Russia. Marked for
death by the Kremlin and bound for a confrontation more vicious that he has faced before, the Man
of Bronze battles an executioner known only as the Red Widow (a master of disguise and mistress of
pain) and a soul-devouring Human Spider ready to strike and destroy without warning!
Originally printed and copyrighted circa 1933 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed circa 1963 by The Conde Nast Publications, Inc. Printed in paperback by Bantam Books. It doesn't appear that these will be reprinted in the near future. So the following out-of-print editions may be read only for your personal interest and may not be otherwise duplicated or published for profit.
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Doc Savage: #188- "Flight into Fear"
Contents
#188 Flight into Fear
by Will Murray (July/1993)
CONTENTS
to skip to a given chapter,
I. Death Sentence
1
II. War Talk
10
III. Unwelcome Welcome
18
IV. Moonwinx
23
V. Bronze Man
38
VI. Unpleasant Discovery
42
VII. Arrest
44
VIII. Moonwinx, Actual
55
IX. The Useful Widow
65
X. Rendezvous in Evanger
82
XI. Two Black Sheep
92
XII. A Wall Closing In
98
XIII. Violence for Breakfast
107
XIV. Passenger Unknown
117
XV. Dark Encounter
122
XVI. The Shortening Rope
133
XVII. The Bottom Fell Out
142
XVIII. Flight
156
XIX. Journey into Mystery
172
XX. Tundra Turmoil
183
XXI. Kill A Red Widow
190
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Doc Savage: #188- "Flight into Fear"
Contents
XXII. The Moon Winked Back
212
Afterword
218
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Doc Savage: #188- "Flight into Fear"
I - Death Sentence
I -- Death Sentence
By a piece of luck, he found a tool for the ambush. His toe kicked against it in the bloomy street.
Instinctively knowing it would do, he stopped and picked it up. It was a perfect thing for dealing with the trouble-making possibilities of an armed woman.
An iron scrap 2 feet long and an inch through. Heavy. An iron rod pitted with rust, foul with soil.
Perhaps it had just fallen off a truck. Off a junk truck or one of the endless truckloads of debris from the tenements that they were still demolishing to make room for more of the great, simple buildings which they were perpetually constructing for the U.N.
The tall pure-looking buildings of pale stone and bluish glass for the United Nations which he feared might be only premature containers for dreams. Although he sincerely hoped that they wouldn't be.
He put himself in ambush for her at once. There was a fork in the path. A 'Y' of a tunnel in thick shrubbery and darkness.
It was very dark now. There was no Moon -- a fact whose irony was not lost on him.
All they had told him when he had set out on the long trail that had brought him to this point was that it was very important. And it involved some person or thing which called 'Moonwinx' .
The right-hand fork would be altogether the more inviting to a woman, he decided. It had a flower border. It was drenched with the odor of fall-blooming asters and mums.
Everything in his experience told him that women invariably choose the inviting things. So he took his ambush on the right-hand fork. Not that his experience with woman was great. Quite the contrary.
"Women never fail to surprise me," he thought ruefully. "Never."
Cold air touched his face. He had a handsome, regular face. But he was not wearing it now.
The one he wore was wide and brutal and as unlike his own as could be imagined. It was a devil face. Huge, almost repulsive.
The air seemed clammy from the breath of all the people in the great city and faintly rancid from the odors of dinners cooked hours before. It had a chill, dead-animal quality remindful of the atmosphere hanging over a corpse.
He grimaced and buried his chin against the turned-up collar of his neat lightweight topcoat. He smelled deeply of the crisp new store-bought aroma of the dark cloth. He drew this newness into his lungs and savored it.
There were no new things in the terrible places in which had spent the recent past. It was not as tasteful a style as he would have preferred. His mission did not permit him to indulge in good taste spectacular and attract the wrong kind of attention. Hence the plain style of dress.
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1
Doc Savage: #188- "Flight into Fear"
I - Death Sentence
The topcoat helped him to look like a dressed-up laborer sauntering in Central Park. A youngish laborer with a stupid face and an overabundance of muscular strength. Not a spectacular type and not worth remembering. A dimwitted and brutal sort of fellow out for a night stroll. That was all.
He listened to woman's shoes tapping the path, approaching.
He waited for her to turn into the right-hand path.
She turned left.
Left!
For a moment, he did not believe it.
The tap-tapping of the woman's shoes went down the left-hand path. He had the impression of suddenly standing there in a world that was incomprehensible.
The club hung useless in his hands. Abruptly, it seemed to weigh as much as another man. It was of no use at all, the bludgeon was.
He lay the iron piece on the grass. One did not hurry about New York City carrying such an object.
Especially this close to Midnight.
The loose feeling in his hands told him hat they were trembling slightly. He was surprised at the severity of his case of nerves. But this entire affair had been in the pipeline for too long. To have exposed it at this late hour could be fatal.
He began to run. He could her tap-tapping walk carrying her along at a surprising rate.
He must get ahead of her again.
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He found a place ridiculously soon. It was almost as good as the first ambush spot. He crouched in the leaves and waited, regretting the loss of the cast-aside bludgeon.
He never carried weapons himself. It was a personal fetish not to do so. He sometimes had cause to regret this choice. If she carried a knife or -- worse -- a pistol, a length of iron pipe could be a handy thing (possibly a lifesaver) if his aim was true.
Presently, he had to make his stomach butterflies calm.
"Am I afraid of her? " he wondered. "Why not? She is a goblin, a devil in skirts. She is a virtueless, depraved, heartless, poisonous, unprincipled vampire. She destroys life bodies and spits into living souls."
His mud-colored eyes -- like the comparison microscopes which the ballistics people use -- caught her approaching figure and checked it to be sure that she was the one.
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Doc Savage: #188- "Flight into Fear"
I - Death Sentence
No mistake there. She was the blonde who had been following him for almost 2 hours. He could yell by her walk.
He had yet to see her face. She had become his shadow. She must be very efficient to be given a job like this one. If she failed to find him again, it would go hard on her. They would not forgive her readily. They never do.
He watcher her cross a place where a streetlamp made the Moon-lost night a bit lighter. He could see now that she wore gloves. This pleased him.
The gloves covered her fingernails. Women had a disconcerting way with fingernails in a man's eyes. He could see some sort of beads flash at her throat.
There was a lot of bounce in her figure. She had dyed her hair. She dangled a hat (a turban thing) in her hand as she walked. He could see that her hair was a garish reddish-blonde mess. Like a shepherd dog astride her shoulders. The real color of her hair was a raven black. He could take oath to that. If only he could see her face clearly …
He was appalled by the confident lack of haste with which she walked. She had trailed him into the park. She had lost him. But she was not excited about it, obviously.
Her self-sureness was horrifying. It was as if he was sure to be the victim, not she. He fought the feeling and drove it back as she came to him.
She called: "Banner!"
He almost laughed. She had called him by the name she should have. It meant danger. Yet, had she used his right name, it would have meant that the months of preparation had been for naught. That his carefully-crafted imposture had been penetrated. And death. It would certainly have meant his death.
But if she did not know who he truly was, she might not be intent upon harming him. As "Banner", his reputation was fierce. But the whole World knew who Doc Savage was.
Steeling himself, he let her approach.
As soon as she was within range, he got her throat in his strong hands.
She gave vent to a thick scream that sought volume but achieved only a kind of tangled ugliness.
It raked his nerves. He was not in the habit of manhandling women. He was not, in fact, accustomed to their nearness in any way, shape, or form. His life's work precluded such entanglements.
He changed his hold. His fingers quested along the shiny beads banding her neck seeking a certain cluster of nerves, intent upon squeezing the consciousness out of her widely animated form.
His brain experienced a sudden explosion! Angry red sparks danced before his retinas.
Her infernal handbag! She had whipped it around on the end of its strap and whacked him on the head. There must be a gun inside to make it so skull-jarring.
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Doc Savage: #188- "Flight into Fear"
I - Death Sentence
It would be a gun, he knew. Never overlook a woman's handbag in a struggle, he reflected grimly.
His head bellowed at him. He had lost his place among the beads.
She brought a hand to her throat and clawed. A lot of good that would do her, he thought. She couldn't tear loose. There was no judo expert good enough to rip free of his expert hold. He had learned it many years ago while pursuing his medical studies. All he had to do was locate the lobe of her left ear and work his fingers toward the nerve center.
The trouble was that he could not find it. In the absolute darkness, this frightened him almost as much as not being able to discern her features in the murk.
He was puzzled and surprised to realize that she was crushing her beads. The shiny baubles that looked so cheap. She was squeezing them until they burst. He thought he heard glass crush.
And now his nostrils filled with the reek of marrubium that came -- violently minty -- from the crushed beads.
The sudden odor of marrubium shocked him. It was like a nail driven with one blow into his skull between the eyes. For this perfume was a sensory password. It was used as the sign of a friend. It was a membership token. It was one of the ways by which a member of the Moonwinx team identified a fellow worker.
His thinking screamed: "She can't be one of us! She's a she-spider born with name Anna Gryahznyi.
I can't be mistaken. I've spent too many hours listening to the recordings of her fiendish interrogation sessions and her shrieking devil-like questions. And I've heard her sentence me to Death."
Yet the odor of marrubium was supposed to be the sign of a friend.
He thought: "But I just heard her voice. It was Anna Gryahznyi's voice. I know Anna Gryahznyi's voice as well as I know my cousin's. Just as I know that Anna Gryahznyi is as deadly as black window spider."
He hesitated, uncertain whether-or-not to release her throat and hear out.
While he hesitated, she gripped his wrists and jerked his large hands off her throat. Uncertainty made him momentarily unresisting despite his great strength.
She said: "You stupid devil-faced oaf!"
He was shocked terribly.
Her voice sounded completely American.
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-
She fell back a step from him. Her hands fluttered and settled in front of her throat. The helpless-damsel posture was bizarre under the circumstances.
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Doc Savage: #188- "Flight into Fear"
I - Death Sentence
"Don't curse, Anna," he admonished.
"You brutal murdering son-of-a- …"
"Anna Gryahznyi," he cut in, irony twisting his tone. "Imagine Anna Gryahznyi cussing with that accent."
"What accent?" she asked, momentarily startled out of her rage.
"Walnut Street in Kansas City, I believe," he said …
… and instantly regretted it. Banner would not have such encyclopedic recall of accents. Banner was an oaf.
"I'm not Anna Gryahznyi," she said sharply, his slip of the tongue going past. "And my accent is my own damn business."
Now he thought: "She may not be Anna after all. Really, I can't tell. I might have imagined the sound of her voice when she called Banner's name."
But it was hardly conceivable that he would fail to know her. Know the one enemy whom he had so intensively studied because she had been personally selected as his executioner.
She asked: "Who is Anna Gryahznyi?"
"You are," he said quickly.
He tried to sound convincing. It was an effort. He could feel his heart climbing his throat with every beat. The ground under his feet felt rubbery. He realized the feeling was in his knees.
"You're crazy!" she snapped. "You're a damn crazier crazy man than they said you would be. The hell with you!"
"Don't curse," he said wearily.
"Why not?" she said blankly.
"Anna Gryahznyi never curses. It does not become you," he stated.
"Oh hell!" she said. "You're really nuts, aren't you?"
He sucked in his wind. It was like kicks in the belly, this elemental fury coming out of her. Thunder from the lips of Anna Gryahznyi, that faceless female fiend.
But she had used his right name (which happened not to be his). Or was that imagination too?
"What name did you call me?" he asked abruptly.
"You want to hear it again, you ugly brute?" she said. "Well I'll be goddamned glad to …"
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Doc Savage: #188- "Flight into Fear"
I - Death Sentence
He leaned down for her purse which had gotten loose from her in the scuffle. She stopped swearing and jumped for it.
But he got to it first. The purse was heavy in his hands.
She swore at him again, too hoarsely to be intelligible. It might have been Russian, not English. He could speak the former as well as the latter. But the muttered imprecation was simply too unintelligible for comprehension.
He opened her purse. The thing that made it so heavy was a gun all right. It lay in his hand in the murk. He did not look at it. He felt his mouth drying. He could tell it was an Oostahf model such as they would give an agent to carry, unimaginative as they were.
He thought: "She doesn't know I'm Doc Savage. She thinks I'm Banner. Banner would not hesitate to shoot her. And whoever she is, she has to know that. If she suspects I'm Doc Savage, this bluff won't work."
His hands jacked back the gun-slide. A cartridge flew out of the ejector. Another went into the chamber as the slide snapped shut, making a noise like a steel beast closing its jaws.
"No! No! Oh please don'!" she wailed, her eyes going wide with seemingly genuine terror.
He pointed the muzzle of the Soviet-made pistol in her direction, his finger barely grazing the cold steel of the trigger. He did not want a mishap. But he put enough coldness in his stare to communicate otherwise. He hoped it would show through the tinted contact lenses that masked his flake gold eye s .
"My name?" he said tightly.
"Banner! You're Banner!" she bleated, seeming to shrink in her own skin much like a trussed prisoner before a firing squad.
He hated to subject her to this mental torment. Or any woman for that matter. Even Anna Gryahznyi who, it was said, broke the souls of her victims to extract the information she needed before shattering their bodies for the sheer enjoyment of it.
"And your name?" he prompted.
"It won't mean anything to you," she gasped. "Baker. "it's Eva Baker. you never heard of me."
Her voice had terror on it like hairs of frost.
Into him came a hideous playfulness of a sort which he had never felt before.
"So I'm Banner. A crazy man," he said carefully. "And you are a stranger. What was that name?
Baker? Eva Baker?"
She was wordless. She stood there grotesquely with her hands shielding her face as if she feared a bullet that would disfigure more than one which would kill.
"Well?" he said patiently.
