THE FANTASTIC ISLAND by J.R.A

Author:J.R.A. [J.R.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-04-26T23:21:10+00:00

Chapter X. EQUATORIAL FLIGHT

WHEN Boris Ramadanoff bailed out of the gyro, his parachute lowered him into a narrow strip of parkway between Riverside Drive and the Hudson River. There was but one person to witness his landing, that individual being a bench derelict, sodden with alcohol. He merely stared, wild-eyed, believing the spectacle of the man crashing into the underbrush with something like a bed sheet fluttering over his head to be a Variation of the old "pink elephant" theme.

Boris Ramadanoff, therefore, was enabled to land virtually unseen. Skinning out of his 'chute harness and scrambling through the park shrubbery, he scurried up the long flight of stone steps to the street level and caught a taxi on the Drive. On Tenth Avenue, directly west of the Times Square district, he directed the driver to the curb.

"Wait for me," he called, and leaped out and ducked into a grimy doorway.

He was back soon, clutching a stiff object wrapped inside a trailing blanket.

"West Street!" he barked.

Riding toward the river, Ramadanoff took the ends of the blanket and wrapped them more snugly about the object which he carried.

West Street skirts the Hudson River and is lined with docks. When Ramadanoff let his taxi go, he walked a block down the dimly lit river-front street till he came to a large, roofed-over pier.

The huge, brick building, was smoke-stained, old-looking. There was nothing to distinguish it in appearance from any of a thousand other piers in New York, accommodating the world's shipping.

A sign over the corrugated metal door read:

HIDALGO TRADING COMPANY

As Ramadanoff very well knew, there was something unusual about this pier. It was not, practically speaking, a pier at all. It was Doc Savage's water-front hangar. It housed an assortment of heavier-than-air craft as remarkable as the ultra-modern land vehicles garaged in the basement of Doc's skyscraper headquarters.

Ramadanoff made no attempt to force an entrance into the sprawling bulk of the hangar. He had scouted the locale before. He knew that the hangar, protected by photo-electric eyes and magnetic fields, was as impossible of entrance as a bank vault would have been.

What he did was ridiculously simple. On each side of the driveway door was head-high, rather scrawny, shrubbery. Ramadanoff moved along the dim street until his dark figure merged with the shadows of the shrubbery.

Any one watching could have observed that his figure did not show again on the other side of the shrubbery. But there was no one watching. The little man squirmed into the very center of the concealing branches and crouched down. He pulled the blanket wrapping from his parcel, exposing a submachine gun of non-glinting blue-metal finish.

WHEN Ramadanoff, weaponless, had ducked out of the taxi into the Tenth Avenue doorway, it was to make a lightning quick call on one of Jans Bergman's men who had a room at the address. Bergman's demise was not yet known to his men, so it had been no trouble for Ramadanoff to arrange for the use of the machine gun.

Doc Savage, Ramadanoff knew, would waste no time in arriving at the hangar to take off for the Galapagos.

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