"Doc Savage Adventure 1935-07 Quest of Qui" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doc Savage Collection)

Johnny burrowed deeper. Snow among the boulders, he discovered, ranged from six to fifteen feet in depth. It was soft, cold enough to be dry.

The metal box which Johnny carried was heavy. He used it to ram through the snow. That pleased him. He could make fair progress.

He heard the plane come back, picked out the ratty sounds which rifle slugs made running around from rock to rock in the snow drifts. Then came a great roar and the earth shimmied, as more dynamite was dumped out of the other plane.

Johnny kept going. Conditions were perfect for what he was doing. He encountered a rock, and worked around that. His flying suit was full of snow. So were his ears, nostrils. He stopped finally and listened.

The plane motor had dropped in volume of noise. At first, he thought it was far away. Then it blasted out. A grating and rasping, quite distinct, came through the snow. The ship had landed.

They would have trouble finding him, Johnny decided grimly. Why were they trying to kill him? Because he had found the wounded man, obviously. But what was behind their action? What were they up to? And could he, Johnny, finally escape? He thought so. But just in case, there was a precaution he could take.

Johnny worked himself from side to side in the snow, and made a small cave. There was not much light, but he did not need much. He opened the box. Some snow fell in. He brushed it out carefully.

The box held a radio outfit which transmitted and received on an extremely short-wave length. Despite its compactness, the apparatus had a range, under favorable conditions, of a good many hundreds of miles.

Johnny turned a switch. A generator, operated by a very sturdy, light storage battery, made some little noise. He fumbled with the microphone and head-set.

He set the dials to the wave length employed by Doc Savage and his men in their communications.

Then he heard about the most unpleasant sound possible under the circumstances. Dogs barking! The other men had landed their plane. They had unloaded dogs, probably sled dogs.

Johnny let out a long word expressive of disgust. The dogs would smell him out like a partridge under the snow.



Chapter 3

KILLERS ALL


NO ONE had ever honestly believed Johnny did not have an agile mind, and he used it now. He thought swiftly. His first conclusion was that it was just as well if these men seeking his life did not know about the radio transmitter and receiver. They would be certain to destroy that link with civilization.

Johnny, in common with some other scholarly men, was a bit absent-minded, however. When he left the radio set and burrowed away hurriedly under the snow, he overlooked something he might have done had he thought of it.

Johnny forgot to turn the radio transmitter off.

Men were shouting. They sounded angry. Dogs were barking, and they sounded joyful, as if they had been cooped up on the plane for some time.

Johnny found himself in snow which was particularly dark, decided that that meant the drift was deep and he was near the bottom, and concluded to lie still. The dogs at least would not hear him then. He might even get away entirely.

After he had stopped, Johnny heard a faint whine which puzzled him. It was almost two minutes before he abruptly remembered he had forgotten to turn off the radio, and this must be the generator he was hearing. It would run for hours. The generator, delivering high voltage, drew little current, and the special storage battery had a high ampere-hour capacity.

During the next few seconds, Johnny entertained ideas of burrowing back and turning the radio off, but put that out of his mind as being too risky. They might not hear it, anyway.

Johnny grinned once, but not joyfully. It was the kind of a grin put on by a man who has just been run over by a car and is too dazed to be sure how badly he is hurt, and Johnny employed the grin because he had thought of how unbelievable his present position was.

A Viking dragon ship filled with bearded freebooters had captured a yacht off Long Island, and that was somehow connected with a plane load of men who were now trying to kill Johnny. There was also something named Qui, of which no man had known for twelve hundred years. It did not quite make sense. Johnny had encountered some strange, unbelievable and mysterious things during his association with Doc Savage, but this one, thus far, made less sense than