The Man of Bronze by Kenneth Robeson Page B

aircraft.

    DOC Savage merely blinked his golden eyes once after the blinding flash which marked the blast that annihilated the tri-motor ship.
    “That was what I was afraid of!” he said dryly.
    The rush of air thrown by the explosion caused his plane to reel. Doc stirred the controls expertly to right it.
    For Doc and his men had not been in the ill-fated tri-motor plane. They were in the other craft which had flown over the airport a moment before the tri-motor took off. Indeed, Doc himself had maneuvered the take-off of the tri-motor, using remote radio control to direct it.
    Doc’s radio remote control apparatus was exactly the same type used by the army and navy in extensive experiments, employing changing frequencies and sensitive relays for its operation.
    Doc did not know how their mysterious enemy had managed to blow up the tri-motor. But thanks to his foresight, Doc’s men had escaped the devilish blast. Doc had used the tri-motor plane for a decoy. It was one of his old ships, almost ready to be discarded, anyway.
    “They must have managed to slip high explosive into one of our boxes,” Doc concluded aloud. “It is too bad we lost the equipment in the destroyed plane. But we can get along without it.”
    “What dizzies me,” Renny muttered, “is how they fixed their bomb to explode in the air, and not on the ground.”
    Doc banked his plane, set a course directly for the city of Washington, using not only the gyroscopic compass with which the craft was fitted, but calculating wind drift expertly.
    “How they made the bomb explode in the air can be simply explained,” he told Renny at last. “They probably put an altimeter or barometer in the bomb. The altimeter would register a change in height. All they had to do was fix an electrical contact to be closed at a given height, and— bang! ”
    “ Bang , is right!” Monk put in, grinning.
    Their plane flashed past the upraised arm of the Statue of Liberty, and sang its song of speed southward over the Jersey marshes.
    Unlike the tri-motor which had been destroyed, this plane was of the latest design. It was a tri-motor craft also, but the great engines were in eggs built directly into the wings. It was what pilots call a low-wing job, with the wings attached well down on the fuselage, instead of at the top. The landing gear was retractible—folded up into the wings so as not to offer a trace of wind resistance.
    It was the ultra in an airman’s steed, this supercraft. And two hundred miles an hour was only its cruising speed.
    No small point was the fact that the cabin was soundproof, enabling Doc and his friends to converse in ordinary tones.
    The really essential portion of their equipment was loaded into the rear of the speed-ship cabin. Packed compactly in light metal containers, an alloy metal that was lighter even than wood, each carton was fitted with straps for carrying.
    In a surprisingly short time they picked up the clustered buildings of Philadelphia. Doc whipped the plane past a little east of the city hall—the center of the downtown business districts.
    Onward they swept, to zoom down on an airport at the outskirts of Washington.

    THE landing Doc made was feather-light, a sample of his wizardry with the controls. He tailed the plane about with sharp whirls of the nose motor, and taxied for the little airport administration office.
    In vain did he look about for his autogyro. Ham should have left the windmill plane here, had he already arrived. But the whirligig ship was not in evidence.
    An attendant, a spick-and-span dude in a white uniform, ran out to meet them.
    “Didn’t Ham show up here?” Monk demanded of the man.
    “Who?”
    “Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks!” Monk explained.
    The airport attendant registered shock, then great embarrassment at the words. He opened his mouth to speak, but instead, excitement made him merely stutter.
    “What has happened?” Doc asked in a gentle but powerful tone that compelled