Crack Comics#18(1941)

Over the previous few months, dozens of scientists (Prof. Steiner, Dr. Marsh, et.al.), are kidnapped by foreign secret agents. Meanwhile Sen. Tom Wright is having problems getting appropriations bills, for the FBI and Secret Service, through the Senate. Sen. Wright goes on a fact-finding mission, and pilots his own plane, looking over key defense plants from above. He finds a factory with way too many boxcars for its available storage track, and forms a suspicion about that. That night, Sen. Wright returns to the plant on foot. He gets inside and while he's looking around, sees one boxcar seemingly vanish. Tom then finds a workman and pays him $100 to swap clothes with him, then snoops around, but is quickly caught by a supervisor, who pulls out a pistol and tells Wright to come with him. They go to the boss's office, and the boss turns out to be Jaspar Crow, who has his henchmen take the nosy senator out to the rail yard, and into a tank car. If he hasn't suffocated to death by morning that's too bad, because the car's going to be loaded with prussic acid. Inside the tank, Tom changes clothes, then the Black Condor's Black Ray pistol, shooting yellow beams of energy, sears a hole through the side of the freight car. Condor flies onto the string of cars from which he saw one vanish, and gets atop the last car. Soon it "vanishes" also, down a boxcar-sized elevator, at least ten stories deep. At the bottom he finds a huge secret factory, making black market war materials for a foreign power. The freight car contains abducted scientists Steiner, Marsh, and others, who are put to work building submarines, for illicit export. Black Condor flies around, undetected, and finds a room where newly-arriving scientists are hypnotized into obedient laborers. Next the Condor flies into the girders above a huge laboratory, toiling inside of which, he finds Dr. Paige and the great Hans Erlicka, both of whom have been missing. Condor changes clothes again, and approaches Paige as Tom Wright, and is soon able to verbally bring the scientist out of his hypnotic state. Paige then shows Tom where the captive scientists are barracked, and returns to resume his labors. Moving from cell to cell, Tom de-hypnotizes over a hundred scientists and gathers them together. But an alert supervisor in a watchtower notices something wrong: "Calling the leader! The men act strange … We think the trances are being broken by someone!" The masked face of Jaspar Crow appears on a large "televisor" screen, and gives the order to execute the scientists; the henchman throws an electrical switch sending thousands of volts through the steel shacks where the scientists are housed. Finding these empty, the guards pull out guns and start hunting for the escapees. The Black Condor has soon knocked them out and given their guns to the scientists, but now the bad guys have a howitzer-sized ray gun, shooting beams of energy at them. The Condor easily eludes the beams, which melt some girders, which fall onto some machinery, to destructive effect. The bad guys then hurry to load their disintegrator ray aboard a submarine, and get under way, announcing their plan to wreak havoc along the east coast. The submarine disappears through a sea-lock door, but the Black Condor's pistol, shooting a red beam, blasts open the lock door like a tin can. Just then the Condor is distracted by seeing the hypnotist fleeing on foot. He catches this guy and forces him to call the leader on a televisor screen, then to hypnotize him as soon as his face appears. This seems to work, but when "the leader" appears in person and is unmasked by the Condor, he turns out to be some flunky left behind by Jaspar Crow. He has however called the police, as instructed. The escaped submarines, armed with disintegrator ray weapons, are lurking off the Cape Hatteras coast, and a large number of Coast Guard ships are approaching them. One sub surfaces and fires on one of the patrol ships, sinking it. This is observed by a Coast Guard patrol plane, which flies in to attack the sub, but also is disabled by the ray. The Black Condor arrives in time to yank the pilots out of the falling plane, and land them safely aboard one of the approaching warships (of which there are at least four). There he borrows four heavy bombs, and flies off to attack the submarines, and picks them off one by one. Soon Wendy Foster and her father are delighted to read in the paper about how Tom Wright single-handedly smashed the scientist-kidnap ring AND got the FBI's funding appropriation doubled.