Elsewhere, Doc is engaged in furious combat with the Neanderthal mob which had captured him and was taking him to their boss. After they are vanquished, Doc looks around for the Russian spy Anya who had deserted him….
On their way to the meeting place, Monk, Ham, and Johnny cut up the parachute into three pieces and fill them with grass, creating make-shift overcoats as the temperature drops. Figuring that Renny and Long Tom would build a signal fire, they send Monk up a tree to look for it, but then they hear a sound….
Anya, who is hiding nearby in the wreckage of downed plane, contacts Popov at his lab and threatens to withhold the Apis Bull because she doesn’t trust him to carry out his end of the bargain. The scientist reminds her of their deal; he will destroy her father’s body rather than raise it unless she delivers the artifact. Anya reminds him that the Apis Bull is necessary to his schemes—and to the promises he made to his Mongol allies. He threatens to dispatch the Neanderthals to capture her/she counters with a promise to destroy the Bull. It seems they are at a stalemate—then Doc Savage captures her.…
At the rendezvous, Renny and Long Tom learn that their bonfire has attracted a band of Mongols….
Doc questions Anya about her father; she explains that he was the leader of the Red Star Unit, a team of crack Soviet agents. The team fell out of favor with the Russian leaders and it was disbanded and the members sent to various Gulags in Siberia. Popov, the Red Star’s biomedical genius, was allowed to continue his experiments in mind control (as seen in his manipulation of the mummy and the crocodiles earlier in the story). Eventually he escaped, with another prisoner called John Sunlight. The prisoners were released after Glasnost but her father was left a broken man. Doc asks about Ambassador Mihailov who was killed at the museum in New York (issue #13); Anya answers that he was a Red Star team member who betrayed the others, and Popov took his revenge via the Mongolian "mummy." Popov and Sunlight rebuilt an old military facility here near Tunguska where a space-born virus came down with the meteor in 1908; Popov has been experimenting with the virus to create the dinosaurs. Now his supply has run out and he needs more; the Apis Bull was carved from the remains of a similar meteor and so Anya was pressured into stealing it for him with the promise of resurrection for her father…..
Ham and Johnny are found by the Neanderthals but Monk leaps suddenly from a tree, scaring them off and he hurries after them in pursuit….
Doc and Anya survey Popov’s installation, which is surrounded by the Mongol camp. Anya explains that they, the guardians of the tomb of Genghis Khan, have allied themselves with the mad scientist. Doc, deciding it is time to get some answers, strides into the enemy camp….