Doc Savage: Phantom Lagoon (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage) (18 page)

“All of you go ahead,” Doc said quietly, after instructing the driver to drop him off some distance from where the
Stormalong
lay anchored. “I will join you directly.”

The car door opened and closed so quietly that it was several seconds before Pat Savage gasped, “He vanished!”

“That’s Doc Savage for you,” grinned Monk.

Upon arriving, they quitted the car, thanked the driver, and made their way to the
Stormalong.

The local press had been keeping their eyes peeled for a Herculean bronze man with golden eyes, so they were not immediately recognized.

By the time the party got to the pier, they rushed on board, and repaired to the lower deck where they held a conference. They were astonished to find Doc Savage waiting for them there, his hair only slightly wet from his swim. For the big bronze man had obviously gone into the water, swam some distance, and climbed aboard the yacht unseen. His close-lying bronze hair possessed the peculiar quality of shrugging off moisture as if it were greased.

Doc had already changed into fresh clothes. The wet ones were sitting on a bench, neatly folded.

“You move mighty fast for someone so tall,” Pat said admiringly.

Doc addressed his cousin. “It is time to assemble what little we know about the situation. Starting with you, Pat.”

Pat shrugged. “All I have are some scraps and rags.”

“They may be important,” invited the bronze man. “Proceed.”

Pat sat down, and began, “While I was eavesdropping on the Count and his men, they said something about a lagoon.”

“Did this lagoon have a name?” queried Doc.

“If it does,” returned Pat dryly, “it was never mentioned in my presence. But they were talking about going to the lagoon. Or so they claimed.”

Doc said, “The Count also let slip something about a cay. Cays are a Caribbean term.”

“Are lagoons found in the Caribbean?” wondered Pat. “I seem to connect them with South Seas atolls in my mind.”

“Coves are more common,” admitted Doc. “But lagoons are not unheard of.”

Monk offered, “Sounds like he’s headed for a cay that has a lagoon in it. Does that sound about right?”

Doc Savage reminded, “Hornetta Hale was picked up on a tiny cay in the Caribbean. She is the trigger for all of these unsettling events.”

“Did that isle have a lagoon?” asked Pat. “Perhaps we should start there.”

“It would make perfect sense to do so,” allowed Doc Savage. “But from the descriptions in the newspapers, that particular cay was so tiny a lagoon would be not a natural feature for it.”

Pat Savage eyed her bronze cousin skeptically, asked, “Have you a better lead?”

“I have not,” admitted Doc. “Prepare to cast off. We will take the
Stormalong
south, and see what we can discover.”

Long Tom grumbled, “Sounds like the beginning of a wild goose chase, if you ask me.”

“Yeah?” challenged Monk. “Got a better idea?”

“Yes,” said Long Tom. “I’m going to dig up some ice for this knob growing out of the side of my head.”

Monk quipped, “From the size of it, I’d hunt up an iceberg.”

“Keep your opinions to yourself,” snapped Long Tom. “Unless you’d like a shiner to match my bruise.”

The hairy chemist subsided. Long Tom was in a foul mood, and when he was thus agitated, one risked his wrath at their own peril.

They cast off, pushed their way out of Hamilton Harbour, and plotted a course south to the Bahamas, which was the closest island group.

Once out in open water, Ham Brooks was complaining, “Cays stretch from the Bahama Bank all the way south to the tip of Florida and around into the Gulf Coast. The Bahamas group alone comprises hundreds of islands. Without a name for this cay, or any inkling about this lagoon, we could be months plying these waters.”

“Not to mention the fact that everything we overheard might’ve been designed to deceive us,” reminded Pat.

Doc Savage said, “It is conceivable that what the Count told Gloomy Starr was designed to confuse and confound him. But the fragment you overheard about a lagoon, Pat, was spoken in an unguarded moment. Therefore, we are looking for a lagoon. Unavoidably, this points to an island or cay or some similar spot.”

“Doc makes sense,” Ham allowed. “Let us head south and see what luck we have.”

What luck they had, as it turned out, proved to be very mixed fortune indeed.

THE HOUR was late, and the
Stormalong
was skirting the maze of small islands of the Bahama Bank as the sun began to set like a slow comet.

Monk had been testing the shard of the glass bottle that had released some potent vapor that produced first, high hilarity, followed by unnervingly deep unconsciousness. The apish chemist availed himself of his wonderfully versatile portable chemical laboratory. Long hours he toiled, but the only result was to deepen the furrows in his minuscule forehead.

Doc Savage looked in at one point. “Any progress, Monk?”

“These traces don’t give me much to work from, but I think it’s a gas that has been concentrated under pressure to make a liquid. Break the bottle, and it turns back into a gas again.”

“Natural? Not man-made?”

“That’s my guess. Pretty volatile stuff, too. There’s traces of carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, methane, and a bunch of other things. It’s a real witch’s brew.”

Doc Savage’s trilling piped up briefly, but the bronze man declined to offer any hint as to his conclusions, if he had any. He might only have been surprised by Monk’s findings.

Not much else transpired until a strikingly colored seaplane flew overhead.

Pat Savage was the first to notice it, Doc having gone below for reasons of his own.

The bronze-haired girl lifted a pair of binoculars that she had hung around her neck. She trained the powerful lenses on the overflying craft. It was a small sport job, equipped with floats. Its colors were a distinctive canary yellow—cowl ring, tail and other elements trimmed with black.

“If I didn’t know any better,” Pat told the others, after she called their attention to the highflying plane, “I would swear that yellowjacket crate belonged to no less than Hornetta Hale herself.”

Ham lifted his own field glasses. “I spy the name
Hornet.
” He frowned. “Whatever would she be doing way out here?”

As if in answer to that interrogative, the bumblebee-like ship performed an expert maneuver and came flying back toward them.

It buzzed the cruiser at a low altitude, then took to the skies, waggling its wings.

On the second pass, the trim aircraft tilted so they could see the blonde tresses of Hornetta Hale hunkered at the controls.

She tossed out a bottle as she zipped by, motor snarling. The snappy aviatrix was attempting to land the bottle on the deck. But she missed.

The bottle made a splash off to port. Momentarily slipping beneath the waves, the object bobbed back to the surface. Ham and Monk trained their binoculars on it, saw that it was a common quart milk bottle, sealed with candle wax.

By this time, Doc Savage has come up on deck. He needed no binoculars to see that the bottle appeared to contain a message.

Stripping off shirt and shoes, the bronze man plunged into the ocean, struck out for the container, seized it in one mighty fist, and brought it back to the
Stormalong.

Once on deck, Doc uncorked the bottle, brought forth a curled note. One word was marked in pencil:

TRUCE?

Peering at the note, Pat Savage sniffed disdainfully, “Give me the word, Doc, and I’ll clip her sassy wings for you.”

Pat brandished her antique six-shooter.

Doc shook his head, found a flare gun, and shot a greenish rocket into the sky.

Pat asked Doc, “Is that a yes or a no to the note?”

The yellowjacket ship was an amphibian, and capable of landing on water. Doc throttled the
Stormalong
back until it was wallowing in the swells.

Hornetta dropped her ship to the lightly-rolling waves, spanked down hard, and coasted in their direction.

Once the prop stopped spinning, Hornetta stuck a blonde head out and asked jauntily, “Permission to come aboard?”

“Permission granted,” Doc called over.

“No horseplay,” admonished Hornetta.

Ham called out, “We could ask the same of you.”

The blonde grinned. “Deal.”

Hornetta swam over to the
Stormalong
and climbed aboard, acting as if it were nothing at all. Her attire was very abbreviated—shorts and a halter top.

Doc Savage wordlessly offered her a towel with which to dry herself off. Hornetta applied it to her face and hair, as strings of water dripped off her clothing. She was dressed for warm weather. Apparently, she was some sort of optimist.

“It is high time,” Hornetta announced, “that we trade information.”

“You first,” Pat said tartly.

“Who are you?” Hornetta demanded, giving the bronze-haired girl the once-over.

“Pat Savage.”

“Never heard of you,” said Hornetta thinly. She turned her attention to Doc Savage. “I lost the trail, so I need to take it up with you.”

“Trail to what?” questioned Doc.

“Her name is Honoria Hale.”

“We have met her,” admitted Doc. “What is she to you?”

Hornetta seemed reluctant to divest herself of any facts. Heaving a reluctant sigh, she said, “My big sister, if you must know.”

Doc said, “She could be your twin.”

Hornetta appeared to be struggling with her tongue. Another sigh came. She spoke.

“She
is
my twin. Honoria’s three minutes older than me.”

Doc Savage said, “The last we saw her, Honoria Hale had been abducted by men in the pay of an individual who was calling himself Count Rumpler.”

“Never heard of him,” snapped Hornetta. “Hear anything of the gent named Lancelot Lacy?”

“No,” said Doc Savage. “Who is he?”

“The biggest phony-baloney you ever could meet,” snorted Hornetta.

“Perhaps you need to start at the beginning,” suggested Doc.

“First things first. What happened to my twin sister?”

“She was abducted aboard the steamer
Matador,
but was spirited away last night. Her abductors took her off in a lifeboat. The boat was found overturned, floating in the Atlantic, with no sign of anyone who had formerly been on board.”

“The Men Under the Sea got her!” snapped Hornetta.

“Who exactly are the Men Under the Sea?”

Hornetta made a stubborn jaw. “If I told you,” she returned, “you would not believe me.”

“Her abductors appear to be very dangerous men, intent upon a very alarming mission,” Doc pointed out.

“Don’t I know it?” gritted Hornetta. “How Honoria got mixed up in all this, is all the fault of that rascal, Lancelot Lacy.”

“We are going around in circles,” Doc pointed out. “What is behind all of this?”

Again Hornetta made a stubborn square of her jaw. She was thinking.

“My bossy big sister fell for this Lancelot Lacy—which I don’t even think is his actual name. They are up to skulduggery. Serious skulduggery.”

Pat interjected tartly, “If you don’t shake loose with some details, I might come over there and box your ears proper.”

Hornetta Hale took that as a challenge. Instead of shrinking, she marched over to Pat Savage and attempted to flatten her nose.

Pat hauled off and connected with the point of Hornetta’s sharp chin.

The sassy blonde went flying backwards, and pitched over the rail.

Doc Savage rushed to the rail, looked down.

There was no sign of the woman. Only disturbed blue water.

Doc leapt in, fearing Hornetta had been knocked unconscious and was at risk of drowning.

Once underwater, the bronze giant rushed about, looking for any sign of the woman. To his amazement, he saw none.

Working his way around to the bow of the boat, Doc broke the surface.

Hornetta was on the other side of the boat, swimming toward her rolling amphibian.

Doc struck out in her direction, swimming madly.

Hornetta had only a fair head start, and Doc soon overhauled her, grasping her by one forearm, arresting her in the water.

“We had a truce,” admonished Doc. “You promised to share information.”

“That was before your brassy girlfriend socked me,” spat Hornetta.

“You were attempting to throw the first punch,” Doc pointed out.

“Either way, the truce went overboard when I did. Now let me go!”

Instead of replying, Doc Savage began swimming back to the
Stormalong,
towing the girl by one arm.

Hornetta had no appetite for returning to the vessel. She began kicking and clawing, spitting and screaming in the manner of an enraged wildcat. Doc Savage had been in many battles in the past. But this was something new.

Hornetta Hale was, as Pat Savage once remarked, a genuine bearcat. It was as if the bronze man got hold of a hurricane in female form. The feisty blonde tried to stick her thumbs in his eyes, poke fingers in his ears, pulled at his hair, twisted his nose and generally made a miserable nuisance of herself.

Doc let go, dived underwater, came up on the girl’s blind side and attempted to get hold of her neck.

Alerted by the rush of water, Hornetta turned around and attempted to bite the bronze man’s fingers. She had very strong teeth. They snapped like castanets.

Brandishing her frontier peacemaker, Pat Savage called over, “Say the word, Doc, and I’ll pot her with my trusty hogleg. You know I never miss.”

“Never mind,” Doc called back.

Reluctantly, Doc Savage allowed the girl to return to her amphibian. Slamming the door shut, Hornetta kicked the engines to life, producing a great deal of exhaust smoke and engine noise. The engine was sorely in need of an overhaul.

As the bronze man watched, various parts of his anatomy smarting, Hornetta Hale sent the amphibian scooting across the water, then droning into the air. She pointed the screaming prop south and settled in for a flight to an unknown destination.

Doc Savage’s men were waiting for him when the bronze man returned to the deck of the
Stormalong.