Doc Savage: Phantom Lagoon (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage) (19 page)

Pat Savage said triumphantly, “Now we know who wears the pants in the Savage family. You let that brazen hussy slap you silly.
I
put her over the rail with one clean sock!”

Doc Savage had nothing to say to that. He looked thoroughly disgusted, and more than a trace embarrassed. The bronze man had been trained by a seemingly endless cavalcade of scientists and other singular experts from the point in life where he had just begun to walk. No expense had been spared, nor any necessary skill deemed suitable for his life plan of roaming the globe, rendering humanitarian service to those in need, and dealing out uncompromising justice where lawful authorities could not reach, was unlearned.

This extensive training had continued relentlessly until adulthood. It was an audacious and demonstrably risky endeavor. That it had been wonderfully successful was proven by the type of man Clark Savage, Jr., had become, and the great works that had attached themselves to his legend.

There had been only one glaring flaw in the undertaking.

No scientist, nor other learned expert, had ever satisfactorily explained the female of the species to Doc Savage. Having been handed off from one tutor to the other, with frequent moves from country to country, learning chemistry, botany and other specialized disciplines, Doc’s social life naturally suffered, and no one had thought to correct this oversight when it came to the opposite sex.

Thus it was that, in adulthood, Doc Savage could design a modern aircraft and perform delicate brain surgery, but women in general baffled him. It was as close to an Achilles’ heel as the big bronze fellow possessed. It explained his perpetual difficulties with his untamable cousin, Pat—as well as giving insight as to how Hornetta Hale had heretofore managed to run rings around him.

Grimly, Doc took the controls and drove the
Stormalong
deeper into the southern reaches of the Caribbean Sea.

Chapter XVIII

HORROR IN THE HOLD

THE HOUR WAS now very late, and a brittle half moon rode high in the night sky. A chill laced the ocean breezes as the Stormalong beat further southward.

Doc Savage stood at the controls, the listener device headphones clapped to his ears. From time to time, a light rain speckled the roof of the bridge, but it didn’t amount to very much. The skies remained as clear as a black velvet curtain dusted with diamonds.

From time to time, the bronze man steered the boat off course as if probing for underwater noises.

His silence, as well as the fact that he kept returning to course, indicated that he detected nothing of the sort.

Sidling up to him, Ham Brooks said quietly, “You are worried about submarines, aren’t you?”

Doc replied, “For the last year or so, there have been unconfirmed reports of foreign submarine activity in the Caribbean. Rumors of refueling bases and resupply depots. None of these have ever been confirmed, however.”

“I have read the same reports,” said Ham. “They appeared in reliable periodicals.”

“Reliable magazines have proven to be in error in the past.”

Below, Long Tom and Pat were taking turns shining torches down an ingenious window that was built into the bottom of the
Stormalong’s
keel.

This portal of glasslike composition material was big enough to offer an excellent view of the waters beneath the cruising yacht. It had many useful applications. Not the least of which was that it afforded the ability to examine the ocean floor in the type of shallow depths toward which they were headed.

Another value was the ability to make out various underwater life-forms, and of course any submarine that might have been passing beneath them. Despite the narrowness of the window, the portal, combined with the moving lights, showed any disturbances such as would be made by the wake of any silently cruising submersible.

After several hours of observation, Pat Savage remarked, “I don’t see anything—not fish nor fowl.”

Long Tom blinked. “Fowl? Underwater?”

Pat winkled her entrancingly pert nose. “Something sure smells foul when we all see a merman cavorting in the pale moonlight.”

Long Tom had no reply to that. He was still examining the mental image of the catapulting creature that had shot out of the water and dived back in.

“What happens if we
do
spy such a creature?” Pat asked. “What do we do about it?”

“Bait our hooks?” Long Tom grumbled.

Pat regarded the puny electrical wizard dubiously, “With what, pray tell?”

“If I know Doc Savage,” Long Tom said carefully, “he will go after it with his bare hands.” He pointed back in the direction of a projecting pipe—a tall round tube of a hatch which had been dogged shut.

Pat had noticed it before, but had not investigated. Now she wondered, “What is that?”

“Diving well. You open it up so you can enter the water quietly and unseen.”

Curious, Pat moved over to investigate. It looked like an ordinary hatch that might have been found on a submarine or similar vessel. It was rather small. It would allow only one person at a time to enter or leave via this route.

Compelled by her feminine curiosity, Pat undogged the hatch and threw it back, using both strong hands owing to its heaviness.

Staring down the pipe, she heard rushing water and after her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she was able to discern the sea swirling past. It was unusually tranquil.

“Very clever,” she remarked. “This well is so tall the water can’t get up and spill over.”

“It’s similar to the escape tubes found in most modern submarines,” advised Long Tom.

Pat shut the hatch, gave the wheel a careless spin, and got back to her feet.

Eyeing the bulkhead overhead, she observed, “I don’t like this one bit. Doc is too quiet.”

Long Tom frowned. “Doc is always quiet.”

“True,” Pat admitted. “But he hasn’t blistered my hide yet, or confined me to my quarters for barging into this screwy mess.”

Long Tom was concentrating on the glass porthole underneath him. He had taken to squatting on the port itself, and moving his flashlight all around.

“This is as dangerous a mission as I can remember,” Long Tom said grimly. “You can tell by looking at him that the big fellow is very preoccupied with getting to the bottom of things.”

“Still,” grimaced Pat, “I can feel my spanking coming.”

“You might want to sit down then,” suggested Long Tom. “And stay that way.”

Pat made a face composed of thoughtful lines. “Maybe I should turn in for the night.”

“Good idea,” said Long Tom. “We’re going to have to take turns on watch. Maybe you should grab your forty winks so you can take the morning watch.”

The
Stormalong
was spacious enough below decks to boast private staterooms. These were very small, barely more than a bunk and a few other items. Pat selected one, and closed the door. She did not bother to lock it. In the event of an emergency, she would need to get out in a hurry.

Long Tom went back to his underwater scrutiny.

After a while, Monk Mayfair came down, toting Habeas Corpus by one oversized ear. He yawned like a steam shovel getting ready to grab a large boulder.

“Where’s Pat?” he asked Long Tom sleepily.

“Turned in for the night,” said the slender electrical expert.

“That’s what I come down for. Doc said to get some shuteye. He and Ham will keep an eye on things.”

Long Tom doused his flashlight, and stood up.

“I have the same idea,” he said. “There’s nothing down there except fish. And not many of those.”

Monk peered down into the blue depths. “See anythin’ interestin’?”

Long Tom shook his pale head. “Sand shark or two. The usual.”

Monk grunted, encouraged Habeas Corpus into one of the staterooms. “Sure it wasn’t a mermaid?”

Long Tom favored the apish chemist with a sour glance. “You know there isn’t any such animal!”

“I knew that yesterday,” commented Monk. “But today, I ain’t so sure….”

With that, the hairy chemist closed his door quietly and before long the sounds of his snoring could be heard.

Long Tom stuffed some cotton into his ears so that he could get some needed sleep. Before long he, too, was gone from the world of wakefulness.

HOURS passed. Dawn was far off. The passage of the
Stormalong
down the Atlantic Coast wended through the multitudinous islands of the Bahamas, with its lonesome coral atolls and strange sandy cays, proved to be entirely uneventful.

At the controls, Doc Savage stood like a statue cast of metal, listening intently to the underwater listener. He turned to Ham Brooks and suggested, “Why don’t you wake up Monk, and get some sleep yourself.”

“Righto,” the dapper lawyer said. He did not look so much like a lawyer now in his nautical outfit and, despite the situation, seemed to be enjoying the voyage. It was suspected that Ham—had he his druthers—would have spent more time at sea had not the pressing work of his demanding legal practice and his association with Doc Savage kept him on dry land.

Ham plucked his sword cane from its place of concealment, where Habeas Corpus could not capture it, and went down the hatch into the lower hold.

He was not down there very long. There came a kind of a screech. Ham came rushing up, waving his stick excitedly.

“Doc!” he howled.

The bronze man turned. “What is it?”

“Pat! She’s
missing!”

Doc Savage plunged for the hatch, banged down the companionway so fast he nearly bowled the dapper lawyer over. Ham followed him down.

The other cabins disgorged their occupants—Monk and Long Tom, looking sleepy and annoyed at the same time.

“What the heck is going on?” demanded Monk.

The answer was not long in coming.

The floor was wet, and there were tracks.

These tracks were not human. They were splayed, larger than a human foot, and had some of the qualities of a duck. Or perhaps a goose. No duck or goose or similar waterfowl possessed such monstrous appendages, however.

The tracks came from the escape well and went directly to Pat Savage’s stateroom, whose door lay open.

Doc entered the cubicle, found rumpled sheets, but no one was lying in the bunk. He touched the mattress. Still warm.

Tracks led back to the escape well, which had been left open by whatever had stolen aboard the yacht and carried away Pat Savage. Doc Savage read that story in a glance from the myriad weird tracks, and by Pat Savage’s distressing absence.

While the truth of the matter was sinking in, the bronze man’s trilling began to issue from his parted lips.

It had a strained, almost agonized tone. It was nothing like his men had ever heard wrenched out of him. They detected myriad emotions threaded through it as the sound circulated about the narrow confines. Shock, anger, confusion, and something that they took to be a weird species of grief.

Without hesitation, Doc stepped out of his shoes and went down the well.

Monk plunged for the companionway, went up to the rail, and also dived into the water.

Neither man said a word. Concern for the missing Pat Savage impelled their frantic behavior.

Doc and Monk swam about as the
Stormalong,
robot helmsman engaged, beat on into the night. Doc had set the automatic controls before abandoning his post.

Realizing what was transpiring, Long Tom raced for the controls, and threw the boat back in the direction that Doc and Monk were treading water.

While Long Tom raced about, making wild circles on the face of the Caribbean, Ham Brooks, after dogging the hatch, was liberally shining his flashlight through the hull-bottom portal.

Doc Savage, he saw, was floating by the stern landing stage. He called for a diving outfit.

Ham Brooks, hearing this shout, got one out of the locker, and brought it to the rail. He handed it down to the waiting bronze man.

This consisted of a mouthpiece and spring nose clip, to which was attached a breath purifier pack. There was nothing more to it than that. But the contrivance allowed Doc Savage to stay submerged longer than his usual extended period of time, the bronze man having a remarkable lung capacity, the result of a childhood spent among the pearl divers of the South Seas.

Another outfit was handed over to Monk Mayfair, who began diving, submerging and resurfacing time and again.

Over an hour passed before silently and reluctantly, Doc Savage and Monk returned to the
Stormalong.
They all went below.

Removing his breathing apparatus, Doc Savage looked like a stricken man.

The flake-gold of his eyes seemed to have become unnaturally still, as if the suspension medium in which the flakes normally whirled—or gave that appearance at any rate—had congealed.

Monk exploded, “What the heck could’ve happened to Pat? Where could she have gone?”

Ham Brooks said thickly, “Those tracks were not the tracks of anything human. Nor were they made by swim fins. See those points? I will wager those are claw marks.”

Everyone bent down to see the tracks more clearly. At points at the edges of the racks, there appeared to be the unmistakable moist indentations of very large claws.

Long Tom Roberts tugged at an oversized ear, and murmured, “I still don’t believe in mermaids, but—”

“Do not be ridiculous!” snapped Ham. “That merman creature we saw possessed a fishy tail. The kidnapper had feet that were like those of wild geese.”

Monk muttered, “That don’t make any more sense than a fishtailed merman.”

Everyone looked to Doc Savage for answers. The bronze man’s face was something frozen in metal. He seemed at a loss for words. Finally, he regarded them with a voice like chilled steel and intoned, “We will find Pat Savage whatever it takes, wherever it takes us.”

It was not an answer to the conundrum, but it gave them a rising confidence in the face of the baffling unknown thing that had transpired.

Wordlessly, Doc Savage regained the controls, pointed the
Stormalong
south, and pushed the throttle as far forward as the mechanism permitted.