Doc Savage: Skull Island (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage) (4 page)

Ham said, “We didn’t see or hear of you for over a year after that.”

“My father saw to that,” said Doc. “He had plans for me. The war interrupted those plans. He was determined to get me back on the path he had ordained for me since before my birth. ‘To right wrongs and punish evildoers,’ he used to say. To this day, I still do not know what motivated him.”

“Heck,” snorted Monk. “That’s simple. He devoted his whole life to the same creed. He just wanted his only son to follow in his footsteps—that’s all there was to it.”

Doc Savage shook his head gravely. “No, there is more. Perhaps one day I will understand the thinking that compelled a man to entrust his first-born son to an endless parade of scientists and other experts from the age of fourteen months into adulthood, molding him along scientific lines. But he gave me only glimpses and gleanings of his thought processes. No clear answers were ever forthcoming.”

“There was a vogue back before the turn of the century to school up children to be virtual supermen,” offered Ham Brooks. “No doubt he first conceived the idea from those experiments.”

“We may never know for certain,” admitted Doc.

“What about this Skull Island Monk mentioned?” prompted Renny. “That’s what I want to hear about.”

“As you all know, we only recently endured a hazardous adventure on a previously unknown spot near New Zealand called Thunder Island.”

Monk grinned. “Yeah. Johnny Littlejohn is still studying his notes on that trip. He’s talking about writing a book on the only known survival of prehistoric life into the Twentieth Century.”

“Thunder Island is not the only such place of its kind,” interjected Savage, “Skull Island—or Skull Mountain Island, to give it its complete name—is quite similar in some ways—although very different in others. It is of Skull Island that I must speak tonight.”

Outside, the dismal drizzle was painting the high row of windows in running transparent watercolor tones. As they waited for Doc to go on, the rain picked up in intensity, became like drumming fingers, urgently encouraging the Man of Bronze to get on with his tale.

“It all began with a telegram from my father,” began Doc….

Chapter IV

THE STRIPS OF letters pasted on the yellow telegram still looked freshly typed as Clark Savage, Junior, reread them on the steamer Hurucan, which was bringing him home from France.

CSJ RETURN TO STATES ALL SPEED STOP AWAIT ME IN SAN FRANCISCO STOP

XAVAGE

That was his father. Brisk and to the point. And more than a little cryptic. When he wished to convey urgency, he always spelled his last name with an X. Why he did so was beyond fathoming. He had many such quirks.

Not for the first time did Doc Savage wonder what was so urgent as to summon him home on the very first day of his discharge. How had the old man known he was at liberty? Well, he had friends in very high places. Probably no mystery there. No doubt a great many officers in the U.S. and other allied armies had kept Clark Savage, Senior, apprised of his son’s activities—where wartime censorship concerns permitted, of course.

Doc—he had picked up the nickname in the trenches—reflected on the strange turn his life had taken. In his first year of medical school, he had enlisted in the war against the Kaiser, where his skill patching broken bones, bullet wounds, and saving soldiers’ lives had caused his comrades to name him that. He liked it. Liked it from the start. He had always been Clark, Junior. Now he was Doc Savage. It had the flair of the Old West, along with a note of respect accorded to a medical man.

On the bed of his bunk lay a strew of metallic objects. These were the components of a Colt .45 automatic, along with a Thompson Annihilator submachine gun and a German MP18—the latter the first machine pistol ever devised. He had disassembled all three in order to bring them home with him. Their mechanisms fascinated him. He picked up the pieces and examined each, his active imagination working.

The automatic’s design was barely ten years old, but already attempts were being made to improve upon it. The German machine pistol was more recent than that. The Thompson gun had been invented for trench clearing operations, but the war had ended before it could be fielded. Doc had come into possession of one of the prototype models, which had been given to him after the war concluded because the brass thought he was the right man to test it. Doc soon discovered that the Thompson had a tendency to jam, and the muzzle was difficult to hold level when in operation. Not that Doc ever had any trouble with that. He could fire a .50 caliber Lewis gun without the need of a tripod mount.

What if the ferocious firepower of an Annihilator gun could be harnessed on a frame nearer to that of a Colt automatic? Both employed the same .45 caliber round. What a weapon that would be!

Doc toyed with the pieces. He had no access to a machine shop. But at his first opportunity, he vowed that he would attack the problem.

That is, if his father allowed him to pursue this.

From the first dawn of self-awareness, Doc had been subject to his father’s indomitable will. There was no brooking it. Quitting medical school to join the army was the first time he had stood up to him in a contest of iron wills. It had not been easy. It might not have been acceptable, but for the simple fact that Clark Savage, Senior, was every bit the patriot as his son.

The nation had called its young men. And Clark Savage, Senior, could not, in the end, thwart his son from enlisting. So it was done.

Now, it was time to pay the piper.

Reluctantly, Doc began stowing the loose pieces back into his kit bag. His metallic features were becoming set. San Francisco lay only hours away. It was difficult to guess what awaited him at landfall.

NIGHT was holding off when the liner pulled into the Embarcadero.

Clark Savage, Senior, was standing in the front of the receiving crowd, towering a full head taller than any of the others, his hair streaked with threads of premature frost.

His rugged face was a weathered mask of brass. His eyes looked eerily pale against the wind-burned skin that had known a thousand suns, and countless climes. Gold they were, but clear and almost transparent. Unlike his son’s eyes, which seemed to be filled with minute golden flakes that were never still. The first time Doc had read Jack London’s
Sea Wolf,
he was struck by how much like his father schooner master Wolf Larsen was, possessing the same rangy, symmetrical musculature—right down to the challenging golden eyes.

Shouldering his kit bag, Doc strode down the sagging gangplank.

“Father,” he said simply. There was not much emotion in the greeting.

Clark Savage, Senior, returned the favor. He did not smile. A brush mustache sprinkled with silver made his mouth look grimly serious.

“Come. We must hurry.”

“What is wrong?

“Explain on the way. Hard voyage?”

“I came by way of the Panama Canal. Reckoned it would be faster than landing in New York and coming west by rail.”

“Sound thinking.”

“Where are you staying? The Savoy?”

“You will see.”

The waiting cab took them only a short distance to the sea wall by the coal pier at the foot of Mission Street. There rocked a familiar black two-masted schooner, rocking with the tide. Brass railed and copper-hulled, she was a sleek beauty. The name on the bows was ORION. Her tilting mast poles stood bare.

“Let me apologize for offering you such a meager berth after so long a crossing,” Clark Savage, Senior, was saying.

“I was born on a ship, Father.”

“Yes. As I recall, this very one.”

They boarded the schooner. She was as Doc remembered her, ketch-rigged for easy handling, spic-and-span from her clipper-style bow to her taffrail. The white pine deck looked freshly holystoned.

From the crew’s quarters scuttle, emerged two stolid-faced men with coarse black hair and coffee-colored features. They were short and squat, and while their muscles showed no definition, there was no questioning their raw strength.

“Indians?” asked Doc of his father.

“Mayans. They do not speak English. We have four in all.”

“Strange crew.”

“Mayans keep secrets.”

Doc nodded. “During the latter months of the war, we used Choctaw speakers to pass messages by field telephone and wireless. The Germans mistakenly thought it was a code they could break; actually it was a language they could never translate.”

“So I have heard.” Turning to his crew, Savage barked out rapid orders in the Mayan tongue. They leapt to work.

“I just told them to cast off.”

“Where are we bound?” wondered Doc.

“Where would you like to go?” countered Savage Senior, eyes snapping golden fire.

“Are you giving me a choice?”

“I thought after the ruinous wars of old Europe, fresh scenery would do you some good.”

Doc Savage regarded his father intently.

“I understood that your summons was urgent.”

“It is. But I remain interested in your answer.”

“I have always wanted to see more of Asia. I enjoyed many happy hours in the South Seas.”

“Fortunately, our itinerary takes us in that general direction. Therefore, you will get your wish. I will stow your things below.”

Clark Savage, Senior, took his departure without another word.

Doc Savage watched the unspeaking crew cast off lines and prepare the
Orion
for departure. He wondered what it was all about.

Deciding time would tell, Doc pitched in to make the schooner ready to leave port.

The sails were raised. The anchor was brought on board mechanically. Powered by her auxiliary gasoline engine, the
Orion
warped out of the slip like a seagoing angel with canvas wings.

Slipping through Golden Gate in a light chop, Captain Savage at the helm, the graceful schooner cleared the Heads and passed into the North Channel in smart time.

Standing in the bow, Doc Savage felt very strange. He was born on this very boat, below deck. She had been anchored off Andros Island in the Bahamas group. He never knew why his parents were coved there. His father always avoided the question rather artfully. For a long time, Doc labored under the mistaken belief that he had been born on the Andros Island situated near the Aegean Sea. His father had told him only the island’s name, which he had looked up in an Atlas, never dreaming that there were two islands by that identical name.

Now the
Orion
was taking him across the Pacific. And the reasons would probably be a long time in coming….

SUPPER was simple fare. Simple, but substantial: Mashed potatoes; fresh T-bone steaks in unacknowledged honor of his return from Europe; green beans; squash. Stick-to-the-ribs stuff.

They ate in silence at first.

A thousand questions passed through Doc Savage’s mind. In many respects, he barely knew his father. He had been an intermittent presence from his earliest memory. Always off on one adventure after another. He seemed more like a distant uncle than a parent, and that peculiar feeling persisted.

It had been his father’s money that paid for the procession of scientists who had reared Doc during his formative years. Intensive study. Hard work. Constant travel. Challenging years, they had been. But fulfilling, too. Approaching his twentieth year, Doc looked thirty.

Invariably, Clark Savage, Senior, stepped in to evaluate the progress of his son. His experiment. Then he would be gone.

Doc had a vivid recollection of a group of older boys piling on him for no discernible reason when he was thirteen. He beat them all—only to discover that his father had paid them to administer a beating. It was no act of aggression, but a way to toughen up Doc for the difficult life that lay before him. It had worked, of course, but at the time the ambush had the appearance of unnecessary cruelty.

Not until Doc had gone off to war did he understand that the stratagem of continually pushing him beyond normal limits had undoubtedly saved his life.

Questions, questions. Always questions. Rarely any answers.

Doc considered his first question, changed his mind and said, “I am thinking of not returning to medical school, father.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

Doc looked at his parent. Finishing medical school had been a supernal goal. But now the old man seemed disinterested.

“I expected an argument,” said Doc.

“The war broke me financially, Clark. Long story. There are no funds available to continue your training.”

The admission so shocked Doc Savage that he withheld comment. He had none. What was there to say?

“What will you do?” he asked at last.

“One thing I learned from your grandfather was that the world is full of treasure, just for the taking. One simply has to find it.”

“Is this a treasure-hunting expedition, then?”

Seeming not to hear, Clark Savage, Senior, went on, “Your grandfather has been missing a very long time, you know.”

“Is there word of him?”

“After a fashion.”

“Go on.”

“The
Courser
has been sighted, adrift in the Indian Ocean. Dismasted. No hands, no bodies on board. A derelict ship.”

“After all this time…” said Doc quietly.

“My intention is to run her down and search the ship for clues.”

“Count on me.”

“I counted on no other answer from a Savage.”

Doc went back to his meal. “If we make a swift crossing, we can reach the Indian Ocean by the first of the year. That will give us three months to operate before the monsoon rain cycle begins all over again.”

No sooner had the last word left his mouth than Doc realized that had been his father’s plan all along. Hence the urgency.

Savage Senior ate in silence for a time, then looked up. “What are your plans, son?”

“Plans?”

“Assuming that we survive this venture—and I intend that we do—what are your plans for the future now that you are a man and have no filial obligations to complete your training?”

“I have become very interested in mechanical studies,” admitted Doc.