Doc Savage: The Secret of Satan's Spine (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 15) (25 page)

Morris Byron was having similar luck, and when they realized they could not make the intricate pistols perform, the quartet exchanged stricken glances.

Don Worth sighed. “It figures that Doc Savage would design these things so no one but he and his men could fire them.”

“So what do we do?” blurted Tuck.

A glint of steel came into Don Worth’s clear eyes. “Maybe we can run a bluff on them.”

“Well, it’s worth a try,” said Dex without a great deal of enthusiasm.

They all felt the same pang. They knew what a withering thing a .30-caliber Browning machine gun in operation could be. But they did not hesitate. Bosun Worth leading, they pounded up the companionway stairs and raced for the stern.

There they saw a sight they could never erase from their minds.

The stern deck was awash with crimson and fragments of entrails and other signs that told them that bodies had been dragged through the vital fluid and thrown over the rail. Some of these bodies still lay there, hideously disfigured.

There had been a bloodbath, right enough.

Manning the Browning were a trio of men whom they recognized as members of Diamond’s crew, owing to the unfamiliarity of their faces and the fact that red-gold rings were visible on the hands of two of them.

Don Worth crept up to them, got their attention and said, “Hands up, all of you!”

The crew manning the Browning showed that it was not an unfamiliar weapon. Without hesitating, they pivoted the vicious machine gun, dropping the long muzzle, bringing it to bear on the new arrivals.

The supermachine pistol firmly in hand, Don Worth froze. To the others coming up behind him, it appeared as if he were mentally prepared to stand up to the Browning. In truth, a strange paralysis gripped him, for he knew that he could not return fire, much less initiate battle, with the machine pistol mechanism locked up.

Undaunted, B. Elmer stepped out from behind Don’s shadow and shouted, “You’re outnumbered!”

The short spiky snout of his supermachine pistol seemed to back up his words.

There was only the briefest of hesitation as the man behind the Browning finished lining up his weapon. It did not last long.

His face tightening, the gunner started to trigger his weapon.

A STRANGE thing happened next. Several strange things, to be perfectly clear.

The gunner suddenly jumped to one side. It happened so fast that he became a blur of motion. He seemed to desert his position, falling off the elevated gun station in his hurry, but the way he went sliding on his stomach along the blood-soaked stern deck suggested that he had been thrown forcibly.

What had hurled him bodily from the station was not visible. That was the queer thing. It was very queer. The gunner’s initial action gave the impression that he had jumped back of his own volition. It was only the way the man went sliding along helplessly that changed the minds of the transfixed witnesses.

The man who stood ready to replace the ammunition box once it had exhausted its load of death and destruction went flying next. He landed on his face, and did not slide very far. Nor did he get up again.

The third gunner had been a loose-jawed observer to this sudden and inexplicable mayhem. He got his wits together and lunged for the Browning gun trips.

Something struck him on the chin with such force that one side of the jaw mandible literally unhinged while several teeth flew out of his mouth in a spray of blood.

He folded up like an unstrung puppet, and did not move after falling, except for a muscular twitching that soon subsided.

Seamen Worth, Byron, Dexter and Tucker gaped at this sudden change in fortunes, not understanding any of it at all.

Something that could not be seen began dismantling the Browning with great force. A box of ammunition flew off the thing, described a half circle in the air and suddenly flung itself overboard. A splash came back, proving that the phenomenon was no trick of their stunned imaginations.

Other pieces of the Browning mechanism began to come off until the weapon was entirely disabled. The barrel fell away, made a loud clank in dropping to the floor of the steel tub of a gun position.

Nothing visible was performing these operations. Nothing at all. In the evening murk, the four shipmates thought they spied a vague shadow moving, but every time they focused on it, the elusive thing did not seem to be there.

They blinked, rubbed their eyes, stared some more. Still they could not see anything solid.

When the Browning finally settled down, two vaguely yellow eyes turned their gaze upon them. The orbs floated over six feet above the deck and were disembodied.

“Shades of Davy Jones!” gulped out Seaman Tucker.

The hairs began standing up at the back of their necks and the two men holding supermachine pistols let the weapons sag, as if they had forgotten they were holding them.

As the quartet searched the stern with wide orbs, staring and staring, the sound of approaching footsteps smote their ears. To their credit, the four shipmates did not retreat. They did not seem to know what to do with themselves. They were, in a word, awestruck.

Then a disembodied voice filled their ears with somber words.

“I was too late to save any of the crew.” The voice was charged with a deep regret. But they recognized it.

Don Worth blurted, “Doc Savage!”

“Yes,” said the bronze man who could not be seen.

A faint rustling accompanied the shifting of the shadows before their eyes and the supermachine pistols were plucked out of the hands of the two sailors wielding them.

The weapons floated in midair, no one holding them.

The yellow eyes scrutinized them for a few moments. The weapons were evidently being manipulated, clickings being heard.

Don and B. Elmer found the supermachine pistols being pressed back into their hands and the voice of Doc Savage instructing, “These weapons will function now. Take them to Monk and Ham in the brig. Release them. Tell them that Diamond and his crew are trying to take over the ship. Organize whatever resistance you can.”

“Right,” rapped Don. “But what about you?”

“If you can stop at my cabin on the way, take from an open trunk two translucent garments you will find there. Bring them to Monk and Ham. When they don them, they will be as difficult to see as I am.”

Leander Tucker beamed. “I get it now. You’re wearing some kind of invisibility gimmick.”

“There is no time to lose,” admonished the bronze man. “Captain McCullum is Diamond’s prisoner.”

Don Worth lost no time getting into motion. They hurried forward.

In the smothering tropical darkness, the two yellow eyes watched them go, then disappeared in a brittle rustling of plastic fabric as Doc moved stealthily and almost entirely invisibly to another part of the ship.

No eye could track his movements, nor could he be heard, for Doc Savage was as silent as a scudding cloud. But the bronze man was heading in the direction of the bridge.

Chapter XXVIII

SPRUNG

STUFFED INTO THE ship’s cramped brig, Monk Mayfair and Ham Brooks spent the first hour quarreling vigorously. It was to be expected. That was their nature.

But the close confines and the dreary position in which they had found themselves soon suppressed their spirits.

Monk noticed a shadow created by light coming in through the round glass window in the door and remarked, “Reminds me of a hangnoose.”

“Cut out that morbid thinking,” snapped Ham. “We are not subject to court-martial. It will be just a matter of time before Doc Savage convinces Captain McCullum to release us.”

Monk growled, “Can’t come soon enough for me.”

There was only one bunk, and they would have matched for it, except that all change had been removed from their pockets before they were locked in. Their belts and shoelaces were likewise confiscated.

Ham’s high-strung nature prevented him from sleeping in such austere circumstances, so he gave very little argument when Monk claimed the bunk.

Soon, the homely chemist was snoring in his peculiar fashion, sounding like a combination of an angry goose and an equally annoyed bumblebee having at it.

Ham, his nerves already frayed, inserted fingers into his ears for relief. But nothing seemed to shut out the awful snoring. So the dapper lawyer, after removing the fake mustache that was his sole remaining gesture at passing as a fictitious British diplomat named Lord Ronald Hathaway, resigned himself to squatting on the floor and awaiting developments, if not the dawn.

Inasmuch as the brig was secreted deep in the innards of the great ship, only monotonous engine sounds penetrated. So it was that Monk and Ham were entirely ignorant of the initial commotion at the stern and the horrible events that transpired afterward.

It was deep into the night when the nervous rattle of the key reached Ham’s alert ears.

The startled attorney jumped to his feet and stuck his face into the round window. He was mildly astonished to see Don Worth and his friends brandishing supermachine pistols and endeavoring to unlock the door.

They managed to do this, and the steel door was thrown open.

By this time, Ham had roused Monk, and the hairy chemist was rolling out of his bunk, sleepily dry-washing his unlovely features, blinking tiny eyes and muttering, “What’s up?”

“We are being sprung,” explained Ham.

This woke up Monk completely. Jumping to his feet, he all but pushed the dapper barrister out of the way in his desire to leave the cramped confines.

“Doc sent us!” Donald Worth said breathlessly. “He said to give you these.”

One of the translucent garments was thrust into Monk’s hairy paws. Grabbing up the thing, he looked at it, blinked stupidly for a moment, then grinned his widest.

“This is one of those special capes we took off those guys over in Romania last year,” he said.

Stepping out, Ham accepted the other garment, which was equipped with an enveloping hood of similar material.

Swiftly, the two men donned the unusual capes, adding gloves which they removed from the pockets, and very quickly they became shifting shadows that were difficult to see. More amazingly, their eyes seemed to turn a yellowish color, for their orbs were the only things that could be seen of them. The hoods of the things came equipped with twin screens that enabled them to see out after a fashion, and which created the yellow orb effect.

“Is this a breakout?” demanded Monk.

“It’s bigger than that,” said Mental Byron breathlessly.

Don inserted, “Diamond and his crew are trying to take over the ship. There’s been a massacre. A lot of dead. Doc Savage saved us. He wants you fellows to get to work. We have to take the ship back.”

Ham demanded, “Where is the captain?”

B. Elmer blurted out, “A prisoner, maybe dead by now.”

“Don’t say that!” snapped Don Worth.

Monk and Ham took their supermachine pistols, which seemed to float in the air as if they were suddenly weightless. Only their intricate weapons and the hazy yellow eyes could be seen of them, although from time to time portions of the cloaking garments shifted in the light, permitting a vague visibility.

It was an eerie phenomenon to which the four shipmates struggled to adjust.

“Let’s go,” said Monk, baring his teeth fiercely. “We’re gonna mop up on Diamond and his gang the way the infantry took the Normandy beaches.”

Together, they flooded out of the brig area, Monk and Ham taking the lead.

As seen from behind, moving from zones of light into shadowy corners, Don Worth and his fellow sailors had difficulty following. Only the floating machine pistols were visible, and these not always clearly so.

“They remind me of the crystal statuette that played tricks on the eyes,” hissed Morris Byron.

Don Worth nodded and, reaching out, pressed the other’s forearm for silence. For they were walking into who knew what definite peril.

It was not long before they encountered trouble.

A single pirate was walking along, toting one of those submachine guns that had been rushed to production during the early days of the war. It was popularly known as a “grease gun,” for it resembled one. When turned into operation, it could fill a man so full of holes that he could not shoot back in the short interval between being struck with mortal lead and dying.

The man happened to turn a passage corner, evidently on the hunt for stray crewmen, when his eyes fell upon Don Worth and his friends.

Thanks to the capes’ weirdly shifting invisibility, he failed to immediately notice the two floating supermachine pistols.

So it was that the Diamond henchman trained his thin-snouted machine pistol on the four Merchant Mariners, not realizing that Monk and Ham had already gotten the drop on him.

Ham fired first. A burst of mercy bullets stitched across the man’s chest, dropping him almost instantly. The fellow had no chance to squeeze his trigger.

Don rushed up to claim the fallen grease gun. Removing the sticklike thirty-round magazine, he examined it in the fitful light. “Only half of the rounds left.”

B. Elmer said grimly, “I would hate to think where the other half are right now.”

“Buck up,” encouraged Don. “We have work to do.”

“With any luck, we can collect a few more of these babies,” grinned Monk.

They moved on, grim and silent. Somewhere, the ship’s clock struck two bells.

Chapter XXIX

BRIDGE STAND-OFF

DOC SAVAGE WAS not challenged as he worked his way through the weather deck of the
Northern Star
toward the navigating bridge.

He was not being particularly prescient when he determined to go there. The bronze man had no way of knowing that Diamond would seek the bridge, but it was a reasonable assumption. Since it was the nerve center of the great ship, seizing control of the bridge would logically be of paramount importance. If it was possible to do so, Doc desired to beat Diamond to the command center.

But getting to the bridge was not so easy as all that.