by Troy Conway
Nobody wanted to stay out in the open like this, even if there was no heavy artillery in the little fishing village. If we were not seen, the mystery of the disappearance of so many young males would be even greater.
There was something like a chaotic mob scene in the control mom as the mermaids began grabbing the prisoners, fondling and kissing them. My Amazons figured they had restrained themselves long enough. They were practically stripping the youths down, right here and now.
The mermen were looking on jealously, their faces dark and angrily flushed. A couple of them stood with twitching fingers as if they would reach out and grab some of the prey away from the female members of their undersea fellowship.
I began to realize that the change of hormones in the mermen was working at full speed now. They were no longer able to restrain the feminine characteristics in their bodies. They wanted a piece of the action with the prisoners.
I moved forward with Janine at my left elbow. To my surprise, Fleur was also there to lend a hand.
“Break it up. Get to your quarters! Snap it up!”
There were fifteen mermaids, and about thirty young prisoners. Each mermaid grabbed a man and dragged him with her. The others stood dazed, looking as if each man thought himself in the middle of a nightmare.
One or two of the merman began making advances to the remaining males, who stared at them in something akin to horror. As commander of this little expedition, I had to keep order. I dared not risk mutiny or at best, a pitched battle in these confined quarters.
“All right, you mermen! Go ahead!”
The mermen whooped with delight. They fastened upon the smaller, slimmer prisoners and dragged them after them to their quarters. The few who were left, I put in the ward room under guard by Fleur.
Janine and I and a skimpy complement of three mermen, who handled the controls, were left. I motioned Janine to take the main switches. I posted myself at the helm. I told the other mermen they would get their chance, but that they had to handle the Triton right now. They were sensible about it.
We proceeded at a speed of five knots past the Ionian islands. Before we reached the Gulf of Kiparissia, the mermen began straggling back to their posts, looking sheepish but satisfied. I released the mermen who had been handling the controls, letting them in on the fun.
Very faintly I could hear faint cries and shouts, feminine squeals and screeches. When the helmsman returned, grinning abashedly, I turned the helm over to his experienced hands and proceeded forward.
In the ward room I found a scowling Fleur. Staring vacantly into space, and five glum prisoners seated on the floor. Fleur flashed me a disgusted glance and looked away. I think she had tried to get the prisoners to manhandle her and so activate her masochistic instincts, but they had suspected a trick and were leaving her strictly alone. I brushed past her, delivering a whack of my palm to her backside. She jerked and managed a faint smile.
In an old U-boat such as this, the crew’s headquarters were bunks in the torpedo room. I stared in at those bunks filled with naked bodies squirming and moving, making throaty, passionate sounds. I saw a male rump bobbing up and down at furious speed, I noted a quivering white female thigh lifted sideways, I saw one girl with her head dangling over the edge of the bunk, eyes closed and tongue moving around her kiss-swollen lips. I paused to survey a feminine backside half over the bunk’s edge, steadily jerking.
I sighed in sympathy with this love-in.
Fortunately I had never been so starved as this, but then, my body had not been shot through with sea-serum and high level radiation. When you begin fooling around with the human body, medically speaking, sometimes you get odd results. These mermaids had become nymphomaniacs, constantly needing sexual satisfaction, yet never quite achieving it.
The mermen were luckier. They had just had their bill of fare changed on them. Instead of girls, they went for boys. But at least, they could get their fill of sex for a little while. The mermaids never could.
In the petty officers’ room I discovered four of the mermaids with four naked Albanians. They were involved in a kind of daisy chain of bodies, so that they made a rough circle. I studied their contortions with the practiced eyes of a professional sexologist.
My Egyptian charmer was kneeling over a slim youth, head bobbing; the head of her victim was buried between the thighs of a slim blonde girl who was, in turn, adoring the manhood of a second Albanian, who was devoting himself to a third mermaid crouched above his face, and so on.
The Egyptian lifted her head and gave a hoarse shout.
She got to her feet, bending forward with her hands on her knees, legs spread wide. Her lover thrust into her in the ram manner of the Hindus. Each of the other four couples played follow the leader. They went at it that way, with the women screaming thickly as male hands caught and played with their dangling breasts, their hips lifting and dropping or swinging from side to side.
I sighed. They had been at this play a long time. I wondered what other designs for venery my inventive Egyptian had come up with. I made a mental note to ask her; I enjoy gleaning information for my League of Sexual Dynamics wherever it is to be found.
I moved aft toward the control roam.
My cabin door was open. Janine was in there, a naked male between her wide-flung thighs, lifting and dropping. Apparently my second-in-command could not wait for me to assauge the fires of her lust. I closed the door on them very gently.
Through the Gulf of Kiparissia and into the Sea of Crete we traveled, then the helm swung to take us north by northwest toward Thraxos. I busied myself through much of this time by arranging a diet for our male prisoners. If they were going to serve as studs, they must be ready, willing and able to perform their duties.
The proper food, a goodly amount of exercise—outdoors and in the open air and sunlight, running, jumping and leaping; no daytime bed calisthenics—and they would be ready, come every evening, to fulfill their diddling duties. I really felt like a king wing for his subjects, working on this project.
I was almost tempted to forget my obligations to Walrus-moustache for a while, just to see how this thing turned out. But I knew I could never do that. Besides, I had to go back to my job at the university, come the fall semester.
I had failed in my attempt to escape with Ernst Bachmann’s notebooks explaining the sea-serum and the radiation treatments. I would have to dream up another escape, and next time, make it stick.
When we landed at Thraxos, everybody not held incommunicado—like Ernst Bachmann—was down at the marina to meet us. Those women who were not mermaids pounced on the ten untried males and began drawing them toward their rooms. The mermaids put up a squawk at that, because they wanted to sample those other boys, but I told them it was share and share alike, and that they had to be satisfied with that arrangement for the time being. They gave me some dirty looks, but they obeyed.
I had called a halt to the mermaid operations. I figured that with the sea-girls we already had, our complement was large enough. If I made any more of them, we would be spending all our time kidnapping male studs to keep them happy; and I had other ideas.
I realized now I would never be able to escape from Thraxos via submarine. Other methods of locomotion were indicated. A fishing smack, perhaps, or a shallop I could row. It would be a long, hard row; my best bet was some sort of boat with a sail.
All this would take time.
And so I resigned myself to a steady day-after-day diet of planning mermen and mermaid raids on yachts and small vessels plying the waters of the Aegean Sea. The mer-people were fantastically successful. They were fast making us wealthy.
Every hour I expected to see a flight of Greek or Turkish warplanes overhead, searching us out. We were pirates, and every nation whose shipping suffered from our depredations would be hunting for our lair.
The trouble came, however, from a completely different source.
CHAPTER TEN
Fleur was almost hysterical.
I hoped, by my treatment, to make her understand that she would get no satisfaction from me as long as she went on needing pain before she could get her pleasure. My prescription was working. I could see that. She was desperate for any kind of sexual relief.
She stood there, berating me as I turned on the little bed lamp. “You never give me any of your time,” she panted, her blue eyes filled with tears. “Damn you, I need fun too. You take care of those hot-pants mermaids and the mermen by getting them studs! But you won’t even look at me!”
“Fleur, take it easy,” I murmured.
“I will not take it easy!” she screamed.
She was sobbing, hands working, tears streaming down her cheeks. For a moment I thought she was going to leap on me and attempt a rape, but her quivering fingers went to the buttons of her khaki tunic. They blurred as she unfastened those metal discs and threw open the flaps.
Her breasts were hard and swollen, and the red nipples were elongated a full inch. Flew Devot had the longest nipples I have ever seen on a woman. They were hard and thick, and their color was an angry scarlet.
She advanced, jutting her breasts at me.
“You see? I’m as much a woman as any of those sluts you’ve been banging. I need it too.”
“There are prisoners you could——”
She swung at my face with a pink palm. I caught her hand, yanking her up against me. I asked brutally, “How do you want it?”
“You k-know!’’ she yelled. “What you call Venus aversa!”
I shook my head. “You just want pain. There’s more to male and female relationships than some kink you’re hung up on. Forget the pain. Enjoy yourself with a normal kind of relationship.”
She drew a gurgling breath between a laugh and a sob.
“All right. Any way at all! I’m too far gone to care about methods now.”
She bent to push her panties down her plump little hips. Outside, a gunshot sounded. And another.
She froze like that, eyes wide, staring up at me while my eyes, that had been riveted to her lower belly, swiveled toward the door. There was another gunshot and somebody screamed.
“What is it?” Fleur whimpered.
I thought about a raid by Greek or Turkish troops. They had found the pirate lair and were attacking. The irony of the situation touched a bitter nerve in me. I had hoped for some such action, but it was far too premature. I myself would be caught as the ringleader of the attackers, and even Walrus-moustache would not be able to help me.
I reached for my Luger and clicked off the light in practically the same movement. I crept toward the door. My hand reached for the knob as Fleur spoke.
“What about me?” she whimpered.
“Are you putting me on?” I snarled. “Listen to those gunshots! We’re under attack And at a time like this, you want to play games?”
She sobbed. I opened the door and stepped out.
A running man across the compound held an automatic rifle in a hand. He was not a merman; he was wearing our uniform for the Albanian prisoners. I saw him turn at sight of me and raise his rifle.
I held the Luger on him, squeezing its trigger. His body went backward as if he had been kicked by a giant hoof. He hit the ground and lay still.
Hearing footsteps, I whirled, smoking automatic raised to fire again. A merman raced around the comer. He raised his hand, palm forward.
“Hold it, your majesty! It isn’t us mermen—it’s the Albanians who are rebelling!”
“The Albanians?” I gasped in amazement.
The prisoners had appeared quite satisfied with their lot up until now. They were well fed; they were looked after like young princes; and all they had to do was go to bed with some overanxious females.
“They want their freedom do they?” I snarled.
“It’s more than that. They want the secret of how to make mermen and mer-girls. They have Ernst Bachmann as a hostage. They intend to take him back with them to Albania.”
“But why, for God’s sake?”
The merman growled, “They want to hand over his secrets to the Red Chinese. The Albanians have allied themselves with the Maoists, you know.”
I thought about the Red Chinese with their millions of slave-labor males. They could make an army of a million mermen without any trouble. Then they could unleash that array of mermen killers on the Pacific coast of the United States.
The mere thought of a million confirmed believers in Mao Tse-tung clambering out of the Pacific Ocean armed with automatic rifles, hand grenades and grenade launchers, maybe even with tanks, made me shudder. At all costs, I had to stop this fiasco!
I ran at top speed toward the marina.
I yelled at the mermen to get the women, to rouse up the other mermen. I angled my run past the Albanian I had shot, grabbing his automatic rifle and a bandolier that held bullets for the gun.
The night was dark, there was just a cusp of moon in the sky. Ahead of me I could make out a few dim figures racing toward the marina. Apparently their attack had been planned a long time. While some of them kept the mermen and the mermaids and the other women busy at their sex games, these others would pounce on Ernst Bachmann and make a beeline for the Triton. I didn’t know how they expected to launch it; I felt positive none of them had ever been aboard an underseas craft before. Maybe they planned to take along those mermen who did.
One of them turned at the sound of my pounding footsteps. I saw a rifle come up. I dropped flat on the ground.
With the wooden stock against my cheek, I fired a blast into those shadowy figures. Four of them went down, including the man who had turned to fire at me.
Behind me I could hear screams of fright and an occasional gunshot. My blood ran cold as sweat dripped down my face. Suppose the Albanians with the girls and the mermen had hidden revolvers somewhere close by and were now using them? Unarmed, even naked for their sex-play, the Amazons and the mermen would fall easy victims to the sneak attack.
I dared not turn. I had to stop the prisoners ahead of me from reaching the Triton. I ran on through the cool night.
To my surprise, the Albanians bypassed the pathway that lead to the marina where the Triton lay docked. They were moving on toward the steps built to take the members of this S.E.L.L. compound to the beach. I ran after them as fast as I could pump my feet.
Once I saw two of them outlined against the sky. I heaved the automatic rifle to my shoulder and let go a burst. Both men dropped, bodies jerking as those lead slugs ploughed into them.
I got to the top of the wooden staircase in time to see a dinghy drawn up on the beach, mast stepped in place, big sail rippling with the seawind sweeping across the Aegean from the Greek mainland. There were a dozen men down there. One of them had his arms tied behind his back. Ernst Bachmann.
I rested the barrel of the Russian-made AK-47 on a stair rail and steadied it. I peered down at the men about to enter the boat.
My finger squeezed the trigger. The automatic rifle bucked against my shoulder, again and again. I saw the Albanians dropping like flies on the sand. Then one of them yanked out a gun and aimed it at Ernst Bachmann.
“Stop—or I kill him!” he screamed.
If I had been a S.E.L.L. operative, or even if I had wanted really to create a pirate empire here on Thraxos, I might have obeyed that hysterical command. I was neither. I took a better aim and let go.
Bullets spattered the sand until they zeroed in on the man with the revolver. But by the time his body jerked and shuddered to half a dozen lead pellets ripping through his flesh, he had fired his own gun. At Bachmann.
The biochemist reeled, staggering in the sand. His body was upright, so
for one wild moment I thought maybe the man had missed. Then the German started to topple forward. He lay there face down on the pebbly beach and never moved again.
I ran down the stairs.
Kicking sand at every footfall, I went to body after body, testing each for any signs of life. There were none. Every man lying there prone on the sand was dead. I grabbed their weapons and tossed them, with their supply of ammunition, into the boat.
Then I turned and raced for the stairs.
I was panting when I reached the top. The cliffs on this side of the island are high and straight, and I had not paused to count steps. I got my second wind, then raced toward the buildings in the distance, where the sound of gunshots told me the mermen and my Amazons were putting up a hard fight against the Red-Chinese-oriented Albanians.
My hands inserted a new clip into the rifle as I ran. From the sounds I heard as I approached, I realized the women’s quarters had been turned into a battleground.
I sped past the unmoving body of a merman and, ten feet further on, that of a dead Albanian. I ran up to a broken window and peered inside.
The backs of seven Albanians were turned to me as they fired across the dormitory at some of the women who had put up a couple of mattresses as a bulwark. The mattresses were hanging in shreds. I spotted ten dead women, lying face down or face up as death had caught them.
My AK-47 barrel slid through the busted window.
I hit the trigger. A spray of bullets ran from the automatic rifle into the backs of the Albanians. From left to right and back again from right to left I raked them. They were standing, dead on their feet, bodies still moving as my hail of lead rammed into them.
When they collapsed, I yelled to the girls.
“You can come out now! They’re dead.”
Celeste Maillot poked her blonde head between the mattresses. “That you, Damon?”
One by one, they stood up—all four of them. The others were lying dead on the far side of the upright mattresses. Four left, out of more than twenty! I went in the door and walked toward the survivors.