Hissing, one man struck at Doc with a short sword. But the blow missed as Doc weaved aside. The force of the swing spun the Oriental. His sword chopped into the passage bulkhead and stuck there.
Doc grasped the swordsman by the neck and one leg. Using the man as a ram, he shot forward like a projectile. Orientals upset, squawling striking. Pistols flamed — nasty little spike-snouted automatics which could drive a bullet a mile.
Then Ham, Renny and Mindoro joined the fray. Their super-firing machine guns made frightful bull-fiddle sawings. Before those terrific blasts of lead, men fell.
It was too much for the corsairs. Those able to do so, fled.
Continuing on, Doc and his men descended a companionway to the forward deck. Doc wrenched open a hatch which gave access to the hold. He descended.
The Orientals caught sight of them. They fired a coughing volley. Slivers jumped out of the deck. Slugs tapped the iron hatch. A bullet hit Ham's sword cane and sent it cartwheeling across the deck.
Ham howled angrily, risked almost certain death to dive over and retrieve his sword cane, then popped down the hatch. By a miracle, he was unscratched.
"You lucky cuss!" Renny told him.
"That's what comes of leading a righteous life!" Ham grinned.
They were in the luggage room of the hold. Trunks and valises were heaped about them. Doc dived into this stuff, hunting his own luggage, which had been put aboard in San Francisco.
At the same time, Doc kept a watch on the hatch.
Grimacing in aversion, Ham ripped off his flashy coat and vest. He had already lost the villainous green hat. He took off the blood-colored shoes and flung them out of the hatch.
"I'll go barefooted before I'll wear them another minute!" he snapped.
Renny snorted mirthfully as, an instant later, the red shoes came flying back down the hatch, hurled by some Oriental.
Chapter 13
WATER ESCAPE
SILENCE now fell. This was broken by singsonged orders. Ham and Renny listened to these with interest. The yellow men seemed to be speaking a half dozen tongues from Hindustani, Mongol dialects, and Mandarin, to Kwangtungese and pidgin English.
"There must be riffraff from every country in the Far East up there!" Renny boomed.
"I'm surprised at that," Ham clipped "Tom Too's men in New York were all Mongols or half-castes with Mongol blood."
Mindoro explained this. "The rumors have it that Tom Too's most trusted men are of Mongol strain. Those were naturally the men he took to New York."
Doc Savage had found his trunks. He wrenched one open. Two cases of the high-powered little cartridges for the compact machine guns toppled out.
Doc grasped the edge of one box. He pulled. The wood tore away under his steel-thewed fingers as though it were so much rotten cork.
Mindoro, who was watching, drew in a gasp of wonder. He was still subject to dumfoundment at the incredible strength in those huge bronze hands of Doc's.
"Keep your eye peeled, Renny!" Doc warned. "They're talking about throwing a hand grenade down that hatch!"
It was Renny's turn to be amazed. How Doc had managed to pick the information out of the unintelligible tumult overhead was beyond him.
Renny strained his eyes upward until they ached.
Sure enough, a hand grenade came sailing down the hatch.
Renny's machine gun blared. The burst of lead caught the grenade, exploded it. Renny was probably one of the most expert machine gunners ever to hold back a trigger. The noisy little weapons of Doc's invention, by no means easy to hold upon a target while operating, were steady as balanced pistols in his big paws.
There was quite a concussion as the grenade detonated. It harmed nobody, although a fragment hit Renny's bullet-proof
vest so hard it set him coughing. Doc, Ham, and Mindoro had dived to cover in the baggage.
"We can play that game with them!" Doc said dryly. He opened a second trunk, took out iron grenades the size of turkey eggs, and flirted two up through the hatch.
The twin roars brought a yowling, agonized burst of Oriental yells. The attackers withdrew a short distance and began pouring a steady stream of bullets at the hatch.
This continued some minutes. Then the hatch suddenly flopped shut. Chains rattled. The links were being employed to make the cover fast.
A flashlight appeared in Doc's hand. It lanced the darkness which now saturated the hold. Rapidly he tried all the exits.
"They've locked us in!" he told the others grimly.
* * *
MINDORO, lapsing into Spanish in his excitement, babbled expletives. "This is incredible!" he fumbled. "Imagine such a thing as this happening on one of the finest liners plying the Pacific! It feels unnatural!"
"I'll bet it feels natural to the pirates on deck," Renny grunted. "This is the way they work it on the China coast. The devils ship aboard as passengers and in the crew, then take over the craft at a signal."
Comparative calm now settled upon the Malay Queen. The engines had not stopped; they continued to throb. They were modern and efficient, those engines. Up on deck they could not be heard. Down here in the hold they were barely audible.
"What are we going to do, Doc?" Ham wanted to know.
"Wait."
"What on? They've got us locked in."
"Which is probably fortunate for us," Doc pointed out. "We can hardly take over the ship, even if we whipped the whole gang. And they're slightly too many for us. We'll wait for — well, anything."
"But what about Monk, Long Tom, and Johnny?"
Fully a minute ticked away before Doc answered.
"We shall have to take the chance that they'll be kept alive as long as I'm living — provided they haven't been eliminated already."
"I don't think they have been killed," Ham said optimistically. "Tom Too is smart. He knows his three prisoners will be the price of his life should he fall into our hands. He won't throw away such a valuable prize."
"My thought, too," Doc admitted.
Mindoro was moved to put a delicate question. Perhaps the strain under which he was laboring made him blunt, for he ordinarily would have couched the query in the most diplomatic phraseology, or not have asked it at all.
"Would you turn Tom Too loose to save your friends?" he quizzed.
Doc's reply came with rapping swiftness.
"I'd turn the devil loose to save those three men!" He was silent the space of a dozen heartbeats, then added: "And you can be sure that when they joined me, they'd turn around and catch the devil again."
The others were silent. Mindoro wished he hadn't asked the question. There was something terrible about the depth of concern the big bronze man felt over the safety of his three friends — a concern which had hardly showed in his manner, but which was apparent here in the darkness of the hold, where they could not see him, but only hear his vibrant voice.
Minutes passed, swiftly at first, then slowly. They dragged into hours.
* * *
THE engines finally stopped. A rumble came from forward.
"The anchor dropping!" Doc declared.
"Any idea where we are?" Ham wanted to know.
"We've about had time to reach the harbor of Mantilla."
The four men listened. The great liner whispered with faint sound, noises too vague for Ham, Renny, and Mindoro to identify. But Doc's highly tuned ears, his greater powers of concentration, fathomed the meaning of the murmurings.
"They're lowering the boats."
"But this craft was supposed to tie up at the wharf in Mantilla," said Mindoro.
Silence fell. They continued to strain their eardrums until they crackled protest.
This continued fully half an hour.
"The liner anchored in about seventy feet of water," Doc stated.
"How can you tell?" Ham asked surprised.
"By the approximate number of anchor-chain links that went overboard. If you had listened carefully, you'd have noted each link made a jar as i
t went through the hawse hole.
Ham grinned. He had not thought of that. He gave their flashlight a fresh wind. This light used no battery, current being supplied by a spring-driven generator within the handle.
"Things have sort of quieted down," murmured Renny, who had been sitting with an ear pressed to a bulkhead.
Mounting the metal ladder to the hold hatch, he struck the lid fiercely with his fist. Bullets instantly rattled against it. A few, driven by rifles, came inside. Renny descended hastily.
"They haven't gone off and left us!" he grunted, "What d'you reckon they're planning to do?" Ham questioned.
"Nothing pleasant, you may be assured," said Mindoro.
Mindoro's nerve was holding up. He showed none of the hysteria which comes of terror. His voice was not even unduly strained.
Faint sounds could now be heard on the deck immediately above. Wrack their ears as they might, Doc and his men could not tell what was happening.
"They're doing something!" Renny muttered, and that was as near as they came to solving the mystery.
The sounds ceased.
Mindoro's anxiety moved him to speak. "Hadn't we better do something?"
"Let them make the first move," Doc replied. "We're in a position down here to cope with any emergency."
Mindoro had his doubts; it looked to him as if they were merely trapped. But Ham and Renny understood what Doc meant — in Doc's baggage there was probably paraphernalia to meet any hostile gesture the pirates might make.
"This waiting gets in my hair!" Renny thumped. "I wish something would happen! Anything — "
Whur-r-room!
The hull of the liner jumped inward, shoved by a monster sheet of flame and expanding gases.
The Orientals had lowered dynamite overside and exploded it below the water line!
* * *
TRUNKS and valises were shoveled to the opposite side of the hold by the blast. Fortunately the liner hull absorbed much of the explosion force.
Doc and his three companions extricated themselves from the mess of baggage.
A wall of water poured through the rent in the hull. It scooted across the hold floor. A moaning, swirling flood, it rose rapidly.
Instinct sent Ham, Renny and Mindoro to the ladder that led to the deck hatch. They mounted.
"We can blow open the hatch with a grenade!" Ham clipped.
"Not so fast!" Doc called from below. "You can bet the pirates will be standing by with machine guns. They'll let you have a flock of lead the minute you show outside!"
A second explosion sounded, jarring the whole liner. This one occurred back near the stern.
"They're sinking the boat!" Mindoro shouted. "We'll be trapped in here!"
In his perturbation, he decided to ignore Doc's warning. He started on up the ladder to the hatch. But Renny flung up a big hand and held him back.
"Doc has got something up his sleeve!" Renny grunted, "so don't worry!"
Down in the hold, water sloshing to his waist, Doc was plucking out the contents of another of his trunks. He turned his flashlight on his three companions, then flung something tip to them. He followed it with another — a third.
Renny caught the first, passed it up to Mindoro, and rumbled: "Put it on!"
The objects consisted of helmetlike hoods which fitted over the entire head and snugged with draw strings around the neck. They were equipped with gogglelike windows.
They were compact little diving hoods. Air for breathing was taken care of by artificial lungs carried in small back packs. Respiration was through a flexible hose and a mouthpiece-nose-clip contrivance inside the mask.
There were also lead bracelets fitting around their ankles, and heavy enough to keep their feet down.
Renny assisted Mindoro to don the diving hood, then put one on himself. Ham's sharply cut, hawklike face disappeared in another; he took a fresh grasp on his sword came and waited.
Doc, his bronze head already enveloped in one of the hoods, was delving into other of his trunks, and making bundles of objects which he removed.
The generator-operated flashlights were waterproof. They furnished a pale luminance in the rushing, greasy floor that rapidly filled the hold.
* * *
THE liner sank. The boilers aft let go with hollow explosions. Water whirled a maelstrom in the hold, tumbling the four men and the numerous pieces of baggage about.
Water pressure increased as the vessel sought the depths. But at seventy feet it was not dangerous. With a surprisingly gentle jar, the Malay Queen settled on the bottom.
Locating etch other by the glowing flashlights, the four men got together. Each carried a light.
Doc had four bundles ready — one for each man.
Thanks to the water-tight hoods, it was not necessary to keep the mouthpiece of the air hose between their lips at all times. By jamming their heads together, they could talk.
"Each of you carry one of these bundles," Doc directed. "We'll leave by the hole their dynamite opened — provided the ship is not resting so the sand has closed it."
The hole was open. They clambered through, using care that razor edges of the torn hull did not perforate the waterproof hoods.
The depths were chocolate-colored with mud raised by the sinking Malay Queen. The men joined hands to prevent being lost from each other. Doc leading, they churned through soft mud, away from the ill-fated liner. They were forced to lean far over, as though breasting a stiff gale, to make progress.
The water changed from chocolate hue to a straw tint, then to that of grapefruit juice, as the mud became less plentiful. Where the sea was clear, Doc halted the procession. They held conclave, heads rammed tightly together.
"Wait here," Doc directed. "If I'm not back in fifteen minutes, head for shore."
"How can we tell where shore is?" Mindoro demanded.
Doc produced a small, water-tight compass. He handed this to Ham.
"Granting that they sank the liner in Mantilla bay, the town itself will be due east. Head that direction."
Doc now twisted a small valve on the "lung" apparatus of his diving hood. This puffed out the slack lower portion of the hood with air — gave him enough buoyancy to counteract the weight of the lead anklets. He lifted slowly, leaving his three companions behind on the bottom, an anxious group.
Nearing the surface — this was evidenced by the glow of sunlight — Doc adjusted another valve in the hood until his weight equaled that of the water he displaced, so that lie neither rose or sank.
He paddled upward cautiously. If his guess was right, the pirates would be standing by in small boats, revolvers and machine guns in hand.
Doc wanted them to know he was alive.
This was of vital importance. As long as Tom Too knew he faced the menace of Doc Savage, he would not be liable to slay Doc's three friends, whom he held prisoner. Or were the three captives still alive?
They were. The instant Doc's head topped the surface, he saw Monk, Long Tom, and Johnny.
Chapter 14
HUNTED MEN
MONK, big and furry, clothes practically torn off, crouched in the how of a near-by lifeboat. He was shackled with heavy chains and metal bands.
The pale electrical wizard, Long Torn, and the bony, archaeologist, Johnny, were seated on a thwart in front of Monk. They were braceleted with ordinary handcuffs.
Other lifeboats and some launches swarmed the vicinity. Yellow men gorged them to the gunwales. Gun barrels bristIed over the boats like naked brush.
Every slant eye was fixed on the spot where the Malay Queen had gone down. The sea still boiled there. Wreckage drifted in confusion, deck chairs, some lounge furniture, a hatch or two, and lesser objects such as shuffleboard cues and ping-pong balls. A pall of steam from the blown boilers hung above Mantilla Bay.
Doc sank and stroked toward the small craft which held his three friends.
He was hardly under the surface when a terrific explosion occurred in the water near by. It smashed
the sea against his body with terrific force.
Swiftly he let all the air out of his diving hood. He scooted into the depths.
He knew what had happened. Some of the corsairs had glimpsed him and hurled a grenade.
Doc swam with grim, machinelike speed. Rifle bullets wouldn't reach him below the surface. But the grenades, detonating like depth bombs, were a grisly menace. He'd have to give up the rescue of his three men. He had no way of getting them ashore.
Chun-n-g!
Then a second grenade loosened. It couldn't have been many feet away. The goggles of Doc's (living hood were crushed inward. Gigantic fists seemed to smash every inch of his bronze frame.
Not missing a stroke in his swimming, Doc shook the glass goggle fragments out of his eyes. No serious damage had been done. He would merely have to keep the mouthpiece-nose-clip contrivance of the "lung" between his lips as long as he was beneath the surface.
His remarkable ability to maintain a sense of direction under all circumstances enabled him to find the three he had left beneath the waters.
Grenades were still exploding beneath the surface. But the blasts were so distant now as to be harmless.
Leaning far over against the water, the four men strode shoreward. Coming to a clear patch of sand, Doc halted, and, with a finger tip, wrote one word.
"Sharks!"
Doc had seen a pilot fish of a shark-following species. After that warning they kept alert eyes roving the surrounding depths. Fortunately, however, they were not molested.
The bottom slanted upward; the water became translucent with sunlight. They were nearing shore. A roaring commotion passed over their heads, evidently a speed boat.
Upright wooden columns appeared suddenly, thick as a forest, shaggy with barnacles — the piling of a wharf.
Doc led his men into the forest. They rose cautiously to the top.
* * *
NO one observed them in the shadowy thicket of piling.
Out on the bay, boats scurried everywhere. Some were motor driven, some propelled by stringy yellow oarsmen.
The Pirate of the Pacific ds-5 Page 10