MAROONED
In flash parts of seconds, Doc was in the control room.
“Put about!” His powerful voice volleyed through the monotonous complaint of the Diesel engines. It penetrated to every cranny of the submarine, from the “hard-nose” bow up front—loaded with steel and concrete in case of collision with the ice—to the little tunnel through the after trim tanks, which gave access to the rudder mechanism.
The helmsman spun his wheel.
“Full speed ahead!” Doc boomed into the engine-room speaking tube.
Captain McCluskey lurched in from the officers’ quarters. He was sticky-eyed from sleep.
“What’s goin’ on here?” he roared. “Rust my anchor, what we puttin’ about for?”
“My two men, Monk and Renny, have disappeared!” Doc told him. “We’re going back to hunt them!”
Captain McCluskey clambered up on deck. But he came down almost at once, his hairy shanks blue from the cold.
“No use!” he rumbled. “Stormin’ up there! If them two swabs ain’t aboard, they’re in Davy Jones’s locker.”
McCluskey seized the speaking tube to the engine room, shouted into it: “Slow your engines to normal speed.” Then, to the helmsman: “Hard over, me hearty. We’re resumin’ our course.”
Cold and hard as a statue of bronze, Doc Savage was suddenly in front of McCluskey. Doc was big. The walrus was bigger. He outweighed Doc by nearly a hundred pounds.
“Countermand that order!” Doc directed.
Such a quality of compelling obedience did his remarkable voice have, that McCluskey made an involuntary gesture at compliance. Then he bristled.
“I’m skipper of this tin fish!” he bellowed. “We ain’t wastin’ no time goin’ back to look for them two swabs. Davy Jones has got ’em, I tell you!”
“Countermand that order!” Doc repeated. “We’ll find Monk and Ham, or their bodies, if we have to winter in this ice pack!”
Captain McCluskey glowered. He had a lot of confidence in himself. He had whipped Monk and Renny in succession, and either one of them looked more dangerous than this strange bronze man.
“I’ll show yer who’s master of this hooker!” he snarled
He reached for Doc’s throat.
The walrus was now treated to the big surprise of his life.
His hand was trapped in mid-air by case-hardened bronze fingers. For an instant, McCluskey thought the hand had been cut off, so much did that grip hurt, and so numb did it make his arm.
He started a blow with his free fist.
It traveled hardly more than an inch. Then that hand was closed in a fearful clasp. The hard paw crushed like so much dough. Big blisters of blood popped out on the finger tips, and burst with fine sprays of crimson.
The walrus screamed like a hurt child.
He stared at his hands. His eyes nearly fell out. Both his monster claws were now being held easily by one hard hand of bronze. Strain as he would, he could not budge them. The largest vise could not have held them tighter—or more painfully.
The walrus screamed again. He had thought himself a mighty fighter. Not in the scope of his memory had he met a scrapper who could stand before him.
But in the hands of this strange bronze man, he was like a fat sheep in the jaws of a hungry tiger. Then a Big Bertha shell seemed to go off in the captain’s head. He slumped senseless.
Doc had kayoed him with one punch!
* * * *
The submarine rooted through growlers and pan ice. Back and forth, right and left, lunged and wallowed. Sometimes sheets of pan ice crowded up on the deck until Doc, Long Tom, Ham, and Johnny had to dive hastily down the hatch to avoid being crushed or swept overboard.
They had been searching for five hours.
No sign of Monk or Renny had they found.
A bitter wind was swooping off the distant wastes of ice-capped Greenland. It froze spray on the steel runners affixed to the hull of the under-the-ice sub. But the chemicals on the sides of the ship flushed the frigid coating away at intervals.
“The gale was worse during the night,” Johnny muttered. “Poor Monk! Poor Renny!” He blinked his eyes back of his spectacle lenses.
Although Monk and Renny had indeed vanished during the night, it was night only by their watches. The sun hung well above the horizon—where it had lingered for some days. It was wan, almost lost in a pale, nasty haze.
Ice which had piled up on deck abruptly slid off with a grinding roar.
Doc went outside. He carried powerful binoculars. But once more, a search through them disclosed nothing.
However, the sub now surged across a comparatively open lead in the ice pack. This was what Doc had been hoping for.
“Stand by to put out the seaplane!” he ordered.
The crew crowded the deck. They were surly. The air of sinister trouble still hung about them. But they obeyed Doc’s orders with alacrity. Some of them had seen what had happened to Captain McCluskey. They had told the others.
A deck plate was lifted. A folding boom was jacked into position.
Out came an all-metal, collapsible seaplane. Doc himself got the tiny hornet of a craft ready for the air.
Captain McCluskey came on deck while the work was under way. Doc Savage rested his golden eyes intently upon the walrus of a man.
McCluskey scowled for a second or two. Then he grinned sheepishly.
“Ye won’t have any more trouble from me, matey,” he mumbled. Then he winced and moved his hands.
Each paw was bundled in bandages until it resembled the foot of a man with the gout.
Doc drew his three remaining companions aside.
“Keep your hands on your guns,” he warned them. “I don’t think McCluskey will make more trouble immediately. But watch his crew!”
It seemed a miracle when the cockpit of the diminutive seaplane held Doc’s mighty bronze form. The little radial engine was fitted with a starter. Doc turned it over. The cold made it stubborn. It fired at last.
The exhaust stacks smoked for a while. Then they lipped blue flame. The engine was warm.
The plane floats left a ribbon of foam as they scudded across the open lead in the ice pack. Doc backed the control stick. The ship vaulted off the water.
He banked in circle after circle, each one wider than the last.
The pale haze hadn’t looked so thick from the surface. But it hampered vision amazingly from the air. The gloom was increasing, too.
No sign of Monk or Renny could he discern.
He flew back at last and alighted beside the submarine. The frozen rigidity of his bronze face told Long Tom, Ham, and Johnny the worst.
“Monk and Renny are—finished,” Long Tom said thickly.
“Monk—how I’m gonna miss that guy!” Ham mumbled. He was near tears.
The crew hoisted the seaplane aboard, collapsed it, and stowed it under the deck plates.
* * * *
Two hours later, walruslike Captain McCluskey was pointing with a thick arm.
“Rust my anchor—look!” he boomed. “Two points off the starboard bow!”
Doc Savage, coming up from below, was a bronze flash. He thought Monk and Renny might have been sighted. There was always the possibility they had been washed overboard, and had reached one of the many icebergs.
This, however, was only a herd of walrus asleep on an enormous pan of ice.
“We need fresh meat,” explained Captain McCluskey. “It’s unusual to sight ’em this far north. I’m goin’ after some of the critters. Want to go along, matey?”
Doc nodded. He advised Ham, Johnny, and Long Tom to go also. It would get their minds off the loss of Monk and Renny.
Several of the crew were also going, big Dynamite Smith included in them. Doc made sure a number of the surly faction amid the crew, the suspected plotters, were among the hunters. There seemed nothing to be lost in deserting the sub for a time.
Two folding kayaks—long and narrow boats with a covering of sealskin—were set up. They also assembled a umiak, overgrown brother of the kayak.
Doc went below. He was gone about ten minutes. During that time, he was alone below decks, every one being outside to witness the departure of the hunters.
Doc came up, bearing a sizable bundle. This was done in waterproof silk.
“What’s that, matey?” Captain McCluskey wanted to know.
Big bronze Doc Savage seemed not to hear the query.
They put off.
The edge of the iceberg, near where the walrus herd slept, arose almost vertically. It was too sheer for a landing. The hunters decided to stalk the animals from the berg. They paddled directly to the floe, alighted, and drew the folding boats well out of the cold water.
Captain McCluskey and the rest of the Helldiver crew led the stalk. Doc, with his strange bundle, kept warily in the rear. Ham, Long Tom, and Johnny trod his heels.
The bitter cold bothered them at first, but became less noticeable in a few minutes. They wore regulation Eskimo garb—moccasins reaching to their knees, and lined with reindeer skin, bearskin trousers, shirts of auk skins with the feathers inside, and shirts of sealskin, with a hood which covered their heads.
The surface of the ice pack was rough. Progress became laborious. The need for silence made it harder. Their speed was hardly half a mile an hour.
Captain McCluskey and his men drew a little ahead.
Suddenly they whirled. They aimed rifles at Doc and his friends.
“Kill the swabs!” shrieked Captain McCluskey.
* * * *
Doc had been alert. He was not taken off guard. Hardly had the Helldiver men started their show of hostilities when a mighty bronze arm rushed Johnny, Long Tom, and Ham to cover behind an ice hummock.
The move was executed so quickly they were sheltered before the first rifle volley spattered out noisily.
Bullets dug into the ice hummock, showering Doc and his friends with fragments of ice. The pieces tinkled down the hard flanks of the ice mound with a sound like tiny bells.
“Retreat!” Doc commanded his friends. “We’re between the gang and their boats. We’ll try to keep them from reaching the craft.”
They were extremely thankful for the rugged surface of the iceberg, now that the situation had changed.
Doc found a small crevice in the ice. Into this he lowered his bundle. With a single rap of his tempered fist, he shattered enough brittle ice to conceal the bundle.
Captain McCluskey’s booming voice reached them.
“The deck swipes!” thundered the walrus. “Put the lot of ’em in Davy Jones’s locker!”
“They don’t seem to be trying to beat us back to the boats!” Doc said in a tight voice of wonder.
A storm of lead scored the ice all about. The Helldiver gang had caught sight of them.
Ham whirled. He secured a glimpse of a fur-swathed head. His rifle jarred. A man slouched out from behind an ice spike and lay down as though tired. Steam curled up from the scarlet pool that gathered around his feebly squirming body.
“I haven’t lost my shooting eye!” Ham said with grim mirth. “Did you see who I winged?”
“Dynamite Smith, the oiler,” Doc retorted. “Let’s veer over to the right here. It looks like better footing.”
There ensued a frightful couple of minutes before they reached the spot Doc had indicated. The more frantic the effort they put forth, the more they slithered around on the terrifically rough and slippery ice.
“Seas have been breaking over this berg recently,” Doc explained. “That’s why it’s so infernally slick.”
Bullets gouged ice around them like hard-driven, invisible picks. Ricocheting, the lead squalled like unseen wild cats.
Doc, Long Tom, Ham, and Johnny finally reached the smooth footing which Doc had indicated. This was a great crack which had opened in the berg, filled with water, then frozen. They glided down it.
“We’re gonna beat ’em to the boats, anyhow!” said the bony Johnny. He had taken off his glasses with the magnifying lens on the left side. His breath steam had been fogging the spectacles. Johnny really did not have much need of glasses on his good right eye, anyway.
“It’s funny they’re not putting up more of a race to keep us from reaching the boats!” Long Tom snapped. “I don’t understand it!”
But they did understand it a moment later.
They came in sight of the boats—more properly, the spot where the boats should have been, for the craft were gone.
And the submarine was not where they had left it!
* * * *
“They’re clever rats!” Doc Savage said grimly. “The men who remained aboard the Helldiver put another folding boat in the water the instant we were out of sight. They secured the craft we left on the ice. And look—there’s why McCluskey’s gang were not so ambitious in pursuing us.” A bronze arm pointed.
The three stared. Their hearts sank.
The Helldiver had cruised down the edge of the iceberg. Standing by, the submarine was picking up members of the villainous crew as they slid off the sheer edge of the vast pan of ice.
Doc’s pals opened fire with their rifles. The range was considerable. A high tribute to their shooting was the fact that they put two of the Helldiver crew out of commission.
The rest of the sailors reached the submarine safely. The craft sped down an open lead in the pack ice, headed northward. It was making for the spot where, according to the map, the liner Oceanic lay. The dense mist swallowed the sub completely.
The last thing they saw was the gigantic figure of Captain McCluskey standing on deck, shaking both his fists in their direction.
“Brothers,” Doc said mildly, “we have been guilty of an unforgivable mistake.”
“What’s that,” Ham wanted to know.
“We underestimated the intelligence of friend McCluskey,” Doc replied. “Some days ago, McCluskey commented on the furtive actions of his own crew, giving the impression, he, himself, feared trouble from them. The clever fellow must have been aware I had noticed the attitude of the crew, and he expressed himself thus to allay my suspicions of him.”
“They’ve got the treasure map, of course,” Ham clipped. “They’ve set out to grab the treasure.”
“And they’ve left us in a pretty serious position,” Johnny muttered. “Marooned on this arctic ice pack is tantamount to a sentence of death.”
Johnny’s words carried awful portent. Johnny knew the polar regions. It was a part of his profession. And if he said their situation was bad—it was really bad!
“We might as well realize we’re up against it,” Doc told them, “and stop talking about it.”
“The racket scared the walrus off the floe,” Long Tom grumbled, his unhealthy-looking features drawing deeper into the hood of his fur parka, like the head of a turtle into its shell. “We’re without grub!”
Ham whipped his bearskin trousers vigorously with his sword cane. “I’ve heard of Eskimos living quite a while by eating their clothes,” he said.
“We won’t need to start on our wardrobe for a while,” Doc smiled. “We have concentrated rations for about a month.”
“Where?” the others yelled in chorus.
“In the bundle I brought along,” Doc replied.
* * * *
The party retraced their steps to secure the all-important bundle Doc had cached in the ice crevice.
There was no excitement now. They had leisure to realize the full peril of their predicament.
The deathlike quiet of the polar wastes had enveloped them. The stillness was as of a tomb.
From time to time, the awful silence was shattered by a crashing roll of sound like thunder. These noises would start with a report sharp and loud as a cannon crack, and there would follow an increasing volley until the very ice under their feet seemed to quake.
This was the awesome voice of the ice waste—it was simply cracks opening in the floes.
“Nice music!” Ham shuddered.
Thoughts came to them of Renny and Monk, of the death both giants seemed certain to have suffered. This depressed them.
There was a quality of horror in the grisly spells of silence. It was as though they existed in some weird, frozen habitat of lost souls. They found themselves listening with an eagerness near pathetic for the sporadic cannonade of the ice—then shivering when the sound did come.
Only big bronze Doc Savage showed no emotion. He swung along easily, keeping his feet on the slick iceberg under foot as surely as though his mukluks were arms with steel spikes. Often, he waited for his three friends to overhaul him.
The mighty bronze man seemed to sense that his very presence offered a bolster to the courage of Long Tom, Ham, and Johnny. So he remained near them, although the best pace they could manage was but the speed of a snail compared to the swiftness with which Doc could have reached the cache.
They secured the bundle from the crevice in the ice.
Doc let his men squat around it. They went to work on the wrappings with cold-stiffened fingers. The more they kept busy, the less they would brood over their fearsome predicament.
Suddenly, Ham gave a start—stopped fiddling with the knots.
To his ears had come the low, exotic trilling sound which was part of Doc. So low, so nearly unreal was the mellow note that it was almost lost in the fearful silences about them. It might have been the voice of some fantastic sprite of this domain of cold.
Ham grasped his sword cane. Johnny and Long Tom became rigid as the ice hummocks about them.
Doc’s trilling slipped away into nothingness in a manner as intangible as its coming.
For a long minute, silence fairly reeked. It was the kind of quiet, this dead apathy of the arctic, which you momentarily expected to explode.
Came a new sound! Doc had heard it before. That was what had surprised him into setting up his trilling note. Now Johnny, Long Tom, and Ham also heard it distinctly.
A clicking! A clicking as of dice rattled together in a palm!
The noise which had haunted Victor Vail down through the years! The noise which marked the presence of Ben O’Gard’s man!
“That, brothers,” Doc Savage said softly, “is one of the last things I expected to hear at this spot!”
* * * *
With the final word, Doc glided forward. The others raced after him. But they were left behind as though their feet were frozen in the ice pack.
Doc Savage was lost to their sight.
When they overhauled him, Doc was standing over a human figure that sprawled in a steaming lake of scarlet.
“Dynamite Smith!” Ham clipped. “The bird I shot.”
Doc and his three friends now exchanged understanding glances.
An uncontrollable palsy had seized Dynamite Smith’s jaws. They rattled together—made the distinctive clicking.
Dynamite Smith was the one of Ben O’Gard’s villains who had kept track of Victor Vail down through the years.
“I don’t understand it!” Long Tom muttered. “When he bent over me that night in my bunk, his teeth clicked. But we have talked with him many times since then, aboard the submarine, and his teeth made no sound.”
“I see the explanation of that—now,” Doc replied. “Dynamite Smith has been using narcotics almost steadily throughout the submarine voyage.”
“You mean——”
“That the dope quiets his jaws,” Doc explained. “In other words, every addict gets the heebie-jeebies when deprived of his narcotic. When Dynamite Smith is without it, his jaws shake. When he has it, they don’t.”
The wounded man was conscious. He rolled his eyes.
Doc Savage now examined the man’s wound. But Ham had made an accurate shot.
“You’re doomed,” Doc told Dynamite Smith without emotion.
The dying man’s lips moved. Doc was forced to bend close before even his keen ears could decipher the fellow’s gaspings.
“Ben O’Gard an’ my mateys went off an’ left me here, huh?” Dynamite Smith said.
Emotion rarely showed on Doc Savage’s handsome bronze face. But it was in evidence now.
“Was Ben O’Gard on the Helldiver?” he demanded.
Dynamite Smith did not answer the question. His glazing eyes rolled slowly until they focused upon Long Tom.
“I was huntin’ the map when yer grabbed the black wig offn my head that night,” he whispered feebly. “After I come near gettin’ caught, Ben O’Gard hisself done the huntin’. It was him found the map an’ swiped it from yer.”
“Which one of the Helldiver crew is Ben O’Gard?” Doc demanded.
An evil, vicious sneer distorted the blue lips of the dying man. His whisper gurgled in his throat.
“We fooled the crew of ye plenty neat,” he labored.
It seemed he would never get the next words past his stiffening throat muscles. The villainous sneer spread upon his lips.
“Ben O’Gard is Cap’n McCluskey!” he coughed.
* * * *
One startled glance Doc and his three friends exchanged. When they looked back at Dynamite Smith, the man was dead.
“Ben O’Gard and Captain McCluskey—the same person!” Ham muttered. “For cryin’ out loud!”
Doc Savage’s strong lips warped slightly.
“It seems, brothers, that we kindly financed the expedition of our enemies to get the treasure,” he said dryly. “No doubt Ben O’Gard—we’ll call him that from now on, instead of Captain McCluskey—no doubt Ben O’Gard did take some of the treasure from the Oceanic when he left the liner more than fifteen years ago. He used that money to fit up the Helldiver. But his funds were not sufficient. He advertised for a sucker to back him. Imagine his pleasure when we presented ourselves!”
Ham groaned loudly.
“It was me called your attention to that newspaper story about the under-the-ice submarine,” he berated himself. “What a mess I got us into!”
Doc’s low laughter danced merrily among the ice hummocks.
“Forget it, Ham. If the fault belongs anywhere, it’s on my shoulders. Let us go back and open that bundle of mine.”
They retraced their steps to the bundle. The sealskin thong was untied. The waterproof covering was removed.
“Hey!” barked Johnny in surprise. “This wrapper is a small silk tent!”
“It’s more than a tent, also,” Doc informed him. “With it in the package is a collapsible frame of alloy metal. Expanded, and with that silk tent stretched over it, the frame becomes a boat. There are web paddles which can be attached to our rifle barrels for propulsion.”
They all now dived into the rest of the bundle. They were anxious to see what fresh wonders it held.
Long Tom released a howl of delight.
“A radio set!” he squawled. “Transmitter and receiver, complete!”
Swiftly, Long Tom drew aside with the wireless equipment. He proceeded to put it in operation. The apparatus was of Doc’s own devising, marvelously compact. It had no bulky batteries which might be rendered useless by moisture or cold, or exhausted by use. Current was supplied by a generator operated by a powerful spring and clockwork. The set operated on very short wave lengths.
In fifteen minutes, Long Tom had it ready for a test. Eagerly, the electrical wizard cocked an ear at the tiny built-in loud speaker, and twirled the tuning dials.
Suddenly a voice purred out of the speaker.
The astonishment of Doc and his friends at hearing that voice was unbounded. It was as though they had tuned in on the other world.
They jumped up and down. They bellowed at each other in a near hysteria of delight. They danced circles on the iceberg.
“I tell you, we’re tuned in on hell!” Ham howled.
Ham was back in his old form.
For it was Monk’s voice coming out of the loud-speaker!