THE THAWING DEATH
Doc Savage sped away from the lost liner Oceanic. Bullets jarred showers of ice flakes from hummocks behind which he dodged. Other slugs ran about in the snow like little moles that traveled too fast for the eye.
Doc was careful not to offer too good a target. But he showed himself often enough to lure his pursuers on.
Yelling excitedly, huge Ben O’Gard led the pack. The walrus of a pirate was careful not to get too far ahead of his men, though. Once, Doc saw him stumble deliberately so as to permit the others to catch up with him.
The man was cautious. He had felt the frightful strength of Doc Savage once. In fact, he still wore bandages on his hands from that occasion.
Doc’s golden eyes ranged ahead. They held anxiety. Had his friends reached the neck of ice?
They had. Doc could see Monk jumping up and down like the gorilla he resembled as he watched the exciting chase. Monk’s yells even reached Doc’s ears. They sounded like the noise two fighting bulls would make. For a man with such a mild voice, Monk could emit the most blood-curdling howls.
Doc quickened his pace. No doubt the pirates thought he had been going at full speed—for a chorus of surprised shouts arose as they saw the bronze man was leaving them as though they stood still.
“Shake out your sails, mateys!” Ben O’Gard bellowed. He waddled out ahead of his killer gang like an elephant. Then, seized with caution, he was careful to let them catch up.
Doc reached the headland. The ice pack had piled up here. Passing through it was laborious business. It was as though the houses of a great white city had been shoved into one huge pile.
Rifle and submachine-gun bullets swarmed like unseen hornets through the ice hummocks.
Doc finally gained the finger of ice. He sprinted. The footing was only moderately rough here—offering correspondingly less shelter.
There was one point where the ice neck narrowed. Thirty or so steps would have spanned it from one side to the other.
In the middle of this narrow place stood a slightly unnatural-looking drift of snow.
Doc sped past this snow pile without giving it a glance.
A rifle slug made such a noise in his ear that he thought he was hit. But the hood of his parka had only been torn.
He doubled low, zigzagged a little—and reached cover.
Here, the ice finger widened again. Doc joined his friends.
Victor Vail stood to one side. He was doing his best to hug both his wife and pretty daughter simultaneously.
“I hope you got a deck of aces up your sleeve, Doc,” Monk said, his voice again mild. “If you ain’t, we’re in a pretty pickle.”
* * * *
As Monk hinted, they were indeed trapped. For it seemed Doc had led them to a spot from which there was no escape. Ben O’Gard and his blood-thirsty pirates had already passed the narrow part of the ice finger. Regaining the shore was now impossible.
To continue their flight in boats, even should Doc have a craft concealed in the rugged ice near by, was also unfeasible. The pirates would have a perfect chance to riddle them with their machine guns.
Doc Savage showed no concern.
“Keep your shirt on, Monk,” he suggested. Then, as a burst of rapid-firer slugs all but parted Monk’s bristling red hair, he added: “And your head down!”
“Let the missing link get a lead haircut!” Ham clipped. “He needs barbering.”
Monk leered at Ham as if he was trying to think of something—got it, and made his inevitable “Hoinck! Hoinck!” of a porker grunting.
Ham subsided.
Doc was now introduced to Victor Vail’s long-lost wife. The introduction lacked something in courtliness, considering that it was made with all of them lying as flat as they could, with flocks of bullets passing but a few inches over their backs.
Mrs. Vail was a tall woman, fully as beautiful as her entrancing blond daughter, although in a more mature way. She showed little effects of her long years of isolation on this barren arctic spot.
Doc turned hastily to his men to avoid the heartfelt gratitude Victor Vail’s wife sought to express, as well as the adoring look in pretty Roxey’s eyes.
“Let me have a pistol!” Doc requested.
His friends were surprised. It was rarely that Doc used firearms on his human foes.
Renny handed over an automatic he had taken from one of his Eskimo guards.
Doc left them. In an instant, he was lost completely to their sight, so expertly did he conceal himself.
They heard his automatic crack once—then four times more.
They stared at the oncoming pirates. Not a man dropped. This was little short of astounding to the five who knew Doc well. Doc was one of the finest marksmen they had ever seen, even if it was seldom that he fired a shot. They had seen him toss up twelve pennies in a single handful, and using two pistols, touch every one with lead before it fell to earth.
Yet he seemed to have missed the easy targets the pirates offered.
“Hey—look!” Monk howled suddenly.
Behind the pirates, where the finger of ice narrowed, a surprising phenomena was in progress.
The ice was melting at great speed!
* * * *
Monk was first to comprehend. “My chemical mixture for dissolving ice!” he chuckled. “Doc put a supply of it under that snow drift. He simply punctured the containers!”
Ben O’Gard and his pirates came to a stop. They had discovered the melting ice. That worried them. But their thirst for blood got the better of them. They resumed their charge.
“Come!” Doc called. “And keep down low!”
He led them for the end of the ice finger.
It became noticeable that the whole formation of ice was now in motion. Enough of the narrow neck had dissolved to permit the rest to break free. The whole thing was now an ordinary floe, plaything of the currents of the polar sea.
Doc reached his objective. He pointed.
“How does that look?” he questioned.
Monk grinned from ear to ear. “Heaven will never look any better to this sinful soul!”
The under-the-ice submarine, Helldiver, lay before them. It was moored to deadman anchors which had obviously been sunken in the ice by depositing a bit of Monk’s remarkable chemical concoction.
They threw off the moorings, then dived down the main hatch.
Doc started the electric motors—there was no time to get the Diesels going. The Helldiver surged away from the floe.
“How’d it happen to be here?” Monk questioned.
Doc smiled faintly.
“I’m afraid I stole it,” he explained. “Ben O’Gard kindly helped me out by leaving no one aboard. But I must say I never put in a busier twenty minutes than I did running the tin whale here single handed.”
A sporadic burst or two of bullets rattled on the submarine hull. They did not have sufficient power to penetrate the steel plates, however.
The shooting stopped abruptly.
Renny took a chance and thrust his head out. He was not shot at.
“If any of you guys are interested in stark drama, come here and watch,” he suggested.
Doc, Long Tom, Monk, Ham, and Johnny crowded up beside him, along with Victor Vail.
Roxey Vail and her mother, after one glance, could not bear the horror of the sight.
* * * *
Grim fate had at last grasped Ben O’Gard and his pirates.
They knew that to drift on the floe did of a certainty mean slow starvation. So they were making desperate tries to reach shore. Some had already plunged into the frigid water, and were battling the strong current.
Others, who could not swim, were fighting those who could, trying to make them serve as unwilling pack horses. A few faint shots rang out.
Those swimming began to go down, overcome by the deadly chill of the water, for some distance now separated the floe from land. Their fur garments handicapped them, yet to remove them was to freeze.
After a while, the last man sprang wildly, hopelessly, into the numbingly cold sea.
Two actually reached the ice-rimmed shore. One of these was the walrus-like Ben O’Gard. But they could not climb upon the ice, so depleted was their strength.
Ben O’Gard was last to slip back to his death.
Monk let a long breath swish from his cavernous lungs.
“He’d better get plenty chilled, because it’s mighty hot where he’s goin’!” muttered the gorilla of a chemist. “He paid a mighty high price tryin’ to get the——”
Monk swallowed twice. His eyes stuck out. He whirled on Doc.
“Hey—what about the treasure?” he howled. “Now we’re in a nice fix! Everybody’s dead who knows anything about it!”
Doc Savage was forced to postpone his answer for a time. Handling the under-the-ice submarine occupied his attention. The tanks had to be trimmed, the Diesels had to be started. He and his five men would have only moderate difficulty piloting the Helldiver southward, although they would be very short-handed.
Monk got his mind back on fifty millions in gold and diamonds.
“Say, Doc, we ain’t goin’ off an’ leave all that money layin’ around on that bleak land somewhere, are we?” he asked plaintively.
“Ben O’Gard and his gang moved the treasure from the strong room of the Oceanic when they mutinied more than fifteen years ago,” Doc said dryly. “In other words, they filched it from their pals, headed by Keelhaul de Rosa, and cached it in a hiding place of their own.”
“Holy cow!” groaned Renny. “Then we have no way of finding that hiding place! Ben O’Gard and his men are all dead.”
“We don’t care about the hiding place,” Doc assured him. “Ben O’Gard and his gang had recovered the loot before they set out a few hours ago to commit wholesale slaughter on the lost liner.”
Monk emitted one of his best howls. “You mean it’s——”
“The whole business is aboard this submarine,” Doc told him. “To be exact, it’s piled some feet deep on the floor of your cabin, Monk!”
It was startling information to Monk, at the end of a most startling adventure. Out of the frozen grip of the North came a fortune in gold and diamonds, saved from the lost liner. But more than that—out of this thrilling adventure came the rescue of two precious lives, and the reunion of a family lost for many years.
To the blind violinist and his reunited family, this was the greatest thing that could have happened, and the battles of Doc and his companions were most marvelous.
But they did not know of the past of Doc and his friends; of the many narrow escapes, the thrilling exploits that were part of their lives.
Neither did they know of the future—the immediate future which held forth adventure and thrills some way connected with the Orient.
Doc himself did not know, and did not care. Somewhere some one else was in danger, some other person needed help. Whatever it was, wherever Doc was needed, there he would go, heedless of danger, conquering all obstacles. And his five companions, adventurers-in-arms, would follow their leader to still greater exploits.