DOC SAVAGE: THE INFERNAL BUDDHA (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage) (2 page)

The pirates waved arms as if lives depended on it, which they conceivably did.

And with that, Dang Mi leathered his smoking pistols and pointed the Maxim at the plane, which was making another trip over the mast hounds. He came down hard on the arrangement which served as a trigger.

The Maxim bucked, stuttered, and hot brass shell casings filled the brass-catcher with a busy clinking. Dang shook so hard he was forced to close his artificially-slanted eyes.

When he opened them he saw that the active half of the bullets had found resting places in the tiny plane’s cowl. It was now as perforated as the top of a salt shaker. A piece of Dural metal hung loose, flapping in the slipstream. The plane banked; it went flying away, falling like an autumn leaf.

“Dang!” said Dang Mi. “Her bloody prop’s still turning!”

It was. The blades and shiny spinner seemed to have escaped the leaden storm unscathed.

Dang watched with one eye beginning to droop—a nuisance that plagued him whenever the collodion lost its fixative strength. His broad face reflected unhappiness when he saw that the tiny craft was banking again.

“What’s he up to?” Dang muttered, shading his eyes.

Then he saw. The plane was coming closer. Its engine began to labor. There was smoke about the riddled cowl.

“He must like catching lead in his snout,” Dang muttered.

“In a little while,” put in Poetical Percival, “he might alight on that isle.”

“Huh?”

Dang looked over his shoulder. There was an island, one of the many dotting this patch of the South China Sea. Through the fog, it was visible as a shadowy hump.

Abruptly, the noise of the airplane motor cut out completely.

“Make for that dang isle quick-like!” Dang shouted. “
Berhenti!
Chop-chop!” he added for the benefit of his mixed crew.

The junk-hands got to their business. The engines kicked into life and the
Devilfish
nosed towards it. It was not going fast enough for Dang Mi, however.

Dang ran out into the open foredeck, paused to judge the progress of the airplane and the distance to the isle. He was close enough to the isle to see, dimly visible through the fog, that there was beach enough to accept a troubled aircraft—if the pilot were brave enough or desperate enough to chance it.

He was. It was immediately evident that the plane would land.

“Drop anchor here!” Dang howled. And without removing the pistols jammed in his belt, he leapt into the sea. He immediately struck out for the isle.

HAD Dang Mi known what the plane was bringing him, and what was to come of it, he would undoubtedly have gotten up and fled, even taking his chances with the British authorities.

But he didn’t. So he swam like a man possessed.

He only stopped when the faint shadow of the silent plane passed over his head. After that, he trod water and watched, completely unaware that his lungs were not working.

The pilot attempted to fishtail air speed away, narrowly missed a wingover, pancaked violently, careened along for a time and left his landing gear sticking in the soft ground. The plane shed one wing, then the other. The propeller beat itself into a frightful-looking twist. The plane slid on its belly to a dusty conclusion and the wrecking was over.

A protracted silence followed. Fog and dust, agitated by the violence of the plane’s unorthodox landing, hung about the wreck like a creeping dun-colored ghost.

Somewhere inland, a sound like a tiger snarling broke the silence. It might possibly have been an actual tiger, too. There were tigers in these islands. The name Singapore had come from the Sanskrit words,
Singa Purha,
which translated as “The Lion City.”  Whoever it was who had named the city originally, hadn’t known the difference. But Captain Dang Mi and his cut-throats were not thinking of lions or tigers at that moment. They were watching the plane.

As they watched, the cabin door was flung upward, disturbing the hovering spook of fog and dust.

A figure stepped out. A man. He clutched a box of some blue crackle-finished metal. It was large but, from the way the man carried it did not seem heavy. It might have been empty. Except that the man held it with a certain care, one arm wrapped over and around it, as if fearful of the lid flying up.

He paused to look into the gaping cabin.

Then a second figure stumbled out of the wreck to join the first. This second figure appeared identical to the first, except that it did not carry a blue box.

Both figures wore odd garments of a single piece that sheathed their bodies from neck to shoe soles. Black was the color of these garments. They rather resembled atmosphere suits, such as are worn by balloonists who venture into the high regions of the stratosphere, where the air is too thin to breathe. Regulation oxygen apparatus completed the remarkable picture.

They seemed utterly unhurt, and even from a distance, not much perturbed by their near brush with death.

The second figure reached back over its shoulders with both hands and drew up a hood-like affair that matched the rest of the garment as to color and texture, except for the square aperture that left the face visible.

Visible, but not exposed, it became clear when the figure reached over to pull the first figure’s weird hood into place. Sunlight glancing off the aperture showed it to be sealed with Cellophane or some other transparent material.

It seemed as if the first figure had required the assistance because he was afraid to let go of the tightly-held box.

Noticing this, Dang Mi had the thought enter his head that there was something in the box that its possessor was afraid would get loose.

He started to swim for the wreck.

That was when matters began assuming peculiar proportions.

“TWINS!” EXPLODED DANG MI.

That was it. Twins. Girl and boy. Young, white—and as almond-eyed as Manchus. Eurasians. One could almost pass for the other. They stood atop the wrecked plane, braced against the settling of the craft, and looked and acted as if nothing had happened, which was strange, since they must surely know that machine-gun bullets had brought their ship down. There were enough bullet holes in the cowl.

Wading ashore on the sandy beach, Dang Mi mentally chalked up a mistake against himself. These were not British bluejackets.

“Stay back, please,” suggested the man-twin in perfect, if oddly accented, English.

Dang Mi was startled into doing so by the utter calmness of the request.

“Who’re you toffs?” asked Dang sourly.

“We’re the Chans,” the pair replied in one perfectly synchronized voice.

“Eh?”

“The Chans. Haven’t you heard of us?”

“No,” admitted Dang Mi.

“We didn’t think you had,” they assured him calmly. Their easy way of speaking in unison was striking—not to mention weird. They might have shared one brain between them.

Dang Mi glowered. It was a funny time for kidding, and it certainly looked as if they were kidding him.

He started forward, his boots making mushy sucking noises in the wet sand of the beach.

“If you come any closer—” the man-twin warned.

“—we will open up the box,” finished the girl-twin.

“You wouldn’t want that,” added the man-twin.

“Definitely, you wouldn’t,” the girl said firmly.

“Us rovers are kinda like raccoons,” Dang announced.

What he meant by that was that he knew it was incongruous that his most intense curiosity should be aroused by the one thing in evidence that was sealed, when there was so much else that he didn’t understand.

Dang asked a perfectly natural question, given his avaricious disposition.

“What’s in that dang box, anyway?”

“A terrible thing,” said the man-twin.

“A wonderful thing,” said the girl-twin, her voice blending in with her twin’s, except on the middle spoken word.

Dang grunted. “Well, which is it?” he demanded.

“Both,” they replied.

“In that case,” said Dang, whipping out his pistols, “it’s all mine.” He started to advance, the dry portion of the beach crunching under his hard heels.

That was when the man-twin whose name was Chan opened the blue box.

He didn’t do it right away. First, he threw on his hood. The girl did, too. Hastily, she fastened it about her throat, and went to make her twin’s hood fast.

Then, with incredible calmness considering the eerie violence of what next transpired, the man-twin opened the box.

He opened it only a crack. The crack was pointed in Dang Mi’s specific direction.

Dang narrowed his one slanted eye at the crack expectantly. He cocked the pistol. He planned to shoot whatever came out of the blue box, if necessary.

But nothing came out of the box.

Instead, the moist white atmosphere of fog surrounding them all began to move. Like a great ghost impelled by an unfelt wind, it surged toward the odd duo. The cottony stuff gathered speed. The Chans were instantly lost from sight, consumed in a ball of the stuff.

As Dang watched, his droopy eye popped open in shock.

One moment, he was striding through a cool world of mist. Then next, it was clear. And the fog was—incredibly—pouring into the blue box as if fleeing the realm of normalcy. There was no mistaking what was happening. The box—or something inside the box, Dang suddenly realized—was consuming the thick fog with greedy voraciousness.

The ball of fog rapidly thinned, revealing the Chans, standing cool, calm and collected. In their coverall garments, they resembled a pair of sleek-skinned ebony seals.

Fleet tendrils of white mist slipped into the blue box. When the last wisps withdrew from sight, the box was clapped shut.

Dang Mi no longer cared by that time. He was running, running for the water with both hands clutching his throat, his pistols tossed carelessly in the sand.

Out of his open mouth came a croaking. One word. He could barely get it out.

“Water,” was the word Dang Mi croaked.

When he reached the surf he threw himself in with a great splashing. On his hands and knees, he began drinking brine in great sobbing gulps. This went on for nearly a minute.

When Dang had had his fill, he stood up. He was facing the
Devilfish,
now visible through remarkably clear air that had moments before been befogged. Beyond the ship, not a little ways, fog hung low. It seemed to drift closer, as if curious, toward the clear void that had been so misty moments before.

Poetical Percival Perkins stood on the rail. On either side were Dang’s cut-throats. Their eyes were so wide their bland faces lost all Asiatic semblance.

“Drinking raw brine,” Poetical Percival called out, “will never turn out fine.”

Dang Mi’s narrow eyes popped and he made some noises remindful of a man who had a chicken bone crosswise of his throat.

“Ark—ark—wawk!”
described his vocal reactions approximately.

“What did you say?” Perkins shouted.

“I said,” Dang jerked out, “I was thirst-struck.”

“Eh?”

“I said, I was overcome by a dang powerful thirst,” reiterated Dang Mi.

“I never heard of a seaman who didn’t know enough not to swallow sea water. It’ll only make you thirstier, you know.”

“I know that, dang it!” Dang exploded. “Never felt the like of it, before. I thought I’d die if I didn’t fill me belly.”

“You’ll wish for death once your belly starts to ache,” Poetical Percival offered. Then he looked queer. His expression halted Dang, who was in the act of expectorating salty sea water from his mouth.

“What is it?” Dang demanded.

“I felt it, too.”

“Felt what?”

“A sudden thirst.”

“If you felt what I felt, you’d have yourself a belly brimming with brine, by now. Mark me, you would,” said Dang Mi.

“It’s like I hadn’t had a drop in days,” Percival went on, “but I took a swig less that an hour ago. And it’s not hot at all.”

Then it developed that the crew of the
Devilfish
were also thirst-struck. They were passing a canteen from hand to hand. When the canteen came to Poetical Percival, he swallowed his share.

Seeing this activity only made Dang Mi all the more eager to get back to his ship.

“Get a dink down,” Dang called. “This isle is hoodooed.”

“What happened to the fog?” asked Percival, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

“I’ll tell you, but you won’t bleedin’ believe me.”

“Skies go clear, bring on fear,” Percival murmured, and strode to the stern, beckoning to the cut-throats to aid him. They did, and he launched a dinghy. Some of the crew got in and Perkins lowered it to the sea on the opposite side of the ship. Up until the boat was lowered, operations were in full view of the two almond-eyed twins on the plane, for they stood on top of the downed aircraft, which was high enough to see the junk’s deck.

“While you’re at it,” ordered the man-twin in a voice that carried despite his all-enveloping suit, “get another boat over the side, or we’ll open the box again.”

“And don’t think we don’t mean it,” added the girl-twin.

Dang Mi’s brown neck was purple and he glared and made gravelly noises in his teeth.

“I won’t,” he choked.

“Don’t be a damned fool,” called the man-twin. “You can reach Singapore in the small boats.”

He lifted the cumbersome box for emphasis. That unremarkable gesture was all that was required.

Two dinghies were lowered. Poetical Percival took command of one. He sent it putt-putting toward Dang, who had not moved from where he stood, knee-deep in the gentle surf. He seemed afraid to step back on the island.

The strange pair who called themselves the Chans worked their way down to the beach. The man-twin Chan carried the blue box before him in both hands. Earlier, he had handled it as if it contained something delicate. Now he carried it as if it were somehow heavier than before, and more unwieldy.

THE dinks were beached with a grating noise. The corsairs of Dang Mi stepped out, looking anxious. They muttered among themselves.

Last to step off was Poetical Percival. He had remained seated in the rear, at the motor, his hands out of sight, as the Malays grouped themselves near their chieftain, Dang.