DOC SAVAGE: THE INFERNAL BUDDHA (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage) (28 page)

“Against whom?” wondered one coolie.

“Against Tang, the wicked.”

“Not against the Japanese?”

Wah Chan shook his head emphatically. “No, against the greater menace, which is Tang and his infernal Buddha.”

This pronouncement brought dark muttering from the crew.

“The monk Tang has helped us slay many invaders. Now you turn against him,” accused one.

“Not against you. Nor for the hateful silkworms of Japan. But against the unholy idol harbored in the hold of the Red Dragon junk.”

This sudden turn of fortune caused bewilderment to ripple across the bland faces of the Red Dragon crew. Their slit eyes narrowed sharply.

Loitering nearby, Monk Mayfair muttered, “They’re not buying it, Doc.”

Lurking in the well of a companionway where he would not be seen, Doc Savage whispered, “We may have to resort to extreme measures.”

“Yeah. Like what?”

But the bronze man did not answer. His metallic face was set in graves lines, however. This caused the apish chemist’s narrow brow to furrow unhappily. It was never good when Doc’s expression betrayed concern, a thing which rarely happened.

The crew of the Red Dragon junk had fallen into a cacophony of singsong conversation. They were eying the
Cuttlefish
crew, with their blue turbans and foreign garb. The crew of  Wah Chan’s war junk was all Chinese to the last man. But the
Cuttlefish
crew was a slovenly gang mixing ruffians from Malaya, Java, Borneo, Java and Siam. Worse, they looked exactly like what they were—pirates. This did not inspire confidence.

The towering helmsman broke loose from the clot of conferees.

“It is written, ‘Who but the sages are free of faults?’ ” he asserted. “What would you have us do, Wah Chan?”

“Overthrow Tang. Quickly!”

“But will he not unleash his devil upon us?”

“If he is not stopped, Tang will unleash his devil upon the entire world,” Wah Chan pointed out.

They fell into a huddle. Excited talk grew angry. Men spat and cursed. A brief scuffle broke out, the immediate result of which was that a dissenter was overpowered and flung overboard, left to strike out for land, if he could.

Finally, the helmsman stepped forth and called over.

“It has been decided that Tang may unleash his devil on any who are not crew members of this worthy vessel,” he said flatly.

“Kai dai!”
swore Wah Chan. “Helmsman, where is your loyalty?”

“It belongs to China.”

This brought wild cries, clucks of agreement.

“Is there no one of you brave and loyal enough to eliminate Tang for Wah Chan?” demanded the bandit generalissimo.

No one spoke up. Their faces were as blank as copper gongs.

“Plainly not,” murmured Ham worriedly.

“Oh, Dad,” whispered Mary. “What are we to do?”

“It is no use,” Wah Chan moaned miserably. His broad shoulders drooped. “They think Tang is their salvation, the savior of China. I have convinced them of this, now I cannot convince them otherwise.”

Then an unexpected thing happened. The sailor named Fragrant Fung abruptly scuttled down a companionway. He was not noticed by the crew jammed along the rail, but his furtive actions were plainly visible to the watchers from the
Cuttlefish
.

Not many minutes passed. Sails cracked in the wind. The red flags flying from the mast as a superstitious protection against storms fluttered madly. Waves lapped at hulls, producing a discordant chuckling.

Wah Chan kept talking in hopes that Fragrant Fung would produce a miracle.

“It is a wise dog who knows his master,” he announced.

“We are no longer your dogs,” came the tart reply.

The trend of the exchange was not productive, but Wah Chan carried on, making more noise than necessary to cover Fung’s surreptitious reconnoiter.

“I am recalling a saying I taught my children when they were young:
Chen chin pu p’a hao lien.
‘True gold fears no fire.’ ”

A junk-man spat back, “
Mi chin pi shaung
! ‘Honeyed deceiving speech!’ We skinned faces, and washed hands, turning our backs on banditry to defend China. Would you have us lose?”

“Chieh!”
retorted Wah Chan. “Alas! If  Tang—”

Came an outcry from below. Muffed by hull and deck planking, it seeped out into the open sea, a bleat of shock, fear and other emotions mixed with it. It was impossible to say who cried out, but the sound was high-pitched and sharp.

Then they heard the thud of a body. Not loud. The one who had fallen was not a large man.

“Sure hope that was Tang,” Monk muttered.

“It might have been the other fellow,” breathed Ham, making his lean sword blade sing in the air.

“If so,” Monk said, “Tang might figure the whole crew turned against him. No tellin’ what he’ll do then.”

In less than a minute, they had their answer.

A vague sensation plucked at them. At first it was not noticed. Then it seized them in its powerful grip.

It was thirst. Raw, raging thirst.

“The terrible Buddha!” Mary gasped.

“Tang has awakened it!” Mark cried.

Wah Chan took his children in his great arms and rushed them to the imagined safety of a companionway.

But there was no safety.

The armored hull of the junk of the Red Dragon was stout, but the terrible force emanating from the infernal Buddha was irresistibly strong.

They could feel it sucking the vitality out of them as if an unseen vampire were attempting to wrest their very souls from their bodies. The pirate crew sought the shelter of the lower regions of the boat. A few ducked into the auxiliary cabin in the high poop deck.

DOC SAVAGE shouldered his way topside. He was obeying the opposite instinct that comes over men facing certain death. Instead of seeking the questionable shelter of the cabins below, he made for the rail and vaulted it in an amazing space of seconds.

The bronze man struck the water like a javelin coming down. He made a larger splash than was his custom. That was the only sign that the bronze man was not exercising the full control normally part of his training.

The ocean brine swallowed him. He did not come up for air.

Minutes passed as the terrible suction-like force that projected from the Buddha of Ice continued to exert its sway.

Teak and timbers began to crackle and groan, no doubt in response to the leaching of residual moisture that was locked within them. Planks shrank, separating.

In a matter of less than a minute, the
Cuttlefish
showed signs of coming apart at the seams, so great was the dramatic force sucking moisture from it.

The crew of the
Cuttlefish
was cowering below deck, lighting joss sticks to supplicate their heathen gods. They expected death.

The Chinese coolies who were braced on the deck of the Red Dragon junk were likewise enduring the awful, debilitating thirst and suffering of victims of the infernal Buddha.

They were getting a taste of their own cruel medicine.

They milled about, sought water, bumped into one another in their panicky consternation. Some leaped over the rails. A flat-bottomed boat was pitched overboard, making a sloppy splash.

In the pell-mell confusion, no thought was given to Doc Savage, who had vanished beneath the turbulent waves. For, like dancing devils, the wave tops were leaping and jumping excitedly, too.

In the intervening minute, Doc had arrowed under the flat keel of the Red Dragon junk to surface on the leeward side. His silk line and grapple came out. He swung it lariat-style, snagged a cleat, and began climbing.

This the bronze man did without hindrance.

Realizing that Tang had pivoted the black-iron contraption that contained the Buddha toward the opposing junk, Doc had sought the protection of water. He had not known whether immersing his entire body in water would protect him. It was reasonable to presume that it might. It did.

The protective ocean had prevented the lethal influence from leaching fluids from his Herculean bronze form. When Doc had come up on the other side, he was positioned behind the open baffles and therefore out of range of the Buddha’s unseen, thirst-inducing tendrils.

As the bronze giant climbed over the starboard rail, he was unimpaired.

Doc moved toward a companionway and began to feel his way down. It was careful work. If a sound or outcry betrayed him, the Buddha could be pivoted in instants and trained upon him. He wore no protection, having shucked his outer garments during the improvised swim.

Shedding his clothes meant that Doc had lost any gadgets he carried concealed upon his person. He had saved the grapple and line, because he knew he would need them for the climb.

Moving slowly to allow his eyes to adjust to the gloomy conditions, Doc Savage made his way to the sturdy door that sealed off the hold. He came to the door. It was shut.

Before it lay the gnarled thing that had been in life Fragrant Fung.

It resembled a dog that had perished and been left to dry out in the sun. Fung looked as if he had been dead a month or more. In actuality, life had departed barely ten minutes ago.

Doc stepped over the remains and sought a chink or opening in the door that would permit vision. There was none. A space under the door might have allowed him to insert his periscopic device, but that too was no longer on his person.

Doc began testing the door, to see if it was latched from within or not, when the commotion from above deck changed character.

Before, it had been frantic confusion. Now it darkened, grew excited in a high-pitched, angry way.

Snatches of words reached the bronze man’s keen ears. He heard enough to understand that the danger was about to become even more perilous.

That decided him. Setting his metallic back against the panel, Doc Savage exerted sudden pressure. Hinges squealing, the door caved. Doc burst into the hold.

Tang was revealed, crouched behind his black-iron contraption, hunkered down as if in abject terror of the thing he had unleashed as well.

He narrowed hard orbs. Spying the oncoming Man of Bronze, Tang emitted a wild screech. He grasped the stove with bony claws and gave the thing a violent spin.

The black hulk rumbled on its caster wheels and the grotesque head of the Fu Dog came about, revealing its yawning maw. Doc Savage, caught half way between the door and his objective, faced the full power of the Buddha of Ice!

Even steeling himself for it, the bronze man was unprepared. Something like a cold wave of shocking power struck his nearly nude body full on. He sealed his mouth, lest it be dried out.

He dared not stop. Retreat was too risky. Doc could only move forward.

He never reached the Buddha.

Instead, a distant cough came from beyond the hull, in the direction of open water. It was followed by a whistling noise. The sound terminated in a dull detonation. The vessel rocked wildly. This impact felt as if the entire stern of the Red Dragon junk had been blown apart—as possibly it had.

Angrily, Tang grabbed for the brass handholds bolted to the stove’s heavy back, redirecting his clumsy weapon toward the spot where he thought death was coming.

It was a blind guess. But the action turned the power of the Buddha away from Doc Savage for the moment.

The bronze man lay supine, fighting with every fibre of his being against the overpowering thirst that had washed over him.

Although stripped down to the black silk bathing trunks he wore in the event he needed to take to the water unexpectedly, Doc was not entirely unprotected.

Long ago, he had prepared a concoction, a pasty mixture that could be applied to the body. When immersed in water, a chemical reaction would keep a swimmer warm. Doc had perfected this in the remote Arctic, where he often sojourned at his Fortress of Solitude. Up there in the frigid waters, he tested it until the greasy preparation offered the correct degree of protection from the debilitating cold of polar conditions.

It happened to be coppery in hue, and thus doubled as part of his Sat Sung disguise.

Earlier, Doc had applied the thick paste over much of his body, not knowing if it would safeguard him against the Buddha’s influence by sealing the pores. To a degree, it had. Doc had been severely dehydrated, but he lived.

With measured stealth and strength, the bronze man climbed to his feet.

Hidden behind the terrible engine of destruction, Tang the monk continued jockeying the Buddha this way and that. Came another cough. A whistling.

Another explosion tore the junk. This one seemed to carry off the mainsail when it hit. Wood shivered. Heavy objects tumbled about on deck. The staunch hull shivered under tearing blows.

Doc Savage pounced on Tang, found his scrawny neck and began the chiropractic manipulations which invariably induced unconsciousness.

It was not an even contest. However, Doc Savage’s prodigious strength had been depleted. Tang was a wizened bag of bones with an evil tortoise face framed by canine ears. His body was almost devoid of flesh. His ribs stuck through the skin, arm and leg tendons standing out like taut strings when they moved.

Yet outward appearance can be deceiving. Tang’s catgut-like muscles were imbued with the raw power of fanaticism. He scratched, snarled, and attempted to bring his snapping teeth to bear. All in vain.

Hissing like a trapped animal, Tang succumbed to the unrelenting pressure of blunt bronze digits.

Doc held the monk’s head in his great cabled hands longer than usual, before he was certain that Tang was no longer conscious. Then he lowered him to the floor.

Creeping around to the back of the ebony machine, Doc found the lever that actuated the louver-like mouth baffles and dropped it with a clang.

The thing sealed itself up. The power of the Buddha of Ice was once again contained.

Clumsily, having to feel his way, Doc exited the hold and regained the deck.

What he beheld did not surprise him. He had gleaned the truth from the excited shouting of the confused crew.

A Japanese naval gunboat had appeared on the scene.

Its forward deck gun was being swiveled on its carriage, round muzzle still smoking. This pointed squarely at the junk of the Red Dragon. Blue-uniformed sailors stuck fingers in ears, ducked at the waist.