Doc Savage: The Secret of Satan's Spine (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 15) (31 page)

If they spotted his eyes, they would not necessarily attribute much significance to them. And because he was following them by sound and smell, not by sight, Doc often walked with his eyes closed. It made no difference. His biggest concern was in not losing his footing on the irregular lava rock beneath his feet.

In time, the bronze man came to the submerged body of the Navy ensign who had been shot down in cold blood.

Treading carefully, Doc had discovered the inert form when one foot encountered an unpleasant obstruction. Kneeling, he felt of the body, discovered the spinal wound, and recognized that the man was beyond hope.

Standing up, the bronze giant resumed his methodical trek.

Doc Savage had no inkling of where Diamond was leading him. The distance was no greater than half a mile, and with each step it seemed less and less likely that an execution had been planned.

The extent of the field of hardened lava perplexed the big bronze man, who had committed to memory all marine charts pertaining to the Bahama group. No such formation was known to him.

This meant that the formation was of recent origin and most likely created by an upthrust of the earth’s crust. Doc searched his memory for reports of seaquakes in this area. There had been several over the last few months, none considered significant, for they had merely shaken the surrounding islands.

More and more, the bronze man became convinced that this was the objective Diamond had called Satan’s Spine. It apparently lay due east of Satan Cay, but was not attached to it. The significance of the name escaped him, but Doc recalled that Satan Cay was originally called Santo Cayo, a Spanish name meaning Holy Isle. Over the centuries, English-speaking sailors had turned the name into a more pronounceable, if sinister, one.

Coming to the spot where the ground lifted, after which his steady stride carried him out of the water, Doc suspected that Diamond’s ultimate objective lay close by.

He paused once, turned his back, thumbed on his flashlight, capping it in his great fist. Through this coppery glow he was able to discern numerous wet footprints that had slogged over this spot. They told the bronze giant that he was traveling in the correct direction.

Dousing the torch, Doc turned about and continued on.

Doc Savage was not unaware of the change in the atmosphere, nor the periods of stillness that brought to mind the stalled hurricane many miles to the south. But even if the blow was on the move, it was not yet at hand. There would be time enough to concern himself with that issue later.

Walking along, Doc encountered obstacles which, by bending and feeling about, revealed themselves to be more of the rocky hands that had somehow formed in the lava bed, perhaps as far back as prehistoric times, if his knowledge of Caribbean geology was to be trusted.

How it was possible for molten lava to be so configured was frankly beyond him. But it was the least of his worries at the moment.

After much walking, Doc realized that the sounds of men moving through the night, along with the stink of human sweat, no longer impinged upon his senses.

He stopped, turned in place—eyes, ears and nose alert. The wind was blowing again. It was possible that it was carrying these impressions away from him. But the more he listened and sniffed of the air, the less likely that seemed.

Doc began reconnoitering the raised hump of hardened lava, seeking a solution to the mystery. He trod carefully, knowing that a wrong move could cause him to inadvertently break off a chunk of brittle black rock, betraying his position by the noise created.

Yet after circling the area twice, the bronze man could discover no sight, smell or sound of his quarry. He had to seal his lips to prevent his trilling sound from issuing forth. That was a mark of how puzzled he was.

Doc Savage had not climbed to the summit. In fact, he could not perceive it in the darkness. The possibility that this was a volcanic cone had instilled a reasonable caution in him. He did not want to blindly blunder into an open crater—even a long-dormant one.

Staring up at the inky spot where he assumed the summit would be, Doc attempted to pierce the frustrating blackness. Something seemed to loom up there, but it might have been a trick of his imagination.

When he gazed in that direction, an ominous feeling came over him. It was a sensation difficult to describe, but it carried with it a suggestion of ancient evil.

Shaking off the superstitious thought, Doc produced his flashlight and resumed mounting the low hill, prepared at any moment to turn on the flash ray and take his chances.

Whatever loomed up there, it should explain the mystery of what had become of Diamond and his cohorts. It was a mystery Doc Savage very much intended to solve.

Chapter XXXVIII

DARK DESCENT

THE CREWMEN OF the
Northern Star
did not know where they were.

Blindfolded, they had been led up the stony prominence and into something that felt as though it must be a natural enclosure.

The absence of moving air combined with a briny odor that was close and stank of indefinable sea smells gave them the idea that they had entered a former sea cave.

There was no other explanation for the change in their surroundings, nor for the weird way the voices of Diamond and his cutthroat crew seemed to change and echo hollowly the further along they progressed.

Having been led up a prominence, they were now descending. The path was circular. That much they could tell.

One of the crewmen, evidently a fellow subject to claustrophobia, began talking nervously. He did not speak to anyone in particular; he simply fell to babbling.

“What is this awful place? Are we going into a cave? I don’t like this. I don’t like this one little bit!”

One of the cutthroats’ voices roared out, “You don’t have to like it! Just keep movin’.”

“This joint smells like old Davy Jones’ Locker,” the claustrophobic one muttered.

This was an unfortunate reference, for it caused the other blindfolded men to conjure up dark thoughts about where they were being led.

“Do they have caves in the Bahamas?” one murmured.

Another responded tightly, “I reckon they have caves anywhere you might go, except in the desert, maybe.”

“Shut up!” Diamond bellowed. “You men have work to do. Keep your mind on your feet. Don’t bump into anything.”

The casual reference to work triggered imaginations. One of the sailors had mined coal in West Virginia prior to joining the Merchant Marines.

“I think this might be a mining works,” he murmured.

“What’s that?” demanded one of Diamond’s men.

“I said, ‘Walking along in the dark is making me lose my mind,’ ” the man fibbed.

“You’ll lose more than that, if you don’t keep your mind on the detail.”

“Yeah,” added another harshly, “you could lose your brain, too. It might just get shot out from between your ears.”

Everyone fell silent upon hearing that threat. They pressed on. They were still meandering downward, but there were no steps. They did not understand that.

Many minutes passed as they went down what they began to imagine was a crude circular ramp.

A sailor, his nerves on edge, afraid of imminent death, but even more fearful of the blackness of the unknown, broke.

“This is surely Hell!” he screeched. “He’s taking us down into the bowels of Hell itself!”

With that, the agitated sailor bolted.

Since he did not know where he was and could not see through his blindfold, his bolting had a haphazard, frantic quality to it. It also had its tragic side.

The man ran smack into an obstruction, rebounded with a bloody nose, and landed on the seat of his denim pants.

This commotion caused the others to halt in their tracks and start milling about, their ears trying to make out the sounds of what was transpiring around them, unseen.

There were no words. Just a single gunshot. And the man who had been concerned about descending into a literal Hell ceased his complaining.

Another thick silence followed.

The voice of Diamond, cold and cutting, came again.

“Listen well, you men. We are in a chamber formed by a pocket of hot gas probably hundreds of thousands of years ago. We’re here to do a job, and then we’re going to get out of here. Follow orders and you’ll be breathing salt air soon enough. Get me?”

No one responded, for few believed they would ever see the light of day again. An oppressiveness of spirit enveloped their thoughts and clutched at their pounding hearts. But they were helpless. They had no choice but to obey.

Once more they were jostled and knocked into single file again, and so they resumed their downward trudging, a great unease creeping into their nervous systems the deeper they descended in the unknown well into the earth.

Chapter XXXIX

THE MOANING THING

IN THE UNRELIEVED darkness of night, a series of sounds reached Doc Savage’s sensitive ears.

They were high-pitched, squeaky, and reminded of mice fleeing a tabby cat. But the sounds did not come from the ground around him, rather from high over his head—in the direction of the oppressive looming thing the bronze man sensed but could not see clearly.

Doc was still attired in the enveloping cape that defeated human sight. The plastic hood covered his ears sufficiently so that, at first, he was not positive what had produced the intermittent noises overhead.

They continued, and were accompanied by more subtle sounds, which Doc studied in his mind.

It was not long before he concluded that these noises signified flapping bats in flight. The question looming in the bronze giant’s mind was this: Were the bats emerging from the thing bulking ahead of him, or were they fleeing it?

Bats, the bronze man knew, roosted high in trees, barns, attics and similar tall structures. Caves also were an attraction, but Doc had never heard of any species of bat that occupied dormant volcanic cones.

This led to a natural conclusion that the thing he was facing and which would soon be illuminated by the rising tropical sun, was not a volcanic structure, but something else. Possibly something man-made. But he could not conceive what it might be.

For this forbidding reef, which he had concluded was the mysterious Satan’s Spine, had been thrust up from the ocean floor comparatively recently. As such, it should not possess as a natural feature any structure that would attract nesting bats.

Although it was tempting to do so, Doc dared not bring his flashlight into play. The hand torch came with an extra bulb which could produce infra-red light, but in order for that to be useful, he needed special filter goggles, which were not on his person. In recent months, the bronze man had retired many of the gadgets he formerly used with great relish. Perhaps this was a consequence of the sobering effect of the World War that had engulfed the planet, or possibly it was a growing maturity of mind that was a consequence of having been called upon by the War Department to undertake various secret missions on behalf of the Allies. Consequently, Doc had been attempting to rely less and less on his customary bag of tricks. His work sometimes took him behind enemy lines, in disguise, and the telltale gadgets could cause him to be stood up against a brick wall reserved for catching such bullets as failed to lodge in the bodies of shot spies.

The bronze man thought with some irony that the invisibility producing cloak he now wore was possibly one of the most outlandish gadgets he had ever employed. So perhaps his precautions were all for naught.

As Doc listened to the squeaky wheeling of unseen bats overhead, he concluded that they were in fact fleeing a rookery, wherever it might be. More and more high-pitched noises followed, and the air was filled with frantic flying things.

Taking great care, Doc lifted the hood attachment of his cape to allow his nose to take in fresh air unobstructed. He was not so much interested in the fresh air as he was in the scents carried along with it.

Odors of men, which had been fresh before, were less distinct now. This suggested to the bronze man’s scientifically trained brain that the sailors of the
Northern Star
had been marched by Diamond and his gang into an enclosure of some kind. Whether natural or man-made was impossible to tell. But it was puzzling to imagine what sort of structure might exist on a reef that had been submerged until recent times.

Taking great care to move without making any sound, and occasionally encountering objects thrusting up from the hard rock beneath his feet, Doc worked his way to the summit, and along the way stopped to feel the weird obstructions.

They were outgrowths or extensions of the hardened lava bed beneath, but they were not evidently natural formations. Every one of them was in the shape of a human hand, his exploring fingers determined. Doc could not see them, of course, but the picture they painted in his imagination suggested the clutching hands of drowning sailors that had somehow crystallized in death.

Some of these hands were many times larger than life-sized. So any association with actual human hands appeared to be far-fetched. That is, unless in ancient times, there existed a race of men vastly larger than present-day humans. Doc doubted this explanation.

Doc Savage put all such fanciful thoughts aside. Treading cautiously, the squealing of the overhead bats covering any intermittent rustling of his plastic cape, the bronze man continued up the rough slope until he encountered something in the form of a great obstruction.

It had the feel of a curved wall. Doc removed one plastic glove, and felt of it.

Among his many mastered disciplines was that of geology, but the substance of this curved surface did not feel familiar. Doc felt along this, moving cautiously, and managed to work his way around it, coming at last to the spot where he believed that he had begun his explorations.

Whatever this thing was, it was very large, apparently tall, and built along the lines of a grain silo or tower. If there was an entrance to it, the bronze man could not locate it by touch.