Chapter XXII

CAMEL BOATS

A SURGE of one mighty shoulder sent the metal door open.

“Monk! Renny! C’mon, you men!” Doc rapped. He added the same command, couched in the dialect of the Phantom City dwellers.

Men surged from the door - big-fisted Renny first,the others crowding his heels. After them came the other prisoners. Of these, women and children outnumbered the men.

The door by which the amphitheater had been entered was only a few yards distant. Doc’s sudden course of action was not as reckless as it seemed. If every one could get through that door, they stood a chance of escaping the Phantom City.

Moreover, Doc was convinced that Mohallet would persuade the White Beasts to start slaying their captives immediately

shrieking in dismay, Mohallet’s men and their unlovely allies raced to intercept the flight. Some of Mohallet’s followers waved guns - the tiny rapid-firers which were Doc’s own invention.

Had the swarthy killers known how to handle the weapons, the fight would have ended disastrously in split seconds. But the little guns had a pronounced recoil; it took some practice to be able to hold them on any kind of a target and get good results.

The pistol-like machine guns jumped about uncontrollably when they were put in action. They fought the brown men like angry, moaning animals. Leaping wildly, the bullet streams felled numbers of their ugly allies.

Doc and his five men, charging fiercely, added to the confusion. They had spent their lives on the trail of violence, these six. Odds did not faze them. Monk often boasted that he would rather fight fifty men than two, because they got in each other’s way.

“Don’t let ‘em cut you off!” Doc warned. “Keep to the outskirts!”

Himself doing directly the opposite of what he had cautioned against, the bronze man waded into the middle of his foes.

A brown man with a machine gun saw he was the object of the rush, and sought to flee. He dropped before taking a dozen steps, clubbed down by two fists that felt like steel.

Doc seized the rapid-firer. One bullet he fired at the stone amphitheater floor. The way it splashed showed him it was one of the mercy slugs. After that, he hosed those about him liberally with the sleep-inducing missiles.

Even in the most heated combat, Doc never took life directly if it could be helped. His kindness, however, did not keep him from permitting his foes to occasionally fall a victim of some death trap of their own.

The last of the Phantom City dwellers were through the door.

“All right - out we go!” Doc Savage called.

He waited until his five friends had preceded him outside, then slammed the door. There was a bar of the same heavy, soft metal which composed the panel. He shot the bar home. The metal felt cool under his hands.

IN reaching the eastern wall of the Phantom City, they had only two encounters with their foes. Both were minor, quickly ended by Doc’s accurate use of the rapid-firer pistol.

Doc still wore his purloined burnoose. It was of excellent fabric. Torn in strips, it became a rope stout enough to

lower them all to within safe dropping distance of the ground.

Working on a plan of action which he had formulated, Doc led the group of fugitives eastward, down the stream.

Behind them, the Phantom City emptied itself in pursuit. Renny dropped back to Doc’s side. “We overheard enough talk to show us why Mohallet was so anxious to get here!” he boomed. “The Phantom City is lousy with platinum. There must be a great mine near here! Mohallet wants the stuff.”

“I know.” Doc told him “Mohallet found a platinum bracelet on Ja’s wrist.”

“Who’s Ja?”

“The girl - that’s her name!”

“Oh, oh!” Renny’s chuckle thundered. “So you’re calling each other by first names!”

“If she has a second name, she forgot to tell me!” Doc took great pains to explain.

The party came to the inflated camel hides upon the stream banks - the weird contraptions which served as boats. There were paddles, crude things of heavy wood.

Under Doc’s direction, the skin craft were put afloat. Some were opened and allowed to fill partially with water. These were loaded upon others which were intact. Thus was a supply of drinking water carried.

“What’re we gonna do for food?” Monk demanded.

“There are wild camels in the desert,” Doc explained. “Water is the main thing.”

“Camel steaks - phooey!” Monk shuddered. “I ate one, once! The only difference between it and a slab of wood was that I didn’t get any splinters in my tongue!”

“If you still had Habeas Corpus, you could eat him!” Ham jeered.

“What became of the pig?” Doc queried.

“Three of our hairy friends were chasin’ ‘im through the rocks, the last I saw of ‘im!” Monk muttered, then added cheerfully: “I don’t think they caught ‘im!”

They embarked. Monk, with a masterly piece of maneuvering, outwitted Ham, who was seeking to get the pretty Ja as a passenger on his inflated camel hide. Ja rode with Monk.

The homely chemist, however, at once experienced great difficulty in navigating the unwieldy craft. He did nothing but go in circles until Ja took a paddle and demonstrated the method used in keeping the tricky raft on a straight and narrow course.

Thanks to the fantastically rough nature of the ground along the stream, they kept ahead of their pursuers. Reaching the lake, Doc set a course toward the mouth of the underground river.

“We can’t get out that way!” Monk called pessimistically. “The cavern is probably entirely full of water by now.”

“Don’t it stand to reason that is the point nearest the coast?” Doc Savage countered.

They had covered two or three miles when other air-filled, camel-hide rafts appeared on the briny surface behind them. The White Beasts, it seemed, themselves possessed a supply of these ungainly vessels.

The pursuers did not gain. Neither did they fall behind. Time dragged. Paddling the clumsy rafts was a nerve-shattering task. There was nothing mechanical about it; each stroke of the paddles had to be different, or the hides would spin like drunken tops.

Doc, dropping back alongside Monk’s raft, carried on a conversation with Ja.

“How did your people get to this region in the first place?” he asked.

“No one knows that for sure,” she replied. “There is only a legend handed down from my ancestors.”

“What is the legend?”

“It is that countless sinin ago, the river did not flow underground, but through the mountains to the sea. My ancestors came up this river and built the Phantom City, carving it from solid rock - since that was almost as easy as quarrying stone. They dwelt here, mining the white metal, until a day when the river suddenly began to flow underground. After that, none could reach the sea because of the savages who inhabited the mountains and desert.”

This sounded reasonable enough. More than once, colonies established in ancient days had been lost completely to the parent nation through the encroachment of surrounding savage races.

For Monk’s benefit, Doc was translating Ja’s conversation.

“They were here to mine the platinum!” Monk muttered. “Say, Doc, how are we gonna get our share of that platinum?”

“You’d better concentrate on how we’re going to get out of here, alive,” Doc advised him. “Anyway, it belongs to these people.” He waved an arm at the Phantom City dwellers on the rafts ahead of them.

“if you wish it, they will be glad to give it all to you as a reward for saving them from the White Beasts,” Ja offered.

As Doc translated, Monk grinned widely at this. Doc showed no expression - a fact which plainly disappointed the ravishingly pretty whitehaired girl.

The night dragged on interminably. The strange-tasting water was rationed carefully from the camel-skin sacks. Men took turns at using the clumsy paddles.

“Why do we not cross the. marshes and take to the mountains?” Ja wanted to know.

“Our friends behind would be certain to overhaul us!” Doc Savage pointed out to her.

Doc gazed frequently at the shore. The moonlight and the fact that he was viewing the terrain from the great expanse of brine, made it look different. But during the day he had fixed certain landmarks in his mind.

Dawn was not far off when he directed their little flotilla inshore.

Johnny, bony arms wielding a paddle with seemingly tirelessness, perceived their position.

“The submarine sank right ahead of us!” he ejaculated.

With an uncanny precision that came of combined keen memory and excellent observation powers, Doc stopped over the sunken Helldiver. Without a word, he slipped off the camel-skin raft and stroked into the brine.

The sub lay at a depth of slightly more than thirty feet. The main hatch leading to the control room was open, a shadow-stuffed maw. Doc pulled himself within.

A metal cabinet held high-powered rifles. They had not been disturbed. He clamped three of them between his knees and churned up to the surface with them, using his hands.

“These will outrange the little rapid-firer pistols,” he explained to his five friends. “Use them to keep our pursuers at a distance. Try to puncture their inflated camel hides.”

Renny took one of the rifles. He set the telescopic sight carefully; then fired a single shot, not at their foes, but at a distant rock. This was to test the range of the bullets.

He then sighted deliberately at an air-filled camel-skin raft. Next to Doc, Renny was the most accomplished sharpshooter in the group. The rifle whacked violently!

A volley of yells drifted from the distant enemy. Several were soon bobbing about on the salty marsh surface. Renny had punctured their ungainly conveyance.

Four or five more shots caused the whole flotilla to come to a baffled halt. Machine-pistol bullets came skipping across the surface, but the range was too great to permit effective shooting.

DOC SAVAGE was diving again and again to the Helldiver. Each trip, he carried a load of much-needed supplies. Arms and ammunition came first, then canned concentrated food which had not been harmed by the water.

“What’re the chances of raising the sub?” Renny asked.

“Not worth trying,” Doc told him.

“But there should be compressed air in the tanks! We might use it - “

“The compressed air was all wasted by Mohallet’s men in their wild efforts to keep the sub from sinking,” Doc explained.

“How are the batteries?”

“Some have been ruined by the salt water,” Doc told him. “But the greater number of the cells, inclosed in waterproof containers, the air vents of which close automatically to keep out water, are still serviceable.”

“Then if we could get her on top, she’d still run!”

“Right! But it would take powerful lifting cranes and big buoyancy tanks to get her up - equipment we do not have.”

Doc made one more dive. He brought up a large waterproof box.

Renny and the others peered at the container, puzzled. Doc had brought considerable apparatus aboard the Helldiver at the start of the voyage - stuff the use of which they were unfamiliar with. This was one of those items.

Doc vouchsafed no explanation. He placed his box carefully on his own raft.

“Let’s go!” he directed.

It was time they were getting under way. Mohallet’s men and the White Beasts had fanned out in a semicircle, and were seeking to surround them, just out of rifle shot. Some had gone ashore with the idea of sharpshooting from behind sheltering rocks.

Doc set a course for the larger and more rugged of the two islands in the canyon, through which the river ran before diving into its underground channel.

Just before reaching the chasm, Monk abruptly turned his raft shoreward. He landed, dashed into the rocks, and came back with Habeas Corpus. He paddled up with the homely pig perched on the bloated camel hide.

“He was hangin’ around waitin’ for Ham’s kiss!” Monk grinned, indicating the big-eared, spindle-legged porker.

Ham expressed a personal and very explicit opinion of Monk, his idea of humor and pigs in general. Ham rarely swore. But he could use dictionary words and get the same effect.

“What is he saying?” Ja asked Monk on her fingers.

“He’s telling me what a pal I am,” Monk explained in the same fashion.

They reached the island without incident. The sun, a gory ball of heat, was lifting as they landed.