A man now got an idea.
"Close that door!" he screamed. "Close the door of the control department!"
They did not understand what he meant. Either that, or they did not act soon enough to suit the man who had the idea. He started plunging forward to close the door himself.
Doc burst another gasoline tin with his fist, got the tin free, and threw it. He made a good throw. The five-gallon gas tin hit squarely in the control compartment.
A center bracket between the two seats held the throttles, and other controls. The tin impaled itself on this, on the throttles. Gasoline splashed the pilot, soaked him from the waist down. He half stood up. His face was horrified, for a moment as distorted as the face of a gargoyle. He knew the high-test gas fumes would explode.
A two-hundred-pound bomb would not take the plane apart more thoroughly than the gas fumes, if a spark got to them.
"Don"t shoot!" he screeched. "Don"t shoot! Don"t shoot! Don"t shoot!"
All through the violence that followed, he screamed the same two words over and over in a continuous screeching, seeming never to stop to take a breath.
The gas tin hitting the throttles had jammed one wide open and one shut. For practical purposes, the plane now had one wide-open motor and one dead one. It was not a ship which flew well under such a condition. It would fly, but it took the babying of a good pilot.
This pilot was not in a state of mind to baby anything.
The plane did a little waltzing. Alarmed, the pilot yanked and pounded at the wedged gasoline can. The plane nosed up, up, up, as he was preoccupied. The ship went into the peak of a power stall.
All that was necessary now was for the pilot to push the stick forward to get the nose of the plane down, get flying speed. But he was excited. He put his feet down hard on the rudders to hold them steady, and one foot slipped off. The result was that the pressure on the other pedal put on hard right rudder at the stalling point, or a moment before.
The big plane snap-rolled.
The snap-roll was not a complete one. The ship did not go over and recover. It got its belly to the sky and stayed there, as the pilot tramped on the rudder pedal he had lost and steadied the stick.
Then the pilot fell out of the seat on his head, for the safety belt had not been fastened. He hit hard and headfirst on what was normally the roof of the pilot compartment, a roof made of transparent plastic set in a metal framing. The plastic split and let him through to his shoulders and he hung there, more scared than he had ever been before in his life.
THE big plane was not built for flying upside down. That is, its characteristics were such that it would notmaintain itself in flight in that position.
Doc Savage was now crouched on the ceiling of the plane, which for the moment had become the floor.
What had been the cabin floor was composed mostly of hatches covering the storage s.p.a.ce in the hull below. These were carelessly fastened, or not fastened at all. They came open, and the storage s.p.a.ce contents sprayed the cabin, fell on the tumbled litter of men on the floor.
Out of the storage s.p.a.ce had come suitcases, packages, two cases of liquor-paper-wrapped bottles of liquor. Some of the liquor broke and added its smell to the gas fumes and its gla.s.s fragments to the general danger. There was a portable radio, rifles, revolvers, cartridges, a bundle of machetes, clothing, cameras, binoculars, a portable typewriter and parachutes. At least a dozen parachutes, all new and all neatly wrapped and sacked, still with the factory labels: Bird Parachute Co.
There was no shooting.
There was not even much fighting.
Because now the big plane balked up into the sky and did a stall, and fell off into the natural result, which was a tight tailspin, harmless, but confusing.
It was like piling all the a.s.sorted objects that were now loose in the plane into a tin can, and then shaking the can and turning it around rapidly.
Doc got into the parachute straps, hanging to a cabin seat. It was a good feeling to snap the last buckle, the chest buckle. It was like finding a nightmare was just a nightmare.
Doc looked out of the cabin windows. His primary interest now was what was below.
It wasn"t water, and that was a great relief.
The pilot neutralized his controls and the big plane came out of the spin. The pilot immediately looked back over his shoulder, much interested in the mess in the cabin. He looked back almost too long, so that the ship was in a screaming dangerous dive.
He had the sense to get the stick back slowly, wisely. The plane has not yet been built which cannot be flown loose from its wings in such a maneuver.
Doc got a small grenade out of his clothing. He held it up menacingly, and made his voice big and threatening.
"Get the parachutes on!" he shouted. "I am going to set the plane afire!"
THEY did not for a moment doubt his intentions. That was good, because he meant what he said.
There was an island below. He wanted everybody down there. On the ground, he could hunt them down one at a time.
It was too much to expect the plane to stay up indefinitely without it occurring to somebody that they could get rid of the gasoline fumes simply by knocking out the cabin windows, or opening them. Ten or fifteen seconds with the windows open, and shooting would be safe in the cabin.
They fought for parachutes. There were enough of them to go around, a couple to spare. But they madea fighting mess of distributing them.
Two men were unconscious, and n.o.body paid attention to them.
Doc said, "Put parachutes on the unconscious men."
They did that, watching the grenade in his hand as if it was a horned devil.
Doc indicated a burlap-covered coil of rope, rather small, which had been in the stuff stored under the floor.
"Cut two lengths of rope," he ordered. "Tie one end to the ripcord rings of their parachutes. Tie the other ends to a seat bracket in the plane."
They did so.
"Now," Doc said, "open the hatch and push them out."
Out went the two unconscious men.
Into the plane cabin through the open hatch, air came roaring.
"h.e.l.l, h.e.l.l, h.e.l.l!" a man bawled, suddenly. "We"re dumb! h.e.l.l, we"re dumb! Smash the windows! The wind will blow the gas out."
Doc tossed his grenade into the gasoline. It was a flash-grenade, a rare type which was more or less experimental. The idea was that it made light, incredible quant.i.ties of light that did the optical organs no good. It was something like looking at a welding arc. For a minute after it, if you looked at it squarely, you were thoroughly blinded.
It took a great deal of heat to make such a light. The flash ignited the gasoline. With a great sound, a big laugh that did not quite come off, the rear of the cabin was full of flame. Then the whole cabin filled.
Doc went out into s.p.a.ce, feeling for the parachute rip-cord ring.
Chapter X. GLOOM ON HAPPY BONES.
THE plane was not high when he jumped, not over three thousand feet. So he hauled the rip cord out of its slide immediately, and the parachute bloomed without mishap. He had made many "chute jumps, and none of them had ever been a casual matter. The nervous perspiration on his forehead felt cold in the rushing air.
He looked down and found that the island below was about two miles long and nowhere more than a mile wide. It looked to be, at one point, almost a mile high, but that was improbable.
But the highest point of the island, the cone of the volcano which had formed it, was all of three thousand, for it was already level with his descending parachute. An island of that size, with that height, looked strange.
It was strange as a stone thumb sticking up out of the wonderfully blue Caribbean Sea, a thumb hairy with green jungle except where the naked stone showed like bare, calloused spots.
Overhead, the burning plane was spilling black smoke and men and parachutes as it boomed through thesky.
The other seaplane was buzzing along above it like a mate-bird that was worried, but helpless over its companion.
The presence of a third plane surprised Doc, caught his instant interest. Monk, Renny, Ham, or Johnny and Stony Smith-he thought instantly. But that was wrong. They would have a plane he would recognize. This was not one of their ships.
This was a two-motored cabin seaplane, civilian, rather crisp and new-looking in the brilliant, tropical sunlight.
It dawned on Doc that he had seen the plane before. But that had been at night, at a Washington airport.
It was Hannah"s plane-the ship in which she had flown southward from Washington.
Hannah nosed her big plane down in the sky for speed. She headed close to the blazing plane, arced past it, came past the parachutes, still diving, past Doc.
It was Hannah, all right. He saw her watching him, saw her arm jump up in a quick gesture intended to show him that she recognized him.
AFTER this, Doc had no time for anything but maneuvering the parachute. The menace of fanged stone and sheer cliffs was threatening him.
The theory of parachute manipulation, when put into words, is simple enough to be a little insulting. You merely pull down the shrouds on one side, spilling air from the other side, and causing the "chute to slide through the sky. Putting the thing in practice can be aggravating, however, and if care is not exercised, something to stand the hair on end. Particularly when the "chutist is close to the ground.
Doc tried furiously to reach the rim of a sheer cliff that dropped suddenly, from a height of three or four hundred feet, into the sea.
He didn"t make it. Trees overhung the cliff edge. He smashed through those, missed the cliff by a dozen feet, and fell rapidly.
He was free of the "chute harness. He had gotten out of that, hoping to get hold of a solid tree limb projecting from the cliff, if possible. He hung with an arm hooked through the parachute harness.
The "chute caught on the boughs. It ripped, had a hole torn in it the size of a tall man. It fell faster, nearly a hundred feet, then blew against a snag and hung.
The snag projected about a dozen feet from the cliff face. It was a gnarled tree, lignum vitae, the tree with wood so tough that pulley blocks are made from it that are better than metal. It had grown out from the cranny in the cliff face, died, turned white with age.
Doc looked at it, at the cliff face.
There was no way, absolutely no way of climbing up or down the cliff from the snag.
It was about a hundred-foot drop to the foot of the cliff.
THERE was a breeze of wind, a fresh, brisk sweep of the trade wind that swept this part of the Caribbean. It puffed and billowed the parachute folds, made them like a blooming, changing white flower.
Doc looked downward thoughtfully. The sea was against the foot of the cliff. Apparently he could drop, and land in it, and the water obviously was deep. But he knew that any kind of a judgment from height was deceptive. He might drop and hit halfway down the cliff slope and be killed.
Out to sea, there was a smacking sound. The burning plane had hit. The trail of smoke it had left was from sky to sea like an irregular, dark snake. White spray knocked up by the ship subsided slowly, and there was one wing sticking up like a shark fin. The wing rolled and disappeared.
Some of the parachuting plane crew were already down in the sea. Others were close to the water. All would land in the sea.
The surviving seaplane was circling slowly, as if dazed.
Hannah had banked back sharply, was flying past the cliff face. She waved at Doc. He waved back.
The heaviest object in Doc"s pockets was a smoke grenade, his only one. He compared its weight with the rip-cord ring and cable, which he still retained. The ring and cable was heavier.
He dropped cable and ring, watched it fall. It hit at the edge of the cliff, hardly in the water.
Cold sweat came out on Doc again. If he had dropped, and it certainly looked safe enough to drop, he would have hit solid stone a hundred feet down.
He began to swing, like a pendulum, his body in toward the cliff, then out. He did it carefully, watching the parachute to make sure it was not tearing free of the snag. It held. The silk was good.
Finally his feet touched the cliff face, and he could give himself more momentum. The next time in against the cliff, he gave the backswing everything he had. At the far end of the outswing, he let go and hurtled toward the sea.
All through the hundred-foot drop, he fought to keep his body falling feet-first. And at the bottom, he tensed himself and protected the back of his head and his nostrils with his arms.
(A hundred-foot dive is not fabulous. Probably everyone who reads this has seen circus high divers perform, and there have been high divers who worked regularly from a height of more than a hundred feet.) The water seemed almost solid when he hit it. But nothing broke, or even hurt very bad.
Hannah, bringing her plane in for a landing, was the first thing he saw when he got to the surface. She landed expertly, on a sea that was not very rough, and taxied in toward him.
She yanked open a hatch, called, "Are you hurt? Get aboard."
Doc swam to her plane, caught a handling cleat, swung up and into the cabin.
"You turn up in unexpected places," Hannah said. "I wasn"t expecting you." She gestured at the cliff.
"Where"d you get the practice, in a circus?"
Doc looked upward. The seaplane was diving for them."Get this thing in the air," he said. "They are going to try to machine gun us."
THE very first bullet fired by the diving seaplane must have stopped their motor. Anyway, they heard no lead hit the plane before the motor stopped. It was the port motor.
Hannah was not unduly excited.
"Bless their lucky souls," she said.
Bullets were hitting the plane.