Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 158 - Five Fathoms Dead

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FIVE FATHOMS DEAD
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page formatted 2004 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I
? Chapter II
? Chapter III
? Chapter IV
? Chapter V
? Chapter VI
? Chapter VII
? Chapter VIII
? Chapter IX
? Chapter X
? Chapter XI
? Chapter XII
? Chapter XIII
Originally published in Doc Savage Magazine April 1946
It's a long time since the days of Treasure Island, since the days when men marauded the seas and flew
the Jolly Roger instead of national flags. But that doesn't mean that piracy is dead . . . suddenly it flares
up again . . . but it's streamlined piracy now, and it requires the attention of Doc Savage—of course!
Who else could cope with a mysterious band of modern brigands who used the high seas as their
thoroughfare? And even Doc Savage had plenty of trouble finding out who the chief was . . . the man
who called himself Cavu . . . not to mention a very unappetizing character who gave orders with his fists
and whom men called Whitey . . .
FIVE FATHOMS DEAD has all the spark of old-time pirate stories plus the modern spark of a typical
Doc Savage yarn. We think you'll like it. . . . Read it and let us know.
Chapter I
THE telescope was of the type known as a spotting 'scope. They are manufactured for use on rifle
ranges to locate the holes the bullets make in the targets. This one had a magnification factor of 40X.
Powerful. Usually they have a power of about 20X.
For fifteen minutes, now, the man they were calling Whitey had been using the telescope. He used it
patiently, intently, his lips wearing the fierce twist of a lynx waiting for a rabbit to venture within springing
reach. With a telescope so powerful, any motion is a serious matter, for the objective will quickly jump
out of the field of view; hence he'd made a rest for the telescope out of two bricks and a bit of fieldstone.
Presently the bushes parted nearby, a white face protruded, and said, “There's a cop coming.”
“How close?”
“Pretty damn close!”
“He pay particular attention to you?”
“No. No, I don't think so.”
“It's a wonder he didn't,” the big man they called Whitey said bitterly. “You couldn't look more scared if
you were playing in a Boris Karloff movie. Wipe that wild look off your puss. Here, have a sandwich.”
Ostensibly, and for the benefit of anybody whose curiosity might be easy on the trigger, they were
picnicking. This was March, late March, actually a bit early for a picnic. But today the sun was out
brightly, spraying the green grass and the trees, which hadn't leafed out yet to any extent, with plenty of
warm glory.
Here on the hill, the highest hill around about, it was balmy and bright, and there was just enough breeze
to kick away the smell of the seashore, which was a mudflat below them. The place and the weather
were all right for a picnic. The picnic baskets looked all right, and there was a raincoat in case it rained
and a blanket for them to sit on.
The man they knew as Whitey handed the other man a ham sandwich, then he tossed the raincoat over
the telescope, leaned back casually and selected a sandwich for himself.
The cop, old, grizzled, apple-cheeked, looked in on them. “Nice day, huh?” he said. He whacked the
bushes with his stick.
“Sure.”
“Enjoying yourselves?”
“Sure.”
The cop's eyes were moving continually, touching everything. Old, wise, farmed out on this placid park
beat the way an old horse is put out to grass, he was alert, hoped he would see some situation that
needed a policeman, just so he could defeat boredom. He was not suspicious particularly. He was just
looking around.
“They don't like it if you scatter a lot of papers around,” he said.
“We won't.”
“Seen anything of a dog? Little girl lost one.”
“What kind of a dog?”
“Black one, short legs, long hair. Scotty, I reckon.”
“Haven't seen it.”
“Let me know if you do.”
“Sure.”
“So long.” The old cop hit the bushes with his nightstick again. He went away.
THE man known as Whitey grinned sardonically. He popped the rest of the ham sandwich in his mouth,
chewed slowly. He was very big, but the middle of him looked flabby and his shoulders slouched, and he
carried his mouth loosely. His skin was just skin color, neither dark nor light, and his hair was just hair,
also neither dark nor light. His eyes were the only really unusual thing about him, and they were rather
shocking, for they were a pale gray—bone-colored—and he seemed to keep them closed or partly
closed a good deal of the time. He wore brown sport clothes.
The other man gasped, “You think he's wise?”
The other man was named Eli Stanley. He was medium-sized and dressed in grays and would have been
colorless except for a violent green necktie.
Whitey laughed. “Don't be silly.” His laugh was as hard as two stones knocking together.
“Why'd he poke his nose in here?”
“Because he's a cop.”
“Well, I dunno—”
“Because he's also an old cop and nothing ever happens on his beat and he wishes it would.”
“But—”
“Forget it. Wipe that look off your face. Have a pickle.” Whitey lifted the raincoat with which he had
covered the telescope. The telescope had shifted its position slightly and, lying down to look again, he
carefully changed it until it again pointed at the submarine in the anchorage westward of the cluster of
brick buildings of the base. He eyed the submarine for some time.
“They're fueling,” he remarked, “for the whole trip.”
“How can you tell?”
He looked annoyed. “The size of the fuel lines, the length of time since a man turned on the valves. It's
very simple.” He frowned at the other man, added, “Eli, I hope you prove to be a better man on assaying
gold and evaluating jewels than I begin to suspect.”
Eli scowled. “Have I said I knew anything about a submarine? If I did, I wouldn't know anything about
an ex-Nazi submarine.” Eli had his jaw shoved out. But he pulled it in presently, and then he looked a
little frightened for his safety. “Not that I'm squawking, you understand,” he said. He was afraid of this
man Whitey.
Whitey acknowledged the other's nervousness with a slight, and fierce grin. He said, “Let's go. I've
learned what I wanted to know about the submarine—they're putting to sea with full fuel tanks.” He
began packing the telescope in the picnic basket.
Eli watched him. They are all, Eli was thinking, wary of this Whitey.
THEY went to one of the better hotels in town. The National Household Specialties Company had a
branch office on the fifth floor, a bedroom, two sitting rooms, one of which had formerly been a
bedroom, and an inner office for private business. The National Household Specialties Company was
Whitey, plus eleven men. They were selling household electrical appliances—vacuum cleaners, electric
mixers, refrigerators, home deep-freeze units, irons, anything electrical—door to door. They had paid
their license fees. They were perfectly legal. If anyone should care to investigate the concern a bit farther,
they would find that the home office in New York occupied a fairly impressive, but not too expensive,
suite of offices in a midtown building, and, although the firm was expanding since the war it was not a
mushroom affair. Nor was the firm a new one. It had been in existence some twenty-five years. It would
have taken more digging, however, to unearth the fact that not more than a month ago the concern had
changed hands.
The business of specialty selling from house to house was one which gave the salesman a logical excuse
for getting around almost anywhere.
Colton, a short fat man, sold deep-freeze units, home size. He looked like a salesman; they all looked
like salesmen.
Colton came in about four o'clock. He reported in the inner room. He smelled of liquor and his eyes
were too bright.
He said, “This kid Flinch, this kid in the Navy—I got him a little tight. Nothing in the way of equipment
has been taken off the sub. The sub put in to a South American port after the war ended, and the crew,
the Nazi crew, was interned right aboard. They've been aboard most of the time since, except that
they're interned ashore in barracks when the sub is in port. There was some delay because of the
diplomatic red tape before the U-boat was turned over to the U.S. Navy, and the Nazi crew was still
kept aboard. The idea is that the Nazi crew is to teach U.S. Navy specialists anything new they know
about submarine warfare—if anything.”
Colton sounded like a salesman of the door-to-door species, as well as looking the part. As a matter of
fact, he had received intensive training in the art for two weeks.
Colton continued, “The sub is going to be taken around through the Canal to the West Coast. To one of
the sub bases on the West Coast. There, the Nazi crew is going to teach the Navy specialists what they
know, before they're shipped back to Germany.”
Whitey, listening to this, could have been asleep. The lids were lowered over his strangely bone-colored
eyes.
“Original equipment is all aboard?”
“Yes.”
“Never been touched?”
“Untouched.”
“What about torpedoes?”
“Still aboard.”
“Shells for the guns?”
“On board, too.”
“What about the airplanes?”
“Two airplanes,” Colton corrected. “They're both on board in flyable condition.”
“Okay. That's all.” Whitey didn't seem to awaken.
Colton went out. He met Eli Stanley in the outer room, and they went downstairs and had a drink. “Sell
any vacuum cleaners?” Colton asked ironically when they were riding down in the elevators.
“Three,” Eli said. “Then me and the boss went on a picnic in the park. Not a bad guy, the boss.”
Colton laughed. Eli didn't mean it about the boss being a great guy, and Colton didn't mean the laugh.
Over whiskies in the hotel bar, they agreed that Whitey was a so-and-so, and hell on wheels.
“But, as long as we're tying into a thing like this, I'm glad he is,” Eli said.
WHITEY transacted more business. He took reports from Hiller and Ward. Hiller sold, ostensibly,
vacuum cleaners, as did Eli. Hiller grinned slyly and said, “Mrs. Goss is talkative. Her husband, Ensign
Goss, is sailing at eight o'clock tonight, she tells me.”
Whitey scowled. “You make a date?”
“Certainly not.”
“Why not?”
“I make a date. I don't show up. The submarine her husband's on disappears. Okay, she's liable to think
of the two in connection, give it to the cops, and there you are.”
Whitey's nod was barely perceptible, but approving. “That's using your head,” he said. “So the sub sails
at eight tonight. Okay. Get an early dinner. Be ready to move about six-thirty.”
“The crew going to move out of town?”
“Certainly the crew isn't going to move out of town. Not for a few days.”
Ward was a sleepy southerner with a voice which sounded as if there was sand in his throat. He was
chewing on a long, almost-black cigar which was unlighted. He said, “I don't like that damned Colorado
Jones. I not only don't like him; I can't take much more of him.”
“Yeah?”
“I don't take that stuff I tell you—”
“What about the supplies?”
“They're all right.”
“Aboard the Dancing Lady?”
“That's right. And that Colorado Jones, I can't take. So help me, I'm gonna smear him.”
“Never mind Colorado Jones. I'll handle Colorado Jones. Is there plenty of fuel aboard? How about the
guns? How about the gas?”
“All taken care of.”
“Good. Eat an early dinner. We go aboard about six-thirty. Pass the word along. Six-thirty.”
Ward nodded. He said, somewhat maliciously, “I don't notice that Colorado Jones jumping when you
speak to him, either.”
Whitey's eyes seemed to close completely, his voice grew lazy, and he asked, “Think I'm not able to
handle the situation?”
Ward thought about it for a moment. He looked at Whitey, considered Whitey's tone, the lazy way he
had spoken. Ward began to get pale.
“I never said that,” he muttered, and fled.
Chapter II
THE yacht Dancing Lady was a yacht by conversion rather than birth, having been constructed as a PT
boat during the war, later sold as surplus, and converted into a fairly comfortable, and certainly speedy,
private craft. In her vitals still reposed the original PT boat power-plant, a gas-devouring set of monsters
which few private owners could afford to keep operating. But she was yachty-looking. She had a coat of
glistening white, some mahogany and chrome had been applied here and there, and the interior was done
in fairly luxurious shades of blue. At six o'clock, two men came aboard with a few cases of beer. They
remained aboard. Presently others came with some food, some fishing equipment. Everyone remained
aboard. Some came empty-handed, and didn't leave.
Whitey, the last to arrive, tilted a satisfied eye at the descending sun.
“Nice,” he remarked. He indicated clouds which were gathering in the sky. “Going to be dark enough to
satisfy everybody.”
He went into the cabin. He told Colorado Jones, “Cast off. Let's get going.”
“Got some drinks to mix,” Colorado Jones said briefly, and moved on.
The man they called Whitey—he signed the name of Clarence Spencer to the company payroll checks,
but that, everyone felt sure, probably wasn't his name—moved sleepily, but snakily, and was suddenly
standing in front of Colorado Jones.
“Beg pardon?” he said.
“Huh?”
“Beg pardon; I didn't understand you—or did I?”
Colorado Jones rolled his lips inward slightly. He was big, six feet four, and built wide where giants are
built wide. His fists were enormous, and scarred as if they had hit things. After his lips had rolled in, his
shoulders crawled up a little and bunched, as if getting ready to jump, and he said, “I said I had some
drinks to—”
The end of his speech was a report, dull and full of force. Whitey had hit him. Colorado Jones walked
backward a few feet and lay down, rather awkwardly, on the cabin floor. He said, “Why, you hit me!”
His speech was perfectly clear and lucid. He got up, addressed the other with his fists, a boxer's stance.
There was some movement, a little fast for the eye, and Colorado Jones lay down again, the full length of
him this time. The whites of his eyes showed, and all of his teeth that would show from drawn-back lips.
Tense, silent, swift, the way people come to a fight, heads appeared in the doors, faces at the windows.
Not a word was said. But they were interested; each face was as intent in expression as the face of a
surgeon making first cut.
“That's twice,” said Colorado Jones. His voice was a trifle thick. “Let's see if it's a habit.” His words
stuck together.
He started to get up. Whitey kicked him in the face. The kick was not gentle, sporting, nor did it seem
necessary. Whitey lifted a foot casually and stamped down on Colorado Jones' stomach. He stamped
again twice more, then watched the victim roll over and, bowing his back like an ill dog, become sick.
He said, when the other was silent, sweating and gasping, “I think the drinks can wait, don't you?”
Colorado Jones didn't say anything.
“Get us under way,” Whitey said. “Then clean up your mess.”
Jones didn't speak and didn't move.
Whitey kicked him where his pants were tight, hard enough to roll him half over, asked, “Something
wrong with your ears?”
Colorado Jones crawled toward the deck. Hoarsely, he said, “Get the engine going. Cast off the
spring-lines.”
In the background, Eli nudged Colton.
“What do you think?” Eli whispered. “What do you think now?”
The Dancing Lady was fast. Leaving the harbor, she lifted her bow four or five feet above the water and
knocked up sheets of spray that sprang outward like gull wings, sometimes thirty or forty feet long. Out
beyond the breakwater and the sea buoy, when she hit the outside chop, the steersman needed a safety
belt to stay in his seat.
“Slow her down,” Whitey said. “Set the course about ninety degrees. Hold it for twenty minutes, then
head out to sea until you lose the mainland.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Ward, who was steering.
Whitey laughed. “You're no sailor, so cut out the aye, aye stuff.”
“Okay.”
Colorado Jones crawled into the lounge. He crawled carefully, laboriously, on hands and knees, eyes
fixed on the floor as if he wished to be very certain where he was going. Without saying anything, without
looking up, he crawled aft. He was going to one of the little cabins, to a bunk. He passed from view.
Ward said, “I wonder if he's ruptured?”
Whitey asked casually, “Make any difference to you?”
“Not me,” Ward said hastily. He looked frightened.
“There's a time to be sassy, if it's your nature to be sassy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Also a time not to be.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Slow her down some more. Fifteen knots is fast enough.”
“Yes, sir.”
Without much humor—the way he did it was an insult—Whitey patted Ward on top of the head. “Keep
saying 'yes, sir' and you'll get ahead,” he said. “That's one way to do it.”
He went below.
Ward's lips curled fiercely. This guy, he thought, is going to be bad. The way he is starting off, nobody is
going to be able to get along with him. Ward thought of some expressive profanity, which he rolled
around his tongue, but under his breath. . . . Give me a chance to fix that big guy's clock, and I will, he
thought. Just gimme the chance. I hope to God I get the chance.
Whitey looked into the lounge. It was not a large room, and the occupants were sitting around, not
looking too happy, most of them trying to register unconcern, as if taking a Nazi submarine away from
the United States Navy was a little job they tossed off every day.
“Colton,” Whitey said.
“Yeah?” Colton didn't jump, but he seemed to want to.
“Get that radar outfit set up.”
“Is it dark enough?”
“Get it set up.”
Rage, a dark current, deepened the color of Colton's face, made his eyes shine. But he stood up and left.
Whitey moved on. He was very big in the cabin. The size of him, the power of him, his ferocity—they
had not realized quite what a nasty fellow he was until they had seen him demonstrate on Colorado
Jones—left an unpleasant aura in the cabin. They all felt this, but nobody spoke of it.
Colorado Jones had crawled into his bunk. Not entirely in. One leg he hadn't managed to get quite in.
But he dragged a pail to the side of the bunk, and was hanging his face over it. He was as silent as if
unconscious.
Whitey closed the door.
Loudly, grimly, he said, “Think you learned anything?”
The other rolled one eye up sickly at him and said, almost as loudly, “They don't do it like that in
Colorado.”
“Did you think this was Colorado?”
Colorado Jones didn't answer. He did, though, lift his head. He grinned. He said—with lips only; he
made no sound—and grinned as he spoke, “I think we did all right.”
Whitey watched his lips, seemed to read them, and said, “The idea is to get them to hating me enough to
doublecross them with the other outfit if they get a chance.”
He used his lips, alone, also.
Colorado Jones nodded.
Quite loudly, he said, “Okay, this isn't Colorado.”
“You willing to let it go at that?” Also loudly.
“I guess so.”
“If you change your mind, let me know.”
“I will.”
THE sun left, and drew after it a monster of blackness that took the sea and held it in its warm belly.
Everything was still, limpid, damp, clammy. Far in the east a little lightning licked the clouds with red
tongues, but there was no sound from it, not this far away. Presently the breeze began to blow from the
land to the sea; during the day it had blown the opposite way, from sea to land, because the sun had
heated the land and the air had been heated in turn and expanded and risen, but now the sea was the
warmer, and the air usually moves toward warm areas.
The converted PT boat ran silently over the dark sea like a cat with its claws sheathed. It was showing
lights. There would be trouble with the coast guard if it was caught running without lights. But folds of
cheesecloth had been masked over the lenses of green and red side-lights and white stern-light, so that
they could not be seen more than a mile away.
Whitey worked with the radio loop. He took bearings, drew lines on the chart.
“Okay,” he said. “We're off the submarine base about twenty miles.” He glanced at his watch.
“Eight-five. The sub should be coming out presently.”
He moved aft. He passed orders.
“Every man have some tear gas handy. You will know how to use it?”
They knew how. If they didn't, they wouldn't have admitted it, because they had been instructed carefully
on it.
“Have your masks handy. Don't wear them unless someone has to use tear gas. Whoever uses it first,
give warning. Yell out, Freddie fell overboard! That's the signal. Everyone got it?”
They had it.
“Okay, now the poison gas. A last resort. If some of them barricades themselves in one of the
compartments, we'll use it. Not otherwise. . . . And get this! I use the poison gas myself. Nobody else.
摘要：

FIVEFATHOMSDEADADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispageformatted2004BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI?ChapterII?ChapterIII?ChapterIV?ChapterV?ChapterVI?ChapterVII?ChapterVIII?ChapterIX?ChapterX?ChapterXI?ChapterXII?ChapterXIIIOriginallypublishedinDocSavageMagazineApril1946        ...

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