Tom Too promptly stopped. Doc caught the faint glitter of a knife in the pirate king's hand.
"He's going to handle the shark native fashion!" Renny grunted.
Distance hampered their view of what happened next. But they knew enough shark lore to guess. Sharks do not have to turn over to bite an object in the depths, but commonly do so to seize a man swimming on the surface. The pale bellies offer a warning flash,
Tom Too disappeared from sight momentarily. There was a splashing turmoil in the water. Tom Too's knife struck repeatedly.
The pirate leader appeared. He swam for shore with renewed energy.
"He got the shark dag-gone it!" Monk wailed.
TOM Too reached the beach without further incident. He sprinted for the jungle.
Doc's sharp eyes noted something the others missed Tom Too no longer carried his brief case. Evidently he had dropped it in his short fight with the shark.
The plane was burning briskly. Flame ate into the fuselage. A Fourth of July uproar came as heat exploded machine-gun bullets in the craft.
The ship sank suddenly.
Tom Too vanished into the jungle.
Doc and his men continued to bend their paddles.
They reached the spot where the plane had gone down. A score of yards beyond, the shark Tom Too had slain floated near the surface. The water lashed in turmoil about the carcass half a dozen other sharks were devouring it.
"Whoa!" said Doc.
Monk wore in his belt a knife he had picked up somewhere. It was a serpentine-bladed kris.
Doc grasped the knife, clipped the blade between his strong teeth, and dropped off the shaky raft. He disappeared in the depths.
"Jiminy!" Monk gulped. "With all these sharks around, Daniel in the lions' den was a piker!"
They waited anxiously. Bubbles gurgled up from the sunken plane. A minute passed. Sixty feet away, cannibal sharks fought with horrible splashings. Another minute groped into eternity.
Doc did not appear.
On the shore, coarse-voiced tropical birds cried like hideous harpies.
Three clapping shots interrupted the birds. Monk ducked as a bullet made cold air kiss his furry neck, nearly lost his balance on the ramshackle raft, but recovered himself.
Tom Too had fired at them water does not wet the powder in modern pistol cartridges.
Doc's five men sprayed lead at the jungle. There was nothing to show they hit Tom Too. But they kept him from shooting again.
Renny glanced at a waterproof wrist watch. He nearly screamed.
Doc had been beneath the surface a full four minutes!
Ten seconds later Doc's bronze head split the water beside the raft. Doc's bronze hair and metallic skin had a strange quality; it seemed to shed water like the back of a duck; he could immerse himself, and his skin and hair would not seem wet when he reappeared.
Doc's shirt front bulged more than his chest should have made it.
Doc's five men wiped cold sweat off their foreheads. The fact that Doc had remained under water so long was not in itself alarming. They had seen the giant bronze man stay below for incredible intervals. But the sharks made these waters reek death.
"Have any trouble?" Monk asked.
Doc shrugged. "Not much."
At this point a second shark carcass appeared beside the first. The hideous creature had been slain with a single expert knife rip. Monk and the others recognized Doc's handiwork. He had battled the monster under water and dismissed it as "not much."
"Huh!" ejaculated Monk. "What were you doin' way over there? The sunken plane is under us."
"Tom Too had a brief case with him, but dropped it when the shark tackled him," Doc replied. "I dived for it from here, not wanting him to know I was after it."
"You get it?"
The bulge in Doc's shirt front gave answer.
THEY now paddled the raft to shore. Tom Too did not fire at them again a wise move on his part.
"Make for the sampan!" Doc directed.
They sped northward along the beach.
Monk glanced over his shoulder. "Hey lookit!"
Wheeling, the rest saw Tom Too. The master pirate had come out on the beach half a mile to the south. He was running for dear life, headed for the encampment of his yellow cutthroat horde.
"I'm in favor of going after him!" Renny boomed. Apparently it did not occur to him that they might not be able to whip several hundred slant-eyed pirates who had been fighters all their lives.
"The sampan!" Doc said impatiently. "We'd better get it and clear out of here."
They resumed their sprint for the sampan, smashing their way through the jungle growth in a short cut across a little headland and reached the beach in short order.
"Good!" rapped Ham, catching sight of the sampan where Tom Too had beached it. "I was afraid he might have jabbed a hole in the bottom, or something."
Renny pointed at the outboard motor.
"Look!" he roared. "The gasoline has been let out!"
The valve of the fuel tank was located in such a position as to spill the emptying fuel upon the sand, where it was hopelessly lost.
"This puts us in a swell mess!" Monk groaned.
Four hardwood paddles reposed on the sampan floorboards. Doc indicated them. "Grab 'em!"
"We can't escape by paddling," Monk pointed out. "The pirates have speed boats Tom Too will send them after us."
With a mighty shove, Doc sent the sampan into the water.
"We'll get back to the other island!" he declared.
There was no more argument. The sampan surged away from the beach, propelled by lusty paddle strokes.
Ham, between sweeps of his paddle, nodded at the bulging front of Doc's shirt, which held the contents of Tom Too's brief case.
"Do you suppose there's anything worth while in there?" he asked.
"We'll let that slip for a while and examine it later," Doc said, then leveled an arm. "Tom Too didn't lose much time!"
They all followed Doc's gesture. Around the other end of the island, a pair of junks appeared, together with several speed boats. More craft followed junks, sampans, launches, and other boats.
The hardwood paddles bent and creaked as Doc's men increased their pace. Water split away from the sampan bows with a steady, sobbing noise. They were making good speed for the palm-crowned smaller island.
"We'll beat them to the island!" Ham decided aloud.
"Yes and then what?" snorted Monk.
Doc's five men exchanged bleak looks. They were perfectly aware they had never faced greater odds. They were experienced fighting men, and they knew a fight against these hundreds of pirates could be nothing but hopeless.
A corsair machine gun dropped a shower of slugs some hundreds of yards short. The spent bullets continued to drop in the water, coming closer and closer. But the little island was now but a few fathoms distant away from the men.
The rasp of the sampan keel on the beach was a welcome sound.
Chapter 21
SEA CHASE
DOC and his men piled out. A few rifle slugs made chopping noises in the tangled jungle growth. Doc eyed the belts and bulging pockets of his men.
"Got plenty of ammunition?" he questioned.
Monk grinned wryly. "Not as much as I'd like to have. We've got a couple or three hundred rounds apiece. That was about all we could swim with when we left the plane last night."
"Latch the guns into single-shot fire," Doc directed.
Each man flipped a small lever on his compact little machine gun. The weapons now discharged only a single bullet for each pull of the trigger.
Using a sampan paddle as a spade, Doc set to work digging a shallow rifle pit. He located it slightly within the jungle, so he could quit it without being observed.
The others followed his example, saying no word.
Straight toward the beach plunged the pirate boats. The launches, being more speedy, were far in the lead. The pirates had erected small shields of sheet steel in the craft their usual precaution, no doubt, when going into battle.