"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.
Prows scooping foam, they approached to within two hundred yards. Then a hundred! Their speed did not slacken. A machine gun in the bow of one began to cough bullets through a slit in a metal shield. The lead hissed and screamed and tore in the jungle about Doc and his men.
"Let the first one land!" Doc commanded.
An instant later the leading speed boat hit the beach. It was traveling fast enough to skid high and dry out of the water. The slant-eyed killers, braced for the impact though they were, nevertheless slammed against thwarts and bulkheads.
"Now!" Doc clipped. "Get 'em in the legs and arms!"
His gun spat. The weapons of his men rapped a multiplied echo. They were crack marksmen, these men. They took their time and planted bullets accurately.
Two yellow men fell out of the launch almost together, bit in the legs. Pain made them squall noisily. Others cackled in agony as slugs, placed with uncanny precision, took them in the hands and arms.
There was psychology behind Doc's command not to kill. One wounded Oriental, yelling bloody murder, could do more to spread fear among his fellows than three or four killed instantly.
Bedlam seized the launch occupants. They could not even see Doc and his men. A tight group, they sought to charge. Those in the lead went down, legs drilled.
Howling, the gang ran back and tried to shove the launch into the water. They were not sufficient in number for the job. In remorseless succession, these also fell.
"Now — the other launches!" Doc ordered.
The volley he and his men fired sounded ragged, scattered. But hardly a bullet went wild.
The nearer launches, four in number, could not hold up before shooting like this. One careened about madly, the helmsman pawing a drilled shoulder, and barely missed crashing another craft. Then all four sheered off, the occupants expressing their opinion of Doc and his men in assorted tongues.
They were going to await the arrival of the heavier junks and sampans.
Monk, flattened in the pit he had scooped, asked Doc:
"What now?"
Doc's pit was in the jungle to the right. No answer came from the spot. Puzzled, Monk squirmed up to look.
Doc was gone. He had vanished silently the instant the fight was over.
NO more than a minute passed before Doc returned. He bore a bulky object — the army-type portable radio transmitter and receiver which Tom Too had left in the island cabin.
Doc gave a short gesture of command. The men plunged out of the jungle and leaped for the speed boat stranded on the beach.
A wounded pirate shot at them, but he was wounded in the arm, and missed. Doc fired a single bullet, and the corsair shrieked as the lead mangled his hand. The other yellow men fled, dragging themselves along or running furiously, depending on where they were hit.
Doc and his five aids laid hands on the launch, strained, and ran it back into the surf.
Out to sea, the pirates suddenly saw the purpose of Doc's strategy in permitting the most speedy craft to land. He was seizing the fast little vessel!
The slant-eyed buccaneers headed for the island again.
Machine guns cackled from their boats, rifles whacked spitefully.
Doc shoved the nose of their own launch around whi]e his men sprang aboard. Renny worked over the motor. The propellers had not been damaged by the forcible beaching.
Lead clanged on the sheet-steel shield, chewed splinters off the gunwales, and, hitting in the water near by, dashed spray over them.
Doc and the others returned the fire with slow precision while Renny fought the motor. The engine caught with a blubbery roar. The light hull surged forward, the propellers flinging water up behind the stern.
At the tiller, Doc sent the boat parallel to the beach. In a moment they were stern-on to their enemies, rendering the steel bullet shield useless.
Doc wrenched the shield from its mounting. "Put it up in the stern."
Monk did that job. He howled wrathfully as lead hit the metal plate, transferring a sting to his hands. Renny lunged to help him, then grunted loudly and clapped a hand to the upper part of his left arm. He had been hit. He tore off the sleeve of his shirt with a single wrench.
"Missed the bone an inch!" he decided.
"We're going to make it!" Ham yelled. He was using the tip of his sword cane to jam a wadded handkerchief into a bullet hole in the launch hull near the water line.
Doc put the rudder hard over. The launch veered to the right — and was suddenly sheltered by the tip of the island. Bullets no longer came near them.
Setting a course toward the distant coast of one of the larger islands of the Luzon Union, Doc held the throttle wide. The boat, traveling at tremendous speed, jarred violently as it slammed across the tops of the choppy waves.