"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 034 - The Fantastic Island" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

bloody red.

Ham heard a rasped breath behind him and was startled into whirling. It was Monk.

"Red lightnin'," Monk uttered, hanging on against the fetid, sulphurous wind at the deck tip. "That's
funny-lookin', ain't it?"

Again the gory light mushroomed out under the clouds. It was more sustained, brighter this time, and it
showed them things. Off to one side bulked a shore line; but this did not strike them with terror. Pat
called attention to the thing that did.

"Look!" she screamed. "Look! All around us!"

"Hard alee!" Monk squalled. "Engines reversed!"

The fantastic red light went out.

"Did you see?" Ham gasped in the silence that followed. "There must be two dozen ships, big and little,
wrecked all around us."

"And the devil only knows where we are," Monk gulped. "I'm gonna back this boat, turn around, get
outta here an' wait for daylight."

"A whole graveyard of wrecked ships," Pat gasped. "Red lightning that smells of sulphur!"

Pat's voice sounded, it seemed, rather cheerful.

"You always did like trouble, didn't you?" Monk grunted at her.

"And mystery," Pat added. "I eat it up."

There must have been a tide that carried the Seven Seas to one side, or something. They were in reverse,
exactly retracing the course they had been sailing, when it happened.

A curling wave lifted the bow of the Seven Seas high in the water and hurled it down. The yacht
shuddered with a wrenching shock that knocked Monk and Ham sprawling on the wet deck. There was
a nightmare of grinding and scrapings as steel plates were wrenched from the hull by jagged coral.

Caught fast on the submerged reef, the craft did not rise with the next wave. She heeled half over instead,
with a groaning of tortured steel; and the wave washed in an avalanche of water over the deck.

Ham and Monk were battered against the anchor winch. They staggered up, half drowned, to claw their
way toward the bridge.

"Aid Pat, if she needs it," Monk bellowed. "Me, I'm goin' for Habeas Corpus!"

Habeas Corpus was Monk's cherished pet pig. He never went anywhere without the animal, much to
Ham's disgust and frequent infuriation.

A streak of light, blue-white, darted from the Seven Sea's bridge, knifed across the rock-fanged water.