The Polar Treasure

Chapter 11 POLAR PERIL

ONE HOUR had passed. In the haze-soaked sky hung a dark spot. This spot emitted a loud droning. The droning increased in volume.

The spot became a seaplane.

It was a two-motored job, not the latest and speediest type of plane, and somewhat shabby. But an angel would not have looked better to the four men watching it from the iceberg.

The ship sloped down in the fog. It circled. It lowered. The floats scraped a long white chalk mark of foam on the open lead in the ice pack. Then they settled. The plane taxied in to the rim of the berg.

Monk and Renny stood on the floats. With acrobatic leaps, they bounded to the ice.

Probably no more hearty reunion ever occurred than took place there in the cold shadow of the north pole.

Unnoticed at first, a man clambered out and sat on the cabin of the plane.

Doc Savage was the first to glimpse him.

"Victor Vail!" he called in surprise.

The famous violinist smiled at Doc. He tried to speak, but could find no words to express the depth of his feeling.

Finally, Victor Vail pointed at his own eyes. It was a simple gesture. But its meaning was unbounded.

Victor Vail now had eyes which were entirely normal. So deep was his gratitude to this giant bronze man that he could not put his emotion into coherent sentences.

"I sure thought I was rid of the sight of your ugly mug," Ham told Monk happily. "What happened?"

"The dang submarine submerged while we were keeping watch on deck," Monk explained in his mild way. "We were washed off. We swam like polar bears. I'll bet we swam ten miles. Talk about cold We happened to have some of that chemical concoction I fixed up to keep a man warm, or we'd have frozen stiff. Anyway, we finally found an iceberg big enough to roost on."

"And we roosted on it until Victor Vail came along and took us off," Renny put in, his vast voice rumbling over the ice pack like thunder.

Doc Savage eyed Victor Vail. The violinist was alone in the plane. Surely, he had not flown into the arctic wastes alone?

Victor Vail sensed his puzzlement.

"I hired this plane and a pilot to overhaul you," he ex plained. "You may have wondered why I have been so interested in your exact position, and the course you intended to follow. The reason was because I intended to join you."

"But why?" Doc questioned.

"My wife and my infant daughter, Roxey," Victor Vail said quietly. "I wanted to satisfy myself as to their — fate."

LONG TOM now busied himself taking down the portable radio outfit, It had served its purpose well, for it had guided the plane to this iceberg.

"Where is the pilot Victor Vail hired to fly him?" Doc asked.

"The monkey got cold feet!" Renny grinned. "Looking at all these icebergs got his goat. He refused to go on. So we took him back south to a little settlement on the coast of Greenland, bought his plane for twice what it is worth, and left him."

"That accounts for our not finding you," Doc decided.

Long Tom stored the last of the radio equipment into its container.

"You haven't told us how you happened to be marooned here," Monk grunted.

So Doc explained. "Captain McCluskey is Ben O'Gard," he concluded.

Victor Vail made a gesture of regret.

"I could not describe Ben O'Gard to you," he murmured. "I had no eyes to see him at the time I was in contact with him."

The famous violinist was now seized again with emotion. In halting words, he sought to express his gratitude to big bronze Doc Savage for the return of his vision.

"Any debt of gratitude you owed me is already paid in full!" Doc assured him. "You have saved me and my friends from almost certain death. In the winter, when the ice pack is frozen solid, we might have reached civilization. But as it was, we were in a death trap."

"McCluskey and Ben O'Gard are the same guy!" Renny ruminated. He popped his enormous fists together They were so hard it was a wonder sparks did not fly. "I'd like to have another chance at that walrus! I'll bet the chump wouldn't lick me the second time!"

"You an' me both, pal!" Monk said with deceptive gentleness. "Dibs on first whack at 'im when we meet again!"

Long Tom had been delving in Doc's bundle. Now he gave a bark of surprise.

"Hey, what's this jigger?" he demanded.

He held up an oddly shaped blob of metal. It weighed quite a number of pounds.

"That," Doc explained softly, "is something I took off the submarine before we came away on our walrus hunt. It's a valve from one of the submerging tanks."

Long Tom grinned widely. He sensed that Doc had pulled a fast one.

"Furthermore," Doc continued, "Monk's chemical which melts the ice is all exhausted from the containers in the hull of the sub. There's material for more of the stuff aboard, but the Helldiver crew don't know how to mix it."

"You mean the gang can't take the submarine beneath the surface without this valve?" Long Tom demanded.

"Exactly," Doc replied. "They will realize they'd never come up if they did. The craft would be flooded. Too, they haven't the chemical to melt themselves out of a jam. The Helldiver cannot escape from this arctic ice pack without submerging to pass under solidly frozen floes."

"Then we've still got the upper hand on the gang!" Monk chortled.

THE SPIRITS of the adventurous group now soared. They boarded the seaplane. Old though the craft might be, it was amply large to accommodate all of them. Doc himself handled the controls.

The shabby buzzard of a plane seemed to take a drink out of the Fountain of Youth, or whatever rejuvenates decrepit seaplanes. It wiggled its tail like a fledgling. With a skipping lunge, it took the air.

"The Helldiver cannot have sailed far," Doc remarked.

Long Tom, Ham, and Johnny were taking stock of the plane fittings. There was an emergency outfit for arctic travel, including pemmican and concentrated fruit juices intended to combat scurvy.

There were also parachutes.

"They may come in handy," Long Tom grinned. "From what I've seen of this ice pack, a man sometimes can go many a mile without finding enough open water to land a plane."

"Suppose you birds use binoculars on what's below us," Doc suggested mildly. "Finding the submarine in this fog is going to be a job."

"You said it," agreed Renny. "We'd never have found you on that iceberg if it hadn't been for the radio compass with which this plane is equipped."

Long Tom hastily seated himself before the radio compass. He twirled the dials, and cranked the gear which turned the loop ae"rial of the compass. Then he growled disgustedly.

"They're not operating the radio on the submarine," he declared. "Finding them would be a pipe if they were."

It was much colder in the air. They shivered in spite of their fur garments. Such warmth as there was in this frigid waste seemed to come from the water.

Doc's great voice suddenly reached every ear in the plane. He spoke but one word.

"Land!"

Several intent looks were required before the others saw what Doc's sharp gaze had discerned.

Land it was, right enough. But it looked more like a vast iceberg. Only occasional rocky peaks projecting from the glacial mass identified it as land.

"No map shows this land!" declared Johnny. "It can't be very great in area."

"What we're interested in is the fact that the liner Oceanic is aground on it somewhere," Doc informed him.

Victor Vail peered eagerly through the cabin windows. He had spent terrible weeks somewhere on that bleak terrain below. It held the secret of the fate of his wife and daughter, Roxey. Yet this was the first time he had ever actually seen it. The sight seemed to depress him. He shuddered.

"No one could live down there — more than fifteen years," he choked.

In Victor Vail's heart had reposed a desperate hope that he might find his loved ones alive. This now faded.

"There's the Helldiver!" Doc said abruptly.

The others discovered it a moment later.

"Holy cow!" exploded Renny. "The ice is about to crush the submarine!"

BEN O'GARD and his villains were trapped! They had nosed the Helldiver into an open lead in the ice pack, close inshore. Excitement over the nearness of their objective must have made them reckless.

The ice floe had closed behind them. Slowly, inexorably, it now squeezed toward the sub. The bergs, a pale and revolting blue in the haze, crept in like the frozen fangs of a vast monster. No more than a score of feet of water lay open on either side of the sharp-backed steel cigar of an underseas boat.

Ben O'Gard and his thugs crowded the deck. They saw the seaplane. They waved frantically.

"I do believe they're glad to see us!" Monk snorted grimly. "We oughta sail around up here and watch 'em get squashed."

"There might be some pleasure in that," Doc admitted. "But we need that submarine to take the treasure home. There's too much of it to fly back by plane."

Monk shrugged. "How can we help 'em? There's not enough open water to land the plane."

"Take the controls," Doc Savage told Renny.

Renny remonstrated: "Hey — what on — "

Then he made a leap for the controls. Doc had deserted them. Renny banked the plane in a circle. Like all of Doc's five friends, he was an excellent pilot. Doc's teaching had made accomplished airmen out of them. Doc seemed able to impact a share of his own genius to those whom he taught.

Doc now snugged a parachute harness about his powerful frame. He grasped the valve which was all-important to the safety of the submarine.

Before the others could voice an objection, Doc shoved open the cabin door. He dived through.

The white silk of the parachute came out of the back pack like a puff of pale smoke. Doc was lowered to the ice near the distressed Helldiver.

Ben O'Gard and his crew held guns. They made threatening gestures. Doc displayed the valve. This was the magic wand that quieted the villains.

"Throw your weapons overboard!" Doc commanded.

For this order, he was roundly cursed. Ben O'Gard waxed especially eloquent. He must have gathered swear words from most of the dives of the world. He swore in six distinct languages, not counting pidgin English.

But the guns went overboard.

DOC SAVAGE now sprinted forward. The ice had closed in perceptibly. But more than a score of feet still separated the Helldiver from the remorseless blue jaws.

The surface of the floe was slippery. The leap to the submarine was prodigious. But from the ease with which Doc made it, he might have been gifted with invisible wings.

More than one gasp of awe escaped from the gullets of the Helldiver villains as they witnessed the great leap. They recoiled from the mighty bronze man. They still remembered what a child their huge walrus of a leader had been in those bronze hands.

One thug even backed away so hastily he fell overboard. He squealed like a rat in the icy water until he was hauled back on deck.

Not a minute could be wasted. Doc hardly touched the steel deck before he was gliding through the intricate insides of the submarine.

Doc worked swiftly at replacing the valve.

Ben O'Gard's men flocked around him like children. They already had the deck hatches closed in readiness.

Even Ben O'Gard himself came fawning up with a wrench to assist in the work. But Doc waved him aside. His bronze fingers were more speedy than any wrench — and they could tighten a tap just about as snugly.

"All clear!" Doc called at last. "Fill the main tanks!"

The crew flocked to station. The electric motors started. With a windy gurgle that was nothing if not joyful, the Helldiver eased down out of the fearsome blue jaws of ice.

Doc watched the valve for a moment. Satisfied it was not going to leak, he turned away.

At that instant, the steel door of the compartment in which he crouched clanged shut. The dogs which secured it rattled fast.

He was imprisoned!