The Polar Treasure

Chapter 12 ICE TRAP

DOC SHRUGGED. He sat down on a convenient pipe. He was not worried. He was armed.

True, Ben O'Gard and his crew probably had guns themselves, by now. The weapons they had thrown overboard so profanely at Doc's request had hardly comprised their entire armament. They were too wily for that.

But Doc had the explosive he always carried in his pair of extra molars. With it, he could speedily blast open the bulkhead.

And once the sub came to the surface, he had simply to unscrew the valve — and he would have the gang at his mercy again.

The electric motors set up a musical vibration. The Helldiver had slanted down steeply in its hurried dive. Now it trimmed level. After a time, it sloped upward perceptibly. There came a jar as it touched the underside of the ice pack.

Other crunching shocks ensued. They were of lesser violence. The submarine was feeling blindly for another spot free of ice. This continued interminably. Open leads seemed to be very scarce.

Doc got up and rapped tentatively on the thick steel bulkhead.

He was cursed. He was told he would be killed if he didn't behave. He was promised all kinds of dire fates.

This didn't worry him much. Danger seldom worried Doc. A telegraph operator in a great relay office becomes accustomed to the uproar of instruments about him. A structural steel worker comes to think nothing of the fact that a single misstep means sudden death.

By the same token, Doc Savage had haunted the trails of those who sought his violent end for so long that he took danger as a matter of course.

More than an hour passed. Doc became impatient.

Finally, the submarine arose to the surface. The stopping of the electric motors and the starting of the oil-burning Diesel engines showed that.

Doc promptly removed the all-important valve.

Through the steel bulkhead, he informed Ben O'Gard what he had done.

He got a surprise. Ben O'Gard gave him the horse laugh.

Doc was puzzled. He had thought he held an ace. But the missing valve seemed to worry his enemies not at all. There was but one explanation.

They had found a snug harbor on the uncharted coast! Doc settled down to await developments. They came twenty minutes later.

There reached his ears a sound like six or seven hard hailstones tapping the submarine hull.

Doc knew what it was.

Machine-gun bullets.

Were his friends starting hostilities? He hoped not. They'd fool around and get themselves shot out of the air. The old seaplane was no battle wagon.

With a jarring bedlam, the Diesel engine sped up. The mad race of the vertical-trunk pistons vibrated the whole submarine. The Helldiver lunged away soggily.

Next instant came a shock which, catching Doc by surprise, piled him against a bulkhead.

The Helldiver had gone aground.

Men yelled. They sounded like chicks cheeping in an incubator. A machine gun cut loose on deck. Another joined it. Their clamor was hollow, like crickets shut up in a can.

This continued for the space of time it would take a man to count to several hundred.

Wham! The sub all but rolled completely over. The plates shrieked. Loose tools jumped about as beans in a shaken box.

Doc picked himself up.

"I'd better hold onto something," he remarked to no one in particular.

A bomb had just exploded in the water near the submarine. Doc shook his head slowly. His friends had no bombs! Ben O'Gard's bellow penetrated the bulkhead. "Come out!" he boomed. "You gotta help us!"

"Go take an ice bath!" Doc suggested.

Ben O'Gard spewed profanity hot enough to melt the steel bulkhead.

"Rust my anchor, matey!" he yelled at last. "You've got the upper hand on us again. We'll do anything you say, only you gotta help us."

"It sounds like you're aground," Doc told him. "My replacing the valve won't help any now."

"T' hell wit' the valve!" roared Ben O'Gard. "Ain't none of us swabs can fly the foldin' seaplane. You gotta take the sky hooker up an' fight off them buzzards that's bombin' us!"

"Who's bombing you?" Doc questioned.

"Keelhaul de Rosa's gang — the dirty deck lice."

DOC DIGESTED this. It was an entirely new development. Since the Helldiver had left New York, there had been nothing to show Keelhaul de Rosa still existed upon the earth. Now the explanation for that was plain.

Keelhaul de Rosa had one of the treasure maps. He had secured a plane and flown to the wreck of the liner Oceanic. And now he was seeking to wipe out his rivals.

"Stand away from the door," Doc ordered. "I'll come out." The dogs securing the steel panel clanked free. Doc swung the panel open. Several of Ben O'Gard's villains faced him. But not a gun was turned in his direction. They were a scared lot.

"Four of me hearties was swept overboard an' drowned by that bomb." Ben O'Gard roared. "The swabs are in Davy Jones's locker."

The thugs split like butter before a hot knife as Doc went through them. A vault, and he was out on deck. He had his valve along.

Ben O'Gard's men were frantically assembling the folding seaplane.

Doc scanned the skies.

"Where's the plane?" he demanded.

"Figure it went back after another load of bombs," boomed Ben O'Gard. "Rust my anchor, matey. We gotta shake a mean leg, or it'll be back 'fore you set sail in the air."

The Helldiver was indeed aground. The bow canted half out of the water. The stern portion of the deck slanted down beneath the surface.

Around about was a glacier-walled cove. Ordinarily, it would have been a snug-enough harbor. But the attack from the air had turned it into a trap.

Doc scrutinized the heavens once more. His strange golden eyes sought everywhere for the shabby plane flown by his friends. There was no sign of it.

Doc juggled the all-important valve. Some of Ben O'Gard's men eyed it enviously. Doc had no idea of surrendering it, though.

"What became of my friends?" he questioned.

Ben O'Gard shrugged his walrus shoulders.

"The last of 'em I saw, they was fightin' Keelhaul de Rosa's sky tub." He leveled an arm which was a cone of beef. "The fracas wandered off down that way."

He was pointing down the glacial coast of the uncharted land.

No line changed on Doc Savage's firm bronze features. But inside, his feelings were far from pleasant. The shabby old seaplane flown by his friends was no fighting craft. An Immelman or a tight loop would pull her wings off.

The tiny folding seaplane was now ready for the air.

"Take 'er off, matey," howled Ben O'Gard. "Rust my — " He fell silent. The drone of a plane had come to their ears. "That's Keelhaul de Rosa comin' back," bawled the walrus. "Hurry, matey. Our lives is in your hands."

"I wish they were," Doc said under his breath. Then, aloud:

"Give me the best machine gun. And throw every other weapon overboard."

"Aw, don't worry about us keepin' our hands offn you from now on,' fawned the walrus. "Why, we'll cut you in on a share of the boodle — "

"Over with the guns," Doc rapped.

There was more squawking. But the motor sound of the approaching plane was like the howl of doom. No argument could have been more persuasive. Falling pistols, rifles, knives, and machine guns whipped the surrounding water into a foam.

Doc waited until the last arm vanished.

Then his mighty bronze form plugged into the tiny seaplane cockpit. The motor purred like a big cat.

He took the air. The all-important valve went with him.

HE WAS none too soon. With a bawl like a banshee spawned by the foul gray haze overhead, Keelhaul de Rosa's plane dived. It opened with a machine gun. The craft had come into the arctic spurred for war. It had a pair of cowl guns, synchronized through the prop.

Every fourth or fifth slug it fired was a phosphorus-burning tracer. The bullets scuffed the water below Doc's fleet little flivver craft. In the green sea, before they were extinguished, the tracers glowed like a streak of scattered sparks.

Cobwebby, gruesome, tracer strings waved before Doc's golden eyes. Phosphorus fumes reeked in his nostrils. Lead gashed a hole in the right-wing bank. The flivver wouldn't stand much of that.

Doc banked quickly. The tiny seaplane was agile as a fly in his master hand.

Twice more, Keelhaul de Rosa's killer craft dived angrily. Its lead missed both times.

Ben O'Gard and his gang now gathered the fruit of all that squawking about giving up their guns, They had delayed Doc almost too long.

Keelhaul de Rosa's plane swooped upon the Helldiver. It released an elongated metal egg. This hatched a choice lump of hell alongside the submarine. Water geysered two hundred feet in the air. A huge wave sprang outward in a circle.

Over heeled the sub, over — over. It writhed. It skewered like a tadpole out of water.

Then it slipped free of the ledge upon which it had been hung.

For a long minute, the Helldiver was lost under the water. Then it came up — and floated.

Doc flung his flivver for the other plane. If size of the craft had been important, the scrap would have been ridiculous. Doc's steed was to the other like a sparrow to a hawk. But size counts little in an air battle.

Doc, however, was handicapped by having to fly his plane and shoot his sub-machine gun by hand at the same time.

He jockeyed in above the enemy. His rapid-firer burred noisily, the breech mechanism spewing a string of smoking empty cartridges.

The other plane jumped in the sky like a thing bitten,

NO SERIOUS damage had been inflicted, however. The two craft sparred wanly. At this, they were about evenly matched.

Keelhaul de Rosa's seaplane was a low-wing, all-metal job of late production. Its two motors were huge and speed-cowled for efficiency. Even the pontoon floats were streamlined in a fashion which made them virtually another pair of small wings.

Only two men occupied the craft.

Neither of these was Keelhaul de Rosa. They had, rather, the wind-burned look of professional airmen of the northland. Probably Keelhaul de Rosa had picked them up to do his flying.

The jockeying for position ended suddenly. A quick flip of Doc's bronze wrist, a gentle pressure from one foot, and the tiny seaplane pounced like a bull pup. It was doubtful if the pair in the big plane understood quite how the maneuver had been managed. But Doc was upon them while the pilot still goggled through the empty sight rings of his cowl rapidfirers.

Doc's small machine gun shimmied and lipped flame. His bullets pushed cabin windows out of the other ship. They tore the goggles off the other pilot.

The big plane did half a wingover, eased into a dizzy slip, and would have collided with Doc's little bus. He evaded it by zooming sharply.

The second man in Keelhaul de Rosa's craft took over the controls.

Once again, the man-made birds skulked each other's sky trails warily. The motors panted and steamed. The evil gray mist squirmed and boiled in the prop wakes.

Doc got in a burst. His lead started colorless streams of liquid stringing from the wings of the other plane. He had opened the fuel tanks in the wings.

In return, he took a lead-whipping that gnawed a ragged area in the fuselage of his little fiivver. After that, the craft flew with a strangely broken-backed feel.

Then fresh trouble loomed. Doc's fuel gauge needle had retreated a lot. It already covered the first two letters of the word "empty." There had been no time to charge the fuel tanks before he took off.

Doc calculated. Fifteen minutes more, and he would have to come down. He'd better finish this sky brawl quickly.

For the second time. Doc's small craft pulled its bewildering pounce of a maneuver. His gun hammered. Lead went home to vital points of the opposing plane. The plane climbed up on its tail and hung hooting at the borealis. It slipped off on a wing tip. It rocked into a tailspin.

It hit a floe hard enough to knock a hole through four feet of pan ice. After that, nothing was left but a wad of tin and wire sticking out of the ice.

Doc slammed his bus back for the cove. He found it in the gray haze.

A disquieting sight met his gaze.

The Helldiver was stealing straight for the open sea — or, rather, the ice-covered sea. All hatches were battened.

Doc's powerful bronze hand closed over the tank valve. He had it in the plane cockpit. If the submarine dived with the tank open, it would never come up.

The sub dived!

TWO MINUTES — three — Doc circled the spot where the Helldiver had gone under the ice pack. Green water boiled. A lot of bubbles came up. Small growlers of ice cavorted like filthy blue animals. And that was all.

Doc's bronze features, remarkably handsome in their rugged masculine way, did not alter expression. He banked away. The tiny folding seaplane climbed. It boomed along at the speed most economical on the fuel.

Doc was hunting his friends.

The outlook was not pleasant. The plane his friends had flown was no match for Keelhaul de Rosa's killer ship. This tiny collapsible crate of Doc's was far more efficient, and Keelhaul de Rosa's bus would have sky-scalped it easily except for Doc's master hand at the controls.

The fog wrapped him around like an odious, ash-colored death shroud. The small engine moaned defiantly. But its life blood, the high-test gas in the tank, ran lower and lower.

Suddenly Doc sighted a human figure below. It was a tiny form. It crawled on all fours, like a white ant in its light-hued fur garments.

Doc dropped his plane to within a score of feet of the ice. The jagged hummocks fanged hungrily at the floats. They seemed to miss them by scant inches.

The crawling human being flashed beneath

It was Victor Vail. He carried a bundle of white silk.

Doc's bronze head gave the barest of nods. He could guess why Victor Vail was down there, carrying the folds of a parachute.

Monk, Renny, Long Tom, Ham. and Johnny — Doc's five iron-nerved, capable friends — had given battle to the sky killer of Keelhaul de Rosa. They had dumped Victor Vail overboard by chute. They had wanted him clear of danger. That meant they knew they were fighting hopeless odds.

It boded ill for Doc's five pals, did that crawling figure of Victor Vail. It meant the five had felt they were going to their death.

Doc flew on. He aimed the noisy snout of his little plane in the direction Victor Vail was crawling. For the violinist had been headed, not for land, but out into the grisly waste of the polar ice pack.

This indicated he had some goal out there.

Doc found that goal in slightly more than a minute-about two miles from where Victor Vail crept.

It was a horrible sight. The mighty bronze man had seen few more ghastly. None that tore at the insides of him like this one did!

A ruptured seaplane float lay on the ice. It was a mass of splinters. Forty yards farther on was the second. Then the ice bore a sprinkling of airplane fragments.

A section of a wing still poured off gruesome yellow smoke.

Gaping, sinister, an open lead in the ice yawned just beyond. Into this had plainly gone engine, fuselage, and the heavier parts of the plane.

To Doc's golden eyes, the whole sickening story was clearly 'written. Tracer bullets had fired the fuel tanks of the shabby seaplane. It had crashed in flames.

The odious green depths of the polar sea was the grave of whatever and whoever had been in the fuselage when the old crate cracked up.

Doc circled slowly.

The engine of his plane gurgled loudly. It coughed.

Then it stopped dead.