_The Crash_
At a few minutes before eight o'clock, Air Mail Pilot Steve Chapman
was enjoying a quiet cigarette while waiting for the mechanics to warm
up the five hundred horses of his mail plane satisfactorily. Halfway
through, he heard, from behind, a quick patter of feet, and, turning,
he observed a figure clad in flannel trousers and sweater. The
cigarette dropped right out of his mouth as he cried:
"Ken! Ken Torrance!"
"Thank God you're here!" said Kenneth Torrance. "I gambled on it.
Steve, I've got to borrow your own personal plane."
"What?" gasped Steve Chapman. "What--what--?"
"Listen, Steve. I haven't been with the whaling company lately; been
resting, down here--secluded. Didn't know that submarine, the _Peary_,
was missing. I just learned. And I know damned well what's happened to
it. I've got to get to it, quick is I can, and I've got to have a
plane."
Steve Chapman said rather faintly:
"But--where was the _Peary_ when they last heard from her?"
"Some twelve hundred miles from the Pole."
"And you want to get there in a plane? From here?"
"Must!"
"Boy, you stand about one chance in twenty!"
"Have to take it. Time's precious, Steve. I've got to stop in at the
Alaska Whaling Company's outpost at Point Christensen, then right on
up. I can't even begin unless I have a plane. You've got to help me on
my one chance of bringing the _Peary's_ men out alive! You'll probably
never see the plane again, Steve, but--"
"To hell with the plane, if you come through with yourself and those
men," said the pilot. "All right, kid, I don't get it all, but I'm
playing with you. You're taking my own ship."
He led Ken to a hangar wherein stood a trim five-passenger amphibian;
and very soon that amphibian was roaring out her deep-throated song of
power on the line, itching for the air, and Steve Chapman was shouting
a few last words up to the muffled figure in the enclosed control
cockpit.
"Fuel'll last around forty hours," he finished. "You'll find two
hundred per, easy, and twenty-five hours should take you clear to
Point Christensen. I put gun and maps in the right pocket; food in
that flap behind you. Go to it, Ken!"
Ken Torrance gripped the hand outstretched to his and held it tight.
He could say nothing, could only nod--this was a real friend. He gave
the ship the gun.
Her mighty Diesel bellowed, lashed the air down and under; the
amphibian spun her retractable wheels over the straight hard ground
until they lifted lightly and tilted upward in a slow climb for
altitude. With fiery streams from the exhaust lashing her flanks, she
faded into the darkness to the north.
"Well," murmured Steve Chapman, "I've got her instalments left,
anyway!" And he grinned and turned to the mail.
* * * * *
That night passed slowly by; and the next day; and all through night
and day the steady roar of beating cylinders hung in Kenneth
Torrance's ears. At last came Point Christensen and a descent; sleep
and then quick, decisive action; and again the amphibian rose, heavily
loaded now, and droned on toward the ice and the cold bleak skies of
the far north. On, ever on, until Point Barrow, Alaska's northernmost
spur, was left behind to the east, and the world was one of drifting
ice on gray water. Muscles cramped, mind dulled by the everlasting
roar, head aching and weary, Ken held the amphibian to her steady
course, until a sudden wind shook her momentarily from it.
A rising wind. The skies were ugly. And then he remembered that the
men at Point Christensen had warned him of a storm that was brewing.
They'd told him that he was heading into disaster; and their
surprised, rather fearful faces appeared before him again, as he had
seen them just before taking off, after he had told them where he was
going.
Of course they'd thought him crazy. He had brought the amphibian down
in the little harbor off the whaling company's base, gone ashore and
greeted his old friends. There was only a handful of men stationed
there; the _Narwhal_ was being overhauled in a shipyard at San
Francisco, and it wasn't the season for surface whalers. They knew
that he, Ken, had been put in a sanitarium; all of them had heard his
wild story about sealmen. But he concocted a plausible yarn to account
for his arrival, and they had fed him and given him a berth in the
bunkhouse for the night.
For the night! Ken Torrance grinned as he recalled the scene. In the
middle of the night he had risen, quickly awakened four of the
sleeping men, and with his gun forced them to take a torpoon from the
outpost's storehouse and put it inside the amphibian's passenger
compartment.
It was robbery, and of course they'd thought him insane, but they
didn't dare cross him. He had told them cheerfully he was going after
the _Peary_, and that if they wanted the torpoon back they were to
direct the searching planes to keep their eyes on the place where the
submarine was last heard from....
* * * * *
Ken came back to the present abruptly as the plane lurched. The wind
was getting nasty. At least he did not have much farther to go; an
hour's flying time would take him to his goal, where he must descend
into the water to continue his search. His search! Had it been, he
wondered, a useless one from the start? Had the submarine's crew been
killed before he'd even read of her disappearance? If the sealmen got
them, would they destroy them immediately?
"I doubt it," Ken muttered to himself. "They'd be kept prisoners in
one of those mounds, like I was. That is, if they haven't killed any
of the creatures. It hangs on that!"
An hour's time, he had reckoned; but it was more than an hour. For
soon the world was blotted out by a howling dervish of wind and driven
snow that time and time again snatched the amphibian from Ken's
control and hurled it high, or threw it down like a toy toward the
inferno of sea and ice he knew lay beneath. He fought for altitude,
for direction, pitched from side to side, tumbled forward and back,
gaining a few hundred feet only to feel them plucked breathtakingly
out from under him as the screaming wind played with him.
Now and again he snatched a glance at the torpoon behind. The
gleaming, twelve-foot, cigar-shaped craft, with its directional
rudders, propeller, vision-plate and nitro-shell gun lay safely
secured in the passenger compartment, a familiar and reassuring sight
to Ken, who, as first torpooner of the _Narwhal_, had worked one for
years in the chase for killer whales. Soon, it seemed, he would have
to depend on it for his life.
For all the Diesel's power, it was not enough to cope with the dead
weight of ice which was forming over the plane's wings and fuselage.
He could not keep the altimeter up. However he fought, Ken saw that
finger drop down, down--up a trifle, quivering as the racked plane
quivered--and then down and down some more.
He saw that the plane was doomed. He would have to abandon it--in the
torpoon--if he could.
He was some thirty miles from his objective. The sea beneath would be
half hidden under ragged, drifting floes. In fair weather he could
have chosen a landing space of clear water, but now he could not
choose. The altitude dial said that the water was three hundred feet
beneath, and rapidly rising nearer.
A margin of seconds in which to prepare! Ken locked the controls and
scrambled back into the passenger compartment. Steadying himself on
the bucking floor, he opened the torpoon's entrance port and slid in;
quickly he locked the port and strapped the inner body harness around
him; and then he waited.
Now it was all chance. If the plane crashed into clear water, he was
safe; but if she hit ice.... He put that thought from him.
The locked controls held the amphibian for perhaps thirty seconds.
Then with a scream the storm-giant took her. A mad up-current of wind
hurled her high, whirled her dizzily, toyed with her--and then she
spun and dove. Down, down, down; down with a speed so wild Ken grew
faint; down through the core of a maelstrom of snow till she crashed.
Kenneth Torrance knew a sudden shaking impact; for an instant there
was uncertainty; and then came all-pervading quiet....