As the boys started up the stairs, the men fell behind and lowered their voices. “How do you like that!” Jerry declared. “Russ Parker is in with these characters.”
“I can hardly believe it,” Sandy said miserably. “Anyhow, at least I know Dad is okay—so far,” he amended.
“No conversation, please,” Kruger ordered sharply.
“Parker, you sneak,” Sandy said bitterly, “you won’t get away with this. The authorities know my dad and his friends are missing. And when we don’t show back at the airfield there’ll be even more search planes combing this area.”
The pilot began to laugh. “No one knows your father and the others are missing. No one at all. By now the hotel has received a telegram from Skagway saying that Professor Crowell and his party returned there on urgent business and that someone will pick up their luggage and pay their hotel bill.”
Sandy was confused. “But—but what about the people at the airport? You said there were search planes out looking for the missing plane.”
“There is no missing plane. Yesterday morning four men rented a plane. Last evening the plane returned—with four men. There was another crew on duty at the airport. They couldn’t suspect that the passengers were four different men.”
Kruger seemed to enjoy the boys’ discomfort. “By the time the American authorities discover that any of you are missing you will be well out of reach in Siberia.”
“Across that narrow stretch of water we were talking about,” Parker taunted them. “The Bering Strait.”
The man with the gun took them through a series of tunnels that slanted up steeply through the mountainside. The ascent was severe, and every ten minutes or so they would stop to rest. When they emerged into the open again, Sandy saw that they were at the site of the main diggings. The terrain was pockmarked with shafts and tunnels. Rusty train tracks disappeared into the gloomy mine tunnels, and abandoned dump cars tilted up through the snow drifts about the entrances. Far below, the main building of the Kennecott mine squatted at the foot of the mountain; from this perspective it reminded Sandy of a miniature cardboard house sitting on a floor of cotton beneath a Christmas tree. They followed a path around a bend to the mouth of a huge tunnel. To one side of it a flaking, rusted cable car rocked gently from a metal cable that was equally rusted. It scraped and screeched monotonously at the slightest gust of wind.