“What about the rest of the gang?”
“The local police arrested them as they were trying to board a freighter at Valdez. It’s a clean sweep.”
“Wow!” Jerry was awake now, his eyes as big and shiny as tin plates. “That’s what I call action.” Grinning, he added, “We sure could have used a little bit of that kind of action yesterday. Where were all the cops and G-men then?”
“In an operation like this one,” Dr. Steele explained, “they had to stay way out on the fringes until the last moment. That was a risk we knew we’d have to take from the start if we hoped to spring a trap on this gang of ruthless saboteurs. If we had an army of bodyguards dogging our footsteps, they never would have been lured in.”
“Lured in?” Sandy was perplexed. “You mean we were sort of decoys for the spies?”
“In a way,” Dr. Steele admitted. “I couldn’t tell you that, even yesterday. But now it’s officially okay to let you in on it.”
“But what about the rocket fuel Professor Crowell was working on? I thought we came up to look for some rare element.”
“That of course was our primary reason for coming to Alaska. And of course we’ll continue to search for Element X. But when the enemy agents began to hound us so persistently, we saw an opportunity to make a double killing.”
Jerry stretched. “Only we came awful close to being the ones who were killed.”
“We had a narrow scrape,” Dr. Steele agreed. “It was ingenious of them to take back the plane to Cordova after they ambushed us at the mine. Our people were holding back, of course, and it really threw them off the trail. As far as they knew, we had checked back into the city and then disappeared into thin air. With a bit more luck the gang might have smuggled us out of the country.”