David Flanagan is back with another amazing adventure with Uncle Pete and TM, this time in the arctic, searching for a lost polar bear. It’s another cracker sure to get young readers flying through its pages! Enjoy the extract below.

Uncle Pete and the Polar Bear Rescue
By David C. Flanagan
Published by Little Door Books

‘What’s that in the sky up ahead?’ TM suddenly shouted to Uncle Pete, pointing from her seat in the plane. ‘It looks like smoke!’

It was smoke, the thickest, blackest, nastiest looking stuff you can imagine. There was a trail of it snaking up through the cold, clear Arctic air. The smoke hung in the blue sky, like someone had smeared soot across it.

Uncle Pete turned the plane to try and avoid the black smoke, and TM coughed and coughed when they flew through the horrible dark clouds of it.

‘Where’s it coming from?’ spluttered Uncle Pete.

TM peered over the side of the plane, trying to see where the smoke began.

‘Look!’ she yelled to Uncle Pete. ‘A ship! It’s coming from a ship!’

Sure enough, far below the plane, there was an enormous dark ship moving fast through the ocean. Icebergs just bounced off the front of the ship, so it was obviously very strong.

The ship had ten huge funnels, all belching out black smoke into the air. There were big cranes along its deck (which is what the floors on a ship are called), and some other mysterious objects that were all covered up. Uncle Pete felt a bit nervous about going closer, but he had to find out what had happened to Berg’s family. And he wanted to see what was under those covers on the ship’s deck.

‘Let’s take a look!’ he yelled to TM and Berg. ‘Hold tight!’

Trying to avoid the clouds of black smoke billowing from the funnels, Uncle Pete dived the plane towards the ship, roaring around it in a big circle.

The ship had a name, painted on the back in big white letters. It was called THE HUNTER.

‘It looks very suspicious indeed!’ shouted Uncle Pete to TM and Berg. ‘I’m going to fly a bit closer and have another look at what’s on the deck!’

Secretly, he wondered if Berg’s family were being hidden under those covers, but he didn’t want to say anything to his friends just yet.

Uncle Pete turned the plane back towards the ship and flew much nearer to it so he could see if there were any clues about what it was doing.

Berg’s nose twitched as they got closer to the ship.

‘I can smell my family!’ he yelled. ‘I can definitely smell them! They’re on that horrible looking ship!’

Just then, three angry looking men burst out of a big metal door on the ship, shouting and pointing up at Uncle Pete’s plane. They didn’t look very happy, or very friendly. The men ran to the mysterious shapes on the deck and pulled off the covers. Uncle Pete gulped when he saw they’d revealed some big guns.

The men started turning the guns towards Uncle Pete’s plane and then… BANG, BANG, BANG! The guns shot at them!

Now, lots of dangerous things had happened to Uncle Pete on his explorer adventures, but he’d NEVER been shot at before. He was completely shocked! Uncle Pete was always peaceful and kind, and hated when people shot animals, or each other.

‘Uh-oh!’ shouted Uncle Pete, ducking down in his seat. ‘TM! Berg! Get your heads down!’

Uncle Pete gritted his teeth and flicked the plane from side to side, trying to avoid all the bullets being fired at them from the ship.

TM was absolutely furious. “How dare you!” she yelled at the men on the ship, though they couldn’t hear her. Then she had an idea.

‘Berg!’ she yelled. ‘Grab some tins of beans and let them have it!’

Berg opened one of their rucksacks and pulled out six tins of beans. Uncle Pete turned and twisted the little plane towards the men on the ship and, just as they passed over the blazing guns, Berg threw the tins of beans over the side.

The tins flew through the air, clonked two of the men on the head and knocked them out. They fell in a heap on the ship’s deck. But this just made the third man angrier, and he spun his big gun around and began blasting away at Uncle Pete’s plane again.

‘This is too dangerous, even for us!’ Uncle Pete said to TM. ‘I think we’ll need to go and get help!’

Just as he was talking to TM, a bullet from a ship’s gun tore a hole through one of the wings of the plane. Uncle Pete managed to keep it flying, but he now definitely thought it was time to get out of there.

‘HA!’ shouted TM over the side of the plane. ‘It’ll take more than that to stop us!’

But then another bullet hit the engine with a loud THUD. The engine spluttered and stopped – stardust poured out of the hole in the engine making a long sparkly trail across the sky.

‘Uh, oh!’ said the three friends all at once.

The two men who’d been knocked out by Berg’s bean tin bombs were getting up rubbing their heads. They cheered when they saw the stardust trail from the damaged engine, and the little plane beginning to dive towards the ocean.

‘We’re going to have to jump out!’ yelled Uncle Pete, hoping he’d packed his parachute and not his dirty washing, just as he’d done by mistake on his first adventure with TM. He’d made sure he’d put a parachute in the back for Berg and he’d made a tiny little one for TM, too, just in case they got into a bad situation. And this was definitely a bad situation.

Uncle Pete and the Polar Bear Rescue by David C. Flanagan is published by Little Door Books, priced £6.99.