CHAPTER XIX
HOSTILE COASTS
An hour from that time, the air-liner was drifting sideways at lowaltitudes, hardly five hundred feet above the waves. A sad spectacleshe made, her wreckage gilded by the infinite splendors of the sun nowlowering toward the horizon. Her helicopters were droning with all theforce that could be flung into them from the crippled power-plant. Herpropellers--some charred to mere stumps on their shafts--stood starklymotionless.
Oddly awry she hung, driven slowly eastward by the wind. Her rudderwas burned clean off; her stern, warped, reeking with white fumes thatdrifted on the late afternoon air told of the fury that had blazedabout her. Flames no longer roared away; but the teeth of theirconsuming rage had bitten deep. Where the aft observation pit hadbeen, now only a twisted net of metal-work remained, with all theplate-glass melted and cracked away. The body of Gorlitz, trappedthere, had mercifully fallen into the sea. That ghastly thing, at anyrate, no longer remained.
Four Legionaries were in the pilot-house: the Master, Bohannan,Leclair, and "Captain Alden." For the most part, they held silence.There was little for them to say. At length the major spoke.
"Still sagging down, eh?" he commented, his eyes on the needle of thealtimeter. "Some situation! Two men dead and others injured. Enginescrippled, propellers the same, and two floats so damaged we couldn'tstay on the surface if we came down. Well, by God!"
Leclair looked very grim.
"I regret only," said he in broken English, "that the stowaway escapedus. Ah, _la belle execution_, if we had him now!"
The Master, at the starboard window, kept silence. No one sat at thewheel. Of what use could it have been? The Master was looking farto eastward, now with the naked eye, now sweeping the prospect withbinoculars. He was studying the African coast, clearly in sight as along, whitish line of sand with a whiter collar of foamy surf, fifteenmiles away.
A few gulls had begun to show--strange, small gulls, yellow-beakedand swift. Off to northward, a native dhow was beating down-wind withfull-bellied lateen sail, with matting over its hatches. Heat wasbeginning to grow intense, for no longer was _Nissr_ making a galethat cooled; no longer was she at high, cold levels. Africa, thetropics, had suddenly become real; and the sudden contrast oppressedthem all.
Through the shimmering, quivering air, an arid pallor extended up theeastern sky; a pale, milky illumination, dull-white over the desert,that told of the furnace into which _Nissr_ was drifting--if indeedshe could survive till she reached land. The glasses showed tawnyreaches of sand, back a little from the coast; and beyond these, lowhills, or rather rolling dunes, lay empurpled by vibrant heat-hazes.
"It won't be much like navigating over that Hell-spot, three or fourmiles in the air," muttered Bohannan. He looked infinitely depressed.The way he gnawed at his red mustache showed how misadventure hadraveled his nerve.
No one answered him. Leclair lighted a cigarette, and silentlysquinted at Africa with eyes long inured to the sun of that land offlame. Alden, at the other window, kept silence, too. That maskedface could express no emotion; but something in the sag of the woman'sshoulders, the droop of her head, showed how profound and intense washer suffering.
"Faith, are we going to make it, chief?" asked the major, impatiently.Not his the temperament that can wait in silence. He made a singularfigure as he lounged there at the pilot-house window, huge elbowson the sill. One hand was wrapped in bandages, well saturated withcroton-oil. Chars and burns on his uniform showed where blazing petrolfrom the final explosion had spattered him.
His eyes, like the Master's, were bloodshot, inflamed. Part of his redcrop of hair had been singed off, and all his eyelashes were gone,as well as half his bushy red brows. But the ugly set of his jaw, thesavage gleam of his eyes showed that no physical pain was depressinghim. His only trouble was the thought that perhaps the expedition ofthe Flying Legion had ended before it had really begun.
"What chance, sir?" he insisted. "It's damned bad, according to my wayof thinking."
"What you think and what you say won't have any weight with thisproblem of aerial flotation," the Master curtly retorted. "If we makeland, we make it, that's all, sir." He relapsed into silence. Leclairmuttered, in Arabic--his words audible only to himself--an ancientIslamic proverb: "Allah knows best, and time will show!" Then, after amoment's pause, the single word: "Kismet!"
Silence again, in which the Master's brain reviewed the stirringincidents of the past hour and a half--how the stowaway had evadedDr. Lombardo's vigilance and (thoroughly familiar with every detailof _Nissr_) had succeeded in making his way to the aft port fuel-tank,from which he had probably drained petrol through a pet-cock andthereafter set it afire; how the miscreant had then scrambled up theaft companion-ladder, to shoot down the Master himself; and how onlya horrible, nightmare fight against the flames had saved even thisshattered wreck of the air-liner.
It had all been Kloof's fault, of course, and Lombardo's. Thosetwo had permitted this disaster to befall, and--yes, they should bepunished, later. But how? The Master's mind attacked this problem.Each of the four Legionaries in the pilot-house was busy with his ownthoughts.
On and on toward the approaching shores of Africa drifted the woundedEagle of the Sky, making no headway save such as the west windgave her. Steadily the needle of the altimeter kept falling. Thehigh-pitched drone of the helicopters told that the crippled engineswere doing their best; but even that best was not quite enough.
Like a tired creature of the air, the liner lagged, she sank. Beforehalf the distance had been covered to that gleaming beach, hardly sixhundred feet lay between the lower gallery of _Nissr_ and the long,white-toothed waves that, slavering, hungered for her gigantic bodyand the despairing crew she bore.
Suddenly the Master spoke into the engine-room telephone.
"Can you do any better?" exclaimed the chief. "This is not enough!"
"We're doing our best, sir," came the voice of Frazier, now in charge.
"If you can possibly strain a point, in some way, and wring a littlemore power out of the remaining engines--"
"We're straining them beyond the limit now, sir."
The Master fell silent, pondering. His eyes sought the droppingneedle. Then the light of decision filled his eyes. A smile came tohis face, where the deep gash made by the splinter of glass had beenpatched up with collodion and cotton. He plugged in on another line,by the touch of a button.
"Simonds! Is that you?"
"Yes, sir," answered the quartermaster, in charge of all the stores.
"Have you jettisoned everything?"
"All we can spare, sir. All but the absolute minimum of food andwater."
"Overboard with them all!"
"But, sir--"
"And drop the body of Auchincloss, too. This is no time forsentiment!"
"But--"
"My order, sir!"
Five minutes later, cases, boxes, bales, water-tanks, began spinningfrom open ports and down through the trap-door in the lower gallery.Then followed the seared corpse of Auchincloss, a good man who haddied in harness, fighting to the end. Those to whom the duty wasassigned of giving his metal-weighted body sea burial turned awaytheir eyes, so that they might not see that final plunge. Butthe sound of the body striking the waves rocketed up to them withsickening distinctness.
Lightened a little, _Nissr_ seemed to rally for a few minutes. Thealtimeter needle ceased its drop, trembled and even rose _.275_degrees.
"God! If we only had an ounce more power!" burst out the major, hismouth mumbling the loose ends of that flamboyant mustache. The Masterremained quite impassive, and made no answer. Bohannan reddened,feeling that the chief's silence had been another rebuff. And on,on drifted _Nissr_, askew, up-canted, with the pitiless sunlightof approaching evening in every detail revealing--as it slanted in,almost level, over the far-heaving infinitudes of the Atlantic--theravages wrought by flame.
Bohannan could not long be silent. The exuberance of his nature burstforth with a half-defi
ant:
"If _I_ were in charge, which I'm not, I'd stop those damnedhelicopters, let her down, turn what power we've got into theremaining propellers, and taxi ashore!"
"And probably sink, or break up in the surf, on the beach, there!"curtly rejoined the Master. "Ah! _What_?"
His binoculars checked their sweep along the coast, which in itsabsolute barrenness looked a place of death for whatever might havelife there.
"You see something, _mon capitaine?_" asked Leclair, blowing smokefrom his cigarette. "Allow me also to look! Where is it?"
"Just to north of that gash--that wady, or gully, making down to thebeach. You see it, eh?"
Slowly the French ace swept the glasses along the surf-foamed fringesof that desolation. Across the lenses no tree flung its green promiseof shade. No house, no hut was visible. Not even a patch of grasscould be discerned. The African coast lay stretched out in ivorynakedness, clean, bare, swept and garnished by simooms, by cruel heat,by the beatings of surf eternal.
Back of it extended an iron hinterland, savage with desert spaces ofsun-baked, wrinkled earth and sand here and there leprously mottledwith white patches of salt and with what the Arabs call _sabkhah_,or sheets of gypsum. The setting sun painted all this horror ofdesolation with strange rose and orange hues, with umbers and palepurples that for a moment reminded the Master of the sunset he hadwitnessed from the windows of _Niss'rosh_, the night his great planhad come to him. Only eight days ago, that night had been; it seemedeight years!
Carefully Leclair observed this savage landscape, over which abrilliant sky, of luminous indigo and lilac, was bending to the vagueedge of the world. Serious though the situation was, the Frenchmancould not repress a thought of the untamed beauty of that scene--aland long familiar to him, in the days when he had flown down thesecoasts on punitive expeditions against the rebellious Beni Harb clansof the Ahl Bayt, or People of the Black Tents. Africa, once more seenunder such unexpected circumstances, roused his blood as he peered atthe crude intensity of it, the splendid blaze of its seared nakednessunder the blood-red sun-ball now dropping to rest.
All at once his glass stopped its sweep.
"Smoke, my Captain!" he exclaimed. "See, it curls aloft like a lady'sringlet. And--beyond the wady--"
"Ah, you see them, too?"
The major's glass, held unsteadily in his unbandaged hand, was nowfixed on the indicated spot, as was "Captain Alden's."
"I see them," the Master answered. "And the green flag--the flag ofthe Prophet--"
"The flag, _oui, mon capitaine!_ There are many men, but--"
"But what, Lieutenant?"
"Ah, do you not see? No horses. No camels. That means their oasis isnot far. That means they are not traveling. This is no nomadic movingof the Ahl Bayt. No, no, my Captain. It is--"
"Well, what?"
"A war-party. What you in your language call the--the receptioncommittee, _n'est-ce pas?_ Ah, yes, the reception committee."
"And the guests?" demanded the major.
"The guests are all the members of the Flying Legion!" answered theFrenchman, with another draw at his indispensable cigarette.
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