by Van Powell
CHAPTER XIII
WAR MANEUVERS
Intent on getting their mail pouch to the airport in record time, theeyes of Don, Garry and Chick, in the Dragonfly, were peering forwardand downward to locate the wind-cone, get wind direction and save everyprecious second even during the approach to the runway.
Unexpected, startling, disconcerting, there came, not a hundred feet infront of the nose, the roaring hiss of a rocket rising to burst, in abrilliant, eye-stunning flash of vivid white just ahead.
Don instinctively side-slipped.
The flash, coming without warning, upset his self-control, made himthink that he might be plunging his chums into some unseen danger. Tospeed into that area of still blazing fire was unthinkable.
Don's side-slip got the ship away fifty feet: then he caught the wings,brought the ship to its forward, level flight.
Roaring upward, a second messenger of terror, with its blazing tail,seemed to be coming straight under the right wing. Garry, seeing it,screamed a warning into the helmet communication tube.
"Don--one's coming--bank left!"
Don kicked rudder, moving the stick to tip the wings. He gunned up, inthe bank.
The ship swung, almost on wingtip.
Again almost ahead of the new swing, came that terror from below.
Don saw it. He skidded out of the turn by giving excess rudder, caughtthe skid, and swiftly adjusted stick and bar to get on a level keel.
His quick wit told him that they were almost exactly at the altitudewhere those deadly fireworks were bursting.
In their excited, upset state all three youths supposed the rocketswere the result of some sort of celebration. The real meaning did notoccur to them.
One thing they all realized was that they were over an area of theutmost danger: no mind could foresee the track of bomb or rocket.
"They don't see us, don't know we're up here!" Chick muttered as Donplanned his next moves with quick and cool precision. Don had regainedhis self-control.
"I'll dive, to get away with the greatest speed!" Don had decided.
Nose down, engine full speed, he dived.
The needle of the altimeter began to hasten its backward swing.
A brilliant shaft of white struck upward, picking them out, throwing uparound them a sea of vivid illumination.
Instantly Don changed his tactics.
To level off, as he intended, to come out of the dive with still a fairmargin of altitude to give him ease of handling well above earth wasimpossible. The searchlight might prevent him from seeing the ground,might blind him.
He was plunging straight down toward it.
Full-gun, he drew back on the stick. Up tipped the nose.
Wires sang with the fierce wind. The ship trembled.
At nearly two hundred miles an hour the ship began to climb in the hugearc of a "loop."
Don had purpose behind his shift of plan.
While he had never executed it in darkness, he recalled the maneuverknown as an Immelmann Turn, said to have been devised by a German warace, by which altitude above an adversary was gained swiftly, with achange of flying direction.
As the ship soared on its vast curve, it came, soon, to the top of theloop. It was precisely "on its back," upside down. The controls wereheavy, inert in response.
Had he maintained control elements in the same position the engineshould have carried the ship, with its speed almost nil, just to thepoint where the nose would have dropped by engine weight, acted on bygravity.
Then, going down on the descending side of the wide arc, it could becaught, at the bottom of the loop, leveled, and sent onward.
Don did not delay for that to happen.
Instead he shifted the stick far to the side, holding it there.
Before the nose dropped, the slight forward speed enabled the aileronsto act: the wing dropped, the other came up, and since Don held theslick steady, the ship, from being on its back, executed half of a"barrel roll," so that it was right side up, and, naturally, at the topof a big circle, pointing its nose exactly backward from its originaldirection.
Quickly Don caught the ship's wings as it turned on its fore-an-aftaxis.
Thus he had climbed to the top of a big loop, had turned the ship frombeing upside down to the correct flying position, facing back on thecourse.
He kept the throttle full open, flying level for an instant.
They were looking away from the search-lamp. Its beams no longermenaced Don's clear vision. Besides, being so much higher, the rayswere spread, diffused.
But they were going back, and for all that Don knew, the force ofrockets might still enable the missiles to reach them.
He knew, with sureness, that no chance celebration accounted for therockets, by that beam of light coming up at them from a spot where nosearchlight should have been!
He wanted to be doubly safe, to return to the proper course.
He began, almost immediately, a banked turn, at the same time goingupward. In that climbing turn they both gained altitude and returnedgradually to the proper course. Chick clamped his gauntleted hands.
"Good work!" he screamed in shrill elation.
Garry, too, commended, his voice more subdued as he realized that histones went through a tube directly into ear outlets clamped close tothe young pilot's head.
"Fine, Don!" he complimented the flyer.
Don nodded his appreciation.
His face, though, was still creased with lines of concern.
"That's somebody with a deadly purpose!" he murmured. "No fireworkswere being sent up for fun. They were meant to upset us. Who could beso mean? Where did that searchlight beam come from? The airport? I wastoo excited to be able to trace it--right in my eyes, the way it was."
He peered over the side: the rays were gone.
The nose was coming toward its proper point. Don adjusted his controls.They had first made a great circle, outward from its center, and upwardin its arc. Then they had continued to climb, but in an arc that was ona different plane.
It took them far out over the swamp.
Garry, sighting the airport, saw that Don brought the nose to itsproper line with the revolving beacon as the beam flicked past in itsblinking circuit of the skies.
Chick, staring, with neck craned, over the side, saw something far moredeadly.
"Garry!" he yelled at the top of his capacity, "tell Don--helicoptercoming--up----"
Garry caught the call, but not its import.
He followed the line of Chick's pointing arm.
Precious seconds were thus expended.
The strange, menacing craft gained an advantage in the delay oflocating it and of discovering its purpose.
Don had to be told. Then he was in such a position that the left winghid the object of Garry's excited explanation.
Garry, over the edge of the wing, saw that the helicopter, itshorizontal blades bringing it higher, the tractor propeller drawing itforward, rose toward them on a slanting line that seemed meant to bringthe odd craft up under their own ship.
Chick, as Don altered the course to get the wing out of his line ofvision, sent over a parachute flare, lighting up the scene with itswhite, revealing gleam.
Don saw their adversary.
From that had come the rockets: he felt sure of it. Flung out, ordischarged from some outboard contrivance, their ignition powder hadsent them in calculated proximity to the Dragonfly--for some deadlypurpose!--to put the ship out of control, no doubt!
"There's a man in that cockpit!" Garry told Don, better able to seepast the swiftly revolving horizontal blades as Chick's flare turnednight into day beneath them.
Chick, looking, saw more.
"It's--it's--" he could hardly make his lips form the words. "It'sthe--Thing that never--was--the Man who Never--Lived!"
He saw the green of the head covering, the slick, glistening, formlessbody in its slippery oilskins, the flicker of light reflect
ed fromshiny rubber gloves.
Up at them came the helicopter, its course calculated to fall on anangle that would drive them upward, or turn them away from the airport,or--if Don sought to side-slip--bring them on a level with thatdreadful Thing at its controls.
What then? In any maneuver they could execute, Don wondered, what wouldthat Thing do?
