seemed to be smashed beyond control. He began to chant incoherently into his mouthpiece, sending out a general call ' for help. No specific station answered him, but he kept giving the position of the Memphis and trying to tell what was happening, although he did not know.
A steward had been carrying a tray of food from the galley to the dining saloon when that first long burst of fire drove into the body of the first pilot.
Before the second pilot had grabbed the controls, the big ship lurched and the steward landed in the lap of one of the vice-presidents of Transatlantic Transport Airways.
The next instant the passengers went mad. The third dun biplane had dived in below the tip of the port wing and was spraying the middle deck that contained the passenger compartments with a withering fire of lead. One moment the guests were chatting gayly, the next a quarter of them were dead. The faces of the rest were twisted into weird masks, and in their eyes was the fear of death. They bellowed and screamed like caged, angry animals, while the second pilot fought the controls and tried to right the ship.
After a bit the Memphis plunged out of the wall of fog that had encompassed it. The three dun biplanes climbed above it and drove incendiary bullets into the wing tanks. A tank exploded and the whole ship was engulfed in a great mass of smoke, out of which a giant tongue of flame leaped upward.
Then one of the biplanes was diving underneath the Memphis, firing round after round of incendiary bullets at the sponsons containing the main gasoline supply. For some reason this attack failed to bring about the intended holocaust, and the pilot, circled and returned for another try.
Suddenly, rivers of flame seemed to pour out of the big airliner from wing tip to wing tip and down the length of the entire hull. It became a fiery furnace of exploding tanks and twisted, white-hot metal struts as it plummeted to its death in the calm Atlantic.
IV—TELLTALE MANEUVER
BILL BARNES watched the instruments on his flight panel as he held the Lancer hard into the rain and fog and tried to climb above them.
He could not tell from the garbled message from the Memphis' radio operator exactly what was happening, but he knew the ship was in imminent danger.
He eased his throttles open until the Lancer was racing through the storm at nearly four hundred miles an hour.
And it took all the strength in his powerful arms and shoulders to hold her on her course.
“Fasten your safety belt and adjust your parachute, kid,” he said into the telephone to Sandy.
But Sandy had already done that.
He gasped, “Wonder how bad it is, Bill?”
“No telling,” Bill said. “We ought to be coming up alongside them pronto if that position was correct.”
Then the Lancer sped out of that dense fog, and they were out in the open with the sun shining brightly in the blue sky above them and the Atlantic like a mill pond far below.
Twenty miles away and far below they spotted the Memphis just as the main supply tanks exploded. A string of curses leaped to Bill's lips as he saw bursts of fire coming from the three dun biplanes darting in and out around the airliner. He opened the throttles of the Lancer wide, saw the airspeed indicator climb to four hundred, and fifty miles an hour. Nursing his machine-gun trip, he fired a short burst to be sure his guns were ready.
“What's happening. Bill?” Sandy panted into his microphone, as they saw the Memphis become a great ball of smoke and flame and start her plunge toward the sea.
“Break out that swivel gun!” Bill said.
“Those three biplanes have murdered the Memphis and all her crew and passengers. They'll come after us now because we saw them.”
He nosed the Lancer down, pointing it at the flaming mass ahead, hoping against hope that there might be some survivors, though realizing in his heart that no one could survive that flaming hell. He eased out of his dive as what remained of the Memphis struck the surface of the water. One final explosion occurred, followed by a half dozen minor ones, and then the skeleton of the giant ship plunged to-its last resting place.
Bill circled low above the great oil spots spreading over the surface, trying to locate a possible survivor. But there was none. He was placing his binoculars back in a pocket when the sound of screaming props struck terror through his whole being. For an instant he was motionless. Then his eyes swept the sky above him as Sandy shouted,
“They're diving on us. Bill!”
The three fast, tear-drop biplanes were converging on them from three sides! They were only three hundred yards above him and traveling at terrific speed. He yanked the control column of the Lancer back into his stomach and hung it on its props. The three diving ships were easing out of their dive to come up underneath him as he poured juice into the engines of the Lancer and took it upstairs.
“Give 'em hell, kid!” Bill said into his microphone, hearing Sandy's swivel gun chattering behind him.
He leveled off a thousand feet above the three biplanes and came around in a vertical bank as they nosed up to form a Vee. His finger hovered over the electric trip of the 37mm. cannon. Suddenly, he opened up the throttles of the Lancer for a moment and went up and back in a flashing Immelmann turn as the three biplanes leveled off. They were coming at him head-on now. When they were four hundred yards away they opened fire with their six machine guns. The concentrated fire was terrific.
Bill skidded the Lancer out of range and eased back on the stick as the three ships passed by him. As he saw their rudders bite into the air to return to the attack, he yanked the stick back and came up and over on his back just as they began their turn. At the top of his loop he neutralized his controls for a moment, then eased the nose down in a steep inverted dive.
He got the first of the three ships under his hair sights for one brief instant. His finger came down on the trip of his 37mm. cannon. The rapid-firer threw five high-explosive shells within the space of a second, but Bill's speed was too great and his dive too steep for accurate shooting. Between the time he had the ship under his sights and when he tripped his trigger the little fighter had passed out of his range of fire.
Bill cursed, leveled off and half-rolled the Lancer upright. The single seaters were coming around on one wing tip as he lifted the nose for altitude. He knew he could get away from them if he wanted to, but the thought of the whole-sale murder he had seen them perpetrate had enraged him almost beyond reason.
He knew he should broadcast what he had witnessed, but something held him back, something he did not understand.
“Why,” he asked himself as he spiraled upward; “did they do it? What is behind it?”
His hand started forward toward his radio switch, to open it and tell the radio station at Foynes what had happened and ask them to send him aid. But something stopped him. Suppose, he thought, I lure these three ships in toward shore to meet planes that are sent out to help me, and in the mixup that follows they escape; then they will never get what is coming to them. They may escape entirely.
He was trying to justify his desire to give battle when he became aware of a screaming prop that roared underneath him. He rolled the Lancer completely over and whipped it up and around to reverse his direction. He dropped the nose and poured a burst of ten shells at the little dun-colored ship arrowing up at him. But again his aim was bad and the little ship kicked its tail in the air and dived out of danger.
“You don't have to make any decision,” he said to himself. “If they want trouble give it to 'em!”
He gunned his engine and dived on the tail of the single-seater. His line of tracer smoke curled above the head of the pilot. He eased his stick forward a little and his bullets crashed into the tail assembly and climbed forward along the fuselage to the engine block. A half-dozen of those powerful .50-caliber bullets nearly tore off the pilot's head. He slumped forward over the stick, while the ship kept straight on toward the waters pf the Atlantic.
And then the air seemed to be choked with slashing, roaring dun-colored biplanes as the other two fighters came back into the battle. Bill realized instantly that these fellows knew their jobs as combat pilots. They were like darting hawks as they converged their fire to get Bill between them. They were everywhere, charging in from all angles, their guns screaming lead.
Bill's mind and muscles had to coordinate with the speed of light if he were to survive that terrific onslaught. He eased the throttles of the Lancer open another notch and took it through the air with the speed and fury of a flaming meteor. He saw his bullets tracing designs on the sides of the dun biplanes, but his own speed was too great for accurate shooting.
