He felt the Lancer buck and shiver as bullets drove into it from that never-ceasing hail of lead. But he fought on while he gasped for breath, his face tense and terrible in its absolute concentration on the horrible job before him. He whipped the Lancer up and down, skidded and side-slipped, zoomed and dived and rolled to avoid the fire of those two fast fighters. He knew, only too well, that one single error in judgment would be his last.
He could hear Sandy's gun chattering at intervals as he drove them off his tail and he could hear Sandy complaining in his ear that he, Bill, never gave him a chance to get in a telling shot.
“Can't you level off and give me a straight shot at 'em once!” Sandy pleaded.
“I can't, kid,” Bill gasped. “They are almost as fast as we are and they have as much maneuverability. I can't give 'em a chance to get set or they'll get us. They'll smash you into bits if I do.”
Then the two ships got him inside a tight circle that he could not break. Each time he tried to break out a terrific burst of fire would cut across his path, forcing him to deviate from his course, and then they would be on him again, forcing him back so that one of them could get him under his sights.
Bullets drummed all around them, and Bill's breath was coming in quick, agonized gasps. His right hand seemed to be frozen to the control column, so tight was his grasp. He was using all his inherent genius as a flyer, getting the utmost from the Lancer's great speed and maneuverability, while Sandy desperately tried to keep the enemy off their tail.
Then the two ships began to tighten the circle again, their guns spewing fire and lead and death. Bill waited until they almost had him between a crossfire. He waited until one of the biplanes became overconfident. Then, for that brief moment that is enough, he got the dun ship under his sights. His finger clamped down on his 37mm. gun. He fired a burst of five shots as he pushed the throttle of the Lancer wide open and nosed down in a power dive.
The dun biplane became a great mass of black smoke and orange flame, the explosive shells taking it apart with a finality that was appalling. The other dun ship zoomed upward to escape the shooting debris as it exploded.
Bill looked back and up as he pulled the Lancer out of its dive. The remaining biplane was diving on their tail, and Sandy tried to get him under the sights of his gun. As Bill began a tight turn to the right, the other ship went underneath him and nosed up eight hundred yards away. Then they were roaring toward each other headon, each striving to find the other under his sights.
When only fifty yards separated them, the pilot of the single-seater suddenly swerved it in fast to the left for a death-dealing burst of fire just before they passed. Bill shouted, involuntarily, then threw the Lancer out of its mad path to avoid the crash that for an instant seemed inevitable.
Bill yanked back on his stick and zoomed the Lancer up and over on its back, while the biplane continued on its course. At the top he half-rolled level and gazed over the side. His face was white and his eyes were wide with disbelief as he watched the dun ship flip over and come back. He couldn't believe what he had just seen and yet he knew it was true.
He knew that he had come in contact with only one man during all his aerial combats who used that particular swerve in to the left before he tripped his guns. And that man was his most deadly enemy. Yanking back on the control column. Bill took the Lancer high into the heavens as the tear-drop biplane tried to come up beneath him. He wanted to get some place where he could think. He took the Lancer steadily upward until his altimeter read 25,000 feet.
“Hey, Bill!” Sandy shouted. “Where the—where are you going? That other ship can't get up. here. He's wallowing!”
“I know it, kid,” Bill said calmly. “Close your hatch and turn on the oxygen. I don't want him to get up here. I don't want to shoot him down. I want to follow him and take him alive.”
“Who is he?” Sandy asked. His voice was a combination of anger and disgust because they were peeling off in the middle of a fight.
“He's our old friend,” Bill said. “And by a coincidence that is stranger than fiction he had another chance to try to murder me.”
Through Bill's mind were racing a thousand and one thoughts. Only his own loyal men knew that he was flying the Atlantic that morning. It had been his men who had urged him to do it, even insisted. Had one or more of them betrayed him—got him out where he would be at the mercy of the man who hated him above all else?
“Who is he?” Sandy persisted.
“The man who calls himself the Saver of Souls,” Bill said. “I didn't recognize his tactics until he came at me with that swerve, head-on.”
And Bill was aware that his voice was unsteady and trembling. He watched the dun biplane slip down in a power glide, then dropped the nose of the Lancer to follow it.
“And. this,” he said grimly to himself, “is the beginning of my holiday!”
V—“HE MUST BE SILENCED!”
MORDECAI MURPHY, the man who had led that little element of three dun-colored biplanes on their murderous flight over the Atlantic that morning, sank into an overstuffed leather chair in the lounging saloon of his hundred-and-eighty-foot, oil-burning yacht
Riding low in the water, the
“I will tell you what happened now,” Mordecai Murphy said in his pleasant, cool way. “I'm sorry I was so abrupt when I came aboard. But I was in no mood to talk. I hadn't got over the amazing thing that happened to me today—the most amazing coincidence that has ever occurred to me. No fiction writer would dare to use it in a story.”
“You destroyed the Memphis?” Duncan asked in a low voice.
“We destroyed the Memphis.”
“Where are Chamberlain and Lorenzo?” Duncan asked.
“Dead,” Murphy said, and his eyes were as hard and brittle as two pieces of ice. “Stop asking me so many bloody questions and I'll tell you about things.
I'm trying to figure how, or why Barnes happened to be out there.”
“Bill Barnes?” Duncan asked.
“I told you something about my previous encounters with Bill Barnes, the American,” Murphy stated.
Duncan nodded.
“It is uncanny,” Murphy continued, half to himself. “I told you how I set a trap for Barnes over the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina?”
“Yes,” Duncan said.
“Did I tell you that the man who lured Barnes down there where I could get an unhampered shot at him was a stock broker in New York who told Barnes he knew a man down there who owned a block of Transatlantic Transport stock?” Murphy asked.
“No,” Duncan said, “you didn't tell me that.”
“That,” said Murphy, “is the why Transatlantic came to my attention. Barnes didn't get the stock because my agent shot himself the same day Barnes and I had our encounter.”
“And Barnes came out on top?” Duncan said, and immediately regretted having said it because of the deep color that suffused Murphy's face, and because of the way his eyes froze.
“But later on,” Murphy said, “Barnes got hold of a large block of it. Almost enough for control. I happen to know that he is having quite a task carrying it. That is one reason why I was willing to listen when you came to me with your proposition to make Transatlantic Transport look bad so that you could build up confidence in our own line, International Airways. I knew I would be killing two birds with one stone in destroying the Memphis.”
“You said Barnes was out there today?” Duncan said.
“I did.” There were two little creases between Murphy's worried eyes, and his mouth was a straight line across his strong jaw.
“We dove on the Memphis, riddling her with incendiary bullets,” he went on after a moment. “She was falling in flames when Barnes suddenly appeared out of nowhere. I don't think he could have received a call for help from
