reconnaissance, because there were many banks of clouds at high level with a very high ceiling. Stan kept his eyes open for enemy interceptors. He half hoped a few Me’s would spot them so that they could try out the new ships. No fighters were seen until they reached the mouth of the Rhine.
Below them they could see Rotterdam and beyond, Gorinchem. O’Malley was wagging his wings, signaling to go down. The fighters they spotted, three in number, did not try to intercept them.
Stan signaled back and they all peeled off. The P-51 went down smoothly but with a swift rush that set Stan back against the shock pad. He had to ease on a bit more power to stay with O’Malley who was trying his ship out.
At five thousand feet they flattened out a quarter mile apart and stalled in toward a line of trees and a windmill. O’Malley brushed the sails of the mill as he swept over it. They were close to the ground now, flipping along like cotton dusters on a Texas plantation. O’Malley was hugging the ground, popping over trees and sliding between buildings. Stan saw the white faces of people as they looked up. Most of them waved to the ship with the United States insignia. They were Dutch farmers.
The three ships hedge-hopped on over the low country. O’Malley held a speed that made the ground blur and waver. It also made dodging power lines and missing church steeples exciting business. Stan raked a pennant off the top of a building without seeing the building at all. After that he called to O’Malley.
“Hey, you. Get up a bit!”
“Sure, an’ the scenery is foine down here,” O’Malley called back. But he did take a little more altitude.
They roared in over Germany and headed for Huls. Twice they were blasted by machine guns, but they were flying so low the German detector system had not spotted them. They were put down as Mosquito bombers out hunting locomotives and trains:
“We’re coming in now,” O’Malley called.
He had swung wide of Huls and was headed for some low hills. Knifing over the the nearest hill, with their bellies scraping the tops of a row of trees, the three P-51’s nosed into a little valley.
Suddenly Stan saw the airfield O’Malley had spotted. In a snap guess he placed the number of planes lined up at one hundred. They were in a long row at the base of a hill. Runways led out to a wide flight strip.
“Strafe them!” he shouted.
The order was not necessary. O’Malley and Sim were going straight down the line of planes, their guns blasting flame and lead. The target was so narrow that Stan had to stall and slip a bit to drop behind in order to get a shot at the line.
The Mustangs went over so fast the Germans did not have time to fire a shot at them. Not a plane moved, except those which blew up or burst into flames under the withering fire from the Yank guns. Up the P-51’s went and over the ridge. They were roaring along at such a pace that it took a long zoom and bank to get lined up for a return trip.
When they came back over, the Germans were ready for them. Smoke makers were billowing thick haze over the scene and every imaginable sort of gun was slamming lead and steel into the sky. The air above the field was thick with flaming muck. O’Malley was out in front with Sim close off his port wing. He went into the muck low down. Stan came in a bit behind his pals.
Looking down into the flaming muzzles of the guns Stan stared hard. There wasn’t a plane in sight! Not even the burning ships or those blasted to bits could be seen. There was nothing but the green slope of the hill and the smooth runways leading to the flight strip.
“Well, what do you know!” he muttered.
At that instant the muck enveloped him along with the pall of smoke from the edges of the field. Just ahead of him he saw something that looked like a huge rocket lift toward Sim’s ship. It exploded with a blinding flash directly under the P-51. Sim’s ship shot upward and a wing swirled away like a dark strip of paper torn from a wall. Then the P-51 nosed into the ground and exploded. Cold sweat broke out all over Stan’s body as he pulled his ship over and up.
At five thousand feet up and well away from the hot spot, Stan took stock. He tried to call O’Malley and found his radio was shot out. Looking through his spattered hatch cover, he saw that his port wing had three gaping holes in it. But the engine was singing sweetly. His first thought was to locate O’Malley, but he had another when he spotted three Focke-Wulf fighters roaring in on his tail.
“We’ll see what you have to offer, sister,” he said softly as he kicked the Mustang wide open and laid her over.
The big ship responded with a surge of power that yanked her into the sky and over in a perfect roll before Stan could decide what was going on. Leveling off, Stan looked for the FW’s. They had missed him by a wide margin. Stan grinned.
“You don’t need a pilot, lady,” he said.
Coming over he tried a burst on one of the FW’s. It was a long shot, but the Jerry was lined up neatly in his sight. The heavy guns of the P-51 roared and bucked. Up ahead the FW wobbled and dived. The other two went up for altitude. Stan went up, too. The P-51 was a high-altitude lady and would do better up where she had rare air and plenty of space.
Stan eased away from the FW’s and did not challenge them. They circled, taking a good look at this new type of fighter. They had learned from sad experience that any new Yank ship might prove to be deadly. The Forts had taught them that.
Stan was well up now where he could look down on the flight strip below. He saw nothing of O’Malley but he did see two wrecked planes at the far edge of the field away from the hill. Nosing down Stan dived toward the field. The two FW’s dived after him, but he soon eased away from them.
Sweeping in a few yards above the runway, Stan laid over just a little. He checked the wrecks and saw that one of them was Sim’s ship. The other was an FW fighter minus one wing. The Germans behind their hidden batteries opened up with a savage burst of fire. Stan went straight toward the hill, flying low to keep out of the flak. As he shot up off the runway he stared hard at the hillside ahead, then blinked his eyes.
“So,” he said softly. “So that’s the way it is.”
He went up and over the hill, spiraling into the sky in a climb steeper than any ship had ever carried him. The FW’s had been joined by five Me 110’s, but the Jerries did not close with him. Stan headed for home as fast as the P-51 could travel, which topped four hundred miles per hour by a wide margin.
He was roaring along with no opposition in sight and a clear sky around him when he suddenly spotted a plane in his mirror. It was overhauling him rapidly. Suddenly Stan grinned. He eased back on the throttle and waggled his wings as O’Malley roared over him. Picking up speed, he dropped in beside his pal and signaled that his radio was dead. They roared on home, wing to wing.
CHAPTER V
HIDDEN DROMES
Stan sat at Colonel Holt’s desk along with O’Malley. It had taken them just twenty minutes to get from the operations room to the colonel’s office. Holt had called in Major Kulp of the photography wing and General Ward from the command staff.
“When I came in to check the wrecked planes,” Stan said, “I was able to see how they do it. They have a screen on tracks. It is covered over with brush and leaves and looks from any angle, except squarely in front, like the side of the hill. They just roll it out and it covers the planes.”
“You wrecked quite a few of them on the ground?” the general asked.
“We must have smashed at least half of them,” Stan answered. “But the part that interested me most was the underground hangars. The screen is only a temporary camouflage. The planes are snapped back into the underground hangar. I say we got about half of them, because the wrecked ones were still out under the screen. The others had been pulled back.”
“We can bomb those hangars out,” the colonel said.
“I don’t think so,” Stan said. “I judge there’s a full forty feet of earth over them as a roof, and I suppose there’s at least ten feet of concrete under that.”
