Dave Dawson at Casablanca Part 20

Eastward and then southward the n.a.z.i planes flew, and then at the end of some thirty-five minutes, they changed their course to the east again, and then northward. Most of the Atlas Range was out of sight now. Ahead lay barren country that looked as though nothing, not even a blade of gra.s.s, had ever lived there. Farther ahead was the border line between Morocco and French Algeria, but of course there was nothing to mark it.

Nothing, for as far as the eye could see there was only wasteland. These barren lands of the western rim of the Sahara Desert seemed to shimmer and tremble in the blistering heat of the sun. Even the banks of clouds were gone now. They had been left over the Atlas Mountains, and the sun blazing down made Dawson's throttles feel like red hot pokers, despite the fact that he was some twelve thousand feet in the air.

As a matter of fact, the constant glare of the sun, and the intense concentration on the n.a.z.i formation ahead and below him strained his eyes to the utmost, and he began to see crazy objects and shapes that were no longer there when he took a second look.

It was because of this that he paid little or no attention to a gray-green blur that appeared on the barren earth just ahead of the n.a.z.i planes. That is, he gave it scant attention until he suddenly realized that the n.a.z.i pilots had cut their throttles, and in follow-the-leader style were circling around and down toward that gray-green blurr.

Shoving up his goggles, he dug knuckles into his smarting eyes, then impulsively leaned forward as though that bit of movement would afford him a better look.

But whether or not it did, he certainly saw more than he had the first time. The gray-green blur was a small group of shrub-covered hills that rose right up out of the desert. That it was some kind of an oasis was evident by the patches of pale green here and there.

One thing was definite, however. To Dawson it was the only thing that mattered. That gray-green patch on the seemingly limitless expanse of shimmering and quivering Sahara was the secret base of Goering's Snoopers! He had found it! There it was! The first two of the bombers were already on the ground on the eastern fringe of the gray-green patch. They looked like beetles as they moved along over the ground.

A wild, fierce joy surged up in Dawson as he stared down at the place, but when he happened to glance at his fuel gauges, a tiny icy shiver went through him, and his joy was tempered by cold, hard reality. He had fuel for about another half hour in the air. Fuel enough to take him a fraction of the distance back to his Casablanca base. What he had expected had happened, but only now did the full significance of it descend upon him.

"But we found it!" he shouted wildly as he put his lips to his flap mike and reached out to tune his set to the Casablanca Base wave length. "And that's what matters most. Now to tell Casablanca and--"

At that moment Dawson's ears were filled with the savage yammer of aerial machine guns and air cannon, above and behind him!

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

_Blazing Doom_

One, two, three seconds slipped by before Dawson could move a single muscle. It was as though invisible hands of steel held him powerless.

Only his eyes and brain seemed able to function in that short s.p.a.ce of time. His eyes saw the top left section of his gla.s.s hatch melt away as if by magic. His brain told him the shambles that was suddenly made of his instrument board and radio panel would never in all this world permit him to contact his Casablanca base. The golden moment had come--and gone.

Keeping alive was his prime concern now. The Grim Reaper was savagely striving to cut life short for one Yank air ace!

In three seconds Dave Dawson became a flying madman. Instinct, and instinct alone, caused him to whirl the Lockheed up, over, and down in a half roll. Hardly had he started the maneuver, than he kicked the ship over on wing and came around back and straight up toward the sun-filled sky. Not until he had reached the peak of his power zoom did he take so much as a second for a look around. But now he did race his eyes about the sky, and rage boiled up within him as he saw three German Messerschmitt 109's pulling out of furious power dives, and prop clawing around and up in an effort to "box" him in a perfect cross fire.

"Not today!" he thundered wildly, and dropped the nose of his Lockheed.

"You had one swell chance, because I was too dumb a sap to think of keeping eyes in the back of my head. That's the only chance you'll get.

You didn't make good, and now it's my turn. Hey! You there on the right!

How do you like _this_ for a tasty dish?"

As he shouted the words, he touched right rudder a bit and slammed down almost at the vertical, straight for one of the power-zooming Messerschmitts. The German pilot must have thought that ramming was the one idea Dawson had in mind, because the n.a.z.i plane suddenly fell over on its side and started to circle away to avoid a mid-air crash. But ramming was not Dawson's idea. No, not while he had slugs for his aerial machine guns and sh.e.l.ls for his air cannon. However, he waited until the last second before he gave the n.a.z.i aircraft everything the Lockheed had. The almost instantaneous result indicated that it was much, much more than enough. One minute the Messerschmitt was curving away, and the next it just wasn't there any more. That is to say, it was just a shower of flaming and smoking embers falling away to the sun-scorched Sahara far below.

"One!" Dawson bellowed, and cut his fire.

Yes, one! And that left two others in the sky. However, those two were crafty veterans of the _Luftwaffe_, and they had not been wasting time.

Nor had their actions been with the idea of getting away from the wild, mad flying Yank eagle. On the contrary, they had simply maneuvered to await their time. And that time came as Dawson cut his fire and started to wheel up out of his thunderous power dive.

As he started up, those two let fly at him. Maybe both hit the mark, or maybe one of them missed completely. But what did it matter? The mark was. .h.i.t, and the "mark" was Dawson's plane. The air all about him seemed suddenly alive with tracer smoke, and the Lockheed Lightning acted as though it was about to fly right out from under Dave. He was hurled back against the headrest with a force that filled his head with winking stars. Then the Lockheed whipped up over on its back, dropped its nose and headed straight down like a meteor gone berserk. Thunder roared in his ears, and before his eyes exploded and flashed all the color combinations in the world. In his nose was the acrid stench of smoke.

"Your turn, this time, pal!" he heard his own voice shout, as he went hurtling downward. "No! No, it isn't, darn it! _You're_ not hit.

_You're_ okay! Hit the silk, you dope! Bail out! Hit the silk! If you--"

He choked off the rest, or rather fear choked off his words, as he suddenly heard the renewed bursts of savage aerial machine-gun fire. His ship shot to ribbons, and falling to earth in flames, yet those two n.a.z.i vultures were still pumping death at him.

"But why not?" he reasoned. "They're n.a.z.is, aren't they? What else would you expect these killing rats to do?"

Even as the thought slipped across his brain, a new one crowded close on its heels. Rather, it was a realization. The realization that there was not one bit of pain in his body as he struggled to free himself from the burning Lockheed. And also that no ribbons of tracer smoke were cutting past him. So what were the n.a.z.is shooting at? At each other, or--

Before he could finish the question he had managed to fight his way up out of the pit, and dived headlong into sun-filled thin air. But it was not his own movements that stopped his unfinished thought. On the contrary, it was the sight of a wingless Messerschmitt 109 hurtling down to its doom about three hundred yards from where his own body seemed to hang in mid air.

"Hey!" he gasped. "Did I get another one? Did I get two, and I'm just finding out? But how the--"

And he didn't finish that question either. He didn't, because at that exact instant the G.o.ds of war, as though angered by the fact that he still lived, tried one last time to finish him off. At any rate, at that exact moment a piece of his riddled Lockheed Lightning flew off.

Straight and true as a ball pitcher's perfect strike it cut across the air s.p.a.ce toward him. He actually saw it coming out of the corner of his eye, and he tried to duck as his body slowly tumbled end over end downward. But he didn't succeed in ducking, or he didn't duck in time.

Something hit him a smashing blow on the side of his head, and the entire North African sky blew up in a thunderous roar of sound!

When consciousness returned to Dawson his first hazy impression was that he was floating about in the middle of a great sea of black ink. But no, not everything was that black. At regular intervals a faint yellowish orange glow appeared before his eyes. But before he could get a good look at it the glow faded away out of sight. Instinctively he tried to get his brain to function; to get it to figure out what everything was all about. However, for a long time he somehow just couldn't force his brain to make that effort. He simply lived in a world of hazy s.n.a.t.c.hes of thought, and inky darkness lighted now and then by a yellowish orange glow.

Eventually, as though secret curtains had been pulled away inside his head, memory came slipping back, and he began to discover and realize things. The first realization was that he was hanging suspended in mid-air and slowly swaying this way and that. The second realization was that the darkness was the darkness of night. The third realization was that there was a dull throbbing on the left side of his head. And the fourth, and perhaps the most important realization of all, was that he was dangling at the ends of the shroud lines of his parachute, which was hopelessly fouled in the crooked and gnarled branches of a scrub tree.

By throwing his head way back he could look upward and see his fouled 'chute and the tree branches silhouetted against the billions of stars that twinkled at him from high overhead. And when he looked down he saw that rocky ground was not over three feet from the soles of his flying boots.

That realization filled him with great joy, but it also made him gulp, and caused beads of cold sweat to break out on his forehead. Never as long as he lived would he be able to remember that he actually had pulled the rip-cord ring of his parachute whether or not that flying bit of Lockheed wreckage caught him on the side of the head. But he must have done that little thing, and by the grace of G.o.d and Lady Luck he had not been allowed to strike ground while still unconscious. To have done so, to have hit ground without being prepared for the landing shock would unquestionably have resulted in a couple of broken ankles, if not legs. Particularly because of the rocky soil under him. However, one chance in a billion had come to pa.s.s, and his journey earthward had been checked in the nick of time by the crooked and gnarled branches of the scrub tree.

"Or maybe it's just a dream!" he whispered hoa.r.s.ely as he fumbled at the snaps of his parachute harness. "Maybe it's just a c.o.c.keyed dream, and I'm going to wake up stone dead!"

The words he spoke, however, were just a means of letting off pent up steam. He got the 'chute harness snaps undone, grabbed the straps with both hands and slowly lowered himself until his feet touched solid earth. However, his body had experienced so much swaying motion that his sense of balance was all upset. And no sooner did his feet touch, and had he let go of the harness straps, than he fell stumbling down onto his hands and knees, and his brain started to spin furiously.

For the next few moments he was content to sit on the solid earth and wait for his brain to stop spinning and for fresh strength to flow back into his body. Then finally he slowly arose and peered about in the darkness. Just where he had come to earth he hadn't the faintest idea, but it seemed a good guess that he must be somewhere in the region of that weird group of shrub-covered hills that marked the spot where he had seen those Junkers 88's go down to land. That guess caused countless little fears to start pecking at his brain. How close to that secret base was he? How come he had been left hanging unconscious on his parachute shroud lines for the rest of the day? Where was Freddy Farmer?

Had Freddy really been trailing those bombers, too? Had he reported the location to Casablanca base? Or was his radio truly dead, and did Casablanca base still not know the truth? What time was it, anyway? Had he been unconscious for just a few hours? Or had it been for a day and a night, and had Goering's Snoopers already roared out from their hidden base to do their devilish dirty work?

Those and countless other soul-tantalizing questions whipped and spun through his head as he searched about him in the gloom. Suddenly he spotted the yellowish-orange glow once again. He judged it to be perhaps a mile away, but he was unable to see the base of the glow because of a rise in the ground. After one good look, though, he knew that it was flame. Rather, a column of flame-tinted smoke that rose upward into the night sky. Having seen that same sort of sight at night in other parts of the world, he was pretty sure that the yellowish-orange glow was from the burning wreckage of a plane.

"Mine, or that n.a.z.i I nailed?" he asked himself the question aloud.

"Or--Hey! I remember, now! _Two_ n.a.z.is went down, and I know darn well that I only got one of them. I--"

He stopped short, caught his breath and held it as though not daring to let himself speak.

"Freddy?" the whisper finally came out from between his stiff lips. "Was it Freddy who piled down and nailed that second n.a.z.i? But--But what then? Where did he go? What did he do? I know he didn't have fuel to get back to Casablanca, but if _only_ his radio worked, and he was able to tell them the story! Please, dear G.o.d, let Freddy have made good where I--I failed."

For a long minute he stood there motionless as though waiting for the answer to his question to come drifting down through the night air.

Suddenly his hand flew to his holstered service gun, and he whirled around and down in a crouch. Behind him, he had heard the crackling snap of dry twigs, followed by the rattle of loose stones. .h.i.tting together, and the faint thud of something falling to the ground.

With his finger crooked about the trigger, and his heart trying to slam-bang its way out through his ribs, he waited for more sound. And when it came to him, he didn't know whether to shout with insane joy, or to break into crazy laughter. He didn't know which to do because the sound he heard was a human voice; a hoa.r.s.e whispering voice that was filled with seething anger. A voice that said:

"Blast, and eternally blast this confounded darkness!"

For five full seconds Dawson was utterly unable to unhinge his frozen tongue. The one-in-a-billion miracle left him completely speechless. It seemed to knock everything out of his head and make all so unreal and fantastic as to be absolutely impossible as an actuality.

"Freddy! Freddy Farmer!" the words finally forced their way past his lips. "Freddy! Can you hear me? Over here, Freddy! Over here!"

As his voice died away to an echo, a tingling moment of silence settled over everything. Then once again he heard Freddy Farmer's voice, like a ghost voice from out out of the past.