The Flying Legion Part 25

"I regret only," said he in broken English, "that the stowaway escaped us. Ah, _la belle execution_, if we had him now!"

The Master, at the starboard window, kept silence. No one sat at the wheel. Of what use could it have been? The Master was looking far to eastward, now with the naked eye, now sweeping the prospect with binoculars. He was studying the African coast, clearly in sight as a long, whitish line of sand with a whiter collar of foamy surf, fifteen miles away.

A few gulls had begun to show--strange, small gulls, yellow-beaked and swift. Off to northward, a native dhow was beating down-wind with full-bellied lateen sail, with matting over its hatches. Heat was beginning to grow intense, for no longer was _Nissr_ making a gale that cooled; no longer was she at high, cold levels. Africa, the tropics, had suddenly become real; and the sudden contrast oppressed them all.

Through the shimmering, quivering air, an arid pallor extended up the eastern sky; a pale, milky illumination, dull-white over the desert, that told of the furnace into which _Nissr_ was drifting--if indeed she could survive till she reached land. The gla.s.ses showed tawny reaches of sand, back a little from the coast; and beyond these, low hills, or rather rolling dunes, lay empurpled by vibrant heat-hazes.

"It won't be much like navigating over that h.e.l.l-spot, three or four miles in the air," muttered Bohannan. He looked infinitely depressed.

The way he gnawed at his red mustache showed how misadventure had raveled his nerve.

No one answered him. Leclair lighted a cigarette, and silently squinted at Africa with eyes long inured to the sun of that land of flame. Alden, at the other window, kept silence, too. That masked face could express no emotion; but something in the sag of the woman's shoulders, the droop of her head, showed how profound and intense was her suffering.

"Faith, are we going to make it, chief?" asked the major, impatiently.

Not his the temperament that can wait in silence. He made a singular figure as he lounged there at the pilot-house window, huge elbows on the sill. One hand was wrapped in bandages, well saturated with croton-oil. Chars and burns on his uniform showed where blazing petrol from the final explosion had spattered him.

His eyes, like the Master's, were bloodshot, inflamed. Part of his red crop of hair had been singed off, and all his eyelashes were gone, as well as half his bushy red brows. But the ugly set of his jaw, the savage gleam of his eyes showed that no physical pain was depressing him. His only trouble was the thought that perhaps the expedition of the Flying Legion had ended before it had really begun.

"What chance, sir?" he insisted. "It's d.a.m.ned bad, according to my way of thinking."

"What you think and what you say won't have any weight with this problem of aerial flotation," the Master curtly retorted. "If we make land, we make it, that's all, sir." He relapsed into silence. Leclair muttered, in Arabic--his words audible only to himself--an ancient Islamic proverb: "Allah knows best, and time will show!" Then, after a moment's pause, the single word: "Kismet!"

Silence again, in which the Master's brain reviewed the stirring incidents of the past hour and a half--how the stowaway had evaded Dr. Lombardo's vigilance and (thoroughly familiar with every detail of _Nissr_) had succeeded in making his way to the aft port fuel-tank, from which he had probably drained petrol through a pet-c.o.c.k and thereafter set it afire; how the miscreant had then scrambled up the aft companion-ladder, to shoot down the Master himself; and how only a horrible, nightmare fight against the flames had saved even this shattered wreck of the air-liner.

It had all been Kloof's fault, of course, and Lombardo's. Those two had permitted this disaster to befall, and--yes, they should be punished, later. But how? The Master's mind attacked this problem.

Each of the four Legionaries in the pilot-house was busy with his own thoughts.

On and on toward the approaching sh.o.r.es of Africa drifted the wounded Eagle of the Sky, making no headway save such as the west wind gave her. Steadily the needle of the altimeter kept falling. The high-pitched drone of the helicopters told that the crippled engines were doing their best; but even that best was not quite enough.

Like a tired creature of the air, the liner lagged, she sank. Before half the distance had been covered to that gleaming beach, hardly six hundred feet lay between the lower gallery of _Nissr_ and the long, white-toothed waves that, slavering, hungered for her gigantic body and the despairing crew she bore.

Suddenly the Master spoke into the engine-room telephone.

"Can you do any better?" exclaimed the chief. "This is not enough!"

"We're doing our best, sir," came the voice of Frazier, now in charge.

"If you can possibly strain a point, in some way, and wring a little more power out of the remaining engines--"

"We're straining them beyond the limit now, sir."

The Master fell silent, pondering. His eyes sought the dropping needle. Then the light of decision filled his eyes. A smile came to his face, where the deep gash made by the splinter of gla.s.s had been patched up with collodion and cotton. He plugged in on another line, by the touch of a b.u.t.ton.

"Simonds! Is that you?"

"Yes, sir," answered the quartermaster, in charge of all the stores.

"Have you jettisoned everything?"

"All we can spare, sir. All but the absolute minimum of food and water."

"Overboard with them all!"

"But, sir--"

"And drop the body of Auchincloss, too. This is no time for sentiment!"

"But--"

"My order, sir!"

Five minutes later, cases, boxes, bales, water-tanks, began spinning from open ports and down through the trap-door in the lower gallery.

Then followed the seared corpse of Auchincloss, a good man who had died in harness, fighting to the end. Those to whom the duty was a.s.signed of giving his metal-weighted body sea burial turned away their eyes, so that they might not see that final plunge. But the sound of the body striking the waves rocketed up to them with sickening distinctness.

Lightened a little, _Nissr_ seemed to rally for a few minutes. The altimeter needle ceased its drop, trembled and even rose _.275_ degrees.

"G.o.d! If we only had an ounce more power!" burst out the major, his mouth mumbling the loose ends of that flamboyant mustache. The Master remained quite impa.s.sive, and made no answer. Bohannan reddened, feeling that the chief's silence had been another rebuff. And on, on drifted _Nissr_, askew, up-canted, with the pitiless sunlight of approaching evening in every detail revealing--as it slanted in, almost level, over the far-heaving infinitudes of the Atlantic--the ravages wrought by flame.

Bohannan could not long be silent. The exuberance of his nature burst forth with a half-defiant:

"If _I_ were in charge, which I'm not, I'd stop those d.a.m.ned helicopters, let her down, turn what power we've got into the remaining propellers, and taxi ash.o.r.e!"

"And probably sink, or break up in the surf, on the beach, there!"

curtly rejoined the Master. "Ah! _What_?"

His binoculars checked their sweep along the coast, which in its absolute barrenness looked a place of death for whatever might have life there.

"You see something, _mon capitaine?_" asked Leclair, blowing smoke from his cigarette. "Allow me also to look! Where is it?"

"Just to north of that gash--that wady, or gully, making down to the beach. You see it, eh?"

Slowly the French ace swept the gla.s.ses along the surf-foamed fringes of that desolation. Across the lenses no tree flung its green promise of shade. No house, no hut was visible. Not even a patch of gra.s.s could be discerned. The African coast lay stretched out in ivory nakedness, clean, bare, swept and garnished by simooms, by cruel heat, by the beatings of surf eternal.

Back of it extended an iron hinterland, savage with desert s.p.a.ces of sun-baked, wrinkled earth and sand here and there leprously mottled with white patches of salt and with what the Arabs call _sabkhah_, or sheets of gypsum. The setting sun painted all this horror of desolation with strange rose and orange hues, with umbers and pale purples that for a moment reminded the Master of the sunset he had witnessed from the windows of _Niss'rosh_, the night his great plan had come to him. Only eight days ago, that night had been; it seemed eight years!

Carefully Leclair observed this savage landscape, over which a brilliant sky, of luminous indigo and lilac, was bending to the vague edge of the world. Serious though the situation was, the Frenchman could not repress a thought of the untamed beauty of that scene--a land long familiar to him, in the days when he had flown down these coasts on punitive expeditions against the rebellious Beni Harb clans of the Ahl Bayt, or People of the Black Tents. Africa, once more seen under such unexpected circ.u.mstances, roused his blood as he peered at the crude intensity of it, the splendid blaze of its seared nakedness under the blood-red sun-ball now dropping to rest.

All at once his gla.s.s stopped its sweep.

"Smoke, my Captain!" he exclaimed. "See, it curls aloft like a lady's ringlet. And--beyond the wady--"

"Ah, you see them, too?"

The major's gla.s.s, held unsteadily in his unbandaged hand, was now fixed on the indicated spot, as was "Captain Alden's."

"I see them," the Master answered. "And the green flag--the flag of the Prophet--"

"The flag, _oui, mon capitaine!_ There are many men, but--"

"But what, Lieutenant?"