OVER THE LINES
"You will carry these with you, of course," said Captain O'Neill,
"those who will be found in, the plane?"
"Yes, sir," said Hal. "They need not be aviators, but merely in
uniform."
"You drop from the machine as she strikes, I suppose?" said the
captain. "She will run after that, of course."
"Certainly it will leave us unsuspected," said Chester. "It will aid
our escape. Certainly no one would suspect a man had planned to fall
in flames."
"You have suggested enough," said the captain. "Your idea alters
much. Meet me in half an hour. Everything will be prepared."
He named a place and left the hut.
Jean Brosseau bent forward in bed, his eyes burning.
"When Captain O'Neill gives you final instructions he may tell you to
employ certain people on the other side. Here!" he motioned for the
map again, "I shall point out to you where they are."
He took a pencil and made a dot toward the corner of one of the
squares.
"In the old military maps a house stood there," he said. "My father's
house it was. There was also a stable; there was also a cellar, which
the Germans have discovered, but beyond it was an old cellar quite
concealed. Our people, at different times, have hidden there. There
are both men and women there now. They will help you if they can."
Jean Brosseau fell back on the bed and closed his eyes.
An hour later Hal climbed into the pilot seat of the biplane that
Captain O'Neill had placed at their disposal. He felt somewhat
uncomfortable in his ragged attire, but he knew that he could not be
attired in better costume for the undertaking. Chester also had
discarded his civilian clothes and donned rags.
The big "bus," as the airplanes were called, with propeller whirling,
lumbered over the ground; the smoothness of flying came to it and,
deafened to everything but the clatter of the motor and the thrash of
the air-screw, Hal gazed down. Points of light, yellow and red and
some almost white, glowed on the ground. Some of these marked
villages, encampments; others signified nothing at all--decoys to
attract the "eggs" of the German night flying falcons.
They neared the lines, and the strip of "No Man's Land," with the
pocked and pitted streaks of defenses on both sides, gleamed white and
spectral green under the star-dashed shells. An infantry attack was
going on; Hal could see the shapes of men as they flattened; they were
pinched to dots when they jumped up and then they spread out again.
Before them burst the frightful fireworks of their own barrage; behind
them, and above, that of the enemy.
Hal shivered in the cold; it was very chill there flying high above the
lines, and he wore but the rags of Jean Brosseau. Directly below them
the land had become black again, specked only by little points of
light, yellow, ruddy, white; some of these, like the lights behind the
French lines, perhaps marked hamlets, encampments; others were mere
decoy-lights; others--they showed but for the briefest second when
the biplane passed overhead were the guiding lights for the French and
American pilots. These were set in chimneys by the French behind the
German lines; any light, if seen by Germans and recognized, might cost
the annihilation of a family, or a neighborhood; many times such lights
had cost such savage penalty. Still, they were set.
Hal and Chester warmed at sight of them this night as never before.
They were going to the people who had set those lights.
The biplane banked and circled. Below was the square where the
airplane was to be shot down. Troops were moving through those fields,
undoubtedly, advancing in single file through communication trenches or
dashing from shell hole to shell hole; other troops lingered in dugouts
underground. The French batteries played all over those fields,
spraying down shrapnel, detonating the frightful charges of high
explosives. But at an hour before the appointed time--at 9 o'clock--the
French batteries would remit their fire for ten minutes upon the
square where the biplane should fall. Hal looked at the clock fastened
before him. It was two minutes to 9; he could see, directly below, the
crimson splash of the great French shells; a little way to the side
showed the flashes of the German heavy batteries making reply.
Now, as though smothered by the German fire, the French batteries
ceased. It was 9 o'clock, and Hal circled above the German batteries,
which were firing, and Chester released the first bomb. Before it
struck and burst, he let go another. He laid a third "egg" close
beside a German battery--so close that the battery ceased to fire;
but before the fourth dropped the anti-aircraft guns were going.
Chester could hear, above the racket of the motor and the air-screw,
the "pop, pop" of smashing shrapnel. They ran through the floating
smoke of a shell, the acrid ether-smelling stuff stinging their
nostrils. The beams of searchlights swept into the air. Hal circled
more carefully and deliberately dropped lower; Chester let two more
bombs drop near the batteries; he cleared the frames of the last pair
of "eggs," and, leaning forward, struck Hal's shoulder to tell him so.
The phosphorus-painted face of the altimeter showed the pointer
registering less than 2,000 feet; before the breaking German shells
should do, in fact, what it was to be pretended they had done, Chester
reached up and ignited the preparation smeared over the top plane.
Yellow flames flared up, and, to keep them above and behind, Hal
pointed the nose of the biplane far down and let her fall.
He turned, as he let the machine dive, back toward the French lines.
Then, as the German antiaircraft gunners saw their target flashing
clear in flames and they strewed their shrapnel closer before it, the
biplane fluttered and fell, no longer diving under guidance, but out of
control.
Chester jerked about to Hal; over the forms strapped between them, he
saw Hal's face in the light of the flame. Hal was not hit; he had
merely let go of the controls. It was part of the plan to let the
machine fall out of control. But, for a moment, it was too much as if
Hal had been hit.
The biplane side-slipped, "went off the wing," sickeningly, dropping
down spinning. Then, suddenly, with a catch of a well-made,
well-balanced plane, the inherent stability asserted itself, and the
planes caught; the big "bus" fluttered like a falling leaf, "flattened
out," and rested; now, it side-slipped again and fell, and Hal did not
touch the controls.
Chester, looking down, saw that the flashes of the guns off to the side
had come halfway to him; if the falling plane caught itself again after
the same amount of drop, side-slipping, it would hover not too far from
the ground before going "off the wing" again. That is, it might.
Anyway, the flames which had caught the wing fabric and were blazing
the breadth of the wings above and jumping back now to the rudder and
the tail were kept above; and to anyone on the ground the illusion of a
machine shot down, burning and out of control, must have become
complete.
Chester held on, not breathing. The momentary flutter and hover of the
machine was over. It was dropping down again in a wild, sliding
swoop--yet Hal made no move to stop it even when it half turned over.
Soon, however, he made a move, and, before the slide had gone too far,
he caught it as before it had caught itself; it fluttered, hovered, the
flames streaking up straight above it; the ground now just below. Then
it went "off the wing" again and crashed.
Chester, leaping clear at the instant of the impact, stumbled and fell
on his face and rolled down a shell hole. He caught himself, half
stunned and dizzy, and tried to crawl back toward the burning plane.
But Hal blundered against him and carried him back.
"All right," Hal whispered. "Are you?"
"All right," said Chester. "Great landing. I've fixed things back
there. Time to be moving. Got your grenades?"
"You bet."
"All right. Good luck."
Their orders were to part now. Chester crawled one way, Hal the
other. The biplane was burning with a great deal of smoke, which
smothered the glow on the side they had leaped. And no German was
near; they could be very sure of that. The gasoline now was ignited,
and the wreck was blazing beautifully. The machine was known, of
course, to be a bombing machine, shot down during operations. No one
would know how many bombs had come down with it; no one would come
close until after the flames had burned down. Then the Germans would
find the "pilot" and the "bomber," the two still forms the lads had
strapped to the machine before leaving their own lines. Everyone would
be accounted for; no search for more would be made.
Both boys now were ready for their desperate work.