_A Present from Satan_
Out on the tarmac of Eighty-Four Dave Dawson and Freddy Farmer stood
peeling off their flying gear and feasting their eyes on the new Mark
5 Spitfires. Lights of joy danced in their eyes, and their faces were
flushed with excitement and eagerness for the future to become the
present in a hurry.
"That _is_ an airplane!" Dave cried and slung his parachute pack up
into the pit. "That's a dream. The sugar in my coffee. The moonlight on
a summer night. The smell of a lovely rose. The goal from the field in
the last ten seconds of play. The whozit of the whatzit. And how!"
Freddy looked at him and sighed unhappily.
"And he was such a bright chap before he took that Mark Five up for a
test hop!" he murmured. "He could count all the way up to ten. He could
write his own name. And he even knew what day of the month it was. But,
now.... O well! They say his kind last just so long. And, of course,
he's a blinking Yank at heart. So.... Hey! Ouch!"
The swinging Mae West life preserver jacket caught Freddy on the ear,
and almost toppled him off his feet. He caught himself in time, ducked
as the Mae West came sailing around again, and charged at his best pal.
Dave backed up and stepped quickly to the side.
"You had that coming to you, my little man," he said sternly. "You
should learn to understand expressions of beauty."
"Sugar in his coffee!" the English youth snorted. "Moonlight on a
summer night! Good grief! Whoever heard of such things?"
"Oh, I've got lots more of them," Dave chuckled. "Better ones, too.
Listen."
"Don't!" Freddy groaned.
Dave ignored him and stuck one hand inside his tunic and extended the
other palm up toward the nearest Spitfire.
"A Mark Five is the lace in your shoe!" he cried. "It is the frosting
on mother's cake. It is the apple in her dumpling pie. It is the breath
of spring. It is the kiss of your girl. It is...."
Dave stopped short and shook his head.
"No, that's wrong," he said. "No girl would kiss that map of yours,
Freddy. They'd.... Hey! So I'm talking to myself, huh?"
It was true. Dave was simply throwing beautiful words at free air.
Freddy had left him cold and walked over to Flight Lieutenant Barker,
who had led the test hop patrol. Dave went over there scowling.
"Fine business!" he growled. "I try to better his education and he
walks out on me!"
Freddy snorted in disgust and Flight Lieutenant Barker grinned.
"You've got a bite, Dawson?" he asked. "Fleas, perhaps?"
"Huh, me?" Dave echoed, and then turned beet red.
He still had one hand stuck inside his tunic. He pulled it out and they
all laughed.
"No kidding, though, Flight Lieutenant," he said. "Isn't that Mark Five
the best thing that ever came down the pike?"
"Down the pike?" the senior officer murmured. Then brightening, "Oh
yes, I get what you mean. Quite! Best bus in the R.A.F. I'm all for
having a go at a Jerry or two right now. I think we'll sweep the skies
with the Mark Fives. But I hear that even better planes are on the
drafting boards right now."
"Phew, that's hard to believe!" Freddy breathed. "I mean, that
anything could be better than the Mark Five."
"Shame, Farmer!" Barker said with a grin. "And that statement from the
lips of an Englishman!"
"Is he?" Dave asked with a mock gasp.
"Is he what?" Barker wanted to know.
"Is Freddy really and truly an Englishman?" Dave replied and set
himself to jump fast. "From the way his eyes slant up, I'd always
thought that he was a little bit...."
Dave didn't finish the rest. And it was not Freddy making a dive for
him that choked off his words. On the contrary it was the wail of the
alarm siren mounted atop the Operations Office. As one man the three
spun around and dashed over to the little hut that was the nerve center
of the Squadron. And so did every other pilot on stand-to duty.
The Operations Officer met them at the door. He waved a slip of paper
at them.
"Zone Ten Spotters!" he snapped. "A single Messerschmitt One-Ten
sneaking in from the coast. Altitude twenty one thousand. Course, due
west. Intercept and teach the beggar a lesson. Chap's balmy to try it
alone these days. Off with you. I'll give you further spotter reports
in the air."
The half dozen pilots turned from the Operations Office door and raced
back to the line of Spitfires. Mechanics already had the propellers
ticking over. Dave skidded to a halt by his ship and practically jumped
into the parachute harness and Mae West that his own mechanic held up
for him. Then in a single leap he vaulted into the pit, snapped his
safety harness in place, plugged in his radio jack, and reached for the
throttle.
"Get one of the dirty beggars for me, sir!" the mechanic cried out. "I
come from Coventry, you know, sir!"
"Fair enough!" Dave yelled and sent the Mark 5 Spitfire streaking
straight out across the field. "One Messerschmitt coming up, for
Coventry! I mean, coming _down_!"
Split seconds after the words popped off his lips he was in the air
with wheels up, and curving up and around toward Zone 10. He did not
have to glance at his map to determine the location of Zone 10. Its
location, like the locations of all the zones that Eighty-Four guarded,
was stamped indelibly on his brain. Zone 10 was on the coast south of
Harwich, and he headed in that direction at top speed.
Out the corner of his eye he saw the other planes of the flight
streaking along in the same direction. He grinned and jammed his hand
against the already wide open throttle as though in so doing he might
get more power out of the singing Rolls-Royce in the nose. And he knew
that Freddy, Flight Lieutenant Barker, and the three other Spitfire
pilots were doing the same thing. If the alarm had said two or more
enemy aircraft were sighted the Eighty-Four lads would have dropped
into formations of flights of three with Barker giving the orders for
attack and so forth. That wasn't necessary, however, with just one lone
Jerry plane in the offing. Instead, it was a case of first come, first
crack at the Jerry. And so the six Eighty-Four lads were hopping their
planes along as fast as they could so that they might be the one to
get first licks at the Messerschmitt. True, that sort of thing wasn't
strictly regulations, but the R.A.F. lads did it ... and often.
"Ten shillings says you guys are wasting your time!" Dave shouted
happily into his radio mike.
"Ten shillings says you've forgotten there's lots of radios in England,
Dawson!" Flight Lieutenant Barker snapped back at him in the earphones.
Dave gulped and went beet red to the roots of his hair. In his
excitement he had clean forgotten that ground stations are tuned in on
aircraft aloft all the time. Whatever is said up there goes right into
the ears of the big shots, if they happen to be listening.
"I mean when the formation reaches the objective!" Dave said hurriedly.
"One Mark Five is more than enough for any One-Ten!"
Barker's laugh came over the radio.
"That's nice quick thinking, Dawson," he said. "No wonder you've got
more than a couple of the beggars in your bag."
"Luck! Absolutely nothing else. I was present each time!"
The voice was Freddy Farmer's. Dave opened his mouth to make a fitting
retort, but checked himself. At that instant he heard the voice of the
Operations officer back down on the field.
"Tiger Flight!" he called, using the code name for the patrol in the
air. "Change course twenty degrees north. Clouds ahead of you. Enemy
aircraft climbing to twenty-four thousand. Operations to Tiger. That is
all!"
"Tiger to Operations!" Dave heard Flight Lieutenant Barker check back.
"Changing course. Right you are!"
Dave had already swung his ship around more to the north, and was
hunched forward over the stick staring hard at the mountain cloud bank
looming up ahead. His eagle eyes swept it from side to side and from
top to bottom. But he failed to see a single moving dot that could
be the Messerschmitt One-Ten trying to climb up over the stuff. He
saw nothing but that bank of clouds and the crazy shadows that marked
nature's nooks and crags in the stuff.
And then he heard Freddy Farmer's excited voice coming into his
earphones.
"Enemy aircraft sighted! Five more degrees northward. Just under the
tip of that finger of the stuff on the left!"
Dave snapped his gaze in the direction indicated, and then suddenly saw
the blurred dot curving upward and to the north. He grinned and gave a
little shake of his head.
"Old Sharp Eyes Freddy Farmer!" he grunted. "Boy! How does he do it?"
"Simple!" the radio's earphones told him instantly. "I jolly well fly
with my eyes _open_. Try it sometime, old bean. You'll be surprised at
the difference."
Dave didn't make any comment. At that instant the moving dot moved
right into the billowy clouds and was completely lost to view.
"Spread out, chaps!" came Barker's orders. "Don't think the beggar
is turning back. Spread out and keep your eyes skinned. And bear
northward."
As he was flying on the extreme left Dave cut around sharp north, and
stuck his nose down for additional speed. The dot had entered the cloud
bank at approximately the same altitude as that of his own Spitfire,
but he had the sudden hunch that the Jerry pilot was going to stop
climbing. That he was going to go down and try to sneak out from under
the cloud bank while the lads of Eighty-Four fruitlessly hunted for him
at high altitudes.
"Maybe I'm wrong," Dave murmured. "And that won't be anything new, and
how. But if he sticks to those clouds it'll mean he isn't on photo
reconnaissance. And if he goes down under the stuff it'll mean the same
thing. Right! There's nothing down there that Goering's little dopes
haven't taken a million pictures of since they started this cockeyed
war. Yeah! It's my hunch that lad is over here on other business."
With a nod for emphasis he steepened the Spitfire's dive a bit and
went cutting down across the English sky like a comet gone haywire.
In less than practically nothing flat he was down below the altitude
of the belly of the stuff. He pulled out and let the Mark 5 prop claw
straight forward at an even keel. At the same time he threw back his
head and raked the underside of the cloud bank with his eyes.
He saw nothing, however. Nothing but clouds and more clouds. Seconds
ticked by to form a minute. He banked slightly and glanced back to see
if any of his pals had the same hunch. His was the only Spitfire to be
seen, however. The others were way up above him and completely out of
sight.
"A horse on you, Dawson," he grunted, "if they smack the guy down, and
buzz back for a spot of tea, leaving you to hunt the little man who
isn't there. Yeah! It would be.... Hold it! So there you are, my little
Jerry!"
A war painted Messerschmitt One-Ten had cut down out of the belly of
the cloud bank about half a mile ahead of him and perhaps the same
distance to the left. It leveled off immediately once it was in clear
air and started streaking to the west again.
"Not today!" Dave shouted and kicked his Mark Five around in a flash
half turn. Then into his flap-mike he bellowed, "Tally-ho, gang!
Downstairs with you!"