_The Dance of Death_
Through an airplane's thick windows of shatter-proof glass, so tough
and resilient that a machine-gun bullet would only make a temporary
dent, the midday sun flashed brightly as the big ship rolled. Along
each side of the small room, high up under the curve of the cabin
roof, windows were ranged. Others like them were in the floor. And,
above, the same glass made a transparent dome from which an observer
could see on all sides.
Outside was the thunderous roar of ten giant motors, but inside the
cabin--the fire-control room of a dreadnought of the air--that blast
of sound became more a reverberation and a trembling than actual
noise.
Certainly the sound of motors and of slashing propellers, as the
battle plane roared up into the sky, did not prevent free
conversation among the three men in the room. Yet there was neither
laughter nor idle talk.
At a built-in desk, before a battery of instruments, sat Farrell, the
captain of the ship. Farther aft, in solidly anchored chairs, Colonel
Culver and Smithy were seated. Occasionally the captain spoke into a
transmitter, cutting in by phone on different stations about the ship.
"Check up on that right-wing gun, Sergeant--number two of the top
wing-battery. Recoil mechanism is reported stiff.... Tell Chicago,
Lieutenant, we will want one thousand gallons in the air--gas only--no
oil needed.... Gun room? Have the gun crews get some sleep. They'll
have to stand by later on...."
Colonel Culver spoke musingly. "Guerilla warfare, the hardest kind to
meet."
* * * * *
Smithy nodded absently. He rose and stared from one of the side
windows that was just level with his eyes. He could see nothing but
the broad expanse of wing, a sheet of smooth gray metal. Along its
leading edge was a row of shimmering disks where great propellers
whirled. From the top of the wing a two-inch Rickert recoilless thrust
forth its snout; it rose in air till the whole weapon was visible,
then settled again and buried itself inside the wing.
They were testing a gun. Smithy knew that inside that wing section
were other guns, and men, and smoothly running motors. The whole ship
was only a giant flying wing of which their own central section was
merely a thickening.
He looked down through a bull's-eye in the floor. The city they had
just left was beneath them. Washington, the nation's capital; the
golden dome of the Capitol Building was slipping swiftly astern. Only
then did he make a belated reply to Culver's statement.
"Well," he said shortly, "they'll have to meet it their own way. We
told them all we knew. And a lot of good that did--not!"
"Five days!" said Culver. "It seems more like five years since the
devils first came out. Nobody knows where they will hit next. But
they're working north--and there's no trouble in telling where they've
been."
Smithy's voice was hot in reply, hot with the intense anger of a
young, aggressive man when confronted by the ponderous motion of a big
organization getting slowly under way.
"If only we'd gone down underground," he exclaimed; "carried the fight
to them! They live there--there must be a whole world underground. We
could have carried in power lines, lighting the place as we went
along. We could have fought 'em with gas. We'd have paid for it, sure
we would, but we'd have given them enough hell to think of down below
so they wouldn't raise so much of it up above.
"But no! We had to fight according to the textbooks. And those red
devils don't fight that way; they never learned the rules."
* * * * *
"Guerilla warfare," Colonel Culver repeated. "There are certain
difficulties about fighting enemies you can't see."
"They're clever," Smithy admitted. "We taught them their lesson down
there in the desert--they've never been seen in daylight since. Out at
night--and their invisible heat-rays setting fire to a city a mile
away, then mopping up with their green flame-throwers if anyone's
left. They pick our planes out of the sky even when they're flying
without lights. Darkness means nothing to them! It was murder to send
troops in against them, troops wiped out to a man! Artillery--that's
no good either when we don't know how many of the devils there are, or
where they are. There's no profit in shelling the place when the
brutes have gone back underground."
Colonel Culver shot a warning glance from Smithy to the seated
officer. "About a hundred square miles of the finest fruit country on
earth laid waste," he admitted gravely; then sought to turn Smithy
from his rebellious mood:
"What's underground, I wonder? Must be a world of caves. Or perhaps
these mole-men can follow up a mere crack or a fault line and open it
out with their flame-throwers to make a tunnel they can go through."
The plane's captain had caught Culver's glance. "Speak your piece," he
said pleasantly. "Don't stop on my account. There's a lot to what Mr.
Smith says--but you don't know all that's going on."
He had been half turned. Now he swung about in his little swivel
chair, whose base was riveted solidly to the floor and whose safety
belt ends dangled as he turned.
"My orders are to deliver you two gentlemen at San Francisco. But
there's a show scheduled for to-night down south of there--two hundred
planes, big and little, scouts, cruisers, battle planes. They're going
to swarm in over when the enemy makes his first crack. There's a devil
of a storm in the mountains along the route we would usually take. I'm
afraid I'll have to swing off south." He was grinning openly as he
turned back to his desk.
Colonel Culver smiled back. "Attaboy!" he said.
But Smithy's forehead was still wrinkled in scowling lines as he
walked forward to an adjoining room. "Underground," he was thinking.
"We've got to carry the fight to them; got to lick 'em so they'll stay
licked. But Rawson--good old Dean--we're too late to help him. And the
lives of all the devils left in hell can't pay for that."
* * * * *
Smithy had been dozing. The shrill whistle of a high-pitched siren
brought him fully awake in an instant. Culver, too, sprang alertly to
his feet. Both men knew the signal was the call to quarters.
They had spread blankets on the floor of the fire-control room. Culver
immediately folded his into a compact bundle, and Smithy followed
suit, as he said: "That's right; we don't want any feather beds flying
around here in case of a mix-up."
Even Culver's simple act of stowing the blankets back in their little
compartment thrilled him with what it portended. His nerves were
suddenly aquiver with anticipation. A real fight! A determined effort!
No telling what these big dreadnoughts could do. Two hundred, big and
little, Captain Farrell had said. If they could catch the enemy out in
the open, show him up in a blaze of enormous flares....
Captain Farrell was calling them. A section of the floor had been
raised up mysteriously to form a platform beneath the shallow dome of
the conning tower. Farrell was there, headphones clamped to his ears,
one hand on the little switchboard at the base of the glass dome that
kept him in touch with every station on the ship. Beside him was the
fire-control officer similarly equipped, though his headphone was
connected only with the gun crews.
* * * * *
"The enemy's out!" said Captain Farrell. "And not just where they were
expected--they're raising fourteen kinds of hell. The ships have been
ordered in. I'm hooked up with the radio room now. They're less than a
hundred miles ahead. Of course we won't mix in on it, but I thought it
best to have my men standing by."
He pressed a little lever on his switchboard and spoke into the
mouthpiece of his head-set. "Pilot room? Our two passengers, Colonel
Culver and Mr. Smith, are coming forward. Let them see whatever they
can of the show."
He gave the two a quick smile and a nod and waved them forward with
the binoculars in his free hand. "It will be 'lights out' after you
get there. We'll be flying dark except for wing and tail lights up on
top. The enemy's movements are uncertain; perhaps he can see us
anyway, but we won't advertise ourselves to him."
The ship's bow was a blunt, rounded nose of glass, cut by cross bars
of aluminum alloy. That deeper central portion of the big flying wing
was carried ten feet forward; it was but one of many details that
Smithy had looked at with interest when he had seen the ship waiting
for them on the field.
* * * * *
The pilot room was dark when they entered. Only the glow from the
instrument panel showed the two men who were seated behind the wheel
controls. One of them turned and nodded a welcome.
"Can't offer you gentlemen seats," he said, "but if you'll stand right
here behind us you can see the whole works." He did not wait for a
reply, but turned back toward the black night ahead.
Smithy glanced past him at the lighted instruments and found the
altimeter. Twelve thousand--yes, there was nasty country hereabouts.
Then he, too, stared out into the dark at the sky sprinkled with
stars, at the vague blur of an unlighted world far below, and off at
either side and behind them the quivering lines of cold light where
starlight was reflected dimly from the spinning propellers.
Other wing lights winked out as he watched, and he knew that from that
moment on, they were invisible from below--invisible to human eyes at
least--that they were sweeping on through the darkness like some
gargantuan night bird pursuing its prey.
"Flares ahead, sir," one of the pilots had spoken into the mouthpiece
of his telephone, spoken lightly, reporting back to Captain Farrell.
The words whipped Smithy's head about, and he, too, saw on a distant
horizon, the beginning of a white glare.
They were fighting there--two hundred planes roaring downward, one
formation following another. In his mind he was seeing it so plainly.
The white blaze of light dead ahead grew broader. It had not been as
far distant as he had first thought, and the scene that he had
pictured came swiftly to reality.
* * * * *
Their own ship was still at the twelve-thousand-foot level. Ahead, and
five thousand feet below, tiny lights, red and white and green, lights
whose swift motion made their hundreds seem like thousands instead,
were weaving intricate patterns in the night. The flying lights of the
fighting planes were on for the planes' own protection; and, too, no
further concealment was possible in the glare that shone upward from
below.
Settling downward were balls of blinding fire, flares dropped by the
squadron of scout planes that had torn through in advance. They
lighted brilliantly a valley which, a few hours before, had been one
of many like it--square fields, dark green with the foliage of fruit
trees, straight lines of crossing roads, houses, and off in the
distance a little city.
And now the valley was an inferno of spouting flame. That city was a
vast, roaring furnace under smoke clouds of mingled blood-red and
black. The valley floor was a place of desolation, of drifting smoke
and of flashing shell-bursts as the fleet swept in above.
The myriad lights of the planes had drawn into a circle, a great
whirlpool of lines that revolved above a mile-wide section of that
valley.
Beside Smithy a wheel control was moving. He clung to the pilot's seat
as their own plane banked and nosed downward. And now he shouted aloud
to Culver:
"The mole-men! There they are! Thousands of them!"
* * * * *
He was pointing between the two pilots as their own plane swept down.
He could see them plainly now, clotted masses of dark figures surging
frenziedly to and fro. For an instant he saw them--then that part of
the world where they had been was a seething inferno of bursting bombs
and shells.
Beside him Colonel Culver spoke quietly: "Caught them cold! That's
handing it to them."
Their own plane had leveled off. With motors throttled they were
drifting slowly past, only a thousand feet higher than the circling
planes just off at one side. Culver's quiet tones rose to a hoarse
shout: "The ships! My God, they're falling!"
His wild cry ended in a gasp. Beside him Smithy, in breathless horror,
like Culver, was staring at that whirlpool of tiny lights that had
gone suddenly from smooth circular motion into frenzied confusion, or
vanished in the yellow glare of exploding gas tanks. The light of
their own white flares picked them out in ghastly clarity as they
fell.
Straight, vertical lines of yellow were burning planes. Again they
made horrible zigzag darts and flashed down into view torn and
helpless, while others, tens and scores of others with crumpled wings,
joined the mad dance of death.
Smithy knew that he could never tear his eyes away from the sight. Yet
within him something was clamoring for his attention. "They didn't do
it from below!" that something was shouting. "Not down in that hell.
There are more of them somewhere." Then somehow, he forced his eyes to
stare ahead and outside of that circle of fearful fascination and he
knew that for an instant he was seeing a single stab of green flame.
* * * * *
One single light on the darkness of a little knoll that stood close
beside this place of white flame and destruction. One light--and in
the valley there had flashed a million brighter. It had shone but an
instant, but, to Smithy, watching, it was the same he had seen when
their own camp was attacked. And now it was Smithy who was abruptly
stone cold.
One hand closed upon a pilot's shoulder with a grip of steel; his
other pointed. "Down there--they're hiding back of that hill, picking
off our ships from the side." And then, like a guiding beacon, a point
of green showed once more.
The plane banked sharply while one of the pilots spoke crisp, clearly
enunciated words into his phone. He listened; then: "Right!" he
snapped. "Power dive for bow-gun firing. Level off for bombing from
five hundred feet."
Off into the night they were headed. Then a left bank and turn brought
the place of blazing flares and falling planes swinging smoothly into
view; they were flying toward it.
* * * * *
Against the white glare in the valley of death was a hill, roundly
outlined. Then the ship's nose sank heavily down; and, from each broad
wing, in straight, forward-stabbing lines, was the steady lightning of
the Rickert batteries in action.
The pilot's room was a place of unbearable sound. The crash of
gunfire, it seemed, must crush the glass wall like an eggshell by the
sheer impact of its own thunder. In that pandemonium Smithy never knew
when they flattened out. He knew only that the hill ahead twinkled
brilliantly, and that each flashing light was an exploding shell. He
knew when the hill passed beneath them.
Then, in the night, close beside them and just outside the pilot-room
glass, was a quick glow of red. The plane lurched and staggered.
Smithy clung desperately to the seat ahead. The pilot was fighting
madly with the wheel. The roar of bombs from astern, where the bombers
had launched their missiles at the approaching hill, was unheard. In a
world suddenly gone chaotic he could hear nothing. He knew only that
the valley dead ahead was whirling dizzily--that it sank suddenly from
sight.
They were crashing. That red glow--they had been hit. Then something
hard and firm was pressing against him, pressing irresistibly. It was
the last conscious impression upon Smithy's mind.