_Satan’s Signals_
EXACTLY THIRTY-SIX hours had passed since the arrival of Dave Dawson and
Freddy Farmer at the Air Corps Base at Colon in the Canal Zone.
Thirty-six hours, during every minute of which they both yearned and
longed for decisive action, or at least action of some kind. However,
they had parts to play, and they played them for all they were worth. As
two special pilots from Washington G.H.Q. they stepped right into the
war activities of the Attack Squadron. They attended brush up classes,
they took part in the many patrol conferences held in the field’s
Ready-Room, and they went out and flew formation look-see patrols that
carried them far out over the Caribbean, and to the north and south of
the Canal Zone.
In short, they did everything to make it look as though they really were
down there to learn, and report their knowledge later to Washington. But
it was simply a part they were playing, and on the morning of their
third day with the Attack Squadron they just couldn’t wait any longer.
They were on the field, dressed for flying, and watching the routine
dawn patrol take off, when Dave mentioned the thought that was ever
constant and uppermost in their minds.
“We’ve got just one more card to play, Freddy,” he said in a low voice
that didn’t carry beyond the ears for which it was meant. “I think we
should play it. Take a chance, anyway, and try to find out if we’re
right or wrong. I’ll go plain, raving nuts if we put it off any longer.
What do you say?”
“I say, absolutely!” the English youth replied instantly. “One more day
and I, too, will be fit for a padded cell, or something. What rotten
luck! I mean, Marble being missing.”
“And how!” Dave grated softly, and stared up at the cloud-streaked
Panama sky. “But pick up first prize. It’s yours, Freddy. You certainly
called it right on Marble. We sure won’t learn a thing from him, because
he isn’t here. But, gosh! I’m almost afraid to start out.”
“The southern Albuquerque Cays, you mean?” Freddy asked, and stared at
him wide-eyed. “Why?”
Dave shrugged and gave a little shake of his head.
“Like going down to the post office to find out if the all important
letter you hope is there _is_ there,” he said after a moment or two. “I
mean, if the southern Albuquerque Cays turn out to be just a bust, then
where are we? Right behind the old eight ball, and a complete wash-out
to Colonel Welsh. Darn it, Freddy, I can take a licking with the best of
them, and come up grinning--I hope. But if I fall down on this job I
think I’ll just walk into the ocean and keep going.”
“I know just how you feel, Dave,” Freddy said, and sighed heavily. “The
fact that we haven’t made any headway to speak of in this blasted mess
makes it all the more important to us. But, good grief! We had so
blasted little to start with in the first place. Of course I’m not
complaining, nor trying to make excuses. Just the same, I think this is
the first Intelligence job we’ve tackled where we absolutely bumped head
on into a brick wall.”
“You’ve got something there, pal!” Dave grunted. “It’s been like shadow
boxing, and trying to knock your shadow cold. You start a haymaker up
from the floor, and suddenly your shadow isn’t there any more. Oh well,
we’re not going to find out a thing just standing around here gabbing.
That’s a cinch. Put on your bib and tucker, Freddy. We’re going to do a
little sky cruising, and see what there is to see. And you know what I’m
hoping, I guess?”
“Quite,” Freddy breathed softly, and tightened the chin strap of his
helmet. “Right-o. Let’s get on with the blasted business. If we don’t
find a thing, we can at least dive straight into the water, and make an
end of our troubles.”
“And that’s an idea, _if_!” Dave grunted, and climbed up into the
forward cockpit of the Vultee attack plane. “All aboard!”
A few moments later Dave took the Vultee off, got himself a bit of
altitude, then started circling the field to create the impression to
any watching eyes below that he and Freddy were just taking a breather
hop, and checking their plane. Eventually he let the plane slide away
from the Air Base, and guided it out over the reaches of the Caribbean
Sea. Presently he spotted the dawn patrol ahead and a little to the
south of his position. He climbed the Vultee to high altitude and
brought it around and put it on a course that led toward the Albuquerque
Cays. They were some two hundred and thirty miles away, and so it was
lacking a few minutes of an hour when he finally sighted them ahead and
low down on the horizon.
Sight of them made little shivers start rippling up and down his spine.
His heart began to hammer, and his mouth and lips went slightly dry. For
a moment he was filled with the insane and utterly ridiculous desire to
bank around and fly away in the opposite direction. Fear that this last
hope would fall through took charge of his nerves, and tiny beads of
sweat began to break out on his forehead. He shook his head in an angry
gesture and took a tighter hold on the control stick, as though in so
doing he could prevent that other half of him from turning the plane
away.
“Come on, stop being a silly dope!” he grated at himself. “You’re worse
than a fellow with his first date with the beautiful girl who just
recently moved into the neighborhood. Snap out of it, kid! What is to
be, will be. And if it isn’t--then, so help me, it’ll be up to you to do
something about it!”
“Do something about what, Dave?” he heard Freddy Farmer call to him.
He turned around and grinned at his English born pal.
“Just giving myself the old pep talk, Freddy,” he said. “Just promising
myself that everything’s going to turn out okay. And how are all your
friends?”
“I’ve known happier and more contented moments,” Freddy replied. Then,
lifting a hand and pointing a finger forward, “Well, there they are, old
thing, for what they’re worth. Better lose some of our altitude so’s we
can take a good look around. These patches of cloud aren’t made of
glass, you know.”
Dave nodded, turned forward, and throttled the Vultee’s Cyclone and let
the plane nose down toward the expanse of deep blue Caribbean sea below.
When he was at around five thousand feet he leveled off and headed
straight for the Albuquerque Cays. Coming up on them, they looked like
lush green and brown dots on a field of blue. And when he was directly
over the first dot of the short curving chain of islands they didn’t
look like very much more. He counted six of them, the biggest being the
most northern one. But nowhere did he see any signs of life. For all you
could tell a subterranean volcanic disturbance might possibly have
pushed them up above the surface of the water overnight. Just patches of
green and brown on a field of blue. Patches of green and brown that were
edged here and there by strips of yellowish white, that were actually
beaches.
For a good half hour Dave drilled up and down over the Albuquerque Cays
searching every square inch of them with his eyes. However, as each
second clicked away into the history of time, his heart sank lower and
lower, and the flame of hope in him grew smaller and smaller. He didn’t
dare turn around and look at Freddy, for he knew that he would only see
his own misery reflected in his pal’s eyes. So he kept his face front
and continued to circle about over the Cay chain. More time passed, and
the hope in him died down to a tiny spark.
Throttling the Wright-powered Vultee V-12C attack bomber to cruising
speed, Dave licked his dry lips, twisted around in the seat, and winked
at Freddy Farmer in the gunner’s pit.
“How’s it go, pal?” he called out, and motioned downward. “Not nervous,
or anything like that, are you?”
“Certainly not!” the English boy shouted back. “I stopped being nervous
hours ago. Now I’m simply _scared stiff_ that we’re wrong! How do you
feel?”
Dave shrugged and made a little gesture with his free hand.
“I’m not sure,” he said, “but I guess it’s something like the way a clay
pigeon must feel. You know, hoping the guy with the trap gun will miss.
But--but I’m afraid this is a waste of time, and that we’ve struck out.”
“Not any more!” Freddy shouted, and pointed to the left. “Look! Do you
see it? Recognize the type?”
Dave instantly turned his head to face east, and peered hard at the
cloud-dotted blue sky. For a second or so he didn’t see a thing but
clouds and blue sky. Then suddenly he saw a dot moving along the
underneath side of one of the clouds. But it was just a moving dot to
him. A plane, of course. But as far as he was concerned, it could well
be a free balloon at that distance. He looked back again at Freddy and
was startled by the wildly excited look on his pal’s face.
“Recognize the type?” he echoed. “What do you think I’ve got here? An
X-ray machine for distance. And what’s eating you? What’s making you so
excited, for cat’s sake?”
“Who wouldn’t be?” the English youth yelled back at him, and stabbed the
air with his pointed finger. “You should get some glasses. Dave, that
plane up there is one of the new Nazi Arados! The folding wing type that
they can carry aboard the larger type of German U-boats. You know, they
use them for scouting convoys and stragglers left behind. That’s what
that is up there--one of the new Nazi Arados! I could spot one of those
in the dark. So I know I’m absolutely right!”
Dave’s mouth fell open in dumbfounded amazement, and for a second or two
he couldn’t move, much less speak a word.
“What?” he finally bellowed. “A Nazi U-boat plane? You’re sure?”
“Yes!” Freddy barked at him. “Yes, for goodness’ sake, let’s do
something about it before the blighter sees _us_, and hides away in one
of those clouds.”
Long before Freddy Farmer had finished his words, Dave had whirled
around front and was feeding the thundering Wright Cyclone every ounce
of high test octane it could take. He hauled the Vultee around and stuck
the nose up toward the clouds in the distance. He leaned forward against
the controls and strained his eyes upward. It wasn’t until a few seconds
had ticked by that he really got a good look at the plane’s silhouette
stamped on a background cloud. But when he did get that good look, there
was no longer the slightest doubt that Freddy had been seeing things.
It was a Nazi U-boat Arado, right enough. He could see the biplane
wings, the rounded fuselage with the radial engine in the nose, and the
war painted pontoon fitted underneath. He stared at it for several
moments as the Vultee went prop screaming upwards. Then he impulsively
lowered his gaze and swept the stretches of the Caribbean below him. But
to his disappointment he didn’t see any U-boat on the surface of the
water, or below it, for that matter. Nor was there any telltale
thread-like wake of a periscope going through the water. There was
nothing but just blue water, and not the sign of a single vessel of any
description.
“More speed, Dave!” came Freddy’s excited cry to his ears. “I think the
beggar has seen us. Yes, he has! And there he goes for that big cloud.
Blast it! If only he were in range!”
Dave made no comment. His eyes were again on the tiny Nazi seaplane, and
he could see it scooting upward toward the white fluffy belly of a great
big cloud.
“Let him hide in it!” he presently growled. “We’ll go in after him and
smoke him out. Get those rear guns ready, Freddy!”
“Think I’d forgotten them!” the English youth snapped. “You just get us
up there. That’s all you have to worry about!”
Dave had to grin in spite of himself. Good old Freddy Farmer! As meek as
a mouse when nothing special was happening. But let action show up and
at the drop of a hat he was like a snarling tiger.
“If we don’t find him,” Dave grunted as he saw the tiny Arado slide up
into the cloud and disappear, “I’ll probably have my hands full stopping
Freddy from getting out and looking around. Well, here we go in after
him. And if we smack into him, it’s going to be his job that’ll break up
like toothpicks, not this tough Vultee.”
As Dave spoke the last he lifted the nose a bit more and then went
slashing up into the cloud. In nothing flat he was tearing through a
glistening white world that seemingly tried to crowd right down into the
cockpit. Hand steady on the stick, and body bent well forward, he peered
hard into the glistening mist, ready at an instant’s notice to fire his
forward guns and swerve off sharply if the shadow of the other plane
should suddenly loom up in front of his propeller.
However, no shadow loomed up before him, nothing but white mist that
glistened in the blazing rays of the tropical sun. And then, suddenly,
the Vultee went ripping up out of the cloud and into clear air. No
sooner was he out in the open than Dave leveled off from his zoom, and
twisted around and stared down back at the top of the cloud. It seemed
almost to wink at him mockingly. There was no sign of hide nor hair of
the Arado.
“Lost him, blast it!” Freddy Farmer grated.
“Keep your shirt on!” Dave snapped. “We’ll find him. He can’t be far.
Just take it easy, and be ready to smack him when he comes up through.”
“_If_ he does!” the English youth groaned, and then fell silent.
Dave didn’t say anything, either. He simply tooled the Vultee back and
forth over the cloud and kept his eyes riveted on its fluffy crest.
Presently he slid down through it again to clear air below. In fact, he
practically combed the cloud with the Vultee, but that was all the good
it did him.
“Well, that’s a horse on me, Freddy,” he was eventually forced to admit
sadly. “Sorry, Freddy. I guess he put one over on me and sneaked over to
some other of these clouds. The darned plane is so small you could hide
it under your hat.”
“Anyway, the venture had a promise of excitement,” Freddy grunted. “What
now? I don’t think there’s any sense hunting around for the blighter. We
could run out of gas trying to find him in all these clouds. Just our
blasted unlucky day, Dave, I’m afraid.”
“It isn’t over yet!” Dawson grated, and banked the Vultee westward. “I’m
going to have another look at those Albuquerque Cays. I--I refuse to
give them up as a lost cause. I swear they’re right in the middle of
this confounded mystery.”
With a savage nod for emphasis, Dawson sent the attack bomber rocketing
back toward the short chain of green and brown islands sticking up out
of the blue water. He was still half a mile from the most southern one
when suddenly Freddy Farmer’s hand came crashing down on his shoulder,
and the English youth’s voice cried out wildly in his ears.
“On this side of that first island, Dave! To the right! That strip of
beach. There’s a crashed plane there. Can you see it? Its tail is
sticking up out of the sand. And, I say! There’s something white on the
beach. It looks like a letter--the letter H! What in the world is that
supposed to mean?”
Dave was too excited to speak for a moment. He had picked out the wreck
of the plane on the beach, and the big letter “H” on the sand close to
it.
“That’s H for help!” he cried. “The pilot of that job must be still
alive. Crashed and got marooned. And, Freddy! Unless I’m nuts, that
broken off tail sticking up is the tail of a Vultee. Holy smoke! We must
be blind not to have seen it before.”
“Worse than that!” Freddy shouted. “But I’d almost swear it wasn’t
there. That’s impossible, of course. But I don’t see how we could have
missed it. I--”
The English youth cut himself off short, and both of them stared down at
the tattered figure of a man who came stumbling out of the thick
underbrush waving both hands in a beseeching gesture.
“That settles it!” Dave cried. “That fellow does need help. And we’re
going to give it to him.”
As Dave spoke the words he hauled back the Cyclone’s throttle and began
to lose altitude fast. He let the Vultee glide out to sea for a bit,
then banked around and headed toward the far end of the beach, away from
the crash. There he banked once more until he was in line with the strip
of packed sand beach. Then he let his wheels down, and glided gently
forward and down.
His landing was perfect. Not a single bounce. He undid his safety and
'chute harness, and legged out of the plane with Freddy. The man in
tattered clothes was stumbling toward them head down.
“Take it easy!” Dave called out cheerfully. “No rush, now. We’re here to
take you off.”
“But there is a rush, my two little friends, a most urgent reason for
speed. But first you will both put your hands in the air!”
For a second the sandy beach seemed to fall away from beneath Dave’s
feet. He heard Freddy Farmer’s tight gasp, but he didn’t bother to
glance at his pal. His eyes were glued to the man in tattered clothes
before him. The man had jerked up his head at the last moment, and a
small but very deadly Luger had suddenly appeared in his right hand as
though by magic. And the muzzle of the Luger moved back and forth from
Dave’s stomach to Freddy’s.
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