Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online Distributed
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JET PLANE
MYSTERY
By
ROY J. SNELL
[Illustration: ]
WILCOX & FOLLETT CO.
CHICAGO
1946
COPYRIGHT, 1944, BY
WILCOX & FOLLETT CO.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
I Whistling Mystery 1
II Contact 10
III Friendly Enemies 20
IV A Glorious Fight 27
V A Good Show 34
VI Plane Wrecked 40
VII A Night's Adventures 49
VIII A Look at a Mystery Plane 60
IX The Tagged Monkey 70
X "Hist There! You!" 78
XI Night Fighters 86
XII Up at Dawn 96
XIII The Jet Plane 105
XIV Ted's Gony 115
XV The Secret Book 125
XVI Mostly Memories 134
XVII Voices in the Night 143
XVIII Luck, Pals and Providence 152
XIX Mysteries Deepen 158
XX A Ship from Some Other World 165
XXI Mary Brown from the U. S. A. 175
XXII Star of the Mist 183
XXIII Hot Cannibal Rivets 192
XXIV Twilight Battle 200
XXV Jack's New Gunner 207
XXVI Jack's Jet Plane Wins Its Way 217
XXVII Stratosphere Tactics 225
XXVIII The Jet Plane's Last Battle 234
JET PLANE MYSTERY
CHAPTER I
WHISTLING MYSTERY
Ensign Jack Steel sat on the edge of a life raft whittling a stick. A
strange place to whittle, one might say, on the deck of a great U. S.
aircraft carrier in mid-Pacific. But Jack loved to whittle.
"What do you make when you whittle?" someone once asked him.
"Shavings--just shavings--that's all," had been his prompt reply. Then,
feeling that this was not a real answer, he went on to say, "I whittle
and think. Thinking is what really counts."
Jack was thinking now, not thinking hard--just letting thoughts drift in
and out of his mind. There was enough to think about, too; they were in
Jap waters right now. Something was bound to happen soon, perhaps at
dawn. Jack would be away before dawn, for his was a scout plane. Back at
the faraway training base at Kingsville he had put in his bid for a dive
bomber.
"Ah! A dive bomber!" he had said to Stew, his buddy. "There's the plane
for me! You climb to twelve thousand feet, you get near the target, you
come zooming down at four hundred an hour, you let go your bomb, and--"
"Wham!" Stew had exclaimed.
"Yes," Jack had agreed. "Then you get out of there fast, as if Old Nick
himself was after you."
In the Navy you don't talk back; so when the powers that be read off
Jack, or "Jackknife Johnny," as some of the boys called him, for a scout
ship, a scout ship it had been--and still was.
And now, Jack thought, I wouldn't trade my little old scout plane for
any ship that flies. To go skimming away before dawn, to watch the "dawn
come up like thunder" in those tropical waters, then to skip from cloud
to cloud, eyes ever on the sea, looking for the enemy--ah, that was the
life!
"Nothing like it!" he whispered as he carved off a long shaving and
allowed it to drop silently on the deck.
A moving shadow loomed up before him. He knew that shadow--"Old
Ironsides," as the boys called him--Lieutenant Commander Donald Stone,
boss of the carrier _Black Bee_, Jack's ship, was on his way to the
bridge.
"Must get a swell view of our task force from up there, eh, Commander?"
Jack spoke before he thought. He'd always been that way.
"Eh? What? Oh, it's you, Jackknife Johnny." The Commander gave a low
laugh. "Well now, on a night like this you don't see much--a bit of
white foam after each ship, and a blink of light now and then--that's
all."
"It's enough, sir," said Jack. "You know what's there--cruisers,
destroyers, and maybe a tanker. Your mind must fill in the picture."
"Oh! It does! It really does!" the Commander agreed. "Want to come up
and see for yourself?" he invited.
"That would be keen, sir!" said Jack, dropping to his feet.
"Come on up then," the Commander urged.
As Jack mounted the steps to the Commander's bridge, twenty-five feet
above the flight deck, he thought how strange life aboard a carrier
would seem to those who had never put to sea as a navy pilot. Routine
was strictly adhered to. When a flight of planes came in from a practice
flight, they came down in perfect formation like a flock of wild geese
landing on a pond.
Strict discipline, yes, he told himself, yet here I am following our
Commander to his bridge, and it doesn't seem a bit strange; for he's one
of us. We're all one, all dressed in khaki, all tanned, trained to the
last degree, ready to act as a unit to beat the Japs.
"Life on a carrier surely is grand, sir!" he said aloud.
"Yes, son," the hardy old Commander rumbled. "There's never been
anything like it before."
"Never has, sir," Jack agreed.
"And now," said the Commander as they reached the bridge, "there's your
Navy task force on a moonless night. Have a seat. Take it all in. I'm
going to do a little meditating on the reality of the Absolute." He
laughed, and Jack laughed with him. Jack didn't know who or what the
Absolute might be, but he did know that the Commander was giving him a
real treat, and that was enough for him.
It was strange sitting up there feeling the throb of the ship's mighty
engines, looking away at the blacker-than-black sea, and knowing that
they were racing along at twenty knots an hour toward some sort of real
trouble.
"Spooky," he thought.
And indeed, it was just that, for they were definitely in Jap waters.
Everyone expected a fight at dawn. If some Jap snooper plane or
submarine sighted them now, there would be a mighty battle.
To the right and a little ahead he caught a white gleam on the water.
"That's the _Black Knight_," he told himself. The _Black Knight_ was a
fast and powerful cruiser. Three other cruisers, always close to the
carrier but not too close, sped along with them. Six destroyers lay
farther out.
"What a lot of power, sir!" Jack said aloud as the Commander strode past
him.
"What? Yes, a lot of striking power," the Commander agreed. "We're
likely to need it, too. They say the Jap navy won't come out and fight.
You can't count on that. They're sly rascals, those Japs. They might
pounce on us with double our striking power any time. They...."
"What's that, sir?" Jack broke in.
"What's what?" The Commander paused.
"Don't you hear it, sir?" Jack asked. "It's like the howl of a dog, or a
train whistle far away."
"All I hear is that banjo on the after deck," the Commander laughed low.
"It's not that, nor anything like it." Jack was in dead earnest. "It's
nothing on this ship. It comes from far away, sir. Listen hard."
"You have good ears," said the Commander. "Radio ears, perhaps. They say
there are people who can pick radio messages right out of the air with
their unaided ears. I've never believed that, but--say!" His voice rose.
"I think I do hear something out there!"
"Sure you do, sir!" Jack exclaimed. "It's getting louder, closer!"
For a space of seconds the two of them, the aged Commander and the boy,
stood there listening with breathless attention.
"This may be serious!" the Commander exclaimed at last, as he dashed for
the intership telephone.
Jack heard him barking words into the phone. He at last exclaimed loud
enough to be heard, "Good boy, Steve! Keep a sharp watch!"
Jack wondered who Steve was, but more than that he wanted to know what
made that high-pitched, screaming whistle that had increased in volume
until it fairly filled the sky.
"It's a bomb!" he exclaimed at last. "Sounds just like the ones those
Jap dive bombers threw at us!" He wanted to race down the companionway
to seek a safer spot. And then again he did not, for was not this a
first-class mystery? And was not the Commander standing by? You had to
be a real sailor.
"Could be a bomb from some stratosphere plane," the Commander, who had
returned to his post, agreed. "But I doubt it."
"What is it then, sir?" Jack asked.
"Some Jap trick I'd say," the Commander rumbled. "They may be closer
than we think. The Germans claim they've got planes loaded with TNT that
they guide by radio. It might be one of those."
From below came the murmur of many voices. All over the ship men were
calling, "What is it?" "What's going on?" "Here it comes!" "Here she
comes!"
Jack wondered if they would be ordered to battle stations, but no order
came.
"It's high up and coming fast." There was a suggestion of huskiness in
the Commander's voice.
"It will pass over quickly, sir," Jack declared. "Unless...."
"Yes," the Commander agreed.
To Jack, whose mind often conjured up strange things, all that lay about
him--the night, the black sea, the tiny lights blinking in from nowhere,
and the eerie scream from the night sky--seemed part of another world.
The Commander took a more practical view of it. "Maybe a meteor," he
grumbled.
"A meteor!" Jack was startled.
"Yes, a shooting star that's burned its way through the earth's
atmosphere."
"But I don't see--"
Jack did not finish, for all of a sudden he realized that the thing,
whatever it might be, had passed directly over their heads and was now
speeding east.
"It--it's gone by!" Jack exclaimed. "Danger's over." He experienced
intense relief.
"I wonder," was the Commander's strange reply.
"Whew! that was fast, sir!"
"Fast?" the Commander added in a lower tone. "Faster than any plane
you've ever flown, Jack my boy!"
"I wouldn't doubt it, sir," Jack laughed.
"Or ever will fly," the Commander added.
In this last statement he was entirely wrong, as future events were to
prove.
"Who'd want to ride a meteor, sir?" Jack asked with another laugh.
"Meteor? Oh, yes. Quite a wild guess on my part," said the Commander. "A
meteor speeding through the air would glow with the heat created by
friction. You didn't see anything, did you?"
"Not a thing, sir. Whatever it might be, it's black as night itself."
"Well, that's that." The Commander sighed a moment later when the last
faint whistle had died away in the night.
"Just one of those things, sir," Jack agreed. At that he wondered
whether he had spoken the truth. Or will there be more of them, many
more? he wondered. And will one of them at last make contact with the
broad side of the old _Black Bee_?
"Boy, oh boy!" he whispered to himself. "That would be something!"
A moment more of vast, black silence, and he was excusing himself to go
down the ladder to join his buddies.
"Got to turn in, sir," he explained.
"That's right," the Commander agreed. "Tomorrow may be a great day for
us all. You never know."