Chapter 18: 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.”