Chapter 21: Suicide?

Gordon Smith, sometimes known as Smithy, was to remember little of the happenings that followed the crash of the big Army dreadnought. It was Colonel Culver who dragged him from the pilot-room wreckage, Colonel Culver and one of the pilots whom he had restored to consciousness. They lowered Smithy carefully to the ground, then explored the rest of the ship.

Their hands were red when they returned--and empty. Captain Farrell and the rest of the crew had ceased to be units of the United States Army Air Force; henceforth they would be only names on a casualty list grown ominously long.

“Stood plumb on her tail,” said the pilot, staring at the wreck. “They hit us just once, and the left wing crumpled like cardboard. Last I remember was pulling her up off the trees.” He stared at the mass of twisted metal and the center section where the wing had torn loose; it stood upright, almost vertical, resting on the crushed tail.

“Funny,” said the pilot in the same flat, level tone that seemed the only voice he had since that last pull on a whipping wheel. “Damn funny--mostly we get it first up there.”

“Come here!” snapped Colonel Culver. “Lend a hand here with Smith; we’ve got to carry him. And don’t talk so loud--those red devils will be out here any minute.”

Smithy was taking a more active interest in his surroundings when he sat a week later in the Governor’s office.

“There’s a detachment moving in there from the south,” said the Governor. “We’re going to follow your advice, to some extent at least. We’re sending troops to Tonah Basin. If the top of that dead crater is closed they will blast it open; then a scouting party’s going down. Call it a reconnaissance, call it suicide--one name’s just as good as the other. Colonel Culver, here, is going. But you know the lay of the land there; you could be of great help. How about it?”

“Are you asking me?” Smithy inquired.

He stood up, flexed his arms, while he grinned at Colonel Culver. “Hinges all greased and working! As a flier, Colonel, you’re a darn good first-aid man. I’ll say that! When do we start?”

Which explains why Smithy, some time later, hidden under the grotesque disguise of a gas mask, was one of fifty, similarly attired, who stood waiting about the black open maw in the great cinder-floored crater of one of the peaks that surrounded Tonah Basin.

Night. And the big stars that hang so low in the black desert sky should have been brilliant. They were lost now in the white glare that streamed upward. The crater was a fortress. Around the circle of the entire rim, on the inner side of the rough crags, men of the 49th Field Artillery stood by their guns. Lookouts trailed their telephone wire to the higher peaks, where they perched as shapeless as huddled owls; and, like owls, their eyes swept the mountain’s slopes and the desert at its base, where the searchlight crews played long fingers of light incessantly--and where nothing moved.

But the empty silence of the desert was misleading, as the men in the crater knew.

They had begun arriving with the earliest light of morning. Smithy had come in with the first lot. And when the first big auto-gyro transport had settled and risen again from the crater, another had taken its place, and another and many others after that.

That first crew had been a machine-gun battalion, and Smithy had smiled with grim satisfaction at the unhurried way in which their young captain had snapped them into position without the loss of a second. And their guns, Smithy noticed, were trained inward upon the crater itself.

Inside that protecting circle the other transports landed one by one: men, mobile artillery, ammunition cases, big searchlights, and a dozen engine-generator outfits. The last transports brought in strange cargo--short sections of aluminum struts with bolts and splice plates to join them together: blocks, and tackle and sheaves; then spools of steel alloy cable at least ten miles in length.