"Hawks!" Ot cried. "About fifty! Straight ahead!"
Hank still could not see anything.
"What about them?"
"They're flying straight for us! They can't be up to any good! It must be an ambush! They're Erakna's, I'll bet! She's sent them here to attack us! She can wipe us out, kill two of her greatest enemies, kill you, wreck the airplane! Oh, my God!"
Hank saw a swarm of dots ahead. He twisted around to look back, and he swore.
"Looks like there's an equal number behind us!"
"See! I told you so! It's an ambush! What do we do now?"
The hawks had planned well. The Jenny was between two precipitous mountains towering over eleven thousand feet. She had about four miles on both sides to maneuver, but she could not turn tail and try to ram through the hawks behind. She might escape them, but she'd run out of fuel before she could get to the next station.
Hank had to fly westward.
He began climbing. He could not gain altitude faster than the hawks and so fly over them. But he was going to need room for maneuvering. He didn't want to smack into a mountainside while he was trying to elude the attackers.
He looked upwards, and he was startled.
There seemed to be several hundred dots up there dropping at terrific speed. Then they became recognizable as hawks as they hurtled down in their two-hundred-mile-per-hour dive.
"Lord, we're done for!" Ot moaned. "Holy Marzha, Mother of Mercy, bless me! Holy Nantho, Mother of Hawks, protect me!"
"How about the rest of us?" Hank yelled. "Say a prayer for us, too!"
Then he said, "What the hell?"
The hawks above had flattened out their dives somewhat. One group was headed towards an intersection point with the hawks approaching from ahead; the second, towards the hawks behind the plane.
Ot screamed with delight.
"They must be Glinda's! She found out about Erakna's ambush and set up an ambush for the ambushers!"
Hank hoped that that was true. He also wished that Glinda had warned him about this so he could have flown another route. But maybe she'd not had enough time.
Hank quit climbing and dived somewhat before leveling out. He pushed the throttle in all the way. He would need all the speed he could get to bull his way through the oncoming enemy. The altimeter indicated that he had almost a thousand feet altitude above the ground below him. He was five thousand feet above sea level, which meant that the engine had less power. It needed more oxygen. He was making only sixty miles per hour ground speed.
Then the Jenny was among a cloud of hawks. Ten seconds before, Glinda's birds had struck the enemy like bolts of feathered lightning. The fifty or so headed for him had suddenly become about a dozen. But these were out to kill him and were checking their speed to match his. They would be trying to board the Jenny as if they were pirates.
The Scarecrow and the Woodman had unstrapped the safety belt and were standing up. The Winkie king held his ax up, ready to chop at the onslaughters. The Ozian was waving his arms about as if he could scare off the birds. Or perhaps he was just expressing his fear.
Hank cursed and howled at them to sit down and belt themselves in again. He could not make any violent maneuvers that might throw the two out of the plane. Then he thought that, yes, he could. The Scarecrow could land almost as safely as if it wore a parachute. The tin man would be battered and bent and maybe his limbs and head might be torn off. But he could be repaired.
However, he had no time nor room for dives, loop the loops, chandelles, Immelmanns, or anything like that. Even if he had, he'd have been followed by the hawks.
A hawk landed on the upper right wing and sank its talons into the fabric. This ripped away, and the dispossessed bird, a screeching frustrated fury, shot by Hank.
Another hawk managed to grip the edge of the front cockpit windshield. Nilklaz's ax flashed, and the hawk was split. Blood spattered the windshield and cockpit and covered parts of the rear windshield. Hank suddenly could not see ahead.
That did not concern for the moment. There was a thump, a perceptible jarring and slowing down of the plane. Feathers sprayed by him and pieces of flesh and a severed glaring-eyed head. The plane began to quiver and to shake. And the motor roared peculiarly.
One or more hawks had encountered the whirling propeller. The vibrations increased; the plane bucked. Hank cursed once more, and he cut the ignition off. The propeller presently was still, revealing that the outer part of a blade had been broken off.
"What is it? What's happened?" Ot screamed.
"We have to make a deadstick landing!" Hank said. He did not have to yell now. The only sound was the singing of the wind through the wires connecting the wings and the fuselage. And the far-off shrieking of the battling hawks.
He looked behind. Glinda's divebombers had knocked out over two thirds of the enemy, but the survivors were battling hard.
He looked below on both sides. Two miles ahead was the broad though sloping meadow that was to be his first landing on the home-leg. It still was. Fortunately, the wind had not become stronger, and it was only slightly gusty.
The two in the front cockpit were yelling at him now. They wanted to know what would happen.
Hank shouted back at them, but the wind carried his words off. He sent Ot to them with his message.
"And stay with them or abandon ship," he said. "I don't care which. Just get out of the cockpit. I need all the room I can get."
Ot delivered the information. The two sat down, and the hawk did the intelligent thing. She flew away.
The wind was from the west today. Hank glided steeply enough into it to keep the Jenny from stalling but not so swiftly that he would, he hoped, land at such a velocity that he'd run out of landing area. When past the meadow, he banked and came back across it and then turned towards it again. The wheels knocked leaves off from the top branches of a tree. Having cleared that, Hank at once side-slipped the plane to lose altitude swiftly. He had just time enough to straighten it out before his wheels touched. Up went the plane, bouncing, came down on wheels and tailskid, leaped again, landed hard, bounced a little, and then the grass and flowers of the meadow were streaming below them and the trees ahead were racing toward them. He did not have brakes; he could only pray that the Jenny would stop in time.
She did. Under the limbs of a tree, the propeller hub only a few inches from a thick gray-black tree trunk.
Hank sat and said nothing for a while. His breathing and heart slowed down. The two ahead of him also sat quietly. From a distance, thunder rumbled and the cries of men running from the camp came to them. Ot landed on the edge of the cockpit, startling him.
"A bad landing for a hawk!" she cried. "But I suppose it's a good one for a man?"
"Very good under the conditions," Hank said.
The Scarecrow rose and turned around. It had some blood spots on its face and the point of a feather stuck near the edge of its painted lips. Though its face did not lose its smile, its voice quivered.
"Does this happen often?"
"Nothing exactly like it has ever happened before," Hank said. "But I've been in worse situations. Anyway, we Earth pilots have a saying. Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. So this is very good."
Rain dropped, gently at first, then poured. The Scarecrow got under a wing. If watersoaked, it became heavy and slow-moving. The Woodman did not mind the rain. Despite what Baum had said, it did not rust. That was a nice touch Baum had made up, as was the Woodman's weeping and then getting rusty joints from the tears. Niklaz had no body fluids or tear ducts.
Ot said, "Glinda has to be notified about this. I'll get a messenger if there's one available. Do you have anything special to tell her?"
"Yes. We may be three days late. Or more. I have to get a new propeller. And I have to take out the propeller shaft and see if it's been bent. If it is, then it has to be straightened. Also, we can't fly if it keeps on raining. We won't take off until the repairs have been made and the weather's good."