From the skipper down to the galley stewards, the ship was being manned with a precise efficiency that left nothing to chance. The men worked silently with a crisp confidence that conveyed itself to the passengers. On this maiden trip those passengers were all officials of the Transatlantic Transport Airways and a sprinkling of reporters and scientists, and the twenty-five aboard represented only half of the ship's capacity.
Three hours out, cruising at twelve thousand feet, the Memphis ran into the first fronts dotting the air above the Atlantic that morning. The big ship flew through the fog and rain with scarcely a tremor to indicate that it had gone from fair weather into foul. The passengers were more interested than frightened by the fog curling along the sides and the rain slashing against the windows. They were air-minded and they had perfect confidence in Captain Arnold Morton and his crew.
Captain Morton was munching a sandwich in his little office, when the first of those three dun-colored, low-wing, tear-drop biplanes came diving out of the fog above the giant transport. The roar of their motors came to the captain's ears faintly and he was just getting out of his chair to investigate the sound when the pilot of that first ship damped down on the trip of the two machine guns synchronized through his propeller.
He had aimed at the back of the neck of the flight-navigator in his navigation turret on the roof of the fuselage. The bullets chopped into the duralumin skin of the big ship and crept forward as the flight navigator lifted his head at the sound of the diving motors. He never saw what was behind and above him because a hail of lead nearly tore his head from his shoulders. He slumped off his little platform and his sextant clattered to the deck, while the bullet line continued forward and tore into the body of the radio operator and the first pilot, who was at the controls.
As that first dun-colored biplane raced above the nose of the big ship at terrific speed, the second biplane came out of the fog with its guns yammering.
Its bullets tore into the top of the Memphis a little to the left of the trajectory of the first ship. Captain Morton had opened his mouth to bellow an order when those bullets tore into his back. They slammed him against a bulkhead where he slumped to the floor, his arms and legs grotesquely spread.
The assistant radio operator leaped to the blood-spattered microphone as he saw the chief operator slide out of his chair. He tried desperately to make contact with the nearest land stations and ships, but the radio apparatus seemed to be smashed beyond control. He began to chant incoherently into his mouthpiece, sending out a general call ' for help. No specific station answered him, but he kept giving the position of the Memphis and trying to tell what was happening, although he did not know.
A steward had been carrying a tray of food from the galley to the dining saloon when that first long burst of fire drove into the body of the first pilot.
Before the second pilot had grabbed the controls, the big ship lurched and the steward landed in the lap of one of the vice-presidents of Transatlantic Transport Airways.
The next instant the passengers went mad. The third dun biplane had dived in below the tip of the port wing and was spraying the middle deck that contained the passenger compartments with a withering fire of lead. One moment the guests were chatting gayly, the next a quarter of them were dead. The faces of the rest were twisted into weird masks, and in their eyes was the fear of death. They bellowed and screamed like caged, angry animals, while the second pilot fought the controls and tried to right the ship.
After a bit the Memphis plunged out of the wall of fog that had encompassed it. The three dun biplanes climbed above it and drove incendiary bullets into the wing tanks. A tank exploded and the whole ship was engulfed in a great mass of smoke, out of which a giant tongue of flame leaped upward.
Then one of the biplanes was diving underneath the Memphis, firing round after round of incendiary bullets at the sponsons containing the main gasoline supply. For some reason this attack failed to bring about the intended holocaust, and the pilot, circled and returned for another try.
Suddenly, rivers of flame seemed to pour out of the big airliner from wing tip to wing tip and down the length of the entire hull. It became a fiery furnace of exploding tanks and twisted, white-hot metal struts as it plummeted to its death in the calm Atlantic.
IV—TELLTALE MANEUVER
BILL BARNES watched the instruments on his flight panel as he held the Lancer hard into the rain and fog and tried to climb above them.
He could not tell from the garbled message from the Memphis' radio operator exactly what was happening, but he knew the ship was in imminent danger.
He eased his throttles open until the Lancer was racing through the storm at nearly four hundred miles an hour.
And it took all the strength in his powerful arms and shoulders to hold her on her course.
“Fasten your safety belt and adjust your parachute, kid,” he said into the telephone to Sandy.
But Sandy had already done that.
He gasped, “Wonder how bad it is, Bill?”
“No telling,” Bill said. “We ought to be coming up alongside them pronto if that position was correct.”
Then the Lancer sped out of that dense fog, and they were out in the open with the sun shining brightly in the blue sky above them and the Atlantic like a mill pond far below.
Twenty miles away and far below they spotted the Memphis just as the main supply tanks exploded. A string of curses leaped to Bill's lips as he saw bursts of fire coming from the three dun biplanes darting in and out around the airliner. He opened the throttles of the Lancer wide, saw the airspeed indicator climb to four hundred, and fifty miles an hour. Nursing his machine-gun trip, he fired a short burst to be sure his guns were ready.
“What's happening. Bill?” Sandy panted into his microphone, as they saw the Memphis become a great ball of smoke and flame and start her plunge toward the sea.
“Break out that swivel gun!” Bill said.
“Those three biplanes have murdered the Memphis and all her crew and passengers. They'll come after us now because we saw them.”
He nosed the Lancer down, pointing it at the flaming mass ahead, hoping against hope that there might be some survivors, though realizing in his heart that no one could survive that flaming hell. He eased out of his dive as what remained of the Memphis struck the surface of the water. One final explosion occurred, followed by a half dozen minor ones, and then the skeleton of the giant ship plunged to-its last resting place.
Bill circled low above the great oil spots spreading over the surface, trying to locate a possible survivor. But there was none. He was placing his binoculars back in a pocket when the sound of screaming props struck terror through his whole being. For an instant he was motionless. Then his eyes swept the sky above him as Sandy shouted,
“They're diving on us. Bill!”
The three fast, tear-drop biplanes were converging on them from three sides! They were only three hundred yards above him and traveling at terrific speed. He yanked the control column of the Lancer back into his stomach and hung it on its props. The three diving ships were easing out of their dive to come up underneath him as he poured juice into the engines of the Lancer and took it upstairs.
“Give 'em hell, kid!” Bill said into his microphone, hearing Sandy's swivel gun chattering behind him.
He leveled off a thousand feet above the three biplanes and came around in a vertical bank as they nosed up to form a Vee. His finger hovered over the electric trip of the 37mm. cannon. Suddenly, he opened up the throttles of the Lancer for a moment and went up and back in a flashing Immelmann turn as the three biplanes leveled off. They were coming at him head-on now. When they were four hundred yards away they opened fire with their six machine guns. The concentrated fire was terrific.