And now the attacking plane had turned, and leaden slugs were coming again. These were tracers. “X” could see their flaming paths. They testified to the flying murderer’s efficiency. And he was handling his guns like an accomplished air fighter. Could this be the Terror himself, or was it merely another hireling, a paid gunman of the air?
“X” did not know. White-lipped, blazing-eyed, he was fighting to hold death at bay. By piloting with the stick at an angle, using the full surface of the partially destroyed aileron to hold the wing up, he was accomplishing the seemingly impossible — flying level And this time he side-slipped away, letting the ship fall off on the good wing, and straightening out when the danger was momentarily passed. If he had not been crippled, he could have outflown and out-maneuvered this other pilot, though in sheer, straightaway speed, the attacking ship seemed as swift as the Blue Comet. In a moment Agent “X” saw why.
A screaming power dive carried the murder ship below him. He got a glimpse of its silhouette against a body of water, a suburban lake.
His airman’s eye identified it at once. It was a seaplane; stubby winged, unbelievably swift. Planes of this type were the fastest in existence, capable of speeds that won all records for velocity. Its twin pontoons were slim as knife blades. Its fuselage was streamlined like a torpedo. He was up against a terror of the air.
It came screaming up at him like some monster hornet with the bright lash of its sting playing an evil spray of fire. The other pilot planned to rake his underside now. That, too, was a fighting maneuver. Agent “X” had seen great German Gothas turned into flaming funeral pyres by the swift upward thrust of a pursuit ship, during the War.
He waited, seeming to hang on slack controls for an instant, then side-slipped again, as the bullets came close. Compared to him, the pilot of the attacking snip was a rank amateur — for all his masterly equipment. But the Agent’s shattered aileron was the hazard that made the outcome unpredictable. It seemed to be getting worse, as fabric and cracked metal worked loose.
For all his skilled touch on the controls, the Blue Comet was flying like a wounded bird. As he slipped this time, the ship would not straighten out immediately. And, when it did, its cowled nose dropped and it fell into a screaming spin that made black sky and lighted ground blend into a mad, dizzy jumble.
THE Agent fought desperately, sweat oozing out under the clamping curve of his helmet. Twice he stopped the corkscrew turns, sent the ship into a long glide, only to have it spin again. The third time he half rose in the cockpit, leaning far out over the padded coaming, adding his weight to the slender balance of the controls. The ship dived, leveled, and began a long climb.
Savagely, as though sensing that victory was close at hand, the other ship banked and came on. The Secret Agent pressed the Blue Comet’s throttle forward to the quadrant stop, gave the blasting cylinders of his radial the last drop of gas they could take. The pull drone of the steel prop as it bit into the air rose to a deafening scream. The slanted orange wings rocketed the plane skyward.
But the other ship still had the advantage of altitude. And its hurtling climb was equal to the Blue Comet’s. But Agent “X” had a plan. If the blind god of Chance favored him, if those raking bullets did not strike him or the bomb, he might yet escape the flying killer by reaching altitudes that the seaplane could not attain. For wing surface must count, given equal horsepower. And he believed his own wings were at least a foot broader.
Yet the hopelessness of his scheme was soon brought home. A steel-jacketed bullet glanced against a flat flying wire with a mocking spang. He presented too good a target. The man in the seaplane could not fly, but he could shoot. And the muzzles of his twin synchronized guns would accomplish what his hand on the controls might not. Those tracers made it too easy for him to point the nose of his ship at the crippled, helpless Blue Comet.
With a tug at his heart, Agent “X” made a swift decision. There was one last chance to save himself and the precious bomb — and to save those on the ground below from awful death. If he threw the bomb overboard, or left it in the plane with him dead or wounded at the controls — the result would be the same. An explosion that would surely wipe out other lives when the terrible engine of death struck. Yet if he sacrificed his plane, jumped now, taking the bomb with him — he might win his fearful game with death.
That was the final plan that Agent “X” had evolved. To make use of his seat-pack parachute, hold the bomb in a dizzy plunge earthward. To let the faithful Blue Comet crash pilotless, hoping that it would miss human habitation. Even if it struck, the disaster would not be as great as though the bomb were in it.
He braced the control stick with his knee, reached down and drew the gray cylinder from under his seat. Bullets slashed close around him, as though the fiend in the seaplane sensed some trickery, and was making desperately certain that his blood lust were not cheated. One of the crystal, gleaming dials on the Blue Comet’s instrument panel, a Sperry horizon indicator of latest design, smashed into a myriad needle-sharp particles that stung the Agent’s face. The engine gave a sobbing cough as a fuel gauge went next.
Bleak-eyed, holding the bomb beneath his right arm, his hand clamped around it, Agent “X” swung a leg over the ship’s side. Never had he so hated to sacrifice a piece of inanimate mechanism. The swift Blue Comet had been like a symbol of his power and vengeance over the black forces of crime. Its destruction seemed an omen of his own inescapable defeat. But if in sacrificing it he helped to bring about the Terror’s downfall, then the valiant ship would have been lost in a human and precious cause.
The weight of his body unbalanced the crippled plane. It turned, hurled him out — and the next instant Agent “X” was plunging earthward through the still dark sky.
One thing alone was fixed in his mind as his body dropped like a stone through space. The bomb! The deadly cylinder that his stiff arm and clawlike fingers clutched. He had made chute jumps before. The first, years ago over a field near Charlrois, when the high tide of the German advance was engulfing all Belgium in a red wave of fear. And when Agent “X,” as a brilliant Intelligence operative, was being dropped into enemy-held territory. Many other jumps had followed in the intervening years. But never had he gone overside with such an engine of death in his grasp.
He made a delayed jump now, did not pull the ripcord till he had fallen a thousand feet below the spot where he had left the Blue Comet’s cockpit. That was his only chance of escaping leaden death. For he knew the killer would not stop at blasting him from his ship. Guessing his daring maneuver perhaps, the man above, who knew no mercy, would try to complete his work.
Not till the ground with its sparkling lights came dangerously close did Agent “X” reach for the slender wire. Then he tugged it calmly, surely, and felt the harness jerk about his body blisteringly as the pilot chute leaped out and the big envelope of the chute itself blossomed.
His clutch on the bomb was vise-like. The strange silence of his slower descent was as though he had been whisked into another world. But, listening, he could hear the motor of the seaplane, and it seemed to him that the other ship had turned and was swooping down. The ground was only eight hundred feet below him. But he knew that in the next few minutes relentless death would be on his heels again.