This morning the air was dead calm, without a bounce or burble of any kind. The engine ran sweetly and the ship obeyed Hyde’s every whim. The slightest twitch of the stick or rudders brought forth a gentle response.
Hyde charged each gun and fired a short burst. Everything was ready.
The plane swam upward past various layers of pink and gold patchy cloud, turning gently from time to time to avoid the cumulus buildups. Swatches of open sky were visible to the north and east.
The eastern sky drew Hyde’s attention. It was quite bright now as the rising sun chased away the night.
Hyde was searching for specks, little black specks in the bright sky that moved slowly this way and that. Those specks would be airplanes.
Finally he remembered to search the gloom in all the other directions. The Huns could be anywhere.
The altimeter recorded his upward progress. After about sixteen minutes of flight he passed fourteen thousand feet. Further progress upward would be much slower. Hyde wanted to be as high as possible, so he kept climbing.
Below he could occasionally catch a glimpse of the ground. Once he saw the ugly brown smear of trenches.
He was near Grommecourt, he thought, but nothing was certain. He couldn’t see enough of the earth to be sure. He must be careful this morning not to let the wind that must be at altitude push him too deep behind enemy lines.
He swung west, let the ship climb into the prevailing westerlies. There was enough light to easily see the altimeter now, which was moving very slowly upward. The temperature in the radiator was rising, so Hyde opened the radiator shutters to let more air through. Up, up, up as the minutes ticked past and the engine hummed sweetly. He leaned the fuel/air mixture, tightened his collar against the cold.
He was breathing shallowly now, and rapidly. The air here was thin. He must make no sudden movements, make no serious demands upon his body or his body would rebel from the lack of oxygen.
At seventeen thousand feet he let the nose come down a degree or two. The plane was slow, sluggish on the controls, and he was a touch light-headed.
He let the left wing drop a few degrees, let the nose track slowly around the horizon until he was again flying east. The sun was up now, filling the eastern sky. All the clouds were below him.
God, it was cold up here! He checked his watch. He had been airborne for forty minutes.
He put his hand over the sun, looked left and right, above and below. Out to the left, the right, behind, below, even above. His eyes never stopped moving.
Another quarter hour passed. The day was fully here, the sun a brilliant orb climbing the sky.
There, a speck against a cloud. No, two. Two specks. To his left and down a thousand feet or so.
He turned in that direction.
Definitely two planes. Flying south. Hyde was approaching them from their right front quarter, so he turned almost north, let them go past at about a mile, hoping they didn’t see him. As the specks passed behind his right wing, he turned toward them and lowered the nose a tad.
Two. One alone would have been more than enough, but Hyde wasn’t going to let the Hun strut about unmolested just because he had brought a friend.
At least there were no enemy scouts above. He looked carefully and saw only empty sky.
He was going fast now, the wires keening, the motor thundering again at full cry, coming down in the right rear quarter of those two planes. The distance closed nicely.
He fingered the trigger levers inside the round stick handle.
The victims flew on straight, seemingly oblivious to his ambush.
At three hundred yards he realized what they were: S.E.5’s.
He turned to cross behind them. If the pilots had seen him, they gave no indication.
Perhaps he should have flown alongside, waved. But they would rag him in the mess, say that he thought they were Germans and had come to pot them. All of which would be true and hard to laugh off, so he turned behind them to sneak away.
He kept the turn in.
There! Just off the nose! A plane coming in almost head-on.
He was so surprised he forgot to do anything.
The enemy pilot shot across almost in front of him, a Fokker D-VII, with a yellow nose and a black Maltese cross on the fuselage behind the pilot.
Hyde slammed the right wing down, pulled the nose around, used the speed that he still had to come hard around in the high thin air. Unfortunately the S.E. turned slowest to the right — maybe he should have turned left.
When he got straightened out he was too far behind the Fokker to shoot.
The enemy pilot roared in after the pair of S.E.’s.
If only he had been more alert! He could have taken a shot as the enemy scout crossed his nose. Damnation!
Now the Hun swooped in on the left-most S.E. A slender feather of white smoke poured aft from the German’s nose — he was shooting.
The S.E.5 seemed to stagger, the wings waggled, then the left wing dropped in a hard turn.
The Fokker closed relentlessly, its gun going.
The S.E. went over on its back and the Fokker swerved just enough to miss it, then lowered its nose even more and dove away.
Paul Hyde kept his nose down, the engine full on.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the S.E.’s nose drop until it was going almost straight down. It couldn’t do that long, he knew, or the wings would come off when the speed got too great.
He checked the Hun, going for a cloud.
Brass. The enemy pilot had brass.
But Hyde was overtaking.
He looked again for the stricken S.E., and couldn’t find it.
Only now did the possibility of another Hun following the first occur to him. Guiltily he looked aft, cleared his tail. Nothing. The sky seemed empty.
He was two hundred yards behind the Fokker now, closing slowly, but closing.
The Fokker was going for a cloud.
Suddenly Paul Hyde knew how it was going to be. He was going to get a shot before the enemy pilot reached the safety of the cloud. He moved his thumb over the firing levers, looked through the post and ring sight mounted on the cowling in front of him. The enemy plane was getting larger and larger.
Without warning the nose of the enemy plane rose sharply, up, up, up.
Hyde automatically pulled hard on the stick. He was going too fast, knew he couldn’t follow the Fokker into the loop, so he pulled the nose up hard and jabbed the triggers. Both guns hammered out a burst and the Fokker climbed straight up through it.
Then Hyde was flashing past, going for the cloud. He jammed the nose down just as the cloud swallowed him.
He throttled back, raised the nose until the altimeter stopped unwinding.
The S.E.5A had no attitude instruments whatsoever. All Hyde could do was hold the stick and rudder frozen, wait until his plane flew through the cloud to the other side.
His airspeed was dropping. He could feel the controls growing sloppy. He eased the nose forward a tad. The altimeter began unwinding.
God, he was high, still above thirteen thousand feet. The altimeter was going down too fast, his speed building relentlessly.
He pulled back on the stick. To no avail. The altimeter continued to fall. He was in a graveyard spiral, but whether to the right or left he could not tell.
Panic seized Paul Hyde. He tightened the pressure on the stick, pulled it back farther and farther.
No. No! Too much of this and he would tear the wings off.
He had no way of knowing if he was turning left or right. He could guess, of course, and try to right the plane with the stick. If he guessed wrong he would put the S.E. over on its back, the nose would come down, and the plane would accelerate until it shed its wings. If he guessed right, he could indeed bring the plane upright, or nearly so, but it would do him no good unless he could keep it upright in balanced flight — and he had no means to accomplish that feat. All this Hyde knew, so he fought the temptation to move the stick sideways. What he did do was pull back even harder, tighten the turn, increase the G-load.