Arctic Wings by L. Ron Hubbard

Author:L. Ron Hubbard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Galaxy Press
Published: 2013-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

BOB DIXON put one wing down and gyrated over the lake, looking carefully for a canoe out in the middle. The moon was very low and the surface of the water was like a black mirror, making it most difficult to establish. But he had ways of avoiding this curse of seaplane pilots.

With relief he sighted the craft, hardly more than a dark line. He flipped level and sped out to vertical back, cutting his gun. His wings whispered in the stillness.

The moon laid a narrow, silver path which wriggled as the small ripples from the canoe passed through it. Bob felt for the water, almost at the stalling point. Finally his pontoons touched, grabbed and plowed, and black spray was wet on his cheeks and mouth.

He taxied, locating the canoe. Nancy was driving the craft in toward him.

She took hold of a pontoon brace and stood up on it to turn and take the edge of the cockpit.

“Bob! Bob, we’ve got to get away quickly! Streak Faulkner answered back on that call! He’s got a Snipe Fighter, ten times the ship this …”

Bob waited for no more. He reached down and boosted her into the rear pit. For an instant their hands and eyes met and then he turned and jabbed throttle. The ship picked up speed, got up on the step and, lightening, took the air.

Full gun, taking his course almost in the tops of tall trees, Bob raced northwest.

He had been flying for less than a minute when Nancy touched his helmet. He whirled, to see her pointing into the north, and looked closely in that direction.

A flaring streamer of red, as though a comet rode the night, was plainly seen.

It was the Snipe!

Swiftly he banked and raced due west, placing his masking fuselage between his own exhaust stack and the speeding pursuit ship. He was very low and treetops were a racing carpet, gone too swiftly to be more than a steady blur, buffeted by the ship’s slipstream and challenged by the striving engine.

But Streak had seen him and Streak put the Snipe’s nose down and opened the gun. To warm his Vickers, he pressed the trips.

That racketing stutter came clearly to Bob and Nancy, and the girl stared back at the flaring streamer from the Snipe’s exhaust stack and saw it joined by the red pom-poms of tracer which were cutting through the Snipe’s prop.

Bob wasted no time in looking. A small line of hills were under them and it was dangerous to be so low, as he could not see anything clearly. But he made out the dark maw of a canyon and lanced deeply into it, the engine thundering between the close walls.

He came out with a zoom and verticaled so swiftly that Nancy felt crushed into the pit. Again he dived, this time across the surface of a lake, to hurdle the trees beyond.

The Snipe was still close upon him and gaining.

But now the Snipe was silhouetted by the moon, and only the ebon night was ahead of Bob.

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