Tom Swift and His Rocketship by Victor Appleton II

Author:Victor Appleton II
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

AN EERIE INFORMANT

AS THE jetcraft and the drone landed, mechanics and security personnel rushed the Fearing Island airfield and surrounded the enemy plane. While one group taxied the robot jet to a hangar, the other men stood by awaiting orders.

In the Sky Queen Tom dashed down the steps past the first deck, where Hanson was coming from his air-tight cubicle next to the hangar.

"Great job! You handled the beeper like a vet," Tom grinned. With Bud at their heels, Tom and Arv ran over to the mystery plane where Phil Radnor joined them, a i-gun in his hand. They forced open the cockpit door with the help of two of the mechanics.

Inside the pilot sat in stony silence. He was black-mustached and seemed very young, perhaps no more than twenty years of age.

"What’s your name?" Tom demanded.

The answer was a glare of hate.

"I’ll look for identification," Hanson spoke up, and as soon as the pilot had climbed out of the plane, hands raised, he went through the man’s pockets. But there was nothing to be found there.

"There may be something in his plane," Tom suggested. "Phil, maybe you should escort our visitor to the hangar office."

While Radnor and several others accompanied the prisoner, Tom, Bud, and Hanson climbed into the jet to make a thorough search. Ten minutes later they were about to admit defeat on every count except fingerprints when Tom cried:

"Wait! Just a minute!"

The jet’s fuselage was built of an aluminum sheathing over a laminated plywood shell. Upon investigation, Tom had noticed that a black line of trimming ran along the wall near the floor of the cockpit. As Tom inched his fingers over the area his nails suddenly caught on the trim. Over it was a thin strip of tape which he quickly tore off.

"Here’s something!" he exclaimed, as his right forefinger touched the edge of a flat parchment packet tucked in between the inside wood and the metal hull. Tom snatched it out.

The pouch held three items: two air charts with routes marked in red ink and a hastily scribbled note. It seemed to be written in some foreign language, but the last word, placed as if it were a signature, fairly jumped off the page at Tom. It was Rotzog.

"The name of the enemy!" Bud exclaimed.

Elated by his find and sensing its top-secret nature, Tom thrust the pouch into his inner pocket. He and his two companions hurried to the young inventor’s office where Tom spread out the three papers on a desk. Starting with the charts, which appeared to be hand-drawn, they noted that one traced a route connecting Fearing Island to the abandoned rocket base in Canada—the Excelsior Oil Company site.

"This links our visitor with the spies all right!" Tom declared.

He picked up the other map and whistled.

"Look at this!" he cried. "This course runs the great circle from that place by the lake all the way to the Bering Sea!"

Three pairs of eyes followed the red line that tracked north of Quebec, across Hudson Bay and Great Bear Lake, past the Yukon and far out over the Bering Sea.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.