CARGO UNKNOWN

Author:===========================================================================
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-05-17T15:55:04+00:00

Chapter VIII

AN updraft got under a wing of the plane, gave it a mighty kick. The motors seemed to sob, and Renny grabbed instinctively for something to hold on to.

Doc Savage glanced out of the cabin windows. He tried not to look discouraged. He knew Renny had turned his head to watch him.

Weather they were going to have. A fine witch’s tempest of it.

The cumulo-nimbus was standing up for miles ahead of them. Anvil-tops, the clouds were called. Thunderheads. Inside them lightning crawled and the awful thermal winds roared. No one really knew how fast the winds blew in the bigger cumulo-nimbus clouds. There were reliable estimates of winds above four hundred miles an hour, which were hardly believable. The Caribbean hurricanes were rarely checked in excess of a hundred miles an hour.

No one, Doc reflected, who hadn’t flown near those clouds in a plane, or hadn’t studied meteorology, would realize the astounding danger and force they represented.

Far ahead, the cumulo-nimbus were black, somber. The blackness meant hail, and hail would chew their plane to a battered wreck and spit it toward the earth. Hail was bad stuff in a plane. It was almost the ground equivalent of driving your automobile into a brick wall.

The strange thing was that, to the average guy on the ground, it just looked like a cloudy day. “Getting ready to rain,” was probably the casual remark being passed. It would be hot. Probably still. On the ground the weather wouldn’t have the reality that it had here in the sky.

Not that it would keep them from reaching Mystic. It wouldn’t. In fact, they were almost at Mystic now. Renny was turning his head, asking. “You want me to put her down?”

“You make the landing,” Doc said. “But first, circle over Mystic and show me where this Nick lives.”

Renny banked the ship slowly, and just over the thousand-feet legal limit for flying over populated places, pointed out the house of Nick Padolfus. “The green house,” he said. “In the block southwest from that vacant lot by the large building with the red roof.”

“The one with the garden?”

“That’s it.”

“Gray roof?”

“Yes.”

“Where do the brothers-in-law live?”

Renny showed him. He described the houses. Then the plane was out over the bay. He set the flaps and low-pitched the prop, full-riched the mixture, checked his carburetor heat, set his stabilizer.

There was plenty of room and the sea was calm. None of the turbulence in the sky showed on the water. But it would later. The storm might strike before long.

Doc glanced sourly at the sky, at the harbor. He said, “This is no place to be caught in a blow.” He indicated the shore. “And that gang may have something cooked up for us. Better take her in the air, after you put me ashore. I’ll have the walkie-talkie with me, so keep the wavelength tuned in.”

Renny asked, “That sand bar be all right?”

“Yes.”

Renny silently swung the ship into the downwind leg, the base leg, the final approach. He did a good job and there was not much splash and very little roughness.

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