Kenneth Robeson - The Avenger 03 by The Sky Walker

Author:The Sky Walker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-20T14:54:52+00:00

He opened the throttle wide. The twin motors screamed as they sent the big plane forward at four hundred miles an hour.

East and a little north. Toward the weird sound in the sky. And toward a low-hanging cloud bank on the horizon that hinted at weather on the morrow less clear than the present amber dusk.

“Keep a close watch ahead, Mac,” Benson directed.

The Scotchman nodded. He heard the weird sound increasing in the earphones. Coming from an empty sky! He stared hard ahead, blinked, stared again.

“See anything?” said Benson, whose pale eyes had caught the blink.

“I don’t know,” Mac said slowly. “I thought I did. But maybe it was only spots before the eyes?”

“Or a man walking fast in the sky,” suggested Benson.

“Now, Muster Benson! How could a mon walk?” Mac broke off sharply. “There is somethin’ ahead. Two little dots, close together, goin’ about as fast as we are, right for the cloud bank.”

He pressed the earphones to his head.

“The noise has changed,” he said. “It was a drone. Now it’s a kind of whistlin’. Like somethin’ big and alive might make if it was flyin’ along in misery?Chief! Look! A ghost ship!”

Mac’s cry was unnecessary. Benson’s telescopic eyes had caught the bizarre sight before the Scot’s had.

At the fringe of the cloud bank, several miles ahead of them, the ghostly outlines of a plane were slowly appearing in empty air. But it was a plane, it seemed, that was made of fog?or was materializing from a world of dead planes and dead pilots.

Thin and gray, like the cloud-stuff itself, the thing briefly showed at the edge of the mist. A ghost plane! A Flying Dutchman of the air. Then it slid into the cloud bank, mist returning to mist, and disappeared from view.

The whistling noise disappeared from the earphones, too. The drone had faded into the eerie whistling; now that had faded into nothingness. The sky was empty of sound save for the background noise of their own motors.

“It’s gone!” exclaimed MacMurdie, freckled face screwed up. “If ye could say a thing has gone when it was never properly here in the first place. Because, d’ye see, a ghost isn’t really here to begin with?”

Benson said nothing. He was* hurtling the ship toward the point where the thin and wavering outlines of the ghost planes had last been seen. He passed it in about ten seconds, and entered the clinging cloud bank.

Nothing could be seen in there. And the detector, swing it as they would, picked up no more of the odd droning or bizarre whistling.

Benson settled to three thousand feet, under the cloud bank. His pale and icy eyes had the glitter in them that came from sudden, valuable knowledge?and which meant disaster for someone in the very near future.

“We’re in familiar territory,” said Mac.

Ahead a few miles was an oblong small dot on the scalloped edge of the lake. But its tininess was obviously the result of distance. A glance told that in reality it was immense.

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.