“Now I’ll tell you why I came into your office,” Bert told Andy after they had securely locked the control room. “Last night someone tampered with my radio equipment and broke up a lot of it.”
Andy’s lips snapped into a thin, straight line.
“How much damage was done?” he asked.
“Not as much as I first feared,” replied Bert. “As luck would have it whoever used the hammer destroyed experimental equipment and the installation for the Goliath is almost intact. He must have been an amateur at the job or he would have singled out the set for the Goliath and smashed it.”
“What you’ve told me and what’s just happened,” said Andy grimly, “makes me positive that there is a well-defined plot under way to injure the Goliath in every way possible. I thought we had a hand-picked crew that couldn’t be bribed but it looks like I was wrong.”
From the timber-covered hills behind the hangar came the sharp crackle of rifle fire, which was followed by a tense quiet as every man in the great hangar stopped work. When the rifle fire was not repeated, the crews slowly resumed their work and Andy and Bert headed for the hills on the run.
Since the Goliath had been partially financed by a government appropriation and its construction embodied secrets valuable to the war department, a military guard had patrolled the construction site from the day the hangar had been completed and the actual assembly of the dirigible started. On a number of occasions they had apprehended men trying to make their way into Bellevue and without exception the secret service detail at the hangar had found them to be agents of foreign governments. They had been quietly sent to military prisons but in the last few weeks there had been no such arrests and the vigilance of the guards had been relaxed somewhat.
Andy and Bert were half-way up the slope to the guard line when they met Merritt Timms, chief of the secret service unit at Bellevue, coming down the hill.
“Anybody hurt at the hangar?” asked Timms anxiously.
“No,” replied Andy. “We stopped the door in time. What happened on top of the hill?”