The lonely golf course and the night re-echoed with the bellow of twelve pistons thrusting in line; watching, one would not have dreamed that a cripple was at the controls of the plane that now swung around with a blast of power, leveled its nose down the course and raced smoothly over close-clipped grass. Its wheels bumped, spun on the ground and lifted into air.
A mile to the dam! Istafiev's words came back to him. It would take Kashtanov twenty minutes at least, for he would go cautiously. But how long had passed—how long? That was the agonizing question.
Staring forward through the hurtling prop, the night rushed at him; the dark hills melted away to either side; clear ground swept into view and then a long black thread that was the spillway channel. Behind was the bubbling, leaping flow of the spillway itself, and Gatun Dam. The smooth cement sides were as yet unharmed.
"Thank God!" Chris muttered. "Now, where—where?"
A stream of light flowed out from the hydro-electric station on the left side of the spillway channel. The opposite bank was bare, running right up to the face of the dam beneath the spillway's seven gates. There the box was to be placed. But from the air, the light was uncertain, deceptive—and a little two-foot-square box was all he had to go by!
"I can't see!" Chris said hoarsely. "I can't see!"
Like a roaring black meteor the plane hurtled over the banks of the spillway, the eyes of its pilot scouring the ground. It zoomed just in time to miss the wall of the dam, banked, doubled like a scared jack-rabbit, dove down again, coming within feet of the spillway channel. Mad, inspired flying! But what good could it do?
Then from its cockpit came a yell.
"There! There! By heaven, I can make it!"