Rankin gripped the wheel and leaned forward as though he could by sheer muscular effort impart a yet greater speed to the hurtling machine. Then again the wire-drawn voice:
“Jack, it’s God’s luck! Under my—under your seat there’s another kind of package. Been doing some hand-bomb practise on a raft, and there’s two or three left! Was going out again to-morrow. Can you reach? Can you steer her?”
Rankin’s heart leaped with a wild exhilaration of sudden battle. “Steer her with my feet,” he hissed back, and he groped below the seat.
“To the right!” came a yell which jarred his ear-drums.
Rankin peered over the edge of the fuselage. At first he saw nothing but surging whitecaps; and then, cutting through them at a long slant from one gray patch of water to another, he discerned a thin streak which left ripples behind it like the fin of a shark.
Without any definite idea of what he was to do he swooped down for it like a giant fish hawk. Then he saw that all round it there kept rising an erratic shower of fountains of high-flung spray which repeated themselves half a mile farther on, and then repeated again, and again at lessening intervals.
But the phenomenon conveyed nothing to him, and he continued to rush on into the danger zone and noticed only that the ship had turned almost like a rabbit and was charging down on the same object at the same time.
“To the left!” came another ear-splitting yell.
Rankin snatched a hurried glance from the shark to look over his shoulder. There, within three hundred yards of him a long gray whale was emerging. There, was something he could see, something he could aim at. Instantly he banked over so that one wide wing-tip skimmed the wave crests, and hurled himself at it. Almost before he had regained his equilibrium he was above. His arm flashed over the side and heaved a conical black object clear of the wing, and then he was over.
There was a giant splash, and: