“Missed her!” yelled Jim, hopping in his seat to face backward.
Rankin spat a terrible oath through his grim set teeth and wheeled over again on a sixty degree slant. As he came round he could see that the whale was hurriedly submerging again. The next second he snatched another black shape from its resting place between his knees and flung it out, well forward. It passed from his view immediately.
He saw Jim’s arms go up with an exultant yell; and the same instant a terrific blast of hot air from behind him kicked the tail of the machine up with a resistless suddenness which drove its nose down at a steep angle for the water. At that height there was no possibility of regaining control. In a second there was a tearing, foaming smash, and Rankin was hurled forward onto the wheel with the force of his own suddenly arrested momentum!
VI.
Here was one test of the born aviator. Presence of mind. Rankin did not hold wildly on to everything within reach to save himself from falling; his first instinct was to fling himself clear from the entangling brace wires. Though he was under water and half smothered, he kept in mind the most open way out, and within the half minute he struggled out onto the limp wreckage of what had once been a lower wing plane. Jim was already crawling up onto an upper surface.
“Hell!” was his greeting. “Guess I’ll earn no more toward that three thousand out of her. Come on up, the view is fine. This side isn’t smashed up so terribly, and there’s air enough in the camber spaces to keep her afloat for a long while yet.”
Rankin climbed up and joined him on his sagging raft, careful not to put his foot through the fabric. The whale was gone utterly! So were all the shark fins. At least, they could see none from their rocking perch. The dominant thought that had impelled him for so long was still uppermost in Rankin’s mind.
“Good stuff!” he kept muttering. “Great! Now’s her time to get away. Why don’t she turn and make a blue streak?”
Their own plight remained in the background of his mind, to be taken out and dealt with after other more important matters had been settled.
But the United States Destroyer Woodruff was showing no desire to get away. Instead, she rushed back and forth and up and down like a questing terrier and every now and then she barked viciously as one gun crew or another fired at anything which appeared to them to have the remotest chance of being a shark’s fin.