Above the roar of the engines the crew heard again a shouted command:
“Pilots, guide left!”
Then all hands knew that the airship was headed for Constantinople. The first link in the chain of Bosphorus forts was below, and the sea of Marmora only eighteen miles distant! The great airship was going a mile a minute, following the water line between the two continents, yet running so high that gun flashes from the batteries were as the explosion of so many firecrackers to the aviators.
The boy pilots leaned hard against the steering wheels; they were feeling the strain of continuous effort, but made no call for relief. It was a red-letter chapter in their flying record.
Now the sea of Marmora, stretching away 170 miles to the straits of the Dardanelles, on the other end of which the allies had concentrated twenty great battleships, eight powerful cruisers and a land force of 50,000.
Over Pera, the residence section of Constantinople, Lieutenant Atlass sent down a shower of bombs, and for miles of Moslem territory the onrushing airship left a blazing trail behind it. The “Sikorsky” had drawn the fire of many guns in its dash between seas, and but for one stray bullet that splintered the glass front of the pilot house would have escaped unscathed.
By fort fire the aviators were driven high again over the Dardanelles, but the forty-two miles in these straits were traversed in fifty minutes.
Landing on the floats was made off Tenedos island, in the Ægean sea.
“You looked like a Zeppelin coming in,” hailed a bluff Briton from the conning tower of a submarine that had bobbed up alongside of the floating aircraft, “and your colors just saved you from being blown to smithereens. That’s the biggest thing on wings you have there.”
“And it has carved a new niche for aviators to reach, this day,” proudly proclaimed the Russian airman.