With a prayer on his lips Frank started the Golden Eagle II into the awful smothering pall. He could not see a foot in front of him and, indeed, in a second his eyes were blinded by the acrid reek.
“We’ve got to do it, we’ve got to do it,” he kept saying to himself through clenched teeth as he drove the aeroplane full into the inferno. It was as dark as night and as hot as a furnace mouth.
Caught in the currents generated by the heat the aeroplane swayed and zigzagged drunkenly. Frank, his eyes closed and drawing every breath with agony, clutched the wheel till the varnish came off on his hands. He could smell the scorching paint of The Golden Eagle II as the awful heat blistered it.
It flashed across his mind that the cloth covering the planes might catch and then? Somehow nothing seemed to matter much then to the dazed, half-suffocated boy, only one clear idea presented itself repeating over and over with trip-hammer regularity:
“Keep going ahead.”
The dash through the flames in the Everglades.
But were they going ahead? Frank did not know. So badly was the craft handicapped by her weight and in such a whirl of heat-engendered air currents was she caught that it was difficult for Frank, blinded as he was, to tell.
Suddenly she gave a swoop down.
Was it the end?