Dave Dawson at Casablanca

by Robert Sidney Bowen

What he saw made Dave fighting mad. He shook with anger, and a red film seemed to slide over his eyes.

"So?" he bellowed at the top of his lungs. "So it's like that, huh?"

It was just like that. No sooner had the words left Dawson's lips than the U-boat's bow gun belched flame, and the sky a hundred yards or so off the Vultee's right wing tip seemed to explode in a roar of sound and a great puff of oily black smoke. An instant later, another bit of sky seemed to explode. This time the puff of oily black smoke was high above the Vultee. This was because Dawson had turned the nose of the plane downward and was thundering straight at the U-boat at almost rocket speed.

"So you want to play, do you?" He shouted the crazy words. "Well, so do we! And how! Here, catch, you tramps!"

The Vultee's wing guns punctuated his words with a chattering blast of sound that made the aircraft tremble violently. Straight lines of silver tracers cut down at the two men crouched behind the guard of the U-boat's bow gun. They would have done better had they dived overboard and down under the U-boat's keel. The bullets from the Vultee's wing guns found them and smashed them to the steel deck. Tapping rudder a bit, Dawson veered the plane's nose a shade to the right and blazed away at the open conning tower hatch. A man crawling up out of it was flung head over heels clear of the U-boat's side and down into the water as though by some invisible giant.

By then the Vultee's prop was about ready to chew into the conning tower itself, and Dawson had to haul the nose up and go curving around and away. That maneuver permitted Freddy Farmer to go into action with his rear guns. As Dave jerked his head around for a split second, he saw the four men on the raft trying to scramble up to the U-boat's wet deck, only to go toppling over backwards like tenpins and disappear beneath the surface of the water.

"There, you rotten beggars, you'll not do that again!" the English youth's voice rang loud in Dawson's inter-com phones. "Not by half, you won't!"

"The sub's crash diving, Freddy!" Dawson yelled as he saw the hatch close and the nose of the U-boat slip down under water. "Oh, gosh! If we only had a depth charge or two! Oh, how I hate to let that snake get away!"

As the wishful words spilled off his lips, he was in the act of doing what little he could. That was wheeling around and down for another run over the crash-diving U-boat, and letting fly with all his guns at the top half of the submerging craft. He might possibly hit some part that would check the dive and force the U-boat back to the surface. That was a slim, slim hope, and it died completely as the entire craft slid out of sight, leaving behind an empty life raft and seven bodies.

With a groan Dave cut his fire, and hauled the Vultee up out of its dive and onto even keel. He stared down at the floating bodies, gulped, shuddered slightly, and drew a hand across his goggles, as though that would wipe away the scene below and make everything as it had been before. It didn't, of course, but when he took another look downward he found it hard to believe that Death had been whispering so close. Then he snapped out of his trance.