Dave Dawson at Casablanca

by Robert Sidney Bowen

"So that settles that," he grunted. "Freddy's set has gone haywire. He probably picked up those Snoopers long ago and hasn't been able to contact me up to now. He's around. I can't see him, but he must be around somewhere doing his job of trailing those Snoopers back to their base. With his eagle eyes, I'll bet a million bucks he can see me!"

His heart overflowing with joy at the knowledge that Freddy Farmer was alive and still flying, Dawson left his set tuned as fine as possible and gave all of his attention to the Messerschmitt-led air cavalcade of Junkers 88's that was sliding through the air over the mountain peaks. They were all well below Dawson's altitude now, and all he had to do was to throttle to their speed and hug the sides of the cloud banks. True, there was a small chance that he might be sighted, silhouetted against the clouds as he was, but that was the chance he had to take. If he was sighted, he knew that it would be the Messerschmitt 109 that would turn back to drive him off, and so he kept his gaze on that plane and paid little or no attention to the bombers.

Eastward and then southward the Nazi planes flew, and then at the end of some thirty-five minutes, they changed their course to the east again, and then northward. Most of the Atlas Range was out of sight now. Ahead lay barren country that looked as though nothing, not even a blade of grass, had ever lived there. Farther ahead was the border line between Morocco and French Algeria, but of course there was nothing to mark it. Nothing, for as far as the eye could see there was only wasteland. These barren lands of the western rim of the Sahara Desert seemed to shimmer and tremble in the blistering heat of the sun. Even the banks of clouds were gone now. They had been left over the Atlas Mountains, and the sun blazing down made Dawson's throttles feel like red hot pokers, despite the fact that he was some twelve thousand feet in the air.

As a matter of fact, the constant glare of the sun, and the intense concentration on the Nazi formation ahead and below him strained his eyes to the utmost, and he began to see crazy objects and shapes that were no longer there when he took a second look.

It was because of this that he paid little or no attention to a gray-green blur that appeared on the barren earth just ahead of the Nazi planes. That is, he gave it scant attention until he suddenly realized that the Nazi pilots had cut their throttles, and in follow-the-leader style were circling around and down toward that gray-green blurr. Shoving up his goggles, he dug knuckles into his smarting eyes, then impulsively leaned forward as though that bit of movement would afford him a better look.

But whether or not it did, he certainly saw more than he had the first time. The gray-green blur was a small group of shrub-covered hills that rose right up out of the desert. That it was some kind of an oasis was evident by the patches of pale green here and there.

One thing was definite, however. To Dawson it was the only thing that mattered. That gray-green patch on the seemingly limitless expanse of shimmering and quivering Sahara was the secret base of Goering's Snoopers! He had found it! There it was! The first two of the bombers were already on the ground on the eastern fringe of the gray-green patch. They looked like beetles as they moved along over the ground.

A wild, fierce joy surged up in Dawson as he stared down at the place, but when he happened to glance at his fuel gauges, a tiny icy shiver went through him, and his joy was tempered by cold, hard reality. He had fuel for about another half hour in the air. Fuel enough to take him a fraction of the distance back to his Casablanca base. What he had expected had happened, but only now did the full significance of it descend upon him.

"But we found it!" he shouted wildly as he put his lips to his flap mike and reached out to tune his set to the Casablanca Base wave length. "And that's what matters most. Now to tell Casablanca and—"

At that moment Dawson's ears were filled with the savage yammer of aerial machine guns and air cannon, above and behind him!