Dave Dawson at Casablanca

by Robert Sidney Bowen

Yes, one! And that left two others in the sky. However, those two were crafty veterans of the Luftwaffe, and they had not been wasting time. Nor had their actions been with the idea of getting away from the wild, mad flying Yank eagle. On the contrary, they had simply maneuvered to await their time. And that time came as Dawson cut his fire and started to wheel up out of his thunderous power dive.

As he started up, those two let fly at him. Maybe both hit the mark, or maybe one of them missed completely. But what did it matter? The mark was hit, and the "mark" was Dawson's plane. The air all about him seemed suddenly alive with tracer smoke, and the Lockheed Lightning acted as though it was about to fly right out from under Dave. He was hurled back against the headrest with a force that filled his head with winking stars. Then the Lockheed whipped up over on its back, dropped its nose and headed straight down like a meteor gone berserk. Thunder roared in his ears, and before his eyes exploded and flashed all the color combinations in the world. In his nose was the acrid stench of smoke.

"Your turn, this time, pal!" he heard his own voice shout, as he went hurtling downward. "No! No, it isn't, darn it! You're not hit. You're okay! Hit the silk, you dope! Bail out! Hit the silk! If you—"

He choked off the rest, or rather fear choked off his words, as he suddenly heard the renewed bursts of savage aerial machine-gun fire. His ship shot to ribbons, and falling to earth in flames, yet those two Nazi vultures were still pumping death at him.

"But why not?" he reasoned. "They're Nazis, aren't they? What else would you expect these killing rats to do?"

Even as the thought slipped across his brain, a new one crowded close on its heels. Rather, it was a realization. The realization that there was not one bit of pain in his body as he struggled to free himself from the burning Lockheed. And also that no ribbons of tracer smoke were cutting past him. So what were the Nazis shooting at? At each other, or—

Before he could finish the question he had managed to fight his way up out of the pit, and dived headlong into sun-filled thin air. But it was not his own movements that stopped his unfinished thought. On the contrary, it was the sight of a wingless Messerschmitt 109 hurtling down to its doom about three hundred yards from where his own body seemed to hang in mid air.

"Hey!" he gasped. "Did I get another one? Did I get two, and I'm just finding out? But how the—"

And he didn't finish that question either. He didn't, because at that exact instant the gods of war, as though angered by the fact that he still lived, tried one last time to finish him off. At any rate, at that exact moment a piece of his riddled Lockheed Lightning flew off. Straight and true as a ball pitcher's perfect strike it cut across the air space toward him. He actually saw it coming out of the corner of his eye, and he tried to duck as his body slowly tumbled end over end downward. But he didn't succeed in ducking, or he didn't duck in time. Something hit him a smashing blow on the side of his head, and the entire North African sky blew up in a thunderous roar of sound!

When consciousness returned to Dawson his first hazy impression was that he was floating about in the middle of a great sea of black ink. But no, not everything was that black. At regular intervals a faint yellowish orange glow appeared before his eyes. But before he could get a good look at it the glow faded away out of sight. Instinctively he tried to get his brain to function; to get it to figure out what everything was all about. However, for a long time he somehow just couldn't force his brain to make that effort. He simply lived in a world of hazy snatches of thought, and inky darkness lighted now and then by a yellowish orange glow.