"Not enough, huh?" Dawson gritted, and hauled out of his own dive to follow through the Nazi's maneuver. "Well, I'm just the guy who can give you more. Like this!"
He was not in position for a tail shot then. The Nazi had pulled out too fast, and his Hell Cat was not letting him down. As a matter of fact, though, it was the kind of a shot that Dawson liked best of all. A rear quarter shot that would permit him to rake the other plane from prop to tail before its pilot could do anything to get out of the way.
The Nazi pilot seemed to sense that truth, and there was no reason he shouldn't sense it in view of the fact that he had been flying as a dirty Nazi spy in Uncle Sam's Navy. Anyway, he belted his plane hard over on wing and tried to whip it down to the vertical. But Dawson followed right through and pressed his trigger button. And it was then that it happened!
Rather, it was then that it didn't happen!
With the Nazi cold meat in his sights, not a one of Dawson's guns fired a shot. Maybe it was that a stray bullet from the Nazi's opening burst had hit something that threw the firing mechanism out of whack. Maybe it was for any one of a hundred different reasons. The cold hard fact was that not one of his guns spoke its piece. And in the next split second the Nazi was out of his sights and in the clear.
During that brief split second Dawson's brain seemed to freeze solid in unbelievable horror. Yet instinct was at work again. Instinct that made him try every way he knew to get his guns working. But it was all in vain. The joke was on him, and the war gods up in their high places were screaming with insane glee.
"No! Oh, no!"
From countless miles away Dawson's own sobbing words echoed back to him. His heart was lead in his stomach, and his head was filled with the flames of an all-consuming rage. Yet with all that he did not give up the ghost and just let his Hell Cat roar down across the sky. The Nazi did not know that his guns had gone out on him. Ten to one the Nazi simply thought that he had kicked his own plane out of the line of fire, and so Dawson had saved his bullets for another try.
At any rate Dawson did not give up. He was made of better stuff than that. Gunless though he was, he still had the advantage of position. He had the Nazi on the defensive, and as long as he could keep the offensive he had not truly lost.
"And after all, I've still got one trick left!" he said hoarsely. "One trick that will stop you from reaching Truk, so help me!"