"Now, ain't that something!" Dave grunted. "The boys start getting scared before I've even fired a shot. Wonder which one he is. The pilot, radioman, or the rear gunner. Anyway, he sure...."
He bit off the rest as he took another look at the figure swaying back and forth at the ends of the parachute's shroud lines. There was something about the man that didn't seem right. But in the next instant Dave realized why. The parachutist was not garbed in flying gear, or even in the uniform of a member of the Nazi Luftwaffe. Instead he wore civilian clothes.
"Spy dropping in broad daylight?" Dave gasped. "Well, I've seen almost everything now! If that isn't a dumb thing to try and pull on us. What does Hitler think we are, anyway? As dumb and thick as his murdering Nazi gang?"
He let it go unanswered. As a matter of fact he didn't bother to give it a second thought. He didn't for the very simple reason that sudden movement of the Messerschmitt showed that the pilot was still aboard. And the sudden movement also showed, rather, indicated, that the German pilot had decided to knock one Dave Dawson out of the English sky before buzzing on back home to Naziland.
At any rate, the One-Ten whipped around in a wing screaming turn, dropped sharply by the nose for a brief instant and then came tearing up at an angle for the belly of Dave's Spitfire. The Messerschmitt's machine guns and air cannon hammered out sound and jetting flame. Not a shot, however, smacked into the Mark 5 Spitfire. Before the German plane started to zoom Dave belted the stick over, jumped hard on right rudder and spun in less than the area of a dime. Before the maneuver was half completed Dave pulled the Spitfire's nose up straight for the sky.
He roared up a good hundred feet, then kicked the ship over on wingtip and dropped straight down like ten ton of brick. Right below him was the Messerschmitt One-Ten, its pilot striving frantically to kick out from under and go skidding away into the clear. He might just as well have jumped out and tried to walk across the sky back across the Channel. Dave had him cold, and everybody concerned knew it.
"Next time, stay home!" Dave shouted and pressed the trigger button.
His guns yammered sound and death. The Messerschmitt took the whole works square in the cockpit. The plane leaped and bolted off to one side as though it had been sideswiped by an invisible express train. For a brief moment Dave saw the pilot and the gunner fighting desperately to shove the cockpit's hood wide open and bail out with their parachutes. Then they became lost to view as sheets of flame belched out from both the port and starboard engines, and the whole plane became a raging ball of fire that went tumbling over and over down toward the ground.
"Another one you won't be using any more, Goering!" Dave grunted and pulled the Mark 5 out of its engine howling dive. "But I wonder why one of those birds jumped so soon? Was he a spy, or was he just too yellow to even be in the Nazi Air Force. Boy! That would be being plenty yellow, what I mean!"
As he voiced his thoughts aloud he started circling about staring downward for a sign of the descending parachute. He spotted it in less time than it takes to tell. The parachutist was still a good two thousand feet from the ground, and a stiff wind was sending it skidding rapidly to the right as the figure at the ends of the shroud lines made no effort to "slip" his 'chute (or spill air from the envelop by hauling down on the shroud lines on that side) to counteract the side-ward movement. As a matter of fact the figure at the ends of the shroud lines didn't seem to be moving a muscle. Instead of the man's hands reaching up to grab the shroud lines and take some of his weight off the harness, the arms just dangled down at the man's side.