"No?"
"No, Dave, my lad," Freddy said, "because I'd jolly well cut it for you, see? Well, there's the first thread of dawn."
As Freddy spoke, he pointed toward the east off the left wing. Dave looked in that direction and saw the thin grey line low down on the horizon. It was the very first signal that the sun was on its way up for a new day. Like night, day comes fast in the Middle East. The first telltale grey line mounts and brightens, and then while you watch a blaze of color streams up over the horizon and starts racing after the shadows of night you can actually see if you turn to the west and look. It is something like the way thunder clouds look sliding down over the horizon before the slanting rays of the sun that has finally broken through—bright and golden to one horizon, and dark and murky to the other.
Letting the plane more or less fly itself, Dave sat staring toward the east and watched the dawning of a new day. In an abstract sort of way he wondered where Freddy and he would be when that sun coming up had made its journey across the sky and had slid down over the western lip of the world. Would they be safely back on the Victory? Would they be at El Aghelia, or Bengazi, or some other British Libyan outpost? Would they be down on the Libyan sands with nothing but a charred heap of wreckage for an airplane? Or would they—
He shook his head angrily as though to drive away the thoughts. They came creeping back to him, however. They sneaked up on his brain when he wasn't suspecting them. And little by little the dangerous side of this mission crept in to occupy his mind. Back on the Victory he had simply accepted as a matter of course that the flight would be fraught with danger. All flights made in war skies were that way. That's why wars were wars. So even after Group Captain Spencer's repeated words about the dangers involved, he had refused to give much thought to that angle of the venture.
He was giving considerable thought to it now, though, and much against his will. That there was an eerie trembling at the back of his neck, and that his heart pounded much too hard, made him furious at himself. His fury, however, didn't drive away the tantalizing thoughts. There, just a few miles ahead of him now, was the Libyan coast. Beyond were miles and miles of hot, blazing desert sands, dotted here and there by a native village so small you could drop it down into Times Square, New York, and hardly be able to find it again. And all of those countless miles of desert were held by the enemy, patrolled by them on the ground, and in the air.
The truth of the matter was that he and Freddy were heading straight into a world where neither man nor nature was their friend. The blazing sun, and the burning sands, were just as much their foes as a Nazi tank, or a Nazi plane, or a squad of desert troops. Their only friend, their only ally, was the Blackburn Skua and its 830 hp. Bristol Pegasus engine. The plane, the engine, and their own will and ability to survive.
"Hey, what are you shaking your head about? Something wrong?"
He turned at the sound of Freddy's voice and grinned reassuringly.
"Just thinking things over, and adding up the points on our side," he said. "You know me! Old Man Cold Feet, once I get started off on something."