"Stop fishing for compliments!" Freddy laughed at him. "Your feet aren't half as cold as mine. And—Uh-uh! Get us some altitude, Dave. Looks like some kind of a coastal patrol plane down there and to the right. What do you make of it?"
Dave leaned forward and to the side and stared downward in the direction of Freddy's pointed finger. A few thousand feet below a murky shadow was moving toward the northwest. Though the light was bad, the shadow was moving too swiftly for it to be any kind of a surface ship. It was a plane, no doubt about that. However, Dave didn't waste time to make sure whether it was British or Axis. He pulled the Skua's nose upward, and fed a bit more fuel to the smooth singing Pegasus engine.
"Maybe it's just two other guys!" he called back over his shoulder. "We'll ignore them just the same. Company's something we don't crave. All set with that camera, Freddy? The sun's coming up fast, and you never can tell how soon we might spot something."
"All set, and ready to start clicking!" the English youth replied. "You show me something, and I'll do the rest. I'm a whiz at this sort of thing, you'll understand."
"Let you know about that after I see some of the results!" Dave chuckled, and held the Skua in its long climb up over the coastline of Libya.
An hour later they were deep over the desert and the sun was a brassy ball that touched the sweeping sands below with fingers of fire. Dave's eyes ached and smarted from the constant glare, despite the sun lenses he had slipped on over the glass of his goggles. They had long since shoved open the cockpit hood, because, though it was uncomfortable in the steady beat of the sun's rays, it was like flying along inside a baker's oven when the hood was shut.
An hour's flight over the desert, and nothing but sand, sand, and more sand. Here and there dark streaks had marked rocky strips that pushed up through the burning sands. And a few tiny dots from their altitude were clumps of desert bush, and a dried up oasis or two. But they didn't sight a single village, though they strained their eyes until they ached almost unbearably. And as far as troops, tanks, and other motorized equipment went, they might just as well have been coasting around over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
There just wasn't anything below them but sand during the first hour of patrol. And the scene was not one bit changed at the end of the second hour. As a matter of fact, the scene was so much the same Dave had the crazy feeling they had been hovering motionless in the same spot of air for time on end. For the last twenty minutes neither of them had spoken a word. To talk was an effort and, besides, there was so little to talk about save the one thought that each kept to himself, the one gnawing fear within each. It was the mounting realization that failure of the mission was beginning to hover in the offing.
For two solid hours, during which time they had covered countless square miles of enemy territory, they hadn't sighted a single thing worth remembering. No troop depots, no desert outposts, no roving tank patrols, and not even any enemy aircraft. That last, the fact they had not sighted a single Italian or Nazi plane in the air, plagued Dave and caused the fingers of worry to play upon his tightly drawn nerves. True, they had not flown close to Tripoli, or anywhere near it. Perhaps Tripoli was overflowing with Axis planes and mechanized desert units. That wasn't the point. That wasn't the reason Freddy and he had been sent out on this scouting patrol.
The British High Command knew that troops and equipment had been assembled at Tripoli. What the High Command didn't know was if any of those units had moved out into the desert, and where, and in what numbers. It stood to reason that the Axis High Command in Libya hadn't kept them bottled up in the Tripoli area for fear of surprise attack by Wavell's forces. That was foolish, if for no other reason than the fact that over four hundred miles of desert lay between the most advanced British outpost and the Tripoli garrison.