"It is a Swordfish torpedo plane!" Freddy cried excitedly. "And look, Dave. There! See? See its markings? What in the world?"
"Boy, what eyes you've got, pal!" Dave grunted and squinted hard at the distant plane. "I can't see a thing. That darn sun is.... Hey! Holy smoke, Freddy! That ship is carrying the markings of Seventy-Four Squadron! Our own outfit!"
"Exactly!" Freddy echoed. "It means that somebody was sent out to signal us that the show was all off. Or else some lad has been trailing us just to find out what we're up to."
"Well, it can't be the first," Dave said as a tiny tingle of worry rippled through him. "Our orders were sealed, you know. Nobody at the Plymouth Base knows where we are."
"Well, one chap does," Freddy said and pointed. "That chap up there."
Dave made no comment to that. He turned his head front and searched the rolling swells all the way south to the horizon line. And to the east and to the west as well. But that was all he saw. Just miles and miles of rolling grey green swells. There wasn't the sign of a single thing on the surface, nor the faint shadow of a U-boat lurking under the surface. In fact, there wasn't so much as a single puff of smoke to denote the presence of surface craft.
"Somebody's either taking us for a sweet sleigh ride," he grunted to himself. "Or else we just naturally read those orders wrong. My guess is that...."
Dave never stated what his guess was. At that moment the savage yammer of aerial machine gun fire crackled against his ear drums above the roar of the Bristol engine. He jerked his head around just in time to see Freddy Farmer clutch at his left cheek and slump over against the side of the cockpit. The English youth straightened up almost immediately and took his hand away from his cheek. Dave's heart started beating again when he saw the thin narrow red line that cut down from the lobe of the ear toward the point of the jaw. Freddy had been slightly creased by a bullet. An inch or so more to the right, however, and the English R.A.F. ace would have been stone dead.
In practically the same instant that Dave looked at Freddy he jerked his gaze skyward. The strange plane from Seventy-Four Squadron was racing down at them with all guns blazing. The thick glass hood over the Fulmar's two place cockpit was being turned into a mass of millions and millions of tiny cracks as the bullets from the Fairey Swordfish's guns slammed against it. Hardly realizing that he was doing so, Dave jumped hard on the controls and whipped the Fulmar up over and down in a wing screaming half roll. The maneuver took them clear of the other plane's gun for a moment or so. But no longer. The biplane followed through in a similar maneuver and came tearing down in again.
"You dirty rat, what gives?" Dave bellowed angrily and slid off the safety catch of his gun triggers. "If you're asking for trouble you're getting it now ... and plenty!"