Both Dave and Manners snapped their heads around and spotted the Nazi plane at the same time. The craft was a couple of thousand feet above their altitude, but even as they spotted it the nose dropped and the plane came down toward them at terrific speed.
"Man the tail guns, Freddy!" Dave barked. "Here's our chance to pay back with a few slugs. We'll...!"
"No!" Air Marshal Manners said sharply. "No scramble with that plane. Get us down into those clouds, Dawson, and lose him. We haven't got time for a fight."
A wave of rebellion swept through Dave but he curbed it instantly. Something in Manners' face told him that the Air Marshal hated to run away just as much as he did, but that he had a very good reason for ordering it.
"Right, sir!" Dave cried.
Even before the words had popped off his lips he shoved the controls forward, pushed the nose down to almost the vertical, and sent the Lockheed Hudson wing screaming for the clouds. It was not more than the matter of a few split seconds before they were plunging through the billowing mist, but even then he heard the savage snarl of the Messerschmitt's aerial machine guns, and the heavier, louder note of its twin 20-mm. cannon. And a split second after that he heard the yammering reply from Freddy Farmer's guns in the tail turret of the Lockheed.
As soon as the Lockheed was completely hidden in the depths of the cloud layer he pulled out of the dive, leveled off and banked due west. For some ten or fifteen minutes he flew on the instruments, twisting this way and that, but always in the general direction of London. And during all that time Air Marshal Manners didn't say a word. He sat like a statue of stone in the co-pilot's seat staring out forward as though his steady gaze might pierce right through the bank after bank of cloud mist that rushed toward them and was sliced and churned by the whirling propellers.
Then suddenly, perhaps a second or two before Dave would have climbed up on top for a quick look-see around, a blurred shadow came racing in from the right. It was no more than a shadow tearing in, and Dave only caught sight of it out the corner of his eye, but his sixth sense told him at once that it might be the Messerschmitt One-Ten.
"Dawson! Look out! There's...."
Air Marshal Manners' wild cry was just a waste of breath. Dave had already slammed the Lockheed over and around on wingtip in a wing shaking vertical bank. The terrific force of the turn cut off the rest of the Air Marshal's cry and pinned him up against the side of the compartment as though he were nailed there. Every muscle of his body braced, and his mouth open to prevent possible blacking-out from the turn, Dave hung grimly to the controls and prayed in his thoughts as he had never prayed before.