“Try, is right!” Dave chuckled. “But we’ve seen them first. Okay, Freddy! There’re only two of them. Get set to teach somebody a little lesson he won’t be forgetting for a long time. We’ll let them come down close, but not too close. Look! They’re banking around and starting down. Well, knock me for a loop! A couple of Waco biplane speed jobs! Think we should go through with it, Freddy? Or should we pull out and tend to our own knitting?”
There was no answer from Freddy Farmer for a couple of seconds. Dave watched the two Wacos come rushing down in almost a vertical dive. Instinctively he slid his hand up the control stick and took off the safety catch of the firing button.
“Eh, what?” came Freddy Farmer’s sudden reply. “Pull off and leave the blighters? Leave them perhaps to get somebody else like poor Tracey? Not a bit of it, Dave. Let’s give it to the beggars, and give it to them good!”
“Words right out of my mouth!” Dave cried gayly. “And to make sure it’s no mistake, we’ll let them smack out the first burst. I still wonder where Colonel Welsh’s agent is. Too bad he’s going to miss this!”
“His hard luck,” Freddy grunted. “But he isn’t here, so he isn’t here, and that’s that. He—On guard, Dave!”
The last wasn’t necessary. Dawson hadn’t taken his eyes off the diving Wacos for so much as a split second. Even as Freddy yelled, he saw twin jetting streams of orange red flame come spurting out the nose of the leading plane. And in that same split second he slammed his weight on the Vultee’s controls and sent the Air Corps ship cartwheeling off to the left and up as though it had been slapped by a bolt of lightning.
So unexpected and so swift had been his maneuver that when he yanked the Vultee out of it a good thousand feet higher in the air, the two Wacos were still diving earthward and still spitting out bullets from all their guns. A harsh laugh rattled off Dave’s lips as he kicked rudder and dropped the nose a hair.
“Go back to flight training school, chumps!” he shouted. “Who do you think we are—a couple of two hour solo cadets? Here! Here are a few kisses from Uncle Sam!”
As Dave spoke the last he sticked the nearest of the two Wacos into his sights and jabbed the electric trigger button. His two forward fixed guns yammered out flame and sound, and the Waco suddenly acted as though its pilot had flown it straight into a meat grinder. The left wings came off clean as a whistle. The fuselage buckled in the middle, and smoke and flame belched out from under the engine cowling, and went whirling backward to envelop the plane completely. Dave watched it closely, but when no figure tumbled down out of that smoke to become a man dangling at the ends of parachute shroud lines, he shuddered slightly and licked his suddenly dry lips.
“Tough!” he muttered, “even if he is an Axis rat. But he asked for it. And he had the chance to get in the first licks, too!”