Dave never finished the last, for at that exact instant a miracle seemed to take place right before his startled eyes. Freddy Farmer's plane stopped flip-flopping and spinning around abruptly. As though someone had reached down and stopped it, the Lockheed came up onto even keel. But it did much more than that! It came up past even keel and on up into a power zoom. Its guns yammered out sound and flame, and perhaps for the infinitesimal part of a split second the pilot of the third and last Messerschmitt was the most stunned and bewildered man in the whole wide world.
But only for that flash of time. In practically nothing flat he was no longer capable of thought, and less of action. He was just a dead man hunched over the controls of a diving plane—that is, the bullet-shattered wreckage of a diving plane. Before he had had the chance to blink or move a muscle, Freddy Farmer had pinned him cold to the dawn sky. And, not a little bewildered himself, Dave saw the Messerschmitt fall apart in mid-air, and Freddy Farmer, grinning from ear to ear, come tearing up past him and level off the top of his zoom. Automatically, Dave pulled up out of his own dive and swung around to join Freddy Farmer. The English-born air ace was still grinning, and he was holding up one hand, forming an "O" with thumb and forefinger, and extending the other three straight upward. Dave gaped at him a moment longer, and then shook his head to drive the cobwebs and mist away.
"So, just another Freddy Farmer trick!" he growled, and shook a fist at the English youth. "I might have known that you were simply slipping out of a tight jam. And to think I was beginning to pray for you—you bum!"
Freddy, of course, didn't hear the words, but he saw Dave's moving lips, and probably guessed what they were saying. His mouth opened in silent laughter, and he made a gesture with one hand, which was just the same as his lips saying:
"Weren't getting worried, were you, old chap?"
CHAPTER SIX
Nazi Wrath
Like so many huge birds of prey coming home to roost, the twenty-one ferry bombers slid down to a landing on the R.A.F. field at Land's End at the southwest tip of England, and went trundling over to the tarmac line and the waiting mechanics. When the last had touched earth, Dave and Freddy cut their throttles and slid down also. They landed together and taxied that way up to the line. When he reached it Dave cut his ignition, climbed out and hurried stiff-legged over to Freddy's plane.
"What was the big idea of giving me such a case of heart failure?" he demanded of his pal. "Holy smoke! That little business took fifteen years off my life, if it took a day. In future, don't do that to me, see?"