As Dave spoke he kept his eyes fixed on the stretch of lush green ground almost directly below. At the very instant he had sighted the first Zero breaking away from formation he had dropped the B-Twenty-Five's nose to increase her glide speed to the limit. And now it was but the matter of a few seconds as to what would happen first. Whether Dawson could get the bomber down onto the ground, or whether the Japs could reach the aircraft with their murderous blasts and send it to earth a raging ball of flame.
From a point that seemed but a couple of feet from his head, Dawson heard the snarl of Jap machine gun fire, and the deeper and louder note of enemy aircraft cannon. But he didn't waste time to jerk up his head for a look. It wouldn't do any good to see the Japs shooting. His ears told him that they were; that at almost any instant death might chop right through to nail him. Just the matter of a few seconds, that was all. A few seconds in which to fight for his life, and Freddy's, and win—or lose.
"This is it, Freddy!" he suddenly yelled, and hauled back on the control wheel column. "Hang on, hard!"
Maybe he yelled the warning aloud, or maybe he simply spoke it in his brain. But either way, there was no time to repeat. The B-Twenty-Five was dangerously low now, and taking up the last bit of its gliding speed to reach a narrow clearing thickly bordered by tropical growth. Maybe the surface of that corridor-shaped clearing was hard and firm. Or maybe it was a narrow strip of swamp ground. There was no way to tell from the air, and no time to do anything about it, anyway. The few seconds had run their course. Time had run out. The B-Twenty-Five had won its race with those diving Jap Zeros, but a crash landing on an unknown strip of Philippine ground was a certainty.
Dawson hung hard to the control wheel to the very last split second. He saw the nose come up, felt the bomber mush forward and start to falter in the air, and he saw that strip of clearing come zooming up toward the belly of the fuselage. And then the B-Twenty-Five touched ground.
Touched ground? The last ounce of its flying and gliding speed spent, the bomber dropped the rest of the way like ten ton of loose brick. Braced as he was for the jolting contact with the ground, Dawson had the crazy sensation that invisible hands grabbed hold of him and started bouncing him around inside the pilots' compartment like a human rubber ball. Freddy, the instrument panel, the control wheel column, and the compartment's windows seemed to parade past his eyes. And then suddenly the roof fell down on top of him, and the next thing his spinning brain realized his head was resting on one of the rudder pedals, and his legs were up in the pilot's seat. And the figure of Freddy Farmer was sitting astride his stomach like a horseback rider.
For perhaps a full three seconds the two youths blinked stupidly into each other's eyes. Then Freddy Farmer choked out a gasp, scrambled off Dawson's middle, and reached down to twist his legs around and his head up.
"You hurt, Dave?" he managed to gasp.
"Don't know, yet!" Dawson replied hoarsely, and kicked open the compartment door with his foot. "Tell you later. We've got to get out of here, kid. This is a swell target for those rats. Here they come down, now!"
There was no need to inform the English youth of that little truth. The ungodly scream of Jap wings in the wind, and the blood-chilling snarl and yammer of their aerial machine gun and aerial cannon fire was enough to make the very ground shake and tremble. Instinctively Dawson reached up, hooked an arm about Freddy and hauled him down onto the floorboards of the compartment. And there they both crouched, breath locked in their lungs, as the Zeros piled down and raked the crashed bomber from twin rudder to nose. Bullets cut through into the compartment, and made a shambles of what was left of the instrument panel. But it was as though the hand of Lady Luck touched each bullet, because neither Dawson nor Freddy Farmer was hit.