“They’re scattered now,” Ted thought as he set his plane climbing. “Their torpedoes will never reach their marks. They—”
His thoughts were interrupted. The moon having come out once more, he found himself above a Jap torpedo plane. Tilting his plane at a rakish angle he fired straight down. His shots were answered by a burst of fire from a small free machine gun. The slugs ripped into his motor.
He caught his breath. Banking sharply, he swung away to the right, then started climbing. Up he went, a thousand—two thousand feet. He smelled smoke, saw a tiny flame play about his motor, and that was all.
With care and speed born of much training, he dragged out his life raft, inflated it, looked to his parachute, threw back the hood, stood up, climbed upon the fuselage, jumped far and wide, then shot downward.
Five seconds later he felt the pull of his parachute, then settled back to drift silently down toward a blue-black sea.
“What luck!” he muttered. “What terrible luck!”
In that moment all that he had hoped for seemed lost—his part in the big show of the morning, the rescue of his pals, the great attack on Mindanao. If he survived, where would he land? Would he be picked up? How soon? And by whom? To these questions he found no answers, so settling back he prayed for what he needed most—a bit of moonlight before he hit those black waters. And his simple prayer was answered.
CHAPTER XII
UP AT DAWN
When Jack was still in grade school he had often visited his uncle’s farm. In summer he had stayed for weeks at a time. There were ghosts that haunted the lonely country roads at night. Old Jock Gordon, the hired hand, and Maggie MacPherson, the cook, often told weird tales about these ghosts as they sat by the kitchen fire at night.
When he was out late playing with some neighbor boy and had to brave the dark roads alone, Jack had gone on tiptoe. But that didn’t always help, for more than once he saw weird white things moving in the hedge or the willows.