The needle of the altimeter began to hasten its backward swing.
A brilliant shaft of white struck upward, picking them out, throwing up around them a sea of vivid illumination.
Instantly Don changed his tactics.
To level off, as he intended, to come out of the dive with still a fair margin of altitude to give him ease of handling well above earth was impossible. The searchlight might prevent him from seeing the ground, might blind him.
He was plunging straight down toward it.
Full-gun, he drew back on the stick. Up tipped the nose.
Wires sang with the fierce wind. The ship trembled.
At nearly two hundred miles an hour the ship began to climb in the huge arc of a “loop.”
Don had purpose behind his shift of plan.
While he had never executed it in darkness, he recalled the maneuver known as an Immelmann Turn, said to have been devised by a German war ace, by which altitude above an adversary was gained swiftly, with a change of flying direction.