The dark waters were beneath them. A stray shell from the enemy would cast them both down—deep down into the North Sea.
More than once they heard the whirr of an aeroplane-engine quite close to them, but going forward, slipping through the air without noise, thanks to Pryor’s silencer, which the authorities had now recognised as a remarkable and highly useful invention in aerial warfare, they managed to evade their adversaries. The strain of it all was, however, terrible.
Upon the misty clouds below shone the glow of searchlights from land and sea, lighting up the billow mists, until they were quite picturesque undulations, like a fairy landscape. Yet through those mists they saw the deadly enemy flying to and fro in search of them as they went out to sea in silence.
Beryl watched it all from her observer’s seat. She knew that their raid had been successful, and that enormous damage had been done to the Hun submarine base. On her left showed the faint lights of Ostend, where she had spent one summer with her sister Iris and her husband, two years before the war. She had walked along the Digue in a smart summer gown, and she had gambled at boule and eaten ices in the great Casino which, according to report, was now used as a German hospital. Ah, how times had changed! She had never dreamt that she would be flying as an enemy over that sandy coast.
Ronnie, with all his wits about him, was heading straight for the English coast north of the Thames when, of a sudden, there arose from the dark void below the rapid throb of an enemy seaplane, which, a few seconds later, opened out its searchlight.
A moment afterwards it had fixed “The Hornet.”
Then began a desperate fight for life. The German aviator, having marked his prey, rose like a hawk, and then bore down upon him swiftly, his searchlight glaring into Beryl’s face like some evil eye.
The girl unstrapped herself and rose in order to be able to handle the machine-gun without encumbrance, for they were now flying upon an even keel.
“Hold on, dear!” the pilot exclaimed, and then suddenly he banked his machine over, swerving away none too soon from the hostile seaplane.
Again he worked up, avoiding the quick swoop of his adversary, who suddenly opened fire.