Far away were three tiny specks in the sky.
Through his glasses Dick could make them out clearly enough. The leader was a machine of a type he had never seen before; a mile behind it were a couple of planes which he at once recognised as the Bristol fighters which had been so familiar to him in France.
The pace of the three machines was terrific. It was clear the English airmen were going all out in a desperate effort to catch the stranger before he reached the water, and they were expending every ounce of energy. But a moment or two later it was quite clear they were falling behind. Presently a puff of smoke from the leader signalled “petrol exhausted,” and he dropped in a long slant to the ground.
The second machine, however, held on grimly, though slowly losing ground. Evidently his predicament was the same as that of his colleague, and a moment later he, too, dipped earthward and was out of the fight.
Only the Mohawk stood between the stranger and safety!
But it was a Mohawk very different from the comparatively crude machine of a year before, wonderful though that was. Dick and Jules had worked out a revolutionary improvement in the lifting screws, with the result that a small supplementary engine, using comparatively little power, was now sufficient to keep the machine suspended in the air. As a result the full power of the big twin driving engines was now available for propulsion, and the speed of the Mohawk, when pushed to the limit, was something of which Dick had hardly dreamed in his earlier days. So far as he knew the Mohawk was easily the fastest craft in existence.
But what of the stranger? Had the men of the mystery craft a still greater secret up their sleeve? That they had something big Dick could plainly see by the way the fastest craft of the British Air Service, the best in the world, had dropped astern of the stranger. Was the Mohawk fast enough to beat the pirate? They would soon know.
As the big machine came on, Yvette set the elevating propellers of the Mohawk to work, and the helicopter shot upward. The stranger saw the manoeuvre and at once followed suit. But here he was at a disadvantage. Yvette’s object, of course, was to get above him. He would then be at their mercy, for he could not fire vertically, while the gun of the Mohawk was specially constructed so as to be able to fire downwards through a trap which opened in the flooring. If they could get what in the air corresponded to the “weather gauge” at sea, they would have the marauder at their mercy if the Mohawk had speed enough to hold him. Could they do it?
Plainly the fugitive saw his danger. As Yvette shot upward he must have realised that in speed of climbing he was no match for his antagonist. He decided to trust to his heels.
Yvette, climbing rapidly, had got a couple of thousand feet above the stranger and was heading to meet him. They were now twelve thousand feet in the air.