Raiders Invisible Part 1

Raiders Invisible.

by Desmond Winter Hall.

The m.u.f.fled, helmeted figure of a pilot climbed down the spider ladder, nestled into the foremost scout's c.o.c.kpit and pressed the starting b.u.t.ton. The motor spat out a wisp of smoke, then burst into its full-throated roar: the automatic clamp above loosened: the scout dropped plummet-like, bobbed to the flags.h.i.+p below, straightened out and zoomed six thousand feet up into the morning blue, where it hovered for a few moments like an eagle on taut wings. Lieutenant Christopher Travers, the pilot, glanced around.

Behind and below him was spread a magnificent panorama. Across the plate of scintillating gla.s.s that was the sea moved rows of toy s.h.i.+ps, tipped by the gleaming, one-fifth-mile long shape of a dirigible, of whose three scout planes Chris's was the leader. As he watched, the second scout dropped from the plane rack beneath the dirigible's sleek underside and went streaking away, followed by the third, in response to the Admiral's order of: "Proceed ahead to locate the enemy's position."

A grin relaxed Chris Travers' tanned, boyish face. His narrowed gray eyes swept the horizon. Below it somewhere lay hidden the ranks of the Black Fleet, complete with its own destroyers, submarines, cruisers, battles.h.i.+ps, aircraft carriers and the ZX-2, sister dirigible of the Blue Fleet's ZX-1. Chris spurted the scout ahead and murmured:

"This war game's goin' to be a big affair--the biggest yet!"

It was. The Atlantic Fleet of the United States Navy, termed "Blue"

for convenience, had been a.s.signed to guard the Panama Ca.n.a.l; the Pacific Fleet, "Black," to attack it. The cream of America's sea forces had been a.s.sembled for that week of March, 1935, all the way from crabby little destroyers to the two newly completed monarchs of the air, the twin dirigibles, fresh from the hangars at Akron, a thousand feet each in length and loaded with the latest offensive and defensive devices developed by Government laboratories.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The war game around the Ca.n.a.l was planned for more than practice, however. The eyes of the whole world were on that array of America's ocean might--the eyes of one foreign nation in particular. Was.h.i.+ngton knew of the policies of that nation, and wished to impress upon is the hopelessness of them. More than a game, this concentration of sea and air-borne fighting power was a gesture for the continued peace of the world--a gesture strong with the hint of steel.

Chris Travers was vaguely aware, through the rumors of the mess-room, of the double meaning of the game he was playing his part in, but this morning he didn't give a single thought. He was too wrapped up in his job of spotting the van of the Black Fleet, radio-telephoning lat.i.tude and longitude to the bridge of the Blue Fleet flags.h.i.+p, and getting home to his dirigible without being declared destroyed by one of the war game umpires.

Therefore, half an hour later, his heart thrilled as he glimpsed, wraith-like on the steely horizon, a wisp of smoke.

He catapulted forward, eyes steady on that hint of s.h.i.+ps. The smoke grew to a cloud of black pouring from the funnels of a V-shaped squad of destroyers, rolling through the lazy swells of the Pacific waters.

Behind them came the bulldogs, larger wars.h.i.+ps, hazy blurs in the distance.

Chris struck fist in palm to the tune of a gleeful chortle. He was first! He hauled the microphone from its cubby in the dashboard and spoke the code words. Lat.i.tude, longitude and steaming direction of the Black Fleet he gave rapidly, and the information knifed back to the bridge of the Blue Fleet flags.h.i.+p, a hundred miles behind, where a white-haired admiral said: "Ah! Good boy! Get those bombers up--p.r.o.nto!"

Chris commanded a superb view of the ZX-2, whose gleaming shape, showering rays of sunlight, hung like a thing in a painting over the Black Fleet. He stared at the far-off dirigible, lost in admiration of her trim lines, pausing a minute before returning to his own ZX-1. At that distance, the mammoth craft seemed no more than four inches long, yet, through his telescopic sight, he could discern her markings, machine-gun batteries and the airplane rack along her belly plainly.

One plane, he saw, was suspended from the rack; the others were scouting for the Blue Fleet, even as he had scouted for the Black. He wondered if something were wrong with the plane left behind. Somehow, it did not look quite familiar.

But, even as he watched, it dropped from the automatic rack, then straightened and soared dizzily up. And, from one of the airplane carriers' broad decks, he saw two pursuit craft begin to rise. He grinned. They'd seen him, were coming after him!

He gripped the stick, prepared to swerve around. He had already raised a spread-fingered hand for a derisive parting gesture, when suddenly he stiffened. The hand dropped as if paralyzed.

"Good Lord!" he gasped. "What--"

The mighty thousand-foot dirigible ZX-2, pride of the Navy and all America, had wobbled drunkenly in her path. She stuck her nose down, and then her whole vast frame s.h.i.+vered like a wind-whipped leaf as the dull roar of an explosion rolled over the sea. A huge sliver of hide was stripped from her as if by magic, revealing the skeleton of girders inside--revealing a tongue of crimson that licked out and welled into a h.e.l.l of flame.

Chris's blood froze. He watched the ZX-2 wallow in her death throes, writhe in the fiery doom that had struck her in seconds, that was devouring her with awful rapidity while thousands of men, blanched and trembling, gazed on helplessly. He saw her plunge, a blazing inferno, into the sea beneath....

There were old pals on her--buddies, gone in a flash of time!

This wasn't a war game. This was tragedy, stark before his eyes.

The Black Fleet forgot its mimic battle. Radio telephone messages winged over the horizon to the approaching Blue Fleet. The Black dreadnoughts hove to; launches with ashen-faced men in white manning them dropped overboard; a dozen destroyers rolled in the swells around a crumbled, charred egg-sh.e.l.l that but minutes before had been an omnipotent giant of the sky.

Chris Travers, aloft in sunlight suddenly bereft of its beauty, jammed the stick of the scout full over. He could do nothing, he knew. He could only return to the ZX-1 and tell the story of its sister as he had seen it.

But why, he wondered as he flew almost blindly, had the ZX-2 so quickly flamed to oblivion? The helium of its inner bags bad been uninflammable, as had the heavy oil of its fuel tanks; the ten engines were Diesels, and hence without the ordinary ignition system and gasoline. Safety devices by the score bad been installed on board; nothing had been overlooked. And the weather, perfect.

It was uncanny. It seemed totally unexplainable.

Swarms of planes droned between sea and sky, all speeding in the one direction, west, to where the crumpled remnants of a dirigible were slipping quickly beneath the billows, beyond the sight of man. Planes of war game umpires, of officials, of newspaper correspondents and photographers. And soon a spectral, gleaming wisp of silver nosed out of the east, and the lone scout flying east dropped in alt.i.tude to meet its mother.

Mechanically, his mind elsewhere, Chris shoved the b.u.t.ton which reared the automatic clamp behind the c.o.c.kpit in preparation for affixing the scout to the plane rack beneath the ZX-1. The dirigible, far in advance of the Blue Fleet, was roaring along at its full one hundred and fifty to hover over the grave of its sister. Chris eyed its course and changed his. To jockey into the rack, he had to pa.s.s the dirigible and come up underneath from its rear.

The air giant roared closer. As the distance between then loosened, Chris's brow wrinkled and he swore softly in puzzlement.

"Now, just what's wrong with them?" he exclaimed, "The darned zep isn't flying straight! She's wobbling in her course!"

It was hardly apparent, but true. Ever so slightly, the snub nose of the ZX-1 was swaying from side to side as it sped through the air; ever so slightly, her ma.s.sive stern directional-rudders were wavering.

She was less than a mile away now. At that time, there were no other planes in sight; none flying in that vicinity save Chris's. He glued his eyes to the telescopic sight. A moment later, sheer horror swept his face.

"_Good G.o.d!_"

The scout leaped as its throttle rammed down. The gleaming, thousand-foot sh.e.l.l of the ZX-1 roared by it at equal alt.i.tude, making it a puny fly-speck in the sky. But the fly-speck was faster. It turned in a screaming bank; it straightened; it lunged back after the swaying, retreating mammoth like a whippet, lower, now, than its quarry. It maneuvered expertly as it gained, for one of the best pilots of the service was at its controls, and there were deep lines graven in his face, lines of anguish and intolerable suspense.

Through the telescopic sight, Chris had not seen a single white-clad figure standing beside the gla.s.s ports of the dirigible's control car.

But he had seen, slung from the rack along her belly, a single plane--the same rather peculiar-looking plane he had seen hanging beneath the rack of the ZX-2 a few minutes before she had gone down in flames!

And in that plane, he knew surely, was the answer to the mystery.

Speed cut to just a trifle more than the dirigible's. Chris pa.s.sed a few feet underneath the huge expanse of her lower directional rudder.

From so close, its uncontrolled wavering was terrifying.

His faculties were concentrated on the task of sliding the scout's clamp into the groove of the plane rack, but he was also surveying the lone airplane hanging from it. A powerful machine, painted in Navy colors, a peculiar k.n.o.b on the upper side of each half of the top wing gave it its unfamiliar appearance. Its pilot was obviously aboard the dirigible, working....

Closer and closer the scout crept, quarter-way now along from the stern of the ma.s.sive bulk that loomed above it, and within fifty feet of the third clamp in the rack. Touchy work, maneuvering into it, with the ZX-1 yawing as she was, and the need for haste desperate. Chris's hands were glued to the stick: his nerves were as tight as violin strings. Then, when only ten feet from the rack clamp, he gave a startled jump of uncomprehending amazement.

The propeller of the mysterious plane ahead had roared over. Its clamp had left the rack; it had dropped down in a perfectly controlled dive and flattened out as if a master pilot were at its controls.

But the plane's c.o.c.kpit was still empty, Chris could see; nor had he seen any figure pa.s.s down the ladder from the dirigible into it!

Devoid of all emotion save bewilderment, he sat stupidly in the scout.

A moment later, so well had he aimed it, its clamp nestled snugly into the groove of the rack, and the regular automatic action took place. A tiny door slid open directly above in the dirigible's hull: a thin ladder craned down--and Chris's nostrils caught a faint whiff of something that cleared his mind of its confusion instantly.

Just a whiff, but it registered. Gas, with an odor resembling carbon monoxide.