CHAPTER ELEVEN

_Flames Of Doom_

WITH HER FOUR Wright “Cyclone” engines thundering out their synchronized song of power, the giant Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress lifted clear of the Albuquerque Air Base runway and nosed up for altitude and the start of the nine hundred odd mile flight to Brownsville, Texas. Back aft by the middle bomb bay, Dave Dawson and Freddy Farmer relaxed comfortably and watched the falling ground through one of the side ports.

“Nice!” Dave grunted. “This is the life, at times. Let somebody else do the flying for a change, hey, Freddy?”

“A fine thing to ask me!” Freddy snorted. “I’m usually a passenger anyway. But it does make a chap feel good not to have any flight responsibility for a change. These are certainly wonderful airplanes.”

“Plenty good, plenty good,” Dave agreed. “I bet before long that Hitler will shoot anybody who mentions 'Flying Fortress’ in his presence. And the day will come, too, and soon, when these babies will be regarded as the smaller type of bomber. We’ll have six and eight engine jobs dumping them off on Adolf’s head. But, by the way, during all the rush this morning I forgot to ask you how the old head was. You look okay from here.”

“I’m fine,” the English youth replied with a smile. “Had a restless night, though. No pain. Just dreams, crazy ones. I dreamed that little cross-eyed men were shooting at me from all directions, and not missing by much.”

“But they missed, like that rat yesterday,” Dave murmured, and squinted down back at the Albuquerque Base that was fast losing itself in the general landscape. “In a way I’m sorry to leave Albuquerque. I mean, it’s sort of like unfinished business. There’s a dirty rat down there, and we didn’t even get close to him. He knows we were there, and he knows we’ve taken off for Brownsville. But there’s one thing in our favor--if you could call it that.”

“And you mean?” Freddy Farmer prompted when the Yank air ace lapsed into silence and didn’t continue. “Go on, finish it.”

“We’ve at least got them worried,” Dave finally said, and nodded for grim emphasis. “Colonel Welsh’s faked message to Washington H.Q. has got them standing on their ears. They think we know something mighty important, when in truth we don’t know a darn thing. And that little fact has me standing on my ear, if you must know.”

“I’m with you there,” Freddy sighed, and gave a little shake of his head. “And if you must know, I’m more than a little worried. I mean, things have happened, but--well, not a thing to our advantage.”

“We’re still alive and kicking,” Dave reminded him. “You could class that as an advantage.”

“Oh, I do!” Freddy said instantly. “Quite! But apart from still being alive, what have we gained? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And to get down to brass tacks, as you Yanks say, what have we ahead?”

“Who knows?” Dave grunted, and shrugged. “We’ll just have to stay in and pitch, and hope for a break. But there is Second Lieutenant Marble with the Ninety-Sixth Attack Squadron. He’s our ace card, you know. All this business just leads up to him. You might say that now we’re just running the gantlet of enemy agents, who are trying to cut us down. But Marble is at the end, and when we get to him--”

Dave finished the rest by winking and snapping his fingers. Freddy Farmer nodded, but the expression on his face indicated that he was not very much impressed.

“Yes, quite so,” he murmured. “But, supposing Marble can’t help us any? Supposing he doesn’t know a thing about what poor Tracey was working on? What then?”

“Then we know for sure we’ve got to start from scratch,” Dave said quietly. “And, Freddy, I’ve been thinking.”

“Good lad,” the English youth said with a smile. “Splendid! You’ll be surprised in how many ways it will improve you!”

“Nuts, I’m serious!” Dave snapped. “I’ve been doing an awful lot of thinking about poor Tracey. There is the key, Freddy. Poor Tracey. No matter how much I try to get away from it, I keep coming back to the firm belief that he gave us the key to the whole business, in those four words that we think added up to Albuquerque.”

“You don’t think so, now?” Freddy asked.

“I don’t know what to think!” Dawson muttered savagely. “He probably was just pronouncing Albuquerque slowly so’s we’d be sure to get it. But why? Tell me why.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Freddy replied with an unhappy shake of his head.

“So that’s what gets me,” Dave said. “Why use his last bit of strength to tell us to tell Colonel Welsh that he came from Albuquerque, when Colonel Welsh already knew that? And that word, southern? Why southern Albuquerque? It doesn’t make sense, Freddy. I’m darned afraid that we didn’t get it right, that we muffed what was really the key to this whole mystery.”

“Well, now that you bring it up,” Freddy Farmer said slowly, “I must confess that I haven’t been at all satisfied with our deductions on what he said. But he repeated it several times, and it sounded the same each time.”

“I know,” Dave said heavily. “But let’s both keep it in our minds. I have a hunch that we were all wet on that. I think that something will come to us out of the blue, and then poor Tracey’s dying words will make sense.”

“Well, there’s still Second Lieutenant Marble,” Freddy Farmer grunted. “I refuse, though, to let my hopes get too high about him. But of course there is a chance that he can explain a lot of things, or at least enough for us to get working on.”

The two youths lapsed into mutual silence and were content with their own thoughts as the big Flying Fortress drilled its way through the air toward Brownsville. As a matter of fact, neither of them spoke for some fifteen minutes or so, and then only when the big bomber’s Flight Engineer came past them on his way aft.

“Anything we can do to help, Lieutenant Kelley?” Dave asked with a smile. “We sort of feel as if we were cheating on the job, just sitting back here and taking it easy.”

The Flight Engineer paused for a moment and grinned down at him.

“No, there isn’t a thing, thanks,” he said. “Glad to have you two aboard for company. These ferrying jobs are pretty dry. I’m just about to rustle up some coffee, and a sandwich or two. Can I interest you?”

“Oh, quite!” Freddy Farmer said, and beamed. “I say, that would be splendid. This American air, you know, makes me frightfully hungry quite often.”

“Quite often, he says!” Dave groaned. “He really means no more than twenty-four hours a day. You don’t happen to have a whole cow aboard for him to nibble on, do you, just as a little snack in between his regular meals? But I could go for a cup of java. Here, let me give you a hand with the business.”

Dave scrambled up on his feet and followed the Flight Engineer past the flare chute compartment and further aft to the bomber’s galley. They had the little electric stove going in nothing flat, and it was not long after that before the pleasing aroma of coffee was mingling with the one hundred and one equally pleasant (to pilots) smells inside the bomber. Freddy sliced bread and Dave buttered it, and the Flight Engineer got out the various things to put in between the buttered slices. It was when he was cutting the first sandwich cornerwise that he suddenly straightened up and sniffed.

“What’s that smell, or is it my imagination?” he asked.

“I smell nothing but nice things to eat,” was Freddy Farmer’s reply to the question.

Dave didn’t make any reply for a moment. He sniffed hard and was suddenly conscious of a very strange smell in his nose. And it didn’t come from the cook stove, either. He tried to identify the smell, but the best he could do was to guess it was burning rubber, or the smell of scorched paint.

“I get something,” he grunted, and turned to look forward. “It smells something like--”

The last froze on Dave’s lips, and for a second or two he couldn’t move, let alone speak. Just forward at the front end of the flare compartment a tiny thread of yellowish smoke was seeping out under a locker door. Even as he stared a tongue of blue-white flame licked out. And there was instantly a hissing sound in the inside of the bomber.

“Fire!” Dave yelped, and snapped out of his trance. “Something’s going up close to the flare compartment!”

Even as Dave spoke the words he was in full action. With a single sweep of his hand he grabbed one of the many placed special fire extinguishers down off the galley wall, and bounded forward. He was but a few steps from the yellow smoke curling up from under the locker door when suddenly a sharp explosion blew the door off its metal hinges. Instantly the whole interior of that part of the bomber was filled with flashing light and acrid yellow smoke that choked and clogged up his throat.

Instinctively Dave dropped flat on the compartment catwalk with the extinguisher thrust out in front of him. Yellow smoke now swirled all about him. It was in his mouth, his nose, and in his eyes. It smarted and stung like the pain of a whip lash. He couldn’t see. He could only feel. And he felt as though he had suddenly been plunged through the wide open door of a roaring blast furnace. He also felt somebody behind grab his feet and start to drag him backward, but he kicked savagely and got his feet free.

“Don’t!” he heard his own voice, which came to him as a faint whisper. “I’m okay. Got to put that out. If it reaches the flare compartment we’ll go up like the Fourth of July!”

As he gasped and panted out the words, he worked the fire extinguisher furiously. For a couple of seconds it seemed that he must be pumping the fire-smothering liquid right out a bomber port. The hissing rose to a roar, and puddles of white and blue flame seemed to come sweeping along the catwalk toward Dave. The heat on his face and hands was terrific. The skin all over his body seemed to shrivel up and curl. But he clenched his teeth and pumped harder.

Maybe it was a few seconds, or maybe it was a few years, before the pools of blue-white flame started to fall back and simmer down to a weird glow. That he was gaining on it filled Dave with new strength. He wiggled up onto his knees, sprayed the fire-smothering liquid for all he was worth, and went creeping forward little by little. The blue-white flames on the catwalk died out completely, and Dave raised the nose of the extinguisher and sprayed the walls on both sides of the compartment. It was not until he got to his feet that he realized that Freddy was at his side pumping away with an extinguisher of his own, and that the Flight Engineer was right behind them spraying his fire killer over their shoulders.

And then finally all signs of live flames were gone. There was nothing but thin choking smoke, and a whole section of the interior of the bomber black and charred by flame. The char marks reached to a point no more than four inches from the flare lockers, and there they stopped abruptly. Dave stopped pumping, lowered his extinguisher and reached for one of the compartment ports to shove it open and let some of the acrid smoke escape. He missed the port, however. Things spun furiously for a moment. When they stopped spinning he was slumped down on his knees, and Freddy and the Flight Engineer were bending over him anxiously.

“You all right, Dave?” Freddy asked. “You’d have cracked your head a fine one, if I hadn’t caught you in time.”

“Knew you’d be right there, pal, so I didn’t worry,” Dave said with a grin and got to his feet. “Boy! That was something while it lasted, huh? Darnedest fire I ever saw.”

“Thank God, and you, Dawson, it didn’t reach the flare compartment!” the Flight Engineer said fervently. “That would have meant curtains for this baby--and us.”

“But that’s just like Dawson!” Freddy said proudly. “Always there in the nick of time.”

“Nuts!” Dave snorted. “I wasn’t thinking of the bomber, or you fellows. I was thinking of just _me_, if you’ve got to know the truth. But how did the thing get started? What was in that locker?”

“Nothing,” the Flight Engineer replied in a puzzled tone.

Something seemed to turn over in Dave’s chest. His heart became a little icy, and countless cold shivers went rippling down his spine.

“Nothing?” he echoed, tight-lipped. “You mean--nothing? Nothing at all?”

“Positive of it!” the Flight Engineer replied, and gave him a sharp look. “That locker’s for an extra gunner’s kit when the bomber is fitted out for active service. I know it was empty because I took a look before we left Seattle yesterday. But stick here. I’ve got to relieve Major Hawks at the controls so he can come back. And as I said, thank God, and you, Dawson. That was one of the nerviest things I ever saw pulled. Why you aren’t burnt to a crisp--!”

The Flight Engineer let the rest go unsaid and, squeezing Dave’s arm, stepped past him and hurried forward. For a long minute Dave stood perfectly still, staring down at the smoke and flame marks. Then he looked at Freddy, and there was smouldering rage in his eyes.

“The dirty low-down rat!” he got out viciously. “The--the--Nuts! There aren’t the right words in the language to say what I’m thinking right now. He’d not only have finished us off, but probably the skeleton crew aboard this bomber as well.”

Freddy returned his gaze and slowly widened his eyes as the full meaning of Dave’s words sank home.

“You really think--?” he began, then stopped and began again. “You really think this wasn’t an accident?”

“What else?” Dave demanded, and pointed a finger at the locker with the blown off door. “He swears that locker was empty. I believe him. So _you_ tell me how an empty locker can explode, blow off its door, and splash that weird-looking blue-white fire all over the place?”

Freddy Farmer stared down at the explosion-damaged locker, too, and shivered slightly.

“Of course, you’re right,” he muttered. “A time set incendiary bomb, with just enough explosive in it to blow off that door so the flames could spread. Good grief, Dave, if it _had_ reached that flare compartment with all those flares--”

The English youth stopped and shuddered violently.

“Yes, it wouldn’t have been fun!” Dave said grimly. “It would have been a sweet mess, or worse. We’d--”

Dave cut off the rest. Major Hawks, in command of the ferry bomber, was hurrying aft. The senior officer took a few more steps, then pulled up short and stared wide-eyed at the fire damage. His jaw was set like a chunk of granite, and his eyes glittered like highly polished steel. After a moment or so he glanced up and sought Dave’s eyes. The corners of his mouth twitched in a faint grin, and he gave a little nod of his head.

“Lieutenant Kelley says we owe you a vote of thanks, Captain,” he said. “And by Jove, we certainly do!”

“That has to include Lieutenant Kelley, and Farmer, too, sir,” Dave said. “I’d never have put it out alone. I just happened to see the smoke first, and got first crack at it. As a matter of fact, it was Lieutenant Kelley who attracted my attention by saying he smelled something funny. Personally, I’m thankful he came aft to get some eats ready. If he hadn’t, we probably wouldn’t have noticed anything until it was too late to do much about it.”

The Major grunted, started to say something, but checked himself, and took a step toward the explosion-damaged locker. Sticking out one foot, he toed out a small black object from the floor of the flame-blackened locker. When he bent down to examine it both Dave and Freddy were right there with him. The black object was about two inches long, round, and about as thick as a man’s middle finger. It was open at both ends, and it was obviously made of metal.

“What in thunder?” Major Hawks breathed, and tried to touch it with a finger, but found it was too hot. “This looks like a piece of small pipe.”

“It is, sir,” Freddy Farmer said quietly. “It’s one end of a pencil incendiary bomb that wasn’t melted by the terrific heat, I fancy.”

The bomber’s commander snapped his head up sharply.

“Huh, what’s that?” he barked. “A pencil incendiary bomb? This?”

“What’s left of it, sir,” Freddy said with a nod. “They are usually about four or five inches long. It is divided in the center by a copper disc. One kind of eating acid is poured in one end, and sealed with wax. Another kind of acid is poured in the other, and sealed up. The two acids eat into the copper disc in the middle, and when they mingle they explode and give off a terrific heat.”

“Oh, yes, I remember about reading of these things in the last war,” the Major said absently. “German spies in the States used to toss them into cargos going aboard ship. When the ship got out to sea, it caught on fire.”

“That’s right, sir,” Freddy said. “And the thickness of the copper disc in the middle determined the time the fire would occur.”

“Yeah, sure,” Major Hawks grunted. Then, stiffening slightly, he barked, “But what’s one of these things doing aboard my Fortress? Holy smoke! Sabotage! Sabotage in the air! I’ll radio the rest of the flight to go through their ships with a fine toothed comb. God grant me time!” This last breathed as a prayer.

Dave opened his mouth to speak, but suddenly thought better of it. He let the Major whirl around and dash back toward the radio nook.

“Perhaps it’s better to let him go,” Freddy Farmer murmured. “To let him think that, eh?”

Dave didn’t answer at once. He stepped over to one of the ports, and peered out into the surrounding sky. Though he was sure that he would spot them, nevertheless a great feeling of relief surged through him when he counted the five other Flying Fortresses winging along behind in loose formation. Presently he turned from the port and looked at Freddy, and slowly closed his hands into rock hard fists. He gave a vicious nod of his head as he spoke.

“This is the end!” he grated out. “I’m fed up to the teeth with being a clay pigeon for unseen sharpshooters.”

“What do you mean?” Freddy asked with a faint trace of anxiety in his voice.

“What I said!” Dave grunted. “First it was Frisco, then it was Albuquerque, and now it’s practically Brownsville. Well, that’s enough of that business for me. Now we’ll give those rats something to _really_ think about!”

“Oh, quite!” Freddy echoed, tight-lipped. “Quite. But would you mind telling me just what’s in your mind? Or is it too great a secret?”

“Keep your shirt on, and come back to earth!” Dave snapped at him. “It’s no secret between you and me. When we get to Brownsville, we’re borrowing a plane and we’re going back to Albuquerque!”

The English born air ace couldn’t speak for a moment. He could only stare at Dawson in dumbfounded amazement.

“Going back to Albuquerque?” he finally managed to choke out. “Are you mad?”

“I’m plenty mad!” Dave told him. “But not the way you’re thinking, pal. Just relax and leave everything to me. I’ve got an idea, I have. Just follow my lead, and maybe everything will turn out swell.”

“Which, of course, means not to question you, eh?” Freddy murmured. “Right-o, then. I don’t see why I agree with you so often, but I do. I suppose that means you have one or two good points. Very well, I’ll just relax and let you lead the blasted parade.”

Dave just looked at him, grinned, and winked.