Alias-the-Blackbird-Chapter-01

OUT OF the east she came buzzing—the great Gold Beetle, a five-ton F-5-L flying boat, with twin motors roaring. She had come up the Hudson from Manhattan, and headed inland between Haverstraw and West Point, on a line which would have brought her, in three hours’ steady flying, straight across New York State to Rochester. She was carrying two hundred and fifty pounds of minted gold, consigned to a Rochester bank, by the most rapid—and what was believed the safest—possible method of transporting such a sizable treasure.

She was up two thousand feet. The Ramapo region of hills, with summits reaching to fifteen hundred feet, heavily forested, and dotted with myriad silver lakes, stretched below her. At this season of the year—it was yellow October—the country was practically deserted, except for the few police officers who maintained forest patrol.

Nimbus formations moved across under the Gold Beetle’s keel—clouds of a cobweb texture. The air was smooth, with hardly a wrinkle in it; extraordinarily bumpless for mountain air. Kelly, the ship’s pilot, held her nose steadily on the horizon. She was a flying ice wagon, and there was as much action to be got out of her as out of a load of cement. Kelly sat with shoulders hunched over his wheel, chewing gum methodically, settled for the long, tedious flight.

The Gold Beetle was not many miles inland from the Hudson, when out of nowhere, so it seemed, there came darting after her a little black monoplane with narrow, blackbird wings. It was a curious craft. It bore a rakish pirate look, with its fuselage set above its flare-back wings, and the lone pilot sitting in his cockpit on top of everything, like a man sitting in a coffin.

Swiftly he dropped down toward the big, clumsy flying boat—black helmeted, imperturbable, with goggled eyes staring. His speed was slightly better than the Beetle’s eighty-five knots. Sliding down the sky, he overtook her. His left wing passed below her right wing pontoon, so that he was just to the rear of her control cockpit, which was forward of her wings, and on the side of her pilot. Now he was not more than twenty feet away from Smike Kelly, the pilot. The two ships were riding wing to wing, and levelly, through the sleek air. The purring motor of the blackbird plane—inaudible near the synchronized booming of the Beetle’s two loud five-hundreds—had been throttled down to the big boat’s speed.

Smike Kelly was in the right hand seat, with a trooper of the State police force beside him. He turned his head around idly, with a grin on his lips, and lifted his hand in salutation to this unknown ship that rode with him in the air. He had turned his head, lifted up his hand, to face death.

The blackbird flier signaled no “Hands up!” nor gave any time for surrender. Clasping his control stick between his knees, he hauled up an automatic rifle in both hands. He steadied his elbow on the cockpit rim, and his grim masked eyes looked along the rifle barrel at the friendly gesturing figure of Smike Kelly, not six yards away from him across thin air. No word he said, but he gripped the trigger hard, and handed out the pepper. Br-rup! Br-rup! The rifle rattled like a loud, staccato cricket. Above the roaring of the motors one could hear it. Br-rup! Br-rup! It croaked its racketing cry, as the blackbird flier jammed in another clip and pumped it empty.

Four men were in the Beetle—Smike Kelly, with the constabulary officer seated beside him; a second trooper in the cabin abaft the wings, two hundred and fifty pounds of man sitting on two hundred and fifty pounds of gold coin in ten strong iron-hooped pine boxes; and Captain Hammer in the observer’s well, out on the nose.

Captain Hammer was a flyer himself, with a famous war record. He was the man who brought down the L99, you remember, the great German bombing Zeppelin, over Winchelsea; and later he put an end to the air piratings of von Bernau, the flying spy, in a terrific fight. Hammer had an interest in the Rochester bank to which the gold coin was being transported, and it was at his instigation that the flying boat had been chosen as a means of conveyance. Who ever heard of a stickup in midair? So confident had Hammer been of the Beetle’s security and of the stolid air ability of Smike Kelly that he had even dozed into a nap out in the bow well, with the pale October sun on his face.

The two constabulary officers were, of course, ground men, and the ways of the air were sickeningly strange to them. In the howl of the motors no word could have been heard, even had it been shrieked with all fury. Br-rup! Br-rup! The swift rifle streaked away. Smike Kelly dropped his head upon the wheel and lay as if asleep.

“Damn me, is this a joke?” bawled the trooper who sat beside Kelly, pounding the pilot hard on the thigh.

Wing to wing the little blackbird held its course. The glassy, unblinking eyes of its pilot stared along the rifle barrel. Then suddenly the little ship went up. No, it had not gone up; but the Gold Beetle had dropped by her bow. With engines opened wide she had nosed over into a glide, slipping like a greased pig down the invisible ramp of the sky. She was inherently stable and showed no signs of spinning. She was merely going down, though with increasing speed.

“Is this a joke?” shouted the trooper again, struggling against his safety strap to stand up. He felt the breath going out of him, his ears were roaring. He pounded the pilot on the back.

The head of Smike Kelly had fallen forward; his arms dangled beside him. The shouting trooper drew back his hand, as if it had been scorched with fire. The body he had struck was limp, and three crimson stains were spreading on the back of Smike Kelly’s white shirt. Aye, it was no joke. Smike Kelly had taken the pepper, and his life was spent.

Bow heavy, pilotless, no hand to lift her wheel or close her guns, the Gold Beetle rushed down toward the slowly moving cloud and the deserted hills that lay below. The trooper snapped loose his belt; he stood up and bellowed. Crazily he jerked out his revolver and emptied it aloft. But the banging of the gun did him no more good than did the inaudible yells he continued to utter. The little blackbird was out of reach, and the Gold Beetle beyond all help of man. She was a doomed ship. She was crashing to her wreck; and the three men alive in her had best say their prayers right speedily, if they had any God to pray to.

Down came the blackbird, lazily curving on dismal wings, following the Beetle’s wild plunge, ready to pounce on her dead bones and fatten on her, when she was a wreck.

At sound of the sudden rifle rattle and the feel of the big ship’s dive, Captain Hammer, in the bow, was aroused abruptly from his indolent day-dreaming. He had not been aware of the approach of the blackbird. He put his hands on the rim of the round well and lifted up his head to stare forth. The blackbird was above him then, wheeling and slipping through the air. Something in the look of it, something in the way it was handled, brought to Hammer a memory that terrified him.

“What—” he screamed at Smike Kelly. Across the stretch of canvas-covered bow, face to face with Captain Hammer, the dead pilot lay at his controls; and his look was not to be mistaken. In that instant he slid flaccidly down from his seat out of sight.

Hammer dived; he flung himself along the narrow tunneled passageway that led to the control cockpit. Prone on his belly, he reached through the hatch door and pushed against the wheel yoke. The pilot’s body was jammed against the hatch, and Hammer could not open it sufficiently to squeeze through. He laid all his shoulder weight against the wheel yoke and gripped the rudder bar with strength like iron.

Somewhere behind the big boat the blackbird had dived, and opened up its bickering voice again. Br-rup! Rup-rup-rup-rup! It croaked away, flying hard on the Beetle’s tail and shooting at the controls.

“Blackbird! Blackbird’s got me now!” thought Captain Hammer, lying prone and tense in the darkness, feeling the great ship careen. “Blackbird’s got me now!”