Alias-the-Blackbird-Chapter-08

IT HAPPENED with a speed approaching that of lightning. Time moves swiftly in the air. It is no place to float and cogitate.

The black ship shot up toward his bow. He could not climb away. He hauled her nose high, but she would not take the air. She rolled and toppled over to one side, like a terror-stiffened horse hearing a rattler’s klir underfoot.

The blackbird zoomed with streaking wings. It leaped like a rocket. Level, its black wings swept by the gray boat at three hundred feet a second. Hammer tried to hook their wings together as they passed, but the black ship was too fast. The motor of the HS roared in spasms. All else was taut silence. Hammer bit his lips and snarled. It was not fair.

Around on the boat’s tail, the black ship whipped with pinwheel speed, heading parallel with Hammer and above him. Its dragging left wing drifted just over the top wing of the flying boat.

Instinctively Hammer cowered, caught in the wide, open cockpit, like a bird in a cage. Blackbird pressed his control stick between his knees. He lifted up his rifle. He moved calmly and methodically, and with certain pleasure, in this thing he was to do. It was a shot at ten paces. A blind man could not miss.

All Hammer’s body was stone. Hroom-hroom! His engine roared. The boat was like a log in his hands, rolling slow. Time passed forever. Blackbird, Blackbird had him now!

“Hand out the pepper, Blackbird! Come on! Come on!” screamed Hammer, not hearing his own cry.

That paralysis of terror dropped from Hammer almost instantly. It was not in his nature to lie down. He would not perish like a tom pigeon, moaning and fluttering in the claws of the eagle. He’d take this thing fighting. His life was worth a price. If this was death, let it come. But let it not come cowardly.

“Come on! Come on!” he shouted.

And Blackbird, looking down, eyes set and bright behind his owlish goggles, must have been surprised to see Hammer laughing! Though he must feel the Blackbird’s claws, yet the Blackbird would feel his beak.

“Give me the pepper, Blackbird, and I’ll give you dynamite!”

His one hope was not to get away, for he had no hope of that, but to hook and entangle the black ship’s wings, to hook the swift fiend in mid-air and crumple him up! Wings locked, hull swinging over to batter landing gear, grapple and wrestle that Blackbird to his death! Laugh into his face as they both spin down to burn. Nail him! Smash him like a matchbox in the air!

Hammer jammed his weight on the rudder, clutched the wheel to his breast. The heavy HS streaked over, perpendicular to earth and sky, like an ax blade on the swing. A great three-ton knife, a swishing cleaver, it hooked toward the darting little black ship, with the speed of centrifugal force.

Hammer’s ears were deafened. Sky and mountaintop whipped round. He tensed himself for the crash. Still he was laughing.

“The fireworks! The fireworks! Hear them bicker and rattle!”

The Blackbird had blazed away. Br-rup! Br-rup! Rup-rup-rup!

The blackbird streaked up, looping out of Hammer’s reach. The bow of the HS falling heavily in a sideslip, at the butt of its swing, missed the black ship’s tail by inches. Over on his back, the Blackbird whizzed in a quick swoop, and dropped down again on the tail of the HS. He had been aware of the nearness of that blow. He would be more wary now. He’d take no more chances.

Again he used his rifle. Br-rup! Br-rup! The engine of the HS began to spin with a sudden jerking roar. She shook herself like a wet dog, the whole boat thundering and trembling, threatening to tear her engine from its bed and break apart in mid-air. Her nose dived down toward the mountain top. The crash behind Hammer told him that the propeller had been shattered. Whirling segments of it, fast to the hub, had set up that shuddering vibration.

She had flown her last mile. Down she dived with augmenting speed. Hard on her tail came the Blackbird, sieving wings and hull with his insistent and deathly drumming.

Momentarily the engine mass itself shielded Hammer from the fire. He snapped shut the switch, halting the wild shuddering. Down the steep gradient of the mountainside he shot headlong, pointed for the black spot of water that he had marked before. Could he make it? Desperately he cast a look behind at the little shadow ship on his tail.

Wavering crests of interlocked trees passed in a blur below the streaking keel. The keel flicked them, tearing through crisp branches like a thunderbolt. Black water rose toward her, somber and still within its circling hemlocks, touched by no light of the departing sun. The wires of the flying boat screamed a high sharp song. Keen wind ripped at Hammer’s face.

The Blackbird streaked out above. He did not care to follow the slope down so closely. Straight down he stared, easing his rifle overside. He took a steady bead. Hammer jerked his head. He felt a streak like fire across his cheek. The black water rushed up, leaped up.

No time to halt the boat’s wild plunge, to stall her, and pancake down. Swift on her forward keel she struck the water with a crack, and shot across it like an arrow.

Desperately Hammer tugged her wheel against his breast, ruddering right. The shore, crowned by dismal forest giants, sunless, cavernous, vast, loomed before her hurtling bow. All was a rushing blur. She plowed to right, with a skidding motion, and careened, as her rudder began to pull her. Her wing pontoon dropped down to drag the water. But she had too much speed on her. She struck the rocky shore at an oblique and dashed her length up it, splintering and ripping to matchwood, as if a mountain had fallen on her.

Steep into the pit of the valley the Blackbird descended in close spirals. When he was not more than a hundred feet over the dark water, he leveled off, setting his controls in a tight, steady turn. He gripped the stick between his knees. Round above the wreck he wheeled.

Hammer crouched helplessly in the ruins.

It was marvelous flying, more cunning and more precise than any wild somersaulting in high air. Like a top upon a solid pivot, he turned and turned, each time as he passed over opening up with his rifle. At the fourth time passing, he hit the gasoline tank of the wreck, and it blew up.