«Wait a minute,» snapped Hubbard. «Are you expecting me to pilot that Stuka out of here?»
Grigsby nodded slowly.
«But I don’t know much about them,» protested Hubbard. «If the Defiant is still over there—»
«The Defiant is still there,» said Grigsby, «but you’d never get to it. You’d never live long enough to get to it. It’s too far away. And it’s too well guarded.»
«Guarded?»
Grigsby’s face had become grim.
«That’s the reason we have to get out of here—this minute! The Jerries have plans for that Defiant. They’re going to load it with explosives, make a flying bomb out of it. A man who’s willing to die for the ‘New Order’ will pilot it to London.»
«To London!»
«Yes, London. Number Ten Downing Street!»
«Good Lord!» said Hubbard. «That’s the Prime Minister’s residence!»
«Listen, fellow,» snapped Grigsby. «As soon as I get into the plane, come as fast as you can. You may have to shoot your way through, but I’ll be there to back you up. And someone else—»
The blast of a plane motor came across the field—a sudden, snarling blast.
«That’s the Defiant!» cried Hubbard.
Grigsby’s face paled as he wheeled, cupping his ear.
«It’s the Defiant, I tell you!» roared Hubbard. «I’d know that Merlin anywhere.»
«Come on, then!» yelled Grigsby. «The plan is off. We have to rush the Stuka. We’ve got to make it!»
He was already running and Hubbard loped behind him, submachine-gun held across his body. Around the edge of the guardhouse they ran. Hubbard saw that the nearest Stuka was a matter of a hundred yards away.
The Defiant was lifting off the field, her motors whining at full blast. A group of Nazi officers and pilots stood beside the bombers across the field, watching her climb.
A warning shot rang out and Hubbard heard the bullet whip past his head.
Someone yelled and then a dozen shouts split the air. Another shot blasted the morning and another. A bullet kicked dust ahead of them.
The farmhouse suddenly erupted men. Hubbard, cradling the tommy gun in the crotch of his arm, slammed home the trigger. The gun stuttered in short bursts and men tumbled like tenpins.
Grigsby, Hubbard saw, had a pistol in his hand, was shooting at a running guard. The guard stumbled, tried to catch himself, fell sprawling.
Bullets now were zipping from the farmhouse, where half a dozen Nazis had taken cover behind a garden wall. Windows slammed up and other gun muzzles appeared.
Hubbard, realizing that the next ten seconds would find them in a hurricane of whizzing steel, ate up the ground, bending low, not trying to return the fire.
Suddenly from behind him a machine-gun broke into its song of death.
Kermit Hubbard unconsciously hunched his shoulders to take the storm of lead. But the gun was not aimed at him. Its bullets were spraying the farmhouse, driving the Nazis to cover.
Above the roar of the gun he heard a full voice roar.
«So you had fun at Dunkerque, did you! Well, curse your bloody hearts!»
The rest of what he said was drowned out in the yammering of the gun.
Not the spiteful chatter of a tommy rifle, but the baleful chuckling of a man-size machine-gun hurling a hail of steel.
Hubbard was climbing into the Stuka and Grigsby scrambled after him, dropping the automatic, not bothering to retrieve it. He heard the bullets chunking into the fuselage and prayed they wouldn’t find an oil line or mess up the engine.
Tumbling into the pilot’s pit, the American reached for the ignition switch, snapped it over, then sat for three precious seconds trying to locate the starter mechanism.
Back of him he heard Grigsby’s curses as the man fought the gun, trying to swing it into position.
Hubbard got the engine going at almost the same instant that Grigsby opened up with the gun in the rear compartment. Off to the left, the tommy rifle operated by the man with the British voice kept up an insane chatter.
«What about that fellow?» yelled Hubbard.
«Get the devil out of here!» Grigsby screamed.
The ball knob in the box to his left, Hubbard figured, must be the throttle.
He rammed it ahead and the Jumo 211 howled as the fury of its 1,500-horsepower engine was unleashed.
Suddenly the instrument board seemed to explode and shattered glass showered over Hubbard. A bullet had slammed through the pit and ended in the maze of dials.
But the Stuka was rolling now, fairly leaping forward. Hubbard hauled back on the stick recklessly. It was dangerous, he knew, starting with a cold engine, without even the pretense of a warm-up. But they had to get away from that murderous ground fire.
The trees on the far end of the field suddenly dipped and Hubbard knew they were in the air. The motor coughed once, then regained its throbbing bark. In the rear compartment the gun still jabbered.
Hubbard wheeled the plane and stared down through the turret glass.
Pilots were scurrying like ants for their ships. With a yell of glee the American whipped the Stuka around and dived.
The air-speed indicator had been smashed. Hubbard couldn’t tell how fast they were going. But it seemed that everything dropped from under him as the plane screamed down, a meteor of vengeance.
He started to level off as his diving Stuka came opposite one end of the line of planes out on the field. He pressed the trigger button on the stick.
The guns in the wings spat viciously and Grigsby’s gun stammered and stuttered with deadly bursts.
Down the line of ships the Stuka went, spraying the field. With a wild whoop, Hubbard looped to come back. It was not until then that he saw the man who stood on top of the guardhouse. A man clad in British battle dress, standing beside a machine-gun, waving at them with his hat, dancing in glee. His mouth was open and he was shouting something, but they couldn’t hear.
From somewhere below an ack-ack banged. Far above them a shell burst, like a flower opening in the sky. The ack-ack coughed again and Hubbard put the Stuka on its tail and climbed.
Only once did he glance back—and his glance was at the guardhouse. On top of it a lone figure was sprawled beside his gun. The man in British battle dress had fired his last round for England.
The ack-acks still were banging, but by now the Stuka was out of range and going fast. Hubbard’s eyes searched the skies ahead of them, made out a black dot far to the west. That would be the Defiant, scurrying for the English coast.
«If I’d only had some bombs!» the American swore feelingly. «I’d have really mowed ’em down.»
Grigsby’s hand reached out of the rear compartment and grasped him by the shoulder.
«You see the Defiant?»
«I sure do,» Hubbard replied.
«You had no business wasting time back there,» charged Grigsby. «It was a fool thing to do. We have to catch that Defiant. We have to catch it before it reaches London!»
«If we hadn’t strafed them, they’d have been on our tails,» Hubbard defended himself. «They would have had planes in the air within the minute. I’d rather waste a little time stopping them before they started than fight them after they got up.»
«How fast can you travel?» Grigsby demanded impatiently.
«I don’t know. Not as fast as the Defiant, normally. But you said the Defiant was loaded.»
«With explosives,» Grigsby snapped. «Explosives for Number Ten Downing Street.»
«We’ll catch it,» Hubbard said grimly.
He pushed against the throttle but it already was forward as far as it would go. The Jumo’s bark had become a snarl, mingled with the screech of air as it slid past the fuselage.