“A cracked cylinder!” was Fred Marmon’s verdict, the minute he saw the oil spray on the window. “How near are we to landing, navigator?”

“Less than an hour,” Lieutenant Levitt answered, “provided there’s enough ceiling under those clouds.”

“I think there will be,” Captain O’Grady told them. “See! There’s a break in the overcast, dead ahead. We’ll go downstairs for a look.”

Taking over the controls, he nosed the Rosy downward through the black hole in the clouds. A moment later Barry could see moonlight glinting on the wave crests.

At a thousand feet the Fortress leveled out. Above her the cloud scuff was breaking up rapidly.

“Got that radio damage located yet, Babbitt?” O’Grady asked through the interphone. “We really ought to let Trinidad know that we’re on our way in, so they won’t be throwing up a lot of flak at us.”

“I’ll have the trouble fixed in about five minutes, sir,” Soapy replied. “Good thing we have plenty of spare parts. What that freak lightning bolt did to us was a caution!”

Just ahead a dark land mass rose out of the sea.

“That’s the upper jaw of the ‘Dragon’s Mouth,’” O’Grady remarked. “Trinidad is just beyond. I’m going upstairs again, until Soapy gets our radio working.”

The big bomber nosed sharply upward. For a few moments she clawed her way in almost pitch darkness through a cloud. Then the moonlight shone clear through the windows.

Suddenly a shaft of brilliant light burst through a rent in the scuff below them. Other searchlights stabbed upward. A sharp detonation jarred the Fortress.

“Antiaircraft shell!” grunted Rosy’s Old Man. “Evidently they don’t like unidentified planes cruising over the airfield. We’d better spin off.”

WHAMM! BLAMM!

Two shells, still closer than the first, made the big plane rock. Tex O’Grady pulled the stick back between his knees and gave the engine full throttle.

“Guess those hombres mean business, Blake,” he chuckled. “How do you like being under fire for the first time?”

“I don’t know,” replied Barry with a forced grin. “Somehow it doesn’t seem quite real, being shot at by your own ground forces. The trouble is that those shells would hurt just as much as Jap flak.”

“Radio’s okay, sir!” came Soapy Babbitt’s voice. “What’ll I send?”

“Identification signals first,” the Old Man replied. “Explain what happened to our radio and lights. Then tell ’em to switch on the floodlights, so we can land before the oil from that cracked engine cylinder drowns us.”

Soapy was still talking into his radio when the searchlights behind them switched off. O’Grady nosed down. In a moment floodlights lighted up the field a few miles distant. The Rosy landed lightly for all her massiveness, and braked to a smooth stop.

“Yahoo! Me for some hot coffee!” whooped her Old Man, reaching for the entrance hatch. “Last man to the office buys for the whole bunch!”

Six days were spent in Trinidad, replacing the cracked cylinder and repairing the lightning’s damage to the electrical system. On the seventh day Rosy hopped off on her long trip across the Atlantic to Freetown, Africa.

This time she carried a few bombs. It was Sergeant Hale’s hope that they might sight a Nazi U-boat on the crossing. The chance, of course, was one in a million. However, watching for a target would help to dispel the monotony of the trip.

The weather was perfect—not a single bump in the air. With “George,” the automatic gyro, taking care of their flying, the pilots had little to do. By turns, they napped, lunched, listened to the radio, played games with the others of the crew. Even Fred Marmon had a soft snap, for Rosy’s hungry “quadruplets” were sucking their gas without a whimper.

Only Sergeant Hale, the bombardier, refused to join his crewmates in killing time. Stretched at full length in the plane’s transparent nose, he stared fixedly at the sea.

“Danny is a born hunter,” the Old Man observed. “Reckon he learned his patience from the Texas Apaches. They’ll lie ten hours in one spot without moving, waiting for a deer to pass a runway.”

They were just six hours out from Trinidad when Hale gave a bellow of discovery. Gazing down and ahead, Barry saw a convoy of twenty merchant ships, escorted by two destroyers and three corvettes. The intensified Nazi submarine attacks had made heavy protection necessary, he reasoned.

“We’ll go down and say hello to them,” said the captain, fastening his safety belt. “Maybe it will cheer them up to see Sweet Rosy O’Grady dropping them a curtsy, even if she can’t stick around.”

With engines throttled down, the bomber dropped toward the crawling convoy. Fascinated, Barry Blake watched the toy-like ships grow larger. Now he could make out the British flags and the tiny figures of the antiaircraft gun crews in their tin nests on the superstructures.

“I hope no cockeyed gunner takes us for an enemy and cuts loose,” he thought. “That wouldn’t be any fun at all—”

“Submarines to the right!” yelled Sergeant Danny Hale. “I can see their shadows just under the surface, Captain. And look—they’ve just fired two torpedoes! Let’s smash ’em!”

“You bet your sweet neck we will!” answered the Old Man. “Take over the throttles, Blake. Watch your r.p.m. We’ll give Hale a target he can’t miss.... Sergeant Babbitt, signal the convoy that we’re not bombing them!”

The Fortress leveled out at 500 feet. Glancing down, Barry saw the deck of a freighter immediately beneath him. He could almost catch the expressions on the upturned faces of her crew. His eyes came back to his instruments and clung to them.

“Bombs away!” yelled Hale’s voice in the interphone. “Give me a run at the other one, Captain.”

WHOOM! BR-ROOM!

As the Fortress zoomed sharply, the two bomb explosions buffeted her. She staggered, gained altitude, banked, and turned.

WHAMM! A torpedo had struck. Flame blossomed from the sides of the freighter. Another ship was dodging the second “tin fish.”

Searching the water for the submarines’ shadows, Barry spotted one, but it looked misshapen, seen through the spreading ring of the bomb burst. Then he found the other. It was less distinct, evidently diving at top speed. That was the next target.

Between it and the convoy, a destroyer was circling like an excited hound. She was waiting, Barry realized, for Rosy’s next run. The corvettes were threading their way through the mass of slower freighters, to be in at the kill.

“Steady, Blake—here we go again!” warned Captain O’Grady. “If that Hun is too deep for our bombs to hurt him, the explosion will spot his dive for the destroyer. Her depth charges will get him for sure.”

WHR-R-ROOM! BOOM!

The Rosy’s second run was still lower. The explosions made her aluminum skin crackle like an empty oil can. Suddenly Barry glimpsed the mast of a freighter spearing up at the bomber’s nose. He gave her full throttle. The mast flashed beneath—seemingly with mere inches of clearance.

“Upstairs” again, the fortress’s crew had a grandstand view of the submarine’s finish. The destroyer raced toward the mark left by Rosy’s last bombs. She dumped a depth charge off her stem. Her Y-guns pitched two more “ash cans,” bracketing the spot. A fourth and last depth charge completed the square.

Behind her, the corvettes darted to the oil slick that now spread over Sergeant Hale’s first target, and dropped two more charges for good measure.

“Pilot from radioman,” Soapy Babbitt’s voice crackled on the interphone. “The destroyer’s commander sends us his congratulations and thanks. He thinks we bagged the second sub, too. Wishes we could stay with him for the rest of the voyage.”

“I reckon he’s telling the truth,” chuckled Rosy’s Old Man. “Those undersea wolves have been hanging right at the heels of every convoy lately. They hunt in packs. We’ll just swing around the outskirts of this floating freight train and see if Danny Hale can spot any more suspicious shadows.”

The Fortress banked slightly in a slow turn, describing a twenty-mile circle around the convoy. As she swung back again, Barry could see the result of one torpedo hit.

The freighter had been struck on the starboard side near the bow. She was slightly down by the head. Smoke was still rising from her forecastle, but she still kept her place in line. Her life-boats were in place, with nobody near them. Evidently her crew had no other thought than to take her to port.

“There’s the second oil slick, Captain!” Hale called. “We got both those U-boats. Yip-yip-yippee!”

As the bombardier’s coyote howl shrilled in his earphones, Barry Blake laughed outright. Like every man on board he felt pretty cocky. Already their ship had been under fire. Now she had drawn first blood, sinking at least one enemy submarine without help. The world was their oyster, waiting to be cracked wide open when they reached the battlefront.

With a final waggle of their broad wings, Sweet Rosy O’Grady turned her back on the convoy and headed eastward on her course. A chorus of grateful whistles followed her. Owing to the thunder of her own engines, her crew could not hear the freighter’s salutes, but Tony Romani in the tail turret reported seeing the puffs of white steam.

The sinking of the subs provided conversation to last Barry and his companions for most of the trip. They were still comparing notes when the sun set. That put an end to Sergeant Hale’s sea-gazing.

Supper was supplied from thermos jugs and a box of sandwiches. Afterwards, Curly Levitt took a fix from the stars, and made a slight correction in their compass course. The engines were behaving so beautifully that their red-headed nurse, Fred, began to be bored. He roamed from tail turret to cockpit playing small practical jokes on everyone, until the Old Man told him to spin off.

By midnight everyone but Captain O’Grady was dozing. His co-pilot was sound asleep in his seat. He was waked by the first red beams of the sun rising over Africa. That was another thrill for Barry Blake—watching the shoreline of a foreign continent loom up out of the horizon. He slapped on his earphones in time to hear Curly Levitt giving the Old Man another change of course—this time to the north.

A few minutes later the deep harbor of Freetown took shape beneath them. Soapy Babbitt, contacting the RAF field, received permission to come in and land. The first of their long, transoceanic hops was safely ended.