A billion or so stars winked down on the long black shadow that was the Aircraft Carrier Victory sliding through the even blacker waters of the Mediterranean. A row of tiny pin points of light stretched the entire length of the starboard side of the flight deck, and at the stern end was a lone Blackburn Skua fighter-dive bomber with its prop slowly ticking over. In the forward pit sat Dave Dawson, and behind him in the gunner's pit was Freddy Farmer. Off to one side stood a silent, watchful group of flight deck mechanics. And on the stub step of one wing, with his head and shoulders inside the partly opened cockpit hood, stood Group Captain Spencer.

Everything possible that could be done, had been done. The plane, fitted with extra tanks to add to its cruising range and time in the air, had been checked and rechecked from propeller boss to rudder post. Every square inch of wing surface, every wire, every nut, and every cotter pin, had been carefully examined by expert eyes. The plan of flight had been gone over two or three times, and last minute instructions had been delivered. All was ready for the take-off. There was nothing more to be said or done. The success or failure of the highly important mission about to be made was strictly in the hands, the capable hands, of two stout-hearted, fighting Royal Air Force pilots, attached for special duty to His Majesty's Fleet Air Arm.

"Happy landings, you two," Group Captain Spencer said quietly, though his voice trembled with deep emotion. "We're all counting on you, and pulling for you. And—well, good luck."

The group captain quickly squeezed the hand of each and then stepped down and away from the plane. Dave grinned at him, nodded, and then turned his gaze to the instrument board. Every instrument received his intent scrutiny. Then finally he twisted around in the seat and looked at Freddy.

"Ready, little man?" he grunted.

The English youth snorted and shrugged.

"For what?" he demanded. "For tea to be served? You're certainly hanging around long enough for us to have some. Stop making the old girl wait! She wants to be rid of us—well, you, anyway."

Dave grinned, and winked.

"So we both feel the same way, eh?" he grunted.

"What way?" Freddy demanded.

Dave put a hand to the side of his mouth.

"My heart's bumping up against my back teeth, too!" he whispered.

"Aren't you right!" Freddy whispered back. "So hurry up and get us off this blasted carrier before we change our minds. It's the waiting that gets me down."

"But it's your old pal who gets you up!" Dave cracked, and turned front.

With a final look and a nod toward Group Captain Spencer standing with the flight deck mechanics, he kicked off the wheel brakes and slowly opened the throttle, or the "gate," as the R.A.F. boys call it. The Bristol Pegasus engine increased the tone of its song and the plane moved forward, picking up speed with every revolution of the engine. Dave pushed the stick forward, got the tail up and sent the plane streaking along the smooth deck on its wheels. A split second later the "Island" (the bridge and superstructure of an aircraft carrier) flashed by on his left. Another few seconds and he pulled the plane clear and the tiny row of pin point take-off guide lights on his right fell away.

He held the ship in a steady climb for a couple of thousand feet or so. Then he leveled off, banked around to the south, and set his plane on the first leg of his compass course. That done with, he pulled back the throttle to cruising speed, shifted to a slightly more comfortable position in the seat and put his lips to the flap-mike.

"Calling Crimson!" he said. "Plane off. Calling—"

He cut himself off short as Freddy's hand banged down on his shoulder. Right afterward he heard the English youth's words in his ears.

"A beautiful start of things, I must say!" Freddy shouted. "The lad is balmy, and talking to himself so soon. I say, Dave, save that until they put you in a padded cell, eh?"

"What the—?" Dave shouted, and then stopped short. "My gosh!" he then blurted out. "I'll never live this down with you around. Boy! Am I bright!"

Dave shook his head in a sheepish gesture and kept his face front so that Freddy couldn't see its bright color even in the faint pale glow of the instrument board light. He had started to radio check with Operations aboard the Victory only to have Freddy's descending hand and wise-crack wake him up to the fact that the Skua's radio had been taken out, and that he had actually just been talking into thin air. The flap-mike was fastened to the lower part of his helmet, but it wasn't hooked up to anything.

He mentally kicked himself all over the plane for being so stupid, and finally turned around to grin at Freddy.

"You want to change seats after that one?" he asked.

The English youth grinned, but shook his head.

"No, I think not," he said. "If that's the worst you do before we're back, everything will come out all right."

"It will come out all right!" Dave echoed in a rush of words. "This job means a lot, Freddy. We can't let the Fleet Air Arm down."

"We won't," Freddy said, and the look in his eyes said that he meant just that.

"Atta boy!" Dave chuckled. "That's the old fight. And don't worry, pal, I won't let you down, either. Gosh! I'd cut my throat if I did."

"Oh no, you wouldn't!" Freddy said firmly.

"No?"

"No, Dave, my lad," Freddy said, "because I'd jolly well cut it for you, see? Well, there's the first thread of dawn."

As Freddy spoke, he pointed toward the east off the left wing. Dave looked in that direction and saw the thin grey line low down on the horizon. It was the very first signal that the sun was on its way up for a new day. Like night, day comes fast in the Middle East. The first telltale grey line mounts and brightens, and then while you watch a blaze of color streams up over the horizon and starts racing after the shadows of night you can actually see if you turn to the west and look. It is something like the way thunder clouds look sliding down over the horizon before the slanting rays of the sun that has finally broken through—bright and golden to one horizon, and dark and murky to the other.

Letting the plane more or less fly itself, Dave sat staring toward the east and watched the dawning of a new day. In an abstract sort of way he wondered where Freddy and he would be when that sun coming up had made its journey across the sky and had slid down over the western lip of the world. Would they be safely back on the Victory? Would they be at El Aghelia, or Bengazi, or some other British Libyan outpost? Would they be down on the Libyan sands with nothing but a charred heap of wreckage for an airplane? Or would they—

He shook his head angrily as though to drive away the thoughts. They came creeping back to him, however. They sneaked up on his brain when he wasn't suspecting them. And little by little the dangerous side of this mission crept in to occupy his mind. Back on the Victory he had simply accepted as a matter of course that the flight would be fraught with danger. All flights made in war skies were that way. That's why wars were wars. So even after Group Captain Spencer's repeated words about the dangers involved, he had refused to give much thought to that angle of the venture.

He was giving considerable thought to it now, though, and much against his will. That there was an eerie trembling at the back of his neck, and that his heart pounded much too hard, made him furious at himself. His fury, however, didn't drive away the tantalizing thoughts. There, just a few miles ahead of him now, was the Libyan coast. Beyond were miles and miles of hot, blazing desert sands, dotted here and there by a native village so small you could drop it down into Times Square, New York, and hardly be able to find it again. And all of those countless miles of desert were held by the enemy, patrolled by them on the ground, and in the air.

The truth of the matter was that he and Freddy were heading straight into a world where neither man nor nature was their friend. The blazing sun, and the burning sands, were just as much their foes as a Nazi tank, or a Nazi plane, or a squad of desert troops. Their only friend, their only ally, was the Blackburn Skua and its 830 hp. Bristol Pegasus engine. The plane, the engine, and their own will and ability to survive.

"Hey, what are you shaking your head about? Something wrong?"

He turned at the sound of Freddy's voice and grinned reassuringly.

"Just thinking things over, and adding up the points on our side," he said. "You know me! Old Man Cold Feet, once I get started off on something."

"Stop fishing for compliments!" Freddy laughed at him. "Your feet aren't half as cold as mine. And—Uh-uh! Get us some altitude, Dave. Looks like some kind of a coastal patrol plane down there and to the right. What do you make of it?"

Dave leaned forward and to the side and stared downward in the direction of Freddy's pointed finger. A few thousand feet below a murky shadow was moving toward the northwest. Though the light was bad, the shadow was moving too swiftly for it to be any kind of a surface ship. It was a plane, no doubt about that. However, Dave didn't waste time to make sure whether it was British or Axis. He pulled the Skua's nose upward, and fed a bit more fuel to the smooth singing Pegasus engine.

"Maybe it's just two other guys!" he called back over his shoulder. "We'll ignore them just the same. Company's something we don't crave. All set with that camera, Freddy? The sun's coming up fast, and you never can tell how soon we might spot something."

"All set, and ready to start clicking!" the English youth replied. "You show me something, and I'll do the rest. I'm a whiz at this sort of thing, you'll understand."

"Let you know about that after I see some of the results!" Dave chuckled, and held the Skua in its long climb up over the coastline of Libya.

An hour later they were deep over the desert and the sun was a brassy ball that touched the sweeping sands below with fingers of fire. Dave's eyes ached and smarted from the constant glare, despite the sun lenses he had slipped on over the glass of his goggles. They had long since shoved open the cockpit hood, because, though it was uncomfortable in the steady beat of the sun's rays, it was like flying along inside a baker's oven when the hood was shut.

An hour's flight over the desert, and nothing but sand, sand, and more sand. Here and there dark streaks had marked rocky strips that pushed up through the burning sands. And a few tiny dots from their altitude were clumps of desert bush, and a dried up oasis or two. But they didn't sight a single village, though they strained their eyes until they ached almost unbearably. And as far as troops, tanks, and other motorized equipment went, they might just as well have been coasting around over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

There just wasn't anything below them but sand during the first hour of patrol. And the scene was not one bit changed at the end of the second hour. As a matter of fact, the scene was so much the same Dave had the crazy feeling they had been hovering motionless in the same spot of air for time on end. For the last twenty minutes neither of them had spoken a word. To talk was an effort and, besides, there was so little to talk about save the one thought that each kept to himself, the one gnawing fear within each. It was the mounting realization that failure of the mission was beginning to hover in the offing.

For two solid hours, during which time they had covered countless square miles of enemy territory, they hadn't sighted a single thing worth remembering. No troop depots, no desert outposts, no roving tank patrols, and not even any enemy aircraft. That last, the fact they had not sighted a single Italian or Nazi plane in the air, plagued Dave and caused the fingers of worry to play upon his tightly drawn nerves. True, they had not flown close to Tripoli, or anywhere near it. Perhaps Tripoli was overflowing with Axis planes and mechanized desert units. That wasn't the point. That wasn't the reason Freddy and he had been sent out on this scouting patrol.

The British High Command knew that troops and equipment had been assembled at Tripoli. What the High Command didn't know was if any of those units had moved out into the desert, and where, and in what numbers. It stood to reason that the Axis High Command in Libya hadn't kept them bottled up in the Tripoli area for fear of surprise attack by Wavell's forces. That was foolish, if for no other reason than the fact that over four hundred miles of desert lay between the most advanced British outpost and the Tripoli garrison.

It was a dead sure thing that parts of the Axis forces had moved out into the desert, and had established communication lines with the main base. Yet—

"Yet there's not a single sign of them!" Dave spoke the thought aloud. "Not a gosh darn sign—unless we're stone blind, and can't see beyond our noses!"

"What did you say, Dave?" he heard Freddy ask.

He turned in the seat and shrugged.

"Just talking aloud," he said. "This business is getting me down. Why haven't we seen anything? Even a village would help. But it's all as blank as a sheet of paper—yeah, a sheet of sand paper. Look, Freddy, I'm just about making up my mind to something."

"To go back?" Freddy asked, and a worried look stole into his eyes.

"Back, nothing!" Dave snorted. "We've still got gas. We're not licked by a darn sight. No, that isn't the idea. Look, we've covered a lot of ground. If we've passed over Axis forces in any of the areas we've checked, then they must have tunneled out from Tripoli, by gosh, and are still underground. That's crazy, of course, so it leaves us one more thing to try."

"Well?" Freddy grunted as Dave paused. "I'm waiting. Let's have it."

"The Tripoli area," Dave said promptly. "Let's get us some more altitude and sneak up on Tripoli as closely as we can without being spotted. If we don't spot anything there, then we can be pretty sure that the Tripoli rumors are so much hog-wash."

"I doubt that last," Freddy said gravely. "The High Command must be pretty sure, rather, dead sure, that something's up, else Fleet Air Arm Command wouldn't have agreed for the Victory to pull out of line and go steaming off on its own."

"Yes, I guess that's true," Dave nodded, and scowled. "But I'm still in favor of sneaking up on the Tripoli area if we can. And for a couple of reasons, too."

"Such as?" the English youth prompted as Dave hesitated.

"Well, first for a look-see at the area," Dave explained presently. "Second because it will take us back toward the coast. It was still pretty dark when we flew in over the coast, and—well, it's just a guess that the Nazis may be sneaking along the coastline. Maybe they're not circling down toward the south and up to flank Wavell's advance forces. Get what I mean?"

"Instantly!" Freddy exclaimed, and his tired eyes lighted up. "I'm tipping my topper to you, my lad. Yes, I believe you're right. They may be sneaking along the coast, just far enough inland to prevent observation from the sea. Yes, let's head back that way, by all means. Good grief, anything would be better than this tooting around over the blasted desert down there. It's like standing in front of a blast furnace with the door open!"

"Ten times worse!" Dave muttered, and started banking the Skua around and up in a climb for altitude. "Boy! I'd sure like to pick the next spot for Hitler and his big bums to invade. I'd get me a transfer to duty there so fast it would make your head swim."

"And where would that be?" Freddy asked.

"The North Pole," Dave said. "Gee! Nice cool air spilling into the cockpit. And a—Hey! Freddy!"

Dave bellowed the last and sat up straight in the seat. The English youth jumped in alarm and banged his head on one of the cowling braces.

"Good grief, what?" he choked out. "What's the matter?"

"Plenty!" Dave snapped back over his shoulder, and at the same time wheeled the Skua around in a quick turn. "Trouble in six different packages. To your right and up! Take a look! Busting down out of the sun. And they aren't sea gulls, either. Buckle your safety strap and get set, Freddy!"

The English youth did just that as he jerked his head around and squinted up toward the sun. He was blinded for a second or so by the brassy glare, but he performed the well known war pilot's trick that makes it possible to spot planes sliding down out of the sun. You close one eye and then hold the thumb of your free hand four or five inches in front of the eye you keep open. The ball of your thumb covers the sun and permits you to see planes diving down in its glare. You can't do it for very long because there is still enough glare to get into your eyes. However, you can stare in the direction of the sun long enough to spot what you want to see.

Anyway, Freddy pulled that sun "eclipsing" stunt and saw the six planes streaking down toward the Skua. They were just moving blurs at first, but in a second or so they took on definite shapes and outlines. He lowered his thumb and eyes and swung to man his rear guns.

"Three Nazi Henschel reconnaissance jobs!" he shouted at Dave. "And three Italian Breda Sixty-Fives. How in thunder did they get up there in the sun?"

"Don't ask me!" Dave called out, and slid the safety catch off his gun trigger button. "Maybe they've been up there all the time, and just now spotted us. I don't know. But, brother, I'm not going to bother about asking them. Hang on, Freddy! I'm first going to try and give them the slip. Gee! Running away from Muzzy pilots and Jerry pilots. But there'll come another day."

"That's what you think!" Freddy shouted. "It's already here, my lad!"