Detective Fiction Weekly/Volume 34/Number 01/Flight

Through the noise of the propeller blast Joe Brookley yelled back at his passenger in the rear cockpit:

"All Set?"

The passenger nodded with a quick, nervous jerk of the head, his goggles masking his face a bit grotesquely.

"Safety belt hooked?"

Again the nervous nod.

"First flight," thought the pilot. "Got the wind up a bit already. Better not stunt him."

The sight-seeing plane took off neatly against a light but somewhat moist breeze from the south.

Joe hoped the fog would hold off for at least another hour. There was a good Saturday afternoon crowd at the field from Los Angeles and the suburbs. Lots of them willing to pay for flights to-day.

It was past mid afternoon, business had been excellent, and he wanted to make as good a day of it as possible. He needed the cash for his experimental work.

He climbed in wide circles for altitude. A couple of thousand feet would be enough. Ten minutes of ordinary flying around the neighborhood of the field and he would go down for the next passenger. If the fog didn't roll in too quickly.

The air was becoming cool and hazy. The slanting sun was losing its brilliance. This bird behind him probably would be satisfied with a few minutes ​less than the usual ten. The plane was beginning to roll a bit; he might get airsick pretty soon. Flying was becoming a trifle rough.

Suddenly the pilot felt something poking against his left shoulder blade. Likely his passenger had enough and wanted to land.

He turned his head to assure him that he was about to take him back to the field—and looked with a good deal of amazement into the short barrel of an automatic.

Behind the weapon, pointed with sufficient steadiness at his head despite the slight pitching of the plane and the gusty air-stream, Brookley saw a pale but grimly determined face. And its pallor was not that of airsickness.

The amber-colored lenses of the goggles only partly concealed a pair of closely-set eyes, narrowed by the intensity with which they were fixed upon the face of the pilot. Thinly compressed lips were slightly twisted, under a sharp nose bent a little toward the right.

The passenger silently shoved forward with his left hand a small sheet of paper. evidently torn from a pad, leaning over the side of the windshield of his cockpit so that Brookley could reach what was evidently a written message.

The pilot, holding the control stick with his right hand, had begun to hold up his left, But the grim passenger, after handing him the note, motioned for him to keep his hands down. Brookley read:

There was no signature to the penciled note.

It is an important part of an aviator's job to think quickly in an emergency, but nothing in his training or experience suggested to Brookley anything to do under the circumstances but keep flying south.

For a moment he thought of throwing the plane upside down, in the hope that his passenger's safety belt was unfastened and he would be thrown out of the cockpit and down upon the sun baked bosom of Southern California.

In order to lean out over the front of his cockpit, as he had when he de livered the note, he must have unhooked the belt.

To kill the passenger whose act of piracy had shanghaied him in his own plane he felt would be justifiable. He knew now that he was not dealing with an insane man, as he at first had conjectured, but a desperate criminal who had conceived this means of escape, probably realizing that the roads to the frontier were being watched for him.

But Brookley immediately discarded the notion that it might be possible to eject the man in the rear cockpit. He must have refastened the belt again. And any sudden maneuver of the plane, he realized, might send a shower of hot lead through his brain.

The passenger who had so surprisingly assumed command of his ship, he was now convinced, was Steve Janis, whose description had been sent to every airport in Southern California after the robbery of the Industrial Bank of Los Angeles ten days ago.

Janis's three associates in the job had been captured, but Janis had shot his way out of the grasp of the police, one of whom had been killed and another wounded. Steve, the leader had got ​away with most of the stolen money, more than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, mostly in cash.

It was thought he might try to escape by airplane, and the airports had been warned not to let any one of Janis's description hire a ship. That description fitted as much of his passenger's physical make-up as he had seen.

Why hadn't he taken a good look at the man before the takeoff? But so many passengers had been flown that afternoon that he was paying no attention to them individually as they presented their tickets and climbed into the cockpit—the cockpit from which he was now menaced.

It was a bold chance Janis had taken, the pilot reflected, but a fairly possible one under the circumstances.

The first heat of the chase for him had cooled down, and when, after more than a week, he had not appeared at any other airports, vigilance would be relaxed.

The hurrying of sight-seeing passengers into and out of the planes—there were four or five others—and the open concealment afforded by the crowd, had given him his opportunity.

He might be caught but, hiding in Los Angeles, he faced that possibility anyway, and he would have to make the break some time.

He had made the break, and so far had got away with it. He might be bluffing about his ability to fly and land the plane—and he might not be. And Brookley thought of the automatic.

He throttled the engine down to idling speed, greatly reducing the noise of the propeller blast, and shouted over his shoulder:

"Haven't got gas enough to make it!"

He throttled on again immediately, fearful that his passenger might think he was purposely losing altitude in order to make a landing. They were now flying fifteen hundred feet through increasingly bumpy air and thickening fog.

The pilot received this scribbled reply:

Brookley climbed in an effort to get above the thickening vapor in which the plane was flying. Condensed moisture rolled over and under the wings and was blown off in heavy rain drops. The plane bored through large, cumulous gray clouds so full of potential rain that it was like flying through great sponges.

The ground had disappeared from sight, and Joe began to realize that he would have to fly a careful compass course, as high as he could, to avoid crashing into one of the higher mountains of the Coast Range.

He found himself beginning to hope that Janis was not bluffing about his knowledge of flying. If he was not, he would now begin to realize that they were flying into danger to both of them as great as any contained in the chamber of the automatic.

It was about two hours' flying from the field to Calexico. As nearly as he could judge from the course he had been flying, and from his knowledge of the terrain ahead, he was in a sub-valley of the Imperial Valley, between two ranges, which in many places were only a few miles apart.

The light headwind had become a stiffening crosswind from the southwest, blowing fog up the valley in increasingly heavy waves.

He watched his drift indicator and altimeter, and hoped he could get through and above the gray quicksands of the sky before he collided head-on with one of the higher mountains.

Intently occupied with the job im​mediately in hand, he had for some minutes practically forgotten about his passenger when he was nudged again and received another message:

He penciled a reply and handed it back:

At six thousand, five hundred feet almost suddenly the air cleared above them. Overhead was an almost perfectly clear blue sky; below was a rolling sea of light-gray clouds and fog. Here and there the top of a mountain reared itself like a mound-shaped island above the vaporous mass. Toward the west the sun was sinking in a golden haze.

Brookley glanced behind and to the left and saw that they had missed one of the peaks by less than a hundred feet—plenty of leeway in automobile traffic, but a close margin in the sky, with a plane speeding through space at a mile and a half a minute in a drifting air current.

He saw, too, when he looked back, that whatever Janis's fear of the fog might have been, he still kept his weapon pointed toward the front cockpit from just behind the windshield, from which it could be brought into action whenever its owner so decided.

Brookley was himself unarmed, and he reflected that it probably would have done him little good had he been. He could not hope to get a shot at a man who had him covered from behind and had nothing else to do.

Calexico now must be little more than half an hour's flying away, but would this apparently impenetrable sea of fog and clouds present an opening to let them safely down?

The fuel gauge showed him that he enough gasoline remaining in the tank for less than an hour's flying, after which the law of gravity, which must be obeyed by bank robbers as well as aviators, would stretch forth its hand to pull them to earth.

Brookley couldn't have safely turned back to the field now, even if Janis had been willing. And a glance at his passenger convinced the pilot that the hold-up man had no such notion.

Joe was heading for Calexico and the Mexican border by dead reckoning. The first town he saw, if the fog opened up in time to let him see one, might be either Salton, Niland, Holtville, El Centro, Calexico, or Sesbania.

He believed, from the position of the setting sun and his instrument readings, that he was too far east to pick up San Diego, on the Pacific Coast, or La Presa, or Tia Juana.

The blue of the sky above him was turning to purple haze, and the long shadow of the plane as it scudded over the misty floor of the fog bank was becoming dim. The air was colder, but less bumpy.

Toward the southwest the fog bank showed signs, in the fading light, of becoming thinner. Brockley figured that the plane must be almost over Calexico, but thought it best to veer toward the dissolving vapor.

lf he could get down through and under the fog there would still be enough sunlight underneath for a fairly safe landing on the desert near Calexico. He penciled a note to his passenger:

The grim one nodded in silent agreement.

The plane slithered down through the drifting vapor on half-throttle. Brookley held his breath as he pushed forward gently on the stick and, keenly alert, strained his eyes for the first sight ​of the ground—or a mountain peak. He was ready to use rudder and ailerons for all they were worth.

Fifteen hundred feet down he breathed again, for below him was a valley—more than half a mile below—and red sunlight, refracted by the under side of the fog and clouds. He glanced about quickly and saw that he had missed the nearest mountain by a hundred yards, and thanked his luck.

But no sign of a town. The pilot wondered by how much he had miscalculated.

Perhaps he had already crossed the Mexican border and was heading for wild desert country or the watery vastness of the Gulf of California. Aviators lost in Lower California had a slim chance of coming back to tell about it.

Brookley was trying to decide whether to turn and make a landing wherever he could find a sufficiently long and level place, when the plane was suddenly engulfed by a last wave of fog from the Pacific, which swept northeastward in a final attempt to smother and crush.

But almost as suddenly as it had come it cleared away, and Brookley, who had dived sharply to reach the clearer air below, now saw the junction of the Southern Pacific tracks at El Centro.

In a few minutes Calexico would be sighted. He had not overshot the border after all. There was enough gas left to make it with a fairly safe margin.

As if he suspected that the pilot night try to land at El Centro, the passenger, when Brookley banked the plane and pointed down toward the town, shook his head violently and motioned for him to fly ahead.

Brockley nodded—and permitted himself the first smile since he had taken the sky pirate aboard.

He smiled again when he read Janis's final note of instruction, and nodded his assent:

There remained enough light for an easy landing on an ample stretch of desert reasonably free from mesquite or other growth large enough to injure the plane.

Brookley swept downward in a wide circle, and came in at an angle calculated to stop the plane near the edge of a tangled growth of chaparral and mesquite, but without danger of crashing into it.

The wheels and the tail-skid touched the ground lightly in a perfect three-point landing; the plane rolled with decreasing speed and stopped.

Brookley and his fugitive passenger were just south of the border and in Mexico, the fight successfully concluded according to Janis's order.

When the roar of propeller and motor had abated Janis gave his first verbal order:

"Stay in your cockpit five minutes. Better not get out at all, if you have enough gas left to hop back across the border. Then you'll avoid trouble with the Mexican cops. I'm leaving five hundred on the seat. You did a good job. Adios."

There was controlled elation in the bandit's voice. The pilot saw, however, that he was taking no chances with him, even now, and continued to keep him covered as he sidled toward the brush.

Suddenly there was a sharp command:

"Drop that gun—hands up high!"

A tall figure in the uniform of the border patrol sprang out of the brush. It was followed instantly by several others.

Janis, taken by surprise, fired wildly. The sergeant did not. The robber, ​shot through the right arm, dropped his smoking weapon.

Sergeant Dabney put the wounded and cursing fugitive in care of his men and turned to the pilot:

"Thanks, Brookley. Your radio messages were picked up at Rockwell and relayed to us at Calexico by telephone. He never suspected you were sending?"

The pilot smiled. "No. I was using a small portable set I've been experimenting with. It was hidden down in my cockpit, and as I wasn't using headphones, but sending Morse by key, he couldn't see what I was doing."

"Well, you're sitting pretty. There's a reward of five thousand for him, and as you delivered him to us, it's yours."

"My passenger—or rather his banking connection—has a rebate coming," said Joe. "He left five hundred in the seat back there. You'd better take that in charge."

In the meantime Janis had been searched, and in a large money belt was found most of the cash stolen from the bank.

"We'll have to hurry back over the border." said the sergeant. "International law doesn't permit us to cross, and we don't do it except in special cases.

"I don't think the Mexicans will raise any hell over this one, but it'll be best not to stay over too long. Can you fly back?"

"Just about make it," replied Brookley. "I think there's a pint or so of gas in the tank."

The plane was turned around, and in a moment took off in a cloud of dust.