They had failed, yet in a way they had succeeded. They had drilled the Lockheed's engines and forced Dave to sit down on that narrow strip of smooth ground deep in a valley. Not knowing the exact results of their efforts, the two men had cruised about over the area as soon as it became light, and--by another crazy twist of fate--they had seen the smoke signal that had been sent up to attract _help_. Seeing that the plane had not crashed, the two men had done the logical thing, from their point of view. They had landed and picked up their prey. Kidnapped them, yes, but for a very good reason. Some other plane passing over might have landed and given them a quick lift to their destination. So the redhead and the pilot had picked them up to make sure somebody else wouldn't do it. And the reason they hadn't been killed on the spot was simple to figure. Death in the dark during that air attack last night would have been different. The plane would have crashed and burned up, and when its charred ruins were found no one would ever had dreamed that bullets had sent it hurtling down to its doom. But three dead men lying beside a force landed plane was something else again. A scene like that naturally screamed murder all over the place. And so the redhead and his pilot had kidnapped them so that if another plane landed to investigate, it would look as though the occupants of the Lockheed had tried to find their way back to civilization on foot, and had become hopelessly lost in the mountains. "But they know all about us! How?" Dave didn't speak the words aloud. He spoke them only in his brain, but as he glanced at Colonel Welsh and met the man's eyes he knew that the senior officer understood what was in his mind, just as though he had heard the words spoken. Even as Dave met his eyes, Colonel Welsh bit his lower lip and gave a sharp little puzzled shake of his head. A hundred and one answers to the question leaped into Dave's brain, but every one of them seemed too fantastic even to bother considering. However, fantastic or not, one thought kept hammering away until he was forced to admit that it at least must be true. It was that somebody close to Colonel Welsh--very close--was unquestionably in the pay of Berlin, or Tokio. Somebody in the drab, unpretentious building where Colonel Welsh maintained his real head-quarters was a traitor to the American flag, a paid rat of the lowest form who gnawed at the very heart of America.