Two hundred feet was the range of the rays! Was Kashtanov that close?
Obviously the controls had not yet been set, for he still held the
box. But he could switch them on in a second and fling the deadly
machine up toward the dam, if he were at present just out of range. A
second--a second!
"Damn you, here goes!" roared Chris.
He wrenched the stick way over. The plane appeared to hang crazily on
one wing. Then it leveled off and stuck its nose down, flipping its
tail up, and down--down--down it bellowed; with no hope in the world
of ever coming out of its insane plunge.
What he saw in that last momentary glimpse was burned forever into
Chris Travers' memory. There was the black box, hanging in the air
straight before the plane's thundering nose; there, behind it, the
black tide of the spillway waters; and, still further behind, he could
see the other bank and the hydro-electric station, and a few tiny
figures that rushed out from it just then to see what some fool flyer
was doing.
All this flashed into his sight, etched against the sable night as if
in flame. Then the plane's snout smashed into the black box hanging
before it, and the propeller crunched through a naked, invisible body.
A ragged scream that marked the passing of Kashtanov split through the
air for a flash of time, and the dark, blurred mass that was an
airplane teetered clean over and flopped into the rushing spillway
channel.
* * * * *
The men who had scrambled out from the hydro-electric station stared
at each other blankly. One of them stuttered:
"But--he did that deliberately! Nothing went wrong with his ship! I
saw him! He seemed to be diving at something!"
"Come on!" snapped another. "We might be able to get him out. A mad
fool like that's just the kind who'll live through it."
* * * * *
End of Project Gutenberg's Raiders Invisible, by Desmond Winter Hall
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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