awks, straight at the muck of flame below. The wind
whistled above the din of bursting shells. Stan took a deep breath. It
was great, if you didn't meet one of those shells on its way up.

The AA shells were bursting close under their noses. It seemed certain
death to dive any farther, but they kept on diving. The sea of flames
leaped up to smack them in the face. It roared around them, then
vanished lighting the sky above them. Stan saw rows of planes on the
ground. He saw them clearly. A hangar was blazing and a row of oil tanks
was sending up a pillar of smoke and flame thousands of feet into the
air.

As Stan looked toward the flaming tanks he saw a circle of them lift and
vanish into the air as a big bomb landed in their midst. Pulling the
nose of his ship up he reached for the gun button, and swooped upon the
lines of planes. On his left Allison and O'Malley were already raking
those bombers. Stan's Brownings drilled a swath of lead across the field
as he swept over.

Up went the Hawks and over and back again. They saw the destruction
their first dive had wrought and set about adding to it. The Liberators
had circled and were down again, the roar of their dive shaking the
earth and the air above it. The field where the rows of Junkers bombers
had stood was heaving and rolling and exploding.

"Up, Red Flight," came a command from Allison. "There's a real show
going on up there."

Up they went, nosing through the flaming muck. This time they had little
trouble in breaking through. Great holes and spaces in the barrage
showed where the bombers had spotted gun placements. O'Malley was on
Stan's left now and Stan was flying the center slot. There had been no
time to take regulation position. Stan saw O'Malley's Hawk lift and
shear away from a blasting burst of steel as a shell exploded under her.
An instant later he knew the Hawk had picked up a package of death. It
was twisting and wobbling, but going on up.

"Go in, O'Malley! Go in O'Malley," Allison was droning. "Get back
across. Get back across."

Before Stan could do anything at all, he was up through the muck, and
then through the clouds, into a real battle. The sky was full of
twisting, diving planes, all spitting at each other in deadly fashion.
He was so busy keeping Messerschmitts off his tail that he lost track of
Allison and O'Malley. He noted that there were only a few Spitfires and
Defiants near him, though the air was literally filled with Jerrie