ling
him rapidly. Suddenly Stan grinned. He eased back on the throttle and
waggled his wings as O'Malley roared over him. Picking up speed, he
dropped in beside his pal and signaled that his radio was dead. They
roared on home, wing to wing.

CHAPTER V

HIDDEN DROMES

Stan sat at Colonel Holt's desk along with O'Malley. It had taken them
just twenty minutes to get from the operations room to the colonel's
office. Holt had called in Major Kulp of the photography wing and
General Ward from the command staff.

"When I came in to check the wrecked planes," Stan said, "I was able to
see how they do it. They have a screen on tracks. It is covered over
with brush and leaves and looks from any angle, except squarely in
front, like the side of the hill. They just roll it out and it covers
the planes."

"You wrecked quite a few of them on the ground?" the general asked.

"We must have smashed at least half of them," Stan answered. "But the
part that interested me most was the underground hangars. The screen is
only a temporary camouflage. The planes are snapped back into the
underground hangar. I say we got about half of them, because the wrecked
ones were still out under the screen. The others had been pulled back."

"We can bomb those hangars out," the colonel said.

"I don't think so," Stan said. "I judge there's a full forty feet of
earth over them as a roof, and I suppose there's at least ten feet of
concrete under that."

"That would make them safe. Have any any ideas for handling them?"
General Ward bent forward eagerly.

"Yes," Stan replied. "We could skip-bomb them."

"Skip-bomb?" Major Kulp asked.

"Bounce our bombs right into the open end of the hangar," Stan said,
grinning.

"It might work," Colonel Holt said.

"The P-51's carry bombs, and I'm sure the boys could rig them so that we
could fly at the right angle to bounce them into the hangars. If we went
across once, they'd have the ships pulled back in and we'd get most of
them."

"We'll try it," the general said. "Wilson, you will have charge of the
flight."

"It will be tough going. We lost Jones today and O'Malley and I were
just lucky. We both had our ships shot up badly."

"Chances we have to take," Colonel Holt said gravely. "Are you sure
Jones was killed?"

"I saw his ship hit by what looked like a rocket shell," Stan said. "I
went into the smoke and did not see it until I flew over it on the
ground."

Silence followed this