"but if you'll stand right
here behind us you can see the whole works." He did not wait for a
reply, but turned back toward the black night ahead.

Smithy glanced past him at the lighted instruments and found the
altimeter. Twelve thousand--yes, there was nasty country hereabouts.
Then he, too, stared out into the dark at the sky sprinkled with
stars, at the vague blur of an unlighted world far below, and off at
either side and behind them the quivering lines of cold light where
starlight was reflected dimly from the spinning propellers.

Other wing lights winked out as he watched, and he knew that from that
moment on, they were invisible from below--invisible to human eyes at
least--that they were sweeping on through the darkness like some
gargantuan night bird pursuing its prey.

"Flares ahead, sir," one of the pilots had spoken into the mouthpiece
of his telephone, spoken lightly, reporting back to Captain Farrell.
The words whipped Smithy's head about, and he, too, saw on a distant
horizon, the beginning of a white glare.

They were fighting there--two hundred planes roaring downward, one
formation following another. In his mind he was seeing it so plainly.

The white blaze of light dead ahead grew broader. It had not been as
far distant as he had first thought, and the scene that he had
pictured came swiftly to reality.

* * * * *

Their own ship was still at the twelve-thousand-foot level. Ahead, and
five thousand feet below, tiny lights, red and white and green, lights
whose swift motion made their hundreds seem like thousands instead,
were weaving intricate patterns in the night. The flying lights of the
fighting planes were on for the planes' own protection; and, too, no
further concealment was possible in the glare that shone upward from
below.

Settling downward were balls of blinding fire, flares dropped by the
squadron of scout planes that had torn through in advance. They
lighted brilliantly a valley which, a few hours before, had been one
of many like it--square fields, dark green with the foliage of fruit
trees, straight lines of crossing roads, houses, and off in the
distance a little city.

And now the valley was an inferno of spouting flame. That city was a
vast, roaring furnace under smoke clouds of mingled blood-red and
black. The valley floor was a place of desolation, of drifting smoke
and of flashing shell-bursts as the fleet swept in above.

The myriad