Out on the tarmac of Eighty-Four Dave Dawson and Freddy Farmer stood peeling off their flying gear and feasting their eyes on the new Mark 5 Spitfires. Lights of joy danced in their eyes, and their faces were flushed with excitement and eagerness for the future to become the present in a hurry.

"That is an airplane!" Dave cried and slung his parachute pack up into the pit. "That's a dream. The sugar in my coffee. The moonlight on a summer night. The smell of a lovely rose. The goal from the field in the last ten seconds of play. The whozit of the whatzit. And how!"

Freddy looked at him and sighed unhappily.

"And he was such a bright chap before he took that Mark Five up for a test hop!" he murmured. "He could count all the way up to ten. He could write his own name. And he even knew what day of the month it was. But, now.... O well! They say his kind last just so long. And, of course, he's a blinking Yank at heart. So.... Hey! Ouch!"

The swinging Mae West life preserver jacket caught Freddy on the ear, and almost toppled him off his feet. He caught himself in time, ducked as the Mae West came sailing around again, and charged at his best pal. Dave backed up and stepped quickly to the side.

"You had that coming to you, my little man," he said sternly. "You should learn to understand expressions of beauty."

"Sugar in his coffee!" the English youth snorted. "Moonlight on a summer night! Good grief! Whoever heard of such things?"

"Oh, I've got lots more of them," Dave chuckled. "Better ones, too. Listen."

"Don't!" Freddy groaned.

Dave ignored him and stuck one hand inside his tunic and extended the other palm up toward the nearest Spitfire.

"A Mark Five is the lace in your shoe!" he cried. "It is the frosting on mother's cake. It is the apple in her dumpling pie. It is the breath of spring. It is the kiss of your girl. It is...."

Dave stopped short and shook his head.

"No, that's wrong," he said. "No girl would kiss that map of yours, Freddy. They'd.... Hey! So I'm talking to myself, huh?"

It was true. Dave was simply throwing beautiful words at free air. Freddy had left him cold and walked over to Flight Lieutenant Barker, who had led the test hop patrol. Dave went over there scowling.

"Fine business!" he growled. "I try to better his education and he walks out on me!"

Freddy snorted in disgust and Flight Lieutenant Barker grinned.

"You've got a bite, Dawson?" he asked. "Fleas, perhaps?"

"Huh, me?" Dave echoed, and then turned beet red.

He still had one hand stuck inside his tunic. He pulled it out and they all laughed.

"No kidding, though, Flight Lieutenant," he said. "Isn't that Mark Five the best thing that ever came down the pike?"

"Down the pike?" the senior officer murmured. Then brightening, "Oh yes, I get what you mean. Quite! Best bus in the R.A.F. I'm all for having a go at a Jerry or two right now. I think we'll sweep the skies with the Mark Fives. But I hear that even better planes are on the drafting boards right now."

"Phew, that's hard to believe!" Freddy breathed. "I mean, that anything could be better than the Mark Five."

"Shame, Farmer!" Barker said with a grin. "And that statement from the lips of an Englishman!"

"Is he?" Dave asked with a mock gasp.

"Is he what?" Barker wanted to know.

"Is Freddy really and truly an Englishman?" Dave replied and set himself to jump fast. "From the way his eyes slant up, I'd always thought that he was a little bit...."

Dave didn't finish the rest. And it was not Freddy making a dive for him that choked off his words. On the contrary it was the wail of the alarm siren mounted atop the Operations Office. As one man the three spun around and dashed over to the little hut that was the nerve center of the Squadron. And so did every other pilot on stand-to duty.

The Operations Officer met them at the door. He waved a slip of paper at them.

"Zone Ten Spotters!" he snapped. "A single Messerschmitt One-Ten sneaking in from the coast. Altitude twenty one thousand. Course, due west. Intercept and teach the beggar a lesson. Chap's balmy to try it alone these days. Off with you. I'll give you further spotter reports in the air."

The half dozen pilots turned from the Operations Office door and raced back to the line of Spitfires. Mechanics already had the propellers ticking over. Dave skidded to a halt by his ship and practically jumped into the parachute harness and Mae West that his own mechanic held up for him. Then in a single leap he vaulted into the pit, snapped his safety harness in place, plugged in his radio jack, and reached for the throttle.

"Get one of the dirty beggars for me, sir!" the mechanic cried out. "I come from Coventry, you know, sir!"

"Fair enough!" Dave yelled and sent the Mark 5 Spitfire streaking straight out across the field. "One Messerschmitt coming up, for Coventry! I mean, coming down!"

Split seconds after the words popped off his lips he was in the air with wheels up, and curving up and around toward Zone 10. He did not have to glance at his map to determine the location of Zone 10. Its location, like the locations of all the zones that Eighty-Four guarded, was stamped indelibly on his brain. Zone 10 was on the coast south of Harwich, and he headed in that direction at top speed.

Out the corner of his eye he saw the other planes of the flight streaking along in the same direction. He grinned and jammed his hand against the already wide open throttle as though in so doing he might get more power out of the singing Rolls-Royce in the nose. And he knew that Freddy, Flight Lieutenant Barker, and the three other Spitfire pilots were doing the same thing. If the alarm had said two or more enemy aircraft were sighted the Eighty-Four lads would have dropped into formations of flights of three with Barker giving the orders for attack and so forth. That wasn't necessary, however, with just one lone Jerry plane in the offing. Instead, it was a case of first come, first crack at the Jerry. And so the six Eighty-Four lads were hopping their planes along as fast as they could so that they might be the one to get first licks at the Messerschmitt. True, that sort of thing wasn't strictly regulations, but the R.A.F. lads did it ... and often.

"Ten shillings says you guys are wasting your time!" Dave shouted happily into his radio mike.

"Ten shillings says you've forgotten there's lots of radios in England, Dawson!" Flight Lieutenant Barker snapped back at him in the earphones.

Dave gulped and went beet red to the roots of his hair. In his excitement he had clean forgotten that ground stations are tuned in on aircraft aloft all the time. Whatever is said up there goes right into the ears of the big shots, if they happen to be listening.

"I mean when the formation reaches the objective!" Dave said hurriedly. "One Mark Five is more than enough for any One-Ten!"

Barker's laugh came over the radio.

"That's nice quick thinking, Dawson," he said. "No wonder you've got more than a couple of the beggars in your bag."

"Luck! Absolutely nothing else. I was present each time!"

The voice was Freddy Farmer's. Dave opened his mouth to make a fitting retort, but checked himself. At that instant he heard the voice of the Operations officer back down on the field.

"Tiger Flight!" he called, using the code name for the patrol in the air. "Change course twenty degrees north. Clouds ahead of you. Enemy aircraft climbing to twenty-four thousand. Operations to Tiger. That is all!"

"Tiger to Operations!" Dave heard Flight Lieutenant Barker check back. "Changing course. Right you are!"

Dave had already swung his ship around more to the north, and was hunched forward over the stick staring hard at the mountain cloud bank looming up ahead. His eagle eyes swept it from side to side and from top to bottom. But he failed to see a single moving dot that could be the Messerschmitt One-Ten trying to climb up over the stuff. He saw nothing but that bank of clouds and the crazy shadows that marked nature's nooks and crags in the stuff.

And then he heard Freddy Farmer's excited voice coming into his earphones.

"Enemy aircraft sighted! Five more degrees northward. Just under the tip of that finger of the stuff on the left!"

Dave snapped his gaze in the direction indicated, and then suddenly saw the blurred dot curving upward and to the north. He grinned and gave a little shake of his head.

"Old Sharp Eyes Freddy Farmer!" he grunted. "Boy! How does he do it?"

"Simple!" the radio's earphones told him instantly. "I jolly well fly with my eyes open. Try it sometime, old bean. You'll be surprised at the difference."

Dave didn't make any comment. At that instant the moving dot moved right into the billowy clouds and was completely lost to view.

"Spread out, chaps!" came Barker's orders. "Don't think the beggar is turning back. Spread out and keep your eyes skinned. And bear northward."

As he was flying on the extreme left Dave cut around sharp north, and stuck his nose down for additional speed. The dot had entered the cloud bank at approximately the same altitude as that of his own Spitfire, but he had the sudden hunch that the Jerry pilot was going to stop climbing. That he was going to go down and try to sneak out from under the cloud bank while the lads of Eighty-Four fruitlessly hunted for him at high altitudes.

"Maybe I'm wrong," Dave murmured. "And that won't be anything new, and how. But if he sticks to those clouds it'll mean he isn't on photo reconnaissance. And if he goes down under the stuff it'll mean the same thing. Right! There's nothing down there that Goering's little dopes haven't taken a million pictures of since they started this cockeyed war. Yeah! It's my hunch that lad is over here on other business."

With a nod for emphasis he steepened the Spitfire's dive a bit and went cutting down across the English sky like a comet gone haywire. In less than practically nothing flat he was down below the altitude of the belly of the stuff. He pulled out and let the Mark 5 prop claw straight forward at an even keel. At the same time he threw back his head and raked the underside of the cloud bank with his eyes.

He saw nothing, however. Nothing but clouds and more clouds. Seconds ticked by to form a minute. He banked slightly and glanced back to see if any of his pals had the same hunch. His was the only Spitfire to be seen, however. The others were way up above him and completely out of sight.

"A horse on you, Dawson," he grunted, "if they smack the guy down, and buzz back for a spot of tea, leaving you to hunt the little man who isn't there. Yeah! It would be.... Hold it! So there you are, my little Jerry!"

A war painted Messerschmitt One-Ten had cut down out of the belly of the cloud bank about half a mile ahead of him and perhaps the same distance to the left. It leveled off immediately once it was in clear air and started streaking to the west again.

"Not today!" Dave shouted and kicked his Mark Five around in a flash half turn. Then into his flap-mike he bellowed, "Tally-ho, gang! Downstairs with you!"