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The body of Gorlitz, trapped there, had mercifully fallen into the sea. That ghastly thing, at any rate, no longer remained. Four Legionaries were in the pilot-house: the Master, Bohannan, Leclair, and "Captain Alden." For the most part, they held silence. There was little for them to say. At length the major spoke. "Still sagging down, eh?" he commented, his eyes on the needle of the altimeter.
Rrisa breathed something in which the words: "La Illaha ilia Allah" transpired in a wraith of sound. Alden nestled closer into the ferns. Bohannan could hardly hold his poise. All three now had their capsule pistols ready. The self-luminous compass and level attached to each gun gave them their exact direction and elevation. Glimmering watches marked the time, the dragging of the last few seconds.
Then he nodded, and smiled the ghost of a smile. "Lord!" exclaimed Bohannan, half awed by the weirdness of the apparition. "Staring at us, that way and all! Is he asleep?" "Try him in any way your ingenuity may suggest," answered the Master, while Alden blinked strangely through his eyeholes, and Rrisa in Arabic affirmed that there is no God but Allah.
The binoculars of the Master and Bohannan drew the machine almost to fingers' touch. "Only one man aboard her, with a machine-gun," commented the Master, eyes at glass, as he watched the flick of sunlight on the attacker's fuselage, the dip and glitter of her varnished wings, the blur of her propellers. Already the roaring of her exhaust gusted down to them. "Ah, see? She's turning, now.
After what seemed more than an hour, though in fact it was but the ten minutes agreed on with Bohannan, off behind them toward the coast a sudden staccato popping of revolvers began to puncture the night. Up and down the Legionaries' trench it pattered, desultory, aimless.
Rrisa, the silent and discreet, brought them up in the private elevator from the forty-first floor to the Master's apartment on the top story of the building, then up the stairway to the observatory, and thus ushered them into the presence of the Master and Bohannan. Each man was personally known to one or the other, who vouched absolutely for his secrecy, valor, and good faith.
Bohannan angrily pushed the spokes over again the other way. "I stick!" he growled. "I've said the last word of this sort you'll ever hear me utter. Full speed ahead to Paradise or Hell!" They said no more. The launch split her way swiftly toward the north. By the vague, ghostly shimmer of light upon the waters, a tense smile appeared on the steersman's lips.
"In case of my death, the authority falls on Major Bohannan. He is today the only man who knows my plans, and with whom I have had any discussion. If we both are killed, then you can elect your own leader. But so long as either of us lives, you have no authority and no redress. I hope that's perfectly understood. Does any man wish to withdraw?" Not one budged.
There must be plenty of water there. We should take water, eh?" "Right!" the Master answered. He got up and turned to Bohannan. "Major," commanded he, "have Simonds and a crew of six stand by, in the lower gallery, to descend in the nacelle. Rrisa is to go. They will need him, to interpret.
The Master and Leclair were first to touch foot to the shelving bottom, all churned up by the long cavalry-charges of the sea-horses, and to drag themselves out of the smother. Rrisa and Bohannan came next, then Enemark, and then the others all save Beziers and Daimamoto, French ace and Japanese surgeon, whose work was forever at an end.
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