Flight of the Silver Eagle E-Book

Arthur Leo Zagat

• Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 38

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Flight of the Silver Eagle by Arthur Leo Zagat soars into a world of high-flying adventure and intrigue. When the sleek and cutting-edge Silver Eagle, an experimental aircraft, goes missing during a crucial test flight, a daring pilot and a brilliant engineer must unravel a tangled web of sabotage, espionage, and corporate greed. As they race against time to recover the stolen aircraft and uncover the truth, they face perilous challenges both in the sky and on the ground. Will they manage to thwart a sinister plot and bring the Silver Eagle back safely, or will their quest end in disaster? Buckle up for an exhilarating ride filled with twists, turns, and airborne excitement.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Flight of the Silver Eagle

I. — THE EMPTY STRATOCAR

II. — THE KAPPA-RAY

III. — THE PURSUIT SQUADRON

IV. — THE DRAGON OF HUNG-CHEN

Landmarks

Table of Contents

Cover

Flight of the Silver Eagle

Thrilling Wonder Stories

By: Arthur Leo Zagat

Edited by: Rafat Allam

Copyright © 2024 by Al-Mashreq Bookstore

First published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Apr 1937

No part of this publication may be reproduced whole or in part in any form without the prior written permission of the author

I. — THE EMPTY STRATOCAR

AGAINST a sky glorious with flung streamers of scarlet and purple, New York's leaping towers and arching aerial streetways traced a prismatic arabesque epitomizing the wonder and the beauty of the Twenty-first Century. But Don Atkins, his lithe, compact body poised on big-thewed legs widespread and firmly planted, was as oblivious to that far-off glory as to the bustle of the Federal Skyport all about him.

He stood beneath the high loom of the landing trap, squinting into the west out of slitted eyes from whose corners weather wrinkles rayed threadlike, and he was conscious of only two things.

Under the yellow silk of his airman's tunic a small, hard lump was cold against his breast. It was the talisman of the Silver Eagle, the throbbing pulse in his temples reminded him, symbol of the gallant fellowship into whose fold he had been inducted at last. The secret that for months had lain prickling between him and his one close friend, Bart Thomas, was a secret no longer. Bart himself, darting from the distant Pacific, would be here in minutes now to receive from him the twisting handgrip of the order. In minutes—in seconds—now—

A siren howled across the field. A black speck notched the low sun's upper rim. "On time to the dot!" Atkins exclaimed. A white blur in the air was suddenly a silver, tear-drop shape caught in the high-reaching fingers of the landing trap's gaunt girders, a thousand feet above him. The gigantic beam surged down, pivoting on its huge hinge, perilously fast at first, then more and more slowly as its hydraulic shock-absorbers sapped the stratocar's incredible momentum.

Atkins dashed for the spot where the duraluminum-skinned, man-carrying projectile would ground to end Thomas' half-hour flight from 'Frisco Skyport.

A knot of brown-garbed mechanics clotted around the tiny car. Their wrenches clanged against the bolt-heads that had clamped tight the hatch cover against the airlessness of upper space. Twirling metal rasped against metal. The shining oval door swung back. With eager impatience Atkins shoved past the mechanics, thrust head and shoulders into the aperture.

"Happy landing, old sock," he shouted. "Welcome to—"

The greeting froze on his lips. The tiny cubicle was unoccupied; was starkly, staringly vacant. In the heatless light of the ceiling tube the teleview screen mirrored the Skyport tarmac, glimmered from the glossy leather of the cushion on which Thomas should have lain outstretched. But Thomas wasn't there—

Atkins' skin was a tight, prickling sheath for his body. The thing was grotesquely, weirdly impossible! Impossible for his chum to have got out of the stratocar unless someone had unbolted the hatch from outside. Impossible for it to have landed somewhere so that that might have been done. To have arrived on the dot of its schedule the stratocar must never have relented from the uttermost limit of its speed. Time lost in any halt could not have been made up.

Impossible for there to have been any halt; the device was propelled by the blast of an electrostatic catapult at its starting point and had no power of its own. Once stopped it could not have taken up its flight again. And it had come straight as an arrow to the landing-trap's hooks at which 'Frisco had aimed it.

A fleck of white on the cushion caught Atkins' eye. He reached in, snatched it up. It was a bit of paper, and on it—

"Mr. Atkins," a peremptory voice battered at his giddy brain, "Conceal that and bring it to me at once."

The airman thrust the scrap into his pocket, whirled. The groundmen were crowding in around him, their swarthy countenances curious, but it was evident that none of them had spoken. Then he recalled the tiny receiver clamped against the bone behind his ear, and he knew whence the summons had come.