Phred pushed his plane's throttle as far forward as it could go. His old Curtis-Wright engine hummed as his plane reached 175 miles per hour. He glanced from his fuel gauge to the oil gauge, engine temperature, to his altimeter. He sighed. Part of him thought that he might have had better chances with Arge. In the last ten minutes Phred had managed to put almost 30 miles between himself and Sky Haven. It wouldn't take long for the Top Hat's J-2 Furys to catch up with him, with their top speed of 250 mph. Phred pulled back on the stick trying to gain altitude. He reasoned that with the Fury's low stall speed would prevent them from climbing quickly to get Phred under their crosshairs. Phred was hoping that as he was heading toward the Republic of Texas Phred could drop to a lower altitude gaining enough speed to out run Devro and his gang...or at least put enough space between himself and the pirates to make them loose interest.
Phred looked back over his shoulder towards his tail. He surehoped they would lose interest. He turned back to his gauges, then to his watch. He had five of the fifteen minutes left that Devro had given him. As odd a time as it was, Phred allowed a relieved grin to form on his face. He might just make it. He might just get back to New York. He might just give George a piece his mind. He might just get fired, but he might just be OK with that.
Something snapped Phred out of his little dream. Something sounded wrong with his engine. It was humming oddly. Suddenly Phred understood. The strange sound was a propeller harmony and it was growing louder. Suddenly Phred understood. His plane wasn't alone anymore. They had found him.
"Those bastards," he thought, "I still have four minutes."
His anger quickly turned to puzzlement.
"How did they find me so fast?"
He looked over his shoulder past his tail to the cloudy overcast skies. He couldn't see anything, which really scared him as the other plane's or planes' humming grew louder. He couldn't tell how many there actually were. He squinted to pick out shapes of planes against the clouds, desperate to know how he would die. He stared at nothing for a second...and then he saw it. And then he wished he hadn't seen it. It was a zeppelin. Phred was being chased by a fully armed pirate zeppelin, probably containing several squadrons of very, very mean pirate pilots who would probably shoot Phred out of the sky like a decrepit turkey.
Why hadn't Phred taken that job writing manuals for kitchen appliances?
Breaking Phred out of his negative daydreams was the crackle of a voice on the radio.
"Oh Phred. How are you?" Devro's sincere voice was as transparent as the windscreen Phred had in front of him.
"D-Devro!" Squeaked Phred, "I-I thought you were going to give me fifteen minutes?"
"Well we figured fifteen minutes is a long time and we figured you might get lonely. So we came to keep you company."
In the background, over the radio, Phred heard laughter.
"Why are they always laughing?" thought Phred. Every time Phred heard laughterhe was reminded of how truly not funny the situation was.
Well Phred wasn't just going to wait to be shot up. He pushed forward on the stick into a sharp dive to gain speed.
"Awww, it looks like our friend wants to play tag. Let's be polite and humor him."
Phred looked over his shoulder at his six o' clock. He could see the zep opening her bomb bay doors along her underside. Instead of bombs planes begin to drop towards the earth.
The gray and tan Furies leveled out and aimed themselves at Phred.
"Ok you guys. Remember the rules," said Devro over the radio, " First to shoot him down gets a free liquor for a month. But if anyone uses their seventy cal. cannons they buy drinks for all of us for two months. The homing rocket unit stashed in his Plane has just about run out of juice now, so seeker rockets won't be of any use. Other than that, let the games begin."
"So that's how they found me," thought Phred, "They used a beeper unit!" The beeper-seeker rocket team had been around for a few years, using a rocket with a homing unit that sent out a radio signal and a rocket with a receiver unit, the seeker, would follow it and explode on target. The beeper rocket would stick against a plane and emit a signal that, for sixty seconds, would bring every seeker right on top of it. However Phred had never heard of a beeper unit that lasted longer that that. He figured that Devro had one of his goons attach it with an extra power source in a space inside Phred's plane. It made Phred think that Devro wasn't as dumb as everyone said. That was a scary thought.
Phred pushed his plane into a dive to gain speed. He decided he would dive into the mountains and use them to keep from getting killed. His "Suped-up" biplane didn't have the speed or the punch of the Furies behind him, but he was just as nimble and if he used the mountainous terrain his enemy would have more difficulty using rockets on his little hunk of junk.
Phred banked his plane between the mountains with the sound of thirty caliber machine guns opening up on his six. Phred's pursuer had been a little too enthusiastic and was off by a mile. Phred's heart was pounding and his mind was racing to stay ahead of the game. His little maneuver wouldn't last forever. The twists and turns he was doing were draining his excess speed. It was only a matter of time before Phred got lined up in their sights.
More gunshots. This time the guy had waited. There were punching sounds, like a pencil being pushed through paper, all along the right upper wing and more punching sounds as slugs went through the bottom right wing. Phred was loosing too much speed. Thankfully these thugs couldn't hit the broad side of a barn if they were standing next to it with a baseball bat. Phred's arm nudged his radio dial, and by accident he had switched to the frequency that the Gray Hats were using.
"Hey Twitch! Break off," said a feminine voice, "Let me get a shot at him."
"All right," Replied what Phred assumed to be Twitch, "I couldn't hit him anyway."
Phred looked to the rear. His chaser rolled to the left and the Fury behind him lined up for a shot. Phred banked his plane to the right and tried to shake her, but the female pilot stuck like glue. Gunshots sounded and Phred heard more punching as the slugs cut through the cloth skin of the real fuselage.
Van Buren, the editor hadn't sprung for armor over the whole plane just the engine, the nose, and the enclosed cockpit. Everything else was canvas. However that was a blessing in disguise. A cloth plane could maintain flight longer if damaged. Bullets usually punched right through to the other side without hurting much.
The crop duster was holding but who knew how long itwould hold? It was going to take a miracle for Phred to get out of this alive. Phred's luck had run out. On his six four Furies lined him up. Phred's adventure was over.