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Joe said to Max, “did you explain to the pilot that under no circumstances was he to pass over the line of the military reservation, that we’d cut before we reached that point?”

“Yes, sir,” Max said nervously. He’d flown before, on the commercial lines, but he’d never been in a glider.

They began lurching across the field, slowly, then gathering speed. And as the sailplane took speed, it took grace. After it had been pulled a hundred feet or so, Joe eased back the stick and it slipped gently into the air, four or five feet off the ground. The towing airplane was still taxiing, but with its tow airborne it picked up speed quickly. Another two hundred feet and it, too, was in the air and beginning to climb. The glider behind held it to a speed of sixty miles or so.

At ten thousand feet, the plane leveled off and the pilot’s head swiveled to look back at them. Joe Mauser waved to him and dropped the release lever which ejected the nylon rope from the glider’s nose. The plane dove away, trailing the rope behind it. Joe knew that the plane pilot would later drop it over the airport where it could easily be retrieved.

In the direction of Mount Overlook he could see cumulus clouds and the dark turbulence which meant strong updraft. He headed in that direction.

Except for the whistling of wind, there is complete silence in a soaring glider. Max Mainz began to call back to his superior, was taken back by the volume, and dropped his voice. He said, “Look, captain. What keeps it up?”

Joe grinned. He liked the buoyance of glider flying, the nearest approach of man to the bird, and thus far everything was going well. He told Max, “An airplane plows through the air currents, a glider rides on top of them.”

“Yeah, but suppose the current is going down?”

“Then we avoid it. This sailplane only has a gliding angle ratio of one to twenty-five, but it’s a workhorse with a payload of some four hundred pounds. A really high performance glider can have a ratio of as much as one to forty.”

Joe had found a strong updraft where a wind ran up the side of a mountain. He banked, went into a circling turn. The gauge indicated they were climbing at the rate of eight meters per second, nearly fifteen hundred feet a minute.

Max hadn’t got the rundown on the theory of the glider. That was obvious in his expression.

Joe Mauser, even while searching the ground below keenly, went into it further. “A wind up against a mountain will give an updraft, storm clouds will, even a newly plowed field in a bright sun. So you go from one of these to the next.”

“Yeah, great, but when you’re between,” Max protested.

“Then, when you have a one to twenty-five ratio, you go twenty-five feet forward for each one you drop. If you started a mile high, you could go twenty-five miles before you touched ground.” He cut himself off quickly. “Look, what’s that, down there? Get your glasses on it.”

Max caught his excitement. His binoculars were tight to his eyes. “Sojers. Cavalry. They sure ain’t ours. They must be Hovercraft lads. And look, field artillery.”

Joe Mauser was piloting with his left hand, his right smoothing out a chart on his lap. He growled, “What are they doing there? That’s at least a full brigade of cavalry. Here, let me have those glasses.”

With his knees gripping the stick, he went into a slow circle, as he stared down at the column of men. “Jack Alshuler,” he whistled in surprise. “The marshal’s crack heavy cavalry. And several batteries of artillery.” He swung the glasses in a wider scope and the whistle turned into a hiss of comprehension. “They’re doing a complete circle of the reservation. They’re going to hit the Baron from the direction of Phoenicia.”