HOSTILE COASTS An hour from that time, the air-liner was drifting sideways at low altitudes, hardly five hundred feet above the waves.

A sad spectacle she made, her wreckage gilded by the infinite splendors of the sun now lowering toward the horizon.

Her helicopters were droning with all the force that could be flung into them from the crippled power-plant.

Her propellers--some charred to mere stumps on their shafts--stood starkly motionless.
Oddly awry she hung, driven slowly eastward by the wind.

Her rudder was burned clean off; her stern, warped, reeking with white fumes that drifted on the late afternoon air told of the fury that had blazed about her.