“Use the Sky Queen,” Tom advised. “And fly her wide open! I’ve got to find that guy who’s using my name!”
“I’ll start at once, skipper,” Bud promised.
His call completed, Tom started checking on Dansitt and learned that he had left the airport at midnight in his own plane. He had not named his destination.
Tom surmised that the student might have followed the man who had stolen the Swift plane.
“Say, Mr. Swift,” the hangar official said suddenly, “I just remembered that the fellow who’s got your plane left a raincoat here. Maybe there’s something in the pockets.”
He put in a call to the lost-and-found department and the coat was brought over. To Tom’s disappointment, there was no identification as to its owner, but there were two rumpled mimeographed sheets.
Tom began to read the first page and was amazed to find it was a treatise on the military use of supersonic sound waves as an offensive weapon.
“The pirates’ blackout method!” Tom murmured, his feeling of excitement mounting.
Tom’s heart beat faster and more excitedly as he read. Flipping to the second page his eyes were attracted to the name of the writer at the bottom of the sheet. It was a name that Tom stared at, fascinated, for almost a minute-Herman Chilcote.
A WANTED SPY 67
Tom’s exultation hit a new high. Clues were coming thick and fast now.
“It shouldn’t be hard to find Chilcote,” he decided. “I’ll ask Dad about him.”
In a few minutes Tom was talking to his father on the phone and receiving an even greater surprise. Mr. Swift recalled the name at once and read his son a note from a scientific periodical.