The Albatros then made a steep left-hand turn and came straight at the PBY, and they approached head-on. Pitt could see the other plane's tracer bullets streaking about ten feet under his windshield. Lucky for us this guy's a lousy shot, he thought. He had a weird feeling in his stomach as the two planes sped together on a collision course. Pitt waited until the last possible instant before he pushed the nose of the PBY down and swiftly banked around, gaining a brief, but favorable position over the Albatros. Again Giordino opened fire. But the yellow Albatros dived out of the spitting hail from the carbine and shot vertically toward the ground, and Pitt momentarily lost sight of it. He swung to the right in a steep turn and searched the sky. It was too late. He sensed, rather than felt, the thumping from a river of bullets that tore into the flying boat. Pitt threw his plane into a violent falling leaf maneuver and successfully dodged the smaller plane's deadly sting. It was a narrow escape.

The uneven battle continued for a full eight minutes while the military spectators on the ground watched, spellbound. The strange aerial dogfight slowly drifted eastward over the shoreline, and the final round began.

Pitt was sweating now. Small glistening beads of the salty liquid were bursting from the pores on his forehead and trickling in snail-like trails down his face. His opponent was cunning, but Pitt was playing the strategy game too. With infinite patience, dredged up from some hidden reserve in his body, he waited for the right moment, and when it finally arrived he was ready.

The Albatros managed to get behind and slightly above the Catalina. Pitt held his speed steady and the other pilot, sensing victory, closed to within fifty yards of the flying boat's towering tail section. But before the two machine guns could speak, Pitt pulled the throttle back and lowered the flaps, slowing the big craft into a near stall. The phantom pilot, taken by surprise, overshot and passed the PBY, receiving several well placed rounds in the Albatros' engine as the carbine spat at near point-blank range. The vintage plane banked in front of Pitt's bow, and he watched with the respect one brave man has for another when the occupant in the open cockpit pushed up his goggles and threw a curt salute. Then the yellow Albatros and its mysterious pilot turned away and headed west over the island, trailing a black streak of smoke that testified to the accuracy of Giordino's marksmanship.

The Catalina was falling out of its stall into a dive now, and Pitt fought the controls for a few unnerving seconds before he regained stable flight. Then he began a sweeping, upward turn in the sky. At five thousand feet he leveled off and searched the island and seascape, but no trace of the bright yellow plane with the maltese cross markings was visible. It had vanished.