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Sonja Gievska
Gjorgji Madjarov (Eds.)

Communications in Computer and Information Science 1110

ICT Innovations 2019

Big Data Processing and Mining
11th International Conference, ICT Innovations 2019
Ohrid, North Macedonia, October 17–19, 2019
Proceedings
Communications
in Computer and Information Science 1110
Commenced Publication in 2007
Founding and Former Series Editors:
Phoebe Chen, Alfredo Cuzzocrea, Xiaoyong Du, Orhun Kara, Ting Liu,
Krishna M. Sivalingam, Dominik Ślęzak, Takashi Washio, Xiaokang Yang,
and Junsong Yuan

Editorial Board Members

Simone Diniz Junqueira Barbosa
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio),
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Joaquim Filipe
Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal, Setúbal, Portugal
Ashish Ghosh
Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India
Igor Kotenko
St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian
Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia
Lizhu Zhou
Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7899
Sonja Gievska Gjorgji Madjarov (Eds.)
•

ICT Innovations 2019

Big Data Processing and Mining
11th International Conference, ICT Innovations 2019
Ohrid, North Macedonia, October 17–19, 2019
Proceedings

123
Editors
Sonja Gievska Gjorgji Madjarov
Saints Cyril and Methodius Saints Cyril and Methodius
University of Skopje University of Skopje
Skopje, North Macedonia Skopje, North Macedonia

ISSN 1865-0929 ISSN 1865-0937 (electronic)

Communications in Computer and Information Science
ISBN 978-3-030-33109-2 ISBN 978-3-030-33110-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33110-8

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

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 Preface

The ICT Innovations conference series, organized by the Macedonian Society of

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT-ACT) is an international forum
for presenting scientific results related to innovative fundamental and applied research
in ICT. The 11th ICT Innovations 2019 conference that brought together academics,
students, and industrial practitioners, was held in Ohrid, Republic of North Macedonia,
during October 17–19, 2019.
The focal point for this year’s conference was “Big Data Processing and Mining,”
with topics extending across several fields including social network analysis, natural
language processing, deep learning, sensor network analysis, bioinformatics, FinTech,
privacy, and security.
Big data is heralded as one of the most exciting challenges in data science, as well as
the next frontier of innovations. The spread of smart, ubiquitous computing and social
networking have brought to light more information to consider. Storage, integration,
processing, and analysis of massive quantities of data pose significant challenges that
have yet to be fully addressed. Extracting patterns from big data provides exciting new
fronts for behavioral analytics, predictive and prescriptive modeling, and knowledge
discovery. By leveraging the advances in deep learning, stream analytics, large-scale
graph analysis and distributed data mining, a number of tasks in fields like, biology,
games, robotics, commerce, transportation, and health care have been brought within
reach.
Some of these topics were brought to the forefront of the ICT Innovations 2019
conference. This book presents a selection of papers presented at the conference which
contributed to the discussions on various aspects of big data mining (including algo-
rithms, models, systems, and applications). The conference gathered 184 authors from
24 countries reporting their scientific work and solutions in ICT. Only 18 papers were
selected for this edition by the international Program Committee, consisting of 176
members from 43 countries, chosen for their scientific excellence in their specific fields.
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the authors for sharing their most
recent research, practical solutions, and experiences, allowing us to contribute to the
discussion on the trends, opportunities, and challenges in the field of big data. We are
grateful to the reviewers for the dedicated support they provided to our thorough
reviewing process. Our work was made easier by following the procedures developed
and passed along by Prof. Slobodan Kaljadziski, the co-chair of the ICT Innovations
2018 conference. Special thanks to Ilinka Ivanoska, Bojana Koteska, and Monika
Simjanoska for their support in organizing the conference and for the technical
preparation of the conference proceedings.

October 2019 Sonja Gievska

Gjorgji Madjarov
 Organization

Conference and Program Chairs

Sonja Gievska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Gjorgji Madjarov University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia

Program Committee
Jugoslav Achkoski General Mihailo Apostolski Military Academy,
North Macedonia
Nevena Ackovska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Syed Ahsan Technische Universität Graz, Austria
Marco Aiello University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Azir Aliu Southeastern European University of North Macedonia,
North Macedonia
Luis Alvarez Sabucedo Universidade de Vigo, Spain
Ljupcho Antovski University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Stulman Ariel The Jerusalem College of Technology, Israel
Goce Armenski University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Hrachya Astsatryan National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, Armenia
Tsonka Baicheva Bulgarian Academy of Science, Bulgaria
Verica Bakeva University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Antun Balaz Institute of Physics Belgrade, Serbia
Lasko Basnarkov University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Slobodan Bojanic Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Erik Bongcam-Rudloff SLU-Global Bioinformatics Centre, Sweden
Singh Brajesh Kumar RBS College, India
Torsten Braun University of Berne, Switzerland
Andrej Brodnik University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Francesc Burrull Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Spain
Neville Calleja University of Malta, Malta
Valderrama Carlos UMons University of Mons, Belgium
Ivan Chorbev University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Ioanna Chouvarda Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Trefois Christophe University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Betim Cico Epoka University, Albania
Emmanuel Conchon Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse,
France
Robertas Damasevicius Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania
Pasqua D’Ambra IAC, CNR, Italy
Danco Davcev University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Antonio De Nicola ENEA, Italy
viii Organization

Domenica D’Elia Institute for Biomedical Technologies, Italy

Vesna Dimitrievska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Ristovska
Vesna Dimitrova University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Ivica Dimitrovski University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Salvatore Distefano University of Messina, Italy
Milena Djukanovic University of Montenegro, Montenegro
Ciprian Dobre University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania
Martin Drlik Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra,
Slovakia
Sissy Efthimiadou ELGO Dimitra Agricultural Research Institute, Greece
Tome Eftimov Stanford University, USA, and Jožef Stefan Institute,
Slovenia
Stoimenova Eugenia Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria
Majlinda Fetaji Southeastern European University of North Macedonia,
North Macedonia
Sonja Filiposka University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Predrag Filipovikj Mälardalen University, Sweden
Ivan Ganchev University of Limerick, Ireland
Todor Ganchev Technical University Varna, Bulgaria
Nuno Garcia Universidade da Beira Interior, Portugal
Andrey Gavrilov Novosibirsk State Technical University, Russia
Ilche Georgievski University of Groningen, The Netherlands
John Gialelis University of Patras, Greece
Sonja Gievska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Hristijan Gjoreski University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Dejan Gjorgjevikj University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Danilo Gligoroski Norwegian University of Science and Technology,
Norway
Rossitza Goleva Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria
Andrej Grgurić Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d., Croatia
David Guralnick International E-Learning Association (IELA), France
Marjan Gushev University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Elena Hadzieva University St. Paul the Apostle, North Macedonia
Violeta Holmes University of Hudersfield, UK
Ladislav Huraj University of SS. Cyril and Methodius, Slovakia
Sergio Ilarri University of Zaragoza, Spain
Natasha Ilievska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Ilija Ilievski Graduate School for Integrative Sciences
and Engineering, Singapore
Mirjana Ivanovic University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Boro Jakimovski University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Smilka Janeska-Sarkanjac University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Mile Jovanov University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Milos Jovanovik University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
 Organization ix

Slobodan Kalajdziski University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia

Kalinka Kaloyanova FMI-University of Sofia, Bulgaria
Aneta Karaivanova Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria
Mirjana Kljajic Borstnar University of Maribor, Slovenia
Ljupcho Kocarev University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Dragi Kocev Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
Margita Kon-Popovska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Magdalena Kostoska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Bojana Koteska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Ivan Kraljevski VoiceINTERconnect GmbH, Germany
Andrea Kulakov University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Arianit Kurti Linnaeus University, Sweden
Xu Lai Bournemouth University, UK
Petre Lameski University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Suzana Loshkovska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
José Machado Da Silva University of Porto, Portugal
Ana Madevska Bogdanova University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Gjorgji Madjarov University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Tudruj Marek Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Ninoslav Marina University St. Paul the Apostole, North Macedonia
Smile Markovski University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Marcin Michalak Silesian University of Technology, Poland
Hristina Mihajlovska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Marija Mihova University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Aleksandra Mileva University Goce Delcev, North Macedonia
Biljana Mileva Boshkoska Faculty of Information Studies in Novo Mesto,
Slovenia
Georgina Mirceva University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Miroslav Mirchev University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Igor Mishkovski University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Kosta Mitreski University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Pece Mitrevski University St. Kliment Ohridski, North Macedonia
Irina Mocanu University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania
Ammar Mohammed Cairo University, Egypt
Andreja Naumoski University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Manuel Noguera University of Granada, Spain
Thiare Ousmane Gaston Berger University, Senegal
Eleni Papakonstantinou Genetics Lab, Greece
Marcin Paprzycki Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Dana Petcu West University of Timisoara, Romania
Antonio Pinheiro Universidade da Beira Interior, Portugal
Matus Pleva Technical University of Košice, Slovakia
Florin Pop University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania
Zaneta Popeska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Aleksandra University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Popovska-Mitrovikj
x Organization

Marco Porta University of Pavia, Italy

Ustijana Rechkoska University of Information Science and Technology
Shikoska St. Paul The Apostle, North Macedonia
Manjeet Rege University of St. Thomas, USA
Bernd Rinn ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Blagoj Ristevski University St. Kliment Ohridski, North Macedonia
Sasko Ristov University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Witold Rudnicki University of Białystok, Poland
Jelena Ruzic Mediteranean Institute for Life Sciences, Croatia
David Šafránek Masaryk University, Czech Republic
Simona Samardjiska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Wibowo Santoso Central Queensland University, Australia
Snezana Savovska University St. Kliment Ohridski, North Macedonia
Loren Schwiebert Wayne State University, USA
Vladimir Siládi Matej Bel University, Slovakia
Josep Silva Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
Ana Sokolova University of Salzburg, Austria
Michael Sonntag Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Dejan Spasov University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Todorova Stela University of Agriculture, Bulgaria
Goran Stojanovski Elevate Global, North Macedonia
Biljana Stojkoska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Ariel Stulman The Jerusalem College of Technology, Israel
Spinsante Susanna Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy
Ousmane Thiare Gaston Berger University, Senegal
Biljana Tojtovska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Yalcin Tolga NXP Labs, UK
Dimitar Trajanov University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Ljiljana Trajkovic Simon Fraser University, Canada
Vladimir Trajkovik University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Denis Trcek University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Christophe Trefois University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Kire Trivodaliev University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Katarina Trojacanec University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Hieu Trung Huynh Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Zlatko Varbanov Veliko Tarnovo University, Bulgaria
Goran Velinov University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Elena Vlahu-Gjorgievska University of Wollongong, Australia
Irena Vodenska Boston University, USA
Katarzyna Wac University of Geneva, Switzerland
Yue Wuyi Konan University, Japan
Zeng Xiangyan Fort Valley State University, USA
Shuxiang Xu University of Tasmania, Australia
Rita Yi Man Li Hong Kong Shue Yan University, Hong Kong, China
Malik Yousef Zefat Academic College, Israel
 Organization xi

Massimiliano Zannin INNAXIS Foundation Research Institute, Spain

Zoran Zdravev University Goce Delcev, North Macedonia
Eftim Zdravevski University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Vladimir Zdravevski University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Katerina Zdravkova University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Jurica Zucko Faculty of Food Technology and Biotechnology,
Croatia
Chang Ai Sun University of Science and Technology Beijing, China
Yin Fu Huang University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Suliman Mohamed Fati INTI International University, Malaysia
Hwee San Lim University Sains Malaysia, Malaysia
Fu Shiung Hsieh University of Technology, Taiwan
Zlatko Varbanov Veliko Tarnovo University, Bulgaria
Dimitrios Vlachakis Genetics Lab, Greece
Boris Vrdoljak University of Zagreb, Croatia
Maja Zagorščak National Institute of Biology, Slovenia

Scientific Committee
Danco Davcev University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Dejan Gjorgjevikj University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Boro Jakimovski University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Aleksandra University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Popovska-Mitrovikj
Sonja Gievska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Gjorgji Madjarov University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia

Technical Committee
Ilinka Ivanoska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Monika Simjanoska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Bojana Koteska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Martina Toshevska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia
Frosina Stojanovska University Ss.Cyril and Methodius, North Macedonia

Additional Reviewers

Emanouil Atanassov
Emanuele Pio Barracchia
Abstract of Keynotes
 Machine Learning Optimization
and Modeling: Challenges and Solutions
to Data Deluge

Diego Klabjan1,2,3
1
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences,
Northwestern University
2
Master of Science in Analytics, Northwestern University
3
Center for Deep Learning, Northwestern University
[email protected]

Abstract. A single server can no longer handle all of the data of a machine
learning problem. Today’s data is fine granular, usually has the temporal
dimension, is often streamed, and thus distributed among several compute nodes
on premise or in the cloud. More hardware buys you only so much; in particular,
the underlying models and algorithms must be capable of exploiting it. We focus
on distributed optimization algorithms where samples and features are
distributed, and in a different setting where data is streamed by an infinite
pipeline. Algorithms and convergence analyses will be presented. Fine granular
data with a time dimension also offers opportunities to deep learning models that
outperform traditional machine learning models. To this end, we use churn
predictions to showcase how recurrent neural networks with several important
enhancements squeeze additional business value.

Keywords: Distributed optimization • Deep learning • Recurrent neural

networks
 Computing and Probing Cancer Immunity

Zlatko Trajanoski

Division of Bioinformatics, Medical University of Innsbruck

[email protected]

Abstract. Recent breakthroughs in cancer immunotherapy and decreasing costs

of high-throughput technologies sparked intensive research into tumour-immune
cell interactions using genomic tools. However, the wealth of the generated data
and the added complexity pose considerable challenges and require computa-
tional tools to process, analyse and visualise the data. Recently, a number of
tools have been developed and used to effectively mine tumour immunologic
and genomic data and provide novel mechanistic insights. In this talk I will first
review and discuss computational genomics tools for mining cancer genomic
data and extracting immunological parameters. I will focus on higher-level
analyses of NGS data including quantification of tumour-infiltrating
lymphocytes (TILs), identification of tumour antigens and T cell receptor
(TCR) profiling. Additionally, I will address the major challenges in the field
and ongoing efforts to tackle them.
In the second part I will show results generated using state-of-the-art
computational tools addressing several prevailing questions in cancer
immunology including: estimation of the TIL landscape, identification of
determinants of tumour immunogenicity, and immuno editing that tumors
undergo during progression or as a consequence of targeting the PD-1/PD-L1
axis. Finally, I will propose a novel approach based on perturbation biology of
patient-derived organoids and mathematical modeling for the identification of a
mechanistic rationale for combination immunotherapies in colorectal cancer.

Keywords: Cancer immunotherapy • Tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes •

Perturbation biology
 Bioinformatics Approaches for Sing Cell
Transcriptomics and Big Omics Data Analysis

Ming Chen

Department of Bioinformatics, College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University

[email protected]

Abstract. We are in the big data era. Multi-omics data brings us a challenge to
develop appropriate bioinformatics approaches to model complex biological
systems at spatial and temporal scales. In this talk, we will describe multi-omics
data available for biological interactome modeling. Single cell transcriptomics
data is exploited and analyzed. An integrative interactome model of non-coding
RNAs is built. We investigated to characterize coding and non-coding RNAs
including microRNAs, siRNAs, lncRNAs, ceRNAs and cirRNAs.

Keywords: Big data • Multi-omics data • RNA

 Crosslingual Document Embedding
as Reduced-Rank Ridge Regression

Robert West

Tenure Track Assistant Professor, Data Science Laboratory, EPFL

robert.west@epfl.chs

Abstract. There has recently been much interest in extending vector-based word
representations to multiple languages, such that words can be compared across
languages. In this paper, we shift the focus from words to documents and
introduce a method for embedding documents written in any language into a
single, language-independent vector space. For training, our approach leverages
a multilingual corpus where the same concept is covered in multiple languages
(but not necessarily via exact translations), such as Wikipedia. Our method,
Cr5 (Crosslingual reduced-rank ridge regression), starts by training a
ridge-regression-based classifier that uses language-specific bag-of-word fea-
tures in order to predict the concept that a given document is about. We show
that, when constraining the learned weight matrix to be of low rank, it can be
factored to obtain the desired mappings from language-specific bags-of-words to
language-independent embeddings. As opposed to most prior methods, which
use pretrained monolingual word vectors, postprocess them to make them
crosslingual, and finally average word vectors to obtain document vectors, Cr5
is trained end-to-end and is thus natively crosslingual as well as document-level.
Moreover, since our algorithm uses the singular value decomposition as its core
operation, it is highly scalable. Experiments show that our method achieves
state-of-the-art performance on a crosslingual document retrieval task. Finally,
although not trained for embedding sentences and words, it also achieves
competitive performance on crosslingual sentence and word retrieval tasks.

Keywords: Crosslingual • Reduced-rank • Ridge regression •

Retrieval • Embeddings
 Contents

Automatic Text Generation in Macedonian Using Recurrent

Neural Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Ivona Milanova, Ksenija Sarvanoska, Viktor Srbinoski,
and Hristijan Gjoreski

Detection of Toy Soldiers Taken from a Bird’s Perspective Using

Convolutional Neural Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Saša Sambolek and Marina Ivašić-Kos

Prediction of Student Success Through Analysis of Moodle Logs:

Case Study. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Neslihan Ademi, Suzana Loshkovska, and Slobodan Kalajdziski

Multidimensional Sensor Data Prediction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Stefan Popov and Biljana Risteska Stojkoska

Five Years Later: How Effective Is the MAC Randomization in Practice?

The No-at-All Attack. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Ivan Vasilevski, Dobre Blazhevski, Veno Pachovski,
and Irena Stojmenovska

Improvement of the Binary Varshamov Bound . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Dejan Spasov

Electrical Energy Consumption Prediction Using Machine Learning . . . . . . . 72

Simon Stankoski, Ivana Kiprijanovska, Igor Ilievski,
Jovanovski Slobodan, and Hristijan Gjoreski

Diatom Ecological Modelling with Weighted Pattern Tree Algorithm

by Using Polygonal and Gaussian Membership Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Andreja Naumoski, Georgina Mirceva, and Kosta Mitreski

A Study of Different Models for Subreddit Recommendation

Based on User-Community Interaction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Andrej Janchevski and Sonja Gievska

Application of Hierarchical Bayesian Model in Ophtalmological Study . . . . . 109

Biljana Tojtovska, Panche Ribarski, and Antonela Ljubic

Friendship Paradox and Hashtag Embedding in the Instagram

Social Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
David Serafimov, Miroslav Mirchev, and Igor Mishkovski
xx Contents

An In-Depth Analysis of Personality Prediction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

Filip Despotovski and Sonja Gievska

Ski Injury Predictions with Explanations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148

Sandro Radovanović, Andrija Petrović, Boris Delibašić,
and Milija Suknović

Performance Evaluation of Word and Sentence Embeddings for Finance

Headlines Sentiment Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
Kostadin Mishev, Ana Gjorgjevikj, Riste Stojanov, Igor Mishkovski,
Irena Vodenska, Ljubomir Chitkushev, and Dimitar Trajanov

A Hybrid Model for Financial Portfolio Optimization Based on LS-SVM

and a Clustering Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Ivana P. Marković, Jelena Z. Stanković, Miloš B. Stojanović,
and Jovica M. Stanković

Protein Secondary Structure Graphs as Predictors for Protein Function. . . . . . 187

Frosina Stojanovska and Nevena Ackovska

Exploring the Attention Mechanism in Deep Models: A Case Study

on Sentiment Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
Martina Toshevska and Slobodan Kalajdziski

Image Augmentation with Neural Style Transfer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212

Borijan Georgievski

Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

 Automatic Text Generation in Macedonian
Using Recurrent Neural Networks

Ivona Milanova, Ksenija Sarvanoska, Viktor Srbinoski,

and Hristijan Gjoreski(&)

Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies,

University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje, Skopje, North Macedonia
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected]

Abstract. Neural text generation is the process of a training neural network to

generate a human understandable text (poem, story, article). Recurrent Neural
Networks and Long-Short Term Memory are powerful sequence models that are
suitable for this kind of task. In this paper, we have developed two types of
language models, one generating news articles and the other generating poems
in Macedonian language. We developed and tested several different model
architectures, among which we also tried transfer-learning model, since text
generation requires a lot of processing time. As evaluation metric we used
ROUGE-N metric (Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation), where
the generated text was tested against a reference text written by an expert. The
results showed that even though the generate text had flaws, it was human
understandable, and it was consistent throughout the sentences. To the best of
our knowledge this is a first attempt in automatic text generation (poems and
articles) in Macedonian language using Deep Learning.

Keywords: Text generation
Storytelling
Poems
RNN
Macedonian

language
NLP
Transfer learning
ROUGE-N

1 Introduction

As the presence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning has become more
prominent in the past couple of years and the fields have acquired significant popu-
larity, more and more tasks from the domain of Natural Language Processing are being
implemented. One such task is automatic text generation, which can be designed with
the help of deep neural networks, especially Recurrent Neural Networks [16]. Text
generation is the process of preparing text for developing a word-based language model
and designing and fitting a neural language model in such a way that it can predict the
likelihood of occurrence of a word based on the previous sequence of words used in the
source text. After that the learned language model is used to generate new text with
similar statistical properties as the source text.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

S. Gievska and G. Madjarov (Eds.): ICT Innovations 2019, CCIS 1110, pp. 1–12, 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33110-8_1
2 I. Milanova et al.

In our paper, we do an experimental evaluation of two types of word-based lan-

guage models in order to create a text generation system that will generate text in
Macedonian. The first model is generating paragraph of a news article and the other is
generating poems. For generating news articles, we also tried implementing transfer
learning, but as there are no pre-trained models on a dataset in Macedonian, we used a
model that was trained on a dataset in English, so the results were not satisfying. The
second model we created was used to generate poetry and was trained on a dataset
consisting of Macedonian folk poems. In order to measure how closely the generated
text resembles a human written text, we used a metric called ROUGE-N (Recall-
Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation), which is a set of metrics for evaluating
automatic generation of texts as well as machine translation. With this metric, we got
an F1 score of 65%.

2 Related Work

Recent years have brought a huge interest in language modeling tasks, a lot of them
being automatic text generation from a corpus of text, as well as visual captioning and
video summarization. The burst of deep learning and the massive development of
hardware infrastructure has made this task much more possible.
Some of the tasks in this field include automatic text generation based on intuitive
model and using heuristics to look for the elements of the text that were proposed by
human feedback [1, 2]. Another approach has leaned towards character-based text
generation using a Hessian-free optimization in order to overcome the difficulties
associated with training RNNs [3]. Text generation using independent short description
has also been one topic of research. The purpose of this paper has been to describe a
scene or event using independent descriptions. They have used both Statistical Machine
Translation and Deep Learning to present text generation in two different manners [4].
The other kind of text generation application has been designing text based interactive
narratives. Some of them have been using an evolutionary algorithm with an end-to-end
system that understands the components of the text generation pipeline stochastically [5]
and others have been using mining of crowd sourced information from the web [6, 7].
Many papers have also focused on visual text generation, image captioning and
video description. One recent approach to image captioning used CNN-LSTM struc-
tures [8, 9]. Sequence-to-sequence models have been used to caption video or movie
contents. They are using an approach where the first sequence encodes the video and
the second decodes the description [10, 11].
The idea behind document summarization has been used on video summarization
where instead of extracting key sentences, key frames or shots are selected [12].
Visual storytelling is the process of telling a coherent story about an image set.
Some of the works covering this include storyline graph modeling [13] and unsuper-
vised mining [14].
Another state-of-the-art approach includes using hierarchically structured rein-
forcement learning for generating coherent multi-sentence stories for the visual sto-
rytelling task [25].
 Automatic Text Generation in Macedonian 3

However, all of these approaches include text generation in English where the
amount of available data is enormous. Our paper focuses on creating stories in
Macedonian using data from Macedonian news portals and folk poetry as well as
exploration of different model architectures in order to get the best result, regarding
comprehensibility and execution time.

3 Dataset and Preprocessing

The first dataset that we used was gathered from online news portals and consisted of
around 2.5 million words. The data was collected with the help of a scraper program we
wrote in .NET Core using the C# programming language. The program loads the web
page from a given Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and then looks at the html tags.
When it finds a match for the html tags that we have given the program, it takes their
content and writes it to a file.
The second dataset consisted of a collection of Macedonian poetry written by
various Macedonian writers [17] and was made up of roughly 7 thousand words. The
data was not clean so we had to do a fair amount of data preprocessing.
The collected datasets are publically available at https://github.com/Ivona221/
MacedonianStoryTelling.
In order to prepare the data that we collected to be suitable to enter the algorithm
and to simplify the task of the algorithm when it starts learning, we had to do a
considerable amount of data cleaning. For this purpose, we created a pipeline in C#,
which in the end gave us a clean dataset to work on. The first step in the algorithm was
to remove any special characters from the text corpus including html tags that were
extracted from the websites along with the text, JavaScript functions and so on. We
also had to translate some of the symbols into text like dollar signs, degree signs and
mathematical operators in order to have the least amount of unique characters for the
algorithm to work with. The next step was to translate all the English words if there
existed a translation or remove the sentences where that was not the case. Next, we had
to separate all the punctuation signs from the words with an empty space in order for
the algorithm to consider them as independent words. The last and one of the most
important steps in this pipeline was creating a custom word tokenizer. All the existing
word tokenizers were making a split on an empty space. However, they do not take into
consideration the most common word collocations as well as words containing dash,
name initials and abbreviations. Our algorithm was taking these words as one. The
abbreviations were handled by using a look-up table of all the Macedonian abbrevia-
tions, as well as the most common collocations and the initials were handled by
searching for specific patterns in text like capital letter-point-capital letter (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Data preprocessing flow

4 I. Milanova et al.

4 Language Model Architecture

We have trained two types of models that work on the principle of predicting the next
word in a sequence, one for news generation and one for poem generation. The lan-
guage models used were statistical and predicted the probability of each word, given an
input sequence of text. For the news generation model, we created several different
variations, including a transfer learning approach (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Language model architecture

4.1 News Article Generation

The first approach for news generation was trained on news articles and used a
sequence of hundred words as input. It then generates one word based on that
sequence, meaning the word with the biggest probability of appearing next. In the next
time step it adds the generated word to the sequence of a hundred words and cuts out
the very first word, meaning that it once again makes a sequence with a length of one
hundred. It then feeds this new sequence to itself as input for the next time step and
continues doing so until it generates the preset amount of words.
We tried out multiple architectures and the best results were acquired from the
following architecture. The neural network was an LSTM (Long-Short Term Memory)
recurrent neural network with two LSTM layers and two dense layers and also, we tried
a variation with a dropout layer in order to see how that affects the performance. The
first LSTM layer consists of 100 hidden units and 100 timesteps and is configured to
give one hidden state output for each input time step for the single LSTM cell in the
 Automatic Text Generation in Macedonian 5

layer. The second layer we added was a Dropout layer with a dropout rate of 0.2. They
key idea behind adding a dropout layer is to prevent overfitting. This technique works
by randomly dropping units (along with their connections) from the neural network
during training. This prevents units from co-adapting too much [18]. The next layer is
also an LSTM layer with 100 hidden units. Then we added a Dense layer which is a
fully connected layer. A dense layer represents a matrix vector multiplication. The
values in the matrix are the trainable parameters, which get updated during back-
propagation. Assuming we have an n-dimensional input vector u (in our case 100-
dimensional input vector) presented with the formula:

u 2 Rn1 ð1Þ

We get an m-dimensional vector as output.

uT:W ¼ W 2 Rnm ð2Þ

A dense layer thus is used to change the dimensions of the vector. Mathematically
speaking, it applies a rotation, scaling, translation transform to your vector. The acti-
vation function meaning the element-wise function we applied on this layer was ReLU
(Rectified Linear Units). ReLU is an activation function introduced by [19]. In 2011, it
was demonstrated to improve training of deep neural networks. It works by thresh-
olding values at zero, i.e. f(x) = max (0, x). Simply put, it outputs zero when x < 0, and
conversely, it outputs a linear function when x  0. The last layer was also a Dense
layer, however with a different activation function, softmax. Softmax function calcu-
lates the probability distribution of the event over ‘n’ different events. In a general way
of saying, this function will calculate the probabilities of each target class over all
possible target classes. Later the calculated probabilities will be helpful for determining
the target class for the given inputs. As the loss function or the error function we
decided to use sparse categorical cross entropy. A loss function compares the predicted
label and true label and calculates the loss. With categorical cross entropy, the formula
to compute the loss is as follows:
XM
 y
c¼1 o;c
logðpo:c Þ ð3Þ

where,
• M – number of classes
• log – the natural log
• y – binary indicator (0 or 1) if class label c is the correct classification for obser-
vation o
• p – predicted probability observation o is of class c
The only difference between sparse categorical cross entropy and categorical cross
entropy is the format of true labels. When we have a single-label, multi-class classifi-
cation problem, the labels are mutually exclusive for each data, meaning each data entry
can only belong to one class. Then we can represent y_true using one-hot embeddings.
This saves memory when the label is sparse (the number of classes is very large).
6 I. Milanova et al.

As an optimizer we decided to use Adam optimizer (Adaptive Moment Estimation)

which is method that computes adaptive learning rates for each parameter. It is an
algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions.
In addition to storing an exponentially decaying average of past squared gradients vt
like Adadelta and RMSprop, Adam also keeps an exponentially decaying average of
past gradients mt, similar to momentum [20]. As an evaluation metric we used
accuracy.
For the second approach, we tried using a transfer learning method using the pre
trained model word2vec, which after each epoch generated as many sentences as we
gave it starting words on the beginning. Word2vec is a two-layer neural net that
processes text. On the pre-trained model, we added one LSTM layer and one Dense
layer. When using a pretrained model the embedding or the first layer in our model is
seeded with the word2vec word embedding weights. We trained this model on 100
epochs using a batch size of 128. However, as the pre-trained models are trained using
English text, this model did not give us satisfying results and that is the reason why this
models results will not be observed in this paper [22].

4.2 Poem Generation

This model has only slight differences from the first LSTM network we described. It is
an LSTM neural network as well, with two LSTM layers and one dense layer. Having
experimented with several different combinations of parameters we decided on the
following architecture. The first LSTM layer is made up of 150 units, then we have a
Dropout layer with a dropout rate of 0.2 so that we can reduce overfitting. The second
LSTM layer is made up of 100 units and it has another Dropout layer after it with a
dropout rate of 0.2. At last, we have a dense layer with a softmax activation function,
which picks out the most fitting class or rather word for the given input.
In this model we have decided on the loss function to be categorical cross entropy
and as an optimizer once again we use the Adam optimizer.
Another thing that we do differently with the second model is the usage of a
callback function EarlyStop [21]. A callback is a set of functions that are applied at
certain stages of the training procedure with the purpose of viewing the internal states
and statistics of the model during training. EarlyStop helps lessen the problem of how
long to train a network, since too little training could lead to under fitting to the train
and test sets while too much training leads to overfitting. We train the network on a
training set until the performance on a validation set starts to degrade. When the model
starts learning the statistical noise in the training set and stops generalizing, the gen-
eralizing error will increase and signal overfitting. With this approach during the
training after every epoch, we evaluate the model on a holdout validation dataset and if
this performance starts decaying then the training process is stopped. Because we are
certain that the network will stop at an appropriate point in time, we use a large number
of training epochs, more than normally required, so that the network is given an
opportunity to fit and then begin to over fit to the training set. In our case, we use 100
epochs.
Early stopping is probably the oldest and most widely used form of neural network
regularization.
 Automatic Text Generation in Macedonian 7

5 Text Generation

As mentioned before the first language model is fed a sequence of hundred words and
to make this possible, a few steps in the text preprocessing need to be taken. With the
tokenizer we first vectorize the data by turning the text into a sequence of integers, each
integer being the index of a token in a dictionary. We then construct a new file which
contains our input text but makes sure to have one hundred words per each line. In the
text generation process we randomly select one line from the previously created file for
the purpose of generating a new word. We then encode this line of text to integers using
the same tokenizer that used when training the model. The model then makes a pre-
diction of the next word and gives an index of the word with the highest probability
which we must look up in the Tokenizers mapping to retrieve the associated word. We
then append this new word to the seed text and repeat the process.
Considering that the sequence will eventually become too long we can truncate it to
the appropriate length after the input sequence has been encoded to integers.

6 Results

As we mentioned before we trained two different main models one for news article
generation and another one for poems.
The accuracy and loss for this kind of task are calculated on the train set since one
cannot measure the correctness of a story, therefore test set cannot be constructed. In
order to evaluate the result we compared it against a human produced equivalent of the
generated story.
Regarding the news generation model, we tried two variations, one with dropout
and one without dropout layers and tested how that affected the training accuracy and
loss. Both variations were trained on 50 epochs, using a batch size of 64. Comparing
the results, adding dropout layers improved accuracy and required shorter training time
(Figs. 3 and 4).
The poem generation model was trained on 100 epochs using a batch size of 64.
This model also included dropout layers (Figs. 5 and 6).
In order to evaluate how closely the generated text resembles a human written text,
we used ROUGE-N metric. It works by comparing an automatically produced text or
translation against a set of reference texts, which are human-produced. The recall (in
the context of ROUGE) refers to how much of the reference summary the system
summary is recovering or capturing. It can be computed as:
number of overlapping words
ð4Þ
total words in reference text

The precision measures how much of the system summary was in fact relevant or
needed. It is calculated as:

number of overlapping words

ð5Þ
total words in system generated text
8 I. Milanova et al.

Fig. 3. Train accuracy, comparison with and without dropout layer

Fig. 4. Train loss, comparison with and without dropout layer

Fig. 5. Train accuracy

 Automatic Text Generation in Macedonian 9

Fig. 6. Train loss.

Using the precision and recall, we can compute an F1 score with the following formula:

precision  recall
F1 ¼ 2 ð6Þ
precision þ recall

In our case we used ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-L.

• ROUGE-1 refers to overlap of unigrams between the system summary and refer-
ence summary
• ROUGE-2 refers to the overlap of bigrams between the system and reference
summaries
• ROUGE-L measures longest matching sequence of words using LCS (Longest
Common Subsequence). An advantage of using LCS is that it does not require
consecutive matches, but in-sequence matches that reflect sentence level word
order. Since it automatically includes longest in-sequence common n-grams, you do
not need a predefined n-gram length.
The reason one would use ROUGE-2 over or in conjunction with ROUGE-1, is to
also show the fluency of the texts or translations. The intuition is that if you follow the
word orderings of the reference summary more closely, then your summary is actually
more fluent [24].
The results from the ROUGE-N metric are shown in Tables 1 and 2:

Table 1. Results for the news generation model

Precision % Recall % F1-score %
ROUGE-1 66.67 76.92 71.43
ROUGE-2 35.85 57.58 44.19
ROUGE-L 66.67 76.92 70.71
10 I. Milanova et al.

Table 2. Results for the poem generation model

Precision % Recall % F1-score %
ROUGE-1 47.89 46.58 47.22
ROUGE-2 21.05 21.28 21.16
ROUGE-L 40.85 39.73 40.26

In the end we present a sample generated from each of the models:

• News generation model:
…ќe ce cлyчи и дa ce кopиcтaт нa кopиcницитe, a и дa ce cлyчи, ce нaoѓa вo
игpaтa, a и дa ce cлyчи, ce yштe нe ce cлyчyвa вo Maкeдoниja. Bo мoмeнтoв, вo
тeкoт нa дpжaвaтa ce вo пpaшaњe, ce вo пpaшaњe, нo нe и дa ce cлyчи, нo и зa
дa ce cлyчи, ce нaвeдyвa вo cooпштeниeтo нa CAД. Bo тeкoт нa дpжaвaтa ce вo
пpaшaњe, ce вo пpaшaњe, и дa ce cлyчи, ce yштe нe и кopyпциcки cкaндaли, ce
нaoѓa вo вoдaтa и…
• Poem generation model:
Bo зaлyлa вpeмe тaмo - oд пpaнгитe sвeкoт, opo нa зeмниoт
зeмниoт poдeн кaт, - тpeндaфил вo oдaja, плиcнaлa вpeвa. мaглa
нa oчивe мoja! жeтвa нajбoгaтa цвeтa, opo нa кaj, шap.
jaзик љyбoвтa нaшa дeлaтa в тиx. paкa jaзик пaднa, -
cтиcнaт cитe љyѓe - нoќ, yбaвa, кpacнa, дишe poj, пиcнaт,
нajдe нa тyѓинa - чeмep вo oдaja, шap. jaзик идeш
пpaг, poдeн кaт, и cкитник co здpжaнa тyѓи opo cин
cтиcнaлa - ПOEMA - нoк, yбaвa, кpacнa, дишe нa poбja,
шap. издpжa cитe љyѓe - нoќ, yбaвa, кpacнa, дишe poj,
пиcнaт, мajкa, кaт, - paзвивa opa, вo oнaa вeчep, в
oчи oчивe нocaм, y ceкoa дoбa. opo ќe cpeтнaм, нajдe.

7 Conclusion

In this paper we present a solution to the problem of automatic text generation in

Macedonian language. To the best of our knowledge this is a first attempt in automatic
text generation (poems and articles) in Macedonian language using Deep Learning.
We made attempts with two types of models, the first for news generation and the
second for poem generation. We also tried a transfer learning model using word-2-vec,
however the results were not satisfying. Excluding the network where we used transfer
learning, we got promising results. The first model was able to generate a text of a
hundred words, including punctuation marks. It used syntax rules correctly and put
punctuation marks where needed. Even though the generated output of the poem model
was nonsensical, it was still a clear indication that the network was able to learn the
style of the writers and compose a similar looking piece of work.
 Automatic Text Generation in Macedonian 11

There is, of course, a lot left to be desired and a lot more can be done to improve
upon our work, such as using a more cohesive dataset. Because our dataset was created
by putting different news articles together, there is no logical connection from one news
article to the other, which resulted in our model not having an output that made much
sense. The same point can apply to our dataset of poems where each poem was
standalone and there was no connection from one to the other. Another suggestion for
achieving better results is adding more layers and units to the networks, keeping in
mind that as the size of the neural network gets bigger, so do the hardware requirements
and training time needed [23].

Acknowledgment. We gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the

donation of the Titan Xp GPU used for this research.

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Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
Dave scowled and looked in the direction of Freddy's pointed hand.
He himself was also desperately tired, and he knew that to continue
on under the blazing sun would take more out of the two of them
than they could spare. Yet some inner force urged him to go on; to
keep Freddy moving forward. Why, he had not the slightest idea.
There was just some little voice within him that begged, pleaded,
and commanded him to keep on moving northward.
"They sure look inviting, Freddy," he said in a weary voice as he
eyed the huge clump of thick desert bush about a hundred yards
away. "But I've got a hunch that we should keep going."
"You and your hunches!" Freddy groaned. "What difference does half
an hour make, I'd like to know? Don't get the idea I'm being a
quitter, Dave. Nothing like that, really. Fact is, I'm trying to be
sensible. We're not trained for this sort of thing. If we bite off too
much at one time, we may pay dearly for our foolishness. Let's rest
a bit in the shade of those bushes, such as it is, and then have
another go at this blasted tramping."
"Okay," Dave finally relented. "I guess you're right at that. No sense
burning ourselves out this early in the game. Okay, we'll—Hold
everything, Freddy!"
As Dave shouted the last he put up both hands as a shield for his
aching eyes and peered hard toward the northwest.
"What is it, Dave?" Freddy cried eagerly. "What do you see?"
"I don't know," Freddy said slowly. "I'm not sure at all. Take a look in
the direction I'm pointing, Freddy. Call it a mile, or so, over there.
What do you make of that darkish streak over there? Say! That's a
ledge of rock, and covered with desert bushes, or I'm a Chinaman."
Freddy cupped his own hands to his eyes and strained them in that
direction.
"You're no Chinaman, Dave!" he cried presently. "That's rock sure
enough. Looks like a plateau split right down through the middle,
but you can't tell in this blasted sun."
"What do you say we make for it?" Dave said. "If it's what it looks
like, it'll give us more shade than those desert bushes over there.
And the sun is getting close to high noon in that darn sky up there.
In an hour or so your bushes won't be worth a darn. What do you
say? Shall we pull up the old socks and try to reach that place, huh?"
Freddy sighed and shrugged resignedly.
"Right you are," he murmured. "But I certainly wish I could learn to
say no now and then to your wild propositions. I'd certainly save a
lot of wear and tear on myself. Right-o, my little hero. Lead the way.
I'm right at your heels. Phew, if these poor blistered feet of mine
were only walking the flight deck of the Victory right now. How
wonderful, how delicious that would be!"
"Shut up!" Dave growled at him, and started plodding across the
seemingly endless expanse of sand. "You'll have me blubbering like a
kid in a minute."
A little under an hour later, the two boys had very definitely learned
something else about the Libyan desert, or any other desert, for that
matter. It was that, when you think some spot is a certain number of
miles away from you, you can just multiply your guess by at least
six, and the answer will still be less than the actual distance. The
glare of the sun, the shimmering heat waves rising up from the
sand, plus the flatness of the desert, fool you completely when it
comes to judging distances between two points.
"This is sure a long mile!" Freddy broke a five minute silence. "Or
have we been walking in circles? My compass says not, but maybe
the heat's got it, too."
"You and me both!" Dave groaned, and nodded his head. "It's been
looking only a mile away for the last twenty minutes. I'm sorry,
Freddy. I guess the desert is a tricky spot. How're you doing? We've
got to keep going now, you know. If we stop, we're done for."
Freddy wiped hot hands across his equally hot face. There was not
even the comfort of sweating, now. No sooner did a bead of sweat
ooze out on their bodies than the heat dried it up. From head to foot
every square inch of their skin felt like a piece of bacon in a frying
pan that a good housewife forgot all about before she left for the
movies. Even though they wore desert sun glasses, their eyes felt as
though they were exposed to the direct rays of the brassy ball of fire
in the sky. Each step was an effort, for their leg joints seemed
sapped of all body lubricants. And every now and then, to add to
their torture, a little flurry of wind would spring up as though by
magic and hurl a swirling cloud of hot stinging sand directly into
their faces. However, each new little discomfort that rose up to
torture them only served to feed fuel to the flame of resoluteness
and grim determination that burned within them.
"Am I right or wrong, pal?" Dave asked when Freddy did not speak.
"Your turn to shut up!" the English youth grunted. "I'm not quitting
until you do, my American friend. Matter of fact, though, I think the
blasted spot does seem a bit closer."
"Me, too," Dave cried, and increased the pace. "Come on, Freddy.
The old whirlwind finish. Yes, it is closer. I'd say only about—"
"Don't say it!" Freddy begged. "Let's stop guessing and not break
our hearts. Let's just walk. What's the matter? Can't you go faster
than that?"
Dave grinned happily as the English youth increased his stride and
went sailing into the lead. Just like old Freddy Farmer. Groans and
gripes a bit, and then before you know it he's making you look like
the one who's groaning and griping.
"Tough guy, huh?" Dave chuckled, and drew up on a level with
Freddy's shoulder. "Maybe you want to sprint the rest of the way?
Well, skip it, pal. This pace is fast enough for me. Boy! Only a couple
of minutes more. And look, Freddy! It's like a regular cliff. Two cliffs,
with a valley in between. Gosh! What do you know! A canyon cut
into this darn flat desert."
"Think again, Dave," Freddy said with a smile. "Better still, turn
around and take a look. I did. We've really been walking uphill, to
the top of a plateau formation of ground. Those cliffs are the two
sides of a crack that time has made in the plateau formation of
ground. Just as unexplainable as why you suddenly come across an
oasis with water and palm trees in the middle of a barren desert."
At Freddy's suggestion Dave turned around and looked back in the
direction whence they had come. It was then he realized the truth of
the English youth's words. Instead of standing on a flat, almost
shapeless desert, they were actually standing near the crest of a
long sloping hill. True, the slope was marked by countless sand
dunes kicked up by the desert winds, but it was still easy to see that
they were a good couple of hundred feet higher than they had been
when they'd started out. To make sure it all wasn't just a trick his
eyes and the desert sun were playing on him, he turned front again
and looked at the brownish slash that marked the split in the plateau
and formed the escarpment. The brownish slash in the desert was
the highest piece of ground before his eyes. Beyond, he could see
only Libyan sky and the brassy glare of the sun. That was so
because he was actually looking uphill.
"Well, what do you know!" he exclaimed, and grinned at Freddy. "No
wonder my legs feel ready to drop off. We've been plowing uphill
and didn't know it."
"The desert is full of tricks," the English youth said with a shrug.
"And all of them mean ones, too. Well, let's get on with it. Won't be
long now."
It turned out to be longer than that, however. Another twenty
minutes passed by into time history before they reached the top of
the escarpment and stood looking down its side. The canyon was
about seventy-five yards long, perhaps thirty-five feet deep, and a
hundred feet wide at the top. The two sides were formed of jagged
rock with treacherous spots of crumpling sand-stone here and there.
There was plenty of brush and shrubbery about, however, and it was
thick enough to cast patches of shade regardless of the burning rays
of the sun. One point struck them at once as being an ideal spot
where they could relax and rest until the sun was deep in the west,
and the cooling winds of night were beginning to steal across the
desert. It was to their left and about halfway down. A shelf of rock
jutted outward a bit. As a matter of fact, it was really two shelves of
rock that jutted out. The bottom one served as a platform upon
which to rest. And the top shelf, rimmed with thick desert bush,
served as a roof, a sort of canopy for the shelf lower down.
Fortunately the side of the escarpment was not too steep to make it
impossible for them to reach the lower shelf.
"That's us, Freddy!" Dave exclaimed, and pointed to it. "We'll get
down there and be cliff dwellers until it's cool enough to start getting
underway again. I vote that we get down there pronto, and have a
bit to eat and a little water. That's our biggest danger—water. We
must save every drop we can. Who knows when—"
Dave stopped short, and a horrified look leaped into his eyes. He
pointed his finger at Freddy and worked his mouth, but no words
came from his lips. The English youth stared at him and impulsively
recoiled a step in surprise and amazement.
"Dave, what's the matter?" he gasped out. "Dave! Come out of it!
What in the world?"
Dave gulped and shook his head as though to snap himself out of
his stunned trance.
"Your water bottle, Freddy!" he blurted out. "Look! It's leaking! The
canvas cover is dripping wet at the bottom. When did you do that?"
The English youth didn't bother to reply. He reached down and took
hold of the canvas-covered water canteen slung at his belt. The
bottom half was dripping wet, though the burning rays of the sun
were doing their best to drink up every drop of moisture. As Freddy
tilted it bottom side up, both boys saw the tiny slash in the canvas
covering and the even smaller crack in the metal underneath.
"I can tell by the weight," Freddy said in a tight, strained voice.
"There's no more than a cupful left. Talk about luck! Blast it!"
Dave nodded and said nothing. There was no mystery as to how the
canvas had been slashed and the metal canteen split so that the
precious water had seeped out a drop at a time as Freddy plodded
across the sands. It was obvious that a made-in-Germany bullet, or
a made-in-Italy bullet had done the work. A stray bullet, a bullet in a
thousand during that air scrap had cut through into the Skua's
cockpit and nicked the bottom of Freddy's water canteen. It had
creased the metal, but not enough to leave an opening through
which the water could escape. No, it hadn't cut all the way through,
but later the bumping of the canteen against Freddy's leg as he
trudged across the sand had caused the paper thin layer of metal
left to part and crack and allow the water to seep through.
"Blast the Jerry or Muzzy gunner who did that!" Freddy grated
through clenched teeth.
"I'm hoping it was one of them we got!" Dave grunted. "Well, my
water canteen's still okay. We'll just have to go extra easy with the
drinking. It's not your fault, anyway. Let's forget it and get down
there. I'm beginning to feel more like a grease spot every second.
We'll split what's in your canteen for our first drink, and then take
turns at mine, later. Come on. And hold that canteen bottom side up
as you climb down."
"Have no fear of that!" the English youth said grimly. "It would have
to be my water canteen, wouldn't it! It couldn't be my leg, or an
arm, or maybe my neck."
Dave laughed and slapped him on the back.
"Chin and thumbs up, pal!" he cried. "Forget it! We'll just make
believe we're a couple of camels. They go for days without water,
you know."
"Oh, quite!" Freddy grunted. "But who wants to be a blinking camel?
However, right you are. Let's get out of this sun, anyway."
Ten minutes later the two boys had safely reached the shelter of the
lower ledge of rock. It wasn't cool and comfortable, by any manner
of means. As a matter of fact, it was something like squatting down
on the top of a stove that hasn't been out for very long. Regardless
of that, however, it was like an icebox compared to the direct rays of
the blistering sun above, and the blistering heat of the shifting sands
beneath their feet.
"Boy, oh boy!" Dave sighed wearily. "The first thing I'm going to do
is get off these shoes. What I wouldn't give for the Kind Fairy to
wave her magic wand and create a nice, cool babbling brook to dip
these dogs in. Gosh! I—"
"Hold still, Dave!" Freddy suddenly cried. "Hold still! Don't move a
muscle!"
Dave, in the act of putting his hands in back of him to serve as a
brace while he arched his body backwards, froze motionless and look
wild-eyed at Freddy.
"What's the matter?" he asked in a hoarse whisper.
Freddy didn't reply. He simply shook his head, and picked up one of
his shoes he had taken off. He gripped it by the toe and leaned
slowly around in back of Dave. Then in a sudden movement he
cracked the heel of the shoe down on the rock with a resounding
smack.
"There!" he breathed, straightening up. "That takes care of that little
beggar."
"Hey, what gives, anyway?" Dave gulped and frowned. "You playing
games or something?"
"Hardly!" Freddy said dryly. "I was simply saving you a lot of pain,
and perhaps something worse than that. Take a look."
Dave twisted around, half expecting to see a squad of Nazi soldiers
crouching behind him. What he really saw was the mashed body of a
three-inch long lizzard-like creature. It looked like a cross between a
lizzard and a grasshopper, and there was a suggestion of a lobster
about it, too. The body was long and tapering, like that of a lizzard.
At the head two tiny horns with lobster-like claws at the end stuck
out in front. And there were four long legs on either side of the
body.
"Gosh, what's that?" he asked. "Some kind of a desert bug?"
"The worst you can meet in the desert," Freddy replied. "It's a
scorpion. See that barbed point that forms the end of his tail? That's
his stinger. You can see it's sort of hook shaped. Well, he strikes with
it by whipping it up over his back. Five minutes after a scorpion
stings you, you're in horrible pain, and your whole body begins to
swell up. It can easily be fatal unless you get medical attention at
once. You were about to put your hand right down on top of it, my
friend."
Dave's face paled, and he shuddered violently.
"Gee!" he breathed in an awed tone. "Gee whiz! Remind me to
remember you in my will, Freddy. Gosh! The enemy is just a small
part of what you have to fight in desert warfare, I'll say. Boy, oh boy,
Freddy, you're my pal for life, and no fooling. Wow."
"I was just lucky enough to spot it in time," Freddy said. Then,
getting to his feet, "I think, though, we'd better search this place to
see if it has any brothers or sister hanging around. In case I do fall
asleep, I'd hate to wake up with one of the beggars sitting on my
nose."
"Sleep?" echoed Dave, as they started searching the shelf of rock,
and gripped a shoe ready for action. "I won't do any sleeping. After
that close call I'll have the jitters for a week."
Freddy just grinned and said nothing. The search took about fifteen
minutes, but no brother or sister scorpions were found lurking about
ready to avenge a death in the family. So presently they relaxed
again, ate some of their emergency rations, and each drank half of
the water left in Freddy's bullet-creased canteen.
"Well, that sure helped," Dave said, leaning back against the shelf
wall. "I'm beginning to feel like a new man already. Now, if that sun
will only slide into high gear and get across that sky, everything will
be jake."
"Don't hurry the sun," Freddy murmured, and stretched out. "I'm
perfectly comfortable right here. It can take as long as it likes. But
it's a bit of a mess, isn't it, Dave? We sure let the Victory down."
"Yeah," Dave grunted, and felt his eyelids growing strangely heavy.
"We sure turned out to be just a couple of foul balls. But we're not
licked yet. We've got our strength, something to eat, and some
water. Maybe when it gets a bit—gets a bit—a bit cooler—"
 CHAPTER NINE
Wings From Tripoli

A faint buzzing sound penetrating Dave's ears pried his eyelids open.
For a second or two he stared bewildered at Freddy Farmer's
motionless body a couple of feet from him, at the shelf of rock upon
which he found himself, and out across a short rocky valley to a wall
of jagged rock studded with sun-scorched brush on the other side.
Then, like a door in his brain being opened, memory rushed back.
Sure, of course! He had dropped off to sleep in spite of his jitters
from the deadly scorpion episode. And a funny buzzing sound had
awakened him.
He remained perfectly still for another moment, his ears strained and
listening intently to the buzzing sound. At the end of that moment
he realized what it was. Not a bee, or a hornet, or anything like that.
The sound came from the engine of an airplane high overhead. He
got to his feet and walked over to the edge of the rock shelf where
he could stare up into the sky. It was then he realized that he hadn't
had any cat-nap. The sun was well down toward the western lip of
the desert and the sky was slowly being painted with streaks of gold,
and red, and purple blue. An impulsive glance at his watch showed
that his little refresher nap had lasted a good six hours and some
odd minutes.
Because of the altitude of the plane, and the countless ever
changing streaks of color in the sky, it was some time before he
could pick it out. When he did, there was no way of telling whether
it was friend or foe up there. The plane was just a dot moving swiftly
toward the west. One thing was certain. It wasn't a Nazi plane. He
could tell that from the steady unthrobbing note of the engine. It
was either Italian or British. The direction of the plane's flight, the
fact that he could tell it was a small single-engined job, and the fact
that night was not very far away, gave him the belief that it must be
Italian. A moment later the engine's note died off a little, and he saw
the dot start sliding downward.
"What's that, Dave? Company?"
Dave looked around at the sound of Freddy's voice. The English
youth was digging groggy sleep out of his eyes and getting slowly to
his feet. He came over to the edge of the rock shelf, shielded his
eyes with his hands and squinted up into the sky.
"An Italian, or one of ours," he said after a moment's study. "I doubt
it's one of ours, though. I say, look! The beggar is banking around
and coming back this way. Good grief, do you suppose he's spotted
us?"
"From that altitude?" Dave grunted, and watched the dot swing
down lower and curve around in their direction. "Not a chance. But
he's heading back here, sure enough. There! He's flattened out of
his glide. And there's his engine hitting on all six again."
It was true. Even as the two boys watched, the still very indistinct
plane seemed to level off, and the sound of its engine increased.
Impulsively they both backed up a couple of steps and stood there
silently watching the plane come closer and closer. Presently it was
close enough to take on definite shape and outline. It was an Italian
Fiat C.R. 42 fighter plane powered by a Fiat radial engine; a biplane
type that had been used extensively by Mussolini's air force since the
very start of the African campaign. They had proved no match,
however, for even the slowest planes General Wavell used, and little
by little it had become harder and harder to find one in the air. Their
pilots had no stomach to stray close to R.A.F. controlled air.
The two boys had been acquainted with the facts about the Fiat C.R.
42, and so their interest and wonder increased as soon as they
noted its type.
"Now what would that lad be doing way out here?" Freddy
murmured aloud. "Of course he isn't near where our flying chaps
might possibly be, but the fact the blighter's actually alone certainly
looks queer."
"Yeah, if what they told us about those jobs is true," Dave grunted,
and scowled at the oncoming plane. "Hey, I wonder! Could that bird
be on reconnaissance patrol, or even contact patrol? Look at the way
he's zigzagging. He's even losing some altitude. Freddy, that guy's
looking for something as sure as you're a foot high!"
"Maybe the crashes of the four planes we shot down," Freddy
suggested. "Perhaps that ship was sent out to confirm the results of
the scrap, to drop food and water to any of those Nazi or Italian lads
who may have survived the crashes."
"Could be," Dave nodded, and continued to scowl at the plane. "But
they sure gave him the wrong location bearings. He's 'way too far
north. No, I think that idea is out, Freddy. That bird's on the look-see
for something else. He's—Hey! See there? He's found what he was
hunting for. Look! He's veered to the north a bit and he's going
down in a long power dive."
Dave gave a final look at the plane, then looked across the desert
canyon toward the other side. The opposite wall was too high for
him to see over it and the stretch of desert beyond. From the glide
angle and direction of the Italian plane, he knew that it was going to
pass low over some point well beyond the northern slope of the
desert plateau. He half turned and touched Freddy on the arm.
"He's got business some place over there where we can't see," he
said. "Get on your shoes, and collect your stuff. We're going to the
other side of this plateau crack and see what the heck is what."
"You took the words right out of my mouth," Freddy said, and
started putting on his shoes.
Going down that side of the escarpment, crossing the valley floor
and scrambling up the other side was no easy task. Bush thorns
caught at their uniforms, and jagged points of rock inflicted more
than a couple of bruises on their bodies. They sacrificed body safety
for speed, however, and presently they were flat on their stomachs
on the top of the other escarpment and peering ahead at the dune-
humped stretches of sun-painted sand.
The Italian plane was now down very low. It wasn't more than three
or four hundred feet above the surface of the sand. It was a good
five miles away from them, however—much, much too far for them
to make out the pilot seated in the pit. Breathlessly they watched
the plane nose down even lower. Then suddenly Dave let out a
startled cry and nudged Freddy with his elbow.
"Look!" he cried. "He's dumped something over the side. Looked like
some kind of a box to me. Did you see it?"
"I saw it," Freddy replied in a voice reverberating with excitement.
"And I see something else, too, to the left of where that box-shaped
thing appeared to hit the ground. Look hard, Dave. See those—
those little humps? They look like little sand dunes, but I'll bet
anything they're not."
"No bet!" Dave breathed after a long moment of silence. "Freddy,
there's something very screwy going on. Those humps are little
shacks, or huts. So help me, that's a village over there. Yet darned if
I can spot a single palm tree."
"And there's somebody there!" Freddy whispered tensely. "There
must be, or that plane's pilot wouldn't be dumping anything over the
side. Look! He's climbing now, and heading back where he came
from. Dave, we're the luckiest two chaps in all Libya right now."
"Maybe," Dave admitted grudgingly. Then, giving him a keen look,
"What makes you say it?"
Freddy didn't answer at once. He chewed on his lower lip and kept
his eyes fixed on the distant scene.
"Do you think you could spot those humps from say five or ten
thousand feet in the air?" he suddenly asked.
"Five or ten thousand?" Dave echoed with a laugh. "Unless I knew
they were there, like that Italian bird must have known, I would
probably sail right over them at five hundred feet, and not know the
difference."
"Right!" Freddy replied instantly. "Now, answer me this one. Why
would an Italian pilot be dumping something overboard on a spot
you could miss at even five hundred feet, eh?"
"I give up," Dave said after a moment's thought. "What is this,
anyway? Some kind of a game you've just thought up?"
"Use that stuff in your noggin you call brains!" Freddy said sharply.
"Use it, Dave! Think hard. I may be completely off my base, but I
think I now know why we didn't spot anything of interest during our
patrol. Certain parties took care so that neither we nor anybody else
should spot anything. Now, does that give you a little idea?"
"For cat's sake, you're talking in riddles!" Dave growled. "How do
you know why we didn't—"
Dave suddenly cut himself short and clapped a hand to his forehead.
"Well, fry me for an oyster!" he breathed fiercely. "Yeah, I think I
begin to see the light. That, Freddy, is an enemy desert outpost, and
so perfectly camouflaged that you'd never spot it from the air, unless
you knew exactly where it was located."
"Absolutely correct," Freddy said. "You may go to the head of the
class, my little man. But wait a minute. One more question."
"Boy, how you wear a guy down!" Dave said, and sighed. "Okay,
dear teacher, shoot."
Freddy nodded his head toward the odd-looking cluster of humps in
the desert.
"Why do you suppose that plane didn't land?" he asked.
Dave gave him a startled glance and shook his head at the same
time.
"I give up," he said. "I haven't the faintest idea. But you always were
the military expert on this team, so tell me. Why?"
"It's just a guess, of course," the English youth said, after a long
pause. "Maybe a crazy one, too. Somehow, though, I have the
feeling that the Nazis or the Italians over there are taking no
chances on being spotted by any possible British plane out on long
distance reconnaissance. Now, if one of our ships were way up there
in the sky somewhere, he wouldn't give a thought to seeing an
Italian plane swoop down low like that chap we just saw. However,
he would prick up his ears if he saw the plane land. He'd at least get
curious enough to slide down himself to see if it was only a forced
landing. Therefore I think that Italian pilot had orders not to land; to
drop whatever he had to deliver, and not deliver it by hand. Are you
getting a little bit of what I mean, now?"
Dave nodded and stared intently at his English pal. Count on good
old Freddy Farmer to dig down and ferret around for the true
meaning of everything that appeared strange and mysterious. He
had a mind like a steel trap, and more than once his mental ferreting
around ahead of time had helped them out of a tight corner later.
"Yes, I'm beginning to catch on," Dave said presently. "In fact, I'm
getting a couple of ideas of my own. I don't know what that Italian
pilot dropped, but it certainly wasn't food, and it wasn't ammunition.
The box, or whatever it was, wasn't big enough."
"And so?" Freddy echoed as Dave hesitated and scowled off into
space.
"And so maybe that's no ordinary desert outpost," Dave finally said.
"Maybe there are important people there—I mean, important military
people. Do you know something, Freddy?"
"'Way ahead of you, Dave, as you would say," Freddy interrupted
with a grin. "Important military people means staff headquarters.
Yes, we're probably crazy, Dave. Both of us may be completely out
of our heads, but I'll bet you the Bank of England against your oldest
pair of flying boots that that spot over there is some kind of field
headquarters for enemy troops in this area of the desert."
"Enemy troops in this area?" Dave echoed, and gave a wave of his
hand that included the surrounding desert. "Troops where? You
mean the force that's right over there where we're looking, don't
you?"
Freddy shook his head and gave a stubborn tilt to his chin.
"No, I don't," he said. "I mean that that's the headquarters base for
a lot of spots in this section just like it, only we haven't seen them.
And, by good luck, we didn't stumble into them since leaving our
burned up Skua."
Dave started to nod, then checked himself and gave Freddy a
perplexed look.
"Don't look right now," he said, "but you're getting me all balled up,
my friend. Just what are you driving at, anyway? Come clean with
the works; then maybe I'll argue with you."
"It's quite simple," the English youth said with a faint smile. "You
just mix a little imagination with what facts you know, and there you
are."
"Maybe you are, but I'm not!" Dave grunted. "Skip the imagination
part and just give me the facts."
"Right you are," Freddy said, and started counting off the fingers of
one hand. "First, British Middle East High Command knows that
troops, planes, and supplies, and so forth, have been transported
across the Mediterranean to Tripoli by air and water. Two, High
Command knows that it is mostly Nazi stuff. Three, it is obvious that
preparations are being made for a drive to beat back Wavell's forces.
Four, it is equally obvious that the enemy knows that Wavell's forces
are not very strong. As Group Captain Spencer said, everything that
could be spared was yanked away and sent down south to hand the
Italians a quick mop-up knockout blow in Ethiopia. Five, the one
important thing in desert warfare is surprise—surprise attack. Six, if
the Axis forces simply started along the main coast road from Tripoli
and around the southern end of the Gulf of Sidra, Wavell's outposts,
to say nothing of his planes, would spot them long before they were
within attacking range, and there would be no surprise at all. You
want me to continue?"
"Sure, stay in there and pitch," Dave nodded with a grin. "I know
you've got something, kid, and I want to hear it all. I really mean
that."
"Very well, then," Freddy said, and started counting his fingers over
again. "Seven, to move a huge attacking army down toward the
south and back up toward the north would be much too exhausting
for the troops, and such an army would be spotted by Wavell's pilots
days ahead of time. R.A.F. bombers would then sail out and bomb
the stuffing out of the advancing armies."
"Just a minute," Dave cut in. "They wouldn't be dumb enough not to
have air protection of their own."
"Correct," Freddy said, and made a little gesture with one hand. "But
where would that air protection base itself in this part of the desert?
Certainly not with the armies as they moved forward a few miles
each day. At Tripoli? And keep flying way out here to guard troops
and tanks and other motorized equipment on the move? Not a bit of
it, Dave. They might just as well send General Wavell a letter telling
him they were creeping up for a surprise attack! They'd—"
"Hold it, hold it!" Dave suddenly broke in excitedly. "You gave me the
tip just now. Creeping up. That's it! Creeping up in small units until
they get close enough to strike at some point in Wavell's defenses in
a main body. Sure, sure, my imagination's beginning to work too!
Small units that can camouflage themselves perfectly so as not to be
seen by any of our planes that might pass over. And then when
they're all close enough, and all set, the bombers and stuff can wing
along the coast from Tripoli and take their part in the attack. Gosh,
Freddy, I'll bet that you've hit the old nail right smack on the head.
We've stumbled onto the hottest thing in Libya. And I don't mean
the sun or the sand, either!"
"I'm sure of it!" Freddy said, and beamed happily. "And here's
something else. The small units move only during the night. And
before dawn they dig in and camouflage themselves so they won't
be seen during the day."
"Yeah, like a tribe of Indians sneaking up on a frontier village in the
old days back in the States," Dave breathed. "And—"
"Dave, that's exactly the idea!" Freddy suddenly cried, and gripped
him by the arm. "Take a good look, now! I see things moving over
there. Am I right, or are my eyes just going haywire?"
The setting sun was now quite low, and the long shafts of orange
gold light that stretched across the desert made it extremely difficult
to distinguish individual objects, or even movement, at any distance
over a mile. The rays of the setting sun cutting through the
shimmering waves of heat rising up off the hot sand made
everything seem to blend into one huge picture of shadows and
various shades of color. After a few moments of intense scrutiny,
however, Dave was ready to agree with Freddy's belief.
Unquestionably things were moving over there. Many things, in fact,
and of all shapes and sizes. He continued to stare hard, and then
suddenly the faint echo of engines coming to life drifted down the
desert wind. He felt, rather than saw, Freddy stiffen at his side. And
a moment later the English youth's excited voice came to his ears.
"Dave! Dave, do you hear that? Those are tank engines, and
armored car engines! See? They're starting to take off the
camouflage coverings. They're getting ready to move, Dave, just as
soon as it gets dark."
"Right!" Dave echoed. "And that means us. We're going to get on
the move, too."
"What do you mean?" Freddy asked without turning his head.
"We're going to get close for a good look," Dave replied, and rose up
onto his hands and knees. "I don't think they'll pull out until it's
actually dark. By then we can sneak up close to them and see what's
what. You know, Freddy, I've a hunch there are the answers to a lot
of questions over there. And if we get up close enough, maybe we
can find out a few of those answers. Anyway, we can't stick here
forever."
"No, of course we can't," the English youth agreed, and got up onto
his feet. "Our bad luck seems to have turned into good luck, so we'd
better make the most of it. Come on. Wait, let's see."
Freddy pulled out his compass and held it steady in one hand. He
peered at it intently for a moment.
"Right-o," he said presently. "If we hold a course fourteen points
east of north we'll be traveling a straight line toward that spot. As
soon as we get down off this escarpment we won't be able to see
the spot all the time. But this compass will take care of that. Right-o.
Let's get started."
"Hey, hold everything!" Dave cried, and held Freddy back. "A fine
Indian scout, you are! And have you forgotten everything you
learned about aerial combat, huh?"
Freddy stared at him in wide-eyed amazement.
"What in the world is eating you, Dave?" he gasped. "Aerial
combat?"
"Sure," Dave said with a nod. "What's the best way to sneak up on
an enemy ship for a surprise attack?"
"Come down on him with the sun at your back, so it's extra hard for
him to see you," Freddy replied promptly. "So what of it?"
"Plenty," Dave said, and pointed to the west. "The same idea holds
good right here. We'll circle around to the west for a spell, and then
creep up on them with the setting sun at our backs. That way we
can get much closer. Less chance of anybody spotting us. Right?"
Freddy grinned a bit sheepishly and nodded.
"The young man is right," he said. "He's absolutely correct. My
apologies and congratulations, sir."
"Oh, think nothing of it, my dear fellow," Dave said with a
magnanimous gesture. "Think nothing of it at all."
"As Dave Dawson would say," Freddy grunted as they started down
the escarpment, "nuts to you!"
 CHAPTER TEN
Courage Against Fate

By the time the sun was a ball of flaming color that rested lightly on
the western lip of the world, the two youths had detoured around to
a point less than half a mile from the spot where they had seen
mysterious activity. Now, though, it was no longer a mystery. Lying
side by side on the western side of a rolling sand dune, they peered
over its crest at a scene that caused their hearts to pound in wild
excitement and the blood to surge through their veins.
There, less than half a mile away, were two enemy motorized units
preparing to break camp and continue their obvious march
northward under the cover of the Libyan night. There were at least
twenty tanks of the small, light armored German type. There were
also as many troop truck transports, and four or five armored cars.
One good look at those armored cars confirmed their earlier beliefs.
High ranking officers of the Axis forces were in charge of those
attack units, and it was quite evident that the mobile force served as
headquarters for other units scattered about the desert area.
If either of them held any doubts as to the truth of that, such doubts
were dispelled some ten minutes later. As though by magic, a plane
seemed to rise up out of the camp. It was a German Messerschmitt
109 single seater, and no sooner had it cleared the sand than it
wheeled toward the northwest and streaked away with the speed of
a bullet. It was not the plane itself that confirmed their belief,
however. It was the German Staff markings they saw painted on the
fuselage of the fleet plane as it raced by.
"Boy!" Dave breathed, and grinned at Freddy. "Talk about finding the
old needle in a haystack! Lady Luck sure is giving us the glad smile."
"Sure, whatever that means," Freddy commented with a frown. "You
and your American slang!"
Dave laughed.
"Slang, my eye," he chuckled. "I simply mean that out of all the
enemy units that are probably hiding out here on the desert, we
spot the headquarters unit right off the bat. See? Like finding a
needle in a haystack first time."
"That's headquarters over there, right enough," Freddy murmured.
"Ten to one that Messerschmitt is winging back to Tripoli to inform
them of the new positions they will take up before dawn."
"And ten to one that ship will be back and nicely camouflaged with
the rest of the stuff by dawn, too," Dave grunted. "Much as the
Germans and the Mussies give me a pain in the neck, I have to hand
it to them for being tops when it comes to camouflaging technique.
You could fly over this desert until you were blue in the face and not
even spot a thing that didn't look like just ordinary desert."
"They certainly know how," Freddy admitted grudgingly. "But let's
grant them that and get our heads to working on more important
things right now. In an hour at the most they'll be under way. What
shall we do? Tag along behind them—or what?"
Dave scooped up a handful of sand and let it slowly trickle between
his fingers as he silently considered the question.
"I think that idea's out, Freddy," he said after a while. "For one
thing, tanks and armored cars don't travel at a snail's pace, not on a
flat desert and in the middle of the night. Another thing, even if we
did manage to keep up with them somehow, we'd be dead on our
feet by dawn. And we'd be faced with the possibility of spending all
tomorrow in the sun. There might not be any spot where there was
shade."
"I know," Freddy murmured in a worried voice. "And tough as we
think we are, that would be too much for us."
"Check," Dave said. "But supposing we could take it somehow. So
what? So we wouldn't be any better off than we are right now. What
we've got to do is get into that camp and find out things, then get
out and get word to the British High Command what the Germans
and Italians are up to. That's the problem—two problems, they really
are."
"And mighty ticklish ones, too," Freddy said with a sudden show of
gloomy depression. "What do you think of the idea of trying to sneak
in there and have a quick look around? We might find out
something."
"And we might find a couple of Mauser rifle bullets heading our way,
too!" Dave said with a shake of his head. "If they were camped
there for keeps that might be a worthwhile bet. But they're getting
ready to move, and they'd only need one look at our uniforms to
know darned well we didn't belong. Even the dumbest Italian over
there would figure that out."
"But after it gets dark, couldn't we—" Freddy began, and then
stopped himself with a negative shake of his head. "No, I guess
not."
"Nix is right," Dave said. "After it gets dark they'll all be in their
tanks and trucks and armored cars, and on their way. Nope, even
pulling the old hitch-hiking stunt wouldn't get us a thing."
Freddy Farmer started to speak, then seemed to change his mind.
He closed his mouth and scowled unhappily at the fingers of his two
hands digging in the sand. Dave watched him for a moment, then
reached over and touched him on the shoulder.
"There is a way, if you're game, Freddy," he said softly.
"I'm jolly well game for anything!" the English youth came right
back. "You know that, Dave. What's your plan?"
"We could make them take us prisoners," Dave said.
Freddy's jaw dropped in utter amazement, and his eyes bulged out
like marbles on long sticks.
"Make them take us prisoners?" he choked out. "Give up? Are you
mad, Dave?"
"No, just maybe a little screwy," Dave replied. "Pin back your ears
for a couple of seconds, and listen. If we try to sneak up on them,
we run the risk of being shot first, and questioned afterwards. That
wouldn't do either of us any good. If we try to tag along behind
them as they move northward, who knows what kind of trouble we
might run into. So what's left? To go along with them—as their
guests. See what I mean?"
"I don't even begin to see," Freddy replied with a befuddled groan.
"Frankly, I don't fancy those chaps over there are in the mood to
have guests. In fact, I doubt very much they would consider us as
guests."
"Oh, I just said 'guests' for the heck of it!" Dave snorted. "Look!
Here's exactly what I mean. You and I will be a couple of British
infantry officers hopelessly lost in the desert. And, boy, that's
doggone close to the truth, and how! Anyway, we have been
wandering around for we don't know how long. We've lost track of
time, see? Maybe the sun has got us a bit. We have just a few drops
of water left in one canteen, see? Our uniforms are torn, and all our
food has gone. We simply stumble right into that camp over there
while it is still light, and they can see us and not take pot shots.
Beginning to catch on?"
The light of hope had come back into Freddy Farmer's eyes, but he
was still a bit befuddled.
"I think so," he said. "You mean, bury our stuff here, and tear our
uniforms, and all that sort of thing?"
"Right on the button!" Dave nodded eagerly. "We happened to see
their camp. When we get close enough we'll start yelling to attract
their attention. We'll—Hold it! I've got an even brighter idea!"
"What is it?" Freddy demanded. "I'm sure it can't be any crazier than
the one you've already told me."
Dave reached over and gave him a playful punch on the shoulder.
"It's a pip!" he cried. "We think we've finally found a small
detachment of our own forces, see? We don't realize they're the
enemy until they've captured us. That will start them spinning."
"Spinning?" Freddy echoed.
"Sure!" Dave nodded. "It'll start them playing guessing games with
themselves. They'll start wondering if they really are alone out here,
as they thought they were. They'll wonder just where we came
from. They'll wonder plenty about us stumbling onto their camp,
Freddy. And you and I can fill them with a lot of hooey that will
make them wonder all the more. No fooling, Freddy, it's a perfect
set-up."
"If all goes well," Freddy said as the cautious side of him came to
the fore for a moment. "But, after all, this wouldn't be the first time
we'd taken a long chance."
"That's the boy, Freddy!" Dave cried, and patted his shoulder. "That's
the old fighting spirit. Okay, it's a deal, huh?"
"You and your wild ideas!" The English youth sighed, then smiled
faintly. "They'll probably end up putting me in front of a firing squad
one of these days. It might just be crazy enough to work, though, I
guess. Right you are, you mad hatter. It's a go."
"My pal!" Dave breathed, and beamed at him. "Contact, then! Let's
peel off the stuff we don't need, and muss ourselves up to look as
though we've been through the mill."
"If we haven't been through the mill today," Freddy groaned, and
started burying things in the sand, "then I sure don't know what
you'd call it. But just remember, my little friend, if I get shot for this,
I'll come back to haunt you every single night, I promise you that!"
"You won't have to come back," Dave brushed the threat aside,
"because I'll be right there with you."
"I don't doubt it for a minute," Freddy said with a hopeless shrug.
"The lad's just like my shadow. Can't get rid of it. Ah me! If I'd only
had sense and remained in England, I'd probably be an air vice-
marshal about now. Oh well, such is life!"
"Boy, am I glad!" Dave murmured with feeling.
"Glad about what?" the English youth asked unsuspectingly.
"Why, that you didn't stay in England and get promoted to be an air
vice-marshal, of course," Dave said solemnly. "After all the good old
R.A.F. has done, to have it fold up and fall apart because a young
squirt has—I just can't finish. I shudder even at the thought of such
a fate for the R.A.F."
"So?" Freddy grunted, and gave him a stern look. "Very well, then, I
refuse to go through with this as planned. I'm going to tell them the
truth. They may be Germans and rotters, but just the same I can't
play that kind of a dirty trick even on them."
"Refuse to go—" Dave gasped as sudden alarm shot across his face.
"Won't play a dirty trick on them? Hey! What goes on here? What do
you mean, tell the truth?"
The English youth didn't answer at once. With deliberate movements
he carefully smoothed the surface of the sand that covered the
equipment he had buried. Then he nonchalantly brushed sand dust
from his hands and glanced at Dave.
"I'm going to tell them who you are," he said firmly. "I just haven't
the heart to let them think they've really captured somebody, when
it's actually only you. No, I'm going to tell them who you are so they
can kick you back out into the desert, the same way a fisherman
throws back a fish that's too small. And I'm going to teach them that
bit of American slang to say as they do it."
"What's that?" Dave asked as the corners of his mouth twitched.
"It's—" Freddy began, and hesitated. Then his face lighted up. "Oh
yes, I remember now. Ten pennies for twelve. Yes, that's it."
Dave started to bellow with laughter, but clapped his hand over his
mouth just in time. Sound carries like magic across the desert, and
they were not yet ready to make their presence known to the enemy
tank and armored car units. However, it was a couple of minutes
before Dave could choke off his laughter enough to speak.
"Ten pennies for twelve!" he gasped out as tears streamed down his
cheeks. "Boy, oh boy, is that one for the book. You mean, Freddy, a
dime a dozen. But let it go. Anyway, you're one in a million, and
that's no kidding. Well, all set?"
As Dave asked the question, it served as an automatic brake, a full
stop, for kidding and joshing around. In a moment the serious
business would begin—deadly serious business, upon the outcome
of which might hang not only their own lives but the success or
failure of Britain's war efforts in the Middle East. Freddy searched
Dave's eyes for a couple of seconds, and then nodded.
"Right-o," he said quietly. "Let's get on with it. We've buried all our
stuff, and we both certainly look as if we've been wandering around
in this blasted desert for days. Yes, let's get on with it."
"Wait, just one more thing," Dave said as Freddy started to get up
and move over the brow of the sand dune. "It just hit me, and it
might help. You can't tell. Speak nothing but English. Make out that
you don't understand German. That is, of course, if any of those
birds speak English. But let's not let on we speak and understand
German until we have to. They—Well, they might let something slip,
you know."
"A darn good idea, Dave!" Freddy said in honest approval. "You're
right. One never can tell."
"Then off we go," Dave said, and got up onto his feet. "Stagger and
reel a little. Pretend you don't hear them the first time they
challenge. Let's even lean a little on each other for support. Boy, if
there's any of the actor in us, this sure is the time for it to come out.
And to think—Gosh!"
"And to think what?" Freddy shot out the corner of his mouth as
they started lurching forward and up over the crest of the sand dune
and into full view of the enemy camp. "What were you going to
say?"
"To think the day would come when you and I would walk up to a
bunch of Nazi slobs and say, 'Here we are,'" Dave grunted. "Of
course it's all for a reason, but—well, it sure gives me a funny feeling
inside."
"I know just how you feel," Freddy said. "And I could feel a lot
better, myself. But if things work out our way, we should fret."
"Things will work out for us!" Dave said grimly, and gave the English
youth's arm a squeeze. "They've got to!"
Neither of them spoke for the next few minutes. They trudged
forward across the sand, purposely faltering in their steps now and
then and stumbling to their knees. Every second of the time,
however, they kept a watchful eye on the desert camp that was just
about ready to move forward. The sun was down below the rim of
the world now, and night was rushing forward from the east on
black wings.
Stumbling step by stumbling step, they drew closer and closer to the
enemy camp. With each step they expected to hear a wild shout go
up, a shout that would mean they had been sighted. With each step,
also, a certain inner and unspoken fear walked with them, the tiny
fear that their little plan might fail horribly almost before it had been
put into action—the kind of failure, very definite and permanent,
that the bark of a rifle and a singing bullet would cause.
No rifles barked, however, and no challenging voices thundered
across the rolling sands. The tank, armored car, and truck motors
had been silenced after a short test run period, and the stillness of
the vast desert had closed down over everything. The boys
impulsively held their breath every now and then as though they and
the entire world were waiting for some sudden all destroying
explosion to shatter what seemed an eternity of silence.
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