Biggles Makes Ends Meet

by W E Johns

  Satisfied that it was now safe to use the path Ginger forced a difficult passage towards it, and was nearly there when two more men appeared, sending him diving for cover. They spoke in English, one with an American accent. This one he had never heard before, but he recognized the voice of the Count. They stopped at the gangway.

  Said the Count: “Sure you’ve got everything clear?”

  “Sure,” was the reply.

  “Then get going. You’ve no time to lose if you want to get clear of the islands. I’ll make the arrangements over the other side.”

  “When do we aim to leave?”

  “Right away.”

  “It’s going to blow.”

  “It may not be much.”

  “You’ll be flying right into it the way it’s coming.”

  “Mitsubu says he can make it,” said the Count. “If I don’t get away tonight, and the rains start, I may be stuck here for weeks,” he added, almost using Biggles’ exact words.

  “Okay. See you over there.” The unknown man went aboard the yacht.

  The Count turned and hurried back the way he had come.

  Ginger decided to give him a minute or two to get clear, in case he collided with him returning for some reason.

  It was fairly clear from the conversation what was about to happen. The other side, he thought, could only mean Ceylon. The yacht, as well as the junk, was about to set sail. The Count was also leaving at once, presumably by air, since as far as Ginger knew there was no other means of transportation.

  A thought struck him. The yacht had not yet cast off, nor had the gangway been withdrawn. It was straining under the rising wind on its two mooring cables. If the cables parted it would drift on the beach or on the rocks. That would prevent it from going anywhere, with the contraband cargo Ginger suspected it had on board. Why let it go? Time was precious, but here, he decided, was an opportunity not to be lost.

  He hurried to the cable holding the bows. It was hemp. Out came his knife. He sawed at the rope. It parted. At once the vessel began to swing. Throwing discretion to the winds he scrambled to the stern cable. A minute and his knife was through it. Still no sound came from the yacht to indicate that those on board were aware of their danger. Serves them right for keeping such a rotten watch, was his thought, as he closed his knife and returned it to his pocket.

  He waited for no more but set off up the path at the best possible speed for the place where he had left the others. He met them coming to look for him.

  “What the deuce have you been up to?” demanded Biggles, with marked asperity. “Can’t you see what the weather’s doing?”

  “Yes and these bally mosquitoes bite like dogs,” complained Bertie.

  “If you’ve had nothing worse than mosquitoes to bite you you’ve nothing to moan about,” retorted Ginger, hotly. “I’ve had an affair with a python. It threw me into the drink. Look at me! I’m wet through.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you one quiet night when we’re sitting at home by the fire; it may sound funny then,” answered Ginger, in a disgruntled voice.

  “For heaven’s sake quit arguing,” broke in Biggles, “We’ve no time to waste. After all that did you get the name of the yacht?”

  “Yes. It’s the Floridia. Oil-burning, I think. Flies the American flag.”

  “Good.” Biggles stared out to sea—or rather, at the lightning now flashing incessantly along the western horizon. “I’m afraid we’re in for a snorter,” he muttered. “We shall have to drop the plan and get back to Algy. He’ll be in a flap with this weather coming up. Come on. Did you see those men. Ginger?”

  “Of course. I nearly barged into ‘em.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “Loading the junk. The Count came down, too, with a man who I think must be the skipper of the yacht. It’s going over to Ceylon. The Count is going to fly over and meet it there.”

  “When?”

  “Right away, I gather. That’s what I understood from the conversation. But the yacht may not be able to get away.”

  “Why not?”

  “I cut the mooring ropes. If the engineer wasn’t ready to start, with the wind on its beam it should drift ashore.”

  “What was the idea of that?”

  “I was just being awkward. The junk was hoisting sail at the time. They may get tangled up.”

  Reaching the open ground at the top of the bank they stopped and stared down into the cove. But clouds had now covered the moon and it was impossible to see anything clearly. The lightning merely dazzled them. Thunder boomed ominously.

  When Biggles spoke again it was clear from his tone of voice that only now for the first time did the thought strike him that they might not be able to take off. “Hark at that sea,” he muttered. “Unless we’re soon back we’re going to lose the Otter. If—” He broke off, as to their ears came the bellow of aero engines.

  “That’ll be the Count, in the Dakota, taking off,” explained Ginger.

  A few seconds later it passed low over them, heading westwards. They could not see it, only hear it intermittently between rolls of thunder.

  “Mitsubu must be as crazy as we are,” stated Biggles. “If the wind swings round he’ll never get across unless he has a big reserve of petrol. Come on. No more talking.”

  They set off at as fast a walk as conditions permitted.

  * * *

  1 The word monsoon actually means season, and is not to be confused with those storms of extraordinary violence which, although much the same thing in different parts of the world, are variously named cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons. Some monsoons bring fine weather, others bad. In the Indian Ocean the north-east monsoon brings good sailing weather. But when, usually in June, it swings through an angle of ninety degrees to the south-west, and this it can do almost in a matter of minutes, it brings storms of thunder and lightning, wind and rain, of sufficient violence to cause shipping to run for shelter. The lowering skies and heavy rain, with resultant loss of visibility, can last for forty or fifty days before passing the climax.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE SUMATRAN

  GREAT masses of cloud now piling up in the sky settled any last lingering light the moon or stars might have given. The intense darkness made anything like fast travel impossible. The wind, still in the north-east, came fitfully, but in gusts of increasing force. The air felt hot, heavy, clammy.

  “Let’s get out on the airstrip,” said Biggles irritably, after they had blundered about in some bushes. “We shan’t get anywhere at this rate. We’re not likely to meet anyone now.” He fought his way clear of the scrub, and reaching open ground broke into a trot.

  A minute later they were nearly swept off their feet by a shrieking blast of wind that filled the air with flying debris that brought them to a halt with their hands over their faces to protect their eyes.

  “Keep together,” shouted Biggles. “If we lose each other in this we’ll never get together again.” In a lull he went on. “This is it. She’s swung right round to the south-west. I must have been raving mad not to start back earlier. But who could have imagined anything like this?”

  “What about Algy?” said Ginger, as they moved on again.

  “With the sea this wind will blow up, if he stays on the ground all we shall find of the machine will be a heap of splinters and torn fabric,” answered Biggles, bitterly. “It’s time I glued myself to an office desk at the Yard.”

  “No use blaming yourself, old boy,” consoled Bertie. “ These things happen.”

  “There’s Algy now,” cried Ginger, as the drone of engines was borne to their ears on the turbulent air. “He’s getting out of it.”

  Biggles listened for a few seconds. “That isn’t Algy. That’s either the Dakota coming back or another of the Colonel’s machines coming in. I’d say it’s Mitsubu, having thought better of it when he saw what was in front of him. He’d never have got across in the teeth of this gale.”

  Li
ghts suddenly outlined the airstrip.

  “He must have radioed for lights to see to get in,” said Ginger.

  They hurried on, buffeted by the wind, only to pull up again as engines roared almost on their heads.

  “What’s the fool doing?” cried Biggles, staring up into the darkness. “Don’t say he’s coming in down wind. My gosh! I believe he is. He can’t have realized that the wind has swung right round. Unless he spots it before his wheels are on the ground he’s had it.”

  No one answered. As pilots they all knew what was bound to happen if the aircraft tried to get down on the front of a wind travelling at a rate of knots.

  “Why doesn’t the fool radio operator tell him!” exclaimed Ginger.

  “He may not have realized it, either,” answered Biggles. “There’s going to be a nasty mess here in a minute, if I know anything.”

  What followed was the sort of accident which, in similar freak conditions, has happened many times, and will, no doubt, happen again. Experienced pilots have made the same mistake: the mistake of supposing that the wind is blowing from the same quarter as it was five minutes earlier when the aircraft took off. No mistake can be easier to make; none more natural, and usually, fatal—at least, as far as the aircraft is concerned. It is all very well to say a pilot should check the wind direction before coming in. So he should. And after a lapse of time, so most certainly he would. The trap lies in the brief time factor. A pilot takes off into the wind. He makes a circuit and comes in to land; and as it is hard to imagine any great change in the wind direction in so short a time he assumes it is still blowing the same way. Should he discover his error in time he may get away with it; but if he does not, unless he has far more room than would be required for a normal landing, a crash, a collision with the first obstacle that gets in his way, is inevitable. There is no way of stopping a machine with its wheels on the ground when it has a wind under its tail. Even air brakes can serve no useful purpose if the aircraft is travelling at the same speed as the wind.

  To the watchers, it seemed that Mitsubu, or whoever was flying the Dakota, did not discover his mistake until it was much too late to do anything about it. All held their breath, rigid with horror, as the machine, wheels on the ground, raced on, tail up, without the slightest sign of slackening speed. With the weight of full tanks, as must have been the case for the proposed ocean crossing, it might have run for miles had nothing intervened. All told, the airstrip was less than half a mile long. The Dakota which had had a job to get its wheels on the ground at all, had covered a third of this, distance before it touched—and then it merely bounced. slightly, to be airborne again for at least a hundred yards before the wheels touched again, to stay down. But still it ran on at a speed which seemed hardly to have diminished at all.

  One of three things was now certain to happen. The machine, left alone, would run into the hangars at the far end of the strip. The pilot, discovering his mistake, might open his throttle in the hope of getting off again; or he might try to turn the machine on the ground to avoid head-on collision with what was in front of him. This was the course he took, although it was probably a matter of Hobson’s choice and the result would have been the same anyway. Even if he opened up, the pilot could not hope to clear the rising ground in front of him. Lightning, now incessant, revealed the scene plainly.

  The spellbound watchers, being pilots, prayed for a miracle. Ginger, dry-lipped, could only be thankful that he was not at the controls of the doomed machine. As the aircraft started to swerve he bit his lip with strain as he waited for the undercarriage to collapse. Whether or not it would have done was a question never answered, for the Nakajima, which had been left outside its hangar, now came into the picture. In an instant it was all over. The Dakota merely touched it with a wing tip, but it was enough. The big machine spun round, cartwheeled, and in a flash was enveloped in flames.

  Biggles started to run towards them, but pulled up with a gesture of helplessness. “That’s it,” he said, in a curiously calm voice. “Neither we nor anyone else can do anything with that so let’s push on.”

  Again they broke into a run.

  To Ginger, feeling sick, the whole business was beginning to take on the character of a nightmare. It was not yet over.

  Biggles suddenly pulled up, saying: “We shan’t get much farther this way so we might as well make for the beach. Great heavens! Look at that.” He pointed.

  Actually, there was no need for him to point, for what he could see was plain to them all. Not only were the Dakota and the unlucky Nakajima blazing but the airfield itself was on fire. It was natural that the petrol tanks should burst, spilling their contents, and so spread the fire for some distance round the machines. But it was now evident from the radius of the flames that the dry grass was alight. Fanned by the wind the fire was racing before it, and there appeared to be nothing to prevent it from sweeping the entire airstrip, or, for that matter, the whole island.

  “Lucky for us it isn’t coming this way,” remarked Ginger. “What a mess.”

  “I’m glad they did it, and not us,” remarked Biggles, as they began fighting their way through the scrub to the nearest beach.

  They reached it at a point still some distance from the place where they had left Algy, and after one look at the sea as the lightning forked and flashed over it Ginger felt his stomach go down like a lift. Great waves were sweeping right up the beaches and pounding the rocks in clouds of spray. It seemed incredible that such a change could occur in a matter of two hours, which was, he estimated, roughly the time they had been away. The Otter must, quite obviously, have been wrecked. Even if by some miracle it had escaped there could be no question of it taking off in such conditions.

  Biggles said nothing. There was really nothing he could say. They must all have been thinking the same thoughts, except that Biggles would be blaming himself for the error of judgment that had brought them to this predicament. They hurried on in silence.

  Then it started to rain. At first a few big drops splashed down, but very soon the heavens were unloading water at a rate which only tropical monsoons know, and that, fortunately, is something which does not occur in temperate zones. The rain blotted out everything. Visibility became a memory. It no longer existed. The blinding flashes of lightning did more harm than good. When they occurred they merely dazzled, leaving the darkness more intense than before. Thunder boomed, rolled and crashed. What with the thunder and the rain the noise was deafening.

  Yelled Bertie above the uproar, trying perhaps to strike a cheerful note: “This little shower should put the fire out.”

  “It’s likely to put us out, too,” shouted Biggles.

  They groped their way forward, making so little progress that it seemed hardly worth while moving at all. At least, so thought Ginger. The only thing that kept them going was the urgent necessity of finding out what had happened to Algy. Anything might have happened to him, brooded Ginger. He might have crashed trying to take the machine off. He could have been drowned trying to save it. Knowing what depended on it he would spare no effort to do that.

  With water pouring down his body Ginger trudged on. He was not in the least tired. His anxiety for Algy was too acute for physical discomfort to worry him. How they were going to recognize the right beach when they came to it he could not imagine. That could be left to Biggles. He had lost all count of time. He seemed to have been walking for hours. His dominant feeling was one of unreality. Dawn, he thought, could not be far off. He hoped it would soon come. It would be a relief to be able to see what they were doing.

  It so happened that the first grey promise of another day came as they were clambering over the rocks of the last little promontory, although none of them realized it until they were on the right side of it, when the murky silhouette of the background told them the truth. There was practically no beach. It was a place of swirling foam as big seas crashed in and raced out again. Miserably, in silence, they skirted the inner fringe, through lacy patterns of
sea-foam, behind which the spray-lashed vegetation reeled before the onslaught of the tempest. They watched the surf for wreckage. None was seen.

  Not until they reached the far extremity of the little bay did Biggles speak. Then he said, simply: “He’s gone.” He took out his cigarette case automatically, but finding its contents wet, returned it to his pocket.

  “Had he stayed here the machine would have been wrecked, in which case we should see the bits and pieces, old boy,” opined Bertie optimistically.

  “One would think so,” agreed Biggles. “What I’m afraid of is he might have capsized trying to take off, in which case the wreckage wouldn’t be here. It might be anywhere. He’d wait as long as he dare, expecting us back at any moment. He was left with a brutal decision to make. I can imagine how he must have felt when he saw the storm worsening. The question is, did he wait too long? After all, if we didn’t realize how severe the storm was going to be, why should he? I knew something was coming, but I wasn’t expecting anything like this.”

  “It’s no use blaming yourself,” asserted Ginger. “You couldn’t make allowance for the monsoon coming three weeks before its time. If you made allowances for every possibility we’d never get anywhere.”

  Biggles nodded. “Well, there’s no point in talking about what we might have done. We’re in a mess, so we’d better start thinking about how we’re going to get out of it.”

  “We’re not the only people on the island in a mess,” declared Ginger. “The Dakota’s gone. The yacht may be on the beach, and that goes for the junk, too.”

  “That doesn’t help us,” returned Biggles, practically, walking to a long slab of rock and seating himself on its dripping surface.

  The others joined him. The rain was not so heavy as it had been. The light was improving. For a little while they stared out at the white, storm-tossed waters, each busy with his own thoughts.

  Ginger spoke. He may have tried to strike an optimistic note, but his voice lacked conviction. “There is this about it. If Algy did manage to get off it’s only a question of time before he comes back for us.”