by W E Johns
‘Certainly, Brunow, smoke by all means,’ answered the Count in a change of voice.
Biggles lit a cigarette. Out of the corner of his eye he saw von Stalhein drop the bullet back into his pocket and knew that he had spoken just in time. ‘Have I your permission to dress now, sir?’ he asked calmly. ‘And I should like a few minutes’ conversation with you when you have a moment to spare.’
‘Certainly, certainly. But why not speak now? I shall be very busy to-day; this confounded reservoir business is the very devil.’
‘Very well, sir.’ Biggles swung round and his jaws set grimly. ‘I have a request to make, but before doing so, would respectfully remind you that I came here under open colours, not at my own instigation or by my own wish, but at the invitation—under the orders if you like—of the German Government. But it seems that for some reason or other I have been regarded with suspicion from the moment I arrived by certain members of your staff. I therefore humbly beg your indulgence in what is to me a very unhappy position, and would ask you to post me to another station, or give me leave to go my own way.’
It was a bold stroke of bluff, and for one ghastly moment Biggles thought he had gone too far, for the last thing he wanted at that juncture was to be posted away.
But the Count reacted just as he hoped he would. ‘Nothing of the sort, Brunow,’ he said in a fatherly tone. ‘I’m sorry if there has been a misunderstanding in the past, but I think we all understand each other now.’ He glanced at von Stalhein meaningly. ‘You get dressed now and hurry along for your coffee,’ he went on. ‘As far as I know I shan’t be needing you this morning, but don’t go far away in case I do. Come on Erich.’
They went out and closed the door behind them.
Biggles poured himself out a glass of water with a hand that trembled slightly, for the ordeal he had just been through had left him feeling suddenly weak. Then he slumped down into a chair and buried his face in his hands. ‘Gosh!’ he breathed, ‘that was closeish—too close for my liking.’
Chapter 8
Forced Down
‘Well, I must say that was a good start for a day’s work,’ he went on as he pulled himself together, dressed, and walked over to the Mess for morning coffee. ‘I got away with it that time, but I shan’t do it every time; one more boob like that and it’ll be the last.’
With these morbid thoughts, he made his way to the olive grove where, after ascertaining as far as it was possible that he was not watched, he began a systematic search for the message he knew Algy must have dropped. It took him a long time, but he found it at last caught up in the branches of one of the grey, gnarled trees that must have been old when the Crusaders were marching on Jerusalem. It was merely a small piece of khaki cloth, weighted with two cartridges, to which was attached a strip of white rag about a yard long. A thousand people might have seen it and taken it for a piece of wind-blown litter without suspecting what it contained.
After a cautious glance around he secured it, opened the khaki rag, and removed the slip of paper he guessed he would find in it; the improvised rag streamer and cartridges he dropped into a convenient hole in the tree. One glance was sufficient for him to memorize the brief message. In neat Roman capitals had been printed:
IMPORTANT NEWS. SPEAK AT RENDEZVOUS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
That was all. He rolled the paper into a ball, slipped it into his mouth, chewed it to a pulp, and then threw it away.
‘What’s wrong now?’ he wondered, as he made his way back to the tarmac. ‘Why didn’t he write the message down while he was about it? No, of course, he daren’t do that: it would have been too risky; and he would have had no means of knowing if I’d got it, anyway.’
Still turning the matter over in his mind, and trying to think of a reasonable excuse to go for a flight, he reached the aerodrome. There were a few mechanics about, most of them at work on machines, but nearly all the serviceable aeroplanes were in the air. Of the Count there was no sign; nor could he see von Stalhein. Thinking of von Stalhein reminded him of his nocturnal adventure and the mysterious Arab; he had little time to think, but he felt instinctively that he was now on the track of something important. That von Stalhein might be El Shereef had not previously occurred to him, and even now he only regarded it as a remote possibility, for the two characters were so utterly different from the physical aspect alone that the more he thought about it the more fantastic a dual personality appeared to be. Nevertheless, he had already decided to watch von Stalhein, and keep an eye open after dark for the Arab who appeared to have access to the Headquarters’ offices; but at the moment his chief concern was to get to Abba Sud as quickly as possible.
To fly without permission after having been warned by the Count to keep close at hand would have been asking for trouble, so he made his way boldly to the fort and asked the Count if he could do a reconnaissance, making the excuse that it was boring doing nothing. To his great relief the Count made no objection, and he hurried back to the hangars in high spirits. He half regretted that he was wearing his German uniform, for it meant taking a German machine, but in the event of a forced landing on either side of the lines a German officer in a British machine would certainly be looked at askance. So more with the idea of making himself acquainted with its controls than for any other reason, he ordered out a Halberstadt in preference to a Pfalz, and was soon in the air.
He set off on a direct course for the lines, but as soon as he was out of sight of the aerodrome he swung away to the east in the direction of the oasis. Twice he was sighted and pursued by British machines, and rather than risk being attacked by pilots whose fire, for obvious reasons, he would be unable to return, he climbed the Halberstadt nearly to its ceiling, keeping a sharp look-out all the time.
He had been flying on his new course about ten minutes, and was just congratulating himself that he was now outside the zone of air operations, when his roving eyes picked out, and instantly focused on, a tiny moving speck far to the south-east. At first glance he thought it was an eagle, for mistakes of this sort often occurred in eastern theatres of war, but when he saw that it was almost at his own height he knew that it must be an aeroplane. He edged away at once a few points to the south, in order to place himself between the sun and the other machine, and putting his nose down for more speed, rapidly overhauled the stranger. While he was still a good two miles away he saw that it was a Halberstadt like his own, and his forehead wrinkled into a puzzled frown when he perceived that it was heading out over the open desert. ‘Where the dickens does that fellow think he’s going?’ he mused, for as far as he could remember there was nothing in that direction but wilderness for a hundred miles, when the flat desolation gave way to barren hills. There were certainly no troops or military targets to account for its presence.
‘I’ll keep an eye on you, my chicken,’ he thought suspiciously. ‘It will be interesting to see what your game is.’ It struck him that it might be a pilot who had lost his way, but the direct course on which the machine was flying quickly discountenanced such a theory; a pilot who was lost would be almost certain to turn from side to side as he looked for possible landmarks.
‘My word! it’s hot, even up here,’ he went on, with a questioning glance at the sun, which had suddenly assumed an unusual reddish hue. Later he was to recognize that significant sign, but at the time he had not been in the East long enough to learn much about the meteorological conditions. But he dismissed the phenomenon from his mind as the other machine started losing height, and throttling back to half power, he followed it, still taking care not to lose his strategical position in the sun. And then a remarkable thing occurred; it was so odd that he pushed up his goggles with a quick movement of his hand and stared round the side of the windscreen with an expression of comical amazement on his face. The machine in front had disappeared. In all his flying experience he had never seen anything like it. He had seen machines disappear into clouds, or into ground mist, but here there were no clouds; nor was there a ground mis
t. Wait a minute, though! He was not so sure. The earth seemed to have become curiously blurred, distorted. ‘Must be heat haze,’ he thought, and then clutched at a centre-section strut as the Halberstadt reeled and reared up on its tail. Before he could bring it to even keel it seemed to drop right out of his hands, and he clenched his teeth as his stomach turned over in the most terrific bump*1 he had ever struck. The machine hit solid air again with a crash that he knew must have strained every wire and strut; it was almost like hitting water.
For a moment he was too shaken and startled to wonder what had happened; if he thought anything at all in the first sickening second, it was that his machine had shed its wings, for it had fallen like a stone for nearly two thousand feet, as his altimeter revealed; but as the first spatter of grit struck his face and the horizon was blotted out, he knew that he had run into a sandstorm, a gale of wind that was tearing the surface from the desert and hurling it high into the air.
He wasted no time in idle contemplation of the calamity. He had never before seen a sandstorm, but he had heard them described by pilots who had been caught in them and had been lucky enough to survive. With the choking dust filling his nostrils and stinging his cheeks, he forgot all about the machine he had been following and sought only to evade the sand demon. He shoved the throttle wide open, turned at right angles, and with the joystick held forward by both hands, he raced across the path of the storm. At first the visibility grew rapidly worse as he encountered the full force of it, and the Halberstadt was tossed about like a dead leaf in an autumn gale, but presently the bumps grew less severe and the ground again came into view, mistily, as though seen through a piece of brown, semi-opaque glass. As far as he could see stretched the wind-swept desert, with the sand dunes rolling like a sea swell and a spindrift of fine grit whipping from their crests. But in one place a long narrow belt of palms rose up like an island in a stormy ocean, and towards it he steered his course. From the vicious lashing of the trees he knew that the wind must be blowing with the force of a tornado, and to land in it might be a difficult matter, but with the certain knowledge that the dust which was now blinding him would soon work its way into the engine and cut it to pieces, he decided that his only course was to get down as quickly as possible, whatever risks it involved; so he pushed his nose down at a steep angle towards the trees, aiming to touch the ground on the leeward side of them.
The landing proved to be more simple than he thought it would be; he could not see the actual surface of the ground as he flattened out on account of the thick stream of air-borne sand that raced over it like quicksilver, but he knew to a few inches where it was. He felt his wheels touch, bump, bump again, and he kicked his rudder bar to avoid a clump of trees that straggled out in the desert a little way from the main group. The landing was well judged, and there was no need to open the throttle again, for his run had carried him amongst the outlying palms of the oasis. He was out in a flash, carrying two of the sandbags with which all desert-flying machines are equipped against such an emergency. Dropping to his knees, he dragged the sand into the bags with both arms and then tied them, by the cords provided for the purpose, to the wing-skids.*2 He was only just in time, for even with these anchors the machine began to drag as the wind increased in violence, so he fetched the two remaining sandbags, filled them, and tied them to the tail-skid.
‘If you blow over now, well, you’ll have to blow over; I can’t do any more,’ he thought, as, choking and half blinded by the stinging sand, he ran into the oasis and flung himself down in the first dip he reached. The sand still stung his face unmercifully, so he took off his tunic, wrapped it about his head, and then lay down to wait for the storm to blow itself out.
He was never sure how long he lay there. It might have been an hour; it might have been two hours; it seemed like eternity. The heat inside the jacket was suffocating, and in spite of all he could do to prevent it, the sand got inside and found its way into his nose, mouth, and ears. It was with heartfelt thankfulness that he heard the wind abating and knew that the worst of the storm was over; at the end it died away quite suddenly, so removing the coat, he sat up and looked about with interest. His first thought was for the machine, and he was relieved to find that it had suffered no damage, so he turned his attention to the immediate surroundings.
The oasis was exactly as he expected it to be; in fact oases in general were precisely as he had always imagined. Some things are not in the least like what artists and writers would lead us to expect; many are definitely disappointing; very few reach the glamorous perfection of our dreams, but the oasis of the desert is certainly one of them.
He found himself standing on a frond-littered sandy carpet from which the tall, straight columns of the date palms rose to burst in feathery fan-like foliage far overhead. Nearer to the heart of the oasis tussocks of coarse grass sprouted through the sand and gave promise of more sylvan verdure within, possibly water. ‘In any case the water can’t be far below the surface,’ he thought as he hurried forward in the hope of being able to quench his thirst. He topped a rise and saw another one beyond. Almost unthinkingly he strode across the intervening dell and ran up the far side. As his eyes grew level with the top, he stopped, not quickly, but slowly, as if his muscles lagged behind his will to act. Then he sank down silently and wormed his way into a growth of leathery bushes that clustered around the palm-boles at that spot. For several seconds he lay quite still, while his face worked under the shock which for a moment seemed to have paralysed his brain. ‘I’m dreaming. I’m seeing things. It must be a mirage,’ he breathed, as he recovered somewhat and crawled to where he could see the scene beyond. But the sound of voices reached him and he knew it was no illusion.
In front of him the ground fell away for a distance of perhaps fifty yards into a saucer-like depression, in the bottom of which was obviously a well. Around the well, in attitude of alert repose, were about a score of Arabs, some sitting, some lying down, and others leaning against the parapet of the well from which they had evidently been drinking. But they were all looking one way; and they were all listening—listening to a man who stood on the far side of the well with his hands resting on the parapet, talking to them earnestly. It was Hauptmann Erich von Stalhein.
To Biggles the whole thing was so unexpected and at the same time so utterly preposterous that he could only lie and watch in a kind of fascinated wonder. And the more he watched and thought about it the more incomprehensible the whole thing became. How on earth had von Stalhein got there when only two hours before he had interrogated him in his room at Zabala, which could not be less than sixty miles away? What was he doing there, with the Arabs? Why was he addressing them so fervently?
His astonishment gave way to curiosity and then to intense interest as he watched the scene. It seemed to him that von Stalhein, from his actions, was exhorting the Arabs to do something, something they were either disinclined to do, or about which they were divided in their opinions. But after a time it became apparent that the powerful personality of the man was making itself felt, and in the end there was a general murmur of assent. Then, as if the debate was over, the party began to break up, some of the Arabs going towards a line of wiry-looking ponies that were tethered between the trees, and others, with von Stalhein, going into a small square building that stood a short distance behind the well. It was little more than a primitive hut, constructed of sun-dried mud bricks and thatched with dead palm fronds.
The Arabs who went to their horses mounted and rode away through the trees, and presently those who had gone into the building reappeared, and they, too, rode away. Silence fell, the blazing sun-drenched silence of the desert.
Biggles lay quite still, never taking his eyes off the hut for an instant, waiting for von Stalhein to reappear. An hour passed and he did not come out. Another hour ticked slowly by. The sun passed its zenith and began to fall towards the west, and still he did not come. Biggles’ thirst became unbearable. ‘I’ve got to drink or die,’ he declared qui
etly to himself, as he rose to his feet and walked towards the well. ‘If he sees me I can only tell the truth and say I was forced down by the storm, which he can’t deny,’ he added thoughtfully.
He reached the well, and dragging up a bucket of the life-saving liquid, drank deeply; that which he could not drink he splashed over his smarting face and hands. ‘And now, Erich, let us see how you behave when you get a shock,’ he thought humorously, for the drink had refreshed him, as he walked boldly up to the door of the hut, which stood ajar. He pushed it open and entered. A glance showed him that the entire building comprised a single room, but it was not that which made him stagger back and then stand rooted to the ground with parted lips. The room was empty. At first his brain refused to accept this astounding fact, and he looked from floor to ceiling as if expecting to see them open up and deliver the missing German in the manner of a jack-in-the-box. He also looked round the walls for a door that might lead to another room, but there was none.
‘Well, I’ve had some shocks in my time, but this beats anything I’ve ever run up against before,’ he muttered. Beyond doubt or question von Stalhein had gone into the hut; only Arabs had come out. Where was von Stalhein? He left the hut, and hurrying to where the horse lines had been, saw a wide trail of trampled sand leading to the edge of the oasis. A long way out in the desert to the south-west a straggling line of horsemen was making its way towards the misty horizon; farther south a solitary white Bisherin racing camel, with a rider on its back, was eating distance in a long rolling stride that in time could wear down the finest horse ever bred. ‘So you’ve changed the colour of your skin again, have you, Mr. von Stalhein?’ thought Biggles, as the only possible solution of the problem flashed into his mind. ‘Good; now we know where we are. I fancy I’m beginning to rumble your little game—El Shereef.’
As he turned away a wave of admiration for the German surged through him. ‘He’s a clever devil and no mistake,’ he thought. ‘But how the dickens did he get here? He must have flown; there was no other way he could have done it in the time. That’s it. He was in the machine I saw. Some one flew him over, dropped him at the oasis, and then went back. They didn’t hear me arrive because of the noise of the wind and I was on the lee-side of them. The Arabs were waiting here for him, and now he has gone off on some job. I wonder if this place is a regular rendezvous.’
