Secret Operative K-13

by Joel Townsley Rogers

  Captain Face smiled coldly. He examined his elegant, slim feet for a minute. He nodded his head slowly, as if something Adjutant Harvey had said confirmed a suspicion of his own.

  “And nevertheless,” he stated curtly, “Fahnestock is our man!”

  “Incredible!” said Harvey. “I know the boy too well. I won’t believe it.”

  “I happened to be flying over Hunland myself about four o’clock,” said the captain, lowering his voice. “Tagging in and out among the clouds at ten thousand feet, what should I see but our precious American friend diving and making a landing. Well back of the Boche lines, over the border in Belgium. He never knew I was watching him, of course. He chinned a few moments with a couple of Huns, and then took off again.”

  “Great God, what could he have been doing?”

  “It seems to me that is for Sub-Leftenant Fahnestock to answer,” said the captain savagely.

  Adjutant Harvey wiped his shining countenance. His mouth was bitter.

  “To think of it!” he said. “Big Dick Fahnestock! I can’t help having liked the boy.”

  “Keep this quiet!” said Captain Face sharply. “No arrest. No word to anyone. We’ll give Fahnestock plenty of rope, and let him hang himself higher than a kite.”

  * * * * *

  Sub-Lieutenant Big Dick Fahnestock of the Fighters heeled his Sopwith over on one ear and went whistling toward the landing field ten thousand feet below. The earth rushed toward him like a hurricane. All the way down he had his head turned to the rear, watching the fluttering tail surfaces of his ship.

  Strips of the linen fabric were tearing loose. They were ripping away in sharp banners through the upper sky. The framework of the stabilizers began to show naked as a dead man’s bones.

  Are we going to hold together, gal? thought Big Dick. Are we a-going to come down in pieces, or all in a chunk?

  When the ground was less than two hundred feet below him, he leveled the ship out into a sweeping horizontal glide. His jaws were working methodically. He squinted overside, watching the ground come up. The speeding ship touched it on two points and went across it like a bullet toward the hangars.

  In the first hundred yards of the ship’s fast roll, the propeller dropped off her nose and went somersaulting away. In the second hundred yards, she lost her right ailerons and a few yards of assorted wires. In the third hundred yards, her whole shot-riddled right wing snapped from its main bolts and dragged the ground. She skeered around on the pivot of the broken wing, showering pieces of splintering struts all around her. She was just in front of the hangar doors when she came to a stop—all that was left of her.

  Big Dick Fahnestock, who had been sitting very tensely and expectantly, sagged down in his seat then and wiped the oily stubble on his cheeks. He began to chew vigorously once more.

  “What do you call that, Big?” shrieked a little yellow-faced pilot, doubling up with laughter. “A speed drill in knocking a ship down on the run?”

  Big Dick spat overside.

  “Fritz sieved me, Washee,” he said. “Looked for a while like the whole damned ship was going to drop away off me, and leave me to fly home on my seat cushion. What’s the hot idea of calling the boys in? Three hours more of clear, sweet daylight still left in the sky, and were cleaning Fritz up five miles back of his own lines.”

  “His Ludship Captain Fairy Face is swilling his afternoon tea, Big,” said Washee. “The spitting and whooping of combat motors disturbs his sensitive eardrums.”

  Washee’s name was Lee Long. He was reputed to be part Chinese. He had been born on, or near, the wharfs of London, had been a choir boy in New York, a jockey in Havana, a dice man in Buenos Aires, and had been married or jailed at least once in practically every other metropolis of any claim to prominence on the habitable globe. He was small and black-headed, with an extraordinarily ugly, wrinkled face. He was commonly reputed to have no religion. Yet he believed devoutly in one God, which was Big Dick Fahnestock.

  “Adj Harvey is looking for you, you Missouri jackass,” he said.

  “Mule is the word,” said Big Dick.

  “Mule or jackass, they’re all the same to me,” said Washee.

  “They may be to a jackass,” said Dick. “But they ain’t to a mule.”

  “Anyway, old Harvey’s looking for you,” said Washee. “He’s all boiling over. A pun to tuppence he wants to warn you again about chewing gum. How do you expect Fritz to have any regard for you when every time he sees you, you are running after him with ten cents’ worth of spearmint stuck in your face and your jaws working like a poppet valve? No wonder he’s given up meeting you socially. You’re supposed to be an officer and a swell, Big.”

  “It’s not chewing gum, it’s Old Horse Plug,” said Big Dick Fahnestock with a grin.

  He stretched his huge arms and climbed clumsily out of the wreck. He was a rangy giant, with mild brown eyes, square-knotted jaws and a fighting man’s snub nose. His face was brown as a nut, and adorned at the moment with three days growth of golden beard.

  “Old Horse Plug, Washee,” he said. “And nothing else but. I buy it off a frog farmer down near Compeigne that makes it out of fertilizer. Say, Washee, I saw old Fairy Face hopping it alone ’way to hell and gone north of the lines about an hour ago. He looked like he had come skimming clean from Belgium. I slid down a couple of thousand feet to say hello, but all I got was a dirty look. Is anyone using the mess bathtub? I got to scrub that there look off. It was so dirty it got mud clean back in my ears.”

  He stalked across the field to officers’ quarters, whistling “O du lieber Augustin!” in a mournful monotone. Big Dick Fahnestock never walked, he stalked, with his heavy shoulders swinging clumsily and his feet shambling forward in a clodhopping stride. To watch him in his ordinary gait, no one would ever know that, when he really wanted to make speed, he was one of the fastest 220 men who ever flashed down a cinder path.

  In the wardroom, which he shared with Washee Long and six other pilots, he dragged out a small, green-painted tin bathtub, the pride of the detachment. He was sloshing pails of hot water from the kitchen into it when Adjutant Harvey opened the door.

  Trimly tailored and shining-faced, pipe-clayed and polished, Harvey leaned his burly frame against the doorpost. He looked Dick up and down.

  “Fahnestock,” he said sharply, without any preliminaries, “I see you haven’t shaved yet. I don’t want to warn you again.”

  Big Dick sighed. He shifted his quid to the other cheek.

  “Adj,” he said, “quit picking on me. I just shaved the tail off a Fokker monoplane. Which would you rather have, my whiskers or the Hun ship?”

  “You claim another?” said Harvey coolly. “Any witnesses?”

  Big Dick didn’t catch the note of suspicion in the voice of the adjutant.

  “Three other Jerries,” he said, “but they turned tail and ran. I’m not looking for glory, Adj, and it wasn’t nothing to speak of. They was four of them, but only one Fritz stood up to meet me, with those three yellow buzzards beating it down the sky. He was a game little guy, too, and he put up a good fight. He went burning down a mile before his ship broke up.”

  Adjutant Harvey came in slowly. There was disbelief in his steady gaze.

  “Fahnestock,” he said, “your blouse is unbuttoned and your shirt isn’t any too clean. There’s a filthy streak of soot across it. You’re supposed to be an officer of the Armies of His Brittanic Majesty. You’re the sloppiest dresser that ever wore the uniform. Button your blouse up and get yourself some clean linen.”

  Big Dick chewed quietly and patiently. He wiped his oily hands on his breeches.

  “Adj,” he said, “that there streak is the mark of a tracer that whistled across my belly. And I buttoned the Fritz that kissed me with it into his coffin, as I’m telling you. What’s this—a game of button-button? I thought it was a war.”

  Adjutant Harvey muttered a few indistinguishable—though no doubt unpleasant—words between his teeth.
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  “Oh, go back and play marbles,” said Dick.

  He peeled, and eased himself carefully into the little tub. He sat with his chin on his knees, surrounded by a steamy vapor. The muscles stood out like twisted ropes on his back. He lathered his face and scalp.

  “There’s a plug in my pants pocket, Adj,” he said. “Bite yourself off a big fat chew.”

  Harvey stood looking down at him.

  “I understand you’ve been out over Hunland,” he said. “What doing?”

  “Me?” said Dick. “I’m telling you. Playing tag and leaping frog with some little Jerry playmates. Souse a bucket of that there water over my head, will you? I got soap in my eyes.”

  “Fahnestock,” said the adjutant, “just what is your reason for being in this war?”

  “Why?” said Dick. “Is there any movement under way to get me out of this war?”

  “You’re not English, not a bit of you,” said Harvey slowly. “You’re an American citizen, I know. But by ancestry—”

  “Let’s omit the ancestry,” said Dick. “I’m in this war, if you want to know, because it’s one hot-dog of a fight. If you know of a better, lead me to it. I like to fight, Adj. I’m built that way. Maybe you don’t understand it, but it’s so.”

  A flush crept over Harvey’s shiny face. His glance shifted away. He had been broken for cowardice in battle, and it was a shame he could not forget.

  “Yes,” he said bitterly, “it’s amazing how the lower classes take to fighting.”

  Big Dick grinned. He extracted the quid of Old Horse Plug from his cheek and hurled it out the window. He felt sorry for Harvey. Meditatively, he swabbed out the crevices between his toes.

  “Sure, I’m lower class,” he drawled. “My old man’s a plain ornery Grundy County hog farmer, since you’ve been mentioning ancestry, and my granddad wrassled mules.”

  “Wrassled mules?” said Harvey.

  “Sure, with the Hagenback Circuses,” said Dick. “A dollar to granddad if he downed the mule, and a peck of oats to the mule if he downed granddad. Or maybe it was the other way around.”

  “Most extraordinary!” said Harvey.

  “The old boy came from Hamburg, Germany,” said Dick. “He used to be a blacksmith back in the old country. He never forged any of his ironwork, either. He used to bite it off and trim it down with his teeth—horseshoes, nails, anything he wanted. He taught me a lot of his tricks, too, Adj. I can still knock out any mule with one wallop of my fist. Or any jackass, either.”

  Grinning, he stood up in the tub and stretched his mighty arms. “Yee-how!” he screeched. He soaped his stomach and splashed down again. The water cascaded up around him. It splattered over Harvey’s fawn-colored breeches. Harvey wiped them anxiously with a handkerchief, scrambling back against the wall.

  Big Dick was grinning still as he climbed out and began to dry himself with a big brown towel. But in his quiet eyes there was the same deep light that came in them when he was diving at three miles a minute on the tail of a running Fokker.

  “Lower class as hell, Adj,” he said. “And so are all the Fighters. Look at old Handsome Redburn—used to be a Welsh colliery boy. Look at Mud-Face Mortimer. His old man is only Baron Aleshire, that runs the biggest string of saloons in Liverpool. Look at Washee Long. I don’t want to be any lower class than that boy. He hedgehopped straight down Fritzie’s second line trenches yesterday, so lower class his wheels was almost touching, and drilled a swell Hun gentleman colonel with a swagger stick and blue blood written all over him right through the left eyeball. It sure must have given that blue-blooded gent an awful pain in the rump when he woke up in hell and found he’d been lower-classed off that way by a Limehouse louse that drinks his soup and can’t even spit in Latin. Yee-how!”

  Adjutant Harvey looked at Big Dick long and steadily.

  “Fahnestock,” he said, “you’re a low order of animal. But, by God, you have your virtue. You’re the most fearless man I’ve ever known. Whatever you are, or whatever you do, I’ll give you credit for being brave. It’s a virtue I admire. I can’t help liking you.”

  “Thanks, Adj,” said Dick. “Dry my back, will you?”

  * * * * *

  Big Dick Fahnestock wondered what was going on behind the colorless eyes of Captain Tillinghast Wainwright Oakley Face. But the mind of the commanding officer of the Eight Combat Flight was a mystery even to his own Fighters.

  The captain flashed Dick only one glance as he entered, fresh from his bath and in a uniform reasonably spotless. The captain sat at his desk, sorting over a mass of official papers with delicate hands. He gave a curt nod to Dick’s salute and motioned to a chair. There was a very piercing quality in his pale eyes that seemed to have bored Dick through with that one brief glance.

  “Mind if I take a chew?” said Dick.

  The captain didn’t answer him. Damned old Fairy Face!

  The captain wrote at length, with a pen in a rapidly flowing hand. He snapped together a handful of papers with a rubber band, and arose, thrusting the packet into his safe. Suddenly and sharply, he heeled about, staring at Dick.

  “German-American, eh, what?” he said.

  “American,” drawled Dick.

  The eyes of the Englishman were like ice. But he smiled at Dick.

  “No disgrace,” he said. “George Hanover himself, His Most Britannic Majesty, is seven-eighths German, and first cousin to Wilhelm Hohenzollern. The Germans are a remarkable people, Fahnestock, and no denying it. They’ve jolly well near licked the world. Don’t be ashamed of being German.”

  He lit a pipe and cocked his head. Those icy eyes didn’t flicker. His precise, sharp voice has suddenly taken on a friendly note. Man-to-man stuff. But there was no friendliness in his eyes.

  “Sure, they’re a remarkable people,” said Dick coolly. “They are swell fighters. That’s why I’m in this man’s war, Captain. I wouldn’t want to be scrapping a bunch of rabbits.”

  The pale Englishman nodded quickly.

  “You have a little sneaking admiration for them, eh, what, Fahnestock?”

  Big Dick walked to the window and spat.

  “My granddad came from Hamburg,” he replied steadily. “My mother was born in Berlin. My name is Richard Wagner Fahnestock, and I like pretzels and sauerkraut, and I could cuss in Hoch Deutsch before I knew a word of English. And you can take all that and stick it in your hat. I’m as American as Bunker Hill monument. I’m fighting this war with everything I’ve got. That’s all you need to know. I hope I’ve answered whatever questions may be sneaking around in the back of your mind, various and sundry.”

  Captain Face made a quick gesture.

  “Yes,” he said. “The report of your, ah, fighting activities has come to me. You have been doing quite a bit of flying well into German territory.”

  Big Dick felt his cheeks burning before the cold steady gaze of the English officer.

  Little spots of light danced in front of his eyes. He advanced a half step unconsciously His big hands were opening and closing

  “I know what you’re thinking!” he said.

  The captain pulled his long mustaches.

  “Maybe you do,” he said politely.

  “Oh, yes I do!” said Big Dick with burning anger. “And I’ve been waiting for someone to say it or think it. Everybody knows a Hun spy is at work in one of the squadrons on this front. Everybody knows he’s been dropping information back of Fritz’s lines. And I’ve been waiting for some rat to pin it onto me. The great, brilliant, illuminating thought has suddenly exploded in your cranium that I’m this Hun. Be a man, and say it!”

  Captain Face edged a step backward. He puffed his pipe a moment in silence.

  “Why, not at all, Fahnestock,” he said blandly. “To be honest with you, such a suspicion has never even remotely entered my thoughts!”

  The little spots of fire still danced before Dick’s eyes. He took a deep breath.

  “Thanks, Captain,” he said simply.


  “Such a suspicion would be absurd.”

  “Thanks, Captain.”

  “Utterly ridiculous!”

  “I’m much obliged to you for saying so, sir.”

  The captain lowered his voice. He stepped up close to Dick.

  “It is about another matter entirely I want to see you,” he said confidentially. “A far more important matter. There is no question at all of your, ah, loyalty, Fahnestock. But I should like to know, can you keep a secret? Eh, what?”

  His light eyes stared around him quickly now. His meager body seemed to have stiffened. With a cautionary nod to Dick, he walked across to the door silently in his stockinged feet, opened it, and peered out. There was no one beyond. He locked the door then, while Dick watched with a feeling of sharpening suspense.

  The captain’s pale brow was glistening with sweat. It was plain he was terrified. Yet there was no visible nor conceivable danger. Big Dick Fahnestock understood that Captain Face—like many a braver and many a more cowardly man—was, for reasons of his own, afraid of something that could not be seen.

  And that is the greatest terror of all.

  The silence ticked. The captain drew up a chair. He stared hard at Dick. He talked in an almost inaudible whisper, shielding his mouth with his hand.

  “Confidentially, Fahnestock,” he whispered, “I’m in Intelligence, you know.”

  “I didn’t know, sir,” said Dick.

  “Are you trustworthy, Fahnestock?” whispered the captain, staring him through. “Can you keep confidential what I tell you, whatever happens?”

  Big Dick shifted his quid to the other side of his face.

  “I’ve always aimed to be square, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “And I reckon I can keep my trap shut as well as the next man. But I’m not yearning for any deep heart-to-heart confessions, Captain. If that’s what you’re getting all set to breathe into my ear, you’ll have to excuse me.”

  “Ever hear of K-13?” said the pale Englishman.

  Dick rolled his mild brown eyes. It seemed to him that the captain’s knees were shivering faintly. He had barely breathed the name.