“At what hour, Excellency?”
“At once!” said von Schmee impatiently, waving his hand.
He bent to his map again. He moved one of the colored pins five centimeters forward—a regiment had advanced another mile. Out in the anteroom, a battery of telegraph instruments were clacking. Commissioned aides and orderlies were rushing in and out all the time, laying reports of troop movements before him as they were received.
The Invincible’s regiments were moving down to the front. The zero hour was coming on. Already von Schmee had forgotten Dick Fahnestock. He was not concerned with mosquitoes.
* * * * *
He was led along a road under spreading elms and locusts toward the old brick wall down behind the stables. Stars burned in a clear sky. The wind was hot and suffocating.
Sentries had been doubled through all the grounds of Oldemonde. They were alert and on edge, in the mood which makes men shoot at shadows. Their sharp challenges rang forth almost constantly.
“Halt an! Wer geht?”
“Colonel the Count von Kleinhals, Chief of Communications, with a squad and one prisoner!”
“Advance, Colonel von Kleinhals, and give the countersign!”
“Cothaven!”
“Pass on!”
A grounding of arms and a rifle salute as Kleinhals led his dark squad past down toward the old brick wall.
They went hurriedly, often breaking into double time at a curt command from Kleinhals to the corporal. Von Schmee had been anxious to have this thing over with, and in secret. He was afraid of English reprisals. There were a corporal and eight men with bayonets fixed who marched behind and beside Dick Fahnestock along that last dark way. And Kleinhals and himself made eleven. Yet he had a feeling that there was one man more.
Perhaps the German soldiers had the feeling, too. They gripped their rifles more firmly. Their eyes darted to either side. Von Kleinhals flashed a bright electric torch into every shrub as he approached.
Someone came running with a sharp tread after them down the blue-stone road. Kleinhals drew the squad to a halt. They stood with cocked rifles. Kleinhals directed his flashlight back along the road.
“Orders from His Excellency, Herr Oberst!”
The form of Lieutenant von Reuter loomed into the yellow beam. He came at a run, breathing quickly.
“His Excellency’s compliments, and report to him at once, Herr Oberst!”
Kleinhals let the beam sink from von Reuter’s face.
“H’m! H’m!” he said thoughtfully. “What is the occasion?”
Von Reuter came up. He spoke in a lowered voice to von Kleinhals’ ear. His voice was breaking with joy.
“K-13 has been found, Herr Oberst!”
“What!”
“Caught red-handed, Herr Oberst!” panted von Reuter jubilantly. “His game is up. His Excellency requests you to report to him immediately.”
Colonel von Kleinhals rumpled his great red beard. His hand was trembling with excitement. He turned to the corporal of the guard squad.
“Proceed! Proceed, Opfer!” he said hurriedly. “Carry out His Excellency’s orders in regard to the prisoner, Fahnestock. At ten paces. If he desires time for meditation or prayer, allow him ninety seconds. Also, the blindfold may be omitted as a courtesy. Seven cartridges, and one blank. You yourself will give the coup de grace. All is understood?”
“At your command, Herr Oberst!” grunted the stolid corporal. “I know the routine.”
“I will dispatch a medical officer to certify to the fact. Postpone interment until his arrival.”
“Zu Befehl, Herr Oberst!”
Accompanied by his brisk young aide, Kleinhals hurried away. His flashlight cut pale circles on the blue-stone road. Presently, the light vanished off in a turning of the park, and the sound of the running feet died away.
Corporal Opfer, his squad and his prisoner, stood watching for a moment, till the light had gone and a silence had descended again over the giant black elms and locusts. They understood that terrible things were about to happen. The feeling of them hung dark and heavily in the air. After a minute, the corporal flashed his short non-com’s sword.
“Gewehr—auf! Schwadron—vorwarts!”
They took up the march in silence.
* * * * *
Mosquitoes droned. Beetles went rushing by like bullets through the darkness. The hot, choking night wind stirred great bushes of hydrangea and syringa. Here and there, again, they were challenged by sentries. Dick Fahnestock stalked amid the grim and silent men. Once he reached up to snatch a handful of edible leaves from an overhanging mulberry. A bayonet prodded him promptly in the buttock.
They moved down behind the abandoned stables, and went across a manured enclosure toward the old brick wall. There was a gnarled apple tree that leaned over the wall, and the bricks were covered with ivy that was alive with rustling leaves. Suddenly, a bright electric torch flashed on them from the summit of the wall, and they were challenged for the last time.
“Halt an! Wer geht?”
“Corporal Opfer of the guard, with a squad and one condemned man!”
“Advance, corporal, and give the countersign!”
“Cothaven!”
“Stand where you are!”
The corporal had advanced four paces ahead of his halted squad. He stood bewildered, blinking his eyes at the blinding light. It lay on top of the wall, and there was blackness behind it. The blackness of the apple tree. The blackness of the stars.
“Orders of His Excellency!” the corporal cried. “A spy to be shot!”
“Stand where you are!”
The corporal cursed beneath his breath. As he stared harder, he beheld upon the wall just behind the light the thick air-cooled muzzle of a machine gun. All else was blackness.
“His Excellency—” he croaked.
“Stand where you are, you swine! Drop arms, all of you!”
Well, a machine gun is a machine gun. Corporal Opfer and his squad knew it. It is something that makes a man sick at his stomach when he sees it at fifteen paces off.
“Drop arms!”
The rifles clattered.
Corporal Opfer stood blinking. He swore and sweated.
“Who are you,” he shouted, “giving commands to a firing squad under orders of His Excellency? I demand your rank!”
“Lieutenant,” said the voice from the blackness.
The corporal gave a grudging salute.
“Your name, sir?”
Said the voice from the blackness—
“K-Dreizehn!”
* * * * *
Big Dick Fahnestock chewed his mulberry leaves. He picked up one of the rifles and clutched it between his knees. Across the bayonet blade he sawed apart the ropes about his wrists.
“Do any of you Huns know English?” barked the voice from the blackness.
None of the Germans replied. They stood bewildered, hands held high.
“Run like hell, big boy,” said the voice in pure American. “You’ll find old Kleinhals lying blotto up the road, a quarter mile from where he left you. Pile yourself into his rags, hide him, and lie low. I’ve cleared the way around your ship. Can you fly it?”
“Can a grasshopper hop?” said Dick.
“I’ll meet you there before midnight, if I can. If not by midnight, make your break alone. And good luck to you, big boy.”
“Do you think I’d fly without you, K-13?” growled Dick.
“If I’m not with you by midnight at the latest,” said the voice from the darkness quietly, “that means my game is over. So save your hide, and don’t try to be an ass of a hero. You can’t help me. Don’t hold me up. Good luck to you, big boy, and beat it!”
Big Dick took a bayonet and cut the suspenders of the bewildered Germans. It was an old trick he had learned from the Paris police, having had it used on himself on occasion when arrested as drunk and disorderly. Their hands were up, but their pants came down. Man cannot run well that way.
&nb
sp; “I’ll meet you again tonight, K-13,” he said, “at the ship or at the gates ajar. I’ll not hop alone. If you’re not with me, von Schmee and several other Huns will roast in hell tonight.”
He gathered up the rifles and hurled them over the wall. He took the sidearms from Corporal Opfer and sent them the same way. Then he wheeled and ran on his toes into the night.
Behind the wall, K-13 kept silence. But the wicked muzzle was still upon the Huns. It held them there till Dick was clear away.
After a long, sweating minute, Corporal Opfer dropped his hands. He pulled up his pants. With a growl, he started to rush toward the unseen warder.
“Stand where you are!”
None of them tried it again. Stolidly, they stood confronting the blazing light and the pointed gun. They held their arms elevated till they were numb and their eyes were reeling. They were disciplined cattle. And they knew the meaning of death.
They stood there, blinking and cursing beneath their breath, till the battery of the electric torch began to fail and its blinding light grew dimmer. Then they could see that the machine gun on the wall was only a piece of cast iron pipe. They rushed it with wild yells. They hoched the Kaiser and damned the English swine. They were the great Invincibles, and they weren’t afraid of a piece of cast iron pipe.
Over the old brick wall they swarmed, into the little graveyard beyond it, not pausing to go around. They ran through the grass like yammering foxhounds. Snatching up their empty guns, they bayoneted the gnarled old apple tree and a couple of toads in the grass.
“Verdamnte Englander!”
But there was nothing for them to bayonet except the ivy on the old brick wall, except the gnarled tree and the toads and five mounds against the wall in the little graveyard, weed-grown and without a marker to tell what victims of the Butcher’s hate lay in this quiet spot.
* * * * *
Through the night, beneath huge whispering trees, Dick Fahnestock dashed like a two-legged deer. Twice sentries shouted challenges to him. He evaded them, swerving quickly between the ancient trees and shrubbery masses of Oldemonde’s parks. Their frightened voices, half doubtful they had seen him, dwindled away into nervous oaths or apologetic laughter.
He came to the boll of a gigantic beech tree beside the blue-stone road, and found Colonel the Count von Kleinhals, suspicious-eyed fox of the Nachrichtenamt, lying bound and gagged with his back to the massive trunk, stripped to his underwear. The tall, red-bearded man was stirring to half-consciousness then. Dick dragged him deep into a clump of uncleared juniper, and there changed his own torn and muddied British uniform for the garments of von Kleinhals.
They were no bad fit, for Kleinhals himself was a big man. Clad from black field boots to pickelhaube—spiked helmet, “pimple-cap” as the Germans called it—he stepped forth in the uniform of an Oberst of the imperial and royal 17th Saxon. He forced himself to go at a steady, easy pace, making by a circuitous route toward the place where last night he had left his ship.
“Halt! Who goes there?”
“Colonel von Kleinhals!”
“Advance, Colonel von Kleinhals, and give the countersign!”
“Cothaven!”
“Pass on!”
He passed on, taking the salute. And if his thumb was sometimes at his nose when he did so, the stiff-backed sentries never saw it. Soldiers, he realized more profoundly than he ever had before, do not look at faces, but at rank markings. Yet there was always the chance that some sentry might challenge him who knew Kleinhals well. Partially to avoid recognition, he buttoned up about his chin the high choker collar of his summer overcoat, and sank his head down in it to the nose. He passed by five sentry posts undisputed.
Before eleven, he arrived on the treeless lawns in front of the château, and saw his own sweet Sopwith still standing by the edge of the water, where he had brought it down twenty-three hours before. The huge hospital cross that lay on the ground near by was not lighted tonight. The vicinity was dark except for the reflection of stars in the rippleless shallow water.
He paced up and down. There was no apparent guard on the ship. He wetted his finger and examined the direction of the wind. It was due south. He would have a clear runway into it. At a time when there was no one around, he ventured to examine the ship. She had an hour’s petrol still in her tanks. Her control wires, wings and under-carriage were undamaged.
He paced up and down along the margin of the carp pond. Not too near the ship, no. Head bent, hands clasped behind him, he gave as good an imitation as he was able of Colonel von Kleinhals immersed in profound reflection. There was great bustle in the château. Motor cars were roaring up and roaring away again. Frequently, a pair of officers or a rapidly running orderly passed around the edge of the pond, saluting when they saw him. Once three officers in a group paused and examined the English ship curiously, and there was one of them who gave him a sharp look.
But there was no man who came alone. K-13 did not come.
He paced up and down. He heard the striking of the quarter-hours five times from a great bell above the doors of the château. He paced up and down, and the midnight came.
The midnight came, but K-13 did not come.
Big Dick turned then and stalked toward von Schmee’s headquarters without hesitation. He knew now that they had got K-13. He knew that he himself would kill von Schmee, and die fighting.
Chapter XI
The Executioner
Leutnant Von Reuter of the Prussian Guards—more precisely, the Brandenburg Guards, the Ignorants, as they called themselves, die herrlichen Unwissenden, die kaiserlichen und königlichen Unueberwindlichen—stood before his beautiful, gilt-framed Eighteenth Century mirror in the hunting lodge of Oldemonde, trying to make a monocle stay put in front of his eye.
The hunting lodge was at present the quarters of the junior staff officers of the 7th Corps. Here Lieutenant von Reuter slept, when he slept. Here he found it convenient to transact certain of his business.
The hour was eleven of the night when von Reuter stood there playing with his monocle. He heard the striking of a bell from the château beyond the beechwoods. Above the door of von Schmee’s great headquarters, the bell was sounding the hour. It had a heavy sound. It was cast of old cannon iron from the field of Waterloo, not many miles away.
Eleven o’clock. For the Invincibles, the zero hour. Now, down in the muddy bottomlands of Laraine Wood, upon the Somme, forty odd miles to the south by west from Oldemonde, they would be moving up out of their trenches in a black and silent mass, a wall of bayonets, a tidal surge of steel, eighty thousand men of them going forward in parade rank three miles wide and twenty men deep, to smash the wedge through the English lines that would win Paris and the sea. Now, down in the trap of Laraine Wood, the Prettiest Lady lay with his Bantams, his Yeomen and his kilted Scots, to blow them into hell.
Eleven o’clock. Bing-bong! Bing-bong! Bing-bong! Bing-bong! Bing-bong! Bing . . . ! Thus the bell struck. Von Schmee would not forget that hour.
The warlords of Germany would not forget that hour. The widows of the Invincibles would not forget it.
Lieutenant von Reuter dusted a grain of brick mortar off the sleeve of his blouse. Softly, he whistled a bar of “Die Lorelei” while he tried to make his monocle stick in his eye.
The loveliest maiden is sitting,
Wonderfully over there,
Her golden jewels ere glittering
She combs her golden hair. . . .
There was no defect of vision in either of his dark blue eyes. On the contrary, they were unusually keen and observant. Nevertheless, in his position as an exalted Oberleutnant of the Brandenburg Guard and aide to Herr Oberst Graf von Kleinhals, it was imperative that Ritter von Reuter master the art of wearing a monocle, even though one only, like his, of plain glass.
“Schweinhund!” he swore as the glass popped out of his eye. “Donner-wetter!”
He tried screwing it in, twisting it around and around in the bony socket betwe
en his cheekbone and his elevated eyebrow. He wetted the edges of it with his tongue, and tried plastering it on.
“Thor’s hammer and the whiskers of nine million defunct cats!” he swore.
Or words to that effect. And plenty of them. In choice and perfectly accented Hoch Deutsch, the most marvelous engine ever invented by the human intellect to express anger, disgust, malediction, execration, vituperation and old fashioned honest blasphemy.
“Unnennbare Greule und Zoten! Fünfzehntausend Sauen mit zahllosen Teufelhundwurfen!” he shouted. “Schweinigelei undsoweiter, undsoweiter!”
The nimble circle of glass popped out again, like a cuckoo out of a clock.
Yet he was smiling with a small quiet smile at his reflection in the mirror, even in the midst of his most guttural blasphemies. He had the habit of smiling. Indeed, had not Herr Oberst Graf von Kleinhals warned him only yesterday afternoon, as they were returning from the hayfield with the messages of the flying, that he laughed too much? An air of levity was bad for a soldier. It indicated an empty mind.
Perhaps it was best, though, that Lieutenant von Reuter had a facility at smiling. He could smile even now, in a moment when he knew very well that Old Captain Death was about ready to tap him on the shoulder.
Delicately, he held the glass between thumb and forefinger. He brought it up cautiously back of his ear and slipped it into place quickly, taking his eye by surprise. It was home at last, after the fifteenth or thirty-second try. It stuck. It did not budge. It stayed as if cemented
“Ach!” he rejoiced, laughing heartily. “Gott ist im Himmel! Der Feind ist zerschmissen!”
He turned his handsome face admiringly to right and left above the high choker collar that held his chin like a curb bit. Softly, he rubbed a speck off the mirror. He straightened his chin a sixteenth of an inch. He smoothed down a disarranged hair in his eyebrows.
Secret Operative K-13 Page 12
