Secret Operative K-13

by Joel Townsley Rogers

  There was a roaring of confused voices beyond the door. Dick slid a step forward. Von Schmee’s eyelids blinked quickly, like the eye-membrane of a toad.

  “Excellenz!” howled the voices. “General von Schmee! An enemy bombing formation reported ten miles away, headed for Oldemonde!”

  But there was no need of that belated warning now. Up on the sweep of the midnight wind, driving straight and fast across the moon-washed sky, nose-to-wing in a wild duck wedge with roaring engine heads and whistling wires, at a hundred miles an hour, the great bombers had come on Oldemonde! Their dreadful shadows cut across the stars. Even while the warning was being shrieked, the loud hroom-hroom-hroom of their multiple Rolls motors swelled in powerful crescendo.

  The organ stops of the gods had been unloosed. Now let the loud diapasons thunder.

  Immediately, the first crash came, landing beyond the beechwoods on the hunting lodge. Fire blazed. The thunderous vibration rolled with a clapping sound through the night. It drowned out the wild voices bellowing at von Schmee’s door. It drowned out the shrieking of the woman who cowered beside von Schmee’s feet. It drowned out the crack of von Schmee’s Luger as he fired it pointblank at Dick Fahnestock’s heart.

  “Lights out! Lights out!” Some lunatic was shrieking. Shrieks and blasphemy, the sounds of sobbing and of shrill laughter, were mingled in a hideous uproar. That was the only voice that could be understood.

  “Lights out! Lights out!”

  The lights of Oldemonde continued to blaze from cellar to roof. But those roaring shadows in the sky soon would put them out.

  Men were stampeding out the doors as the bombers came on over the beechwoods. They were plunging wildly through the night, racing somewhere to get away from the roaring ships chat drove across the sky. The terror of death had come on Oldemonde at last. Hell was cooking for this snug, secret nest of the Hun brass hats, and before the stew was thoroughly cooked, it would be a dish even hotter and more terrible than that which the Prettiest Lady had cooked for the slaughtered regiments down in the Laraine.

  “They got the junior officers’ quarters! Direct hit! In God’s name, here they come!”

  The brass hats scattered like mice. They ran yelling. There were no bombproofs in Oldemonde. There was not a single Archie battery. Across the beechwoods the hunting lodge was burning up. The great iron bell began to clang above the château door, bing-bong! bing-bong! In answer to the swelling hroom-hroom-hroom of the bombers.

  “In God’s name, here they come! Won’t somebody stop them?” a lunatic was yelling. “Won’t somebody stop them, please?”

  The great electric hospital torch sparkled out suddenly on the ground. The second crash from out the night blew it to Kingdom Come.

  Those first two crashes were premature. They were probably twenty-pounders sent down by the little fighting ships flying high above the bombers. The bombers had not yet spoken. They had more terrible eggs to lay, and they could take their time, so as to waste not a single one. They passed northward directly over the roof ridge of Oldemonde to get the range and wind drift, and banked around on lazy sweeping wings, heading back up wind.

  “Lights out! Lights out! Lights out!” the shrill voice kept yelling.

  When the bombers spoke, there would be no more lights left in Oldemonde.

  * * * * *

  Dick Fahnestock did not know that von Schmee had pulled the trigger. He saw the gun muzzle jerk in von Schmee’s hand at the instant the first crash sounded, but that was all. He did not feel the bullet smash.

  The next few minutes were obscure. He saw von Schmee staring at him for a long, long instant with dazed eyes, like a man who himself had been shot in the heart and was dying. Von Schmee backed against the wall, still holding the Luger leveled. Slowly Dick advanced, around the great, carved desk of Flemish oak that separated him from the Butcher. The yellow-haired woman on the floor was uttering shriek after shriek. Horrible cries.

  There sounded the second crash, out in front of the château. Nearer this time. The flash of it passed across the tall, barred windows. The Butcher opened his mouth in a roar that made no sound above the thunderclap. Terror had seized him. The fierce and ruthless heart was broken in his breast.

  The great bombers went roaring across the roof ridge. They did not lay their eggs this time. They were getting the wind drift. But it was as sure as dynamite that Oldemonde was doomed, and every living thing within its walls, and every stone that made it.

  Backward von Schmee crept, and backward, sliding all the time toward his bedchamber door. Backed against the door he stood, fumbling it open with his left hand behind him, while Dick moved toward him slowly and steadily.

  “Are you man or devil?” said the Butcher.

  Pointblank, at seven paces off, again he fired his pistol at Dick’s breast. This time Dick heard the crack. But that was all. The face of the Butcher was very white. He whirled and ran like a bear across the deep rugs of his bedchamber toward the window. Dick leaped after him, but the woman on the floor wound her lean arms around his ankles. For an instant he stumbled, while she clung to him with the fury of a snake.

  Before von Schmee could reach the window, a man sprang up onto the window ledge from out the night. His lithe, active form was outlined against the lopsided moon that rode low in the east. He crouched upon the window ledge, breathing quickly, naked to the waist. It was Ritter von Reuter. It was K-13!

  “I have come, Butcher, according to my promise,” he said in a clear and even voice, which cost him what effort no man can say, “to show you K-13. Now I demand the reward you offered, Butcher. I demand Oldemonde, and all that’s in it!”

  His head swayed in short jerks. His dark blue eyes were dilated like the eyes of a dying man. There was the scorch of a powder burn across his cheek, and his naked, sweating ribs were very much muddied and blood-smeared, and crimson drops were welling up constantly from his left shoulder. But he laughed. He was good at laughing. Upon the window ledge he crouched giddily, with his handsome face all twisted up and ghastly from exhaustion, laughing at the Butcher.

  “Give me Oldemonde or not,” he said, “I’ll take it!”

  Von Schmee fired his pistol as he ran forward. He fired again, and von Reuter rocked on the window ledge, laughing. A third time von Schmee fired. He must have been out of his mind then, for von Reuter did not topple. He ran up close. He pressed the pistol to von Reuter’s blood-soaked breast, and fired it.

  “God strike me dead!” he shouted, and hurled the weapon past von Reuter’s head out the window.

  The powder scorch marked a gray ring above von Reuter’s heart. He swayed off balance and clutched von Schmee’s beard to steady himself again.

  “I loaded it with blanks,” he said, “before I trimmed this beard of yours, Butcher.”

  “God strike me dead!” von Schmee panted. “God strike me dead and let me lie with my great Invincibles, for you are a devil, von Reuter, who have wrecked my life and sent to slaughter the best soldiers this world has ever seen. Would not one regiment, or ten, have been enough? Did you need to take from me the last drop of blood?”

  He broke out in wrenching sobs, and huge, hot tears poured down into his beard. Suddenly he seemed an old, old man, a thin and shriveled gray old man beneath the pendulous folds of his gross flesh. He cried and beat his forehead, and the brain behind the skull he thumped was the brain of a madman.

  “God strike me dead!” he said. “I can carry on no more.”

  “Why call on God?” said von Reuter.

  His sick, white face was very tired as he looked at the Butcher. There was no hate in his eyes. There was pity. He pulled out from his waistband a small Luger, and handed it to von Schmee, muzzle end.

  “There were seven in the magazine,” he said. “But Abendstern stopped two, and Wolf stopped four. There is only that one remaining. I can do no more for you.”

  Von Schmee took the little pistol and put it to von Reuter’s ear. Steadily von Reuter looked at him, and
von Reuter was smiling. Big Dick Fahnestock wrenched himself loose then from that yelling, clawing, biting female fiend upon the floor, and he had to do it in a way that wasn’t very gentlemanly. Growling in his throat, he rushed like a tiger at von Schmee.

  Von Reuter held him back with a gesture. Von Reuter did not flinch, though the muzzle was at his head.

  “You have a better use for it, von Schmee,” he said.

  Then he swung his legs over the window ledge and dropped down onto the moonlit grass. Dick vaulted out after him. They raced breathlessly away from the shadow of that great doomed pile, for the bombers, wheeling about into the wind north over the Meser, were coming back in their roaring flight for the last time.

  * * * * *

  It wasn’t the safest place in the world to be, for bomb-sights are not so accurate as artillery. And even at a thousand feet in a clear night there was always an off chance that some excited gunner up there might release an egg a quarter-mile away from its objective. Yet, as Big Dick Fahnestock grabbed the propeller of his ship to spin it, he stared up a moment at that beautiful sight within the clear night sky.

  “There she goes!” whispered von Reuter. “I asked to have ’em make that sweep, to give me time to dodge before the big unloading.”

  “All the time in the world, all the time in the world,” said Dick. “Not even a machine-gun barking up at ’em. Boy, when I get to be eighty-two, and kind of begin to lose my youthful vim and vigor, I’m going to grab me a job as a bomber.”

  “Get her going, big boy,” said von Reuter wearily. “Let’s get up and away. I’m tired, Big Dick. I’m sunk, and I’m a sick man. Damned lucky crack it was for me that blew a corner off the hunting lodge, but I don’t care to be so near again to a mess like that, big boy. My nerves aren’t built that way.”

  “Yeah, you sure are a nervous guy,” said Dick.

  Hroom-hroom-hroom! came the wild duck flight, and high above, close underneath the stars, the little Fighters walked along like gnats. Hroom-hroom-hroom! Eighteen of them, bow-to-wing, cutting across the stars in silhouette, heading straight into the wind above the roof of Oldemonde. It was bombing practice for them. It was pie.

  Big Dick had shot his Sopwith over the grass and lifted her into the air by the time the bombers cut their engines and the thunderous flashes came. Below him, the world rocked, and Oldemonde went up in fire. The bombers wheeled, and spread out in a fan. And still below them, the thunderous flashes dotted the black-and-silver ground, in the cedar wood, among the beeches, down by the old brick wall behind the stables, where the nameless dead lay sleeping. The bombers were out to wipe the last square yard of Oldemonde from the map, to wipe the last smell of von Schmee from it. And before they had finished their work, they had nearly done it.

  Up toward the stars Big Dick held his bow, climbing to meet the Fighters. High up they stood, and suddenly they dropped, one by one like birds from off a perch. Down they came, streaking through the whistling wind like bullets, Harvey and Mud-Face Mortimer, little Washee Long and Handsome Redburn and all of them. They flashed by Dick at two hundred miles an hour, cheering silently and lifting their arms in salute. Close above the ground they flattened out and hedgehopped, heaving overboard their hand grenades and twenty-pounders, opening up the Vickers racket at squads of panic-stricken fugitives. It would have been easier for many of those Hun brass hats at Oldemonde had they died fighting with the Invincibles in the trap of the Laraine.

  Big Dick laid his ship over on its ear, and wheeled about in a close turn, while, one by one, the Fighters came up to him. The bombers were turning back. Their work was over. Dick climbed with the Fighters. Mr. Archie and Herr Fokker and Fraulein Pompom would be doing a great deal of arguing before the Fighters got safe home again. The Fighters would be glad that Big Dick Fahnestock was with them before that night was over.

  • • • • •

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