This was alarming enough, but both Holmes and I were struck at the same time with a far more disturbing thought. Holmes, as usual, was more quick in his reactions. He screamed, ‘Who’s flying the plane?’ Wentworth smiled lazily and said, ‘Nobody. Don’t worry. The controls are connected to a little device I invented last month. As long as the air is smooth, the plane will fly on an even keel all by itself.’
He stiffened suddenly, cocked his head to one side, and said, ‘Do you hear it?’
‘Great Scott, man!’ I cried. ‘How could we hear anything about the infernal racket of those motors?’
‘Cockroaches!’ Wentworth bellowed. ‘Giant flying cockroaches! That evil scientist has released another horror upon the world!’
He whirled, and he was gone into the blackness of the tunnel.
Holmes and I stared at each other. Then Holmes said, ‘We are at the mercy of a madman, Watson. And there is nothing we can do until we have landed.’
‘We could parachute out,’ I said.
‘I would prefer not to,’ Holmes said stiffly. ‘Besides, it somehow doesn’t seem cricket. The pilots have no parachutes, you know. These two were provided only because we are civilians.’
‘I wasn’t planning on asking Wentworth to ride down with me,’ I mumbled, somewhat ashamed of myself for saying this.
Holmes didn’t hear me; once again his stomach was trying to reject contents that did not exist.
III
Shortly after dawn, the German planes struck. These, as I was later told, were Fokker E-III’s, single-seater monoplanes equipped with two Spandau machine guns. These were synchronized with the propellors to shoot bullets through the empty spaces between the whirling of the propellor blades.
Holmes was sitting on the floor, holding his head and groaning, and I was commiserating with him, though getting weary of his complaints, when the telephone bell rang. I removed the receiver from the box attached to the wall, or bulkhead, or whatever they call it. Wentworth’s voice bellowed, ‘Put on the parachutes and hang on to something tight! Twelve ****ing Fokkers, a whole staffel, coming in at eleven o’clock!’
I misunderstood him. I said, ‘Yes, but what type of plane are they?’
‘Fokkers!’ he cried, adding, ‘No, no! My eyes played tricks on me. They’re giant flying cockroaches! Each one is being ridden by a Prussian officer, helmeted and goggled and armed with a boarding cutlass!’
‘What did you say?’ I screamed into the phone, but it had been disconnected.
I told Holmes what Wentworth had said, and he forgot about being airsick, though he looked no better than before. We staggered out to the door and looked through its window.
The night was now brighter than day, the result of flares thrown out from the attacking areoplanes. Their pilots intended to use the light to line up the sights of their machine guns on our helpless craft. Then, as if that were not bad enough, shells began exploding, some so near that our aeroplane shuddered and rocked under the impact of the blasts. Giant searchlights began playing about, some of them illuminating monoplanes with black crosses on their fuselages.
‘Archy!’ I exclaimed”. ‘The French anti-aircraft guns are firing at the Huns! The fools! They could hit us as well!’
Something flashed by. We lost sight of it, but a moment later we saw a fighter diving down toward us through the glare of the flares and the searchlights, ignoring the bursting shells around it. Two tiny red eyes flickered behind the propellor, but it was not until holes were suddenly punched in the fabric only a few feet from us that we realised that those were the muzzles of the machine guns. We dropped to the floor while the great plane rolled and dipped and rose and dropped and we were shot this way and that across the floor and against the bulkheads.
‘We’re doomed!’ I cried to Holmes. ‘Get the parachutes on! He can’t shoot back at the planes, and our plane is too slow and clumsy to get away!’
How wrong I was. And what a demon that madman was. He did things with that big lumbering aeroplane that I wouldn’t have believed possible. Several times we were upside down and we only kept from being smashed, like mice shaken in a tin, by hanging on desperately to the bunkposts.
Once, Holmes, whose sense of hearing was somewhat keener than mine, said, ‘Watson, isn’t that a******e shooting a machine gun? How can he fly this plane, put it through such manoeuvres, and still operate a weapon which he must hold in both hands to use effectively?’
‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. At that moment both of us were dangling from the post, failing to fall only because of our tight grip. The plane was on its left side. Through the window beneath my feet I saw a German plane, smoke trailing from it, fall away. And then another followed it, becoming a ball of flame about a thousand feet or so from the ground.
The Handley Page righted itself, and I heard faint thumping noises overhead, followed by the chatter of a machine gun. Something exploded very near us and wreckage drifted by the window.
This shocked me, but even more shocking was the rapping on the window. This, to my astonishment, originated from a fist hammering on the door. I crawled over to it and stood up and looked through it. Upside down, staring at me through the isinglass, was Wentworth’s face. His lips formed the words, ‘Open the door! Let me in!’
Numbly, I obeyed. A moment later, with an acrobatic skill that I still find incredible, he swung through the door. In one hand he held a Spandau with a rifle stock. A moment later, while I held on to his waist, he had closed the door and shut out the cold shrilling blast of wind.
‘There they are!’ he yelled, and he pointed the machine gun at a point just past Holmes, lying on the floor, and sent three short bursts past Holmes’ ear.
Holmes said, ‘Really, old fellow . . .’ Wentworth, raving, ran past him and a moment later we heard the chatter of the Spandau again.
‘At least, he’s back in the cockpit,’ Holmes said weakly. However, this was one of the times when Holmes was wrong. A moment later the captain was back. He opened the trap-door, poked the barrel of his weapon through, let loose a single burst, said, ‘Got you, you ****ing son of a *****!’ I closed the trap-door, and ran back toward the front.
Forty minutes later, the plane landed on a French military aerodrome outside of Marseilles. Its fuselage and wings were perforated with bullet holes in a hundred places, though fortunately no missiles had struck the petrol tanks. The French commander who inspected the plane pointed out that more of the holes were made by a fun firing from the inside than from guns firing from the outside.
‘Damn right!’ Wentworth said. ‘The cockroaches and their allies, the flying leopards, were crawling all over inside the plane! They almost got these two old men!’
A few minutes later a British medical officer arrived. Wentworth, after fiercely fighting six men, was subdued and put into a straitjacket and carried off in an ambulance.
Wentworth was not the only one raving. Holmes, his pale face twisted, his fists clenched, was cursing his brother Mycroft, young Merrivale, and everyone else who could possibly be responsible, excepting, of course, His Majesty.
We were taken to an office occupied by several French and British officers of very high rank. The highest,
General Chatson-Dawes-Overleigh, said, ‘Yes, my dear Mr. Holmes, we realise that he sometimes has these hallucinatory fits. Becomes quite mad, to be frank. But he is the best pilot and also the best espionage agent we have, even if he is a Colonial, and he has done heroic work for us. He never hallucinates negatively, that is, he never harms his fellows—though he did shoot an Italian once, but the fellow was only a private and he was an Italian and it was an accident—and so we feel that we must permit him to work for us. We can’t permit a word of his condition to get back to the civilian populace, of course, so I must require you to swear silence about the whole affair. Which you would have to do as a matter of course, and, of course, of patriotism. He’ll be given a little rest cure, a drying-out, too, and then returned to duty. Britain sorely need
s him.’
Holmes raved some more, but he always was one to face realities and to govern himself accordingly. Even so, he could not resist making some sarcastic remarks about his life, which was also extremely valuable, being put into the care of a homicidal maniac. At least, cooling down, he said, ‘And the pilot who will fly us to Egypt? Is he also an irresponsible madman? Will we be in more danger from him than from the enemy?’
‘He is said to be every bit as good a pilot as Wentworth,’ the general said. ‘He is an American . . .’
‘Great Scott!’ Holmes said. He groaned, and he added, ‘Why can’t we have a pilot of good British stock, tried and true?’
‘Both Wentworth and Kentov are of the best British stock,’ Overleigh said stiffly. ‘They’re descended from some of the oldest and noblest stock of England. They have royal blood in them, as a matter of fact. But they happen to be Colonials. The man who will fly you from here has been working for His Majesty’s cousin, the Tsar of all the Russias, as an espionage agent. The Tsar was kind enough to loan both him and one of the great Sikorski Ilya Mourometz Type V aeroplanes to us. Kentov flew here in it with a full crew, and it is ready to take off.’
Holmes’ face became even paler, and I felt every minute of my sixty-four years of age. We were not to get a moment’s rest, and yet we had gone through an experience which would have sent many a youth to bed for several days.
IV
General Overleigh himself conducted us to the colossal Russian aeroplane. As we approached it, he described certain features in answer to Holmes’ questions.
‘So far, the only four-engined heavier-than-air craft in the world has been built by the Russians,’ he said. ‘Much to the shame of the British. The first one was built, and flown, in 1913. This, as you can see, is a biplane, fitted with wheels and a ski undercarriage. It has four 150-horsepower Sunbeam water-cooled Vee-type engines. The Sunbeam, unfortunately, leaves much to be desired.’
‘I would rather not have known that,’ I murmured. The sudden ashen hue of Holmes’ face indicated that his reactions were similar to mine.
‘Its wing span is ninety-seven feet, nine and a half inches; the craft’s length is fifty-six feet, one inch; its height is fifteen feet, five and seven-eighths inches. Its maximum speed is seventy-five miles per hour; its operational ceiling is 9,843 feet. And its endurance is five hours—under ideal conditions. It carries a crew of five, though it can carry more. The rear fuselage is fitted with compartments for sleeping and eating.’
Overleigh shook hands with us after he had handed us over to a Lieutenant Obrenov. The young officer led us to the steps into the fuselage and to the rear, where he showed us our compartment. Holmes chatted away with him in Russian, of which he had gained a certain mastery during his experience in Odessa with the Trepoff case. Holmes’ insistence on speaking Russian seemed to annoy the officer somewhat, since, like all upper-class people of his country, he preferred to use French. But he was courteous, and after making sure we were comfortable, he bowed himself out. Certainly, we had little to complain about except possibly the size of the cabin. It had been prepared especially for us, had two swing-down beds, a thick rug which Holmes said was a genuine Persian, oil paintings on the walls which Holmes said were genuine Maleviches (I thought they were artistic nonsense), two comfortable chairs bolted to the deck, and a sideboard also bolted to the deck and holding alcoholic beverages. In one corner was a tiny cubicle containing all the furniture and necessities that one finds in a W.C.
Holmes and I lit up the fine Cuban cigars we found in a humidor and poured out some Scotch whisky, Duggan’s Dew of Kirkintilloch, I believe. Suddenly, both of us leaped into the air, spilling our drinks over our cuffs. Seemingly from nowhere, a tall figure had silently appeared. How he had done it, I do not know, since the door had been closed and under observation at all times by one or both of us.
Holmes groaned and said, under his breath, ‘Not another madman?’
The fellow certainly looked eccentric. He wore the uniform of a colonel of the Imperial Russian Air Service, but he also wore a long black opera cloak and a big black slouch hat. From under its floppy brim burned two of the most magnetic and fear-inspiring eyes I have ever seen. My attention, however, was somewhat diverted from these by the size and the aquilinity of the nose beneath them. It could have belonged to Cyrano de Bergerac.
I found that I had to sit down to catch my breath. The fellow introduced himself, in an Oxford accent, as Colonel Kentov. He had a surprisingly pleasant voice, deep, rich, and shot with authority. It was also heavily laced with bourbon.
‘Are you all right?’ he said.
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘You gave me quite a start. A cloud seemed to pass over my mind. But I’m fine now, thank you.’
‘I must go forward now,’ he said, ‘but I’ve assigned a crew member, a tail gunner now but once a butler, to serve you. Just ring that bell beside you if you need him.’
And he was gone, though this time he opened the door. At least, I think he did.
‘I fear, my dear fellow, that we are in for another trying time,’ Holmes said.
Actually, the voyage seemed quite pleasant once one got used to the roar of the four motors and the nerve-shaking jack-out-of-the-box appearances of Kentov. The trip was to take approximately twenty-eight hours, if all went well. About every four and a half hours we put down at a hastily constructed landing strip to which petrol and supplies had been rushed by ship, air, or camel some days before. With the Mediterranean Sea on our left and the shores of North Africa below us, we sped toward Cairo at an amazing average speed of seventy-point-three miles per hour, according to our commander. While we sipped various liquors or liqueurs and smoked Havanas, we read to pass the time. Holmes commented several times that he could use a little cocaine to relieve the tedium, but I believe that he said that just to needle me. Holmes had brought along a work of his own authorship, the privately printed Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations Upon the Segregation of the Queen. He had often urged me to read the results of his experience with his Sussex bees and so I now acceded to his urgings, mainly because all the other books available were in Russian.
I found it more interesting than I had expected, and I told Holmes so. This seemed to please him, though he had affected an air of indifference to my reaction before then.
‘The techniques and tricks of apiculture are intriguing and complex enough,’ he said. ‘But I was called away from a project which goes far beyond anything any apiculturist—scientist or not—has attempted. It is my theory that bees have a language and they communicate such important information as the location of new clover, the approach of enemies, and so forth, my means of symbolic dancing. I was investigating this with a view to turning theory into fact when I got Mycroft’s wire.’
I sat up so suddenly that the ash dropped off my cigar into my lap, and I was busy for a moment brushing off the coals before they burned a hole in my trousers. ‘Really, Holmes,’ I said, ‘you are surely pulling my leg! Bees have a language? Next you’ll be telling me they compose sonnets in honour of their queen’s inauguration! Or perhaps when she gets married!’
‘Epitases?’ he said, regarding me scornfully. ‘You mean epithalamiums, you blockhead! I suggest you use moderation while drinking the national beverage of Russia. Yes, Watson, bees do communicate, though not in the manner which Homo sapiens uses.’
‘I understand that Lord Mowgli of the Seeonee claims that he can talk to beasts and reptiles . . .’ I said, but I was interrupted by that sudden vagueness of mind which signalled the appearance of our commander. I always jumped and my heart beat hard when the cloud dissolved and I realized that Kentov was standing before me. My only consolation was that Holmes was just as startled.
‘Confound it, man!’ Holmes said, his face red. ‘Couldn’t you behave like a civilised being for once and knock before entering? Or don’t Americans have such customs?’
This, of course, was sheer sarcasm, sin
ce Holmes had been to the States several times.
‘We are only two hours from Cairo,’ Kentov said, ignoring Holmes’ remarks. ‘But I have just learned from the wireless station in Cairo that a storm of severe proportions is approaching us from the north. We may be blown somewhat off our course. Also, our spies at Cos, in Turkey, report that a Zeppelin left there yesterday. They believe that it intends to pick up Von Bork. Somehow, he’s slipped out past the cordon and is waiting in the desert for the airship.’
Holmes, gasping and sputtering, said, ‘If this execrable voyage turns out to be for nothing . . . if I was forced to endure that madman’s dangerous antics only to have . . .!’
Suddenly, the colonel was gone. Holmes regained his normal colour and composure, and he said, ‘Do you know, Watson, I believe I know that man! Or, at least, his parents. I’ve been studying him at every opportunity, and though he is doubtless a master at dissimulation, that nose is false, he has a certain bone structure and a certain trait of walking, of turning his head, which leads me to believe . . .’
At that moment the telephone rang. Since I was closest to the instrument, I answered it. Our commander’s voice said, ‘Batten down all loose objects and tie yourself into your beds. We are in for a hell of a storm, the worst of this century, if the weather reports are accurate.’
For once, the meteorologists had not exaggerated. The next three hours were terrible. The giant aeroplane was tossed about as if it were a sheet of writing paper. The electric lamps on the walls flickered again and again and finally went out, leaving us in darkness. Holmes groaned and moaned and finally tried to crawl to the W.C. Unfortunately, the craft was bucking up and down like a wild horse and rolling and yawling like a rowboat caught in a rapids. Holmes managed to get back to his bed without breaking any bones but, I regret to say, proceeded to get rid of all the vodka and brandy (a combination itself not conducive to good digestion, I believe), beef stroganoff, cabbage soup, and black bread on which we had dined earlier. Even more regrettably, he leaned over the edge of the bed to perform this undeniable function, and though I did not get all of it, I did get too much. I did not have the heart to reprimand him. Besides, he would have killed me, or at least attempted to do so, if I had made any reproaches. His mood was not of the best.
The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes II Page 10
