by W E Johns
“Ah!” breathed Biggles. “I thought so. What did you do? Speak up.”
The man’s breath was coming fast. Clearly, he was badly scared. “I cut the aileron control,” he gasped.
“Why did you do that? Come on, let’s have the truth or I’ll have you sent to prison for life, for sabotage and attempted murder,” promised Biggles. “Why did you try to kill me?”
“I didn’t want to do it—I swear I didn’t,” pleaded the wretched man, whose nerves seemed to have gone to pieces.
“Then why did you?”
“He made me.”
“Who made you?”
“Herr Preuss. For God’s sake don’t tell him I told you or he’ll kill me.” The man’s terror was almost pathetic.
“So you’re afraid of Preuss?” Biggles’s remark was more a statement than a question.
“He’s a man to be afraid of,” was the answer.
“I see. Well, having gone so far you might as well make a clean breast of the rest. Where are the two machines that disappeared from here?”
“I don’t know, and that’s God’s truth, sir,” declared the German.
“But they were here?”
The man betrayed himself by hesitation.
“Come on—I’m waiting,” snapped Biggles.
“Heaven help me if Preuss ever finds out I told you,” moaned the man. “Yes, they were here. I helped to build them.”
“A fighter and a light bomber?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your trade—fitter?”
“Yes.”
“Did you help to fit the undercarriages?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’d know the dimension of the wheel track of the bomber?”
“It was four metres. I didn’t fit the Wolf—that’s what they call the fighter—but it was slightly less.”
“Where did these machines go?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t told. I don’t think anyone knew except Preuss. He and Herr Baumer were always whispering together.”
“So Baumer flew one of the machines?”
“Who went in the party?”
“There were five of them. The machines went together, at night. The only people I knew were Renkell and Baumer. Herr Renkell seemed upset. Baumer flew the fighter, taking Herr Renkell with him.”
“What about the bomber?”
“It has been converted into a transport. I didn’t know the man who flew it. He only arrived the day before. I think he was an Italian. Baumer called him Carlos.”
Biggles glanced at Algy before continuing. “Who were the passengers?”
“From pictures I’ve seen of him I think one was Herr Gontermann. The other was a stranger, an American by his accent. He— But here comes Herr Preuss. He’s seen me talking to you. For God’s sake don’t let him know what I’ve told you.”
“All right. You can trust me,” promised Biggles. “It will be worth your while to do so. Tell me this. Preuss saw the two machines off, eh?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Schneider—Franz Schneider.”
“Where can I find you if I want you? Preuss is heading for trouble, so if you want to keep out of the mess you’d better be honest.”
“I live at number forty Unterstrasse, Augsburg. I have a room on the top floor.”
“If Preuss attempts to leave the ground in his machine, I want you to ring me up at once and let me know. We’ve no time for more now. Get in touch with me at the Colon Hotel and we’ll fix an appointment. Ask for Sergeant Bigglesworth.”
“Yes, sir.”
Preuss came hurrying up, his expression heavy with suspicion. “What’s the matter here?” he demanded.
“Nothing to get upset about, surely,” returned Biggles calmly. “This lad was interested in my machine. I was telling him a few things about it. Any objection?”
“I don’t like my staff talking with strangers,” said Preuss brusquely. “Get back to your work, Schneider.”
The mechanic walked off, looking as servile as only a German can, in the presence of a superior.
“Anything else you want to say, Mr. Preuss?” asked Biggles quietly.
“No.”
“Then don’t let us keep you.”
Preuss clicked his heels, bowed, and departed.
With a pensive expression in his eyes Biggles watched him go. “A typical bullying Nazi, if ever there was one,” he observed. “A potential murderer, at that. He sent that lad to sabotage the plane. Lucky I spotted him, otherwise we should have scattered ourselves all over the aerodrome when we tried to take off. Preuss knows what we’re after. I fancy there’s more in this affair than ever Raymond suspects. A dangerous type, is Mr. Preuss. He’ll watch us from his office. When he sees us repairing that severed cable he’ll know his plan for bumping us off has failed. I imagine he’ll let Gontermann and Co. know that we’re around. One thing is certain. We couldn’t get back to England before dark even if we wanted to—and I’m not sure that I want to. I’d like another word with that fellow Schneider. He has no stomach for this job, and he’s ready to talk, to save himself. He’s scared stiff of Preuss, there’s no doubt about that.”
“You told Schneider you’d be at the Colon,” reminded Ginger.
“I spoke on the spur of the moment, but I think I will stay there,” answered Biggles. “We’ll get the Spur into one of the empty hangars and repair the damage. Algy, you’d better have a good look round your machine, too. I’ve got a little job for you and Bertie.”
“Have you, by Jove?” murmured Bertie. “What is it?”
“I want you to take a quick trip to the Persian Gulf,” answered Biggles casually.
Algy started. “To where?”
“You heard me.”
“What’s the idea?”
Biggles lit a cigarette. “Because it’s the thing to do.” he went on, smiling faintly. “If murder novels and cinema thrillers are to be believed, the first thing the best detectives do is visit the scene of the crime. The first crime of our series was the pearl robbery in the Persian Gulf. I didn’t rush straight off there, but had we drawn blank here I should have had a look round. We now have something definite to look for. Somehow—it doesn’t matter how—the man who pinched the pearls left the Rajah and reached the coast, where a plane must have been waiting to take the swag to America. Naturally, the plane would wait on the side of the Gulf nearest to America. That’s Arabia. I doubt if a plane could land on the other side, the Persian side, anyway, because it’s mostly cliff and rock. The Arabian coast is flat sand. You could put a machine down almost anywhere, but you couldn’t do it without leaving wheel marks.”
“But just a minute, old boy,” put in Bertie. “If Baumer is as smart as he seems to be, he might have erased the tracks after he landed.”
“So he might,” agreed Biggles. “But he’d be a thundering clever man to erase the tracks he made taking off. The machine took off again after picking up the pearl thief.”
Bertie made a gesture of disgust. “What a bally idiot I am. Never thought of that, by jingo. You’re absolutely right.”
“As I was saying,” went on Biggles, “unless there has been a sand-storm, somewhere along that coast there are wheel tracks. There’s no likelihood of their being obliterated by traffic because there isn’t any traffic. It’s Arab country, and most of the Arabs are in the towns—and there aren’t many towns, anyway. I don’t suppose anyone walks that coast once in a blue moon. I want you to go down and find the tracks. Cruise along the coast, low. On that unbroken sand, tyre marks should stand out like tank traps. Having found what you’re looking for, land, measure the wheel tracks carefully, and then come home. Those tracks can tell us a lot, which is why I asked Schneider about them. He says the wheel track of the Renkell bomber—or, rather, transport—is four metres. That’s a trifle over thirteen feet—thirteen feet one and a half inches, to be precise, if I haven’t forgotten my arithmetic. If you find two g
rooves in the sand thirteen feet apart we shall know where the Gontermann-Baumer syndicate went when it bolted from here, and why. You’ve a longish hop in front of you—close on three thousand miles the way you’ll have to go so you’d better get cracking. If I were you I’d go via Malta and Alexandria, so that you can pick up petrol at R.A.F. stations. By taking turns at the controls you ought to be able to run right through. You should be at Basra, at the head of the Gulf, about dawn. Have a rest and a bite while the boys are servicing the machine, then go on. Unless you get a signal from me at Alex or Malta on the way back, go straight home to Croydon. Unless something happens in the meantime I shall be there myself by then.”
Algy nodded. “Okay. We’ll get off right away. Watch your step with Preuss. He’s a nasty piece of work. Come on, Bertie.”
They went out, leaving Biggles and Ginger alone.
“You get busy on that repair job,” ordered Biggles. “I’ll ring Howath and ask him to mount a guard over the aircraft all night. I don’t feel like giving Preuss a second chance to try any funny tricks. I’ll ask Howath to book a couple of rooms at the Colon at the same time. We’ll sleep there tonight. After dinner we’ll try to get in touch with Schneider. I fancy he knows more than he had time to tell us. Even if this Renkell gang was not responsible for the robberies the authorities will be glad to have information about them. They’re up to something, and it’s something pretty big. If Schneider is to be believed, and I feel pretty sure he was telling the truth, there are at least six of them in it—Renkell, Gontermann, Baumer, Preuss, Carlos the Italian, and an unknown American. Carlos must be Carlos Scaroni, Baumer’s pal, the chap who inscribed the photograph we found in Baumer’s office. But how an American comes into it is a puzzler.”
“And that isn’t the only thing that puzzles me,” remarked Ginger. “How are we going to arrest six men, even if we find them? Suppose we did—what then? Even if they are engaged in skyway robbery, how the deuce are we going to prove it? If we found them tomorrow, what evidence should we have against them? How are you going to get evidence? How can you prove that a plane went to any particular place, when it leaves no trail in the air?”
“The ideal thing would be to catch them red-handed at something,” returned Biggles thoughtfully.
“But in that case they’d be in the air,” argued Ginger. “You can stop a surface vehicle without hurting the occupants, but you can’t stop a plane forcibly without knocking it down and killing the passengers. Should we be justified in doing that?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Biggles. “Raymond doesn’t know, either. I asked him that very question. He said something about challenging, and shooting if the plane refused to go down.”
“Challenging? That implies the use of radio. You can’t talk to another machine any other way. While we were requesting them to put their wheels on the ground they’d probably be popping at us with their guns. Shoot first and challenge afterwards, I should say.”
“The whole of this air business bristles with difficulties,” asserted Biggles. “There will have to be new legislation to deal with it; until there is, we shall just have to use our discretion. There’s nothing else we can do, as far as I can see.”
“If this chap Preuss is a sample of what we’re up against, I’m glad we brought our automatics,” declared Ginger.
“I had a feeling we might need them,” murmured Biggles. “But this won’t do. Push on with the job. I’ll give you a hand as soon as I’ve spoken to Howath.”
CHAPTER V
PREUSS TRIES AGAIN
LATER in the evening, Biggles and Ginger were just sitting down to dinner in the Colon Hotel when a waiter informed Biggles that he was wanted on the telephone.
Biggles put down his napkin. “That’ll be Schneider,” he said softly to Ginger, and followed the waiter to the instrument.
He was away about twenty minutes. When he came back his manner was alert. “Schneider,” he said quietly, in reply to Ginger’s questioning glance, as he dropped into his chair. “Things are moving fast. Preuss has had his machine pulled out and filled up for a long trip. He hasn’t left the ground yet, but he’s all set to go. If it were daylight I’d try to shadow him, but it’s no use trying to follow him in the dark. I’ve done a deal with Schneider. The poor little devil is scared stiff of Preuss, and of this crooked business he’s engaged in. He’s afraid Preuss suspects he told us more than he should this afternoon. Before he would tell me anything he asked me to give him a thousand marks, which would, he said, enable him to clear off to another town and find a new job.”
“Did you say you would?”
“Yes. It seemed a reasonable request. I told him he could come here to collect the money at eight o’clock; we shall have finished eating by then. He said he’d come. He had something on his mind that he daren’t say over the phone, but he told me a few things. Preuss has been away twice before, taking a fairly heavy load with him. On each occasion he left here overnight, with a full tank, heading south, and arrived back from that direction at dawn, with a nearly dry tank, looking as though he had been up all night. Schneider doesn’t know where he went; as far as he knows, Preuss told no one; but if he headed south he must have gone to Italy, or North Africa.”
“He couldn’t have got to North Africa and back without refuelling,” put in Ginger.
“There might have been petrol available at the other end,” returned Biggles. “Let’s work it out. The Swan can probably kick the air behind it at around two-fifty miles an hour. Preuss was away twelve hours. Allowing an hour at the objective he could have covered getting on for three thousand miles. Beyond that, it’s guesswork.”
“Where the deuce does he get so much petrol at this end?” demanded Ginger.
“I asked Schneider that. He says there’s a concrete underground tank near the top end of the Renkell hangar. The valve is under a pile of rubbish. It was put in by the Nazis— emergency war stores. Preuss should have declared it to Howath, but he didn’t. He told the staff to keep their mouths shut about it.”
“We could collar him for that.”
“It wouldn’t do us any good. I’d rather Preuss were free. We shall learn more from him that way than by locking him up. Now we know where Preuss gets his petrol at this end, we could at any time keep the Swan on the ground by seizing the petrol—but I don’t think the time is quite ripe for that.”
“Did Schneider tell you anything else?”
“Very little. He got on the phone as quickly as possible to let me know about Preuss going off. It looks more and more as if the Swan is running a private communication line between Gontermann and Co. and Germany.
“Did it take Schneider twenty minutes to tell you what you’ve just told me?” asked Ginger incredulously.
“No, as a matter of fact it didn’t. After he had finished I put a call through to the Yard. I managed to get hold of Raymond, and asked him to do one or two things for me.”
“Such as?”
“For one thing I asked him to get the B.B.C. to keep an ear to the air for unofficial signals. I told him I was particularly interested in Southern Europe and North Africa. He said he thought he could get service operators at Malta and Alexandria to listen, too.”
“Didn’t he wonder what you were up to?”
“Probably. But Raymond knows me too well to waste time asking premature questions. He was a bit shaken though, judging from his voice, when I asked him to query the United States Federal Bureau if Max Grindler was at large.”
Ginger started. “Grindler!”
“Grindler, you remember, was the big-shot gangster with whom Gontermann worked when he was in the States.”
“But Gontermann squealed when Grindler was caught. Judging from what I’ve seen on the flicks, and read in the papers, American racketeers take a poor view of that sort of thing. Grindler’s only reason for contacting Gontermann would be to bump him off.” Ginger spoke with warmth.
Biggles nodded assent. “I agree. But according to Schn
eider, there’s an American in this party over here, and Grindler is the only American crook who, as far as we know, has been associated with Gontermann or his confederates. Of course, it might be another member of the Grindler gang, but we’ve no way of checking up on that. We can check up on Grindler. It’s a shot in the dark, but I thought it was worth trying.”
“From the way you speak of Gontermann and Co., although the machines belonged to Renkell I take it you regard Gontermann as the head of this thing?”
“I should say he’s the boss by now, if he wasn’t at the beginning. Gontermann is that sort of man. He’d have to be, to get as high as he did in the Nazi party. I can’t imagine him taking orders from Renkell, or Baumer, or this Italian, Scaroni. By the way, I also asked Raymond to try to get particulars of Scaroni, and his unit, which from the photo seems to have been Escadrille Thirty-three. He said he thought he could, although it might take a little time, because it would mean getting in touch with the Italian Record Office.”
Biggles glanced at the clock. “It’s nearly eight. Schneider should be along any minute now. When he comes we’ll ask him to join us over coffee. That should make him feel at home. I confess to some curiosity about this item of news he daren’t mention over the phone.”
Another quarter of an hour passed. Biggles began to fidget.
“He’s late,” he remarked, with a trace of anxiety in his voice. “We’d better order some more coffee—this is nearly cold.”
Very soon he was looking at the clock every few minutes. At twenty past eight he left the dining-room, taking Ginger with him, and went into the vestibule, finding a seat that commanded a view of the swing doers. Still there was no sign of Schneider.
At eight-thirty Biggles got up. “I don’t like this,” he said bluntly. “It begins to look as if he isn’t coming”
“Perhaps he’s changed his mind,” suggested Ginger.
“A man in Schneider’s position doesn’t change his mind when there is a sum of money to be collected,” answered Biggles. “I’m going to find out what’s happened. We can leave word with the hall porter that if Schneider comes he is to wait. Let’s go.”
