by W E Johns
Evans gasped and rolled his eyes. Biggles struck him a smart blow. ‘Get up! Our only chance is to keep him moving,’ he told Ginger in a swift aside.
Evans made an effort to rise.
‘That’s better,’ said Biggles, trying to get the stricken man on to his feet. Then, to Ginger: ‘Okay. Dash into the town and get a doctor and an ambulance. I’ll keep him going.’
Ginger went off at the double, tore into the town, and by great good fortune spotted a military ambulance. He told the corporal driver what had happened. The N.C.O. said he would see to it, whereupon Ginger dashed back to Rum Keg Haven to find the position unchanged. Ten minutes later an ambulance pulled up outside and a service medical officer hurried in. They watched him inject a shot of serum.
‘We’ll get him to hospital, said the doctor. ‘Lucky you were about. You did well. He’s got a chance.’
The sick man was put on a stretcher and carried out. The ambulance departed, and Biggles and Ginger were left alone in the fast-falling twilight.
‘What you might call a hectic finish to what promised be a dull day,’ observed Biggles, mopping his face.
‘That snake was no accident,’ declared Ginger in a hard voice. ‘It was a fer-de-lance. I recognized it from Evans’s description. I understood him to say that the snake wasn’t a native of Jamaica, which means that it must have been planted here.’
‘I don’t think there’s much doubt about that,’ assented Biggles.
‘By von Stalhein.’
‘He may have known about it, but I can’t think that he did the actual job. Snakes are not his line of country, and it’s hard to see how he could have got hold of one so quickly, even if he had wanted one. Yet I admit it’s queer that he should have warned us of snakes. The implication is that he knew someone who had the snake, someone who wouldn’t be above slipping it our way.’
‘Then it looks as if we might have been watched.’
‘Whoever put that snake here must have gambled we’d come back some time. He didn’t reckon on anyone else going in.’
‘How did he get the thing in the house?’
Biggles pointed to one of the lower panes in the glass door that opened on the garden. It was broken. ‘That, I fancy, is how it was done. That glass wasn’t broken when we first came here — or if it was I didn’t notice it. By thunder! They didn’t waste any time. Well, we know what to expect.’ He pointed to where the egg lay on the floor, its yolk a horrible sickly red. ‘That did us a good turn although it may have cost Evans his life. If he lives we’ll get him another.’
‘He came here to fetch it, I suppose.’
‘Of course. He could hardly wait to see it, poor chap.’
Biggles indicated the keys still hanging from the door. ‘He came into the house that way. It was nearer than going round to the front door. The brute was here and it went for him.’
‘And now it’s somewhere in the garden.’
‘Which means that I, for one, shall give the garden a wide berth,’ asserted Biggles, closing the french window, locking it on the outside and putting the keys in his pocket. ‘That seems to be all,’ he concluded. ‘Let push along. The others will be wondering what’s happened to us. Keep your eyes skinned for that creeping horror.’
Keeping to the middle of the drive, with a watchful eye for the snake, they went back to the car. Shortly after they had started, as they cruised down the road, a figure came in sight walking with a swinging stride in the same direction. It was a tall negro with peg-top trousers and a slim-waisted jacket.
Ginger recognized him at once. ‘By gosh!’ he breathed. ‘Look who’s here. Napoleon, the Communist from the Dunghill, the pal of von Stalhein’s pal.’
Biggles’s lips came together in a hard line. ‘The Saga Boy from Trinidad — Trinidad; where snakes are common.’
‘So he’s the skunk who did it,’ grated Ginger.
‘It might be a coincidence, of course, but I don’t trust coincidences.’
As they passed the than he turned his head in their direction and gave them a flashing smile, at the same sweeping off his hat in a salute so exaggerated that it was obviously intended to be insolent.
Biggles drove on. ‘I hope one day to put a different expression on that rascal’s face,’ he said quietly.
CHAPTER 5
STUMPED!
The morning following the drama at Rumkeg Haven saw the Otter in the air, heading on a course north-west under a blue sky, over a sea even more blue, for the nearest known haunt of the scarlet flamingos: Inagua, the second largest island of the great Bahama archipelago, and, incidentally, the one nearest to Jamaica. Even so, by taking the famous Windward Passage between the foreign islands of Cuba and Haiti it still meant a run of about three hundred miles.
Maps and Admiralty charts had yielded a certain amount of information, but nothing particularly exciting. There were, it was ascertained, two Inaguas: Great Inagua and Little Inagua, the last named being a small piece of land lying off the most northerly point of the larger island. Being in the Bahamas both were British. Andros, the other known habitat of the flamingos, lay many hundreds of miles away to the north, and could, Biggles decided, be ruled out, since it was considered unlikely that Hagen would deviate so far from his course on his escape route from Europe to Jamaica. Nor would he subsequently be likely to choose a cache so far from his home.
Great Inagua, it turned out, was an island of some size, embracing nearly eight hundred square miles, much of which, however, comprised an immense land-locked central lagoon around which the island had been fashioned, so to speak. This lagoon was the home of the fiery flamingos. It was learned that the island once held a fairly large black population, but over the years this had shrunk to a mere handful of old people who for the most part dwelt in a ramshackle settlement known as Mathew Town. There was nothing on the island for the men to do, so new generations went away. Ships seldom called. In a word, the island was practically abandoned, and was now much in the same state as it was when the explorers arrived from Europe.
Spread out on the Atlantic side of the island for hundreds of miles was the multitude of islands, islets, cays and reefs that formed the archipelago known as the Bahamas. Through these, Wolff, the escaping Nazi, must have passed on his way to Jamaica; and somewhere he must have stopped to hide those things which would have betrayed him had they been discovered by the Port Authorities when he arrived at Jamaica. Assuming that he would enter the Caribbean Sea through the Windward Passage, over which the Otter was now flying, he would pass close to Inagua. There was no dearth of hiding-places. As the Air Commodore had said, the sea was bestrewn with islands of all shapes and sizes; and it was evident that without something definite on which to work the task of finding Hagen’s cache would be hopeless from the outset. By the merest chance they now held a clue, a slender one admittedly, but it was infinitely better than nothing at all.
There were a few craft dotted about, but mostly small and seldom far from land. Far to the north a liner was steaming at speed for the Windward Passage, leaving a long white wake behind her. Southward, a rakish craft was almost stationary; but it must have been moving faster than was apparent; for the next time Ginger looked it was no longer there.
Before starting Biggles had rung up the hospital to get the latest news of Evans. They were all relieved to hear that he had passed a comfortable night, and while he might expect to be a sick man for some time, he was now thought to be out of danger.
Biggles did not, of course, hope to achieve anything conclusive on his first trip to Inagua. It was more in the nature of a reconnaissance, to make a broad survey of the area, to establish, if possible, the particular island on which the flamingos had started a second colony. He did not rule out the possibility of there being two or three such colonies, unknown to Hagen, which would complicate matters. Apart from the birds, therefore, close watch was to be kept for any physical feature, isle or lagoon, that bore a resemblance to the outline depicted on the sketch. The diffi
culty was, there was no scale shown, so the drawing might represent something with an overall area of anything from yards to miles.
By ten o’clock the rugged hills of Cuba and Haiti, with their white shore-lines of surf, had dropped away astern, and the flat mass of Great Inagua, shaped like a horn with a large hole punched through it – the lagoon – lay ahead. As they drew near, and Biggles dropped some altitude, Ginger, who was sitting next to him in the cockpit, regarded it first with curiosity and then with disappointment; for it was far from being the picturesque tropic isle of popular imagination. Still, it was a rarely visited island in a tropic sea, and all islands, coral islands, desert islands or treasure islands, sandy, palm-clad or rocky, hold a fascination of their own. Ginger would have agreed with the man who once described an island as ‘a body of land surrounded by mystery and romance.’ Certain it is that a report of wealth on a continent never excites the same interest as the same thing found on a remote island. Inagua, or one of its neighbours, might hold a treasure of even greater importance to civilization than gold, pondered Ginger as they drew near. That was what they were there to investigate.
The first view damped his enthusiasm. There was no riot of luxuriant vegetation, no mysterious mountains or secret rivers. The whole place looked as flat as a slate, and the colour of one, except where patches of white showed the salt pans that provided some of the inhabitants with a livelihood. Naturally, there was nothing wanting in the matter of beaches, or reefs, on which the ocean rollers dashed themselves to pieces. For mile after mile the beaches stretched, the pure white sand fringing the pale turquoise water of the shallows.
The line of demarcation where the water inside the reef met the open sea was remarkable. There was no gradual merging of colour. The shallows along the shore varied slightly between the palest turquoise and green, but outside the reefs there was an abrupt change to an intense ultramarine blue which could only mean great depth. Looking at the Admiralty chart on his knees Ginger noted with awe that the depths were marked in thousands of feet; so he knew that far under the blue was a world of everlasting night. Yet from this lonely floor rose up, erect like a colossal mushroom, the slab of land that the scarlet flamingos had chosen for their home. The world was a strange place, he pondered, impressed by this solemn thought.
Behind the beach, filling a great part of the island was the immense lagoon, limpid, lifeless and desolate, with two or three smaller ones clustering round one round end like offspring round a parent. The vegetation on the land was sparse, and appeared to be mostly colourless scrub and palmettos. There were some wind-torn, weary looking palms, but these mostly occurred near the coast, obviously having germinated from nuts cast up by the waves. At one point on the coast there was a compact jungle of mangroves, also, no doubt, introduced by the sea. Apart from these there were only a few trees, mostly isolated. Some sombre blots later turned out to be that remarkable growth, the banyan, which by dropping aerial roots from its branches, turned itself into a close-knit forest that covered an acre or more of ground.
From the angle from which they approached there was no sign of human habitation. Mathew Town, Ginger saw from his chart, lay at the extreme western end of the island. As Biggles had made his landfall about the middle it could not be seen. According to Admiralty Sailing Directions there was, or used to be another settlement at a place called Man-o’-War Bay. But he could not pick it out from the grey background. The general picture of desolation was not improved by the wreck of a schooner that lay half-buried in the sand just beyond the reach of the waves which at some time in the past had cast it there.
Ginger’s eyes, exploring the far rim of the lagoon, stopped suddenly at a curious pink fringe.
‘Flamingoes!’ said Biggles, who had evidently spotted the colony.
Flamingoes they were, and in numbers beyond Ginger’s expectation. Apparently they did not like the aircraft, for as it roared towards them they rose in a mass to provide one of the most unforgettable natural spectacles that he had ever seen. There must have been hundreds of birds in the pack. At first they kept together, surging up like a scarlet flood into the blue sky, then they broke off into long skeins, so that suddenly the air was full of weaving streaks of fire, and Biggles had to move fast to keep clear. For a little while there was some of collision. In a voice shrill with admiration Ginger called to Bertie and Algy, who were in the cabin, to make sure that they had not missed this incredible sight. Apparently they were looking, for Algy answered: ‘It’s out of this world.’
‘And I must be out of my mind to scatter the whole colony like that,’ muttered Biggles. ‘I wasn’t expecting them to be so wild. Obviously, not many aircraft come this way.’
The Otter continued to climb in circles while some of birds returned to their nesting ground and others faded into the blue. Little Inagua came into view just off the tip of the parent island. Beyond it, and to left and right, a bewildering array of surf-washed islets of all shapes and sizes made a pattern like a broken jigsaw puzzle thrown carelessly on the blue sea. With the chart on his knees Ginger tried to pick them out by name: Providencialis, Ambergris Cay, Turk’s Island, Castle Island, and so on indefinitely.
On several islands birds were standing in the shallows but Biggles said he thought they did not nest there. They were members of the main colony which through his carelessness he had disturbed. This was soon seen to be true, for before long the birds were taking off and drifting back to Inagua.
Ginger said little, but for the first time the full magnitude of the task they had set themselves was brought home to him. To search all those scraps of land was out of the question. None of them, as far as he could see, bore the slightest resemblance to the sketch which he had memorized. Nor was there a lake, a lagoon, a wood, or anything else of the right shape. Not normally pessimistic, he became convinced that short of further evidence they were doomed to failure.
For another hour Biggles flew round, and in that time a wide expanse of ocean was covered. ‘Do you see anything?’ he once asked Ginger.
‘Nothing,’ answered Ginger, in a hopeless sort of voice.
‘If there’s a colony in this region, apart from the one on Inagua, I don’t know where it is,’ stated Biggles. ‘None of these odd birds we see about could be called a colony; by which I mean a nesting ground. There was no doubt about the one on Inagua, and you saw how the birds behaved. We’ve seen nothing like that since, even in a small way.’
‘If the worst comes to the worst we shall have to land at some of these islands and see if there are any nests,’ suggested Ginger without enthusiasm. ‘If we could see some nests from ground level we could judge what they would look like from the air.’
‘You’re not expecting me to fly low through that mob on Inagua, I hope?’ returned Biggles.
‘Nothing so daft,’ answered Ginger. ‘I was only thinking that at the place where Hagen landed there must have been nests, or he couldn’t have got the egg.’
‘Well, we’ve had a look, and that gives us an idea of what we’re up against,’ went on Biggles. ‘It won’t help matters if we strike a head wind and run out of petrol, so we’ll get back.’ He brought the machine round on a course for its base.
The Otter touched down in time for a late lunch at the little hotel where they had found accommodation.
‘Has anybody any ideas?’ asked Biggles, over coffee. ‘This morning has made it pretty plain that flapping about the sky haphazard isn’t going to get us anywhere.’
‘How about some of us going to Kingston to see if we can locate the photographer who developed Hagen’s photos?’ suggested Ginger. ‘I saw nothing in the house to show that he did his own developing and printing. Few people do, nowadays. Hagen obviously had a camera. If he took some photos someone must have developed them, and that person, having seen the prints, might be able to describe the scenery.’
‘It might save time if we saw Evans first,’ answered Biggles thoughtfully. ‘He’s probably expecting us to call. There’s a chan
ce that he may be able to tell us right away who developed Hagen’s films. You might try it, Ginger. I shall have to take the machine to the airport and get the tanks filled up.’
‘Fair enough,’ agreed Ginger. Anyone coming with me?’ he asked, looking round.
‘I shall want Algy with me,’ said Biggles. ‘Apart from refueling I have an idea of looking over Hagen’s yacht. It’s in the harbour not far from the airport. Algy can give me a hand.’
‘I’ll come with you, old boy,’ Bertie told Ginger.
‘Okay. Then let’s get mobile,’ said Ginger, getting up.
In a few minutes they were on their way in the car that had been used on the previous day.
They found Evans sitting up in bed, but still looking pale and shaken, as he had good reason to be. However, he assured them that, although his leg was much swollen, complete recovery was now only a matter of time. Had it not been for Biggles’s prompt action in sucking out most of the venom, as he learned from the doctor, he would certainly have passed out on the floor of Rumkeg Haven. He went on, as Ginger feared he might, to comment on the coincidence of the affair. He had told Biggles he had never seen a snake in the vicinity yet within an hour he had been bitten by one. He couldn’t imagine how it had got there. It obviously didn’t occur to him that this was anything but a remarkable coincidence; and Ginger did not enlighten him for the explanation would have involved questions he preferred not to answer. Ginger himself would have liked to know how the snake had been produced at such short notice, and Evans, knowing the island well, might have been able to make a suggestion; but in the circumstances he felt it was wiser to leave the question unanswered.
They then came to the matter of the flamingos. Ginger mentioned that the egg had been smashed but Evans said he knew this, for he had just picked it up when the snake struck him. He remembered dropping it. Ginger said they would try to get him another, and then passed on to the vital question. Assuming that Hagen taken some photographs of the flamingos, where were they? They were not to be found in the house. However, opined Ginger, Hagen might not have fetched them from the agency to which he had taken them for development. Did he, Evans, know the name of the man who usually did Hagen’s photographic work?
