Biggles - Air Commodore Read online

  Biggles did not confine his attention entirely to the main body of the enemy. From time to time he slewed the barrel round and raked the surrounding rocks behind which the spectators had taken cover, and the scream of ricochetting bullets seemed to intensify the volume of fire. Suddenly the noise broke off short, and he knew that the belt was exhausted.

  ‘Come on,’ he yelled to Ginger, who was crouching behind him, automatic in hand, and made a dash for the jungle not a score of paces distant. Ginger followed. So completely successful had the sortie been that he did not have to fire a single shot during the whole engagement.

  Chapter 17

  Just Retribution

  For a short distance they followed a narrow path through the bush, but then, knowing that they would be pursued by the Dyaks, who, at home in such surroundings, would soon overtake them, Biggles turned aside into the rank vegetation, taking care not to leave any marks that would betray them. Ginger, feeling with a queer sense of unreality that the clock had been put back a few years and he was once more playing at Indians, followed his example.

  Within the forest a dim grey twilight still persisted, for the matted tree-tops met over their heads, shutting out the sunlight, while below, the secondary growth made the going difficult, and the only way they could keep moving was by constantly changing direction, taking the least obstructed path that offered itself. After the recent noise and commotion, it all seemed very still and quiet, but Biggles was not deceived; he knew that somewhere not far away the enemy would be seeking them.

  Ginger realized suddenly that they were out of the trap—or nearly out—and so swiftly had the situation changed that he had difficulty in believing it. ‘Where are you making for?’ he whispered.

  ‘So far, I haven’t been making for anywhere in particular,’ answered Biggles quietly. ‘I’ve been quite happy to go anywhere. But now we must try to get down to the beach; I only pray that Algy is still sitting tight behind the islet. If he’s had to move—but let’s not think about that. Come on, let’s keep going. Hello! What’s that? Listen!’

  From somewhere not far behind them a wild shout had echoed through the trees, to be followed immediately by others, and the swish of undergrowth.

  Biggles knew what it meant. The Dyaks had found their trail and were in hot pursuit. ‘Come on,’ he whispered. It’s no use trying to move without leaving a trail in this stuff; it has got to be a matter of speed.’

  Neither of them will ever forget the next ten minutes. At first they tried to move quietly, but it was impossible, and in a short time they had abandoned such methods and were making all the speed possible, regardless of noise. The stagnant air, combined with the flies that rose from the foetid ground and followed them in an ever-increasing cloud, did nothing to make their progress easier, and to Ginger the flight had soon resolved itself into a delirium of whirling branches and swaying palm-fronds; but he kept his eyes on Biggles’s back and followed closely on his heels. Once they plunged through a mire in which several crocodiles were wallowing, but the creatures were evidently as startled as they were, for they crashed into the bushes, leaving the way clear. On the far side the ground sloped steeply down towards the sea, the deep blue of which they could now see from time to time through the foliage. Down towards it they plunged, slipping, sliding, falling, and sometimes rolling, grabbing at any handhold to steady themselves. Occasionally they heard crashes in the bush perilously close behind them.

  They burst out of the forest at a point which Biggles recognized at once; it was a little to one side of the quicksands, fortunately the side nearer to their own bay. A few hundred yards to the right the gaunt uprights of the elevated cemetery straddled the rocks near the edge of the cliff, and as they swung towards them Biggles grabbed Ginger’s arm with his right hand, pointing to seaward with his left.

  ‘Great Heavens! What on earth is all that?’ he gasped.

  He need not have pointed, for Ginger had already seen them—a dozen or more machines in arrowhead formation, the point directed towards the island.

  ‘They’re Vildebeests!’ he yelled exultantly, as he saw the blunt noses and queerly humped backs of the aircraft. ‘How the—where the—?’

  ‘Never mind how they got here, keep going,’ panted Biggles, snatching a glance over his shoulder just as the Dyaks began to stream out of the jungle. They raised a shout as they viewed their quarry.

  To Biggles, the appearance of the R.A.F. machines was as miraculous as it had been to Ginger, for it was quite certain that they could not have come from Singapore in the hour that had elapsed since they had signalled the Seafret; but there was no time to ponder the mystery. The Dyaks were gaining on them. They were not more than fifty yards behind, and the beach was still nearly a quarter of a mile away.

  As they reached the cemetery, a kris flashed past Biggles’s shoulder and glanced off the rocks in front of him, and he knew that to continue running was to court disaster, for the next one might bury itself in his back—or Ginger’s. Subconsciously he was aware of the Vildebeests nosing down towards the centre of the island, the roar of their engines drowning all other sounds, and he knew that whatever happened now their mission had been successful. In a sort of savage exultation he drew his automatic and whirled round. Bang! Bang! Bang! it spat as he opened rapid fire on the mob.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! Ginger’s gun took up the story.

  The Dyaks, who were evidently well acquainted with firearms, split up like a covey of partridges going down a line of guns as they dodged for cover, and at that moment the first bomb burst.

  Biggles grabbed Ginger by the arm and sped on, satisfied with the brief respite they had gained. With the roar of bursting bombs in their ears, they reached the place where the rocks sloped down to the bay, and Ginger let out a yell as the Nemesis came into view, her metal propellers two flashing arcs of living fire as she skimmed across the surface of the water towards them. They saw her nose turn in towards the shore and then swing out again as her keel touched the sandy bottom near the beach; saw the propellers slow down; saw Algy jump up in the cockpit and dive into the cabin, to reappear with the machine-gun, which he balanced on the windscreen. But that was all they saw for, at that moment, the whole island seemed to blow up.

  Ginger afterwards swore that the ground lifted several inches under his feet, and Biggles admitted that he had never heard anything quite like it, not even during the war, although the explosion must have been similar to that of the famous Bailleul ammunition dump. It was just like a tremendous roar of thunder that went on for a full minute.

  The force of it threw both Biggles and Ginger of their feet, and they finished the last twenty yards of the slope in something between a roll and a slide. And, as he lay on his back at the bottom, with the extraordinary vividness that such moments sometimes produce, a picture was printed indelibly on Ginger’s brain. It was of a Vildebeest, against a background of blue sky, soaring vertically upwards and whirling like a dead leaf in a gale as the pilot strove to control his machine in such an up-current as would seldom, if ever, be encountered in nature.

  Shaken, and not a little dazed, Ginger picked himself up and obeyed Biggles’s order to get to the amphibian. Biggles himself, gun in hand, was looking back up the slope at the place where the Dyaks might be expected to appear. But they did not come, and presently he followed Ginger to the Nemesis.

  Algy looked at him askance. ‘If sounds are anything to go by, you have been having a lovely time,’ he observed.

  ‘Not so bad,’ grinned Biggles. ‘Where in thunder did all this aviation start from?’

  Algy shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he answered shortly. ‘I know no more about it than you do. I —’ He broke off with a puzzled expression on his face, staring over Biggles’s shoulder at the jungle-clad hill-side.

  Ginger, following his gaze, saw a curious sight. From the centre of the island there seemed to be rising a pale green transparent cloud that writhed and coiled like a Scotch mist on an October day, an
d rolled in slow, turgid waves down the hill-side towards the sea. And as it rolled, and in silence embraced the forest, the foliage of the trees changed colour. The dark green of the casuarinas turned to yellow, and the emerald of the palm crests to dingy white.

  As Biggles beheld this phenomenon he turned very pale and shouted one word. It was enough. The word was ‘Gas’, and almost before the word had died on his lips the three of them were falling into their places in the aircraft faster than they had ever embarked in all their travels.

  Within a minute the Nemesis was tearing across the water, flinging behind her a line of swirling foam. The line ended abruptly as Biggles lifted her from the sea, and climbed slowly away from where the Vildebeests were now re-forming.

  ‘Where to?’ asked Algy.

  ‘I think we might as well go home,’ answered Biggles, glancing down through the green miasma at the flagging desolation of what had, a few minutes before, been a living forest. ‘But before we do that we had better have a word or two with Sullivan,’ he added, turning the nose of the Nemesis in the direction of Hastings Island.

  Twenty minutes later he landed in the anchorage that had proved so ill-chosen for the Seafret, and taxied up to the beach near the stranded destroyer, where the ship’s officers awaited them in a little group. From the far distance the drone of many engines rose and fell on the gentle breeze, and as he stepped ashore Biggles could see the formation of Vildebeests heading towards the island. He raised a finger and pointed to them, at the same time turning to the commander of the Seafret.

  ‘Sullivan,’ he said, ‘can you satisfy my burning curiosity by telling me just how it happened that these aeroplanes arrived at this particular spot so opportunely?’

  The commander smiled. ‘That’s easy,’ he answered. ‘I fetched them here.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Of course. You didn’t suppose it was a fluke, did you?’

  Biggles scratched his head. ‘I didn’t know what to think, and that’s a fact,’ he confessed. ‘You certainly had a brain-wave. What caused it?’

  ‘The simple fact that Lacey didn’t return. I don’t mind telling you that it got me all hot and bothered. It seemed to be the last straw, our only mobile unit going west—as I thought. In the circumstances there was only one thing left for me to do, which was to get in touch with R.A.F. headquarters at Singapore and ask for assistance both for myself and you. We’d got to get away from here some time, and I didn’t feel like abandoning you without a search. Squadron-Leader Gore-Alliston has just landed here with his pack of airhounds, and I was just telling him the story when your message came through. Naturally, Gore-Alliston took off at once for Elephant Island. I hope he did his stuff all right.’

  ‘He certainly did,’ agreed Biggles gravely. ‘There isn’t a living creature left on the island, I’ll warrant—human being, crocodile, or mosquito.’

  Sullivan’s face expressed incredulity.

  ‘They’re gassed, the lot of them,’ explained Biggles. ‘I didn’t know our fellows carried gas-bombs nowadays—’

  ‘Who told you they did?’

  ‘It looks mighty like it to me.’

  Sullivan shook his head. ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ he said, ‘but I can hazard a guess as to what happened. The Vildebeests were carrying ordinary hundred-and-twelve pound high explosive bombs, and they must have hit the enemy’s gas-shell dump.’

  ‘Gas-shells? Where did you get that idea?’

  ‘When we brought the “mouldy” aboard from the junk, my gunnery officer thought it would be a good thing to have a shell or two as well, to try and find out the name of the firm who was supplying them. He tells me that they are all gas-shells—at least, all those he brought aboard the Seafret.’

  ‘Jumping crocodiles! Do you mean to tell me that those skunks were going to use gas-shells if it came to a scrap?’

  Sullivan nodded grimly. ‘I don’t suppose they were going to use them for ballast,’ he observed harshly.

  ‘Then it serves them jolly well right that they’ve got hoisted with their own blinking petard,’ declared Biggles savagely. ‘There seems to be a bit of poetic justice about what has happened that meets with my entire approval.’ He turned to watch the Vildebeests land on the bay.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ asked Sullivan.

  Biggles glanced over his shoulder. ‘I suppose they’re sending a ship from Singapore to pick you up?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, a destroyer is on the way.’

  ‘In that case I’m going to hit the breeze for home,’ Biggles told him. ‘The people who sent us out on this jaunt will be anxious to know what is happening, and I don’t think it would be wise to entrust such delicate information to ordinary lines of communication.’

  ‘You’re not going without telling us what happened on the island,’ protested Sullivan.

  Biggles looked pained. ‘My dear chap, I wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing,’ he answered. ‘How about a quiet bit of dinner tonight to celebrate the occasion? I can tell you all about it then.’

  Chapter 18

  In Passing

  Ten days later, early in the evening, the door of the sitting-room in Biggles’s flat opened and Biggles walked in. He glanced at Algy and Ginger, who looked as though they had been expecting him, lit a cigarette, and flicked the dead match into the grate.

  ‘Well, come on, out with it,’ growled Ginger. ‘What did he say?’

  Biggles frowned. ‘You mustn’t call the Foreign Secretary a “he”.’

  ‘I’ll call you something worse than that if you don’t tell me what he said,’ grinned Ginger.

  ‘Very well, since you must know, he said, “Thank you!”’

  Ginger blinked. ‘He said what?’

  ‘“Thank you!” Or, to be absolutely accurate, he said, “Thank you very much”.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘What did you expect? Did you suppose he was going to kiss me?’

  ‘No, but—do you mean to tell me that was all he had to say, after all we’ve done?’

  ‘Unless he wrote a song and dance about it, there isn’t much more he could say, when you come to think about it, is there?’

  ‘No, I suppose there isn’t. But he might have done something—given us a gold watch apiece, for instance.’

  Biggles shook his, head. ‘The government doesn’t express its thanks by doling out gold watches,’ he answered seriously. ‘And, anyway, you’ve got something better than that. Your name is down on the Imperial archives for having rendered the state a signal service, and one day that may stand you in very good stead. When you’ve worked for the government as long as I have you’ll know that virtue is expected to be its own reward.’

  ‘Well, if that’s all, we might as well go out and buy ourselves a bite of dinner,’ declared Algy, rising.

  ‘No need to do that,’ replied Biggles, smiling. ‘Lord Lottison has been kind enough to ask us all to dine with him, at his house, in order that certain members of the Cabinet may learn at first hand just what transpired during the operations of His Majesty’s aircraft Nemesis in the Straits of the Mergui Archipelago. Go and put on your best bibs and tuckers, and look sharp about it; Cabinet Ministers don’t like being kept waiting.’

  THE END