Biggles Goes to War Page 8

  Biggles opened the proceedings by firing a short burst over the big machine, and his lips parted in a whimsical smile at the gunner’s consternation. For perhaps three seconds he stared up white-faced at the three machines sitting on his tail, then he threw up his hands and disappeared from sight. Biggles assumed that he had gone through to speak to the pilot, and in this he soon saw that he was correct, for, by diving slightly, he could see the two Lovitznian airmen together in the glass-enclosed cockpit. Seeing that they were both looking at him, he leaned out as far as he could and jerked downwards with his gloved hand. The order was obvious, but it did not, however, suit the pilot of the big machine, for he immediately began to turn away; but he straightened out again with alacrity when Algy raced up on that side of him and fired a short burst across his nose.

  The big machine was now flying straight again on its original course, almost hemmed in by the three fighters, and in that position it continued while several minutes passed. Again Biggles saw the pilot staring at him, and again he jabbed downwards, but as the other ignored the commands his patience gave out. Bringing his nose round, and praying that he would not hit anything vital, he deliberately fired a few shots into the machine. That they took effect was clear, for the pilot at once cut out his engine and began gliding down. Biggles followed, still pointing sternly downwards, and when he got a nod from the man in the pilot’s seat of the big machine, he knew that he had won. ‘If, after that, you try any funny tricks, my lad, you’re for the high jump,’ he muttered savagely to himself.

  Glancing down, he saw to his surprise that they had almost reached Janovica, for in the excitement of the chase he had forgotten all about the city. Turning in his seat, he beckoned Ginger to come closer, and pointed to the aerodrome, an indication that he – Ginger – was to lead the way in; then, looking back at the enemy pilot, he made him understand that he was to follow, which he did, as meekly as a lamb. Biggles did not blame him for that; he would have been a fool to do otherwise. If any blame attached to any one it was to the gunner, who had so unpardonably been caught off his guard, and thus let his pilot down.

  Ginger landed first, to be followed in close order by the Lovitznian machine, and then the other two fighters. Biggles taxied tail up to the foreigner and waited for the pilot to alight before he switched off, then jumped down and ran towards him. The two Lovitznians raised their hands in token of surrender.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ asked Biggles, curtly.

  The men shook their heads; it was obvious that they did not.

  Biggles pointed to the lane through the trees. ‘March!’ he said. There could be no mistake about his meaning, and the little party, encumbered in heavy flying-kit, moved slowly towards the wood. In addition to normal kit, the two Lovitznians were also equipped with parachutes, which considerably retarded their movements.

  Biggles was wondering what he should do with his prisoners when he saw a car racing down the road, and was relieved when Ludwig jumped out and ran towards them.

  ‘You’ve got them!’ he cried excitedly.

  Biggles laid a finger on his lips, and handed over the prisoners to Algy before turning to speak. ‘Look here, Ludwig,’ he said earnestly, ‘you’ve got to take charge of these fellows, and there must be no mistake. On no account must they be allowed to escape or the fat will be in the fire. Can you fix things up?’

  ‘Certainly. I have made the necessary arrangements in case you brought it off.’

  ‘What are you going to do with them?’

  ‘Take them to a special quarter in the state prison.’

  ‘Can you do that without any one knowing about it?’

  ‘I think so. The governor is a friend of mine.’

  ‘Then see what you can do. I don’t want Bethstein to know they are here or he will want to interview them and I don’t want that to happen.’

  ‘I’ll take them along in my car. Not a word shall be said.’

  ‘You realize that nothing must appear in the papers?’

  ‘Leave that to me.’ Ludwig had become a different man since the previous evening.

  ‘All right, off you go.’

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘I haven’t time now.’

  ‘I have told the princess what you said, and my uncle is on the way home already, by air. We telephoned him.’

  ‘Good! We can talk about it tonight.’

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘Six o’clock.’

  ‘That will suit me very well. I will call for you at six. Some one wishes to speak to you.’

  Biggles threw Ludwig a sidelong glance. ‘I understand,’ he said shortly. ‘I’d like to have a word with you now, but you know what I hope to do; moreover, I don’t want any one to see these two fellows. We’ll go into things at six o’clock.’

  ‘Very well, I’ll get along.’

  Biggles waited until the prisoners were on their way to prison in Ludwig’s car, with his orderly sitting behind them on guard. Then he turned to Smyth. ‘Is the big machine fitted with bomb racks?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good! I hoped it would be. Sling on the two biggest you’ve got.’

  ‘They’re one hundred kilogrammes.’

  ‘They’ll do. Get them on as quickly as you can, and get Carter to look the machine over to find out where those shots of mine went. Don’t trouble about them, though, unless they did any real damage.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  Biggles turned to Algy who was just coming out of the cabin door of the big machine. ‘Anything interesting inside?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d say there is. Come and look at this.’ Algy pointed to a bale of leaflets standing on the floor of the cabin. The string had already been cut.

  ‘What the deuce are they?’

  ‘I can’t read what it says on them because the language is, I suppose, Maltovian, but I reckon they’re propaganda – the sort of stuff both sides dropped over the lines during the last War. They must have been going to drop them over the city.’

  ‘Good job we stopped that. There’s no telling what mischief they might have caused. Haul the whole lot into the shed and throw something over them. We’ll attend to them when we get back. Anything else?’

  ‘Only a map.’

  ‘Let’s have a look at it.’

  While the mechanics were busy on the machine, Biggles examined the map. Several lines had been drawn on it, and in one place an area had been encircled with a fine red line. ‘Hello – hello, what’s all this, I wonder?’ he muttered. ‘Unless I’m mistaken this map is going to tell us a useful story. We’ll spend a bit of time on it tonight and try to work out what these lines mean.’ He folded the map and handed it to Smyth. ‘Put that in your pocket and don’t lose it,’ he said. ‘Remember to give it to me when I come back.’

  ‘There are some people coming down the road,’ announced Ginger.

  ‘Then we’ll get off before they arrive,’ declared Biggles. ‘I don’t want too many people to see what’s going on. I can’t quite make up my mind what to do about this machine; my original idea was to dump it somewhere as soon as we had bombed the bridge, but I must say it seems a pity to do away with it. It might be useful. The trouble about an aeroplane is that you can’t disguise it.’

  ‘We could paint out the markings,’ suggested Ginger.

  ‘I could paint it red, or some other colour, all over,’ put in Smyth.

  ‘Unhappily, paint doesn’t alter the shape of a machine,’ murmured Biggles. ‘Never mind; perhaps we could keep it hidden. I’ll bring it back, anyway, so you get your paint ready, Smyth, and fix up some sort of cover to put it under. I had better speak to Ludwig about some trustworthy men to form a guard to keep prowlers out of the wood. That’s all for the moment; we shall have more time to discuss these things when we get back. Let’s get away. Algy, you man the rear gun.’

  ‘What about me?’ asked Ginger.

  Biggles hesitated. ‘I think you’d better stay here,
’ he said.

  Ginger’s face fell. ‘That’s a bit thick,’ he muttered in tones of the deepest disappointment.

  Biggles reflected for a moment or two. ‘All right, you can come if you like; you had better sit next to me and help to watch the sky.’

  Ginger gave a little whoop and climbed into his seat. Biggles followed, and spent a few seconds examining the instrument-board of the big machine; but everything was, as he expected, of standard international pattern, and presented no difficulty. The engines were still hot, so, the usual warming-up being unnecessary, the bomber was soon in position to take off.

  Biggles looked at Ginger, one hand on the throttle. ‘Well, here we go for the fireworks,’ he said.

  The engines roared and the machine sped across the aerodrome.

  1 three-engined aircraft – see cover illustration.

  Chapter 11

  The Bridge – and a Capture

  FOR AN HOUR Biggles flew steadily into the north-east over rough, hilly country, heading on a straight course for his objective. Actually, he struck the river a little way above the bridge, but he soon picked it out in the distance. Before turning towards it, however, he flew up and down inside the Lovitznian frontier, his keen eyes searching the terrain for movements of enemy troops and war material. It was not necessary to look very hard, for evidence of the coming conflict was apparent everywhere – camps, lorries on the roads, and working parties of men.

  ‘If we hadn’t come here, the Lovitznians would be inside Maltovia within a week,’ he told Ginger moodily, as he stared down at the military preparations. ‘Apparently it has not occurred to Lovitzna that anything might happen to their lovely bridge. Look at the hills on our side of the river; with the bridge out of the way a handful of determined men could prevent the Lovitznians from getting across. Well, let’s go and give them something to think about.’

  As he spoke, Biggles turned the machine and headed back towards the river, steering for the bridge, which lay like a white road across the water. In this way, to any one watching the machine, it would appear to be coming from the heart of Lovitzna, certainly not from Maltovia.

  At a distance of about two miles he throttled back and began a long glide, at the same time lining the machine up with the bridge. Every few moments he glanced around the sky, but not another machine was in sight, so it may have been the simplicity of his task that brought a faint smile to his face.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ asked Ginger.

  ‘I was just thinking how simple this is compared with the jobs we had to do in France,’ answered Biggles.

  ‘Suppose some one is just going over the bridge?’

  ‘Then it looks like being his unlucky day. It would be just too bad, as the Americans say. Can you see any one watching us?’

  ‘There are some people who look like soldiers at each end of the bridge; I can see their faces so they must be staring up.’

  ‘They’ll have something else to stare at presently,’ announced Biggles, as he steepened his glide into a dive. Dispassionately, his right elbow resting on the side of the cockpit, he watched the bridge apparently coming to meet the machine. So unconcerned was he that he might have been going to land on his own aerodrome, but he did not relax his vigilance, and in spite of his casual manner he was flying very carefully, for he had only two bombs and he could not afford to miss. The needle of the altimeter crept slowly back until it was actually resting on zero, although his height might have been two hundred feet as he glided, slowly now, over the blockhouse on the northern side of the river. His hand felt for the bomb toggle and gripped it. Still he waited, the machine flying at not much more than stalling speed, his feet applying the slight pressure necessary on one side of the rudder-bar1 or the other. Suddenly he jerked his hand back. The machine rocked. Simultaneously he jerked the throttle wide open, thrust the stick forward and banked away steeply.

  Ginger heard the roar of the explosion above the noise of the engines; he felt the machine surge upwards like a lift under its pressure, but for a moment he could see nothing owing to the cloud of smoke that rose high in the air over the centre of the bridge. Then, as it cleared and the middle of the bridge became visible, a cry of triumph broke from his lips. The two centre arches had completely disappeared. ‘You’ve got it!’ he yelled exultantly.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Biggles, ‘and I fancy it will take longer to fill up that gap than it did to make it.’ As he spoke, he turned the machine and cruised back up the river.

  ‘Where the dickens are you going?’ asked Ginger in alarm.

  ‘I’m just going to have a look at the damage, that’s all,’ replied Biggles casually. ‘I also want the fellows down there – who, by the way, seem to be excited over something – to see us. Yes, we’ve certainly made a hole,’ he continued, looking down as they passed over the shattered arches. ‘Seems a pity to spoil a nice bridge like that, but there it is. Well, I think we might be getting home; we’d better go this way. It might not be wise to allow ourselves to be seen roaring straight back to Maltovia.’ He turned, this time to the left, which took the machine further into Lovitzna; shortly afterwards he turned left again and flew parallel with the river, still well inside Lovitznian territory. It was flat, open country, mostly grassland on which grazed occasional herds of cattle. For the rest, it appeared to be sparsely populated. ‘I don’t think there is much to see here,’ he murmured after a while, and was about to turn on the homeward course when he stiffened suddenly. ‘Hello, what’s this coming?’ he said tersely.

  Ginger had seen nothing, but following the direction of Biggles’s eyes, he saw an aircraft coming up towards them from out of the west. ‘My goodness! You don’t miss much,’ he muttered.

  ‘It doesn’t do to miss anything at this game,’ Biggles told him. ‘Go and make sure Algy has seen him.’

  Ginger crept through into the rear cockpit, but Algy had already seen the stranger, and was leaning idly against his gun watching him. Ginger returned to his seat. ‘Algy is watching him,’ he told Biggles.

  ‘It looks like a two-seater,’ observed Biggles, ‘but I can’t see any one in the rear cockpit, can you?’

  ‘If there is any one in it he must be sitting on the floor,’ returned Ginger emphatically.

  By this time the machine was only a few hundred yards away, slightly above them and a little to the right, but it had turned slowly in their direction. ‘By gosh! It’s one of the new high-performance Fokker day-bombers,’ ejaculated Biggles, who was watching the machine with knitted brows.

  ‘It’s carrying Lovitznian markings, anyway,’ cried Ginger in alarm.

  ‘So are we, so I don’t think we’ve anything to worry about,’ replied Biggles. ‘By the look of it I should say that it’s a brand new machine, too,’ he went on in a low voice, as if he were talking to himself. ‘Coming out of the west? It must be a new machine just being delivered to the Lovitznian Air Force. By James, we could do with that ourselves.’

  Ginger stared. ‘You’re not thinking of trying to capture it by any chance, are you?’ he asked, a trifle sarcastically.

  ‘As a matter of fact, that’s just what I was thinking of,’ answered Biggles evenly.

  ‘You don’t want me to board it in mid-air, or anything like that, I hope?’

  ‘Nothing so desperate, Ginger. I never make life harder than it is. Give the chap a wave.’

  The pilot in the bomber, evidently noting that the machine was a Lovitznian, was already waving, and Biggles lost no time in opening the side window of his cockpit and waving back. Then he looked down and noted that there were half a dozen fields within easy reach, each large enough to land in. ‘Jab downwards, Ginger,’ he ordered. ‘Try to make him understand that we’ve come to meet him and that we want him to land.’

  ‘OK,’ cried Ginger, suddenly understanding.

  Biggles did not wait. He throttled back and began gliding towards a big field some distance to the right.

  Algy’s head popped into the cockpit. ‘
Are you crazy?’ he shouted. ‘We’re over Lovitzna.’

  ‘Go back to your gun,’ Biggles told him shortly, and a minute or two later his wheels touched lightly on the green turf of enemy country. ‘What’s he doing, Ginger?’ he asked sharply.

  ‘He’s circling,’ answered Ginger tersely. ‘I think he’s going to follow us down.’

  ‘Fine! Leave the talking to me.’

  Biggles jumped out as soon as the machine had finished its run, and beckoned to the pilot of the bomber, who was still circling the field, evidently undecided what to do. But at Biggles’s vigorous invitation he waited no longer, but glided down, his machine coming to a standstill about a hundred yards from the other. The pilot climbed down stiffly, which suggested that he had come a long way. Biggles noticed also that he wore a parachute.

  ‘Hello!’ he called cheerfully. Do you speak English?’

  The other looked surprised. ‘You are English?’ he queried, with a strong foreign accent.

  ‘Yes, we are instructors to the Lovitznian Air Force.’

  ‘Goot! I am Wengel. I have brought a new machine for you.’

  ‘We were expecting it,’ returned Biggles easily. ‘In fact, we were sent to meet you. My chief has given some special instructions about the delivery of the machine.’

  ‘So!’

  ‘Yes, there is a big crowd waiting to greet you at the aerodrome, and the chief wants to celebrate the occasion by presenting you with a decoration – the Purple Pigeon of Lovitzna.’