by W E Johns
As the Otter cruised on Bertie stepped in. “Blow me down, chaps, look at all those bally islands in front of us. Talk about a wild goose chase. Which reminds me, wasn’t it about here, a couple of thousand or so years ago, that the Greeks did some wonderful line-shooting on aviation? There was one silly ass named Icarus who must have been on an altitude test. He flew so high that the sun melted the wax that stuck his wings together. As a result of that spot of structural failure he did a nose dive into the drink.”
“This is about the place,” agreed Biggles, smiling.
“And if I remember rightly there was a yarn about another bloke, called Perseus, who whistled around shooting down Gorgons and saving maidens from ravening sea-monsters.”
“That’s right.”
“Ah,” sighed Bertie. “Aviating must have been fun in those days.”
“You may have some fun, as you call it, on this trip, before we’re through.”
“Let’s hope so, old boy, let’s hope so. Frankly, between you and me I’m finding this waffling up and down without getting anywhere a trifle dull—if you see what I mean. Wouldn’t this be a good place to try out my little scheme?”
“Must you keep on about that? If you were taken through the Dardanelles into the Black Sea we should never see you again.”
“Well, let’s have a bash at it and see what happens,” said Bertie, cheerfully. “Now’s the time, before we get tangled up in those bally islands. If I found myself going through the Darda—wachermaycallems I could always jump overboard and swim for the shore. Years ago, I recall, there was a sportsman named Leander who used to swim that ditch regularly to see his girl friend, a wench by the jolly name of Hero. She must have been the right sort, too, holding up a torch every night to keep him on his course.”
“There’s no need to get lyrical about it. He did it once too often. The night a storm blew up he went for a burton, which wasn’t so romantic. That could happen to you. But let’s quit fooling. This is serious. I hate to discourage you but this brainwave of yours bristles with too many risks. Suppose the Saphos didn’t see you?”
“Dash it all, old boy, they couldn’t miss me if I was right in their track.”
“If the Saphos is the sort of craft I suspect it’s by no means a foregone conclusion that they’d stop and pick you up even if they saw you. You’d be in the way. Be sure they don’t want stray passengers on board.”
“They’d fish me out from sheer curiosity to know where I was going.”
“Then knock you on the head and throw you back.”
“Why should they? I’d act dumb.”
Eddie came in grinning. “Say, brother, you wouldn’t have to do much acting, at that, if you were crazy enough to leap in the sea hoping to be hauled out by a bunch of crooks. But I sure admire your nerve.”
Biggles continued. “At the best you might find yourself on one of the smaller uninhabited islands, of which there are plenty.”
“I wouldn’t mind playing Robinson Crusoe for a bit. You could always pick me up.”
“That might not be as easy as it sounds. People have been stuck on these islands for years,” argued Biggles. After a brief hesitation he went on, “However, as you’re so dead set on your lunatic scheme you can have a go at it if you like. But I’m not leaving you swimming. I insist you use the dinghy, although what reasonable yarn you’ll spin for being in one I can’t imagine.”
“Fair enough. I’d simply say I’d been ditched, which would be true up to a point.”
“Okay. Get ready. I’ll make a detour to get in front of the Saphos before she starts zig-zagging through the islands.”
“I must say you guys take chances,” remarked Eddie.
“When you fly with people like Bertie there are times when you have to or you get no peace,” returned Biggles, dryly, as he altered course to keep well clear of the Saphos, whose smoke could be seen on the horizon.
Twenty minutes later he landed on the water dead in line with the last known position of the ship and perhaps ten miles ahead of her. Already to the north could be seen the cone-shaped silhouettes of the many islands that lay before them. The rubber dinghy was inflated and made ready. Bertie, just as he was, stepped into it. Biggles gave him a final reminder of a detailed description of Alfondez so that he would know him if he saw him.
There had been a discussion on what he should take with him, but, as Bertie argued with some force, anything except the clothes he stood in would look suspicious, so he ended by taking nothing. The usual flask of water was in the dinghy as part of its normal equipment.
“Don’t worry about me, chaps,” were Bertie’s last words. “If I come unstuck I’ll swim for it, in which case you’ll find me browsing on figs on one of these jolly little islands.”
And so, presently, the Otter left him, a lonely speck adrift on the wide blue sea. There was some tittering at the somewhat incongruous picture he made as he squatted in his tiny craft, monocle in his eye, smoking a cigarette. But Biggles frowned. “This is no laughing matter,” he rebuked. “Bertie’s taking a risk I wouldn’t care to take myself. I’m allowing him to do this against my better judgment. In fact, I only agreed to this crazy plan because I could see that if I turned it down he’d have been hurt, saying I always knocked his ideas on the head.”
“If this is a sample of them, brother, I’m not surprised,” murmured Eddie.
Biggles took the Otter some twenty miles to the east and then went down to await the first outcome of the scheme. He waited for rather more than an hour, and then, flying low, made his way back to the track of the Saphos, the usual line of oil and garbage stretching from horizon to horizon.
There was no difficulty in spotting the dinghy, for the simple reason that with the exception of one or two small Greek sailing boats, of the type known as caïques, which had appeared in the distance, it was the only mark of any size in sight. Even before they reached it they could see that Bertie was no longer in it.
From the expression on Biggles’ face it was not clear whether he was glad or sorry. All he said was: “We might as well save the dinghy. Now, whatever happens, we’ve got to keep in touch with that confounded ship.”
This offered no real difficulty until dusk, by which time the Saphos was picking her way through the labyrinth of islands, some large and many small, some low but others mountainous, that lie scattered all over the Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey. Here the lights of the ship were soon lost among those that were springing up in many places ashore, isolated or clustered in what apparently were villages.
“This is no use,” said Biggles after a while. “Apart from wasting petrol there are too many high rocks about for my liking—certainly for low flying. All we can do is go down. We should be able to pick up the Saphos in the morning, by which time if she holds her course she should be in the region of the Northern Sporades. I’m still puzzled about where she’s making for. And I don’t mind admitting I’m more than worried about Bertie. But that’s how he wanted it. We’ll go down and spend the night against one of these smaller islands.”
CHAPTER IX
LOST AND FOUND
ANOTHER brilliant dawn found the Otter again in the air after a quiet night spent in a cove, within a few yards of the shore of a small, apparently uninhabited island. Anyway, no habitation could be seen and no one came near them. Ginger went ashore intending to take a walk, but finding the going dangerous through weeds and aromatic shrubs hiding nasty-looking crevasses between the rocks, returned to the aircraft without seeing any form of life except big grey grasshoppers which made enormous leaps when disturbed. The only trees were a few sprawling figs, most of them dead and none bearing fruit. A wild vine crawling over one provided him with a few grapes with which to quench a thirst caused partly by the heat but perhaps more by the dry pollen that filled the air as he disturbed the many flowering weeds.
As soon as it was light enough to offer fair visibility, anxious to locate the Saphos Biggles headed north, expecting to find he
r in the more open water east of the Cyclades, although to be sure there were plenty of islands even there. Ginger, who had never flown over this section of the Mediterranean, was amazed by the number of islands in the Greek archipelagos. Whichever way he looked he could see islands, some of them mere rocks rising straight out of the sea, but others quite large. Most of these towered high to a central peak. All had deeply indented shores, the work of waves through the ages. On many of them an occasional village could be seen, shining whitely in the rising sun, usually near the sea but once in a while on the terraced flank of a hill.
Bluff-bowed caïques, a local serviceable type of sailing craft that has remained unchanged in these waters for more than a thousand years, were now fairly common. Their tawny well-worn sails, often patched to form grotesque patterns, made attractive spots of colour against the sapphire surface of the sea.
As the morning wore on with no sign of the Saphos Biggles’ anxiety mounted, and again he reproached himself with what he called the folly of having allowed himself to be persuaded by Bertie to consent to an enterprise which, in the light of cold fact, looked ever more desperate.
“This was just the sort of situation I was afraid might arise,” he told Marcel, bitterly.
He tried following up the tracks of ships on the placid water. They were plain enough to see, but the trouble was, now over regular shipping lanes between Greece and Turkey, there were too many of them, crossing and re-crossing as they plied from one port to another. Islands prevented them from keeping a straight course for very long.
Every track that Biggles tried ended in failure. Another difficulty was, the Otter had often to fly so high to avoid islands that rose like miniature mountains from the sea that identification of any particular ship was difficult. He searched the waters north of the Northern Sporades, which he calculated was the limit of how far the Saphos could have travelled during the night, but all to no purpose.
“We’re beaten,” he muttered at last, irritably. “She must have turned off somewhere during the night. That, of course, was always a possibility. Had Bertie not been on her it wouldn’t have mattered so much, although even that is assuming he is still on board. She picked him up. There’s not much doubt about that. But they may not have kept him, as would have been the case had the Saphos been a normal ship.”
“You think they might have put him overboard?” queried Eddie.
“They’d take no chances with a stranger. Why should they? He might see too much.”
“Even so he might have swum to an island. Goodness knows there are enough of ‘em. Who do they all belong to?”
“People have been fighting over ‘em for as far back as history goes. Most of them are owned by Greece, but a few belong to Turkey and Italy.”
“How about landing at some of these villages and asking if anyone has seen the Saphos go through? Folks who live by the sea usually get to know the regular ships that go past.”
“You’d be lucky to find anyone able to speak English, although it could happen. Like other islanders it’s not uncommon for them to go abroad, or take ship, to make some money. Having done that they nearly always drift back to the place where they were born. Home is always a magnet.” As he finished speaking Biggles retarded the throttled little and began a long, shallow glide.
“What now, old warrior?” asked Marcel.
“I’m going down to think about this. I can do that on the water as well as I can up here, and while we’re not yet short of petrol we shall be if we go on using it at this rate. We might make enquiries at some of these little fishing ports as Eddie has suggested. Some of them might stock a little petrol for small craft that have internal combustion engines but they wouldn’t have aviation spirit. We might get some at Athens, or Salonika, but I imagine that would be difficult. It would mean answering a lot of questions, which would mean telling lies. The sympathies of people are always with their own race and class, and here the sympathy would probably be with any smugglers. Keep your eyes open, everyone. There’s still a chance we may spot the Saphos. She may have twigged we were following her and tucked herself tight against one of these islands.”
Said Marcel, as the Otter cruised on: “She might have stopped to sell off some of the cargo she picked up at Marseilles. No big ship would be likely to stop to land supplies at these little places; but the Saphos might, to get rid of cargo she may not really want. If she is about we ought to see her.”
“True enough,” agreed Biggles. “Privately-owned yachts do a certain amount of cruising round the islands at this time of the year, but they’re mostly painted white— seldom black. Which reminds me, to give you an idea of how lonely some of these islands are, a few years ago an English yacht wrecked herself on one on a dark night. As you may have noticed, the place doesn’t exactly bristle with lighthouses. The owner and his wife got ashore. Do you know how long it was before they were taken off— bearing in mind that this is Europe, not the Pacific?”
“Tell me.”
“Eighteen months.”
“Holy pumpkins!” exclaimed Eddie, from behind.
“Sounds silly, doesn’t it? But that’ll give you a notion of how seldom some of these islands are visited. The truth is, there’s nothing to land for, unless you happen to be an archaeologist looking for ancient Greek ruins, and I believe there are plenty of those although most of them have been pretty well searched. The famous statue of Venus was found in Milos, not far away to the south of us.”
Still cruising on half throttle, slowly losing height, Biggles passed close to several islands. “We might make enquiries at that longish one ahead of us,” he decided. “I haven’t a clue as to what its name is, but I see what looks like a fair-sized village at the end of that creek with the mountain right behind it. There are some small craft there. One of them may have seen the Saphos. We might be able to buy some fresh fruit and eggs, anyway. If—”
Biggles suddenly broke off, leaning forward, staring. Without a word, without touching the throttle, he swung the machine away to put it between the island and the sun.
“I thought you were going down!” exclaimed Marcel.
“I was, but I’ve changed my mind,” answered Biggles, tersely. “Don’t talk. I’ve got to think.”
Not until he was well clear of the creek, with the towering centre of the island between them and the village, did he cut the engines and begin in a series of “S” turns to lose height. “I’m going down,” he said, crisply. “Keep your eyes open, everyone, for anything that looks like a building. I don’t want to be seen.”
A few minutes passed in silence; then Marcel said: “I don’t see a house. Most of the coast seems to be cliff.”
“That’s fine. I’ll make for that cove in front. That should suit us.”
Five minutes later the Otter’s keel was cutting a broad ripple on the flat water of the cove, close in, between forbidding, rugged banks. “Phew!” breathed Biggles, as the machine ran to a stop. “That was close. I’m getting careless.”
“What caused you to change your mind like that?” asked Ginger.
“Didn’t you see it?”
“See what?”
“The Saphos. And she wasn’t alone. She was moored alongside another vessel three times her size.”
“I saw nothing,” declared Marcel, wide-eyed.
“They weren’t easy to see, both being black against a dark background. It was a wisp of smoke that first caught my eye. Then I saw a yellow band on a funnel. That made me stare. The Saphos is there, unless it’s a similar craft belonging to the same company. This puts a different complexion on things—very different. I must be getting dunderheaded not to make allowances for the possibility of the Saphos keeping a rendezvous with another ship. It may mean she goes no farther than this. I couldn’t be sure, but I fancy she was taking on cargo—baskets or cases, or things of that nature.”
“The dry fruit she takes to Marseilles.”
“Could be.”
“Did they see us, do you think?
” asked Eddie.
“That’s what I’d like to know. I was pretty high, and flying on half throttle I wasn’t making much noise. Much would depend on the noise the people in the ships were making. Unless one of them happened to be looking up, and I can think of no reason why anyone should gaze at the sky, we may have passed unnoticed. I wasn’t long slipping into the sun, and after that the machine would be difficult to see at all.”
“Would it matter if they did see us?” questioned Ginger. “Aircraft are pretty common nowadays, even here, I imagine.”
“It might not be all that important but I’d rather we weren’t seen. It’s a relief to me to know where the Saphos is. As a matter of detail, the person most likely to be looking up would be Bertie, if he’s still on board. He’d be on the look-out for us.”
“Okay. So what’s the next move in this fantastic set-up?” inquired Eddie.
“Obviously, the first thing to do is to confirm that the ship I saw is really the Saphos. The next, to find out what she’s doing, and how far she’s associated with the other ship. We shall want to know her name and nationality, too.”
“How are you going to get this information?”
“Not by flying over them. That would tear things wide open—unless, of course, we’ve got things all wrong. It’s still possible that these ships may be engaged in legitimate trading, Alfondez running dope as a sideline with or without the knowledge of the owners.” Biggles lit a cigarette and drew on it thoughtfully. “I was prepared to strike something complicated at the end of this trip but I’ll admit frankly that I didn’t visualize anything like this. I imagined our enquiries ending in one of the big Mid-East ports between Port Said and Istanbul; instead of which, here we are, bogged down on a second-rate island in the Aegean. That doesn’t necessarily mean the trail ends here, of course. We shall see. It’s this second ship that puzzles me. Is it bringing the dope already manufactured or is the stuff being made here? However unlikely that may appear at first glance, now that most countries in Europe have kicked out these infernal racketeers it is possible. These are the questions we’ve got to answer, and the only place where we shall find them is in that creek where the ships are lying. But make no mistake about this. If this island is the hew headquarters of a big dope ring we’re sitting on a volcano. If these devils can commit murder in big cities and get away with it imagine how easy it would be here.”