“You will be warm enough in there,” he said. “Monsieur le Lieutenant is coming to fetch you.”
The lieutenant approached them and motioned Fawley to descend.
“Colonel Dumesnil would like a word or two with you, Monsieur,” he announced. “Will you be so good as to come this way? Sergeant!”
The sergeant’s instructions were unspoken but obvious. He walked by Fawley’s side, and the steel of his unsheathed bayonet was very much in evidence. Fawley turned up his coat collar and swore softly.
“I shall never find my way down through this labyrinth of passes if you keep me here much longer,” he grumbled. “Why does your commandant wish to speak to me?”
“That you will soon discover,” the lieutenant answered shortly. “Let me advise you to answer his questions politely and without complaint. The Colonel is not noted for his good temper. This way, please.”
Fawley was ushered into what might have been an orderly-room. Colonel Dumesnil looked up from his task of studying a pile of maps and watched the new-comer keenly. The former was a short man whose spurred riding-boots scarcely reached the floor, but his face was stern and his steel grey eyes and tone were alike menacing.
“Will you explain, sir, what you are doing on a military reservation?” he demanded.
“I was following a road which is marked on my map as an ordinary civilian thoroughfare,” Fawley explained. “I had a perfect right to be where I was.”
“That, sir, one might easily dispute,” was the cold reply. “All the roads round here are well known by the handful of scattered residents to be under military supervision. I must ask you what you are doing in this part of the world.”
“There is no secret about it,” Fawley answered blandly. “I have been trying to discover the extent and nature of the new French fortifications.”
No more unexpected reply could have been given. There was a dead silence. The Colonel’s face remained immovable, but there was an ominous tapping of his fingers upon the desk.
“For what reason?”
Fawley shrugged his shoulders.
“If you insist upon knowing I suppose I had better tell you,” he said, “but I don’t want the thing to get about. There are some golf links about twelve kilometres from here at a place called Sospel. I have taken a great fancy to them and to the hotel, and as I have a little capital to invest I thought of buying the lot. The one thing which makes me hesitate is that no one is willing or able to tell me where the new French fortifications and gun emplacements are situated, and until I know that I feel that my property might be utterly destroyed in case of war.”
There was a further silence. Another officer who might have been the Colonel’s aide-de-camp crossed the room and whispered in his ear.
“You have corroborative evidence of what you are telling me?” the Colonel asked.
“Any quantity,” Fawley assured him confidently. “The Mayor of the district, the committee of the old golf club, the late hotel proprietor and owner of the land, half the village of Sospel.”
“Your name and passport.”
Fawley produced them from his pocket and handed them across. The Colonel examined them and his face relaxed.
“As an ex-military man, Major Fawley,” he said, with a certain severity still in his tone, “you should have known that yours was a very dangerous enterprise. You should have applied to the authorities for any information you desired.”
“I thought as mine was a civil enterprise,” Fawley argued, “they might not notice me. All that I need is a little general information.”
“There is none to be given,” was the brusque reply. “Escort this gentleman to our boundaries, Lieutenant, and let me warn you, sir, not to be found in this locality again. This is from no lack of courtesy, Major Fawley. It is a matter of military necessity which I am amazed that you should not already have realised and respected.”
Fawley suffered himself to be led away. A soldier escorted him to the nearest village, where he descended at the local café, and accepted without hesitation a ten-franc note to be spent there. He refused, however, to answer the slightest question respecting the geography of the neighbourhood and regarded with evident suspicion Fawley’s few tentative enquiries.
“Monsieur has been generous,” were his parting words as he stood outside the café. “He would be wise to listen to a word of advice. Strangers are sometimes treated generously, as Monsieur has been, on their first visit to the nest in the mountains. The second visit means the cold steel or the swift bullet. The bones of more than one too curious person will be found in the secret places of the mountains yonder when the world comes to an end.”
He pointed up beyond the pass which they had descended. A stern, inhospitable line of country it was with great declivities and huge fragments of rock split by the slow fires of eternity. Fawley shivered a little as he stepped back into the car.
“I shall not forget, my brave fellow,” he declared. “Drink a glass for me. I am best out of the neighbourhood.”
The soldier grinned. Nevertheless, there was something serious in his expression behind the grin.
“Monsieur est un homme prudent,” was his only comment.
Chapter VIII
Fawley, a few nights later, lay on his stomach in the midst of a crumpled heap of undergrowth on almost the topmost spur of the range of mountains eastward from Mont Agel and very little below the snow line. He was on the edge of a recently made clearing and the air was full of the odour of the sawn pine trunks lying about in every direction. The mists rolled over his head and the frozen rain stung his cheeks and pattered against his leather clothes. It was the third moonless night of his almost concluded enterprise and there remained only one unsolved mystery. The six galleries were there visualised before his eyes. He knew the connecting points of each one and the whereabouts of most of the amazing battery of guns. He knew the entrances and roughly the exits to each. His work had been done with genius and good fortune, yet it was incomplete. The seventh gallery! The key to all the positions. The seventh gallery which must hold the wonder gun. Its exact whereabouts still eluded him.
The night before the storm which had swept the mountains bare, which had driven even the guards and sentries into shelter, had been a godsend to him. In the roar of the elements and that blinding deluge of rain, the crashing of the trees and the hissing of the wind through the undergrowth and along the ground, he had abandoned caution. He had tramped steadily round from post to post. He had been within a few yards of the Colonel’s headquarters. He had even laid his hand on one of the guns, but it was not the gun he sought. He had worked it all out, though, by a process of elimination. The main gallery, the control station and the supreme mystery which was probably the mightiest antiaircraft gun in the world must be somewhere within a radius of about a hundred yards of where he was. It was information invaluable enough as it stood, but Fawley, through these long hours of darkness and peril, had conceived an almost passionate desire to solve the last enigma of this subterranean mountain fortress. The howling of the wind, which the night before had been his great aid, obscuring all sound and leaving him free to roam about in the darkness in comparative safety, was now, he felt, robbing him of his chance. The special body of men of whom he was in search—he had discovered that many hours ago—worked only in the darkness, so that even the woodcutters should know nothing of their doings. They must be somewhere near now…. There were great piles of cement half carted away lying within fifty feet of where he was, barrels of mortar, light and heavy trucks. Somewhere close to him they must be working…. This business of listening grew more hopeless. One of the trees in the wood, on the outskirts of which he lay, was creaking and roaring like a wild animal in pain. He raised himself slowly and carefully on one side and by straining his eyes he could catch the outlines of its boughs stretched out in fantastic fashion like great arms. He even heard the splinters go.
Then, for the first time, he fancied he heard—not one voice but a hum of voices! His whole body stiffened—not with fear but with the realisation of danger. The voices seemed to come from below. He raised himself a little more almost on to his knees. His eyeballs burned with the agony of the fruitless effort to penetrate the darkness. Below! In his brain at any rate there was light enough. He remembered the somewhat artificial appearance of the great masses of undergrowth amongst which he lay. Perhaps this number seven tunnel was underneath! Perhaps in seeking for shelter he had crept into a ready made ambush. Then for some time he ceased to think and action became almost automatic.
Nothing in the orchestra of the howling wind, the crashing trees and the hollow echoes amongst the grim mountains had produced sound such as now seemed to split his ear-drums. Within a few feet of him there came a crash which blotted out the whole world with a great barrier of sound. He felt his cheeks whipped, his body thrashed, the sense of an earthquake underneath him—the sense of falling. It took him only a second or two to realise what was happening. Within a few yards of him the tree which he had been watching had given up its fight with the rising wind and had crashed through the artificial roof on which he lay, down into the space below. He, too, was falling as the branches and shrubs on either side subsided. He fell with his mind quite clear. He saw two men in the familiar uniform of the Chasseurs Alpins, their faces convulsed with amazed fear, flung to the ground by the trunk of the tree. It fell upon them so that Fawley, even in those wild seconds of excitement, was obliged to close his eyes. Their shrieking and yelling was all over in a moment…. Fawley himself fell sideways on to the platform of a smooth and shining cylindrical erection which was unlike anything he had ever seen before. There was nothing to which he could cling, and almost at once he slid down on to the cement floor. Opposite him was the most astonished human being he had ever seen—a soldier, who had run to the assistance of the other two and was suddenly faced with the consciousness of Fawley’s amazing appearance.
“Sacré nom de Dieu!” he called out, wringing his hands. “What is it then that has arrived? Is it an earthquake? Who are you?”
“Never mind. Stay where you are. Don’t raise your hands.”
One last sobbing cry went down and echoed from wall to wall of the passage. Fawley took one look under the tree and then turned his back.
“They are dead,” he said. “You cannot help them. Listen. Is this gallery number seven?”
The chasseur, incapable of speech, pointed to the wall. There it was—a great sprawling seven.
“Which is the way out?” Fawley asked.
The youth—he was scarcely more than a boy—was shivering so that words were almost impossible. He pointed in a certain direction. Fawley drew an automatic from his pocket.
“Look here,” he threatened, “if you have lied, I shall come back and shoot you.”
The chasseur pointed again. His face was white. He looked almost as though he had had a stroke. His head was bleeding where one of the boughs had struck him. The tree lay like a great destroying octopus all over the place. Only one thing seemed to have survived untouched. The great machine, with its metal cylinders and huge dynamos, which might well have been some devilish contrivance of the nether world.
“Where do you come from?” the youth asked.
Fawley raised his weapon. He had completely recovered his self-control.
“No more questions,” he said curtly. “Give me your belt.”
The soldier obeyed. Fawley’s hand seemed as steady as a rock and the revolver, though small, was an ugly-looking affair.
“Put your hands out. Fold them together.”
Again the chasseur obeyed. Fawley tied them, then, leaning forward, he struck him lightly but firmly near the chin.
“That is for your good,” he said, as his victim stumbled backwards.
He turned away and crawled down the passage. There was no sentry, but the wind had ceased its sobbing for a moment and from the road came the sound of voices and the hurrying of feet. Fawley, bent double, made his way through the rough piece of waste ground towards the edge of the precipice. Something seemed to have created an alarm and shots came from behind him to which he paid no attention. A bullet whistled over his head. He only smiled. At the edge of the precipice he steadied himself: six hundred feet to scramble. Well, he had done it before. He fell flat just in time to escape another bullet and then, with gloved hands and his thick leather clothes, he commenced the wild descent. Sometimes his feet slipped and he heard the crashing of the small boulders and stones which he had dislodged. He felt himself falling through space, but each time a bump in the ground, or a bush, or a young pine sapling saved him. Once he hung over an absolutely sheer precipice, his legs dangling in the air, the trunk of the tree he clasped cracking and splintering in his hands. He pulled himself up again, made a little détour and felt the ground rise beneath his feet. As he descended lower and lower the wind and rain grew less, the cold decreased. The time came when he found himself standing upright on the solid earth. Below him long stretches of wood lay like black smudges of fallen clouds, but for a time at any rate he had reached a rough path down which he was able to scramble without difficulty. He took one pull at his flask and in a dark spot with trees all around one quick glance at his compass with the help of his torch. A sparsely planted wood was a godsend to him. He swung himself from trunk to trunk of the trees, his feet secure in the thick accumulation of pine needles below. When he emerged it was to face a flickering light from a small hamlet already astir. Before daybreak he was in his car clad in a rough knickerbocker suit, smoking a pipe, leaning nonchalantly back in his seat, and already well on his way down the great descent to the sea.
***
Monsieur Carlotti, the very popular manager of the Hôtel de France, was taking his usual morning promenade in the lounge of the hotel when Fawley drove up and entered. He welcomed his returning guest with a beaming smile.
“Monsieur has found the weather inclement, I fear,” he remarked.
“Fiendish,” was the emphatic reply. “No more of your mountains for me, Monsieur Carlotti. I have finished with them. Cagnes may be dull golf, but it will be good enough for me.”
Carlotti’s eyes twinkled with comprehension.
“The telephones have been busy this morning,” he observed. “There has been a great deal of disturbance and still is at the frontiers. The weather again without a doubt.”
Fawley nodded.
“I shall not trouble the frontiers,” he confided. “A few quiet days in this warmth will suit me better.”
Carlotti bowed.
“It is good news for us,” he declared. “If by chance,” he added, as the two men neared the lift, “Monsieur should be in need of a golfing companion there is a Mr. Krust here who would like a game.”
“Fix it up for me,” Fawley replied. “To-morrow or the next day—as soon as the weather gets decent.”
The little man remained below, smiling and bowing. Fawley mounted to his apartments upon the second floor. The valet, whom he met in the corridor, threw open the doors and shutters.
“There have been telephone enquiries for Monsieur,” he announced, pointing to some slips upon the table. “No letters.”
“A hot bath—quickly,” Fawley ordered. “As soon as you have turned the water on find the waiter and order coffee—a large pot—café complet.”
The valet bustled off. Fawley strolled into the room twenty minutes later in his dressing-gown, a different man. The coffee was steaming upon the table, a delicious fragrance was in the air. He ordered more rolls and butter. In the act of serving himself he stopped abruptly. Upon his writing-table, in a prominent position, was a blue envelope. He called to the valet.
“Henri,” he pointed out, “that letter was not on my table when I went to my bath a few minutes ago.”
“Certainly it was not, sir.”
“Who has been in the room?”
“No one, sir, except the waiter who brought the coffee.”
Fawley turned to the latter, who had just reappeared.
“Did you bring that note?” he asked.
The man shook his head.
“Non, Monsieur,” he replied. “I have not seen it before. Ten minutes ago when I first came it was not there.”
Fawley made no further remark. He possessed himself of the note and turned to the valet.
“Send me the coiffeur,” he ordered, “in twenty minutes. Afterwards you might put me out a grey tweed suit and flannel shirt.”
“No golf or tennis to-day, sir?”
Fawley shook his head. The man disappeared. Fawley poured out the coffee with his right hand. His left palm lay over the letter in the blue envelope. Just at that moment, without any previous warning, there came an almost peremptory knocking at the inside door of the salon.
Chapter IX
Fawley’s left hand conveyed the letter in the blue envelope to the safe recesses of his pocket. His right hand continued its task of pouring out the coffee.
“Come in,” he invited.
The door was promptly opened. The person who stood upon the threshold was one of the most harmless-looking elderly gentlemen possible to conceive. He was inclined to be stout, but his broad shoulders and erect carriage somewhat discounted the fact. He was possessed of a pink-and-white complexion, eyes of almost a China-blue and shortly cropped grey hair. He wore a grey knickerbocker suit and carried in his hand a hat of the same colour, of quaint design.
“I have the pleasure to address Major Fawley, is it not so?” he began in a clear, pleasant voice with a slight foreign accent. “I was hoping to present a letter of introduction, but it arrives late. My name is Krust.”
“Adolf Krust?” Fawley asked, rising to his feet.
“The same,” was the cheerful rejoinder. “You have heard of me, yes?”
The Spy Paramount Page 4