Secret Operative K-13

by Joel Townsley Rogers

  “Fahnestock!”

  Windows banged up. Men in barracks, suddenly awakened, added their shouts to the uproar. From all over the field, sentries were running. Adjutant Harvey cut across the field after Big Dick’s fleet figure. Mortimer and Washee Long drew ahead of him. But Big Dick, when on his toes, had a stride like a racehorse. The shouting men might as well have tried to catch greased lightning.

  He ran to the Sopwith and vaulted aboard. The startled mechanics of the night hangar watch made a half-hearted effort to grab the wings. The sergeant in command of them ran to the side of the cockpit to remonstrate, but a wave of Big Dick’s pistol drove him back.

  “Big! Big, boy! What’s happened?” little Washee Long was shrieking in a despairing voice.

  But Big Dick made no answer to the man who was his buddy. He ducked his head and jammed the throttle open. With a loud yell over the field, the fast ship raced away. A cursing sentry raised his rifle to fire at it, but Washee Long knocked the muzzle aside.

  Up toward the starry night the ship zoomed like a rocket. High, high it shot, and keeled about, heading north. Its black shadow cut across the Big Dipper. Its roar faded to a whisper. Soon, against the far horizon, its shadow passed away. The hard little stars were glittering again in an empty sky.

  * * * * *

  They found Captain Tillinghast Wainwright Oakley Face lying, bound hand and foot, against the door of his broken safe. One badly discolored eye was almost swollen shut. His lips were puffed and bleeding. He spat out a few broken teeth.

  “The bloody beggar smashed me!” he mumbled. “By God, he hauled off and pasted me! Feel my jaw! Is it broken?”

  A sentry cut the cords that bound his ankles and wrists. He clambered dizzily to his feet, staring around him with a pale watchful look.

  “What a wallop!” he moaned, feeling his jaw. “I never expected the blasted fellow would hit so hard!”

  Washee Long had darted to a corner of the room. He rolled over the motionless form of Sevenoaks, the captain’s batman. The blue eyes of the Yorkshire yeoman were opened wide, staring at the ceiling.

  But there was no light in them. And his hands were cold. His breast was cold and still.

  “Through the heart!” said Washee.

  He was sober now. There was a hard, watchful look about him.

  Captain Face hobbled over, pulling at his teeth. He touched the murdered man with a delicate toe. He stared down with a pale, steady glance.

  “Yes, Sevenoaks, poor beggar!” he said. “A good fellow, loyal and devoted. I was very fond of him. Fahnestock, the damned spy, shot him down without a prayer.”

  Washee’s slant black eyes narrowed till they were thin as pencil marks.

  “But cold as a lobster,” he muttered. “You’d think he had been two hours dead.”

  More and more of the Fighters were pouring into the room, many of them only half dressed or in bathrobes! In the confusion, Washee’s sharp observation was unnoticed.

  The captain now turned to his safe. The door had been sprung from its hinges. He made a great bustle of rummaging through it, mouthing and muttering.

  “It’s worse, far worse than I feared,” he muttered.

  “In God’s name, what’s been stolen?” cried Harvey.

  “Information of incalculable value to the enemy,” said the captain. “The blasted spy must have been planning this coup a long time.”

  He confronted the excited throng of Fighters with a pale glance. He held up his hand for silence, with the little finger of it curved like a hook.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “you have been witnesses to an act of the most stupendous treachery. There is not one of you more astounded and shocked than myself. If we had not seen it, we could not believe it. I have shared your admiration for the apparent honesty and fighting courage of the man we have known as Leftenant Richard Fahnestock. Yet, as Adjutant Harvey can tell you, I have had reasons to suspect him. Gentlemen, we must accept the bitter truth. Leftenant Fahnestock is a Hun spy. He has been working all along with the enemy, in the pay of the German Intelligence.”

  Two or three of the Fighters were whispering. But most of them were deathly silent. Washee Long crouched on the floor side the body of Sevenoaks. He clasped his knees, rocking back and forth on his heels.

  “You lie!” he screamed defiantly.

  “Arrest him!” said the captain coldly.

  “He’s drunk, sir,” said Adjutant Harvey.

  “Arrest him, and confine him in quarters!”

  Shrieking and fighting, Washee was led out between two sentries.

  “This frightful affair has hurt me more than any of you,” said the captain in tones of profound grief. “Yet, in a way, I am glad. It clears the air of suspicion. There need be no longer any whispering about a Hun traitor in the flying force. No longer need each of us regard our comrades with mistrust. The traitor is out in the open at last. And Leftenant Richard Fahnestock is that man. . . .

  “Adjutant,” he said, “take steps for the summoning of a general court martial immediately.”

  “Do you think Fahnestock will be returning to stand trial?” said Harvey bitterly.

  “He will be tried in absentia,” said Captain Face. “I am quite sure we shall never see him again.”

  He dabbed his pale forehead with a handkerchief of light blue silk. The corners of his mouth were twitching. He covered it with the handkerchief in his right hand. And the little finger of that hand moved like a hook across his mouth—the little finger that had been broken, and had grown crooked, and could never be straight again.

  Chapter IV

  The Jaws of Von Schmee

  Straight northeast by north Big Dick Fahnestock held the bow of his droning ship, keeping Polaris on a line with the inboard strut of his left wing.

  A head wind was set against him. Yet, even so, he estimated he was making a ground speed of sixty knots. He moved at eight thousand feet. The black earth passed below him like a plate of black glass. He was into Hunland now. He would be over Oldemonde before midnight.

  Suddenly, fingers of searchlights shot up from the surface of the lightless and impenetrable ground. The sound of his motor had been heard by the German A.A. detectors. The pale lights felt around for him through the starry sky. They pierced through cobwebs of thin white cloud, creeping and fingering.

  A luminous ray crept on him, and stayed like a terrible blinding eye. It bathed his struts and flying wires with a ghostly glow. He saw his propeller turning like a cascade of silver water. Steeply, he keeled his ship over and sideslipped down. The black wind whistled against his cheek. He was in the vast darkness again, and a half mile away, before the Archies began to bark.

  Again the searchlights were fingering.

  “They’ll be keeping the wires hot all along the front,” he thought with a grin. “Solitary British Sopwith detected flying north. Fritz won’t get much sleep tonight.”

  Once more they caught him, and he whipped over into the darkness before the A.A. gunners had the range. He climbed through the moonless sky. At fifteen thousand feet, he ran into a tangle of thin cloud. He lifted above it a hundred feet and held his course steadily. Below his keel, the cloud rushed like a river of tenuous spindrift, vaporous and opaque.

  The beams of the searchlights went slipping over the under surface of the cloud. But they could not penetrate it. It beat them back like a mirror. Again and again they passed below him, those anxious beams, dull as moons reflected under a pale water.

  Tiny points of fire began to spot the invisible earth here and there. The A.A.’s were firing blind, dividing the sky into sectors, bracketing his estimated position and trying for a lucky shot. But the sky is a big place. Even so, one shrapnel burst flowered out less than a hundred yards below him. A ragged hole appeared in his left lower wing, and the linen began to strip itself away.

  “Oh, quit throwing them things at me!” he said.

  He leaned overside with one eye closed, chewing vigorously. When he saw the
flash of an A.A. battery blooming directly below him, he spat.

  The blind firing ceased after a hot three minutes. The creeping searchlights, far to the rear now, one by one winkled out. In the beam of the last pale light, he caught a glimpse of a flock of Gotha bombers moving southward miles below. Then the last flash died. There was nothing more to be seen on earth or in the sky but the small twinkling stars.

  From twenty miles away he picked up the lights of Oldemonde. He slipped through the dark, chill wind toward that gleam. At first no bigger and brighter than a glowworm, it grew clearer, a solitary beacon on the vast expanse of the world.

  The droning Sopwith ate up the dark air miles. A huge electric cross laid out on the grounds of the pseudo-hospital grew definite in shape.

  “You lying skunks!” thought Dick. “If I had a bomb-rack of Mark IV’s, I’d hospital the pack of you to Kingdom Come.”

  The Red Cross is seldom ever misused in warfare, in spite of the accusations of misuse that the belligerents were continually hurling at each other. Violation of the symbol is too apt to be a boomerang. Only the rarely unscrupulous and criminal commander such as Lieutenant-General von Schmee, the Butcher, a man who had a black name even among his own people, a thief without pride and a murderer without remorse, would hide under the humanitarian flag with such contempt of the laws of warfare.

  “Wonder how long Fairy Face has known the Butcher’s lair?” thought Dick. “Why don’t they sic the bombers onto him and blow his nest a mile in the air?”

  He slid along the sky, watching the château move beneath his wing. This was farther north than he was accustomed to do his hopping. Yet, three or four times he had escorted bombing formations of Handley-Pages as far as Oldemonde, on their way to raid the great ammunition dumps near Brussels.

  He had spent the last two hours in an intensive study of photographic maps. A detailed picture of the topography of the false hospital was clear in his mind. In front of the ancient stone pile was a carp pond of a half acre in extent, set in smooth velvet lawns. To the east were broad green forests of beach and elm, developed as a deer park. Behind the château, to the northward, was a small, thick cedar wood, which even in the clearest day made a black ribbon on the ground. Beyond the cedars were cultivated fields and broad, rolling meadowlands grown to hay.

  He carried no parachute flares. There was no light of the moon. The illuminated cross, spread out on the lawns beside the carp pond, offered the best landing. He kept his glance on it steadily.

  “Down there, old gal,” he said softly to his droning ship, “is the smartest, toughest Hun that ever lived. And with him are a whole hornet’s nest of wise babies. They’d have to be wise, or they wouldn’t have been able to land themselves soft staff berths. And we’re going to take a nice dive into that tank of man-eating crocodiles. Does it sound pretty? It does not. Well, here goes nothing. And goodbye to him.”

  The lighted cross had slid beneath his wing. He cut his engine switch and hooked up in a stall. Then, swish! the ship fell over into a spin. Tight as a top, he corkscrewed down through the rushing blackness toward Oldemonde, three miles below.

  And even in that moment, he knew it was a doomed and hopeless act. Yet he could not turn back now and see the cold, bitter grin on the lips of Captain Face. He could not endure to hear Face saying, in his high-pitched drawling sneer:

  “So you are a blasted coward, eh, what, Fahnestock?”

  He knew that he was the same as dead. But he had to go through with it. He’d have to fight it out to the end, for the sake of the unknown K-13, if not his own.

  The lighted cross rushed up at him in a rapid four-cornered jerk. To his dizzy eyes, it began to look like a double cross then.

  With the altimeter needle sliding below three hundred feet, he straightened out into a wild perpendicular dive. The great black mass of Oldemonde rocked rapidly toward him. Dim lights were flashing on in the windows. A bugle blew with a wild, clear note. Suddenly, a small brilliant spotlight stabbed at him from the roof.

  He was half blinded by the glare. Shadowy men were running below him. The smooth carp pond gleamed with refracted lights. Directly above the center of the illuminated cross, he stalled his ship, bow up. The bottom of the air dropped out beneath it. It slapped itself down like a pancake, and went bouncing over a smooth sward toward the black carp pond beyond.

  He sank down in his seat as the ship rolled to a stop, all but exhausted. A landing at night is no cure for nervous prostration. The spotlight still blazed at him. He faced it, chewing vigorously. Men came splashing through the shallows of the water and pounding over the grass.

  “You are cofered!” said a sharp voice in English. “Do not mofe!”

  He stood up with a lazy grin, holding his arms high, blinking against the light.

  “Grapsen des Englischen Schwein!”

  He caught a glimpse of the man who was shouting, a gaunt, bony-faced sergeant with eye sockets like a skull’s. The shadowy men rushed him on all sides, grunting and yelling. They tore him out of the cockpit and hurled him to the ground, beating him about the face and kicking him unmercifully, though he was making no resistance.

  “Verdammte Engländer! Lass mir ’n schlachten!”

  Good God, the pack of them! Boots and fists! All of them shrieking and mauling and hitting. Probably none of them had ever had a chance to take a wallop at an Englishman before. The thought flashed to him that staff soldiers, like women and preachers and other noncombatants, are apt to be filled with more murderous hate and virulent patriotism and sheer, downright yelling hellishness than is ever felt by real fighting men. The most ferocious hang-the-Kaiser boys that Dick had ever met on his own side were the brass hats safely billeted in London or well behind the lines. And it seemed to be the same way with the Fritzes.

  Big Dick Fahnestock was good-natured, and mighty hard to hurt. But it annoyed him when they kneed him in the groin and tried to gouge out his eyes.

  “If you brass hats want a fight, you’ll have it!” he yelled. “Button back your ears, ’cause here I come!”

  He rolled and swung like a wildcat, smashing out with his mighty fists. They landed on those German maps like bricks. He half struggled to his feet, hurling them to right and left away from him.

  “Gerade der Schnautze!” he bellowed in triumph. “Straight to the snout!” He banged the bony-faced sergeant on the most sensitive part of his nose. “Plautz auf dem Küsser—smack on the kisser!” he whooped, dynamiting a handful of teeth from the mouth of a ferocious blond Superman.

  But there were too many of them. They were rushing up all the time and piling onto him. He couldn’t fight the whole damned German Army.

  In an instant, an officer came running up. He was a lithe, dark-haired man, a lieutenant of the Guards, Dick surmised by his markings. Dick was lying on his back then, resting, with his teeth firmly clenched in a Bavarian ear and his hands locked about the windpipes of a couple of Pomeranian corporals.

  “What is it, Wolf?” the officer said in a sharp, clear voice.

  “We’ve captured the enemy, Leutnant von Reuter,” moaned the gaunt, black-eyed sergeant, holding his bleeding nose.

  Lieutenant Ritter von Reuter stood slapping a swagger stick against his thigh, like an angry cat lashing its tail. At a sharp command from him, the German soldiers hoisted Dick to his feet. They held his arms twisted firmly behind him, however, and particularly his ponderous hard fists.

  “Namen und Rang?” said von Reuter slowly, staring at Dick closely as he spoke. “Name and rank? I do not speak English. Do you understand me?”

  “Ich bin Deutscher,” Dick said. “Deutscher Amerikaner.”

  “Späher?”

  “Nein, nicht Späher—Fahnenflüchtiger.”

  “Ah, a deserter,” said von Reuter, eyeing him ironically. “You will have the opportunity of proving that to our complete satisfaction, Herr—?”

  “Fahnestock.”

  “Fahnestock der Fahnenflüchtiger,” said von Reuter wit
h a curving grin. “Flagpole the Flag-Fugitive. Neat, not so? Too neat to suit me. If you are an English spy, Mr. Fahnestock, by the God above me, your uniform won’t protect you! We have had enough of spies around here.”

  Dick felt his face flooding with a guilty heat. The eyes of the young Prussian were merciless as steel. They were about the coolest and most penetrating thing that Dick had ever run against.

  “Take this fellow, Sergeant Wolf, and give him double irons! Hold him incommunicado.”

  “I have papers—” Dick began, fumbling at his breast.

  “Papers of what sort?”

  “Papers to prove—”

  “To prove you are a deserter?” said von Reuter. “That is good! That is rich! Maybe K-13 gave them to you, eh, to help you fool us?”

  He narrowed his arched black brows at Dick.

  “I don’t know who you mean,” mumbled Dick.

  But he had never been a good liar.

  “Give me those papers!

  “For Colonel von Kleinhals only, or the general himself.”

  “I am Colonel von Kleinhals’ aide. Obey me instantly when I give you an order, or I will have you flogged!”

  “Why, you damned little pup!” yelled Dick.

  Only it didn’t sound even so nice as that in German.

  He saw red. He lunged and wrestled to get at that monocled, insolent young fop. What he had been afraid of had happened. He had lost his temper in a fierce fighting rage. But the soldiers had him in a firm grip. They twisted up his wrists behind his back and wrapped their arms about his knees.

  Von Reuter stood watching him with a cool smile, polishing his monocle.

  “A fighter, eh?” he said. “You will apologize on your knees to me for those words, Leutnant Fahnestock, or I will have your heart. On your knees!”

  “I’ll see you cooking in hell first!” breathed Dick.

  “Extraordinary language,” yawned von Reuter, poking his monocle into his eye. “Wolf, relieve this boisterous fool of his papers. Let him eat iron for a while.”