Chapter 7

What happened to Algy

Apart from the gruelling monotony of the passage, Algy's flight from the Falklands to the Argentinian coast to meet Biggles and Ginger at the appointed rendezvous some distance north of Puerto Guano was uneventful. He flew through a world of sea and sky - and nothing else. Dawn had just broken by the time the flying-boat left the water, flooding the atmosphere with pink, gold, and the translucent hues of mother-of-pearl. Soon, however, the sun rose higher, and the sky became a mighty dome of blue, steely ultramarine overhead, fading to pale azure at the horizon which, seeming to rise to his own level, created an impression that he was flying rim to rim across a colossal basin. Not for over three hours did any mark, large or small, break the pristine purity of the azure world through which he flew. From his altitude of five thousand feet the south Atlantic ocean appeared as a featureless dark blue carpet. Bertie, sitting beside him, was silent until the dark line of the Argentinian coast came into sight, and then his only comment was, "Dashed hard work, this roaring to and fro across all those miles of drink."

Algy nodded agreement and declared, "I'm heartily sick of the sight of the Atlantic Ocean, or any other ocean."

Having reaching the coast, Algy turned north and throttled back. Flying as he was by dead reckoning, and knowing that it is one thing to look at a map, but a different thing altogether when one is faced with the same thing in reality, he had deliberately chosen to make his landfall a little south of the objective. Thus, by turning north he was certain to cross it. Sure enough, a few minutes later, the little cove chosen for the rendezvous came into sight. Algy made two uneventful circuits, flying low, and then nosed down to what proved to be a comfortable mooring. Less than five minutes later the big flying-boat was safely anchored close inshore. The Gosling was not - as Algy and Bertie had expected it to be - waiting for them, but this did not worry them unduly. However, as the minutes passed they became conscious of an uneasiness which presently turned to anxiety.

"Are we going to stay here all day?" queried Bertie.

"No," decided Algy. "You know what a stickler Biggles is for orders. He said to push off if he was more than an hour late. If he came here and found us still here he'd have a few short sharp words to say about it. We'll give him a bit longer." Algy looked at his watch. "If he isn't here in, say, fifteen minutes, we'll go."

Twenty minutes later the flying-boat was in the air, heading east on its return journey to the Falklands.

When there was still no sign of the Gosling when they returned to the little cove the next morning, both Algy and Bertie began to get really alarmed. They sat in the machine in silence, making an anxious reconnaissance of the sky. Bertie, who was sitting by the radio, began to polish his eyeglass furiously as if he proposed to rub a hole through it.

By eleven o' clock the failure of the Gosling to appear put Algy in what is commonly called a quandary. On the one hand, he would have liked to start an immediate search for the Gosling. On the other, he remembered that Biggles had abjured him not to panic if the Gosling missed a rendezvous. He scanned the sky to the north anxiously for the last time, and then turned to Bertie.

"Okay," he announced. "Something's gone wrong. The question is - what do we do about it? I'd like to go scouting for the Gosling but I don't think we should just yet. You know how anxious Biggles was about anyone seeing the flying-boat and making a stink about a British military aircraft operating in Argentinian airspace. So this is what I propose - unless you can think of a better plan. We'll unload all the stores and I shall stay behind, in case the Gosling turns up. Biggles and Ginger are bound to come here, to try to make contact with us. Anyway, as soon as I hear their engines, I'll light a smudge fire to attract their attention. You can push off back to the Falklands and come back here tomorrow. If Biggles and Ginger haven't shown up by then or sent us a radio message, we must assume that they're down somewhere and we'll start looking for them - stink or no stink."

"I say, old boy, that doesn't sound much of a plan to me," protested Bertie.

"What's wrong with it?"

"Well, there isn't any plan at all. It's too simple - if you get what I mean."

"The simplicity is probably the best thing about it," Algy declared. "The more involved the scheme the easiest it is to go wrong. I've heard Biggles say that a score of times."

"Too true, too true," murmured Bertie. "No plan could be simpler than yours, old boy."

Algy ignored the thrust. "If you've got nothing more to say, let's get cracking."

Unloading the petrol and stores did not take long. They were hastily concealed amongst some low scrub that grew nearly to the line of the high water mark, and then Bertie took his place in the cockpit of the flying-boat. Algy watched him taxi into position and race in a smother of foam towards the open sea, and then occupied himself for a while gathering dry brushwood for the smudge fire. Then he ate a frugal snack of biscuits and bully beef, more to kill time than because he was hungry. The food tasted like sawdust.

For a while Algy paced up and down restlessly, his eyes constantly on the sky. Then he re-arranged the sticks he had collected for the smudge fire. Finally, as the afternoon began to fade, he decided to relieve his anxiety by exploring his surroundings. He wandered along the beach to the north end of the cove, where a shallow channel ran sluggishly into the sea. Rather than get his feet wet, he preferred to make his way for a little way along the bank. A large rock barred his way; he scrambled over it and then jumped lightly on the sand at the base. As he landed there was an unpleasant squelch and he sank into the sand over the ankles. At the same time the ground seemed to quiver and press tightly around his feet. Even so, it was not until he went to take a pace forward that he realised that he was in the grip of a quicksand.

He perceived afterwards that, had he stood still, even for a few seconds, when first he stepped on the sand, he would certainly have died the most dreadful of all deaths; but fortunately, only a barely perceptible instant elapsed before the time he jumped down and the time he started to move on, to discover that his feet were held fast. To say that he "discovered" this may not be the literal truth. There was no time to discover anything, for instantly he began to fall forward, as was inevitable in the circumstances.

Even as he fell, the thought, "quicksands", flashed through his brain, but the frantic grab that he made at an overhanging shrub was purely instinctive.

He managed to catch hold of it and hang on. For a few desperate seconds, as he began to haul on the branch round which his fingers had closed, it was touch and go whether it would stand the strain, or break and precipitate him bodily into a death-trap; but it held, and the crisis passing as his feet began to emerge from the treacherous sand, it was only a matter of another second before he lay gasping on the rock and not a little shaken.

For a little while he sat regarding the innocent looking little creek with cold, hostile eyes and bitterly regretting his decision to take a little exercise. Then, drawing a deep breath, he prepared to return to his original position. His mood did not improve when he narrowly avoided stepping on a little brown snake that lay curled up on the sand. It reared, hissing, and Algy side-stepped and ran for his life. Actually, at the moment he was more concerned with the sound that his ears had just caught - the purr, still distant, of an aircraft to the north - than with wild beasts.

To his surprise, the machine seemed to be passing to the west rather than heading for the rendezvous point, so he lost no time in putting a match to the fire that he had prepared and almost immediately had the satisfaction of seeing a thin pillar of white smoke coil upwards. Expecting it to be soon observed, and the machine to arrive over the spot, Algy busied himself for a moment with feeding more fuel to the fire. Then he heard another sound, one which caused him to stare upwards in alarm. Above the subdued hum of the Gosling's twin engines came the sound of another engine, and the scream of wind torn wings that told a story of terrific speed. He saw the Gosling at once, heading steadily south at a moderate altitude, clearly unaware of its danger. Behind it, dropping out of the eye of the sun like a winged bullet, was another machine. Even at that distance Algy had no difficulty in recognising it as a Messerschmitt 109. Breathless, he stood still and watched. There was nothing he could do, absolutely nothing. Except watch. And as he watched he realised that the end was a forgone conclusion, for the Gosling, flying serenely along, was a mark that not even a novice at the game could miss.

In a sort of numb stupor he watched the pilot of the Messerschmitt 109 half pull out of his dive, swing round on the tail of the amphibian, and align his sights on the target. Indeed, so intense was the moment that he could almost feel him doing it.

At that particular instant the amphibian turned. It was only a slight movement, but it was enough to disconcert the pilot of the Messerschmitt 109, who, at the same time, opened fire.

Algy felt a cold perspiration break out on his face as the Gosling swerved sickeningly. Whether or not the movement was accidental or deliberate he did not know, but when he saw the nose soar skyward and the machine swing around in a tight Immelmann turn, he knew that whoever was at the co ntrols had not been hit, for the manoeuvre was one that could only be performed by a machine under perfect control.

Again the Messerschmitt 109 fired, and again the amphibian twisted like a snipe as the pilot strove to spoil the other's aim. And for a moment it seemed to Algy that he succeeded, although he knew quite well that such an unequal combat could not be prolonged. "Go down!" he roared, well aware of the futility of speech but unable to control himself any longer, for his one concern at this stage was that Biggles and Ginger might save their lives regardless of anything else.

From the behaviour of the Gosling it almost seemed as if the pilot had heard him, for the machine began to zigzag down, at the same time side-slipping, first to left and then to right, in order to lose height. The Messerschmitt 109 was round after it in flash, little tongues of orange flame flickering from the guns concealed in its engine cowling and wings, and streams of tracer bullets cutting white pencil lines across the blue.

With a wild swerve, and with the Messerschmitt 109 in close attendance, the Gosling disappeared from sight behind a high ridge to the south. Then came a sound which, once heard, is never forgotten. It was the splintering crackle of a crashing aeroplane. The distance Algy judged to be not more than four or five miles away. He stood, white-faced, as if frozen to the ground, and a minute or so later saw a coiling cloud of black smoke rise into the air.

Shortly afterwards the Messerschmitt 109 reappeared, circling upwards through the smoke. When it had gained some height, it turned away and disappeared towards the south.

Algy had no recollection of how long he stood staring at the ridge, but suddenly he seemed to come to his senses. He set off at a wild run along the beach in the direction of the hill behind which the machines had disappeared. On reaching the southern end of the little bay where the beach terminated he found that the sand gave way to a rising rocky foreshore on which the scrubby coastal vegetation had only been able to fasten an insecure hold. Through this he could only make slow time, keeping as near to the edge of the cliff as possible. In this manner he covered what must have been several miles. Finally, the cliff ended and Algy scrambled down onto the beach of another small bay, larger than the one on which he had landed, but otherwise precisely the same in appearance. It was as if a giant dredge had grabbed a great lump out of the rock. At the other end a buttress of rock jutted out into the sea, and a faint plume of dark smoke could still be seen rising lazily into the air on the other side. Algy realised that because the tide had begun to ebb it would be possible to get right round the rocks by splashing through the shallow water, and with renewed energy he set off at a fast dogtrot. He was panting heavily by the time that he approached the rocks, and his pace slowed to a walk.

When, with a sinking sensation in his stomach, he rounded the rocks to observe the charred and blacked remains of an aircraft lying on the beach before him not more than fifty feet away, he knew the worst. His eyes probed the burnt-out wreck, looking for two bodies, for experience told him that those in the machine could not have escaped.

He saw, but ignored, a group of uniformed men standing close by. Four of them carried rifles. The other, standing slightly in front, was obviously an officer of superior rank. Algy supposed them to be the local guardia, knowing that in Latin America the police - like most continental police - are armed like soldiers. He vaguely wondered what had brought them to the scene of the crash so quickly, but otherwise he paid little attention to them. He could not take his eyes from what, he knew in his heart, must be the remains of Biggles' and Ginger's funeral pyre. Then he felt two pairs of hands seize him from behind, and a voice spoke.

"And here is the Honourable Algernon Lacey - still scouting for trouble," it said mockingly.

Algy could not see the face of the man who had spoken, but he recognised the voice only too well; it was that of Erich von Stalhein.