Chapter 15

The enemy hits back

For over two hours the three machines bored their way across the South Atlantic Ocean, devouring space at a steady two hundred and fifty miles an hour. Biggles was weary, despite having dozed during the trip across from Vicuna to Port Stanley earlier that day, and his face was beginning to show signs of the strain imposed by the fast-moving events of the last forty-eight hours. He was driving himself and the others hard, and he knew it. While he was anxious to strike, as the saying has it, while the iron was hot, he knew that the odds were stacked heavily against them. And although he did not allow himself to dwell upon the possibility of Algy or Bertie becoming a casualty, the fear of it lurked in the background of his mind. It was characteristic of him that h e did not think of himself.

It was not an ideal day for flying. As Biggles approached the coast he noticed that the wind had swung around to the south, and was bringing up a good deal of cloud. A glance at the watch on the instrument-board, and a quick mental calculation, told him they were approaching their destination, but he was compelled to go down under the cloud-bank in order to pick up a landmark to make sure that he was on his course. When he did so he caught his breath. Conspicuous against the white clouds was a spreading grey smudge, dead ahead.

An uneasy feeling that something was very wrong swept over Biggles. He toyed with the flap of his radio transmitter, but remembering his own order for wireless silence, allowed it to fall back. Instead, he glanced at his reflector to make sure that the machines behind him were still in place. The other two Hurricanes were roaring along behind him as if glued to his wing tips.

The smudge was explained when they reached Vicuna. Where the hangars and the radio building had stood was a smoking wreck of twisted girders. A plume of black oily smoke was still ascending into the air from the place where the fuel and oil had been stored.

Biggles' hand moved to the throttle, and as the defiant roar of the aircraft dropped to a deep-throated growl its sleek nose tilted downwards. Soon the three machines were circling low over the airstrip. A little distance from the charred remains of the hangars, a small group of people were looking upward at the Hurricanes. They stood around a long slim object shrouded in a dark blanket. Biggles' body seemed to go cold, and his nerves to contract, for he had seen the sight too many times not to know what it was - a human body.

Biggles landed first and taxied straight up the group standing around the body. Almost before the machine had stopped running he had switched off the engine, leapt to the ground, slipped out of his parachute harness, and started sprinting towards them. A tall, spare, grey-haired man detached himself from the others and hurried to meet him.

"I'm Grivin, the general manager here," he cried. "Who the devil are you, sir, and what the dickens is going on? Has war broken out? I mean, war with Argentina?"

Biggles ignored the question. "What happened?" he rapped out.

"Argentinian troops have been here. They set fire to the place. I don't know the details; I've only just got here myself. Consuelo - that is, Mrs O'Neilson - the wife of our chief pilot, and Pedro, one of the mechanics, seem to have been the only people at the airstrip at the time. When the others saw the smoke they all ran up, but a couple of the soldiers kept them back at rifle point. The soldiers left in a truck about an hour ago. Apparently there was one of their aircraft here as well. The mechanic, Pedro, has been shot - killed - and Mrs O'Neilson is in a state of shock. She's been taken to her house and one of the women is looking after her."

By now Algy and Bertie had also landed their machines, and came running up.

"Where's O'Neilson?" demanded Biggles.

"Gone. He left early this morning. Had to fly the veterinary surgeon to another one of the Company's properties to look into an outbreak of foot rot."

The sound of another aero engine was heard. All eyes turned upward. A Gypsy Moth appeared, flying low. It landed and O'Neilson jumped down. He hurried straight to the body lying on the ground and lifted the edge of the blanket. Then he stood up and looked at Biggles, white-faced. "That was Pedro. He was a good man," he said, breathing heavily.

"I'm terribly sorry, O'Neilson," said Biggles quietly. "I thought you might get a rap over the knuckles from your boss for getting mixed up in this business. I didn't expect anything like this."

O'Neilson turned to Grivin. "Is anyone else hurt?" he demanded.

Grivin shook his head. "No, but your wife is in a bit of a state. She was here when it happened." He indicated the body. "Not a nice experience for a woman. You had better go up and see her straight away."

Without wasting further words, O'Neilson set off at a run for his bungalow. Biggles, Algy and Bertie hastened after him.

Mrs O'Neilson was standing on the steps of the house. Seeing her husband, she rushed to him and, regardless of onlookers, they flung their arms about each other in a fervent embrace. Mrs O'Neilson burst into a torrent of Spanish.

"Let's go inside, and Consuelo can tell us exactly what happened," suggested Biggles.

Prompted by her husband, Mrs O'Neilson proceeded to tell her story, haltingly, in a mixture of Spanish and English. The gist of was this. She had heard an aeroplane approaching the Vicuna landing strip. Thinking it must be her husband returning, she had hurried over to the airstrip to meet him. Pedro had joined her there. She had been puzzled when a machine, which she recognised as being of the same kind as the Dragon Moth, had landed, because she was sure that Pat had departed in the smaller machine. She had discussed this with Pedro, and they had gone to look in the hangar to confirm that the Dragon Moth was still there. It was. By the time that they came out of the hangar, the other machine had taxied up to the buildings. Half a dozen armed soldiers had emerged from the aircraft. They had spoken amongst themselves in a language that she did not understand. At the same time a lorry with Argentinian military markings had arrived on the airstrip. One of the men who had arrived in the aircraft, and who appeared to be their leader, had spoken to Pedro in Spanish, and had demanded to know where the petrol supply was kept.

"Can you describe this fellow," requested Biggles quietly. He was not greatly surprised when Consuelo gave a fair description of von Stalhein.

She resumed her story. Pedro had taken the soldiers to the building where the petrol drums were kept. A number of them had been loaded onto the lorry. Some of the smaller tins of petrol were loaded into the machine in which the intruders had arrived. Then O'Neilson's Dragon Moth had been dragged out of the hangar and loaded with more tins of petrol. Its engines had been started. When Pedro realised that the intruders intended to fly the machine away, he had protested. In fact, he had tried to stop them. There was a scuffle, and one of the soldiers had promptly shot him.

At this point Consuelo buried her face in her hands and burst into tears. Her husband looked on helplessly, miserably.

Biggles touched O'Neilson on the arm and said, "No need to ask her any more. We can guess the rest."

He got up and walked outside. Algy and Bertie followed him.

Biggles tapped a cigarette on the back of his hand and then threw it on the ground. He did not speak.

Algy's face was pale. "Von Stalhein had absolutely no right to do this," he said coldly.

Bertie, too, was pale and his eyes glittered frostily. "What a blighter the bounder must be," he muttered.

"Be fair," replied Biggles shortly. "We've broken the International Law of neutrality, too."

"It was my fault that poor devil of a mechanic has been killed," he continued. "I should never have dragged O'Neilson into this affair."

O'Neilson joined them. "It looks as if this is where you go home, Biggles," he observed soberly. "It's a bad show. If you go on you won't have enough juice to get back to Port Stanley, and there's not a drop of petrol left here - what the Huns didn't take away with them they destroyed."

"On the contrary, this is where we go after them," returned Biggles curtly. "This is only the first round. There's aviation spirit at Puerto Guano. We shall help ourselves to some of it. The lorry will hardly have had time to get back yet. With a heavy load it will be travelling slowly. It's a fair guess that there are no troops left at Puerto Guano."

"You're not serious," Algy exclaimed. "As soon as the Argentinians see us coming, they'll radio a message to the mine. If the Messerschmitts catch us on the ground there are likely to be some pyrotechnics with us in the middle of them."

"I was never more serious," replied Biggles. "It will take the Messerschmitts at least half an hour to reach Puerto Guano from the mine, flying at top speed. Very good. We should be waiting upstairs for them by then. We shan't go to meet them, but will try to get as much altitude as possible before they arrive. That should give us the advantage, because I expect that they'll be in too much of a hurry to waste time climbing for height."

Algy nodded. "Okay. I get it."

"Then let's get busy," replied Biggles.

Five minutes later the three Hurricanes took off and headed south. Biggles did not bother climbing for height, and the machines annihilated space as they raced low over rock and sand and coastal scrub. Biggles did not beat about the atmosphere; he went straight as an arrow for Puerto Guano.

When the Hurricanes arrived Biggles saw with relief that was no sign of the lorry on the airfield. The place seemed to be deserted, except for one man, who ran out of a building and stood staring upwards. Biggles dived low and fired a short burst. The bullets kicked up the dirt in a line near the man's feet, and he turned tail and fled back inside the building.

As soon as Biggles had landed he taxied to the underground fuel tank - the existence and location of which he had noted on the occasion of his previous visit to Puerto Guano - leapt down and removed the small man-hole cover. Frantically, he began working a small hand-pump. There had obviously once been a mechanical pump installed, but it appeared to have been removed. \par Algy and Bertie taxied up and they all took turns working the pump. Biggles' eyes went constantly to the western horizon and his ears strained to hear the hum of approaching aero engines. As soon as his tank was full, Biggles leapt back into his cockpit and shouted, "You two carry on. I'll try to keep the Messerschmitts off if they get here before you're topsides."

With that, he swung himself into the cockpit, started the engine, taxied tail-up down the bare dirt of the runway and swept like a winged torpedo into the air. Pulling the joystick back, he spiralled steadily upwards over the Puerto Guano airstrip. Biggles frowned when he saw that while the sky had cleared somewhat there was still a fair amount of loose cumulus about. There was a lot of broken cloud on the horizon, and scattered masses of it overhead. His hope was that none of the Messerschmitts would get home - although he knew that was optimistic - and the cloud cover would hinder that objective, by providing a hiding-place for the enemy machines.

Biggles knew the direction from which trouble would come, if it came, and his eyes switched continually between the western sky, and the scattered clouds below. Presently, to his relief, the two other Hurricanes appeared, and climbed up to meet him. They took up positions at his wing tips. But where were the Messerschmitts? Surely, if they were coming, they would have appeared by now? Then he saw what he was looking for. Two Messerschmitt 109s flying together, several thousand feet lower than the Hurricanes. They did not bother to thread their way through the scattered clouds, but came straight on. As he watched they vanished briefly into a cloud bank and reappeared on the other side. To the three Hurricanes they may have looked, as no doubt they were intended to look, easy victims; but Biggles was not deceived by so transparent a ruse. Long experience made him lift his eyes to the sky above, and it did not take him long to spot four more Messerschmitts flying in a ragged vee formation a couple of thousand feet above his own height. "Six," he mused. "That's probably the lot."

Biggles could tell the moment when the two lower flying Messerschmitts sighted the Hurricanes, for the leading machine altered course a trifle in their direction, and pointed its nose upwards. Concentrating his attention on the enemy machines, Biggles made out that the leader's nose was painted blue.

Biggles moistened his lips and braced his body. The time had come. He turned his head to look at Algy and Bertie in turn. They were both watching him. He nodded. Then, with his lips se t in a straight line by the strain of the impending action he thrust the control column forward. With a wail of protest the nose of the Hurricane tilted down until it was in line with the enemy machines. A swift glance upward showed the remaining four Messerschmitts coming down on top of him. Algy and Bertie were turning to meet them.

The enemy machines seemed to float up towards him as the distance closed between them. Biggles could see every detail of the two Messerschmitts clearly. He took the blue-nosed machine in his sights. But he held his fire. The range was still too long, and he had no ammunition to waste. The Messerschmitts opened fire, and tracers streamed upwards, cutting glittering white lines through the air between the Hurricane and the enemy machines, but not until he was within five hundred feet did Biggles' hand move to the firing button. He could feel bullets smashing through his wings and collision seemed inevitable, but he had no intention of turning away, for the first to turn away in head-on attack admits inferiority, and one of the first traditions laid down by the Flying Corps in the early days of air combat was "never turn".

At the last instant the Messerschmitts split and hurled past on either side of him. Biggles was round with the speed of light. He clung to the tail of the blue-nosed machine, firing short bursts until a shadow falling across him made him kick out his foot and fling the joystick hard over. Unprepared for the move, the enemy pilot swerved and overshot him. The Messerschmitt zoomed upwards, rolled onto its back, and then, with its engine still on, spun out of sight. A Hurricane – Bertie's - roared past, with its undercarriage wheels hanging at a lop-sided angle. Biggles waited for no more. He snatched a glance around, looking for the blue-nosed Messerschmitt. The sky was full of aircraft, banking, diving and zooming, but he caught a fleeting glimpse of the machine he sought disappearing into the side of a cloud. He plunged into the white, woolly vapour in pursuit.

As Biggles emerged on the far side of the cloud, he nearly collided with his quarry. He whirled round after it, and with a reckless abandon that he would not have considered employing in normal moments, dragged the stick back into his thigh. The enemy aircraft loomed into sight through the swirling arc of his propeller, and his guns spurted. At such short range it was almost impossible to miss. The nose of the blue-painted machine jerked upward spasmodically, which told him that the pilot had been hit. It fell over on to one wing, went into a spin, and plunged downwards. Biggles watched it suspiciously, for he knew that it might be a trick to deceive him. But it was no trick. A tiny spark of fire appeared, glowing ever brighter, and then there was a blinding flash of flame as the tanks of the German machine exploded.

Curiously, Biggles felt none of the elation such as he normally knew after a duel. The victory had been too easy. "The trouble with me is I'm getting old," he told himself moodily. He turned away, leisurely, and was still turning when a movement in his reflector caused him to move so fast that it seemed impossible that he could have found time to think. Kicking out his foot and flinging the joystick over on the same side, he spun round in a wild bank while a stream of tracer flashed past his wing tip. His mouth went dry at the narrowness of his escape. A split-second later and the bullets, fired from close range, must have riddled the Hurricane.

A machine howled past in the wake of the bullets and with a jolt Biggles recognised it as a Messerschmitt 110, a formidable twin-engined two-seater fighter-bomber, capable of doing an immense amount of damage. Thoughts crowded into Biggles' brain, although to his racing nerves the scene seemed to be moving in slow motion. He wondered where the Messerschmitt 110 had come from. He wondered why Jose had not mentioned it to him if it was based at the diamond mine. He concluded that as a non-airman Jose must have failed to appreciate the differences between the two types of German fighter, even as he saw the wicked black muzzles of the rear gunner's twin 7.92 mm machine guns swinging round to take the Hurricane in his sights at point blank range.

In such moments the brain works swiftly and the sight of jets of orange flame spurting from the guns was photographed on Biggles' mind even as he frantically kicked out his left foot, which brought him skidding round as though struck by a whirlwind. But there was no shaking off a man who knew his job. Biggles could hear the bullets ripping through his fuselage. Pieces of metal were leaping from his engine cowling and the re was a splintering jar as something crashed through his instrument panel. The compass flew to pieces, and the liquid that it contained spurted back in his face. Some went into his eyes, and he gasped at the pain.

He flew on blindly, trying desperately to see. Something lashed the Hurricane like a cat-o'-nine-tails; he felt the machine quiver, and the next moment he was spinning. He experienced a real spasm of fright as he realised that he was fighting for his life for the first time in a long while. He was paying the penalty for allowing the pilot of the Messerschmitt 110 to enjoy the supreme advantage of surprise. The Messerschmitt 110 must have been stalking him for some minutes while he was pre-occupied with the blue-nosed Messerschmitt 109. There was nothing wrong with that. It was all in the game, for in air combat there are no rules. All is fair. There is no question of hitting below the belt. There are no rounds. The formula is simple - get your man. How, when and where, doesn't matter as long as you get him.

Desperately, Biggles fought to get the nose of the machine up, and it came out of the spin. The Messerschmitt 110 had followed him down, and it was now firing the fixed guns mounted in its nose. Biggles spun again, deliberately, three times, and then spun again in the opposite direction, twice. When he came out of the spin the Messerschmitt 110 was still there, still firing at him.

Biggles knew he was going down under a hail of lead in just the same way as he had seen dozens of machines going down, as he himself had sent them down, and at that moment he thought - no, he was convinced - that the German had him cold. His reaction was one not uncommon with air fighters. Instead of trying to get out of that blasting stream of lead, he savagely shoved the stick forward and tried to ram his opponent, automatically pressing his thumb down on the brass firing-button on the top loop of the stick as his nose came into line with that of the other machine. He found himself straight in the track of his enemy, facing him head-on at a distance of not much more than a hundred yards. For a fleeting instant the air between the two machines was filled with tracer, and Biggles braced himself for the shock of collision.

At the last moment the Messerschmitt 110 swerved and for a moment it seemed that the two machines would pass unscathed. Then with agonising deliberation one of the Messerschmitt's airscrews bit into the very tip of Biggles' port wing. It was enough. The sheet metal began to tear like paper; and then the wing broke clean off. The fuselage of the Hurricane lurched violently, and then dropped earthward like a stone.

Pulling back the cockpit cover, Biggles scrambled out, and, as the machine lurched preparatory to its final plunge, he clutched the little brass ring that operated the ripcord of his parachute and launched himself into space. The Hurricane roared on past him as he sank easily and smoothly into the void. He felt his harness tighten as his downward progress was arrested, and looking up, he saw the billowing folds of the parachute mushroom out. Catching his breath, he looked about him. Accustomed as he was to the speed with which the scene can change in modern air combat, he was surprised to find that the only machine in sight was the Messerschmitt 110, going down in an erratic glide.

Biggles looked down, to take stock of the country below. He stared, blinked, and stared again as a dark green expanse of foam-lashed water met his horrified gaze. There could be no mistake. He was looking down at the sea. As he watched, he saw the fragments of his machine strike the water with a terrific splash.

He turned his head and saw - over his shoulder - a white line far behind him. It was the coast. He guessed it to be at least ten miles away.