Billy Barcroft, R.N.A.S Part 6

Whether his captors heard his m.u.f.fled protests or not they paid no heed save to give the cloth that encircled his head an extra twist.

The pressure upon his nose was painful. He had difficulty in breathing, so, realising that his stifled exclamations were futile, he wisely held his peace from a vocal point of view, although inwardly he was raging furiously.

He could hear the boots of his captors clattering on the cobbles until the crisp-sounding footfalls told him that the men had gained the cinder path on the east side of the house. Then, with considerable effort on the part of his bearers, he was lifted up a flight of four stone steps, beyond which, he knew, was an extensive gra.s.sfield that rose gradually for the next half mile.

Grunting and obviously short of breath the men trudged stolidly onwards for perhaps nearly two hundred yards. Once Norton thought fit to make a sudden effort and wriggle from his captors' grasp, but the attempt ended disastrously to himself. Brutally they b.u.mped him upon the ground. The shock to the spinal system was excruciating, but it had the desired effect. The prisoner's spirit of resistance was broken; even the stern mandate, "Quiet, or you are a dead man,"

was unnecessary.

The scarf or cloth that enveloped his head had slipped during the struggle. He could now see. Either his kidnappers had not noticed the fact or else they regarded it as of no consequence.

He could discern the faces and upper portions of the bodies of the two men. They were tall burly fellows dressed in black oilskins. In spite of their powerful physique they were breathing stertorously; they reeked of petrol.

Another fifty yards and they came to a halt. Norton turned his head and saw what appeared at first sight to be the dark grey body of a motorcar. It was quivering under the application of some unseen influence, yet there was no purr of internal mechanism to justify the belief that it possessed self-contained machinery.

"Lash that schweinhund's ankles, Pfeil," ordered one of the fellows in German. "That is right; now do you enter first and I'll heave the English fool up so that you can get him inside."

"Now is the dangerous time," commented his companion as he scrambled through a narrow aperture.

"It is ever a dangerous time with us," rejoined the other gloomily.

"Ah, yes; but now? Supposing the wire is insufficient to take the strain?"

"It will bear thrice our total weight," replied the first speaker, "frail though it looks. No fear of that breaking. It is that highly-charged electric cable that worries me. We must have landed nearer to it than we should have done, yet it looks further away on the map."

The fellow completed his difficult task of lifting Norton into the interior of the covered-in car--the observation room of a Zeppelin floating motionless five hundred feet or so overhead.

The commander of the giant aircraft had successfully carried out a daring manoeuvre with the ultimate object of taking prisoner the man on whom his imperial master the "All-Highest" had set a price for his capture. Taking advantage of an almost imperceptible breeze and knowing his position to an almost dead certainty by means of exact cross-bearings afforded by three reservoirs, conspicuous even in the darkness, he had caused to be lowered the aluminium observation car.

In flight this contrivance is slung close under the after part of the Zeppelin, but when necessary it can be lowered by means of a fine but enormously strong flexible steel wire to a maximum distance of two thousand feet beneath the giant envelope. Thus it is possible for a Zeppelin to remain hidden in a bank of clouds and lower the observation car to within a few hundred feet of the ground. Its comparatively small size and inconspicuous colour would render it invisible even at that short distance, and give the observer an uninterrupted view of the country. By means of a telephone he could then communicate with the commander of the airs.h.i.+p and indicate the objects singled out for attack.

On this occasion the aluminium box was lowered till it touched the ground. The two men purposely told off for the work in hand had anch.o.r.ed the car, thereby keeping the Zeppelin stationary also. In the event of a surprise the airs.h.i.+p's crew would unhesitatingly sever the wire and leave the car and their two comrades to their fate.

And now most of this particular enterprise had been carried out. The supposed object of their attentions lay gagged and bound within the aluminium cage. All that remained to be done was to break out the grapnel and signal to the men in the Zeppelin to wind in the steel cable.

"All ready?" enquired Pfeil through the telephone. "Good! When I give the signal will you forge ahead to the north-east? Why? Because we are much too close to the high tension cable which Herr Leutnant knows of."

He leant through an aperture in the side of the cradle and listened intently. At the first sound of the airs.h.i.+p's propellers he jerked a tripping-line smartly. The fluke of the grapnel folded as he did so, and the car, no longer held captive, slid jerkily over the gra.s.s.

"Up!" telephoned the German.

The next instant Norton felt himself being lifted through the air as the car ascended swiftly at a rate of five feet a second. In less than two minutes the cradle's supplementary movement ceased. It was hauled hard up against the immense bulk of the Zeppelin and secured with additional las.h.i.+ngs.

The wind was now shrieking through the lattice work of the airs.h.i.+p, as gathering speed she flew through the still air at a rate of nearly fifty miles an hour, or a little more than half her maximum speed.

It was cold--horribly cold. Lightly clad and coming from a warm room the prisoner felt the change acutely. He s.h.i.+vered in spite of his efforts to the contrary.

Gripped by the ankles he found himself being dragged like a sack of flour from the detachable car to the V-shaped gangway connecting two of the fixed gondolas. The las.h.i.+ngs securing his lower limbs were cast off, and, thrust forward by the powerful Pfeil, he was made to walk along the narrow corridor.

"Here is the Englishman, Herr Leutnant," announced the German addressing a short, corpulent officer who stood by the bomb-dropping apparatus in the centre of the gondola.

"Good!" was the appreciative reply. Ober-leutnant Julius von Loringhoven squirmed in antic.i.p.ation of winning more than a half of the promised guerdon. A share--a considerable share unfortunately--was owing to a certain individual who, acting as an agent of the German Government, had given valuable aid in snaring the proscribed Englishman. His a.s.sistance was necessary, of course, but that meant a sensible reduction of the sum of paper money with which von Loringhoven hoped to restore the fortunes of his impoverished house.

"Good!" he repeated. "Remove that covering and let me look at the pig."

Pfeil obeyed smartly. With a savage jerk he exposed the face of his captive.

"Utter idiot!" shouted Andrew Norton in German. "Imbecile! You've blundered and spoilt everything."

CHAPTER VII

THE RAID

OBER-LEUTNANT JULIUS VON LORINGHOVEN recoiled a couple of paces in sheer amazement. The compartment in which he stood was strictly limited in point of size, or he might have stepped back even more, so great was his consternation. For some seconds he stood with his shoulders against the aluminium bulkhead, his small eyes protruding to their utmost capacity.

"Von Eitelwurmer!" he gurgled at last. "What does this mean?"

"It means," retorted Andrew Norton furiously, "that your men have wrecked everything. It is their duty to wreck everything English, I admit, but they have overreached themselves."

"I am sorry," said the ober-leutnant humbly, though the apology needed an effort. "The culprits will be duly punished."

"And serve them right," interrupted the kidnapped man. "But that will not mend matters. Our plans are completely upset; Barcroft will take warning; there will be no plausible excuse for my sudden departure--Ach, it is intolerable. Is it possible to set me down?"

Von Loringhoven shook his head.

"Impossible," he replied. "You must return with us to the Fatherland. Meanwhile I must take steps to justify the presence of this war-machine over the hated country."

Siegfried von Eitelwurmer was one of the German super-spies--a cla.s.s far and above the host of ordinary spies that, in spite of the utmost vigilance on the part of the British government, still continue their activities although in a restricted form. To all outward appearance he was English born and bred. His mannerisms were entirely so. Even in his most excitable moods, for Teutonic stolidity was almost a stranger to him, he would never betray by word or gesture the fact that he was of Hunnish birth and sympathies. When he spoke in English his inflexion was as pure as a typical Midlander; his knowledge of British habits and customs was profound. In short, he was one of the most dangerous type of German agents that ever set foot on British soil.

It will be unnecessary to detail his past activities, which almost invariably he carried out successfully and without giving rise to suspicion, even at times when the espionage mania was at its height, and Britons were being arrested and detained on suspicion for various slight acts of indiscretion that they had committed in pure ignorance. A man might in all good faith take photographs of a place of national interest; an artist might make a sketch in the grounds of his own house--and be promptly haled before the magistrates and fined. The "powers-that-be" seem to be blind to the fact that a trained spy would not attempt to use a conspicuous camera. An instrument of the vest-pocket type would serve his purpose equally well and with little chance of detection.

It was the Kaiser's manifesto relating to the capture of the "dangerous" Peter Barcroft that turned the course of von Eitelwurmer's activities in the direction of Ladybird Fold--not wholly for the sake of the pecuniary reward, but with the idea of gaining additional kudos at the hands of his Imperial master.

The spy had little difficulty in tracing Barcroft's movements from the time he vacated Riversdale House in the village of Alderdene.

The information that his quarry had removed to Tarleigh in Lancas.h.i.+re he had communicated to Berlin, but owing to a delay the news was not in time to prevent the Hun airman, von Blow und Helferich, making his ill-fated flight to the south-eastern part of England.

Von Eitelwurmer's method of communicating with Berlin was simplicity itself, and as such ran less chance of detection than if he had resorted to elaborate and intricate means.

He would obtain catalogues from manufacturers living in the same town in which he had taken up his temporary abode. On the pages he would write with invisible ink--or even milk or lemon, both of which when dried naturally show no trace of their presence--his reports, taking the additional precaution of using a cipher which he could retain mentally and thus do away with the risk of incriminating doc.u.ments.

The next step was to get possession of a printed wrapper bearing the name and address of the firm in question. The catalogue, enclosed in the wrapper, was then sent to a pseudo Englishman living in Holland, who, almost needless to say, was a German agent.

These reports were then sent in duplicate, one preceding the other in the s.p.a.ce of three days. Fortunately or otherwise--according to the standpoint taken by interested parties--the first secret dispatch related to the movements of Peter Barcroft was lost in a Dutch mail-boat that a German submarine had sent to the bottom. The second resulted in Ober-leutnant von Loringhoven being dispatched on a Zeppelin raid with the primary intention of kidnapping the proscribed Englishman.

Julius von Loringhoven was an officer of the Imperial German Navy.

In his youth he had served before the mast on board several British coasters with the idea of gaining intimate local knowledge of the harbours of the land that in due course would be an integral part of the vast and una.s.sailable German Empire; for, like thousands of Germans he held the firm belief that the Emperor Wilhelm II was the rightful heir to the British throne by virtue of his descent through the eldest child of the late Queen Victoria.