Chapter XX “Hands Up!”
“Haende in die hohe!” cried Keane as soon as the last message had been sent.
“Der Teufel!” gasped the professor as two swift shadows darted out from behind the curtain, and the two men whom he had just been discussing with such utter contempt confronted him and his accomplice with gleaming pistols.
“Hands up!” repeated Keane, anxious to give the professor another chance.
With a blasphemous oath the man of evil genius, who saw that he had been outwitted, reached for a small hand grenade which lay beside him on the table, and shouted:—
“Never!”
“Then take that!” cried the Englishman, and two puffs of greenish smoke, following a sharp crackle, burst simultaneously from the pistols, for they had both fired together.
The new Asphixor bullets took immediate effect. Both the Germans staggered, clutched their throats as though to ward off the effects of this new powerful gas recently discovered and adapted by that eminent British scientist, Sir Joseph Verne—then lurched and fell, whilst their opponents stepped back and quickly fitted on their safety masks.
“They are both sound asleep,” observed Keane, when, the fumes having cleared away, he threw aside his respirator and carefully examined the unconscious men.
“Let them sleep,” said Sharpe, who would have adopted even more drastic measures if he could have had his own way. “’Tis scant mercy they would have shown to us if we had been in their power.”
“And now let us get to work, for they will awaken in seven or eight hours, and we have much to do. We must prepare for Colonel Tempest, and also for this raider,” urged Keane.
“But they will not come to-day, Captain.”
“Scarcely, but we must be prepared for anything. There are only a couple of us.”
“Shall we secure these men, in case they awake earlier than the stipulated time?”
“No, let us remove their slumbering forms behind the curtain there; we will attend to them before they awake. I do not like the idea of strapping down unconscious men, even though they are criminals. We will watch them from time to time.”
Then for the next half-hour they carried out a careful examination of the hangar and its contents. They were amazed at the intricate and wonderful mechanism with which the place was fitted. It seemed impossible that these things could have been transported hither without attracting attention. Parts of aeroplane wings, struts, propellers, engine-fittings, strange, weird-looking cylinders, retorts, analytical appliances, instruments and vessels for chemical research, powerful but silent dynamos, and numberless other things, all neatly arranged, and apparently in working order, half filled the place.
The further they carried their investigation the more were these two Englishmen bewildered by what they saw.
“Is it possible,” gasped Keane, “or am I only dreaming? We have discovered the home of the super-alchemist. After this, nothing will surprise me.”
“We have discovered the devil’s workshop,” replied Sharpe, who did not appear to be half so enraptured as his friend.
“Nay, we shall find the philosopher’s stone, or the elixir vitae soon,” replied Keane, continuing his investigation.
“We are more likely to find the elixir mortis than anything else,” said the gloomy one. “This place gives me the shivers. I am sure that I shall have cold feet for the rest of my life.”
“After this, Hermes and Geber will be dull reading,” continued the enthusiast. “Give me the Schwarzwald every time for the real thrill of the alchemist.”
“Their time might have been more profitably employed, at any rate,” remarked Sharpe.
“Yes, it is a thousand pities that the wonderful brain which designed and organised all this should have had nothing better in view than brigandage and world revolution.”
“More misdirected energy,” moaned Sharpe; “the greatest brains often make the greatest criminals.”
“You’re a veritable misanthrope, Sharpe!” said his companion, laughing.
“I have reason to be,” returned the other.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean this—we’re not out of the wood yet.”
“I agree; we’re in the very centre of it,” replied Keane.
“Yet you did not inflict the coup de grâce on the diabolical vipers, and they will shortly awake. Moreover, the Scorpion may arrive unexpectedly, and we shall be unprepared for her.”
“What would you do?”
“Bring over the machines from Mulhausen, ready to fight this air fiend when he comes.”
“Ho! So you’re longing for another real air fight, are you, like the ‘scraps’ we used to have with the Richthofen ‘circus’?”
“At any rate, we’d better prepare. Then I’d bind those two criminals hand and foot or surround them with live wires, so that, should they awake unexpectedly, they would not dare to stir.”
“There is certainly something in what you suggest about bringing the aeroplanes over, though we should have a deuce of a job to land them in this place; they’re by no means possessed of the powers of a helicopter. However, I’ll get into touch with Colonel Tempest and ask for immediate assistance, and also ask him to bring over Professor Verne to investigate these mysterious engineering and chemical appliances.”
So, leaving the workshop, the live wires and the prisoners to the care of Sharpe, the senior airman devoted all the rest of that morning to investigating the wireless apparatus, examining the secret codes, and trying to get into touch with the Commissioner of Aerial Police. In this, however, he was not very successful, for the air was full of messages, concerning an overdue air-liner which had been expected for some time at Cairo. Perhaps his message had been jammed or lost in the aerial jostle.
Colonel Tempest was almost at his wits’ end. He sorely needed the help of his able assistants. He wanted to send them out east to chase this daring brigand off the trade routes.
He was unable also to comply with the request for assistance, when at length it did reach him, for all his best fighting men, with the exception of these two in the Black Forest, had been sent after the raider. He promised, however, to come personally at the earliest possible moment, as soon as matters had been cleared up a little.
Again and again Keane tried to reach him with brief, but urgent coded messages, for he was now getting extremely anxious lest the raider should appear before they were ready. Sharpe, however, who was eminently practical, had taken the professor’s own tip, and had laid wires across the glade, which, when properly connected up, would make it a dangerous proceeding for a hostile aeroplane to land there, while, in the event of a friendly one appearing, the current could be immediately switched off. He had seen to the prisoners as well, for, unknown to Keane, he had, on the first signs of awakening, given to each of them a sufficiently strong soporific to extend the period of their quiescence for a considerably longer period, so that, late that afternoon, his friend was somewhat alarmed at their quietude.
That night they watched in turns, and relieved each other every two hours. When morning came they climbed the highest trees and scanned the horizon in every direction for the promised help, and also for the Scorpion. But although the column of smoke from the fire which had been lighted, ascended all day in one long grey streak to guide the British airmen, yet morning wore on to afternoon, and no assistance came.
Keane sent message after message, but apparently to no purpose. The very heavens were full of messages, for the whole civilized world had been roused by the last daring feat of the phantom airman. London, Paris, Cairo, Delhi and New York were clamouring for his immediate capture and execution. Strong things, too, were being said about the incapacity of the much vaunted aerial police, but all the world realised that the task before these men was almost superhuman.
Twice an urgent message came recalling the two Englishmen, but Keane replied with the one word, “Impossible!”
And all this time the raider, who was carefully hiding for a few days, delighted his companions by retailing with much gusto such of these messages as he had been able to piece together from the aerial jumble.
“Let them send all their available machines and pilots out east,” he had said to Carl and Max, “then we will quietly slip across Europe to Ireland, where everything is ripe for the promised revolution.”
“And the Schwarzwald?” queried Max.
“Oh, we will call there for a few hours en route,” replied the pirate, calmly relighting his pipe, “The professor will understand our silence and inactivity.”
So the third morning came, and Keane, whose anxiety regarding the still sleeping prisoners had been allayed by Sharpe, who smilingly confessed what he had done, now became fearfully uneasy as to the condition of affairs.
“For heaven’s sake light that beacon again!” he ordered. “If assistance does not arrive to-day, all these secrets I have endeavoured to rescue will be lost.”
“What will you do?” asked his companion, who was already applying a match to the pile of dried tinder and sticks.
“Blow the whole place up,” he replied.
“And shoot the prisoners?” ventured his friend, slyly.
“No.”
“What then?”
“Rouse them up, somehow, handcuff them together and take them away.”
“Some job that,” remarked Sharpe, looking up at the long thin trail of smoke, for there was still an absence of wind currents.
Even as he gazed into the sky, however, he caught sight of a tiny speck hovering at twelve thousand feet, and he almost shouted, “Aeroplane!”
“Where?” asked his startled comrade, whose nerves had undergone some strain during the past few days.
“Right up in the blue. There, can you see her?”
“Yes, I have her now, but she’s very high. Can it be the Scorpion, do you think?” asked the senior.
“Cannot say yet. I’ll fetch the glasses.”
“Run for them, quickly! I cannot hear her engines at all. It must be the brigand.”
“Ah, there, I hear the engines now, very faintly, though. Rolls-Royce engines too, thank God!” exclaimed Keane fervently, as he recognised the well-known sound, and knew that assistance had arrived at last, in the shape of at least one Bristol Fighter.
“It’s all right, Sharpe. Cut off that beastly current. Tempest will be here in a minute.”
“Are you sure it’s Tempest?”
“Yes. Listen to that! Now he’s cut his engine out again, and he’s coming down. It’s the chief right enough; I should know his flying amongst a score of aeroplanes.”
The wires were cut off, a temporary landing-tee quickly rigged up on the ground, and frantic signals were made to the pilot, who was now rapidly coming down in sharp spirals.
A few minutes later the intrepid pilot flattened out above the tree tops, dipped again, banked steeply, and sideslipped almost to the ground, in order to get into the confined and narrow space which served the Scorpion for an aerodrome. Scarcely had he landed when another machine, which had followed him from England, performed the same highly-skilled manoeuvre, and taxied up to the little group.