Almost sick with horror, he pulled and pulled at the useless rip cord, while he alternately cursed his utter folly in flinging himself to his death and gasped breathless prayers to God to save him.
Time ceases to exist at such awful moments. He was still plunging downwards at a fantastic speed and had virtually given himself up as finished when, without a second's warning, his arms were nearly torn from their sockets and a violent jerk at the belt round his middle drove the breath out of his body.
He had forgotten that a short interval must elapse between releasing the parachute and its opening to its full spread when it would arrest his headlong descent. Now, as that thought flashed into his agonised mind, he could still hardly believe that the safety device had begun to function efficiently the second he had pulled the cord.
His feet sank down lower than his head and before he knew quite what had happened he was standing upright, swaying a little from side to side, his long legs dangling.
Almost collapsing with relief he found he could look upwards and saw the dome of the fully opened parachute like a great dark mushroom against the starlit sky above.
For the first time since leaving the plane he was able to gasp in a full breath and look about him consciously. The 'T' of flares towards his right was still larger now but only the blackness of the land below had caused him to think he was so near it. His terror had been engendered by his complete inexperience; for he had made a good take off, although he had lost some seconds before being able to pull the rip cord, but when he had done so the parachute had opened perfectly normally.
The swaying motion increased, until he was covering an arc of about thirty degrees; as if he were the pendulum of some huge clock. He knew he should try to check the movement, otherwise he might make a bad landing, but he did not know how to, not realising that a pair of ropes now dangling one at each side of him were for that purpose. Apart from the fear that he might suddenly be swung into a tree he found the motion rather enjoyable. The lights were now rising gently towards his right, but he did not seem to be coming any nearer to them, and he judged that he would make his landing quite a long way from the smugglers' secret base.
As they came low on the horizon it warned him that he was nearing earth and he gathered his muscles taut together, so that as his feet touched he might spring into the air again, in order to reduce the force of the impact. A faint shimmer showed to his left and he realised that it was the reflection of the starlight upon a winding creek of water. Next moment the flares disappeared from view; blotted out by an unseen crest. Then his right foot hit something with a thud and instantly he was sprawling on the ground with every ounce of breath knocked out of his body.
He clutched wildly at the grass as he felt himself moving still, but sideways now, dragged by the parachute. Bumping over a ditch he was pulled into some low bushes. There was a sharp crackling as the dry twigs snapped and he thrust up his arms to protect his face, then the dragging ceased, for the parachute had sunk to earth.
For a moment he remained there, bruised and breathless, then he struggled into a sitting position and wriggled out of his harness. Only a dull glow, coming from over a crest of rising ground to the north, now indicated the smugglers' landing place. He stood up and pulled his big torch from his pocket then cursed aloud as he found that his fall had broken the bulb. He had meant to bundle up the expensive parachute and hide it somewhere but time was precious and he dared not waste it fumbling round for something that he could not see. Except for the lighter patch of sky low on the horizon to the northward, caused by the flares and the faint starlight, the whole countryside was shrouded in darkness. Abandoning the parachute he set off towards the north. Only the deeper patches of blackness indicated the taller grass and low bushes when he was almost upon them while there was nothing at all to show the frequent ditches which intersected the marshes.
Pressing forward warily, he stumbled at almost every step, and was compelled by some obstacle to alter his course every ten yards or so. He thanked his gods at least that it was August. Most of the smaller water courses now had dry beds and the marshland squelched under foot only in the lower places. To have attempted to cross this wild country in winter would have been impossible; he would have been bogged for a certainty.
As it was, he had to cross two creeks; stagnant, scummy bands of water with muddy bottoms which dragged and sucked at his boots when he floundered through them and thrust his way among the tall knifelike reeds that fringed their banks.
It was a nightmare journey. Wet to the waist, tired, bruised and angry, he struggled onward; yet the glow from the flares seemed little nearer and the going so difficult he doubted if he had traversed more than half a mile in twenty minutes. Then he came to a wire fence, climbed over, and found a steep grassy bank, up which he crawled on all fours. The top was level; next moment he tripped over a sleeper and came down heavily between two railway lines.
Picking himself up with renewed curses, he found he could now see the flares some distance away on the far side of the embankment, and turned northwest along it.
Knowing how quickly the smugglers completed their operations, he began to hurry; fearing that with all the time he had lost plunging into ditches and over tussocks of coarse grass he would be too late to find out what was going on.
He had barely covered another two hundred yards when he caught the sound of a train puffing up behind him from Dungeness and, jumping off the permanent way, slid down the bank to conceal himself while it passed.
A short goods train of no more than half a dozen closed wagons rumbled by shaking the embankment. The sparks from its engine and glare of the furnace temporarily lit up a small section of the surrounding country.
When the train had gone past Gregory stumbled on to the permanent way again and set off after it. To his surprise he saw it pull up ahead of him, opposite the flares, so he broke into a jog trot, spurred on by the thought that his gruelling experiences of the last hour might,’ after all, have been well worth while.
Five minutes later he was within fifty yards of the train's rear wagon and, slipping down the far side of the embankment, he crawled along under its cover still nearer, until he could see by the bright light of the landing flares the business which was proceeding. Beyond the flares were a couple of big planes and the smaller one in which the Limper had arrived from Quex Park. The others had already left and big stacks of boxes at intervals on a level stretch of ground showed where they had unloaded their cargoes. One of the large planes took the air as he watched and he was able to see enough of it to recognise it as a 240 h.p. twin-engine de Havilland Dragon, which would normally carry eight passengers, but in their place was capable of transporting about half a ton of cargo.
From the sound of the engine, as the plane circled in the air, he knew that something of its cruising speed, which should have been 140 m.p.h., had been sacrificed by the appliance of the latest silencing devices, so that the noise of even a fleet of these machines, crossing the coastline at six thousand feet, would barely be noticeable and certainly not sufficient to attract undue attention.
At the bottom of the embankment he wriggled through the fence and found a dry gully which offered such excellent cover that he determined to risk crawling even nearer; soon he was crouching in it no more than twenty yards from the landing ground.
About forty men were working with frantic speed unloading the goods train; pitching dozens of wooden boxes from it down the embankment. They had already cleared the first three wagons and, while a number of them attacked the rest, the others went off to the dumps which had been unloaded from the planes, then began to carry the boxes towards the empty wagons.