He chuckled and patted my shoulder, a gesture so rare that my heart warmed.
“Good old Watson.”
Mycroft called for cigars, and while we were lighting up, he said, “You two will leave tonight from a Royal Naval Air Service strip outside London. You will be flown by two stages to Cairo, by two different pilots, I should say. The fliers have been carefully selected because their cargo will be precious. The Huns may already know your destination. If they do, they will make desperate efforts to intercept you, but our fliers are the pick of the lot. They are fighter pilots, but they will be flying bombers. The first pilot, the man who’ll take you under his wing tonight, is a young fellow. Actually, he is only seventeen, he lied to get into the service, but officially he is eighteen. He has downed seven enemy planes in two weeks and done yeoman service in landing our agents behind enemy lines. You may know of him, at least you knew his great-uncle.”
He paused and said, “You remember, of course, the late Duke of Greystoke?”1
“I will never forget the size of the fee I collected from him,” Holmes said, and he chuckled.
“Your pilot, Leftenant John Drummond, is the adopted son of the present Lord Greystoke,” Mycroft continued.
“But wait!” I said. “Haven’t I heard some rather strange things about Lord Greystoke? Doesn’t he live in Africa?”
“Oh, yes, in darkest Africa,” Mycroft said. “In a tree house, I believe.”
“Lord Greystoke lives in a tree house?” I said.
“Ah, yes,” Mycroft said. “Greystoke is living in a tree house with an ape. At least, that’s one of the rumours I’ve heard.”
“Lord Greystoke is living with an ape?” I said. “A female ape, I trust.”
“Oh, yes,” Mycroft said. “There’s nothing queer about Lord Greystoke, you know.”2
“But surely,” I said, “this Lord Greystoke can’t be the son of the old duke? Not the Lord Saltire, the duke’s son, whom we rescued from kidnappers in the adventure of the Priory School?”
Holmes was suddenly as keen as an eagle that detects a lamb. He stooped toward his brother, saying, “Hasn’t some connexion been made between His Grace and the hero of that fantastic novel by that American writer — what’s-his-name? — Bayrows? Borrows? Isn’t the Yank’s protagonist modelled somewhat after Lord Greystoke? The book only came out in the States in June of 1914, I believe, and so very few copies have gotten here because of the blockade. But I’ve heard rumours of it. I believe that His Grace could sue for libel, slander, defamation of character and much else if he chose to notice the novel.”
“I really don’t know,” Mycroft said. “I never read fiction.”
“By the Lord Harry!” Merrivale said. “I do! I’ve read the book, a rattling good yarn but wild, wild. This heir to an English peerage is adopted by a female ape and raised with a tribe of wild and woolly...”
Mycroft slammed his palm against the top of the table, startling all of us and making me wonder what had caused this unheard-of violence from the usually phlegmatic Mycroft.
“Enough of this time-wasting chitchat about an unbalanced peer and an excessively imaginative Yankee writer!” he said. “The Empire is crumbling around our ears and we’re talking as if we’re in a pub and all’s well with the world!”
He was right, of course, and all of us, including Holmes, I’m sure, felt abashed. But that conversation was not as irrelevant as we thought at the time.
An hour later, after receiving verbal instructions from Mycroft and Merrivale, we left in the limousine for the secret airstrip outside London.
Two
Our chauffeur drove off the highway onto a narrow dirt road which wound through a dense wood of oaks. After a half a mile, during which we passed many signs warning trespassers that this was military property, we were halted by a barbed wire gate across the road. Armed R.N.A.S. guards checked our documents and then waved us on. Ten minutes later, we emerged from the woods onto a very large meadow. At its northern end was a tall hill, the lower part of which gaped as if it had a mouth which was open with surprise. The surprise was that the opening was not to a cavern at all but to a hangar which had been hollowed out of the living rock of the hill. As we got out of the car, men pushed from the hangar a huge aeroplane, the wings of which were folded against the fuselage.
After that, events proceeded swiftly — too swiftly for me, I admit, and perhaps a trifle too swiftly for Holmes. After all, we had been born about a half century before the first aeroplane had flown. We were not sure that the motor-car, a recent invention from our viewpoint, was altogether a beneficial device. And here we were being conducted by a commodore toward the monstrously large aircraft. Within a few minutes, according to him, we would be within its fuselage and leaving the good earth behind and beneath us.
Even as we walked toward it, its biplanes were unfolded and locked into place. By the time we reached it, its propellors had been spun by mechanics and the two motors had caught fire. Thunder rolled from its rotaries, and flame spat from its exhausts.
Whatever Holmes’ true feelings, and his skin was rather grey, he could not suppress his driving curiosity, his need to know all that was relevant. However, he had to shout at the commodore to be heard above the roar of the warming-up motors.
“The Admiralty ordered it to be outfitted for your use,” the commodore said. His expression told us that he thought that we must be very special people indeed if this aeroplane was equipped just for us.
“It’s the prototype model of the Handley Page 0/100,” he shouted. “The first of the ‘bloody paralyser of an aeroplane’ the Admiralty ordered for the bombing of Germany. It has two 250-horsepower Rolls-Royce Eagle H motors, as you see. It has an enclosed crew cabin. The engine nacelles and the front part of the fuselage were armour-plated, but the armour has been removed to give the craft more speed.”
“What?” Holmes yelled. “Removed?”
“Yes,” the commodore said. “It shouldn’t make any difference to you. You’ll be in the cabin, and it was never armour-plated.”
Holmes and I exchanged glances. The commodore continued, “Extra petrol tanks have been installed to give the craft extended range. These will be just forward of the cabin...”
“And if we crash?” Holmes said.
“Poof!” the commodore said, smiling, “No pain, my dear sir. If the smash doesn’t kill you, the flaming petrol sears the lungs and causes instantaneous death. The only difficulty is in identifying the corpse. Charred, you know,”
We climbed up a short flight of wooden mobile steps and stepped into the cabin. The commodore closed the door, thus somewhat muting the roar. He pointed out the bunks that had been installed for our convenience and the W.C. This contained a small washbowl with a gravity-feed water tank and several thunder-mugs bolted to the deck.3
“The prototype can carry a four-man crew,” the commodore said. “There is, as you have observed, a cockpit for the nose gunner, with the pilot in a cockpit directly behind him. There is a cockpit near the rear for another machine gunner, and there is a trap-door through which a machine gun may be pointed to cover the rear area under the plane. You are standing on the trap-door.”
Holmes and I moved away, though not, I trust, with unseemly haste.
“We estimate that with its present load the craft can fly at approximately 85 miles per hour. Under ideal conditions, of course. We have decided to eliminate the normal armament of machine guns in order to lighten the load. In fact, to this end, all of the crew except the pilot and co-pilot are eliminated. The pilot, I believe, is bringing his personal arms: a dagger, several pistols, a carbine, and his specially mounted Spandau machine gun, a trophy, by the way, taken from a Fokker E-1 which Captain Wentworth downed when he dropped an ash-tray on the pilot’s head. Wentworth has also brought in several cases of hand grenades and a case of Scotch whisky.”