This was alarming enough, but both Holmes and I were struck at the same time with a far more disturbing thought. Holmes as usual, was more quick in his reactions. He screamed, “Who’s flying the plane?”
Wentworth smiled lazily and said, “Nobody. Don’t worry. The controls are connected to a little device I invented last month. As long as the air is smooth, the plane will fly on an even keel all by itself.”
He stiffened suddenly, cocked his head to one side, and said, “Do you hear it?”
“Great Scott, man!” I cried. “How could we hear anything above the infernal racket of those motors?”
“Cockroaches!” Wentworth bellowed. “Giant flying cockroaches! That evil scientist has released another horror upon the world!”
He whirled, and he was gone into the blackness of the tunnel.
Holmes and I stared at each other. Then Holmes said, “We are at the mercy of a madman, Watson. And there is nothing we can do until we have landed.”
“We could parachute out,” I said.
“I would prefer not to,” Holmes said stiffly. “Besides, it somehow doesn’t seem cricket. The pilots have no parachutes, you know. These two were provided only because we are civilians.”
“I wasn’t planning on asking Wentworth to ride down with me,” I mumbled, somewhat ashamed of myself for saying this.
Holmes didn’t hear me; once again his stomach was trying to reject contents that did not exist.
Three
Shortly after dawn, the German planes struck. These, as I was told later, were Fokker E-IIIs, single-seater monoplanes equipped with two Spandau machine guns. These were synchronised with the propellors to shoot bullets through the empty spaces between the whirling of the propellor blades.
Holmes was sitting on the floor, holding his head and groaning, and I was commiserating with him, though getting weary of his complaints, when the telephone bell rang. I removed the receiver from the box attached to the wall, or bulkhead, or whatever they call it. Wentworth’s voice bellowed, “Put on the parachutes and hang on to something tight! Twelve ****ing Fokkers, a whole staffel, coming in at eleven o’clock!”
I misunderstood him. I said, “Yes, but what type of plane are they?”
“Fokkers!” he cried, adding, “No, no! My eyes played tricks on me. They’re giant flying cockroaches! Each one is being ridden by a Prussian officer, helmeted and goggled and armed with a boarding cutlass!”
“What did you say?” I screamed into the phone, but it had been disconnected.
I told Holmes what Wentworth had said, and he forgot about being airsick, though he looked no better than before. We staggered out to the door and looked through its window.
The night was now brighter than day, the result of flares thrown out from the attacking aeroplanes. Their pilots intended to use the light to line up the sights of their machine guns on our helpless craft. Then, as if that were not bad enough, shells began exploding, some so near that our aeroplane shuddered and rocked under the impact of the blasts. Giant searchlights began playing about, some of them illuminating monoplanes with black crosses on their fuselages.
“Archy!” I exclaimed. “The French anti-aircraft guns are firing at the Huns! The fools! They could hit us just as well!”
Something flashed by. We lost sight of it, but a moment later we saw a fighter diving down toward us through the glare of the flares and the searchlights, ignoring the bursting shells around it. Two tiny red eyes flickered behind the propellor, but it was not until holes were suddenly punched in the fabric only a few feet from us that we realised that those were the muzzles of the machine guns. We dropped to the floor while the great plane rolled and dipped and rose and dropped and we were shot this way and that across the floor and against the bulkheads.
“We’re doomed!” I cried to Holmes. “Get the parachutes on! He can’t shoot back at the planes, and our plane is too slow and clumsy to get away!”
How wrong I was. And what a demon that madman was. He did things with that big lumbering aeroplane that I wouldn’t have believed possible. Several times we were upside down and we only kept from being smashed, like mice shaken in a tin, by hanging on desperately to the bunkposts.
Once, Holmes, whose sense of hearing was somewhat keener than mine, said, “Watson, isn’t that a*****e shooting a machine gun? How can he fly this plane, put it through such manoeuvres, and still operate a weapon which he must hold in both hands to use effectively?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed. At that moment both of us were dangling from the post, failing to fall only because of our tight grip. The plane was on its left side. Through the window beneath my feet I saw a German plane, smoke trailing from it, fall away. And then another followed it, becoming a ball of flame about a thousand feet or so from the ground.
The Handley Page righted itself, and I heard faint thumping noises overhead, followed by the chatter of a machine gun. Something exploded very near us and wreckage drifted by the window.
This shocked me, but even more shocking was the rapping on the window. This, to my astonishment, originated from a fist hammering on the door. I crawled over to it and stood up and looked through it. Upside down, staring at me through the isinglass, was Wentworth’s face. His lips formed the words, “Open the door! Let me in!”
Numbly, I obeyed. A moment later, with an acrobatic skill that I still find incredible, he swung through the door. In one hand he held a Spandau with a rifle stock. A moment later, while I held on to his waist, he had closed the door and shut out the cold shrilling blast of wind.
“There they are!” he yelled, and he pointed the machine gun at a point just past Holmes, lying on the floor, and sent three short bursts past Holmes’ ear.
Holmes said, “Really, old fellow...” Wentworth, raving, ran past him and a moment later we heard the chatter of the Spandau again.
“At least, he’s back in the cockpit,” Holmes said weakly. However, this was one of the times when Holmes was wrong. A moment later the captain was back. He opened the trap-door, poked the barrel of his weapon through, let loose a single burst, said, “Got you, you ****ing son of a *****!” closed the trap-door, and ran back toward the front.
Forty minutes later, the plane landed on a French military aerodrome outside of Marseilles. Its fuselage and wings were perforated with bullet holes in a hundred places, though fortunately no missiles had struck the petrol tanks. The French commander who inspected the plane pointed out that more of the holes were made by a gun firing from the inside than from guns firing from the outside.
“Damn right!” Wentworth said. “The cockroaches and their allies, the flying leopards, were crawling all over inside the plane! They almost got these two old men!”
A few minutes later a British medical officer arrived. Wentworth, after fiercely fighting six men, was subdued and put into a straitjacket and carried off in an ambulance.
Wentworth was not the only one raving. Holmes, his pale face twisted, his fists clenched, was cursing his brother Mycroft, young Merrivale, and everyone else who could possibly be responsible, excepting, of course, His Majesty.
We were taken to an office occupied by several French and British officers of very high rank. The highest, General Chatson-Dawes-Overleigh, said, “Yes, my dear Mr. Holmes, we realise that he sometimes has these hallucinatory fits. Becomes quite mad, to be frank. But he is the best pilot and also the best espionage agent we have, even if he is a Colonial, and he has done heroic work for us. He never hallucinates negatively, that is, he never harms his fellows — though he did shoot an Italian once, but the fellow was only a private and he was an Italian and it was an accident — and so we feel that we must permit him to work for us. We can’t permit a word of his condition to get back to the civilian populace, of course, so I must require you to swear silence about the whole affair. Which you would have to do as a matter of course, and, of course, of patriotism. He’ll be given a little rest cure, a drying-out, too, and then returned to duty. Britain sorely needs him.”4 Holmes raved some more, but he always was one to face realities and to govern himself accordingly. Even so, he could not resist making some sarcastic remarks about his life, which was also extremely valuable, being put into the care of a homicidal maniac. At last, cooling down, he said, “And the pilot who will fly us to Egypt? Is he also an irresponsible madman? Will we be in more danger from him than from the enemy?”