Elvdalen had been smoking a heavy pipe and he had laid it down in an ash-tray on his desk. Taking from his waistcoat pocket a small phial of cyanide, which he always carried, Gregory inserted a little of the deadly powder into the hole of the pipe-stem. No human court was needed to convict the Professor; a higher court had decreed that when he betrayed his King it should be before a witness who was also prepared to act as judge and executioner. Gregory's act was carried out with cold deliberation and when he rejoined the others he only felt a mild gratification at the thought that Elvdalen was now most unlikely to live to enjoy the rewards of his treachery. Five minutes later the two cars were descending the winding track to the village.
On the main road there was still a long line of vehicles streaming north but this time they had no great distance to go and they arrived at Ringsaker at half-past two. The place was a fair-sized country town and it stood on a long, narrow arm of the great Mjose Lake, which ran all the way from Hamar to Lillehammer.
Von Ziegler drove straight through the town and some way beyond it until they reached a point where the foothills of the mountain range rose sharply to the right of the road but on its left was a mile-wide strip of flat, cultivated land between it and the Lake. Driving through an open gateway into a meadow, he pulled up and got out. Gregory followed suit and they sat down on a near-by bank to smoke some cigarettes that Elvdalen had pressed upon them.
There was no reason at all why von Ziegler should not have taken Gregory into his confidence as to what the next move was to be, but the adventurous airman evidently derived considerable pleasure in producing one rabbit after another out of the hat for the edification of his companion, who was technically his senior officer, and by now it had become more or less accepted between them that Gregory should ask no questions but only offer useful advice if they got into any difficulty; so he controlled his impatience to know why they should have halted outside Ringsaker instead of going straight on to Lillehammer.
As they were still many miles from King Haakon's new headquarters it seemed pointless to halt here if another air attack on the King had been ordered, and he could only assume that von Ziegler had made a rendezvous at that spot with the man who had the secret wireless-station in the town. But once again he proved wrong.
Just before three o'clock von Ziegler got to his feet and began to pace restlessly up and down. Gregory noticed that he kept glancing at the sky to the southward until, after a few moments, he suddenly gave a whoop of joy and cried: 'Here they come!'
Following the German's glance Gregory could just make out a number of tiny black specks in the sky, which were growing in size with considerable rapidity, and a second later the droning note of the aeroplanes was quite clear. 'Perhaps,' he thought, 'they're going to bomb the King again after all, but, if so, why should we have pulled up in a spot where we have no possible chance of seeing the effect of the attack and it will take us at least an hour to reach the scene of the raid to find out if it has proved successful?'
Then the shape of the planes became perceptible and he saw that they were not dive-bombers but troop-carriers of the JU 52 pattern. As he watched six of them roared over and out of each tumbled a succession of what looked like large black parcels. For an instant he thought that they must be some new type of bomb, but there seemed no point whatever in bombing these quiet fields and meadows on the lake-shore. A second later the parcels burst and a wavy object billowed out above each. They were men descending from the aeroplanes by parachute.
Gregory was intensely interested. He knew that the Russians had formed parachute battalions years ago and it had seemed to him then that the idea was an excellent one. Such troops could land far behind an enemy's lines and seize aerodromes or strong points and cut communications almost without interference.
He had spoken of the idea with considerable enthusiasm to a Staff Colonel of the British War Office, but the Colonel had poured cold water on the scheme. He had said that the Russian experiment had not proved at all a success, as many of the men had injured themselves on landing, and that Britain could not afford to risk that sort of thing happening to her fellows; also that the parachutists landed so far apart from one another that they afterwards had great difficulty in forming up into a coherent unit and therefore could be picked off or rounded up and captured separately before they had time to do any serious damage.
Those arguments had not seemed to Gregory to hold water, for he considered it part of a soldier's business to risk being injured in training just as an R.A.F. pilot has to risk his neck while learning to fly, and he felt that it must be possible to reduce the number of casualties on landing to an insignificant proportion if the parachutists were given proper training. Moreover, if they floated down on to a patch of peaceful countryside, far from any troop concentrations, who was going to capture or kill them before they succeeded in joining up, however widely they were dispersed on landing?
The Colonel had not attempted to argue the matter further, but had implied that the whole thing was rather the sort of comic-opera business that one might expect from people like the Russians, and that it did not really come into the sphere of serious soldiering.
Gregory had again heard of parachute troops being used in the Polish Campaign; this time by the Germans. But the reports about it were rather vague and, whatever British Military Intelligence may have known about the actual facts, the Press had inferred that most of the Germans who made parachute descents in Poland were spies, dressed in civilian clothes, whose business it was to spread false reports and sabotage communications. It was, therefore, with positive fascination that he now saw for himself that the Germans had adopted the new technique and actually had companies of fully-equipped troops specially trained to make parachute-landings.
The spectacle was the most charming thing to watch. The planes had circled round and were on their way back to Oslo, but the whole sky to the west of the road was dotted with the green hemispheres of the wind-filled parachutes as they floated gracefully down carrying either a man or a big, tubular drum.
The drop was not a great one, as the planes had passed over at about five hundred feet, and in a few minutes the soldiers were landing all over the fields for a mile or more either side of the place where Gregory stood. Even the refugees streaming along the road, who had at first been terrified by the approach of the German aircraft, had now, in many cases, halted as though spellbound at the sight of this manoeuvre which seemed more like a number in a military tattoo than an act of war.
A few of the parachutists were dragged as they landed or became caught up in trees and bushes, but after cutting themselves free from their parachutes most of them remained where they had fallen for about a minute, as though acting on a routine drill, to recover from the shock of landing. Then the officers'
whistles sounded and, springing up, they began to run at full speed towards the drums which had been landed with them.
One of these had fallen into a ditch quite near Gregory and he saw some of the men fling themselves upon it. Ripping open its zip fasteners they pulled out an amazing variety of items, including automatic rifles, leather ammunition-carriers, two heavy machine-guns and a squat, fat-barrelled affair that looked like a cross between a trench mortar and a small howitzer. Within five minutes the platoons had assembled and were numbering off so that the officers could make certain that none of their men had been stunned in his fall and was missing. The second that this check-up had been completed the officers gave an order and the men dispersed again in little groups to take up positions behind the most advantageous shelter immediately available from which they could cover the road against any possible attack.