Biggles Delivers The Goods by W E Johns

Author:W E Johns [Johns, W E]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: War Stories, Adventure
Published: 2011-05-20T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XII

HOW ALGY DITCHED THE GOSLING

APART from the gruelling monotony of the passage Algy’s flight to India was uneventful. Putting down his wheels he landed at the service aerodrome at Madras, where he was quickly surrounded by members of the squadron who demanded in no uncertain terms to be told how much longer they were to be kept waiting. They were browned off in every sense of the word, asserted Angus Mackail, who was flying again, although he still showed signs of wear and tear, the result—as he put it—of his “crumper” in Burma some months ago.1

Over a quick lunch Algy passed on Biggles’ orders, then went to station headquarters to carry out the other duties assigned to him. These occupied him for some time. He saw the two Lightnings take off and head eastward but nearly two hours elapsed before he was able to follow.

“We shall expect you sometime tomorrow morning,” he told those who were to fly the transport Liberators. “Don’t forget to bring some juice—we shall need it.”

For the first five hours his return trip was as devoid of incident as the outward journey. He flew through a world of sea and sky—and nothing else. From his altitude of five thousand feet the Indian Ocean lay as flat as a tropic sea can be in its most placid mood. Always lonely, on the course he took to pass between the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, war appeared to have swept the sea clean. The sky was a mighty dome of blue, steely-ultramarine overhead, fading to pale azure at the horizon which, seeming to rise to his own level, created an impression that he was flying from rim to rim across a colossal basin.

Not for five hours did any mark, large or small, break the pristine purity of the azure world through which he flew; then his ever-questing eyes came to rest on a smudge of smoke on the northern horizon, so faint that had there been anything else to arrest the eye it might have passed unnoticed. The smoke could mean the presence of only one thing—a ship. It might be a friend or it might be a foe. He was taking no chances, so he turned slightly to the south to keep well clear. Automatically he scanned the sky ahead of him along his new course, and again, almost at once, his eyes came to rest, this time on two tiny specks, no larger than midges, that moved at about his own height in a northerly direction across the vault of implacable blue. Obviously, they were aircraft, and although they were still too far off for identification he knew it was unlikely that they would be British. All he could do was turn away in the hope, a remote hope, that he would not be seen. There was no question of taking cover, for in all the vast expanse of sea and sky that surrounded him there was nothing that could have hidden a fly. He felt—and, indeed, he was—as conspicuous as a bumble-bee in a whitewashed cell.

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