Chapter One Part Nine
Smith glanced up at Jenkinson and shook his head. Whether it was at the over-optmistic Englishman or at himself neither truly knew. He was surprised at how rotten inside he felt - not at their failure, but at von Junker's heroic but sad demise.
"We don't have the blueprints, no," he explained. "They're still attached to this man's bloody arm, and they're both of them heading towards Dover as we wait here chatting." A strange thought entered his head that he would never be able to explain for as long as he lived: first an urge to shave his head and to encourage peace between his fellow man; then the feeling that he would have to roll a six, and that surely if the die turned up a one, the world would be enveloped in a never ending war, a war to end all wars...
"The others may well be waiting for this other German fellow down in Dover, but there seems little point in hanging around waiting to find out - let's go, he's only got about a ten minutes head start, I should say. I trust you can get us there as fast as a German? And, I say, Wellington? Do me a favour old chap? Never let me do any medicine on you if it ever comes to that - I'm bloody useless at it."
Von Fersen worried about his comrade John Link. He wouldn't say what had happened in Dover just before rejoining him and McGeenyton, and von Fersen worried that what had happened was a strong blow to the head. He was asking him to recount again, step by step, the events of the last 6 hours that had led him to be strolling briskly through the frozen Kentish night towards a German flying contraption which, if it managed to take off with its stolen bounty, could lead to German domination of the continent, if not the world. He'd been invited a few weeks before, with a member of the Swedish embassy, to view the battleship HMS Dreadnought. She was a terrifying and fantastic vessel, and even just remembering back to his brief snatched views of her stirred something sea-going and ancient in the young noble's soul.
Anyway - he'd told Link twice already, and that seemed more than enough; he had a captive to take care of. The German seemed to be faithfully leading the way for McGeenyton, Link and von Fersen - he was, of course, honour-bound, and probably saw that delaying the inevitable discovery of his countrymen's flying device meant delaying his escape from this incredible Swede's interminable ramblings on the subject of elk hunting, elk antlers, elk dropppings. Apart from recounting again and again to his fellow gentleman, the brooding Scot, exactly what they had done over the course of the night, it seemed that all the damnable Swede would talk about was elk and their by-products.
He volunteered to buy some of the proffered genuine elk droppings, half in fear, and half in hope that that would be the end of the matter.
It turned out that von Fersen didn't even have any elk feces on him; the German was surprised to find himself mildly irritated. It was true, after all, that his father, God rest his soul, had been an avid collector. Perhaps there was some symbolism in his sudden nostalgia.
He started to wonder if he too had been lost to the folly of these three magnificently eccentric gentlemen - the furrow-browed amnesiac Scot, the duelling tea-fixated Englishman, the elk-obsessed Swede. Was it the madness brought upon him by the cold and his captivity? Or did he really hear the visceral howl of those awful highland instruments of ancient days carried on the night wind? The sound of bagpipes at this time and at this place seemed, to him, unimaginable - they struck a fear that cut him quicker than the chilly sea wind that had begun to pick up. It was no wonder the Kaiser was reported to want to ban them under the impending revision of the Geneva Convention. That was no Godly sound.
His reverie was abruptly brought to a halt by the distinctive report of a rifle bursting into life in the near distance, its boom exploding across the empty and lifeless downs. The bagpipes, if they had been real at all, ceased.
Hurrying towards the flying contraption, Thomas Wallace thanked the highlander McMurray, swearing upon his gentlemanly, and Wallacely, honour to find him a new weapon once this battle was done.
His lust for battle was heartily stirred by the ferocious sounds of his highlanders' marching band; he felt the battle fever come upon him. He felt his ancestors whispering to him in the night wind as cold as a highland winter; he...
"By Jove! I do believe they are opening fire on us! Take cover!"
The crack of a rifle rang out from the farm building a hundred yards ahead of them; Wallace crouched behind a convenient shrubbery, muttering to himself about the ungentlemanliness of firing on one's foe without giving a fair warning. That was the reasoning behind the famed red jackets, as any fool knew. As the drummers and the pipers stopped playing to take cover, he popped his head over his makeshift parapet and could clearly make out before him a long stone barn with a smaller outhouse beside it. Between him and the buildings there were a few trees, bushes, a few small fields divided up with traditional stone walling. Behind the buildings there lay a massive and unexplainable grey cylinder, fully five hundred feet in length, that appeared to rise as if by some unearthly volition into the night air, towering nearly a hundred feet into the sky above them. Lights shone about its base, illuminating a few scurrying men as if worker ants attending to their queen. An ominous hum could be made out from where he watched.
"I say," let out the breathless Scot.
Author
Topic: Roll to Be a Gentleman Spy - Chapter Three Part Twenty One. (Read 74943 times)