“There is no secret about it,” Fawley answered blandly. “I have been trying to discover the extent and nature of the new French fortifications.”
No more unexpected reply could have been given. There was a dead silence. The colonel’s face remained immovable but there was an ominous tapping of his fingers upon the desk.
“For what reason?”
Fawley shrugged his shoulders.
“If you insist upon knowing, I suppose I had better tell you,” he said, “but I don’t want the thing to get about. There are some golf links about twelve kilometres from here at a place called Sospel. I have taken a great fancy to them and to the hotel, and as I have a little capital to invest, I thought of buying the lot. The one thing which makes me hesitate is that no one is willing or able to tell me where the new French fortifications and gun emplacements are situated, and until I know that, I feel that my property might be utterly destroyed in case of war.”
There was a further silence. Another officer who might have been the colonel’s aide-de-camp crossed the room and whispered in his ear.
“You have corroborative evidence of what you are telling me?” the Colonel asked.
“Any quantity,” Fawley assured him confidently. “The mayor of the district, the committee of the old golf club, the late hotel proprietor and owner of the land, half the village of Sospel.”
“Your name and passport.”
Fawley produced identification papers from his pocket and handed them across. The Colonel examined them and his face relaxed.
“As an ex-military man, Major Fawley,” he said, with a certain severity still in his tone, “you should have known that yours was a very dangerous enterprise. You should have applied to the authorities for any information you desired.”
“I thought, as mine was a civil enterprise,” Fawley argued, “they might not notice me. All that I need is a little general information.”
“There is none to be given,” was the brusque reply. “Escort this gentleman to our boundaries, Lieutenant, and let me warn you, sir, not to be found in this locality again. This is from no lack of courtesy, Major Fawley. It is a matter of military necessity which I am amazed that you should not already have realised and respected.”
Fawley suffered himself to be led away. A soldier escorted him to the nearest village, where he descended at the local café and accepted
without hesitation a ten franc note to be spent there. He refused, however, to answer the slightest question respecting the geography of the neighbourhood and regarded with evident suspicion Fawley’s few tentative enquiries.
“Monsieur has been generous,” were his parting words, as he stood outside the café. “He would be wise to listen to a word of advice. Strangers are sometimes treated generously, as Monsieur has been, on their first visit to the nest in the mountains. The second visit means the cold steel or the swift bullet. The bones of more than one too curious person will be found in the secret places of the mountains yonder, when the world comes to an end.”
He pointed up beyond the pass which they had descended. A stern inhospitable line of country it was, with great declivities and huge fragments of rock split by the slow fires of eternity. Fawley shivered a little as he stepped back into the car.
“I shall not forget, my brave fellow,” he declared. “Drink a glass for me. I am best out of the neighbourhood.”
The soldier grinned. Nevertheless, there was something serious in his expression behind the grin.
“Monsieur est un homme prudent,” was his only comment.
CHAPTER VIII
Fawley, a few nights later, lay on his stomach in the midst of a crumpled heap of undergrowth on almost the topmost spur of the range of mountains eastward from Mont Agel and very little below the snow line. He was on the edge of a recently made clearing and the air was full of the odour of the sawn pine trunks lying about in every direction. The mists rolled over his head and the frozen rain stung his cheeks and pattered against his leather clothes. It was the third moonless night of his almost concluded enterprise and there remained only one unsolved mystery. The six galleries were there, visualised before his eyes. He knew the connecting points of each one and the whereabouts of most of the amazing battery of guns. He knew the entrances and roughly the exits to each. His work had been done with genius and good fortune, yet it was incomplete. The seventh gallery! The key to all the positions. The seventh gallery which must hold the wonder gun. Its exact whereabouts still eluded him.
The night before, the storm which had swept the mountains bare, which had driven even the guards and sentries into shelter, had been a godsend to him. In the roar of the elements and that blinding deluge of rain, the crashing of the trees and the hissing of the wind through the undergrowth and along the ground, he had abandoned caution. He had tramped steadily round from post to post. He had been within a few yards of the Colonel’s headquarters. He had even laid his hand on one of the guns, but it was not the gun he sought. He had worked it all out, though, by a process of elimination. The main gallery, the control station and the supreme mystery, which was probably the mightiest anti-aircraft gun in the world, must be somewhere within a radius of about a hundred yards of where he was. It was information invaluable as it stood, but Fawley, through these long hours of darkness and peril, had conceived an almost passionate desire to solve the last enigma of this subterranean mountain fortress. The howling of the wind, which the night before had been his great aid, obscuring all sound and leaving him free to roam about in the darkness in comparative safety, was now, he felt, robbing him of his chance. The special body of men of whom he was in search—he had discovered that many hours ago—worked only in the darkness, so that even the woodcutters should know nothing of their doings. They must be somewhere near now…There were great piles of cement lying within fifty feet of where he was, barrels of mortar, light and heavy trucks. Somewhere close to him they must be working…
This business of listening grew more hopeless. One of the trees in the wood, on the outskirts of which he lay, was creaking and roaring, like a wild animal in pain. He raised himself slowly and carefully on one side and by straining his eyes he could catch the outlines of its boughs, stretched out in fantastic fashion like great arms. He even heard the splinters go. Then, for the first time, he fancied he heard—not one voice but a hum of voices! His whole body stiffened—not with fear but with the realisation of danger. The voices seemed to come from below. He raised himself a little more, almost on to his knees. His eyeballs burned with the agony of the fruitless effort to penetrate the darkness. Below! In his brain, at any rate, there was light enough. He remembered the somewhat artificial appearance of the great masses of undergrowth amongst which he lay. Perhaps this Number Seven tunnel was underneath! Perhaps in seeking for shelter he had crept into a ready-made ambush. Then for some time he ceased to think and action became almost automatic.
Nothing in the orchestra of the howling wind, the crashing trees and the hollow echoes amongst the grim mountains had produced sound such as now seemed to split his eardrums. Within a few feet of him came a crash which blotted out the whole world with a great barrier of sound. He felt his cheeks whipped, his body thrashed, the sense of an earthquake underneath him—the sense of falling.
It took him only a second or two to realise what was happening. Within a few yards of him, the tree which he had been watching had given up its fight with the rising wind and had crashed through the artificial roof on which he lay, down into the space below. He, too, was falling, as the branches and shrubs on either side subsided. He fell with his mind