So Disdained by Nevil Shute Read Free Book Online

Rügen, about a hundred and twenty miles farther on. There was a stiffish wind against him, and that leg of the course took him an hour and a quarter. The darkness and the intense cold, together with the strain, were making him sleepy. He had several drinks out of his flask, he said, and presently he picked up a lighthouse on Rügen.
    After that he was pretty well home. He passed over Rostock and Lubeck, and then set about looking for his landing-ground. The Russians had secured a great country house that stood in the middle of that marshy land; he said that it was all shut up except for three rooms that they lived in. He said he didn't ask many questions about the place.
    "Anyway," he said, "they'd done their part of it all right. The arrangement was that they'd have the devil of a great bonfire lighted half-way between Elmshorn and Lubeck, and three miles south of that I'd find the landing lights laid out on the ground for me to land by, inconspicuous-like. Well, I picked up the bonfire all right. They'd given a beano to some village [Pg 31] there, and supplied the wood and the drink and everything. It was a good fire, that. The flames must have been getting on for fifty feet high at times. I saw it twenty miles away, and gave it a pretty good berth. It was easy then. I circled round a bit and found the landing, and put the Breguet down on to the grass along the line of lights."
    He said that it had been a very cold flight. "Living in England, you don't know what it's like. I was all sort of cramped and stiffened in the one position. I tried to get out of the machine when she stopped, but I had to sit there till they came and climbed up on to the fuselage to help me out. I've never been like that before. The usual crowd of Jew Boys, but they were damn good to me that night. They had hot soup all ready, and a fire, and as soon as I was thawed out a bit and had a quart or so of soup inside me, I fell asleep where I was, pretty well standing up."
    He slept till noon the next day, and spent the afternoon with a mechanic, overhauling the machine for the flight to Portsmouth.
    "That was Monday afternoon," he said. "I started at about six in the evening, with fifteen hours' fuel on board. That flight should take about eleven hours for the return journey, allowing a bit for head winds and for about a quarter of an hour over Portsmouth."
    He took a compass course over Holland, passing pretty well inland. He said he was afraid of getting mixed up with the Zuyder Zee. He came out on the coast near Ostend, and took a departure from there for Dover, flying at about three thousand feet. Finally he came to the Island at about half-past eleven. He picked up the Nab lighthouse first, and from there he followed straight along in through Spithead.
    He took up the poker absently, and scraped a little of the ash from the bars of the grate. The fire was glowing very red into his face.
    "I throttled down at the Nab," he said, "and then we went creeping in, doing about eighty, and so quiet that I might have heard my watch ticking if I'd put it to my ear. I had the parachute [Pg 32] flare all ready, with a little stick to poke it down the tube with. It was the entrance to the harbour that I had to take—the narrow part."
    My pipe was out, but I was afraid to interrupt his narrative by stirring to relight it.
    "It was easy enough. The lights from the town—the streetlamps—showed on both sides of the water, so that the entrance looked like a great streak of black between the lights. I cruised round a bit before I set off the flare and dropped off a little height, so that I finished up at about two thousand five hundred feet. Eight hundred metres was the height that we'd fixed for the focus of the camera, you see."
    He paused. "I could see that there was something funny going on before I set off the flare," he said. "There was a string of green lights stretching right across the entrance from side to side, near the mouth. Like a barrier to stop