Faked Passports by Dennis Wheatley Read Free Book Online

relief they munched their pears disconsolately and waited in uneasy suspense.
    Barely ten minutes later they caught the first sound of the men who had been sent out to hunt them down. Evidently the search had started from the road and was being made with German thoroughness; otherwise it would not have taken solong for the troops to work right through to almost the far extremity of the wood. Occasional calls came floating through the chill silence as the searchers approached and now and then the blast of a whistle by which an officer was evidently directing them; then came the crackling of twigs and the snapping of brambles as the heavy-footed troopers kicked their way through the undergrowth.
    Gregory and Charlton remained deadly still, fearful that the faintest movement would draw attention to their hiding-place; since a pine tree, although the best that they could find at that season, does not afford good cover and anyone standing immediately beneath it had only to glance up to see them.
    The flat cap of a grey-clad soldier appeared below. He was carrying a rifle with fixed bayonet slung over his shoulder and halted for a moment just under the tree. Suddenly Freddie felt a frantic desire to cough but managed to convert the spasm into a gurgle, which he half-stifled by clapping his hand over his mouth.
    With acute anxiety Gregory stared down at the soldier fearing he had heard the noise that Charlton had made. If the man looked up the only possible way of preventing him from giving a triumphant shout, which would bring his comrades running, was to drop right on top of him. The weight of another body falling from twenty feet would smash him to the ground and with luck knock him out. Balancing himself carefully Gregory prepared to make that desperate plunge. His wound was temporarily forgotten in the tenseness of the moment but he was quick to realise that as the soldier’s bayonet was sticking up just beside his head anyone who fell upon him from above must inevitably fall on the point of that too. Nevertheless, his decision had been taken instantly, since he felt that he owed it to Charlton to give him this desperate chance of remaining undiscovered and getting away afterwards.
    For nearly a minute the man stood there, directly below them, glancing from side to side; then he moved on again, peering right and left into the near-by bushes as he went. Gregory stifled a sigh of relief and, relaxing, leaned back against the tree-trunk.
    Gradually the sounds of the search receded and the two fugitives were able to ease their positions; but soon afterwards the searchers reached the edge of the wood and, turning, began to come back. Once again Gregory and Freddie held their breath as they listened to the thrusting of feet through the undergrowthand the occasional calls of one man to another; but by half-past ten silence had fallen once more and it seemed that they had escaped discovery, at least for the time being.
    They were more cheerful now as they argued that the gunners who had brought them down could not know that one of them was wounded; having searched the wood thoroughly would have convinced them that the fugitives were no longer there and, assuming them to have got much further afield, they would not bother to search it again. To be on the safe side the fugitives remained up the tree and as time began to hang interminably they endeavoured to pass it more quickly by swapping reminiscences.
    Gregory told Charlton the fantastic story of his adventures during the past two months which had culminated in his enabling the German Army leaders to stage a revolt against the Nazis. Freddie listened with amazed attention, not quite knowing whether to believe it all or not; but as he himself had secretly landed Gregory two months earlier outside Cologne and had picked him up again the previous night outside Berlin he had definite evidence that the lean, sinewy man beside him was not entirely romancing.
    The airman’s own