Hammond Innes - Attack Alarm

I swung round from the window, my mind suddenly made up.

‘Micky!’ I called softly, shaking him by the shoulder. ‘Micky! Wake up!’

‘Uh?’ He rolled over and blinked his eyes at me sleepily. ‘Wasamatter?’

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ I told him.

‘I don’t see why. We’re very comfortable, ain’t we?’

‘Yes, but there’s something funny going on.’

‘You just tell me when to laugh,’ he mumbled, ‘and I’ll laugh.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ I said, and shook him violently.

‘Orl right, orl right,’ he grumbled and climbed off the bed. ‘Wot’s the trouble?’

I told him what I had seen. ‘I want to try and find out where the lorries are coming from and what they’re carrying. And we haven’t much time,’ I added. I had got into my battle top and was putting on my shoes.

‘Probably the poor bleedin’ infantry doing night ops.,’ he said unhelpfully. He was still half asleep.

I went over to the window. It was a drop of about twenty feet and it wasn’t a soft landing. However, the ivy looked pretty tough. The only difficulty was the bars. They were much stronger than most nursery window bars. Moreover, when I looked at them closely I found that they were not the type that screw into the window frame, but had been cemented into deep sockets.

I looked more closely at the cement, scraping the coat of paint away with my clasp knife. It wasn’t new, but I was certain that it was very much newer than the window frame in which it was set.

It was then that the scales suddenly fell from my eyes. These bars were not here because the room had once been a nursery. And the door had not been locked just because we looked pretty desperate characters. The old man was a fake.

I tugged with all my strength at the bars. They did not move. Micky came and considered my efforts. ‘You’ll never loosen those, mate,’ he said. ‘Better try the door.’

‘That’s locked,’ I said as we went over to it.

‘Well, it can be unlocked, can’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said, amazed at his denseness, ‘but the key happens to be on the other side.’

‘Gimme your clasp knife. I flogged mine one night when I was tight.’

I unhooked the knife from my lanyard. He opened the spike and inserted it in the lock. A few minutes later I heard the key drop on the other side of the door.

‘It’s easy if you’ve got the right tool,’ Micky muttered as he gently worked the spike in the lock. This thing is too thick by’alf.’

There was nothing I could do to help. I stood by and waited in a fever of anxiety for fear he wouldn’t be able to do it. But at last there was a click and he straightened up.

‘Cor lumme,’ he said, ‘I ain’t lost me touch, ‘ave I? Come in useful when I get demobbed, won’t it?’ and he gave me a wink.

‘Grand!‘I said. ‘Let’s go.’

Quietly I turned the handle of the door and opened it. The passage outside was dark after our room, which had been flooded with moonlight. I put my head out of the door and glanced up and down. There appeared to be no-one there. I flashed my torch. The passage was empty. As I stepped out into it there was a slight sound at the far end of the stairs. I stopped dead, poised on one foot. The house was deathly still. Nothing stirred. And faintly came the tick of the grandfather clock.

It might have been a mouse, or even a rat — the place was probably infested with both. I started forward again. Micky shut the door of our room behind us. We made the stairs and still the house was silent about us.

But as we descended I began to find it an oppressive silence. I had an unpleasant feeling of panic — a desire to run out of the place before those silent walls closed about us for ever. It was one of those houses that have atmosphere. I had not noticed it when I first entered it, flushed with a sense of adventure. But now that I knew the place to be hostile I was frightened of the atmosphere, an atmosphere of sly violence that made its Victorian apparel appear no more than a smug veneer.

But we made the front door without disturbing that silence. I drew the bolts and undid the chain. The lock was, for a wonder, well oiled and the key turned with scarcely a sound. I opened it and the moonlight flooded the hall in a great swathe, lighting the refectory table and the great fireplace with a ghostly pallor. I was thankful when Micky had closed the door behind us.

We moved along the house to the left and made open country in the shadow of the barn. As soon as we were in the heather I broke into a trot. I could just see the clump of gorse bushes behind which the lorries had passed. It took us only a few minutes to reach it, and about a hundred yards farther on we came upon a grass track half grown over with heather. Though the ground was hard it was possible to see the tracks of the lorries faintly marked where the wheels had beaten down heather and grass. It looked like the path that had forked off from the Cold Harbour Farm track.

We set off down it in the direction from which the lorries had come. We hadn’t gone far before we had to go to cover in order to let three more lorries rumble past. ‘Here, wot’s the idea?’ Micky demanded as we scrambled out of the heather and regained the track. ‘Them was R.A.F. lorries.’

‘That’s what we’ve got to find out,’ I said.

I was quite convinced now that I was on to something. Obviously if Vayle wanted to get something, such as arms or explosives, with which to assist an air landing, into our fighter ‘dromes, he had to use R.A.F. lorries and men in R.A.F. uniform driving them. Provided they had the necessary passes, they would be admitted to the aerodromes. No questions would be asked and the lorries would not be searched.

Almost unconsciously I had increased the pace until at last the track bore away to the right and dipped into a big gravel pit. We left the path here and, crouching low, struck farther right, keeping to the level ground until at last we came out on the edge of the pit. We wormed our way forward until we could look over the edge.

Micky gasped as he crawled up beside me. Parked in the pit below us were more than thirty big R.A.F. lorries. At the time I wondered how they had managed to obtain so many Air Force vehicles. Later I learnt that the organisation included men in the motor transport section of most of the fighter stations. The place seemed alive with men in R.A.F. uniforms. Some were sergeants, Alt mostly they were just aircraftmen. I saw no officers. The lorries were being loaded with what appeared to be large compressed-air cylinders. They looked very much like the hydrogen cylinders used for inflating barrage balloons. They were being brought from a hole in the far side of the pit. There were big piles of gravel on either side of the entrance, suggesting that the cache had been hidden by a heap of this gravel.

The lorries nearest the entrance to the pit appeared to have been loaded up. The drivers of the first three stood in a group chatting, obviously waiting for the order to move off. Many of the aircraftmen engaged in loading the lorries farther down the line had belts with revolvers in holsters. There were guards armed with rifles at the entrance to the pit where the ground rose to the level of the surrounding heath, and there were also several patrolling the edge of the pit. This caused me some uneasiness and I kept an eye on our rear and flank. But there seemed to be no guard near where we lay.

Then from behind one of the lorries walked a figure I knew. It was Vayle. I recognised his quick, purposeful walk despite the officer’s uniform he wore. He went straight up the line of lorries to the drivers of the first three. Some twenty men followed him. I would have given anything to hear what he said to those men. The conversation did not last more than a minute. Then he glanced at his watch and a second later they had climbed into the lorries and the engines came to life. The men who had followed him piled into the backs of the lorries, about seven in each. The gears of the first grated and it swung out of the line towards the entrance. The other two followed. A moment later they disappeared and the sound of their engines gradually faded on the still night air.