Codeword Golden Fleece (49 page)

With an awful sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach Rex thought of the Golden Fleece, which in a few minutes now looked like being whisked away, God alone knew where, under the seat of the Major’s car. True, he had the car’s number and now the name of its owner, which had just been mentioned by the Station Commander, but it might be the most frightful job to trace it once Major Serzeski had left the Bukovina.

In a last effort to retrieve the situation he tried an angry bluff and boomed: ‘You can’t do this to me. I’m an American citizen. You’ve no right to detain me just because I’ve had the bad luck to be attacked by some Polish crook or dirty German.’

‘In the circumstances I have every right,’ snapped the Station Commander. ‘Unless, of course, you can prove your
bona fides
. If you are really an American perhaps you have friends in the United States Legation in Bucharest. If there is anyone there who would vouch for you I will have a trunk call put through.’

‘No,’ said Rex a little lamely. ‘No, I don’t know anyone at our Legation in Bucharest.’

‘Very well then. I shall keep you confined in our lock-up here until we are fully satisfied as to your identity.’

‘Holy Mike!’ Rex gasped. ‘How—how long’s that likely to be?’

The Station Commander shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. It largely depends on the information you are prepared to give us about yourself. A week perhaps, but in the present state of things it might easily be a month if the friends to whom you refer us outside Rumania are dilatory in answering our enquiries.’

As he finished speaking he made a sign to the young Duty Officer, who slipped out into the hall and returned a moment later with two armed guards.

While the Rumanians were saying good-night to Major Serzeki the guards placed themselves one on either side of Rex, and, with the Duty Officer in attendance, marched him from the room.

He was taken down a long passage, then through several others at the back of the building until they came to a row of cells. One of the cells was unlocked, and the soldiers pushed Rex into it, locking the door behind him.

One look round was enough to show him that he was in a proper military ‘glasshouse’, from which there was little hope
of escape. The walls were solid brick, the door had a glass peephole in it, and the windows were barred. The place was furnished only with a truckle bed, a wooden chair and a tin pail.

Wearily he sank down on the bed and drew his hand across his eyes. He felt utterly done and absolutely overwhelmed by an agony of depression. His beloved and trusted friend, dear old Greyeyes, was out of the game for good. Simon had by this time almost certainly been identified and was probably facing a charge of violent assault, if not murder, for the attack on von Geisenheim and the German Commercial Attaché. Poor old Richard had been half-killed in the car-smash and, still a cripple, was now hundreds of miles away in distant Turkey. While he, the last of that splendid company, had messed up the final hand that they still had left to play and had landed himself in a military prison—perhaps for a week, perhaps for a month.

‘A month!’ And the option was only good for thirty days from the 21st of September. It still had twenty-five days to go; but how long would he remain cooped up in prison? There was no one to whom he could appeal to go surety for him in Rumania without giving away to the Rumanians that his real name was van Ryn, and if any of the Iron Guards got to know of his whereabouts they would pounce on him for being mixed up in the von Geisenheim affair.

In a fresh wave of distress he realised that this would also apply if he endeavoured to get himself vouched for by his father or other friends outside the country. To reveal his full name in any circumstances was as good as asking to be allowed to join poor Simon for a term of years in the Rumanian equivalent of Sing Sing.

But even if he could find some means of persuading the Station Commander to set him free, he no longer had the Golden Fleece. His friends had relied on him to get it through, and he had let them down. That was the last straw. They had given everything they had to give, and in the end they had trusted him with a thing they valued more than their lives. Yet he had lost it and now had no hope at all of retrieving it.

Exhausted, still aching in every part of his body from his cuts and bruises, utterly overwrought, Rex felt like letting his head fall into his hands and sobbing like a child. But he did not do so. The stubbornness with which his American forbears had fought the prairie and the Indians and the drought came to his assistance now, and all the best of the courage and chivalry that
had been the light of Europe for many generations lit a beacon in his mind as he thought of the Duke.

De Richleau would not give way to a sentimental flood of tears inspired by his own inadequacy. Shrewd as he was, there had been times when he, too, had made mistakes, and many a time the luck had turned against him. But never had he thrown his hand in and blubbered like an ill-used schoolboy. He had been like a blade of pure, fine-tempered steel that could take it and take it and yet come up again finally to run an antagonist through the heart.

There must be a way out if he, Rex, could only think of it, and there
was
a way out. There was one card in the pack that had not yet been played. It was a card that needed very skilful playing and a dangerous card that, when played, might easily cost him his life; on the other hand, it might prove the Ace of Trumps. Rex knew that he must wait to play it, but a few days would not make all that difference. He must hold his hand when they questioned him tomorrow, and perhaps the next day and the next.

That was an appalling risk to take, because at any time Major Serzeski might have his Ford V.8 properly cleaned out, which would result in the discovery of the Golden Fleece. But that was a risk which must be taken. Rex knew that he could play his card effectively only if he pretended that he had no cards at all and then produced it casually, so that he would be allowed to exploit it instead of its being brushed peremptorily aside.

He lay down on the bed and within a few minutes, instead of sobbing like an impotent child, he was sleeping as peacefully as a great Commander who, faced with enormously superior odds, is at least content in the knowledge that he has made the best plan possible before the day of battle.

On the following morning Rex was wakened by the sound of bugles blowing the
Réveillé
. He had been so done up the night before that, faced with the difficulty of undressing with the use of only one hand, he had flung himself down on the bed and slept in his clothes. He had not been able to shave since he left Cernauti, so his chin was now covered with a bristly stubble, and he felt generally ghastly.

However, he was allowed little time to commiserate with himself on his parlous state, his torn and muddy garments, or the fact that he had lost the Golden Fleece and was now in prison. The bugles had hardly ceased sounding when there came the jingle of keys and the noise of doors being thrown open. His own cell was unlocked, and he was beckoned out to join a line of men, who were then marched off to a wash-house. One of the guards, noticing that Rex had his arm in a sling, very decently helped him get his upper garments off, and two out of his five fellow prisoners lent him soap, a towel and shaving equipment. None of them seemed to speak any language he understood, but they were a decent crowd of simple, cheerful airmen, and they extended a ready sympathy to their new comrade in misfortune.

Feeling considerably refreshed by his clean-up, Rex was marched back to his cell, where his breakfast, consisting of a bowl of porridge, two doorsteps well spread with butter and a mug of coffee, was passed in to him. A quarter of an hour later, from a variety of sounds out in the passage, he guessed that the other prisoners were being led off to work, but he was left undisturbed until half past nine, when he was taken from his cell and escorted to an office two doors away from the one in which he had been brought before the Station Commander the previous night.

The tall, gawky Intelligence Officer and the dapper, beaky-nosed Adjutant were both there. The former told him to sit down and began to interrogate him. In the interval since breakfast Rex had had an opportunity to collect his thoughts
and work out the details of the account he meant to give of himself.

His story was that his business was selling cars in a big way, and he was the European representative of a new United States make called the Stuyvesant. The outbreak of the war had caught him in Poland. When Britain and France had come in he had thought it just on the cards that the United States might follow suit. If that had happened and he had been caught by the Nazis, he would have found himself interned for the duration. As he didn’t care to risk that, he had made his way to the Rumanian border and crossed it with a number of other refugees. Having reached Cernauti, he heard that all that was left of the Polish Air Force was being flown out to Grodek and decided to go there to see if he could learn what had happened to his friend Captain Jan Lubieszow of the Polish Air Force Reserve. He had been on his way up to the Polish camp two evenings before when the man whom they knew as Kilec had come up behind him on the road and suddenly attacked him, without giving the least indication why he did so.

There followed a long interrogation about his age and circumstances, his movements in Poland and during the four days which were all that he admitted to having spent in Rumania; about how he had received the bullet wound in his arm and about how he had been dressed when he was attacked. Finally, they asked if he had no business connections in Rumania who could speak for him.

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, but in Rumania I just don’t know a soul. You see, my firm’s a new one and as motor manufacturers go we’re not starting up in a very big way. My first trip was to include only Scandinavia, Poland and the Baltic States, then I’d figured to do a run round South-eastern Europe next spring, but naturally there was no point in making contacts in these parts until I was due to undertake the journey.’

‘What about Britain, France and Germany?’ enquired the Intelligence Officer. ‘I should have thought you would have gone for those big markets before bothering about Poland or the Baltic States.’

Rex gave a knowing grin. ‘I had a hunch that if I could place our automobiles in some of the smaller countries the bigger boys would be more prepared to listen to me when I tackled them. I figured they’d feel they were slipping a bit and getting behind the times if they weren’t stocking Stuyvesants when I could show
them orders from Warsaw, Riga, Bucharest and Belgrade. Anyhow, that’s how I intended to play it.’

The Adjutant asked him to describe the new car, and Rex promptly launched into a spate of technologies. He had an extremely wide knowledge of both car and aeroplane engines, so it was easy for him to create in his imagination a sporting guttsey bus, somewhat on the lines of an M.G. and calculated to have a wide appeal to young men of moderate means, whatever their nationality.

This invitation to talk on a subject that he knew was the very thing for which Rex had been angling. It enabled him to speak so convincingly that his listeners now tended to gloss over in their minds a few hesitations in the replies to their previous questions.

When he had done the Adjutant asked him in an almost friendly way whether he objected to being photographed, and Rex replied at once:

‘Of course not. Just lead me to the camera. You can take my finger-prints, too, if you like. I’m just a plain American business man, and I haven’t a thing to hide.’

After the photographs had been taken, full physical particulars of Rex were noted down, then he was led along to the First Aid Room, where the jovial doctor re-dressed all his hurts. It was now midday, and back in his cell he was given a plain but quite eatable dinner.

During the afternoon and evening no one disturbed him, and when he turned in that night he felt that he had not had an altogether profitless day. By and large, the interrogation, which he had been rather dreading first thing that morning, had gone extremely well, and he felt that his captors were now inclined to believe him. The report, together with his photographs and measurements, would by now be on its way to Bucharest. These could not possibly be identified with any Nazi agent or German living in Rumania and listed as a suspect, that the Rumanian Secret Service might have on their books. In consequence, within another two days a clean bill on that score should come in. His captors had said that they meant to hold him until he could produce proof of his identity, but, once they had satisfied themselves that no dossier concerning him existed, it was reasonable to suppose that they would regard him as more probably unfortunate than dangerous and allow him a reasonable degree of liberty until his affair could be cleared up.

When the point was reached he meant to ask the Station Commander to give him the freedom of the camp, and, if necessary, he was even prepared to offer his parole in order to secure it. He would then put into operation the plan that he had thought of the night before. He would mingle with the officers, talk flying to them without disclosing his own prowess as an airman and, quite suddenly, on the first occasion that he saw one of them do a stunt, make a big bet that he could beat it. Once in the air he hoped to elude any pursuit, land in some lonely valley, hide the plane, go after Major Serzeski, retrieve the Golden Fleece, return to the hidden aircraft and fly out of the country.

It would be much more dangerous than his scheme to steal a Polish aircraft, as he was now on a military airport equipped with Ack-Ack, and fighter aircraft that would certainly go up after him, or even go up with him, as in this case he had the additional handicap of being a prisoner; but he put considerable faith in his great skill as a pilot to keep out of trouble if only he could get into the air.

The thought that he might have to break his parole had caused him a good deal of worry; but he had argued the matter out with himself and come to the decision that no individual should allow his own honour to weigh in the scales against the possibility of bringing victory for his country nearer by many months, if not years; and, as far as the war was concerned, Rex thought of Britain as his country.