Chapter VI: A Flying Victory

IT was a great day for the boys when they set foot in imperial Berlin, with its palaces, art galleries, museums, parliament building, monuments, magnificent parks, and over all its martial spirit.

Roque, by which name, it might be mentioned, he was not known in this heart of the empire, soon demonstrated to his charges that he was the man higher up by his manner of getting about, and the high cost of living had no worries for him.

"Who'd have thought that we would be hitched up to a ten-time winner like this?" Billy was content for the time being to be allied with power.

Among the many who answered the summons of Roque in the intelligence bureau, the young aviators were most interested in a score of blond, blue-eyed, well-set-up Saxons, renowned as Zeppelin navigators, who were destined to guide the "terrors of the air" in furtherance of another raiding plan taking form in the fertile brain of the eminent promoter of trouble for the enemy.

While the boys had faith only in the heavier-than-air machines, they conceded that the risk taken by the Zeppelin crews entitled the latter to brush elbows with the crack flyers of the other kind of bird craft. It was also true that when a Zeppelin got anywhere it was a tremendous factor in war. And it was no question but that the Fatherland had gone Zeppelin mad.

Woe betide the hostile airmen who dropped the bomb on the Zeppelin works at Friedrichshaven if Roque had the means of catching them. It was only another score that he had marked up against Ardelle, whom the master agent of the empire charged with planning this destructive performance.

"Roque said he was going to show us where these gas cruisers grow," Henri advised Billy one evening, getting this news while his chum was engaged in an argument with a Zeppelin worker.

"Something I've been wanting to see," exclaimed Billy. "I owe something to a Zeppelin, even if it is like a balloon."

This last was a sort of side swipe at the man who had been on the other side of the argument.

"There is one thing sure, these dirigibles can't camp out." This was Billy's first remark in Friedrichshaven.

He was peering into a big steel-framed shed with a glass roof which housed one of these grim engines of the air--a great cylinder flanked by platforms. This newest of the huge airships was about the length of a first-class battleship, and the opinion of the young aviator that it could not drop anywhere and everywhere like the aëroplanes he drove was not a prejudiced one.

When Henri had a look at the powerful motors he was impressed with their capacity to drink up petrol at a most appalling rate.

"What's her top speed?" he asked one of the big fellows who had traveled over from Berlin with them.

"Forty-five miles in the calm," was the reply.

"Gee!" exclaimed Billy. "We could get a seaplane home for breakfast while they were waiting supper on you!"

"Yet," claimed the Zeppelin expert, "it's the car they're all afraid of."

"It certainly does look like a scaremark," admitted Henri, who remembered a certain evening on the Belgian coast, when he was one of the company aboard a stranded hydroplane dragged ashore by the swinging anchor of a Zeppelin, which loomed overhead like a cloud, and buzzed like a million bees.

A gang of at least a hundred men swarmed about the shed when the order issued for a trial trip of the new super-Zeppelin, a sample of the fleet in course of building, and Roque carefully noted every detail of equipment.

The gas chambers were fed with pure hydrogen, no common coal gas, and many thousand cubic meters were in the flow of this one envelope filling.

"Guess they'd have to carry a hydrogen factory around with this outfit to keep it going," observed Billy, as he noted the elaborate process.

"Not that bad," advised the man at his elbow, "this gas can be transported from the factory in cylinders under pressure."

"Just think of it," put in Henri, "I heard them say just now that it took thirty gallons of petrol an hour to buzz these motors."

"Biggest thing I know in the air business. I wish Captain Johnson could see an expense bill like this. He'd have a fit." Billy would, indeed, have counted it a red-letter occasion if his old friend, and the boss airman of Dover, were really at hand to take in this show.

To go aloft in an airship about which they were not thoroughly posted was a brand-new experience for the boys, but they were not in the least degree like the proverbial cat in a strange garret. It was easy riding, and none of the guns pointed their way. Billy carried a memorandum of a British military biplane, with a record of 10,000 miles, which Henri and himself had once patched up, that had been hit by 250 rifle bullets and sixty fragments of shells. He wondered if the immense craft in which they were sailing could have floated with, proportionately, about ten times that amount of lead poured into her. But Billy, of course, did not then know much about Zeppelins.

Roque, however, was eminently well satisfied, particularly with the improved method of distributing explosives where they would do the most harm. The airship had a special armored compartment for bombs near the propellers and a big gun mounted in front to destroy aëroplanes. "Get a fleet of these over the English channel," he proclaimed, "and somebody would think that hell had been moved upstairs!"

"I'll say this much," announced Billy, "I'd take an ocean voyage for my health if I knew when they were coming."

"But if the fighting crowd over there had the date and the hour, I'll promise you that the reception your fleet would receive would be warm enough to boil an egg." This was Henri's prediction.

"We never advertise," grimly remarked Roque.

When the Zeppelin had completed her trial trip and had again been housed by the small army of workmen, Roque informed the boys that he was going to give them the chance on the morrow to show their mettle in a biplane test, which was to decide the relative merits as to the speed of two special designs.

"I am going to put you up to jockey the machine that I favor," he said, "and, mind you, the aviators that will drive against you are among the finest in our flying corps. I always pick my men by personally knowing what they can do in any line of action. They seldom fail me, and it is with you to make good."

"We're going some, Herr Roque, when we come up to your standard," replied Henri.

"See that you are 'going some' at the finish of the race to-morrow," laughed Roque.

"It will be because something breaks if we don't hit the high mark," assured Billy.

"Go over and size up your winged steed," directed Roque, pointing to a hangar across the field. "Show them No. 3"--this to one of the attendants.

"This is no mosquito," announced Billy, after a view of the fine lines of "No. 3."

"Speed there, I tell you, old boy," was Henri's comment as he walked around the rigging, "and carrying armor, too."

In an hour the boys had fully comprehended all the new features of this up-to-the-minute machine. They had been builders themselves and knew a good stroke of the business when they saw it.

Returning across the field, Billy and Henri were introduced to the rival aviators by Roque. The German airmen were a jolly pair, and showed by the professional courtesy they exhibited to the two of their kind that the coming contest was wholly a friendly one, and the results to be of value to the flying corps.

"No. 2 is a little older than your machine," was the greeting of one of the Teuton experts, "but it can hold its own."

Roque, speaking for his champions, gaily disposed of this claim:

"Keep your eyes open to-morrow, Fritz, or you will get lost somewhere in the rear."

"No fear, sir; there are no cobwebs on No. 2."

"What are they talking about, Buddy?" asked Billy.

"They just think they are going to beat us, that's all," interpreted Henri.

A bright clear morning presented itself for the aërial race, and Lake Constance lay like a broad mirror under the sunlight. The course was set due north and straightaway for twenty miles, and the turn fixed at a high point called Round Top, upon which, Roque informed the boys, a tall flagstaff had been mounted.

There were no preliminary trials, for both machines had been carefully groomed, and each was as fit as a fiddle.

With the aviators up the biplanes scudded down the field for the rise, and got away upon almost equal terms, the German drivers slightly in the lead, through better acquaintance with the lay of the ground. They trailed a yellow streamer, while the boys floated a band of black.

The ascent reached 2,000 feet, when the machines darted north like arrows. Roque and a group of officers about him followed the speeders through field glasses.

"They would run a swallow to death," remarked the secret agent to the aviation lieutenant at his side.

The aëroplanes had dwindled in the vision to mere specks, and there was no telling which was in the fore.

"Ah, they are headed back!" cried Roque. "Now for the show-down."

The glasses revealed the specks moving twin-like, and such was the terrific onrush that the crowd surging in the field soon caught a view of the contestants in growing size.

One enthusiast shouted: "Fritz will shut them out!"

But the glasses did not uphold the prediction. The machine with the black streamer was evidently using the reserve power that had been claimed for the newer make, and Henri was getting the best out of it. Yet the first-born craft was being handled in a masterly manner, had plenty of go to spare, and five miles still rolled between the speeders and the finish flag.

Now four, and the machines were bow and bow; now three, and the yellow band flapped a few feet behind the black; now two, now within the mile, and the whirring of the motors audible to the nerve-strained watchers below--then the close finish--and the white-faced pilot crowned victor was Billy Barry of Bangor, U. S. A.!

When the aëroplanes made landing, Roque pushed through the crowd and favored the Aëroplane Scouts with a forcible slap between the shoulders.

The victors were quick enough to extend hands to the vanquished.

"My friend," cried Billy, giving Fritz a warm grip, "it was only fifty feet, and it was the new motors that did it."

Then the crowd cheered, while the efficiency committee agreed with Roque that "No. 3" was the machine to be many times duplicated.

"That was something over a mile a minute coming back, I guess," figured Billy.

"The fastest heavy craft I ever sailed in," was Henri's expressed belief.

"I think you youngsters could make a living here if I were to bounce you," said Roque, who had been talking to some of the factory chiefs. "But you are hooked to my train for a while yet. And that reminds me that the mentioned train starts in the direction of Austria in the next two hours. Vienna is not a slow place, you will find."

As Roque was likely to jump anywhere at the drop of a hat, the boys in his company had long since lost the emotion of surprise.

Perpetual motion had become a habit with them.

In the Austrian capital the travelers encountered many invalids from the front, men who limped a little, had an arm in a sling, or a bandaged head. The Viennese on the surface did not seem to be greatly impressed by the tragedy of the war--evidently becoming used to it--yet the determination to fight to the finish, while not as grim as in Berlin, was there, nevertheless.

Another thing that impressed the boys was that here foreign terms were still much in evidence--French and English. In Berlin it was different.

As Billy said, "we're in a better mixing town." He and Henri were told that quite a number of medical and art students from America had decided that Vienna was safe enough for them, but Roque kept his airmen close under his wing, and they had no opportunity to pass even the time of day with any of the U. S. A. crowd.

They had no present desire, however, to attempt a bolt from Roque and did not believe, anyway, that their detention was just then seriously affecting their health.

"Time enough to run," was Billy's philosophy, "when his nobs begins to kick in our ribs."

They were seeing plenty to keep them interested, the arrival of sleeping-car trains bringing the wounded to the capital, the movement of troops bound for the Polish or Galician front, the daily sights of the Ring and the Kartnerstrasse.

Roque, as usual, was up to his eyes in war business, ever behind the scenes but ever moving, for there is close military coöperation between Germany and Austria-Hungary. All interests related to the war have been pooled--one empire gives to the other what can be spared. The king-pin of secret agents from Berlin served a purpose wherever he went.

He sat in no open councils, but privately conducted many of his own, was constantly receiving and dispatching messages, and the devices he originated to aid his disguised subordinates burrowing for information in hostile territory were too numerous for detail. These latter operations were not accompanied by band music, for officially this live wire had no identity.

"If that man took a pot shot at the ocean you would never know in what direction he was aiming unless you happened to see the splash." Billy was not far from being right in the summing up of Roque's methods.

Within the next hour the boys "happened to see the splash."

A uniformed messenger handed Roque a telegram. The secret agent hastily read it, and sprang to his feet, his eyes aglow with triumphant satisfaction.

"I've got Mr. Ardelle in a stone box at last!"