The Flying Legion - free ebook by George Allan England

THE FLYING LEGION

Published July, 1920...

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CHAPTER

I A Spirit Caged. II "To Paradise—or Hell!" III The Gathering of the Legionaries. IV The Masked Recruit. V In the Night. VI The Silent Attack. VII The Nest of the Great Bird. VIII The Eagle of the Sky. IX Eastward Ho. X "I Am the Master's!" XI Captain Alden Stands Revealed. XII The Woman of Adventure. XIII The Enmeshing of the Master. XIV Storm Birds. XV The Battle of Vibrations. XVI Leclair, Ace of France. XVII Miracles, Scourge of Flame. XVIII "Captain Alden" Makes Good. XIX Hostile Coasts. XX

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A SPIRIT CAGED

The room was strange as the man, himself, who dwelt there. It seemed, in a way, the outward expression of his inner personality. He had ordered it built from his own plans, to please a whim of his restless mind, on top of the gigantic skyscraper that formed part of his properties. Windows boldly fronted all four cardinal compass-points—huge, plate-glass windows that gave a view unequaled in its sweep and power. The room seemed an eagle's nest perched on the summit of a man-made crag. The Arabic

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"TO PARADISE—OR HELL"

For a time the Master sat in the thickening gloom, eating the dates and temmin wafers, drinking the coffee, pondering in deep silence. When the simple meal was ended, he plucked a little sprig of leaves from the khat plant in the bowl, and thrust them into his mouth. This khat, gathered in the mountains back of Hodeida, on the Red Sea not far from Bab el Mandeb, had been preserved by a process known to only a few Coast Arabs. The plant now in the bowl was part of a shipment that had been more th

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THE GATHERING OF THE LEGIONARIES

One week from that night, twenty-seven other men assembled in the strange eyrie of Niss'rosh , nearly a thousand feet above the city's turmoil. They came singly or in pairs, their arrival spaced in such a manner as not to make the gathering obvious to anyone in the building below. Rrisa, the silent and discreet, brought them up in the private elevator from the forty-first floor to the Master's apartment on the top story of the building, then up the stairway to the observatory, and thus ushered t

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THE MASKED RECRUIT

A little silence lengthened, while the strange aviator continued to peer out with strangely shining eyes through the holes of his mask. The effect of that human intelligence, sheltered in there behind that expressionless celluloid, whose frail thinness they all knew covered unspeakable frightfulness, became uncanny. Some of the men eased the tension by blowing ribbons of smoke or by relighting tobacco that had gone out while the stranger had been talking. Others shifted, a bit uneasily. Voices b

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IN THE NIGHT

The night was moonless, dark, warm with the inviting softness of late spring that holds out promises of romance. Stars wavered and wimpled in the black waters of the Hudson as a launch put out in silence from the foot of Twenty-seventh Street. This launch contained four men. They carried but little baggage; no more than could be stowed in a rucksack apiece. All were in their old service uniforms, with long coats over the uniforms to mask them. All carried vacuum-flashlights in their overcoat poc

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THE SILENT ATTACK

At the exact instant when the second hand notched to the minute's edge, and in precisely the spot indicated, a slight, luminous spot became dimly visible above the trees. The spot took uncertain form high above the ghost-glow rising from the unseen stockade. For an instant it hung suspended, pale-greenish, evanescent. Then, as a faint plop! drifted to the watchers—a sound no louder than a feeble clack of the tongue—this indefinite luminosity began to sink, to fade, falling slowly, gradually diss

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THE NEST OF THE GREAT BIRD

As the little group of four penetrated into the enclosure which but a few moments before had been guarded all round its perimeter by a small army of determined men, more and more of the Legionaries began to concentrate toward the entrance. Silently they came, with almost the precision of automata in some complex mechanical process. All were obeying the Master's will, because obedience was sweet to them; because it spelled adventure, freedom, life. Now and then one stopped, bent, arose with some

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THE EAGLE OF THE SKY

He slid open another door. The three men passed through the captain's cabin and pilot-house. This place measured twelve feet on its longer axis and nine on its shorter, being of approximately diamond shape with one point forward in the very nose of the machine, one ending in a door that gave access to the main, longitudinal corridor, and the right and left points joining the walls of the backward-sloping prow. It contained two sofa-lockers with gas-inflated, leather cushions, a chart-rack, pilot

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EASTWARD HO!

Not all the stern discipline that had been enforced by the Master—discipline already like a second nature to this band of adventurous men—could quite prevent a little confusion on board the Eagle of the Sky. As the huge machine crashed, plunged, staggered, then righted herself and soared aloft, shouts echoed down the corridors, shots crackled from the lower gallery and from a few open ports. At sound of them, and of faint, far cries from the Palisades, with a futile spatter of pistol-and rifle-f

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"I AM THE MASTER'S!"

The arrival of Simonds, with the spare window-pane, and of Brodeur—one of the boldest flyers out of Saloniki in the last months of the war—broke in upon the Master's reveries. Only a few minutes were required to mend the window. During this time, the Master explained some unusual features of control to the Frenchman, then let him take charge of Nissr . "She's wonderful," said he, as Brodeur settled himself at the wheel. "With her almost unlimited power, her impeccable controls and her automatic

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CAPTAIN ALDEN STANDS REVEALED

Hardly had the trembling Arab salaamed and departed in terror of soul, knowing not what fearful events might be impending, when Bohannan appeared. The smile on the Master's lips, the sternly calculating expression in his eyes, faded into something as near astonishment as this strange man ever felt, when the major exclaimed: "Well, faith now, what d'you think? The most improbable thing you can imagine!" "What may that be, Major?" "It's not what it may be, it's what it is that's astonishing me. We

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THE WOMAN OF ADVENTURE

A moment's utter silence followed. The woman, with another gesture, drew off the aviator's cap she had worn; she pulled away the tight-fitting toupee that had been drawn over her head and that had masked her hair under its masculine disguise. With deft fingers she shook out the masses of that hair—fine, dark masses that flowed down over her shoulders in streams of silken glory. "Now you see me as I am!" said she, her voice low and just a little trembling, but wholly brave. "Now, perhaps, you und

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THE ENMESHING OF THE MASTER

She fell silent, biting her full lip. Something in her eyes shamed the man. Not for all his inflexible sternness could he feel that he had come out a winner in this, their first encounter. A woman—one of the despised, ignored creatures—had deceived him. She had disobeyed his orders. She had flatly thrown down the gage of battle to him, that she would never leave Nissr alive. And last, she had forced him into planning to disseminate falsehoods among his crew—falsehoods the secret of which only sh

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STORM BIRDS

The first slow light of day, "under the opening eyelids of the morn," found the Master up in the screened observation gallery at the tip of the port aileron. Here were mounted two of the six machine-guns that comprised Nissr's heavier armament; and here, too, were hung a dozen of the wonderful life-preservers—combination anti-gravity turbines and vacuum-belt, each containing a signal-light, a water-distiller and condensed foods—that, invented by Brixton Hewes, soon after the close of the war, ha

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THE BATTLE OF VIBRATIONS

Two, five, a dozen, now a score of tiny specks dotted the mist, some moving right across the broadening face of the sun itself. As Nissr's flight stormed eastward, and these gnats drove to the west, their total rate of approach must have been tremendous; for even as the men watched, they seemed to find the attackers growing in bulk. And now more and ever more appeared, transpiring from the bleeding vapors of dawn. "Looks like business, sir!" exclaimed the Celt, his jaw hard. "Business, yes." "Ba

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LECLAIR, ACE OF FRANCE

Swooping, rising, falling like a falcon in swift search of quarry, the last plane of the Azores squadron swept in toward the on-rushing Eagle of the Sky. Undismayed by the swift, inexplicable fall of all its companions, it still thrust on for the attack. In a few minutes it had come off the port bows of the giant air-liner, no more than half a mile distant. Now the watchers saw it, slipping through some tenuous higher cloud-banks that had begun to gather, a lean, swift, wasplike speedster: one o

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MIRACLES, SCOURGE OF FLAME

His form, sitting there at the desk—his face wearing an odd smile—had already begun to grow less distinct. It seemed as if the light surrounding him had faded, though everywhere else in the cabin it still gleamed with its accustomed brilliance. And as this light around him began to blur into a russet dimness, forming a sort of screen between him and visibility, the definition of his outlines began to melt away. The Master still remained visible, as a whole; but the details of him were surely van

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"CAPTAIN ALDEN" MAKES GOOD

The crash of shattered glass mingled with the volley flung by the murderously spitting automatic of the stowaway. From the forward companion, at the top of the ladder, "Captain Alden" fired—one shot only. No second shot was needed. For the attacker, grunting, lunged forward, fell prone, sprawled on the down-slanting plates of the take-off platform. His pistol skidded away, clattering, over the buffed metal. "As neat a shot as the other's was bad," calmly remarked the Master, brushing from his sl

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HOSTILE COASTS

An hour from that time, the air-liner was drifting sideways at low altitudes, hardly five hundred feet above the waves. A sad spectacle she made, her wreckage gilded by the infinite splendors of the sun now lowering toward the horizon. Her helicopters were droning with all the force that could be flung into them from the crippled power-plant. Her propellers—some charred to mere stumps on their shafts—stood starkly motionless. Oddly awry she hung, driven slowly eastward by the wind. Her rudder wa

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THE WAITING MENACE

"Ah, sure now, but that's fine!" exclaimed the major with delight, his eyes beginning to sparkle in anticipation. "The best of news! A little action, eh? I ask nothing better. All I ask is that we live to reach the committee—live to be properly killed! It's this dying-alive that kills me ! Faith, it tears the nerves clean out of my body!" "That is a true Arab idea, Major," smiled Leclair. "To this extent you are brother to the Bedouin. They call a man fatis , as a reproach, who dies any other wa

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SHIPWRECK AND WAR

"You call them dogs, eh?" asked the chief. "And why?" "What else are such apostate fanatics? People who live by robbery and plunder—people who, if they find no gold in your money-belt, will rip your stomach open to see if you've swallowed it! People who boast of being harami (highwaymen), and who respect the jallah (slave-driver)! "People who practice the barbaric thar , or blood-feud! People who torture their victims by cutting off the ends of their fingers before beheading or crucifying them!

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BELEAGUERED

"La Illaha illa Allah! M'hámed rasul Allah!" Raw, ragged, exultant, a scream of passion, joy, and hate, it rose like the voice of the desert itself, vibrant with wild fanaticism, pitiless and wild. The wolflike, high-pitched howl of the Arab outcasts—the robber-tribe which all Islam believed guilty of having pillaged the Haram at Mecca and which had for that crime been driven to the farthest westward confines of Mohammedanism—this war-howl tore its defiance through the wash and reflux of the sur

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A MISSION OF DREAD

Panting, with a slither of dry sand under their laboring feet, the Legionaries charged. At any second, a raking volley might burst from the dunes. The lethal pellets—so few in this vast space—might not have taken effect. Not one heart there but was steeling itself against ambush and a shriveling fire. Up they stormed. The Master's voice cried, once more: "Give 'em Hell!" He was the first man to top the dune, close to the wady's edge. There he checked himself, revolver in mid-air, eyes wide with

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ANGELS OF DEATH

In utter silence, moving only a foot at a time, the trio of man-hunters advanced. They spaced themselves out, dragged themselves forward one at a time, took advantage of every slightest depression, every wrinkle in the sandy desert-floor, every mummy-like acacia and withered tamarisk-bush, some sparse growth of which began to mingle with the halfa-grass as they passed from the coast-dunes to the desert itself. Breathing only through open mouths, for greater stillness, taking care to crackle no t

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THE GREAT PEARL STAB

The Master began to feel a peculiar anxiety. Into the east he peered, where now indeed a low, steady hum was growing audible, as of a million angry spirits swarming nearer. The stars along that horizon had been blotted out, and something like a dark blanket seemed to be drawing itself across the sky. "My Captain," said the lieutenant, "there may be trouble brewing, close at hand. A sand-storm, unprotected as we are—" "Men with stern work to do cannot have time to fear the future!" Leclair grew s

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THE SAND-DEVILS

With hands that quivered in unison with his nerves, now no longer impassive, the strange chief of this still stranger expedition took from Rrisa the leather sack. Over the top of the wady a million sand-devils were screeching. The slither of the dry snow—the white, fine snow of sand—filled all space with a whispering rustle that could be heard through the shouting of the simoom. Sand was beating on them, everywhere, in the darkness lighted only by the tortured beach-fire. The stinging particles

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TOIL AND PURSUIT

Before midnight the storm died with a suddenness even greater than that of its onset. Like a tangible flock of evil birds or of the spirits Victor Hugo has painted in Les Djinns , the sand-storm blew itself out to sea and vanished. The black sky opened its eyes of starlight, once again; gradually calm descended on the desert, and by an hour after midnight the steady east wind had begun to blow again. The "wolf's tail," or first gray streak of dawn along the horizon, found the Legion all astir. L

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ONWARD TOWARD THE FORBIDDEN CITY

The Master rang for full engine-power, and threw in all six helicopters with one swift gesture. "Major," commanded he, as Nissr's burned and wounded body began to quiver through all its mutilated fabric; "Major, man the machine-guns again. All stations! Quick !" Bohannan departed. The droning of the helicopters rose to a shrill hum. The Master switched in the air-pressure system; and far underneath, white fountains of spumy water leaped up about the floats, mingled with sand and mud all churned

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"LABBAYK!"

As Nissr slowed near the oasis, the frightened Arabs—who had been at their ghanda , or mid-day meal—swarmed into the open. They left their mutton, cous-cous , date-paste, and lentils, their chibouques with perfumed vapor and their keef-smoking, and manifested extreme fear by outcries in shrill voices. Under the shadows of the palms, that stood like sentinels against the blistering sands, they gathered, with wild cries. No fighting-men, these. The glasses disclosed that they were mostly old men,

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OVER MECCA

The descent of the giant air-liner and her crew of masterful adventurers on the Forbidden City had much the quality of a hawk's raid on a vast pigeon-cote. As Nissr , now with slowed engines loomed down the Valley of Sacrifice, a perfectly indescribable hurricane of panic, rage, and hate surged through all the massed thousands who had come from the farthest ends of Islam to do homage to the holy places of the Prophet. The outraged Moslems, in one fierce burst of passion against the invading Feri

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EAST AGAINST WEST

The major, peering down through the trap, swore luridly. Leclair muttered something to himself, with wrinkled brow. "Captain Alden's" eyes blinked strangely, through the holes of the mask. The others stared in frank astonishment. "What the devil, sir—?" began the major; but the chief held up his hand for silence. Again he spoke whisperingly into the strange apparatus. This time a murmur rose to him; a murmur increasing to a confused tumult, that in an angry wave of malediction beat up about Niss

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THE BATTLE OF THE HARAM

The raiding-party, beside its two leaders, consisted of Lombardo, Rennes, Emilio, Wallace, and three others, including Lebon. The lieutenant's orderly, now having recovered strength, had pleaded so hard for an opportunity to avenge himself on the hated Moslems that Leclair had taken him. As for Lombardo, he had downright insisted on going. His life, he knew, was already forfeited to the expedition—by reason of his having let the stowaway escape—and, this being so, he had begged and been granted

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THE ORDEAL OF RRISA

Alone in his cabin with the waterspout of massive gold and with the sacred Black Stone, the Master sat down in front of the table where they had been laid, took a few leaves of khat, and with profound attention began to study the treasures his bold coup had so successfully delivered into his hands. The waterspout, he saw at once, would as a mere object of precious metal be worth a tremendous sum. It was of raw gold, apparently unalloyed—as befitted its office of carrying the water from the roof

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THE INNER SECRET OF ISLAM

The chief handed him a pencil. Rrisa intelligently studied the map for nearly two minutes, then raised his hand and made a dot a few miles north-east of the intersection of fifty degrees east and twenty degrees north. The Master's eye was not slow to note that the designated location formed one point of a perfect equilateral triangle, the other points of which were Bab el Mandeb on the south and Mecca on the north. "There, M'almé ," whispered the Arab, in a choking voice. "Now I have told you th

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INTO THE VALLEY OF MYSTERY

The upraised blade, poised for swift murder, did not descend. With a groan from the heart's core, Rrisa let fall his trembling hand, as he recoiled toward the vague patch of starlight that marked the cabin window. " Bismillah !" he whispered hoarsely. "I cannot! This is my sheik—'and thrice cursed is the hand that slays the sheik.' I cannot kill him!" For a moment he remained there, pondering. Swift, passionate thoughts surged through his brain, which burned with fever. In Rrisa's fighting-blood

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JOURNEY'S END

All this time, the strange, yellowish sheen against the heavens was increasing. What might lie beyond the mountains—who could tell? But that its nature was wholly different from anything any white man ever had beheld seemed obvious. Quite suddenly, at 10:05, the Master's binoculars detected a break far to southward, in the craggy wall of rock. He ordered Nissr's beak turned directly thither. Swiftly the Eagle of the Sky held her course, speeding like an arrow. And now a vast, open plain was seen

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THE GREETING OF WARRIORS

Without delay, everything was put in complete readiness for whatever eventualities might develop. If these strange people meant peace and wanted it, the Legion would give them peace. If war, then by no means was the Legion to be unprepared. The gangplank was put down from the starboard port in the lower gallery. The helicopters were cut off. Nothing was left running but one engine, at half-speed, to furnish current for the apparatus the Master had decided to use in dealing with the Jannati Shahr

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BARA MIYAN, HIGH PRIEST

The crash of six machine-guns clattered into a chattering tumult, muzzles pointed high over the heads of the Jannati Shahr men. Up into the still, hot air jetted vicious spurts of flame. The Legion's answer lasted but a minute. As the trays of blanks became empty, the tumult ceased. Silence fell, strangely heavy after all that uproar. This silence lengthened impressively, with the massed horsemen on one side, the Legionaries on the other. Between them stretched a clear green space of turf. Behin

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ON, TO THE GOLDEN CITY!

The Spartan simplicity of the proceedings impressed the Master far more than any Oriental ceremony could have done. Here was the Olema, or high priest and chief, of a huge city carved of virgin gold, coming to meet him on horseback and speaking to him face to face, like a man. It was archaic, patriarchal, dramatic in the extreme. No incensed courts, massed audiences, tapestried walls, trumpeting heralds, genuflexions, could have conveyed half the sense of free, virile power that this old Bara Mi

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INTO THE TREASURE-CITADEL

Well might those Legionaries who had been left behind to protect Nissr and the sacred gifts have envied the more fortunate ones now sweeping into Jannati Shahr. The rear guard, however, formed no less essential a part of the undertaking than the main body of the Legion. This rear guard consisted of Grison, Menendez, Prisrend, Frazier, and Manderson. Their orders were as follows: If the main body did not return by midnight, or if sounds of firing were heard from the city, or again if they receive

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THE MASTER'S PRICE

A dim and subtly perfumed corridor opened out before them, its walls hung with tapestries, between which, by the light of sandal-oil mash'als , or cressets, the glimmer of the dull-gold walls could be distinguished. Pillars rose to the roof, and these were all inlaid with mother-of-pearl, with fine copper and silver arabesques of amazing complexity. Every minutest architectural detail had been carved out of the solid gold dyke that had formed the city; nothing had been added to fill out any port

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"SONS OF THE PROPHET, SLAY!"

The Olema shook an emphatic head of negation. " Yafta Allah! " he exclaimed, using the absolute, decisive formula of refusal in Arab bargaining. "This gold of ours is sacred. The angel Jibrail himself struck the Iron Mountains with his wing, at the same hour when the Black Stone fell from Paradise, and caused the gold to gush out. It is not earthly gold, but the gold of angels. "Not one grain can be taken from El Barr. The curses of Jehannun, of Eblis, rest on Arab or Ajam who dare attempt it. S

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WAR IN THE DEPTHS

Horrible, unreal as a fever-born nightmare in its sudden frenzy, the Arab's attack drove in at them. The golden passageway flung from wall to wall screams, curses in shrill barbaric voices, clangor of steel whirled from scabbards, echoes of shots loud-roaring in that narrow space. Bara Miyan's pistol, struck up by the woman's hand, spat fire over the Master's head just as the Olema himself went down with blood spurting from a jugular severed by the major's bullet. The Olema's gaudy burnous crims

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INTO THE JEWEL-CRYPT

It was time some exit should be discovered. The tumult had notably increased, at the barred entrance. The staples could not hold, much longer. The Legionaries pressed forward. At the far end of the chamber, another door was indeed visible; smaller than the first, low, almost square, and let into a deep recess in the elaborately carved wall of gold. Barefooted, in their socks, or some still in slippers, they reached this door. A little silence fell on them, as they inspected it. One man coughed,

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THE JEWEL HOARD

Men do strange things, at times, when confronted by experiences entirely outside even the limits of imagination. At sight of the perfectly overwhelming masses of wealth that lay there in square pits chiseled out of the solid gold, most of the Legionaries reacted like men drunk or mad. The hoard before them was enough to unbalance reason. Leclair began to curse with amazing fluency in French and Arabic, while his orderly fell into half-hysterical prayer. Bristol—stolid Englishman though he was—ha

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BOHANNAN BECOMES A MILLIONAIRE

Like men in a dream, after the first wild emotions had died, the Legionaries peered down into this sea of light. Smoke from the lamps rose toward the dim, low-arched roof. Blood from the Maghrabi's wounds slowly spread and clotted on the golden floor. Without, a confused murmur told of resuming preparations to smash in the door. And through it all, the dry clicking of the gems made itself audible, as the major sifted them with shaking fingers. "Well, men," the Master laughed dryly, "here they ar

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A WAY OUT?

The woman stood pointing into a black recess at the far end of the crypt. All that the Master could discern there, at first, was a darkness even greater than that which shrouded the corners of the vault. "Light, here!" he commanded. Ferrara swung a lamp, by its chain, into the recess. They saw a low, square opening in the wall of dull, gleaming metal. "A passage, eh?" the Master ejaculated. "Maybe a cul-de-sac ," she answered. "But—there's no telling—it may lead somewhere." "By Allah! Men! Here—

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THE RIVER OF NIGHT

The major's clenched fist was caught as it drove, by a scientific guard from the Master's right. The Master dropped his lamp, and with a straight left-hander sprawled Bohannan on the slimy pave. Impersonally he stood over the crazed Celt. "Will you jump, voluntarily," demanded he, "or shall we be under the painful necessity of having to throw you down that pit?" Enough rationality remained in the major to spur his pride. He crawled to his feet, chastened. "You win, sir," he answered. "Who goes f

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THE DESERT

The Desert. Four men, one woman. Save for these five living creatures, all was death. All was that great emptiness which the Arabs call "La Siwa Hu"—that is to say, the land "where there is none but He." Over terrible spaces, over immense listening silences of hard, unbroken dunes extending in haggard desolation to fantastic horizons of lurid ardor, hung a heat-quivering air of deathlike stillness. Redder than blood, a blistering sun-ball was losing itself behind far, iron hills of black basalt.

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"WHERE THERE IS NONE BUT ALLAH"

An hour after sundown, four Legionaries pushed westward, driving the gaunt, mange-stained camels. In the sand near the wady lay buried Leclair and all the camel-drivers, with the sand smoothed over them so as to leave as little trace as possible. Leclair had come to the death of all deaths he would have most abominated, death by ruse at the hands of an Arab. Not all his long experience with Arabs had prevented him from bending over a dead camel-driver. The dead man had suddenly revived from his

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TORTURE

How that day passed, they knew not. Nature is kind. When agony grows too keen, the All-mother veils the tortured body with oblivion. Over blood-colored stretches swept by the volcano-breath of the desert, through acacia barrens and across basaltic ridges the two lonely figures struggled on and on. They fell, rested, slept a nightmare sleep under the furious heat, got up again and dragged themselves once more along. Now they were conscious of plains all whitened with saltpeter, now of scudding sa

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CHAPTER LII

"Thálassa! Thálassa!" Another of those horrible, red mornings, with a brass circle of horizon flaming all around in the most extraordinary fireworks topped by an azure zenith, found them still crawling south-westwards making perhaps a mile an hour. Disjointed words and sentences kept framing themselves in the man's mind; above all, a sentence he had read long ago in Greek, somewhere. Where had he read that? Oh, in Xenophon, of course. In The Retreat of the Ten Thousand. The Master gulped it alou

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THE GREATER TREASURE

New York, months later. Spring had long departed—the spring of the year in which the Eagle of the Air had flung itself aloft from the Palisades, freighted with such vast hopes. Summer was past and gone. The sparkling wine of autumn had already begun to bubble in the cup of the year. Sunset, as when this tale began. Sunset, bronzing the observatory of Niss'rosh , on top of the huge skyscraper. Two of the Legionaries—a woman and a man—were watching that sunset from the western windows of that room

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