BIGGLES – SECRET AGENT

by Captain W. E. Johns

IX. A GRIM DISCOVERY (Pages 147 – 159)

Biggles shins his torch into the hole and the light reveals a flight of stones steps leading downwards. They hear the door to their room next door being forced open. Going down the steps, they find themselves in a gloomy cave with bricked arches. “It was damp; in places it was wet, for the moisture had seeped through the roof to fall on a slimy green floor, or into patches of grotesque fungus that clung to the walls”. Biggles thinks the tunnel must lead to the castle and, at long last, after rising steeply for a short distance, at a point where there has been heavy subsidence, they come to a massive door barred with iron. Not able to get through, Biggles sits down to think and Ginger turns the torch off. They hear a slight sound and realise the bedroom trap-door has been opened and dropped back into place. Someone is coming down the tunnel! Biggles uses the torch to examine the fallen masonry and discovers a cavity on top of the bricks. They can hide there. At the top of the pile they find a recess at the back of which there is another tunnel. A party of two of three people come along the main tunnel and knock on the door. The door is unlocked to admit them, then shut and relocked. Biggles and Ginger explore their new found tunnel which is a good deal narrower than the previous one, it would more correctly be called a corridor. The stone wall changes to wood as they go along and Ginger finds a spy hole into a huge hall furnished as an office. Erich von Stalhein is sat at a large carved desk. In front of him, flanked by two grey-shirted storm-troopers is a prisoner. It was Algy. (It was Algy - is the illustration on page 157).