BIGGLES – SECRET AGENT

by Captain W. E. Johns

XIV. BIGGLES GOES TO PRENZEL (Pages 229 – 242)

When Biggles left the others he had a plan. Knowing there was a regular service operated by Planet Airways, running between Prenzel and Croydon, via Hamburg. There was a passenger plane at nine in the morning and a mail plane at midnight. Biggles was going to purloin the mail plane. Prenzel was forty miles away so he returned to the car they had abandoned in the wood. Here he kicks off the ‘G.B.’ plate and uses moist earth to rub over the number-plate. At the village of Garenwald a red lamp is waved in front of him but he does not stop and a bullet is fired that goes through his windscreen. Stopping at a cinema at the next small town, Biggles leaves his car and steals a big car of unknown make. Two policemen are in the act of putting a pole across the road and they try to stop him but they have to jump aside as he drives through. Biggles knows the airport is some four or five miles outside of Prenzel. Passing through another village, Biggles finds a barricade in the road which he smashes through, knocking one headlight off and leaving the other knocked sideways. The light blazing at an angle of forty-five degrees gives Biggles a false sense of direction, with the result that he knocks an approaching policeman off his bicycle, before he can switch the light off. Two shots hit the back of his car as he drives, hooting frantically, “for there were several people about, and he had no wish to kill an innocent party”. Onwards, he races, to the airport, and as he reaches it, he abandons the car in a corn field. Biggles then gets out and runs to the boundary lights of the aerodrome. By five to twelve he is near the hangars and sees a twin-engined Lockheed Electra, bearing British registration letters and the ‘arrow and globe’ insignia of Planet Airways – the London-bound mail plane. Biggles gets to the cabin door as the two pilots arrive. Biggles does not recognise them but takes them into his confidence, explaining that he is a British agent and he has vital information to get home and the frontiers are closed. Not getting the help he seeks, Biggles distracts the pilots and punches a mechanic under the jaw and gets in the plane, just missing walking into a spinning propeller blade. (Without warning he hit the nearest mechanic under the jaw - is the illustration on page 241). Inside the aircraft is the wireless operator but Biggles “pushed his hand into the man’s face and flung him backwards into his seat” and gets in the pilot’s seat and pushes the throttle open. The wireless operator tries to tackle Biggles by grabbing him from behind. “Look out, you fool, you’ll kill us both!” yelled Biggles. Biggles tells the wireless operator he is a British agent and takes off and heads on a course for Unterhamstadt.