BIGGLES IN THE
ORIENT
By Captain W.
E. Johns
XVII. THE
END OF THE TRAIL (Pages
170 - 180)
Biggles runs down the steps and finds
Taffy Hughes and Johnny Crisp. Taffy has
been stabbed in the leg. Biggles runs to
the lorry where Ferocity Ferris is on guard but he has seen nobody. Bertie and Tex had gone to grab Larapindi's car and Biggles runs
down the side street to where the car is parked. Here he finds Tex holding the native driver
of the car at gunpoint. Tex says "a
little feller in European clothes shot out of a side door. When we shouted to him to stop
he had a crack at us and then bolted towards the river. Bertie went after him". Biggles runs to a long wharf at the rear of
the warehouse and hears shots. Larapindi has got away in a powerful motor-boat. Biggles returns to Larapindi's
car and tells his team to call an ambulance for Taffy and then drive the lorry
up-stream to try and stop Larapindi getting to the aircraft
hanger he knows he has somewhere up the river. Biggles then races off to Dum Dum
airfield. "In the short drive that
followed Biggles took risks which in the ordinary way he would have considered
unjustifiable". Biggles climbs into
the cockpit of a Spitfire and then flies up the river. Seeing lights on the ground, Biggles realises
the lorry is signalling to him and he flies towards it, almost colliding with
the Gull that is Larapindi's aircraft. To Biggles surprise, someone in the cabin
opens fire on him with a machine-gun, presumably a mobile one. Biggles shoots the plane down. Biggles cruises back to the airfield and then
goes out in the ambulance to the crash site.
Two bodies are in the wreck. Larapindi and his pilot.
Biggles meets with Air Commodore Raymond who says that five Japanese
airmen have been found hiding in the warehouse.
It must have been a rendezvous for enemy pilots forced down on the
British side of the lines. Additionally,
Larapindi's safe has interesting contents. He had done a deal with the Japanese for a
high political position in India should the country be taken by Japan. Biggles confirms that Mackail,
Harcourt and Taffy, his injured pilots, are all right. (The book finishes with an error. "I want to have a little wager with
Tug" says Biggles. "I am going
to bet him that the hole in my arm is deeper than the
one in his leg". But it was
Taffy who was stabbed in the leg and not Tug, who was unharmed. The error remains in all versions of the book
up until the 1992 Red Fox paperback when the line was corrected to refer to
Taffy).