Читать книгу The Boy Aviators on Secret Service; Or, Working with Wireless - Goldfrap John Henry - Страница 1

“Come in!”

The gray-haired man who uttered these words gazed sharply up at the door of the private office of the Secretary of the Navy’s Bureau, at Washington, D. C., as he spoke. He was evidently anticipating callers of more than usual importance judging from his expectant look. The old negro who had knocked opened the door and respectfully stood waiting.

“Well, Pinckney?”

“Dey have come, sah.”

“Ah; good, – show them in at once.”

The old negro bowed respectfully and withdrew. A few seconds later he reappeared and ushered in two bright looking youths of sixteen and fourteen with the announcement in a pompous tone of voice:

“Messrs. Frank and Harry Chester.”

Frank, the elder of the two brothers, was a well set up youngster with crisp, wavy brown hair and steady gray eyes. Harry, his junior by two years, had the same cool eyes but with a merrier expression in them. He, like Frank, was a well-knit, broad-shouldered youth. Both boys were tanned to an almost mahogany tinge for they had only returned a few days before from Nicaragua, where they had passed through a series of strange adventures and perils in their air-ship, the Golden Eagle, perhaps, before her destruction in an electric storm, the best known craft of her kind in the world and one which they had built themselves from top plane to landing wheels.

The Secretary of the Navy, for such was the office held by the gray-haired man, looked at the two youths in front of him with some perplexity for a moment.

“You are the Boy Aviators we have all heard so much of?” he inquired at length with a note of frank incredulity in his voice.

“We are, sir,” rejoined Frank, with just the ghost of a smile playing about his lips at the great man’s evident astonishment – and its equally evident cause.

“I beg your pardon,” hastily spoke up the Secretary of the Navy, who had observed Frank’s amusement; “but you seem – ”

“I know what you were thinking, sir,” interrupted Frank, “that we are very young to undertake such exacting service as Admiral Kimball outlined to us in Nicaragua.”

“You have guessed just right, my boy,” rejoined the other, with a hearty laugh at Frank’s taking his thoughts and putting them into such exact words, “but your youth has evidently not interfered with your progress if all the reports I have heard of you are true. Sit down,” he went on, “and we will talk over the proposal the Department has to make to you.”

The boys set down their straw hats and seated themselves in two chairs facing the grizzled official. Both listened attentively as he began.

“When Admiral Kimball wrote to me about you, telling me that he had found in the two sons of Planter Chester of Nicaragua the very agents we wanted for a particularly dangerous and difficult mission,” he said, “I at once sent for you to come here from New York to see for myself if his judgment was correct. I have not been disappointed – ”

The boys colored with pleasure.

“My brief observation of you has confirmed to my mind his report and I am going to entrust to you the responsibility of this undertaking. Now,” he went on impressively, “the government has been experimenting for some time in secret with Chapinite, a new explosive of terrific power, the invention – as its name makes apparent – of Lieut. Bob Chapin of the United States Navy. I say ‘has been experimenting’ advisedly. It is so no more.

“The formula of the explosive has disappeared from the archives of the department and, what is still more serious, Lieutenant Chapin himself is missing.”

“The agents of the Secret Service force have worked in vain on the case without discovering much more than the one very important fact that the government of a far Eastern power has recently been experimenting with an explosive whose effects and manifestations make it almost undoubted that the stuff is Chapinite. By a tedious process of observation and deduction the men have traced the shipments as far as the west Florida coast but there all clues have ended. Weeks of work have left us as much in the dark as ever as to the location of the source of supply of the far Eastern power. But that somewhere within the untracked wildernesses of the Everglades a plant has been set up in which Chapinite is being manufactured in large quantities is a practical certainty to my mind.

“It is useless for the secret service men to attempt to explore what is still an unmapped labyrinth of swamp and jungle and above all it would occupy time. What we have to do is to act quickly. I racked my brain for days until I happened to come across a paragraph in a newspaper calling attention to your wonderful flights in the Golden Eagle, and then followed Admiral Kimball’s dispatch. It struck me at once that here indeed was a way of locating these men that might prove feasible – I say ‘might’ because if you boys accept the commission I do not want to absolutely impose the condition of success upon you. All that we shall expect of you is that you will do your best.

“Will you accept the assignment?”

The blunt question almost took the boys off their feet so to speak. They exchanged glances and then Frank said:

“As you perhaps know, sir, our first aeroplane, the Golden Eagle– ”

“In which you rescued William Barnes, a newspaper correspondent, from a camp in which he was held prisoner,” remarked the Secretary – “you see I have followed your doings closely.”

“Exactly,” went on Frank; “that first Golden Eagle is at the bottom of the sea. She went down when we were driven off the land in a tropical electric storm and it was only the fact that she was equipped with wireless, with which we signaled a passing steamer, that saved us from sharing her fate.

“We might, however, construct a second one. In fact I have the designs partially drawn up. She would be a more powerful craft than the first and capable of even longer sustained flights.”

“The very thing!” exclaimed his listener enthusiastically, “then you will accept the commission?”

“I have not yet said that we would,” rejoined Frank, calmly. “As you have described the situation it looks rather like a wild-goose chase; however, I think that if my brother agrees that we might consent to try to do our best.”

“Of course I agree, Frank,” cried Harry enthusiastically. The very mention of anything that promised exciting adventures was sufficient to enlist Harry’s ardent interest.

“Then it is as good as settled,” concluded the Secretary. “The thing is now, how long will it take you to build this craft?”

“We shall require at least three weeks,” replied Frank.

The Secretary almost groaned.

“It is a long time – or at least it seems so,” he corrected, “when there is so much at stake.”

“It would be quite impossible to construct a suitable aeroplane in a lesser period;” rejoined Frank, with finality in his tones.

“Then I suppose we shall have to exercise patience,” remarked the secretary. “You will of course need funds. How much shall you require do you suppose?”

“We cannot build a second Golden Eagle for less than ten thousand dollars to start with,” was the quiet reply.

“Ten thousand dollars?” repeated the secretary, in tones of amazement.

“It does sound like a good deal of money,” replied Frank, “but if you were more familiar with aeroplane construction you would see that it is not exorbitant. Everything that enters into the construction of an air craft must be of the very best and strongest material. The engine alone is a heavy item of expense and besides must be of specially prepared metals and hand machined.”

“I see,” replied the secretary. “You know best. I will see that arrangements are made to provide you with everything you require. Where do you intend to build the ship?”

“There is a place at White Plains, some miles out from the town and back in the hills,” replied Frank, “that is in every way suited for our purpose. It is off any main road and we can work there in quiet. We built the first Golden Eagle there and I don’t think that outside of ourselves and our workmen half a dozen people knew about it.”

“The very thing,” replied the secretary. “Of course I need not impress upon you the importance of absolute secrecy in this matter. We have almost positive proof that our every movement is watched by agents of those who have stolen the plans, and who now have Lieutenant Chapin a prisoner – that is, if they have not made away with him, poor fellow. My own idea is, however, that he has been kidnapped and forced to take charge of the work, as without his direction it would be impossible, even with the aid of the formula, to manufacture the explosive. What I fear is, that after they have made a sufficient quantity to stock up the arsenals of the far Eastern power they will destroy their plant and end Lieutenant Chapin’s life. You see the explosive is so powerful that even a small quantity would make the nation possessing it extremely formidable, therefore it is not likely that wherever they have set up their plant they are figuring on a permanent location.”

“What is the last trace you have of the plotters?” asked Frank.

For answer the secretary pressed a bell that stood on his table at his elbow. When in response the bowing old negro appeared he said sharply:

“Send Flynn here.”

Flynn turned out to be a thick-set, red-faced man with the neck of a bull and powerful physique. He was one of the most trusted men in the Secret Service Bureau.

“Flynn,” said the secretary when the detective had introduced his huge bulk, “these young men are Frank and Harry Chester, the Boy Aviators, they are going to take up your work where you left it off.”

“Only because we were up against a dead wall,” protested the agent.

“Quite so – quite so; I meant no offence. I know that you did all it was humanly possible to accomplish. What I want you to do now is to outline to these young men the discoveries you made following the morning on which we found the safe opened and the plans gone, – to be followed a few hours later by the discovery that Lieutenant Chapin had also vanished.”

“Well,” said Flynn, “cutting out the minor details we discovered that the very same day a big white yacht had cleared from New York without papers and had headed toward the south. We traced her up and found that she had been bought by a Mr. Brownjohn of Beaver Street. We looked him up and found he was a ship broker who had bought the craft on telegraphed instructions from Washington. We trailed up the telegram and found that it had been sent from the Hotel Willard by a Captain Mortimer Bellman, who, from what we can find out about him, was considerable of an adventurer and had at one time lived a good deal in the far East. In fact he had only recently come from there. At the Marine Basin at Ulmer Park, near Coney Island, we discovered that a nondescript sort of a crew had been hustled on board and that the yacht had sailed at night without papers a few hours after her purchase was completed.

“Ten days later the newspapers reported that a large yacht had gone ashore on one of the Ten Thousand Islands on the west coast of the Everglades, and the men we sent down there to investigate discovered that the derelict was the Mist, – the same yacht that Bellman had bought. What was most remarkable, however, was that the boat seemed to have been deliberately wrecked, for everything had been taken off her except her coal and ballast and all the boats were gone. There was no indication that she had been abandoned in a hurry and the reef on which she lay was such an obvious one that even at high water it was clearly visible. Now that the Mist’s boats went into the Everglades we are reasonably sure. If they had gone anywhere else we should have got some trace of them by this time, but from that day to this we have not had a word or sign concerning them.”

“We have heard, however, that the navy of the power we suspect has been conducting experiments with a new explosive and we have also learned that this same explosive is undoubtedly Chapinite. We have looked up Bellman’s record and find that while he was stopping at the Willard he received several letters from the government in question and that he paid twenty thousand dollars for the Mist. Now a man isn’t going to pay that much out for a boat and wreck her unless he does it purposely. Bellman didn’t have that much money anyhow. There is only one conclusion, Bellman was simply the agent for some one else and that some one has got a lot of money to spend to secure the most powerful explosive ever discovered.”

“There you have the case in a nutshell,” remarked the secretary as Flynn concluded.

“There is only one thing that is not clear to me,” objected Frank. “Why should they make the stuff in the Everglades. Why not manufacture it out and out in the country you have mentioned?”

“Such a course would have been too full of risks,” replied the secretary, “we are at peace with that power and if the stolen formula had been discovered there it would have led to a serious international breach and possibly war. By manufacturing it here and shipping it secretly in small quantities the plotters secure safety from war to their own country.”

“I see,” nodded Frank. He pulled out his watch. It was twelve o’clock. “There is a train to New York at one o’clock,” he said.

“Won’t you stop and have lunch with me?” asked the secretary.

“No, thank you,” was the boys’ reply; “you see we have a lot of work before us. Building an aeroplane in three weeks calls for some tall hustling.”