Where Eagles Dare

Where Eagles Dare Alistair MacLean The classic World War II thriller from the acclaimed master of action and suspense. Now reissued in a new cover style.One winter night, seven men and a woman are parachuted onto a mountainside in wartime Germany. Their objective: an apparently inaccessible castle, headquarters of the Gestapo. Their mission: to rescue a crashed American general before the Nazi interrogators can force him to reveal secret D-Day plans. Where Eagles Dare Alistair Maclean Copyright (#ulink_5f78a044-a307-5978-b7d0-6e6098815f6b) HarperCollinsPublisbers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) Previously published in paperback by HarperCollins 1994 and by Fontana 1969 First published in Great Britain by Collins 1967 Copyright © Devoran Trustees Ltd. 1967 Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. 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The decibel-level, Smith calculated, must have been about that found in a boiler factory, and one, moreover, that was working on overtime rates, while the shaking cold in that cramped, instrument-crowded flight-deck was positively Siberian. On balance, he reflected, he would have gone for the Siberian boiler factory any time because, whatever its drawbacks, it wasn’t liable to fall out of the sky or crash into a mountainside which, in his present circumstances, seemed a likely enough, if not imminent contingency for all that the pilot of their Lancaster bomber appeared to care to the contrary. Smith looked away from the darkly opaque world beyond the windscreens where the wipers fought a useless battle with the driving snow and looked again at the man in the left-hand captain’s seat. Wing Commander Cecil Carpenter was as completely at home in his environment as the most contented oyster in his shell in Whitstable Bay. Any comparison with a Siberian boiler factory he would have regarded as the ravings of an unhinged mind. Quite clearly, he found the shuddering vibration as soothing as the ministrations of the gentlest of masseurs, the roar of the engines positively soporific and the ambient temperature just right for a man of his leisured literary tastes. Before him, at a comfortable reading distance, a book rested on a hinged contraption which he had swung out from the cabin’s side. From what little Smith could occasionally see of the lurid cover, depicting a blood-stained knife plunged into the back of a girl who didn’t seem to have any clothes on, the Wing Commander held the more serious contemporary novelists in a fine contempt. He turned a page. ‘Magnificent,’ he said admiringly. He puffed deeply on an ancient briar that smelt like a fumigating plant. ‘By heavens, this feller can write. Banned, of course, young Tremayne’—this to the fresh-faced youngster in the co-pilot’s seat—‘so I can’t let you have it till you grow up.’ He broke off, fanned the smoke-laden air to improve the visibility, and peered accusingly at his co-pilot. ‘Flying Officer Tremayne, you have that look of pained apprehension on your face again.’ ‘Yes, sir. That’s to say, no, sir.’ ‘Part of the malaise of our time,’ Carpenter said sorrowfully. ‘The young lack so many things, like appreciation of a fine pipe tobacco or faith in their commanding officers.’ He sighed heavily, carefully marked the place in his book, folded the rest away and straightened in his seat. ‘You’d think a man would be entitled to some peace and quiet on his own flight-deck.’ He slid open his side-screen. An icy gust of snow-laden wind blew into the flight-deck, carrying with it the suddenly deepened roar from the engines. Carpenter grimaced and thrust his head outside, shielding his eyes with a gauntleted right hand. Five seconds later he shook his head dispiritedly, screwed his eyes shut as he winced in what appeared to be considerable pain, withdrew his head, closed the screen, brushed the snow away from his flaming red hair and magnificent handlebar moustache, and twisted round to look at Smith. ‘It is no small thing, Major, to be lost in a blizzard in the night skies over war-torn Europe.’ ‘Not again, sir,’ Tremayne said protestingly. ‘No man is infallible, my son.’ Smith smiled politely. ‘You mean you don’t know where we are, sir?’ ‘How should I?’ Carpenter slid down in his seat, half-closed his eyes and yawned vastly. ‘I’m only the driver. We have a navigator and the navigator has a radar set and I’ve no faith in either of them.’ ‘Well, well,’ Smith shook his head. ‘To think that they lied to me at the Air Ministry. They told me you’d flown some three hundred missions and knew the continent better than any taxi driver knows his London.’ ‘A foul canard put about by unfriendly elements who are trying to prevent me from getting a nice safe job behind a desk in London.’ Carpenter glanced at his watch. ‘I’ll give you exactly thirty minutes’ warning before we shove you out over the dropping zone.’ A second glance at his watch and a heavy frown. ‘Flying Officer Tremayne, your gross dereliction of duty is endangering the entire mission.’ ‘Sir?’ An even deeper apprehension in Tremayne’s face. ‘I should have had my coffee exactly three minutes ago.’ ‘Yes, sir. Right away, sir.’ Smith smiled again, straightened from his cramped position behind the pilots’ seats, left the flight-deck and moved aft into the Lancaster’s fuselage. Here in this cold, bleak and forbidding compartment, which resembled nothing so much as an iron tomb, the impression of the Siberian boiler factory was redoubled. The noise level was so high as to be almost intolerable, the cold was intense and metal-ribbed metal walls, dripping with condensation, made no concessions whatsoever to creature comfort. Nor did the six metal-framed canvas seats bolted to the floor, functionalism gone mad. Any attempt to introduce those sadistically designed instruments of torture in HM penitentiaries would have caused a national outcry. Huddled in those six chairs sat six men, probably, Smith reflected, the six most miserable men he’d ever seen. Like himself, each of the six was dressed in the uniform of the German Alpine Corps. Like himself, each man wore two parachutes. All were shivering constantly, stamping their feet and beating their arms, and their frozen breath hung heavy in the ice-chill air. Facing them, along the upper starboard side of the fuselage, ran a taut metal wire which passed over the top of the doorway. On to this wire were clipped snap-catches, wires from which led down to folded parachutes resting on top of an assortment of variously shaped bundles, the contents of only one of which could be identified by the protruding ends of several pairs of skis. The nearest parachutist, a dark intense man with Latin features, looked up at Smith’s arrival. He had never, Smith thought, seen Edward Carraciola look quite so unhappy. ‘Well?’ Carraciola’s voice was just as unhappy as his face. ‘I’ll bet he’s no more bloody idea where we are than I have.’ ‘He does seem to navigate his way across Europe by opening his window and sniffing the air from time to time,’ Smith admitted. ‘But I wouldn’t worry—’ He broke off as a sergeant air-gunner entered from the rear, carrying a can of steaming coffee and enamel mugs. ‘Neither would I, sir.’ The sergeant smiled tolerantly. ‘The Wing Commander has his little ways. Coffee, gentlemen? Back at base he claims that he reads detective novels all the time and depends upon one of the gunners telling him from time to time where we are.’ Smith cradled frozen hands round the coffee mug. ‘Do you know where we are?’ ‘Of course, sir.’ He seemed genuinely surprised, then nodded to the metal rungs leading to the upper machine-gun turret. ‘Just nip up there, sir, and look down to your right.’ Smith lifted an enquiring eyebrow, handed over his mug, climbed the ladder and peered down to his right through the Perspex dome of the turret cupola. For a few seconds only the darkness filled his eyes then gradually, far below and seen dimly through the driving snow, he could make out a ghostly luminescence in the night, a luminescence which gradually resolved itself into a criss-cross pattern of illuminated streets. For a brief moment only Smith’s face registered total disbelief then quickly returned to its normal dark stillness. ‘Well, well.’ He retrieved his coffee. ‘Somebody should tell them down there. The lights are supposed to be out all over Europe.’ ‘Not in Switzerland, sir,’ the sergeant explained patiently. ‘That’s Basle.’ ‘Basle?’ Smith stared at him. ‘Basle! Good God, he’s gone seventy or eighty miles off course. The flight plan routed us north of Strasbourg.’ ‘Yes, sir.’ The sergeant air-gunner was unabashed. ‘The Wing Commander says he doesn’t understand flight plans.’ He grinned, half apologetically. ‘To tell the truth, sir, this is our milk-run into the Vorarlberg. We fly east along the Swiss frontier, then south of Schaffhausen—’ ‘But that’s over Swiss territory!’ ‘Is it? On a clear night you can see the lights of Zurich. They say Wing Commander Carpenter has a room permanently reserved for him there in the Baur-au-Lac.’ ‘What?’ ‘He says if it’s a choice between a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany and internment in Switzerland he knows which side of the frontier he’s coming down on…After that we fly down the Swiss side of Lake Constance, turn east at Lindau, climb to eight thousand to clear the mountains and it’s only a hop, skip and jump to the Weissspitze.’ ‘I see,’ Smith said weakly. ‘But—but don’t the Swiss object?’ ‘Frequently, sir. Their complaints always seem to coincide with the nights we’re around those parts. Wing Commander Carpenter claims it’s some ill-intentioned Luftwaffe pilot trying to discredit him.’ ‘What else?’ Smith asked, but the sergeant was already on his way to the flight-deck. The Lancaster lurched as it hit an infrequent air pocket, Smith grabbed a rail to steady himself and Lieutenant Morris Schaffer, of the American Office of Strategic Services and Smith’s second-in-command, cursed fluently as the better part of a cup of scalding coffee emptied itself over his thigh. ‘That’s all I need,’ he said bitterly. ‘I’ve no morale left. I wish to God we would crash-land in Switzerland. Think of all those lovely Wiener-schnitzels and Apfelstrudels. After a couple of years living among you Limeys, Spam and powdered eggs and an ounce of margarine a day, that’s what Mama Schaffer’s little boy requires. Building up.’ ‘You’d also live a damn’ sight longer, friend,’ Carraciola observed morosely. He transferred his gaze to Smith, gave him a long considering look. ‘The whole set-up stinks, Major.’ ‘I don’t think I understand,’ Smith said quietly. ‘Suicidal, is what I mean. What a bunch. Just look at us.’ He gestured to the three men sitting nearest to him on his left: Olaf Christiansen, a flaxen-haired first cousin of Leif Ericsson, Lee Thomas, a short dark Welshman—both those men seemed slightly amused—and Torrance-Smythe, as languidly aristocratic-looking as any ci-devant French count that ever rode a tumbrel, a doleful ex-Oxford don who clearly wished he were back among the University cloisters. ‘Christiansen, Thomas, old Smithy and myself. We’re just a bunch of civil servants, filing clerks—’ ‘I know very well what you are,’ Smith said quietly. ‘Or yourself.’ In the de-synchronized thunder of the engines the soft-voiced interruption had gone unnoticed. ‘A major in the Black Watch. No doubt you cut quite a dash playing the bagpipes at El Alamein, but why the hell you to command us? No offence. But this is no more in your line than it is ours. Or Lieutenant Schaffer here. An airborne cowboy—’ ‘I hate horses,’ Schaffer said loudly. ‘That’s why I had to leave Montana.’ ‘Or take George here.’ Carraciola jerked a thumb in the direction of the last member of the party, George Harrod, a stocky army sergeant radio-operator with an expression of profound resignation on his face. ‘I’ll bet he’s never as much as made a parachute jump in his life before.’ ‘I have news for you,’ Harrod said stoically. ‘I’ve never even been in a plane before.’ ‘He’s never even been in a plane before,’ Carraciola said despairingly. ‘My God, what a bunch of no-hopers! All we need is a team composed of specialist Alpinists, Commandos, mountaineers and safe-breakers and what do we have?’ He shook his head slowly. ‘We have us.’ Smith said gently: ‘We were all the Colonel could get. Be fair. He told us yesterday that the one thing in the world that he didn’t have was time.’ Carraciola made no reply, none of the others spoke, but Smith didn’t have to be any clairvoyant to know what was in the minds of all of them. They were thinking what he was thinking, like himself they were back several hours in time and several hundred miles in space in that Admiralty Operations Room in London where Vice-Admiral Rolland, ostensibly Assistant Director of Naval Operations but in fact the long-serving head of MI6, the counter-espionage branch of the British Secret Service, and his deputy, Colonel Wyatt-Turner, had gravely and reluctantly briefed them on what they had as gravely and reluctantly admitted to be a mission born from the sheerest desperation. ‘Deucedly sorry and all that, chaps, but time is of the essence.’ Wyatt-Turner, a big, red-faced, heavily moustached colonel, tapped his cane against a wall-map of Germany, pointing to a spot just north of the Austrian border and a little west of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. ‘Our man was brought down here at 2 a.m. this morning but SHAEF, in their all-knowing wisdom, didn’t let us know until 10 a.m. Damned idiots! Damned idiots for not letting us know until so late and double-damned idiots for ignoring our advice in the first place. Gad, will they never learn to listen to us?’ He shook his head in anger, tapped the map again. ‘Anyway, he’s here. Schloss Adler. The castle of the eagle. Believe me, it’s well named, only an eagle could get there. Our job—’ Smith said: ‘How are you so sure he’s there, sir?’ ‘We’re sure. Mosquito he was in crash-landed only ten miles away. The pilot got off a radio message just before a German patrol closed in.’ He paused, smiled grimly, continued: ‘Schloss Adler, Major Smith, is the combined HQ of the German Secret Service and the Gestapo in South Germany. Where else would they take him?’ ‘Where indeed? How was he brought down, sir?’ ‘Through the most damnable ill-luck. We carried out a saturation raid on N?rnberg last night and there shouldn’t have been a German fighter within a hundred miles of the Austrian border. But a wandering Messerschmitt patrol got him. That’s unimportant. What’s important is getting him out before he talks.’ ‘He’ll talk,’ Thomas said sombrely. ‘They all do. Why did they disregard our advice, sir? We told them two days ago.’ ‘The whys don’t matter,’ Wyatt-Turner said tiredly. ‘Not any more. The fact that he’ll talk does. So we get him out. You get him out.’ Torrance-Smythe cleared his throat delicately. ‘There are paratroops, sir.’ ‘Scared, Smithy?’ ‘Naturally, sir.’ ‘The Schloss Adler is inaccessible and impregnable. It would require a battalion of paratroops to take it.’ ‘Of course,’ Christiansen said, ‘the fact that there’s no time to mount a massed paratroop attack has no bearing on the matter.’ Christiansen appeared positively cheerful, the proposed operation obviously appealed vastly to him. Wyatt-Turner gave him the benefit of his icy blue stare then decided to ignore him. ‘Secrecy and stealth are the only hope,’ he went on. ‘And you gentlemen are—I trust—secretive and stealthy. You are experts at that and experts at survival behind enemy lines where all of you have spent considerable periods of time, Major Smith, Lieutenant Schaffer and Sergeant Harrod here in their professional capacities, the rest of you in—um—other duties. With the—’ ‘That was a damned long time ago, sir,’ Carraciola interrupted. ‘At least for Smithy, Thomas, Christiansen and myself. We’re out of touch now. We don’t know the latest developments in weapons and combat techniques. And God only knows we’re out of training. After a couple of years behind a desk it takes me all my time to run fifty yards after a bus.’ ‘You’ll have to get fit fast, won’t you?’ Wyatt-Turner said coldly. ‘Besides, what matters most is, that with the exception of Major Smith, you all have an extensive knowledge of Western Europe. You all speak fluent German. You’ll find your combat training—on the level you’ll be engaged in—as relevant today as it was five years ago. You are men with exceptional records of resourcefulness, ability and ingenuity. If anyone has a chance, you have. You’re all volunteers, of course.’ ‘Of course,’ Carraciola echoed, his face carefully deadpan. Then he looked speculatively at Wyatt-Turner. ‘There is, of course, another way, sir.’ He paused, then went on very quietly indeed. ‘A way with a hundred per cent guarantee of success.’ ‘Neither Admiral Rolland nor I claim to be infallible,’ Wyatt-Turner said slowly. ‘We have missed an alternative? You have the answer to our problems?’ ‘Yes. Whistle up a Pathfinder squadron of Lancasters with 10-ton blockbuster bombs. Do you think anyone in the Schloss Adler would ever talk again?’ ‘I don’t think so.’ Admiral Rolland spoke gently and for the first time, moving from the wall-map to join the group. Admiral Rolland always spoke gently. When you wielded the almost incredible range of power that he did, you didn’t have to talk loudly to make yourself heard. He was a short, grey-haired man, with a deeply trenched face and an air of immense authority. ‘No,’ he repeated, ‘I don’t think so. Nor do I think that your grasp of the realities of the situation is any match for your total ruthlessness. The captured man, Lieutenant General Carnaby, is an American. If we were to destroy him General Eisenhower would probably launch his Second Front against us instead of against the Germans.’ He smiled deprecatingly, as though to remove rebuke from his voice. ‘There are certain—um—niceties to be observed in our relationship with our Allies. Wouldn’t you agree?’ Carraciola didn’t agree or disagree. He had, apparently, nothing to say. Neither did anyone else. Colonel Wyatt-Turner cleared his throat. ‘That’s it then, gentlemen. Ten o’clock tonight at the airfield. No more questions, I take it?’ ‘Yes, sir, there bloody well is, begging the Colonel’s pardon, sir.’ Sergeant George Harrod not only sounded heated, he looked it, too. ‘What’s all this about? Why’s this geezer so bloody important? Why the hell do we have to risk our necks—’ ‘That’ll do, Sergeant.’ Wyatt-Turner’s voice was sharp, authoritative. ‘You know all you require to know—’ ‘If we’re sending a man to what may be his death, Colonel, I think he has the right to know why,’ Admiral Rolland interrupted gently, almost apologetically. ‘The rest know. He should too. It’s painfully simple, Sergeant. General Carnaby is the overall co-ordinator of planning for the exercise known as Operation Overlord—the Second Front. It would be absolutely true to say that he knows more about the Allied preparations for the Second Front than any man alive. ‘He set off last night to meet his opposite numbers in the Middle East, Russia and the Italian Front to co-ordinate final plans for the invasion of Europe. The rendezvous was in Crete—the only meeting point the Russians would accept. They haven’t a plane fast enough to out-run the German fighters. The British Mosquito can—but it didn’t last night.’ Silence lay heavy in the austere operations room. Harrod rubbed his hand across his eyes, then shook his head slowly, as if to clear it. When he spoke again all the truculence, all the anger had vanished from his voice. His words came very slowly. ‘And if the General talks—’ ‘He’ll talk,’ Rolland said. The voice was soft, but it carried total conviction. ‘As Mr Thomas has just said, they all talk. He won’t be able to help himself. A mixture of mescalin and scopolamine.’ ‘And he’ll tell them all the plans for the Second Front.’ The words came as from a man in a dream. ‘When, where, how—Good God, sir, we’ll have to call the whole thing off!’ ‘Precisely. We call it off. No Second Front this year. Another nine months on the war, another million lives needlessly lost. You understand the urgency, Sergeant, the sheer desperate urgency of it all?’ ‘I understand, sir. Now I understand.’ Harrod turned to Wyatt-Turner. ‘Sorry I spoke like that, sir. I’m afraid—well, I’m a bit edgy, sir.’ ‘We’re all a bit edgy, Sergeant. Well, the airfield at ten o’clock and we’ll check the equipment.’ He smiled without humour. ‘I’m afraid the uniforms may not fit too well. This is early closing day in Savile Row.’ Sergeant Harrod huddled more closely into his bucket seat, beat freezing hands against freezing shoulders, morosely surveyed his uniform, wrinkled like an elephant’s legs and about three sizes too big for him, then raised his voice above the clamour of the Lancaster’s engines. ‘Well,’ he said bitterly, ‘he was right about the bloody uniforms, anyway.’ ‘And wrong about everything else,’ Carraciola said heavily. ‘I still say we should have sent in the Lancasters.’ Smith, still standing against the starboard fuselage, lit a cigarette and eyed him speculatively. He opened his mouth to speak when it occurred to him that he had seen men in more receptive mood. He looked away without saying anything. In the flight-deck, now slid so impossibly far forward in his seat that the back of his head rested on the back of his seat, Wing Commander Carpenter was still deeply and contentedly pre-occupied with pipe, coffee and literature. Beside him, Flying Officer Tremayne was obviously failing to share his mood of pleasurable relaxation. He was, in fact, keeping a most anxious watch, his eyes constantly shifting from the instrument panel to the opaque darkness beyond the windscreen to the recumbent figure of his superior officer who appeared to be in danger of dropping off to sleep at any moment. Suddenly Tremayne sat far forward in his seat, stared for long seconds through the windscreen ahead of him then turned excitedly to Carpenter. ‘There’s Schaffhausen down there, sir!’ Carpenter groaned heavily, closed his book, swung back the hinged book-rest, finished his coffee, levered himself upright with another groan, slid open his side-screen and made an elaborate pretence of examining the loom of light far below, without, however, actually going to the lengths of exposing his face to the wind and the driving snow outside. He closed the screen and looked at Tremayne. ‘By heavens,’ he said admiringly, ‘I believe you’re right. It’s a great comfort to have you along, my boy, a great comfort.’ He switched on the intercom while Tremayne looked suitably abashed. ‘Major Smith? Yes. Thirty minutes to go.’ He switched off and turned again to Tremayne. ‘Right. South-east down the old Bodensee. And for God’s sake keep to the Swiss side.’ Smith hung up the headphones and looked quizzically at the six seated men. ‘That’s it, then. Half an hour. Let’s hope it’s warmer down there than it is up here.’ No one had any comment to make on that. No one seemed to have any hope either. Soundlessly, wordlessly, they looked without expression at one another, then pulled themselves stiffly to their frozen feet. Then very slowly, very awkwardly, their numbed hands and cramped conditions making things almost impossibly awkward for them, they prepared themselves for the drop. They helped each other strap loads on their backs, beneath the high-mounted parachutes, then struggled into their white waterproof snow trousers. Sergeant Harrod went one better. He pulled a voluminous snow-smock over his head, zipped it up with difficulty and drew the hood over his head. He turned round questioningly as a hand tapped the hummocked outline below his white smock. ‘I hardly like to say this,’ Schaffer said diffidently, ‘but I really don’t reckon your radio is going to stand the shock of landing, Sergeant.’ ‘Why not?’ Harrod looked more lugubrious than ever. ‘It’s been done before.’ ‘Not by you, it hasn’t. By my reckoning you’re going to hit the ground with a terminal velocity of a hundred and eighty miles an hour. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think you’re going to experience some difficulty in opening your chute.’ Harrod looked at him, looked at his other five smockless companions, then nodded slowly and touched his own smock. ‘You mean I put this on after we reach the ground?’ ‘Well,’ Schaffer said consideringly, ‘I really think it would help.’ He grinned at Harrod, who grinned back almost cheerfully. Even Carraciola’s lips twitched in the beginnings of a smile. The release of tension within that frozen fuselage was almost palpable. ‘Well, well, time I earned my wing-commander’s pay while you stripling pilots sit and gaze in rapt admiration.’ Carpenter studied his watch. ‘Two fifteen. Time we changed places.’ Both men unhooked their safety belts and awkwardly changed over. Carpenter fastidiously adjusted the right-hand seat’s back rest until it was exactly right for him, manoeuvred his parachute to its position of maximum comfort, fastened his seatbelt, unhooked and adjusted on his head a combined earphones and microphone set and made a switch. ‘Sergeant Johnson?’ Carpenter never bothered with the regulation call-up formalities. ‘Are you awake?’ Back in the navigator’s tiny and extremely uncomfortable recess, Sergeant Johnson was very much awake. He had been awake for hours. He was bent over a glowing greenish radar screen, his eyes leaving it only to make rapid reference to the charts, an Ordnance map, a picture and a duplicate compass, altimeter and air-speed indicator. He reached for the switch by his side. ‘I’m awake, sir.’ ‘If you fly us into the side of the Weissspitze,’ Carpenter said threateningly, ‘I’ll have you reduced to aircraftman. Aircraftman second class, Johnson.’ ‘I wouldn’t like that. I make it nine minutes, sir.’ ‘For once we’re agreed on something. So do I.’ Carpenter switched off, slid open the starboard screen and peered out. Although there was just the faintest wash of moonlight in the night sky, visibility might as well have been zero. It was a greyly opaque world, a blind world, with nothing to be seen but the thinly driving snow. He withdrew his head, brushed away the snow from his huge moustache, closed the screen, looked regretfully at his pipe and carefully put it away in his pocket. For Tremayne, the stowage of the pipe was the final proof that the Wing Commander was clearing the decks for action. He said unhappily: ‘A bit dicey, isn’t it, sir? Locating the Weissspitze in this lot, I mean?’ ‘Dicey?’ Carpenter sounded almost jovial. ‘Dicey? I don’t see why? It’s as big as a mountain. In fact, it is a mountain. We can’t miss it, my dear boy.’ ‘That’s what I mean.’ He paused, a pause with more meaning in it. ‘And this plateau on the Weissspitze that we have to drop them on. Only three hundred yards wide, sir. Mountain above it, cliff below it. And those adiabatic mountain winds, or whatever you call them, blowing in any old unpredictable direction. A fraction to the south and we’ll hit the mountain, a fraction to the north and they’ll fall down that whacking great cliff and like as not all break their necks. Three hundred yards!’ ‘What do you want?’ Carpenter demanded expansively. ‘Heathrow Airport? Three hundred yards? All the room in the world, my boy. We land this old crate on runways a tenth of that width.’ ‘Yes, sir. I’ve always found runway landing lights a great help, sir. At seven thousand feet up the side of the Weissspitze—’ He broke off as a buzzer rang. Carpenter made a switch. ‘Johnson?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ Johnson was huddled more closely than ever over his radar screen where the revolving scanner-line had picked up a white spot immediately to the right of centre of the screen. ‘I have it, sir. Right where it should be.’ He looked away from the screen and made a quick check on the compass. ‘Course oh-nine-three, sir.’ ‘Good lad.’ Carpenter smiled at Tremayne, made a tiny course alteration and began to whistle softly to himself. ‘Have a look out your window, laddie. My moustache is beginning to get all waterlogged.’ Tremayne opened his window, strained his head as far as possible, but still there was only this grey and featureless opacity. He withdrew his head, silently shook it. ‘No matter. It must be there somewhere,’ Carpenter said reasonably. He spoke into the intercom. ‘Sergeant? Five minutes. Hook up.’ ‘Hook up!’ The sergeant air-gunner repeated the order to the seven men standing in line along the starboard side of the fuselage. ‘Five minutes.’ Silently they clipped their parachute snap-catches on to the overhead wire, the sergeant air-gunner carefully checking each catch. Nearest the door and first man to jump was Sergeant Harrod. Behind him stood Lieutenant Schaffer whose experiences with the OSS had made him by far the most experienced parachutist of the group and whose unenviable task it was to keep an eye on Harrod. He was followed by Carraciola, then Smith—as leader he preferred to be in the middle of the group—then Christiansen, Thomas and Torrance-Smythe. Behind Torrance-Smythe two young aircraftmen stood ready to slide packaged equipment and parachutes along the wire and heave them out as swiftly as possible after the last man had jumped. The sergeant air-gunner took up position by the door. The tension was back in the air again. Twenty-five feet forward of where they were standing, Carpenter slid open his side-screen for the fifth time in as many minutes. The now downward drooping moustache had lost much of its splendid panache but the Wing Commander had obviously decided that there were more urgent considerations in life than waterlogged moustaches. He was wearing goggles now, continuously brushing away snow and moisture with a chamois leather, but the view ahead—or lack of view—remained obstinately the same, still that greyly driving snow looming out of and vanishing into that greyly impenetrable opacity, still nothingness. He closed the screen. A call-up buzzer rang. Carpenter made a switch, listened, nodded. ‘Three minutes,’ he said to Tremayne. ‘Oh-nine-two.’ Tremayne made the necessary minute course adjustment. He no longer looked through the side-screen, he no longer even looked at the screen ahead of him. His whole being was concentrated upon flying that big bomber, his all-exclusive attention, his total concentration, on three things only: the compass, the altimeter, and Carpenter. A degree too far to the south and the Lancaster would crash into the side of the Weissspitze: a couple of hundred feet too low and the same thing would happen: a missed signal from Carpenter and the mission was over before it had begun. The young, the absurdly young face was expressionless, the body immobile as he piloted the Lancaster with a hair-trigger precision that he had never before achieved. Only his eyes moved, in a regular, rhythmic, unvarying pattern: the compass, the altimeter, Carpenter, the compass, the altimeter, Carpenter: and never longer than a second on each. Again Carpenter slid open his side-screen and peered out. Again he had the same reward, the opacity, the grey nothingness. With his head still outside he lifted his left hand, palm downwards, and made a forward motion. Instantly Tremayne’s hand fell on the throttle levers and eased them forward. The roar of the big engines died away to a more muted thunder. Carpenter withdrew his head. If he was concerned, no trace of it showed in his face. He resumed his soft whistling, calmly, almost leisurely, scanned the instrument panel, then turned his head to Tremayne. He said conversationally: ‘When you were in flying school, ever hear tell of a strange phenomenon known as stalling speed?’ Tremayne started, glanced hurriedly at the instrument panel and quickly gave a fraction more power to the engines. Carpenter smiled, looked at his watch and pressed a buzzer twice. The bell rang above the head of the sergeant airgunner standing by the fuselage door. He looked at the tense, expectant faces before him and nodded. ‘Two minutes, gentlemen.’ He eased the door a few inches to test whether it was moving freely. With the door only fractionally open the suddenly deepened roar from the engines was startling but nowhere nearly as dismaying as the snow-laden gust of icy wind that whistled into the fuselage. The parachutists exchanged carefully expressionless glances, glances correctly interpreted by the sergeant who closed the door and nodded again. ‘I agree, gentlemen. No night for man nor beast.’ Wing Commander Carpenter, his head once again poked through the side-screen, didn’t think so either. Five seconds’ exposure to that arctic wind and driving snow and your face was full of porcupine quills: fifteen seconds and the totally numbed skin conveyed no sensation at all, it was when you withdrew your head and waited for the exquisite pain of returning circulation that the fun really started: but this time Carpenter was determined not to withdraw his head until he had complete justification for doing so: and the only justification would be the sighting of the Weissspitze. Mechanically, industriously, he rubbed the chamois leather across his goggles, stared unblinkingly into the greyly swirling gloom and hoped that he saw the Weisspitze before the Weissspitze saw him. Inside, Tremayne’s eyes continued on their rhythmic, unvarying pattern of movement: the compass, the altimeter, Carpenter, the compass, the altimeter, Carpenter. But now his gaze was resting fractionally longer on Carpenter each time, waiting for the sudden signal that would galvanize him into throwing the big Lancaster into a violent bank to port, the only avoiding action they could possibly take. Carpenter’s left hand was moving, but he wasn’t giving any signal, the fingers of his left hand were drumming gently on his knee. This, Tremayne suddenly and incredulously realized, was probably the highest state of excitement that Carpenter was capable of achieving. Ten seconds passed. Five. And another five. Tremayne was conscious that, even in that ice-cold cabin, the sweat was pouring down his face. The urge to pull the bomber away to the left, to avoid the shattering, annihilating collision that could be only seconds away now, was almost overpowering. He was aware of a fear, a fear bordering on a reason-abdicating panic, such as he had never previously guessed at, let alone experienced. And then he became aware of something else. The drumming of Carpenter’s left fingers had abruptly ceased. Carpenter had it now. It was more imagined than real, more guessed at than seen, but he had it now. Then gradually, almost imperceptibly, ahead and a little to the right of the direction of flight, he became aware of something more solidly tangible than wishful thinking beginning to materialize out of the nothingness. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t materializing any more, it was solidly, unmistakably there, the smooth, unbroken side of an almost vertically towering mountain soaring up at a dizzy 80° until it vanished in the grey darkness above. Carpenter withdrew his head, leaving the screen open this time, and pressed his head-switch. ‘Sergeant Johnson?’ The words came out stiffly, mechanically, not because of any crisis of emotion that the Wing Commander was passing through but because his entire face, lips included, was so frozen that he could no longer articulate properly. ‘Sir?’ Johnson’s voice over the intercom was disembodied, empty, but even the metallic impersonality of that single word could not disguise the bowtaut tension behind it. Carpenter said: ‘I think Flying Officer Johnson a much nicer name.’ ‘Sir?’ ‘Relax. I have it. You can go back to sleep.’ He switched off, took a quick look through the side-screen, reached up and touched an overhead switch. Above the starboard door in the fuselage, a red light came on. The sergeant air-gunner laid his hand on the door. ‘One minute, gentlemen.’ He jerked the door wide open, securing it on its standing latch, and a miniature blizzard howled into the belly of the Lancaster. ‘When the red light turns green—’ He left the sentence unfinished, partly because those few words were crystal clear in themselves, partly because he had to shout so loudly to make himself heard over the combined roar of wind and engines that any superfluity of words was only that much wasted effort. No one else said anything, mainly because of the near impossibility of making oneself heard. In any event, the parachutists’ silently exchanged glances conveyed more eloquently than words the very obvious thought that was in the minds of all of them: if it was like that inside, what the hell was it like outside? At a gesture from the sergeant, they moved up in line to the open door, Sergeant Harrod in the lead. On his face was the expression of a Christian martyr meeting his first and last lion. The Lancaster, like some great black pterodactyl from out of the primeval past, roared on through the driving snow alongside the smoothly precipitous side of the Weissspitze. That sheer wall of ice-encrusted rock seemed very close indeed. Tremayne was convinced that it was impossibly close. He stared through the still open screen by Carpenter’s head and would have sworn that the starboard wing-tip must be brushing the side of the mountain. Tremayne could still feel the sweat that bathed his face but his lips were as dry as ashes. He licked them, surreptitiously, so that Carpenter would not see him, but it didn’t do any good at all: as dry as ashes they remained. Sergeant Harrod’s lips weren’t dry, but that was only because his face was taking the full brunt of the horizontally driving snowstorm that lashed along the bomber’s fuselage. Otherwise, he shared Tremayne’s sentiments and apprehensions to a very marked degree. He stood in the doorway, gripping the fuselage on each side to hold him in position against the gale of wind, his storm-lashed face showing no fear, just a peculiarly resigned expression. His eyes were turned to the left, looking forward with an almost hypnotized fixity at that point in space where it seemed that at any second now the star-board wing-tip must strike against the Weissspitze. Inside the fuselage, the red lamp still burned. The sergeant air-gunner’s hand fell on Harrod’s shoulder in an encouraging gesture. It took Harrod all of three seconds to free himself from his thrall-like fixation with that starboard wing-tip and take a half step back inside. He reached up and firmly removed the sergeant’s hand. ‘Don’t shove, mate.’ He had to shout to make himself heard. ‘If I’m to commit suicide, let me do it in the old-fashioned way. By my own hand.’ He again took up position by the open door. At the same instant Carpenter took a last quick look through the side-screen and made the gesture that Tremayne had been waiting for, been praying for, a slight turning motion of the left hand. Quickly Tremayne banked the big bomber, as quickly straightened up again. Slowly, the mountain-side fell away. The mountain-brushing episode had been no mere bravado or folly, Carpenter had been deliberately lining up for his pre-determined course across the narrow plateau. Once again, and for the last time, he had his head outside, while his left hand slowly—interminably slowly, it seemed to Tremayne—reached up for the button on the bulkhead above the screen, located it, paused, then pressed it. Sergeant Harrod, head craned back at a neck-straining angle, saw the red light turn to green, brought his head down, screwed shut his eyes and, with a convulsive jerk of his arms, launched himself out into the snow and the darkness, not a very expert launching, for instead of jumping out he had stepped out and was already twisting in mid-air as the parachute opened. Schaffer was the next to go, smoothly, cleanly, feet and knees together, then Carraciola followed by Smith. Smith glanced down below him and his lips tightened. Just dimly visible in the greyness beneath, Harrod, a very erratic human pendulum, was swinging wildly across the sky. The parachute cords were already badly twisted and his clumsily desperate attempts to untwist them resulted only in their becoming more entangled than ever. His left-hand cords were pulled too far down, air was spilling from the parachute, and, still swaying madly, he was side-slipping to his left faster than any man Smith had ever seen side-slip a parachute before. Smith stared after the rapidly disappearing figure and hoped to God that he didn’t side-slip his way right over the edge of the precipice. Grim-faced, he stared upwards to see how the others had fared. Thank God, there was no worry there. Christiansen, Thomas and Smithy all there, so close as to be almost touching, all making perfectly normal descents. Even before the last of the parachutists, Torrance-Smythe, had cleared the doorway, the sergeant air-gunner was running towards the after end of the fuselage. Swiftly he flung aside a packing-case, dragging a tarpaulin away, reached down and pulled a huddled figure upright. A girl, quite small, with wide dark eyes and delicate features. One would have looked for the figure below to be as petite as the features, but it was enveloped in bulky clothes over which had been drawn a snow-suit. Over the snow-suit she wore a parachute. She was almost numb with cold and cramp but the sergeant had his orders. ‘Come on, Miss Ellison.’ His arm round her waist, he moved quickly towards the doorway. ‘Not a second to lose.’ He half led, half carried her there, where an aircraftman was just heaving the second last parachute and container through the doorway. The sergeant snapped the parachute catch on to the wire. Mary Ellison half-turned as if to speak to him, then turned away abruptly and dropped out into the darkness. The last parachute and container followed at once. For a long moment the sergeant stared down into the darkness. Then he rubbed his chin with the palm of his hand, shook his head in disbelief, stepped back and pulled the heavy door to. The Lancaster, its four engines still on reduced power, droned on into the snow and the night. Almost immediately, it was lost to sight and, bare seconds later, the last faint throb of its engines died away in the darkness. TWO (#ulink_6f0dcd87-5e1d-5c4f-9507-cd455db6f18c) Smith reached his hands far up into the parachute shrouds, hauled himself sharply upwards and made a perfect knees-bent, feet-together landing in about two feet of snow. The wind tugged fiercely at his parachute. He struck the quick release harness clasp, collapsed the parachute, pulled it in, rolled it up and pressed it deeply into the snow, using for weight the pack he had just shrugged off his shoulders. Down there at ground level—if seven thousand feet up on the Weissspitze could be called ground level—the snowfall was comparatively slight compared to that blizzard they’d experienced jumping from the Lancaster but, even so, visibility was almost as bad as it had been up above, for there was a twenty-knot wind blowing and the dry powdery snow was drifting quite heavily. Smith made a swift 360° sweep of his horizon but there was nothing to be seen, nobody to be seen. With fumbling frozen hands he clumsily extracted a torch and whistle from his tunic. Facing alternately east and west, he bleeped on the whistle and flashed his torch. The first to appear was Thomas, then Schaffer, then, within two minutes altogether, all of the others with the exception of Sergeant Harrod. ‘Pile your chutes there and weight them,’ Smith ordered. ‘Yes, bed them deep. Anyone seen Sergeant Harrod?’ A shaking of heads. ‘Nobody? No sight of him at all?’ ‘Last I saw of him,’ Schaffer said, ‘he was going across my bows like a destroyer in a heavy sea.’ ‘I saw a bit of that,’ Smith nodded. ‘The shrouds were twisted?’ ‘Put a corkscrew to shame. But I’d have said there was no danger of the chute collapsing. Not enough time. We were almost on the ground before I lost sight of him.’ ‘Any idea where he landed, then?’ ‘Roughly. He’ll be all right, Major. A twisted ankle, a bump on the head. Not to worry.’ ‘Use your torches,’ Smith said abruptly. ‘Spread out. Find him.’ With two men on one side of him, three on the other, all within interlocking distance of their torch beams, Smith searched through the snow, his flashlight raking the ground ahead of him. If he shared Schaffer’s optimism about Harrod, his face didn’t show it. It was set and grim. Three minutes passed and then came a shout from the right. Smith broke into a run. Carraciola it was who had called and was now standing at the farther edge of a wind-swept outcrop of bare rock, his torch shining downwards and slightly ahead. Beyond the rock the ground fell away abruptly to a depth of several feet and in this lee a deep drift had formed. Half-buried in its white depths, Sergeant Harrod lay spread-eagled on his back, his feet almost touching the rock, his face upturned to the falling snow, his eyes open. He did not seem to notice the snow falling on his eyes. They were all there now, staring down at the motionless man. Smith jumped down into the drift, dropped to his knees, slid an arm under Harrod’s shoulders and began to lift him to a sitting position. Harrod’s head lolled back like that of a broken rag doll. Smith lowered him back into the snow and felt for the pulse in the throat. Still kneeling, Smith straightened, paused for a moment with bent head then climbed wearily to his feet. ‘Dead?’ Carraciola asked. ‘He’s dead. His neck is broken.’ Smith’s face was without expression. ‘He must have got caught up in the shrouds and made a bad landing.’ ‘It happens,’ Schaffer said. ‘I’ve known it happen.’ A long pause, then: ‘Shall I take the radio, sir?’ Smith nodded. Schaffer dropped to his knees and began to fumble for the buckle of the strap securing the radio to Harrod’s back. Smith said: ‘Sorry, no, not that way. There’s a key around his neck, under his tunic. It fits the lock under the flap of the breast buckle.’ Schaffer located the key, unlocked the buckle after some difficulty, eased the straps off the dead man’s shoulders and finally managed to work the radio clear. He rose to his feet, the radio dangling from his hand, and looked at Smith. ‘Second thoughts, what’s the point. Any fall hard enough to break his neck wouldn’t have done the innards of this radio any good.’ Wordlessly, Smith took the radio, set it on the rock, extended the antenna, set the switch to ‘Transmit’, and cranked the call-up handle. The red telltale glowed, showing the transmission circuit to be in order. Smith turned the switch to receive, turned up the volume, moved the tuning knob, listened briefly to some static-laden music, closed up the radio set and handed it back to Schaffer. ‘It made a better landing than Sergeant Harrod,’ Smith said briefly. ‘Come on.’ ‘We bury him, Major?’ Carraciola asked. ‘No need.’ Smith shook his head and gestured with his torch at the drifting snow. ‘He’ll be buried within the hour. Let’s find the supplies.’ ‘Now, for God’s sake don’t lose your grip!’ Thomas said urgently. ‘That’s the trouble with you Celts,’ Schaffer said reprovingly. ‘No faith in anyone. There is no cause for alarm. Your life is in the safe hands of Schaffer and Christiansen. Not to worry.’ ‘What else do you think I’m worrying about?’ ‘If we all start sliding,’ Schaffer said encouragingly, ’we won’t let you go until the last possible minute.’ Thomas gave a last baleful glance over his shoulder and then began to edge himself out over the black lip of the precipice. Schaffer and Christiansen had an ankle apiece, and they in turn were anchored by the others. As far as the beam of Thomas’s torch could reach, the cliff stretching down into the darkness was absolutely vertical, black naked rock with the only fissures in sight blocked with ice and with otherwise never a hand-or foot-hold. ‘I’ve seen all I want to,’ he said over his shoulder. They pulled him back and he edged his way carefully up to their supply pile before getting to his feet. He prodded the pack with the skis protruding from one end. ‘Very handy,’ he said morosely. ‘Oh, very handy for this lot indeed.’ ‘As steep as that?’ Smith asked. ‘Vertical. Smooth as glass and you can’t see the bottom. How deep do you reckon it is, Major?’ ‘Who knows?’ Smith shrugged. ‘We’re seven thousand feet up. Maps never give details at this altitude. Break out that nylon.’ The proper supply pack was located and the nylon produced, one thousand feet of it coiled inside a canvas bag as it had come from the makers. It had very little more diameter than a clothes-line but its wire core made it immensely strong and every yard of it had been fully tested to its rated breaking strain—its actual breaking strain was much higher—before leaving the factory. Smith tied a hammer to one end, and with two of the men holding him securely, paid it out over the edge, counting his arm spans as he let it go. Several times the hammer snagged on some unseen obstruction but each time Smith managed to swing it free. Finally the rope went completely slack and, despite all Smith’s efforts, it remained that way. ‘Well.’ Smith moved back from the edge. ‘That seems to be about it.’ ‘And if it isn’t, hey?’ Christiansen asked. ‘If it’s caught on a teensy-weensy ledge a thousand feet above damn all?’ ‘I’ll let you know,’ Smith said shortly. ‘You measured it off,’ Carraciola said. ‘How deep?’ ‘Two hundred feet.’ ‘Eight hundred feet left, eh?’ Thomas grinned. ‘We’ll need it all to tie up the garrison of the Schloss Adler.’ No one was amused. Smith said: ‘I’ll need a piton and two walkie-talkies.’ Fifteen feet back from the edge of the cliff they cleared away the snow and hammered an angled piton securely into the bare rock. Smith made a double bowline at one end of the nylon, slipped his legs through the loops, unclasped his belt then fastened it tightly round both himself and the rope and slipped a walkie-talkie over his shoulder. The rope was then passed round the piton and three men, backs to the cliff, wrapped it round their hands and prepared to take the weight. Schaffer stood by with the other walkie-talkie. Smith checked that there were no sharp or abrasive edges on the cliff-top, wriggled cautiously over and gave the signal to be lowered. The descent itself was simple. As Thomas had said, it was a vertical drop and all he had to do was to fend himself off from the face as the men above paid out the rope. Once only, passing an overhang, he spun wildly in space, but within ten seconds regained contact with the rock face again. Mountaineering made easy, Smith thought. Or it seemed easy: perhaps, he thought wryly, it was as well that he couldn’t see what stretched beneath him. His feet passed through eighteen inches of snow and rested on solid ground. He flashed his torch in a semi-circle, from cliff wall to cliff wall. If it was a ledge, it was a very big one for, as far as his eye and torch could reach, it appeared to be a smooth plateau sloping gently outwards from the cliff. The cliff wall itself was smooth, unbroken, except for one shallow fissure, a few feet wide, close by to where he stood. He climbed out of the double bowline and made the switch on the walkie-talkie. ‘OK so far. Haul up the rope. Supplies first, then yourselves.’ The rope snaked upwards into the darkness. Within five minutes all the equipment had been lowered in two separate loads. Christiansen appeared soon afterwards. ‘What’s all the fuss about this Alpine stuff, then?’ he asked cheerfully. ‘My grandmother could do it.’ ‘Maybe we should have brought your grandmother along instead,’ Smith said sourly. ‘We’re not down yet. Take your torch and find out how big this ledge is and the best way down and for God’s sake don’t go falling over any precipices.’ Christiansen grinned and moved off. Life was for the living and Christiansen gave the impression of a man thoroughly enjoying himself. While he was away reconnoitring, all the others came down in turn until only Schaffer was left. His plaintive voice came over the walkie-talkie. ‘And how am I supposed to get down? Hand over hand for two hundred feet? Frozen hand over frozen hand for two hundred feet on a rope this size? You’d better stand clear. Somebody should have thought of this.’ ‘Somebody did,’ Smith said patiently. ‘Make sure the rope is still round the piton then kick the other eight hundred feet over the edge.’ ‘There’s always an answer.’ Schaffer sounded relieved. They had just lowered him to the ground when Christiansen returned. ‘It’s not so bad,’ he reported. ‘There’s another cliff ahead of us, maybe fifty yards away, curving around to the east. At least I think it’s a cliff. I didn’t try to find out how deep or how steep. I’m married. But the plateau falls away gently to the west there. Seems it might go on a fair way. Trees, too. I followed the line of them for two hundred yards.’ ‘Trees? At this altitude?’ ‘Well, no masts for a tall ship. Scrub pine. They’ll give shelter, hiding.’ ‘Fair enough,’ Smith nodded. ‘We’ll bivouac there.’ ‘So close?’ The surprised tone in Schaffer’s voice showed that he didn’t think much of the idea. ‘Shouldn’t we get as far down this mountain as possible tonight, Major?’ ‘No need. If we start at first light we’ll be well below the main tree line by dawn.’ ‘I agree with Schaffer,’ Carraciola said reasonably. ‘Let’s get as much as we can behind us. What do you think, Olaf?’ This to Christiansen. ‘It doesn’t matter what Christiansen thinks.’ Smith’s voice was quiet but cold as the mountain air itself. ‘Nor you, Carraciola. This isn’t a roundtable seminar, it’s a military operation. Military operations have leaders. Like it or not, Admiral Rolland put me in charge. We stay here tonight. Get the stuff across.’ The five men looked speculatively at one another, then stooped to lift the supplies. There was no longer any question as to who was in charge. ‘We pitch the tents right away, boss?’ Schaffer asked. ‘Yes.’ In Schaffer’s book, Smith reflected, ‘boss’ was probably a higher mark of respect than either ‘Major’ or ‘sir’. ‘Then hot food, hot coffee and a try for London on the radio. Haul that rope down, Christiansen. Come the dawn, we don’t want to start giving heart attacks to any binocular-toting characters in the Schloss Adler.’ Christiansen nodded, began to haul on the rope. As the free end rose into the air, Smith gave a shout, jumped towards Christiansen and caught his arm. Christiansen, startled, stopped pulling and looked round. ‘Jesus!’ Smith drew the back of his hand across his forehead. ‘That was a close one.’ ‘What’s up?’ Schaffer asked quickly. ‘Two of you. Hoist me up. Quickly! Before that damn rope disappears.’ Two of them hoisted him into the air. Smith reached up and caught the dangling end of the rope, dropped to earth, taking the rope with him and then very carefully, very securely, tied it to the other end of the rope. ‘Now that you’ve quite finished—’ Torrance-Smythe said politely. ‘The radio.’ Smith let out a long sigh of relief. ‘There’s only one list of frequencies, call signs and code. Security. And that one list is inside Sergeant Harrod’s tunic.’ ‘Mind if I mop my brow, too, boss?’ Schaffer enquired. ‘I’ll go get it for you if you like,’ Christiansen volunteered. ‘Thanks. But it’s my fault and I’ll get it. Besides, I’m the only person here who’s done any climbing—or so I believe from Colonel Wyatt-Turner—and I think you’d find that cliff rather more awkward to climb than descend. No hurry. Let’s bivouac and eat first.’ ‘If you can’t do better than this, Smithy,’ Schaffer said to Torrance-Smythe, ‘you can have a week’s notice. Starting from a week ago.’ He scraped the bottom of his metal plate and shuddered. ‘I was brought up in a Christian home, so I won’t tell you what this reminds me of.’ ‘It’s not my fault,’ Torrance-Smythe complained. ‘They packed the wrong size tin-openers.’ He stirred the indeterminate-looking goulash in the pot on top of the butane stove and looked hopefully at the men seated in a rough semicircle in the dimly-lit tent. ‘Anyone for any more?’ ‘That’s not funny,’ Schaffer said severely. ‘Wait till you try his coffee,’ Smith advised, ‘and you’ll be wondering what you were complaining about.’ He rose, poked his head through the door to take a look at the weather, looked inside again. ‘May take me an hour. But if it’s been drifting up there…‘ The seated men, suddenly serious, nodded. If it had been drifting up there it might take Smith a very long time indeed to locate Sergeant Harrod. ‘It’s a bad night,’ Schaffer said. ‘I’ll come and give you a hand.’ ‘Thanks. No need. I’ll haul myself up and lower myself down. A rope round a piton is no elevator, but it’ll get me there and back and two are no better than one for that job. But I’ll tell you what you can do.’ He moved out and reappeared shortly afterwards carrying the radio which he placed in front of Schaffer. ‘I don’t want to go all the way up there to get the code-book just to find that some hob-nailed idiot has fallen over this and given it a heart attack. Guard it with your life, Lieutenant Schaffer.’ ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ Schaffer said solemnly. With a hammer and a couple of spare pitons hanging from his waist, Smith secured himself to the rope, with double bowline and belt as before, grabbed the free end of the rope and began to haul himself up. Smith’s statement to the others that this was a job for a mountaineer seemed hardly accurate for the amount of mountaineering skill required was minimal. It was gruelling physical labour, no more. Most of the time, with his legs almost at right angles to his body, he walked up the vertical cliff face: on the stretch of the overhang, with no assistance for his arms, he twice had to take a turn of the free end of the rope and rest until the strength came back to aching shoulder and forearm muscles: and by the time he finally dragged himself, gasping painfully and sweating like a man in a sauna bath, over the edge of the cliff, exhaustion was very close indeed. He had overlooked the crippling effect of altitude to a man unaccustomed to it. He lay face down for several minutes until breathing and pulse returned to something like normal—or what was normal for seven thousand feet—rose and examined the piton round which the nylon passed. It seemed firm enough but, for good measure, he gave it another few heavy blows with the hammer, undid the double bowline round his legs and secured the end of the rope to the piton with a round turn and two half-hitches, hauling on the rope until the knot locked tight. He moved a few feet farther away from the cliff edge, cleared away the snow and lightly hammered in one of the spare pitons he had brought with him. He tested it with his hand to see if it broke clear easily. It did. He tapped it in lightly a second time and led round it the part of the rope that was secured to the firmly anchored first piton. Then he walked away, moving up the gently sloping plateau, whistling ‘Lorelei’. It was, as Smith himself would have been the first to admit, a far from tuneful whistle, but recognizable for all that. A figure appeared out of the night and came running towards him, stumbling and slipping in the deep snow. It was Mary Ellison. She stopped short a yard away and put her hands on her hips. ‘Well!’ He could hear her teeth chattering uncontrollably with the cold. ‘You took your time about it, didn’t you?’ ‘Never wasted a minute,’ Smith said defensively. ‘I had to have a hot meal and coffee first.’ ‘You had to have—you beast, you selfish beast!’ She took a quick step forward and flung her arms around his neck. ‘I hate you.’ ‘I know.’ He pulled off a gauntlet and gently touched her disengaged cheek. ‘You’re frozen.’ ‘You’re frozen, he says! Of course I’m frozen. I almost died in that plane. Why couldn’t you have supplied some hot water bottles—or—or an electrically heated suit or—or something? I thought you loved me!’ ‘I can’t help what you think,’ Smith said kindly, patting her on the back. ‘Where’s your gear?’ ‘Fifty yards. And stop patting me in that—that avuncular fashion.’ ‘Language, language,’ Smith said. ‘Come on, let’s fetch it.’ They trudged upwards through the deep snow, Mary holding his arm tightly. She said curiously: ‘What on earth excuse did you give for coming back up here? Lost a cuff-link?’ ‘There was something I had to come for, something apart from you, although I gave a song-and-dance act of having forgotten about it until the last moment, until it was almost too late. The radio code-book inside Sergeant Harrod’s tunic.’ ‘He—he lost it? He dropped it? How—how could he have been so criminally careless!’ She stopped, puzzled. ‘Besides, it’s chained—’ ‘It’s still inside Sergeant Harrod’s tunic,’ Smith said sombrely. ‘He’s up here, dead.’ ‘Dead?’ She stopped and clutched him by the arms. After a long pause, she repeated: ‘He’s dead! That—that nice man. I heard him saying he’d never jumped before. A bad landing?’ ‘So it seems.’ They located the kit-bag in silence and Smith carried it back to the edge of the cliff. Mary said: ‘And now? The code-book?’ ‘Let’s wait a minute. I want to watch this rope.’ ‘Why the rope?’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Don’t tell me,’ Mary said resignedly. ‘I’m only a little girl. I suppose you know what you’re doing.’ ‘I wish to God I did,’ Smith said feelingly. They waited, again in silence, side by side on the kit-bag. Both stared at the rope in solemn concentration as if nylon ropes at seven thousand feet had taken on a special meaningfulness denied nylon ropes elsewhere. Twice Smith tried to light a cigarette and twice it sputtered to extinction in the drifting snow. The minutes passed, three, maybe four: they felt more like thirty or forty. He became conscious that the girl beside him was shivering violently—he guessed that she had her teeth clamped tight to prevent their chattering—and was even more acutely conscious that his entire left side—he was trying to shelter her from the wind and snow—was becoming numb. He rose to leave when suddenly the rope gave a violent jerk and the piton farther from the cliff edge was torn free. The loop of the rope slid quickly down past the piton to which it was anchored and kept on going till it was brought up short by its anchor. Whatever pressure was on the rope increased until the nylon bit deeply into the fresh snow on the cliff edge. Smith moved across and tested the pressure on the rope, at first gingerly and tentatively then with all his strength. The rope was bar-taut and remained bar-taut. But the piton held. ‘What—what on earth—’ Mary began, then broke off. Her voice was an unconscious whisper. ‘Charming, charming,’ Smith murmured. ‘Someone down there doesn’t like me. Surprised?’ ‘If—if that spike hadn’t held we’d never have got down again.’ The tremor in her voice wasn’t all due to the cold. ‘It’s a fair old jump,’ Smith conceded. He took her arm and they moved off. The snow was heavier now and even with the aid of their torches visibility was no more than six feet, but, by using the rocky outcrop as a bearing, it took Smith no more than two minutes to locate Sergeant Harrod, now no more than a featureless mound buried in the depths of the snow-drift. Smith brushed aside the covering shroud of white, undid the dead man’s tunic, recovered the codebook, hung the chain round his neck and buttoned the book securely inside his own Alpenkorps uniform. Then came the task of turning Sergeant Harrod over on his side. Unpleasant Smith had expected it to be, and it was: impossible he hadn’t expected it to be, and it wasn’t—not quite. But the effort all but defeated him, and the dead man was stiff as a board, literally frozen solid into the arms outflung position into which he had fallen. For the second time that night Smith could feel the sweat mingling with the melted snow on his face. But by and by he had him over, the frozen right arm pointing up into the snow-filled sky. Smith knelt, brought his torch close and carefully examined the back of the dead man’s head. ‘What are you trying to do?’ Mary asked. ‘What are you looking for?’ Again her voice was a whisper. ‘His neck is broken. I want to find out just how it was broken.’ He glanced up at the girl. ‘You don’t have to look.’ ‘Don’t worry.’ She turned away. ‘I’m not going to.’ The clothes, like the man, were frozen stiff. The hood covering Harrod’s head crackled and splintered in Smith’s gauntleted hands as he pulled it down, exposing the back of the head and neck. Finally, just below the collar of the snow-smock, Smith found what he was searching for—a red mark at the base of the neck where the skin was broken. He rose, caught the dead man’s ankles and dragged him a foot or two down the slope. ‘What now?’ In spite of herself Mary was watching again, in reluctant and horrified fascination. ‘What are you looking for now?’ ‘A rock,’ Smith said briefly. There was a cold edge to the words and although Mary knew it wasn’t intended for her, it was an effective discouragement to any further questioning. Smith cleared the snow for two feet around where Harrod’s head had lain. With hand and eyes he examined the ground with meticulous care, rose slowly to his feet, took Mary’s arm and began to walk away. After a few steps he hesitated, stopped, turned back to the dead man and turned him over again so that the right arm was no longer pointing towards the sky. Half-way back to the cliff edge, Smith said abruptly: ‘Something struck Harrod on the back of the neck. I thought it might have been a rock. But there was no rock where he lay, only turf.’ ‘There was a rocky outcrop nearby.’ ‘You don’t break your neck on a rocky outcrop, then stand up and jump out into a snowdrift. Even had he rolled over into the drift, he could never have finished with his head seven feet out from the rock. He was struck by some hard metallic object, either the butt of a gun or the haft of a knife. The skin is broken but there is no bruising for the neck was broken immediately afterwards. When he was unconscious. To make us think it was an accident. It must have happened on the rock—there was no disturbance in the snow round Harrod—and it must have happened while he was upright. A tap on the neck, a quick neck-twist, then he fell or was pushed over the edge of the outcrop. Wonderful stuff, stone,’ Smith finished bitterly. ‘It leaves no footprints.’ Mary stopped and stared at him. ‘Do you realize what you’re saying?’ She caught his speculative and very old-fashioned look, took his arm and went on quickly: ‘No, I mean the implications. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, of course you do, John, I—I’m scared. Even all those months with you in Italy—well, you know, nothing like this—’ She broke off, then continued: ‘Couldn’t there—couldn’t there be some other explanation?’ ‘Like he hit himself on the back of the head or the abominable snowman got him?’ She looked at him steadily, her dark eyes far too large in what could be seen of her hooded face. ‘I don’t deserve that, John. I am frightened.’ ‘Me, too.’ ‘I don’t believe you.’ ‘Well, if I’m not, it’s damn well time I started to be.’ Smith checked his descent when he estimated he was about forty feet from the base of the cliff. He took two turns of the nylon round his left leg, damped it with his right, took a turn round his left arm, pulled off his right gauntlet with his teeth, stuffed it inside his tunic, eased out his Luger, slid the safety catch and went on his way again, checking his speed of descent with his gauntleted hand. It was a reasonable enough expectation that whoever had tried to pull down the rope would be waiting there to finish off the job. But there was no reception committee waiting, not, at least, at the spot where he touched down. He traversed a quick circle with his torch. There was nobody there and nothing there and the footprints that must have been there were long obscured by the drifting snow. Gun in one hand, torch in the other, he moved along the cliff face for thirty yards then moved out in a semi-circle until he arrived back at the cliff-face. The rope-puller had evidently opted for discretion. Smith returned to the rope and jerked it. In two minutes he had Mary’s kit-bag down and, a few minutes later, Mary herself. As soon as she had stepped out of the double bowline, Smith undid the knot, pulled the rope down from the top of the cliff and coiled it. So numbed and frozen were his hands by this time that the operation took him nearly fifteen minutes. Rope over one shoulder, her kit-bag on the other, Smith led Mary to the fissure in the cliff side. ‘Don’t pitch the tent,’ Smith said. ‘Unroll it, put your sleeping bag on one half, get into it and pull the other half of the tent over you. Half an hour and you’ll be covered with drifting snow. The snow will not only keep you warm, it’ll hide you from any somnambulists. I’ll be along in the morning before we leave.’ He walked away, stopped, looked back. Mary was still standing where he had left her, looking after him. There was no sag to her shoulders, no particular expression to her face, but for all that she looked oddly defenceless, lonely and forlorn, a quality as indefinable as it was unmistakable. Smith hesitated, then went back to her, unrolled her tent and sleeping bag, waited till she had climbed in, zipped up the bag and pulled the other half of the tent up to her chin. She smiled at him. He fixed the sleeping bag hood, pulled a corner of the tent over it and left, all without saying a word. Locating his own tent was simple enough, a steady light burnt inside it. Smith beat the snow from his clothes, stooped and entered. Christiansen, Thomas and Carraciola were in their sleeping bags and were asleep or appeared to be. Torrance-Smythe was checking over their store of plastic explosives, fuses, detonators and grenades, while Schaffer was reading a paper-back—in German—smoking a cigarette—also German—and faithfully guarding the radio. He put down the book and looked at Smith. ‘OK?’ ‘OK.’ Smith produced the code-book from his tunic. ‘Sorry I was so long, but I thought I’d never find him. Drifting pretty badly up there.’ ‘We’ve arranged to take turns on watch,’ Schaffer said. ‘Half an hour each. It’ll be dawn in three hours.’ Smith smiled. ‘What are you guarding against in these parts?’ ‘The abominable snowman.’ The smile left Smith’s face as quickly as it had come. He turned his attention to Harrod’s codebook and spent about ten minutes in memorizing call-up signals and wave-frequencies and writing a message out in code. Before he had finished Schaffer had turned into his sleeping bag, leaving Torrance-Smythe on watch. Smith folded the message, tucked it in a pocket, rose, took the radio and a rubber ground-sheet to protect it from the snow. ‘I’m going to move out a bit,’ he said to Torrance-Smythe. ‘Reception is lousy among trees. Besides, I don’t want to wake everyone up. Won’t be long.’ Two hundred yards from the tent, after having stopped twice and changed direction twice, Smith knelt with his back—and the rubber ground-sheet —to the drifting snow. He extended a fourteen feet telescopic aerial, adjusted a pre-selected call-up and cranked a handle. Four times he cranked the handle and on the fifth he got results. Someone was keeping a very close radio watch indeed. ‘This is Danny Boy,’ the set speaker crackled. The signal was faint and intermittent, but just comprehensible. ‘Danny Boy replying to you. Over.’ Smith spoke into the mouth microphone. ‘This is Broadsword. Can I speak to Father Machree or Mother Machree? Over.’ ‘Sorry. Unavailable. Over.’ ‘Code,’ Smith said. ‘Over.’ ‘Ready.’ Smith extracted the paper from his pocket and shone his torch on it. There were two lines containing meaningless jumbles of letters and, below that, the plain language translation, which read: ‘SAFE LANDING HARROD DEAD WEATHER FINE PLEASE AWAIT MESSAGE 0800 GMT. Smith read off the corresponding code figures and finished off: ‘Have that delivered to Father Machree by 0700. Without fail.’ Torrance-Smythe looked up at Smith’s return. ‘Back already?’ Surprise in his voice. ‘You got through?’ ‘Not a chance,’ Smith said disgustedly. ‘Too many bloody mountains around.’ ‘Didn’t try for very long, did you?’ ‘Two and a half minutes.’ It was Smith’s turn to look surprised. ‘Surely you know that’s the safe maximum?’ ‘You think there may be radio monitoring stations hereabouts?’ ‘Oh, no, not at all.’ Smith’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. ‘You wouldn’t expect to find radio monitors in the Schloss Adler, would you now?’ ‘Well, now.’ Torrance-Smythe smiled tiredly. ‘I believe someone did mention it was the southern HQ of the German Secret Service. Sorry, Major. It’s not that I’m growing old, though there’s that, too. It’s just that what passes for my mind is so gummed up by cold and lack of sleep that I think it’s stopped altogether.’ Smith pulled off his boots and snow-suit, climbed into his sleeping bag and pulled the radio close to him. ‘Then it’s time you had some sleep. My explosives expert is going to be no good to me if he can’t tell a detonator from a door-knob. Go on. Turn in. I’ll keep watch.’ ‘But we had arranged—’ ‘Arguments, arguments,’ Smith sighed. ‘Insubordination on every hand.’ He smiled. ‘Straight up, Smithy, I’m wide awake. I know I won’t sleep tonight.’ One downright lie, Smith thought, and one statement of incontrovertible truth. He wasn’t wide awake, he was physically and mentally exhausted and on the slightest relaxation of will-power oblivion would have overtaken him in seconds. But that he wouldn’t sleep that night was beyond doubt: no power on earth would have let him sleep that night but, in the circumstances, it was perhaps wiser not to say so to Torrance-Smythe. THREE (#ulink_0bb0ead9-0e56-51c4-8f9d-ec5e139ed0b9) The pre-dawn greyness was in the sky. Smith and his men had broken camp. Tent and sleeping bags were stored away and the cooking utensils—after a very sketchy breakfast scarcely deserving of the name—were being thrust into haversacks. There was no conversation, none at all: it wasn’t a morning for speaking. All of them, Smith thought, looked more drawn, more exhausted, than they had done three hours ago: he wondered how he himself, who had had no sleep at all, must look. It was as well, he reflected, that mirrors were not part of their commando equipment. He looked at his watch. ‘We’ll leave in ten minutes,’ he announced. ‘Should give us plenty of time to be down in the tree line before sun-up. Assuming there are no more cliffs. Back in a moment. Visibility is improving and I think I’ll go recce along the cliff edge. With any luck, maybe I can see the best way down.’ ‘And if you haven’t any luck?’ Carraciola asked sourly. ‘We’ve still that thousand feet of nylon rope,’ Smith said shortly. He pulled on his snow-suit and left, angling off in the direction of the cliff. As soon as he was beyond the belt of the scrub pines and out of sight of the camp he changed direction uphill and broke into a run. A single eye appeared under a lifted corner of snow-covered canvas as Mary Ellison heard the soft crunch of running footsteps in the snow. She heard the first two bars of a tuneless whistling of ‘Lorelei’, unzipped her sleeping bag and sat up. Smith was standing above her. ‘Not already!’ she said protestingly. ‘Yes, already. Come on. Up!’ ‘I haven’t slept a wink.’ ‘Neither have I. I’ve been watching that damned radio all night—and watching to check that no somnambulists took a stroll in this direction.’ ‘You kept awake. You did that for me?’ ‘I kept awake. We’re off. Start in five minutes. Leave your tent and kit-bag here, you won’t be requiring them again. Take some food, something to drink, that’s all. And for God’s sake, don’t get too close to us.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘We’ll stop at 7 a.m. Check your watch. Exactly 7 a.m. And don’t bump into us.’ ‘What do you think I am?’ But Smith didn’t tell her what he thought she was. He had already gone. A thousand feet farther down the side of the Weissspitze the trees were something worth calling trees, towering conifers that soared sixty and seventy feet up into the sky. Into the clear sky, for the snow had stopped falling now. It was dawn. The slope of the Weissspitze was still very steep, perhaps one in four or five. Smith, with his five men strung out behind him in single file, slipped and stumbled almost constantly: but the deep snow, Smith reflected, at least cushioned their frequent falls and as a mode of progress it was a damn sight preferable to shinning down vertical cliff-faces on an impossibly thin clothes-line. The curses of his bruised companions were almost continuous but serious complaints were marked by their total absence: there was no danger, they were making excellent time and they were now completely hidden in the deep belt of trees. Two hundred yards behind them Mary Ellison carefully picked her way down the tracks made by the men below her. She slipped and fell only very occasionally for, unlike the men, she was carrying no over-balancing gear on her back. Nor had she any fear of being observed, of coming too close to Smith and the others: in still, frosty air on a mountain sound carries with a preternatural clarity and from the sound of the voices farther down the slope she could judge her distance from them to a nicety. For the twentieth time she looked at her watch: it was twenty minutes to seven. Some time later, for much more than the twentieth time, Smith checked his watch again. It was exactly 7 o’clock. The dawn had gone and the light of full day-time filtered down through the snow-bent boughs of the conifers. Smith stopped and held up his hand, waiting until the other five had caught up with him. ‘We must be half-way down now.’ He shrugged off the heavy pack on his back and lowered it gratefully into the snow. ‘I think it’s time we had a look at the scenery.’ They piled their gear and moved off to their right. Within a minute the pines started to thin out and at a signal from Smith they all dropped to hands and knees and crawled forward the last few yards towards the edge of the belt of pines. Smith carried a telescope in his hand: Christiansen and Thomas both wore binoculars. Zeiss binoculars. Admiral Rolland had left nothing to chance. Beyond the last of the pines a mound of snow obstructed their view of the valley below. Shrouded from top to toe, in the all-enveloping white of their snow-smocks, they completed the last few feet on their elbows and knees. What lay below them was something out of a fairy tale, an impossibly beautiful scene from an impossibly beautiful fairy tale, a fairy tale set aeons back in the never-never land of the age of dreams, a kindlier land, a nobler land than man had ever known since first he had set his hand against his brother. A land that never was, Smith thought, a land that never was: but there it lay before them, the golden land that never was, the home of that most dreaded organization in the entire world, the German Gestapo. The impeccable incongruity of it all, Smith reflected, passed all belief. The valley was bowl-shaped, open to the north, hemmed in by steeply rising hills to the east and west, closed off by the towering bulk of the Weissspitze to the south. A scene of fantastic beauty. Nine thousand, seven hundred and ten feet in height, the second highest mountain in Germany, the Weissspitze soared up menacingly like another north wall of the Eiger, its dazzling whiteness caught in the morning sun, its starkly lovely outline sharply etched against the now cloudless blue of the sky. High up near the cone-shaped summit could be seen the line of black rock marking the cliff Smith and his men had descended during the night with, just below it, a much greater cliff-face on the plateau above which they had spent the night. Directly opposite where they lay, and almost exactly on the same level, was the Schloss Adler itself. The castle of the eagle had been aptly named, an impregnable fortress, an inaccessible eyrie set between mountain and sky. Just below the spot where the steep-sided slopes of the Weissspitze began to flatten out northwards into the head of the valley, a geological freak, known as a volcanic plug, jutted two hundred vertical feet up into the sparkling, ice-cold air. It was on this that the Schloss Adler had been built. The northern, western and eastern sides of this volcanic plug were sheer, perpendicular walls of rock, walls that swept up smoothly, without intermission or break into the structure of the castle itself: from where they lay, it was impossible to say where the one ended and the other began. To the south, a steeply-sloping ridgeback connected the plug to the equally sloping ramparts of the Weissspitze. The castle itself was another dream, the dream of the apotheosis of medievalism. This dream, Smith was aware, was as illusory as the golden age of its setting. It wasn’t medieval at all, it had been built as late as the mid-nineteenth century to the express order of one of the madder of the Bavarian monarchs who had suffered from a comprehensive list of delusions, of which grandeur had not been the least. But, delusions or not, he had had, as the deluded so often have—to the dismay and consternation of their allegedly saner brethren—impeccable taste. The castle was perfect for the valley, the valley for the castle. Any other combination would have been inconceivable. The Schloss Adler was built in the form of a hollow square. It was towered, battlemented and crenellated, its most imposing aspects, two perfectly circular towers, the one to the east higher than that to the west, facing down the valley towards the north. Two smaller, but still magnificent towers, lay at the southern corners, facing the looming bulk of the Weissspitze. From where Smith lay, at some slight level above that of the castle, he could just see into the open square in its middle, outside access to which was obtained by a pair of huge iron gates at the rear. The sun had not yet climbed sufficiently high above the eastern hills for its rays to strike the castle directly, but, for all that, its incredibly white walls gleamed and glittered as if made of the most iridescent marble. Below the soaring northern ramparts of the castle the valley fell away steeply to the Blau See, beautiful pine-fringed jewel of a lake of the deepest and most sparkling blue, a colour which with the green of the pines, the white dazzle of the snow and the brilliant, lighter blue of the sky above formed a combination of breath-taking loveliness, Impossibly lovely, Smith thought, a completely faithful colour reproduction of the scene would have had everybody shouting ‘fake’. From where they lay they could see that the belt of pines in which they lay hidden extended almost all the way down to the lake. Getting down there unobserved would be no problem at all. An almost exactly matching line of pines swept down the opposite—the eastern—side of the valley. From the lake those two long sweeps of pines, climbing steadily upwards as they marched to the south, must have appeared like a pair of great curving horns almost meeting at the top of the lower of the two cliff-faces on the Weissspitze. A small village lay at the head of the lake. Basically it consisted of a single wide street, perhaps two hundred yards in length, a railway station, two inevitable churches perched on two inevitable knolls and a thin scattering of houses climbing up the steep slopes on either side of the village. From the southern end of the village a road curved up the far side of the valley till it reached the ridge-back to the south of the castle: this ridgeback it ascended by a series of hairpin bends, the last of which led to the great doors guarding the forecourt at the back of the castle. The road, just then, was completely blocked by snow and sole access to the castle was obviously by means of the Luftseilbahn, an aerial cableway. Two cables stretched from the village straight up to the castle, crossing three supporting pylons en route. Even as they watched, a cable-car was completing the last section of its journey up to the castle. At a distance of not much more than a hundred feet from the glittering walls of the Schloss Adler it appeared to be climbing almost vertically. On the Blau See, about a mile beyond the village, lay a very large group of regularly spaced huts, arranged in rectangular patterns. It bore an uncommonly close resemblance to a military encampment. ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ With an almost physical effort of will, Schaffer forced himself to look away and Smith could see the wonder reflected in his eyes. ‘Is this for real, boss?’ It wasn’t a question that called for an answer. Schaffer had summed up their collective feeling pretty well and there was nothing that anyone could add that wouldn’t seem and sound superfluous. Prone in the snow, they watched in silence as the cable-car climbed agonizingly slowly up the last fifty feet towards the castle. It seemed as if it would never make it and Smith could almost palpably sense the empathy of his companions and himself as they willed that little car on the last few feet of its journey. But make it it did and it disappeared from sight under the roof of the cable header station that had been built into the western foot of the castle. The tension relaxed and Schaffer cleared his throat. ‘Boss,’ he said diffidently, ‘there are a couple of minor points that occur to me. Requiring elucidation, one might say. First of all, if I didn’t know better I’d say that was a military barracks down by that little old lake there.’ ‘You don’t know better. That is a military barracks down by that little old lake there. And no ordinary military barracks either, I might say. That’s the training HQ of the J?ger battalions of the Wehrmacht’s Alpenkorps.’ ‘Oh, my gosh! The Alpine Corps! If I’d known this I’d never have come along. The Alpine Corps! Why didn’t someone tell Ma Schaffer’s nearest and dearest?’ ‘I thought you knew,’ Smith said mildly. ‘Why do you think we’re not dressed as German sailors or Red Cross nurses?’ Schaffer unzipped his snow-smock, minutely examined his Alpenkorps uniform as if seeing it for the first time, then zipped it up again. He said carefully: ‘You mean to say we’re going to mingle, careless like, with the German Army.’ He paused, looked wide-eyed at Smith’s smiling nod, then went on incredulously: ‘But—but we’ll be recognized as strangers!’ ‘Training troops come and go all the time,’ Smith said offhandedly. ‘What’s six new faces among six hundred new faces?’ ‘This is terrible,’ Schaffer said, gloomily. ‘Worse than horses?’ Smith smiled. ‘After all, the Alpenkorps don’t buck and trample all over you.’ ‘Horses don’t carry machine-guns,’ Schaffer said morosely. ‘And your second point?’ ‘Ah, yes. The second point. There’s the little matter of the old Schloss itself. Kinda forgotten our helicopter, haven’t we? How do we get in?’ ‘A good point,’ Smith conceded. ‘We’ll have to think about it. But I’ll tell you this. If Colonel Wyatt-Turner can penetrate the German High Command and, more important, get away again, this should be a piece of cake for us.’ ‘He did what?’ Schaffer demanded. ‘Didn’t you know?’ ‘How should I know?’ Schaffer was irritated. ‘Never met the guy till yesterday.’ ‘He spent the years ’40 to ’43 inside Germany. Served in the Wehrmacht for part of the time. Ended up in the GHQ in Berlin. Says he knows Hitler quite well.’ ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’ Schaffer paused for a long moment, finally arrived at a conclusion. ‘The guy,’ he said moodily, ‘must be nuts.’ ‘Maybe. But if he can do it, we can. We’ll figure a way. Let’s get back among the trees.’ They inched their way back into cover, leaving Christiansen behind with Smith’s telescope to keep watch. After they’d made a temporary camp, heated and drunk some coffee, Smith announced his intention of trying to contact London again. He unpacked the radio and sat down on a kit-bag a few feet distant from the others. The switch that cut in the transmitter circuit was on the left-hand side of the radio, the side remote from where the other four men were sitting. Smith switched on with a loud positive click, cranked the call-up handle with his left hand. With the very first crank his left hand moved the transmitting switch from ‘On’ to ‘Off’, the whirring of the call-up blanketing the sound. Smith cranked away diligently at intervals, stopping from time to time to make minute adjustments to the controls, then finally gave up and sat back, shaking his head in disgust. ‘You’ll never make it with all those trees around,’ Torrance-Smythe observed. ‘That must be it,’ Smith agreed. ‘I’ll try the other side of the wood. Might have better luck there.’ He slung the transmitter over his shoulder and trudged off through the deep snow, cutting straight across to the other side of the belt of pines. When he thought he was safely out of eyeshot of the men at the camp, he checked with a quick look over his shoulder. They were out of sight. He turned more than ninety degrees left and hurried up the hill until he cut the tracks that he and his men had made on the way down. He followed the tracks uphill, whistling ‘Lorelei’, but whistling softly: in that frosty air, sound travelled dangerously far. He stopped whistling when Mary appeared from where she had been hiding behind a fallen pine. ‘Hallo, darling,’ she said brightly. ‘We’ll have less of the “darlings”,’ Smith said briskly. ‘It’s 8 a.m. Father Machree awaits. And keep your voice down.’ He sat on the fallen tree, cranked the handle and established contact almost immediately. The transmission from London was still very faint but clearer than it had been in the earlier hours of the morning. ‘Father Machree is waiting,’ the radio crackled. ‘Hold. Hold.’ Smith held and the unmistakable voice of Admiral Rolland took over from the London operator. ‘Position please, Broadsword.’ Smith consulted the piece of paper in his hand, again in code and plain language. The message read: WOODS DUE WEST CASTLE DESCENDING W.H. THIS EVENING. Smith read out the corresponding code letters. There was a pause, presumably while Rolland was having the message decoded, then his voice came again. ‘Understood. Proceed. Harrod killed accidentally?’ ‘No. Over.’ ‘By the enemy? Over.’ ‘No. What is the weather report? Over.’ ‘Deteriorating. Freshening winds, strong later. Snow. Over.’ Smith looked up at the still and cloudless sky above. He assumed that Rolland hadn’t got his forecasts mixed up. He said: ‘Time of next broadcast uncertain. Can you stand by? Over.’ ‘Am remaining HQ until operation complete,’ Rolland said. ‘Good luck. Good-bye.’ Smith closed up the radio and said thoughtfully to Mary: ‘I didn’t much care for the way he said good-bye there.’ In the Naval Operations room in Whitehall, Admiral Rolland and Colonel Wyatt-Turner, one on either side of the radio operator manning a huge transceiver, looked at each other with heavy faces. ‘So the poor devil was murdered,’ Wyatt-Turner said flatly. ‘A high price to pay for confirmation that we were right,’ Rolland said sombrely. ‘Poor devil, as you say. The moment we gave him that radio to carry we signed a death-warrant. I wonder who’s next. Smith himself?’ ‘Not Smith.’ Wyatt-Turner shook his head positively. ‘Some people have a sixth sense. Smith has a seventh, eighth and ninth and a built-in radar set for danger. Smith can survive under any circumstances I can conceive of. I didn’t pick him with a pin, sir. He’s the best agent in Europe.’ ‘Except possibly yourself. And don’t forget, Colonel, there may possibly be circumstances that even you can’t conceive of.’ ‘Yes, that’s so.’ He looked directly at Rolland. ‘What do you reckon his chances are?’ ‘Chances?’ Rolland’s eyes were remote, unseeing. ‘What do you mean, chances? He doesn’t have any.’ Almost precisely the same thought was in Smith’s mind as he lit a cigarette and looked at the girl beside him, careful not to let his thoughts show in his face. Not until that first sight he’d just had of the castle had the full realization of the apparent impossibility of their task struck him. Had he known what the precise physical situation had been, he doubted very much whether he would have come. Deep in the furthest recesses of his mind, he knew, although he would not admit it to himself, that there really was no room for the element of doubt. He wouldn’t have come. But he had come. He was here and he had better do something about it. He said to Mary: ‘Have you had a squint at the old Schloss yet?’ ‘It’s a fantastic place. How on earth do we ever get General Carnaby out of there?’ ‘Easy. We’ll take a walk up there tonight, get inside and take him away.’ Mary stared at him in disbelief and waited for him to amplify his statement. He didn’t. Finally, she said: ‘That’s all?’ ‘That’s all.’ ‘The simplicity of true genius. You must have spent a lot of time working that one out.’ When he still didn’t reply, she went on, elaborately sarcastic: ‘In the first place, of course, there’ll be no trouble about getting in. You just go up to the main door and knock.’ ‘More or less. Then the door—or window—opens, I smile at you, say thank you and pass inside.’ ‘You what?’ ‘I smile and say thank you. Even in wartime, there’s no reason why the little courtesies—’ ‘Please!’ She was thoroughly exasperated now. ‘If you can’t talk sense—’ ‘You are going to open the door for me,’ Smith explained patiently. ‘Are you feeling all right?’ ‘The staff shortage in Germany is acute. The Schloss Adler is no exception. You’re just the type they’re looking for. Young, intelligent, good-looking, you can cook, polish, sew on Colonel Kramer’s buttons—’ ‘Who’s Colonel Kramer?’ Her tone as much as her face showed the bewilderment in her mind. ‘Deputy Chief of the German Secret Service.’ Mary said with conviction: ‘You must be mad.’ ‘If I wasn’t I wouldn’t be doing this job.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve been gone too long and I fear that I’m surrounded by the odd suspicious mind. We move off at five. Exactly five. Down in the village there’s a Gasthaus on the east side of the main street called “Zum Wilden Hirsch.” “The Wild Deer.” Remember it, “Zum Wilden Hirsch.” We don’t want you wandering into the wrong pub. Behind it there’s a shed used as a beer cellar. It’s always kept locked but there will be a key in the door tonight. I’ll meet you there at exactly eight o’clock.’ He turned to go, but she caught him by the arm. ‘How do you know all this?’ she asked tensely. ‘About the Gasthaus and the bottle store and the key being there and about Colonel Kramer and—’ ‘Ah, ah!’ Smith shook his head admonishingly and touched her lips with his forefinger. ‘Hand-book for spies, golden rule number one.’ She drew away from him and stared down at the snow-covered ground, her voice low and bitter. ‘Never ever ever tell anyone anything unless you have to.’ She paused and looked up. ‘Not even me?’ ‘Especially not you, poppet.’ He patted her lightly on the cheek. ‘Don’t be late.’ He walked away down the slope leaving her looking after him with an expressionless face. Lieutenant Schaffer lay stretched out and almost buried in the deep snow, half-hidden behind the bole of a pine, with a telescope to his eye. He twisted as he heard the soft crunch of snow behind him and saw Smith approaching on his hands and knees. ‘Couldn’t you knock or something?’ Schaffer asked irritably. ‘Sorry. Something you wanted to show me, so the boys say.’ ‘Yeah.’ Schaffer handed Smith the telescope. ‘Take a gander at this lot. Thought it might interest you.’ Smith took the telescope and fingered the very precise adjustment until he achieved maximum definition. ‘Lower down,’ Schaffer said. ‘At the foot of the rock.’ Smith traversed the telescope down the sides of the Schloss Adler and the sheer walls of the volcanic plug until the fine cross-hairs came to rest on the snow-covered slopes at the foot. Moving across the slope he could see two soldiers with slung machine-carbines and, not on leashes, four dogs. ‘My, my,’ Smith murmured thoughtfully. ‘I see what you mean.’ ‘Those are Doberman pinschers, boss.’ ‘Well, they aren’t toy poodles and that’s a fact,’ Smith agreed. He moved the telescope a little way up the walls of the volcanic plug, held it there. ‘And floodlights?’ he added softly. He lowered the telescope again, past the patrolling soldiers and dogs, till it came to rest on a high wire fence that appeared to go all the way around the base of the volcanic plug. ‘And a dinky little fence.’ ‘Fences,’ Schaffer said pontifically, ‘are made to be cut or climbed.’ ‘You try cutting or climbing this one, laddie, and you’ll be cooked to a turn in nothing flat. A standard design, using a standard current of 2,300 volt, single-phase, 60 cycle AC. All the best electric chairs have it.’ Schaffer shook his head. ‘Amazing the lengths some folks will go to protect their privacy.’ ‘Fences, floods and Dobermans,’ Smith said. ‘I don’t think that combination will stop us, do you, Lieutenant?’ ‘Of course not. Stop us? Of course not!’ He paused for some moments, then burst out: ‘How in God’s name do you propose—’ ‘We’ll decide when the time comes,’ Smith said easily. ‘You mean you’ll decide,’ Schaffer said complainingly. ‘Play it pretty close to the cuff, don’t you?’ ‘That’s because I’m too young to die.’ ‘Why me, for God’s sake?’ Schaffer demanded after a long pause. ‘Why pick me for this job? This isn’t my line of country, Major.’ ‘God knows,’ Smith said frankly. ‘Come to that, why me?’ Schaffer was in the middle of giving him a long and pointedly disbelieving look when he suddenly stiffened and cocked his head up to the sky in the direction of the unmistakably rackety whirr of a helicopter engine. Both men picked it up at once. It was coming from the north, over the Blau See, and heading directly towards them. It was a big military version and, even at that distance, the swastika markings were clearly distinguishable. Schaffer started to move backwards towards the line of pines. ‘Exit Schaffer,’ he announced hurriedly. ‘The bloodhounds are out for us.’ ‘I don’t think so,’ Smith said. ‘Stay where you are and pull your smock over your head.’ Quickly they pulled their white smocks over their heads until only their eyes, and Smith’s telescope, partly buried in the snow, could be seen. From thirty yards in any direction, including straight up, they must have been quite invisible. The helicopter swept up the valley still maintaining a course directly towards the spot where the two men lay hidden. When it was only a few hundred yards away even Smith began to feel uneasy and wondered if by some evil mischance the enemy knew or suspected their presence. They were bound to have heard the engines of the Lancaster, muted though they had been, during the night. Had some suspicious and intelligent character—and there would be no lack of those in the Schloss Adler—come up with the right answer to the question of the presence of this errant bomber in one of the most unlikely places in all Germany? Could picked members of the Alpenkorps be combing the pine woods even at that moment—and he, Smith, had been so confident that he hadn’t even bothered to post a guard. Then, abruptly, when the helicopter was almost directly overhead, it side-slipped sharply to its left, sank down over the castle courtyard, hovered for a few moments and slowly descended. Smith surreptitiously mopped his forehead and applied his eye to the telescope. The helicopter had landed. The rotor stopped, steps descended and a man climbed down to the courtyard floor. From his uniform, Smith decided, a very senior officer. Then he suddenly realized that it was a very very senior officer indeed. His face tightened as he pushed the telescope across to Schaffer. ‘Take a good look,’ he advised. Schaffer took a good look, lowered the telescope as the man passed through a doorway. ‘Pal of yours, boss?’ ‘I know him. Reichsmarschall Julius Rosemeyer. The Wehrmacht Chief of Staff.’ ‘My very first Reichsmarschall and me without my telescopic rifle,’ Schaffer said regretfully. ‘I wonder what his highness wants.’ ‘Same as us,’ Smith said briefly. ‘General Carnaby?’ ‘When you’re going to ask the Allies’ overall co-ordinator of planning a few questions about the Second Front you don’t send just the corporal of the guard to interview him.’ ‘You don’t think they might have come to take old Carnaby away?’ Schaffer asked anxiously. ‘Not a chance. The Gestapo never gives up its prisoners. In this country the Wehrmacht does what the Gestapo says.’ ‘Or else?’ ‘Or else. Off you go—they’ve more coffee on the brew back there. Send someone to relieve me in an hour.’ Admiral Rolland’s weather forecast for the area turned out to be perfectly correct. As the endless shivering hours dragged slowly by the weather steadily deteriorated. By noon the sun was gone and a keen wind sprang up from the east. By early afternoon snow had begun to fall from the darkened sky, slowly at first then with increasing severity as the east wind steadily increased in strength and became bitingly cold. It looked like being a bad night, Smith thought. But a bad night that reduced visibility to near-zero and kept people indoors was what they wanted: it would have been difficult for them to saunter up to the Schloss Adler bathed in the warm light of a harvest moon. Smith checked his watch. ‘Time to go.’ He climbed stiffly to his feet and beat his arms to restore circulation. ‘Call Thomas, will you.’ Rucksacks and kit-bags were slung and shouldered. Thomas, who had been keeping watch, appeared carrying Smith’s telescope. Thomas was very far from being his usual cheerful self, and it wasn’t just the fact that he’d spent the last hour exposed to the full force of wind and snow that had left him in such ill-humour. ‘Is that damned radio working yet?’ he asked Smith. ‘Not a hope. Six tries, six failures. Why?’ ‘I’ll tell you why,’ Thomas said bitterly. ‘Pity we couldn’t get the Admiral to change his mind about the paratroops. A full troop train just got in, that’s all.’ ‘Well, that’s fine,’ Smith said equably. ‘The old hands will think we’re new boys and the new boys will think we’re old hands. Very convenient.’ Thomas looked thoughtfully at Smith. ‘Very, very convenient.’ He hesitated, then went on: ‘How about loosening up a bit, Major?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Come off it,’ Carraciola said roughly. ‘You know damn well what he means. It’s our lives. Why do we have to go down into that damned village? And how do you intend to get Carnaby out? If we’re to commit suicide, tell us why. You owe us that.’ ‘I owe you nothing,’ Smith said flatly. ‘I’ll tell you nothing. And if you know nothing you can’t talk. You’ll be told when the time comes.’ ‘You, Smith,’ Torrance-Smythe said precisely, ‘are a cold-blooded devil.’ ‘It’s been said before,’ Smith said indifferently. The village railway station was a small, two-track, end-of-the-line depot. Like all end-of-the-line depots it was characterized by rust, dilapidation, the barest functionalism of design and an odd pessimistically-expectant air of waiting for someone to come along and finish it off properly. At any time, its air of desolation was total. That night, completely deserted, with a high, gusting wind driving snow through pools of light cast by dim and swaying electric lamps, the ghostly impression of a place abandoned by man and by the world was almost overwhelming. It suited Smith’s purpose perfectly. He led his five snow-smock clad men quickly across the tracks and into the comparative shelter of the station buildings. They filed silently past the closed bookstall, the freight office, the booking office, flitted quickly into the shadows beyond and stopped. Smith lowered the radio, shrugged off his rucksack, removed snow-smock and trousers and sauntered casually alongside the tracks—the thrifty Bavarians regarded platforms as a wasteful luxury. He stopped outside a door next to a bolted hatch which bore above it the legend GEPACK ANNAHME. He tried the door. It was locked. He made a quick survey to check that he was unobserved, stooped, examined the keyhole with a pencil-flash, took a bunch of oddly shaped keys from his pockets and had the door opened in seconds. He whistled softly and was almost at once joined by the others, who filed quickly inside, already slipping off their packs as they went. Schaffer, bringing up the rear, paused and glanced up at the sign above the hatch. ‘My God!’ He shook his head. ‘The left luggage office!’ ‘Where else?’ Smith asked reasonably. He ushered Schaffer in, closed and locked the door behind him. Hooding his pencil torch until only a finger-width beam emerged, he passed by the luggage racks till he came to the far end of the room where a bay window was set in the wall. It was a perfectly ordinary sash window and he examined it very minutely, careful that at no time the pinpoint of light touched the glass to shine through to the street beyond. He turned his attention to the vertical wooden planking at the side of the window, took out his sheath knife and levered a plank away to expose a length of twin-cored flex stapled vertically to the wall. He split the cores, sliced through each in turn, replaced the plank and tested the lower sash of the window. It moved easily up and down. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. 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