Читать книгу Where Eagles Dare - Alistair MacLean, Alistair MacLean, John Denis - Страница 7

The vibrating clangour from the four great piston engines set teeth on edge and made an intolerable assault on cringing ear-drums. 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 Nürnberg 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.