Читать книгу Where Eagles Dare - Alistair MacLean, Alistair MacLean, John Denis - Страница 8

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 Jäger 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.