Читать книгу For King and Country - David Monnery, David Monnery - Страница 5

Italy, January 1944

The SAS men sat in two rows, facing each other across the empty belly of the rumbling Halifax. It was almost eleven o’clock on the night of 19 January 1944, and these eight soldiers had been entrusted with Operation Jacaranda, the destruction of a railway bridge across the River Potenza just outside the small town of San Severino in eastern central Italy. In just over fifty-five hours 50,000 Allied troops would be attempting a landing on the Anzio peninsula just south of Rome, and this was one of several SAS parties that were being parachuted in to disrupt the inevitable German attempts at reinforcement. There were only a few rail routes across the ridge of mountains which formed Italy’s backbone, and cutting any or all of these would hinder any shift of German forces from the east coast to the west.

The eight men were dressed in camouflage Denison smocks, khaki trousers and heavy boots. The 1937-pattern webbing pouches around their waists held ammunition for the holstered Webley .455 revolvers and directional compasses. Jump helmets and silenced models of the Sten sub-machine-gun sat in each lap. Variety could only be found in bodily posture, facial expression and the colours of the berets stuffed through the epaulettes of the smocks. Five of these were beige, reflecting a preponderance of SAS veterans, the other three the newly adopted maroon.

Ten minutes earlier the air had been full of shouted jokes, but the proximity of the drop zone had reduced them all to silence.

Captain Julian Morgan, ‘Jools’ as he’d been known since prep school, looked the most relaxed. He seemed to be grinning at some private joke as he pushed back the flop of blond hair which was forever falling over his left eye, but he was just tracing his own progress from service in India through the excitements of North Africa and Sicily to this imminent descent on the Italian mainland. There had been moments of terror and moments of sadness – enough SAS pioneers had died in the desert – but deep down he knew he was having the time of his life.

On the seat beside him was Sergeant Morrie Beckwith, his dark face as stern as ever. He was thinking, as he always did at such moments, of his wife Margie back in Wolverhampton, and worrying over what would become of her and the children if something happened to him. He told himself, as he’d frequently told her, that he was much safer in the SAS than he would have been catching artillery in the infantry, torpedoes in the Navy or flak in the Air Force, but he didn’t believe it any more than she had.

On his left, Trevor Corrigan was finding it hard to sit still. His body was telling him he needed a crap, but since he’d had one just before setting off he was inclined to think that his body was having him on. He tried to concentrate on the girl he’d met in the Salerno café two nights ago, but conjuring up a picture of her was easier than holding on to it, and in the end he just let her go and sat there farting quietly, willing the journey to be over.

Last in line on that side of the Halifax, Roger Imrie was also contemplating his first drop behind enemy lines with dry mouth and whirring brain. He was worried he would let the others down, worried about how his mother would cope on the farm if something happened to both him and his bomber-pilot brother, worried that his parachute would fail to open. He’d always thought that that would be the worst kind of death, just falling and falling, with all that time to think about it, until you were splattered all over the ground.

Sitting opposite Imrie, Lieutenant Robert Farnham noticed the spasm of fear which leapt across the younger man’s face, and knew that he was imagining the worst in one form or another. He could remember doing the same himself, but these days his quiet and watchful countenance reflected a genuine calmness within. Since Catherine’s death in 1940 – she had been killed in their country cottage when a London-bound German pilot had decided to dump his bombs and run rather than look for a real target – his own life had become almost a matter of indifference to him. He wanted to kill Germans and he wanted to win the war, but the edge of caution which came with having someone else to live for had been dulled. His sister, Eileen, would no doubt miss him, but probably not for long. Another couple of years and she’d meet and marry some nice young survivor.

The man next to Farnham looked equally unperturbed by the prospect of imminent action, but then not much ever seemed to worry Corporal Neil Rafferty. If his face wasn’t sporting its habitual innocent smile, it would be wearing its current air of good-natured puzzlement. At this moment he was thinking about the two officers and how different they were, and wondering whether he felt more comfortable with Farnham’s cool seriousness or the more popular Morgan’s dashing enthusiasm.

Such thoughts were far from Ian Tobin’s mind. He was thinking, as usual, about sex. When he wasn’t thinking about it he was worrying that he thought about it too much, and when he did think about it he found it disturbing that he could think about it with anyone, and not just with Megan, even though he was sure he really loved her. At the moment he was most concerned at the thought that he might die a virgin, without having it off with anyone. He and Megan had agreed to wait until they were married, but at times like this he couldn’t help thinking that the man sitting on his left had a surer handle on what was really important.

Mickie McCaigh was also thinking about sex, reliving the moment two nights earlier when Lucia had flicked aside the shoulder strap on her dress and revealed that she was wearing nothing underneath. Her breasts had been so damned perfect, and the way she had arched herself back over the end of the bed…He sighed and tried to think about something else, not wanting to leave the plane with a throbbing erection, and smiled as he remembered his father’s last words of advice. ‘You’ll probably have to kill a few men,’ the old man had told him, ‘so make sure you make love to even more women. It’s the only way to hang on to your marbles.’

McCaigh was doing his best – in fact, so far he was well ahead – and he had a sneaking suspicion the old man had been right. It was all completely crazy anyway – jumping out of a plane over Italy because some jumped-up little twerp in Germany had invaded Poland five years ago – but he was seeing the world and its women, and he felt as sane as he ever had.

The dispatcher opened the bomb bay, adding the howl of the wind to the rumble of the plane’s engines, and the eight men got to their feet. With the padded helmets on and the Stens slung across their backs they fixed the static lines to the suggested points on the fuselage and double-checked that they were secure – in Africa, during the formative months of the SAS, several men had fallen to their deaths when chutes failed to open.

The wait for the word to go seemed endless, but finally the lights changed colour, the dispatcher mouthed ‘good luck’ to the lead jumper and almost shoved him through the hole. The other seven followed in quick succession, for even an extra second’s delay could land someone out of sight of the man in front, and the moon had already disappeared behind a thickening layer of cloud. It was going to be dark on the ground.

The eight ghostly shapes drifted down, each man concentrating on keeping himself balanced as his eyes sought definition in the darkness below. The landing zone, according to the briefer back in Salerno, was mainly bare plateau, but the ‘mainly’ was worrying, and no one wanted to be the odd man out, landing in the only tree for miles around and breaking his neck.

In the lead position Morgan saw the ground suddenly rise up to meet him, and just about had time to appreciate the lack of trees – the intelligence gathered from an Italian restaurant-owning family in Soho had obviously been accurate – before his feet were touching down on a gently sloping section of the plateau. He went into the roll, and was on his feet again almost instantly, pulling in the billowing chute like a fisherman gathering a net.

As expected, the clouds were thick enough to render the moon almost irrelevant, and visibility was severely limited. From where Morgan stood he couldn’t see much more than a football pitch’s worth of sloping grass, interspersed with outcrops of rock. He hoped no one would be landing on one of those.

No sooner had this thought flashed through his mind than a metallic crash echoed across the plateau.

Morgan started walking back down the line of descent, half dragging and half carrying the bundled chute, compass in hand. At least his sense of direction hadn’t deserted him. He was walking south, as his instinct had told him he was. On a clear day, or even a clear night, he would have been able to see the Adriatic some thirty miles away to the left, the snow-covered peaks of the Monti Sibillini some fifteen miles in front of him, but at this particular moment the known world was about a hundred yards in diameter, and seemed to be shrinking.

The noise had been made by Corrigan, who had landed on grass but rolled into a clutch of rocks. He announced himself unhurt, but the biscuit-tin radio he was carrying – so named for the Huntley & Palmer tin in which it was packed – looked significantly the worse for wear.

‘Good job we brought two,’ Farnham said, examining it. By this time the whole team had converged on the site of Corrigan’s fall to earth.

‘Mickie, Ian – start digging,’ Morgan ordered, tossing the jump helmet in their direction and fixing his beige beret at an appropriately rakish angle. He stared into the distance, imagining what lay ahead. If the Halifax navigator had done his sums right they should be about seven miles to the north of the Potenza valley town of San Severino. And about a thousand feet above it. According to the Soho restaurateurs the journey down from the plateau would offer all the tree cover they needed for the hours of daylight.

There were also several hill villages en route, and how their occupants would react to the appearance of British soldiers was harder to predict. According to the informants in London some villages were more hospitable than others, but they had disagreed violently as to which was which. The Oxford Italian history don subsequently consulted by Intelligence was not surprised. ‘The villages around there are all walled,’ he explained, ‘and not because they’ve been worried about foreign invaders. Those villages have been fighting each other since the fall of the Roman Empire.’

Morgan grinned at the memory and turned to see how the excavation was going. It was almost complete. One last shovel full and the eight chutes were pressed into the hole, the sections of turf carefully relaid.

McCaigh straightened up and took a first real look at his surroundings. ‘Hard to imagine Vera Lynn bursting into song in a place like this,’ he muttered.

They set off in single file, Stens at the ready. Beckwith took the lead, with Morgan only a step behind him, clutching the map which had been drawn in the British Museum map room and further detailed – if the stains were any guide – during a spaghetti sauce-making competition. Not that it was needed for the moment, for all trace of the moon had now vanished and they could hardly see a yard in front of their faces. Bunching to keep in contact, the column of men was looking more like a conga line than an armed raiding party.

Progress, not surprisingly, was slow, and to make matters worse rain began to fall. Fitful at first, it soon became a steady downpour.

They continued south, hoping that their starting point had been where it was supposed to be, silently cursing the rain and whatever else came to mind. Hitler, army food and the Americans were high on most lists, though the pecking order varied.

About an hour after starting out, with everyone soaked to the skin, they finally reached the edge of the plateau and started downhill. Another ten minutes and they found themselves descending a wooded valley. It was too late for the trees to keep them dry, but Farnham thought it a good place to dig in for the rest of the night and following day. He suggested as much to Morgan, who overrode his instinctive desire to push on and reluctantly agreed.

By this time it was almost two in the morning, and much of the next hour was spent in excavating two cross-shaped hides. Both were about two feet deep, with an arm for each of the four occupants and a central well for their equipment. The men’s groundsheets, supported by cut branches and covered in foliage, offered both concealment and shelter from the rain. ‘We might be soaked to the skin, but we’re not going to get any wetter,’ Morrie Beckwith announced hopefully.

‘Someone shoot the bugger,’ came a voice from the other hide.

For the next sixteen hours six of the eight men only left their scrapes to relieve themselves in the surrounding trees. It was still raining when dawn came, though by this time the heavy downpour had subsided into a drifting mist. Visibility didn’t improve much until around noon, when the mist suddenly grew thinner and wafted away, revealing brightening clouds in the branches above. These too soon broke apart, revealing not only the sun but an arc of mostly invisible rainbow in the eastern sky.

‘That’s a good omen,’ Corrigan decided.

‘Just about cancels out your diving into a rock with the radio,’ Beckwith told him brutally.

The inhabitants of the other hide were still laughing when Morgan appeared in Farnham’s observation slit. ‘I’m going back up the hill to take a recce,’ he announced. ‘Get a decent fix on where we are. And Rafferty might as well come with me. I’ve heard he can read a map.’

Rafferty gave his companions an ‘aren’t I the lucky one’ grin and crawled out of the hide to join the captain. They walked cautiously up through the still-dripping trees, whose branches seemed full of birds eager to make up for lost warbling time, and stood watching for a few moments on the uppermost edge of the wood before starting up the slope which they had descended the previous night. It was just as bare by daylight – there were no signs of human use, no buildings in the distance, no grazing animals, just rocks and rough mountain grass.

A couple of hundred yards up the slope there was more to see. Looking south, they could see the snowcapped peaks of the Monti Sibillini shining like a row of blazing torches in the afternoon sun; looking east, their eyes could follow the parallel valleys of the rivers Potenza and Chienti to the far-distant sea. About five miles from where they stood a dark line seemed to snake across the hills between the two valleys, and Morgan’s binoculars confirmed that this was the railway they’d been sent to cripple.

San Severino was still hidden from view, but looking out across the wooded cleft in which they were camped the two men could see the land fall away into a much deeper and broader valley. The town was down there somewhere, and training his binoculars in its likely direction Morgan thought he could make out several diaphanous trails of rising smoke against the wall of hills beyond.

‘Look,’ Rafferty said suddenly, and following his arm Morgan could see another trail of smoke, this one moving towards him on the distant railway. Before the train vanished from view in the valley below them, he had counted twenty-three flat wagons, each carrying a Wehrmacht tank. He was probably only imagining it, but several minutes later he seemed to hear the train rattling across the bridge they had come to destroy.

Darkness fell soon after five, but there was another seven hours of boredom to be endured before the time came to leave the security of the hides. By then the clouds had returned and the temperature had plummeted, giving the damp air a distinctly raw edge, but at least it hadn’t started to rain again. The eight men had changed into their only other set of undergarments, and the chances of getting the first set dry seemed remote. ‘Another night like last night and we’ll all come down with fucking pneumonia,’ Trevor Corrigan observed as he disentangled a groundsheet from the wet foliage which had been laid across it.

‘You know the flu epidemic after the last war killed more people than the war did?’ Roger Imrie offered.

‘A fountain of knowledge,’ McCaigh said sardonically.

‘A fountain of crap,’ Beckwith snorted.

‘It’s true,’ Imrie protested, as if they cared.

‘So instead of dropping bombs on the Germans perhaps we should just parachute in people with runny noses,’ McCaigh offered.

‘OK, OK,’ Morgan said, cutting through the laughter. ‘Let’s have a bit of hush. We might not be the only people in Italy.’

‘I bet we’re the only people this wet,’ Corrigan said under his breath.

‘You are,’ Beckwith muttered back.

They set off on their night march, Morgan in the lead, Beckwith close behind him. It was almost as dark as it had been the previous night, but the CO had spent a considerable part of the day trying to memorize the map, and intended using his torch only as a last resort.

They had walked about three-quarters of a mile down the valley when it became apparent that the ground beneath their feet was now a fairly well-beaten path. A little further and they could see the gaunt silhouettes of buildings on the slope above them. ‘Stigliano,’ Morgan murmured to himself, just as the sound of a dog barking cut through the silence. His mental map confirmed, Morgan turned away from the village, heading up the slope to his right. The dog continued to bark, and eventually a human voice responded with what was presumably a string of Italian curses.

The team reached the top of the ridge and started down the other side. Another small village – Serripola on Morgan’s map – became dimly visible, clinging precariously to the other side of the valley. They bypassed it by following the stream which tumbled along the bottom, then clambered up what they hoped was the last ridge before San Severino.

It was. The moon was now making an effort to shine through the clouds, and the roofs of the town below glowed in the pale light. It wasn’t a big town, but Farnham guessed it would be a pretty one in daylight. It had apparently been founded about fifteen hundred years earlier by Romans on the run from Barbarians, and was said to have a lovely elliptical square and some nice churches. After the war, Farnham told himself. For now it was just a lot of buildings next door to a bridge.

The latter was still hidden from view by the curve of the ridge, but a faint yellow glow seemed to be emanating from its presumed position, suggesting a degree of illumination which reflected the enemy’s understanding of its strategic importance. The thought crossed Farnham’s mind that this was not going to be as easy as Morgan seemed to think.

‘I think another recce’s in order,’ Morgan said softly, breaking Farnham’s reverie. ‘We need to find a spot for an OP with a decent view of the bridge,’ he continued, ‘and there’s no sense in all of us stumbling around in the dark. I’ll take Rafferty.’

Farnham nodded, his eyes still on the town below. It looked so peaceful.

It took Morgan and Rafferty twenty minutes to reach their destination, but the view was worth the trip. From the edge of the trees which covered the end of the snub-nosed ridge the land fell steeply away to the railway, which itself followed a narrow shelf between cliff and river. To their right, across the rushing waters of the Potenza, the town slept, cloaked in grey. About two hundred yards to their left, the single track swept across the river on a simple underslung truss bridge. It was about seventy-five feet long, and extremely well lit by searchlights at either end. At the far end, which alone seemed to offer easy access, a railwaymen’s hut had been turned into a guardhouse. There was a light in the window, and even at this distance the two SAS men could hear raised voices inside it. Another two armed soldiers were halfway across the bridge, and unlike many such sentries Morgan had seen in his military career, they seemed to be actually taking note of the world around them.

Beyond the bridge the railway completed an S-bend by turning into what was obviously the station and goods area. The single track divided into four, and long lines of goods wagons stood on the three to the left. The roof of a goods shed rose above them. On the other side of the through line, some thirty yards this side of the station itself, there was a small engine shed with a coaling platform and water-tower.

The wagons in the goods yard might offer some cover for the approach, Morgan thought. He turned his binoculars on the road bridge, which crossed the river another couple of hundred yards beyond the railway. It was unlit and apparently unguarded.

He smiled to himself. Blowing the bridge didn’t look that difficult – the real trick would be surviving the aftermath. There were thirty miles of fairly open country between them and the scheduled Navy pickup, and the local Germans were likely to be distinctly miffed. ‘Go and fetch the others,’ he told Rafferty. ‘We won’t find a better spot for an OP than this.’

Daylight found all eight men well concealed in two rectangular trenches. One narrow end of each looked out across the bridge and station area, and it was here that the men took turns keeping watch through the narrow slit between ground and cover. The other ends were for sleeping, cooking on the tiny hexamine stoves, and, in the case of the eastern trench, manufacturing explosive devices. Morrie Beckwith was the resident expert, bringing together the ingredients they had carried with them – lumps of the new plastic explosive, thermite and lubricant – into his own variations on SAS pioneer Jock Lewes’s famous Lewes bomb. Beckwith had an almost dreamy look on his face as he worked, which suggested both intense concentration and a strange joy in the process.

Those on watch had rather less to keep them interested. It soon became apparent that the day shift in the guardhouse below was remarkably similar to the night shift – a total of six guards, two of whom would be crossing and recrossing the bridge at roughly five-minute intervals. During the day a further pair of soldiers could be seen pacing up and down the distant station platform. There was presumably a local German garrison which supplied these guards, but where it was, and how many men it comprised, God only knew. The SAS men hoped it was a long way away.

A troop convoy comprising over twenty lorries passed through the town early in the afternoon, but trains were conspicuous by their absence. The Allied air forces no doubt discouraged the Germans from too much movement during the hours of daylight, but in any case this was a little-used line. If the SAS parties to the north did their jobs then the Germans would need it badly, but by that time, with any luck, it would be out of action.

Soon after dark Morgan called a conference in one of the hides, and all eight men squeezed in. Once the four visitors had made appropriate remarks about the décor and prevailing odours he went through the catalogue of their observations over the past sixteen hours, presented a possible plan of action and, in true SAS spirit, invited comments from all and sundry.

‘Almost sounds too easy, boss,’ McCaigh said.

It was close to one o’clock when the eight men slipped one by one across the road bridge, down the small embankment, and into the deeper shadow of the trees beside the river. The light was better than on the previous two nights, though still a long way short of what the moon could manage from a clear sky. It was probably about perfect, Morgan thought – bright enough for Beckwith to do his demolition work, dark enough to cloak their escape into the hills.

Three hundred yards upstream, the illuminated bridge looked more substantial than it had from their bird’s-eye vantage-point.

They started working their way along the bank, crouching slightly as they walked, more from instinct than any real fear that they would silhouette themselves against the cliffs on the other side of the river. There was no need to worry about noise – the rush of the black water beside them was loud enough to drown out a male voice choir’s rendition of ‘God Save the King’.

Fifty yards or so from the guardhouse Morgan gestured everyone to the ground, and they all lay there waiting for the two-man patrol to reach the designated stage of their regular route. As they set foot on the near side of the bridge Morgan and Farnham rose to their feet and walked swiftly towards the windowless back wall of the railway hut turned guardhouse. Reaching it, they stood still for a moment, listening to the German voices inside. They sounded like they were having a good time.

At Morgan’s signal the two men inched their way round the end of the hut furthest from the bridge, hoping the door was open, as it had been when they broke camp an hour and a half earlier.

It was.

The two men on patrol had almost reached the other end of the bridge. Morgan took one step inside the door and another to his left, allowing Farnham an equal angle of fire. The two men had a fleeting glimpse of bareheaded, greatcoated men sitting round a packing case, cards in hand, before the silent fusillade ripped the scene to pieces, shredding the back and head of the man who was facing away from the door, spurting blood and brains in a welter of collapsing bodies. There was a sound like furniture falling, a moment of utter silence, and then they could hear the river once more.

They pulled two of the bodies out of their greatcoats, grabbed a coal-scuttle helmet each, and waited by the door. Glancing back at the four dead men, Farnham was struck by how young the faces looked. In a few days four homes in Germany would be getting letters from the Wehrmacht, and tears would be rolling down their mothers’ cheeks.

A wave of cold anger ran through him, anger at the bastards who had set the whole bloody mess in motion.

Morgan was looking at his watch. It usually took the guards five minutes to complete their circuit, which meant there was one to go. Straining his ears, he thought he could hear the faint drumming of feet on the bridge, and seconds later he heard their voices. Thirty yards, he guessed. Twenty, fifteen…

The two SAS men exchanged nods, and walked calmly out through the door.

One of the approaching Germans shouted out a question in a cheerful voice, and in reply Morgan’s Sten seemed to lift him off his feet. Farnham’s target died less dramatically, dropping like a stone as the bullets stitched a line from belly button to forehead.

They walked quickly forward, grabbed the bodies by the ankles, and dragged them back across the cinders to the makeshift mass grave in the guardhouse. ‘Call in the others,’ Morgan told Farnham.

They were already on their way, squeezing into the hut one by one.

‘Nice and warm in here,’ Beckwith muttered, feigning not to notice the pile of corpses around the stove. The faces of both Tobin and Imrie, Farnham noticed, were decidedly pale.

‘So far so…’ Morgan started to say, but at that moment all eight heads turned in response to the unmistakable sound of approaching heavy vehicles. In a move worthy of the Marx Brothers all eight men moved towards the doorway, causing a general scrum, and tipping Imrie off his feet and into the lap of a German corpse. He froze for a second, took a deep breath and clambered back up.

Meanwhile Morgan had asserted rank and claimed the view from the door. Two large lorries had drawn up in the station forecourt about a hundred and fifty yards away. Their uniformed drivers had already climbed down and were lighting cigarettes. A man in an officer’s cap was just disappearing into the station building.

‘Maybe he’s just stopped for a shit,’ McCaigh suggested hopefully.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Morgan decided. ‘Trev, Roger – get some coats and helmets on and start pretending to be guards. Robbie,’ he went on, looking out through the doorway, ‘form a line of defence. Two of you behind this hut, the other two behind the engine shed over there. If Jerry starts pouring out of those lorries and heading this way, start shooting.’ He pushed a lock of unruly hair back inside the beret and turned to Beckwith. ‘Come on, Morrie, we’ve got a bridge to blow.’

There was still no movement in the distant forecourt, though this time Morgan thought he could hear laughter from inside one of the lorries. The officer had not returned – if McCaigh had been right about his destination maybe the bastard was constipated.

As Corrigan and Imrie, suitably coated and helmeted, walked along the track towards the bridge, Morgan and Beckwith skirted round the pool of light, reached the bank of river some thirty yards downstream and then worked their way back along the water’s edge. Climbing up into the underslung girder was as easy as it had looked from the OP, and they encountered no difficulties crossing to the other side along the wide, L-shaped beams. The only real problem was a distinct lack of light, but then Beckwith had always claimed he could put together explosive charges in his sleep.

On the bridge above them Corrigan and Imrie had stopped to light cigarettes and were now leaning over the parapet, puffing away as contentedly as their German predecessors had done. Away to their right the lorries were still sitting in the forecourt.

The striking of a match betrayed the position of the missing officer. ‘The bastard’s standing on the platform,’ Imrie suddenly realized.

‘Maybe he’s waiting for a train,’ Corrigan said flippantly.

A few seconds later the two men were staring at each other, suddenly aware of what that might mean.

Thirty yards away, crouched behind a corner of the stone-built engine shed, Farnham was mentally sifting through the same implications. If the lorries were there to meet a train, then the chances of it arriving either just before or just after the bridge blew up were pretty good. But was there any way to take the train down with the bridge? He couldn’t think of one. It was already too late – Beckwith would have the time pencils in place by now. They would have to trust to luck.

The mingled smell of coal, tar and oil was heavy in Farnham’s nostrils, taking him back to his schooldays and the frequent illicit trips to Bishop’s Stortford engine shed which he and Tubby Mayne had made. Fifteen years ago now. A lot had happened in that time. The Depression, the War, marriage, growing up. Tubby had been killed in the Battle of Britain.

He looked at his watch – Morgan and Beckwith had been under the bridge for almost fifteen minutes. And then he heard the train whistle in the distance. It was still a few miles away, he thought. Probably approaching one of the three tunnels that lay between San Severino and Tolentino.

Under the bridge Morgan had heard it too, and the same possibilities had occurred to him. But by this time Beckwith had placed all the charges and was now scurrying through the girders, squeezing the detonators on the black-coded time pencils. As the ampoules shattered, the acid began eating into the thin wire, and in roughly ten minutes – the ‘roughly’ was a sore point among users – the wires would break, releasing the springs and slamming firing pins into initiators, exploding the charges and hopefully, in this case, dropping the bridge into the river.

Morgan could hear the wheeze of the approaching locomotive. It couldn’t be much more than a mile away.

Beckwith was only a few feet away now, breathing heavily as he reached for the final device. The last thing Morgan heard was his sergeant’s mutter of frustration, and then the charge went off, tearing Beckwith limb from limb and hurling Morgan himself against an iron girder with the force of a hurricane. Both bodies dropped into the surging river.

Thirty yards away Farnham spun round to see the bridge still standing, the smoke clearing to reveal Corrigan on the far bank, pointing at something in the water. He just had time to notice that the German officer had vanished from the station platform when the man re-emerged in the forecourt barking orders at the standing lorries. There was a sound of boots hitting the ground.

Realizing he’d been holding his breath, Farnham took in a gulp of cold air and tried to think. As far as he could tell the best way out was the way they’d come in – the only alternative was to retreat across the bridge and then they’d be trapped between cliff and river.

‘Get across to Neil,’ he told Tobin, who was crouching wild-eyed beside him. ‘Tell him to keep Jerry at a distance. I’m going to check the bridge.’ Without waiting for an answer he launched himself across the space towards the river’s edge, reaching it just in time to see what looked like a severed leg bobbing beyond the circle of illumination offered by the searchlights. On the far bank Corrigan and Imrie were gazing hopelessly at the water, and for a few seconds Farnham felt equally paralysed. The sound of the approaching train mingled with the clatter of boots in the forecourt and the guttural shouts of the German NCOs.

He forced himself to think. Morgan and Beckwith must have been under the bridge long enough to place and prime all the charges, but Farnham was certain that only one of them had exploded. The bridge would probably still go up, but when? There’d been no discussion of which time pencils would be used – making sure everyone was on the same page had never been one of Morgan’s strengths. If they made a run for it now the Germans might have time to save the bridge, but could he ask the others to die holding them off when he wasn’t even sure the bridge was going to blow?

He gulped in another lungful of air and decided he couldn’t. ‘Get back over here,’ he shouted at Corrigan and Imrie, who both looked at him stupidly for a second and then started clambering back up from the water’s edge.

A second later the Germans opened fire, presumably in response to the silent Stens of Rafferty, Tobin and McCaigh.

Farnham began zig-zagging his way back towards the shelter of the guardhouse. He was about halfway there when a second charge went off behind him, and then a third. He turned to see a huge cloud of smoke rising to obscure the cliffs beyond as the far end of the bridge, with what sounded eerily like a huge sigh, sank heavily into the river.

As the smoke cleared he could see Corrigan and Imrie climbing shakily to their feet on the far bank. The bad news was that they couldn’t get back across; the good news was that neither could the Germans. Farnham gestured to them to escape along the tracks and after only a few seconds’ hesitation Corrigan flashed a thumbs up and turned away, pulling Imrie after him.

Farnham resumed his run towards the guardhouse, just as a hail of bullets swept over his head. The train was now entering the station, pouring a dark plume of smoke at the sky and half drowning the sound of the German guns. With something akin to a leap of the heart Farnham realized that it was going to pull right through the station, effectively cutting them off from the German troops who were inching their way forward from the end of the platform.

Reaching the shelter of the guardhouse, he opened up with his own Sten and saw a German fall, though whether from his or Rafferty’s fire he couldn’t tell. The Italian locomotive was still coming forward, and at this rate it might even reach what remained of the bridge.

‘The boss and Morrie are dead,’ Farnham told the others. The edge of panic had disappeared and he now felt almost supernaturally calm and collected. ‘Corrigan and Imrie were on the other side of the river when the bridge went down. They’re making their own way home. We’re going out the way we came in. OK?’

The others nodded at him.

The train was almost on top of them. ‘So let’s go,’ Farnham said, leading off at a run towards the line of trees beside the river. To their left two more charges went off on the broken bridge, momentarily eclipsing the deafening hiss of the braking locomotive.

The train was composed entirely of closed and lightless wagons, and once away from the bridge area the four SAS men found themselves cloaked once more in the relative safety of darkness. They raced towards the road, occasionally stumbling over rough pieces of ground, expecting to hear gunfire behind them at any moment, but the German troops were either very green or unusually disorganized, and none came. Reaching the road, Farnham resisted the temptation to seek the safety of the high ground they already knew, instead ploughing on through the orchard opposite. From this they emerged into an open field, which in the darkness seemed to stretch for miles.

This was the escape route they had decided on earlier that night in the OP. If anyone got separated from the party the plan was to rendezvous a quarter of a mile north of the tiny hill village of San Giuseppe, which was itself about six miles east of San Severino. The spot in question might be a swamp or a local trysting place – their map was somewhat limited, to say the least – but if Corrigan and Imrie escaped from the Germans then that would be where they’d expect to find their comrades waiting.

And then they could all cheerfully hike their way to the sea.

Farnham suddenly felt cold all over. The remaining radio had been in Corrigan’s bergen, and that was still lying where Corrigan had left it, on the floor of the railway hut. They had no way of contacting the Navy, and if they missed the pick-up there would be no second chance. How could he have been so stupid?

As they tried to hurry across the wet field, slipping and sliding in the mud, he told himself it was done, and there was no point in dwelling on the fact. They still had forty-eight hours to go, or two whole nights. The Germans would be looking for them, but they couldn’t have that many men in the area, and with any luck the Anzio landing – which would be starting in an hour or so – would give the enemy something more important to think about.

He became aware that Rafferty had stopped a few yards ahead of him. ‘The railway’s only just over there,’ the younger man said, pointing to a dark line of bushes away to their right. ‘Don’t you think we’d be better off walking down the track than wading through all this muck? Just for a while, anyway. They can’t follow us with their lorries, can they? And if they try backing up that train we’ll hear it coming.’

It was a good idea, Farnham realized. Rafferty’s brain seemed to be working better than his own. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said.

The four men struggled across the last thirty yards of mud, bulldozed their way through the line of bushes and on to the track. Away to the right, they could see nothing of the station half a mile away – only the faint yellow glow which hung above it.

As they started walking in the opposite direction Farnham tried to think himself into the mind of the ranking German. He would know the intruders couldn’t have got far, but he would have no idea of their direction, and the night was dark enough to hide an army. As regards the four of them, he would wait for daylight before casting a net. As regards the other two, Farnham realized with a sinking heart, he would immediately seek to slam the door on their escape route.

Maybe Corrigan and Imrie would find a way of crossing the river or scaling the cliffs, but their map hadn’t suggested any. If it had, they would have made the initial approach from that direction.

He put the problem to the back of his mind and concentrated on adjusting his step to the evenly spaced wooden sleepers. Rafferty was about ten yards in front of him, Tobin about ten to his rear, McCaigh a similar number behind the Welshman. Their training was showing, Farnham thought, and about time too, because so far this operation had hardly covered the SAS with glory. Two dead men, the unit split up, one radio broken and another left behind, an over-hasty retreat from the scene of the action.

But at least the bridge was down.

They walked on, ears alert for the sounds of a train or motor traffic on the nearby road, but in half an hour only one motorcycle dispatch rider, also heading east, disturbed the dark silence. They had, by Rafferty’s estimate, walked about three miles when the mouth of the tunnel suddenly emerged out of the gloom, and a few yards more when the rain started to fall. By the time they had reached the shelter of the portal it was coming down with a vengeance.

According to their map the tunnel was about three-quarters of a mile long.

‘It’ll keep us dry,’ Rafferty argued.

‘We’re already wet through,’ Tobin protested. Nor did he like the idea of a walk in the pitch dark. ‘And we’d be like rats in a trap,’ he added.

Farnham wasn’t sure why, but he agreed with him. Taking the tunnel felt a bit too much like walking into the spider’s parlour. He looked at his watch. It was almost three o’clock and they were probably about three miles from San Giuseppe. ‘We’ll go over the top,’ he announced.

The next two hours were among the most miserable any of the four men could remember. In the teeth of a near-gale, with the cold rain whipping into their faces, they stumbled across two ranges of hills and climbed in and out of one deep valley. Wet through and freezing cold, their only consolation lay in their complete invisibility to the enemy. But then again, if the Germans were out searching for them in this weather, more than just Hitler needed his head examined.

At around five Farnham called a halt. They were crossing a small valley similar to the one they had camped in two nights before, and the low branches of the trees, once they were hung with groundsheets, could offer a temporary bivouac and the prospect of cooking up some soup to warm the blood. If they just pushed on, Farnham decided, there was every chance they’d blunder past San Giuseppe in the dark. They couldn’t be far from the village, and if this weather kept up they wouldn’t have much to fear from spotter planes, especially in the first hour of half-light.

It took McCaigh only a few minutes to get the hexamine stove set up and a couple of cans heating. ‘I wonder where the stupid bastards have got to?’ he muttered to no one in particular.

‘What went wrong, do you think?’ Tobin asked.

‘Must have been a faulty time pencil,’ Rafferty said. ‘I can’t see Morrie making a mistake.’

‘Yeah,’ McCaigh agreed. ‘He was good.’ He gave the soup a final stir. ‘At least it was quick. The miserable bastard wouldn’t have known what hit him.’

The others murmured agreement.

‘He had a wife though, didn’t he?’ Tobin asked.

Rafferty frowned at him. ‘Yeah,’ he said curtly. The thought of getting killed wasn’t so bad, but he found it hard to think about leaving Beth with no one to look after her and the baby.

Bending over the soup, McCaigh remembered his dad’s line about 1918 – ‘All those women in black, and not enough men left to satisfy half of them.’ There was no woman praying for his return – well, maybe a few here and there were offering up the odd wishful thought – but his sixteen-year-old brother Patrick would probably go right off the rails if someone wasn’t there to keep an eye on him.

Half an hour later, Farnham’s claim that he could detect a lightening in the eastern sky was received with some scepticism, but a few minutes more and even McCaigh was willing to admit that the shade of darkness had slightly changed. Now the swirls of mist and rain were being painted in charcoal grey rather than black; the difference, he said, was ‘like night and night’.

They pulled down their groundsheet roofing and started off once more. San Giuseppe turned out to be only a few hundred yards away, and they were almost on top of the village when the first cluster of buildings loomed alarmingly out of the gloom.

‘Nice navigating, Neil,’ Farnham murmured. He checked his compass, and pointed them north.

‘Let’s hope there’s a Lyons Corner House where X marks the spot,’ said McCaigh.

At first there seemed to be only a bare hillside, and that hardly seemed the ideal place to wait for their comrades, rain or no rain. But then fortune smiled on the four men, lifting a swirl of mist like a curtain to reveal a small chapel set amid a grove of oak trees. From the outside it looked ruined, but inside they found a simple altar set on a stone plinth in an otherwise bare chamber.

This was as good a place as anywhere to sit out the day, Farnham decided. There were no roads nearby, and the other two would have a good chance of finding them. Best of all, it was dry.

‘Cup of tea for breakfast?’ McCaigh suggested.

He was just pouring the first cup when the door opened and the two Italians walked in.

The newcomers looked almost reproachfully at the Sten gun that Rafferty was pointing in their direction. ‘Friend,’ the older of the two said economically, in Italian. He was probably in his forties, with greying hair, a weathered face and eyes that even at this moment seemed full of amusement. His companion was a young man barely out of his teens, still apparently struggling to grow a full moustache.

‘Enzio,’ the older man said, tapping himself on the chest. ‘Giancarlo,’ he added, pointing at the other. ‘American?’ he asked, offering two open palms to the four SAS men.

‘We are English,’ Farnham told him in reasonably adequate Italian. He’d been learning the language on and off since 1941, partly to fill in the periods of boredom endemic to army life, partly to maximize his chances of being selected for exactly this sort of mission. And he had to admit that during the last six months in Italy he had developed a definite hankering to return here when the war was over.

Enzio beamed at his linguistic proficiency, though Giancarlo seemed a bit disappointed that they were not Americans.

‘You are the men who blew up the bridge in San Severino,’ the older man half stated, half asked.

There didn’t seem much point in denying it. ‘We did,’ Farnham agreed, wondering how the news had reached the middle of nowhere so fast.

‘We are partisans,’ Enzio said, as if in explanation. ‘We have people in the town.’

‘How did you find us here?’ Farnham asked.

Enzio smiled. ‘You were seen at San Giuseppe, and followed here,’ he explained. ‘By a six-year-old,’ he added, his eyes almost dancing with amusement.

Farnham had the grace to laugh.

‘But you cannot stay here,’ Enzio went on. ‘This is a holy place, and some people will not understand. You must come to the village, dry your clothes, have something good to eat, and then we can talk about your plans. You will be safe there,’ he added, seeing the look of doubt on Farnham’s face. ‘The Germans are not likely to come, but if they do there will be warning. They cannot surprise us.’

Farnham smiled. ‘This is very generous of you,’ he told the Italian, ‘but first I must talk to my men.’

‘Of course,’ Enzio said.

Farnham turned to the others. ‘They say they’re partisans. They’re offering us shelter, food and somewhere to dry out. If they’re who they say they are then they’ll be able to help us get to the sea. And if the others don’t turn up they’ll probably have ways of finding out what’s happened to them. What do you reckon?’

‘Do you think they’re the genuine article?’ Rafferty asked.

‘Yes,’ Farnham said without hesitation.

‘Then why not?’

‘Sounds good to me,’ McCaigh said. ‘Especially the bit about drying out.’

‘We shall be honoured,’ Farnham told Enzio.

The two Italians escorted them back across the rainswept hillside to the village, and as they walked down the only street the doorways seemed full of curious eyes. Their destination was a large barn that had obviously been built to withstand the winter weather, for inside it was dry and relatively warm. Enzio left them for a few minutes, and then returned with a pile of dry clothes in varying sizes. Not long after that two oldish women arrived with a pot of steaming noodle soup and two loaves of freshly baked bread, all of which left the four men feeling truly warm for the first time since their departure from Salerno three nights before.

Every now and then the door would inch open to reveal one or more children staring in at them. One young girl, probably no more than six years old, with dark, saucer-like eyes seemed unable to drag herself away.

‘But where are they keeping the older sisters?’ McCaigh wondered out loud.

‘They’ve probably been locked up for the duration of your visit,’ Rafferty told him.

‘Ah, fame,’ McCaigh said dreamily.

‘We should get some sleep,’ Farnham said, interrupting the reverie. His instincts told him the Italians were trustworthy, but he wasn’t about to lower their guard completely. ‘I’ll take first watch,’ he added, and it seemed only seconds before the barn was echoing to satisfied snores. Farnham sat with his back against a stall, running through the events of the past twelve hours. He couldn’t pretend he had liked Morgan – he’d always thought of him as one of those men who found it hard to imagine a world without them – but there was no doubting that the man had been tailor-made for the SAS.

Life was so easy to snuff out. One moment a whole person, in all his or her bewildering complexity, and the next – nothing. Unless of course you believed in an afterlife, and Farnham was pretty sure he didn’t. It would have been nice to believe that a life in heaven had saved Catherine from extinction, but only for his own sake. She would have found it boring.

The morning went by. Farnham took a brief look around outside – he needed some idea of where they were – but otherwise kept to the safety of the barn. More food arrived early in the afternoon, this time accompanied by a jug of wine, from which he poured four conservative measures. This didn’t seem the time or place for dulling their brains or motor skills.

Soon after dark Enzio returned, a stern look on his face. ‘The Germans have captured them,’ he said without preamble.

Farnham’s heart sank but he wasn’t surprised. ‘Where are they?’ he asked.

‘They are being held in the town hall. They have been there most of the day – the story is that they walked straight into a German patrol in the darkness.’

‘Are they being treated as prisoners of war?’ Farnham asked anxiously. Late in 1942 Hitler had ordered the execution of all commandos captured behind enemy lines, regardless of whether or not they were in uniform. In Africa Rommel had ignored the order, but on at least two recent occasions German commanders in Italy had carried it out.

Enzio didn’t know. ‘The Army captured them, but the men in leather coats arrived this afternoon.’ He shrugged.

Farnham’s heart sank again. If they were being questioned by the Gestapo, then torture was a real possibility. That would be bad enough in itself, but both men knew the pick-up point at the mouth of the River Chienti. ‘How many men are guarding them?’ he asked Enzio. After all, a town hall was not a prison.

The Italian raised both eyebrows. ‘You are thinking of a rescue?’ he asked.

‘If it is possible.’

Enzio blew a silent whistle with his lips. ‘The town is full of Germans now. Your broken bridge – well, they are like flies around shit. But maybe the town hall…I don’t know…’

‘Could you get us into the town to take a look?’ Farnham asked.

The Italian nodded. ‘Two of you, perhaps. Early in the morning, when there are many carts on the road.’

‘That would be wonderful. Now, I must tell the others what you have told me.’

Enzio nodded, turned away, and then turned back again. ‘And I have other news for you. Better news. Your armies have landed this morning on the coast south of Rome.’ He smiled. ‘You were expecting this, I suppose.’

‘It is why we came to blow the bridge, to make it harder for the Germans to reinforce their armies in the south.’

Enzio smiled again, and left.

Farnham turned to the others. Their grim faces told him they had guessed the gist, but he went through the conversation in detail. This was the SAS, not the regular army, and they needed to know everything he did before a decision could be taken on what to do next.

‘So what do you think, boss?’ McCaigh asked, once all the information had been shared.

Farnham chose his words carefully. ‘If there’s any chance of getting the two of them back without getting everyone – including them – killed, then I think we’ll have to give it a shot. And if that means blowing the boat…’

‘We can always steal a boat,’ Rafferty said with a sniff. Both he and Tobin seemed to be developing colds. ‘The Adriatic can’t be that wide.’

‘Yeah, but Yugoslavia’s on the other side,’ McCaigh said. ‘And I seem to remember a German invasion.’

‘So we sail south,’ Rafferty said. ‘We’re bound to hit Africa sooner or later.’

Farnham did a round of the faces. They all knew that staying where they were was risky, let alone taking a trip back into the lion’s den, but he could detect no real desire to cut and run. They’d rather head for the sea and home – who wouldn’t? – but they wouldn’t desert their mates without a damn good reason.

He felt proud of them. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘I’ll give Enzio the good news.’

The cart left the following morning as dawn was breaking, Farnham and Rafferty sharing the back with seven villagers, while Enzio, Giancarlo and a woman called Carmela sat in the front. Most of their fellow passengers seemed friendly, but Farnham couldn’t help noticing the resentment in a few of the eyes. In their place, he thought, he might well have felt the same.

The rain and clouds had vanished overnight, giving the two Englishmen their first real view of the village and surrounding countryside. The twenty or so dwellings of San Giuseppe were perched high on a hillside, above the fields which its inhabitants worked, staring out across the mile-wide valley at a similar-sized village on the opposite slope. About six hundred feet below them the Chienti, exhausted after its precipitous descent from the mountains, was beginning its lazy meander to the sea.

Enzio had explained that by taking a roundabout route they could avoid the usual checkpoint at the eastern approach to the town, and it was almost two hours before the horses toiled across the brow of a bare hill and San Severino came into view below them. The descending road wound through a series of hairpin bends, and it was above the last of these, by the side of an apparently endless orchard, that Enzio pulled the animals to a halt and gave Farnham the bad news. ‘There’s a checkpoint ahead,’ he said.

Looking over the Italian’s shoulder, the SAS man could see the posse of helmeted guards and their motorcycles astride a small bridge at the southern entrance to the town.

‘You’ll have to wait for us here,’ Enzio said. ‘There’s plenty of cover,’ he added, indicating the orchard.

Farnham agreed reluctantly. There was no point in denying that neither he nor Rafferty looked like a local.

They climbed down and headed for the shelter of the trees as the horses resumed their downhill plod.

‘We could try circling round,’ Rafferty suggested, more in hope than expectation.

‘We could,’ Farnham agreed, ‘but we wouldn’t know where to look once we were in. How about up there?’ he said, indicating a shelf of rock some fifty yards above them which looked out across both the orchard and the town.

They reached it just as their cart was drawing up at the checkpoint below. Enzio seemed to be talking to the German for a long time, and for a fleeting moment Farnham imagined the Italian suddenly pointing up the hillside to where they lay, but then the cart moved on into the town and he felt momentarily ashamed of his lack of trust.

Taking out his binoculars, he began to study the town below. Not surprisingly, his first point of call was the bridge they had brought down, and he was pleased to see that nothing much in the way of repair work seemed to have been done since their departure. The bridge sat in the rushing water, and there was as yet no sign of a crane to lift it out. The train which had come so fortuitously between them and the German troops was still standing where they’d left it, and on the track beyond it a later arrival could just be made out, stretching away into the distance.

Flies on shit, Enzio had said, and there was certainly no shortage of Germans in evidence. Troop carriers surrounded the station like a wagon train from a Western, two tanks were parked like book-ends either side of the road bridge over the river and several infantry patrols were visible on the town’s already busy streets. The chances of rescuing Corrigan and Imrie seemed poised somewhere between slim and zero.

He trained the binoculars on the elliptical square he’d noticed two nights before, wondering if this was where the town hall would be. Perhaps it was the sunshine, but the square looked even more beautiful from this angle. The strange shape was pretty enough in its own right, but the colonnaded buildings which lined the perimeter would have looked lovely anywhere.

Farnham was just wondering why the square was so empty when a group of men suddenly walked into view. All but two were helmeted, and it didn’t take Farnham many seconds to realize that the odd men out were Corrigan and Imrie. He couldn’t actually see their faces, but Imrie’s blond hair was a give-away. And in any case, who else could they be? The closest Allied op to Jacaranda was more than a hundred miles to the north.

‘What is it?’ Rafferty asked, sensing the other man’s excitement.

‘Corrigan and Imrie. In the square, but they’re out of sight now.’

‘Did they look OK?’

‘They were walking all right,’ Farnham said. He hoped Enzio would be able to find out where they’d been taken, and that it would be somewhere more accessible than the town hall of a town swarming with Germans. ‘I didn’t get…’

The volley of shots cut him off. A swarm of birds rose squawking into the air above the distant square and the rippling echo of gunfire seemed to bounce from one side of the valley to the other.

‘Oh God,’ Farnham murmured.

‘The bastards!’ Rafferty half cried out.

For the next few minutes they took turns with the binoculars, but there was no visual evidence of what they both knew to be true.

The wait for the villagers’ return seemed endless, but eventually the familiar cart made its appearance on the road below. They went to meet it, thinking that Enzio’s news could hardly be worse than expected, but they were wrong.

‘They have hung the bodies of your friends in the piazza,’ he informed Farnham with a sigh. ‘As an example of what happens to anyone who opposes them,’ he added unnecessarily.

‘What did he say?’ Rafferty asked.

Farnham told him, and watched a single tear roll down the younger man’s cheek. He closed his own eyes, but there in the darkness he could see Corrigan sitting by the broken radio with a silly grin on his face, the anxious smile on Imrie’s face as he sat waiting in the belly of the Halifax. Thousands were dying every day, but a death was still a death.

By the time they arrived back in San Giuseppe early that afternoon Farnham had already decided on an immediate departure. He didn’t want the four of them sitting around brooding over what had happened, and in any case there was precious little time to waste if they were to keep their rendezvous with the Navy at the mouth of the Chienti. They had thirty-plus miles to cover in fourteen hours, but that seemed possible now that the weather had improved. He wouldn’t have fancied their chances in the previous day’s rain.

When told of their plans Enzio offered an unexpected boost. He would take them part of the way, he said. After examining their intended route on Farnham’s map he announced that he would take them down into the valley and up the other side. Then they could follow the small roads that clung to the distant ridge most of the way to the narrow coastal plain. ‘And it is good that you are leaving now,’ he added. ‘A brother of one of the women in the village – he has suddenly disappeared. It may mean nothing, but…’ He shrugged.

Ten minutes later they were on their way, perched on the same cart but pulled by fresh horses. Most of the villagers came out to give them goodbye waves and smiles of encouragement, and Farnham silently vowed that if he survived the war he’d return and thank them properly.

Enzio, it turned out, had more immediate gratification in mind. ‘We need guns,’ he told Farnham as the cart wound down the hill. ‘The Germans think that things like they did today will scare people, and maybe they will scare a few, but things like that will also make more people willing to fight them. The people here never wanted to fight with them, but there’s quite a few who can hardly wait to fight against them. But we must have guns. And explosives. And when they rebuild your bridge, we can blow it up again.’

Farnham promised to do what he could.

‘You could drop them in the field where we found you in the rain,’ Enzio added with a twinkle.

They reached the valley floor, and for the next ten minutes, as they drove along the dangerous stretch of main road beside the river, neither man spoke. But no enemy motorcycle or lorry hove into view before they turned off it once more, rattling across the Chienti on an old stone bridge and starting up another small road into the hills. As they climbed the winding track the sun was sinking swiftly towards the line of the Apennines, casting the valley behind them in a gorgeous warm glow, and Rafferty was taking one last look at this panoramic scene when he spotted the plume of smoke rising in the northern sky.

‘Ask Enzio what that is,’ he said to Farnham, hoping he was wrong.

The Italian looked back, and the change which came over his face in that moment would long remain in the Englishmen’s memory. The eyes seemed to soften with sorrow as the features hardened with rage, as if the mind behind them was stretching to encompass the war.

‘They are burning our winter feed,’ Enzio said flatly.

‘I’m sorry,’ Farnham said, hoping that the Italian was right, and that feed was all the Germans were burning. ‘You’ve brought us far enough,’ he added. ‘Get back to your people.’

Enzio shook his head, and jerked the horses back into motion. ‘I will take you to Urbisaglia,’ he said, and Farnham knew it would be useless to try to get him to change his mind.

An hour later, with the darkness almost complete, the Italian drove through the small village and brought the cart to a halt. ‘Follow this road,’ he told them, pointing to a track which led higher into the hills. ‘And send us guns,’ he told Farnham once more, after shaking hands with each man and climbing back on the cart.

The SAS men started walking. According to the map they now had only twenty-five miles to cover, but the roads were neither as straight as the map suggested nor as flat as the paper it was printed on, and Farnham reckoned they would need every minute of the hours remaining to make the rendezvous on time.

The track switched from side to side of the ridge, offering intermittent views of the valleys to north and south, and as the evening wore on the pinpoints of light in the distant villages flickered out and the glow of a waning half-moon flooded the winter fields. There was little traffic on the road – only a few solitary locals who gave them uncertain smiles and hurried on by – and not much more on the main roads which followed the valley bottoms. The railway line which paralleled the road to the north was definitely out of use, which at least offered some satisfaction to the four men.

Soon after midnight, with almost two-thirds of the journey behind them, they stopped in a convenient wood for food and a fifteen-minute rest. There had not been much conversation on the march and there wasn’t much now. When not focused on the task in hand, each of the four men was prone to find himself wondering about the vagaries of fate.

It could so easily have been two of them who had been blown to pieces under the bridges, two of them who had been executed by the Germans in the town square. This war in Europe was not going to be like the war in North Africa, Rafferty thought to himself, and he supposed he’d been a fool to ever think it would. Armies fighting each other in deserts could afford to be chivalrous – in such circumstances war was a man’s game in which only men got hurt. But Europe this time round…well, there were already enough rumours about what the Germans had done and were still doing to innocent civilians on the continent they had conquered, and now the RAF and USAF were doing to German civilians what the Luftwaffe had done to London and other English cities. The rules had broken down, and no one was safe.

In his mind’s eye Rafferty could see Enzio’s face as the Italian turned to see the smoke rising from his village.

Shortly after half past four they slipped across the empty coastal road and railway and walked the last half a mile across the empty dunes to the river’s mouth. The moon was down, the sea dark and apparently empty, but at precisely five o’clock the hump of the submarine broke surface some three hundred yards from shore, and within minutes two dinghies was being lowered into the water.

Farnham flashed the light again to assist the vessel with its navigation, but there was no way of telling it that now only one dinghy was required.