Nobody blew his head off. There were soldiers immediately to be seen, it was true, soldiers armed and at the ready, but they weren’t looking in his direction: there were five of them, spread out in an arc of a circle, perhaps fifteen yards from the station entrance, and every machine-pistol was trained on that entrance. Waiting for the rabbits to bolt, Smith thought.
What was of much more interest was the empty truck parked only feet away from the window where he was: it was the reflected light from its side-lights that had enabled him to locate the window. Hoping that the truck was built along conventional lines, Smith armed the grenade, counted three, lobbed it under the back wheels of the truck and ducked behind the shelter of the washroom wall.
The two explosions – grenade and petrol tank – went off so almost simultaneously as to be indistinguishable in time. Shattered glass from the window above showered down on his head and his ear-drums hurt fiercely both from the roar of sound and the proximity to the explosive shock-wave. Smith made no attempt to inspect the damage he had done, less from the urgent need for haste to leave there than from the very obvious fact that the remains of the truck outside had burst into flames and to have lifted his head above that window-sill would have been a swift form of illuminated suicide: not that he could have done so in any event for the wind-driven flames from the truck were already beginning to lick through the shattered washroom window. On hands and knees Smith scuttled across the washroom floor, not rising till he had reached the cloakroom. Schaffer, who had his hand on the key and the door already open a fraction of an inch turned at Smith’s approach.
‘To the hills, boss?’ he enquired.
‘To the hills.’
The track-side of the station was, predictably, deserted: those who had not automatically run to investigate the source of the explosion would have as automatically assumed that the explosion was in some way connected with an escape attempt or resistance on the part of the hunted men. However it was, the result was the satisfactory same.
They ran along the tracks till they came to the bumpers at the end of the line, skirted these and continued running until they were safely among the scatter of houses that rose steeply up the hill-side on the eastern side of the village. They stopped to take breath and looked back the way they had come.
The station was on fire, not yet heavily on fire, but, with flames rising six to eight feet and black smoke billowing into the night sky, obviously already beyond any hope of extinction.
Schaffer said: ‘They’re not going to be very pleased.’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
‘What I mean is, they’re really going to go after us now. With everything they have. They’ve Doberman pinschers up at the castle and I’ve no doubt they have them at the camp too. They’ve only to bring them to the station, sniff our gear, have them circle the station, pick up our scent and that’s it. Smith and Schaffer torn to shreds. I’ll take on the Alpenkorps by numbers, but I draw the line at Doberman pinschers, boss.’
‘I thought it was horses you were scared of?’ Smith said mildly.
‘Horses, Doberman pinschers, you name it, I’m scared of it. All it’s got to have is four feet.’ He looked gloomily at the burning station. ‘I’d make a rotten vet.’
‘No worry,’ Smith assured him. ‘We won’t be here long enough for any of your four-footed pals to come bothering you.’
‘No?’ Schaffer looked at him suspiciously.
‘The castle,’ Smith said patiently. ‘That’s what we’re here for. Remember?’
‘I hadn’t forgotten.’ The flames from the blazing station were now licking thirty, forty feet up in the air. ‘You gone and ruined a perfectly good station, you know that?’
‘As you would say yourself,’ Smith reminded him, ‘it wasn’t our station to start with. Come on. We’ve a call to make then we’ll go see what kind of reception awaits us at the Schloss Adler.’
Mary Ellison was just at that moment discovering what the reception in the Schloss Adler was like. In her case it was none too pleasant. Von Brauchitsch and Heidi beside her, she was gazing around the great hall of the castle, stone walls, stone flags, a dark oaken roof, when a door at the end of the hall opened and a girl came towards them. There was an arrogance, a crisp authority about her: she marched, rather than walked.
But a very beautiful girl, Mary had to admit to herself, big, blonde, blue-eyed and beautiful. She could have been a pin-up girl for the Third Reich. At the moment, the blue eyes were very cold.
‘Good-evening, Anne-Marie,’ von Brauchitsch said. There was a marked lack of cordiality in his voice. ‘This is the new girl, Fräulein Maria Schenk. Maria, this is the Colonel’s secretary, in charge of all female staff.’
‘Took your time about getting here, didn’t you, Schenk?’ If Anne-Marie had a soft, lilting, mellifluous voice she wasn’t bothering to use it just then. She turned to Heidi and gave her an icy up-and-down. ‘And why you? Just because we let you wait table when the Colonel has company –’
‘Heidi is this girl’s cousin,’ von Brauchitsch interrupted brusquely. ‘And she has my permission.’ The cold implication that she should confine herself to her duties was unmistakable.
Anne-Marie glared at him but made no attempt to press the point. Very few people would have done. Von Brauchitsch was just that sort of person.
‘In here, Schenk.’ Anne-Marie nodded to a side door. ‘I have a few questions to ask.’
Mary looked at Heidi, then at von Brauchitsch, who shrugged and said: ‘Routine investigation, Fräulein. I’m afraid you must.’
Mary preceded Anne-Marie through the doorway. The door was firmly closed behind them. Heidi and von Brauchitsch looked at each other. Heidi compressed her lips and the expression that momentarily flitted over her face about matched the one Anne-Marie had been wearing: von Brauchitsch made the age-old helpless gesture of lifting his shoulders high, palms of the hands turned up.
Within half a minute the reason for von Brauchitsch’s helpless gesture became obvious. Through the door there came first the sound of a raised voice, a brief scuffle then a sharp cry of pain. Von Brauchitsch exchanged another resigned glance with Heidi, then turned as he heard heavy footsteps behind him. The man approaching was burly, weather-beaten, middle-aged and in civilian clothes: but although not in uniform he could never have been mistaken for anything other than an army officer. The heavy blue-shaven jowls, bull-neck, close-cropped hair and piercing blue eyes made him almost a caricature of the World War I Prussian Uhlan cavalry officer. That he was by no means as fossilized as he appeared was quite evident from the distinctly respectful manner in which von Brauchitsch addressed him.
‘Good evening, Colonel Kramer.’
‘Evening, Captain. Evening, Fräulein.’ He had an unexpectedly gentle and courteous voice. ‘You wear an air of expectancy?’
Before either could answer, the door opened and Anne-Marie and Mary entered: Mary gave the impression of having been pushed into the room. Anne-Marie was slightly flushed and breathing rather heavily, but otherwise her beautiful Aryan self. Mary’s clothes were disordered, her hair dishevelled and it was obvious that she had been crying. Her cheeks were still tear-stained.
‘We’ll have no more trouble with her,’ Anne-Marie announced with satisfaction. She caught sight of Kramer and the change in her tone was perceptible. ‘Interviewing new staff, Colonel.’
‘In your usual competent fashion, I see,’ Colonel Kramer said dryly. He shook his head. ‘When will you learn that respectable young girls do not like being forcibly searched and having their under-clothes examined to see if they were made in Piccadilly or Gorki Street?’
‘Security regulations,’ Anne-Marie said defensively.
‘Yes, yes.’ Kramer’s voice was brusque. ‘But there are other ways.’ He turned away impatiently. The engaging of female staff was not the problem of the deputy chief of the German Secret Service. While Heidi was helping Mary to straighten her clothes, he went on, to von Brauchitsch: ?
??A little excitement in the village tonight?’
‘Nothing for us.’ Von Brauchitsch shrugged. ‘Deserters.’
Kramer smiled.
‘That’s what I told Colonel Weissner to say. I think our friends are British agents.’
‘What!’
‘After General Carnaby, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Kramer said carelessly. ‘Relax, Captain. It’s over. Three of them are coming up for interrogation within the hour. I’d like you to be present later on. I think you’ll find it most entertaining and– ah– instructive.’
‘There were five of them, sir. I saw them myself when they were rounded up in “Zum Wilden Hirsch”.’
‘There were five,’ Colonel Kramer corrected. ‘Not now. Two of them – the leader and one other – are in the Blau See. They commandeered a car and went over a cliff.’
Mary, her back to the men and Anne-Marie, smoothed down her dress and slowly straightened. Her face was stricken. Anne-Marie turned, saw Mary’s curiously immobile position and was moving curiously towards her when Heidi took Mary’s arm and said quickly: ‘My cousin looks ill. May I take her to her room?’
‘All right.’ Anne-Marie waved her hand in curt dismissal. ‘The one you use when you are here.’
The room was bleak, monastic, linoleum-covered, with a made-up iron bed, chair, tiny dressing-table, a hanging cupboard and nothing else. Heidi locked the door behind them.
‘You heard?’ Mary said emptily. Her face was as drained of life as her voice.
‘I heard – and I don’t believe it.’
‘Why should they lie?’
‘They believe it.’ Heidi’s tone was impatient, almost rough. ‘It’s time you stopped loving and started thinking. The Major Smiths of this world don’t drive over cliff edges.’
‘Talk is easy, Heidi.’
‘So is giving up. I believe he is alive. And if he is, and if he comes here and you’re gone or not there to help him, you know what he’ll be then?’ Mary made no reply, just gazed emptily into Heidi’s face. ‘He’ll be dead. He’ll be dead because you let him down. Would he let you down?’
Mary shook her head dumbly.
‘Now then,’ Heidi went on briskly. She reached first under her skirt then down the front of her blouse and laid seven objects on the table. ‘Here we are. Lilliput .21 automatic, two spare magazines, ball of string, lead weight, plan of the castle and the instructions.’ She crossed to a corner of the room, raised a loose floor-board, placed the articles beneath it and replaced the board. ‘They’ll be safe enough there.’
Mary looked at her for a long moment and showed her first spark of interest in an hour.
‘You knew that board was loose,’ she said slowly.
‘Of course. I loosened it myself, a fortnight ago.’
‘You – you knew about this as far back as then?’
‘Whatever else?’ Heidi smiled. ‘Good luck, cousin.’
Mary sank on to the bed and sat there motionless for ten minutes after Heidi had gone, then rose wearily to her feet and crossed to her window. Her window faced to the north and she could see the line of pylons, the lights of the village and, beyond that, the darkened waters of the Blau See. But what dominated the entire scene were the redly-towering flames and billowing clouds of black smoke reaching up from some burning building at the far end of the village. For a hundred yards around it night had been turned into day and even if there had been a local fire brigade to hand it would have been clearly impossible for them to approach anywhere near the flames. When that fire went out all that would be left would be smoking ashes. Mary wondered vaguely what it might mean.
She opened her window and leaned out, but cautiously. Even for a person as depressed as she was, there was no temptation to lean too far: castle walls and volcanic plug stretched vertically downwards for almost three hundred feet. She felt slightly dizzy.
To the left and below a cable-car left the castle header station and started to move down to the valley below. Heidi was in that car, leaning out a partially opened window and hopefully waving but Mary’s eyes had again blurred with tears and she did not see her. She closed the window, turned away, lay down heavily on the bed and wondered again about John Smith, whether he were alive or dead. And she wondered again about the significance of that fire in the valley below.
Smith and Schaffer skirted the backs of the houses, shops and Weinstuben on the east side of the street, keeping to the dark shadows as far as it was possible. Their precautions, Smith realized, were largely superfluous: the undoubted centre of attraction that night was the blazing station and the street leading to it was jammed with hundreds of soldiers and villagers. It must, Smith thought, be a conflagration of quite some note, for although they could no longer see the fire itself, only the red glow in the sky above it, they could clearly hear the roaring crackle of the flames, flames three hundred yards away and with the wind blowing in the wrong direction. As a diversion, it was a roaring success.
They came to one of the few stone buildings in the village, a large barn-like affair with double doors at the back. The yard abutting the rear doors looked like an automobile scrapyard. There were half-a-dozen old cars lying around, most of them without tyres, some rusted engines, dozens of small useless engine and body parts and a small mountain of empty oil drums. They picked their way carefully through the debris and came to the doors.
Schaffer used skeleton keys to effect and they were inside, doors closed and both torches on, inside fifteen seconds.
One side of the garage was given over to lathes or machine tools of one kind or another, but the rest of the floor space was occupied by a variety of vehicles, mostly elderly. What caught and held Smith’s immediate attention, however, was a big yellow bus parked just inside the double front doors. It was a typically Alpine post-bus, with a very long overhang at the back to help negotiate mountain hairpin bends: the rear wheels were so far forward as to be almost in the middle of the bus. As was also common with Alpine post-buses in winter, it had a huge angled snow-plough bolted on to the front of the chassis. Smith looked at Schaffer.
‘Promising, you think?’
‘If I was optimistic enough to think we’d ever get back to this place,’ Schaffer said sourly, ‘I’d say it was very promising. You knew about this?’
‘What do you think I am? A bus-diviner? Of course I knew about it.’
Smith climbed into the driver’s seat. The keys were in the ignition. Smith switched on and watched the fuel gauge climb up to the half-full mark. He located the headlamps switch and turned it on. They worked. He pressed the starter button and the engine caught at once. Smith killed it immediately. Schaffer watched the performance with interest.
‘I suppose you know you need a PSV licence to drive one of those, boss?’
‘I have one around somewhere. Leave half the explosives in the back of the bus. And hurry. Heidi might be down with the next car.’
Smith climbed down from the driver’s seat, went to the front doors, unbolted both, top and bottom, and pushed gently. The doors gave an inch, then stopped.
‘Padlocked,’ Smith said briefly.
Schaffer surveyed the massive steel plough on the front of the bus and shook his head sorrowfully.
‘Poor old padlock,’ he said.
The snow had stopped but the wind from the west was now very strong. The cold was intense. Masses of ragged dark cloud hurried across the sky and the entire valley was alternately cast into the deepest shadow or bathed in contrastingly dazzling light as the moon was alternately obscured by the clouds or shone through the shifting gaps between them. But there was no alternating light and shade at the far end of the village: the station still burnt furiously enough to render the moon’s best efforts pretty ineffectual.
A cable-car was coming slowly down the valley, less than a hundred yards now from the lower station. Impelled by the powerfully gusting wind, it swung wildly, terrifyingly, across the night sky. But as it approached the end of its journey the motion quickly d
ampened down and disappeared altogether as it approached the station.
The cable-car jerked to a stop. Heidi, the only passenger, climbed out: understandably enough, she was looking rather pale. She walked down the steps at the back of the station, reached ground level then stopped dead as she heard the softly-whistled first few notes of ‘Lorelei’. She whirled round, then slowly approached two shapes, clad all in white, huddled by the side of the station.
‘The Major Smiths of this world don’t drive off cliff-tops,’ she said calmly. She paused, then stepped forward suddenly and gave each man a quick hug and kiss on the cheek. ‘But you had me a little worried there.’
‘You just keep on worrying like that,’ Schaffer said. ‘No need to worry about him, though.’
Heidi waved a hand in the direction of the other end of the village. From the cable-car station on the lower slopes they had an excellent if distant view of the fire. ‘Are you responsible for this?’ she asked.
‘It was a mistake,’ Smith explained.
‘Yeah. His hand slipped,’ Schaffer added.
‘You two should audition for a turn on vaudeville,’ Heidi said dryly. Suddenly serious she said: ‘Mary thinks you’re both gone.’
‘Weissner doesn’t,’ Smith said. ‘The car that went over the cliff went without us. They’re on to us.’
‘Hardly surprising,’ she murmured. ‘Or hadn’t you noticed the size of the fire.’ She paused, then went on bleakly: ‘They’re not the only ones who are on to you. Kramer knows you’re British agents after General Carnaby.’
‘Well, well, well,’ Smith said thoughtfully. ‘I wonder what little bird has been whispering in Kramer’s shell-like ear. One with a very long-range voice, methinks.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Nothing. It’s not important.’
‘It’s not important! But don’t you see?’ Her voice was imploring, almost despairing. ‘They know – or will any minute – that you’re alive. They know who you are. They’ll be expecting you up there.’