In silence the two men left the hut, in silence they crossed the deserted compound and in silence they entered the radio hut. Mallory went no farther than the doorway. For what was probably no more than ten seconds but for what seemed to Reynolds to be an unconsciously long time, Mallory stared at the dead man and the smashed transmitter, his eyes bleak, his face registering no emotional reaction. Reynolds mistook the expression, or lack of it, for something else, and could suddenly no longer contain his pent-up fury.
‘Well, aren’t you bloody well going to do something about it instead of standing there all night?’
‘Every dog’s entitled to his one bite,’ Mallory said mildly. ‘But don’t talk to me like that again. Do what, for instance?’
‘Do what?’ Reynolds visibly struggled for self-control. ‘Find the nice gentleman who did this.’
‘Finding him will be very difficult.’ Mallory considered. ‘Impossible, I should say. If the killer came from the camp here, then he’ll have gone to earth in the camp here. If he came from outside, he’ll be a mile away by this time and putting more distance between himself and us every second. Go and wake Andrea and Miller and Groves and tell them to come here. Then go and tell Major Broznik what’s happened.’
‘I’ll tell them what’s happened,’ Reynolds said bitterly. ‘And I’ll also tell them it never would have happened if you’d listened to me. But oh no, you wouldn’t listen, would you?’
‘So you were right and I was wrong. Now do as I ask you.’
Reynolds hesitated, a man obviously on the brink of outright revolt. Suspicion and defiance alternated in the angry face. Then some strange quality in the expression in Mallory’s face tipped the balance for sanity and compliance and he nodded in sullen antagonism, turned and walked away.
Mallory waited until he had rounded the corner of the hut, brought out his torch and started, not very hopefully, to quarter the hard-packed snow outside the door of the radio hut. But almost at once he stopped, stooped, and brought the head of the torch close to the surface of the ground.
It was a very small portion of footprint indeed, only the front half of the sole of a right foot. The pattern showed two V-shaped marks, the leading V with a cleanly-cut break in it. Mallory, moving more quickly now, followed the direction indicated by the pointed toeprint and came across two more similar indentations, faint but unmistakable, before the frozen snow gave way to the frozen earth of the compound, ground so hard as to be incapable of registering any footprints at all. Mallory retraced his steps, carefully erasing all three prints with the toe of his boot and reached the radio hut only seconds before he was joined by Reynolds, Andrea, Miller and Groves. Major Broznik and several of his men joined them soon after.
They searched the interior of the radio hut for clues as to the killer’s identity, but clues there were none. Inch by inch they searched the hard-packed snow surrounding the hut, with the same completely negative results. Reinforced, by this time, by perhaps sixty or seventy sleepy-eyed Partisan soldiers, they carried out a simultaneous search of all the buildings and of the woods surrounding the encampment: but neither the encampment nor the surrounding woods had any secrets to yield.
‘We may as well call it off,’ Mallory said finally. ‘He’s got clean away.’
‘It looks that way,’ Major Broznik agreed. He was deeply troubled and bitterly angry that such a thing should have happened in his encampment. ‘We’d better double the guards for the rest of the night.’
‘There’s no need for that,’ Mallory said. ‘Our friend won’t be back.’
‘There’s no need for that,’ Reynolds mimicked savagely. ‘There was no need for that for poor Saunders, you said. And where’s Saunders now? Sleeping comfortably in his bed? Is he hell! No need –’
Andrea muttered warningly and took a step nearer Reynolds, but Mallory made a brief conciliatory movement of his right hand. He said: ‘It’s entirely up to you, of course, Major. I’m sorry that we have been responsible for giving you and your men so sleepless a night. See you in the morning.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Not that that’s so far away.’ He turned to go, found his way blocked by Sergeant Groves, a Groves whose normally cheerful countenance now mirrored the tight hostility of Reynolds’s.
‘So he’s got clear away, has he? Away to hell and gone. And that’s the end of it, eh?’
Mallory looked at him consideringly. ‘Well, no. I wouldn’t quite say that. A little time. We’ll find him.’
‘A little time? Maybe even before he dies of old age?’
Andrea looked at Mallory. ‘Twenty-four hours?’
‘Less.’
Andrea nodded and he and Mallory turned and walked away towards the guest hut. Reynolds and Groves, with Miller slightly behind them, watched the two men as they went, then looked at each other, their faces still bleak and bitter.
‘Aren’t they a nice warm-hearted couple now? Completely broken up about old Saunders.’ Groves shook his head. ‘They don’t care. They just don’t care.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ Miller said diffidently. ‘It’s just that they don’t seem to care. Not at all the same thing.’
‘Faces like wooden Indians,’ Reynolds muttered. ‘They never even said they were sorry that Saunders was killed.’
‘Well,’ Miller said patiently, ‘it’s a cliché, but different people react in different ways. Okay, so grief and anger is the natural reaction to this sort of thing, but if Mallory and Andrea spent their time in reacting in that fashion to all the things that have happened to them in their lifetimes, they’d have come apart at the seams years ago. So they don’t react that way any more. They do things. Like they’re going to do things to your friend’s killer. Maybe you didn’t get it, but you just heard a death sentence being passed.’
‘How do you know?’ Reynolds said uncertainly. He nodded in the direction of Mallory and Andrea who were just entering the guest hut. ‘And how did they know? Without talking, I mean.’
‘Telepathy.’
‘What do you mean – “telepathy”?’
‘It would take too long,’ Miller said wearily. ‘Ask me in the morning.’
SIX
Friday
0800–1000
Crowning the tops of the towering pines, the dense, interlocking snow-laden branches formed an almost impenetrable canopy that effectively screened Major Broznik’s camp, huddled at the foot of the jamba, from all but the most fleeting glimpses of the sky above. Even at high noon on a summer’s day, it was never more than a twilit dusk down below: on a morning such as this, an hour after dawn with snow falling gently from an overcast sky, the quality of light was such as to be hardly distinguishable from a starlit midnight. The interior of the dining hut, where Mallory and his company were at breakfast with Major Broznik, was gloomy in the extreme, the darkness emphasized rather than alleviated by the two smoking oil lamps which formed the only primitive means of illumination.
The atmosphere of gloom was significantly deepened by the behaviour and expression of those seated round the breakfast table. They ate in a moody silence, heads lowered, for the most part not looking at one another: the events of the previous night had clearly affected them all deeply but none so deeply as Reynolds and Groves in whose faces was still unmistakably reflected the shock caused by Saunders’s murder. They left their food untouched.
To complete the atmosphere of quiet desperation, it was clear that the reservations held about the standard of the Partisan early-morning cuisine were of a profound and lasting nature. Served by two young partisankas – women members of Marshal Tito’s army – it consisted of polenta, a highly unappetizing dish made from ground corn, and raki, a Yugoslav spirit of unparalleled fierceness. Miller spooned his breakfast with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
‘Well,’ he said to no one in particular, ‘it makes a change, I’ll say that.’
‘It’s all we have,’ Broznik said apologetically. He laid down his spoon and pushed his plate away from him. ‘And even that I c
an’t eat. Not this morning. Every entrance to the jamba is guarded, yet there was a killer loose in my camp last night. But maybe he didn’t come in past the guards, maybe he was already inside. Think of it – a traitor in my own camp. And if there is, I can’t even find him. I can’t even believe it!’
Comment was superfluous, nothing could be said that hadn’t been said already, nobody as much as looked in Broznik’s direction: his acute discomfort, embarrassment and anger were apparent to everyone in his tone of voice. Andrea, who had already emptied his plate with apparent relish, looked at the two untouched plates in front of Reynolds and Groves and then enquiringly at the two sergeants themselves, who shook their heads. Andrea reached out, brought their plates before him and set to with every sign of undiminished appetite. Reynolds and Groves looked at him in shocked disbelief, possibly awed by the catholicity of Andrea’s taste, more probably astonished by the insensitivity of a man who could eat so heartily only a few hours after the death of one of his comrades. Miller, for his part, looked at Andrea in near horror, tried another tiny portion of his polenta and wrinkled his nose in delicate distaste. He laid down his spoon and looked morosely at Petar who, guitar slung over his shoulder, was awkwardly feeding himself.
Miller said irritably: ‘Does he always wear that damned guitar?’
‘Our lost one,’ Broznik said softly. ‘That’s what we call him. Our poor blind lost one. Always he carries it or has it by his side. Always. Even when he sleeps – didn’t you notice last night? That guitar means as much to him as life itself. Some weeks ago, one of our men, by way of a joke, tried to take it from him: Petar, blind though he is, almost killed him.’
‘He must be stone tone deaf,’ Miller said wonderingly. ‘It’s the most god-awful guitar I ever heard.’
Broznik smiled faintly. ‘Agreed. But don’t you understand? He can feel it. He can touch it. It’s his own. It’s the only thing left to him in the world, a dark and lonely and empty world. Our poor lost one.’
‘He could at least tune it,’ Miller muttered.
‘You are a good man, my friend. You try to take our minds off what lies ahead this day. But no man can do that.’ He turned to Mallory. ‘Any more than you can hope to carry out your crazy scheme of rescuing your captured agents and breaking up the German counter-espionage network here. It is insanity. Insanity!’
Mallory waved a vague hand. ‘Here you are. No food. No artillery. No transport. Hardly any guns – and practically no ammunition for those guns. No medical supplies. No tanks. No planes. No hope – and you keep on fighting. That makes you sane?’
‘Touché.’ Broznik smiled, pushed across the bottle of raki, waited until Mallory had filled his glass. ‘To the madmen of this world.’
‘I’ve just been talking to Major Stephan up at the Western Gap,’ General Vukalovic said. ‘He thinks we’re all mad. Would you agree, Colonel Lazlo?’
The man lying prone beside Vukalovic lowered his binoculars. He was a burly, sun-tanned, thickset, middle-aged man with a magnificent black moustache that had every appearance of being waxed. After a moment’s consideration, he said: ‘Without a doubt, sir.’
‘Even you?’ Vukalovic said protestingly. ‘With a Czech father?’
‘He came from the High Tatra,’ Lazlo explained. ‘They’re all mad there.’
Vukalovic smiled, settled himself more comfortably on his elbows, peered downhill through the gap between two rocks, raised his binoculars and scanned the scene to the south of him, slowly raising his glasses as he did so.
Immediately in front of where he lay was a bare, rocky hillside, dropping gently downhill for a distance of about two hundred feet. Beyond its base it merged gradually into a long flat grassy plateau, no more than two hundred yards wide at its maximum, but stretching almost as far as the eye could see on both sides, on the right-hand side stretching away to the west, on the left curving away to the east, north-east and finally north.
Beyond the edge of the plateau, the land dropped abruptly to form the bank of a wide and swiftly flowing river, a river of that peculiarly Alpine greenish-white colour, green from the melting ice-water of spring, white from where it foamed over jagged rocks and overfalls in the bed of the river. Directly to the south of where Vukalovic and Lazlo lay, the river was spanned by a green-and-white-painted and very solidly-constructed cantilevered steel bridge. Beyond the river, the grassy bank on the far side rose in a very easy slope for a distance of about a hundred yards to the very regularly defined limit of a forest of giant pines which stretched away into the southern distance. Scattered through the very outermost of the pines were a few dully metallic objects, unmistakably tanks. In the farthest distance, beyond the river and beyond the pines, towering, jagged mountains dazzled in their brilliant covering of snow and above that again, but more to the south-east, an equally white and dazzling sun shone from an incongruously blue patch in an otherwise snow-cloud-covered sky.
Vukalovic lowered his binoculars and sighed.
‘No idea at all how many tanks are across in the woods there?’
‘I wish to heaven I knew.’ Lazlo lifted his arms in a small, helpless gesture. ‘Could be ten. Could be two hundred. We’ve no idea. We’ve sent scouts, of course, but they never came back. Maybe they were swept away trying to cross the Neretva.’ He looked at Vukalovic, speculation in his eyes. ‘Through the Zenica Gap, through the Western Gap or across that bridge there – you don’t know where the attack is coming from, do you, sir?’
Vukalovic shook his head.
‘But you expect it soon?’
‘Very soon.’ Vukalovic struck the rocky ground with a clenched fist. ‘Is there no way of destroying that damned bridge?’
‘There have been five RAF attacks,’ Lazlo said heavily. ‘To date, twenty-seven planes lost – there are two hundred AA guns along the Neretva and the nearest Messerschmitt station is only ten minutes’ flying time away. The German radar picks up the British bombers crossing our coast – and the Messerschmitts are here, waiting, by the time they arrive. And don’t forget that the bridge is set in rock on either side.’
‘A direct hit or nothing?’
‘A direct hit on a target seven metres wide from three thousand metres. It is impossible. And a target so camouflaged that you can hardly see it five hundred metres away on land. Doubly impossible.’
‘And impossible for us,’ Vukalovic said bleakly.
‘Impossible for us. We made our last attempt two nights ago.’
‘You made – I told you not to.’
‘You asked us not to. But of course I, Colonel Lazlo, knew better. They started firing star-shells when our troops were halfway across the plateau, God knows how they knew they were coming. Then the searchlights –’
‘Then the shrapnel shells,’ Vukalovic finished. ‘And the Oerlikons. Casualties?’
‘We lost half a battalion.’
‘Half a battalion! And tell me, my dear Lazlo, what would have happened in the unlikely event of your men reaching the bridge?’
‘They had some amatol blocks, some hand-grenades –’
‘No fireworks?’ Vukalovic asked in heavy sarcasm. ‘That might have helped. That bridge is built of steel set in reinforced concrete, man! You were mad even to try.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Lazlo looked away. ‘Perhaps you ought to relieve me.’
‘I think I should.’ Vukalovic looked closely at the exhausted face. ‘In fact I would. But for one thing.’
‘One thing?’
‘All my other regimental commanders are as mad as you are. And if the Germans do attack – maybe even tonight?’
‘We stand here. We are Yugoslavs and we have no place to go. What else can we do?’
‘What else? Two thousand men with pop-guns, most of them weak and starving and lacking ammunition, against what may perhaps be two first-line German armoured divisions. And you stand there. You could always surrender, you know.’
Lazlo smiled. ‘With respect, General, this is no time for faceti
ousness.’
Vukalovic clapped his shoulder. ‘I didn’t think it funny, either. I’m going up to the dam, to the northeastern redoubt. I’ll see if Colonel Janzy is as mad as you are. And Colonel?’
‘Sir?’
‘If the attack comes, I may give the order to retreat.’
‘Retreat!’
‘Not surrender. Retreat. Retreat to what, one hopes, may be victory.’
‘I am sure the General knows what he is talking about.’
‘The General isn’t.’ Oblivious to possible sniper fire from across the Neretva, Vukalovic stood up in readiness to go. ‘Ever heard of a man called Captain Mallory. Keith Mallory, a New Zealander?’
‘No,’ Lazlo said promptly. He paused, then went on: ‘Wait a minute, though. Fellow who used to climb mountains?’
‘That’s the one. But he has also, I’m given to understand, other accomplishments.’ Vukalovic rubbed a stubbly chin. ‘If all I hear about him is true, I think you could quite fairly call him a rather gifted individual.’
‘And what about this gifted individual?’ Lazlo asked curiously.
‘Just this.’ Vukalovic was suddenly very serious, even sombre. ‘When all things are lost and there is no hope left, there is always, somewhere in the world, one man you can turn to. There may be only that one man. More often than not there is only that one man. But that one man is always there.’ He paused reflectively. ‘Or so they say.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Lazlo said politely. ‘But about this Keith Mallory –’
‘Before you sleep tonight, pray for him. I will.’
‘Yes, sir. And about us? Shall I pray for us, too?’
‘That,’ said Vukalovic, ‘wouldn’t be at all a bad idea.’
The sides of the jamba leading upwards from Major Broznik’s camp were very steep and very slippery and the ascending cavalcade of men and ponies were making very heavy going of it. Or most of them were. The escort of dark stocky Bosnian Partisans, to whom such terrain was part and parcel of existence, appeared quite unaffected by the climb: and it in no way appeared to interfere with Andrea’s rhythmic puffing of his usual vile-smelling cigar. Reynolds noticed this, a fact which fed fresh fuel to the already dark doubts and torments in his mind.