He said sourly: ‘You seem to have made a remarkable recovery in the night-time, Colonel Stavros, sir.’
‘Andrea.’ The cigar was removed. ‘I have a heart condition. It comes and goes.’ The cigar was replaced.
‘I’m sure it does,’ Reynolds muttered. He glanced suspiciously, and for the twentieth time, over his shoulder. ‘Where the hell is Mallory?’
‘Where the hell is Captain Mallory,’ Andrea chided.
‘Well, where?’
‘The leader of an expedition has many responsibilities,’ Andrea said. ‘Many things to attend to. Captain Mallory is probably attending to something at this very moment.’
‘You can say that again,’ Reynolds muttered.
‘What was that?’
‘Nothing.’
Captain Mallory was, as Andrea had so correctly guessed, attending to something at that precise moment. Back in Broznik’s office, he and Broznik were bent over a map spread out on the trestle table. Broznik pointed to a spot near the northern limit of the map.
‘I agree. This is the nearest possible landing strip for a plane. But it is very high up. At this time of year there will still be almost a metre of snow up there. There are other places, better places.’
‘I don’t doubt that for a moment,’ Mallory said. ‘Faraway fields are always greener, maybe even faraway airfields. But I haven’t the time to go to them.’ He stabbed his forefinger on the map. ‘I want a landing-strip here and only here by night-fall. I’d be most grateful if you’d send a rider to Konjic within the hour and have my request radioed immediately to your Partisan HQ at Drvar.’
Broznik said drily: ‘You are accustomed to asking for instant miracles, Captain Mallory?’
‘This doesn’t call for miracles. Just a thousand men. The feet of a thousand men. A small price for seven thousand lives?’ He handed Broznik a slip of paper. ‘Wavelength and code. Have Konjic transmit it as soon as possible.’ Mallory glanced at his watch. ‘They have twenty minutes on me already. I’d better hurry.’
‘I suppose you’d better,’ Broznik said hurriedly. He hesitated, at a momentary loss for words, then went on awkwardly: ‘Captain Mallory, I – I –’
‘I know. Don’t worry. The Mallorys of this world never make old bones anyway. We’re too stupid.’
‘Aren’t we all, aren’t we all?’ Broznik gripped Mallory’s hand. ‘Tonight, I make a prayer for you.’
Mallory remained silent for a moment, then nodded.
‘Make it a long one.’
The Bosnian scouts, now, like the remainder of the party, mounted on ponies, led the winding way down through the gentle slope of the thickly-forested valley, followed by Andrea and Miller riding abreast, then by Petar, whose pony’s bridle was in the hand of his sister. Reynolds and Groves, whether by accident or design, had fallen some little way behind and were talking in soft tones.
Groves said speculatively: ‘I wonder what Mallory and the Major are talking about back there?’
Reynolds’s mouth twisted in bitterness. ‘It’s perhaps as well we don’t know.’
‘You may be right at that. I just don’t know.’ Groves paused, went on almost pleadingly: ‘Broznik is on the up-and-up. I’m sure of it. Being what he is, he must be.’
‘That’s as may be. Mallory too, eh?’
‘He must be, too.’
‘Must?’ Reynolds was savage. ‘God alive, man, I tell you I saw him with my own eyes.’ He nodded towards Maria, some twenty yards ahead, and his face was cruel and hard. ‘That girl hit him – and how she hit him – back in Neufeld’s camp and the next thing I see is the two of them having a cosy little lovey-dovey chat outside Broznik’s hut. Odd, isn’t it? Soon after, Saunders was murdered. Coincidence, isn’t it? I tell you, Groves, Mallory could have done it himself. The girl could have had time to do it before she met Mallory – except that it would have been physically impossible for her to drive a six-inch knife home to the hilt. But Mallory could have done it all right. He’d time enough – and opportunity enough – when he handed that damned message into the radio hut.’
Groves said protestingly: ‘Why in God’s name should he do that?’
‘Because Broznik had given him some urgent information. Mallory had to make a show of passing this information back to Italy. But maybe sending that message was the last thing he wanted. Maybe he stopped it in the only way he knew how – and smashed the transmitter to make sure no one else could send a message. Maybe that’s why he stopped me from mounting a guard or going to see Saunders – to prevent me from discovering the fact that Saunders was already dead – in which case, of course, because of the time factor, suspicion would have automatically fallen on him.’
‘You’re imagining things.’ Despite his discomfort, Groves was reluctantly impressed by Reynolds’s reasoning.
‘You think so? That knife in Saunders’s back – did I imagine that too?’
Within half an hour, Mallory had rejoined the party. He jogged past Reynolds and Groves, who studiously ignored him, past Maria and Petar, who did the same, and took up position behind Andrea and Miller.
It was in this order, for almost an hour, that they passed through the heavily-wooded Bosnian valleys. Occasionally, they came to clearings in the pines, clearings that had once been the site of human habitation, small villages or hamlets. But now there were no humans, no habitations, for the villages had ceased to exist. The clearings were all the same, chillingly and depressingly the same. Where the hard-working but happy Bosnians had once lived in their simple but sturdy homes, there were now only the charred and blackened remains of what had once been thriving communities, the air still heavy with the acrid smell of ancient smoke, the sweet-sour stench of corruption and death, mute testimony to the no-quarter viciousness and total ruthlessness of the war between the Germans and the Partisan Yugoslavs. Occasionally, here and there, still stood a few small, stone-built houses which had not been worth the expenditure of bombs or shells or mortars or petrol: but few of the larger buildings had escaped complete destruction. Churches and schools appeared to have been the primary targets: on one occasion, as evidenced by some charred steel equipment that could have come only from an operating theatre, they passed by a small cottage hospital that had been so razed to the ground that no part of the resulting ruins was more than three feet high. Mallory wondered what would have happened to the patients occupying the hospital at the time: but he no longer wondered at the hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs – 350,000 had been the figure quoted by Captain Jensen, but, taking women and children into account, the number must have been at least a million – who had rallied under the banner of Marshal Tito. Patriotism apart, the burning desire for liberation and revenge apart, there was no place else left for them to go. They were a people, Mallory realized, with literally nothing left, with nothing to lose but their lives which they apparently held of small account, but with everything to gain by the destruction of the enemy: were he a German soldier, Mallory reflected, he would not have felt particularly happy about the prospect of a posting to Yugoslavia. It was a war which the Wehrmacht could never win, which the soldiers of no Western European country could ever have won, for the peoples of the high mountains are virtually indestructible.
The Bosnian scouts, Mallory observed, looked neither to left nor right as they passed through the lifeless shattered villages of their countrymen, most of whom were now almost certainly dead. They didn’t have to look, he realized: they had their memories, and even their memories would be too much for them. If it were possible to feel pity for an enemy, then Mallory at that moment felt pity for the Germans.
By and by they emerged from the narrow winding mountain track on to a narrow, but comparatively wide road, wide enough, at least, for single-file vehicular traffic. The Bosnian scout in the lead threw up his hand and halted his pony.
‘Unofficial no-man’s-land, it would seem.’ Mallory said. ‘I think this is where they turfed us off the truck this morning.’
Mal
lory’s guess appeared to be correct. The Partisans wheeled their horses, smiled widely, waved, shouted some unintelligible words of farewell and urged their horses back the way they had come.
With Mallory and Andrea in the lead and the two sergeants bringing up the rear, the seven remaining members of the party moved off down the track. The snow had stopped now, the clouds above had cleared away and the sunlight was filtering down between the now thinning pines. Suddenly Andrea, who had been peering to his left, reached out and touched Mallory on the arm. Mallory followed the direction of Andrea’s pointing hand. Downhill, the pines petered out less than a hundred yards away and through the trees could be glimpsed some distant object, a startling green in colour. Mallory swung round in his saddle.
‘Down there. I want to take a look. Don’t move below the tree-line.’
The ponies picked their delicate sure-footed way down the steep and slippery slope. About ten yards from the tree-line and at a signal from Mallory, the riders dismounted and advanced cautiously on foot, moving from the cover of one pine to the next. The last few feet they covered on hands and knees, then finally stretched out flat in the partial concealment of the boles of the lowermost pines. Mallory brought out his binoculars, cleared the cold-clouded lenses and brought them to his eyes.
The snow-line, he saw, petered out some three or four hundred yards below them. Below that again was a mixture of fissured and eroded rock-faces and brown earth and beyond that again a belt of sparse and discouraged-looking grass. Along the lower reaches of this belt of grass ran a tarmacadam road, a road which struck Mallory as being, for that area, in remarkably good condition: the road was more or less exactly paralleled, at a distance of about a hundred yards, by a single-track and extremely narrow-gauge railway: a grass-grown and rusted line that looked as if it hadn’t been used for many years. Just beyond the line the land dropped in a precipitous cliff to a narrow winding lake, the farther margin of which was marked by far more towering precipices leading up without break and with hardly any variation in angle to rugged snow-capped mountains.
From where he lay Mallory was directly overlooking a right-angled bend in the lake, a lake which was almost incredibly beautiful. In the bright clear sparkling sunlight of that spring morning it glittered and gleamed like the purest of emeralds. The smooth surface was occasionally ruffled by errant catspaws of wind, catspaws which had the effect of deepening the emerald colour to an almost translucent aquamarine. The lake itself was nowhere much more than a quarter of a mile in width, but obviously miles in length: the long right-hand arm, twisting and turning between the mountains, stretched to the east almost as far as the eye could see: to the left, the short southern arm, hemmed in by increasingly vertical walls which finally appeared almost to meet overhead, ended against the concrete ramparts of a dam. But what caught and held the attention of the watchers was the incredible mirrored gleam of the far mountains in that equally incredible emerald mirror.
‘Well, now,’ Miller murmured, ‘that is nice.’ Andrea gave him a long expressionless look, then turned his attention to the lake again.
Groves’s interest momentarily overcame his animosity.
‘What lake is that, sir?’
Mallory lowered the binoculars. ‘Haven’t the faintest idea. Maria?’ She made no answer. ‘Maria! What – lake – is – that?’
‘That’s the Neretva dam,’ she said sullenly. ‘The biggest in Yugoslavia.’
‘It’s important, then?’
‘It is important. Whoever controls that controls Central Yugoslavia.’
‘And the Germans control it, I suppose?’
‘They control it. We control it.’ There was more than a hint of triumph in her smile. ‘We – the Germans – have got it completely sealed off. Cliffs on both sides. To the east there – the upper end – they have a boom across a gorge only ten yards wide. And that boom is patrolled night and day. So is the dam wall itself. The only way in is by a set of steps – ladders, rather – fixed to the cliff-face just below the dam.’
Mallory said drily: ‘Very interesting information – for a parachute brigade. But we’ve other and more urgent fish to fry. Come on.’ He glanced at Miller, who nodded and began to ease his way back up the slope, followed by the two sergeants, Maria and Petar. Mallory and Andrea lingered for a few moments longer.
‘I wonder what it’s like,’ Mallory murmured.
‘What’s what like?’ Andrea said.
‘The other side of the dam.’
‘And the ladder let into the cliff?’
‘And the ladder let into the cliff.’
From where General Vukalovic lay, high on a cliff-top on the right-hand or western side of the Neretva gorge, he had an excellent view of the ladder let into the cliff: he had, in fact, an excellent view of the entire outer face of the dam wall and of the gorge which began at the foot of the wall and extended southwards for almost a mile before vanishing from sight round an abrupt right-hand corner.
The dam wall itself was quite narrow, not much more than thirty yards in width, but very deep, stretching down in a slightly V-formation from between overhanging cliff-faces to the greenish-white torrent of water foaming from the outlet pipes at the base. On top of the dam, at the eastern end and on a slight eminence, were the control station and two small huts, one of which, judging from the clearly visible soldiers patrolling the top of the wall, was almost certainly a guard-room. Above those buildings the walls of the gorge rose quite vertically for about thirty feet, then jutted out in a terrifying overhang.
From the control-room, a zig-zag, green-painted iron ladder, secured by brackets to the rock-face, led down to the floor of the gorge. From the base of the ladder a narrow path extended down the gorge for a distance of about a hundred yards, ending abruptly at a spot where some ancient landslide had gouged a huge scar into the side of the gorge. From here a bridge spanned the river to another path on the right-hand bank.
As bridges go, it wasn’t much, an obviously very elderly and rickety wooden swing bridge which looked as if its own weight would be enough to carry it into the torrent at any moment: what was even worse, it seemed, at first glance, as if its site had been deliberately picked by someone with an unhinged mind, for it lay directly below an enormous boulder some forty feet up the landslide, a boulder so clearly in a highly precarious state of balance that none but the most foolhardy would have lingered in the crossing of the bridge. In point of fact, no other site would have been possible.
From the western edge of the bridge, the narrow, boulder-strewn path followed the line of the river, passing by what looked like an extremely hazardous ford, and finally curving away from sight with the river.
General Vukalovic lowered his binoculars, turned to the man at his side and smiled.
‘All quiet on the eastern front, eh, Colonel Janzy?’
‘All quiet on the eastern front,’ Janzy agreed. He was a small, puckish, humorous-looking character with a youthful face and incongruous white hair. He twisted round and gazed to the north. ‘But not so quiet on the northern front, I’m afraid.’
The smile faded from Vukalovic’s face as he turned, lifted his binoculars again and gazed to the north. Less than three miles away and clearly visible in the morning sunlight, lay the heavily wooded Zenica Gap, for weeks a hotly contested strip of territory between Vukalovic’s northern defensive forces, under the command of Colonel Janzy, and units of the invading German 11th Army Corps. At that moment frequent puffs of smoke could be seen, to the left a thick column of smoke spiralled up to form a dark pall against the now cloudless blue of the sky, while the distant rattle of small-arms fire, punctuated by the occasional heavier boom of artillery, was almost incessant. Vukalovic lowered his glasses and looked thoughtfully at Janzy.
‘The softening-up before the main attack?’
‘What else? The final assault.’
‘How many tanks?’
‘It’s difficult to be sure. Collating reports, my staff estimate a hundred and f
ifty.’
‘One hundred and fifty!’
‘That’s what they make it – and at least fifty of those are Tiger tanks.’
‘Let’s hope to heaven your staff can’t count.’ Vukalovic rubbed a weary hand across his bloodshot eyes: he’d had no sleep during the night just gone, no sleep during the night previous to that. ‘Let’s go and see how many we can count.’
Maria and Petar led the way now, with Reynolds and Groves, clearly in no mood for other company, bringing up the rear almost fifty yards behind. Mallory, Andrea and Miller rode abreast along the narrow road. Andrea looked at Mallory, his eyes speculative.
‘Saunders’s death? Any idea?’
Mallory shook his head. ‘Ask me something else.’
‘The message you’d given him to send. What was it?’
‘A report of our safe arrival in Broznik’s camp. Nothing more.’
‘A psycho,’ Miller announced. ‘The handy man with the knife, I mean. Only a psycho would kill for that reason.’
‘Maybe he didn’t kill for that reason,’ Mallory said mildly. ‘Maybe he thought it was some other kind of message.’
‘Some other kind of message?’ Miller lifted an eyebrow in the way that only he knew how. ‘Now what kind –’ He caught Andrea’s eye, broke off and changed his mind about saying anything more. Both he and Andrea gazed curiously at Mallory who seemed to have fallen into a mood of intense introspection.
Whatever its reason, the period of deep preoccupation did not last for long. With the air of a man who has just arrived at a conclusion about something, Mallory lifted his head and called to Maria to stop, at the same time reining in his own pony. Together they waited until Reynolds and Groves had made up on them.