Both men sank under the water as the sergeant atop the dam wall continued his traverse with the searchlight. The beam passed over the nose of the first of the amatol cylinders, but a black-painted cylinder in dark waters makes a poor subject for identification and the sergeant failed to see it. The light moved on, finished its traverse of the water alongside the dam, then went out.
Mallory and Miller surfaced cautiously and looked swiftly around. For the moment, there was no other sign of immediate danger. Mallory studied the luminous hands of his watch. He said: ‘Hurry! For God’s sake, hurry! We’re almost three minutes behind schedule.’
They hurried. Desperate now, they had the two amatol cylinders over the wire inside twenty seconds, opened the compressed air valve on the leading cylinder and were alongside the massive wall of the dam inside another twenty. At that moment, the clouds parted and the moon broke through again, silvering the dark waters of the dam. Mallory and Miller were now in a helplessly exposed position but there was nothing they could do about it and they knew it. Their time had run out and they had no option other than to secure and arm the amatol cylinders as quickly as ever possible. Whether they were discovered or not could still be all-important: but there was nothing they could do to prevent that discovery.
Miller said softly: ‘Forty feet apart and forty feet down, the experts say. We’ll be too late.’
‘No. Not yet too late. The idea is to let the tanks across first then destroy the bridge before the petrol bowsers and the main infantry battalions cross.’
Atop the dam wall, the sergeant with the searchlight returned from the western end of the dam and reported to the captain.
‘Nothing, sir. No sign of anyone.’
‘Very good.’ The captain nodded towards the gorge. ‘Try that side. You might find something there.’
So the sergeant tried the other side and he did find something there, and almost immediately. Ten seconds after he had begun his traverse with the searchlight he picked up the figures of the unconscious Groves and the exhausted Petar and, only feet below them and climbing steadily, Sergeant Reynolds. All three were hopelessly trapped, quite powerless to do anything to defend themselves: Reynolds had no longer even his gun.
On the dam wall, a Wehrmacht soldier, levelling his machine-pistol along the beam of the searchlight, glanced up in astonishment as the captain struck down the barrel of his gun.
‘Fool!’ The captain sounded savage. ‘I want them alive. You two, fetch ropes, get them up here for questioning. We must find out what they have been up to.’
His words carried clearly to the two men in the water for, just then, the last of the bombing ceased and the sound of the small-arms fire died away. The contrast was almost too much to be borne, the suddenly hushed silence strangely ominous, deathly, almost, in its sinister foreboding.
‘You heard?’ Miller whispered.
‘I heard.’ More cloud, Mallory could see, thinner cloud but still cloud, was about to pass across the face of the moon. ‘Fix these float suckers to the wall. I’ll do the other charge.’ He turned and swam slowly away, towing the second amatol cylinder behind him.
When the beam of the searchlight had reached down from the top of the dam wall Andrea had been prepared for instant discovery, but the prior discovery of Groves, Reynolds and Petar had saved Maria and himself, for the Germans seemed to think that they had caught all there were to be caught and, instead of traversing the rest of the gorge with the searchlights, had concentrated, instead, on bringing up to the top of the wall the three men they had found trapped on the ladder. One man, obviously unconscious – that would be Groves, Andrea thought – was hauled up at the end of a rope: the other two, with one man lending assistance to the other, had completed the journey up the ladder by themselves. All this Andrea had seen while he was bandaging Maria’s injured leg, but he had said nothing of it to her.
Andrea secured the bandage and smiled at her. ‘Better?’
‘Better.’ She tried to smile her thanks but the smile wouldn’t come.
‘Fine. Time we were gone.’ Andrea consulted his watch. ‘If we stay here any longer I have the feeling that we’re going to get very, very wet.’
He straightened to his feet and it was this sudden movement that saved his life. The knife that had been intended for his back passed cleanly through his upper left arm. For a moment, almost as if uncomprehending, Andrea stared down at the tip of the narrow blade emerging from his arm then, apparently oblivious of the agony it must have cost him, turned slowly round, the movement wrenching the hilt of the knife from the hand of the man who held it.
The Cetnik sergeant, the only other man to have survived with Droshny the destruction of the swing bridge, stared at Andrea as if he were petrified, possibly because he couldn’t understand how a man could suffer such a wound in silence and, in silence, still be able to tear the knife from his grasp. Andrea had now no weapon left him nor did he require one. In what seemed an almost grotesque slow motion, Andrea lifted his right hand: but there was nothing slow-motion about the dreadful edge-handed chopping blow which caught the Cetnik sergeant on the base of the neck. The man was probably dead before he struck the ground.
Reynolds and Petar sat with their backs to the guard-hut at the eastern end of the dam. Beside them lay the still unconscious Groves, his breathing now stertorous, his face ashen and of a peculiar waxed texture. From overhead, fixed to the roof of the guardhouse, a bright light shone down on them, while nearby was a watchful guard with his carbine trained on them. The Wehrmacht captain of the guard stood above them, an almost awestruck expression on his face.
He said incredulously but in immaculate English: ‘You hoped to blow up a dam this size with a few sticks of dynamite? You must be mad!’
‘No one told us the dam was as big as this,’ Reynolds said sullenly.
‘No one told you – God in heaven, talk of mad dogs and Englishmen! And where is this dynamite?’
‘The wooden bridge broke.’ Reynolds’s shoulders were slumped in abject defeat. ‘We lost all the dynamite – and all our other friends.’
‘I wouldn’t have believed it, I just wouldn’t have believed it.’ The captain shook his head and turned away, then checked as Reynolds called him. ‘What is it?’
‘My friend here.’ Reynolds indicated Groves. ‘He is very ill, you can see that. He needs medical attention.’
‘Later.’ The captain turned to the soldier in the open transceiver cabin. ‘What news from the south?’
‘They have just started to cross the Neretva bridge, sir.’
The words carried clearly to Mallory, at that moment some distance apart from Miller. He had just finished securing his float to the wall and was on the point of rejoining Miller when he caught a flash of light out of the corner of his eye. Mallory remained still and glanced upward and to his right.
There was a guard on the dam wall above, leaning over the parapet as he moved along, flashing a torch downwards. Discovery, Mallory at once realized, was certain. One or both of the supporting floats were bound to be seen. Unhurriedly, and steadying himself against his float, Mallory unzipped the top of his rubber suit, reached under his tunic, brought out his Luger, unwrapped it from its waterproof cover and eased off the safety-catch.
The pool of light from the torch passed over the water, close in to the side of the dam wall. Suddenly, the beam of the torch remained still. Clearly to be seen in the centre of the light was a small, torpedo-shaped object fastened to the dam wall by suckers and, just beside it, a rubber-suited man with a gun in his hand. And the gun – it had, the sentry automatically noticed, a silencer screwed to the end of the barrel – was pointed directly at him. The sentry opened his mouth to shout a warning but the warning never came for a red flower bloomed in the centre of his forehead, and he leaned forward tiredly, the upper half of his body over the edge of the parapet, his arms dangling downwards. The torch slipped from his lifeless hand and tumbled down into the water.
The impact
of the torch on the water made a flat, almost cracking sound. In the now deep silence it was bound to be heard by those above, Mallory thought. He waited tensely, the Luger ready in his hand, but after twenty seconds had passed and nothing happened Mallory decided he could wait no longer. He glanced at Miller, who had clearly heard the sound, for he was staring at Mallory, and at the gun in Mallory’s hand with a puzzled frown on his face. Mallory pointed up towards the dead guard hanging over the parapet. Miller’s face cleared and he nodded his understanding. The moon went behind a cloud.
Andrea, the sleeve of his left arm soaked in blood, more than half carried the hobbling Maria across the shale and through the rocks: she could hardly put her right foot beneath her. Arrived at the foot of the ladder, both of them stared upwards at the forbidding climb, at the seemingly endless zig-zags of the iron ladder reaching up into the night. With a crippled girl and his own damaged arm, Andrea thought, the prospects were poor indeed. And God only knew when the wall of the dam was due to go up. He looked at his watch. If everything was on schedule, it was due to go now: Andrea hoped to God that Mallory, with his passion for punctuality, had for once fallen behind schedule. The girl looked at him and understood.
‘Leave me,’ she said. ‘Please leave me.’
‘Out of the question,’ Andrea said firmly. ‘Maria would never forgive me.’
‘Maria?’
‘Not you.’ Andrea lifted her on to his back and wound her arms round his neck. ‘My wife. I think I’m going to be terrified of her.’ He reached out for the ladder and started to climb.
The better to see how the final preparations for the attack were developing, General Zimmermann had ordered his command car out on to the Neretva bridge itself and now had it parked exactly in the middle, pulled close in to the right-hand side. Within feet of him clanked and clattered and roared a seemingly endless column of tanks and self-propelled guns and trucks laden with assault troops: as soon as they reached the northern end of the bridge, tanks and guns and trucks fanned out east and west along the banks of the river, to take temporary cover behind the steep escarpment ahead before launching the final concerted attack.
From time to time, Zimmermann raised his binoculars and scanned the skies to the west. A dozen times he imagined he heard the distant thunder of approaching air armadas, a dozen times he deceived himself. Time and again he told himself he was a fool, a prey to useless and fearful imaginings wholly unbecoming to a general in the Wehrmacht: but still this deep feeling of intense unease persisted, still he kept examining the skies to the west. It never once occurred to him, for there was no reason why it should, that he was looking in the wrong direction.
Less than half a mile to the north, General Vukalovic lowered his binoculars and turned to Colonel Janzy.
‘That’s it, then.’ Vukalovic sounded weary and inexpressibly sad. ‘They’re across – or almost all across. Five more minutes. Then we counterattack.’
‘Then we counter-attack,’ Janzy said tonelessly. ‘We’ll lose a thousand men in fifteen minutes.’
‘We asked for the impossible,’ Vukalovic said. ‘We pay for our mistakes.’
Mallory, a long trailing lanyard in his hand, rejoined Miller. He said: ‘Fixed?’
‘Fixed.’ Miller had a lanyard in his own hand. ‘We pull those leads to the hydrostatic chemical fuses and take off?’
‘Three minutes. You know what happens to us if we’re still in this water after three minutes?’
‘Don’t even talk about it,’ Miller begged. He suddenly cocked his head and glanced quickly at Mallory. Mallory, too, had heard it, the sound of running footsteps up above. He nodded at Miller. Both men sank beneath the surface of the water.
The captain of the guard, because of inclination, a certain rotundity of figure and very proper ideas as to how an officer of the Wehrmacht should conduct himself, was not normally given to running. He had, in fact, been walking, quickly and nervously, along the top of the dam wall when he caught sight of one of his guards leaning over the parapet in what he could only consider an unsoldierly and slovenly fashion. It then occurred to him that a man leaning over a parapet would normally use his hands and arms to brace himself and he could not see the guard’s hands and arms. He remembered the missing Maurer and Schmidt and broke into a run.
The guard did not seem to hear him coming. The captain caught him roughly by the shoulder, then stood back aghast as the dead man slid back off the parapet and collapsed at his feet, face upwards: the place where his forehead had been was not a pretty sight. Seized by a momentary paralysis, the captain stared for long seconds at the dead man, then, by a conscious effort of will, drew out both his torch and pistol, snapped on the beam of the one and released the safety catch of the other and risked a very quick glance over the dam parapet.
There was nothing to be seen. Rather, there was nobody to be seen, no sign of the enemy who must have killed his guard within the past minute or two. But there was something to be seen, additional evidence, as if he ever needed such evidence, that the enemy had been there: a torpedo-shaped object – no, two torpedo-shaped objects – clamped to the wall of the dam just at water level. Uncomprehendingly at first, the captain stared at those, then the significance of their presence there struck him with the violence, almost, of a physical blow. He straightened and started running towards the eastern end of the dam, shouting ‘Radio! Radio!’ at the top of his voice.
Mallory and Miller surfaced. The shouts – they were almost screams – of the running captain to the guard – carried clear over the now silent waters of the dam. Mallory swore.
‘Damn and damn and damn again!’ His voice was almost vicious in his chagrin and frustration. ‘He can give Zimmermann seven, maybe eight minutes’ warning. Time to pull the bulk of his tanks on to the high ground.’
‘So now?’
‘So now we pull those lanyards and get the hell out of here.’
The captain, racing along the wall, was now less than thirty yards from the radio and where Petar and Reynolds sat with their backs to the guard-house.
‘General Zimmermann!’ he shouted. ‘Get through. Tell him to pull his tanks to the high ground. Those damned English have mined the dam!’
‘Ah, well.’ Petar’s voice was almost a sigh. ‘All good things come to an end.’
Reynolds stared at him, his face masked in astonishment. Automatically, involuntarily, his hand reached out to take the dark glasses Petar was passing him, automatically his eyes followed Petar’s hand moving away again and then, in a state of almost hypnotic trance, he watched the thumb of that hand press a catch in the side of the guitar. The back of the instrument fell open to reveal inside the trigger, magazine and gleamingly-oiled mechanism of a sub-machine gun.
Petar’s forefinger closed over the trigger. The sub-machine gun, its first shell shattering the end of the guitar, stuttered and leapt in Petar’s hands. The dark eyes were narrowed, watchful and cool. And Petar had his priorities right.
The soldier guarding the three prisoners doubled over and died, almost cut in half by the first blast of shells. Two seconds later the corporal guard by the radio hut, while still desperately trying to unsling his Schmeisser, went the same way. The captain of the guard, still running, fired his pistol repeatedly at Petar, but Petar still had his priorities right. He ignored the captain, ignored a bullet which struck his right shoulder, and emptied the remainder of the magazine into the radio transceiver, then toppled sideways to the ground, the smashed guitar falling from his nerveless hands, blood pouring from his shoulder and a wound on his head.
The captain replaced his still smoking revolver in his pocket and stared down at the unconscious Petar. There was no anger in the captain’s face now, just a peculiar sadness, the dull acceptance of ultimate defeat. His eyes moved and caught Reynolds’s: in a moment of rare understanding both men shook their heads in a strange and mutual wonder.
Mallory and Miller, climbing the knotted rope, were almost opposite the top of the dam wall
when the last echoes of the firing drifted away across the waters of the dam. Mallory glanced down at Miller, who shrugged as best a man can shrug when hanging on to a rope, and shook his head wordlessly. Both men resumed their climb, moving even more quickly than before.
Andrea, too, had heard the shots, but had no idea what their significance might be. At that moment, he did not particularly care. His left upper arm felt as if it were burning in a fierce bright flame, his sweat-covered face reflected his pain and near-exhaustion. He was not yet, he knew, halfway up the ladder. He paused briefly, aware that the girl’s grip around his neck was slipping, eased her carefully in towards the ladder, wrapped his left arm round her waist and continued his painfully slow and dogged climb. He wasn’t seeing very much now and he thought vaguely that it must be because of the loss of blood. Oddly enough, his left arm was beginning to become numb and the pain was centring more and more on his right shoulder which all the time took the strain of their combined weights.
‘Leave me!’ Maria said again. ‘For God’s sake, leave me. You can save yourself.’
Andrea gave her a smile or what he thought was a smile and said kindly: ‘You don’t know what you’re saying. Besides, Maria would murder me.’
‘Leave me! Leave me!’ She struggled and exclaimed in pain as Andrea tightened his grip. ‘You’re hurting me.’
‘Then stop struggling,’ Andrea said equably. He continued his pain-racked, slow-motion climb.
Mallory and Miller reached the longitudinal crack running across the top of the dam wall and edged swiftly along crack and rope until they were directly above the arc lights on the eaves of the guard-house some fifty feet below: the brilliant illumination from those lights made it very clear indeed just what had happened. The unconscious Groves and Petar, the two dead German guards, the smashed radio transceiver and, above all, the sub-machine gun still lying in the shattered casing of the guitar told a tale that could not be misread. Mallory moved another ten feet along the crack and peered down again: Andrea, with the girl doing her best to help by pulling on the rungs of the ladder, was now almost two-thirds of the way up, but making dreadfully slow progress of it: they’ll never make it in time, Mallory thought, it is impossible that they will ever make it in time. It comes to us all, he thought tiredly, some day it’s bound to come to us all: but that it should come to the indestructible Andrea pushed fatalistic acceptance beyond its limits. Such a thing was inconceivable: and the inconceivable was about to happen now.