‘Ah, but you overlook the subtleties, my dear Heidi,’ Schaffer put in. ‘What they don’t know is that we are expecting them to be expecting us. At least, that’s what I think I mean.’
‘You’re whistling in the dark, Lieutenant. And one last thing: your friends are being brought up to the castle any time now.’
‘For interrogation?’ Smith asked.
‘I don’t expect they’ve been asked up for tea,’ she said acidly.
‘Fair enough,’ Smith nodded. ‘We’ll go up with them.’
‘In the same car?’ The words didn’t question Smith’s sanity, but the tone and expression did.
‘Not “in”. With.’ Smith peered at his watch. ‘The post-bus in Sulz’s garage. Be there in eighty minutes. And oh! – bring a couple of crates of empty beer bottles.’
‘Bring a couple of – oh, all right.’ She shook her head in conviction. ‘You’re both mad.’
‘Shines through in our every word and gesture,’ Schaffer agreed, then, suddenly serious, added: ‘Say a prayer for us, honey. And if you don’t know any prayers, keep your fingers crossed till they ache.’
‘Please come back,’ she said. There was a catch in her voice. She hesitated, made to say more, turned and walked quickly away. Schaffer looked after her admiringly as she walked down the street.
‘There goes the future Mrs Schaffer,’ he announced. ‘Bit tetchy and snappy, perhaps.’ He pondered. ‘But funny, I thought she was near crying at the end there.’
‘Maybe you’d be tetchy and snappy and tearful if you’d been through what she’s been in the past two and a half years,’ Smith said sourly.
‘Maybe she’d be less tetchy and tearful if she knew a bit more about what’s going on.’
‘I haven’t the time to explain everything to everybody.’
‘You can say that again. Devious, boss. That’s the word for you.’
‘Like enough.’ Smith glanced at his watch. ‘I wish to God they’d hurry up.’
‘Speak for yourself.’ Schaffer paused. ‘When we – well, if we – get away, is she coming with us?’
‘Is who coming with us?’
‘Heidi, of course!’
‘Heidi, of course. If we make it – and we can only do it through Mary, and Mary was introduced by –’
‘Say no more.’ He stared after the retreating figure and shook his head. ‘She’ll be a sensation in the Savoy Grill,’ he said dreamily.
SIX
The seconds crawled by and became minutes, and the minutes in turn piled up with agonizing slowness until almost quarter of an hour had passed. Brilliant moonshine and a contrastingly almost total darkness had alternated a score of times as the low, tattered, black clouds scudded across the valley, and the cold deepened until it reached down into the bones of the two watchers in the shadows. And still they waited. They waited because they had to: they couldn’t reach the Schloss Adler without company and company was a long time in coming.
And they waited in silence, each man alone with his own thoughts. What was in Schaffer’s mind Smith couldn’t guess. Probably he was blissfully envisaging himself as the instigator of a series of uncontrollable stampedes in a selection of the better known hostelries in the West End of London. Smith’s own thoughts were much more pragmatic and concerned solely with the immediate future. He was becoming concerned, and seriously concerned, about the intense cold and how it would affect their chances of making the trip up to the castle intact. Stamp their feet and flail their arms as they might, that numbing cold tightened its grip on them with every minute that passed. What they were about to do needed both physical strength and quick reactions in full measure, and that glacial cold was swiftly draining them of both. Briefly and bleakly he wondered what odds any reasonable bookmaker would have given against their chances of reaching the castle but dismissed the thought still-born. When no other option offered there was no point in figuring the percentages, and, besides, they were due to find out immediately: the long-awaited company was at hand.
Two Alpenkorps command cars, the leading one with wailing siren and flashing headlamps, swept up the village street just as the moon broke through the cloud-wrack once again, flooding the valley with light. Smith and Schaffer looked up at the moon, then at each other and then, wordlessly, moved back and pressed more deeply into the shadows on the west side of the lower station. The two metallic clicks seemed unnaturally loud as they eased forward the safety catches of their Schmeisser machine-pistols.
Engines stopped and headlamps faded and died almost on the same instant as the two cars pulled up beneath the steps. Men hurried out and lined up briefly before advancing single file up the station steps. A dozen altogether, Smith counted, an officer, eight guards and Carraciola, Thomas and Christiansen. All eight guards had their guns at the ready, which seemed a rather superfluous precaution as the three prisoners had their hands manacled behind their backs. Ergo, the guns weren’t there to guard the prisoners but against any rescue attempt by Smith and Schaffer. He and Schaffer, Smith thought wryly, must be acquiring quite a reputation for themselves. But, nonetheless, a reassuring spectacle: if the Germans had known the true reason for his, Smith’s, presence in Bavaria, they would also have known that they could have taken the three prisoners up with only a pea-shooter for protection and still have remained free from molestation.
The last of the twelve men passed inside the lower station. Smith touched Schaffer’s arm. They slung their Schmeissers, scrambled quickly but quietly on to the ice-covered and steeply-sloping roof of the station and silently and with no little difficulty crawled forwards and upwards to the front edge of the roof under which the cable-car would appear as it moved out at the beginning of its long haul towards the castle. They were, Smith knew, terribly exposed: snow-suits or not, a casual passer-by in the street below had only to glance upwards and their detection was certain. Fortunately, there appeared to be no casual passers-by: the free entertainent provided by the burning station was drawing a full house. And then, as the cable began to move, the moon disappeared behind clouds.
They waited, tensely, till the leading edge of the cable-car appeared, swung their legs over the lip of the roof, waited till the suspension bracket passed beneath them, reached down for the cable, allowed themselves to be pulled off the roof, fell across the cable and lowered themselves gently until their feet touched the roof of the cable-car.
Mary walked slowly along the dimly-lit, stone-flagged passage, counting off doors as she went. Outside the fifth she stopped, put her ear to it, stooped, glanced through the keyhole, knocked quietly and waited for a response. There was none. She knocked again, more loudly, with the same result. She turned the handle and found the door locked. From her small handbag she produced a set of skeleton keys. When the door yielded, she slipped quickly inside, closed the door and switched on the light.
The room was a considerable improvement on the one she had been given, although furnished with the same regulation iron bedstead. It was close-carpeted, boasted a couple of arm-chairs, and had a small chair with an Oberleutnant’s uniform on it, a large wardrobe and a chest of drawers with a holstered belt, gun and binoculars resting on its glass top.
Mary locked the door, withdrew the key, crossed the room, lifted the lower sash window and looked down. She was, she saw, directly above the roof of the cable-car header station, a very steeply downward sloping roof the upper edge of which was built into the castle wall itself. She withdrew her head, removed from her handbag a ball of string with a heavy bolt attached to one end, laid it on the bed, picked up the binoculars and took up station by the window. Shivering in the bitter night wind, she adjusted the focus of the field-glasses, then traversed down the line of the aerial cables. And then she had it, dimly seen but unmistakable, the squat black outline of the cable-car, now half-way between the bottom and middle pylons, swaying madly, frighteningly, across the sky in the high and gusting wind.
Smith and Schaffer lay stretched out on the roof, clutching
desperately to the suspension bracket, the only anchorage available. The roof was solidly coated with white-sheeted ice, they could find no purchase anywhere for their feet, and their bodies slid uncontrollably in all directions with the violent buffeting of the car beneath them. The sheer physical strain on hands and arms and shoulders was even worse than Smith had feared: and the worst was yet to come.
Schaffer twisted his head and peered downwards. It was a dizzy, vertiginous and frankly terrifying spectacle. The entire valley below seemed to be swinging through a forty-five degree arc. One second he was looking at the line of pines that bordered the western slope of the valley, then the floor of the valley rushed by beneath them and seconds later he was staring at the line of pines that swept up the eastern side of the valley. He twisted his head upwards, but that was no improvement; the lights of the Schloss Adler careened wildly through the same dizzy arc: it was like being on a combination of a roller-coaster, big dipper and runaway Ferris wheel with the notable exception, Schaffer thought bleakly, that the coaster, dipper and Ferris wheel were provided with safety belts and other securing devices designed to prevent the occupant from parting company with his machine. The wind howled its high and lonely threnody through the cables and the suspension bracket. Schaffer looked away, screwed his eyes shut, lowered his head between his outstretched arms and moaned.
‘Still think the horse the world’s worst form of transport?’ Smith asked. His lips were close to Schaffer’s ear.
‘Give me my boots and saddle,’ Schaffer said, then, even more despairingly, ‘Oh, no! Not again!’
Once more, without any warning, the moon had broken through, flooding the two men in its pale cold light. Gauging the time when the strain on their arms was least, they pulled the snow hoods far over their heads and tried to flatten themselves even more closely on to the roof.
In the Schloss Adler two people were watching the wild upward progress of the cable-car, now brilliantly illuminated by the moon. Through Mary’s field-glasses two clearly distinguishable shapes of men could be seen stretched out on the cable-car roof. For half a minute she kept the glasses trained on them, then slowly turned away, her eyes wide, almost staring, her face empty of expression. Fifty feet above her head a sentry with slung gun patrolling the battlements stopped and gazed down at the cable-car crawling up the valley. But he didn’t gaze for long. Although booted, gauntleted and muffled to the ears, he shook with the cold. It was no night for idle spectating. He looked away indifferently and resumed his brisk sentry-go.
Indifference was a quality that was conspicuously lacking on top of the cable-car. The cable-car was on the last lap now, the section between the last pylon and the castle header station. Soon the moment of truth. A minute from then, Smith thought, and they could both well be lying broken and lifeless on the rocks two hundred feet below.
He twisted his head upwards. The cold moon still sailed across a clear gap in the sky but was closing rapidly towards another bank of cloud. The castle battlements, with the header station at the base, seemed almost vertically above his head. So steeply was the car rising on this last section that the volcanic plug itself was now less than fourteen yards away. His gaze followed the volcanic plug downwards till it reached its base: down there, on the slopes below, patrolling guards and their Doberman pinschers were barely the size of beetles.
‘Suits her, doesn’t it?’ Schaffer said suddenly. Harsh edges of strain blurred his voice and his face was tight and desperate. ‘A lovely name.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Smith demanded.
‘Heidi.’
‘Oh, my God!’ Smith stared up at the rapidly closing header station. ‘Her name is Ethel.’
‘You didn’t have to tell me.’ Schaffer tried to sound aggrieved but it didn’t quite come off. He followed Smith’s upward gaze and, after a long pause, said very slowly: ‘Jesus! Look at the slope of that goddamned roof!’
‘I’ve been looking.’ Smith eased his knife from its sheath and made a quick grab at the suspension bracket as a particularly violent swing almost broke his grip with his other hand. ‘Get your knife ready. And for God’s sake don’t lose it.’
The moon slid behind a black patch of cloud and the valley was flooded with darkness. Slowly, carefully, as the cable-car approached the header station and the swaying motion dampened down, Smith and Schaffer eased their way to the after end of the car, rose gingerly but swiftly to their feet and grabbed the cable with their free hands while their feet tried to find what precarious hold they could on the treacherously ice-sheathed roof.
The front of the car passed under the lip of the header station roof. A moment later the suspension bracket followed and Smith lunged forward and upwards, flinging himself bodily on to the roof. His right arm struck downwards and the knife blade pierced the coating of ice and imbedded itself firmly in the wood beneath. Less than a second later Schaffer had landed beside him, the downward arcing knife making contact at exactly the same instant as himself.
The blade broke off at the hilt. Schaffer opened his hand, dropped the haft and clawed desperately at the ice. The dragging nails ripped through the encrusting ice, quite failing to hold him. He reached his left hand to his mouth, tore off the gauntlet and dug both hands in with all the strength that was in him. He slowed, but not enough. His scrabbling toes failed to find any more purchase and he knew he was sliding out over the edge – and that when he went the first thing to halt his fall would be the rock-pile two hundred and fifty feet beneath at the base of the volcanic plug.
Smith had been badly winded by his fall. Several seconds elapsed before he realized that Schaffer wasn’t where he should have been – lying on the roof beside him. He twisted round, saw the white blur of Schaffer’s strained and desperate face, had a vague impression of Schaffer’s eight finger-nails scoring their way through the ice as his body, already up to mid-thigh, slid inexorably over the edge and brought his left hand flashing down with a speed and power that, even in those circumstances, made Schaffer grunt in pain as the vice-like grip clamped over his right wrist.
For some seconds they lay like that, spread-eagled and motionless on the sloping roof, the lives of both dependent on the slim imbedded blade of Smith’s knife; then Schaffer, urged by Smith’s quivering left arm, began to inch his way slowly upwards. Thirty seconds later and he was level with Smith.
‘This is a knife I have, not an ice-axe,’ Smith said hoarsely. ‘Won’t take much more of this. Have you another knife?’
Schaffer shook his head. Momentarily, speech was beyond him.
‘Piton?’
The same shake of the head.
‘Your torch?’
Schaffer nodded, reached under the cumbersome snow-smock with his left hand and eventually managed to wriggle his torch free.
‘Unscrew the bottom,’ Smith said. ‘Throw it away – and the battery.’ Schaffer brought his left hand across to where his right was pinioned by Smith, removed base and battery, flattened the now empty cylinder base a little, reversed his grip and gouged the torch into the ice, downwards and towards himself. He moved his right hand and Smith released his grip. Schaffer remained where he was. Smith smiled and said: ‘Try holding me.’
Schaffer caught Smith’s left wrist. Tentatively, his hand still hooked in readiness, Smith removed his hand from the haft of the knife. Schaffer’s imbedded torch held firm. Cautiously at first, then with increasing confidence as the sharp blade cut through the protective sheathing of ice, Smith carved out a secure handhold in the wooden roof of the station, passed his knife to Schaffer, wriggled out of his snow-smock, undid a few turns of the knotted rope round his waist and secured the free end to Schaffer’s belt. He said: ‘With the knife and torch, think you can make it?’
‘Can I make it?’ Schaffer tested both knife and torch and smiled, a pretty strained effort, but his first for some time. ‘After what I’ve been through – well, ever seen a monkey go up a coconut palm tree?’
Fifty feet above their h
eads, Mary withdrew from the window and laid the binoculars on the chest of drawers. Her hands shook and the metal of the binoculars rattled like castanets against the glass top. She returned to the window and began to pay out the weighted string.
Smith came up the last few feet of the sloping roof at the end of the rope, caught Schaffer’s hand, stood upright on the flat inner section of the roof and at once began to unwind the rest of the knotted rope from his waist. Schaffer, although the temperature was far below freezing, wiped his brow like a man in a heat-wave.
‘Brother!’ He mopped his brow some more. ‘If I can ever do you a favour, like lending you a carfare –’
Smith grinned, clapped his shoulder, reached up into the gloom, caught the weighted end of the suspended string and quickly bent the nylon on to it. He gave two gentle tugs and the rope began to move upwards as Mary hauled it in through the window. Smith waited until two more gentle return tugs indicated that the rope was securely fastened and began to climb.
He was half-way up to the window when the moon broke through. In his Alpenkorps uniform he was perfectly silhouetted against the gleaming white of the castle walls. He hung there motionless, not daring to move, not so much as even daring to glance upwards or downwards lest the movement attract some hostile attention.
Twenty-five feet below him Schaffer peered cautiously over the edge of the header station roof. The guards and dogs were still patrolling the area round the base of the volcanic plug. They had only to give one casual upwards glance and Smith’s discovery was inevitable. Then some hair-prickling sixth sense made Shaffer look sharply upwards and he became very still indeed. The sentry, another circuit of the battlements completed, was standing with hands splayed out on the parapet, gazing out over the valley, perhaps watching the now dying flames from the burnt-out station: he had to lower his eyes only a fraction and that was that. Slowly, with his right hand, Schaffer brought up the Luger with the long perforated silencer screwed to its muzzle and laid it, in the best police fashion, across his left wrist. He had no doubt he could kill his man with one shot, the only question was when best to do it, how to weigh the balance of possibilities. If he waited until the man sighted them, he might give a warning shout or thrust himself back into cover before Schaffer could kill him. If he shot the sentry before he sighted them, then there would be no question of either escape or warning. But there was the possibility that the man might pitch forward over the battlements, crash off the roof of the header station and fall into the valley below, close by the patrolling men and dogs. A possibility only, Schaffer decided, not a probability: the slamming effect of the Luger shell would almost certainly knock him backwards off his feet. Schaffer had never before gunned down an unsuspecting man, but he coldly prepared to do so now. He lined up the luminous sight on the man’s breast-bone and began to squeeze the trigger.
Where Eagles Dare Page 12