by Desmond Cory
Johnny hummed gently as he went; and the sun, now riding well up in the sky, watched his movements with interest.
Three hours later Johnny was considerably worried. Once again he had underestimated Mayer; he was now forced to the conclusion that the German was covering the ground at an absolutely unholy rate. Johnny, it may be remembered, had assumed that Mayer would have been able to travel for four hours only that previous evening, before being forced to stop by the failing light; but Johnny had now travelled for four hours in Mayer’s footsteps, fresh and in a morning light, and yet had not come upon any traces of even a momentary halt.
After another half-hour, when his spirits were really dropping towards zero, Johnny suddenly realised the point for which Mayer had obviously been making; a point where some prehistoric geological upheaval had made a great split in the spur close to the steep sides of the peak, a split which had been worn and weathered into a narrow depression some twenty-five yards wide; it offered only the slightest protection from the wind, but Mayer would certainly have considered it better than no protection at all. Johnny increased his pace slightly, and reached the hollow some ten minutes later.
There was plenty of evidence that Mayer had, indeed, rested there. There was much confusion in the snow; there was the impression of Mayer’s sleeping-bag; and there were deep furrows where he had risen in the night and had stamped desperately around, trying to get the blood moving through his frozen limbs. There were odd scraps of the thin paper in which the plasmon biscuits had been wrapped; Johnny realised with a shock just how much difference a few rashes of bacon might make, rashers of bacon and a pint of scalding coffee. Mayer had had nothing but biscuits and melted snow – not even the brandy…
And his tracks, where he had moved off again, filled Johnny with the wildest hope; they completely re-established his faith in his ability to catch Mayer. They were the steps of a drunken man; it was obvious that not even Mayer’s tremendous physique had been able to withstand the awful chill of night on the Old Man’s north-west face. His steps climbing out of that tiny bowl were almost pathetic, the steps a child might have taken, each pace barely twelve inches apart; he had staggered; he had halted; three times in that short pace he had fallen. In one place, the imprint of his great hand was shown clearly in the snow; elsewhere, the beating and the thrashing all round the marks of his fall showed the terrible effort it had cost him to regain his feet. Outside the bowl, the steps turned and retraced themselves; and a clear rectangular impression showed that he had dropped the case of diamonds, and had walked on for nearly twenty yards before realising the loss. His hands must have been numbed to a loss of all sensation, all sense of touch… Johnny waited no longer but strode out in pursuit, his own tracks those of a giant beside the weak, straggling steps he followed.
Johnny was impressed; especially when he remembered his own struggle in the comparative luxury of the hut. He had always known he was hunting an enemy of great strength, cunning and intelligence; he now had to credit Mayer with all the guts there were. He might be a Nazi and he might be a murderer; he had the bravery and will-power of an Antarctic explorer.
Which, to Johnny, merely meant that it was even more important than before that Mayer should die. Johnny respected bravery as much as anyone; but he was a single-minded person with little cant in his nature, and knew that bravery in an enemy only made that enemy more dangerous. It was no redeeming quality.
… He pushed his way onwards with redoubled vigour, conscious that he was now gaining on his quarry with every step he took. The tracks continued to show the tremendous difficulties Mayer had experienced in setting off again; for almost a mile the steps remained as weak as at the beginning, and at one point Johnny saw them returning ahead of him from a great C-shaped detour. He cut straight across to pick them up again. Obviously, Mayer had blundered off down-hill in his weariness, and had retraced his steps on discovering his error; a mistake that would cost him many minutes of his lead.
Gradually, as the spur narrowed and the going became rougher, Mayer’s tracks showed a gain in confidence; at first there was a subtle shifting of the weight, a movement forward, so that the impressions of the heels grew deeper and the steps less dragging; the paces became more regular, straighter, no longer wandering from side to side, and their length slowly increased until they were almost restored to normal. But all this took time, a lot of time; and before the last stage was reached Johnny was well among the slippery, downward-sloping rocks marking the edge of the Zabern glacier and the entry to the col. Visibility in front and to the west was now very clear indeed; in the latter direction, Johnny could trace the narrow line of the road that cut through the woods in the valley, driving deep into the heart of the Russian zone; and, visible only as a pale blur far away behind the forests, the clearing in which Oberneusl stood. In front of him, a rugged, crevasse-littered landscape reminiscent of the Ice Age, terminating in the smooth central moraine of the glacier itself.
The sun was now high in the sky, fast approaching its zenith, and Johnny decided to curb his impatience long enough for a rest and a hurried lunch. He had been travelling at full stretch for almost six hours, and the strain was, not surprisingly, beginning to tell on him… Accordingly he slipped off his rucksack, drove the helve of his ice-pick into the frozen snow at a correct professional angle, and seated himself beside it; leaning on it negligently and scanning the surrounding panorama through his goggles.
He wondered – not for the first time – just what was happening down in the village. He was not worried about Marie-Andrée as other, perhaps more human, men might have been worried; for the alarming thoroughness of Johnny’s training had taught him that worry was a disturbing factor, to be ruthlessly eliminated from a game in which concentration and split-second reaction are absolute essentials. He was nevertheless perplexed. Mayer’s passing reference to Mann “taking charge at the inn” had hardly sunk in at the time when it was made; Johnny had since had time to consider it more deeply. And to reach the not staggeringly difficult conclusion that there was nothing he could do about it anyway. First things came first, and Mayer was certainly that.
… He pushed a last cube of chocolate between his inflamed lips, rose to his feet, and set out once more on the trail. The duel of hunter and hunted recommenced.
Twenty minutes later Mayer’s tracks circumnavigated a tricky patch of serac and emerged on a sharp downhill slope. There, they suddenly changed into peculiar twin tracks, resembling those that might have been made by a bob-sleigh with a narrow body and fantastically wide runners. Johnny stared at them, puzzled; it was his first introduction to the method of locomotion known as the glissade, which consists of turning oneself into a human toboggan and sliding downhill on one’s feet. It is not an easy manoeuvre, although it looks it; and Johnny immediately realised that mountain technique had not yet played its final part in the chase…
He took a deep breath and launched himself off in pursuit; promptly performed an ungraceful backwards somersault and continued downhill on his back, gathering speed with an altogether alarming rapidity. If he had not had the ingenious idea of braking himself with his ice-pick, he would probably have sailed on down the slope until he either piled up on a patch of scree, or else vanished at a pace approaching terminal velocity over the edge of the Lovers… He breathed even more deeply than before, picked himself up, knocked damp ice from everywhere and found Mayers’ trail again. He had overshot it by about fifty feet.
Mayer had recoursed to this manoeuvre several times in the next couple of miles, and had lost height very fast indeed; after a little experimentation, Johnny evolved a satisfactory approximation to the method of sitting down, pushing himself off with a hefty shove and then employing his ice-pick as a combined rudder and brake… It was a most uncomfortable means of progress, soaking him to the skin and burning the exposed parts of his body painfully; and yet it was strangely exhilarating.
It was also – and in this Johnny’s ignorance rendered him blessed – qu
ite appallingly dangerous. Had he been deliberately trying to provoke a landslide he could hardly have selected a better way; and it was sheer, undeserved good luck for Johnny that the really murderous stretches of avalanche country lay still well below him and to the north, where the great piled-up masses of soft winter snow over the glacier were awaiting far less provocation than this to start them grinding remorselessly downwards…
After some time, Mayer had apparently realised that his present course was not taking him clear of the barrier of the Lovers; he had turned sharply in his course and headed north again, once more following a contour line towards the glacier – which was now clearly visible. For the first time, he had been obliged to use the ice-axe to secure his footholds; Johnny scampered along in the freshly-cut steps, paying very scant attention to the warning given him by Trout. For time was now beginning to run short, very short indeed… Johnny calculated that he could not be much more than an hour behind Mayer now, and maybe rather less; but there seemed to be little more than four or five hours’ distance between his present position and the screes of the tree-line… beyond which point, of course, Mayer’s tracks would no longer be visible to the eyes of anyone but a Hottentot bushman. Every minute counted, and Johnny was glad to see that the line of cut steps was long and wavering. For every step Mayer lost an invaluable second…
They ended at another patch of loose, weather-worn ice rubble, and the glissading commenced again; there was then a long, straightforward trek straight towards the centre of the glacier. Johnny sped along it; and towards the end of that long, long stretch, and providentially when he was close to a great tilted ice slab… he saw Mayer.
He rushed for the cover of the slab and, crouching down, watched Mayer with narrowed eyes. The German was still very far away and much, much lower down the slope; he was visible only as a moving speck on the rim of the glacier, but his movement and gait was unmistakeable. And he was doing an almost incredible thing.
He was heading back towards the Lovers, moving in Johnny’s direction.
His present course would take him out of sight in less than five minutes, and Johnny, waiting in the shadow of the rock, watched every step of his passage. It seemed the longest five minutes he had ever spent. On the verge of disappearance, Mayer justified his caution by pausing and surveying the mountain above him keenly; had Johnny been ten minutes, or twenty, later on the trail, he would have been caught on the great open stretch he had just traversed, and clearly visible… As it was, Mayer moved off again, satisfied, and disappeared from view.
In those few minutes, Johnny had worked out a course to take, a path that would converge on Mayer’s present line of progress; and he set off at once at a really reckless pace. He had to lose six hundred metres of height as quickly as possible; and to do so, moreover, making the maximum possible use of the disrupted rocks that offered him protection from the German’s view. Here, again, he did better than he knew, for the rugged nature of the ground minimised the risk of the landslides, of which he now stood in imminent danger; once or twice on the way down he heard the snow creaking protestingly and on one occasion, after an exceptionally flurried series of steps, he felt the ground tremble ominously under his feet and settle down again. He made no attempt to slow down his pace, however; for only by going all out could he possibly head off Mayer in time.
He could not understand the reason for Mayer’s change of direction. It seemed quite incomprehensible. The natural thing for Mayer to do would be continue northwards and then strike down the moraine to the trees – not more than two hours of fairly simple country. Instead, he had deliberately turned his back on the escape route and was now travelling towards the Lovers, towards the jagged, impassable ice cliffs.
Certainly, one might expect the unconventional from an operative of Mayer’s genius. But this was not being wily, it was being downright mad; and that he certainly was not. No, there was some design behind it; some dark and sinister ruse. Or so Johnny considered.
… And then, slithering splay-footed down a steep slope and shooting icy spray sideways from his boots, Johnny saw the reason for Mayer’s action; he saw that Mayer could have done nothing else. For, at that moment, the lower half of the glacier came into view, its main downwards sweep to the scree. And it was stiff with Russian soldiers.
There was something like a brigade of them. They were everywhere; and they were heading west – hundreds of them. They had seen Mayer and were hot on his trail; of that there could be no doubt at all, though they were some little way behind. But Johnny had competition now; and competition not to be sniffed at.
He adjusted his course to take him wide of a high ridge of boulders and out of the Russians’ line of view. And he started to go even faster than before, rattling down the sheer slope with a speed and recklessness and utter lack of technique that would have appalled Trout – or, indeed, anybody with a knowledge of even the rudiments of mountaineering. But, for all the faults of his method, it took him along; not even Mayer could have approximated his pace now. Mayer would have known better than to dare it.
All the same, he was no slouch. That Johnny fully recognised forty minutes later; when, travelling at full tilt, he went straight past a single line of footprints before he was able to stop his rush… He checked himself awkwardly, clambered back to the trail and stooped over it.
It was Mayer all right; every tiniest characteristic of the soles of his boots was now indelibly printed on Johnny’s memory. Once again Johnny had underestimated the pace at which Mayer could move; the deep impressions of the toes and the comparatively light dints of the heels showed that Mayer had been travelling at something very near a run.
Johnny straightened up and looked about him. Mayer wasn’t in sight, but he could hardly be more than ten minutes ahead; the line of footprints went straight into a tangle of ice blocks not fifty yards distant, and it was possible that he had but that moment vanished among them. Behind, the coast was clear for half a mile or so; no sign of the Russian pursuit. Johnny eased the straps of his rucksack across his shoulders and set off again, moving at a fast lope that shortened his breathing uncomfortably.
As soon as Mayer had reached the blocks, he had turned downward on a course parallel to Johnny’s previous direction; then left, then right, then left, then right again, bobbing and weaving through the twisted lanes of ice like a hunted fox. Over short stretches, the ice was so hard frozen as barely to retain evidence of his passage; his boots, indeed, left no mark at all, but there was always the sharp splintering dint of the ice-pick spike to serve as a guide. And Johnny, his eye alert for these traces, realised that – had he been a genuine detective – the manner of Aigen’s death could indeed have furnished him with an important clue.
This slippery, difficult going occupied him for almost a quarter of an hour; after which time he emerged, with breathtaking suddenness, on the very edge of the Lovers, not ten yards from where the tough grey ice jumped off into empty air. The cliff ran at right angles to Mayer’s line of flight, rising gradually as it extended westwards. Here, it was perhaps a hundred metres in height, with another two hundred metres of precipitous schrund at its base… Mayer had paused for a moment and then turned west, following the cliff towards the afternoon sun and remaining constantly ten to twenty yards from its edge.
And again Johnny followed.
It was a clever move, turning straight into the eye of the sun; though, of course, an inevitable one. It made visibility ahead extremely difficult; and travelling so close to the extremity of the cliff on so treacherous a surface made it essential to concentrate on the ground at one’s feet. A really bad slither, Johnny knew, would leave him no chance of checking himself before the greasy ice carried him over the edge. Accordingly, he mounted slightly higher and travelled above Mayer’s tracks; thereby eliminating that danger and also enabling him to angle his vision slightly, so that he was no longer squinting directly into the sun.
For all that… he did not see Mayer until he was within ten yards of
him.
He was not taken completely by surprise; for some little time now he had been travelling with the butt of his pistol protruding well clear of his pocket. His draw at that moment would have been considered fast by any standards other than his own. The barrel of the Walther was aligned with Mayer’s chest almost at the same split second in which his eyes adjusted themselves to the correct focus; and at ten yards Johnny could punch a railway ticket without sighting. And yet his finger hesitated on the trigger; because once again this extraordinary German was doing the incomprehensible.
He was sitting peacefully on the frozen ground and staring across the valley, rather as though taking a moment’s rest on a pleasant afternoon’s saunter.
He looked round as Johnny approached; and his hands remained motionless by his thighs. “Good evening,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you.”
Johnny came to a halt six feet away and smiled, rather unpleasantly. “I don’t suppose you were. Who were you waiting for – the Russians?”
“Unwillingly,” said Mayer. “Most unwillingly, yes. I seem to have broken my ankle.”
Johnny’s eyes did not move from Mayer’s face for several seconds; then, very slowly, they moved downwards towards his feet. The left boot was unlaced, the trouser leg pulled up and stained with blood at the cuff; and an inch of bone showed white through a tear in the brown skin. The whole of the boot and the ice where it rested were alike stained with scarlet; but a hastily-applied tourniquet had checked the flow, and only a thin trickle now moved downwards from the fractured limb.