by Desmond Cory
“Nasty,” said Johnny.
He took a step forward and stooped; he came up with a green attache case clasped firmly in his hand and his pistol still pointing towards Mayer’s navel. “There was no need to snatch,” said Mayer reprovingly.
Johnny gestured with his pistol towards the edge of the Lovers, not more than twenty yards away. “It was too easy a throw,” he explained. “You might have been tempted.”
“I never even thought of it,” said Mayer sadly. “I was thinking of… Well, never mind.”
“Ways out?” Johnny sank down on his haunches and placed the case on his left, well clear of Mayer. “There aren’t any. And as I don’t particularly want to be caught by the Russians, either, I don’t feel like wasting any time over it. Don’t worry; I’ll give it to you clean.”
Mayer’s pale-blue eyes watched the pistol resignedly. “Yes. I quite understand. I should like a cigarette, if I may.”
“No time,” said Johnny. Mayer nodded slowly, and said, “Then tell me one thing.”
“What?”
“Who are you?”
“Fedora,” said Johnny; and the eyes watching him flickered.
“I knew you were no amateur. Fedora, eh? I’ve often wanted to meet you… One thing, you did not win; you did not beat me. I had bad luck.”
“Bad luck,” said Johnny mirthlessly, “is what you people call your mistakes.”
He drew a packet of Davros’ from his pocket, left-handed, his fingers still stiff and awkward; shook a cigarette into his mouth, and lit it. He blew smoke into the air, a pale-blue wraith against the vast blue shadow of the surrounding ice; and his eyes, watching Mayer’s every movement, were the same colour, cold and emotionless. The acrid touch of the cigarette fumes was bitter against the back of his throat. He took three slow, calculated drags; and neither man said a word.
“… Catch,” said Johnny; and threw it into Mayer’s lap. And, as the German’s huge fingers fumbled in search of it,
“… Three,” he said. There was no need to be more explicit.
Mayer found the cigarette, held it between finger and thumb and raised it to his nose. “An unhygienic practice,” he said gently. “Barbaric.” He flicked his finger; and the cigarette was a whirling white speck against the great dark background of the valley; a speck sent swerving by the breeze riding from the cliff face; and then nothing, nothing at all, as the Lovers reached up and engulfed it.
Johnny watched it go; and, when it had disappeared, his eyes remained focused dreamily out across the valley. Had Mayer taken advantage of his apparent absence of mind to make a sudden movement, he would have been dead before that movement had been completed; but he made no such move. And down in the valley, too, everything was still.
The deep silence of the mountains held all that country frozen; the tracts of brown and grey rock-strewn rubble, the sweeping miles of green pine forest clambering over the foothills, the slim chain of the road bisecting the woods, even the glittering mountain-streams that frothed and floffled towards the heart of the valley. The village stood in the distance, an insignificant reminder of the presence of man in that huge and savage panorama… And towering over all, over forest, village, stream and rock; frowning down upon the two men beneath like a cruel and colossal sentinel… the Old Man, aloof; cold, potent, untouchable; filled with the terror of beauty. All was as nothing to its merciless sublimity; Johnny, Mayer, the Russians, the village far below… all were infinitesimal specks, less than insects; less than cigarette ends thrown to the wind.
… Mayer had not moved; and Johnny stood up, brushing the snow from his legs with his left hand. The pistol pointed at Mayer no longer.
“Well,” said Johnny, stooping to pick up the attache case. “This looks like your lucky day.”
Mayer said, “Why?”
“I’m leaving you. I’m leaving you for the Russians. It’s not my quarrel any more.”
Mayer looked thoroughly dejected. “But if—”
“They’ll give you medical treatment, unless they decide to shoot you,” explained Johnny cheerfully. “Either way, I don’t think Trout will need to bother with you any further. The Russians are pretty efficient with their political prisoners, I’m told.”
“I’ve heard that, too,” said Mayer. “I would prefer you to shoot me. I would do it myself, if I had a weapon.”
“… Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
“As you wish,” said Johnny.
He raised the Walther again… And as his wrist steadied for the shot, Mayer’s face suddenly became contorted.
“Get down. Get down. Here they are.”
Johnny’s hand instantly dropped and his head jerked round. Mayer was right. There they were, not more than two hundred metres away, rounding the nearest ridge; a fighting section of grey-clad Russian infantry… Johnny’s upper lip rose and he snarled like a wolf.
“They haven’t seen us yet,” said Mayer, his voice dropping to a whisper. “The sun’s in their eyes.”
“They’ll be here in a couple of minutes.” Johnny’s glance wandered round the rocks behind them.
“What will you do?”
“They’re not taking me alive, either.”
“Good. Do you, by any chance, have a spare pistol? As neither of us has any hope of escape, you may trust me with one.”
“I’ve only this. Let’s get to cover. Those rocks behind us – can you get that far?”
Mayor looked round. “Yes, if you help me.”
“I’ll help you. Come on.”
The rocks were only thirty feet away; but that was very far indeed. Mayer got to his feet, grimacing, and threw his right arm over Johnny’s shoulders. They hobbled off. The situation was ridiculous intrinsically, in view of the conversation of the preceding five minutes; and their appearance was even more ludicrous – rather as though they were running in a three-legged race. The Russians saw them at once, for an amazed shout rose from behind them before they had covered five paces; but for several seconds nothing happened at all. One can only assume that the Russians had difficulty in believing their eyes.
But then they fired.
It was a ragged volley, not very accurate. Chips of sharp ice flew up all around them; one sliver struck Johnny’s chin and cut it. The next moment there was a muffled slap, the sound of an empty glove hitting a wooden table, and Mayer jerked against Johnny’s shoulders with a gasp.
“… All right?”
“Yes.”
“… Keep going.”
The Russians continued to fire as the refugees lumbered frantically towards the shelter of the boulders; the air was full of the ringing thump and crack of the bullets, and ice was jumping everywhere. And yet, somehow, miraculously, they were not hit again. They were not five feet from the nearest boulder… they were diving recklessly for its cover… when the Russians – annoyed, perhaps, at seeing their prey vanish in this manner – opened up with an L.M.G.
It was a long burst, cutting across the ragged ripping of the rifles like a tear in a sheet of brown paper. A chain of exploding ice particles reared dizzily towards them, swerved, sent zipping fragments showering over them and went crackling over their heads as they lay, panting, in the shelter of the rocks. Then the firing stopped, seeming to leave in its wake an almost deathly silence; and in that silence something happened, something beyond all anticipation.
There was a noise that seemed to grow out of the very depths of the silence; a noise so deep as to seem beyond the compass of the human ear, only discernible in the throbbing of the ground beneath. Johnny did not know what it was, for it was a noise he had never heard before; and, indeed, there are few men alive who can truthfully say they have heard it – a vast subterranean rumble with another, even deeper, sound supplying a terrible harmonic bass; a splitting and a groaning and a creaking and a crying, and underneath everything else an incredible humming tone; a tone suggesting nothing but the noise the whirling world makes as it spins on its journey round the sun�
� For long seconds Johnny did nothing but cling to the frightened earth, trying to equate this new, impossible sound with anything within his experience; then he raised his head and peered over the rocks.
He saw the Old Man begin to move.
… It started on the high slopes to the north, the slopes he had traversed on his wild rush down the mountain, the slopes he had loosened dangerously with the impetus of his passage. At first there was little to see but a pale mist, smoky wraiths of snow rising from the mountain as though released by some strange submontane fission. But then the whole side of the mountain, a whole tremendous area more than a mile across, all that huge, treacherous, shining expanse of snow began to come apart like a falling building, to shimmer like a waterfall, to collapse slowly at first and with a majestic solemnity… and then suddenly with an impetus gathered from nowhere, suddenly with a rush and a sweep and a roar; and the cloud of snow was rising fast, blotting out the mountain peak and the land beneath it; and that colossal rumbling was getting louder and louder, taking on a tenor note and then an alto, getting shriller and shriller until the hiss of that falling country of snow was like a scream in Johnny’s ears… Now great pieces were detaching themselves from the main body, leaping into the air, leaping high and whistling downwards again, whirling their own snowclouds about them like the haloes of evil angels. One seemed to swerve in its flight and struck the mountain two hundred yards above them; the air was instantly full of flying snow and spinning boulders, was darkened by them, and over their heads a shadow like that of a planet seemed to flicker past the sun…
“Get down, you fool…” That was Mayer’s voice, a whisper raised in a hurricane. And the roar of the downwards-surging snow blotted him out completely. Johnny withdrew his head, folded his arms over it, and lay still; waiting for eternity.
It was a long time coming. It was almost fifty seconds before the avalanche hit. There was the warning bump, bump, bump of an advance-guard of heavy boulders that plunged past and went wailing over the side of the Lovers with a despairing hisssss-sss; and then a noise like a train in an underground tunnel passing directly over his head, and snow, snow everywhere, snow like a blanket over him, snow in his nose and snow in his mouth, hard prickly snow driven into the recesses of his shirt, plugging his ears, misting his goggles in a second, covering him as he lay in a deep, choking blizzard.
There was a sudden blast of wind that howled against the protecting boulder and almost stripped him away from it, a series of desultory pitter-patterings all round that formed a staccato accompaniment to the steaming hiss of the snow piling up at the foot of the cliff below; and then silence.
Two minutes went by before Johnny dared to move; then it was to brush his face against his right arm, freeing great clots of snow and partially clearing his goggles.
“Mayer,” he said softly.
There was no reply. Johnny wriggled himself clear of the constricting snow around his body, and looked up into a cold, grey, gradually settling storm-cloud.
“Mayer,” he said again, and turned his head.
Mayer was no longer there. There was nothing to show that he had ever been there. Where he had been lying, five feet to Johnny’s left, was a great, ugly, sweeping gouge torn in the ice by a falling boulder, a long furrow in the mountain’s surface, a wound already scarred. Johnny turned his head again and looked down towards the Lovers, his eyes wide with fear.
In the maelstrom of snow plunging over the cliff, mingled inextricably in that hell of spitting ice, somewhere there had been a dead man falling.
… A man, and a case of diamonds.
Ten minutes later Johnny, rose to his feet, shaky but indomitable. The cloud had descended and the air was now clear, very clear indeed; the sun beat down upon his head as he stood and stared to the north.
He had caught nothing but the bare outriders of the real avalanche; nothing but the wind of the passage of the real mass of slipping snow. The main landslide had swept down the seracs and down the smooth slopes of the glacier, spilling out in a huge white sheet over the bergschrund at its base and flattening whole acres of the forest around it. The face of the mountainside had changed, was smoothed as though a giant hand had sliced it with a knife.
And as for the Russians, they might never have existed.
A small figure moved across the top of the Lovers, a small disconsolate figure heading northwards towards the flat screes below. Up the southern slopes of the Hunting Horn marched Lieutenant Brock, leading ten good men and true to the relief of Mr. Trout. And elsewhere on the mountainside, nothing moved at all.
The Old Man watched.
THE END
PLEASE REVIEW THIS BOOK:
If you have enjoyed reading this book, please write an honest review on Amazon. Reviews on Goodreads would also be highly appreciated. If you do so, please sign the guest book at www.dessmondcory.com and we will be sure to send you a gift . To read other Desmond Cory novels, please visit the Amazon Kindle store.