by Colin Forbes
'What is this in aid of? The pause?' he enquired.
'Something about that bridge I don't like. If I were planning an ambush – and ruthlessly, didn't care tuppence about innocent civilian casualties – that bridge would be the death-trap.'
'I think we may have a problem,' Cardon said, speaking through the open window, straddled on his machine. 'I suggest you don't proceed any further until Butler and I have spied out the lie of the land.
OK?'
'What triggered off this mood of caution?' Tweed asked.
'There's an old castle perched up just behind these old houses. Anyone located on top has a perfect view of the bridge and any vehicle crossing it. Harry and I saw at least one man at the summit of the keep – with what looked like a rifle in his hands. I'm going to check under the bridge, Harry takes the castle. Sit tight.'
'Look! A lovely cat…'
Before Tweed could stop her Paula had opened the door, jumped out and was walking briskly behind Cardon who was approaching the bridge on foot, leaving his motorbike leaning against the Espace. There was a large fat cat on the parapet of the bridge and Tweed knew she was fond of cats. But he also noticed she had undone the flap of her shoulder-bag next to her hip. Inside was an easily accessible pocket which had been specially designed to take her. 32 Browning.
Tweed watched as Paula, clad in a padded windcheater and ski pants tucked into leather boots with rubber soles, strode confidently on to the bridge. Any watcher was unlikely to suspect her of being anything but a ski-season tourist.
She picked up the heavily furred cat which was coffee-coloured with white 'stockings' and a white chest. She glanced around as it purred at her attentions and saw the swiftly moving figure of Harry Butler disappearing below the looming castle. Cardon had referred to a 'keep' and this was a great round tower rearing up above the rest of the edifice. She nipped one of the ears of the cat which protested, prepared to leap out of her arms. She aimed it over the edge of the parapet on to the snow-covered bank at the edge of the frozen stream.
Cardon, seeing the opportunity she'd provided, lowered himself over the stone wall as though in pursuit of the animal. Agilely, Paula dropped over the wall, followed him under the bridge. The cat perched on a snowbound rock at the far end of the arch, glaring at them. Cardon raised a warning hand.
Paula followed the direction of his pointing finger. An explosives expert, Cardon recognized lethal hardware. Attached by ropes to ancient iron rings in the centre of the arch was suspended a large metal plate supporting a large number of what appeared to Paula to be Roman-candle type fireworks.
'Dynamite sticks,' Cardon commented. 'That collection adds up to one big bomb, powerful enough to blast the stone bridge and any vehicle on it sky-high.'
'It can hardly work by pressure of a vehicle crossing the bridge,' Paula mused. She was scared stiff and kept talking to conceal her reaction. 'Otherwise a farm wagon could have set it off at any time.'
'Correct,' Cardon agreed. 'A bit diabolical this one. See that grey cable running from the bomb to the other end of the arch near where the cat is? Butler, who has a nasty mind, scraped away snow from the base of one of the old buildings near the climb to the castle. He found more of that cable. The snow kept people indoors last night, now it's concealing the cable this morning.'
'Where does the cable end? Can we cut it?'
'My guess is that if we did it would blow us sky-high. It runs to the top of the castle keep – where someone watching can press the button at the right moment.'
Butler took long careful strides through the snow as he reached the heavy wooden door leading into the castle rearing up above him. The snow was a giveaway – other footprints had preceded his to this same doorway.
He turned the iron ring-handle slowly, making not a sound as he pushed the door inwards inch by inch. For a sturdily built man Butler could move with deadly silence. He held the Luger in his right hand as he padded inside, closed the door with the same care behind him.
Waiting while he listened, while his eyes accustomed themselves to the dim light, he heard nothing. Ahead of him a stone staircase climbed alongside the outer wall of the castle. He used a large handkerchief to clean snow off the soles of his shoes. If it came to a showdown he did not want his feet slipping from under him. He began to mount the staircase, following a trail of snow patches which he guessed the man above him had left behind off his own soles when he'd made the same ascent.
Butler came to a point where an archway led off the main staircase to another narrower staircase which curved up constantly. He guessed that this led up round the sides of the looming turret to the high roof where he'd glimpsed a man with a weapon. Again Butler knew he was heading in the right direction – a fresh tell-tale trail of snow patches smeared the well-worn stone steps, steps smoothed down by footfalls over the centuries.
A draught of even colder fresh air warned him he was near the exit at the summit. It was freezing cold on the spiral staircase and the snow patches had frozen solid. He took a firmer grip on the Luger as he edged round a corner and saw an archway framing the clear blue sky beyond. He had to get there in time – he knew Cardon would be investigating what the opposition had planted underneath the bridge.
'You really should get the hell out of here, Paula,' Cardon warned. 'I make one false move deactivating this bomb and we both end up playing harps in the sky.'
'You mean two and a quarter of us,' Paula joked to hide her fear. 'Don't forget Puss. He would take a fancy to me at this moment.'
The cat had come running back to her, had reached up with its forepaws on her right leg. She'd picked it up and tickled it under its ear while Cardon made his preliminary examination with a pencil torch. Philip, she thought, always seemed to carry a complete tool-kit with him.
'Can't I help you in some way?' she pressed.
'Well…'
He was reluctant to agree, but he knew it would be safer if he had an extra pair of hands. No, he decided, scare her well away from this potential tomb before he started experimenting. He gestured with the secateurs he'd taken from a small cloth hold-all.
'Look, Paula, this is the score. I count six sticks of dynamite – probably stolen from a stone quarry. Plenty of them with explosives stores in the Vosges. Now – to neutralize, make them inert sticks of nothing – I have to cut six cables attached to six detonators. It's a crude but effectively improvised bomb. So I cut each of the green cables…'
'Not the red ones?' The cat was still purring as she tickled it under the ear. 'I always thought red was for danger.'
'That is the crude trick they played.' Cardon turned his pink healthy face towards Paula and grinned. 'I've checked this thingumajig carefully. To render it harmless I've got to snip through six green cables. That was their idea of a boobytrap. Assuming, of course, I know what I'm doing. You know what an explosives expert will tell you? That you can never rely on explosives reacting as they're supposed to. Still want to risk hanging about here?'
'What can I do to help?'
'It's your funeral – mine too. See this canvas bag I brought from the bike? As I snip a cable I'll take hold of a stick of dynamite and hand it to you. Then you lay it carefully in the bottom of the bag. Put the next jigger alongside it.'
'What are we waiting for?' Paula enquired as she placed the cat in the snow.
'I don't like it,' Tweed said from his seat in the Espace. 'Philip has found something under that bridge – and Paula is down there with him. I'm going to see what's going on.' Newman grasped him by the arm, forced him down back into his seat.
'You're going nowhere at all. What's the matter with you? Lost your capacity for waiting? You've always been hot on that aspect of our work. How many times have you told members of your team who were getting impatient that they must learn to wait?'
'I suppose you're right.'
'I know I am,' Newman said firmly. 'We may be under observation. Two people under the bridge is enough. Just hope there's no big bang.'
Butler stood three steps below the archway leading out on to the flat roof. He held the Luger gripped in both hands, aimed at the Norman arch. He was waiting to hear something that would tell him where the man – or men – who had climbed the tower before him were located.
The waiting was getting on his nerves. He couldn't forget the cable he'd found by scraping his foot along the base of the stone wall of a house near the castle. He couldn't forget that Cardon was probably now beneath the bridge, fooling around with God knew what devilish device.
The pressure was almost unbearable, the urge to dash out on to the roof, but he resisted the overwhelming temptation. Then, without warning, the back of a heavily built man clad in a windcheater and jeans appeared as he stood close to the edge of the low parapet. Butler realized he was staring at something through binoculars. He spoke to some unseen person. The twang was American.
'Gary, that friggin' Espace is still stuck a distance from the bridge. Looks like they could be staying there all day. Would the bomb reach them? Debris from the bridge? Great hunks of rock. Shall we give it a try?'
'Norton said to wait till it was on the bridge.'
'Gary, Norton is the friggin' Invisible Man. We can see the situation. And that girl who was fooling with that cat has gone to earth under the bridge. What say we give it a try? Hell, Norton is probably filling his belly in some upmarket restaurant in Strasbourg while we freeze.'
'If you say so, Mick. But it was you who…'
Butler jumped on to the platform. Mick, by the parapet, reacted with the speed of a pro, hauled out an automatic from inside his windcheater. He never had a chance to take aim as two bullets from Butler's 9-mm. Luger slammed into his chest. The force of the bullets toppled the thug over the edge. Butler never saw his arms and legs splay in his final fall into eternity. He had swung the Luger's muzzle to where Gary was crouched over a square box with a handle protruding a foot from the top. Gary's clawed hands descended, ready to grasp the handle, to depress the plunger.
Butler shot him twice in the left armpit. Gary jerked upright, blood streaming over his windcheater, staggering above the deadly box. Butler walked forward, used the muzzle of his weapon to shove the reeling American to the brink. He fell backwards and this time Butler saw what looked like a matchstick man plunging into the depths, both arms stretched out like a swimmer. He struck a projecting rock, was thrown off it by his own momentum and vanished into a tangle of deep undergrowth. No sign of Mick. He must have vanished into the same wilderness.
Butler slid the Luger back inside his hip holster, bent over the detonating mechanism. Cardon had trained him in explosives and Butler realized this was a crude improvised effort, reminiscent of photographs he'd seen of similar devices used in the First World War.
He took hold of the handle gently, twisted it slowly. It unscrewed anti-clockwise. He lifted the handle clear of the box, went to the edge of the parapet and threw the handle into the undergrowth which now concealed two bodies.
***
Paula had taken five of the six sticks of dynamite from Cardon and placed them carefully in the open canvas bag. The danger came from a most unexpected direction.
'Here you are. That's the last one. All OK,' Cardon said as he handed Paula the sixth stick of dynamite.
She had reached out her right hand, had grasped the stick, when the fat cat appeared out of nowhere, leapt up on to her left arm. It must have weighed almost nine pounds and threw her off balance.
She performed several reflex actions at once. Moving her right foot out, ramming it deep into the snow, she stood straddled in a desperate attempt to maintain her balance. Still gripping the dynamite stick in her right hand, she clutched at the great ball of fur and muscle with her left hand, hugging it to her breast. The cat dug its forepaws into the shoulder of her padded jacket, which at least relieved her of some of the weight. For Paula, the last straw was when it began to purr with pleasure.
'I could kill you,' she said in a deliberately affectionate tone which wouldn't disturb it.
'Stay just as you are,' Cardon said. 'I'm going to take the stick out of your hand. I'll tell you when to let go. Easy does it… Now, I've got it…'
Crouching down, he slid the last stick alongside the others, used a collection of chamois cloths he kept inside the bag to separate one stick from another. When he'd zipped the bag closed he looked up.
'I could throw this hunk into that frozen stream,' Paula told him.
The cat, still purring, had closed its eyes. It was going to sleep – unlike Norton who was standing in the main street of Kaysersberg, waiting expectantly.
Norton had been standing patiently outside the entrance to a small bar for over half an hour. He excelled in patience. He had pushed up his fur hat so that it was clear of his ears. His eyes showed no warmth, no particular expression as he waited for the sound of the explosion. He had stepped back from viewing the bridge. It was a sizeable bomb his men had placed under it during the ice-cold night when the streets were deserted.
He stiffened as he heard a vehicle approaching, moved back further out of sight into the entrance. The station wagon, driven by Nield, crawled past him, bumping over the cobbles. The Harley-Davidson, with Butler on the saddle, appeared, overtook Nield, headed west out of the village for the Vosges. Almost at once a grey Espace crawled past, also bumping over the old cobbles. It was moving so slowly Norton had a clear view of Tweed in one of the front passenger seats.
A second motorcycle ridden by Philip Cardon brought up the rear of the convoy. Norton waited until the sound of its engine had died away and the heavy silence of the snowbound morning descended again. Taking out his mobile phone, Norton contacted Mencken who was located high up in the mountains.
'Norton here. Our competitors are leaving Kaysersberg. Their director is a passenger in a grey Espace which is driven by a man and also is carrying two women. Two motorcycles and a station wagon are escorting them. So activate Phase Two. Immediately. Understood?'
'OK. Understood. So OK!' Mencken's rasping voice acknowledged.
Norton slid back the aerial inside his instrument, walked down to a side street where his hired blue Renault was parked. The next stage was to drive towards the Chateau Noir. Long before he reached it Tweed would be eliminated. Norton didn't waste a moment's thought as to why the bomb had not exploded. A faulty detonator? It didn't matter. Mencken was waiting for his target. Norton was indeed a man who excelled in patience.
40
'There will be fresh attempts to ambush us,' Tweed warned as they left Kaysersberg behind and the road spiralled up.
'What made you really suspect that bridge?' Newman asked.
'Sixth sense. Reverse thinking, if you like.'
'What's that?' Paula asked.
'Knowing the route between Colmar and the Chateau Noir the average man would assume the real danger would lie high up in the remote regions of the Vosges…'
'But you're not the average man,' Jennie remarked, leaning her arms on the back of Tweed's seat. 'Do go on.' -
That's right, dear, Paula was thinking cynically, lay on the flattery with a trowel.
'Reverse thinking,' Tweed explained, ignoring the interruption, 'is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Turn everything round, and learn from any precedent where you can. We have one – demonstrating Norton's callousness when it comes to loss of innocent human life. The attack on us in the Bahnhofstrasse -where the second killer had a machine-pistol and was about to use it until Bob shot him. Spraying a weapon like that in a crowded city street could easily have caused fatal casualties to bystanders. So blowing up a bridge in Kaysersberg which could have killed several locals bothered Norton not one jot.'
'This is going to be a dangerous journey, then,' Jennie suggested. .
'Well, you were warned before you joined us,' rapped out Paula.
'Oh, I'm not frightened. That man on top of that rock was watching us through something,' she went on. 'I saw the sun flashing off glass, maybe bino
culars.'
'Are you sure it wasn't imagination?' queried Paula.
'Check it,' Tweed ordered Newman. 'Jennie may well have seen something…'
Despite its snow tyres, the Espace was rocking as it passed over hardened ruts. Newman slowed to a stop on a steep incline, lowered his window. Arctic-like air flowed into the vehicle. Paula could now see the massive bluffs and high knife-edge ridges of the Vosges very clearly in the glaring sunlight. Cardon appeared at Newman's window, paused astride his machine.
'Something suspicious ahead of us,' Newman began.
'On the top of that ridge,' Jennie said, leaning forward, aiming her extended arm and index finger like a gun. 'I know I saw at least one man.'
'Keep the Espace parked here,' Cardon said as Butler returned and pulled up astride his own machine. 'We'll investigate.' He looked at Paula. 'Those dynamite sticks we collected may come in useful. I've got them in my panniers.' He pointed to the containers slung from either side of his machine. 'See you…'
'He's got grenades,' Tweed commented.
'Saving them for a rainy day,' Paula suggested.
After a brief conversation between Cardon and Butler the two men sped off up the curving ascent, bouncing over the ruts. Newman took out a pair of binoculars and scanned the ridge Jennie had pointed at. No sign of anyone, so maybe Paula had been right in suggesting it was Jennie's imagination.
Carrying out the plan they had improvised, Butler and Cardon each played a separate role. Butler continued riding at reduced speed up the road, acting as bait. Behind him Cardon had turned his machine off the road and sped under the lee of the ridge which made him invisible to any watcher on the heights. Before leaving the Espace he had tucked one stick of dynamite, folded inside his scarf, behind his belt. The ground was rough, treacherous, the snow concealing rocks and dips, and he prayed the vibration would not disturb the dynamite. Should have used a grenade instead. Too late to worry about that now.