‘Before we jump, I want you – all of you – to remove every distinguishing badge or emblem of rank on your clothes.’ He gestured to Andrea and Miller at the rear of the flight-deck to indicate that they were included as well, then looked at Reynolds again. ‘Sergeants’ stripes, regimental flashes, medal ribbons – the lot.’
‘Why the hell should I?’ Reynolds, Mallory thought, had the lowest boiling-point he’d come across in quite some time. ‘I earned those stripes, those ribbons, that flash. I don’t see –’
Mallory smiled. ‘Disobeying an officer on active service?’
‘Don’t be so damned touchy,’ Reynolds said.
‘Don’t be so damned touchy, sir.’
‘Don’t be so damned touchy, sir.’ Reynolds suddenly grinned. ‘O?, so who’s got the scissors?’
‘You see,’ Mallory explained, ‘the last thing we want to happen is to fall into enemy hands.’
‘Amen,’ Miller intoned.
‘But if we’re to get the information we want we’re going to have to operate close to or even inside their lines. We might get caught. So we have our cover story.’
Groves said quietly: ‘Are we permitted to know just what that cover story is, sir?’
‘Of course you are,’ Mallory said in exasperation. He went on earnestly: ‘Don’t you realize that, on a mission like this, survival depends on one thing and one thing only – complete and mutual trust? As soon as we start having secrets from each other – we’re finished.’
In the deep gloom at the rear of the flight-deck, Andrea and Miller glanced at each other and exchanged their wearily cynical smiles.
As Mallory left the flight-deck for the fuselage, his right hand brushed Miller’s shoulder. After about two minutes Miller yawned, stretched and made his way aft. Mallory was waiting towards the rear of the fuselage. He had two pieces of folded paper in his hand, one of which he opened and showed to Miller, snapping on a flashlight at the same time. Miller stared at it for some moments, then lifted an eyebrow.
‘And what is this supposed to be?’
‘It’s the triggering mechanism for a 1,500-pound submersible mine. Learn it by heart.’
Miller looked at it without expression, then glanced at the other paper Mallory held.
‘And what have you there?’
Mallory showed him. It was a large-scale map, the central feature of which appeared to be a winding lake with a very long eastern arm which bent abruptly at right-angles into a very short southern arm, which in turn ended abruptly at what appeared to be a dam wall. Beneath the dam, a river flowed away through a winding gorge.
Mallory said: ‘What does it look like to you? Show them both to Andrea and tell him to destroy them.’
Mallory left Miller engrossed in his homework and moved forward again to the flight-deck. He bent over Groves’s chart table.
‘Still on course?’
‘Yes, sir. We’re just clearing the southern tip of the island of Hvar. You can see a few lights on the mainland ahead.’ Mallory followed the pointing hand, located a few clusters of lights, then reached out a hand to steady himself as the Wellington started to climb sharply. He glanced at Reynolds.
‘Climbing now, sir. There’s some pretty lofty stuff ahead. We should pick up the Partisan landing lights in about half an hour.’
‘Thirty-three minutes,’ Groves said. ‘One-twenty, near enough.’
For almost half an hour Mallory remained on a jump-seat in the flight-deck, just looking ahead. After a few minutes Andrea disappeared and did not reappear. Miller did not return. Groves navigated, Reynolds flew, Saunders listened in to his portable transceiver and nobody talked at all. At one-fifteen Mallory rose, touched Saunders on the shoulders, told him to pack up his gear and headed aft. He found Andrea and a thoroughly miserable-looking Miller with their parachute snap-catches already clipped on to the jumping wire. Andrea had the door pulled back and was throwing out tiny pieces of shredded paper which swirled away in the slipstream. Mallory shivered in the suddenly intense cold. Andrea grinned, beckoned him to the open doorway and pointed downwards. He yelled in Mallory’s ear: ‘There’s a lot of snow down there.’
There was indeed a lot of snow down there. Mallory understood now Jensen’s insistence on not landing a plane in those parts. The terrain below was rugged in the extreme, consisting almost entirely of a succession of deep and winding valleys and steep-sided mountains. Maybe half of the landscape below was covered in dense forests of pine trees: all of it was covered in what appeared to be a very heavy blanket of snow. Mallory drew back into the comparative shelter of the Wellington’s fuselage and glanced at his watch.
‘One-sixteen.’ Like Andrea, he had to shout.
‘Your watch is a little fast, maybe?’ Miller bawled unhappily. Mallory shook his head, Miller shook his. A bell rang and Mallory made his way to the flight-deck, passing Saunders going the other way. As Mallory entered, Reynolds looked briefly over his shoulder, then pointed directly ahead. Mallory bent over his shoulder and peered forwards and downwards. He nodded.
The three lights, in the form of an elongated V, were still some miles ahead, but quite unmistakable. Mallory turned, touched Groves on the shoulder and pointed aft. Groves rose and left. Mallory said to Reynolds: ‘Where are the red and green jumping lights?’
Reynolds indicated them.
‘Press the red light. How long?’
‘Thirty seconds. About.’
Mallory looked ahead again. The lights were less than half as distant as they had been when first he’d looked. He said to Reynolds: ‘Automatic pilot. Close the fuel switches.’
‘Close the – for the petrol that’s left –’
‘Shut off the bloody tanks! And get aft. Five seconds.’
Reynolds did as he was told. Mallory waited, briefly made a last check of the landing lights ahead, pressed the green light button, rose and made his way swiftly aft. By the time he reached the jump door, even Reynolds, the last of the first five, was gone. Mallory clipped on his snap-catch, braced his hands round the edge of the doorway and launched himself out into the bitter Bosnian night.
The sudden jarring impact from the parachute harness made him look quickly upwards: the concave circle of a fully open parachute was a reassuring spectacle. He glanced downwards and saw the equally reassuring spectacle of another five open parachutes, two of which were swaying quite wildly across the sky – just as was his own. There were some things, he reflected, about which he, Andrea and Miller had a great deal to learn. Controlling parachute descents was one of those things.
He looked up and to the east to see if he could locate the Wellington, but it was no longer visible. Suddenly, as he looked and listened, both engines, almost in perfect unison, cut out. Long seconds passed when the only sound was the rush of the wind in his ears, then there came an explosively metallic sound as the bomber crashed either into the ground or into some unseen mountainside ahead. There was no fire or none that he could see: just the crash, then silence. For the first time that night, the moon broke through.
Andrea landed heavily on an uneven piece of ground, rolled over twice, rose rather experimentally to his feet, discovered he was still intact, pressed the quick-release button of his parachute, then automatically, instinctively – Andrea had a built-in computer for assuring survival – swung through a complete 360° circle. But no immediate danger threatened, or none that he could see. Andrea made a more leisurely survey of their landing spot.
They had, he thought grimly, been most damnably lucky. Another hundred yards to the south and they’d have spent the rest of the night, and for all he knew, the rest of the war, clinging to the tops of the most impossibly tall pine trees he had ever seen. As it was, luck had been with them and they had landed in a narrow clearing which abutted closely on the rocky scarp of a mountainside.
Or rather, all but one. Perhaps fifty yards from where Andrea had landed, an apex of the forest elbowed its way into the clearing. The outermost tree in this ape
x had come between one of the parachutists and terra firma. Andrea’s eyebrows lifted in quizzical astonishment, then he broke into an ambling run.
The parachutist who had come to grief was dangling from the lowermost bough of the pine. He had his hands twisted in the shrouds, his legs bent, knees and ankles close together in the classic landing position, his feet perhaps thirty inches from the ground. His eyes were screwed tightly shut. Corporal Miller seemed acutely unhappy.
Andrea came up and touched him on the shoulder, gently. Miller opened his eyes and glanced at Andrea, who pointed downwards. Miller followed his glance and lowered his legs, which were then four inches from the ground. Andrea produced a knife, sliced through the shrouds and Miller completed the remainder of his journey. He straightened his jacket, his face splendidly impassive, and lifted an enquiring elbow. Andrea, his face equally impassive, pointed down the clearing. Three of the other four parachutists had already landed safely: the fourth, Mallory, was just touching down.
Two minutes later, just as all six were coming together some little distance away from the most easterly landing flare, a shout announced the appearance of a young soldier running towards them from the edge of the forest. The parachutists’ guns came up and were almost immediately lowered again: this was no occasion for guns. The soldier was trailing his by the barrel, excitedly waving his free hand in greeting. He was dressed in a faded and tattered near-uniform that had been pillaged from a variety of armies, had long flowing hair, a cast to his right eye and a straggling ginger beard. That he was welcoming them, was beyond doubt. Repeating some incomprehensible greeting over and over again, he shook hands all round and then a second time, the huge grin on his face reflecting his delight.
Within thirty seconds he’d been joined by at least a dozen others, all bearded, all dressed in the same nondescript uniforms, no two of which were alike, all in the same almost festive mood. Then, as at a signal almost, they fell silent and drew slightly apart as the man who was obviously their leader appeared from the edge of the forest. He bore little resemblance to his men. He differed in that he was completely shaven and wore a uniform, a British battledress, which appeared to be all of one piece. He differed in that he was not smiling: he had about him the air of one who was seldom if ever given to smiling. He also differed from the others in that he was a hawk-faced giant of a man, at least six feet four inches in height, carrying no fewer than four wicked-looking Bowie-type knives in his belt – an excess of armament that on another man might have looked incongruous or even comical but which on this man provoked no mirth at all. His face was dark and sombre and when he spoke it was in English, slow and stilted, but precise.
‘Good evening.’ He looked round questioningly. ‘I am Captain Droshny.’
Mallory took a step forward. ‘Captain Mallory.’
‘Welcome to Yugoslavia, Captain Mallory – Partisan Yugoslavia.’ Droshny nodded towards the dying flare, his face twitched in what may have been an attempt at a smile, but he made no move to shake hands. ‘As you can see, we were expecting you.’
‘Your lights were a great help,’ Mallory acknowledged.
‘Thank you.’ Droshny stared away to the east, then back to Mallory, shaking his head. ? pity about the plane.’
‘All war is a pity.’
Droshny nodded. ‘Come. Our headquarters is close by.’
No more was said. Droshny, leading, moved at once into the shelter of the forest. Mallory, behind him, was intrigued by the footprints, clearly visible in the now bright moonlight, left by Droshny in the deep snow. They were, thought Mallory, most peculiar. Each sole left three V-shaped marks, the heel one: the right-hand side of the leading V on the right sole had a clearly defined break in it. Unconsciously, Mallory filed away this little oddity in his mind. There was no reason why he should have done so other than that the Mallorys of this world always observe and record the unusual. It helps them to stay alive.
The slope steepened, the snow deepened and the pale moonlight filtered thinly down through the spreading, snow-laden branches of the pines. The light wind was from the east: the cold was intense. For almost ten minutes no voice was heard, then Droshny’s came, softly but clearly and imperative in its staccato urgency.
‘Be still.’ He pointed dramatically upward. ‘Be still! Listen!’
They stopped, looked upward and listened intently. At least, Mallory and his men looked upward and listened intently, but the Yugoslavs had other things on their minds: swiftly, efficiently and simultaneously, without either spoken or gestured command being given, they rammed the muzzles of their machine-guns and rifles into the sides and backs of the six parachutists with a force and uncompromising authority that rendered any accompanying orders quite superfluous.
The six men reacted as might have been expected. Reynolds, Groves and Saunders, who were rather less accustomed to the vicissitudes of fate than their three older companions, registered a very similar combination of startled anger and open-mouthed astonishment. Mallory looked thoughtful. Miller lifted a quizzical eyebrow. Andrea, predictably, registered nothing at all: he was too busy exhibiting his usual reaction to physical violence.
His right hand, which he had instantly lifted halfway to his shoulder in an apparent token of surrender, clamped down on the barrel of the rifle of the guard to his right, forcing it away from him, while his left elbow jabbed viciously into the solar plexus of the guard to his left, who gasped in pain and staggered back a couple of paces. Andrea, with both hands now on the rifle of the other guard, wrenched it effortlessly free, lifted it high and brought the barrel down in one continuous blur of movement. The guard collapsed as if a bridge had fallen on him. The winded guard to the left, still bent and whooping in agony, was trying to line up his rifle when the butt of Andrea’s rifle struck him in the face: he made a brief coughing sound and fell senseless to the forest floor.
It took all of the three seconds that this action had lasted for the Yugoslavs to release themselves from their momentary thrall of incredulity. Half-a-dozen soldiers flung themselves on Andrea, bearing him to the ground. In the furious, rolling struggle that followed, Andrea laid about him in his usual willing fashion, but when one of the Yugoslavs started pounding him on the head with the barrel of a pistol, Andrea opted for discretion and lay still. With two guns in his back and four hands on either arm Andrea was dragged to his feet: two of his captors already looked very much the worse for wear.
Droshny, his eyes bleak and bitter, came up to Andrea, unsheathed one of his knives and thrust its point against Andrea’s throat with a force savage enough to break the skin and draw blood that trickled on to the gleaming blade. For a moment it seemed that Droshny would push the knife home to the hilt, then his eyes moved sideways and downwards to look at the two huddled men lying in the snow. He nodded to the nearest man.
‘How are they?’
A young Yugoslav dropped to his knees, looked first at the man who had been struck by the rifle-barrel, touched his head briefly, examined the second man, then stood up. In the filtered moonlight, his face was unnaturally pale.
‘Josef is dead. I think his neck is broken. And his brother – he’s breathing – but his jaw seems to be –’ The voice trailed away uncertainly.
Droshny transferred his gaze back to Andrea. His lips drew back, he smiled the way a wolf smiles and leaned a little harder on the knife.
‘I should kill you now. I will kill you later.’ He sheathed his knife, held up his clawed hands in front of Andrea’s face, and shouted: ‘Personally. With those hands.’
‘With those hands.’ Slowly, meaningly, Andrea examined the four pairs of hands pinioning his arms, then looked contemptuously at Droshny. He said: ‘Your courage terrifies me.’
There was a brief and unbelieving silence. The three young sergeants stared at the tableau before them with faces reflecting various degrees of consternation and incredulity. Mallory and Miller looked on impassively. For a moment or two, Droshny looked as if he hadn’t heard aright, t
hen his face twisted in savage anger as he struck Andrea backhanded across the face. Immediately a trickle of blood appeared at the right-hand corner of Andrea’s mouth but Andrea himself remained unmoving, his face without expression.
Droshny’s eyes narrowed. Andrea smiled again, briefly. Droshny struck again, this time with the back of the other hand. The effect was as before, with the exception that this time the trickle of blood came from the left-hand corner of the mouth. Andrea smiled again but to look into his eyes was to look into an open grave. Droshny wheeled and walked away, then halted as he approached Mallory.
‘You are the leader of those men, Captain Mallory?’
‘I am.’
‘You’re a very – silent leader, Captain?’
‘What am I to say to a man who turns his guns on his friends and allies?’ Mallory looked at him dispassionately. ‘I’ll talk to your commanding officer, not to a madman.’
Droshny’s face darkened. He stepped forward, his arm lifted to strike. Very quickly, but so smoothly and calmly that the movement seemed unhurried, and totally ignoring the two rifle-muzzles pressing into his side, Mallory lifted his Luger and pointed it at Droshny’s face. The click of the Luger safety-catch being released came like a hammer-blow in the suddenly unnatural intensity of silence.
And unnatural intensity of silence there was. Except for one little movement, so slow as to be almost imperceptible, both Partisans and parachutists had frozen into a tableau that would have done credit to the frieze on an Ionic temple. The three sergeants, like most of the Partisans, registered astonished incredulity. The two men guarding Mallory looked at Droshny with questioning eyes. Droshny looked at Mallory as if he were mad. Andrea wasn’t looking at anyone, while Miller wore that look of world-weary detachment which only he could achieve. But it was Miller who made that one little movement, a movement that now came to an end with his thumb resting on his Schmeisser’s safety-release. After a moment or two he removed his thumb: there would come a time for Schmeissers, but this wasn’t it.
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