The moon passed behind a cloud.
Miller covered the last ten feet separating him from Mallory. He looked at Mallory and said: ‘They’re both going to go, you know that?’
‘I know that.’ Mallory sounded even more tired than he looked. ‘Come on. Another thirty feet and we should be in position.’ Mallory, leaving Miller where he was, continued his traverse along the crack. He was moving very quickly now, taking risks that no sane cragsman would ever have contemplated, but he had no option now, for time was running out. Within a minute he had reached a spot where he judged that he had gone far enough, hammered home a piton and securely belayed the rope to it.
He signalled to Miller to come and join him. Miller began the last stage of the traverse, and as he was on his way across, Mallory unhitched another rope from his shoulders, a sixty-foot length of climbers’ rope, knotted at fifteen-inch intervals. One end of this he fastened to the same piton as held the rope that Miller was using for making his traverse: the other end he let fall down the cliff-side. Miller came up and Mallory touched him on the shoulder and pointed downwards.
The dark waters of the Neretva dam were directly beneath them.
TWELVE
Saturday
0135–0200
Andrea and Reynolds lay crouched among the boulders at the western end of the elderly swing bridge over the gorge. Andrea looked across the length of the bridge, his gaze travelling up the steep gully behind it till it came to rest on the huge boulder perched precariously at the angle where the steep slope met the vertical cliff-face behind it. Andrea rubbed a bristly chin, nodded thoughtfully and turned to Reynolds.
‘You cross first. I’ll give you covering fire. You do the same for me when you get to the other side. Don’t stop, don’t look round. Now.’
Reynolds made for the bridge in a crouching run, his footsteps seeming to him abnormally loud as he reached the rotting planking of the bridge itself. The palms of his hands gliding lightly over the hand ropes on either side he continued without check or diminution of speed, obeying Andrea’s instructions not to risk a quick backward glance, and feeling a very strange sensation between his shoulderblades. To his mild astonishment he reached the far bank without a shot being fired, headed for the concealment and shelter offered by a large boulder a little way up the bank, was startled momentarily to see Maria hiding behind the same boulder, then whirled round and unslung his Schmeisser.
On the far bank there was no sign of Andrea. For a brief moment Reynolds experienced a quick stab of anger, thinking Andrea had used this ruse merely to get rid of him, then smiled to himself as he heard two flat explosive sounds some little way down the river on the far bank. Andrea, Reynolds remembered, had still had two grenades left and Andrea was not the man to let such handy things rust from disuse. Besides, Reynolds realized, it would provide Andrea with extra valuable seconds to make good his escape, which indeed it did for Andrea appeared on the far bank almost immediately and, like Reynolds, effected the crossing of the bridge entirely without incident. Reynolds called softly and Andrea joined them in the shelter of the boulder.
Reynolds said in a low voice: ‘What next?’
‘First things first.’ Andrea produced a cigar from a waterproof box, a match from another waterproof box, struck the match in his huge cupped hands and puffed in immense satisfaction. When he removed the cigar, Reynolds noticed that he held it with the glowing end safely concealed in the curved palm of his hand. ‘What’s next? I tell you what’s next. Company coming to join us across the bridge, and coming very soon, too. They’ve taken crazy risks to try to get me – and paid for them – which shows they are pretty desperate. Crazy men don’t hang about for long. You and Maria here move fifty or sixty yards nearer the dam and take cover there – and keep your guns on the far side of the bridge.’
‘You staying here?’ Reynolds asked.
Andrea blew out a noxious cloud of cigar smoke. ‘For the moment, yes.’
‘Then I’m staying, too.’
‘If you want to get killed, it’s all right by me,’ Andrea said mildly. ‘But this beautiful young lady here wouldn’t look that way any more with the top of her head blown off.’
Reynolds was startled by the crudeness of the words. He said angrily: ‘What the devil do you mean?’
‘I mean this.’ Andrea’s voice was no longer mild. ‘This boulder gives you perfect concealment from the bridge. But Droshny and his men can move another thirty or forty yards farther up the bank on their side. What concealment will you have then?’
‘I never thought of that,’ Reynolds said.
‘There’ll come a day when you say that once too often,’ Andrea said sombrely, ‘and then it will be too late to think of anything again.’
A minute later they were in position. Reynolds was hidden behind a huge boulder which afforded perfect concealment both from the far side of the bridge and from the bank on the far side up to the point where it petered out: it did not offer concealment from the dam. Reynolds looked to his left where Maria was crouched farther in behind the rock. She smiled at him, and Reynolds knew he had never seen a braver girl, for the hands that held the Schmeisser were trembling. He moved out a little and peered down-river, but there appeared to be no signs of life whatsoever at the western edge of the bridge. The only signs of life at all, indeed, were to be seen behind the huge boulder up in the gully, where Andrea, completely screened from anyone at or near the far side of the bridge, was industriously loosening the foundations of rubble and earth round the base of the boulder.
Appearances, as always, were deceptive. Reynolds had judged there to be no life at the western end of the bridge but there was, in fact, life and quite a lot of it, although admittedly there was no action. Concealed in the massive boulders about twenty feet back from the bridge, Droshny, a Cetnik sergeant and perhaps a dozen German soldiers and Cetniks lay in deep concealment among the rocks.
Droshny had binoculars to his eyes. He examined the ground in the neighbourhood of the far side of the swing bridge, then traversed to his left up beyond the boulder where Reynolds and Maria lay hidden until he reached the dam wall. He lifted the glasses, following the dimly-seen zig-zag outline of the iron ladder, checked, adjusted the focus as finely as possible, then stared again. There could be no doubt: there were two men clinging to the ladder, about three-quarters of the way up towards the top of the dam.
‘Good God in heaven!’ Droshny lowered the binoculars, the gaunt craggy features registering an almost incredulous horror, and turned to the Cetnik sergeant by his side. ‘Do you know what they mean to do?’
‘The dam!’ The thought had not occurred to the sergeant until that instant but the stricken expression on Droshny’s face made the realization as immediate as it was inevitable. ‘They’re going to blow up the dam!’ It did not occur to either man to wonder how Mallory could possibly blow up the dam: as other men had done before them, both Droshny and the sergeant were beginning to discover in Mallory and his modus operandi an extraordinary quality of inevitability that transformed remote possibilities into very likely probabilities.
‘General Zimmermann!’ Droshny’s gravelly voice had become positively hoarse. ‘He must be warned! If that dam bursts while his tanks and troops are crossing –’
‘Warn him? Warn him? How in God’s name can we warn him?’
‘There’s a radio up on the dam.’
The sergeant stared at him. He said: ‘It might as well be on the moon. There’ll be a rearguard, they’re bound to have left a rearguard. Some of us are going to get killed crossing that bridge, Captain.’
‘You think so?’ Droshny glanced up sombrely at the dam. ‘And just what do you think is going to happen to us all down here if that goes?’
Slowly, soundlessly and almost invisibly, Mallory and Miller swam northwards through the dark waters of the Neretva dam, away from the direction of the dam wall. Suddenly Miller, who was slightly in the lead, gave a low exclamation and stopped swimming.
> ‘What’s up?’ Mallory asked.
‘This is up.’ With an effort Miller lifted a section of what appeared to be a heavy wire cable just clear of the water. ‘Nobody mentioned this little lot.’
‘Nobody did,’ Mallory agreed. He reached under the water. ‘And there’s a steel mesh below.’
‘An anti-torpedo net?’
‘Just that.’
‘Why?’ Miller gestured to the north where, at a distance of less than two hundred yards, the dam made an abrupt right-angled turn between the towering cliff-faces. ‘It’s impossible for any torpedo bomber – any bomber – to get a run-in on the dam wall.’
‘Someone should have told the Germans. They take no chances – and it makes things a damned sight more difficult for us.’ He peered at his watch. ‘We’d better start hurrying. We’re late.’
They eased themselves over the wire and started swimming again, more quickly this time. Several minutes later, just after they had rounded the corner of the dam and lost sight of the dam wall, Mallory touched Miller on the shoulder. Both men trod water, turned and looked back in the direction from which they had come. To the south, not much more than two miles away, the night sky had suddenly blossomed into an incandescent and multi-coloured beauty as scores of parachute flares, red and green and white and orange, drifted slowly down towards the Neretva river.
“Very pretty, indeed,’ Miller conceded. ‘And what’s all this in aid of?’
‘It’s in aid of us. Two reasons. First of all, it will take any person who looks at that – and everyone will look at it – at least ten minutes to recover his night-sight, which means that any odd goings-on in this part of the dam are all that less likely to be observed: and if everyone is going to be busy looking that way, then they can’t be busy looking this way at the same time.’
‘Very logical,’ Miller approved. ‘Our Captain Jensen doesn’t miss out on very much, does he?’
‘He has, as the saying goes, all his marbles about him.’ Mallory turned again and gazed to the east, his head cocked the better to listen. He said: ‘You have to hand it to them. Dead on target, dead on schedule. I hear him coming now.’
The Lancaster, no more than five hundred feet above the surface of the dam, came in from the east, its engine throttled back almost to stalling speed. It was still two hundred yards short of where Mallory and Miller were treading water when suddenly huge black silk parachutes bloomed beneath it: almost simultaneously, engine-power was increased to maximum revolutions and the big bomber went into a steeply banking climbing turn to avoid smashing into the mountains on the far side of the dam.
Miller gazed at the slowly descending black parachutes, turned, and looked at the brilliantly burning flares to the south. ‘The skies,’ he announced, ‘are full of things tonight.’
He and Mallory began to swim in the direction of the falling parachutes.
Petar was near to exhaustion. For long minutes now he had been holding Groves’s dead weight pinned against the iron ladder and his aching arms were beginning to quiver with the strain. His teeth were clenched hard, his face, down which rivulets of sweat poured, was twisted with the effort and the agony of it all. Plainly, Petar could not hold out much longer.
It was by the light of those flares that Reynolds, still crouched with Maria in hiding behind the big boulder, first saw the predicament of Petar and Groves. He turned to glance at Maria: one look at the stricken face was enough to tell Reynolds that she had seen it, too.
Reynolds said hoarsely: ‘Stay here. I must go and help them.’
‘No!’ She caught his arm, clearly exerting all her will to keep herself under control: her eyes, as they had been when Reynolds had first seen her, had the look of a hunted animal about them. ‘Please, Sergeant, no. You must stay here.’
Reynolds said desperately: ‘Your brother –’
‘There are more important things –’
‘Not for you there aren’t.’ Reynolds made to rise, but she clung to his arm with surprising strength, so that he couldn’t release himself without hurting her. He said, almost gently: ‘Come on, lass, let me go.’
‘No! If Droshny and his men get across –’ She broke off as the last of the flares finally fizzled to extinction, casting the entire gorge into what was, by momentary contrast, an almost total darkness. Maria went on simply: ‘You’ll have to stay now, won’t you?’
‘I’ll have to stay now.’ Reynolds moved out from the shelter of the boulder and put his night-glasses to his eyes. The swing bridge, and as far as he could tell, the far bank seemed innocent of any sign of life. He traversed up the gully and could just make out the form of Andrea, his excavations finished, resting peacefully behind the big boulder. Again with a feeling of deep unease, Reynolds trained his glasses on the bridge. He suddenly became very still. He removed the glasses, wiped the lenses very carefully, rubbed his eyes and lifted the glasses again.
His night-sight, momentarily destroyed by the flares, was now almost back to normal and there could be no doubt or any imagination about what he was seeing – seven or eight men, Droshny in the lead, flat on their stomachs, were inching their way on elbows, hands and knees across the wooden slats of the swing bridge.
Reynolds lowered the glasses, stood upright, armed a grenade and threw it as far as he could towards the bridge. It exploded just as it landed, at least forty yards short of the bridge. That it achieved nothing but a flat explosive bang and the harmless scattering of some shale was of no account, for it had never been intended to reach the bridge: it had been intended as a signal for Andrea, and Andrea wasted no time.
He placed the soles of both feet against the boulder, braced his back against the cliff-face and heaved. The boulder moved the merest fraction of an inch. Andrea momentarily relaxed, allowing the boulder to roll back, then repeated the process: this time the forward motion of the boulder was quite perceptible. Andrea relaxed again, then pushed for the third time.
Down below on the bridge, Droshny and his men, uncertain as to the exact significance of the exploding grenade, had frozen into complete immobility. Only their eyes moved, darting almost desperately from side to side to locate the source of a danger that lay so heavily in the air as to be almost palpable.
The boulder was distinctly rocking now. With every additional heave it received from Andrea, it was rocking an additional inch farther forward, an additional inch farther backwards. Andrea had slipped farther and farther down until now he was almost horizontal on his back. He was gasping for breath and sweat was streaming down his face. The boulder rolled back almost as if it were going to fall upon him and crush him. Andrea took a deep breath, then convulsively straightened back and legs in one last titanic heave. For a moment the boulder teetered on the point of imbalance, reached the point of no return and fell away.
Droshny could most certainly have heard nothing and, in that near darkness, it was certain as could be that he had seen nothing. It could only have been an instinctive awareness of impending death that made him glance upwards in sudden conviction that this was where the danger lay. The huge boulder, just rolling gently when Droshny’s horror-stricken eyes first caught sight of it, almost at once began to bound in ever-increasing leaps, hurtling down the slope directly towards them, trailing a small avalanche behind it. Droshny screamed a warning. He and his men scrambled desperately to their feet, an instinctive reaction that was no more than a useless and token gesture in the face of death, because, for most of them, it was already far too late and they had no place to go.
With one last great leap the hurtling boulder smashed straight into the centre of the bridge, shattering the flimsy woodwork and slicing the bridge in half. Two men who had been directly in the path of the boulder died instantaneously: five others were catapulted into the torrent below and swept away to almost equally immediate death. The two broken sections of the bridge, still secured to either bank by the suspension ropes, hung down into the rushing waters, their lowermost parts banging furiously against the b
oulder-strewn banks.
There must have been at least a dozen parachutes attached to the three dark cylindrical objects that now lay floating, though more than half submerged, in the equally dark waters of the Neretva dam. Mallory and Miller sliced those away with their knives, then joined the three cylinders in line astern, using short wire strops that had been provided for that precise purpose. Mallory examined the leading cylinder and gently eased back a lever set in the top. There was a subdued roar as compressed air violently aerated the water astern of the leading cylinder and sent it surging forward, tugging the other two cylinders behind it. Mallory closed the lever and nodded to the other two cylinders.
‘These levers on the right-hand side control the flooding valves. Open that one till you just have negative buoyancy and no more. I’ll do the same on this one.’
Miller cautiously turned a valve and nodded at the leading cylinder. ‘What’s that for?’
‘Do you fancy towing a ton and a half of amatol as far as the dam wall? Propulsion unit of some kind. Looks like a sawn-off section of a twenty-one-inch torpedo tube to me. Compressed air, maybe at a pressure of five thousand pounds a square inch, passing through reduction gear. Should do the job all right.’
‘Just so long as Miller doesn’t have to do it.’ Miller closed the valve on the cylinder. ‘About that?’
‘About that.’ All three cylinders were now just barely submerged. Again Mallory eased back the compressed air lever on the leading cylinder. There was a throaty burble of sound, a sudden flurry of bubbles streaming out astern and then all three cylinders were under way, heading down towards the angled neck of the dam, both men clinging to and guiding the leading cylinder.
When the swing bridge had disintegrated under the impact of the boulder, seven men had died: but two still lived.
Droshny and his sergeant, furiously buffeted and badly bruised by the torrent of water, clung desperately to the broken end of the bridge. At first, they could do no more than hold on, but gradually, and after a most exhausting struggle, they managed to haul themselves clear of the rapids and hang there, arms and legs hooked round broken sections of what remained of the bridge, fighting for breath. Droshny made a signal to some unseen person or persons across the rapids, then pointed upwards in the direction from which the boulder had come.
Force 10 from Navarone Page 21