Mallory knotted a bowline round Reynolds’s waist, taking the strain, if one were to arise, with Andrea and Groves. Reynolds launched himself bodily into the rapids, heading for the first of the rounded boulders which offered so treacherous a hold in that seething foam. Twice he was knocked off his feet, twice he regained them, reached the rock, but immediately beyond it was washed away off balance and swept down-river. The men on the bank hauled him ashore again, coughing and spluttering and fighting mad. Without a word to or look at anybody Reynolds again hurled himself into the rapids, and this time so determined was the fury of his assault that he succeeded in reaching the far bank without once being knocked off his feet.
He dragged himself on to the stony beach, lay there for some moments recovering from his exhaustion, then rose, crossed to a stunted pine at the base of the cliff rising on the other side, undid the rope round his waist and belayed it securely round the bole of the tree. Mallory, on his side, took two turns round a large rock and gestured to Andrea and the girl.
Mallory glanced upwards again to the top of the gully. There were still no signs of the enemy. Even so, Mallory felt that they could afford to wait no longer, that they had already pushed their luck too far. Andrea and Maria were barely halfway across when he told Groves to give Petar a hand across the rapids. He hoped to God the rope would hold, but hold it did for Andrea and Maria made it safely to the far bank. No sooner had they grounded than Mallory sent Miller on his way, carrying a pile of automatic arms over his left shoulder.
Groves and Petar also made the crossing without incident. Mallory himself had to wait until Miller reached the far bank, for he knew the chances of his being carried away were high and if he were, then Miller too would be precipitated into the water and their guns rendered useless.
Mallory waited until he saw Andrea give Miller a hand into the shallow water on the far bank and waited no longer. He unwound the rope from the rock he had been using as a belay, fastened a bowline round his own waist and plunged into the water. He was swept away at exactly the same point where Reynolds had been on his first attempt and was finally dragged ashore by his friends on the far bank with a fair amount of the waters of the Neretva in his stomach but otherwise unharmed.
‘Any injuries, any cracked bones or skulls?’ Mallory asked. He himself felt as if he had been over Niagara in a barrel. ‘No? Fine.’ He looked at Miller. ‘You stay here with me. Andrea, take the others up round the first corner there and wait for us.’
‘Me?’ Andrea objected mildly. He nodded towards the gully. ‘We’ve got friends that might be coming down there at any moment.’
Mallory took him some little way aside. ‘We also have friends,’ he said quietly, ‘who might just possibly be coming down-river from the dam garrison.’ He nodded at the two sergeants, Petar and Maria. ‘What would happen to them if they ran into an Alpenkorps patrol, do you think?’
‘I’ll wait for you round the corner.’
Andrea and the four others made their slow way up-river, slipping and stumbling over the wetly slimy rocks and boulders. Mallory and Miller withdrew into the protection and concealment of two large boulders and stared upwards.
Several minutes passed. The moon still shone and the top of the gully was still innocent of any sign of the enemy. Miller said uneasily: ‘What do you think has gone wrong? They’re taking a damned long time about turning up.’
‘No, I think that it’s just that they are taking a damned long time in turning back.’
‘Turning back?’
‘They don’t know where we’ve gone.’ Mallory pulled out his map, examined it with a carefully hooded pencil-torch. ‘About three-quarters of a mile down the railway track, there’s a sharp turn to the left. In all probability the locomotive would have left the track there. Last time Neufeld and Droshny saw us we were aboard that locomotive and the logical thing for them to have done would have been to follow the track till they came to where we had abandoned the locomotive, expecting to find us somewhere in the vicinity. When they found the crashed engine, they would know at once what would have happened – but that would have given them another mile and a half to ride – and half of that uphill on tired ponies.’
‘That must be it. I wish to God,’ Miller went on grumblingly, ‘that they’d hurry up.’
‘What is this?’ Mallory queried. ‘Dusty Miller yearning for action?’
‘No, I’m not,’ Miller said definitely. He glanced at his watch. ‘But time is getting very short.’
‘Time,’ Mallory agreed soberly, ‘is getting terribly short.’
And then they came. Miller, glancing upward, saw a faint metallic glint in the moonlight as a head peered cautiously over the edge of the gully. He touched Mallory on the arm.
‘I see him,’ Mallory murmured. Together both men reached inside their tunics, pulled out their Lugers and removed their waterproof coverings. The helmeted head gradually resolved itself into a figure standing fully silhouetted in the moonlight against the sharply etched skyline. He began what was obviously meant to be a cautious descent, then suddenly flung up both arms and fell backwards and outwards. If he cried out, from where Mallory and Miller were the cry could not have been heard above the rushing of the waters. He struck the ledge halfway down, bounced off and outwards for a quite incredible distance, then landed spread-eagled on the stony river bank below, pulling down a small avalanche behind him.
Miller was grimly philosophical. ‘Well, you said it was dangerous.’
Another figure appeared over the lip of the precipice to make the second attempt at a descent, and was followed in short order by several more men. Then, for the space of a few minutes, the moon went behind a cloud, while Mallory and Miller stared across the river until their eyes ached, anxiously and vainly trying to pierce the impenetrable darkness that shrouded the slope on the far side.
The leading climber, when the moon did break through, was just below the ledge, cautiously negotiating the lower slope. Mallory took careful aim with his Luger, the climber stiffened convulsively, toppled backwards and fell to his death. The following figure, clearly oblivious of the fate of his companion, began the descent of the lower slope. Both Mallory and Miller sighted their Lugers but just then the moon was suddenly obscured again and they had to lower their guns. When the moon again reappeared, four men had already reached the safety of the opposite bank, two of whom, linked together by a rope, were just beginning to venture the crossing of the ford.
Mallory and Miller waited until they had safely completed two-thirds of the crossing of the ford. They formed a close and easy target and at that range it was impossible that Mallory and Miller should miss, nor did they. There was a momentary reddening of the white waters of the rapids, as much imagined as seen, then, still lashed together they were swept away down the gorge. So furiously were their bodies tumbled over and over by the rushing waters, so often did cartwheeling arms and legs break surface, that they might well have given the appearance of men who, though without hope, were still desperately struggling for their lives. In any event, the two men left standing on the far bank clearly did not regard the accident as being significant of anything amiss in any sinister way. They stood and watched the vanishing bodies of their companions in perplexity, still unaware of what was happening. A matter of two or three seconds later and they would never have been aware of anything else but once more a wisp of errant dark cloud covered the moon and they still had a little time, a very little time, to live. Mallory and Miller lowered their guns.
Mallory glanced at his watch and said irritably: ‘Why the hell don’t they start firing? It’s five past one.’
‘Why don’t who start firing?’ Miller said cautiously.
‘You heard. You were there. I asked Vis to ask Vukalovic to give us sound cover at one. Up by the Zenica Gap there, less than a mile away. Well, we can’t wait any longer. It’ll take –’ He broke off and listened to the sudden outburst of rifle fire, startlingly loud even at that comparatively close dista
nce, and smiled. ‘Well, what’s five minutes here or there. Come on. I have the feeling that Andrea must be getting a little anxious about us.’
Andrea was. He emerged silently from the shadows as they rounded the first bend in the river. He said reproachfully: ‘Where have you two been? You had me worried stiff.’
‘I’ll explain in an hour’s time – if we’re all still around in an hour’s time,’ Mallory amended grimly. ‘Our friends the bandits are two minutes behind. I think they’ll be coming in force – although they’ve lost four already – six including the two Reynolds got from the locomotive. You stop at the next bend upriver and hold them off. You’ll have to do it by yourself. Think you can manage?’
‘This is no time for joking,’ Andrea said with dignity. ‘And then?’
‘Groves and Reynolds and Petar and his sister come with us upriver, Reynolds and Groves as nearly as possible to the dam, Petar and Maria wherever they can find some suitable shelter, possibly in the vicinity of the swing bridge – as long as they’re well clear of that damned great boulder perched above it.’
‘Swing bridge, sir?’ Reynolds asked. ‘A boulder?’
‘I saw it when we got off the locomotive to reconnoitre.’
‘You saw it. Andrea didn’t.’
‘I mentioned it to him,’ Mallory went on impatiently. He ignored the disbelief in the sergeant’s face and turned to Andrea. ‘Dusty and I can’t wait any longer. Use your Schmeisser to stop them.’ He pointed north-westwards towards the Zenica Gap, where the rattle of musketry was now almost continuous. ‘With all that racket going on, they’ll never know the difference.’
Andrea nodded, settled himself comfortably behind a pair of large boulders and slid the barrel of his Schmeisser into the V between them. The remainder of the party moved upstream, scrambling awkwardly around and over the slippery boulders and rocks that covered the right-hand bank of the Neretva, until they came to a rudimentary path that had been cleared among the stones. This they followed for perhaps a hundred yards, till they came to a slight bend in the gorge. By mutual consent and without any order being given, all six stopped and gazed upwards.
The towering breath-taking ramparts of the Neretva dam wall had suddenly come into full view. Above the dam on either side precipitous walls of rock soared up into the night sky, at first quite vertical then both leaning out in an immense overhang which seemed to make them almost touch at the top, although this, Mallory knew from the observation he had made from above, was an optical illusion. On top of the dam wall itself the guardhouses and radio huts were clearly visible, as were the pigmy shapes of several patrolling German soldiers. From the top of the eastern side of the dam, where the huts were situated, an iron ladder – Mallory knew it was painted green, but in the half-shadow cast by the dam wall it looked black – fastened by iron supports to the bare rock face, zig-zagged downwards to the foot of the gorge, close by where foaming white jets of water boiled from the outlet pipes at the base of the dam wall. Mallory tried to estimate how many steps there would be in that ladder. Two hundred, perhaps two hundred and fifty, and once you started to climb or descend you just had to keep on going, for nowhere was there any platform or backrest to afford even the means for a temporary respite. Nor did the ladder at any point afford the slightest scrap of cover from watchers on the bridge. As an assault route, Mallory mused, it was scarcely the one he would have chosen: he could not conceive of a more hazardous one.
About halfway between where they stood and the foot of the ladder on the other side, a swing bridge spanned the boiling waters of the gorge. There was little about its ancient, rickety and warped appearance to inspire any confidence: and what little confidence there might have been could hardly have survived the presence of an enormous boulder, directly above the eastern edge of the bridge, which seemed in imminent danger of breaking loose from its obviously insecure footing in the deep scar in the cliff-side.
Reynolds assimilated all of the scene before him, then turned to Mallory. He said quietly: ‘We’ve been very patient, sir.’
‘You’ve been very patient, Sergeant – and I’m grateful. You know, of course, that there is a Yugoslav division trapped in the Zenica Cage – that’s just behind the mountains to our left, here. You know, too, that the Germans are going to launch two armoured divisions across the Neretva bridge at two a.m. this morning and that if once they do get across – and normally there would be nothing to stop them – the Yugoslavs, armed with their pop-guns and with hardly any ammunition left, would be cut to pieces. You know the only way to stop them is to destroy the Neretva bridge? You know that this counter-espionage and rescue mission was only a cover for the real thing?’
Reynolds said bitterly: ‘I know that – now.’ He pointed down the gorge. ‘And I also know that the bridge lies that way.’
‘And so it does. I also know that even if we could approach it – which would be quite impossible – we couldn’t blow that bridge up with a truckload of explosives; steel bridges anchored in reinforced concrete take a great deal of destroying.’ He turned and looked at the dam. ‘So we do it another way. See that dam wall there – there’s thirty million tons of water behind it – enough to carry away the Sydney bridge, far less the one over the Neretva.’
Groves said in a low voice: ‘You’re crazy,’ and then, as an afterthought, ‘sir.’
‘Don’t we know it? But we’re going to blow up that dam all the same. Dusty and I.’
‘But – but all the explosives we have are a few handgrenades,’ Reynolds said, almost desperately. ‘And in that dam wall there must be ten- to twenty-feet thicknesses of reinforced concrete. Blow it up? How?’
Mallory shook his head. ‘Sorry.’
‘Why, you close-mouthed –’
‘Be quiet! Dammit, man, will you never, never learn. Even up to the very last minute you could be caught and made to tell – and then what would happen to Vukalovic’s division trapped in the Zenica Cage? What you don’t know, you can’t tell.’
‘But you know.’ Reynolds’s voice was thick with resentment. ‘You and Dusty and Andrea – Colonel Stavros – you know. Groves and I knew all along that you knew, and you could be made to talk.’
Mallory said with considerable restraint: ‘Get Andrea to talk? Perhaps you might – if you threatened to take away his cigars. Sure, Dusty and I could talk – but someone had to know.’
Groves said in the tone of a man reluctantly accepting the inevitable: ‘How do you get behind that dam wall – you can’t blow it up from the front, can you?’
‘Not with the means at present available to us,’ Mallory agreed. ‘We get behind it. We climb up there.’ Mallory pointed to the precipitous gorge wall on the other side.
‘We climb up there, eh?’ Miller said conversationally. He looked stunned.
‘Up the ladder. But not all the way. Three-quarters of the way up the ladder we leave it and climb vertically up the cliff-face till we’re about forty feet above the top of the dam wall, just where the cliff begins to overhang there. From there, there’s a ledge – well, more of a crack, really –’
‘A crack!’ Miller said hoarsely. He was horror-stricken.
‘A crack. It stretches about a hundred and fifty feet clear across the top of the dam wall at an ascending angle of maybe twenty degrees. We go that way.’
Reynolds looked at Mallory in an almost dazed incredulity. ‘It’s madness!’
‘Madness!’ Miller echoed.
‘I wouldn’t do it from choice,’ Mallory admitted. ‘Nevertheless, it’s the only way in.’
‘But you’re bound to be seen,’ Reynolds protested.
‘Not bound to be.’ Mallory dug into his rucksack and produced from it a black rubber frogman’s suit, while Miller reluctantly did the same from his. As both men started to pull their suits on, Mallory continued: ‘We’ll be like black flies against a black wall.’
‘He hopes,’ Miller muttered.
‘Then with any luck we expect them to be looking
the other way when the RAF start in with the fireworks. And if we do seem in any danger of discovery – well, that’s where you and Groves come in. Captain Jensen was right – as things have turned out, we couldn’t have done this without you.’
‘Compliments?’ Groves said to Reynolds. ‘Compliments from the Captain? I’ve a feeling there’s something nasty on the way.’
‘There is,’ Mallory admitted. He had his suit and hood in position now and was fixing into his belt some pitons and a hammer he had extracted from his rucksack. ‘If we’re in trouble, you two create a diversion.’
‘What kind of diversion?’ Reynolds asked suspiciously.
‘From somewhere near the foot of the dam you start firing up at the guards atop the dam wall.’
‘But – but we’ll be completely exposed.’ Groves gazed across at the rocky scree which composed the left bank at the base of the dam and at the foot of the ladder. ‘There’s not an ounce of cover. What kind of chance will we have?’
Mallory secured his rucksack and hitched a long coil of rope over his shoulder. ‘A very poor one, I’m afraid.’ He looked at his luminous watch. ‘But then, for the next forty-five minutes you and Groves are expendable. Dusty and I are not.’
‘Just like that?’ Reynolds said flatly. ‘Expendable.’
‘Just like that.’
‘Want to change places?’ Miller said hopefully. There was no reply for Mallory was already on his way. Miller, with a last apprehensive look at the towering rampart of rock above, gave a last hitch to his rucksack and followed. Reynolds made to move off, but Groves caught him by the arm and signed to Maria to go ahead with Petar. He said to her: ‘We’ll wait a bit and bring up the rear. Just to be sure.’
‘What is it?’ Reynolds said in a low voice.
‘This. Our Captain Mallory admitted that he has already made four mistakes tonight. I think he’s making a fifth now.’
The Complete Navarone Page 48