Where Eagles Dare

by Алистер Маклин

  “That's all I need!” Smith swore bitterly. “That's all I bloody well need.” He ran through the radio room door out into the passage, located the glass-cased alarm bell some feet away and struck it viciously with the butt of his Schmeisser. The shattered glass tinkled to the floor and the clangour abruptly ceased.

  “Inside!” Smith gestured to the open doorway of the radio room. “All of you. Quickly.” He ushered them all inside, looked around, saw a side door leading off to the right and said to Mary: “Quickly. What's in there? Schaffer!”

  “Horatio hold the bridge,” Schaffer murmured. He moved across and took up position at the radio room door. “We could have done without this, boss.”

  “We could do without a lot of things in this world,” Smith said wearily. He glanced at Mary. “Well?”

  “Storage rooms for radio spares, looks like.”

  “You and Jones take those three in there. If they breathe, kill them.”

  Jones looked down at the gun held gingerly in his hand and said: “I am not a serviceman, sir.”

  “I have news for you,” Smith said. “Neither am I.”

  He crossed hurriedly to the transceiver, sat down and studied the confusing array of dials, knobs and switches. For fully twenty seconds he sat there, just looking.

  Schaffer said from the doorway: “Know how to work it, boss?”

  “A fine time to ask me,” Smith said. “We'll soon find out, won't we?” He switched the machine to “Send”, selected the ultra short wave band and lined up his transmitting frequency. He opened another switch and picked up a microphone.

  “Broadsword calling Danny Boy,” he said. “Broadsword calling Danny Boy. Can you hear me? Can you hear me?”

  Nobody heard him or gave indication of hearing him. Smith altered the transmitting frequency fractionally and tried again. And again. And again. After the sixth or seventh repetition, Smith started as a crash of machine-pistol fire came from the doorway. He twisted round. Schaffer was stretched full length on the floor, smoke wisping from the barrel of his Schmeisser.

  “We got callers, boss,” Schaffer said apologetically. “Don't think I got any but I sure as hell started their adrenalin moving around.”

  “Broadsword calling Danny Boy,” Smith said urgently, insistently. “Broadsword calling Danny Boy. For God's sake, why don't they answer?”

  “They can't come round the corner of the passage without being sawn in half.” Schaffer spoke comfortably from his uncomfortable horizontal position on the floor. “I can hold them off to Christmas. So what's the hurry?”

  “Broadsword calling Danny Boy. Broadsword calling Danny Boy. How long do you think it's going to be before someone cuts the electricity?”

  “For God's sake, Danny Boy,” Schaffer implored. “Why don't you answer? Why don't you answer?”

  “Danny Boy calling Broadsword.” The voice on the radio was calm and loud and clear, so free from interference that it might have come from next door. “Danny Boy—”

  “One hour, Danny Boy,” Smith interrupted. “One hour. Understood? Over.”

  “Understood. You have it, Broadsword?” The voice was unmistakably that of Admiral Rolland's. “Over.”

  “I have it,” Smith said. “I have it all.”

  “All sins are forgiven. Mother Machree coming to meet you. Leaving now.”

  There came another staccato crash of sound as Schaffer loosed off another burst from his Schmeisser. Admiral Rolland's voice on the radio said: “What was that?”

  “Static,” Smith said. He didn't bother to switch off. He rose, took three paces back and fired a two-second burst from his machine-pistol, his face twisting in pain as the recoil slammed into his shattered hand. No one would ever use that particular radio again. He, glanced briefly at Schaffer, but only briefly: the American's face, though thoughtful, was calm and unworried: there were those who might require helpful words, encouragement and reassurance, but Schaffer was not one of them. Smith moved swiftly across to the window and lifted the lower sash with his left hand.

  The moon was almost obscured behind some darkly drifting cloud. A thin weak light filtered down into the half-seen obscurity of the valley below. Once again the snow was beginning to fall, gently. The air was taut, brittle, in the intensity of its coldness, an Arctic chill that bit to the bone. The icy wind that gusted through the room could have come off the polar ice-cap.

  They were on the east side of the castle, Smith realised, the side remote from the cable-car header station. The base of the volcanic plug was shrouded in a gloom so deep that it was impossible to be sure whether or not the guards and Dobermans were patrolling down there: and, for the purposes of present survival, it didn't really matter. Smith withdrew from the window, pulled the nylon from the kit-bag, tied one end securely to the metal leg of the radio table, threw the remainder of the rope out into the night then, with his left hand, thoroughly scuffed and rubbed away the frozen encrusted snow on both the window-sill and for two or three feet beneath it: it would, he thought, have to be a hypercritical eye that didn't immediately register the impression that there had been fairly heavy and recent traffic over the sill. He wondered, vaguely, whether the rope reached as far as the ground and dismissed the thought as soon as it had occurred to him: again, it didn't really matter.

  He crossed the room to where Schaffer lay spread-eagled in the doorway. The key was in the lock on the inside of the door and the lock, he observed with satisfaction, was on the same massive scale as everything else in the Schloss Adler. He said to Schaffer: “Time to close the door.”

  “Let's wait till they show face again then discourage them some more,” Schaffer suggested. “It's been a couple of minutes since the last lad peeked his head round the corner there. Another peek, another salvo from Schaffer and it might give us another couple of minutes' grace—enough time to make it feasible for us to have shinned down that little rope there and made our getaway.”

  “I should have thought of that.” An icy snow-laden gust of wind blew across the room, from open window through open door, and Smith shivered. “My God, it's bitter!”

  “Loss of blood,” Schaffer said briefly, then added, unsympathetically: “And all that brandy you guzzled back there. When it comes to opening pores—”

  He broke off and lay very still, lowering his head a fraction to sight along the barrel of his Schmeisser. He said softly: “Give me your torch, boss.”

  “What is it?” Smith whispered. He handed Schaffer the torch.

  “Discretion,” Schaffer murmured. He switched on the torch and placed it on the floor, pushing it as far away from himself as he could. “I reckon if I were in their place I'd be discreet, too. There's a stick poking round the corner of the passage and the stick has a mirror tied to it. Only, they haven't got it angled right.”

  Smith peered cautiously round the door jamb, just in time to see stick and suspended mirror being withdrawn from sight, presumably to make adjustments. A few seconds later and the stick appeared again, this time with the mirror angled at more or less forty-five degrees. Mirror and stick disintegrated under the flatly staccato hammering of Schaffer's machine-pistol. Schaffer stood up, took careful aim at the single overhead light illuminating the passage and fired one shot. Now the sole light in the passage came from the torch on the floor, the light from which would not only effectively conceal from the Germans at the far end of the passage what was going on at the radio room door but, indeed, make it very difficult to decide whether or not the door itself was open or shut.

  Smith and Schaffer moved back into the radio room, soundlessly closed the door behind them and as soundlessly turned the key in the lock. Schaffer used the leverage of his Schmeisser to bend the key so that it remained firmly jammed in the wards of the lock.

  They waited. At least two minutes passed, then they heard the sound of excited voices at the far end of the passage followed almost at once by the sound of heavy boots pounding down the passage. They moved away from the door, passed inside
the radio spares room, leaving just a sufficient crack in the doorway to allow a faint backwash of light to filter through. Smith said softly: “Mary, you and Mr. Jones for Thomas there. A gun in each temple.” He took Christiansen for himself, forced him to kneel and ground his gun into the back of his neck. Schaffer backed Carraciola against a wall, the muzzle of his Schmeisser pressed hard against his teeth. At the other end of the machine-pistol Schaffer smiled pleasantly, his teeth a pale gleam in the near darkness. The stillness inside the little room was complete.

  The half-dozen Germans outside the radio room door bore no resemblance to the elderly guard von Brauchitsch had interrogated in the courtyard. They were elite soldiers of the Alpenkorps, ruthless men who had been ruthlessly trained. No one made any move to approach the door handle or lock: the machine-like efficiency with which they broached that door without risk to themselves was clearly the result of a well-drilled procedure for handling situations of precisely this nature.

  At a gesture from the Oberleutnant in charge, a soldier stepped forward and with two diagonal sweeps emptied the magazine of his machine-pistol through the door. A second used his machine-pistol to stitch a neat circle in the wood, reversed his gun and knocked in the wooden circle with the butt. A third armed two grenades and lobbed them accurately through the hole provided while a fourth shot away the lock. The soldiers pressed back on each side of the door. The two flat cracks of the exploding grenades came almost simultaneously and smoke came pouring through the circular hole in the door.

  The door was kicked open and the men rushed inside. There was no longer any need to take precautions—any men who had been in the same confined space as those two exploding grenades would be dead men now. For a moment there was confusion and hesitation until the blue acrid smoke was partially cleared away by the powerful cross-draught then the Oberleutnant, locating the source of this draught with the aid of a small hand-torch, ran across to the open window, checked at the sight of the rope disappearing over the sill, leaned out the window, rubbed his now-streaming eyes and peered downwards along the beam of his torch. The beam reached perhaps half-way down the side of the volcanic plug. There was nothing to be seen. He caught the rope in his free hand and jerked it savagely: it was as nearly weightless as made no difference. For a moment he focused his torch on the disturbed snow on the window-ledge then swung back into the room.

  “Gott in Himmel!” he shouted. “They've got away. They're down already! Quickly, the nearest phone!”

  “Well, now.” Schaffer listened to the fading sound of running footsteps, removed the muzzle of his Schmeisser from Carraciola's teeth and smiled approvingly. “That was a good boy.” Gun in Carraciola's back, he followed Smith out into the wrecked radio room and said thoughtfully: “It isn't going to take them too long to find out there are no footprints in the snow down there.”

  “It's going to take them even less time to discover that this rope is gone.” Swiftly, ignoring the stabbing pain in his right hand, Smith hauled the nylon in through the window. “We're going to need it. And we're going to need some distractions.”

  “I'm distracted enough as it is,” Schaffer said.

  “Take four or five plastic explosives, each with different fuse length settings. Chuck them into rooms along the corridor there.”

  “Distractions coming up.” Schaffer extracted some plastic explosives from the kit-bag, cut the slow-burning R.D.X. fuses off to varying lengths, crimped on the chemical igniters, said, “Consider it already done,” and left.

  The first three rooms he came to were locked and he wasted neither time nor the precious ammunition of his silenced Luger in trying to open them. But each of the next five rooms was unlocked. In the first three, all bedrooms, he placed charges in a Dresden fruit bowl, under an officer's cap and under a pillow: in the fourth room, a bathroom, he placed it behind a W.C. and in the fifth, a store-room, high up on a shelf beside some highly inflammable-looking cardboard cartons.

  Smith, meanwhile, had ushered the others from the still smoke-filled, eye-watering, throat-irritating atmosphere of the radio room into the comparatively purer air of the passageway beyond, and was waiting the return of Schaffer when his face became suddenly thoughtful at the sight of some fire-fighting gear—a big CO2 extinguisher, buckets of sand and a fireman's axe—on a low platform by the passage wall.

  “You are slipping, Major Smith.” Mary's eyes were red-rimmed and her tear-streaked face white as paper, but she could still smile at him. “Distractions, you said. I've had the same thought myself, and I'm only me.”

  Smith gave her a half-smile, the way his hand, hurt he felt he couldn't afford the other half, and tried the handle of a door beside the low platform, a door lettered AKTEN RAUM—Records Office. Such a door, inevitably, was locked. He took the Luger in his left hand, placed it against the lock, squeezed the trigger and went inside.

  It certainly looked like a Records Office. The room was heavily shelved and piled ceiling-high with files and papers. Smith crossed to the window, opened it wide to increase the draught then scattered large piles of paper on the floor and put a match to them. The paper flared up at once, the flames feet high within seconds.

  “Kinda forgot this, didn't you?” Schaffer had returned and was bearing with him the large CO2 cylinder. He crossed to the window. “Gardyloo or mind your heads or whatever the saying is.”

  The cylinder disappeared through the open window. The room was already so furiously ablaze that Schaffer had difficulty in finding his way back to the door again. As he stumbled out, his clothes and hair singed and face smoke-blackened, a deep-toned bell far down in the depths of the Schloss Adler began to ring with a strident urgency. “For God's sake, what next,” Schaffer said in despair. “The fire brigade?”

  “Just about,” Smith said bitterly. “Damn it, why couldn't I have checked first? Now they know where we are.”

  “A heat-sensing device linked to an indicator?”

  “What else? Come on.”

  They ran along the central passage-way, driving the prisoners in front of them, dropped down a central flight of stairs and were making for the next when they heard the shouting of voices and the clattering of feet on treads as soldiers came running up from the castle courtyard.

  “Quickly! In behind there!” Smith pointed to a curtained alcove. “Hurry up! Oh, God—I've forgotten something!” He turned and ran back the way he had come.

  “Where the hell has he—” Schaffer broke off as he realised the approaching men were almost upon them, whirled and jabbed the nearest prisoner painfully with the muzzle of his Schmeisser. “In that alcove. Fast.” In the dim light behind the curtains he changed his machine-pistol for the silenced Luger. “Don't even think of touching those curtains. With the racket that bell's making, they won't even hear you die.”

  Nobody touched the curtains. Jack-booted men, gasping heavily for breath, passed by within feet of them. They clattered furiously up the next flight of stairs, the one Smith and the others had just descended, and then the footsteps stopped abruptly. From the next shouted words it was obvious that they had just caught sight of the fire and had abruptly and for the first time realised the magnitude of the task they had to cope with.

  “Emergency! Sergeant, get on that phone!” It was the voice of the Oberleutnant who had led the break-in to the radio room. “Fire detail at the double! Hoses, more CO2 cylinders. Where in God's name is Colonel Kramer. Corporal! Find Colonel Kramer at once.”

  The corporal didn't answer, the sound of jutting heels striking the treads as he raced down the stairs was answer enough. He ran by the alcove and ran down the next flight of stairs until the sound of his footfalls was lost in the metallic clamour of the alarm bell. Schaffer risked a peep through a crack in the curtains just as Smith came running up on tiptoe.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Schaffer's voice was low and fierce.

  “Come on, come on! Out of it!” Smith said urgently. “No, Jones, not down that flight of stairs, you want
to meet a whole regiment of Alpenkorps coming up it? Along the passage to the west wing. We'll use the side stairs. For God's sake, hurry. This place will be like Piccadilly Circus in a matter of seconds.”

  Schaffer pounded along the passage beside Smith and when he spoke again the anxiety-born fierceness of tone had a certain plaintive equality to it. “Well, where the bloody hell have you been?”

  “The man we left tied up in the room beside the telephone exchange. The Records Office is directly above. I just remembered. I cut him free and dragged him out to the passage. He'd have burnt to death.”

  “You did that, did you?” Schaffer said wonderingly. “You do think of the most goddamned unimportant things, don't you?”

  “It's a point of view. Our friend lying in the passage back there wouldn't share your sentiments. Right, down those stairs and straight ahead. Mary, you know the door.”

  Mary knew the door. Fifteen paces from the foot of the stairs she stopped. Smith spared a glance through the passage window on his left. Already smoke and flame were snowing through the windows and embrasures in the north-east tower of the castle. In the courtyard below, dozens of soldiers were running around, most of them without what appeared to be any great sense of purpose or direction. One man there wasn't running. He was the overalled helicopter pilot and he was standing very still indeed, bent low over the engine. As Smith watched he slowly straightened, lifted his right arm and shook his fist in the direction of the burning tower.

  Smith turned away and said to Mary: “Sure this is the room? Two stories below the window we came in?”

  Mary nodded. “No question. This is it.”

  Smith tried the door handle: the room was locked. The time for skeleton keys and such-like finesse was gone: he placed the barrel of his Luger against the lock.