Where Eagles Dare

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘Let’s finish it now!’ Rosemeyer demanded impatiently.

  ‘If you please, Reichsmarschall, let us play this charade out to the bitter end.’

  ‘You have your reasons?’

  ‘I most certainly have.’

  Briskly, but not hurriedly, von Brauchitsch walked away from Mary’s room, his footfalls echoing crisply on the stone-flagged corridor. Once round the corner of the corridor he broke into a run.

  He reached the courtyard and ran across to the helicopter. There was no one there. Quickly he ran up a few steps and peered through the Perspex cupola of the cockpit. He reached ground again and hailed the nearest guard, who came stumbling across, a leashed Doberman trailing behind him.

  ‘Quickly,’ von Brauchitsch snapped. ‘Have you seen the pilot?’

  ‘No, Herr Major,’ the guard answered nervously. He was an elderly man, long past front-line service, and held the Gestapo in great fear. ‘Not for a long time.’

  ‘What do you mean by a long time?’ von Brauchitsch demanded.

  ‘I don’t know. That’s to say,’ the guard added hastily, ‘half an hour. More. Three-quarters, I would say, Herr Major.’

  ‘Damnation,’ von Brauchitsch swore. ‘So long. Tell me, when the pilot is carrying out repairs is there a place near here he uses as a work-shop?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The guard was eager to oblige with some positive information. ‘That door there, sir. The old grain store.’

  ‘Is he in there now?’

  ‘I don’t know, Herr Major.’

  ‘You should know,’ von Brauchitsch said coldly. ‘It’s your job to keep your eyes open. Well, just don’t stand there, oaf! Go and find out!’

  The elderly guard trotted away while von Brauchitsch, shaking his head angrily over his impatience with the old soldier, crossed the courtyard and questioned the guards at the gate, three tough, competent, young storm-troopers who, unlike the patrol guard, could be guaranteed not to miss anything. He received the same negative answer there.

  He strode back towards the helicopter and intercepted the elderly guard running from the old grain store.

  ‘There’s nobody there, Herr Major.’ He was slightly out of breath and highly apprehensive at being the bearer of what might be ill news. ‘It’s empty.’

  ‘It would be,’ von Brauchitsch nodded. He patted the old shoulder and smiled. ‘No fault of yours, my friend. You keep a good watch.’

  Unhurriedly, almost, now, he made for the main entrance door, pulling out a set of master keys as he went. He struck oil with the first door he opened. The pilot lay there, still unconscious, the smashed distributor cap lay beside him, the pair of overalls lying on top of him a mute but entirely sufficient explanation of the way in which the distributor cap had been removed without detection. Von Brauchitsch took a torch from a long rack on the wall, cut the pilot’s bonds, freed his gag and left him lying there with the door wide open. The passage outside was a heavily travelled one, and someone was bound to be along soon.

  Von Brauchitsch ran up the stairs to the passage leading to the bedrooms, slowed down, walked easily, casually past Mary’s bedroom and stopped at the fifth door beyond that. He used his master keys and passed inside, switching on the light as he went in. He crossed the room, lifted the lower sash window and nodded when he saw that nearly all the snow on the sill had been brushed or rubbed away. He leaned farther out, switched on his torch and flashed the beam downwards. The roof of the header station was fifty feet directly below and the markings and footprints in the snow told their own unmistakable story.

  Von Brauchitsch straightened, looked at the odd position of the iron bedstead against the wardrobe door and tugged the bed away. He watched the wardrobe door burst open and the bound and gagged figure inside roll to the floor without as much as hoisting an eyebrow. This had been entirely predictable. From the depths of the bound man’s groans it was obvious that he was coming round. Von Brauchitsch cut him free, removed his gag and left. There were more urgent matters demanding his attention than holding the hands of young Oberleutnants as they held their heads and groaned their way back to consciousness.

  He stopped outside Mary’s room, put his ear to the door and listened. No sound. He put his eye to the keyhole and peered. No light. He knocked. No reply. He used his master keys and passed inside. No Mary.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ von Brauchitsch murmured. ‘Very interesting indeed.’

  ‘Finished?’ Smith asked.

  Thomas nodded. Christiansen and Carraciola glowered. But all three were sitting back and it was obvious that all three were, in fact, finished. Smith walked along behind them, reaching over their shoulders for the note-books. He took them across the room and laid them on the little table by Kramer’s chair.

  ‘The moment of truth,’ Smith said quietly. ‘One book should be enough.’

  Kramer, reluctantly almost, picked up the top book and began to read. Slowly he began to leaf his way through the pages. Smith drained his glass and sauntered unconcernedly across the room to the decanter on the sideboard. He poured some brandy, carefully recapped the bottle, walked a few aimless steps and halted. He was within two feet of the guard with the carbine.

  He sipped his brandy and said to Kramer: ‘Enough?’

  Kramer nodded.

  ‘Then compare it with my original.’

  Kramer nodded. ‘As you say, the moment of truth.’

  He picked up the note-book, slid off the rubber band and opened the cover. The first page was blank. So was the next. And the next . . . Frowning, baffled, Kramer lifted his eyes to look across the room to Smith.

  Smith’s brandy glass was falling to the ground as Smith himself, with a whiplash violent movement of his body brought the side of his right hand chopping down on the guard’s neck. The guard toppled as if a bridge had fallen on him. Glasses on the sideboard tinkled in the vibration of his fall.

  Kramer’s moment of utter incomprehension vanished. The bitter chagrin of total understanding flooded his face. His hand stretched out towards the alarm button.

  ‘Uh-uh! Not the buzzer, Mac!’ The blow that had struck down the guard had held no more whiplash than the biting urgency in Schaffer’s voice. He was stretched his length on the floor where he’d dived to retrieve the Schmeisser now trained, rock steady, on Kramer’s heart. For the second time that night, Kramer’s hand withdrew from the alarm button.

  Smith picked up the guard’s carbine, walked across the room and changed it for his silenced Luger. Schaffer, his gun still trained on Kramer, picked himself up from the floor and glared at Smith.

  ‘A second-rate punk,’ he said indignantly. ‘A simple-minded American. That’s what you said. Don’t know what goddamned day of the week it is, do I?’

  ‘All I could think of on the spur of the moment,’ Smith said apologetically.

  ‘That makes it even worse,’ Schaffer complained. ‘And did you have to clobber me so goddamned realistically?’

  ‘Local colour. What are you complaining about? It worked.’ He walked across to Kramer’s table, picked up the three note-books and buttoned them securely inside his tunic. He said to Schaffer: ‘Between them, they shouldn’t have missed anything . . . Well, time to be gone. Ready, Mr Jones?’

  ‘And hurry about it,’ Schaffer added. ‘We have a street-car to catch. Well, anyhow, a cable-car.’

  ‘It’s a chicken farm in the boondocks for me.’ Jones looked completely dazed and he sounded exactly the same way. ‘Acting? My God, I don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘This is all you want?’ Kramer was completely under control again, calm, quiet, the total professional. ‘Those books? Just those books?’

  ‘Well, just about.’ Lots of nice names and addresses. A bedtime story for MI6.’

  ‘I see.’ Kramer nodded his understanding. ‘Then those men are, of course, what they claim to be?’

  ‘They’ve been under suspicion for weeks. Classified information of an invaluable nature was going out and false �
�� and totally valueless – information was coming in. It took two months’ work to pinpoint the leakages and channels of false information to one or more of the departments controlled by those men. But we knew we could never prove it on them – we weren’t even sure if there was more than one traitor and had no idea who that one might be – and, in any event, proving it without finding out their contacts at home and abroad would have been useless. So we – um – thought this one up.’

  ‘You mean, you thought it up, Captain Smith,’ Rosemeyer said.

  ‘What does it matter?’ Smith said indifferently.

  ‘True. It doesn’t. But something else does.’ Rosemeyer smiled faintly. ‘When Colonel Kramer asked you if the books were all you wanted, you said ‘just about’. Indicating that there was possibly something else. It is your hope to kill two birds with one stone, to invite me to accompany you?’

  ‘If you can believe that, Reichsmarschall Rosemeyer,’ Smith said unkindly, ‘it’s time you handed your baton over to someone else. I have no intention of binding you hand and foot and carrying you over the Alps on my shoulder. The only way I could take you is at the point of a gun and I very much fear that you are a man of honour, a man to whom the safety of his skin comes a very long way behind his loyalty to his country. If I pointed this gun at you and said to get up and come with us or be gunned down, nobody in this room doubts that you’d just keep on sitting. So we must part.’

  ‘You are as complimentary as you are logical.’ Rosemeyer smiled, a little, bitter smile. ‘I wish the logic had struck me as forcibly when we were discussing this very subject a few minutes ago.’

  ‘It is perhaps as well it didn’t,’ Smith admitted.

  ‘But – but Colonel Wilner?’ Kramer said. ‘Field-Marshal Kesselring’s Chief of Intelligence. Surely he’s not –’

  ‘Rest easy. Willi-Willi is not on our pay-roll. What he said he believed to be perfectly true. He believes me to be the top double agent in Italy. I’ve been feeding him useless, false and out-of-date information for almost two years. Tell him so, will you?’

  ‘Kind of treble agent, see?’ Schaffer said in a patient explaining tone. ‘That’s one better than double.’

  ‘Heidelberg?’ Kramer asked.

  ‘Two years at the University. Courtesy of the – um – Foreign Office.’

  Kramer shook his head. ‘I still don’t understand –’

  ‘Sorry. We’re going.’

  ‘In fact, we’re off,’ Schaffer said. ‘Read all about it in the post-war memoirs of Pimpernel Schaffer –’

  He broke off as the door opened wide. Mary stood framed in the doorway and the Mauser was very steady in her hand. She let it fall to her side with a sigh of relief.

  ‘Took your time about getting here, didn’t you?’ Smith said severely. ‘We were beginning to get a little worried about you.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I just couldn’t get away. Von Brauchitsch –’

  ‘No odds, young lady.’ Schaffer made a grandiose gesture with his right arm. ‘Schaffer was here.’

  ‘The new girl who arrived tonight!’ Kramer whispered. He looked slightly dazed. ‘The cousin of that girl from the –’

  ‘None else,’ Smith said. ‘She’s the one who has been helping me to keep Willi-Willi happy for a long time past. And she’s the one who opened the door for us tonight.’

  ‘Boss,’ Schaffer said unhappily. ‘Far be it for me to rush you –’

  ‘Coming now,’ Smith smiled at Rosemeyer. ‘You were right, the books weren’t all I wanted. You were right, I did want company. But unlike you, Reichsmarschall, those I want have a high regard for their own skins and are entirely without honour. And so they will come.’ His gun waved in the direction of Carraciola, Thomas and Christiansen. ‘On your feet, you three. You’re coming with us.’

  ‘Coming with us?’ Schaffer said incredulously. ‘To England?’

  ‘To stand trial for treason. It’s no part of my duties to act as public executioner . . . God alone knows how many hundreds and thousands of lives they’ve cost already. Not to mention Torrance-Smythe and Sergeant Harrod.’ He looked at Carraciola, and his eyes were very cold. ‘I’ll never know, but I think you were the brains. It was you who killed Harrod back up there on the mountain. If you could have got that radio code-book you could have cracked our network in South Germany. That would have been something, our network here has never been penetrated. The radio code-book was a trap that didn’t spring . . . And you got old Smithy. You left the pub a couple of minutes after I did tonight and he followed you. But he couldn’t cope with a man –’

  ‘Drop those guns.’ Von Brauchitsch’s voice was quiet and cold and compelling. No one had heard or seen the stealthy opening of the door. He stood just inside, about four feet from Mary and he had a small-calibre automatic in his right hand. Smith whirled round, his Luger lining up on the doorway, hesitated a fatal fraction of a second because Mary was almost directly in line with von Brauchitsch. Von Brauchitsch, his earlier gallantry of the evening abruptly yielding to a coldly professional assessment of the situation, had no such inhibitions. There was a sharp flat crack, the bullet passed through Mary’s sleeve just above the elbow and Smith exclaimed in pain as he clutched his bleeding hand and heard his flying Luger strike against some unidentified furniture. Mary tried to turn round but von Brauchitsch was too quick and too strong. He jumped forward, hooked his arm round her and caught her wrist with the gun and thrust his own over her shoulder. She tried to struggle free. Von Brauchitsch squeezed her wrist, she cried out in pain, her hand opened and her gun fell to the floor. Von Brauchitsch seemed to notice none of this, his unwinking right eye, the only vulnerable part of him that could be seen behind Mary, was levelled along the barrel of his automatic.

  Schaffer dropped his gun.

  ‘You shouldn’t have tried it,’ von Brauchitsch said to Smith. ‘An extremely silly thing to do . . . In your circumstances, I’d have done exactly the same silly thing.’ He looked at Kramer. ‘Sorry for the delay, Herr Colonel. But I thought the young lady was very anxious and restive. And she knows precious little about her native Düsseldorf. And she doesn’t know enough not to let people hold her hand when she’s telling lies – as she does most of the time.’ He released the girl and half turned her round, smiling down at her. ‘A delightful hand, my dear – but what a fascinating variation of pulse rates.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t care.’ Kramer gave vent to a long luxurious sigh and drooped with relief. ‘Well done, my boy, well done. My God! Another minute––’ He heaved himself to his feet, crossed over to Schaffer, prudently keeping clear of von Brauchitsch’s line of fire, searched him for hidden weapons, found none, did the same to Smith with the same results, handed him a white handkerchief to stem the flow of blood, looked at Mary and hesitated. ‘Well, I don’t see how she very well can be, but . . . I wonder. Anne-Marie?’

  ‘Certainly, Herr Colonel. It will be a pleasure. We’ve met before and she knows my methods. Don’t you, my dear?’ With a smile as nearly wolf-like as any beautiful Aryan could give, Anne-Marie walked across to Mary and struck her viciously across the face. Mary cried in pain, staggered back against the wall and crouched there, eyes too wide in a pale face, palms pressed behind her for support from the wall, a trickle of blood coming from the corner of her mouth. ‘Well?’ Anne-Marie demanded. ‘Have you a gun?’

  ‘Anne-Marie!’ There was protest and aversion in Kramer’s face. ‘Must you –’

  ‘I know how to deal with cheap little spies like her!’ She turned to Mary and said: ‘I’m afraid they don’t like watching how I get results. In there!’

  She caught Mary by the hair, pulled her to the side door, opened it and pushed her violently inside. The sound of her body crashing to the floor and another gasp of pain came together. Anne-Marie closed the door behind them.

  For the next ten seconds or so there could be clearly heard the sound of blows and muffled cries of pain. Von Brauchitsch w
aved Smith and Schaffer back with his gun, advanced, hitched a seat on the edge of one of the big arm-chairs, winced as he listened to the sound of the struggle and said to Kramer dryly: ‘I somehow think the young lady would have preferred me to search her. There’s a limit to the value of false modesty.’

  ‘I’m afraid Anne-Marie sometimes lets her enthusiasm carry her away,’ Kramer conceded. His mouth was wrinkled in distaste.

  ‘Sometimes?’ Von Brauchitsch winced again as more sounds filtered through the door, the crash of a body against a wall, a shriek of pain, low sobbing moans, then silence. ‘Always. When the other girl is as young and beautiful as herself.’

  ‘It’s over now,’ Kramer sighed. ‘It’s all over now.’ He looked at Smith and Schaffer. ‘We’ll fix that hand first, then – well, one thing about the Schloss Adler, there is no shortage of dungeons.’ He broke off, the fractional widening of his eyes matching a similar slumping of his shoulders, and he said carefully to von Brauchitsch: ‘You are far too good a man to lose, Captain. It would seem that we were wasting our sympathy on the wrong person. There’s a gun four feet from you pointing at the middle of your back.’

  Von Brauchitsch, his gun-hand resting helplessly on his thigh, turned slowly round and looked over his shoulder. There was indeed a gun pointing at the middle of his back, a Lilliput .21 automatic, and the hand that held it was disconcertingly steady, the dark eyes cool and very watchful. Apart from the small trickle of blood from her cut lip and rather dishevelled hair, Mary looked singularly little the worse for wear.

  ‘It’s every parent’s duty,’ Schaffer said pontifically, ‘to encourage his daughter to take up Judo.’ He took the gun from von Brauchitsch’s unresisting hand, retrieved his own Schmeisser, walked across to the main door and locked it. ‘Far too many folk coming in here without knocking.’ On his way back he looked through the opened door of the room, whistled, grinned and said to Mary: ‘It’s a good job I have my thoughts set on someone else. I wouldn’t like to be married to you if you lost your temper. That’s a regular sick-bay dispensary in there. Fix the Major’s hand as best you can. I’ll watch them.’ He hoisted his Schmeisser and smiled almost blissfully: ‘Oh, brother, how I’ll watch them.’