And he watched them. While Mary attended to Smith’s injured hand in the small room where Anne-Marie had so lately met her Waterloo, Schaffer herded his six charges into one of the massive couches, took up position by the mantelpiece, poured himself some brandy, sipped it delicately and gave the prisoners an encouraging smile from time to time. There were no answering smiles. For all Schaffer’s nonchalance and light-hearted banter there was about him not only a coldly discouraging competence with the weapon in his hand but also the unmistakable air of one who would, when the need arose and without a second’s hesitation, squeeze the trigger and keep on squeezing it. Being at the wrong end of a Schmeisser machine-pistol does not make for an easy cordiality in relationships.
Smith and Mary emerged from the side room, the latter carrying a cloth-covered tray. Smith was pale and had his right hand heavily bandaged. Schaffer looked at the hand then lifted an enquiring eyebrow to Mary.
‘Not so good.’ She looked a little pale herself. ‘Forefinger and thumb are both smashed. I’ve patched it as best I can but I’m afraid it’s a job for a surgeon.’
‘If I can survive Mary’s first aid,’ Smith said philosophically, ‘I can survive anything. We have a more immediate little problem here.’ He tapped his tunic. ‘Those names and addresses here. Might be an hour or two before we get them through to England and then another hour or two before those men can be rounded up.’ He looked at the men seated on the couch. ‘You could get through to them in a lot less than that and warn them. So we have to ensure your silence for a few hours.’
‘We could ensure it for ever, boss,’ Schaffer said carelessly.
‘That won’t be necessary. As you said yourself, it’s a regular little dispensary in there.’ He removed the tray cloth to show bottles and hypodermic syringes. He held up a bottle in his left hand. ‘Nembutal. You’ll hardly feel the prick.’
Kramer stared at him. ‘Nembutal? I’ll be damned if I do.’
Smith said in a tone of utter conviction: ‘You’ll be dead if you don’t.’
NINE
Smith halted outside the door marked RADIO RAUM, held up his hand for silence, looked at the three scowling captives and said: ‘Don’t even think of tipping anyone off or raising the alarm. I’m not all that keen on taking you back to England. Lieutenant Schaffer, I think we might immobilize those men a bit more.’
‘We might at that,’ Schaffer agreed. He went behind each of the three men in turn, ripped open the top buttons on their tunics and pulled the tunics down their backs until their sleeves reached their elbows and said in the same soft voice: ‘That’ll keep their hands out of trouble for a little.’
‘But not their feet. Don’t let them come anywhere near you,’ Smith said to Mary. ‘They’ve nothing to lose. Right, Lieutenant, when you’re ready.’
‘Ready now.’ Carefully, silently, Schaffer eased open the door of the radio room. It was a large, well-lit, but very bleak room, the two main items of furniture being a massive table by the window on the far wall and, on the table, an almost equally massive transceiver in gleaming metal: apart from two chairs and a filing cabinet the room held nothing else, not even as much as a carpet to cover the floor-boards.
Perhaps it was the lack of a carpet that betrayed them. For the first half of Schaffer’s stealthy advance across the room the operator, his back to them, sat smoking a cigarette in idle unconcern, listening to soft Austrian Schrammel music coming in over his big machine: suddenly, alerted either by the faintest whisper of sound from a creaking floorboard or just by some sixth sense, he whirled round and jumped to his feet. And he thought as quickly as he moved. Even as he raised his arms high in apparently eager surrender, he appeared to move slightly to his right, shifting the position of his right foot. There came the sudden strident clamour of an alarm bell ringing in the passage outside, Schaffer leapt forward, his Schmeisser swinging, and the operator staggered back against his transceiver then slid unconscious to the floor. But Schaffer was too late. The bell rang and kept on ringing.
‘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 adrenaline moving around.’
‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy,’ Smith said urgently, insistingly. ‘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. ‘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 realized, 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 kitbag, 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 élite 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 RDX 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 WC and in the fifth, a store-room, high up on a shelf beside som
e 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 passage-way 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?’
Where Eagles Dare Page 18
