Where Eagles Dare

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘No.’ Smith glanced in the rear-view mirror and steadied the wildly swaying bus up on a steadier course. ‘Never thought I’d be glad to see a few carloads or truck-loads of Alpenkorps coming after me.’ He changed into top gear and pushed the accelerator to the floor. ‘I’m happy to make an exception this time.’

  Schaffer turned and looked through the shattered rear windows. He could count at least three pairs of headlights on the road behind them, with two others swinging out through the southern gates: between them, they effectively blotted the post-bus from the view of the tank gunner.

  ‘Happy isn’t the word for it. Me, I’m ecstatic. Tiger tanks are one thing but little itsy-bitsy trucks are another.’ Schaffer strode rapidly down the central aisle, passing by Mary, Heidi and Carnaby-Jones, all of whom were struggling rather shakily to their feet, and looked at the crates stacked in the rear seats.

  ‘Six crates!’ he said to Heidi. ‘And we asked for only two. Honey, you’re going to make me the happiest man alive.’ He opened the rear door and began to empty the contents of the crates on to the road. A few of the bottles just bounced harmlessly on ridges of hard-packed snow, but the speed of the bus was now such that most of them shattered on impact.

  The first of the two leading pursuit cars was within three hundred yards of the bus when it ran into the area of broken glass. From Schaffer’s point of view it was impossible to tell what exactly happened, but such indications as could be gathered by long-range sight and sound were satisfying enough. The headlights of the leading car suddenly began to slew violently from side to side, the screeching of brakes was clearly audible above the sound of the post-bus’s diesel, but not nearly as loud as the rending crash of metal as the second car smashed into the rear of the first. For a few seconds both cars seemed locked together, then they skidded wildly out of control, coming to rest with the nose of the first car in the right-hand ditch, the tail of the second in the left-hand ditch. The headlamps of both cars had failed just after the moment of impact but there was more than sufficient illumination from the lamps of the first of the trucks coming up behind them to show that the road was completely blocked.

  ‘Neat,’ Schaffer said admiringly. ‘Very neat, Schaffer.’ He called to Smith: ‘That’ll hold them, boss.’

  ‘Sure, it’ll hold them,’ Smith said grimly. ‘It’ll hold them for all of a minute. You can’t burst heavy truck tyres that way and it won’t take them long to bull-doze those cars out of the way. Heidi?’

  Heidi walked forward, shivering in the icy gale blowing through both the shattered front and side windows. ‘Yes, Major?’

  ‘How far to the turn off?’

  ‘A mile.’

  ‘And to the wooden bridge – what do you call it, Zur Alten Brücke?’

  ‘Another mile.’

  ‘Three minutes. At the most, that.’ He raised his voice. ‘Three minutes, Lieutenant. Can you do it?’

  ‘I can do it.’ Schaffer was already lashing together packages of plastic explosives. He used transparent adhesive tape, leaving long streamers dangling from the bound packages. He had just secured the last package in position when he lurched heavily as the post-bus, now clear of the Blau See and running through a pine forest, swung abruptly to the left on to a side road.

  ‘Sorry,’ Smith called. ‘Almost missed that one. Less than a mile, Lieutenant.’

  ‘No panic,’ Schaffer said cheerfully. He fished out a knife to start cutting the fuses to their shortest possible length, then went very still indeed as he glanced through where the rear windows had once been. In the middle distance were the vertically wavering beams of powerful headlights, closing rapidly. The cheerfulness left Schaffer’s voice. ‘Well, maybe there is a little bit of panic, at that. I’ve got bad news, boss.’

  ‘And I have a rear mirror. How far, Heidi?’

  ‘Next corner.’

  While Schaffer worked quickly on the fuses, Smith concentrated on getting the post-bus round the next corner as quickly as possible without leaving the road. And then they were on and round the corner and the bridge was no more than a hundred yards away.

  It was not, Smith thought, a bridge he would have chosen to have crossed with a bicycle, much less a six ton bus. Had it been a bridge crossing some gently meandering stream, then, yes, possibly: but not a bridge such as this one was, a fifty-foot bridge surfaced with untied railway sleepers, spanning a ravine two hundred feet in depth and supported by trestles, very ancient wooden trestles which, from what little he could see of them from his acute angle of approach, he wouldn’t have trusted to support the tables at the vicar’s garden party.

  Smith hit this elderly and decrepit edifice at forty miles per hour. A more cautious and understandable approach might have been to crawl over it at less than walking pace but Smith’s conviction that the less time he spent on each ancient sleeper the better was as instantaneous as it was complete. The heavy snow chains on each tyre bit into and dislodged each successive sleeper with a terrifying rumble, the post-bus bounced up and down as if on a giant cake-walk while the entire structure of the bridge swayed from side to side like the bridge of a destroyer at speed in a heavy cross-sea. It had been Smith’s original intention to stop in the middle of the bridge but once embarked upon the crossing he would no more have done so than dallied to pick up an edelweiss in the path of an Alpine avalanche. Ten feet from the edge of the bridge he stamped on the brakes and skidded to a sliding halt, on solid ground again, in less than twenty yards.

  Schaffer already had the back door open and the two packages of plastic explosives in his hands before the bus stopped. Five seconds after hitting the road he was back on the bridge again, skipping nimbly over a dozen dislodged sleepers until he had arrived at the main supports of the central trestle. It took him less than twenty seconds to tape one package to the right-hand support, cross the bridge and tape the second package to the left-hand support. He heard the deepening roar of a rapidly approaching engine, glanced up, saw the swathe of unseen headlamp beams shining round the corner they had just passed, tore off the ignition fuse, crossed the bridge, tore off the other and raced for the bus. Smith already had the bus in gear and was moving away when Schaffer flung himself through the back doorway and was hauled inside by helping hands.

  Schaffer twisted round till he was sitting on the passage-way, his legs dangling through the open doorway, just in time to see the headlamps of the pursuing car sweep into sight round the corner. It was now less than a hundred yards from the bridge, and accelerating. For a brief, almost panic-stricken, moment, Schaffer wondered wildly if he had cut the fuses short enough, he hadn’t realized the following car had been quite as close as it was: and from the tense and strained expressions on the faces of the two girls and the man beside him, expressions sensed rather than seen, he knew that exactly the same thought was in their minds.

  The two loud, flat detonations, each fractionally preceded by the brilliant white flash characteristic of the plastic explosive, came within one second of each other. Baulks of timber and railway sleepers were hurled forty feet into the air, spinning lazily around in a curious kind of slow motion, many of them falling back again on to the now tottering support structure with an impact sufficient to carry away the central trestle. One moment, a bridge: the next, an empty ravine with, on the far side of it, the wildly swinging headlamp beams as the driver flung his car from side to side in a nothing-to-be-lost attempt to prevent the car from sliding over the edge of the ravine. It seemed certain that he must fail until the moment when the car, sliding broadside on along the road, struck a large rock, rolled over twice and came to a halt less than six feet from the edge of the ravine.

  Schaffer shook his head in wonder, rose, closed the rear door, sat in the back seat, lit a cigarette, tossed the spent match through the smashed rear window and observed: ‘You’re a lucky lot to have me around.’

  ‘All this and modesty, too,’ Heidi said, admiringly.

  ‘A rare combination,’ Schaffer acknowledged. �
�You’ll find lots of other pleasant surprises in store for you as we grow old together. How far to this airfield now?’

  ‘Five miles. Perhaps eight minutes. But this is the only road in. With the bridge gone, there’s no hurry now.’

  ‘That’s as maybe. Schaffer is anxious to be gone. Tell me, honey, were all those beer bottles empty?’

  ‘The ones we threw away were.’

  ‘I just simply don’t deserve you,’ Schaffer said reverently.

  ‘We’re thinking along the same lines at last,’ Heidi said acidly.

  Schaffer grinned, took two beer bottles and went forward to relieve Smith, who moved out only too willingly with the bus still in motion. Smith’s right hand, Schaffer saw, hadn’t a scrap of bandage left that wasn’t wholly saturated in blood and the face was very pale. But he made no comment.

  Three minutes later they were out of the forest, running along through open farm-land, and five minutes after that, acting on Heidi’s directions, Schaffer swung the bus through a narrow gateway on the left-hand side of the road. The headlamps successively illuminated two small hangars, a narrow, cleared runway stretching into the distance and, finally, a bullet-riddled Mosquito bomber with a crumpled under-carriage.

  ‘Ain’t that a beautiful sight, now?’ Schaffer nodded at the damaged plane. ‘Carnaby-Jones’s transport?’

  Smith nodded. ‘It began with a Mosquito and it will end – we hope – in a Mosquito. This is Oberhausen airfield. HQ of the Bavarian Mountain Rescue pilots.’

  ‘Three cheers for the Bavarian Mountain Rescue pilots.’ Schaffer stopped the bus facing up the length of the runway, switched off the lights and turned off the engine. They sat silently in the darkness, waiting.

  Colonel Wyatt-Turner glanced through the side-screen and breathed with relief as, for the first time that night, the ground fell away sharply beneath the Mosquito. He said sarcastically: ‘Losing your nerve, Wing Commander?’

  ‘I lost that September 3rd, 1939,’ Carpenter said cheerfully. ‘Got to climb. Can’t expect to see any recognition signals down among the bushes there.’

  ‘You’re sure we’re on the right course?’

  ‘No question. That’s the Weissspitze there. Three minutes’ flying time.’ Carpenter paused and went on thoughtfully. ‘Looks uncommon like Guy Fawkes night up there, don’t you think.’

  The Wing Commander was hardly exaggerating. In the far distance the silhouette of the Weissspitze was but dimly seen, but there was no mistaking the intensity of the great fire blazing half-way up the mountain-side. Occasionally, great gouts of red flame and what looked like gigantic fireworks could be seen soaring high above the main body of the fire.

  ‘Explosives or boxes of ammunition going up, I’d say,’ Carpenter said pensively. ‘That’s the Schloss Adler, of course. Were any of your boys carrying matches?’

  ‘They must have been.’ Wyatt-Turner stared impassively at the distant blaze. ‘It’s quite a sight.’

  ‘It’s all of that,’ Carpenter agreed. He touched Wyatt-Turner’s arm and pointed forwards and down. ‘But there’s a sight that’s finer far, the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen.’

  Wyatt-Turner followed the pointing finger. Less than two miles away, about five hundred feet below, a pair of headlamps were flashing regularly on and off, once every two seconds. With a conscious effort of will he looked away and glanced briefly at Carpenter, but almost at once was back on the flashing headlamps. He stared at them hypnotically and shook his head in slow and total disbelief.

  Schaffer had the headlights switched on main beam, illuminating the runway, and the post-bus engine running as the black squat shape of the Mosquito, air-brakes fully extended, lined up for its approach to the runway, and had the bus itself moving, accelerating quickly through the gears, as the Mosquito sank down over the top of the bus and settled down beautifully without the slightest suspicion of a bounce.

  Within a minute Schaffer brought the bus to a skidding halt only yards from the now stationary plane. Half a minute later, with all five of them safely inside the plane, Carpenter had the Mosquito turned through 180° and was standing hard on the brakes as he brought the engines up to maximum revolutions. And then they were on their way, gathering speed so rapidly that they were air-borne two hundred yards before the end of the runway. For the first mile of their climb Carpenter kept the plane heading almost directly towards the blazing castle that now redly illuminated the entire valley, then the funeral pyre of the Schloss Adler vanished for the last time as the Mosquito banked and headed for the north-west and home.

  TWELVE

  Wing Commander Carpenter took the Mosquito up to five thousand feet and kept it there. The time for dodging around among the bushes was past for, on the outward journey, Carpenter had been concerned only that no German station pick him up long enough to form even a rough guess as to where he was going. But now he didn’t care if every radar station in the country knew where he was going: he was going home to England, mission accomplished, and there wasn’t a warplane in Europe that could catch him. Wing Commander Carpenter pulled luxuriously at his evil-smelling briar. He was well content.

  His five newly-acquired passengers were, perhaps, a fraction less content. They lacked Carpenter’s well-upholstered pilot’s seat. The interior of the Mosquito made no concessions whatsoever to passenger comfort. It was bleak, icy, cramped – it didn’t require much space to carry a 4,000 lb bomb load, the Mosquito’s maximum – and totally devoid of seating in any form. The three men and the two girls squatted uncomfortably on thin palliasses, the expressions on their faces pretty accurately reflecting their acute discomfort. Colonel Wyatt-Turner, still holding across his knees the Sten gun he’d had at the ready in case any trouble had developed on the ground or the flashing lights of the truck had been a German ruse, was sitting sideways in the co-pilot’s seat so that he could see and talk to the pilot and the passengers at the same time. He had accepted without question or apparent interest Smith’s brief explanation of the two girls’ presence as being necessary to escape Gestapo vengeance. Colonel Wyatt-Turner had other and weightier matters on his mind.

  Smith looked up from the bleeding mangled hand that Mary was re-bandaging with the plane’s first aid kit and said to the Colonel: ‘It was good of you to come in person to meet us, sir.’

  ‘It wasn’t good of me at all,’ Wyatt-Turner said frankly. ‘I’d have gone mad if I’d stayed another minute in London – I had to know. It was I who sent you all out here.’ He sat without speaking for some time, then went on heavily: ‘Torrance-Smythe gone, Sergeant Harrod, and now, you say, Carraciola, Christiansen and Thomas. All dead. A heavy price, Smith, a terrible price. My best men.’

  ‘All of them, sir?’ Smith asked softly.

  ‘I’m getting old.’ Wyatt-Turner shook his head wearily and drew a hand across his eyes. ‘Did you find out who –’

  ‘Carraciola.’

  ‘Carraciola! Ted Carraciola? Never! I can’t believe it.’

  ‘And Christiansen.’ Smith’s voice was still quiet, still even. ‘And Thomas.’

  ‘And Christiansen? And Thomas?’ He looked consideringly at Smith. ‘You’ve been through a lot, Major Smith. You’re not well.’

  ‘I’m not as well as I was,’ Smith admitted. ‘But I was well enough when I killed them.’

  ‘You – you killed them?’

  ‘I’ve killed a traitor before now. You know that.’

  ‘But – but traitors! All three of them. Impossible. I can’t believe it! I won’t believe it!’

  ‘Then maybe you’ll believe this, sir.’ Smith produced one of the note-books from his tunic and handed it to Wyatt-Turner. ‘The names and addresses or contacts of every German agent in southern England and the names of all British agents in north-west Europe who have been supplanted by German agents. You will recognize Carraciola’s writing. He wrote this under duress.’

  Slowly, like a man in a dream, Wyatt-Turner reached out and took the note-book. For three m
inutes he examined the contents, leafing slowly, almost reluctantly through the pages, then finally laid the book down with a sigh.

  ‘This is the most important document in Europe, the most important document I have ever seen.’ Wyatt-Turner sighed. ‘The nation is deeply in your debt, Major Smith.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Or would have been. It’s a great pity it will never have the chance to express its gratitude.’ He lifted the Sten from his knees and pointed it at Smith’s heart. ‘You will do nothing foolish, will you, Major Smith?’

  ‘What in God’s name –’ Carpenter twisted in his seat and stared at Wyatt-Turner in startled and total disbelief.

  ‘Concentrate on your flying, my dear Wing Commander.’ Wyatt-Turner waved the Sten gently in Carpenter’s direction. ‘Your course will do for the present. We’ll be landing at Lille airport within the hour.’

  ‘The guy’s gone nuts!’ Schaffer’s voice was a shocked whisper.

  ‘If he has,’ Smith said dryly, ‘he went nuts some years ago. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the most dangerous spy in Europe, the most successful double agent of all time.’ He paused for reaction, but the silence remained unbroken: the enormity of the revelation of Wyatt-Turner’s duplicity was too great for immediate comprehension. Smith continued: ‘Colonel Wyatt-Turner, you will be court-martialled this afternoon, sentenced, removed to the Tower then taken out, blindfolded and shot at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.’

  ‘You knew?’ Wyatt-Turner’s affable self-confidence had completely deserted him and his voice, low and strained, was barely distinguishable above the clamour of the engines. ‘You knew about me?’

  ‘I knew about you,’ Smith nodded. ‘But we all knew about you, didn’t we, Colonel? Three years, you claimed, behind the German lines, served with the Wehrmacht and finally penetrated the Berlin High Command. Sure you did. With the help of the Wehrmacht and the High Command. But when the tide of war turned and you could no longer feed the Allies with false and misleading reports about proposed German advances, then you were allowed to escape back to England to feed the Germans true and accurate reports about Allied plans – and give them all the information they required to round up British agents in north-west Europe. How many million francs do you have in your numbered account in Zurich, Colonel?’