'It is,' Mallory agreed. 'It would have to be, wouldn't it, to account for the remarkably odd position in which find ourselves at this moment.'
'A point, a point.' Slowly, deliberately, Neufeld ticked off other points on his fingers. 'You have for some months, you claim, been running a penicillin and drug-running ring in the south of Italy. As an Allied liaison officer you found no difficulty in obtaining supplies from American Army and Air force bases.'
'We found a little difficulty towards the end,' Mallory admitted.
'I'm coming to that. Those supplies, you also claim, were funnelled through to the Wehrmacht.'
'I wish you wouldn't keep using the word "claim" in that tone of voice,' Mallory said irritably. 'Check with Field-Marshal Kesselring's Chief of Military Intelligence in Padua.'
'With pleasure.' Neufeld picked up a phone, spoke briefly in German and replaced the receiver.
Mallory said in surprise: 'You have a direct line to the outside world? From this place?'
'I have a direct line to a hut fifty yards away where we have a very powerful radio transmitter. So. You further claim that you were caught, court-martialled and were awaiting the confirmation of your death sentence. Right?'
'If your espionage system in Italy is all we hear it is, you'll know about it tomorrow,' Mallory said drily.
'Quite, quite. You then broke free, killed your guards and overheard agents in the briefing room being briefed on a mission to Bosnia.' He did some more finger-steepling. 'You may be telling the truth at that. What did you say their mission was?'
'I didn't say. I didn't really pay attention. It had something to do with locating missing British mission leaders and trying to break your espionage set-up. I'm not sure. We had more important things to think about.'
'I'm sure you had,' Neufeld said distastefully. 'Such as your skins. What happened to your epaulettes, Captain? The medal ribbons? The buttons?'
'You've obviously never attended a British court-martial, Hauptmann Neufeld.'
Neufeld said mildly: 'You could have ripped them off yourself.'
'And then, I suppose, emptied three-quarters of the fuel from the tanks before we stole the plane?'
'Your tanks were only a quarter full?' Mallory nodded. 'And your plane crashed without catching fire?'
'We didn't mean to crash,' Mallory said in a weary patience. 'We meant to land. But we were out of fuel — and, as we know now, at the wrong place.'
Neufeld said absently: 'Whenever the Partisans put up landing flares we try a few ourselves — and we knew that you — or someone — were coming. No petrol, eh?' Again Neufeld spoke briefly on the telephone, then turned back to Mallory. 'All very satisfactory — if true. There just remains to explain the death of Captain Droshny's man here.'
'I'm sorry about that. It was a ghastly blunder. But surely you can understand. The last thing we wanted was to land among you, to make direct contact with you. We've heard what happens to British parachutists dropping over German territory.'
Neufeld steepled his fingers again. 'There is a state war. Proceed.'
'Our intention was to land in Partisan territory, slip across the lines and give ourselves up. When Droshny turned his guns on us we thought the Partisans were to us, that they had been notified that we'd stolen the plane. And that could mean only one thing for us.' 'Wait outside. Captain Droshny and I will join you in a moment.'
Mallory left. Andrea, Miller and the three sergeants were sitting patiently on their rucksacks. From the distance there still came the sound of distant music. For a moment Mallory cocked his head to listen to it, and walked across to join the others. Miller patted his lips delicately with his napkin and looked up at Mallory.
'Had a cosy chat?'
'I spun him a yarn. The one we talked about in the plane.' He looked at the three sergeants. 'Any of you speak German?' All three shook their heads.
'Fine. Forget you speak English too. If you're questioned you know nothing.'
'If I'm not questioned,' Reynolds said bitterly, 'I still don't know anything.'
'All the better,' Mallory said encouragingly. Then you can never tell anything, can you?'
He broke off and turned round as Neufeld and Droshny appeared in the doorway. Neufeld advanced and said: 'While we're waiting for some confirmation, a little food and wine, perhaps.' As Mallory had done, he cocked his head and listened to the singing. 'But I first of all, you must meet our minstrel boy.'
'We'll settle for just the food and wine,' Andrea said.
'Your priorities are wrong. You'll see. Come.'
The dining-hall, if it could be dignified by such a name, was about forty yards away. Neufeld opened the door to reveal a crude and makeshift hut with two rickety trestle tables and four benches set on the earth en floor. At the far end of the room the inevitable pine fire burnt in the inevitable stone hearth-place. Close to the fire, at the end of the farther table, three men — obviously, from their high-collared coats and guns propped by their sides, some kind of temporarily off duty guards — were drinking coffee and listening to the quiet singing coming from a figure seated on the ground by the fire.
The singer was dressed in a tattered anorak type jacket, an even more incredibly tattered pair of trousers and a pair of knee boots that gaped open at almost every possible seam. There was little to be seen of his face other than a mass of dark hair and a large pair of rimmed dark spectacles.
Beside him, apparently asleep with her head on his shoulder, sat a girl. She was clad in a high-collared British Army greatcoat in an advanced state of dilapidation, so long that it completely covered her tucked-in legs. The uncombed platinum hair spread over her shoulders would have done justice to any Scandinavian, but the broad cheekbones, dark eye brows and long dark lashes lowered over very pale cheeks were unmistakably Slavonic.
Neufeld advanced across the room and stopped by the fireside. He bent over the singer and said: Petar, I want you to meet some friends.'
Petar lowered his guitar, looked up, then turned and touched the girl on the arm. Instantly, the girl's head lifted and her eyes, great dark sooty eyes, opened wide. She had the look, almost, of a hunted animal. She glanced around her, almost wildly, then jumped quickly to her feet, dwarfed by the greatcoat which itched almost to her ankles, then reached down to help the guitarist to his feet. As he did so, he stumbled: he was obviously blind.
This is Maria,' Neufeld said. 'Maria, this is Captain Mallory.'
'Captain Mallory.' Her voice was soft and a little husky: she spoke in almost accentless English. 'You English, Captain Mallory?'
It was hardly, Mallory thought, the time or the place for proclaiming his New Zealand ancestry. He smiled. 'Well, sort of.'
Maria smiled in turn. 'I've always wanted to meet in Englishman.' She stepped forward towards Mallory's outstretched hand, brushed it aside and struck him, open-handed and with all her strength, across the face.
Maria!' Neufeld stared at her. 'He's on our side.'
An Englishman and a traitor!' She lifted her hand in but the swinging arm was suddenly arrested in Andrea's grip. She struggled briefly, futilely, then subsided, dark eyes glowing in an angry face. Andrea lifted his free hand and rubbed his own cheek in fond recollection.
He said admiringly: 'By heavens, she reminds me of own Maria,' then grinned at Mallory. 'Very handy their hands, those Yugoslavs.'
Mallory rubbed his cheek ruefully with his hand and turned to Neufeld. 'Perhaps Petar — that's his name — '
'No.' Neufeld shook his head definitely. 'Later. Let's eat now.' He led the way across to the table at the far end of the room, gestured the others to seats, Sat down himself and went on: 'I'm sorry. That was my fault. I should have known better.'
Miller said delicately: 'Is she — um — all right?'
'A wild animal, you think?'
'She'd make a rather dangerous pet, wouldn't you say?'
'She's a graduate of the University of Belgrade. Languages. With honours, I'm told. Some time after gradua
tion she returned to her home in the Bosnian mountains. She found her parents and two small brothers butchered. She — well, she's been like this ever since.'
Mallory shifted in his seat and looked at the girl. Her eyes, dark and unmoving and unwinking, were fixed on him and their expression was less than encouraging. Mallory turned back to Neufeld.
'Who did it? To her parents, I mean.'
'The Partisans,' Droshny said savagely. 'Damn their black souls, the Partisans. Maria's people were our people. Cetniks.'
'And the singer?' Mallory said.
'Her elder brother.' Neufeld shook his head. 'Blind from birth. Wherever she goes, she leads him by the hand. She is his eyes: she is his life.'
They sat in silence until food and wine were brought in. If an army marched on its stomach, Mallory thought, this one wasn't going to get very far: he had heard that the food situation with the Partisans was close to desperate, but, if this were a representative sample, the Cetniks and Germans appeared to be in little better case. Unenthusiastically, he spooned — it would have been impossible to use a fork — a little of the greyish stew, a stew in which little oddments of indefinable meat floated forlornly in a mushy gravy of obscure origin, glanced across at Andrea and marvelled at the gastronomic fortitude that lay behind the already almost empty plate. Miller averted his eyes from the plate before him and delicately sipped the rough red wine. The three sergeants, so far, hadn't even looked at their food: they were too occupied in looking at the girl by the fireside. Neufeld saw their interest, and smiled.
'I do agree, gentlemen, that I've never seen a more beautiful girl and heaven knows what she'd look like she had a wash. But she's not for you, gentlemen. She's not for any man. She's wed already.' He looked at the questioning faces and shook his head. 'Not to any man. To an ideal — if you can call death an ideal. The death of the Partisans.'
'Charming,' Miller murmured. There was no other comment, for there was none to make. They ate in silence broken only by the soft singing from the fireside, the voice was melodious enough, but the guitar sounded sadly out of tune. Andrea pushed away his empty plate, looked irritably at the blind musician and turned to Neufeld.
'What's that he's singing?'
'An old Bosnian love song, I've been told. Very old and very sad. In English you have it too.' He snapped his fingers. 'Yes, that's it. "The girl I left behind me".'
Tell him to sing something else,' Andrea muttered. Neufeld looked at him, puzzled, then looked away as a German sergeant entered and bent to whisper in his I ear. Neufeld nodded and the sergeant left.
'So.' Neufeld was thoughtful. 'A radio report from the patrol that found your plane. The tanks were empty. I hardly think we need await confirmation from Padua, do you, Captain Mallory?'
'I don't understand.'
'No matter. Tell me, have you ever heard of a General Vukalovic?'
'General which?'
'Vukalovic.'
'He's not on our side,' Miller said positively. 'Not with a name like that.'
'You must be the only people in Yugoslavia who don't know him. Everybody else does. Partisans, Cetniks, Germans, Bulgarians, everyone. He is one of their national heroes.'
'Pass the wine,' Andrea said.
'You'd do better to listen.' Neufeld's tone was sharp. 'Vukalovic commands almost a division of Partisan infantry who have been trapped in a loop of the Neretva river for almost three months. Like the men he leads. Vukalovic is insane. They have no shelter, none. They are short of weapons, have almost no ammunition left and are close to starvation. Their army is dressed in rags. They are finished.'
'Then why don't they escape?' Mallory asked.
'Escape is impossible. The precipices of the Neretva cut them off to the east. To the north and west are impenetrable mountains. The only conceivable way out is to the south, over the bridge at Neretva. And we have two armoured divisions waiting there.'
'No gorges?' Mallory asked. 'No passes through the mountains?'
'Two. Blocked by our best combat troops.'
'Then why don't they give up?' Mallory asked reasonably. 'Has no one told them the rules of war?'
'They're insane, I tell you,' Neufeld said. 'Quite insane.'
At that precise moment in time, Vukalovic and his Partisans were proving to some other Germans just how extraordinary their degree of insanity was.
The Western Gap was a narrow, tortuous, boulder-strewn and precipitously walled gorge that afforded the only passage through the impassable mountains that shut off the Zenica Cage to the east. For three months German infantry units — units which had recently included an increasing number of highly-skilled Alpine troops — had been trying to force the pass: for three months they had been bloodily repulsed. But the Germans never gave up trying and on this intensely cold night of fitful moonlight and gently, intermittently falling snow, they were trying again. The Germans carried out their attack with the cold-professional skill and economy of movement born long and harsh experience. They advanced up the ridge in three fairly even and judiciously spaced lines: combination of white snow suits, of the utilization every scrap of cover and of confining their brief forward rushes to those moments when the moon was temporarily obscured made it almost impossible see them. There was, however, no difficulty in locating them: they had obviously ammunition and spare for machine-pistols and rifles alike and the flashes from those muzzles were almost continuous. Almost as continuous, but some distance behind them, the sharp flat cracks of fixed mountain pieces pinpointed the source of the creeping artillery barrage that preceded the Germans up the boulder-strewn slope that narrow defile.
The Yugoslav Partisans waited at the head of the gorge, entrenched behind a redoubt of boulders, hastily piled stones and splintered tree-trunks that had been shattered by German artillery fire. Although the snow was deep and the east wind full of little knives, few of the Partisans wore greatcoats. They were clad in extraordinary variety of uniforms, uniforms that had belonged in the past to members of British, German, Italian, Bulgarian and Yugoslav armies: the one identifying feature that all had in common was a red star sewn on to the right-hand side of their forage caps The uniforms, for the most part, were thin and tattered, offering little protection against the piercing cold, so that the men shivered almost continuously. An astonishing proportion of them appeared to be wounded there were splinted legs, arms in slings and bandaged heads everywhere. But the most common characteristic among this rag-tag collection of defenders was their pinched and emaciated faces, faces where the deeply etched lines of starvation were matched only by the calm and absolute determination of men who have no longer anything to lose.
Near the centre of the group of defenders, two men stood in the shelter of the thick bole of one of the few pines still left standing. The silvered black hair, the deeply trenched — and now even more exhausted — face of General Vukalovic was unmistakable. But the dark eyes glowed as brightly as ever as he bent forward to accept a cigarette and light from the officer sharing his shelter, a swarthy, hook-nosed man with at least half of his black hair concealed under a blood-stained bandage. Vukalovic smiled.
'Of course I'm insane, my dear Stephan. You're insane — or you would have abandoned this position weeks ago. We're all insane. Didn't you know?'
'I know this.' Major Stephan rubbed the back of his hand across a week-old growth of beard. 'Your parachute landing, an hour ago. That was insane Why, you-' He broke off as a rifle fired only feet away, moved to where a thin youngster, not more than seventeen years of age, was peering down into the white gloom of the gorge over the sights of a Lee-Enfield. 'Did you get him?'
The boy twisted and looked up. A child. Vukalovic thought despairingly, no more than a child: he should still have been at school. The boy said: 'I'm not sure, sir.'
'How many shells have you left? Count them.'
'I don't have to. Seven.'
'Don't fire till you are sure.' Stephan turned back to Vukalovic. 'God above, General, you were almost blown into German h
ands.'
'I'd have been worse off without the parachute,' Vukalovic said mildly.
'There's so little time.' Stephan struck a clenched It against a palm. 'So little time left. You were crazy to come back. They need you far more — ' He stopped abruptly, listened for a fraction of a second, threw himself at Vukalovic and brought them both crashing heavily to the ground as a whining mortar shell buried itself among loose rocks a few feet away, exploding on impact. Close by, a man screamed in agony. A second mortar shell landed, then a third and a fourth, all within thirty feet of one another.
'They've got the range now, damn them.' Stephan rose quickly to his feet and peered down the gorge.
For long seconds he could see nothing, for a band of dark cloud had crossed the face of the moon: then the moon broke through and he could see the enemy all too clearly. Because of some almost certainly prearranged signal, they were no longer making any attempt to seek cover: they were pounding straight up the slope with all the speed they could muster, machine-carbines and rifles at the ready in their hands — and as soon as the moon broke through they squeezed the triggers of those guns. Stephan threw himself behind the shelter of a boulder.
'Now!' he shouted. 'Now!'
The first ragged Partisan fusillade lasted for only a few seconds, then a black shadow fell over the valley The firing ceased.
'Keep firing,' Vukalovic shouted. 'Don't stop now They're closing in.' He loosed off a burst from his own machine-pistol and said to Stephan, 'They know what they are about, our friends down there.'
They should.' Stephan armed a stick grenade and spun it down the hill. 'Look at all the practice we've given them.'
The moon broke through again. The leading German infantry were no more than twenty-five yards away. Both sides exchanged hand-grenades, fired at point-blank range. Some German soldiers fell, but many more came on, flinging themselves on the redoubt Matters became temporarily confused. Here and then bitter hand-to-hand fighting developed. Men shouted at each other, cursed each other, killed each other. But the redoubt remained unbroken. Suddenly, dark heavy clouds again rolled over the moon, darkness flooded the gorge and everything slowly fell quiet, In the distance the thunder of artillery and mortar fire fell away to a muted rumble, then finally died.
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