The Heights of Zervos

by Colin Forbes

  The reverberations of the detonation crashed round the hillsides, roared out across the gulf like a cannonade, and sent a shock wave like a bombardment through the gap in the wall. The demolition charge had reached zero. Dietrich, half-protected by the wall, was thrown sprawling onto the grass, and he thought he heard two explosions close together - the charge first, then the boilers going up. The full force of the wave had struck the four Alpenkorps soldiers like a giant hammer and they lay in the road like trampled rag dolls. Only two men were moving feebly and one of them fell limp almost immediately as he lost consciousness. The sentry was bunched up against the outside of the wall in a strangely twisted position. As Dietrich lay on the grass, temporarily deafened by the road, there was a stench of burning oil in his nostrils and Prentice and Ford, whose ears had not been affected, heard debris clattering on the village rooftops like spent shrapnel from ack-ack guns.

  For both of them the immensely strong sea-wall had muffled the blast. But Dietrich was recovering quickly. As he staggered to his feet Prentice began to move up behind him with a rock in his fist. The Abwehr man, unaware of what was happening behind him, fished the Luger out of his pocket, looked quickly up the road and along the jetty, and moved towards the soldier who was climbing to his feet in the centre of the road. Prentice, moving soundlessly on the grass, followed Dietrich as he lurched towards the soldier who had now brought himself to his knees and was shaking his head like a dog emerging from a river. He looked up as Dietrich brought the Luger barrel crashing down on his head. He was slumping to the ground when Dietrich tugged the loop of the machine-pistol free. Prentice stared in astonishment, the rock still poised in his hand, but when he saw the machine-pistol he moved forward again. The Abwehr man turned, knocked the unsteady fist aside and thrust the weapon into Prentice's hands. 'This will be more useful - if you can handle the damned thing.'

  He had spoken in English and without waiting for Prentice's reaction he hauled another machine-pistol loose from an inert German, tossed it across to Ford, and then extracted spare magazines from the pockets of the two men on the ground. When he stood up he noticed that it was Ford who was familiar with the machine-pistol and shoved the magazines at him. 'Here - it looks as though they'd be more use to you.

  Now, we've got to get moving pdq. We go that way - along the wall to the south.'

  'Who the devil are you?' Prentice demanded,

  'Dietrich of the Abwehr.'

  The reply was given ironically as the large man stared briefly along the jetty wall. The Hydra looked like a refugee from an Atlantic convoy. The funnel was bent at a surrealist angle and her bows were already settling in the shallow water. Around the hull men swam in the sea distractedly as a huge column of black smoke ascended into the clear sky like a gigantic signal which would be seen clear across the bay to the mainland. As he gazed at the wreckage a tongue of red flame flared up at the base of the distorted funnel. Soon the whole superstructure would be ablaze and would go on burning until the hulk was reduced to its waterline and the Hydra was a blackened shell. All Burckhardt's efforts at preserving an appearance of normality had gone up with the demolition charge. 'I thought she'd never blow,' he said half to himself, and then he saw Nopagos clambering up onto the jetty. The shock wave must have blown straight over the heads of the group on the beach. He looked back towards the town and the road was still empty. 'They'll be coming soon,' he warned, 'so let's get to hell out of here.'

  'Which way? The village is crawling with them...'

  'Along this wall - five years ago I walked all over this place. We've got to head up the peninsula .,.'

  'But who the devil are you?' Prentice repeated, and when the reply came the Scots burr was even more pronounced.

  'I'm Ian Macomber.' He grabbed at the lieutenant's arm. 'Now, if you don't want to get shot, follow me and run like hell!'

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sunday, 10 AM

  By ten o'clock in the morning they had marched almost nonstop through punishing hill country which had caused them either to climb or descend most of the way, and they had still seen no trace of Grapos. It was Macomber who had urged them on mercilessly, insisting that they put as much ground as possible between themselves and the oncoming Germans before they rested. Several times Prentice had tried to talk and ask questions, but on each occasion the Scot had brusquely told him to save his breath for the march. They followed a footpath which twisted and turned as its surface changed, sometimes sand, sometimes rock and often merely beaten earth. A path which led them past olive groves, over hilltops ringed with boulders, and down into scrub-infested valleys where the streams raced with swelling waters. But now they had reached a hilltop where Macomber consented to pause briefly because it gave a clear view back to the north where the road from Katyra came towards them in a series of bends and drops down the near sides of hills dense with undergrowth.

  'We can see them coming from here,' Macomber announced as he perched on a rounded boulder. 'And water is going to be our problem. There isn't much of it on the plateau.'

  'This might help,' Ford suggested as he undid his coat and showed a pear-shaped water-bottle attached to his belt. 'I filched that off one of those dead Jerries while you two pulled yourselves together.'

  'Ford gets his priorities right,' Prentice remarked, and then stared hard at Macomber. 'Mind if I hear a little more about you now?'

  Macomber took a swig from the water-bottle, handed it on to Prentice and grinned faintly. 'I've spent the last fifteen months in the Balkans. Do you think that sounds cushy?'

  'Depends what you were doing,' Prentice replied cautiously. 'What were you doing?'

  'I'll tell you, then. I'm like Winston Churchill as far as ancestry goes - half-British and half-American. My mother was a New Yorker and my father came from Aberdeen. I spent a third of my early years in the States, another third in Scotland, and the rest of the time travelling round Europe with my parents. My father was a linguistics expert and I inherited his gift for languages.' There was no modesty in Macomber's tone but neither was he boasting; he was simply stating a fact. 'And that's where the trouble started,' he went on. 'Principally my languages are German, Greek and French - which comes in useful when you're in Rumania. I had lung trouble before the war...'

  'Lung trouble!' Prentice looked sceptical, remembering the tremendous pace the Scot had set up while they were making their dash up and down those endless hills.

  'It's cured now - at least so a quack in Budapest assured me. He said it was the pure clean air from Siberia which blows across Hungary in winter that had done the trick. But that lung kept me out of the Forces in 1939, so the Ministry of Economic Warfare asked me to do a job for them. Get your head out of the way, Ford, I can't see that road.'

  'What sort of a job?' Prentice asked casually. Without appearing to do so he was trying to check the Scot's story.

  'Buying up strategic war materials the Jerries wanted. You'd never believe the funds I had at my disposal. I bought up everything I could lay my hands on and had it shipped out of the Balkans. I had an idea the bright boys foresaw the German Drach nach Osten and wanted to denude the place before Hitler arrived.'

  'Sounds interesting,' was Prentice's only comment.

  'You think so? Just sitting behind a desk and making out orders in quadruplicate for a few thousand gallons of oil or the odd few tons of copper - is that how you see it?'

  'I didn't say so.'

  'No, but you looked so!' He took out one of his remaining cigars. 'What I don't think you've quite grasped is that I had competitors, Jerry competitors, and they can play very rough, very rough indeed. When I'd survived two attempts to kill me

  - one in Gyor and one in Budapest - I decided my luck was running out and the time had come to go underground, so I acquired some false papers and set up as a German.' He looked quizzically at Prentice over his cigar, put it back in his mouth and went on talking. 'Don't look so damned unbelieving

  - false papers can be obtained almost anywher
e if you have the money, and I had a small fortune to play with.'

  'You set up as Dietrich, then?'

  'No, he came later. I called myself Hermann Wolff, and, you know, necessity really did turn out to be the mother of invention. I found myself mixing openly with the German community in Budapest, which in the beginning was simply excellent camouflage, but later when I ran out of stuS to buy up it gave our Ministry brains another idea, a diabolical idea.' He turned again to look over his shoulder at the hill behind, in the opposite direction from where the Germans must come, and this was a gesture he had repeated several times.

  'Isn't that the wrong direction to fret over?' Prentice inquired. 'Or could they have got ahead of us on the road while we were doing our cross-country route march?'

  'Old habits...' Dietrich spread a large hand. 'I've spent so many months looking over my shoulder - because the danger always comes from where you least expect it.' He shrugged and stared at Ford for a moment. 'When it comes, it comes.'

  'A diabolical job, you were saying,' Prentice reminded him. As he listened he scanned the deserted countryside to the north where a dark smoke column from the burning Hydra was still climbing into the brilliant morning sky. They'd see that smoke as far away as Salonika, almost, if the weather visibility was as good across Macedonia. It seemed incredible that a whole German expedition was mustering itself somewhere beyond those hills for a forced march south to Mount Zervos.

  'Yes, truly diabolical,-' Macomber repeated. 'There were hardly any more strategic supplies I could lay my hands on, but there was a mass of stuff the Germans had bought up which still hadn't been shipped back to the Reich. It was lying around in warehouses and railway sidings, so the Ministry brainboxes said would I have a go at it? Very obliging they were, too - sent out an explosives man to teach me a trick or two about things that go bang in the night...' He paused again, detecting a sudden freshening of interest from Ford, but when the ammunition examiner said nothing he continued. 'The trouble again was I was made to order for these sabotage jobs. I picked up information from the German community I was mixing with about what was where - and by then I was accepted in Budapest. We even used German explosives - like ten-kilogram demolition charges.'

  'Why not British equipment?' queried Ford.

  'Because I was operating in neutral territory and the Hungarian government might not have taken too kindly to British time-bombs being planted inside their goods wagons. Those bombs don't always function according to the book and sometimes they don't function at all. Even when they do, the experts can often piece together a few vital bits and tell the type of bomb that was used and where it was made.' He glanced over his shoulder and grinned again. 'And don't ask me how we got hold of German explosives because that's a state secret.'

  'You were pretty successful in passing yourself off as a German even in Hungary then?' Prentice suggested idly. He felt close to exhaustion but his mind was still sufficiently alert to go on checking Macomber's identity so far as he could.

  'I knew the Reich well by the time war broke out. In peacetime I'd been a shipping broker - some of my business was with the Reich and I spent a lot of time in Germany before 1939 and sometimes, even then, it was convenient to pass for one of the Herrenvolk. The trick is to learn to think like them, to feel you are one of them - and that's something I had to work overtime at while we were on the Hydra. I may tell you that was the longest voyage of my life, and it took just twenty-four hours.'

  'How did you fool the colonel? That must have taken some doing.'

  'The ability to bluff big - nothing else. I took a leaf out of the dear Führer's book there: if you want to believe a lie, be sure it's a whopper. If I'd tried to pass myself off simply as a German civilian, I think they'd have restricted my movements, but the dreaded Abwehr was something quite different. I knew quite a lot about the Abwehr when I went aboard the Hydra at Istanbul - in fact, I thought they had somebody on my tail ready to do an assassination act before I could get home...'

  'You weren't put on that ship deliberately then?' Prentice found it difficult to keep the surprise out of his voice. Ford was emptying the machine-pistol while he tested the mechanism and then re-loaded.

  'No, I'd finished with the Balkans and I was on my way to Athens to get a berth to Egypt. The Germans had occupied the whole area and it wasn't possible to operate any more with the key points swarming with their security chaps. I was coming on the direct Istanbul-Athens ferry, but that was cancelled at the last moment. When Burckhardt's lot took over the ship I wasn't completely surprised - the presence of several Germans on the passenger list was something I'd been thinking about ever since I got on board.'

  'But why pretend you were the Abwehr?'

  'Because I knew how they operated - months ago they'd sent men to Budapest to investigate the sabotage. But mainly because it's the only organization inside Germany today which the armed forces get nervous about. Burckhardt was convinced I'd been put on the ship to check up on how he handled things - which gave me a psychological stranglehold over him from the outset.'

  'You make it sound so damned easy.' There was a hint of admiration in Prentice's manner as he sat with his back propped against a boulder and waited.

  'Oh, very easy - as easy as moving round inside Hungary and Rumania with top Abwehr agents on your tail. As easy as making frequent trips to wayside railway stations to collect suitcases left by someone you never see - suitcases containing demolition charges. As easy as lugging them across railway lines at two in the morning with engines shunting all over the place and guards with dogs looking for you." Macomber's voice had risen to a low growl as he glared at Prentice with an intensity of rage which was alarming. 'As easy as going back to your flat late in the evening and noticing that the lock has been tampered with - so you know that inside that darkened flat someone is waiting for you with a knife or a gun or whatever particular weapon they've decided will do the job quickly and quietly. Yes, Prentice, and it was easy on that ship we've just left, too - easy putting those wireless sets out of action with two hundred troops all around you, easy coming into your cabin to cut your ropes to give you a chance to get clear and warn that destroyer...'

  'I'm sorry,' Prentice said quietly, realizing for the first time the tremendous pressure this man must have lived under for months, catching a glimpse of what it must have been like to go on living alone in the alien Balkans surrounded by enemies while he went on with his deadly work. He supposed that the outburst was the climax of God knew how much pent-up anxiety and living on the nerves endlessly, until it had seemed it must go on for ever. Macomber made no attempt to apologize for the outburst but he smiled wintrily as he smoked his cigar and started talking again.

  'Planting the demolition charge was simpler than you might imagine. I just saw it lying with the fuses in a half-open rucksack and grabbed it. There was a little trouble in the dark on deck when I ran into a soldier, but a knowledge of unarmed combat can come in useful. Afterwards, I pitched him over the side like you did your chap. The vital moment was when we'd just come ashore - I'd always foreseen that.'

  'Why then?' asked Prentice.

  'Several reasons. Burckhardt's whole attention was taken up with the landing and capturing Katyra quickly. Later, he'd have more time to think, which is just what I didn't want him to have. Then there was the problem of the other wireless set -I'd messed up the tuning coil with the butt of my Luger but I gathered they might be able to repair the thing. The moment they could wireless for confirmation of my identity I was finished. And you can thank whatever lucky star you were born under that the bomb didn't go off earlier - it must have stopped and then started again.'

  'What time had you set it for?' Prentice was taking a great interest in the answer to this question and now he saw Ford looking over his shoulder towards the hill behind them. Macomber's fears were contagious.

  'I set it to detonate at 3.30 AM while we were still well down the gulf.'

  'Good God!'

  A trace of the
nervous reaction still smouldered inside Macomber and he didn't bother to put it too tactfully. 'I'm sure, Prentice, that by now you know there's a war on. There were two hundred German troops aboard who may yet do untold damage to the Allied cause - if I could sink them I was going to do it. And I still will, although how I haven't the slightest idea. You know they're heading for the monastery on Mount Zervos to set up an observation post, I take it?'

  'I had an idea that was the objective. I agree we've got to get there first, if we can, but I can't quite see us forming the monks into a defensive battalion to hold off the Jerries. Is there any means of communication there we could use to get in touch with the mainland?'

  'Not so far as I know apart from the telephone line to Salonika and that's been cut.' Macomber dropped the half-smoked cigar into the sand and carefully heeled it out of sight. 'But there's always something that can be done as long as you're there - that's something I've learned.' His expression became ferocious as he growled out the words. Whatever happens the Germans have got to be stopped from taking Zervos. Hell! If there's nothing else we'll have to set fire to the place to attract attention. There are British troops driving up that coast only a few miles across the gulf. Setting fire to the monastery may be the only solution!'