Dead Man Falling: A Johnny Fedora Espionage Spy Thriller Assignment Book 3

by Desmond Cory

  There was a clear nine inches between their fingertips.

  “Listen,” said Johnny, forcing himself to speak with some semblance of Gruber’s own calmness. “I can’t hold you if you get up any momentum, but I can take you from here. Easily. Now jump.”

  “Cut the rope first.”

  The two men stared into each other’s eyes, and in that wildly unlikely moment Johnny remembered their original encounter on the Munich train. Gruber’s eyes had held exactly the same expression then…

  The heavy knife was slung from Johnny’s belt in a soft leather sheath; he tore it out and, with one firm slash, cut the rope.

  He cut if between himself and Martin.

  He dropped the knife with the same movement, for there was no time to return it to its sheath; and instantly thrust himself upwards to the next step. And even as his foot settled in it, the ice-pick finally came out.

  And Gruber threw himself despairingly sideways, his arm flung out a seemingly incredible distance, groping in the air for a rescuing hand that was no longer there. Johnny abandoned handhold and balance in a wild right-handed grab; his fingers brushed Gruber’s wrist, slipped, caught again, and locked. Gruber swung in a horrible slow parabola past Johnny’s ankle, supported by tired, ice-swollen fingers; by the aching muscles of Johnny’s arms and shoulders; and finally by eight slim inches of tempered steel wedged into the treacherous ice. The weight was unbelievable, Gruber’s grip on Johnny’s wrist was like a red-hot vice, yet the strain lasted for only two or three seconds; almost before his fall was checked, Gruber was again slashing downwards with his pick and kicking his foot frantically into the new crevice… He looked up at Johnny and nodded; Johnny instantly released his grip; Gruber clamped his free hand to the step where Johnny’s foot rested; and down below, Johnny’s knife went falling through the air…

  … Slowly, very slowly, Gruber climbed up to Johnny’s level.

  “Danke schön,” he said politely; rather as though he had been offered a cup of tea and a biscuit.

  “It’s all right,” said Johnny. “Just for a moment, I was worried; but it’s all right now.”

  “Yes,” said Gruber simply. “Well – shall we continue?” Ten minutes later, one by one, the pairs of climbers wriggled painfully over the sharp edge of the summit of the Lovers. Johnny would never have believed that such a moment could possibly have seemed an anticlimax.

  They lay in the thin snow on top of the cliff, four little black specks poised over eight hundred metres of mirror-smooth ice and rock; they ate plasmon biscuits, chewed cubes of sugar and trickled Gruber’s brandy down their dry throats. From time to time the wind sent clouds of whirling snow-flakes down upon them, tiny particles of moisture that stung and at the same time cooled their faces and hands; and the lassitude of physical exhaustion weighed as heavily upon them as a great dark blanket. Martin, in particular, seemed in bad shape; cold and nervous reaction had so weakened him that his body constantly shook and trembled as from a fever. So that as soon as the meal was finished they rose together, as though by some tacit understanding, without a word being spoken.

  They re-roped themselves, this time at ten-yard intervals; Gruber tying the middleman’s knot around Johnny’s waist and patting him lightly on the shoulder. “How are you feeling now?”

  “Bloody,” said Johnny truthfully.

  “Never mind.” Gruber looked back to where Martin was still wearily arranging his rucksack. “Soon we’ll be able to enjoy a proper rest.”

  “How much farther?”

  “A mile and a half. And only five hundred metres higher. When we top the next ridge the hut should, I think, be visible. And – if you’ll excuse another quotation – allor sarai al fin d’esto sentiero; quivi di riposar l’affanno aspetta.”

  Johnny again succeeded in gathering the gist of that remark. “You’re an erudite so-and-so, Herr Gruber.”

  Gruber smiled sadly. “At one time, perhaps. Herr Helmut would have appreciated it; he was an erudite man.”

  “Well, you came close to being in a position to make the comment to him personally – back there.”

  Gruber continued to smile sadly. Then he adjusted the set of his goggles and strode forwards. “Avanti,” he said cheerfully. “Avanti, spiriti lenti.”

  And Johnny plodded after him, towards the great snow slope heaving up a vast shoulder towards the peak of the Old Man, now plainly visible and an eye-dazzling white against the cobalt of the afternoon sky.

  He was rather surprised at that little interchange; for Gruber, it amounted to a positive outburst of talkativeness. He wondered how much an outstretched hand across the cliff face had to do with this change in the Austrian’s attitude; probably quite a lot. The cloud of mystery hovering around Gruber was still quite impenetrable to Johnny’s vision; but certain facts about him were emerging. He was obviously a man of uncommon physical endurance and of very great courage; a very fine mountaineer and something of a scholar. He could quote both Dante and Rilke in their original tongues, and Johnny would have been no whit surprised to hear him perform a similar service for Racine or Milton…

  That reminded Johnny of something; of an S.A.S. pilot with whom he had once flown – in fact, on his first operational drop. On the journey out, that pilot had chanted blank verse at the top of his voice, repeating the same lines over and over again with an almost hypnotic effect; so that Johnny had found himself falling dizzily through the night air with the magnificent sonorities and subtle cross-cadences of the Miltonic rhythm still resounding in his ears…

  Before the starry threshold of Jove’s court

  My mansion is, where those immortal shapes

  Of bright aerial spirits live insphered

  In regions mild of calm and serene air,

  Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot

  Which men call earth…

  Yes, he still remembered it, even after so many years; it was almost the only poetry with which Johnny was acquainted, and he was sufficiently pleased with himself to consider trying it out on Gruber. Of course, it was Gruber’s last remark that had started his train of thought. Laggard spirits… In regions mild of calm and serene air… That was it, all right. That was the mountain top…

  There hope to rest your weariness. Dante had the right idea, too; though, of course, his had been a very different mountain. Mount Purgatory; very different from the Old Man… Or, Johnny thought suddenly, was it?

  … There was something about this air. Calm and serene it might be, but it certainly encouraged the wildest and most rambling thoughts. One’s mental processes seemed completely, incredibly alive, even while the gradient was beating one’s physical powers into a state of aching submission. It was really very strange…

  Johnny plodded on.

  The surface underfoot was still ice, blue ice, with a thick powdering of wet, gritty snow; and from time to time as they worked their way along the ridge it became necessary once more to cut footholds. Their route ran straight across the great ridge that, lower down and much farther to the west, became the flat main spur of the Hunting Horn; from that direction, there came at almost regular intervals long, slow gusts of bitterly cold wind that lifted the snow in heaps from the ridge and swept it into their faces. Then the wind would die as suddenly as it had arisen and the sun would bake down again, a hard, brutal heat quite devoid of humidity, turning the edges of their ice-blisters to the consistency of apple-peel and swelling the tender skin around their eyelids until it was difficult to see clearly through the narrow slits that remained; but for the goggles this would have happened many hours sooner, and even now the protection they offered was considerable. For the light off the snow held a dazzling brilliance that had to be seen to be appreciated; once Johnny pushed up his goggles to wipe away the snow encrusting his eyebrows, and that sheer, vicious purity hit him in the eyes like a blow, sending a sharp, numbing pain stabbing through to his brain. He didn’t repeat the experiment… The air, too, was an enemy. At first, it had done little but p
roduce the heady exhilaration, the mental activity that Johnny had already noticed; but as time wore on the lack of oxygen began to make itself felt more uncomfortably, as a dull ache at the base of the skull and as a permanent sense of tightness around the lower ribs. Johnny’s breath grew more laboured, and he was occasionally afflicted by bouts of nervous twitching in which his hands shook like leaves in an autumn gale; but still he plodded on.

  Mount Purgatory. Oh, yes; Dante had the right idea… The four men trudged slowly forwards, up towards the huge, ominous sweep of the ridge; a cold white sabre-stroke against the deep blue of the Austrian sky.

  And an hour and fifty minutes later they gained it.

  They stood there, leaning heavily on their picks, and gazing down the length of the spur; apart from small patches of dead ground, the whole of its expanse was now visible, from the clean white heights marking the sudden final upward rush of the summit to the snow-flecked, rocky depths where the misty green swell of the Berghof Forest rose to engulf the mountain. Johnny, squinting through his swollen eyelids, sought frantically to see anywhere on those miles of frozen, crevasse-torn, rock-tormented mountainside the tiny, elusive speck that would tell him that Mayer, also, was well on his way to the third hut.

  But there was nothing. Nothing but downward-dipping, sugar-iced slopes, criss-crossed and pitted by shadows of pale and unearthly blue, broken many metres away by the hot greys and browns of jagged rock clusters and by the utter blackness of deep fissures in its surface. Sharp-toothed pinnacles of snow; enormous smooth tracts of snow; steep slippery clefts of snow; white snow, blue snow, snow everywhere. It was a lost white world, miraculously hanging between the great violet bowl of the sky and the flat green saucer of the forests beneath; a world in which nothing moved except the winds.

  Johnny looked away as the horizon began to swim before his eyes, and found that Biel was watching him.

  “He is not in sight, Herr Videl.”

  “No.”

  “No matter. This ground is deceptive; there are whole stretches of it we cannot see from here. And if we cannot see him, then he cannot see us either.”

  “That’s true,” said Johnny, slightly cheered. “I was thinking he might have already reached the hut.”

  Biel shook his head, and drops of moisture leapt outwards from his hair. “Unlikely. The hut doesn’t seem to be occupied.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Haven’t you seen it?” Biel looked surprised, and pointed; Johnny followed the line of his outstretched forefinger towards that point where the peak of the Old Man snapped at the sky. And there it was; there, in the shadow of that last precipitous incline; a tiny doll’s hut dwarfed against the barren whiteness of the mountain, yet so clearly visible that one might almost make out the outlines of each individual plank. Johnny gasped involuntarily.

  “It can’t be more than half a kilometre off.”

  “It’s more than that,” said Biel gently. “But not much more. From here, it’s a gentle stroll.”

  “Fine,” said Johnny. “Let’s stroll, then.”

  … They swung off again, moving at a considerably faster pace now that the object of their journey was actually in sight; for, apart from the psychological impetus this gave them, the ground was now very nearly flat. They were moving over the spur itself, and the hut remained in view all the time; Johnny hardly took his eyes from it. Within that hut, he told himself, that hut so near that I can practically reach out and touch it, are the von Huysen diamonds; jewels of a value to disrupt the diamond markets of all Europe, jewels for which the Intelligence Services of eleven countries had hunted for years in vain. Most important consideration of all, jewels the loss of which would deprive the neo-Nazi movement of nearly all its assets, would strangle it financially to death in less than six months.

  In his growing exhilaration, Johnny came near to forgetting his extreme physical exhaustion, and he ploughed through the snow as though he had but that moment risen from his breakfast. The Third Hut had drawn him over a continent and up the side of a mountain, and now that it was actually visible its effect was that of a magnet, pulling him remorselessly forwards almost independently of his own will. When for a few short minutes the ground dipped unexpectedly and the hut vanished from sight, his spirits seemed to drop like a stone and he came near to an unreasoning despondency; then, as he gained the farther slope and the hut appeared so incredibly near that it seemed possible to pitch a stone on to its thin wooden roof, it was with difficulty that he restrained himself from breaking into a run. But instead, he paused, and called the others to a halt.

  “… Wait one moment.”

  Gruber looked back perplexedly. “What’s the matter? We’re almost there.”

  “That’s just it. There’s always the possibility that Mayer’s in there already; in which case, the first thing we’re likely to know about it will be a stream of bullets through our heads. We’d better take this last stretch very carefully.”

  Gruber and Biel both looked thoughtful; and Biel nodded sagely. It was Martin who said,

  “He’s not there. That’s certain.”

  They all regarded him curiously. “What makes you so sure?” asked Johnny.

  “Look behind you,” said Martin.

  He made the suggestion so calmly that for one moment they failed to follow his meaning; the next moment they had whirled round, Johnny’s hand instinctively flicking to the zipper of his jacket. But there was no sign of Mayer; no sign of anything, except of their own tracks dipping down into the hollow, rising up again through the snow on the far side, and then diminishing gradually into the infinite whiteness of the ridge. Johnny sighed heavily.

  “Of course. Of course he isn’t there.”

  Biel stared at him. “But…?”

  “Look at those footmarks in the snow. There’s no sign of any disturbance anywhere near the hut. Mayer hasn’t got here yet; unless he’s grown wings. And that’s most unlikely.”

  Johnny gave the boy a glance that was intended to show unqualified approval; and he stepped off again on the last stage of the journey. They came up to the hut door together: Biel, heavy-footed, spurning the snow aside with every step; Martin, moving now at a tired and inelegant shamble; Gruber, walking with exactly the same casual pace he had used all through the trip, showing tiredness only in the slightest discernible slackening of his shoulder muscles; Johnny, walking with a feline spring in every step and somehow persuading the rest of his body to keep up with his feet.

  The door stood slightly ajar, and flakes of snow had settled on the bare wooden floor just inside it; farther within, all was dark. For a few moments they stood grouped outside, as if no one of them wished to lead the way. Then Johnny moved forwards, kicked the door open to a loud protest from its hinges, and stood with both feet on the threshold, trying to pierce the darkness inside. The others followed him and stood at his shoulders.

  “Hasn’t this hut got any windows?” asked Johnny, irritated.

  “No,” said Biel. “There is usually an oil-lamp somewhere. Wait – I think I have a match in my pocket.”

  “I’ve got some,” said Johnny, fumbling inside his jacket. The matches were there all right, neatly wrapped in a little waterproof case; but it took him almost a minute to get one of them into a striking position. His fingers had ceased to be of any real utility as flexible instruments; they were, indeed, so badly swollen that he experienced some difficulty in coaxing them into his pocket at all. Eventually he managed to get a match awkwardly between first finger and thumb and struck it; then held it high above his head.

  “There,” said Martin and Gruber together.

  The oil-lamp was hanging from a peg by the door, slightly to Johnny’s left. Gruber stretched out a long hand and unhooked it from its position; they examined it curiously.

  It was old and filthy and heavily rusted in parts; but it seemed to contain a plentiful supply of colza oil and the wick was in good condition. Gruber wrestled with the glass protector for a few moments,
and finally wrenched it open; Johnny struck another match and applied it. The flame sprang up, burning brightly and not too smokily; and Gruber closed the shield and hung the lamp once more on the peg.

  The dim light it flung across the hut was extraordinarily restful after the brilliance of the snow outside; Johnny suddenly realised that he was still wearing his goggles, and pushed them up over the top of his forehead, racing-driver style… The hut itself was small, not more than twenty feet long and hardly ten wide; the walls were lined lengthwise with a continuous wooden bench wide enough to serve as a bunk, and blankets were piled on this in the far comer. There was a built-in cupboard over the bench, and, in the middle of the hut, a stove; the stove. It was dilapidated and rusty, almost falling to pieces; the pipe leading up to the ceiling had come apart at one of its joints and hung over at a drunken angle.

  Martin was not interested in anything but the bench. He slipped off his rucksack, threw himself down onto the heap of blankets, and fell immediately asleep. Johnny, watching him, privately sympathised; he met Biel’s eye and smiled.

  “It’s not surprising he is tired,” said Biel. “It has been a terrible journey, for a youngster. I am wearied myself.”

  He planked himself down at Martin’s feet and stretched himself luxuriously. Gruber had already seated himself opposite and was divesting himself of his rucksack; the shadow fell upon him as he leant forwards and made his face seem one dark purple bruise. Johnny alone remained standing, balancing himself on the balls of his feet and still eyeing the stove.

  “What now, Herr Videl?” said Gruber, dropping his rucksack to the floor with a thump and arching his back happily.

  Johnny stroked his chin. “I think the first thing,” he said, “is to make sure that what we came here for is still safely in position. Then we can all sleep comfortably – or all except one of us. We’d better have some kind of a guard system in case Mayer arrives.”

  As he spoke, he walked forwards and stood by the stove; then swung back von Knopke’s right boot and aimed a kick at it with all the power he could muster – not, in actual fact, a great deal. The stove, however, was unused to such cavalier treatment; it squealed plaintively and shook all over; and the next blow detached it completely from the pipe and from its rusty retaining screws, and rolled it over on the floor.