‘You’ve asked. We’ll have to go as quickly as our ponies can take us. A blind man can’t see obstructions, can’t balance himself according to the level of the terrain, can’t anticipate in advance how he should brace himself for an unexpectedly sharp drop, can’t lean in the saddle for a corner his pony knows is coming. A blind man, in short, is a hundred times more liable to fall off in a downhill gallop than we are. It’s enough that a blind man should be blind for life. It’s too much that we should expose him to the risk of a heavy fall with his glasses on, expose him to the risk of not only being blind but of having his eyes gouged out and being in agony for life.’
‘I hadn’t thought – I mean – I’m sorry, sir.’
‘Stop apologizing, boy. It’s really my turn, you know – to apologize to you. Keep an eye on him, will you?’
Colonel Lazlo, binoculars to his eyes, gazed down over the moonlit rocky slope below him towards the bridge at Neretva. On the southern bank of the river, in the meadows between the south bank and the beginning of the pine forest beyond, and, as far as Lazlo could ascertain, in the fringes of the pine forest itself, there was a disconcertingly ominous lack of movement, of any sign of life at all. Lazlo was pondering the disturbingly sinister significance of this unnatural peacefulness when a hand touched his shoulder. He twisted, looked up and recognized the figure of Major Stephan, commander of the Western Gap.
‘Welcome, welcome. The General has advised me of your arrival. Your battalion with you?’
‘What’s left of it.’ Stephan smiled without really smiling. ‘Every man who could walk. And all those who couldn’t.’
‘God send we don’t need them all tonight. The General has spoken to you of this man Mallory?’ Major Stephan nodded, and Lazlo went on: ‘If he fails? If the Germans cross the Neretva tonight –’
‘So?’ Stephan shrugged. ‘We were all due to die tonight anyway.’
‘A well-taken point,’ Lazlo said approvingly. He lifted his binoculars and returned to his contemplation of the bridge at Neretva.
So far, and almost incredibly, neither Mallory nor any of the six galloping behind him had parted company with their ponies. Not even Petar. True, the incline of the slope was not nearly as steep as it had been from the Ivenici plateau down to the block-house, but Reynolds suspected it was because Mallory had imperceptibly succeeded in slowing down the pace of their earlier headlong gallop. Perhaps, Reynolds thought vaguely, it was because Mallory was subconsciously trying to protect the blind singer, who was riding almost abreast with him, guitar firmly strapped over his shoulder, reins abandoned and both hands clasped desperately to the pommel of his saddle. Unbidden, almost, Reynolds’s thoughts strayed back to that scene inside the block-house. Moments later, he was urging his pony forwards until he had drawn alongside Mallory.
‘Sir?’
‘What is it?’ Mallory sounded irritable.
‘A word, sir. It’s urgent. Really it is.’
Mallory threw up a hand and brought the company to a halt. He said curtly: ‘Be quick.’
‘Neufeld and Droshny, sir.’ Reynolds paused in a moment’s brief uncertainty, then continued. ‘Do you reckon they know where you’re going?’
‘What’s that to do with anything?’
‘Please.’
‘Yes, they do. Unless they’re complete morons. And they’re not.’
‘It’s a pity, sir,’ Reynolds said reflectively, ‘that you hadn’t shot them after all.’
‘Get to the point,’ Mallory said impatiently.
‘Yes, sir. You reckoned Sergeant Baer released them earlier on?’
‘Of course.’ Mallory was exercising all his restraint. ‘Andrea saw them arrive. I’ve explained all this. They – Neufeld and Droshny – had to go up to the Ivenici plateau to check that we’d really gone.’
‘I understand that, sir. So you knew that Baer was following us. How did he get into the blockhouse?’
Mallory’s restraint vanished. He said in exasperation: ‘Because I left both keys hanging outside.’
‘Yes, sir. You were expecting him. But Sergeant Baer didn’t know you were expecting him – and even if he did he wouldn’t be expecting to find keys so conveniently to hand.’
‘Good God in heaven! Duplicates!’ In bitter chagrin, Mallory smacked the fist of one hand into the palm of the other. ‘Imbecile! Imbecile! Of course he would have his own keys.’
‘And Droshny,’ Miller said thoughtfully, ‘may know a short cut.’
‘That’s not all of it.’ Mallory was completely back on balance again, outwardly composed, the relaxed calmness of the face the complete antithesis of his racing mind. ‘Worse still, he may make straight for his camp radio and warn Zimmermann to pull his armoured divisions back from the Neretva. You’ve earned your passage tonight, Reynolds. Thanks, boy. How far to Neufeld’s camp, do you think, Andrea?’
‘A mile.’ The words came over Andrea’s shoulder, for Andrea, as always in situations which he knew called for the exercise of his highly specialized talents, was already on his way.
Five minutes later they were crouched at the edge of the forest less than twenty yards from the perimeter of Neufeld’s camp. Quite a number of the huts had illuminated windows, music could be heard coming from the dining hut and several Cetnik soldiers were moving about in the compound.
Reynolds whispered to Mallory: ‘How do we go about it, sir?’
‘We don’t do anything at all. We just leave it to Andrea.’
Groves spoke, his voice low. ‘One man? Andrea? We leave it to one man?’
Mallory sighed. ‘Tell them. Corporal Miller.’
‘I’d rather not. Well, if I have to. The fact is,’ Miller went on kindly, ‘Andrea is rather good at this sort of thing.’
‘So are we,’ Reynolds said. ‘We’re commandos. We’ve been trained for this sort of thing.’
‘And very highly trained, no doubt,’ said Miller approvingly. ‘Another half-dozen years’ experience and half a dozen of you might be just about able to cope with him. Although I doubt it very much. Before the night is out, you’ll learn – and I don’t mean to be insulting, Sergeants – that you are little lambs to Andrea’s wolf.’ Miller paused and went on sombrely: ‘Like whoever happens to be inside that radio hut at this moment.’
‘Like whoever happens –’ Groves twisted round and looked behind him. ‘Andrea? He’s gone. I didn’t see him go.’
‘No one ever does,’ Miller said. ‘And those poor devils won’t ever see him come.’ He looked at Mallory. ‘Time’s a-wasting.’
Mallory glanced at the luminous hands of his watch. ‘Eleven-thirty. Time is a-wasting.’
For almost a minute there was a silence broken only by the restless movements of the ponies tethered deep in the woods behind them, then Groves gave a muffled exclamation as Andrea materialized beside him. Mallory looked up and said: ‘How many?’
Andrea held up two fingers and moved silently into the woods towards his pony. The others rose and followed him, Groves and Reynolds exchanging glances which indicated more clearly than any words could possibly have done that they could have been even more wrong about Andrea than they had ever been about Mallory.
At precisely the moment that Mallory and his companions were remounting their ponies in the woods fringing Neufeld’s camp, a Wellington bomber came sinking down towards a well-lit airfield – the same airfield from which Mallory and his men had taken off less than twenty-four hours previously. Termoli, Italy. It made a perfect touchdown and as it taxied along the runway an army radio truck curved in on an interception course, turning to parallel the last hundred yards of the Wellington’s run down. In the left-hand front seat and in the right-hand back seat of the truck sat two immediately recognizable figures: in the front, the piratical splendidly bearded figure of Captain Jensen, in the back the British lieutenant-general with whom Jensen had recently spent so much time in pacing the Termoli Operations Room.
Plane and truck came to a halt at the same
moment. Jensen, displaying a surprising agility for one of his very considerable bulk, hopped nimbly to the ground and strode briskly across the tarmac and arrived at the Wellington just as its door opened and the first of the passengers, the moustached major, swung to the ground.
Jensen nodded to the papers clutched in the major’s hand and said without preamble: ‘Those for me?’ The major blinked uncertainly, then nodded stiffly in return, clearly irked by this abrupt welcome for a man just returned from durance vile. Jensen took the papers without a further word, went back to his seat in the jeep, brought out a flashlight and studied the papers briefly. He twisted in his seat and said to the radio operator seated beside the General: ‘Flight plan as stated. Target as indicated. Now.’ The radio operator began to crank the handle.
Some fifty miles to the south-east, in the Foggia area, the buildings and runways of the RAF heavy bomber base echoed and reverberated to the thunder of scores of aircraft engines: at the dispersal area at the west end of the main runway several squadrons of Lancaster heavy bombers were lined up ready for take-off, obviously awaiting the signal to go. The signal was not long in coming.
Halfway down the airfield, but well to one side of the main runway, was parked a jeep identical to the one in which Jensen was sitting in Termoli. In the back seat a radio operator was crouched over a radio, earphones to his head. He listened intently, then looked up and said matter-of-factly: ‘Instructions as stated. Now. Now. Now.’
‘Instructions as stated,’ a captain in the front seat repeated. ‘Now. Now. Now.’ He reached for a wooden box, produced three Very pistols, aimed directly across the runway and fired each in turn. The brilliantly arcing flares burst into incandescent life, green, red and green again, before curving slowly back to earth. The thunder at the far end of the airfield mounted to a rumbling crescendo and the first of the Lancasters began to move. Within a few minutes the last of them had taken off and was lifting into the darkly hostile night skies of the Adriatic.
‘I did say, I believe,’ Jensen remarked conversationally and comfortably to the General in the back seat, ‘that they are the best in the business. Our friends from Foggia are on their way.’
‘The best in the business. Maybe. I don’t know. What I do know is that those damned German and Austrian divisions are still in position in the Gustav Line. Zero hour for the assault on the Gustav Line is –’ he glanced at his watch – ‘in exactly thirty hours.’
‘Time enough,’ Jensen said confidently.
‘I wish I shared this blissful confidence.’
Jensen smiled cheerfully at him as the jeep moved off, then faced forward in his seat again. As he did, the smile vanished completely from his face and his fingers beat a drum tattoo on the seat beside him.
The moon had broken through again as Neufeld, Droshny and their men came galloping into camp and reined in ponies so covered with steam from their heaving flanks and distressed breathing as to have a weirdly insubstantial appearance in the pale moonlight. Neufeld swung from his pony and turned to Sergeant Baer.
‘How many ponies left in the stables?’
‘Twenty. About that.’
‘Quickly. And as many men as there are ponies. Saddle up.’
Neufeld gestured to Droshny and together they ran towards the radio hut. The door, ominously enough on that icy night, was standing wide open. They were still ten feet short of the door when Neufeld shouted: ‘The Neretva bridge at once. Tell General Zimmermann –’
He halted abruptly in the doorway, Droshny by his shoulder. For the second time that evening the faces of both men reflected their stunned disbelief, their total uncomprehending shock.
Only one small lamp burned in the radio hut, but that one small lamp was enough. Two men lay on the floor in grotesquely huddled positions, the one lying partially across the other: both were quite unmistakably dead. Beside them, with its faceplate ripped off and interior smashed, lay the mangled remains of what had once been a transmitter. Neufeld gazed at the scene for some time before shaking his head violently as if to break the shocked spell and turned to Droshny.
‘The big one,’ he said quietly. ‘The big one did this.’
‘The big one,’ Droshny agreed. He was almost smiling. ‘You will remember what you promised, Hauptmann Neufeld? The big one. He’s for me.’
‘You shall have him. Come. They can be only minutes ahead.’ Both men turned and ran back to the compound where Sergeant Baer and a group of soldiers were already saddling up the ponies.
‘Machine-pistols only,’ Neufeld shouted. ‘No rifles. It will be close-quarter work tonight. And Sergeant Baer?’
‘Hauptmann Neufeld?’
‘Inform the men that we will not be taking prisoners.’
As those of Neufeld and his men had been, the ponies of Mallory and his six companions were almost invisible in the dense clouds of steam rising from their sweat-soaked bodies: their lurching gait, which could not now even be called a trot, was token enough of the obvious fact that they had reached the limits of exhaustion. Mallory glanced at Andrea, who nodded and said: ‘I agree. We’d make faster time on foot now.’
‘I must be getting old,’ Mallory said, and for a moment he sounded that way. ‘I’m not thinking very well tonight, am I?’
‘I do not understand.’
‘Ponies. Neufeld and his men will have fresh ponies from the stables. We should have killed them – or at least driven them away.’
‘Age is not the same thing as lack of sleep. It never occurred to me, either. A man cannot think of everything, my Keith.’ Andrea reined in his pony and was about to swing down when something on the slope below caught his attention. He pointed ahead.
A minute later they drew up alongside a very narrow-gauge railway line, of a type common in Central Yugoslavia. At this level the snow had petered out and the track, they could see, was overgrown and rusty, but for all that, apparently in fair enough mechanical condition: undoubtedly, it was the same track that had caught their eye when they had paused to examine the green waters of the Neretva dam on the way back from Major Broznik’s camp that morning. But what simultaneously caught and held the attention of both Mallory and Miller was not the track itself, but a little siding leading on to the track – and a diminutive, wood-burning locomotive that stood on the siding. The locomotive was practically a solid block of rust and looked as if it hadn’t moved from its present position since the beginning of the war: in all probability, it hadn’t.
Mallory produced a large-scale map from his tunic and flashed a torch on it. He said: ‘No doubt of it, this is the track we saw this morning. It goes down along the Neretva for at least five miles before bearing off to the south.’ He paused and went on thoughtfully: ‘I wonder if we could get that thing moving.’
‘What?’ Miller looked at him in horror. ‘It’ll fall to pieces if you touch it – it’s only the rust that’s holding the damn thing together. And that gradient there!’ He peered in dismay down the slope. ‘What do you think our terminal velocity is going to be when we hit one of those monster pine trees a few miles down the track?’
‘The ponies are finished,’ Mallory said mildly, ‘and you know how much you love walking.’
Miller looked at the locomotive with loathing. ‘There must be some other way.’
‘Shh!’ Andrea cocked his head. ‘They’re coming. I can hear them coming.’
‘Get the chocks away from those front wheels,’ Miller shouted. He ran forward and after several violent and well-directed kicks which clearly took into no account the future state of his toes, succeeded in freeing the triangular block which was attached to the front of the locomotive by a chain: Reynolds, no less energetically, did the same for the other chock.
All of them, even Maria and Petar helping, flung all their weight against the rear of the locomotive. The locomotive remained where it was. They tried again, despairingly: the wheels refused to budge even a fraction of an inch. Groves said, with an odd mixture of urgency and diffidence: ‘
Sir, on a gradient like this, it would have been left with its brakes on.’
‘Oh my God!’ Mallory said in chagrin. ‘Andrea. Quickly. Release the brake lever.’
Andrea swung himself on to the footplate. He said complainingly: ‘There are a dozen damned levers up here.’
‘Well, open the dozen damned levers, then.’ Mallory glanced anxiously back up the track. Maybe Andrea had heard something, maybe not: there was certainly no one in sight yet. But he knew that Neufeld and Droshny, who must have been released from the block-house only minutes after they had left there themselves and who knew those woods and paths better than they did, must be very close indeed by this time.
There was a considerable amount of metallic screeching and swearing coming from the cab and after perhaps half a minute Andrea said: ‘That’s the lot.’
‘Shove,’ Mallory ordered.
They shoved, heels jammed in the sleepers and backs to the locomotive, and this time the locomotive moved off so easily, albeit with a tortured squealing of rusted wheels, that most of those pushing were caught wholly by surprise and fell on their backs on the track. Moments later they were on their feet and running after the locomotive which was already perceptibly beginning to increase speed. Andrea reached down from the cab, swung Maria and Petar aboard in turn, then lent a helping hand to the others. The last, Groves, was reaching for the footplate when he suddenly braked, swung round, ran back to the ponies, unhitched the climbing ropes, flung them over his shoulder and chased after the locomotive again. Mallory reached down and helped him on to the footplate.
‘It’s not my day,’ Mallory said sadly. ‘Evening rather. First, I forget about Baer’s duplicate keys. Then about the ponies. Then about the brakes. Now the ropes. I wonder what I’ll forget about next?’
‘Perhaps about Neufeld and Droshny.’ Reynolds’s voice was carefully without expression.
‘What about Neufeld and Droshny?’
Reynolds pointed back up the railway track with the barrel of his Schmeisser. ‘Permission to fire, sir.’
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