‘Six,’ Neufeld said reluctantly.
‘Seven and you’re a dead man,’ Andrea warned.
‘Six.’
As they approached, the guns – almost certainly because the men behind them had identified Neufeld and Droshny – were withdrawn, the embrasures closed, the heavy metal front door opened. A sergeant appeared in the doorway and saluted respectfully, his face registering a certain surprise.
‘An unexpected pleasure, Hauptmann Neufeld,’ the sergeant said. ‘We had no radio message informing us of your arrival.’
‘It’s out of action for the moment.’ Neufeld waved them inside but Andrea gallantly insisted on the German officer taking precedence, reinforcing his courtesy with a threatening hitch of his Schmeisser. Neufeld entered, followed by Droshny and the other five men.
The windows were so narrow that the burning oil lamps were obviously a necessity, the illumination they afforded being almost doubled by a large log fire blazing in the hearth. Nothing could ever overcome the bleakness created by four rough-cut stone walls, but the room itself was surprisingly well furnished with a table, chairs, two armchairs and a sofa: there were even some pieces of carpet. Three doors led off from the room, one heavily barred. Including the sergeant who had welcomed them, there were three armed soldiers in the room. Mallory glanced at Neufeld who nodded, his face tight in suppressed anger.
Neufeld said to one of the guards: ‘Bring out the prisoners.’ The guard nodded, lifted a heavy key from the wall and headed for the barred door. The sergeant and the other guard were sliding the metal screens back across the embrasures. Andrea walked casually towards the nearest guard, then suddenly and violently shoved him against the sergeant. Both men cannoned into the guard who had just inserted the key into the door. The third man fell heavily to the ground: the other two, though staggering wildly, managed to retain a semblance of balance or at least remain on their feet. All three twisted round to stare at Andrea, anger and startled incomprehension in their faces, and all three remained very still, and wisely so. Faced with a Schmeisser machine-pistol at three paces, the wise man always remains still.
Mallory said to the sergeant: ‘There are three other men. Where are they?’
There was no reply: the guard glared at him in defiance. Mallory repeated the question, this time in fluent German: the guard ignored him and looked questioningly at Neufeld, whose lips were tight-shut in a mask of stone.
‘Are you mad?’ Neufeld demanded of the sergeant. ‘Can’t you see those men are killers? Tell him.’
‘The night guards. They’re asleep.’ The sergeant pointed to a door. ‘That one.’
‘Open it. Tell them to walk out. Backwards and with their hands clasped behind their necks.’
‘Do exactly as you’re told,’ Neufeld ordered.
The sergeant did exactly what he was told and so did the three guards who had been resting in the inner room, who walked out as they had been instructed, with obviously no thought of any resistance in their minds. Mallory turned to the guard with the key who had by this time picked himself up somewhat shakily from the floor, and nodded to the barred door.
‘Open it.’
The guard opened it and pushed the door wide. Four British officers moved out slowly and uncertainly into the outer room. Long confinement indoors had made them very pale, but apart from this prison pallor and the fact that they were rather thin they were obviously unharmed. The man in the lead, with a major’s insignia and a Sandhurst moustache – and, when he spoke, a Sandhurst accent – stopped abruptly and stared in disbelief at Mallory and his men.
‘Good God above! What on earth are you chaps –’
‘Please.’ Mallory cut him short. ‘I’m sorry, but later. Collect your coats, whatever warm gear you have, and wait outside.’
‘But – but where are you taking us?’
‘Home. Italy. Tonight. Please hurry!’
‘Italy. You’re talking –’
‘Hurry!’ Mallory glanced in some exasperation at his watch. ‘We’re late already.’
As quickly as their dazed condition would allow, the four officers collected what warm clothing they had and filed outside. Mallory turned to the sergeant again. ‘You must have ponies here, a stable.’
‘Round the back of the block-house,’ the sergeant said promptly. He had obviously made a rapid readjustment to the new facts of life.
‘Good lad,’ Mallory said approvingly. He looked at Groves and Reynolds. ‘We’ll need two more ponies. Saddle them up, will you?’
The two sergeants left. Under the watchful guns of Mallory and Miller, Andrea searched each of the six guards in turn, found nothing, and ushered them all into the cell, turning the heavy key and hanging it up on the wall. Then, just as carefully, Andrea searched Neufeld and Droshny: Droshny’s face, as Andrea carelessly flung his knives into a corner of the room, was thunderous.
Mallory looked at the two men and said: ‘I’d shoot you if necessary. It’s not. You won’t be missed before morning.’
‘They might not be missed for a good few mornings,’ Miller pointed out.
‘So they’re over-weight anyway,’ Mallory said indifferently. He smiled. ‘I can’t resist leaving you with a last little pleasant thought, Hauptmann Neufeld. Something to think about until someone comes and finds you.’ He looked consideringly at Neufeld, who said nothing, then went on: ‘About that information I gave you this morning, I mean.’
Neufeld looked at him guardedly. ‘What about the information you gave me this morning?’
‘Just this. It wasn’t, I’m afraid, quite accurate. Vukalovic expects the attack from the north, through the Zenica Gap, not across the bridge at Neretva from the south. There are, we know, close on two hundred of your tanks massed in the woods just to the north of the Zenica Gap – but there won’t be at two a.m. this morning when your attack is due to start. Not after I’ve got through to our Lancaster squadrons in Italy. Think of it, think of the target. Two hundred tanks bunched in a tiny trap a hundred and fifty yards wide and not more than three hundred yards long. The RAF will be there at 1.30. By two this morning there won’t be a single tank left in commission.’
Neufeld looked at him for a long moment, his face very still, then said, slowly and softly: ‘Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!’
‘Damning is all you’ll have for it,’ Mallory said agreeably. ‘By the time you are released – hopefully assuming that you will be released – it will all be over. See you after the war.’
Andrea locked the two men in a side room and hung the key up by the one to the cell. Then they went outside, locked the outer door, hung the key on a nail by the door, mounted their ponies – Groves and Reynolds had already two additional ones saddled – and started climbing once again, Mallory, map in hand, studying in the fading light of dusk the route they had to take.
Their route took them up alongside the perimeter of a pine forest. Not more than half a mile after leaving the block-house, Andrea reined in his pony, dismounted, lifted the pony’s right foreleg and examined it carefully. He looked up at the others who had also reined in their ponies.
‘There’s a stone wedged under the hoof,’ he announced. ‘Looks bad – but not too bad. I’ll have to cut it out. Don’t wait for me – I’ll catch you up in a few minutes.’
Mallory nodded, gave the signal to move on. Andrea produced a knife, lifted the hoof and made a great play of excavating the wedged stone. After a minute or so, he glanced up and saw that the rest of the party had vanished round a corner of the pine wood. Andrea put away his knife and led the pony, which quite obviously had no limp whatsoever, into the shelter of the wood and tethered it there, then moved on foot some way down the hill towards the block-house. He sat down behind the bole of a convenient pine and removed his binoculars from their case.
He hadn’t long to wait. The head and shoulders of a figure appeared in the clearing below peering out cautiously from behind the trunk of a tree. Andrea flat in the snow now and with the icy rims o
f the binoculars clamped hard against his eyes, had no difficulty at all in making an immediate identification: Sergeant Baer, moonfaced, rotund and about seventy pounds overweight for his unimpressive height, had an unmistakable physical presence which only the mentally incapacitated could easily forget.
Baer withdrew into the woods, then reappeared shortly afterwards leading a string of ponies, one of which carried a bulky covered object strapped to a pannier bag. Two of the following ponies had riders, both of whom had their hands tied to the pommels of their saddles. Petar and Maria, without a doubt. Behind them appeared four mounted soldiers. Sergeant Baer beckoned them to follow him across the clearing and within moments all had disappeared from sight behind the block-house. Andrea regarded the now empty clearing thoughtfully, lit a fresh cigar and made his way uphill towards his tethered pony.
Sergeant Baer dismounted, produced a key from his pocket, caught sight of the key suspended from the nail beside the door, replaced his own, took down the other, opened the door with it and passed inside. He glanced around, took down one of the keys hanging on the wall and opened a side door with it. Hauptmann Neufeld emerged, glanced at his watch and smiled.
‘You have been very punctual, Sergeant Baer. You have the radio?’
‘I have the radio. It’s outside.’
‘Good, good, good.’ Neufeld looked at Droshny and smiled again. ‘I think it’s time for us to make our rendezvous with the Ivenici plateau.’
Sergeant Baer said respectfully: ‘How can you be so sure that it is the Ivenici plateau, Hauptmann Neufeld?’
‘How can I be so sure? Simple, my dear Baer. Because Maria – you have her with you?’
‘But of course, Hauptmann Neufeld.’
‘Because Maria told me. The Ivenici plateau it is.’
Night had fallen on the Ivenici plateau, but still the phalanx of exhausted soldiers was trudging out the landing-strip for the plane. The work was not by this time so cruelly and physically exacting, for the snow was now almost trampled and beaten hard and flat: but, even allowing for the rejuvenation given by the influx of another five hundred fresh soldiers, the overall level of utter weariness was such that the phalanx was in no better condition than its original members who had trudged out the first outline of the airstrip in the virgin snow.
The phalanx, too, had changed its shape. Instead of being fifty wide by twenty deep it was now twenty wide by fifty deep: having achieved a safe clearance for the wings of the aircraft, they were now trudging out what was to be as close as possible an iron-hard surface for the landing wheels.
A three-quarters moon, intensely white and luminous, rode low in the sky, with scattered bands of cloud coming drifting down slowly from the north. As the successive bands moved across the face of the moon, the black shadows swept lazily across the surface of the plateau: the phalanx, at one moment bathed in silvery moonlight, was at the next almost lost to sight in the darkness. It was a fantastic scene with a remarkably faery-like quality of eeriness and foreboding about it. In fact it was, as Colonel Vis had just unromantically mentioned to Captain Vlanovich, like something out of Dante’s Inferno, only a hundred degrees colder. At least a hundred degrees, Vis had amended: he wasn’t sure how hot it was in hell.
It was this scene which, at twenty minutes to nine in the evening, confronted Mallory and his men when they topped the brow of a hill and reined in their ponies just short of the edge of the precipice which abutted on the western edge of the Ivenici plateau. For at least two minutes they sat there on their ponies, not moving, not speaking, mesmerized by the other-world quality of a thousand men with bowed heads and bowed shoulders, shuffling exhaustedly across the level floor of the plain beneath, mesmerized because they all knew they were gazing at a unique spectacle which none of them had ever seen before and would never see again. Mallory finally broke free from the trance-like condition, looked at Miller and Andrea, and slowly shook his head in an expression of profound wonder conveying his disbelief, his refusal to accept the reality of what his own eyes told him was real and actual beyond dispute. Miller and Andrea returned his look with almost identical negative motions of their own heads. Mallory wheeled his pony to the right and led the way along the cliff-face to the point where the cliff ran into the rising ground below.
Ten minutes later they were being greeted by Colonel Vis.
‘I did not expect to see you, Captain Mallory.’ Vis pumped his hand enthusiastically. ‘Before God, I did not expect to see you. You – and your men – must have a remarkable capacity for survival.’
‘Say that in a few hours,’ Mallory said drily, ‘and I would be very happy indeed to hear it.’
‘But it’s all over now. We expect the plane –’ Vis glanced at his watch – ‘in exactly eight minutes. We have a bearing surface for it and there should be no difficulty in landing and taking off provided it doesn’t hang around too long. You have done all that you came to do and achieved it magnificently. Luck has been on your side.’
‘Say that in a few hours,’ Mallory repeated.
‘I’m sorry.’ Vis could not conceal his puzzlement. ‘You expect something to happen to the plane?’
‘I don’t expect anything to happen to the plane. But what’s gone, what’s past, is – was, rather – only the prologue.’
‘The – the prologue?’
‘Let me explain.’
Neufeld, Droshny and Sergeant Baer left their ponies tethered inside the woodline and walked up the slight eminence before them, Sergeant Baer making heavy weather of their uphill struggle through the snow because of the weight of the large portable transceiver strapped to his back. Near the summit they dropped to their hands and knees and crawled forward till they were within a few feet of the edge of the cliff overlooking the Ivenici plateau. Neufeld unslung his binoculars and then replaced them: the moon had just moved from behind a dark barred cloud highlighting every aspect of the scene below: the intensely sharp contrast afforded by black shadow and snow so deeply and gleamingly white as to be almost phosphorescent made the use of binoculars superfluous.
Clearly visible and to the right were Vis’s command tents and, nearby, some hastily erected soup kitchens. Outside the smallest of the tents could be seen a group of perhaps a dozen people, obviously, even at that distance, engaged in close conversation. Directly beneath where they lay, the three men could see the phalanx turning round at one end of the runway and beginning to trudge back slowly, so terribly slowly, so terribly tiredly, along the wide path already tramped out. As Mallory and his men had been, Neufeld, Droshny and Baer were momentarily caught and held by the weird and other-worldly dark grandeur of the spectacle below. Only by a conscious act of will could Neufeld bring himself to look away and return to the world of normality and reality.
‘How very kind,’ he murmured, ‘of our Yugoslav friends to go to such lengths on our behalf.’ He turned to Baer and indicated the transceiver. ‘Get through to the General, will you?’
Baer unslung his transceiver, settled it firmly in the snow, extended the telescopic aerial, pre-set the frequency and cranked the handle. He made contact almost at once, talked briefly then handed the microphone and head-piece to Neufeld, who fitted on the phones and gazed down, still half mesmerized, at the thousand men and women moving antlike across the plain below. The headphones cracked suddenly in his ears and the spell was broken.
‘Herr General?’
‘Ah. Hauptmann Neufeld.’ In the ear-phones the General’s voice was faint but very clear, completely free from distortion or static. ‘Now then. About my psychological assessment of the English mind?’
‘You have mistaken your profession, Herr General. Everything has happened exactly as you forecast. You will be interested to know, sir, that the Royal Air Force is launching a saturation bombing attack on the Zenica Gap at precisely 1.30 a.m. this morning.’
‘Well, well, well,’ Zimmermann said thoughtfully. ‘That is interesting. But hardly surprising.’
‘No, sir.’ Neufeld
looked up as Droshny touched him on the shoulder and pointed to the north. ‘One moment, sir.’
Neufeld removed the ear-phones and cocked his head in the direction of Droshny’s pointing arm. He lifted his binoculars but there was nothing to be seen. But unquestionably there was something to be heard – the distant clamour of aircraft engines, closing. Neufeld readjusted the ear-phones.
‘We have to give the English full marks for punctuality, sir. The plane is coming in now.’
‘Excellent, excellent. Keep me informed.’
Neufeld eased off one ear-phone and gazed to the north. Still nothing to be seen, the moon was now temporarily behind a cloud, but the sound of the aircraft engines was unmistakably closer. Suddenly, somewhere down on the plateau, came three sharp blasts on a whistle. Immediately, the marching phalanx broke up, men and women stumbling off the runway into the deep snow on the eastern side of the plateau, leaving behind them, obviously by pre-arrangement, about eighty men who spaced themselves out on either side of the runway.
‘They’re organized, I’ll say that for them,’ Neufeld said admiringly.
Droshny smiled his wolf’s smile. ‘All the better for us, eh?’
‘Everybody seems to be doing their best to help us tonight,’ Neufeld agreed.
Overhead, the dark and obscuring band of cloud drifted away to the south and the white light of the moon raced across the plateau. Neufeld could immediately see the plane, less than half a mile away, its camouflaged shape sharply etched in the brilliant moonlight as it sank down towards the end of the runway. Another sharp blast of the whistle and at once the men lining both sides of the runway switched on hand lamps – a superfluity, really, in those almost bright as day perfect landing conditions, but essential had the moon been hidden behind cloud.
‘Touching down now,’ Neufeld said into the microphone. ‘It’s a Wellington bomber.’
The Complete Navarone Page 44
