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Copyright
HarperCollinsPublisbers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Previously published in paperback by HarperCollins 1994 and by Fontana 1969
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1967
Copyright © Devoran Trustees Ltd. 1967
Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006158042
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007289486
Version: 2020-09-03
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To Geoff and Gina
Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Keep Reading
About the Author
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
ONE
The vibrating clangour from the four great piston engines set teeth on edge and made an intolerable assault on cringing ear-drums. The decibel-level, Smith calculated, must have been about that found in a boiler factory, and one, moreover, that was working on overtime rates, while the shaking cold in that cramped, instrument-crowded flight-deck was positively Siberian. On balance, he reflected, he would have gone for the Siberian boiler factory any time because, whatever its drawbacks, it wasn’t liable to fall out of the sky or crash into a mountainside which, in his present circumstances, seemed a likely enough, if not imminent contingency for all that the pilot of their Lancaster bomber appeared to care to the contrary. Smith looked away from the darkly opaque world beyond the windscreens where the wipers fought a useless battle with the driving snow and looked again at the man in the left-hand captain’s seat.
Wing Commander Cecil Carpenter was as completely at home in his environment as the most contented oyster in his shell in Whitstable Bay. Any comparison with a Siberian boiler factory he would have regarded as the ravings of an unhinged mind. Quite clearly, he found the shuddering vibration as soothing as the ministrations of the gentlest of masseurs, the roar of the engines positively soporific and the ambient temperature just right for a man of his leisured literary tastes. Before him, at a comfortable reading distance, a book rested on a hinged contraption which he had swung out from the cabin’s side. From what little Smith could occasionally see of the lurid cover, depicting a blood-stained knife plunged into the back of a girl who didn’t seem to have any clothes on, the Wing Commander held the more serious contemporary novelists in a fine contempt. He turned a page.
‘Magnificent,’ he said admiringly. He puffed deeply on an ancient briar that smelt like a fumigating plant. ‘By heavens, this feller can write. Banned, of course, young Tremayne’—this to the fresh-faced youngster in the co-pilot’s seat—‘so I can’t let you have it till you grow up.’ He broke off, fanned the smoke-laden air to improve the visibility, and peered accusingly at his co-pilot. ‘Flying Officer Tremayne, you have that look of pained apprehension on your face again.’
‘Yes, sir. That’s to say, no, sir.’
‘Part of the malaise of our time,’ Carpenter said sorrowfully. ‘The young lack so many things, like appreciation of a fine pipe tobacco or faith in their commanding officers.’ He sighed heavily, carefully marked the place in his book, folded the rest away and straightened in his seat. ‘You’d think a man would be entitled to some peace and quiet on his own flight-deck.’
He slid open his side-screen. An icy gust of snow-laden wind blew into the flight-deck, carrying with it the suddenly deepened roar from the engines. Carpenter grimaced and thrust his head outside, shielding his eyes with a gauntleted right hand. Five seconds later he shook his head dispiritedly, screwed his eyes shut as he winced in what appeared to be considerable pain, withdrew his head, closed the screen, brushed the snow away from his flaming red hair and magnificent handlebar moustache, and twisted round to look at Smith.
‘It is no small thing, Major, to be lost in a blizzard in the night skies over war-torn Europe.’
‘Not again, sir,’ Tremayne said protestingly.
‘No man is infallible, my son.’
Smith smiled politely. ‘You mean you don’t know where we are, sir?’
‘How should I?’ Carpenter slid down in his seat, half-closed his eyes and yawned vastly. ‘I’m only the driver. We have a navigator and the navigator has a radar set and I’ve no faith in either of them.’
‘Well, well,’ Smith shook his head. ‘To think that they lied to me at the Air Ministry. They told me you’d flown some three hundred missions and knew the continent better than any taxi driver knows his London.’
‘A foul canard put about by unfriendly elements who are trying to prevent me from getting a nice safe job behind a desk in London.’ Carpenter glanced at his watch. ‘I’ll give you exactly thirty minutes’ warning before we shove you out over the dropping zone.’ A second glance at his watch and a heavy frown. ‘Flying Officer Tremayne, your gross dereliction of duty is endangering the entire mission.’
‘Sir?’ An even deeper apprehension in Tremayne’s face.
‘I should have had my coffee exactly three minutes ago.’
‘Yes, sir. Right away, sir.’
Smith smiled again, straightened from his cramped position behind the pilots’ seats, left the flight-deck and moved aft into the Lancaster’s fuselage. Here in this cold, bleak and forbidding compartment, which resembled nothing so much as an iron tomb, the impression of the Siberian boiler factory was redoubled. The noise level was so high as to be almost intolerable, the cold was intense and metal-ribbed metal walls, dripping with condensation, made no concessions whatsoever to creature comfort. Nor did the six metal-framed canvas seats bolted to the floor, functionalism gone mad. Any attempt to introduce those sadistically designed instruments of torture in HM penitentiaries would have caused a national outcry.
Huddled in those six chairs sat six men, probably, Smith reflected, the six most miserable men he’d ever seen. Like himself, each of the six was dressed in the uniform of the German Alpine Corps. Like himself, each man wore two parachutes. All were shivering constantly, stamping their feet and beating their arms, and their frozen breath hung heavy in the ice-chill air. Facing them, along the upper starboard side of the fuselage, ran a taut metal wire which passed over the top of the doorway. On to this wire were clipped snap-catches, wires from which led down to folded parachutes resting on top of an assortment of variously shaped bundles, the contents of only one of which could be identified by the protruding ends of several pairs of skis.
The nearest parachutist, a dark intense man with Latin features, looked up at Smith’s arrival. He had never, Smith thought, seen Edward Carraciola look quite so unhappy.
‘Well?’ Carraciola’s voice was just as unhappy as his face. ‘I’ll bet he’s no more bloody idea where we are than I have.’
‘He does seem to navigate his way across Europe by opening his window and sniffing the air from time to time,’ Smith admitted. ‘But I wouldn’t worry—’
He broke off as a sergeant air-gunner entered from the rear, carrying a can of steaming coffee and enamel mugs.
‘Neither would I, sir.’ The sergeant smiled tolerantly. ‘The Wing Commander has his little ways. Coffee, gentlemen? Back at base he claims that he reads detective novels all the time and depends upon one of the gunners telling him from time to time where we are.’
Smith cradled frozen hands round the coffee mug. ‘Do you know where we are?’
‘Of course, sir.’ He seemed genuinely surprised, then nodded to the metal rungs leading to the upper machine-gun turret. ‘Just nip up there, sir, and look down to your right.’
Smith lifted an enquiring eyebrow, handed over his mug, climbed the ladder and peered down to his right through the Perspex dome of the turret cupola. For a few seconds only the darkness filled his eyes then gradually, far below and seen dimly through the driving snow, he could make out a ghostly luminescence in the night, a luminescence which gradually resolved itself into a criss-cross pattern of illuminated streets. For a brief moment only Smith’s face registered total disbelief then quickly returned to its normal dark stillness.
‘Well, well.’ He retrieved his coffee. ‘Somebody should tell them down there. The lights are supposed to be out all over Europe.’
‘Not in Switzerland, sir,’ the sergeant explained patiently. ‘That’s Basle.’
‘Basle?’ Smith stared at him. ‘Basle! Good God, he’s gone seventy or eighty miles off course. The flight plan routed us north of Strasbourg.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The sergeant air-gunner was unabashed. ‘The Wing Commander says he doesn’t understand flight plans.’ He grinned, half apologetically. ‘To tell the truth, sir, this is our milk-run into the Vorarlberg. We fly east along the Swiss frontier, then south of Schaffhausen—’
‘But that’s over Swiss territory!’
‘Is it? On a clear night you can see the lights of Zurich. They say Wing Commander Carpenter has a room permanently reserved for him there in the Baur-au-Lac.’
‘What?’
‘He says if it’s a choice between a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany and internment in Switzerland he knows which side of the frontier he’s coming down on…After that we fly down the Swiss side of Lake Constance, turn east at Lindau, climb to eight thousand to clear the mountains and it’s only a hop, skip and jump to the Weissspitze.’
‘I see,’ Smith said weakly. ‘But—but don’t the Swiss object?’
‘Frequently, sir. Their complaints always seem to coincide with the nights we’re around those parts. Wing Commander Carpenter claims it’s some ill-intentioned Luftwaffe pilot trying to discredit him.’
‘What else?’ Smith asked, but the sergeant was already on his way to the flight-deck. The Lancaster lurched as it hit an infrequent air pocket, Smith grabbed a rail to steady himself and Lieutenant Morris Schaffer, of the American Office of Strategic Services and Smith’s second-in-command, cursed fluently as the better part of a cup of scalding coffee emptied itself over his thigh.
‘That’s all I need,’ he said bitterly. ‘I’ve no morale left. I wish to God we would crash-land in Switzerland. Think of all those lovely Wiener-schnitzels and Apfelstrudels. After a couple of years living among you Limeys, Spam and powdered eggs and an ounce of margarine a day, that’s what Mama Schaffer’s little boy requires. Building up.’
‘You’d also live a damn’ sight longer, friend,’ Carraciola observed morosely. He transferred his gaze to Smith, gave him a long considering look. ‘The whole set-up stinks, Major.’
‘I don’t think I understand,’ Smith said quietly.
‘Suicidal, is what I mean. What a bunch. Just look at us.’ He gestured to the three men sitting nearest to him on his left: Olaf Christiansen, a flaxen-haired first cousin of Leif Ericsson, Lee Thomas, a short dark Welshman—both those men seemed slightly amused—and Torrance-Smythe, as languidly aristocratic-looking as any ci-devant French count that ever rode a tumbrel, a doleful ex-Oxford don who clearly wished he were back among the University cloisters. ‘Christiansen, Thomas, old Smithy and myself. We’re just a bunch of civil servants, filing clerks—’
‘I know very well what you are,’ Smith said quietly.
‘Or yourself.’ In the de-synchronized thunder of the engines the soft-voiced interruption had gone unnoticed. ‘A major in the Black Watch. No doubt you cut quite a dash playing the bagpipes at El Alamein, but why the hell you to command us? No offence. But this is no more in your line than it is ours. Or Lieutenant Schaffer here. An airborne cowboy—’
‘I hate horses,’ Schaffer said loudly. ‘That’s why I had to leave Montana.’
‘Or take George here.’ Carraciola jerked a thumb in the direction of the last member of the party, George Harrod, a stocky army sergeant radio-operator with an expression of profound resignation on his face. ‘I’ll bet he’s never as much as made a parachute jump in his life before.’
‘I have news for you,’ Harrod said stoically. ‘I’ve never even been in a plane before.’
‘He’s never even been in a plane before,’ Carraciola said despairingly. ‘My God, what a bunch of no-hopers! All we need is a team composed of specialist Alpinists, Commandos, mountaineers and safe-breakers and what do we have?’ He shook his head slowly. ‘We have us.’
Smith said gently: ‘We were all the Colonel could get. Be fair. He told us yesterday that the one thing in the world that he didn’t have was time.’
Carraciola made no reply, none of the others spoke, but Smith didn’t have to be any clairvoyant to know what was in the minds of all of them. They were thinking what he was thinking, like himself they were back several hours in time and several hundred miles in space in that Admiralty Operations Room in London where Vice-Admiral Rolland, ostensibly Assistant Director of Naval Operations but in fact the long-serving head of MI6, the counter-espionage branch of the British Secret Service, and his deputy, Colonel Wyatt-Turner, had gravely and reluctantly briefed them on what they had as gravely and reluctantly admitted to be a mission born from the sheerest desperation.
‘Deucedly sorry and all that, chaps, but time is of the essence.’ Wyatt-Turner, a big, red-faced, heavily moustached colonel, tapped his cane against a wall-map of Germany, pointing to a spot just north of the Austrian border and a little west of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. ‘Our man was brought down here at 2 a.m. this morning but SHAEF, in their all-knowing wisdom, didn’t let us know until 10 a.m. Damned idiots! Damned idiots for not letting us know until so late and double-damned idiots for ignoring our advice in the first place. Gad, will they never learn to listen to us?’ He shook his head in anger, tapped the map again. ‘Anyway, he’s here. Schloss Adler. The castle of the eagle. Believe me, it’s well named, only an eagle could get there. Our job—’
Smith said: ‘How are you so sure he’s there, sir?’
‘We’re sure. Mosquito he was in crash-landed only ten miles away. The pilot got off a radio message just before a German patrol closed in.’ He paused, smiled grimly, continued: ‘Schloss Adler, Major Smith, is the combined HQ of the German Secret Service and the Gestapo in South Germany. Where else would they take him?’
‘Where indeed? How was he brought down, sir?’
‘Through the most damnable ill-luck. We carried out a saturation raid on Nürnberg last night and there shouldn’t have been a German fighter within a hundred miles of the Austrian border. But a wandering Messerschmitt patrol got him. That’s unimportant. What’s important is getting him out before he talks.’
‘He’ll talk,’ Thomas said sombrely. ‘They all do. Why did they disregard our advice, sir? We told them two days ago.’
‘The whys don’t matter,’ Wyatt-Turner said tiredly. ‘Not any more. The fact that he’ll talk does. So we get him out. You get him out.’
Torrance-Smythe cleared his throat delicately. ‘There are paratroops, sir.’
‘Scared, Smithy?’
‘Naturally, sir.’
‘The Schloss Adler is inaccessible and impregnable. It would require a battalion of paratroops to take it.’
‘Of course,’ Christiansen said, ‘the fact that there’s no time to mount a massed paratroop attack has no bearing on the matter.’ Christiansen appeared positively cheerful, the proposed operation obviously appealed vastly to him.
Wyatt-Turner gave him the benefit of his icy blue stare then decided to ignore him.
‘Secrecy and stealth are the only hope,’ he went on. ‘And you gentlemen are—I trust—secretive and stealthy. You are experts at that and experts at survival behind enemy lines where all of you have spent considerable periods of time, Major Smith, Lieutenant Schaffer and Sergeant Harrod here in their professional capacities, the rest of you in—um—other duties. With the—’
‘That was a damned long time ago, sir,’ Carraciola interrupted. ‘At least for Smithy, Thomas, Christiansen and myself. We’re out of touch now. We don’t know the latest developments in weapons and combat techniques. And God only knows we’re out of training. After a couple of years behind a desk it takes me all my time to run fifty yards after a bus.’
‘You’ll have to get fit fast, won’t you?’ Wyatt-Turner said coldly. ‘Besides, what matters most is, that with the exception of Major Smith, you all have an extensive knowledge of Western Europe. You all speak fluent German. You’ll find your combat training—on the level you’ll be engaged in—as relevant today as it was five years ago. You are men with exceptional records of resourcefulness, ability and ingenuity. If anyone has a chance, you have. You’re all volunteers, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Carraciola echoed, his face carefully deadpan. Then he looked speculatively at Wyatt-Turner. ‘There is, of course, another way, sir.’ He paused, then went on very quietly indeed. ‘A way with a hundred per cent guarantee of success.’
‘Neither Admiral Rolland nor I claim to be infallible,’ Wyatt-Turner said slowly. ‘We have missed an alternative? You have the answer to our problems?’
‘Yes. Whistle up a Pathfinder squadron of Lancasters with 10-ton blockbuster bombs. Do you think anyone in the Schloss Adler would ever talk again?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Admiral Rolland spoke gently and for the first time, moving from the wall-map to join the group. Admiral Rolland always spoke gently. When you wielded the almost incredible range of power that he did, you didn’t have to talk loudly to make yourself heard. He was a short, grey-haired man, with a deeply trenched face and an air of immense authority. ‘No,’ he repeated, ‘I don’t think so. Nor do I think that your grasp of the realities of the situation is any match for your total ruthlessness. The captured man, Lieutenant General Carnaby, is an American. If we were to destroy him General Eisenhower would probably launch his Second Front against us instead of against the Germans.’ He smiled deprecatingly, as though to remove rebuke from his voice. ‘There are certain—um—niceties to be observed in our relationship with our Allies. Wouldn’t you agree?’
Carraciola didn’t agree or disagree. He had, apparently, nothing to say. Neither did anyone else. Colonel Wyatt-Turner cleared his throat.
‘That’s it then, gentlemen. Ten o’clock tonight at the airfield. No more questions, I take it?’
‘Yes, sir, there bloody well is, begging the Colonel’s pardon, sir.’ Sergeant George Harrod not only sounded heated, he looked it, too. ‘What’s all this about? Why’s this geezer so bloody important? Why the hell do we have to risk our necks—’
‘That’ll do, Sergeant.’ Wyatt-Turner’s voice was sharp, authoritative. ‘You know all you require to know—’
‘If we’re sending a man to what may be his death, Colonel, I think he has the right to know why,’ Admiral Rolland interrupted gently, almost apologetically. ‘The rest know. He should too. It’s painfully simple, Sergeant. General Carnaby is the overall co-ordinator of planning for the exercise known as Operation Overlord—the Second Front. It would be absolutely true to say that he knows more about the Allied preparations for the Second Front than any man alive.
‘He set off last night to meet his opposite numbers in the Middle East, Russia and the Italian Front to co-ordinate final plans for the invasion of Europe. The rendezvous was in Crete—the only meeting point the Russians would accept. They haven’t a plane fast enough to out-run the German fighters. The British Mosquito can—but it didn’t last night.’
Silence lay heavy in the austere operations room. Harrod rubbed his hand across his eyes, then shook his head slowly, as if to clear it. When he spoke again all the truculence, all the anger had vanished from his voice. His words came very slowly.
‘And if the General talks—’
‘He’ll talk,’ Rolland said. The voice was soft, but it carried total conviction. ‘As Mr Thomas has just said, they all talk. He won’t be able to help himself. A mixture of mescalin and scopolamine.’
‘And he’ll tell them all the plans for the Second Front.’ The words came as from a man in a dream. ‘When, where, how—Good God, sir, we’ll have to call the whole thing off!’
‘Precisely. We call it off. No Second Front this year. Another nine months on the war, another million lives needlessly lost. You understand the urgency, Sergeant, the sheer desperate urgency of it all?’
‘I understand, sir. Now I understand.’ Harrod turned to Wyatt-Turner. ‘Sorry I spoke like that, sir. I’m afraid—well, I’m a bit edgy, sir.’
‘We’re all a bit edgy, Sergeant. Well, the airfield at ten o’clock and we’ll check the equipment.’ He smiled without humour. ‘I’m afraid the uniforms may not fit too well. This is early closing day in Savile Row.’
Sergeant Harrod huddled more closely into his bucket seat, beat freezing hands against freezing shoulders, morosely surveyed his uniform, wrinkled like an elephant’s legs and about three sizes too big for him, then raised his voice above the clamour of the Lancaster’s engines.
‘Well,’ he said bitterly, ‘he was right about the bloody uniforms, anyway.’
‘And wrong about everything else,’ Carraciola said heavily. ‘I still say we should have sent in the Lancasters.’
Smith, still standing against the starboard fuselage, lit a cigarette and eyed him speculatively. He opened his mouth to speak when it occurred to him that he had seen men in more receptive mood. He looked away without saying anything.
In the flight-deck, now slid so impossibly far forward in his seat that the back of his head rested on the back of his seat, Wing Commander Carpenter was still deeply and contentedly pre-occupied with pipe, coffee and literature. Beside him, Flying Officer Tremayne was obviously failing to share his mood of pleasurable relaxation. He was, in fact, keeping a most anxious watch, his eyes constantly shifting from the instrument panel to the opaque darkness beyond the windscreen to the recumbent figure of his superior officer who appeared to be in danger of dropping off to sleep at any moment. Suddenly Tremayne sat far forward in his seat, stared for long seconds through the windscreen ahead of him then turned excitedly to Carpenter.