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‘Second thoughts, what’s the point. Any fall hard enough to break his neck wouldn’t have done the innards of this radio any good.’
Wordlessly, Smith took the radio, set it on the rock, extended the antenna, set the switch to ‘Transmit’, and cranked the call-up handle. The red telltale glowed, showing the transmission circuit to be in order. Smith turned the switch to receive, turned up the volume, moved the tuning knob, listened briefly to some static-laden music, closed up the radio set and handed it back to Schaffer.
‘It made a better landing than Sergeant Harrod,’ Smith said briefly. ‘Come on.’
‘We bury him, Major?’ Carraciola asked.
‘No need.’ Smith shook his head and gestured with his torch at the drifting snow. ‘He’ll be buried within the hour. Let’s find the supplies.’
‘Now, for God’s sake don’t lose your grip!’ Thomas said urgently.
‘That’s the trouble with you Celts,’ Schaffer said reprovingly. ‘No faith in anyone. There is no cause for alarm. Your life is in the safe hands of Schaffer and Christiansen. Not to worry.’
‘What else do you think I’m worrying about?’
‘If we all start sliding,’ Schaffer said encouragingly, ’we won’t let you go until the last possible minute.’
Thomas gave a last baleful glance over his shoulder and then began to edge himself out over the black lip of the precipice. Schaffer and Christiansen had an ankle apiece, and they in turn were anchored by the others. As far as the beam of Thomas’s torch could reach, the cliff stretching down into the darkness was absolutely vertical, black naked rock with the only fissures in sight blocked with ice and with otherwise never a hand-or foot-hold.
‘I’ve seen all I want to,’ he said over his shoulder. They pulled him back and he edged his way carefully up to their supply pile before getting to his feet. He prodded the pack with the skis protruding from one end.
‘Very handy,’ he said morosely. ‘Oh, very handy for this lot indeed.’
‘As steep as that?’ Smith asked.
‘Vertical. Smooth as glass and you can’t see the bottom. How deep do you reckon it is, Major?’
‘Who knows?’ Smith shrugged. ‘We’re seven thousand feet up. Maps never give details at this altitude. Break out that nylon.’
The proper supply pack was located and the nylon produced, one thousand feet of it coiled inside a canvas bag as it had come from the makers. It had very little more diameter than a clothes-line but its wire core made it immensely strong and every yard of it had been fully tested to its rated breaking strain—its actual breaking strain was much higher—before leaving the factory. Smith tied a hammer to one end, and with two of the men holding him securely, paid it out over the edge, counting his arm spans as he let it go. Several times the hammer snagged on some unseen obstruction but each time Smith managed to swing it free. Finally the rope went completely slack and, despite all Smith’s efforts, it remained that way.
‘Well.’ Smith moved back from the edge. ‘That seems to be about it.’
‘And if it isn’t, hey?’ Christiansen asked. ‘If it’s caught on a teensy-weensy ledge a thousand feet above damn all?’
‘I’ll let you know,’ Smith said shortly.
‘You measured it off,’ Carraciola said. ‘How deep?’
‘Two hundred feet.’
‘Eight hundred feet left, eh?’ Thomas grinned.
‘We’ll need it all to tie up the garrison of the Schloss Adler.’
No one was amused. Smith said: ‘I’ll need a piton and two walkie-talkies.’
Fifteen feet back from the edge of the cliff they cleared away the snow and hammered an angled piton securely into the bare rock. Smith made a double bowline at one end of the nylon, slipped his legs through the loops, unclasped his belt then fastened it tightly round both himself and the rope and slipped a walkie-talkie over his shoulder. The rope was then passed round the piton and three men, backs to the cliff, wrapped it round their hands and prepared to take the weight. Schaffer stood by with the other walkie-talkie.
Smith checked that there were no sharp or abrasive edges on the cliff-top, wriggled cautiously over and gave the signal to be lowered. The descent itself was simple. As Thomas had said, it was a vertical drop and all he had to do was to fend himself off from the face as the men above paid out the rope. Once only, passing an overhang, he spun wildly in space, but within ten seconds regained contact with the rock face again. Mountaineering made easy, Smith thought. Or it seemed easy: perhaps, he thought wryly, it was as well that he couldn’t see what stretched beneath him.
His feet passed through eighteen inches of snow and rested on solid ground. He flashed his torch in a semi-circle, from cliff wall to cliff wall. If it was a ledge, it was a very big one for, as far as his eye and torch could reach, it appeared to be a smooth plateau sloping gently outwards from the cliff. The cliff wall itself was smooth, unbroken, except for one shallow fissure, a few feet wide, close by to where he stood. He climbed out of the double bowline and made the switch on the walkie-talkie.
‘OK so far. Haul up the rope. Supplies first, then yourselves.’
The rope snaked upwards into the darkness. Within five minutes all the equipment had been lowered in two separate loads. Christiansen appeared soon afterwards.
‘What’s all the fuss about this Alpine stuff, then?’ he asked cheerfully. ‘My grandmother could do it.’
‘Maybe we should have brought your grandmother along instead,’ Smith said sourly. ‘We’re not down yet. Take your torch and find out how big this ledge is and the best way down and for God’s sake don’t go falling over any precipices.’
Christiansen grinned and moved off. Life was for the living and Christiansen gave the impression of a man thoroughly enjoying himself. While he was away reconnoitring, all the others came down in turn until only Schaffer was left. His plaintive voice came over the walkie-talkie.
‘And how am I supposed to get down? Hand over hand for two hundred feet? Frozen hand over frozen hand for two hundred feet on a rope this size? You’d better stand clear. Somebody should have thought of this.’
‘Somebody did,’ Smith said patiently. ‘Make sure the rope is still round the piton then kick the other eight hundred feet over the edge.’
‘There’s always an answer.’ Schaffer sounded relieved.
They had just lowered him to the ground when Christiansen returned.
‘It’s not so bad,’ he reported. ‘There’s another cliff ahead of us, maybe fifty yards away, curving around to the east. At least I think it’s a cliff. I didn’t try to find out how deep or how steep. I’m married. But the plateau falls away gently to the west there. Seems it might go on a fair way. Trees, too. I followed the line of them for two hundred yards.’
‘Trees? At this altitude?’
‘Well, no masts for a tall ship. Scrub pine. They’ll give shelter, hiding.’
‘Fair enough,’ Smith nodded. ‘We’ll bivouac there.’
‘So close?’ The surprised tone in Schaffer’s voice showed that he didn’t think much of the idea. ‘Shouldn’t we get as far down this mountain as possible tonight, Major?’
‘No need. If we start at first light we’ll be well below the main tree line by dawn.’
‘I agree with Schaffer,’ Carraciola said reasonably. ‘Let’s get as much as we can behind us. What do you think, Olaf?’ This to Christiansen.
‘It doesn’t matter what Christiansen thinks.’ Smith’s voice was quiet but cold as the mountain air itself. ‘Nor you, Carraciola. This isn’t a roundtable seminar, it’s a military operation. Military operations have leaders. Like it or not, Admiral Rolland put me in charge. We stay here tonight. Get the stuff across.’
The five men looked speculatively at one another, then stooped to lift the supplies. There was no longer any question as to who was in charge.
‘We pitch the tents right away, boss?’ Schaffer asked.
‘Yes.’ In Schaffer’s book, Smith reflected, ‘boss’ was probably a higher mark of respect than either ‘Major’ or ‘sir’. ‘Then hot food, hot coffee and a try for London on the radio. Haul that rope down, Christiansen. Come the dawn, we don’t want to start giving heart attacks to any binocular-toting characters in the Schloss Adler.’
Christiansen nodded, began to haul on the rope. As the free end rose into the air, Smith gave a shout, jumped towards Christiansen and caught his arm. Christiansen, startled, stopped pulling and looked round.
‘Jesus!’ Smith drew the back of his hand across his forehead. ‘That was a close one.’
‘What’s up?’ Schaffer asked quickly.
‘Two of you. Hoist me up. Quickly! Before that damn rope disappears.’
Two of them hoisted him into the air. Smith reached up and caught the dangling end of the rope, dropped to earth, taking the rope with him and then very carefully, very securely, tied it to the other end of the rope.
‘Now that you’ve quite finished—’ Torrance-Smythe said politely.
‘The radio.’ Smith let out a long sigh of relief. ‘There’s only one list of frequencies, call signs and code. Security. And that one list is inside Sergeant Harrod’s tunic.’
‘Mind if I mop my brow, too, boss?’ Schaffer enquired.
‘I’ll go get it for you if you like,’ Christiansen volunteered.
‘Thanks. But it’s my fault and I’ll get it. Besides, I’m the only person here who’s done any climbing—or so I believe from Colonel Wyatt-Turner—and I think you’d find that cliff rather more awkward to climb than descend. No hurry. Let’s bivouac and eat first.’
‘If you can’t do better than this, Smithy,’ Schaffer said to Torrance-Smythe, ‘you can have a week’s notice. Starting from a week ago.’ He scraped the bottom of his metal plate and shuddered. ‘I was brought up in a Christian home, so I won’t tell you what this reminds me of.’
‘It’s not my fault,’ Torrance-Smythe complained. ‘They packed the wrong size tin-openers.’ He stirred the indeterminate-looking goulash in the pot on top of the butane stove and looked hopefully at the men seated in a rough semicircle in the dimly-lit tent. ‘Anyone for any more?’
‘That’s not funny,’ Schaffer said severely.
‘Wait till you try his coffee,’ Smith advised, ‘and you’ll be wondering what you were complaining about.’ He rose, poked his head through the door to take a look at the weather, looked inside again. ‘May take me an hour. But if it’s been drifting up there…‘
The seated men, suddenly serious, nodded. If it had been drifting up there it might take Smith a very long time indeed to locate Sergeant Harrod.
‘It’s a bad night,’ Schaffer said. ‘I’ll come and give you a hand.’
‘Thanks. No need. I’ll haul myself up and lower myself down. A rope round a piton is no elevator, but it’ll get me there and back and two are no better than one for that job. But I’ll tell you what you can do.’ He moved out and reappeared shortly afterwards carrying the radio which he placed in front of Schaffer. ‘I don’t want to go all the way up there to get the code-book just to find that some hob-nailed idiot has fallen over this and given it a heart attack. Guard it with your life, Lieutenant Schaffer.’
‘Aye, aye, sir,’ Schaffer said solemnly.
With a hammer and a couple of spare pitons hanging from his waist, Smith secured himself to the rope, with double bowline and belt as before, grabbed the free end of the rope and began to haul himself up. Smith’s statement to the others that this was a job for a mountaineer seemed hardly accurate for the amount of mountaineering skill required was minimal. It was gruelling physical labour, no more. Most of the time, with his legs almost at right angles to his body, he walked up the vertical cliff face: on the stretch of the overhang, with no assistance for his arms, he twice had to take a turn of the free end of the rope and rest until the strength came back to aching shoulder and forearm muscles: and by the time he finally dragged himself, gasping painfully and sweating like a man in a sauna bath, over the edge of the cliff, exhaustion was very close indeed. He had overlooked the crippling effect of altitude to a man unaccustomed to it.
He lay face down for several minutes until breathing and pulse returned to something like normal—or what was normal for seven thousand feet—rose and examined the piton round which the nylon passed. It seemed firm enough but, for good measure, he gave it another few heavy blows with the hammer, undid the double bowline round his legs and secured the end of the rope to the piton with a round turn and two half-hitches, hauling on the rope until the knot locked tight.
He moved a few feet farther away from the cliff edge, cleared away the snow and lightly hammered in one of the spare pitons he had brought with him. He tested it with his hand to see if it broke clear easily. It did. He tapped it in lightly a second time and led round it the part of the rope that was secured to the firmly anchored first piton. Then he walked away, moving up the gently sloping plateau, whistling ‘Lorelei’. It was, as Smith himself would have been the first to admit, a far from tuneful whistle, but recognizable for all that. A figure appeared out of the night and came running towards him, stumbling and slipping in the deep snow. It was Mary Ellison. She stopped short a yard away and put her hands on her hips.
‘Well!’ He could hear her teeth chattering uncontrollably with the cold. ‘You took your time about it, didn’t you?’
‘Never wasted a minute,’ Smith said defensively. ‘I had to have a hot meal and coffee first.’
‘You had to have—you beast, you selfish beast!’ She took a quick step forward and flung her arms around his neck. ‘I hate you.’
‘I know.’ He pulled off a gauntlet and gently touched her disengaged cheek. ‘You’re frozen.’
‘You’re frozen, he says! Of course I’m frozen. I almost died in that plane. Why couldn’t you have supplied some hot water bottles—or—or an electrically heated suit or—or something? I thought you loved me!’
‘I can’t help what you think,’ Smith said kindly, patting her on the back. ‘Where’s your gear?’
‘Fifty yards. And stop patting me in that—that avuncular fashion.’
‘Language, language,’ Smith said. ‘Come on, let’s fetch it.’
They trudged upwards through the deep snow, Mary holding his arm tightly. She said curiously: ‘What on earth excuse did you give for coming back up here? Lost a cuff-link?’
‘There was something I had to come for, something apart from you, although I gave a song-and-dance act of having forgotten about it until the last moment, until it was almost too late. The radio code-book inside Sergeant Harrod’s tunic.’
‘He—he lost it? He dropped it? How—how could he have been so criminally careless!’ She stopped, puzzled. ‘Besides, it’s chained—’
‘It’s still inside Sergeant Harrod’s tunic,’ Smith said sombrely. ‘He’s up here, dead.’
‘Dead?’ She stopped and clutched him by the arms. After a long pause, she repeated: ‘He’s dead! That—that nice man. I heard him saying he’d never jumped before. A bad landing?’
‘So it seems.’
They located the kit-bag in silence and Smith carried it back to the edge of the cliff. Mary said: ‘And now? The code-book?’
‘Let’s wait a minute. I want to watch this rope.’
‘Why the rope?’
‘Why not?’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Mary said resignedly. ‘I’m only a little girl. I suppose you know what you’re doing.’
‘I wish to God I did,’ Smith said feelingly.
They waited, again in silence, side by side on the kit-bag. Both stared at the rope in solemn concentration as if nylon ropes at seven thousand feet had taken on a special meaningfulness denied nylon ropes elsewhere. Twice Smith tried to light a cigarette and twice it sputtered to extinction in the drifting snow. The minutes passed, three, maybe four: they felt more like thirty or forty. He became conscious that the girl beside him was shivering violently—he guessed that she had her teeth clamped tight to prevent their chattering—and was even more acutely conscious that his entire left side—he was trying to shelter her from the wind and snow—was becoming numb. He rose to leave when suddenly the rope gave a violent jerk and the piton farther from the cliff edge was torn free. The loop of the rope slid quickly down past the piton to which it was anchored and kept on going till it was brought up short by its anchor. Whatever pressure was on the rope increased until the nylon bit deeply into the fresh snow on the cliff edge. Smith moved across and tested the pressure on the rope, at first gingerly and tentatively then with all his strength. The rope was bar-taut and remained bar-taut. But the piton held.
‘What—what on earth—’ Mary began, then broke off. Her voice was an unconscious whisper.
‘Charming, charming,’ Smith murmured. ‘Someone down there doesn’t like me. Surprised?’
‘If—if that spike hadn’t held we’d never have got down again.’ The tremor in her voice wasn’t all due to the cold.
‘It’s a fair old jump,’ Smith conceded.
He took her arm and they moved off. The snow was heavier now and even with the aid of their torches visibility was no more than six feet, but, by using the rocky outcrop as a bearing, it took Smith no more than two minutes to locate Sergeant Harrod, now no more than a featureless mound buried in the depths of the snow-drift. Smith brushed aside the covering shroud of white, undid the dead man’s tunic, recovered the codebook, hung the chain round his neck and buttoned the book securely inside his own Alpenkorps uniform.
Then came the task of turning Sergeant Harrod over on his side. Unpleasant Smith had expected it to be, and it was: impossible he hadn’t expected it to be, and it wasn’t—not quite. But the effort all but defeated him, and the dead man was stiff as a board, literally frozen solid into the arms outflung position into which he had fallen. For the second time that night Smith could feel the sweat mingling with the melted snow on his face. But by and by he had him over, the frozen right arm pointing up into the snow-filled sky. Smith knelt, brought his torch close and carefully examined the back of the dead man’s head.
‘What are you trying to do?’ Mary asked. ‘What are you looking for?’ Again her voice was a whisper.
‘His neck is broken. I want to find out just how it was broken.’ He glanced up at the girl. ‘You don’t have to look.’
‘Don’t worry.’ She turned away. ‘I’m not going to.’
The clothes, like the man, were frozen stiff. The hood covering Harrod’s head crackled and splintered in Smith’s gauntleted hands as he pulled it down, exposing the back of the head and neck. Finally, just below the collar of the snow-smock, Smith found what he was searching for—a red mark at the base of the neck where the skin was broken. He rose, caught the dead man’s ankles and dragged him a foot or two down the slope.
‘What now?’ In spite of herself Mary was watching again, in reluctant and horrified fascination. ‘What are you looking for now?’
‘A rock,’ Smith said briefly. There was a cold edge to the words and although Mary knew it wasn’t intended for her, it was an effective discouragement to any further questioning.
Smith cleared the snow for two feet around where Harrod’s head had lain. With hand and eyes he examined the ground with meticulous care, rose slowly to his feet, took Mary’s arm and began to walk away. After a few steps he hesitated, stopped, turned back to the dead man and turned him over again so that the right arm was no longer pointing towards the sky.
Half-way back to the cliff edge, Smith said abruptly:
‘Something struck Harrod on the back of the neck. I thought it might have been a rock. But there was no rock where he lay, only turf.’
‘There was a rocky outcrop nearby.’
‘You don’t break your neck on a rocky outcrop, then stand up and jump out into a snowdrift. Even had he rolled over into the drift, he could never have finished with his head seven feet out from the rock. He was struck by some hard metallic object, either the butt of a gun or the haft of a knife. The skin is broken but there is no bruising for the neck was broken immediately afterwards. When he was unconscious. To make us think it was an accident. It must have happened on the rock—there was no disturbance in the snow round Harrod—and it must have happened while he was upright. A tap on the neck, a quick neck-twist, then he fell or was pushed over the edge of the outcrop. Wonderful stuff, stone,’ Smith finished bitterly. ‘It leaves no footprints.’
Mary stopped and stared at him.
‘Do you realize what you’re saying?’ She caught his speculative and very old-fashioned look, took his arm and went on quickly: ‘No, I mean the implications. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, of course you do, John, I—I’m scared. Even all those months with you in Italy—well, you know, nothing like this—’ She broke off, then continued: ‘Couldn’t there—couldn’t there be some other explanation?’
‘Like he hit himself on the back of the head or the abominable snowman got him?’
She looked at him steadily, her dark eyes far too large in what could be seen of her hooded face. ‘I don’t deserve that, John. I am frightened.’
‘Me, too.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Well, if I’m not, it’s damn well time I started to be.’
Smith checked his descent when he estimated he was about forty feet from the base of the cliff. He took two turns of the nylon round his left leg, damped it with his right, took a turn round his left arm, pulled off his right gauntlet with his teeth, stuffed it inside his tunic, eased out his Luger, slid the safety catch and went on his way again, checking his speed of descent with his gauntleted hand. It was a reasonable enough expectation that whoever had tried to pull down the rope would be waiting there to finish off the job.
But there was no reception committee waiting, not, at least, at the spot where he touched down. He traversed a quick circle with his torch. There was nobody there and nothing there and the footprints that must have been there were long obscured by the drifting snow. Gun in one hand, torch in the other, he moved along the cliff face for thirty yards then moved out in a semi-circle until he arrived back at the cliff-face. The rope-puller had evidently opted for discretion. Smith returned to the rope and jerked it. In two minutes he had Mary’s kit-bag down and, a few minutes later, Mary herself. As soon as she had stepped out of the double bowline, Smith undid the knot, pulled the rope down from the top of the cliff and coiled it. So numbed and frozen were his hands by this time that the operation took him nearly fifteen minutes.
Rope over one shoulder, her kit-bag on the other, Smith led Mary to the fissure in the cliff side.
‘Don’t pitch the tent,’ Smith said. ‘Unroll it, put your sleeping bag on one half, get into it and pull the other half of the tent over you. Half an hour and you’ll be covered with drifting snow. The snow will not only keep you warm, it’ll hide you from any somnambulists. I’ll be along in the morning before we leave.’
He walked away, stopped, looked back. Mary was still standing where he had left her, looking after him. There was no sag to her shoulders, no particular expression to her face, but for all that she looked oddly defenceless, lonely and forlorn, a quality as indefinable as it was unmistakable. Smith hesitated, then went back to her, unrolled her tent and sleeping bag, waited till she had climbed in, zipped up the bag and pulled the other half of the tent up to her chin. She smiled at him. He fixed the sleeping bag hood, pulled a corner of the tent over it and left, all without saying a word.
Locating his own tent was simple enough, a steady light burnt inside it. Smith beat the snow from his clothes, stooped and entered. Christiansen, Thomas and Carraciola were in their sleeping bags and were asleep or appeared to be. Torrance-Smythe was checking over their store of plastic explosives, fuses, detonators and grenades, while Schaffer was reading a paper-back—in German—smoking a cigarette—also German—and faithfully guarding the radio. He put down the book and looked at Smith.