Smith and Schaffer reached the safety of an unbroken stretch of fencing and peered down just in time to see the car, upside down now and its headlamps still blazing, strike the surface of the lake with an oddly flat explosive sound, like distant gunfire. A column of water and weirdly phosphorescent spray reached half-way up the cliff side. When it subsided, they could at once locate from an underwater luminescence the position of the sinking car: the headlamps were still burning. Smith and Schaffer looked at each other then Smith thoughtfully removed his peaked cap and sent it sailing over the edge. The strong gusting wind blew the cap in against the cliff face, but it tumbled on down and landed, inside up, on still surfacing bubbles iridescently glittering from the light now far below. Then the light went out.
‘So who cares?’ Schaffer straightened up from the fencing and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Wasn’t our car. Back to the village, hey?’
‘Not on your life,’ Smith said emphatically. ‘And I mean that–literally. Come on. Other way.’
Clutching their recently acquired weapons, they ran round the corner in the direction in which the car had been travelling. They had covered less than seventy yards when they heard the sound of car engines and saw wavering beams lighting up the splintered fence. Seconds later Smith and Schaffer were off the road, hidden in the pines and moving slowly back in the direction of a command car and two armoured cars that had now pulled up at the broken barrier.
“That’s it, then, Herr Colonel.’ An Alpenkorps sergeant with shoulder slung gun peered gingerly over the edge of the cliff. ‘Going too fast, saw it too late–or never saw it at all. The Blau See is over a hundred metres deep here, Herr Colonel. They’re gone.’
‘Maybe they’re gone and maybe they’re not. I wouldn’t trust that lot as far as my front door.’ Colonel Weissner’s voice carried clearly and sounded bitter. ‘They may have faked it and doubled back. Send one party of men straight into the pines there as far as the cliff wall. Five metre spacing. Let them use their torches. Then another party of men five hundred metres in the car back towards the camp. You go with them, Sergeant. Again spread out to the cliff-face. Let them come together. And be quick.’
Schaffer, from his hiding-place behind the bole of a pine, looked thoughtfully at Smith.
‘I have to concede a point, boss, it’s perhaps as well we didn’t go straight back to the village. Cunning old devil, isn’t he?’
‘And what does that make me?’ Smith murmured.
‘Okay, okay. I’ll concede that point, too.’
Five minutes passed. Comparatively little of the falling snow penetrated the thickly-matted branches of the pines and the two men could clearly see the occasional flicker of torches as the line of men nearest them moved away to the south, their lights probing behind tree-trunks and under windfalls as they searched for the two escaped prisoners. Colonel Weissner paced up and down, slowly, beside his command car, his head bowed as if immersed in thought. From time to time he consulted his watch. As Smith watched, he moved out to the unbroken fencing and remained there, peering down towards the surface of the Blau See.
By and by Smith and Schaffer could hear the distant sound of muffled voices and within a minute the sergeant moved into the beam of the command car headlamps, approached Colonel Weissner and saluted.
‘Not even a footprint, Herr Colonel.’
Weissner straightened and turned.
‘There wouldn’t be,’ he said sombrely. ‘I’ve just seen a hat floating in the water. A squalid end for such brave men, Sergeant. A squalid end.”
The cable-car moved slowly out of the lower station at the beginning of its long climb up to the castle. An impossible climb, Mary thought, a dangerous and impossible climb. Peering through the front windows she could just distinguish the outline of the first pylon through the thinly-driving snow. The second and third pylons were invisible, but the intermittently shining cluster of lights suspended impossibly high in the sky showed clearly enough where they had to go. People have made it before, she thought dully, we’ll probably make it, too. The way she felt then, with the bottom gone from her world, she didn’t particularly care whether she made it or not.
The cable-car was a twelve-passenger vehicle, painted bright red outside, well-lit inside. There were no seats, only grab-rails along the two sides. That the grab-rails were very necessary became immediately and alarmingly obvious. The wind was now very strong and the car began to sway alarmingly only seconds after clearing the shelter of the lower station.
Apart from two soldiers and an apparent civilian, the only other passengers consisted of von Brauchitsch, Mary and Heidi, the last now with a heavy woollen coat and cossack fur hat over her ordinary clothes. Von Brauchitsch, holding on to the grab-rail with one hand, had his free arm round
Mary’s shoulders. He gave them a reassuring squeeze and smiled down at her.
‘Scared?’ he asked.
‘No.’ And she wasn’t, she hadn’t enough emotion left to be scared, but even with no hope left she was supposed to be a professional. ‘No, I’m not scared. I’m terrified. I feel seasick already. Does–does this cable ever break.’
‘Never.’ Von Brauchitsch was reassurance itself. ‘Just hang on to me and you’ll be all right.’
That’s what he used to say to me,’ Heidi said coldly.
‘Fraulein,’ von Brauchitsch explained patiently, ‘I am gifted beyond the average, but I haven’t yet managed to grow a third arm. Guests first.’
With a cupped cigarette in his hand, Schaffer leaned against the base of an unmistakable telephone pole and gazed thoughtfully into the middle distance. There was reason both for the hooded cigarette and the thoughtful expression. Less than a hundred yards away from where he stood at the edge of the pines bordering the road running alongside the shore of the Blau See he could see guards, clearly illuminated by over-head lights, moving briskly to and fro in the vicinity of the barrack gates. Dimly seen behind them were the outline of the barracks themselves.
Schaffer shifted his stance and gazed upwards. The snow was almost gone now, the moon was threatening to break through, and he had no difficulty at all in distinguishing the form of Smith, his legs straddled across the lowest crossbar.
Smith was busily employed with a knife, a specially designed commando knife which, among other advanced features, had a built-in wire cutter. Carefully, methodically, he brought the wire-cutter to bear. With eight consecutive snips eight consecutive telephone wires fell to the ground. Smith closed and pocketed his knife, disentangled his legs from the cross-bar, wrapped his arms round the pole and slid down to the ground. He grinned at Schaffer.
‘Every little helps,’ he said.
‘Should hold them for a while,’ Schaffer agreed. Once more they gathered up their guns and moved off to the east, vanishing into the pine woods which bordered the rear of the barracks.
The cable-car swayed more alarmingly than ever. It had now entered upon the last near-vertical lap of its journey. With von Brauchitsch’s arm still around her shoulders, with her face still pressed against the front windows of the car, Mary stared up at the towering battlements, white as the driving snow, and thought that they reached up almost to the clouds themselves. As she watched, a break came in the wisping clouds and the whole fairy-tale castle was bathed in bright moonlight. Fear touched her eyes, she moistened her lips and gave an involuntary shiver. Nothing escaped von Brauchitsch’s acute perception. He gave her shoulders another reassuring squeeze, perhaps the twentieth in that brief journey. ‘Not to worry, Fraulein. It will be all right.’ ‘I hope so.’ Her voice was the ghost of a whisper.
The same unexpected moonlight almost caught Smith and Schaffer. They had just crossed the station tracks and were moving stealthily along towards the left luggage office when the moon broke through. But they were still in the shadows of ù the over-hanging station roof. They pressed back into those shadows and peered along the tracks, past the/hydraulic bumpers which marked the end of the line. Clearly now, sharply-limned as if in full daylight, red etched against the white, they could see one cable-car approaching the lower station, the other climbing the last few vertical feet towards the header station and, above that, the dazzling outline of the Schloss Adler glittering under the bright moon.
That helps,’ Schaffer said bitterly. ‘That helps a lot.’
‘Sky’s still full of clouds,’ Smith said mildly. He bent to the keyhole of the left luggage office, used his skeleton keys and moved inside. Schaffer followed, closing the door.
Smith located their rucksacks, cut a length of rope from the nylon, wrapped it round his waist and began stuffing some hand grenades and plastic explosives into a canvas bag. He raised his head as Schaffer diffidently cleared his throat.