In the Schloss Adler two people were watching the wild upward progress of the cable-car, now brilliantly illuminated by the moon. Through Mary’s field-glasses two clearly distinguishable shapes of men could be seen stretched out on the cable-car roof. For half a minute she kept the glasses trained on them, then slowly turned away, her eyes wide, almost staring, her face empty of expression. Fifty feet above her head a sentry with slung gun patrolling the battlements stopped and gazed down at the cable-car crawling up the valley. But he didn’t gaze for long. Although booted, gauntleted and muffled to the ears, he shook with the cold. It was no night for idle spectating. He looked away indifferently and resumed his brisk sentry-go.
Indifference was a quality that was conspicuously lacking on top of the cable-car. The cable-car was on the last lap now, the section between the last pylon and the castle header station. Soon the moment of truth. A minute from then, Smith thought, and they could both well be lying broken and lifeless on the rocks two hundred feet below.
He twisted his head upwards. The cold moon still sailed across a clear gap in the sky but was closing rapidly towards another bank of cloud. The castle battlements, with the header station at the base, seemed almost vertically above his head. So steeply was the car rising on this last section that the volcanic plug itself was now less than fourteen yards away. His gaze followed the volcanic plug downwards till it readied its base: down there, on the slopes below, patrolling guards and their Dobermann pinchers were barely the size of beetles.
‘Suits her, doesn’t it?’ Schaffer said suddenly. Harsh edges of strain buried in his voice and his face was tight and desperate. ‘A lovely name.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Smith demanded.
‘Heidi.’
‘Oh, my God!’ Smith stared up at the rapidly closing header station. ‘Her name is Ethel.’
‘You didn’t have to tell me.’ Schaffer tried to sound aggrieved but it didn’t quite come off. He followed Smith’s upward gaze and, after a long pause, said very slowly: ‘Jesus! Look at the slope of that goddamned roof!’
‘I’ve been looking.’ Smith eased his knife from its sheath and made a quick grab at the suspension bracket as a particularly violent swing almost broke his grip with his other hand. ‘Get your knife ready. And for God’s sake don’t lose it.’
The moon slid behind a black patch of cloud and the valley was flooded with darkness. Slowly, carefully, as the cable-car approached the header station and the swaying motion dampened down, Smith and Schaffer eased their way to the after end of the car, rose gingerly but swiftly to their feet and grabbed the cable with their free hands while their feet tried to find what precarious hold they could on the treacherously ice-sheathed roof.
The front of the car passed under the lip of the header station roof. A moment later the suspension bracket followed and Smith lunged forward and upwards, flinging himself bodily on to the roof. His right arm struck downwards and the knife blade pierced the coating of ice and imbedded itself firmly in the wood beneath. Less than a second later Schaffer had landed beside him, the downward arcing knife making contact at exactly the same instant as himself.
The blade broke off at the hilt. Schaffer opened his hand, dropped the haft and clawed desperately at the ic& The dragging nails ripped through the encrusting ice, quite failing to hold him. He reached his left hand to his mouth, tore off the gauntlet and dug both hands in with all the strength that was in him. He slowed, but not enough. His scrabbling toes failed to find any more purchase and he knew he was sliding out over the edge — and that when he went the first thing to halt his fall would be the rock-pile two hundred and fifty feet beneath at the base of the volcanic plug.
Smith had been badly winded by his fall. Several seconds elapsed before he realised that Schaffer wasn’t where he should have been — lying on the roof beside him. He twisted round, saw the white blur of Schaffer’s strained and desperate face, had a vague impression of Schaffer’s eight finger-nails scoring their way through the ice as his body, already, up to mid-thigh, slid inexorably over the edge and brought his left hand flashing down with a speed and power that, even in those circumstances, made Schaffer grunt in pain as the vice-like grip clamped over his right wrist.
For some seconds they lay like that, spreadeagled and motionless on the sloping rope, the lives of both dependent on the slim imbedded blade of Smith’s knife; then Schaffer, urged by Smith’s quivering left arm, began to inch his way slowly upwards. Thirty seconds later and he was level with Smith.
‘This is a knife I have, not an ice-axe,’ Smith said hoarsely. ‘Won’t take much more of this. Have you another knife?’
Schaffer shook his head. Momentarily, speech was beyond him.
‘Piton?’
The same shake of the head.
‘Your torch?’
Schaffer nodded, reached under the cumbersome snow-smock with his left hand and eventually managed to wriggle his torch free.
‘Unscrew the bottom,’ Smith said. ‘Throw it away — and the battery.’ Schaffer brought his left hand across,to where his right was pinioned by Smith, removed base and battery, flattened the now empty cylinder base a little, reversed his grip and gouged the torch into the ice, downwards and towards himself. He moved his right hand and Smith released his grip. Schaffer remained where he was. Smith smiled and said: ‘Try holding me.’
Schaffer caught Smith’s left wrist. Tentatively, his hand still hooked in readiness, Smith removed his hand from the haft of the knife. Schaffer’s imbedded torch held firm. Cautiously at first, then with increasing confidence as the sharp blade cut through the protective sheathing of ice, Smith carved out a secure handhold in the wooden roof of the station, passed his knife to Schaffer, wriggled out of his snow-smock, undid a few turns of the knotted rope round his waist and secured the free end to Schaffers’ belt. He said: ‘With the knife and torch, think you can make it?’
‘Can I make it?’ Schaffer tested both knife and torch and smiled, a pretty strained effort, but his first for some time.
‘After what I’ve been through — well, ever seen a monkey go up a coconut palm tree?’
Fifty feet above their heads, Mary withdrew from the window and laid the binoculars on the chest of drawers. Her hands shook and the metal of the binoculars rattled like castanets against the glass top. She returned to the window and began to pay out the weighted string.
Smith came up the last few feet of the sloping roof at the end of the rope, caught Schaffer’s hand, stood upright on the flat inner section of the roof and at once began to unwind the rest of the knotted rope from his waist. Schaffer, although the temperature was far below freezing, wiped his brow like a man in a heat-wave.
‘Brother!’ He mopped his brow some more. ‘If I can ever do you a favour, like lending you a car-fare — ‘
Smith grinned, clapped his shoulder, reached up into the gloom, caught the weighted end of the suspended string and quickly bent the nylon on to it. He gave two gentle tugs and the rope began to move upwards as Mary hauled it in through the window. Smith waited until two more gentle return tugs indicated that the rope was securely fastened and began to climb.
He was half-way up to the window when the moon broke through. In his Alpenkorps uniform he was perfectly silhouetted against the gleaming white of the castle walls. He hung there motionless, not daring to move, not so much as even daring to glance upwards or downwards lest the movement attract some hostile attention.
Twenty-five feet below him Schaffer peered cautiously over the edge of the header station roof. The guards and dogs were still patrolling the area round the roof of the volcanic plug. They had only to give one casual upwards glance and Smith’s discovery was inevitable. Then some hair-prickling sixth sense made Schaffer look sharply upwards and he became very still indeed. The sentry, another circuit of the battlements completed, was standing with hands splayed out on the parapet, gazing out over the valley, perhaps watching the now dying flames from the burnt-out station: he had to lower his eyes only a fraction and that was that. Slowly, with his right hand, Schaffer brought up the Luger with the long perforated silencer screwed to its muzzle and laid it, in the best police fashion, across his left wrist. He had no doubt he could kill his man with one shot, the only question was when best to do it, how to weigh the balance of possibilities. If he waited until the man sighted them, he might give a warning shout or thrust himself back into cover before Schaffer could kill him. If he shot the sentry before he sighted them, then there would be no question of either escape or warning. But there was the possibility that the man might pitch forward over the battlements, crash off the roof of the header station and fall into the valley below, close by the patrolling men and dogs. A possibility only, Schaffer decided, not a probability: the slamming effect of the Luger shell would almost certainly knock him backwards off his feet. Schaffer had never before gunned down an unsuspecting man, but he coldly prepared to do so now. He lined up the luminous sight on the man’s breast-bone and began to squeeze the trigger.