The moon was almost obscured behind some darkly drifting cloud. A thin weak light filtered down into the half-seen obscurity of the valley below. Once again the snow was beginning to fall, gently. The air was taut, brittle, in the intensity of its coldness, an Arctic chill that bit to the bone. The icy wind that gusted through the room could have come off the polar ice-cap. ,
They were on the east side of the castle, Smith realised, the side remote from the cable-car header station. The base of the volcanic plug was shrouded in a gloom so deep that it was impossible to be sure whether or not the guards and Dobermanns were patrolling down there: and, for the purposes of present survival, it didn’t really matter. Smith withdrew from the window, pulled the nylon from the kit-bag, tied one end securely to the metal leg of the radio table, threw the remainder of the rope out into the night then, with his left hand, thoroughly scuffed and rubbed away the frozen encrusted snow on both the window-sill and for two or three feet beneath it: it would, he thought, have to be a hypercritical eye that didn’t immediately register the impression that ù there had been fairly heavy and recent traffic over the sill. He wondered, vaguely, whether the rope reached as far as the ground and dismissed the thought as soon as it had occurred to him: again, it didn’t really matter.
He crossed the room to where Schaffer lay spread-eagled in the doorway. The key was in the lock on the inside of the door and the lock, he observed with satisfaction, was on the same massive scale as everything else in the Schloss Adler. He said to Schaffer: ‘Time to close the door.’
‘Let’s wait till they show face again then discourage them some more,’ Schaffer suggested. ‘It’s been a couple of minutes since the last lad peeked his head round the corner there.
Another peek, another salvo from Schaffer and it might give us another couple of minutes’ grace — enough time to make it feasible for us to have shinned down that little rope there and made our getaway.’
‘I should have thought of that.’ An icy snow-laden gust of wind blew across the room, from open window through open door, and Smith shivered. ‘My God, it’s bitter!’
‘Loss of blood,’ Schaffer said briefly, then added, unsympathetically: ‘And all that brandy you guzzled back there. When it comes to opening pores — ‘
He broke off and lay very still, lowering his head a fraction to sight along the barrel of his Schmeisser. He said softly: ‘Give me your torch, boss.’
‘What is it?’ Smith whispered. He handed Schaffer the torch.
‘Discretion,’ Schaffer murmured. He switched on the torch and placed it on the floor, pushing it as far away from himself as he could. ‘I reckon if I were in their place I’d be discreet, too. There’s a stick poking round the corner of the passage and the stick has a mirror tied to it. Only, they haven’t got it angled right.’
Smith peered cautiously round the door jamb, just in time to see stick and suspended mirror being withdrawn from sight, presumably to make adjustments. A few seconds later and the stick appeared again, this time with the mirror angled at more or less forty-five degrees. Mirror and stick disintegrated under the flatly staccato hammering of Schaffer’s machine-pistol. Schaffer stood up, took careful aim at the single overhead light illuminating the passage and fired one shot. Now the sole light in the passage came from the torch on the floor, the light from which would not only effectively conceal from the Germans at the far end of the passage what was going on at the radio room door but, indeed, make it very difficult to decide whether or not the door itself was open or shut.
Smith and Schaffer moved back into the radio room, soundlessly closed the door behind them and as soundlessly turned the key in the lock. Schaffer used the leverage of his Schmeisser to bend the key so that it remained firmly jammed in the wards of the lock.
They waited. At least two minutes passed, then they heard the sound of excited voices at the far end of the passage followed almost at once by the sound of heavy boots pounding down the passage. They moved away from the door, passed inside the radio spares room, leaving just a sufficient crack in the doorway to allow a faint backwash of light to filter through. Smith said softly: ‘Mary, you and Mr. Jones for Thomas there. A gun in each temple.’ He took Christiansen for himself, forced him to kneel and ground his gun into the back of his neck. Schaffer backed Carraciola against a wall, the muzzle of his Schmeisser pressed hard against his teeth. At the other end of the machine-pistol Schaffer smiled pleasantly, his teeth a pale gleam in the near darkness. The stillness inside the little room was complete.
The half-dozen Germans outside the radio room door bore no resemblance to the elderly guard von Brauchitsch had interrogated in the courtyard. They were elite soldiers of the Alpenkorps, ruthless men who had been ruthlessly trained. No one made any move to approach the door handle or lock: the machine-like efficiency with which they broached that door without risk to themselves was clearly the result of a well-drilled procedure for handling situations of precisely this nature.
At a gesture from the Oberleutnant in charge, a soldier stepped forward and with two diagonal sweeps emptied the magazine of his machine-pistol through the door. A second used his machine-pistol to stitch a neat circle in the wood, reversed his gun and knocked in the wooden circle with the butt. A third armed two grenades and lobbed them accurately through the hole provided while a fourth shot away the lock. The soldiers pressed back on each side of the door. The two flat cracks of the exploding grenades came almost simultaneously and smoke came pouring through the circular hole in the door.
The door was kicked open and the men rushed inside. There was no longer any need to take precautions — any men who had been in the same confined space as those two exploding grenades would be dead men now. For a moment there was confusion and hesitation until the blue acrid smoke was partially cleared away by the powerful cross-draught then the Oberleutnant, locating the source of this draught with the aid of a small hand-torch, ran across to the open window, checked at the sight of the rope disappearing over the sill, leaned out the window, rubbed his now-streaming eyes and peered downwards along the beam of his torch. The beam reached perhaps half-way down the side of the volcanic plug. There was nothing to be seen. He caught the rope in his free hand and jerked it savagely: it was as nearly weightless as made no difference. For a moment he focused his torch on the disturbed snow on the window-ledge then swung back into the room.
‘Gott in Himmel!’ he shouted. “They’ve got away. They’re down already! Quickly, the nearest phone!’
“Well, now.’ Schaffer listened to the fading sound of running footsteps, removed the muzzle of his Schmeisser from Carraciola’s teeth and smiled approvingly. ‘That was a good boy.’ Gun in Carraciola’s back, he followed Smith out into the wrecked radio room and said thoughtfully: ‘It isn’t going to take them too long to find out there are no footprints in the snow down there.’
‘It’s going to take them even less time to discover that this rope is gone.’ Swiftly, ignoring the stabbing pain in his right hand, Smith hauled the nylon in through the window. ‘We’re going to need it. And we’re going to need some distractions.’
‘I’m distracted enough as it is,’ Schaffer said.
Take four or five plastic explosives, each with different fuse length settings. Chuck them into rooms along the corridor there.’
‘Distractions coming up.’ Schaffer extracted some plastic explosives from the kit-bag, cut the slow-burning R.D.X. fuses off to varying lengths, crimped on the chemical igniters, said, ‘Consider it already done,’ and left.
The first three rooms he came to were locked and he wasted neither time nor the precious ammunition of his silenced Luger in trying to open them. But each of the next five rooms was unlocked. In the first three, all bedrooms, he placed charges in a Dresden fruit bowl, under an officer’s cap and under a pillow: in the fourth room, a bathroom, he placed it behind a W.C. and in the fifth, a store-room, high up on a shelf beside some highly inflammable-looking cardboard cartons.
Smith, meanwhile, had ushered the others from the still smoke-filled, eye-watering, throat-irritating atmosphere of the radio room into the comparatively purer air of the passageway beyond, and was waiting the return of Schaffer when his face became suddenly thoughtful at the sight of some fire-fighting gear — a big CO2 extinguisher, buckets of sand and a fireman’s axe — on a low platform by the passage wall.