‘You are slipping, Major Smith.’ Mary’s eyes were red-rimmed and her tear-streaked face white as paper, but she (could still smile at him. ‘Distractions, you said. I’ve had the same thought myself, and I’m only me.’
Smith gave her a half-smile, the way his hand, hurt he felt he couldn’t afford the other half, and tried the handle of a door beside the low platform, a door lettered AKTEN RAUM — Records Office. Such a door, inevitably, was locked. He took the Luger in his left hand, placed it against the lock, squeezed the trigger and went inside.
It certainly looked like a Records Office. The room was heavily shelved and piled ceiling-high with files and papers. Smith crossed to the window, opened it wide to increase the draught then scattered large piles of paper on the floor and put a match to them. The paper flared up at once, the flames feet high within seconds.
‘Kinda forgot this, didn’t you?’ Schaffer had returned and was bearing with him the large CO2 cylinder. He crossed to the window. ‘Gardyloo or mind your heads or whatever the saying is.’
The cylinder disappeared through the open window. The room was already so furiously ablaze that Schaffer had difficulty in finding his way back to the door again. As he stumbled out, his clothes and hair singed and face smoke-blackened, a deep-toned bell far down in the depths of the Schloss Adler began to ring with a strident urgency. ‘For God’s sake, what next,’ Schaffer said in despair. ‘The fire brigade?’
‘Just about,’ Smith said bitterly. ‘Damn it, why couldn’t I have checked first? Now they know where we are.’
‘A heat-sensing device linked to an indicator?’
‘What else? Come on.’
They ran along the central passage-way, driving the prisoners in front of them, dropped down a central flight of stairs and were making for the next when they heard the shouting of voices and the clattering of feet on treads as soldiers came running up from the castle courtyard.
‘Quickly! In behind there!’ Smith pointed to a curtained alcove. ‘Hurry up! Oh, God — -I’ve forgotten something!’ He turned and ran back the way he had come.
“Where the hell has he — ‘ Schaffer broke off as he realised the approaching men were almost upon them, whirled and jabbed the nearest prisoner painfully with the muzzle of his Schmeisser. ‘In that alcove. Fast.’ In the dim light behind the curtains he changed his machine-pistol for the silenced Luger. ‘Don’t even think of touching those curtains. With the racket that bell’s making, they won’t even hear you die.’
Nobody touched the curtains. Jack-booted men, gasping heavily for breath, passed by within feet of them. They clattered furiously up the next flight of stairs, the one Smith and the others had just descended, and then ù the footsteps stopped abruptly. From the next shouted words it was obvious that they had just caught sight of the fire and had abruptly and for the first time realised the magnitude of the task they had to cope with.
‘Emergency! Sergeant, get on that phone!’ It was the voice of the Oberleutnant who had led the break-in to the radio room. ‘Fire detail at the double! Hoses, more CO2 cylinders. Where in God’s name is Colonel Kramer. Corporal! Find Colonel Kramer at once.’
The corporal didn’t answer, the sound of jutting heels striking the treads as he raced down the stairs was answer enough. He ran by the alcove and ran down the next flight of stairs until the sound of his footfalls was lost in the metallic clamour of the alarm bell. Schaffer risked a peep through a crack in the curtains just as Smith came running up on tiptoe.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Schaffer’s voice was low and fierce.
‘Come on, come on! Out of it!’ Smith said urgently. ‘No, Jones, not down that flight of stairs, you want to meet a whole regiment of Alpenkorps coming up it? Along the passage to the west wing. We’ll use the side stairs. For God’s sake, hurry. This place will be like Piccadilly Circus in a matter of seconds.’
Schaffer pounded along the passage beside Smith and when he spoke again the anxiety-born fierceness of tone had a certain plaintive equality to it. ‘Well, where the bloody hell have you been?’
‘The man we left tied up in the room beside the telephone exchange. The Records Office is directly above. I just remembered. I cut him free and dragged him out to the passage. He’d have burnt to death.’
‘You did that, did you?’ Schaffer said wonderingly. ‘You do think of the most goddamned unimportant things, don’t you?’
‘It’s a point of view. Our friend lying in the passage back there wouldn’t share your sentiments. Right, down those stairs and straight ahead. Mary, you know the door.’
Mary knew the door. Fifteen paces from the foot of the stairs she stopped. Smith spared a glance through the passage window on his left. Already smoke and flame were snowing through the windows and embrasures in the north-east tower of the castle. In the courtyard below, dozens of soldiers were running around, most of them without what appeared to be any great sense of purpose or direction. One man there wasn’t running. He was the overalled helicopter pilot and he was standing very still indeed, bent low over the engine. As Smith watched he slowly straightened, lifted his right arm and shook his fist in the direction of the burning tower.
Smith turned away and said to Mary: ‘Sure this is the room? Two stories below the window we came in?”
Mary nodded. ‘No question. This is it.’
Smith tried the door handle: the room was locked. The time for skeleton keys and such-like finesse was gone: he placed the barrel of his Luger against the lock.
The corporal despatched by his Oberleutnant to locate Colonel Kramer was faced by the same problem when he turned the handle of the gold drawing-room, for when Smith and the others had left there for the last time Schaffer had locked the door and thoughtfully thrown the key out a convenient passage window. The corporal first of all knocked respectfully. No reply. He knocked loudly, with the same lack of result. He depressed the handle and used his shoulder and all he did was to hurt his shoulder. He battered at the lock area with the butt of his Schmeisser but the carpenters who had built the Schloss Adler doors had known what they were about. He hesitated, then ‘brought his machine-pistol right way round and fired a burst through the lock, praying to heaven that Colonel Kramer wasn’t sleeping in a chair in direct line with the keyhole.
Colonel Kramer was sleeping all right, but nowhere near the direct line of the keyhole. He was stretched out on the gold carpet with a considerately-placed pillow under his head. The corporal advanced slowly into the drawing-room, his eyebrows reaching for his hair and his face almost falling apart in shocked disbelief. Reichsmarschall Rosemeyer was stretched out beside the Colonel. Von Brauchitsch and a sergeant were sprawled in arm-chairs, heads lolling on their shoulders, while Anne-Marie — a very dishevelled and somewhat bruised-looking Anne-Marie — was stretched out on one of the big gold-lame couches.
Like a man in a daze, still totally uncomprehending, the corporal approached Kramer, knelt by his side and then shook him by the shoulder, with gentle respect at first and then with increasing vigour. After some time it was borne in upon him that he could shake the Colonel’s shoulder all night and that would be all he would have for it.
And then, illogically and for the first time, he noticed that all the men were without jackets, and that everyone, including Anne-Marie, had their left sleeves rolled up to the elbow. He looked slowly around the drawing-room and went very still as his gaze rested on a tray with bottles, beakers and hypodermic syringes. Slowly, on the corporal’s face, shocked incomprehension was replaced by an equally shocked understanding. He took off through the doorway like the favourite in the Olympics 100 metres final.
Schaffer tied the nylon rope round the head of the iron bedstead, tested the security of the knot, lifted the lower sash window, pushed the rope through and peered unhappily down the valley. At the far end of the village a pulsating red glow marked the smouldering embers of what had once been the railway station. The lights of the village itself twinkled clearly. Immediately below and to the right of where he stood could be seen four patrolling guards with as many dogs — Kramer hadn’t spoken idly when he’d said the outside guards had been doubled — and the ease with which he could spot them Schaffer found all too readily understandable when he twisted his head and stared skywards through the thinly driving snow. The moon had just emerged from behind a black bar of cloud and was sailing across a discouragingly large stretch of empty sky. Even the stars could be seen.