‘Good lad,’ Mallory said approvingly. He looked at Groves and Reynolds. ‘We’ll need two more ponies Saddle them up, will you?’
The two sergeants left. Under the watchful guns of Mallory and Miller, Andrea searched each of the six guards in turn, found nothing, and ushered them all into the cell, turning the heavy key and hanging it up on the wall. Then, just as carefully, Andrea searched Neufeld and Droshny: Droshny’s face, as Andrea carelessly flung his knives into a corner of the room, was thunderous.
Mallory looked at the two men and said: ‘I’d shoot if necessary. It’s not. You won’t be missed before morning.’
They might not be missed for a good few mornings,’ Miller pointed out.
‘So they’re over-weight anyway,’ Mallory said indifferently. He smiled. ‘I can’t resist leaving you with last little pleasant thought, Hauptmann Neufeld. something to think about until someone comes and is you.’ He looked consideringly at Neufeld, who said nothing, then went on: ‘About that information gave you this morning, I mean.’
Neufeld looked at him guardedly. ‘What about the formation you gave me this morning?’ ‘Just this. It wasn’t, I’m afraid, quite accurate. Vukalovic expects the attack from the north, through the Zenica Gap, not across the bridge at Neretva from the south. There are, we know, close on two hundred of tanks massed in the woods just to the north of the Zenica Gap – but there won’t be at two a.m. this morning when your attack is due to start. Not after we got through to our Lancaster squadrons in Italy, think of it, think of the target. Two hundred tanks bunched in a tiny trap a hundred and fifty yards wide and not more than three hundred yards long. The RAF will be there at 1.30. By two this morning there won’t be a single tank left in commission.’
Neufeld looked at him for a long moment, his face very still, then said, slowly and softly: ‘Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!’ ‘Damning is all you’ll have for it,’ Mallory said agreeably. ‘By the time you are released – hopefully assuming that you will be released – it will all be over. See you after the war.’
Andrea locked the two men in a side room and hung the key up by the one to the cell. Then they went outside, locked the outer door, hung the key on a nail by the door, mounted their ponies – Groves and Reynolds had already two additional ones saddled – and started climbing once again, Mallory, map in hand, studying in the fading light of dusk the route they had to take.
Their route took them up alongside the perimeter of a pine forest. Not more than half a mile after leaving the block-house, Andrea reined in his pony, dismounted, lifted the pony’s right foreleg and examined it carefully. He looked up at the others who had also reined in their ponies.
‘There’s a stone wedged under the hoof,’ he announced. ‘Looks bad – but not too bad. I’ll have to cut it out. Don’t wait for me – I’ll catch you up in a few minutes.’
Mallory nodded, gave the signal to move on. Andrea produced a knife, lifted the hoof and made a great play of excavating the wedged stone. After a minute or so, he glanced up and saw that the rest of the party had vanished round a corner of the pine wood. Andrea put away his knife and led the pony, which quite obviously had no limp whatsoever, into the shelter of the wood and tethered it there, then moved on foot some way down the hill towards the block-house. He sat down behind the bole of a convenient pine and removed his binoculars from their case.
He hadn’t long to wait. The head and shoulders of a figure appeared in the clearing below peering out cautiously from behind the trunk of a tree. Andrea flat in the snow now and with the icy rims of the binoculars clamped hard against his eyes, had no difficulty at all in making an immediate identification: Sergeant Baer, moon-faced, rotund and about seventy and overweight for his unimpressive height, had unmistakable physical presence which only the mentally incapacitated could easily forget. Baer withdrew into the woods, then reappeared shortly afterwards leading a string of ponies, one which carried a bulky covered object strapped a pannier bag. Two of the following ponies had riders, both of whom had their hands tied to the pommels of their saddles. Petar and Maria, without a doubt. Behind them appeared four mounted soldiers.
Sergeant Baer beckoned them to follow him across the clearing and within moments all had disappeared from sight behind the block-house. Andrea regarded the now empty clearing thoughtfully, lit a fresh cigar and made his way uphill towards his tethered pony.
Sergeant Baer dismounted, produced a key from his pocket, caught sight of the key suspended from the wall beside the door, replaced his own, took down the other, opened the door with it and passed inside. He glanced around, took down one of the keys hanging on the wall and opened a side door with it. Hauptmann Neufeld emerged, glanced at his watch smiled.
‘You have been very punctual, Sergeant Baer. You have the radio?’
‘I have the radio. It’s outside.’
‘Good, good, good.’ Neufeld looked at Droshny and smiled again. ‘I think it’s time for us to make our rendezvous with the Ivenici plateau.’
Sergeant Baer said respectfully: ‘How can you be so sure that it is the Ivenici plateau, Hauptmann Neufeld?’
‘How can I be so sure? Simple, my dear Baer Because Maria – you have her with you?’ ‘But of course, Hauptmann Neufeld.’ ‘Because Maria told me. The Ivenici plateau it is.’
Night had fallen on the Ivenici plateau, but still the phalanx of exhausted soldiers was trudging out the landing-strip for the plane. The work was not by this time so cruelly and physically exacting, for the snow was now almost trampled and beaten hard and flat but, even allowing for the rejuvenation given by the influx of another five hundred fresh soldiers, the overall level of utter weariness was such that the phalanx was in no better condition than its original members who had trudged out the first outline of the airstrip in the virgin snow.
The phalanx, too, had changed its shape. Instead of being fifty wide by twenty deep it was now twenty wide by fifty deep: having achieved a safe clearance for the wings of the aircraft, they were now trudging out what was to be as close as possible an iron-hard surface for the landing wheels.
A three-quarters moon, intensely white and luminous, rode low in the sky, with scattered bands of cloud coming drifting down slowly from the north. As the successive bands moved across the face of the moon, the black shadows swept lazily across the surface of the plateau: the phalanx, at one moment bathed in silvery moonlight, was at the next almost lost to sight in the darkness. It was a fantastic scene with a remarkably faery-like quality of eeriness and foreboding about ii In fact it was, as Colonel Vis had just unromanticallv mentioned to Captain Vlanovich, like something out Dante’s Inferno, only a hundred degrees colder. At least a hundred degrees, Vis had amended: he wasn’t sure how hot it was in hell.
It was this scene which, at twenty minutes to nine in the evening, confronted Mallory and his men when they topped the brow of a hill and reined in their ponies just short of the edge of the precipice which abutted on to the western edge of the Ivenici plateau. For at least two minutes they sat there on their ponies, not moving, not speaking mesmerized by the other-world quality of a thousand men with bowed heads and bowed shoulders, shuffling exhaustedly across the level floor of the plain beneath, mesmerized because they all knew they were gazing at a unique spectacle which none them had ever seen before and would never see again. Mallory finally broke free from the trance-like condition, looked at Miller and Andrea, and slowly shook his head in an expression of profound wonder conveying his disbelief, his refusal to accept the reality of what his own eyes told him was real and actual beyond dispute. Miller and Andrea returned his look with almost identical negative motions of their heads. Mallory wheeled his pony to the right and the way along the cliff-face to the point where the cliff ran into the rising ground below. Ten minutes later they were being greeted by Colonel Vis.
‘I did not expect to see you, Captain Mallory.’ Vis pumped his hand enthusiastically. ‘Before God, I did not expect to see you. You – and your men – must have a remarkable capacity for survival.’
‘Say that in a few hours,’ Mallory said drily, ‘and I would be very happy indeed to hear it.’