There was a considerable amount of metallic screeching and swearing coming from the cabin after perhaps half a minute Andrea said: ‘That’s the lot.’
‘Shove,’ Mallory ordered.
They shoved, heels jammed in the sleepers and backs to the locomotive, and this time the locomotive moved off so easily, albeit with a tortured squealing of rusted wheels, that most of those pushing were caught wholly by surprise and fell on their back on the track. Moments later they were on their feet and running after the locomotive which was already perceptibly beginning to increase speed. Andrea reached down from the cab, swung Maria and Petar aboard m turn, then lent a helping hand to the others. The last Groves, was reaching for the footplate when he sudden I v braked, swung round, ran back to the ponies, unhitched the climbing ropes, flung them over his shoulder and chased after the locomotive again. Mallory reached down and helped him on to the footplate.
‘It’s not my day,’ Mallory said sadly. ‘Evening rather First, I forget about Baer’s duplicate keys. Then about the ponies. Then about the brakes. Now the ropes I wonder what I’ll forget about next?’
‘Perhaps about Neufeld and Droshny.’ Reynolds voice was carefully without expression.
‘What about Neufeld and Droshny?’
Reynolds pointed back up the railway track with barrel of his Schmeisser. ‘Permission to fire, sir.’ Mallory swung round. Neufeld, Droshny and and an indeterminate number of other pony-mounted soldiers had just appeared around a bend in the track and were more than a hundred yards away, ‘permission to fire,’ Mallory agreed. ‘The rest of get down.’ He unslung and brought up his own Schmeisser just as Reynolds squeezed the trigger of his, For perhaps five seconds the closed metallic confines of the tiny cabin reverberated deafeningly to the crash of the two machine-pistols, then, at a nudge from Mallory, the two men stopped firing. There was no target left to fire at. Neufeld and his men had loosed off a few preliminary shots but immediately realized that the wildly swaying saddles of their ponies made an impossibly unsteady firing position as compared to cab of the locomotive and had pulled their ponies into the woods on either side of the track. But not all of them had pulled off in time: two men lay motionless and face down in the snow while their ponies still galloped down the track in the wake of the locomotive.
Miller rose, glanced wordlessly at the scene behind, tapped Mallory on the arm. ‘A small point occurs me, sir. How do we stop this thing.’ He gazed apprehensively through the cab window. ‘Must be doing sixty already.’
‘Well, we’re doing at least twenty,’ Mallory said agreeably. ‘But fast enough to out-distance those ponies. Ask Andrea. He released the brake.’
‘He released a dozen levers,’ Miller corrected. ‘Any could have been the brake.’
‘Well, you’re not going to sit around doing nothing, ?’ Mallory asked reasonably. ‘Find out how to stop the damn thing.’
Miller looked at him coldly and set about trying to find out how to stop the damn thing. Mallory turned as Reynolds touched him on the arm. ‘Well?’
Reynolds had an arm round Maria to steady her on the now swaying platform. He whispered: They going to get us, sir. They’re going to get us for sure. Why don’t we stop and leave those two, sir? Give them a chance to escape into the woods?’
‘Thanks for the thought. But don’t be mad. With us they have a chance – a small one to be sure, but a chance. Stay behind and they’ll be butchered.’
The locomotive was no longer doing the twenty miles per hour Mallory had mentioned and if it hadn’t approached the figure that Miller had so fearfully mentioned it was certainly going quickly enough to make it rattle and sway to what appeared to be the very limits of its stability. By this time the last of the trees to the right of the track had petered out, the darkened waters of the Neretva dam were clearly visible to the west and the railway track was now running very close indeed to the edge of what appeared to be a dangerously steep precipice. Mallory looked back into the cab. With the exception of Andrea, every one now wore expressions of considerable apprehension their faces. Mallory said: ‘Found out how to stop this damn thing yet?’
‘Easy.’ Andrea indicated a lever. ‘This handle here.’
‘Okay, brakeman. I want to have a look.’
To the evident relief of most of the passenger in the cab, Andrea leaned back on the brake-lever. There was an eldritch screeching that set teeth on edge, clouds of sparks flew up past the sides of the cab as some wheels or other locked solid in the lines, then the locomotive eased slowly to a halt, both the intensity of sound from the squealing brakes and the number of sparks diminishing as it did so. Andrea, duty done, leaned out of the side of the cab with the bored aplomb of the crack loco engineer: one had the feeling that all he really wanted in life that moment was a piece of oily waste and a whistle-cord to pull.
Mallory and Miller climbed down and ran to the edge of the cliff, less than twenty yards away. At st Mallory did. Miller made a much more cautious j>roach, inching forward the last few feet on hands id knees. He hitched one cautious eye over the edge of It precipice, screwed both eyes shut, looked away and st as cautiously inched his way back from the edge of [the cliff: Miller claimed that he couldn’t even stand on the bottom step of a ladder without succumbing to the I overwhelming compulsion to throw himself into the abyss.
Mallory gazed down thoughtfully into the depths. They were, he saw, directly over the top of the dam wall, which, in the strangely shadowed half-light cast by the moon, seemed almost impossibly far below in the dizzying depths. The broad top of the dam wall was brightly lit by floodlights and patrolled by at least half a dozen German soldiers, jack-booted and helmeted. Beyond the dam, on the lower side, the ladder Maria had spoken of was invisible, but the frail-looking swing bridge, still menaced by the massive bulk of the boulder on the scree on the left bank, and farther down, ‘ the white water indicating what might or might not have been a possible – or passable – ford were plainly In sight. Mallory, momentarily abstracted in thought, gazed at the scene below for several moments, recalled that the pursuit must be again coming uncomfortably close and hurriedly made his way back to the locomotive. He said to Andrea: ‘About a mile and a half, I should think. No more.’ He turned to Maria. ‘You know there’s a ford – or what seems to be a ford some way below the dam. Is there a way down?’
‘For a mountain goat.’
‘Don’t insult him,’ Miller said reprovingly.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Ignore him,’ Mallory said. ‘Just tell us when we get there.’
Some five or six miles below the Neretva dam General Zimmermann paced up and down the fringe of the pine forest bordering the meadow to the south of the bridge at Neretva. Beside him paced a colonel, one of his divisional commanders. To the south of them could just dimly be discerned the shapes of hundreds of men and scores of tanks and other vehicles, vehicles with all their protective camouflage now removed, each tank and vehicle surrounded by its coterie of attendants making last-minute and probably wholly unnecessary adjustments. The time for hiding was over. The waiting was coming to an end. Zimmermann glanced ;ii his watch.
‘Twelve-thirty. The first infantry battalions start moving across in fifteen minutes, and spread out along the north bank. The tanks at two o’clock.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The details had been arranged many hour-, ago, but somehow one always found it necessary to repeat the instructions and the acknowledgements The colonel gazed to the north. ‘I sometimes wonder if there’s anybody at all across there.’
‘It’s not the north I’m worrying about,’ Zimmerman said sombrely. ‘It’s the west.’
‘The Allies? You – you think their air armadas will come soon? It’s still in your bones, Herr General?’
‘Still in my bones. It’s coming soon. For me, for you, for all of us.’ He shivered, then forced a smile. Some ill-mannered lout has just walked over my grave.’
CHAPTER TEN
Saturday 0040-0120
‘We’re coming up to it now,’ Maria said. Blonde hair streaming in the passing wind, she peered out again through the cab window of the clanking, swaying locomotive, withdrew her head and turned to Mallory. ‘About three hundred metres.’
Mallory glanced at Andrea. ‘You heard, brakeman?’
‘I heard.’ Andrea leaned hard on the brake lever. The result was as before, a banshee shrieking of locked wheels on the rusty lines and a pyrotechnical display of sparks. The locomotive came to a juddering halt as Andrea looked out his cab window and observed a V shaped gap in the edge of the cliff directly opposite where they had come to a stop. ‘Within the yard, I should say?’