Andrea, too, was at that moment peering at something about fifty feet away, but it would have required a hyperactive imagination to detect any signs of anxiety in that dark and rugged face. Andrea, as the guards on the dam had so recently been doing, was listening rather than looking. From his point of view all hi could see was a dark and shapeless jumble of wetly glistening boulders with the Neretva rushing whitely alongside. There was no sign of life down there, but that only meant that Droshny, Neufeld and his men, having learnt their lessons the hard way – for Andrew could not know at this time that Neufeld had been wounded – were inching their way forward on elbows and knees, not once moving out from one safe cover until they had located another.
A minute passed, then Andrea heard the inevitable: a barely discernible ‘click’, as two pieces of stone knocked together. It came, Andrea estimated, from about thirty feet away. He nodded as if in satisfaction, armed the grenade, waited two seconds, then gently lobbed it downstream, dropping flat behind his protective boulder as he did so. There was the typically flat crack of a grenade explosion, accompanied by a briefly white flash of light in which two soldiers could be seen being flung bodily sideways.
The sound of the explosion came clearly to Mallory’s ear. He remained still, allowing only his head to turn slowly till he was looking down on top of the dam wall, now almost twenty feet beneath him. The same two guards who had been previously listening so intently stopped their patrol a second time, gazed down the gorge again, looked at each other uneasily, shrugged uncertainly, then resumed their patrol. Mallory resumed his climb.
He was making better time now. The former negligible finger and toe holds had given way, occasionally, to small fissures in the rock into which he was able to work the odd piton to give him a great deal more leverage than would have otherwise been possible. When he stopped climbing and looked upwards he was more than six feet below the longitudinal crack he id been looking for – and, as he had said to Miller earlier, it was no more than a crack. Mallory made to begin again, then paused, his head cocked towards the sky.
Just barely audible at first above the roaring of the waters of the Neretva and the sporadic small-arms fire from the direction of the Zenica Gap, but swelling in power with the passing of every second, could be heard a low and distant thunder, a sound unmistakable to all who had ever heard it during the war, a sound that heralded the approach of squadrons, a fleet of heavy bombers. Mallory listened to the rapidly approaching clamour of scores of aero engines and smiled to himself.
Many men smiled to themselves that night when icy heard the approach from the west of those squadrons of Lancasters. Miller, still perched on his ladder and still exercising all his available will-power not to look down, managed to smile to himself, as did Groves at the foot of the ladder and Reynolds by the bridge. On the right bank of the Neretva, Andrea smiled to himself, reckoned that the roar of those fast-approaching engines would make an excellent cover for any untoward sound and picked another grenade from his belt. Outside a soup tent high up in the biting cold of the Ivenici plateau, Colonel Vis and Captain Vlanovich smiled their delight at each other and solemnly shook hands. Behind the southern redoubts of the Zenica Cage, General Vukalovic and his three senior officers, Colonel Janzy, Colonel Lazlo and Major Stephan, for once removed the glasses through which they had been so long peering at the Neretva bridge and the menacing woods beyond and smiled their incredulous relief at one another. And, most strangely of all, already seated in his command truck just inside the woods to the south of the Neretva bridge, General Zimmermann smiled perhaps the most broadly of all.
Mallory resumed his climb, moving even more quickly now, reached the longitudinal crack, worked his way up above it, pressed a piton into a convenient crack in the rock, withdrew his hammer from his belt and prepared to wait. Even now, he was not much more than forty feet above the dam wall, and the piton that Mallory now wanted to anchor would require not one blow but a dozen of them, and powerful ones at that the idea that, even above the approaching thunder of the Lancasters’ engines, the metallic hammering would go unremarked was preposterous. The sound of the heavy aero engines was now deepening by the moment.
Mallory glanced down directly beneath him. Miller was gazing upward, tapping his wrist watch as best a man can when he has both arms wrapped round the same rung of a ladder, and making urgent gestures Mallory, in turn, shook his head and made a downward restraining motion with his free hand. Miller shook his head in resignation.
The Lancasters were on top of them now. The leader arrowed in diagonally across the dam, lifted slightly as it came to the high mountains on the other side and then the earth shook and ripples of dark waters shivered their erratic way across the surface of the Neretva dam before the first explosion reached their ears, as the first stick of 1,000-pound bombs crashed squarely into the Zenica Gap. From then on the sounds of the explosions of the bombs raining down on the Gap were so together as to be almost continuous: what little time-lapse there was between some of the explosions bridged by the constantly rumbling echoes that rumbled through the mountains and valleys of central Bosnia.
Mallory had no longer any need to worry about sound any more, he doubted he could even have heard himself speak, for most of those bombs were landing in a concentrated area less than a mile from where he hung to the side of the cliff, their explosions making an almost constant white glare that showed clearly above the mountains to the west. He hammered home his piton, belayed a rope around it, and dropped the rope to Miller, who immediately seized it and began to climb: he looked, Mallory thought, uncommonly like one of the early Christian martyrs. Miller was no mountaineer, but, no mistake, he knew how to climb a rope: in a remarkably short time he was up beside Mallory, feet firmly wedged into the longitudinal crack, both hands gripping tightly to the piton.
‘Think you can hang on that piton?’ Mallory asked, almost had to shout to make himself heard above still undiminished thunder of the falling bombs. ‘Just try to prise me away.’
‘I won’t,’ Mallory grinned.
He coiled up the rope which Miller had used for ascent, hitched it over his shoulder and started to move quickly along the longitudinal crack. ‘I’ll take this across the top of the dam, belay it to another piton. Then you can join me. Right?’
‘Miller looked down into the depths and shuddered. I you think I’m going to stay here, you must be mad.’
Mallory grinned again and moved away.
To the south of the Neretva bridge, General Zimmermann, with an aide by his side, was still listening to the sounds of the aerial assault on the Zenica Gap. He glanced at his watch.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘First-line assault troops into position.’
At once heavily armed infantry, bent almost double to keep themselves below parapet level, began to move quickly across the Neretva bridge: once on the other side, they spread out east and west along the northern bank of the river, concealed from the Partisans by the ridge of high ground abutting on the river bank. Or they thought they were concealed: in point of fact a Partisan scout, equipped with night-glasses and field telephone, lay prone in a suicidally positioned slit-trench less than a hundred yards from the bridge itself, sending back a constant series of reports to Vukalovic.
Zimmermann glanced up at the sky and said to his aide: ‘Hold them. The moon’s coming through again. Again he looked at his watch. ‘Start the tank engines in twenty minutes.’
‘They’ve stopped coming across the bridge then? Vukalovic said.
‘Yes, sir.’ It was the voice of his advance scout. ‘I think it’s because the moon is about to break through in a minute or two.’
‘I think so too,’ Vukalovic said. He added grimly ‘And I suggest you start working your way back before it does break through or it will be the last chance you’ll ever have.’
Andrea, too, was regarding the night sky with interest. His gradual retreat had now taken him into a particularly unsatisfactory defensive position, practically bereft of all cover: a very unhealthy situation to caught in, he reflected, when the moon came out from behind the clouds. He paused for a thoughtful moment, then armed another grenade and lobbed it in the direction of a cluster of dimly seen boulders about fifty feet away. He did not wait to see what effect it had, he was already scrambling his way up-river before the grenade exploded. The one certain effect it did have was to galvanize Droshny and his men to immediate and furious retaliation, at least half dozen machine-pistols loosing off almost simultaneous bursts at the position Andrea had so recently and prudently vacated. One bullet plucked at the sleeve of his tunic, but that was as near as anything came. He reached another cluster of boulders without incident and took up a fresh defensive position behind them: when the moon did break through it would be Droshny and his men who would be faced with the unpalatable prospect of crossing that open stretch of ground.