It was a nasty enough looking flesh wound, but, Reynolds knew, not dangerous. He reached for his medical pack, gave her a reassuring smile and then forgot all about his medical pack. The expression in Maria’s eyes had given way to one of shock and fear and she was no longer looking at him.
Reynolds twisted round. Droshny had just hauled himself over the edge of the river bank, had risen to his feet and was now heading purposefully towards Andrea’s prostrate body, with the obvious intention of heaving the unconscious man into the gorge.
Reynolds picked up his Schmeisser and pulled the trigger. There was an empty click – he’d forgotten the magazine had been emptied. He glanced around almost wildly in an attempt to locate Maria’s gun, but there was no sign of it. He could wait no longer Droshny was only a matter of feet from where Andrea lay. Reynolds picked up his knife and rushed along the bank. Droshny saw him coming and he saw too thai Reynolds was armed with only a knife. He smiled as a wolf would smile, took one of his wickedly-curved knives from his belt and waited.
The two men approached closely and circled warily.
Reynolds had never wielded a knife in anger in his life and so had no illusions at all as to his chances: hadn’t Neufeld said that Droshny was the best man in the Balkans with a knife? He certainly looked it, Reynolds thought. His mouth felt very dry.
Thirty yards away Maria, dizzy and weak with and dragging her wounded leg, crawled towards the spot where she thought her gun had fallen when she had been hit. After what seemed a very long time, at what was probably no more than ten seconds, she found it half-hidden among rocks. Nauseated and faint from the pain of her wounded leg, she forced herself to it up and brought the gun to her shoulder. Then she lowered it again.
In her present condition, she realized vaguely, it would have been impossible for her to hit Droshny without almost certainly hitting Reynolds at the same time: in fact, she might well have killed Reynolds while missing Droshny entirely. For both men were now locked chest to chest, each man’s knife-hand the right – clamped in the grip of the other’s left.
The girl’s dark eyes, which had so recently reflected and shock and fear, now held only one expression – despair. Like Reynolds, Maria knew of Droshny’s reputation – but, unlike Reynolds, she had seen Droshny kill with that knife and knew too well how lethal a combination that man and that knife were. A wolf and a lamb, she thought, a wolf and a lamb. After he kills Reynolds – her mind was dulled low, her thoughts almost incoherent – after he kills Reynolds I shall kill him. But first, Reynolds would have to die, for there could be no help for him. And then the despair left the dark eyes to be replaced by almost unthinkable hope for she knew with an intuitive certainty that with Andrea by one’s side hope need never be abandoned.
Not that Andrea was as yet by anyone’s side. He-had forced himself up to his hands and knees and was gazing down uncomprehendingly at the rushing white-waters below, shaking his leonine head from side to side in an attempt to clear it. And then, still shaking his head, he levered himself painfully to his feet and he wasn’t shaking his head any more. In spite of her pain, Maria smiled.
Slowly, inexorably, the Cetnik giant twisted Reynolds’s knife-hand away from himself while at the same time bringing the lancet point of his own knife nearer to Reynolds’s throat. Reynolds’s sweat-sheened face deflected his desperation, his total awareness of impending defeat and death. He cried out with pain as Droshny twisted his right wrist almost to breaking-point, forcing him to open his fingers and drop his knife. Droshny kneed him viciously at the same time, freeing his left hand to give Reynolds a violent shove that sent him staggering to crash on his back against the stones and lie there winded and gasping in agony. Droshny smiled his smile of wolfish satisfaction Even although he must have known that the need for haste was paramount he yet had to take time off to carry out the execution in a properly leisurely fashion, to savour to the full every moment of it, to prolong the exquisite joy he always felt at moments like these Reluctantly, almost, he changed to a throwing grip on his knife and slowly raised it high. The smile was broader than ever, a smile that vanished in an instant of time as he felt a knife being plucked from his own belt. He whirled round. Andrea’s face was a mask of stone.
Droshny smiled again. ‘The gods have been kind to me.’ His voice was low, almost reverent, his tone a caressing whisper. ‘I have dreamed of this. It is better that you should die this way. This will teach you, my friend-‘
Droshny, hoping to catch Andrea unprepared, broke off in mid-sentence and lunged forward with cat-like speed. The smile vanished again as he looked in almost comical disbelief at his right wrist locked in the vice-like grip of Andrea’s left hand.
Within seconds, the tableau was as it had been in the beginning of the earlier struggle, both knife-wrists locked in the opponents’ left hands. The two men appeared to be absolutely immobile, Andrea with his face totally impassive, Droshny with his white teeth bared, but no longer in a smile. It was, instead, a vicious snarl compounded of hate and fury and baffled anger -for this time Droshny, to his evident consternation and disbelief, could make no impression whatsoever on his opponent. The impression, this time, was being made on him.
Maria, the pain in her leg in temporary abeyance, and a slowly recovering Reynolds stared in fascination as Andrea’s left hand, in almost millimetric slow-motion, gradually twisted Droshny’s right wrist so that the blade moved slowly away and the Cetnik’s fingers began, almost imperceptibly at first, to open. Droshny, his face darkening in colour and the veins standing out on forehead and neck, summoned every last reserve of strength to his right hand: Andrea, rightly sensing that all of Droshny’s power and will and concentration were centred exclusively upon breaking his crushing grip, suddenly tore his own right hand free and brought his knife scything round and under and upwards with tremendous power: the knife went in under the breastbone, burying itself to the hilt. For a moment or two the giant stood there, lips drawn far back over bared teeth smiling mindlessly in the rictus of death, then, as Andrea stepped away, leaving the knife still embedded, Droshny toppled slowly over the edge of the ravine. The Cetnik sergeant, still clinging to the shattered remains of the bridge, stared in uncomprehending horror as Droshny, the hilt of the knife easily distinguishable, fell head-first into the boiling rapids and was immediately lost to sight.
Reynolds rose painfully and shakily to his feet and smiled at Andrea. He said: ‘Maybe I’ve been wrong about you all along. Thank you, Colonel Stavros.’
Andrea shrugged. ‘Just returning a favour, my boy. Maybe I’ve been wrong about you, too.’ He glanced at his watch. Two o’clock! Two o’clock! Where are the others?’
‘God, I’d almost forgotten. Maria there is hurt. Groves and Petar are on the ladder. I’m not sure, but I think Groves is in a pretty bad way.’
‘They may need help. Get to them quickly. I’ll look after the girl.’
At the southern end of the Neretva bridge, General Zimmermann stood in his command car and watched the sweep-second hand of his watch come up to the top.
‘Two o’clock,’ Zimmerman said, his tone almost conversational. He brought his right hand down in a cutting gesture. A whistle shrilled and at once tank engines roared and treads clattered as the spearhead of Zimmermann’s first armoured division began to cross the bridge at Neretva.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Saturday 0200-0215
‘Maurer and Schmidt! Maurer and Schmidt!’ The captain in charge of the guard on top of the Neretva dam wall came running from the guard-house, looked around almost wildly and grabbed his sergeant by the arm. ‘For God’s sake, where are Maurer and Schmidt? No one seen them? No one? Get the searchlight.’
Petar, still holding the unconscious Groves pinned against the ladder, heard the sound of the words but did not understand them. Petar, with both arms round Groves, now had his forearms locked at an almost impossible angle between the stanchions and the rock-face behind. In this position, as long as his wrists or forearms didn’t break, he could hold Groves almost indefinitely. But Petar’s grey and sweat-covered face, the racked and twisted face, was mute testimony enough the almost unendurable agony he was suffering. Mallory and Miller also heard the urgently shouted commands, but, like Petar, were unable to understand what it was that was being shouted. It would be something, Mallory thought vaguely, that would bode no good for them, then put the thought from his mind: he had other and more urgently immediate matters to occupy his attention. They had reached the barrier of the torpedo net and he had the supporting cable in one hand; a knife in the other when Miller exclaimed and caught his arm.