“On your feet,” Lomax said in German. “Do as you’re told and live.”
They stood up slowly, hands clasped behind their necks. The two card-players were little more than boys, but the one who had been reading the magazine was older with a hard, cold look to him and shrapnel scars down the side of his face.
He stared at them unwinkingly and Lomax said to Boyd, “Right, upstairs quick. I’ll see to these three.”
Boyd moved out and Lomax said, “Take off your belts and turn round.”
One of the boys started to tremble and the man with the scarred face said, “Don’t worry, son. They won’t get very far.”
“Shut your mouth and do as you’re told,” Lomax said. “If we could have afforded the noise, you’d be dead.”
There was the sound of gunfire on the stairs. Instinctively, he glanced towards the door and the man with the scarred face kicked a chair at him and jumped for the arms rack on the wall.
Lomax turned, firing from the hip in a wide arc that drove the man against the wall and continued to cut down the two boys who still stood by the table, bewildered and uncertain. One of them screamed hi his agony, heels drumming against the floor. Lomax finished him with another quick burst and turned and ran out into the hall.
As he reached the foot of the stairs, Boyd came round the corner. There was blood on his face where a piece of stone had sliced his cheek.
“Turned the corner and met one of them coming down,” he said. “Too bloody quick for me. Closed some kind of steel trapdoor where the stairs pass through the first floor.”
“They’ll have every soldier in town up here before we know it,” Lomax said. “And Nikoli isn’t supposed to blow the bridge until he hears this lot go. You’ll have to lay your charges here.”
Boyd didn’t argue. He took off his pack and opened it. The plastic explosive he was using was already made up into charges and Lomax helped him to fuse them quickly. Boyd placed them round the walls at spaced intervals. As he started to wire them up, an explosion sounded in the distance.
They looked at each other for a brief moment and then Boyd continued with his task, face calm. Something had obviously made Nikoli Aleko move ahead of time. Probably a vehicle had tried to cross the bridge and he had realised that something must have gone wrong.
“Is there enough?” Lomax demanded.
Boyd shrugged. “Depends how good the foundations are. In this climate, the mortar in these old buildings is usually pretty rotten.”
He linked the wires to a small, battery-operated detonating box and nodded. “You get the truck moving. As soon as I hear the engine, I’ll set this thing for thirty seconds.”
Lomax moved outside quickly. The dead sentry still crouched on the floor of the cab, flies crawling over his face. Lomax dragged him out and clambered behind the wheel. The engine roared into life and as he moved into gear, Boyd ran out of the entrance and swung up beside. him.
Lomax turned so tightly that the off-side wheels lifted. As they accelerated across the yard, someone fired a Schmeisser from one of the upper storeys, the bullets kicking fountains of dust into the air ten yards to the left and then they were through the gates.
The explosion, when it came, was tremendous and in the driving mirror Lomax saw a great cloud mushroom above the walls, the tower rising from its centre.
For a few moments it remained straight and true and then it seemed to lurch to one side. It started to fall hi slow motion, gathering momentum as it disappeared into the dust and smoke.
Boyd had been leaning out of the window and he turned with a grin and wiped blood from his face with the back of his hand. “I don’t mind telling you I was worried there for a moment or two.”
“I still am,” Lomax told him. “The sooner we’re on the other side of the mountain, the better I’ll like it”
He took the truck down through the ravine in a cloud of dust and braked sharply as they came out into the open. A German troop-carrier had just rounded the shoulder of the mountain a couple of hundred yards below and was moving towards them.