Fifteen painful minutes later Miller snipped off the rough edges of the adhesive bandage that bound Mallory’s right foot, straightened up stiffly and contemplated his handiwork with pride.
“Beautiful, Miller, beautiful,” he murmured complacently. “Not even in John Hopkins in the city of Baltimore . . .” He broke off suddenly, frowned down at the thickly bandaged feet and coughed apologetically. “A small point has just occurred to me, boss.”
“I thought it might eventually,” Mallory said grimly. “Just how do you propose to get my feet into these damned boots again?” He shivered involuntarily as he pulled on a pair of thick woollen socks, matted and sodden with melted snow, picked up the German sentry’s boots, held them at arm’s length and examined them in disgust. “Sevens, at the most–and a darned small sevens at that!”
“Nines,” Stevens said laconically. He handed over–his own jack-boots, one of them slit neatly down the side where Andrea had cut it open. “You can fix that tear easily enough, and they’re no damned good to me now. No arguments, sir, please.” He began to laugh softly, broke off in a sharply indrawn hiss of pain as the movement jarred the broken bones, took a couple of deep, quivering breaths, then smiled whitely. “My first–and probably my last–contribution to the expedition. What sort of medal do you reckon they’ll give me for that, sir?”
Mallory took the boots, looked at Stevens a long moment in silence, then turned as the tarpaulin was pushed aside. Brown stumbled in, lowered the transmitter and telescopic aerial to the floor of the cave and pulled out a tin of cigarettes. They slipped from his frozen fingers, fell into the icy mud at his feet, became brown and sodden on the instant. He swore, briefly, and without- enthusiasm, beat his numbed hands across his chest, gave it up and. sat down heavily on a convenient boulder. He looked tired and cold and thoroughly miserable.
Mallory lit a cigarette and passed it across to him.
“How did it go, Casey? Manage to raise them at all?”
“They managed to raise me–more or less. Reception was lousy.” Brown drew the grateful tobacco smoke deep down into his lungs. “And I couldn’t get through at all. Must be that damned great hill to the south there.”
“Probably,” Mallory nodded. “And what news from our friends in Cairo. Exhorting us to greater efforts? Telling us to get on with the job?”
“No news at all. Too damn’ worried about the silence at this end. Said that from now on they were going to come through every four hours, acknowledgment or no. Repeated that about ten times, then signed off.”
“That’ll be a great help,” Miller said acidly. “Nice to know they’re on our side. Nothin’ like moral support.” He jerked his thumb towards the mouth of the cave. “Reckon them bloodhounds would be scared to death if they knew. . . . Did you take a gander at them before you came in?”
“I didn’t have to,” Brown said morosely. “I could hear them–sounded like the officer in charge shouting directions.” Mechanically, almost, he picked up his automatic rifle, eased the clip in the magazine. “Must be less than a mile away now.”
The search party, more closely bunched by this time, was less than a mile, was barely half a mile distant from the cave when the Oberleutnant in charge saw that the right wing of his line, on the steeper slopes to the south, was lagging behind once more. Impatiently he lifted his whistle to his mouth for the three sharp, peremptory blasts that would bring his weary men stumbling into line again. Twice the whistle shrilled out its imperative urgency, the piercing notes echoing flatly along the snowbound slopes and dying away in the valley below: but the third wheep died at birth, caught up again and tailed off in a wailing, eldritch diminuendo that merged with dreadful harmony into a long, bubbling scream of agony. For two or three seconds the Oberleutnant stood motionless in his tracks, his face shocked and contorted: then he jack-knifed violently forward and pitched down into the crusted snow. The burly sergeant beside him stared down at the fallen officer, looked up in sudden horrified understanding, opened his mouth to shout, sighed and toppled wearily over the body at his feet, the evil, whip-lash crack of the Mauser in his ears as he died. –
High up on the western slopes of Mount Kostos, wedged in the V between two great boulders, Andrea gazed down the darkening mountainside over the depressed telescopic sights of his rifle and pumped another three rounds into the wavering, disorganised line of searchers. His face was quite still, as immobile as the eyelids that never flickered to the regular crashing of his Mauser, and drained of all feeling. Even his eyes reflected the face, eyes neither hard nor pitiless, but simply empty and almost frighteningly remote, a remoteness that mirrored his mind, a mind armoured for the moment against all thought and sensation, for Andrea knew that he must not think about this thing. To kill, to take the life of his fellows, that was the supreme evil, for life was a gift that it was not his to take away. Not even in fair fight. And this was murder. –
Slowly Andrea lowered the Mauser, peered through the drifting gun-smoke that hung heavily in the frosty evening air. The enemy had vanished, completely, rolled behind scattered boulders or burrowed frantically into the blanketing anonymity of the snow. But they were still there, still potentially as dangerous as ever. Andrea knew that they would recover fast from the death of their officer–there were no finer, no more tenacious fighters in Europe than the ski-troops of the Jaeger mountain battalion–and would come after him, catch and kill him if humanly possible. That was why Andrea’s first care had been to kill their officer–he might not have come after him, might have stopped to puzzle out the reason for this unprovoked flank attack.
Andrea ducked low in reflex instinct as a sudden burst of automatic fire whined in murderous ricochet off the boulders before him. He had expected this. It was the old classic infantry attack pattern–advance under covering fire, drop, cover your mate and come again. Swiftly Andrea rammed home another charge into the magazine of his Mauser, dropped flat on his face and inched his way along behind the low line of broken rock that extended fifteen or twenty yards to his right–he had chosen his ambush point with care–and then petered out. At the far end he pulled his snow hood down to the level of his brows and edged a wary eye round the corner of the rock.
Another heavy burst of automatic fire smashed into the boulders he had just left, and half a dozen men– three from either end of the line–broke cover, scurried along the slope in a stumbling, crouching run, then pitched forward into the snow again. Along the slope– the two parties had run in opposite directions. Andrea lowered his head and rubbed the back of a massive hand across the stubbled grizzle of his chin. Awkward, damned awkward. No frontal attack for the foxes of the W.G.B. They were extending their lines on either side, the points hooking round in a great, encircling halfmoon. Bad enough for himself, but he could have coped with that–a carefully reconnoitred escape gully wound up the slope behind him. But he hadn’t foreseen what was obviously going to happen: the curving crescent of line to the west was going to- sweep across the rock-shelter where the others lay hidden.
Andrea twisted over on his back and looked up at the evening sky. It was darkening by the moment, darkening with the gloom of coming snow, and daylight was beginning to fail. He twisted again and looked across the great swelling shoulder of Mount Kostos, looked at the few scattered rocks and shallow depressions that barely dimpled the smooth convexity of the slope. He took a second quick look round the rock as the rifles of the W.G.B. opened up once more, saw the same encircling manoeuvre being executed again, and waited no longer. Firing blindly downhill, he half-rose to his feet and flung himself out into the open, finger squeezing on the trigger, feet driving desperately into the frozen snow as he launched himself towards the nearest -rock-cover, forty yards away if an inch. Thirty-five yards to go, thirty, twenty and still not a shot fired, a slip, a stumble on the sliding scree, a catlike recovery, ten yards, still miraculously immune, and then he had dived into shelter to land on chest and stomach with a sickening impact that struck cruelly into his ribs and emptied his lungs with an explosive gasp.
Fighting for breath, he struck the magazine cover, rammed home another charge, risked a quick peep over the top of the rock and catapulted himself to his feet again, all inside ten seconds. The Mauser held across his body opened up again, firing downhill at vicious random, for Andrea had eyes only for the smoothly-treacherous ground at his feet, for the scree-lined depression so impossibly far ahead. And then the Mauser was empty, useless in his hand, and every gun far below had opened up, the shells whistling above his head or blinding him with spurting gouts of snow as they ricochetted off the solid rock. But twilight was touching the hills, Andrea was only a blur, a swiftly-flitting blur against a ghostly background, and uphill accuracy was notoriously difficult at any time. Even so, the massed fire from below was steadying and converging, and Andrea waited no longer. Unseen hands plucking wickedly at the flying tails of his snow-smock, he flung himself almost horizontally forward and slid the last ten feet face down into the waiting depression.