"The radio, Kapitan! It"s warm, very warm! It"s been in use inside the last five minutes."
"In the last five minutes? Impossible!" He stared at the sergeant. "Unless -- "
"Yes, Herr Kapitan. Unless."
"Surround the station," the officer shouted. "Search every room."
"Oh G.o.d!" Schaffer moaned. "Why can"t they leave us alone?"
"Quickly," Smith said softly. He took Schaffer"s arm and they moved through the dark shadows till they reached the ladies" cloakroom. Carefully not to rattle his skeleton keys, Smith had the door open in seconds. They pa.s.sed inside and locked the door behind them.
"This won"t look so good in my obituary," Schaffer said dolefully. There was a perceptible edge of strain under the lightly-spoken words.
"What won"t?"
"Gave his life for his country in a ladies" lavatory in Upper Bavaria. How can a man R.I.P. with that on his mind?... What"s our friend outside saying?"
"If you shut up we might hear."
"And when I say everywhere, I mean everywhere." The German captain was barking out his commands in the best parade-ground fashion. "If a door is locked, break it open. If you can"t break it open, shoot the lock away. And if you don"t want to die in the next five minutes, never forget that these are violent and extremely dangerous men almost certainly armed with stolen Schmeisser machine-pistols, apart from their own weapons. Make no attempt to capture them. Shoot on sight and shoot to kill."
"You heard?" Smith said.
"I"m afraid I did." There was a perceptible click as Schaffer c.o.c.ked his machine-pistol.
They stood side-by-side in the darkness listening to the sounds of the search, the calling of voices, the hammering of rifle b.u.t.ts on wood, the splintering of yielding doors, the occasional short burst of machine-gun fire where a door, presumably, had failed to yield to more conventional methods of persuasion. The sounds of the approaching search grew very close.
"They"re getting warm," Schaffer murmured.
Schaffer had underestimated the temperature. Just as he finished speaking an unseen hand closed on the outer door handle and rattled the door furiously. Smith and Schaffer moved silently and took up position pressed close against the wall, one on either side of the door.
The rattling ceased. A heavy crashing impact from the outside shook the door on its hinges. A second such impact and the woodwork in the jamb by the lock began to splinter. Two more would do it, Smith thought, two more.
But there were no more.
"Gott in Himmel, Hans!" The voice beyond the door held -- or appeared to hold -- a mixture of consternation and outrage. "What are you thinking of? Can"t you read?"
"Can"t I -- " The second voice broke off abruptly and when it came again it was in tones of defensive apology. "DAMEN ! Mein Gott! DAMEN !" A pause. "If you, had spent as many years on the Russian Front as I have -- " His voice faded as the two men moved away.
"G.o.d bless our common Anglo-Saxon heritage," Schaffer murmured fervently.
"What are you talking about?" Smith demanded. He had released his tense grip on the Schmeisser and realised that the palms of his hands were damp.
"This misplaced sense of decency," Schaffer explained.
"A far from misplaced and highly developed sense of self-preservation," Smith said dryly. "Would you like to come searching for a couple of reputed killers, like us, knowing that the first man to find us would probably be cut in half by a burst of machine-gun fire? Put yourself in their position. How do you think those men feel. How would you feel?"
Td feel very unhappy," Schaffer said candidly.
"And so do they. And so they seize on any reasonable excuse not to investigate. Our two friends who have just left have no idea whatsoever whether we"re in here or not and, what"s more, the last thing they want to do is to find out."
"Stop making with the old psychology. All that matters is that Schaffer is saved. Saved!"
"If you believe that," Smith said curtly, "you deserve to end up with a blindfold round your eyes."
"How"s that again?" Schaffer asked apprehensively.
"You and I," Smith explained patiently, "are not the only people who can put ourselves in the places of the searchers. You can bet your life that the captain can and more than likely the sergeant, too -- you saw how quickly he caught on to the d.a.m.n" radio. By and by one or other is going to come by, see this closed and undamaged door, blow his top and insist on a few of his men being offered the chance to earn a posthumous Iron Cross. What I mean is, Schaffer is not yet saved."
"What do we do, boss?" Schaffer said quietly. "I don"t feel so funny any more."
"We create a diversion. Here are the keys -- this one. Put it in the lock and hold it ready to turn. We"ll be leaving in a hurry -- troops of this calibre can"t be fooled for long."
He dug into his knapsack, fished out a hand-grenade, crossed the cloakroom into the washroom and, in almost total darkness, felt his way across it to where the window at the back should have been, finally located it from the source of a faint wash of light. He pressed his nose against the gla.s.s but could see nothing, cursed softly as he realised a washroom window would always certainly be frosted, located the latch and slowly swung the window wide. With infinite caution, a fraction of an inch at a time, he thrust his head slowly through the window.
n.o.body blew his head off. There were soldiers immediately to be seen, it was true, soldiers armed and at the ready, but they weren"t looking in his direction : there were five of them, spread out in an arc of a circle, perhaps fifteen yards from the station entrance, and every machine-pistol was trained on that entrance. Waiting for the rabbits to bolt, Smith thought.
What was of much more interest was the empty truck parked only feet away from the window where he was: it was the reflected light from its side-lights that had enabled him to locate the window. Hoping that the truck was built along conventional lines, Smith armed the grenade, counted three, lobbed it under the back wheels of the truck and ducked behind the shelter of the washroom wall.
The two explosions -- grenade and petrol tank -- went off so almost simultaneously as to be indistinguishable in time Shattered gla.s.s from the window above showered down on his head and his ear-drums hurt fiercely both from the roar of sound and the proximity to the explosive shock-wave. Smith made no attempt to inspect the damage he had done, less from the urgent need for haste to leave there than from the very obvious fact that the remains of the truck outside had burst into flames and to have lifted his head above that window sill would have been a swift form of illuminated suicide: not that he could have done so in any event for the wind-driven flames from the track were already beginning to lick through the shattered washroom window. On hands and knees Smith scuttled across the washroom floor, not rising till he had reached the cloakroom. Schaffer, who had his hand on the key and the door already open a fraction of an inch turned at Smith"s approach.
To the hills, boss?" he enquired.
To the hills."
The track-side of the station was, predictably, deserted: those who had not automatically run to investigate the source of the explosion would have as automatically a.s.sumed that the explosion was in some way connected with an escape attempt or resistance on the part of the hunted men. However it was, the result was the satisfactory same.
They ran along the tracks till they came to the b.u.mpers at the end of the line, skirted these and continued running until they were safely among the scatter of houses that rose steeply up the hill-side on the eastern side of the village. They stopped to take breath and looked back the way they had come.
The station was on "fire, not yet heavily on fire, but, with flames rising six to eight feet and black smoke billowing into the night sky, obviously already beyond any hope of extinction.
Schaffer said: "They"re not going to be very pleased."
"I shouldn"t think so."
"What I mean is, they"re really going to go after us now. With everything they have. They"ve Dobermann pinchers up at the castle and I"ve no doubt they have them at the camp too. They"ve only to bring them to the station, sniff our gear, have them circle the station, pick up our scent and that"s it. Smith and Schaffer torn to shreds. I"ll take on the Alpenkorps by numbers, but I draw the line at Dobermann pinchers, boss."
"I thought it was horses you were scared of?" Smith said mildly.
"Horses, Dobermann pinchers, you name it, I"m scared of it. All it"s got to have is four feet." He looked gloomily at the burning station. Td make a rotten vet."
"No worry," Smith a.s.sured him. "We won"t be here long enough for any of your four-footed pals to come bothering you."
"No?" Schaffer looked at him suspiciously.
"The castle," Smith said patiently. "That"s what we"re here for. Remember?"
"I hadn"t forgotten." The flames from the blazing station were now licking thirty, forty feet up in the air. "You gone and ruined a perfectly good station, you know that?"