The helicopter had landed. The rotor stopped, steps descended and a man climbed down to the courtyard floor. From his uniform, Smith decided, a very senior officer. Then he suddenly realised that it was a very very senior officer indeed. His face tightened as he pushed the telescope across to Schaffer. "Take a good look," he advised.
Schaffer took a good look, lowered the telescope as the man pa.s.sed through a doorway. "Pal of yours, boss?"
"I know him. Reichsmarschall Julius Rosemeyer. The Wehrmacht Chief of Staff."
"My very first Reichsmarschall and me without my telescopic rifle," Schaffer said regretfully. 1 wonder what his highness wants."
"Same as us," Smith said briefly.
"General Carnaby?"
"When you"re going to ask the Allies" overall co-ordinator of planning a few questions about the Second Front you don"t send just the corporal of the guard to interview him."
"You don"t think they might have come to take old Carnaby away?" Schaffer asked anxiously.
"Not a chance. The Gestapo never gives up its prisoners. In this country the Wehrmacht does what the Gestapo says."
"Or else?"
"Or else. Off you go -- they"ve more coffee on the brew back there. Send someone to relieve me in an hour."
Admiral Rolland"s weather forecast for the area turned out to be perfectly correct. As the endless shivering hours dragged slowly by the weather steadily deteriorated. By noon the sun was gone and a keen wind sprung up from the east. By early afternoon snow had begun to fall from the darkened sky, slowly at first then with increasing severity as the east wind steadily increased in strength and became bitingly cold. It looked like being a bad night, Smith thought. But a bad night that reduced visibility to near-zero and kept people indoors was what they wanted : it would have been difficult for them to saunter up to the Schloss Adler bathed in the warm light of a harvest moon. Smith checked his watch.
Time to go." He climbed stiffly to his feet and beat his arms to restore circulation. "Call Thomas, will you."
Rucksacks and kit-bags were slung and shouldered. Thomas, who had been keeping watch, appeared carrying Smith"s telescope. Thomas was very far from being his usual cheerful self, and it wasn"t just the fact that he"d spent the last hour exposed to the full force of wind and snow that had left him in such ill-humour.
"Is that d.a.m.ned radio working yet?" he asked Smith. "Not a hope. Six tries, six failures. Why?"
"I"ll tell you why," Thomas said bitterly. "Pity we couldn"t get the Admiral to change his mind about the paratroops. A full troop train just got in, that"s all."
"Well, that"s fine," Smith said equably. "The old hands will think we"re new boys and the new boys will think we"re old hands. Very convenient."
Thomas looked thoughtfully at Smith.
"Very, very convenient." He hesitated, then went on: "How about loosening up a bit, Major?"
"What do you mean?"
"Come off it," Carraciola said roughly. "You know d.a.m.n well what he means. It"s our lives. Why do we have to go down into that d.a.m.ned village? And how do you intend to get Carnaby out? If we"re to commit suicide, tell us why. You owe us that."
"I owe you nothing," Smith said flatly. "I"ll tell you nothing. And if you know nothing you can"t talk. You"ll be told when the time comes."
"You, Smith," Torrance-Smythe said precisely, "are a cold blooded devil."
"It"s been said before," Smith said indifferently.
The village railway station was a small, two-track, end-of-the-line depot. Like all end-of-the-line depots it was characterised by rust, dilapidation, the barest functionalism of design and an odd pessimistically-expectant air of waiting for someone to come along and finish it off properly. At any time, its air of desolation was total. That night, completely deserted, with a high, gusting wind driving snow through pools of light cast by dim and swaying electric lamps, the ghostly impression of a place abandoned by man and by the world was almost overwhelming. It suited Smith"s purpose perfectly.
He led his five snow-smock clad men quickly across the tracks and into the comparative shelter of the station buildings. They filed silently past the closed bookstall, the freight office, the booking office, flitted quickly into the shadows beyond and stopped.
Smith lowered the radio, shrugged off his rucksack, removed snow-smock and trousers and sauntered casually alongside the tracks--the thrifty Bavarians regarded platforms as a wasteful luxury. He stopped outside a door next to a bolted hatch which bore above it the legend GEPACK ANNA H M E. He tried the door. It was locked. He made a quick survey to check that he was un.o.bserved, stooped, examined the keyhole with a pencil flash, took a bunch of oddly shaped keys from his pockets and had the door opened in seconds. He whistled softly and was almost at once joined by the others, who filed quickly inside, already slipping off their packs as they went. Schaffer, bringing up the rear, paused and glanced up at the sign above the hatch.
"My G.o.d!" He shook his head. "The left luggage office!"
"Where else?" Smith asked reasonably. He ushered Schaffer in, closed and locked the door behind him. Hooding his pencil torch until only a finger-width beam emerged, he pa.s.sed by the luggage racks till he came to the far end of the room where a bay window was set in the wall. It was a perfectly ordinary sash window and he examined it very minutely, careful that at no time the pinpoint of light touched the gla.s.s to shine through to the street beyond. He turned his attention to the vertical wooden planking at the side of the window, took out his sheath knife and levered a plank away to expose a length of twin-cored flex stapled vertically to the wall. He split the cores, sliced through each in turn, replaced the plank and tested the lower sash of the window. It moved easily up and down.
"An interesting performance," Schaffer observed. "What was all that in aid of?"
"It"s not always convenient to enter by the front door. Or, come to that, leave by it either."
"A youth mis-spent in philandering or burgling," Schaffer said sadly. "How did you know it was wired for sound?"
"Even a small country station will have valuables stored in its left luggage office from time to time," Smith said patiently. "But it will not have a full-time baggage attendant. The attendant, booking clerk, ticket-collector, porter and station-master are probably all one man. So it"s kept locked. But there"s no point in barring the front door if your bag-s.n.a.t.c.her can climb in through the back window. So your back window is grilled 01 wired. No grille--and a badly-fitting plank. Obvious."
"Obvious to you, maybe," Carraciola said sourly. "All this -- ah -- expertise with skeleton keys and burglar alarms. The Black Watch you said you were in?"
"That"s right."
"Very odd training they give you in those Scottish regiments. Very odd indeed."
""Thorough" is the word you"re searching for," Smith said kindly. "Let"s go and have a drink."
"Let"s do that," Carraciola said heavily. "Remind me to get mine down in one go or ten gets you one that I"ll never live to finish it."
"It would be a shame to waste good beer," Smith agreed. He waited until the last man was out, locked the door behind him and rejoined them as they walked out of the main station entrance under the "Bahnhof sign. They were now no longer carrying rucksacks or wearing snow-smocks. All were dressed in the uniforms of soldiers of a Jager battalion, Smith as a major, Schaffer as a lieutenant and the other four as sergeants. Their uniforms were no longer as immaculately crease-free as they might have been nor for that matter, as Sergeant Harrod had observed, did they fit as well as they might have done. But in a village street or crowded bar, at night-time, they should pa.s.s muster. Or so Smith devoutly hoped.
It was a typical main street in a typical high alpine village. The buildings lining either side of the street, solid, rugged, four-square buildings, looked as if they had been defying the bitter Bavarian winters for a long long time and intended going on doing so for as long again. Nearly all the houses were of the wooden chalet type, with great sweeping eaves and balconies running the full width of the front of the houses. A few were of comparatively modern construction, with shingled walls, large double-glazed windows and fancy wrought-iron grille-work, but most were very old and low, planked with rough adze-cut wood, and having the interlocking wall-beams projecting at the corners.
There were no street lamps but neither was there any attempt at a blackout. Elongated rectangles of light from uncurtained windows patterned the snow-packed streets. Beyond the far or southern end of the street, intermittently seen through the sweeping curtains of snow, a duster of bright lights seemed to hang suspended in the sky. Instinctively, almost, Smith stopped to gaze at this distant constellation and his men stopped with him. The lights of the Schloss Adler, the castle of the eagle, seemed impossibly remote, as unattainable as the mountains of the moon. Wordlessly, the men looked at them in long silence, then at one another, then, by mutual and still silent consent, moved on their way again, their boots crunching crisply in the beaten snow, their frozen breaths wisping away in the chill night wind.
The main street -- the only street -- was deserted, quite empty of life. Inevitably so, on so bitter a night. But if the street was deserted, the village was anything but: the sounds of laughter and singing and the babel of voices filled the night air and the nose-to-tail row of parked German trucks along one side of the street showed clearly enough just who was responsible for the singing and the laughter. For the training troops in the military barracks" on the Blau See there was only one centre of entertainment for twenty miles around and this village was it: the Gasthauser and Weinstuben were jammed to the doors with soldiers of the Alpenkorps, probably the most highly trained combat troops in Europe.
Schaffer said plaintively: "I don"t really feel like a drink, boss."
"Nonsense," Smith said encouragingly. "You"re just shy at the thought of meeting strangers." He stopped in front of a Gastbaus with the legend "Drei Konige" above the door. "Here"s a likely looking place, now. Hang on a minute."
He climbed the steps, opened the door and looked inside. Down in the street the other five looked at one another, the same mingled apprehension and expectancy mirrored in every eye. Austrian Schrammel music, hauntingly and nostalgically evocative of a kindlier and happier age, flooded through the open doorway. The expressions on the faces of the men below didn"t change. There was a time and a place for Schrammel music and this wasn"t it.
Smith shook his head, closed the door and rejoined his men.
"Packed," he said. "Not even standing room." He nodded across the street to another hostelry, the "Eichhof," a small, squat, beetle-browed building with adze-cut corner beams and an air of advanced dilapidation. "Let"s see what this has to offer."
But the "Eichhof had nothing to offer. Regretfully but firmly Smith closed its front door and turned away.
"Jammed," he announced. "Besides, a low-cla.s.s dump unsuitable for officers and N.C.O.s of the Wehrmacht. But this next place looks more promising, don"t you think?"
From the pointed silence it was apparent that the other five didn"t think anything of the kind, and, in fact, apart from the factor of size, the third Wemstube looked remarkably like the ones Smith had just pa.s.sed up. "Zum Wilden Hirsch", it was called, and above the sign was a snow-shrouded wooden carving of a wild deer.