Force 10 from Navarone (8 page)

‘Not tonight, I’m afraid.’ Neufeld exchanged a smile with Droshny.
‘You
are going to find out for us where this break-out is coming.’

‘We are?’ Miller drained his glass and reached for the bottle. ‘Infectious stuff, this insanity.’

Neufeld might not have heard him. ‘Partisan HQ is about ten kilometres from here. You are going to report there as the bona-fide British mission that has lost its way. Then, when you’ve found out their plans, you tell them that you are going to their main HQ at Drvar, which of course, you don’t. You come back here instead. What could be simpler?’

‘Miller’s right,’ Mallory said with conviction. ‘You
are
mad.’

‘I’m beginning to think there’s altogether too much talk of this madness.’ Neufeld smiled. ‘You would prefer, perhaps, that Captain Droshny here turned you over to his men. I assure you, they are most unhappy about their – ah – late comrade.’

‘You can’t ask us to do this!’ Mallory was hard-faced in anger. ‘The Partisans are bound to get a radio message about us. Sooner or later. And then – well, you know what then. You just can’t ask this of us.’

‘I can and I will.’ Neufeld looked at Mallory and his five companions without enthusiasm. ‘It so happens that I don’t care for dope-peddlers and drug-runners.’

‘I don’t think your opinion will carry much weight in certain circles,’ Mallory said.

‘And that means?’

‘Kesselring’s Director of Military Intelligence isn’t going to like this at all.’

‘If you don’t come back, they’ll never know. If you do –’ Neufeld smiled and touched the Iron Cross at his throat – ‘they’ll probably give me an oak leaf to this.’

‘Likeable type, isn’t he?’ Miller said to no one in particular.

‘Come then.’ Neufeld rose from the table. ‘Petar?’

The blind singer nodded, slung his guitar over his shoulder and rose to his feet, his sister rising with him.

‘What’s this, then?’ Mallory asked.

‘Guides.’

‘Those
two?’

‘Well,’ Neufeld said reasonably, ‘you can’t very well find your own way there, can you? Petar and his sister – well, his sister – know Bosnia better than the foxes.’

‘But won’t the Partisans –’ Mallory began, but Neufeld interrupted.

‘You don’t know your Bosnia. These two wander wherever they like and no one will turn them from their door. The Bosnians believe, and God knows
with sufficient reason, that they are accursed and have the evil eye on them. This is a land of superstition, Captain Mallory.’

‘But – but how will they know where to take us?’

‘They’ll know.’ Neufeld nodded to Droshny, who talked rapidly to Maria in Serbo-Croat: she in turn spoke to Petar, who made some strange noises in his throat.

‘That’s an odd language,’ Miller observed.

‘He’s got a speech impediment,’ Neufeld said shortly. ‘He was born with it. He can sing, but not talk – it’s not unknown. Do you wonder people think they are cursed?’ He turned to Mallory. ‘Wait outside with your men.’

Mallory nodded, gestured to the others to precede him. Neufeld, he noted, was immediately engaged in a short, low-voiced discussion with Droshny, who nodded, summoned one of his Cetniks and dispatched him on some errand. Once outside, Mallory moved with Andrea slightly apart from the others and murmured something in his ear, inaudible to all but Andrea, whose nodded acquiescence was almost imperceptible.

Neufeld and Droshny emerged from the hut, followed by Maria who was leading Petar by the hand. As they approached Mallory’s group, Andrea walked casually towards them, smoking the inevitable noxious cigar. He planted himself in front of a puzzled Neufeld and arrogantly blew smoke into his face.

‘I don’t think I care for you very much, Hauptmann Neufeld,’ Andrea announced. He looked at Droshny. ‘Nor for the cutlery salesman here.’

Neufeld’s face immediately darkened, became tight in anger. But he brought himself quickly under control and said with restraint: ‘Your opinion of me is of no concern to me.’ He nodded to Droshny. ‘But do not cross Captain Droshny’s path, my friend. He is a Bosnian and a proud one – and the best man in the Balkans with a knife.’

‘The best man –’ Andrea broke off with a roar of laughter, and blew smoke into Droshny’s face. ‘A knife-grinder in a comic opera.’

Droshny’s disbelief was total but of brief duration. He bared his teeth in a fashion that would have done justice to any Bosnian wolf, swept a wickedly-curved knife from his belt and threw himself on Andrea, the gleaming blade hooking viciously upwards, but Andrea, whose prudence was exceeded only by the extraordinary speed with which he could move his vast bulk, was no longer there when the knife arrived. But his hand was. It caught Droshny’s knife wrist as it flashed upwards and almost at once the two big men crashed heavily to the ground, rolling over and over in the snow while they fought for possession of the knife.

So unexpectedly, so wholly incredible the speed with which the fight had developed from nowhere that, for a few seconds, no one moved. The three
young sergeants, Neufeld and the Cetniks registered nothing but utter astonishment. Mallory, who was standing close behind the wide-eyed girl, rubbed his chin thoughtfully while Miller, delicately tapping the ash off the end of his cigarette, regarded the scene with a sort of weary interest.

Almost at the same instant, Reynolds, Groves and two Cetniks flung themselves upon the struggling pair on the ground and tried to pull them apart. Not until Saunders and Neufeld lent a hand did they succeed. Droshny and Andrea were pulled to their feet, the former with contorted face and hatred in his eyes, Andrea calmly resuming the smoking of the cigar which he’d somehow picked up after they had been separated.

‘You madman!’ Reynolds said savagely to Andrea. ‘You crazy maniac. You – you’re a bloody psychopath. You’ll get us all killed.’

‘That wouldn’t surprise me at all,’ Neufeld said thoughtfully. ‘Come. Let us have no more of this foolishness.’

He led the way from the compound, and as he did so they were joined by a group of half-a-dozen Cetniks, whose apparent leader was the youth with the straggling ginger beard and cast to his eye, the first of the Cetniks to greet them when they had landed.

‘Who are they and what are they for?’ Mallory demanded of Neufeld. ‘They’re not coming with us.’

‘Escort/Neufeld explained. ‘For the first seven kilometres only.’

‘Escorts? What would we want with escorts? We’re in no danger from you, nor, according to what you say, will we be from the Yugoslav Partisans.’

‘We’re not worried about you,’ Neufeld said drily. ‘We’re worried about the vehicle that is going to take you most of the way there. Vehicles are very few and very precious in this part of Bosnia – and there are many Partisan patrols about.’

Twenty minutes later, in a now moonless night and with snow falling, they reached a road, a road which was little more than a winding track running through a forested valley floor. Waiting for them there was one of the strangest four-wheeled contraptions Mallory or his companions had ever seen, an incredibly ancient and battered truck which at first sight, from the vast clouds of smoke emanating from it, appeared to be on fire. It was, in fact, a very much pre-war wood-burning truck, of a type at one time common in the Balkans. Miller regarded the smoke-shrouded truck in astonishment and turned to Neufeld.

‘You call this a vehicle?’

‘You call it what you like. Unless you’d rather walk.’

‘Ten kilometres? I’ll take my chance on asphyxiation.’ Miller climbed in, followed by the others, till only Neufeld and Droshny remained outside.

Neufeld said: ‘I shall expect you back before noon.’

‘If we ever come back,’ Mallory said. ‘If a radio message has come through –’

‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ Neufeld said indifferently.

With a great rattling and shaking and emission of smoke and steam, all accompanied by much red-eyed coughing from the canvas-covered rear, the truck jerked uncertainly into motion and moved off slowly along the valley floor, Neufeld and Droshny gazing after it. Neufeld shook his head. ‘Such clever little men.’

‘Such
very
clever little men,’ Droshny agreed. ‘But I want the big one, Captain.’

Neufeld clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You shall have him, my friend. Well, they’re out of sight. Time for you to go.’

Droshny nodded and whistled shrilly between his fingers. There came the distant whirr of an engine starter, and soon an elderly Fiat emerged from behind a clump of pines and approached along the hard-packed snow of the road, its chains clanking violently, and stopped beside the two men. Droshny climbed into the front passenger seat and the Fiat moved off in the wake of the truck.

For the fourteen people jammed on the narrow side benches under the canvas-hooped roof, the journey could hardly be called pleasurable. There were no cushions on the seats just as there appeared to be a total absence of springs on the vehicle, and the torn and badly fitting hood admitted large quantities of icy night air and eye-smarting smoke in about equal proportions. At least, Mallory thought, it all helped considerably to keep them awake.

Andrea was sitting directly opposite him, seemingly oblivious of the thick choking atmosphere inside the truck, a fact hardly surprising considering that the penetrating power and the pungency of the smoke from the truck was of a lower order altogether than that emanating from the black cheroot clamped between Andrea’s teeth. Andrea glanced idly across and caught Mallory’s eye. Mallory nodded once, a millimetric motion of the head that would have gone unremarked by
even the most suspicious. Andrea dropped his eyes until his gaze rested on Mallory’s right hand, lying loosely of his knee. Mallory sat back and sighed, and as he did his right hand slipped until his thumb was pointing directly at the floor. Andrea puffed out another Vesuvian cloud of acrid smoke and looked away indifferently.

For some kilometres the smoke-enshrouded truck clattered and screeched its way along the valley floor, then swung off to the left on to an even narrower track, and began to climb. Less than two minutes later, with Droshny sitting impassively in the front passenger seat, the pursuing Fiat made a similar turn off.

The slope was now so steep and the spinning driving wheels losing so much traction on the frozen surface of the track that the ancient wood-burning truck was reduced to little more than walking pace. Inside the truck, Andrea and Mallory were as watchful as ever, but Miller and the three sergeants seemed to be dozing off, whether through exhaustion or incipient asphyxiation it was difficult to say. Maria and Petar, hand in hand, appeared to be asleep. The Cetniks, on the other hand, could hardly have been more wide awake, and were making it clear for the first time that the rents and holes in the canvas cover had not been caused by accident: Droshny’s six men were now kneeling on the benches with the muzzles of their machine-pistols thrust through the apertures in the canvas. It was clear that the truck was now
moving into Partisan territory, or, at least, what passed for no-man’s-land in that wild and rugged territory.

The Cetnik farthest forward in the truck suddenly withdrew his face from a gap in the canvas and rapped the butt of his gun against the driver’s cab. The truck wheezed to a grateful halt, the ginger-bearded Cetnik jumped down, checked swiftly for any signs of ambush, then gestured the others to disembark, the repeatedly urgent movements of his hand making it clear that he was less than enamoured of the idea of hanging around that place for a moment longer than necessity demanded. One by one Mallory and his companions jumped down on to the frozen snow. Reynolds guided the blind singer down to the ground, then reached up a hand to help Maria as she clambered over the tailboard. Wordlessly, she struck his hand aside and leapt nimbly to the ground: Reynolds stared at her in hurt astonishment. The truck, Mallory observed, had stopped outside a small clearing in the forest. Backing and filling and issuing denser clouds of smoke than ever, it used this space to turn around in a remarkably short space of time and clanked its way off down the forest path at a considerably higher speed than it had made the ascent. The Cetniks gazed impassively from the back of the departing truck, made no gesture of farewell.

Maria took Petar’s hand, looked coldly at Mallory, jerked her head and set off up a tiny footpath
leading at right-angles from the track. Mallory shrugged and set off, followed by the three sergeants. For a moment or two, Andrea and Miller remained where they were, gazing thoughtfully at the corner round which the truck had just disappeared. Then they, too, set off, talking in low tones to each other.

The ancient wood-burning truck did not maintain its initial impetus for any lengthy period of time. Less than four hundred yards after rounding the corner which blocked it from the view of Mallory and his companions it braked to a halt. Two Cetniks, the ginger-bearded leader of the escort and another black-bearded man, jumped over the tailboard and moved at once into the protective covering of the forest. The truck rattled off once more, its belching smoke hanging heavily in the freezing night air.

A kilometre farther down the track, an almost identical scene was taking place. The Fiat slid to a halt, Droshny scrambled from the passenger’s seat and vanished among the pines. The Fiat reversed quickly and moved off down the track.

The track up through the heavily wooded slope was very narrow, very winding: the snow was no longer hard-packed, but soft and deep and making for very hard going. The moon was quite gone now, the snow, gusted into their faces by the
east wind, was becoming steadily heavier and the cold was intense. The path frequently arrived at a V-shaped branch but Maria, in the lead with her brother, never hesitated: she knew, or appeared to know, exactly where she was going. Several times she slipped in the deep snow, on the last occasion so heavily that she brought her brother down with her. When it happened yet again, Reynolds moved forward and took the girl by the arm to help her. She struck out savagely and drew her arm away. Reynolds stared at her in astonishment, then turned to Mallory.

‘What the devil’s the matter with – I mean, I was only trying to help –’

‘Leave her alone,’ Mallory said. ‘You’re one of them.’

‘I’m one of –’

‘You’re wearing a British uniform. That’s all the poor kid understands. Leave her be.’

Reynolds shook his head uncomprehendingly. He hitched his pack more securely on his shoulders, glanced back down the trail, made to move on, then glanced backwards again. He caught Mallory by the arm and pointed.

Andrea had already fallen thirty yards behind. Weighed down by his rucksack and Schmeisser and weight of years, he was very obviously making heavy weather of the climb and was falling steadily behind by the second. At a gesture and word from Mallory the rest of the party halted and peered back down through the driving snow, waiting for
Andrea to make up on them. By this time Andrea was beginning to stumble almost drunkenly and clutched at his right side as if in pain. Reynolds looked at Groves: they both looked at Saunders: all three slowly shook their heads. Andrea came up with them and a spasm of pain flickered across his face.

‘I’m sorry.’ The voice was gasping and hoarse. ‘I’ll be all right in a moment.’

Saunders hesitated, then advanced towards Andrea. He smiled apologetically, then reached out a hand to indicate the rucksack and Schmeisser.

‘Come on, Dad. Hand them over.’

For the minutest fraction of a second a flicker of menace, more imagined than seen, touched Andrea’s face, then he shrugged off his rucksack and wearily handed it over. Saunders accepted it and tentatively indicated the Schmeisser.

‘Thanks.’ Andrea smiled wanly. ‘But I’d feel lost without it.’

Uncertainly, they resumed their climb, looking back frequently to check on Andrea’s progress. Their doubts were well-founded. Within thirty seconds Andrea had stopped, his eyes screwed up, and bent almost double in pain. He said, gaspingly: ‘I must rest … Go on. I’ll catch up with you.’

Miller said solicitously: ‘I’ll stay with you.’

‘I don’t need anybody to stay with me,’ Andrea said surlily. ‘I can look after myself.’

Miller said nothing. He looked at Mallory and
jerked his head in an uphill direction. Mallory nodded, once, and gestured to the girl. Reluctantly, they moved off, leaving Andrea and Miller behind. Twice, Reynolds looked back over his shoulder, his expression an odd mixture of worry and exasperation: then he shrugged his shoulders and bent his back to the hill.

Andrea, scowling blackly and still clutching his ribs, remained bent double until the last of the party had rounded the nearest uphill corner, then straightened effortlessly, tested the wind with a wetted forefinger, established that it was moving up-trail, produced a cigar, lit it and puffed in deep and obvious contentment. His recovery was quite astonishing, but it didn’t appear to astonish Miller, who grinned and nodded downhill. Andrea grinned in return, made a courteous gesture of precedence.

Thirty yards down-trail, at a position which gave them an uninterrupted view of almost a hundred yards of the track below them they moved into the cover of the bole of a giant pine. For about two minutes they stood there, staring downhill and listening intently, then suddenly Andrea nodded, stooped and carefully laid his cigar in a sheltered dried patch of ground behind the bole of the pine.

They exchanged no words: there was need of none. Miller crawled round to the downhill-facing front of the pine and carefully arranged himself in a spread-eagled position in the deep snow, both
arms outflung, his apparently sightless face turned up to the falling snow. Behind the pine, Andrea reversed his grip on his Schmeisser, holding it by the barrel, produced a knife from the recesses of his clothing and stuck it in his belt. Both men remained as motionless as if they had died there and frozen solid over the long and bitter Yugoslav winter.

Probably because his spreadeagled form was sunk so deeply in the soft snow as to conceal most of his body, Miller saw the two Cetniks coming quite some time before they saw him. At first they were no more than two shapeless and vaguely ghostlike forms gradually materializing from the falling snow: as they drew nearer, he identified them as the Cetnik escort leader and one of his men.

They were less than thirty yards away before they saw Miller. They stopped, stared, remained motionless for at least five seconds, looked at each other, unslung their machine-pistols and broke into a stumbling uphill run. Miller closed his eyes. He didn’t require them any more, his ears gave him all the information he wanted, the closing sound of crunching footsteps in the snow, the abrupt cessation of those, the heavy breathing as a man bent over him.

Miller waited until he could actually feel the man’s breath in his face, then opened his eyes. Not twelve inches from his own were the eyes of the ginger-bearded Cetnik. Miller’s outflung arms
curved upwards and inwards, his sinewy fingers hooked deeply into the throat of the startled man above him.

Andrea’s Schmeisser had already reached the limit of its backswing as he stepped soundlessly round the bole of the pine. The black-bearded Cetnik was just beginning to move to help his friend when he caught sight of Andrea from the corner of one eye, and flung up both arms to protect himself. A pair of straws would have served him as well. Andrea grimaced at the sheer physical shock of the impact, dropped the Schmeisser, pulled out his knife and fell upon the other Cetnik still struggling desperately in Miller’s stranglehold.

Miller rose to his feet and he and Andrea stared down at the two dead men. Miller looked in puzzlement at the ginger-bearded man, then suddenly stooped, caught the beard and tugged. It came away in his hand, revealing beneath it a clean-shaven face and a scar which ran from the corner of a lip to the chin.

Andrea and Miller exchanged speculative glances, but neither made comment. They dragged the dead men some little way off the path into the concealment of some undergrowth. Andrea picked up a dead branch and swept away the dragmarks in the snow and, by the base of the pine, all traces of the encounter: inside the hour, he knew, the brushmarks he had made would have vanished under a fresh covering of snow. He picked up his cigar and threw the branch deep into the woods.
Without a backward glance, the two men began to walk briskly up the hill.

Had they given this backward glance, it was barely possible that they might have caught a glimpse of a face peering round the trunk of a tree farther downhill. Droshny had arrived at the bend in the track just in time to see Andrea complete his brushing operations and throw the branch away: what the meaning of this might be he couldn’t guess.

He waited until Andrea and Miller had disappeared from his sight, waited another two minutes for good measure and safety, then hurried up the track, the expression on his swarthy brigand’s face nicely balanced between puzzlement and suspicion. He reached the pine where the two Cetniks had been ambushed, briefly quartered the area, then followed the line of brushmarks leading into the woods, the puzzlement on his face giving way first to pure suspicion, then the suspicion to complete certainty.

He parted the bushes and peered down at the two Cetniks lying half-buried in a snow-filled gully with that curiously huddled shapelessness that only the dead can achieve. After a few moments he straightened, turned and looked uphill in the direction in which Andrea and Miller had vanished: his face was not pleasant to look upon.

Andrea and Miller made good time up the hill. As they approached one of the innumerable bends in the trail they heard up ahead the sound
of a softly-played guitar, curiously muffled and softened in tone by the falling snow. Andrea slowed up, threw away his cigar, bent forward and clutched his ribs. Solicitously, Miller took his arm.

The main party, they saw, was less than thirty yards ahead. They, too, were making slow time: the depth of snow and the increasing slope of the track made any quicker movement impossible. Reynolds glanced back – Reynolds was spending a great deal of his time in looking over his shoulder, he appeared to be in a highly apprehensive state – caught sight of Andrea and Miller and called out to Mallory who halted the party and waited for Andrea and Miller to make up with them. Mallory looked worriedly at Andrea.