The Complete Navarone (44 page)

Neufeld looked at him guardedly. ‘What about the information you gave me this morning?’

‘Just this. It wasn’t, I’m afraid, quite accurate. Vukalovic expects the attack from the
north
, through the Zenica Gap, not across the bridge at Neretva from the south. There are, we know, close on two hundred of your tanks massed in the woods just to the north of the Zenica Gap – but there won’t be at two a.m. this morning when your attack is due to start. Not after I’ve got through to our Lancaster squadrons in Italy. Think of it, think of the target. Two hundred tanks bunched in a tiny trap a hundred and fifty yards wide and not more than three hundred yards long. The RAF will be there at 1.30. By two this morning there won’t be a single tank left in commission.’

Neufeld looked at him for a long moment, his face very still, then said, slowly and softly: ‘Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!’

‘Damning is all you’ll have for it,’ Mallory said agreeably. ‘By the time you are released – hopefully assuming that you will be released – it will all be over. See you after the war.’

Andrea locked the two men in a side room and hung the key up by the one to the cell. Then they went outside, locked the outer door, hung the key on a nail by the door, mounted their ponies – Groves and Reynolds had already two additional ones saddled – and started climbing once again, Mallory, map in hand, studying in the fading light of dusk the route they had to take.

Their route took them up alongside the perimeter of a pine forest. Not more than half a mile after leaving the block-house, Andrea reined in his pony, dismounted, lifted the pony’s right foreleg and examined it carefully. He looked up at the others who had also reined in their ponies.

‘There’s a stone wedged under the hoof,’ he announced. ‘Looks bad – but not too bad. I’ll have to cut it out. Don’t wait for me – I’ll catch you up in a few minutes.’

Mallory nodded, gave the signal to move on. Andrea produced a knife, lifted the hoof and made a great play of excavating the wedged stone. After a minute or so, he glanced up and saw that the rest of the party had vanished round a corner of the pine wood. Andrea put away his knife and led the pony, which quite obviously had no limp whatsoever, into the shelter of the wood and tethered it there, then moved on foot some way down the hill towards the block-house. He sat down behind the bole of a convenient pine and removed his binoculars from their case.

He hadn’t long to wait. The head and shoulders of a figure appeared in the clearing below peering out cautiously from behind the trunk of a tree. Andrea flat in the snow now and with the icy rims of the binoculars clamped hard against his eyes, had no difficulty at all in making an immediate identification: Sergeant Baer, moonfaced, rotund and about seventy pounds overweight for his unimpressive height, had an unmistakable physical presence which only the mentally incapacitated could easily forget.

Baer withdrew into the woods, then reappeared shortly afterwards leading a string of ponies, one of which carried a bulky covered object strapped to a pannier bag. Two of the following ponies had riders, both of whom had their hands tied to the pommels of their saddles. Petar and Maria, without a doubt. Behind them appeared four mounted soldiers. Sergeant Baer beckoned them to follow him across the clearing and within moments all had disappeared from sight behind the block-house. Andrea regarded the now empty clearing thoughtfully, lit a fresh cigar and made his way uphill towards his tethered pony.

Sergeant Baer dismounted, produced a key from his pocket, caught sight of the key suspended from the nail beside the door, replaced his own, took down the other, opened the door with it and passed inside. He glanced around, took down one of the keys hanging on the wall and opened a side door with it. Hauptmann Neufeld emerged, glanced at his watch and smiled.

‘You have been very punctual, Sergeant Baer. You have the radio?’

‘I have the radio. It’s outside.’

‘Good, good, good.’ Neufeld looked at Droshny and smiled again. ‘I think it’s time for us to make our rendezvous with the Ivenici plateau.’

Sergeant Baer said respectfully: ‘How can you be so sure that it is the Ivenici plateau, Hauptmann Neufeld?’

‘How can I be so sure? Simple, my dear Baer. Because Maria – you have her with you?’

‘But of course, Hauptmann Neufeld.’

‘Because Maria told me. The Ivenici plateau it is.’

Night had fallen on the Ivenici plateau, but still the phalanx of exhausted soldiers was trudging out the landing-strip for the plane. The work was not by this time so cruelly and physically exacting, for the snow was now almost trampled and beaten hard and flat: but, even allowing for the rejuvenation given by the influx of another five hundred fresh soldiers, the overall level of utter weariness was such that the phalanx was in no better condition than its original members who had trudged out the first outline of the airstrip in the virgin snow.

The phalanx, too, had changed its shape. Instead of being fifty wide by twenty deep it was now twenty wide by fifty deep: having achieved a safe clearance for the wings of the aircraft, they were now trudging out what was to be as close as possible an iron-hard surface for the landing wheels.

A three-quarters moon, intensely white and luminous, rode low in the sky, with scattered bands of cloud coming drifting down slowly from the north. As the successive bands moved across the face of the moon, the black shadows swept lazily across the surface of the plateau: the phalanx, at one moment bathed in silvery moonlight, was at the next almost lost to sight in the darkness. It was a fantastic scene with a remarkably faery-like quality of eeriness and foreboding about it. In fact it was, as Colonel Vis had just unromantically mentioned to Captain Vlanovich, like something out of Dante’s
Inferno
, only a hundred degrees colder. At least a hundred degrees, Vis had amended: he wasn’t sure how hot it was in hell.

It was this scene which, at twenty minutes to nine in the evening, confronted Mallory and his men when they topped the brow of a hill and reined in their ponies just short of the edge of the precipice which abutted on the western edge of the Ivenici plateau. For at least two minutes they sat there on their ponies, not moving, not speaking, mesmerized by the other-world quality of a thousand men with bowed heads and bowed shoulders, shuffling exhaustedly across the level floor of the plain beneath, mesmerized because they all knew they were gazing at a unique spectacle which none of them had ever seen before and would never see again. Mallory finally broke free from the trance-like condition, looked at Miller and Andrea, and slowly shook his head in an expression of profound wonder conveying his disbelief, his refusal to accept the reality of what his own eyes told him was real and actual beyond dispute. Miller and Andrea returned his look with almost identical negative motions of their own heads. Mallory wheeled his pony to the right and led the way along the cliff-face to the point where the cliff ran into the rising ground below.

Ten minutes later they were being greeted by Colonel Vis.

‘I did not expect to see you, Captain Mallory.’ Vis pumped his hand enthusiastically. ‘Before God, I did not expect to see you. You – and your men – must have a remarkable capacity for survival.’

‘Say that in a few hours,’ Mallory said drily, ‘and I would be very happy indeed to hear it.’

‘But it’s all over now. We expect the plane –’ Vis glanced at his watch – ‘in exactly eight minutes. We have a bearing surface for it and there should be no difficulty in landing and taking off provided it doesn’t hang around too long. You have done all that you came to do and achieved it magnificently. Luck has been on your side.’

‘Say that in a few hours,’ Mallory repeated.

‘I’m sorry.’ Vis could not conceal his puzzlement. ‘You expect something to happen to the plane?’

‘I don’t expect anything to happen to the plane. But what’s gone, what’s past, is – was, rather – only the prologue.’

‘The – the prologue?’

‘Let me explain.’

Neufeld, Droshny and Sergeant Baer left their ponies tethered inside the woodline and walked up the slight eminence before them, Sergeant Baer making heavy weather of their uphill struggle through the snow because of the weight of the large portable transceiver strapped to his back. Near the summit they dropped to their hands and knees and crawled forward till they were within a few feet of the edge of the cliff overlooking the Ivenici plateau. Neufeld unslung his binoculars and then replaced them: the moon had just moved from behind a dark barred cloud highlighting every aspect of the scene below: the intensely sharp contrast afforded by black shadow and snow so deeply and gleamingly white as to be almost phosphorescent made the use of binoculars superfluous.

Clearly visible and to the right were Vis’s command tents and, nearby, some hastily erected soup kitchens. Outside the smallest of the tents could be seen a group of perhaps a dozen people, obviously, even at that distance, engaged in close conversation. Directly beneath where they lay, the three men could see the phalanx turning round at one end of the runway and beginning to trudge back slowly, so terribly slowly, so terribly tiredly, along the wide path already tramped out. As Mallory and his men had been, Neufeld, Droshny and Baer were momentarily caught and held by the weird and other-worldly dark grandeur of the spectacle below. Only by a conscious act of will could Neufeld bring himself to look away and return to the world of normality and reality.

‘How very kind,’ he murmured, ‘of our Yugoslav friends to go to such lengths on our behalf.’ He turned to Baer and indicated the transceiver. ‘Get through to the General, will you?’

Baer unslung his transceiver, settled it firmly in the snow, extended the telescopic aerial, pre-set the frequency and cranked the handle. He made contact almost at once, talked briefly then handed the microphone and head-piece to Neufeld, who fitted on the phones and gazed down, still half mesmerized, at the thousand men and women moving antlike across the plain below. The headphones cracked suddenly in his ears and the spell was broken.

‘Herr General?’

‘Ah. Hauptmann Neufeld.’ In the ear-phones the General’s voice was faint but very clear, completely free from distortion or static. ‘Now then. About my psychological assessment of the English mind?’

‘You have mistaken your profession, Herr General. Everything has happened exactly as you forecast. You will be interested to know, sir, that the Royal Air Force is launching a saturation bombing attack on the Zenica Gap at precisely 1.30 a.m. this morning.’

‘Well, well, well,’ Zimmermann said thoughtfully. ‘That is interesting. But hardly surprising.’

‘No, sir.’ Neufeld looked up as Droshny touched him on the shoulder and pointed to the north. ‘One moment, sir.’

Neufeld removed the ear-phones and cocked his head in the direction of Droshny’s pointing arm. He lifted his binoculars but there was nothing to be seen. But unquestionably there was something to be heard – the distant clamour of aircraft engines, closing. Neufeld readjusted the ear-phones.

‘We have to give the English full marks for punctuality, sir. The plane is coming in now.’

‘Excellent, excellent. Keep me informed.’

Neufeld eased off one ear-phone and gazed to the north. Still nothing to be seen, the moon was now temporarily behind a cloud, but the sound of the aircraft engines was unmistakably closer. Suddenly, somewhere down on the plateau, came three sharp blasts on a whistle. Immediately, the marching phalanx broke up, men and women stumbling off the runway into the deep snow on the eastern side of the plateau, leaving behind them, obviously by pre-arrangement, about eighty men who spaced themselves out on either side of the runway.

‘They’re organized, I’ll say that for them,’ Neufeld said admiringly.

Droshny smiled his wolf’s smile. ‘All the better for us, eh?’

‘Everybody seems to be doing their best to help us tonight,’ Neufeld agreed.

Overhead, the dark and obscuring band of cloud drifted away to the south and the white light of the moon raced across the plateau. Neufeld could immediately see the plane, less than half a mile away, its camouflaged shape sharply etched in the brilliant moonlight as it sank down towards the end of the runway. Another sharp blast of the whistle and at once the men lining both sides of the runway switched on hand lamps – a superfluity, really, in those almost bright as day perfect landing conditions, but essential had the moon been hidden behind cloud.

‘Touching down now,’ Neufeld said into the microphone. ‘It’s a Wellington bomber.’

‘Let’s hope it makes a safe landing,’ Zimmermann said.

‘Let’s hope so indeed, sir.’

The Wellington made a safe landing, a perfect landing considering the extremely difficult conditions. It slowed down quickly, then steadied its speed as it headed towards the end of the runway.

Neufeld said into the microphone: ‘Safely down, Herr General, and rolling to rest.’

‘Why doesn’t it stop?’ Droshny wondered.

‘You can’t accelerate a plane over snow as you can over a concrete runway,’ Neufeld said. ‘They’ll require every yard of the runway for the take-off.’

Quite obviously, the pilot of the Wellington was of the same opinion. He was about fifty yards from the end of the runway when two groups of people broke from the hundreds lining the edge of the runway, one group heading for the already opened door in the side of the bomber, the other heading for the tail of the plane. Both groups reached the plane just as it rolled to a stop at the very end of the runway, a dozen men at once flinging themselves upon the tail unit and beginning to turn the Wellington through 180°.