Force 10 from Navarone (19 page)

The two sergeants hurried off after Maria and Petar.

Andrea listened to the scraping of heavy boots on stones, the very occasional metallic chink of a gun striking against a rock, and waited, stretched out flat on his stomach, the barrel of his Schmeisser rock-steady in the cleft between the boulders. The sounds heralding the stealthy approach up the river bank were not more than forty yards away when Andrea raised himself slightly, squinted down the barrel and squeezed the trigger.

The reply was immediate. At once three or four guns, all of them, Andrea realized, machine-pistols, opened up. Andrea stopped firing, ignoring the bullets whistling above his head and ricocheting from the boulders on either side of him, carefully lined up on one of the flashes issuing from a machine-pistol and fired a one-second burst. The man behind the machine-pistol straightened convulsively, his upflung right arm sending his gun spinning, then slowly toppled sideways in the Neretva and was carried away in the whitely swirling waters. Andrea fired again and a second man twisted round and fell heavily among the rocks. There came a suddenly barked order and the firing down-river ceased.

There were eight men in the down-river group and now one of them detached himself from the
shelter of a boulder and crawled towards the second man who had been hit: as he moved, Droshny’s face revealed his usual wolfish grin, but it was clear that he was feeling very far from smiling. He bent over the huddled figure in the stones, and turned him on his back: it was Neufeld, with blood streaming down from a gash in the side of the head. Droshny straightened, his face vicious in anger, and turned round as one of his Cetniks touched his arm.

‘Is he dead?’

‘Not quite. Concussed and badly. He’ll be unconscious for hours, maybe days. I don’t know, only a doctor can tell.’ Droshny beckoned to two other men. ‘You three – get him across the ford and up to safety. Two stay with him, the other come back. And for God’s sake tell the others to hurry up and get here.’

His face still contorted with anger and for the moment oblivious of all danger, Droshny leapt to his feet and fired a long continuous burst upstream, a burst which apparently left Andrea completely unmoved, for he remained motionless where he was, resting peacefully with his back to his protective boulder, watching with mild interest but apparent unconcern as ricochets and splintered fragments of rock flew off in all directions.

The sound of the firing carried clearly to the ears of the guards patrolling the top of the dam. Such was the bedlam of small-arms fire all around and such were the tricks played on the ears by the
baffling variety of echoes that reverberated up and down the gorge and over the surface of the dam itself, that it was quite impossible precisely to locate the source of the recent bursts of machine-pistol fire: what was significant, however, was that it
had
been machine-gun fire and up to that moment the sounds of musketry had consisted exclusively of rifle fire. And it
had
seemed to emanate from the south, from the gorge below the dam. One of the guards on the dam went worriedly to the captain in charge, spoke briefly, then walked quickly across to one of the small huts on the raised concrete platform at the eastern end of the dam wall. The hut, which had no front, only a rolled-up canvas protection, held a large radio transceiver manned by a corporal.

‘Captain’s orders,’ the sergeant said. ‘Get through to the bridge at Neretva. Pass a message to General Zimmermann that we – the captain, that is – is worried. Tell him that there’s a great deal of small-arms fire all around us and that some of it seems to be coming from down-river.’

The sergeant waited impatiently while the operator put the call through and even more impatiently as the earphones crackled two minutes later and the operator started writing down the message. He took the completed message from the operator and handed it to the captain, who read it out aloud.

‘General Zimmermann says, “There is no cause at all for anxiety, the noise is being made by our
Yugoslav friends up by the Zenica Gap who are whistling in the dark because they are momentarily expecting an all-out assault by units of the 11th Army Corps. And it will be a great deal noisier later on when the RAF starts dropping bombs in all the wrong places. But they won’t be dropping them near you, so don’t worry.’” The captain lowered the paper. ‘That’s good enough for me. If the General says we are not to worry, then that’s good enough for me. You know the General’s reputation, sergeant?’

‘I know his reputation, sir.’ Some distance away and from some unidentifiable direction, came several more bursts of machine-pistol fire. The sergeant stirred unhappily.

‘You are still troubled by something?’ the captain asked.

‘Yes, sir. I know the general’s reputation, of course, and trust him implicitly.’ He paused then went on worriedly: ‘I could have sworn that that last burst of machine-pistol fire came from down the gorge there.’

‘You’re becoming just an old woman, sergeant,’ the captain said kindly, ‘and you must report to our divisional surgeon soon. Your ears need examining.’

The sergeant, in fact, was not becoming an old woman and his hearing was in considerably better shape than that of the officer who had reproached him. The current burst of machine-pistol firing was, as he’d thought, coming from the gorge,
where Droshny and his men, now doubled in numbers, were moving forward, singly or in pairs, but never more than two at a time, in a series of sharp but very short rushes, firing as they went. Their firing, necessarily wildly inaccurate as they stumbled and slipped on the treacherous going underfoot, elicited no response from Andrea, possibly because he felt himself in no great danger, probably because he was conserving his ammunition. The latter supposition seemed the more likely as Andrea had slung his Schmeisser and was now examining with interest a stick-grenade which he had just withdrawn from his belt.

Farther up-river, Sergeant Reynolds, standing at the eastern edge of the rickety wooden bridge which spanned the narrowest part of the gorge where the turbulent, racing, foaming waters beneath would have offered no hope of life at all to any person so unfortunate as to fall in there, looked unhappily down the gorge towards the source of the machine-pistol firing and wondered for the tenth time whether he should take a chance, re-cross the bridge and go to Andrea’s aid: even in the light of his vastly revised estimate of Andrea, it seemed impossible, as Groves had said, that one man could for long hold off twenty others bent on vengeance. On the other hand, he had promised Groves to remain there to look after Petar and Maria. There came another burst of firing from down-river. Reynolds made his mind up. He would offer his gun to Maria to afford herself and Petar
what protection it might, and leave them for as little time as might be necessary to give Andrea what help he required.

He turned to speak to her, but Maria and Petar were no longer there. Reynolds looked wildly around, his first reaction was that they had both fallen into the rapids, a reaction that he at once dismissed as ridiculous. Instinctively he gazed up the bank towards the base of the dam, and even although the moon was then obscured by a large bank of cloud, he saw them at once, making their way towards the foot of the iron ladder, where Groves was standing. For a brief moment he puzzled why they should have moved upstream without permission, then remembered that neither he nor Groves had, in fact, remembered to give them instructions to remain by the bridge. Not to worry, he thought, Groves will soon send them back down to the bridge again and when they arrived he would tell them of his decision to return to Andrea’s aid. He felt vaguely relieved at the prospect, not because he entertained fears of what might possibly happen to him when he rejoined Andrea and faced up to Droshny and his men but because it postponed, if even only briefly, the necessity of implementing a decision which could be only marginally justifiable in the first place.

Groves, who had been gazing up the seemingly endless series of zig-zags of that green iron ladder so precariously, it seemed, attached to that
vertical cliff-face, swung round at the soft grate of approaching footsteps on the shale and stared at Maria and Petar, walking, as always, hand in hand. He said angrily: ‘What in God’s name are you people doing here? You’ve no right to be here – can’t you see, the guards have only to look down and you’ll be killed? Go on. Go back and rejoin Sergeant Reynolds at the bridge. Now!’

Maria said softly: ‘You are kind to worry, Sergeant Groves. But we don’t want to go. We want to stay here.’

‘And what in hell’s name good can you do by staying here?’ Groves asked roughly. He paused, then went on, almost kindly: ‘I know who you are now, Maria. I know what you’ve done, how good you are at your own job. But this is not your job. Please.’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘And I
can
fire a gun.’

‘You haven’t got one to fire. And Petar here, what right have you to speak for him. Does he know where he is?’

Maria spoke rapidly to her brother in incomprehensible Serbo-Croat: he responded by making his customary odd sounds in his throat. When he had finished, Maria turned to Groves.

‘He says he knows he is going to die tonight. He has what you people call the second sight and he says there is no future beyond tonight. He says he is tired of running. He says he will wait here till the time comes.’

‘Of all the stubborn, thick-headed –’

‘Please, Sergeant Groves.’ The voice, though still low, was touched by a new note of asperity. ‘His mind is made up, and you can never change it.’

Groves nodded in acceptance. He said: ‘Perhaps I can change yours.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘Petar cannot help us anyway, no blind man could. But you can. If you would.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Andrea is holding off a mixed force of at least twenty Cetniks and German troops.’ Groves smiled wryly. ‘I have recent reason to believe that Andrea probably has no equal anywhere as a guerilla fighter, but one man cannot hold off twenty for ever. When he goes, then there is only Reynolds left to guard the bridge – and if he goes, then Droshny and his men will be through in time to warn the guards, almost certainly in time to save the dam, certainly in time to send a radio message through to General Zimmermann to pull his tanks back on to high ground. I think, Maria, that Reynolds may require your help. Certainly, you can be of no help here – but if you stand by Andrea you
could
make all the difference between success and failure. And you did say you can fire a gun.’

‘And as
you
pointed out, I haven’t got a gun.’

‘That was then. You have now.’ Grove unslung his Schmeisser and handed it to her along with some spare ammunition.

‘But –’ Maria accepted gun and ammunition reluctantly. ‘But now
you
haven’t a gun.’

‘Oh yes I have.’ Groves produced his silenced Luger from his tunic. ‘This is all I want tonight. I can’t afford to make any noise tonight, not so close to the dam as this.’

‘But I
can’t
leave my brother.’

‘Oh, I think you can. In fact, you’re going to. No one on earth can help your brother any more. Not now. Please hurry.’

‘Very well.’ She moved off a few reluctant paces, stopped, turned and said: ‘I suppose you think you’re very clever, Sergeant Groves?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Groves said woodenly. She looked at him steadily for a few moments, then turned and made her way down-river. Groves smiled to himself in the near-darkness.

The smile vanished in the instant of time that it took for the gorge to be suddenly flooded with bright moonlight as a black, sharply-edged cloud moved away from the face of the moon. Groves called softly, urgently to Maria: ‘Face down on the rocks and keep still,’ saw her at once do what he ordered, then looked up the green ladder, his face registering the strain and anxiety in his mind.

About three-quarters of the way up the ladder, Mallory and Miller, bathed in the brilliant moonlight, clung to the top of one of the angled sections as immobile as if they had been carved from the rock itself. Their unmoving eyes, set in
equally unmoving faces, were obviously fixed on – or transfixed by – the same point in space.

That point was a scant fifty feet away, above and to their left, where two obviously jumpy guards were leaning anxiously over the parapet at the top of the dam: they were gazing into the middle distance, down the gorge, towards the location of what seemed to be the sound of firing. They had only to move their eyes downwards and discovery for Groves and Maria was certain: they had only to shift their gaze to the left and discovery for Mallory and Miller would have been equally certain. And death for all inevitable.

Like Mallory and Miller, Groves, too, had caught sight of the two German sentries leaning out over the parapet at the top of the dam and staring anxiously down the gorge. As a situation for conveying a feeling of complete nakedness, exposure and vulnerability, it would, Groves felt, take a lot of beating. And if he felt like that, how must Mallory and Miller, clinging to the ladder and less than a stone’s throw from the guards, be feeling? Both men, Groves knew, carried silenced Lugers, but their Lugers were inside their tunics and their tunics encased in their zipped-up frogmen’s suits, making them quite inaccessible. At least, making them quite inaccessible without, clinging as they were to the ladder, performing a variety of contortionist movements to get at them – and it was certain that the least untoward movement would have been immediately spotted by the two guards. How it was that they hadn’t already been seen, even without
movement, was incomprehensible to Groves: in that bright moonlight, which cast as much light on the dam and in the gorge as one would have expected on any reasonably dull afternoon, any normal peripheral vision should have picked them all up immediately. And it was unlikely that any front-line troops of the Wehrmacht had less than standard peripheral vision. Groves could only conclude that the intentness of the guards’ gaze did not necessarily mean that they were looking intently: it could have been that all their being was at that moment concentrated on their hearing, straining to locate the source of the desultory machine-pistol fire down the gorge. With infinite caution Groves eased his Luger from his tunic and lined it up. At that distance, even allowing for the high muzzle-velocity of the gun, he reckoned his chances of getting either of the guards to be so remote as to be hardly worth considering: but at least, as a gesture, it was better than nothing.

Groves was right on two counts. The two sentries on the parapet, far from being reassured by General Zimmermann’s encouraging reassurance, were in fact concentrating all their being on listening to the down-river bursts of machine-pistol fire, which were becoming all the more noticeable, not only because they seemed – as they were – to be coming closer, but also because the ammunition of the Partisan defenders of the Zenica Gap was running low and their fire was becoming more sporadic. Groves had been right, too, about the
fact that neither Mallory nor Miller had made any attempt to get at their Lugers. For the first few seconds, Mallory, like Groves, had felt sure that any such move would be bound to attract immediate attention, but, almost at once and long before the idea had occurred to Groves, Mallory had realized that the men were in such a trance-like state of listening that a hand could almost have passed before their faces without their being aware of it. And now, Mallory was certain, there would be no need to do anything at all because, from his elevation, he could see something that was quite invisible to Groves from his position at the foot of the dam: another dark band of cloud was almost about to pass across the face of the moon.

Within seconds, a black shadow flitting across the waters of the Neretva dam turned the colour from dark green to the deepest indigo, moved rapidly across the top of the dam wall, blotted out the ladder and the two men clinging to it, then engulfed the gorge in darkness. Groves sighed in soundless relief and lowered his Luger. Maria rose and made her way down-river towards the bridge. Petar moved his unseeing gaze around in the sightless manner of the blind. And, up above, Mallory and Miller at once began to climb again.

Mallory now abandoned the ladder at the top of one of its zigs and struck vertically up the cliff-face. The rockface, providentially, was not completely smooth, but such hand-and footholds as it afforded were few and small and awkwardly
situated, making for a climb that was as arduous as it was technically difficult: normally, had he been using the hammer and pitons that were stuck in his belt, Mallory would have regarded it as a climb of no more than moderate difficulty: but the use of pitons was quite out of the question. Mallory was directly opposite the top of the dam wall and no more than 35 feet from the nearest guard: one tiny chink of hammer on metal could not fail to register on the hearing of the most inattentive listener: and, as Mallory had just observed, inattentive listening was the last accusation that could have been levelled against the sentries on the dam. So Mallory had to content himself with the use of his natural talents and the vast experience gathered over many years of rock-climbing and continue the climb as he was doing, sweating profusely inside the hermetic rubber suit, while Miller, now some forty feet below, peered upwards with such tense anxiety on his face that he was momentarily oblivious of his own precarious perch on top of one of the slanted ladders, a predicament which would normally have sent him into a case of mild hysterics.

Andrea, too, was at that moment peering at something about fifty feet away, but it would have required a hyperactive imagination to detect any signs of anxiety in that dark and rugged face. Andrea, as the guards on the dam had so recently been doing, was listening rather than looking. From his point of view all he could see was a dark
and shapeless jumble of wetly glistening boulders with the Neretva rushing whitely alongside. There was no sign of life down there, but that only meant that Droshny, Neufeld and his men, having learnt their lessons the hard way – for Andrea could not know at this time that Neufeld had been wounded – were inching their way forward on elbows and knees, not once moving out from one safe cover until they had located another.

A minute passed, then Andrea heard the inevitable: a barely discernible ‘click’, as two pieces of stone knocked together. It came, Andrea estimated, from about thirty feet away. He nodded as if in satisfaction, armed the grenade, waited two seconds, then gently lobbed it downstream, dropping flat behind his protective boulder as he did so. There was the typically flat crack of a grenade explosion, accompanied by a briefly white flash of light in which two soldiers could be seen being flung bodily sideways.

The sound of the explosion came clearly to Mallory’s ear. He remained still, allowing only his head to turn slowly till he was looking down on top of the dam wall, now almost twenty feet beneath him. The same two guards who had been previously listening so intently stopped their patrol a second time, gazed down the gorge again, looked at each other uneasily, shrugged uncertainly, then resumed their patrol. Mallory resumed his climb.

He was making better time now. The former negligible finger and toe holds had given way,
occasionally, to small fissures in the rock into which he was able to insert the odd piton to give him a great deal more leverage than would have otherwise been possible. When next he stopped climbing and looked upwards he was no more than six feet below the longitudinal crack he had been looking for – and, as he had said to Miller earlier, it
was
no more than a crack. Mallory made to begin again, then paused, his head cocked towards the sky.

Just barely audible at first above the roaring of the waters of the Neretva and the sporadic smallarms fire from the direction of the Zenica Gap, but swelling in power with the passing of every second, could be heard a low and distant thunder, a sound unmistakable to all who had ever heard it during the war, a sound that heralded the approach of squadrons, of a fleet of heavy bombers. Mallory listened to the rapidly approaching clamour of scores of aero engines and smiled to himself.

Many men smiled to themselves that night when they heard the approach from the west of those squadrons of Lancasters. Miller, still perched on his ladder and still exercising all his available will-power not to look down, managed to smile to himself, as did Groves at the foot of the ladder and Reynolds by the bridge. On the right bank of the Neretva, Andrea smiled to himself, reckoned that the roar of those fast-approaching engines would make an excellent cover for any untoward sound
and picked another grenade from his belt. Outside a soup tent high up in the biting cold of the Ivenici plateau, Colonel Vis and Captain Vlanovich smiled their delight at each other and solemnly shook hands. Behind the southern redoubts of the Zenica Cage, General Vukalovic and his three senior officers, Colonel Janzy, Colonel Lazlo and Major Stephan, for once removed the glasses through which they had been so long peering at the Neretva bridge and the menacing woods beyond and smiled their incredulous relief at one another. And, most strangely of all, already seated in his command truck just inside the woods to the south of the Neretva bridge, General Zimmermann smiled perhaps the most broadly of all.

Mallory resumed his climb, moving even more quickly now, reached the longitudinal crack, worked his way up above it, pressed a piton into a convenient crack in the rock, withdrew his hammer from his belt and prepared to wait. Even now, he was not much more than forty feet above the dam wall, and the piton that Mallory now wanted to anchor would require not one blow but a dozen of them, and powerful ones at that: the idea that, even above the approaching thunder of the Lancasters’ engines, the metallic hammering would go unremarked was preposterous. The sound of the heavy aero engines was now deepening by the moment.

Mallory glanced down directly beneath him. Miller was gazing upward, tapping his wristwatch
as best a man can when he has both arms wrapped round the same rung of a ladder, and making urgent gestures. Mallory, in turn, shook his head and made a downward restraining motion with his free hand. Miller shook his head in resignation.

The Lancasters were on top of them now. The leader arrowed in diagonally across the dam, lifted slightly as it came to the high mountains on the other side and then the earth shook and ripples of dark waters shivered their erratic way across the surface of the Neretva dam before the first explosion reached their ears, as the first stick of 1,000- pound bombs crashed squarely into the Zenica Gap. From then on the sounds of the explosions of the bombs raining down on the Gap were so close together as to be almost continuous: what little time-lapse there was between some of the explosions was bridged by the constantly rumbling echoes that rumbled through the mountains and valleys of central Bosnia.

Mallory had no longer any need to worry about sound any more, he doubted he could even have heard himself speak, for most of those bombs were landing in a concentrated area less than a mile from where he clung to the side of the cliff, their explosions making an almost constant white glare that showed clearly above the mountains to the west. He hammered home his piton, belayed a rope around it, and dropped the rope to Miller, who immediately seized it and began to climb: he looked, Mallory thought, uncommonly like one of
the early Christian martyrs. Miller was no mountaineer, but, no mistake, he knew how to climb a rope: in a remarkably short time he was up beside Mallory, feet firmly wedged into the longitudinal crack, both hands gripping tightly to the piton.

‘Think you can hang on that piton?’ Mallory asked. He almost had to shout to make himself heard above the still undiminished thunder of the falling bombs.

‘Just try to prise me away.’

‘I won’t,’ Mallory grinned.

He coiled up the rope which Miller had used for his ascent, hitched it over his shoulder and started to move quickly along the longitudinal crack. ‘I’ll take this across the top of the dam, belay it to another piton. Then you can join me. Right?’

Miller looked down into the depths and shuddered. ‘If you think I’m going to stay here, you must be mad.’

Mallory grinned again and moved away.

To the south of the Neretva bridge, General Zimmermann, with an aide by his side, was still listening to the sounds of the aerial assault on the Zenica Gap. He glanced at his watch.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘First-line assault troops into position.’

At once heavily armed infantry, bent almost double to keep themselves below parapet level, began to move quickly across the Neretva bridge: once on the other side, they spread out east
and west along the northern bank of the river, concealed from the Partisans by the ridge of high ground abutting on the river bank. Or they thought they were concealed: in point of fact a Partisan scout, equipped with night-glasses and field telephone, lay prone in a suicidally positioned slit-trench less than a hundred yards from the bridge itself, sending back a constant series of reports to Vukalovic.

Zimmermann glanced up at the sky and said to his aide: ‘Hold them. The moon’s coming through again.’ Again he looked at his watch. ‘Start the tank engines in twenty minutes.’

‘They’ve stopped coming across the bridge, then?’ Vukalovic said.

‘Yes, sir.’ It was the voice of his advance scout. ‘I think it’s because the moon is about to break through in a minute or two.’

‘I think so too,’ Vukalovic said. He added grimly: ‘And I suggest you start working your way back before it does break through or it will be the last chance you’ll ever have.’

Andrea, too, was regarding the night sky with interest. His gradual retreat had now taken him into a particularly unsatisfactory defensive position, practically bereft of all cover: a very unhealthy situation to be caught in, he reflected, when the moon came out from behind the clouds. He paused for a thoughtful moment, then armed another grenade and lobbed it in the direction of a cluster
of dimly seen boulders about fifty feet away. He did not wait to see what effect it had, he was already scrambling his way up-river before the grenade exploded. The one certain effect it did have was to galvanize Droshny and his men into immediate and furious retaliation, at least half a dozen machine-pistols loosing off almost simultaneous bursts at the position Andrea had so recently and prudently vacated. One bullet plucked at the sleeve of his tunic, but that was as near as anything came. He reached another cluster of boulders without incident and took up a fresh defensive position behind them: when the moon did break through it would be Droshny and his men who would be faced with the unpalatable prospect of crossing that open stretch of ground.