Force 10 from Navarone (23 page)

‘Two o’clock,’ Zimmerman said, his tone almost conversational. He brought his right hand down in a cutting gesture. A whistle shrilled and at once tank engines roared and treads clattered as the spearhead of Zimmermanns first armoured division began to cross the bridge at Neretva.

‘Maurer and Schmidt! Maurer and Schmidt!’ The captain in charge of the guard on top of the Neretva dam wall came running from the guard-house, looked around almost wildly and grabbed his sergeant by the arm. ‘For God’s sake, where are Maurer and Schmidt? No one seen them? No one? Get the searchlight.’

Petar, still holding the unconscious Groves pinned against the ladder, heard the sound of the words but did not understand them. Petar, with both arms round Groves, now had his forearms locked at an almost impossible angle between the stanchions and the rockface behind. In this position, as long as his wrists or forearms didn’t break, he could hold Groves almost indefinitely. But Petar’s grey and sweat-covered face, the racked and twisted face, was mute testimony enough to the almost unendurable agony he was suffering.

Mallory and Miller also heard the urgently
shouted commands, but, like Petar, were unable to understand what it was that was being shouted. It would be something, Mallory thought vaguely, that would bode no good for them, then put the thought from his mind: he had other and more urgently immediate matters to occupy his attention. They had reached the barrier of the torpedo net and he had the supporting cable in one hand, a knife in the other when Miller exclaimed and caught his arm.

‘For God’s sake, no!’ The urgency in Miller’s voice had Mallory looking at him in astonishment. ‘Jesus, what do I use for brains. That’s not a wire.’

‘It’s not –’

‘It’s an insulated power cable. Can’t you see?’

Mallory peered closely. ‘Now I can.’

‘Two thousand volts, I’ll bet.’ Miller still sounded shaken. ‘Electric chair power. We’d have been frizzled alive.
And
it would have triggered off an alarm bell.’

‘Over the top with them,’ Mallory said.

Struggling and pushing, heaving and pulling, for there was only a foot of clear water between the wire and the surface of the water, they managed to ease the compressed air cylinder over and had just succeeded in lifting the nose of the first of the amatol cylinders on to the wire when, less than a hundred yards away, a six-inch searchlight came to life on the top of the dam wall, its beam momentarily horizontal, then dipping sharply to
begin a traverse of the water close in to the side of the dam wall.

‘That’s all we bloody well need,’ Mallory said bitterly. He pushed the nose of the amatol block back off the wire, but the wire strop securing it to the compressed air cylinder held it in such a position that it remained with its nose nine inches clear of the water. ‘Leave it. Get under. Hang on to the net.’

Both men sank under the water as the sergeant atop the dam wall continued his traverse with the search-light. The beam passed over the nose of the first of the amatol cylinders, but a black-painted cylinder in dark waters makes a poor subject for identification and the sergeant failed to see it. The light moved on, finished its traverse of the water alongside the dam, then went out.

Mallory and Miller surfaced cautiously and looked swiftly around. For the moment, there was no other sign of immediate danger. Mallory studied the luminous hands of his watch. He said: ‘Hurry! For God’s sake, hurry! We’re almost three minutes behind schedule.’

They hurried. Desperate now, they had the two amatol cylinders over the wire inside twenty seconds, opened the compressed air valve on the leading cylinder and were alongside the massive wall of the dam inside another twenty. At that moment, the clouds parted and the moon broke through again, silvering the dark waters of the dam. Mallory and Miller were now in a helplessly
exposed position but there was nothing they could do about it and they knew it. Their time had run out and they had no option other than to secure and arm the amatol cylinders as quickly as ever possible. Whether they were discovered or not could still be all-important: but there was nothing they could do to prevent that discovery.

Miller said softly: ‘Forty feet apart and forty feet down, the experts say. We’ll be too late.’

‘No. Not yet too late. The idea is to let the tanks across first then destroy the bridge before the petrol bowsers and the main infantry battalions cross.’

Atop the dam wall, the sergeant with the searchlight returned from the western end of the dam and reported to the captain.

‘Nothing, sir. No sign of anyone.’

‘Very good.’ The captain nodded towards the gorge. ‘Try that side. You might find something there.’

So the sergeant tried the other side and he did find something there, and almost immediately. Ten seconds after he had begun his traverse with the search-light he picked up the figures of the unconscious Groves and the exhausted Petar and, only feet below them and climbing steadily. Sergeant Reynolds. All three were hopelessly trapped, quite powerless to do anything to defend themselves: Reynolds had no longer even his gun.

On the dam wall, a Wehrmacht soldier, levelling
his machine-pistol along the beam of the searchlight, glanced up in astonishment as the captain struck down the barrel of his gun.

‘Fool!’ The captain sounded savage. ‘I want them alive. You two, fetch ropes, get them up here for questioning. We
must
find out what they have been up to.’

His words carried clearly to the two men in the water for, just then, the last of the bombing ceased and the sound of the small-arms fire died away. The contrast was almost too much to be borne, the suddenly hushed silence strangely ominous, deathly, almost, in its sinister foreboding.

‘You heard?’ Miller whispered.

‘I heard.’ More cloud, Mallory could see, thinner cloud but still cloud, was about to pass across the face of the moon. ‘Fix these float suckers to the wall. I’ll do the other charge.’ He turned and swam slowly away, towing the second amatol cylinder behind him.

When the beam of the searchlight had reached down from the top of the dam wall Andrea had been prepared for instant discovery, but the prior discovery of Groves, Reynolds and Petar had saved Maria and himself, for the Germans seemed to think that they had caught all there were to be caught and, instead of traversing the rest of the gorge with the searchlights, had concentrated, instead, on bringing up to the top of the wall the three men they had found trapped on the
ladder. One man, obviously unconscious – that would be Groves, Andrea thought – was hauled up at the end of a rope: the other two, with one man lending assistance to the other, had completed the journey up the ladder by themselves. All this Andrea had seen while he was bandaging Maria’s injured leg, but he had said nothing of it to her.

Andrea secured the bandage and smiled at her. ‘Better?’

‘Better.’ She tried to smile her thanks but the smile wouldn’t come.

‘Fine. Time we were gone.’ Andrea consulted his watch. ‘If we stay here any longer I have the feeling that we’re going to get very, very wet.’

He straightened to his feet and it was this sudden movement that saved his life. The knife that had been intended for his back passed cleanly through his upper left arm. For a moment, almost as if uncomprehending, Andrea stared down at the tip of the narrow blade emerging from his arm then, apparently oblivious of the agony it must have cost him, turned slowly round, the movement wrenching the hilt of the knife from the hand of the man who held it.

The Cetnik sergeant, the only other man to have survived with Droshny the destruction of the swing bridge, stared at Andrea as if he were petrified, possibly because he couldn’t understand how a man could suffer such a wound in silence and, in silence, still be able to tear the knife from his grasp. Andrea had now no weapon left him
nor did he require one. In what seemed an almost grotesque slow motion, Andrea lifted his right hand: but there was nothing slow-motion about the dreadful edge-handed chopping blow which caught the Cetnik sergeant on the base of the neck. The man was probably dead before he struck the ground.

Reynolds and Petar sat with their backs to the guard-hut at the eastern end of the dam. Beside them lay the still unconscious Groves, his breathing now stertorous, his face ashen and of a peculiar waxed texture. From overhead, fixed to the roof of the guard-house, a bright light shone down on them, while nearby was a watchful guard with his carbine trained on them. The Wehrmacht captain of the guard stood above them, an almost awestruck expression on his face.

He said incredulously but in immaculate English: ‘You hoped to blow up a dam this size with a few sticks of dynamite? You must be mad!’

‘No one told us the dam was as big as this,’ Reynolds said sullenly.

‘No one told you – God in heaven, talk of mad dogs and Englishmen! And where is this dynamite?’

‘The wooden bridge broke.’ Reynolds’s shoulders were slumped in abject defeat. ‘We lost all the dynamite – and all our other friends.’

‘I wouldn’t have believed it, I just wouldn’t have believed it.’ The captain shook his head and
turned away, then checked as Reynolds called him. ‘What is it?’

‘My friend here.’ Reynolds indicated Groves. ‘He is very ill, you can see that. He needs medical attention.’

‘Later.’ The captain turned to the soldier in the open transceiver cabin. ‘What news from the south?’

‘They have just started to cross the Neretva bridge, sir.’

The words carried clearly to Mallory, at that moment some distance apart from Miller. He had just finished securing his float to the wall and was on the point of rejoining Miller when he caught a flash of light out of the corner of his eye. Mallory remained still and glanced upward and to his right.

There was a guard on the dam wall above, leaning over the parapet as he moved along, flashing a torch downwards. Discovery, Mallory at once realized, was certain. One or both of the supporting floats were bound to be seen. Unhurriedly, and steadying himself against his float, Mallory unzipped the top of his rubber suit, reached under his tunic, brought out his Luger, unwrapped it from its waterproof cover and eased off the safety-catch.

The pool of light from the torch passed over the water, close in to the side of the dam wall. Suddenly, the beam of the torch remained still. Clearly to be seen in the centre of the light was a
small, torpedo-shaped object fastened to the dam wall by suckers and, just beside it, a rubber-suited man with a gun in his hand. And the gun – it had, the sentry automatically noticed, a silencer screwed to the end of the barrel – was pointed directly at him. The sentry opened his mouth to shout a warning but the warning never came for a red flower bloomed in the centre of his forehead, and he leaned forward tiredly, the upper half of his body over the edge of the parapet, his arms dangling downwards. The torch slipped from his lifeless hand and tumbled down into the water.

The impact of the torch on the water made a flat, almost cracking sound. In the now deep silence it was bound to be heard by those above, Mallory thought. He waited tensely, the Luger ready in his hand, but after twenty seconds had passed and nothing happened Mallory decided he could wait no longer. He glanced at Miller, who had clearly heard the sound, for he was staring at Mallory, and at the gun in Mallory’s hand with a puzzled frown on his face. Mallory pointed up towards the dead guard hanging over the parapet. Miller’s face cleared and he nodded his understanding. The moon went behind a cloud.

Andrea, the sleeve of his left arm soaked in blood, more than half carried the hobbling Maria across the shale and through the rocks: she could hardly put her right foot beneath her. Arrived at the foot of the ladder, both of them stared upwards at the
forbidding climb, at the seemingly endless zig-zags of the iron ladder reaching up into the night. With a crippled girl and his own damaged arm, Andrea thought, the prospects were poor indeed. And God only knew when the wall of the dam was due to go up. He looked at his watch. If everything was on schedule, it was due to go now: Andrea hoped to God that Mallory, with his passion for punctuality, had for once fallen behind schedule. The girl looked at him and understood.

‘Leave me,’ she said. ‘Please leave me.’

‘Out of the question,’ Andrea said firmly. ‘Maria would never forgive me.’

‘Maria?’

‘Not you.’ Andrea lifted her on to his back and wound her arms round his neck. ‘My wife. I think I’m going to be terrified of her.’ He reached out for the ladder and started to climb.

The better to see how the final preparations for the attack were developing, General Zimmermann had ordered his command car out on to the Neretva bridge itself and now had it parked exactly in the middle, pulled close in to the right-hand side. Within feet of him clanked and clattered and roared a seemingly endless column of tanks and self-propelled guns and trucks laden with assault troops: as soon as they reached the northern end of the bridge, tanks and guns and trucks fanned out east and west along the banks of the river, to take temporary cover behind the
steep escarpment ahead before launching the final concerted attack.

From time to time, Zimmermann raised his binoculars and scanned the skies to the west. A dozen times he imagined he heard the distant thunder of approaching air armadas, a dozen times he deceived himself. Time and again he told himself he was a fool, a prey to useless and fearful imaginings wholly unbecoming to a general in the Wehrmacht: but still this deep feeling of intense unease persisted, still he kept examining the skies to the west. It never once occurred to him, for there was no reason why it should, that he was looking in the wrong direction.