Where Eagles Dare. Alistair MacLean

      Rope over one shoulder, her kit-bag on the other, Smith led Mary to the fissure in the cliff side.

      ‘Don’t pitch the tent,’ Smith said. ‘Unroll it, put your sleeping bag on one half, get into it and pull the other half of the tent over you. Half an hour and you’ll be covered with drifting snow. The snow will not only keep you warm, it’ll hide you from any somnambulists. I’ll be along in the morning before we leave.’

      He walked away, stopped, looked back. Mary was still standing where he had left her, looking after him. There was no sag to her shoulders, no particular expression to her face, but for all that she looked oddly defenceless, lonely and forlorn, a quality as indefinable as it was unmistakable. Smith hesitated, then went back to her, unrolled her tent and sleeping bag, waited till she had climbed in, zipped up the bag and pulled the other half of the tent up to her chin. She smiled at him. He fixed the sleeping bag hood, pulled a corner of the tent over it and left, all without saying a word.

      Locating his own tent was simple enough, a steady light burnt inside it. Smith beat the snow from his clothes, stooped and entered. Christiansen, Thomas and Carraciola were in their sleeping bags and were asleep or appeared to be. Torrance-Smythe was checking over their store of plastic explosives, fuses, detonators and grenades, while Schaffer was reading a paper-back—in German—smoking a cigarette—also German—and faithfully guarding the radio. He put down the book and looked at Smith.

      ‘OK?’

      ‘OK.’ Smith produced the code-book from his tunic. ‘Sorry I was so long, but I thought I’d never find him. Drifting pretty badly up there.’

      ‘We’ve arranged to take turns on watch,’ Schaffer said. ‘Half an hour each. It’ll be dawn in three hours.’

      Smith smiled. ‘What are you guarding against in these parts?’

      ‘The abominable snowman.’

      The smile left Smith’s face as quickly as it had come. He turned his attention to Harrod’s codebook and spent about ten minutes in memorizing call-up signals and wave-frequencies and writing a message out in code. Before he had finished Schaffer had turned into his sleeping bag, leaving Torrance-Smythe on watch. Smith folded the message, tucked it in a pocket, rose, took the radio and a rubber ground-sheet to protect it from the snow.

      ‘I’m going to move out a bit,’ he said to Torrance-Smythe. ‘Reception is lousy among trees. Besides, I don’t want to wake everyone up. Won’t be long.’

      Two hundred yards from the tent, after having stopped twice and changed direction twice, Smith knelt with his back—and the rubber ground-sheet —to the drifting snow. He extended a fourteen feet telescopic aerial, adjusted a pre-selected call-up and cranked a handle. Four times he cranked the handle and on the fifth he got results. Someone was keeping a very close radio watch indeed.

      ‘This is Danny Boy,’ the set speaker crackled. The signal was faint and intermittent, but just comprehensible. ‘Danny Boy replying to you. Over.’

      Smith spoke into the mouth microphone. ‘This is Broadsword. Can I speak to Father Machree or Mother Machree? Over.’

      ‘Sorry. Unavailable. Over.’

      ‘Code,’ Smith said. ‘Over.’

      ‘Ready.’

      Smith extracted the paper from his pocket and shone his torch on it. There were two lines containing meaningless jumbles of letters and, below that, the plain language translation, which read: ‘SAFE LANDING HARROD DEAD WEATHER FINE PLEASE AWAIT MESSAGE 0800 GMT. Smith read off the corresponding code figures and finished off: ‘Have that delivered to Father Machree by 0700. Without fail.’

      Torrance-Smythe looked up at Smith’s return.

      ‘Back already?’ Surprise in his voice. ‘You got through?’

      ‘Not a chance,’ Smith said disgustedly. ‘Too many bloody mountains around.’

      ‘Didn’t try for very long, did you?’

      ‘Two and a half minutes.’ It was Smith’s turn to look surprised. ‘Surely you know that’s the safe maximum?’

      ‘You think there may be radio monitoring stations hereabouts?’

      ‘Oh, no, not at all.’ Smith’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. ‘You wouldn’t expect to find radio monitors in the Schloss Adler, would you now?’

      ‘Well, now.’ Torrance-Smythe smiled tiredly. ‘I believe someone did mention it was the southern HQ of the German Secret Service. Sorry, Major. It’s not that I’m growing old, though there’s that, too. It’s just that what passes for my mind is so gummed up by cold and lack of sleep that I think it’s stopped altogether.’

      Smith pulled off his boots and snow-suit, climbed into his sleeping bag and pulled the radio close to him.

      ‘Then it’s time you had some sleep. My explosives expert is going to be no good to me if he can’t tell a detonator from a door-knob. Go on. Turn in. I’ll keep watch.’

      ‘But we had arranged—’

      ‘Arguments, arguments,’ Smith sighed. ‘Insubordination on every hand.’ He smiled. ‘Straight up, Smithy, I’m wide awake. I know I won’t sleep tonight.’

      One downright lie, Smith thought, and one statement of incontrovertible truth. He wasn’t wide awake, he was physically and mentally exhausted and on the slightest relaxation of will-power oblivion would have overtaken him in seconds. But that he wouldn’t sleep that night was beyond doubt: no power on earth would have let him sleep that night but, in the circumstances, it was perhaps wiser not to say so to Torrance-Smythe.

       THREE

      The pre-dawn greyness was in the sky. Smith and his men had broken camp. Tent and sleeping bags were stored away and the cooking utensils—after a very sketchy breakfast scarcely deserving of the name—were being thrust into haversacks. There was no conversation, none at all: it wasn’t a morning for speaking. All of them, Smith thought, looked more drawn, more exhausted, than they had done three hours ago: he wondered how he himself, who had had no sleep at all, must look. It was as well, he reflected, that mirrors were not part of their commando equipment. He looked at his watch.

      ‘We’ll leave in ten minutes,’ he announced. ‘Should give us plenty of time to be down in the tree line before sun-up. Assuming there are no more cliffs. Back in a moment. Visibility is improving and I think I’ll go recce along the cliff edge. With any luck, maybe I can see the best way down.’

      ‘And if you haven’t any luck?’ Carraciola asked sourly.

      ‘We’ve still that thousand feet of nylon rope,’ Smith said shortly.

      He pulled on his snow-suit and left, angling off in the direction of the cliff. As soon as he was beyond the belt of the scrub pines and out of sight of the camp he changed direction uphill and broke into a run.

      A single eye appeared under a lifted corner of snow-covered canvas as Mary Ellison heard the soft crunch of running footsteps in the snow. She heard the first two bars of a tuneless whistling of ‘Lorelei’, unzipped her sleeping bag and sat up. Smith was standing above her.

      ‘Not already!’ she said protestingly.

      ‘Yes, already. Come on. Up!’

      ‘I haven’t slept a wink.’

      ‘Neither have I. I’ve been watching that damned radio all night—and watching to check that no somnambulists took a stroll in this direction.’

      ‘You kept awake. You did that for me?’

      ‘I kept awake. We’re off. Start in five minutes.

      Leave your tent and kit-bag here, you won’t