Алистер Маклин - Where Eagles Dare

The helicopter had landed. The rotor stopped, steps descended and a man climbed down to the courtyard floor. From his uniform, Smith decided, a very senior officer. Then he suddenly realized that it was a very very senior officer indeed. His face tightened as he pushed the telescope across to Schaffer. ‘Take a good look,’ he advised.

Schaffer took a good look, lowered the telescope as the man passed through a doorway. ‘Pal of yours, boss?’

‘I know him. Reichsmarschall Julius Rosemeyer. The Wehrmacht Chief of Staff.’

‘My very first Reichsmarschall and me without my telescopic rifle,’ Schaffer said regretfully. ‘I wonder what his highness wants.’

‘Same as us,’ Smith said briefly.

‘General Carnaby?’

‘When you’re going to ask the Allies’ overall co-ordinator of planning a few questions about the Second Front you don’t send just the corporal of the guard to interview him.’

‘You don’t think they might have come to take old Carnaby away?’ Schaffer asked anxiously.

‘Not a chance. The Gestapo never gives up its prisoners. In this country the Wehrmacht does what the Gestapo says.’

‘Or else?’

‘Or else. Off you go – they’ve more coffee on the brew back there. Send someone to relieve me in an hour.’

Admiral Rolland’s weather forecast for the area turned out to be perfectly correct. As the endless shivering hours dragged slowly by the weather steadily deteriorated. By noon the sun was gone and a keen wind sprang up from the east. By early afternoon snow had begun to fall from the darkened sky, slowly at first then with increasing severity as the east wind steadily increased in strength and became bitingly cold. It looked like being a bad night, Smith thought. But a bad night that reduced visibility to near-zero and kept people indoors was what they wanted: it would have been difficult for them to saunter up to the Schloss Adler bathed in the warm light of a harvest moon. Smith checked his watch.

‘Time to go.’ He climbed stiffly to his feet and beat his arms to restore circulation. ‘Call Thomas, will you.’

Rucksacks and kit-bags were slung and shouldered. Thomas, who had been keeping watch, appeared carrying Smith’s telescope. Thomas was very far from being his usual cheerful self, and it wasn’t just the fact that he’d spent the last hour exposed to the full force of wind and snow that had left him in such ill-humour.

‘Is that damned radio working yet?’ he asked Smith.

‘Not a hope. Six tries, six failures. Why?’

‘I’ll tell you why,’ Thomas said bitterly. ‘Pity we couldn’t get the Admiral to change his mind about the paratroops. A full troop train just got in, that’s all.’

‘Well, that’s fine,’ Smith said equably. ‘The old hands will think we’re new boys and the new boys will think we’re old hands. Very convenient.’

Thomas looked thoughtfully at Smith.

‘Very, very convenient.’ He hesitated, then went on: ‘How about loosening up a bit, Major?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Come off it,’ Carraciola said roughly. ‘You know damn well what he means. It’s our lives. Why do we have to go down into that damned village? And how do you intend to get Carnaby out? If we’re to commit suicide, tell us why. You owe us that.’

‘I owe you nothing,’ Smith said flatly. ‘I’ll tell you nothing. And if you know nothing you can’t talk. You’ll be told when the time comes.’

‘You, Smith,’ Torrance-Smythe said precisely, ‘are a cold-blooded devil.’

‘It’s been said before,’ Smith said indifferently.

The village railway station was a small, two-track, end-of-the-line depot. Like all end-of-the-line depots it was characterized by rust, dilapidation, the barest functionalism of design and an odd pessimistically-expectant air of waiting for someone to come along and finish it off properly. At any time, its air of desolation was total. That night, completely deserted, with a high, gusting wind driving snow through pools of light cast by dim and swaying electric lamps, the ghostly impression of a place abandoned by man and by the world was almost overwhelming. It suited Smith’s purpose perfectly.

He led his five snow-smock clad men quickly across the tracks and into the comparative shelter of the station buildings. They filed silently past the closed bookstall, the freight office, the booking office, flitted quickly into the shadows beyond and stopped.

Smith lowered the radio, shrugged off his rucksack, removed snow-smock and trousers and sauntered casually alongside the tracks – the thrifty Bavarians regarded platforms as a wasteful luxury. He stopped outside a door next to a bolted hatch which bore above it the legend GEPACK ANNAHME. He tried the door. It was locked. He made a quick survey to check that he was unobserved, stooped, examined the keyhole with a pencil-flash, took a bunch of oddly shaped keys from his pockets and had the door opened in seconds. He whistled softly and was almost at once joined by the others, who filed quickly inside, already slipping off their packs as they went. Schaffer, bringing up the rear, paused and glanced up at the sign above the hatch.

‘My God!’ He shook his head. ‘The left luggage office!’

‘Where else?’ Smith asked reasonably. He ushered Schaffer in, closed and locked the door behind him. Hooding his pencil torch until only a finger-width beam emerged, he passed by the luggage racks till he came to the far end of the room where a bay window was set in the wall. It was a perfectly ordinary sash window and he examined it very minutely, careful that at no time the pinpoint of light touched the glass to shine through to the street beyond. He turned his attention to the vertical wooden planking at the side of the window, took out his sheath knife and levered a plank away to expose a length of twin-cored flex stapled vertically to the wall. He split the cores, sliced through each in turn, replaced the plank and tested the lower sash of the window. It moved easily up and down.

‘An interesting performance,’ Schaffer observed. ‘What was all that in aid of?’

‘It’s not always convenient to enter by the front door. Or, come to that, leave by it either.’

‘A youth mis-spent in philandering or burgling,’ Schaffer said sadly. ‘How did you know it was wired for sound?’

‘Even a small country station will have valuables stored in its left luggage office from time to time,’ Smith said patiently. ‘But it will not have a fulltime baggage attendant. The attendant, booking clerk, ticket-collector, porter and station-master are probably all one man. So it’s kept locked. But there’s no point in barring the front door if your bag-snatcher can climb in through the back window. So your back window is grilled or wired. No grille – and a badly-fitting plank. Obvious.’

‘Obvious to you, maybe,’ Carraciola said sourly. ‘All this – ah – expertise with skeleton keys and burglar alarms. The Black Watch you said you were in?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Very odd training they give you in those Scottish regiments. Very odd indeed.’

‘ “Thorough” is the word you’re searching for,’ Smith said kindly. ‘Let’s go and have a drink.’

‘Let’s do that,’ Carraciola said heavily. ‘Remind me to get mine down in one go or ten gets you one that I’ll never live to finish it.’

‘It would be a shame to waste good beer,’ Smith agreed. He waited until the last man was out, locked the door behind him and rejoined them as they walked out of the main station entrance under the ‘Bahnhof’ sign. They were now no longer carrying rucksacks or wearing snow-smocks. All were dressed in the uniforms of soldiers of a Jäger battalion, Smith as a major, Schaffer as a lieutenant and the other four as sergeants. Their uniforms were no longer as immaculately crease-free as they might have been nor for that matter, as Sergeant Harrod had observed, did they fit as well as they might have done. But in a village street or crowded bar, at night-time, they should pass muster. Or so Smith devoutly hoped.