Алистер Маклин - Where Eagles Dare

Schaffer went. As soon as he was in position, Smith brought out skeleton keys. The third key fitted and the door gave under his hand. He signalled Schaffer to return.

With the door closed and locked behind them, they looked around the room, a room faintly but for their purposes adequately lit by the backwash of light shining through the unshuttered window from the courtyard. It was, quite apparently, the fire-fighting HQ of the castle. The walls were hung with drums of rolled hoses, asbestos suits, helmets and fire-axes: wheeled handpumps, CO 2cylinders and a variety of smaller cylinders for fighting oil and electrical fires took up much of the floor space.

‘Ideal,’ Smith murmured.

‘Couldn’t be better,’ Schaffer agreed. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘If we leave anyone in here,’ Smith explained, ‘he’s unlikely to be discovered unless there’s an actual outbreak of fire. Agreed? So.’ He took Schaffer by the arm and led him to the window. ‘The lad working on the chopper there. About your size, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Schaffer said. ‘And if you’ve got in mind what I think you have in mind, then I don’t want to know, either.’

Smith drew the shutters, crossed to the door and switched on the overhead light.

‘You got any better ideas?’

‘Give me time,’ he complained.

‘I can’t give you what we haven’t got. Take your jacket off and keep your Luger lined up on that door. I’ll be back in a minute.’

Smith left, closing but not locking the door behind him. He passed through the outer doorway, walked a few paces across the courtyard, halted at the base of a set of steps leading up to the helicopter and looked up at the man working above him, a tall rangy man with a thin intelligent face and a lugubrious expression on it. If he’d been working bare-handed with metal tools in that freezing temperature, Smith thought, he’d have had a lugubrious expression on his face, too.

‘You the pilot?’ Smith asked.

‘You wouldn’t think so, would you?’ the over-alled man said bitterly. He laid down a spanner and blew on his hands. ‘Back in Tempelhof I have two mechanics for this machine, one a farm-hand from Swabia, the other a blacksmith’s assistant from the Harz. If I want to keep alive I do my own mechanics. What do you want?’

‘Not me. Reichsmarschall Rosemeyer. The phone.’

‘The Reichsmarschall?’ The pilot was puzzled. ‘I was speaking to him less than fifteen minutes ago.’

‘A call just came through from the Chancellory in Berlin. It seems urgent.’ Smith let a slight note of impatience creep into his voice. ‘You better hurry. Through the main door there, then the first on the right.’

Smith stood aside as the pilot clambered down, looked casually around him. A guard with a leashed Doberman was no more than twenty feet away, but paying no attention to them: with his pinched bluish face sunk deep in his upturned collar, his hands thrust down into his great-coat pockets and his frozen breath hanging heavily in the air, he was too busy concentrating on his own miseries to have time to spare for ridiculous suspicions. Smith turned to follow the pilot through the main door, unobtrusively unholstering his Luger and gripping it by the barrel.

Smith hadn’t intended chopping down the pilot with his gun butt but was left with no option. As soon as the pilot had passed through the side door and seen Schaffer’s Luger pointing at his chest from a distance of four feet his shoulders lifted – the preliminary, Smith knew, not to violence or resistance but to a shout for help. Schaffer caught him as he pitched forward and lowered him to the floor.

Quickly they unzipped the overall from the unconscious man, bound and gagged him and left him lying in a corner. The overall was hardly a perfect fit for Schaffer, but, then, overalls are rarely a perfect fit for anybody. Schaffer switched the pilot’s hat for his own, pulled the peak low over his eyes and left.

Smith switched off the light, unshuttered the window, raised the lower sash and stood, Luger in hand, just far enough back from the window so as not to be seen from outside. Schaffer was already climbing the steps up to the helicopter. The guard was now only feet from the base of the ladder. He’d his hands out of his pockets now and was flailing his arms across his shoulders in an attempt to keep warm.

Thirty seconds later Schaffer climbed down the ladder again, carrying some piece of equipment in his left hand. He reached the ground, lifted the piece of equipment for a closer inspection, shook his head in disgust, lifted his right hand in a vague half-greeting to the uncaring German guard and headed for the main door again. By the time he reached the fire-fighting room, Smith had the window shuttered again and the light on.

‘That was quick,’ Smith said approvingly.

‘Fear lent him wings, as the saying goes,’ Schaffer said sourly. ‘I’m always quick when I’m nervous. Did you see the size of the teeth in that great slavering monster out there?’ He held up the piece of equipment for inspection, dropped it to the floor and brought his heel down on it. ‘Distributor cap. I’ll bet they haven’t another in Bavaria. Not for that engine. And now, I suppose, you want me to go and impersonate the telephone operator.’

‘No. We don’t want to exhaust all your Thespian stamina.’

‘My what?’ Schaffer asked suspiciously. ‘That sounds kinda like a nasty crack to me.’

‘Your acting resources. The only other impersonation you’ll be called to make tonight is that of Lieutenant Schaffer, OSS, the innocent American abroad.’

‘That shouldn’t be too difficult,’ Schaffer said bitterly. He draped the overalls he’d just removed over the unconscious pilot. ‘A cold night. Anyway, the telephone exchange.’

‘Soon. But I’d like to check first how far they’ve got with old Carnaby-Jones. Let’s take a look.’

Two floors higher up and midway along the central passage Smith stopped outside a doorway. At a nod from him, Schaffer reached for a light switch. Except for a faint glow of light at either end, the passage was now completely dark. Smith laid a gentle hand on the door-knob and quietly eased the door open. Fifteen inches, no more. Both men swiftly slid through the narrow gap, Smith quickly and softly closing the door to again.

The room, if so enormous a chamber could be called a room, must have been at least seventy feet long by thirty wide. The farther end of the room was brightly and warmly lit by three large chandeliers: comparatively, the end of the room where Smith and Schaffer stood was shrouded in near darkness.

They stood, not on the floor, but on a platform some dozen feet above the floor. It was a massive and grotesquely carved oaken minstrels’ gallery which completely spanned the thirty-foot width of that end and ran perhaps a quarter of the way down both the longer sides of the room. There were rows of wooden benches, an organ on one side of the door through which they had just passed, a battery of organ pipes on the other. Whoever had built that place had obviously liked the organ and choir-singing: or maybe he just thought he did. From the centre of the front of the gallery, opposite the rear door, a flight of steps with intricately scrolled wooden banisters led down to what was very obviously the gold drawing-room.

It was aptly named, Smith thought. Everything in it was gold or golden or gilt. The enormous wall-to-wall carpet was deep gold in colour, the thickness of the pile would have turned a polar bear green with envy. The heavy baroque furniture, all twisted snakes and gargoyles’ heads, was gilt, the huge couches and chairs covered in a dusty gold lamé. The chandeliers were gilded and, above the enormous white and gilt-plated fireplace, in which a crackling pine log fire burned, hung an almost equally enormous white and gilt-plated mirror. The great heavy curtains could have been made from beaten gold. The ceiling-high oak panelling was a mistake, it continued to look obstinately like oak panelling, maybe the original covering gold paint had worn off. All in all, Smith reflected, it was a room only a mad Bavarian monarch could have conceived of, far less lived in.