Алистер Маклин - Where Eagles Dare

Perhaps it was the lack of a carpet that betrayed them. For the first half of Schaffer’s stealthy advance across the room the operator, his back to them, sat smoking a cigarette in idle unconcern, listening to soft Austrian Schrammel music coming in over his big machine: suddenly, alerted either by the faintest whisper of sound from a creaking floorboard or just by some sixth sense, he whirled round and jumped to his feet. And he thought as quickly as he moved. Even as he raised his arms high in apparently eager surrender, he appeared to move slightly to his right, shifting the position of his right foot. There came the sudden strident clamour of an alarm bell ringing in the passage outside, Schaffer leapt forward, his Schmeisser swinging, and the operator staggered back against his transceiver then slid unconscious to the floor. But Schaffer was too late. The bell rang and kept on ringing.

‘That’s all I need!’ Smith swore bitterly. ‘That’s all I bloody well need!’ He ran through the radio room door out into the passage, located the glass-cased alarm bell some feet away and struck it viciously with the butt of his Schmeisser. The shattered glass tinkled to the floor and the clangour abruptly ceased.

‘Inside!’ Smith gestured to the open doorway of the radio room. ‘All of you. Quickly.’ He ushered them all inside, looked around, saw a side door leading off to the right and said to Mary: ‘Quickly. What’s in there? Schaffer!’

‘Horatio hold the bridge,’ Schaffer murmured. He moved across and took up position at the radio room door. ‘We could have done without this, boss.’

‘We could do without a lot of things in this world,’ Smith said wearily. He glanced at Mary. ‘Well?’

‘Storage rooms for radio spares, looks like.’

‘You and Jones take those three in there. If they breathe, kill them.’

Jones looked down at the gun held gingerly in his hand and said: ‘I am not a serviceman, sir.’

‘I have news for you,’ Smith said. ‘Neither am I.’

He crossed hurriedly to the transceiver, sat down and studied the confusing array of dials, knobs and switches. For fully twenty seconds he sat there, just looking.

Schaffer said from the doorway: ‘Know how to work it, boss?’

‘A fine time to ask me,’ Smith said. ‘We’ll soon find out, won’t we?’ He switched the machine to ‘Send’, selected the ultra short wave band and lined up his transmitting frequency. He opened another switch and picked up a microphone.

‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy,’ he said. ‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy. Can you hear me? Can you hear me?’

Nobody heard him or gave indication of hearing him. Smith altered the transmitting frequency fractionally and tried again. And again. And again. After the sixth or seventh repetition, Smith started as a crash of machine-pistol fire came from the doorway. He twisted round. Schaffer was stretched full length on the floor, smoke wisping from the barrel of his Schmeisser.

‘We got callers, boss,’ Schaffer said apologetically. ‘Don’t think I got any but I sure as hell started their adrenaline moving around.’

‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy,’ Smith said urgently, insistingly. ‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy. For God’s sake, why don’t they answer?’

‘They can’t come round the corner of the passage without being sawn in half.’ Schaffer spoke comfortably from his uncomfortable horizontal position on the floor. ‘I can hold them off to Christmas. So what’s the hurry?’

‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy. Broadsword calling Danny Boy. How long do you think it’s going to be before someone cuts the electricity?’

‘For God’s sake, Danny Boy,’ Schaffer implored. ‘Why don’t you answer? Why don’t you answer?’

‘Danny Boy calling Broadsword.’ The voice on the radio was calm and loud and clear, so free from interference that it might have come from next door. ‘Danny Boy–’

‘One hour, Danny Boy,’ Smith interrupted. ‘One hour. Understood? Over.’

‘Understood. You have it, Broadsword?’ The voice was unmistakably that of Admiral Rolland. ‘Over.’

‘I have it,’ Smith said. ‘I have it all.’

‘All sins are forgiven. Mother Machree coming to meet you. Leaving now.’

There came another staccato crash of sound as Schaffer loosed off another burst from his Schmeisser. Admiral Rolland’s voice on the radio said: ‘What was that?’

‘Static,’ Smith said. He didn’t bother to switch off. He rose, took three paces back and fired a two-second burst from his machine-pistol, his face twisting in pain as the recoil slammed into his shattered hand. No one would ever use that particular radio again. He glanced briefly at Schaffer, but only briefly: the American’s face, though thoughtful, was calm and unworried: there were those who might require helpful words, encouragement and reassurance, but Schaffer was not one of them. Smith moved swiftly across to the window and lifted the lower sash with his left hand.

The moon was almost obscured behind some darkly drifting cloud. A thin weak light filtered down into the half-seen obscurity of the valley below. Once again the snow was beginning to fall, gently. The air was taut, brittle, in the intensity of its coldness, an Arctic chill that bit to the bone. The icy wind that gusted through the room could have come off the polar ice-cap.

They were on the east side of the castle, Smith realized, the side remote from the cable-car header station. The base of the volcanic plug was shrouded in a gloom so deep that it was impossible to be sure whether or not the guards and Dobermans were patrolling down there: and, for the purposes of present survival, it didn’t really matter. Smith withdrew from the window, pulled the nylon from the kitbag, tied one end securely to the metal leg of the radio table, threw the remainder of the rope out into the night then, with his left hand, thoroughly scuffed and rubbed away the frozen encrusted snow on both the window-sill and for two or three feet beneath it: it would, he thought, have to be a hypercritical eye that didn’t immediately register the impression that there had been fairly heavy and recent traffic over the sill. He wondered, vaguely, whether the rope reached as far as the ground and dismissed the thought as soon as it had occurred to him: again, it didn’t really matter.

He crossed the room to where Schaffer lay spread-eagled in the doorway. The key was in the lock on the inside of the door and the lock, he observed with satisfaction, was on the same massive scale as everything else in the Schloss Adler. He said to Schaffer: ‘Time to close the door.’

‘Let’s wait till they show face again then discourage them some more,’ Schaffer suggested. ‘It’s been a couple of minutes since the last lad peeked his head round the corner there. Another peek, another salvo from Schaffer and it might give us another couple of minutes’ grace – enough time to make it feasible for us to have shinned down that little rope there and made our getaway.’

‘I should have thought of that.’ An icy snow-laden gust of wind blew across the room, from open window through open door, and Smith shivered. ‘My God, it’s bitter!’

‘Loss of blood,’ Schaffer said briefly, then added, unsympathetically: ‘And all that brandy you guzzled back there. When it comes to opening pores–’

He broke off and lay very still, lowering his head a fraction to sight along the barrel of his Schmeisser. He said softly: ‘Give me your torch, boss.’

‘What is it?’ Smith whispered. He handed Schaffer the torch.

‘Discretion,’ Schaffer murmured. He switched on the torch and placed it on the floor, pushing it as far away from himself as he could. ‘I reckon if I were in their place I’d be discreet, too. There’s a stick poking round the corner of the passage and the stick has a mirror tied to it. Only, they haven’t got it angled right.’