Алистер Маклин - Partisans

Their relief was almost palpable when Petersen abruptly turned off the road into a narrow gully which suddenly – and to the two girls, miraculously – appeared in the vertical cliff-side to their right. The road was no road at all, just a convoluted, rutted track that offered only minimal traction for the almost constantly spinning rear wheels, but at least there was no way they could fall off it: high walls of rock pressed in closely on both sides. Perhaps five minutes after leaving the main road, Petersen stopped, cut the engine and dropped down.

‘This is as far as we go,’ he said. ‘As far as we can go in this truck, anyway. Stay here.’ He walked round to the back of the truck, parted the curtains, repeated his words and disappeared into the swirling snow.

He was back within a few minutes, sitting beside the driver of a peculiar open vehicle which looked as if it might once have been a small truck that had had both its top and rear sliced off. The driver, clad in British warm – a thick, khaki, woollen overcoat – could have been of any nationality: with a fur cap pulled down to eyebrow level, a luxuriant black beard and moustache and a pair of hornrimmed sunglasses, there wasn’t a single distinguishable feature of his face to be seen except for a nose that could have belonged to anyone. Petersen stepped down as the vehicle came to a halt.

‘This is Dominic,’ he said. ‘He’s come to help us along a bit. That’s a four-wheel-drive vehicle he’s got there. It can go places where this truck can’t, but even then it can’t go very far, perhaps a couple of kilometres. Dominic will take the two young ladies, all our gear and all our blankets – I can assure you we’re going to need those tonight – as far as he can, then come back for the rest of us. We’ll start walking.’

Sarina said: ‘You mean to tell us you expected this friend of yours to meet us here? And at just this time?’

‘Give or take a few minutes. I wouldn’t be much of a tour guide, would I, if I got all my connections wrong?’

‘This truck,’ Giacomo said. ‘You’re surely not going to leave it here?’

‘Why ever not?’

‘I thought it was your custom to park unwanted Italian trucks in the Neretva. I saw some lovely parking spots in the god-awful ravine we just came through.’

‘A sinful waste. Besides, we might even want it again. What matters, of course, is that our friend Major Cipriano already knows we have it.’

‘How would he know that?’

‘How would he not know it, you mean. Has it not occurred to you that the informer who tipped him off to our presence in the Hotel Eden would also have given him all the details of our trip from the torpedo boat, including those of this vehicle? Either by radio or before being apparently dragged from an hotel bedroom, it doesn’t matter. We passed through a check-point at Potoci about an hour ago and the guard didn’t even bother to slow us down. Odd, one might think, except that he had already been given details of our vehicle, recognized it at once and obeyed orders to let us through. Let’s get that stuff out quickly. It’s turned even colder than I thought it would be.’

It had indeed. A south-east wind had sprung up, a wind from which they would have been sheltered in the Neretva valley, and was steadily strengthening. This would not normally have been a cold wind but this was a wind that paid no attention to meteorological norms: it could have been blowing straight from Siberia. The four-wheel-drive vehicle was loaded with passengers and gear and drove off in a remarkably short time: there could be no doubt that Dominic’s sunglasses were, in effect, snow-glasses.

The five men set out on foot and were picked up some fifteen minutes later by the returning Dominic. The ride along an even more bumpy and deteriorating track was, because of the increase in snowdepth and incline, uncomfortable and haphazard to a degree, and only marginally better and faster than walking. None of the passengers was sorry when the truck pulled up at the track’s end outside a ramshackle wooden hut which proved to be its garage. Inside, the two girls were sheltering from the snow. They were not alone. There were three men – boys, rather – in vaguely paramilitary uniforms and five ponies.

Sarina said: ‘Where on earth are we?’

‘Home, sweet home,’ Petersen said. ‘Well, an hour and a half’s gentle ride and we’ll be there. This is the mountain of Prenj, more of a massif, really. The Neretva river makes a big U-turn here and runs around three sides of it, which makes Prenj, in defensive terms, an ideal place to be. Only two bridges cross the river, one to the northwest at Jablanica, the other to the north-east at Konjik, and both of those are easily guarded and defended. It’s open to the south-east but no danger threatens from that direction.’

‘Gentle ride, you said. Do those horses canter or gallop? I don’t like horses.’

‘They’re ponies, not horses, and, no, they don’t canter or gallop. Not on this occasion anyway. They wouldn’t be stupid enough to try. It’s all uphill and pretty steeply uphill.’

‘I don’t think I’m going to enjoy this climb.’

‘You’ll enjoy the view.’

It was half an hour later and she was enjoying neither the climb nor the view. The climb, though not impossibly steep, was a difficult enough one and the view, remarkable though it was, engendered in her only a feeling that lay halfway between fascinated horror and paralysed terror. The path, barely two metres in width and sometimes noticeably less, had been gouged out of the side of a slope so steep as to be virtually a cliff-side, and ascended it by a series, a seemingly endless series, of hairpin twists and turns. With every step the pony took, the floor of the narrow valley, when it could be seen at all through the driving snow, seemed more remotely and vertically distant. Only she and Lorraine had been mounted: the other three ponies carried all their securely strapped gear and blankets. Lorraine was on foot now, clutching Giacomo’s arm as if he was her last faint hope on earth.

Petersen, walking beside Sarina’s pony, said: ‘I’m afraid you’re not enjoying this as much as I would like you to.’

‘Enjoying it!’ She shuddered uncontrollably, not with cold. ‘Back in the hotel I told you I wasn’t a great big coward. Well, I am, I am! I’m terrified. I keep on telling myself it’s silly, it’s stupid, but I can’t help it.’

Petersen said matter-of-factly: ‘You’re not a coward. It’s been like this since you were a child.’

‘Like what? What do you mean?’

‘Vertigo is what I mean. Anyone can suffer from it. Some of the bravest men I know, some of the most fearsome fighters I’ve ever met, won’t climb a step-ladder or set foot in a plane.’

‘Yes, yes. Always. Do you know about it?’

‘I don’t get it, but I’ve seen it too often not to know about it. Dizziness, loss of equilibrium, an almost uncontrollable desire to throw yourself over the edge and, in the present case, a conviction on your part that your pony is about to jump out into space at any moment. That’s about it, isn’t it?’

She nodded, dumbly. Petersen refrained from saying that if she’d known about her condition and the Yugoslav mountains, she should have stayed in Cairo. Instead he moved round the head of the horse and took her stirrup-leather in his hand.

‘These ponies are more sure-footed than we are and by a long way. Even if it should suffer from a bout of vertigo now, and ponies never do, I would be the first over the edge. And even if you felt like throwing yourself over, you can’t because I’m between you and the cliff edge and I’d stop you and catch you. And I’ll change sides at every corner. That way we’ll be sure to make it to the top. I won’t be so silly as to tell you to sit back and relax: all I can say is that you’ll be feeling a lot better in fifteen minutes or so.’