Colin Forbes - The Leader And The Damned

He slept badly, tossing and turning on the unfamiliar bed, and through the open window chill air flowed into the room – he opened it so he could hear if the police called in the night. On the day they left the place he wondered whether the lack of sleep had been due to premonition. The crossing at Spielfeld-Strass was a bloody affair.

Part Three

The Cauldron: Der Kessel

In forty years Spielfeld-Strass has not changed. It is the same today as it was in 1943 – when Paco and her companions arrived in a six-coach train drawn by an ancient steam engine. It is more like a wayside halt than a frontier station.

As Lindsay alighted, following Paco, he saw another train waiting in a siding. The destination plates hanging from the coaches carried the legend WIEN SUDBHF. They crossed the tracks coated with early morning frost and went inside the small station building through the door marked Ausgang. No one was about to collect the tickets they had purchased at Graz.

Paco walked without appearing to hurry, descended some concrete steps and they were out in the open. The station stood perched on the side of a small hill. Down a short slope they walked into Spielfeld, a handful of houses and a police station, a two-storeyed building with a tiled gable and a tiny dormer window like a dovecote. Over the entrance were the words Gendarmerie and Postenkommando.

It was all so entirely unexpected. Lindsay transferred his suitcase to his left hand and caught up with Paco.

'There's no sign of troops or defences.'

'Wait till we get to the border crossing. It's not far.'

'What's happened to Bora and Milic?'

'Questions, questions, questions! You're at it again. They've gone a different way to create the diversion if we run into trouble at the crossing point…'

Lindsay said nothing. He was recalling how he had wandered into the kitchen of the house at Graz. Milic had been packing equipment inside a bag – the 'equipment' had included stick grenades and what looked like smoke bombs. Presumably he had collected his travelling gear from some secret weapons store inside the house. He had not enquired.

'Don't stop!' Paco warned. 'Keep walking – ignore the police van.'

The police station stood at the edge of a deserted square. On the far side reared a huge chestnut tree, gaunt with naked branches along which were perched rows of sparrows. Behind the tree huddled an ancient inn with faded, colour-washed walls. Gasthof Schenk.

It was so incredibly peaceful. The other passengers seemed to have made off in the opposite direction – which made Lindsay feel conspicuous and nervous of the police station. Coffee-coloured hens trod the paving stones, jerking their red wattles. The birds chattered testily. The only other sound was the click of billiard balls from an open window in the Gasthof.

It was 11 am, the sky was a sea of surging grey clouds and there was the smell of rain to come.

Two uniformed policemen sat in the cab of the police van parked under the chestnut. As they walked past the vehicle which bore the word Polizei in white across the front, Lindsay was aware of two pairs of eyes studying him. The two men remained motionless but he knew they were watching. He waited for the metallic grind of the handle being turned as the door opened.

Paco waited until they were descending a country lane before she spoke. Behind there was a faint flapping and Lindsay almost jumped. It was the birds taking off.

'They wouldn't stoop to speak to the likes of us,' she remarked in a perfect cockney accent. 'The way we're dressed!'

They had changed into different clothes at the house in Graz. Now Paco wore a peasant jacket and skirt of Serbian style with a brightly-coloured handkerchief wrapped tightly round her head – again concealing her blonde hair.

Lindsay was similarly attired in the male equivalent and, at Paco's suggestion, had again not shaved so he was well-whiskered. They passed a high green knoll as they proceeded down the empty country lane and now the only sound was the distant whistle of an engine followed by the clang of shunted coaches.

`Milic and Bora may have to wipe out the frontier post if we are stopped,' she remarked casually. 'In case of trouble, put as much distance as possible between yourself and the guards. We have arrived

…'

Acts of violence are shocking not so much by the casualties they create as in the suddenness with which they occur. Rounding a corner in the country lane they were confronted with the frontier post, with war.

German troops mounted guard over the crossing point, men clad in field-grey uniform who moved restlessly about to combat the morning chill. They paused to stamp their booted feet on the iron-hard ground crusted heavily with frost in a hollow. They slapped their gloved hands round their shoulders to get the circulation going. In the descent from the station the temperature had dropped ten degrees.

The rail track had reappeared, the line leading south into the Balkans, into the battlefield. A goods wagon stood in a siding and men loaded it with wooden boxes from an Army truck. Lindsay stiffened and Paco's arm linked inside his kept him moving.

The boxes were rectangular in shape, made of wood and stencilled with broken lettering. Ammunition boxes. The rail wagon was almost fully-laden. Sentries with machine-pistols at the ready patrolled on both sides of the track.

'A bad moment to arrive,' Lindsay murmured.

'A good moment,' Paco murmured back. 'Their attention is taken up with that wagon.'

Lindsay glanced up at the grassy knolls topped with copses of trees surrounding the hollow. He was trying to imagine where he would position himself if he were Milic and Bora. There was no sign of the two men. Paco produced some grubby papers and they joined a queue of no more than half-a-dozen peasants waiting to cross into Yugoslavia.

The two old women immediately in front of them chattered in a strange language, a sing-song, zizzing sound. Lindsay had never heard people speaking in that way before. Paco, who was watching him, whispered.

'That's Serbo-Croat. You'd better get used to it, you're going to hear a lot of that..

Strange, Lindsay reflected, her calm confidence that they would reach the Promised Land, Yugoslavia. The border post was a small wooden but very much like those he remembered night watchmen had sheltered inside in England before the war. All papers were being examined minutely by a young Army captain.

'Be careful,' he warned Paco, 'the young ones are the worst.'

'Not for me!'

She really was quite incredible. Lindsay's nerves were twanging. Then he noticed why such a youngster occupied this passive occupation. His left sleeve hung loose like a draped curtain: he had only one arm. He observed the tight mouth, the bitter expression. Paco could have misjudged this man.

The queue shuffled forward. Beyond the hut, maybe a hundred metres beyond, stood a huge tidy log pile stacked in a cube. Some of the logs from this pile' formed a fire which crackled dose to the hut. The captain waved a man across the border. Safety was simply permission to continue walking down a country road – on to Yugoslav soil.

Now only the two old women in front of them had to be checked before it was their turn. Lindsay had never felt so helpless in his life – no experience at the Wolf's Lair, at the Berghof, while they were spending the night at the tumbledown Gasthof near the Sudbahnhof, had been as bad as this. He felt so horribly exposed…

'I thought my aunt looked surprisingly well – considering how ill she has been. Don't you agree?' asked Paco, speaking German in a calm voice.

She caught Lindsay off guard. He had been studying the topography close to the border point. He realized she was making conversation for the benefit of the officer checking papers.