Colin Forbes - The Heights of Zervos

For both of them the immensely strong sea-wall had muffled the blast. But Dietrich was recovering quickly. As he staggered to his feet Prentice began to move up behind him with a rock in his fist. The Abwehr man, unaware of what was happening behind him, fished the Luger out of his pocket, looked quickly up the road and along the jetty, and moved towards the soldier who was climbing to his feet in the centre of the road. Prentice, moving soundlessly on the grass, followed Dietrich as he lurched towards the soldier who had now brought himself to his knees and was shaking his head like a dog emerging from a river. He looked up as Dietrich brought the Luger barrel crashing down on his head. He was slumping to the ground when Dietrich tugged the loop of the machine-pistol free. Prentice stared in astonishment, the rock still poised in his hand, but when he saw the machine-pistol he moved forward again. The Abwehr man turned, knocked the unsteady fist aside and thrust the weapon into Prentice's hands. 'This will be more useful – if you can handle the damned thing.'

He had spoken in English and without waiting for Prentice's reaction he hauled another machine-pistol loose from an inert German, tossed it across to Ford, and then extracted spare magazines from the pockets of the two men on the ground. When he stood up he noticed that it was Ford who was familiar with the machine-pistol and shoved the magazines at him. 'Here – it looks as though they'd be more use to you.

Now, we've got to get moving pdq. We go that way – along the wall to the south.'

'Who the devil are you?' Prentice demanded,

'Dietrich of the Abwehr.'

The reply was given ironically as the large man stared briefly along the jetty wall. The Hydra looked like a refugee from an Atlantic convoy. The funnel was bent at a surrealist angle and her bows were already settling in the shallow water. Around the hull men swam in the sea distractedly as a huge column of black smoke ascended into the clear sky like a gigantic signal which would be seen clear across the bay to the mainland. As he gazed at the wreckage a tongue of red flame flared up at the base of the distorted funnel. Soon the whole superstructure would be ablaze and would go on burning until the hulk was reduced to its waterline and the Hydra was a blackened shell. All Burckhardt's efforts at preserving an appearance of normality had gone up with the demolition charge. 'I thought she'd never blow,' he said half to himself, and then he saw Nopagos clambering up onto the jetty. The shock wave must have blown straight over the heads of the group on the beach. He looked back towards the town and the road was still empty. 'They'll be coming soon,' he warned, 'so let's get to hell out of here.'

'Which way? The village is crawling with them…'

'Along this wall – five years ago I walked all over this place. We've got to head up the peninsula.,.'

'But who the devil are you?' Prentice repeated, and when the reply came the Scots burr was even more pronounced.

'I'm Ian Macomber.' He grabbed at the lieutenant's arm. 'Now, if you don't want to get shot, follow me and run like hell!'

Sunday, 10 AM

By ten o'clock in the morning they had marched almost nonstop through punishing hill country which had caused them either to climb or descend most of the way, and they had still seen no trace of Grapos. It was Macomber who had urged them on mercilessly, insisting that they put as much ground as possible between themselves and the oncoming Germans before they rested. Several times Prentice had tried to talk and ask questions, but on each occasion the Scot had brusquely told him to save his breath for the march. They followed a footpath which twisted and turned as its surface changed, sometimes sand, sometimes rock and often merely beaten earth. A path which led them past olive groves, over hilltops ringed with boulders, and down into scrub-infested valleys where the streams raced with swelling waters. But now they had reached a hilltop where Macomber consented to pause briefly because it gave a clear view back to the north where the road from Katyra came towards them in a series of bends and drops down the near sides of hills dense with undergrowth.

'We can see them coming from here,' Macomber announced as he perched on a rounded boulder. 'And water is going to be our problem. There isn't much of it on the plateau.'

'This might help,' Ford suggested as he undid his coat and showed a pear-shaped water-bottle attached to his belt. 'I filched that off one of those dead Jerries while you two pulled yourselves together.'

'Ford gets his priorities right,' Prentice remarked, and then stared hard at Macomber. 'Mind if I hear a little more about you now?'

Macomber took a swig from the water-bottle, handed it on to Prentice and grinned faintly. 'I've spent the last fifteen months in the Balkans. Do you think that sounds cushy?'

'Depends what you were doing,' Prentice replied cautiously. 'What were you doing?'

'I'll tell you, then. I'm like Winston Churchill as far as ancestry goes – half-British and half-American. My mother was a New Yorker and my father came from Aberdeen. I spent a third of my early years in the States, another third in Scotland, and the rest of the time travelling round Europe with my parents. My father was a linguistics expert and I inherited his gift for languages.' There was no modesty in Macomber's tone but neither was he boasting; he was simply stating a fact. 'And that's where the trouble started,' he went on. 'Principally my languages are German, Greek and French – which comes in useful when you're in Rumania. I had lung trouble before the war…'

'Lung trouble!' Prentice looked sceptical, remembering the tremendous pace the Scot had set up while they were making their dash up and down those endless hills.

'It's cured now – at least so a quack in Budapest assured me. He said it was the pure clean air from Siberia which blows across Hungary in winter that had done the trick. But that lung kept me out of the Forces in 1939, so the Ministry of Economic Warfare asked me to do a job for them. Get your head out of the way, Ford, I can't see that road.'

'What sort of a job?' Prentice asked casually. Without appearing to do so he was trying to check the Scot's story.

'Buying up strategic war materials the Jerries wanted. You'd never believe the funds I had at my disposal. I bought up everything I could lay my hands on and had it shipped out of the Balkans. I had an idea the bright boys foresaw the German Drach nach Osten and wanted to denude the place before Hitler arrived.'

'Sounds interesting,' was Prentice's only comment.

'You think so? Just sitting behind a desk and making out orders in quadruplicate for a few thousand gallons of oil or the odd few tons of copper – is that how you see it?'

'I didn't say so.'

'No, but you looked so!' He took out one of his remaining cigars. 'What I don't think you've quite grasped is that I had competitors, Jerry competitors, and they can play very rough, very rough indeed. When I'd survived two attempts to kill me

– one in Gyor and one in Budapest – I decided my luck was running out and the time had come to go underground, so I acquired some false papers and set up as a German.' He looked quizzically at Prentice over his cigar, put it back in his mouth and went on talking. 'Don't look so damned unbelieving

– false papers can be obtained almost anywhere if you have the money, and I had a small fortune to play with.'

'You set up as Dietrich, then?'

'No, he came later. I called myself Hermann Wolff, and, you know, necessity really did turn out to be the mother of invention. I found myself mixing openly with the German community in Budapest, which in the beginning was simply excellent camouflage, but later when I ran out of stuS to buy up it gave our Ministry brains another idea, a diabolical idea.' He turned again to look over his shoulder at the hill behind, in the opposite direction from where the Germans must come, and this was a gesture he had repeated several times.