Десмонд Бэгли - High Citadel

The men appeared to make up their minds. One of them ran off and presently the big man with the beard appeared from among the rocks, climbed down and walked to the abutments of the bridge. He shouted, ‘Is that Señor Aguillar?’

‘No,’ shouted O’Hara, changing into English. ‘It is O’Hara.’

‘Ah, the pilot.’ The big man responded in English, rather startling O’Hara with his obvious knowledge of their identities. ‘What do you want, Señor O’Hara?’

Benedetta had returned to join them and now said quickly, ‘This man is not a Cordilleran; his accent is Cuban.’

O’Hara winked at her. ‘Señor Cuban, why do you shoot at us?’

The big man laughed jovially. ‘Have you not asked Señor Aguillar? Or does he still call himself Montes?’

‘Aguillar is nothing to do with me,’ called O’Hara. ‘His fight is not mine — and I’m tired of being shot at.’

The Cuban threw back his head and laughed again, slapping his thigh. ‘So?’

‘I want to get out of here.’

‘And Aguillar?’

‘You can have him. That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?’

The Cuban paused as though thinking deeply, and O’Hara said to Benedetta, ‘When I pinch you, scream your head off.’ She looked at him in astonishment, then nodded.

‘Bring Aguillar to the bridge and you can go free, Señor O’Hara.’

‘What about the girl?’ asked O’Hara.

‘The girl we want too, of course.’

O’Hara pinched Benedetta in the arm and she uttered a blood-curdling scream, artistically chopping it off as though a hand had been clapped to her mouth. O’Hara grinned at her and waited a few moments before he raised his voice. ‘Sorry, Señor Cuban; we had some trouble.’ He let caution appear in his tone. ‘I’m not the only one here — there are others.’

‘You will all go free,’ said the big man with an air of largesse. ‘I myself will escort you to San Croce. Bring Aguillar to the bridge now; let us have him and you can all go.’

‘That is impossible,’ O’Hara protested. ‘Aguillar is at the upper camp. He went there when he saw what was happening here at the bridge. It will take time to bring him down.’

The Cuban lifted his head suspiciously. ‘Aguillar ran away?’ he asked incredulously.

O’Hara swore silently; he had not thought that Aguillar would be held in such respect by his enemies. He quickly improvised. ‘He was sent away by Rohde, his friend. But Rohde has been killed by your machine-gun.’

‘Ah, the man who shot at us on the road just now.’ The Cuban looked down at his tapping foot, apparently undecided. Then he lifted his head. ‘Wait, Señor O’Hara.’

‘How long?’

‘A few minutes, that is all.’ He walked up the road and disappeared among the rocks.

Armstrong said, ‘He’s gone to consult with his second-in-command.’

‘Do you think he’ll fall for it?’

‘He might,’ said Willis. ‘It’s an attractive proposition. You baited it well — he thinks that Rohde has been keeping us in line and that now he’s dead we’re about to collapse. It was very well done.’

The Cuban was away for ten minutes, then he came back to the bridge accompanied by another man, a slight swarthy Indian type. ‘Very well,’ he called. ‘As the norteamericanos say, you have made a deal. How long to bring Aguillar?’

‘It’s a long way,’ shouted O’Hara. ‘It will take some time — say, five hours.’

The two men conferred and then the Cuban shouted, ‘All right, five hours.’

‘And we have an armistice?’ shouted O’Hara. ‘No shooting from either side?’

‘No shooting,’ promised the Cuban.

O’Hara sighed. ‘That’s it. We must get the trebuchet finished. We’ve got five hours’ grace. How’s Jenny, Benedetta?’

‘She will be all right. I gave her some hot soup and wrapped her in a blanket. She must be kept warm.’

‘Five hours isn’t a long time,’ said Armstrong. ‘I know we were lucky to get it, but it still isn’t long. Maybe we can string it out a little longer.’

‘We can try,’ said O’Hara. ‘But not for much longer. They’ll get bloody suspicious when the five hours have gone and we haven’t produced Aguillar.’

Armstrong shrugged. ‘What can they do that they haven’t been trying to do for the last three days?’

The day wore on.

The trebuchet was repaired and O’Hara made plans for the rage that was to come. He said, ‘We have one crossbow and a pistol with one bullet — that limits us if it comes to infighting. Benedetta, you take Jenny up to the camp as soon as she can walk. She won’t be able to move fast, so you’d better get a head start in case things blow up here. I still don’t know what they’ve got in the second truck, but it certainly isn’t intended to do us any good.’

So Benedetta and Miss Ponsky went off, taking a load of Molotov cocktails with them. Armstrong and O’Hara watched the bridge, while Willis tinkered with the trebuchet, doing unnecessary jobs. On the other side of the river men had popped out from among the rocks, and the hillside seemed alive with them as they unconcernedly smoked and chatted. It reminded O’Hara of the stories he had heard of the first Christmas of the First World War.

He counted the men carefully and compared notes with Armstrong. ‘I make it thirty-three,’ he said.

‘I get thirty-five,’ said Armstrong. ‘But I don’t suppose the difference matters.’ He looked at the bowl of his pipe. ‘I wish I had some tobacco,’ he said irritably.

‘Sorry, I’m out of cigarettes.’

‘You’re a modern soldier,’ said Armstrong. ‘What would you do in their position? I mean, how would you handle the next stage of the operation?’

O’Hara considered. ‘We’ve done the bridge a bit of no good with the trebuchet, but not enough. Once they’ve got that main gap repaired they can start rushing men across, but not vehicles. I’d make a rush and form a bridgehead at this end, spreading out along this side of the gorge where we are now. Once they’ve got us away from here it won’t be much trouble to repair the rest of the bridge to the point where they can bring a couple of jeeps over. Then I’d use the jeeps as tanks, ram them up to the mine as fast as possible — they’d be there before we could arrive on foot. Once they hold both ends of the road where can we retreat to? There’s not a lot we can do about it — that’s the hell of it.’

‘Um,’ said Armstrong glumly. ‘That’s the appreciation I made.’ He rolled over on his back. ‘Look, it’s clouding over.’

O’Hara turned and looked up at the mountains. A dirty grey cloud was forming and had already blotted out the higher peaks and now swirled in misty coils just above the mine. ‘That looks like snow,’ he said. ‘If there was ever a chance of a real air-search looking for and finding us, it’s completely shot now. And it must have caught Ray flatfooted.’ He shivered. ‘I wouldn’t like to be in their boots.’

They watched the cloud for some time and suddenly Armstrong said, ‘It may be all right for us, though; I believe it’s coming low. We could do with a good, thick mist.’

When the truce had but one hour to go the first grey tendrils of mist began to curl about the bridge and O’Hara sat up as he heard a motor engine. A new arrival pulled up behind the trucks, a big Mercedes saloon car out of which got a man in trim civilian clothes. O’Hara stared across the gorge as the man walked to the bridge and noted the short square build and the broad features. He nudged Armstrong. ‘The commissar has arrived,’ he said.

‘A Russian?’

‘I’d bet you a pound to a pinch of snuff,’ said O’Hara.