Alistair MacLean - Where Eagles Dare

He moved a few feet farther away from the cliff edge, cleared away the snow and lightly hammered in one of the spare pitons he had brought with him. He tested it with his hand to see if it broke clear easily. It did. He tapped it in lightly a second time and led round it the part of the rope that was secured to the firmly anchored first piton. Then he walked away, moving up the gently sloping plateau, whistling ‘Lorelei’. It was, as Smith himself would have been the first to admit, a far from tuneful whistle, but recognizable for all that. A figure appeared out of the night and came running towards him, stumbling and slipping in the deep snow. It was Mary Ellison. She stopped short a yard away and put her hands on her hips.

‘Well!’ He could hear her teeth chattering uncontrollably with the cold. ‘You took your time about it, didn’t you?’

‘Never wasted a minute,’ Smith said defensively. ‘I had to have a hot meal and coffee first.’

‘You had to have—you beast, you selfish beast!’ She took a quick step forward and flung her arms around his neck. ‘I hate you.’

‘I know.’ He pulled off a gauntlet and gently touched her disengaged cheek. ‘You’re frozen.’

‘You’re frozen, he says! Of course I’m frozen. I almost died in that plane. Why couldn’t you have supplied some hot water bottles—or—or an electrically heated suit or—or something? I thought you loved me!’

‘I can’t help what you think,’ Smith said kindly, patting her on the back. ‘Where’s your gear?’

‘Fifty yards. And stop patting me in that—that avuncular fashion.’

‘Language, language,’ Smith said. ‘Come on, let’s fetch it.’

They trudged upwards through the deep snow, Mary holding his arm tightly. She said curiously: ‘What on earth excuse did you give for coming back up here? Lost a cuff-link?’

‘There was something I had to come for, something apart from you, although I gave a song-and-dance act of having forgotten about it until the last moment, until it was almost too late. The radio code-book inside Sergeant Harrod’s tunic.’

‘He—he lost it? He dropped it? How—how could he have been so criminally careless!’ She stopped, puzzled. ‘Besides, it’s chained—’

‘It’s still inside Sergeant Harrod’s tunic,’ Smith said sombrely. ‘He’s up here, dead.’

‘Dead?’ She stopped and clutched him by the arms. After a long pause, she repeated: ‘He’s dead! That—that nice man. I heard him saying he’d never jumped before. A bad landing?’

‘So it seems.’

They located the kit-bag in silence and Smith carried it back to the edge of the cliff. Mary said: ‘And now? The code-book?’

‘Let’s wait a minute. I want to watch this rope.’

‘Why the rope?’

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Mary said resignedly. ‘I’m only a little girl. I suppose you know what you’re doing.’

‘I wish to God I did,’ Smith said feelingly.

They waited, again in silence, side by side on the kit-bag. Both stared at the rope in solemn concentration as if nylon ropes at seven thousand feet had taken on a special meaningfulness denied nylon ropes elsewhere. Twice Smith tried to light a cigarette and twice it sputtered to extinction in the drifting snow. The minutes passed, three, maybe four: they felt more like thirty or forty. He became conscious that the girl beside him was shivering violently—he guessed that she had her teeth clamped tight to prevent their chattering—and was even more acutely conscious that his entire left side—he was trying to shelter her from the wind and snow—was becoming numb. He rose to leave when suddenly the rope gave a violent jerk and the piton farther from the cliff edge was torn free. The loop of the rope slid quickly down past the piton to which it was anchored and kept on going till it was brought up short by its anchor. Whatever pressure was on the rope increased until the nylon bit deeply into the fresh snow on the cliff edge. Smith moved across and tested the pressure on the rope, at first gingerly and tentatively then with all his strength. The rope was bar-taut and remained bar-taut. But the piton held.

‘What—what on earth—’ Mary began, then broke off. Her voice was an unconscious whisper.

‘Charming, charming,’ Smith murmured. ‘Someone down there doesn’t like me. Surprised?’

‘If—if that spike hadn’t held we’d never have got down again.’ The tremor in her voice wasn’t all due to the cold.

‘It’s a fair old jump,’ Smith conceded.

He took her arm and they moved off. The snow was heavier now and even with the aid of their torches visibility was no more than six feet, but, by using the rocky outcrop as a bearing, it took Smith no more than two minutes to locate Sergeant Harrod, now no more than a featureless mound buried in the depths of the snow-drift. Smith brushed aside the covering shroud of white, undid the dead man’s tunic, recovered the codebook, hung the chain round his neck and buttoned the book securely inside his own Alpenkorps uniform.

Then came the task of turning Sergeant Harrod over on his side. Unpleasant Smith had expected it to be, and it was: impossible he hadn’t expected it to be, and it wasn’t—not quite. But the effort all but defeated him, and the dead man was stiff as a board, literally frozen solid into the arms outflung position into which he had fallen. For the second time that night Smith could feel the sweat mingling with the melted snow on his face. But by and by he had him over, the frozen right arm pointing up into the snow-filled sky. Smith knelt, brought his torch close and carefully examined the back of the dead man’s head.

‘What are you trying to do?’ Mary asked. ‘What are you looking for?’ Again her voice was a whisper.

‘His neck is broken. I want to find out just how it was broken.’ He glanced up at the girl. ‘You don’t have to look.’

‘Don’t worry.’ She turned away. ‘I’m not going to.’

The clothes, like the man, were frozen stiff. The hood covering Harrod’s head crackled and splintered in Smith’s gauntleted hands as he pulled it down, exposing the back of the head and neck. Finally, just below the collar of the snow-smock, Smith found what he was searching for—a red mark at the base of the neck where the skin was broken. He rose, caught the dead man’s ankles and dragged him a foot or two down the slope.

‘What now?’ In spite of herself Mary was watching again, in reluctant and horrified fascination. ‘What are you looking for now?’

‘A rock,’ Smith said briefly. There was a cold edge to the words and although Mary knew it wasn’t intended for her, it was an effective discouragement to any further questioning.

Smith cleared the snow for two feet around where Harrod’s head had lain. With hand and eyes he examined the ground with meticulous care, rose slowly to his feet, took Mary’s arm and began to walk away. After a few steps he hesitated, stopped, turned back to the dead man and turned him over again so that the right arm was no longer pointing towards the sky.

Half-way back to the cliff edge, Smith said abruptly:

‘Something struck Harrod on the back of the neck. I thought it might have been a rock. But there was no rock where he lay, only turf.’

‘There was a rocky outcrop nearby.’

‘You don’t break your neck on a rocky outcrop, then stand up and jump out into a snowdrift. Even had he rolled over into the drift, he could never have finished with his head seven feet out from the rock. He was struck by some hard metallic object, either the butt of a gun or the haft of a knife. The skin is broken but there is no bruising for the neck was broken immediately afterwards. When he was unconscious. To make us think it was an accident. It must have happened on the rock—there was no disturbance in the snow round Harrod—and it must have happened while he was upright. A tap on the neck, a quick neck-twist, then he fell or was pushed over the edge of the outcrop. Wonderful stuff, stone,’ Smith finished bitterly. ‘It leaves no footprints.’