Prentice reluctantly helped Ford out of the vehicle, and as soon as they were in the roadway Macomber let off the brake and began driving forward. The slope was a little steeper than he had anticipated but once the tracks gripped its surface he felt them steadily pushing the vehicle up the ascent. The mist was thickening again when he had climbed sixty feet above the bridge and he switched on his lights to see where he was going. The beams were blurred cones and the lights reflected off tiny particles of moisture as they penetrated the trees, showed up a massive slab of rock beyond. Tilted at an angle of perhaps thirty degrees, sagged back heavily against his seat, he steered the half-track cautiously between two tree-trunks, pulled it up with its nose inches from the slab, looked back and swore. The one essential of the ambush was a clear view of the bridge and the mist had closed over it, blotting it out completely. If it didn't shift before the German half-track arrived he was impotent, powerless to help, and the other three would have to fight it out alone. He took out the cigar, moistened his lips and waited with the engine ticking over. Another calculated risk – that the motor of the German vehicle combined with the mist would muffle the sound of his own engine. What the devil was keeping Jerry?
Waiting was an activity – if doing nothing can be termed activity – Macomber had some experience of. Waiting in the shadows of a warehouse on the Danube while he checked the supplies going aboard a barge; waiting beneath a manhole cover while a German soldier patrolled the street above; some of his most gruelling hours during the past fifteen months had been spent waiting. But at the moment waiting didn't suit him; it gave a chance for the fatigue to make itself felt, to settle in his weary limbs and his over-strained mind, and he wondered how much more he could take before his final reserves were drained. Even the slow-motion coils of mist which drifted below as he remained twisted round in his seat seemed to add to the appalling tiredness which was becoming his permanent condition. He blinked, thinking he saw a man creeping up through the mist, but it was only the vapour assuming strange shapes, and then, above the murmuring throb of his own motor, he heard the sound he had been waiting for.
The half-track proceeding cautiously down the hill echoed weirdly through the fogged silence, a distant engine sound combining with a more distinctive noise – the rattle and grind of the descending tracks. And still the bridge was lost, might be a dozen miles away for all he could see of it through the dense pall which smothered the slope so that now it might have been late evening or early morning. Had he known this was going to happen he could have stopped lower down, relying on the mist alone to conceal his presence, but it was far too late to alter position, so all he could do was to wait and hope -hope that damned mist would thin in time. The clanking sound was closer now, the half-track still moving slowly, as he had foreseen it would. His hand went towards the brake, clutched it, and he had forgotten he was smoking as he stared fixedly downwards, trying to make up his mind whether the mist had thinned just a little. His eyes were feeling the strain of staring in one direction and a dull ache was building up behind his temples as the clanking noise grew louder, still a muffled ratchetty sound, but definitely louder. They'd be at the bottom any moment now, turning onto the bridge. It wasn't going to work, there was going to be a tragedy down there, Macomber felt it in his chilled bones, a chill brought on by a feeling of almost unbearable frustration which twitched at his nerves. I may be responsible for the death of three men, he thought.
A breath of wind touched his face as he heard the engine sound slow – they had reached the bottom, they were turning the corner. He suddenly realized his lights were still on and switched them off quickly. A blunder like that would have lost him his life long ago. Pull yourself together, for Christ's sake, this is going to be tricky enough as it is without going to sleep on the job. A noise like gently falling water came from above as the wind rustled the trees, then the mist began to retreat rapidly, to dissolve back down the slope as the wind parted it in melting eddies. He stiffened, his side rigid against the seat, straining to see what was happening down there. Had a voice drifted up from below? He was frowning ferociously, still trying to decide, when the mist cleared from the bridge and he saw the German half-track turning the first corner as it lumbered up to the bridge and stopped, broadside on to the destroyed wall, stopped in the position Macomber had prayed it would stop. Four men inside, and the man standing up by the driver was Hahnemann. Too far away to see clearly, but Macomber knew it was Hahnemann, knew it for a certainty from the way he moved. Now!
He released the brake, accelerated, reversed down the slope at gathering speed as the tracks churned and slithered their way down, the revolutions increasing with every yard of the descent. Had they reacted instantly, remained cool, taking deliberate aim before they fired, they might have killed the Scot, freed the half-track's steering so it would have careered in a different direction. But Macomber had counted on the element of surprise, on the element of terror which can freeze men's minds for vital seconds, on the view as seen from the bridge which a moment earlier had seemed so deserted, on the view seconds later as they heard the harsh grind and thunder of the descending tracks and saw the tank-like projectile coming out of the mist and roaring down on them. Still twisted round in his seat, both hands locked to the wheel, steering by feel alone, Macomber turned the direction of the onslaught a fraction, aiming the half-track square at the vehicle below. He saw Hahnemann react at last, saw him haul out his pistol from his holster, raise it, take deliberate aim, then collapse as Grapos, secreted behind a rock above the bridge, fired at the same moment as Prentice pressed the trigger of his machine-pistol. Hahnemann's three companions ducked, or fell, Macomber had no idea which, as the tracks bounded over a flat boulder and changed direction round the end of the bridge, smashing with enormous force into the side of the German vehicle parked by the gap. The collision was tremendous, a jarring shock which knocked Macomber backward into the wheel, and only his anticipation of what was coming prevented his being impaled on the steering column as he braked at the last moment, a split-second problem of timing since he needed all the force of the rushing descent to strike the half-track before he tried to escape following it to destruction. The battering-ram blow slammed the German vehicle half-way over the edge as one of the Alpenkorps men scrambled dazedly to his feet, acted intuitively and threw himself over the brink, only to be followed seconds later by the half-track which dropped sideways and buried him when it plunged into the river. A burst of water jumped up to bridge height, subsided, and Macomber, turning painfully round saw that his own vehicle was perched on the brink, but perched safely. He was lying forward over the wheel, taking in great gulps of mist-laden air when Prentice reached him. 'Are you all right, Mac?' 'I think so. Stand clear a minute.'
Afterwards he could never remember his automatic action of driving forward slowly and turning the half-track so it faced towards the mountain road before he braked, switched off the engine and staggered out onto the road where Prentice held him as his legs almost gave way. 'I'm not too bad… I'll survive. I want to see…' He stumbled over to a piece of the remaining wall and leant heavily against it while he looked over. The half-track, upside down, had been caught by two huge boulders thrust above the water, but as he looked down it lost its balance, tipped over sideways, wallowed briefly three-parts submerged and then sank. Bubbles coming up from it reached the surface and were then whipped away in the fast-flowing current, so he couldn't be sure whether his eyes had played him a trick. The sunken vehicle gave up one last memory, the uniformed body of an Alpenkorps man who came to the surface and then was swept away downriver, towards Molos, towards the Gulf of Zervos. 'Poor devil,' Macomber muttered, then he straightened up, still using the wall for support. 'There'll be others on the way, so we'd better get on – up the mountain.'
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sunday, 2-30 PM
The ledge which supported the road was dangerously narrow -as Macomber had predicted they were hemmed in between a vertical wall of rock to their right, a wall which climbed high above them, while to their left the abyss fell away to unknown depths, unknown because the mist below prevented them from seeing how far down the drop continued. They were fifteen minutes' driving time from the wrecked bridge – no great distance considering he had been compelled to move up at a rate of only a few miles per hour – but in that time they had climbed steadily and Macomber calculated that soon they would have ascended a thousand feet, one thousand nerve-crushing feet. Before they had left the bridge Prentice had offered to take over the wheel, but the Scot refused the suggestion. 'I think I've a little experience of handling her now,' he had remarked drily, conferring a feminine status on the most unfeminine-looking object imaginable, 'you might even say I've had a crash course in coping with a half-track.'
'Crash is the word,' Prentice agreed humorously, 'and that's why I'm wondering whether you're in fit state to drive it up the mountain.'
