Mary said with conviction: “You must be mad.”
“If I wasn't I wouldn't be doing this job.” He glanced at his watch. “I've been gone too long and I fear that I'm surrounded by the odd suspicious mind. We move off at five. Exactly five. Down in the village there's a Gasthaus on the east side of the main street called ‘Zum Wilden Hirsch.’ ‘The Wild Deer.’ Remember it, ‘Zum Wilden Hirsch.’ We don't want you wandering into the wrong pub. Behind it there's a shed used as a beer cellar. It's always kept locked but there will be a key in the door tonight. I'll meet you there at exactly eight o'clock.”
He turned to go, but she caught him by the arm.
“How do you know all this?” she asked tensely. “About the Gasthaus and the bottle store and the key being there and about Colonel Kramer and—”
“Ah, ah!” Smith shook his head admonishingly and touched her lips with his forefinger.
“Handbook for spies, golden rule number one.” She drew away from him and stared down at the snow- covered ground, her voice low and bitter. “Never ever ever tell anyone anything unless you have to.” She paused and looked up. “Not even me?”
“Especially not you, poppet.” He patted her lightly on the cheek. “Don't be late.”
He walked away down the slope leaving her looking after him with an expressionless face.
Lieutenant Schaffer, lay stretched out and almost buried in the deep snow, half-hidden behind the bole of a pine, with a telescope to his eye. He twisted as he heard the soft crunch of snow behind him and saw Smith approaching on his hands and knees.
“Couldn't you knock or something?” Schaffer asked irritably.
“Sorry. Something you wanted to show me, so the boys say.” “Yeah.” Schaffer handed Smith the telescope. “Take a gander at this lot. Thought it might interest you.”
Smith took the telescope and fingered the very precise adjustment until he achieved maximum definition. “Lower down,” Schaffer said. “At the foot of the rock.” Smith traversed the telescope down the sides of the Schloss Adler and the sheer walls of the volcanic plug until the fine cross-hairs came to rest on the snow-covered slopes at the foot. Moving across the slope he could see two soldiers with slung machine-carbines and, not on leashes, four dogs.
“My, my,” Smith murmured thoughtfully. “I see what you mean.”
“Those are Doberman pinchers, boss.”
“Well, they aren't toy poodles and that's a fact,” Smith agreed. He moved the telescope a little way up the walls of the volcanic plug, held it there.
“And floodlights?” he added softly.
He lowered the telescope again, past the patrolling soldiers and dogs, till it came to rest on a high wire fence that appeared to go all the way around the base of the volcanic plug.
“And a dinky little fence.”
“Fences,” Schaffer said pontifically, “are made to be cut or climbed.”
“You try cutting or climbing this one, laddie, and you'll be cooked to a turn in nothing flat. A standard design, using a standard current of 2,300 volt, single-phase, 60 cycle A.C. All the best electric chairs have it.”
Schaffer shook his head. “Amazing the lengths some folks will go to protect their privacy.”
“Fences, floods and Dobermans,” Smith said. “I don't think that combination will stop us, do you, Lieutenant?”
“Of course not. Stop us? Of course not!” He paused for some moments, then burst out: “How in God's name do you propose—”
“We'll decide when the time comes,” Smith said easily.
“You mean you'll decide,” Schaffer said complainingly. “Play it pretty close to the cuff, don't you?”
“That's because I'm too young to die.”
“Why me, for God's sake?” Schaffer demanded after a long pause. “Why pick me for this job? This isn't my line of country, Major.”
“God knows,” Smith said frankly. “Come to that, why me?”
Schaffer was in the middle of giving him a long and pointedly disbelieving look when he suddenly stiffened and cocked his head up to the sky in the direction of the unmistakably rackety whirr of a helicopter engine. Both men picked it up at once. It was coming from the north, over the Blau See, and heading directly towards them. It was a big military version and, even at that distance, the swastika markings were clearly distinguishable. Schaffer started to move backwards towards the line of pines.
“Exit Schaffer,” he announced hurriedly. “The bloodhounds are out for us.”
“I don't think so,” Smith said. “Stay where you are and pull your smock over your head.”
Quickly they pulled their white smocks over their heads until only their eyes, and Smith's telescope, partly buried in the snow, could be seen. From thirty yards in any direction, including straight up, they must have been quite invisible.
The helicopter swept up the valley still maintaining a course directly towards the spot where the two men lay hidden. When it was only a few hundred yards away even Smith began to feel uneasy and wondered if by some evil mischance the enemy knew er suspected their presence. They were bound to have heard the engines of the Lancaster, muted though they had been, during the night. Had some suspicious and intelligent character—and there would be no lack of those in the Schloss Adler—come up with the right answer to the question of the presence of this errant bomber in one of the most unlikely places in all Germany? Could picked members of the Alpenkorps be combing the pine woods even at that moment—and he, Smith, had been so confident that he hadn't even bothered to post a guard. Then, abruptly, when the helicopter was almost directly overhead, it side-slipped sharply to its left, sank down over the castle courtyard, hovered for a few moments and slowly descended. Smith surreptitiously mopped his forehead and applied his eye to the telescope.
The helicopter had landed. The rotor stopped, steps descended and a man climbed down to the courtyard floor. From his uniform, Smith decided, a very senior officer. Then he suddenly realised that it was a very very senior officer indeed. His face tightened as he pushed the telescope across to Schaffer. “Take a good look,” he advised.
Schaffer took a good look, lowered the telescope as the man passed through a doorway. “Pal of yours, boss?”
“I know him. Reichsmarschall Julius Rosemeyer. The Wehrmacht Chief of Staff.”
“My very first Reichsmarschall and me without my telescopic rifle,” Schaffer said regretfully. “I wonder what his highness wants.”
“Same as us,” Smith said briefly.
“General Carnaby?”
“When you're going to ask the Allies' overall co-ordinator of planning a few questions about the Second Front you don't send just the corporal of the guard to interview him.”
“You don't think they might have come to take old Carnaby away?” Schaffer asked anxiously.
“Not a chance. The Gestapo never gives up its prisoners. In this country the Wehrmacht does what the Gestapo says.”
“Or else?”
“Or else. Off you go—they've more coffee on the brew back there. Send someone to relieve me in an hour.”
Admiral Rolland's weather forecast for the area turned out to be perfectly correct. As the endless shivering hours dragged slowly by the weather steadily deteriorated. By noon the sun was gone and a keen wind sprung up from the east. By early afternoon snow had begun to fall from the darkened sky, slowly at first then with increasing severity as the east wind steadily increased in strength and became bitingly cold. It looked like being a bad night, Smith thought. But a bad night that reduced visibility to near-zero and kept people indoors was what they wanted: it would have been difficult for them to saunter up to the Schloss Adler bathed in the warm light of a harvest moon. Smith checked his watch.
“Time to go.” He climbed stiffly to his feet and beat his arms to restore circulation. “Call Thomas, will you.”
Rucksacks and kit-bags were slung and shouldered. Thomas, who had been keeping watch, appeared carrying Smith's telescope. Thomas was very far from being his usual cheerful self, and it wasn't just the fact that he'd spent the last hour exposed to the full force of wind and snow that had left him in such ill-humour.
