'I'm one of — '
'You're wearing a British uniform. That's all the poor kid understands. Leave her be.'
Reynolds shook his head uncomprehendingly. He lit died his pack more securely on his shoulders, glanced back down the trail, made to move on, then glanced backwards again. He caught Mallory by the arm and pointed.
Andrea had already fallen thirty yards behind. Weighed down by his rucksack and Schmeisser and weight of years, he was very obviously making heavy weather of the climb and was falling steadily behind by the second. At a gesture and word from Mallory the rest of the party halted and peered back down through the driving snow, waiting for Andrea to make up on them. By this time Andrea was beginning to stumble in almost drunkenly and clutched at his right side as if in pain. Reynolds looked at Groves: they both looked at Saunders: all three slowly shook their heads. Andrea came up with them and a spasm of pain flickered across his face.
I'm sorry.' The voice was gasping and hoarse. 'I'll be all right in a moment.'
Saunders hesitated, then advanced towards Andrea. He smiled apologetically, then reached out a hand to indicate the rucksack and Schmeisser.
'Come on, Dad. Hand them over.'
For the minutest fraction of a second a flicker of menace, more imagined than seen, touched Andrea face, then he shrugged off his rucksack and wearily handed it over. Saunders accepted it and tentatively indicated the Schmeisser.
Thanks.' Andrea smiled wanly. 'But I'd feel lost without it.'
Uncertainly, they resumed their climb, looking bad frequently to check on Andrea's progress. Their doubt were well-founded. Within thirty seconds Andrea had stopped, his eyes screwed up and bent almost double in pain. He said, gaspingly: 'I must rest… Go on. I'll catch up with you.'
Miller said solicitously: 'I'll stay with you.'
'I don't need anybody to stay with me,' Andrea said surreally. 'I can look after myself.'
Miller said nothing. He looked at Mallory and jerked his head in an uphill direction. Mallory nodded once, and gestured to the girl. Reluctantly, they moved off, leaving Andrea and Miller behind. Twice, Reynolds looked back over his shoulder, his expression an odd mixture of worry and exasperation: then he shrugged his shoulders and bent his back to the hill.
Andrea, scowling blackly and still clutching his rib, remained bent double until the last of the party had rounded the nearest uphill corner, then straightened effortlessly, tested the wind with a wetted forefinger, established that it was moving up-trail, produced a cigar, lit it and puffed in deep and obvious contentment. His recovery was quite astonishing, but it didn't appear to astonish Miller, who grinned and nodded downhill. Andrea grinned in return, made a courteous gesture of precedence.
Thirty yards down-trail, at a position which gave an uninterrupted view of almost a hundred yards of the track below them they moved into the cover of bole of a giant pine. For about two minutes they there, staring downhill and listening intently, suddenly Andrea nodded, stooped and carefully his cigar in a sheltered dried patch of ground behind the bole of the pine.
They exchanged no words: there was need of none. Miller crawled round to the downhill-facing front of pine and carefully arranged himself in a spread-eagled position in the deep snow, both arms outflung, apparently sightless face turned up to the falling snow. Behind the pine, Andrea reversed his grip on Schmeisser, holding it by the barrel, produced a knife from the recesses of his clothing and stuck it in belt. Both men remained as motionless as if they died there and frozen solid over the long and bitter Yugoslav winter. Probably because his spread-eagled form was sunk deeply in the soft snow as to conceal most of his body, Miller saw the two Cetniks coming quite some time before they saw him. At first they were no more in two shapeless and vaguely ghostlike forms gradually materializing from the falling snow: as they drew nearer, he identified them as the Cetnik escort leader and one of his men.
They were less than thirty yards away before they saw Miller. They stopped, stared, remained motionless for at least five seconds, looked at each other, unslung their machine-pistols and broke into a stumbling uphill run. Miller closed his eyes. He didn't require them any more, his ears gave him all the information he wanted, the closing sound of crunching footsteps in the snow, the abrupt cessation of those, the heavy breathing as a man bent over him.
Miller waited until he could actually feel the man's breath in his face, then opened his eyes. Not twelve inches from his own were the eyes of the ginger bearded Cetnik. Miller's outflung arms curved upwards and inwards, his sinewy fingers hooked deeply into the throat of the startled man above him.
Andrea's Schmeisser had already reached the limit of its backswing as he stepped soundlessly round the bole of the pine. The black-bearded Cetnik was just beginning to move to help his friend when he caught sight of Andrea from the corner of one eye, and flung, up both arms to protect himself. A pair of straws would have served him as well. Andrea grimaced at the shear physical shock of the impact, dropped the Schmeisser, pulled out his knife and fell upon the other Cetnik still struggling desperately in Miller's stranglehold.
Miller rose to his feet and he and Andrea stared down at the two dead men. Miller looked in puzzlement at the ginger-bearded man, then suddenly stooped caught the beard and tugged. It came away in his hand, revealing beneath it a clean-shaven face and a scar which ran from the corner of a lip to the chin.
Andrea and Miller exchanged speculative glances but neither made comment. They dragged the dead men some little way off the path into the concealment of some undergrowth. Andrea picked up a dead branch lid swept away the dragmarks in the snow and, by the lie of the pine, all traces of the encounter: inside the hour, he knew, the brushmarks he had made would have vanished under a fresh covering of snow. He picked up his cigar and threw the branch deep into the woods. Without a backward glance, the two men began to walk briskly up the hill.
Had they given this backward glance, it was barely possible that they might have caught a glimpse of a face peering round the trunk of a tree further downhill, Droshney had arrived at the bend in the track just in time to see Andrea complete his brushing operations throw the branch away: what the meaning of this it be he couldn't guess.
He waited until Andrea and Miller had disappeared from his sight, waited another two minutes for good measure and safety, then hurried up the track, the expression on his swarthy brigand's face nicely balanced between puzzlement and suspicion. He reached the pine where the two Cetniks had been ambushed, briefly quartered the area, then followed the line of brushmarks leading into the woods, the puzzlement his face giving way first to pure suspicion, then the suspicion to complete certainty. He parted the bushes and peered down at the two Cetniks lying half-buried in a snow-filled gully with it curiously huddled shapelessness that only the dead can achieve. After a few moments he straightened, turned and looked uphill in the direction in Andrea and Miller had vanished: his face was not pleasant to look upon.
Andrea and Miller made good time up the hill. As they approached one of the innumerable bends in the trail they heard up ahead the sound of a softly-played guitar, curiously muffled and softened in tone by the falling snow. Andrea slowed up, threw away his cigar, bent forward and clutched his ribs. Solicitously, Miller took his arm.
The main party, they saw, was less than thirty yards ahead. They, too, were making slow time: the depth of snow and the increasing slope of the track made any quicker movement impossible. Reynolds glanced back — Reynolds was spending a great deal of his time in looking over his shoulder, he appeared to be in a highly apprehensive state — caught sight of Andrea and Miller and called out to Mallory who halted the party and waited for Andrea and Miller to make up with them. Mallory looked worriedly at Andrea.
'Getting worse?'
'How far to go?' Andrea asked hoarsely.
'Must be less than a mile.'
Andrea said nothing, he just stood there breathing heavily and wearing the stricken look of a sick man contemplating the prospect of another upward mile through deep snow. Saunders, already carrying two rucksacks, approached Andrea diffidently, tentatively he said: 'It would help, you know, if — '
'I know.' Andrea smiled painfully, unslung the Schmeisser and handed it to Saunders. 'Thanks, son'
Petar was still softly plucking the strings of his guitar, an indescribably eerie sound in those dark and ghostly pine woods. Miller looked at him and said to Mallory: 'What's the music while we march for?'
'Petar's password, I should imagine.'
'Like Neufeld said? Nobody touches our singing-Cetnik?'
'Something like that.'
