whose pony's bridle was in the hand of his sister. Reynolds and Groves, whether by accident or design, had fallen some little way behind and were talking in soft tones.
Groves said speculatively: 'I wonder what Mallory and the Major are talking about back there?'
Reynolds's mouth twisted in bitterness. 'It's perhaps as well we don't know.'
'You may be right at that. I just don't know.' Groves paused, went on almost pleadingly: 'Broznik is on the up-and-up. I'm sure of it. Being what he is, he must be.'
'That's as may be. Mallory too, eh?'
'He must be, too.'
'Must?' Reynolds was savage. 'God alive, man, I tell you I saw him with my own eyes.' He nodded towards Maria, some twenty yards ahead, and his face was cruel and hard. 'That girl hit him — and how she hit him — back in Neufeld's camp and the next thing I see is the two of them having a cosy little lovey-dovey chat outside Broznik's hut. Odd, isn't it? Soon after, Saunders was murdered. Coincidence, isn't it? I tell you, Groves, Mallory could have done it himself. The girl could have had time to do it before she met Mallory — except that it would have been physically impossible for her to drive a six-inch knife home to the hilt. But Mallory could have done it all right. He'd time enough — and opportunity enough — when he handed that damned message into the radio hut.'
Groves said protestingly: 'Why in God's name should do that?'
'Because Broznik had given him some urgent information. Mallory had to make a show of passing this information back to Italy. But maybe sending that message was the last thing he wanted. Maybe he did it in the only way he knew how — and smashed the transmitter to make sure no one else could send a message. Maybe that's why he stopped me from mounting a guard or going to see Saunders — prevent me from discovering the fact that Saunders already dead — in which case, of course, because of the time factor, suspicion would have automatically fallen on him.'
'You're imagining things.' Despite his discomfort, Groves was reluctantly impressed by Reynolds's reasoning.
'You think so? That knife in Saunders's back — did I imagine that too?'
Within half an hour, Mallory had rejoined the party, jogged past Reynolds and Groves, who studiously ignored him, past Maria and Petar, who did the same, and took up position behind Andrea and Miller. It was in this order, for almost an hour, that they passed through the heavily-wooded Bosnian valleys. Occasionally, they came to clearings in the pines, parings that had once been the site of human habitation, small villages or hamlets. But now there were humans, no habitations, for the villages had ceased exist. The clearings were all the same, chillingly and depressingly the same. Where the hard-working but happy Bosnians had once lived in their simple but sturdy homes, there were now only the charred and blackened remains of what had once been thriving communities, the air still heavy with the acrid smell of ancient smoke, the sweet-sour stench of corruption and death, mute testimony to the no-quarter vicious ness and total ruthlessness of the war between the Germans and the Partisan Yugoslavs. Occasionally, here and there, still stood a few small, stone-built houses which had not been worth the expenditure of bombs or shells or mortars or petrol: but few of the larger buildings had escaped complete destruction. Churches and schools appeared to have been the primary targets: on one occasion, as evidenced by some charred steel equipment that could have come only from an operating theatre, they passed by a small cottage hospital that had been so razed to the ground that no part of the resulting ruins was more than three feet high. Mallory wondered what would have happened to the patients occupying the hospital at the time: but he no longer wondered at the hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs — 350,000 had been the figure quoted by Captain Jensen, but, taking women and children into account, the number must have been at least a million — who had rallied under the banner of Marshal Tito. Patriotism apart, the burning desire for liberation and revenge apart, there was no place else left for them to go. They were a people, Mallory realized, with literally nothing left, with nothing to lose but their lives which they apparently held of small account, but with everything to gain by the destruction of the enemy: were he a German soldier, Mallory reflected, he would not have felt particularly happy about the prospect of a posting to Yugoslavia. It was a war which the Wehrmacht could never win, which the soldiers of no Western European country could ever have won, for the peoples of the high mountains are virtually indestructible.
The Bosnian scouts, Mallory observed, looked neither to left nor right as they passed through the lifeless shattered villages of their countrymen, most of whom are now almost certainly dead. They didn't have to look, he realized: they had their memories, and even their memories would be too much for them. If it were possible to feel pity for an enemy, then Mallory at that ent felt pity for the Germans, and by they emerged from the narrow winding mountain track on to a narrow, but comparatively wide road, wide enough, at least, for single-file vehicular traffic. The Bosnian scout in the lead threw up his hand and halted his pony.
'Unofficial no-man's-land, it would seem,' Mallory said. I think this is where they turfed us off the truck this morning.'
Mallory's guess appeared to be correct. The Partisans Wheeled their horses, smiled widely, waved, shouted some unintelligible words of farewell and urged their horses back the way they had come. With Mallory and Andrea in the lead and the two Sergeants bringing up the rear, the seven remaining members of the party moved off down the track. The snow had stopped now, the clouds above had cleared away and the sunlight was filtering down between the now thinning pines. Suddenly Andrea, who had been peering to his left, reached out and touched Mallory on the arm. Mallory followed the direction of Andrea's pointing hand. Downhill, the lines petered out less than a hundred yards away and through the trees could be glimpsed some distant object, a startling green in colour. Mallory swung round his saddle.
'Down there. I want to take a look. Don't move below the tree-line.'
The ponies picked their delicate sure-footed way down the steep and slippery slope. About ten yards from the tree-line and at a signal from Mallory, the riders dismounted and advanced cautiously on foot, moving from the cover of one pine to the next. The last few feet they covered on hands and knees, then finally stretched out flat in the partial concealment of the boles of the lowermost pines. Mallory brought out his binoculars, cleared the cold- clouded lenses and brought them to his eyes.
The snow-line, he saw, petered out some three or four hundred yards below them. Below that again was a mixture of fissured and eroded rock-faces and brown earth and beyond that again a belt of sparse and discouraged- looking grass. Along the lower reaches of this belt of grass ran a tarmacadam road, a road which struck Mallory as being, for that area, in remarkably good condition: the road was more or less exactly paralleled, at a distance of about a hundred yards, by a single-track and extremely narrow-gauge railway: a grass-grown and rusted line that looked as if it hadn't been used for many years. Just beyond the line the land dropped in a precipitous cliff to a narrow winding lake, the farther margin of which was marked by far more towering precipices leading up without break and with hardly any variation in angle to rugged snow-capped mountains.
From where he lay Mallory was directly overlooking a right-angled bend in the lake, a lake which was almost incredibly beautiful. In the bright clear sparkling sunlight of that spring morning it glittered and gleamed like the purest of emeralds. The smooth surface was occasionally ruffled by errant catspaws of wind, catspaws which had the effect of deepening the emerald colour to an almost translucent aquamarine, lake itself was nowhere much more than a quarter of a mile in width, but obviously miles in length: the long right-hand arm, twisting and turning between the mountains, stretched to the east almost as far as the eye could see: to the left, the short southern arm, hemmed by increasingly vertical walls which finally appeared almost to meet overhead, ended against the concrete imparts of a dam. But what caught and held the attention of the watchers was the incredible mirrored gleam of the far mountains in that equally incredible emerald mirror.
'Well, now,' Miller murmured, 'that is nice.' Andrea gave him a long expressionless look, then turned his attention to the lake again. Groves's interest momentarily overcame his animosity -
'What lake is that, sir?'
Mallory lowered the binoculars. 'Haven't the faintest idea. Maria?' She made no answer. 'Maria! What — lake is — that?'
That's the Neretva dam,' she said sullenly. 'The biggest in Yugoslavia.' 'It's important, then?'
'It is important. Whoever controls that controls central Yugoslavia.'
'And the Germans control it, I suppose?' 'They control it. We control it.' There was more an a hint of triumph in her smile. 'We — the Germans — have got it completely sealed off. Cliffs on both sides. To the east there — the upper end — they have a boom across a gorge only ten yards wide. And the boom is patrolled night and day. So is the dam all itself. The only way in is by a set of steps — ladders, rather — fixed to the cliff-face just below the dam.'
