The General sighed. 'Informed opinion has it that they're making all preparations for a lightning pull-out. Informed opinion! All that concerns me is that those blasted divisions are still in the Gustav Line. Jensen, what has gone wrong?'
Jensen lifted his shoulders in a gesture of helplessness. 'It was arranged for a radio rendezvous every two hours from four a.m. -'
'There have been no contacts whatsoever.'
Jensen said nothing.
The General looked at him, almost speculatively. The best in Southern Europe, you said.'
'Yes, I did say that.'
The General's unspoken doubts as to the quality of the agents Jensen had selected for operation Force 10 would have been considerably heightened if he had been at that moment present with those agents in the guest hut in Hauptmann Neufeld's camp in Bosnia. They were exhibiting none of the harmony, understanding and implicit mutual trust which one would have expected to find among a team of agents rated as the best in the business. There was, instead, tension and anger in the form of an air of suspicion and mistrust so heavy as to be almost palpable. Reynolds, confronting Mallory, had is anger barely under control.
'I want to know now!' Reynolds almost shouted lie words.
'Keep your voice down,' Andrea said sharply. 'I want to know now,' Reynolds repeated. This time his voice was little more than a whisper, but none the less demanding and insistent for that.
'You'll be told when the time comes.' As always, Mallory's voice was calm and neutral and devoid of heat. 'Not till then. What you don't know, you can't tell.'
Reynolds clenched his fists and advanced a step. 'Are you damn well insinuating that — '
Mallory said with restraint: 'I'm insinuating nothing. I was right, back in Termoli, Sergeant. You're no better than a ticking time-bomb.'
'Maybe.' Reynolds's fury was out of control now. 'But at least there's something honest about a bomb.'
'Repeat that remark,' Andrea said quietly.
'What?'
'Repeat it.'
'Look, Andrea — '
'Colonel Stavros, sonny.'
'Sir.'
'Repeat it and I'll guarantee you a minimum of five years for insubordination in the field.'
'Yes, sir.' Reynolds's physical effort to bring himself under control was apparent to everyone. 'But why should he not tell us his plans for this afternoon and at the same time let us all know that we'll be leaving from this Ivenici place tonight?'
'Because our plans are something the Germans can do something about,' Andrea said patiently. 'If they find out. If one of us talked under duress. But they can't do anything about Ivenici — that's in Partisan hands.'
Miller pacifically changed the subject. He said to Mallory: 'Seven thousand feet up, you say. The snow must be thigh-deep up there. How in God's name does anyone hope to clear all that lot away?'
'I don't know,' Mallory said vaguely. 'I suspect some body will think of something.'
And seven thousand feet up on the Ivenici plateau, somebody had indeed thought of something.
The Ivenici plateau was a wilderness in white, a bleak and desolate and, for many months of the year, a bitterly cold and howling and hostile wilderness, totally inimical to human life, totally intolerant of human presence. The plateau was bounded to the west by a five-hundred-foot-high cliff-face, quite vertical in some parts, fractured and fissured in others. Scattered along its length were numerous frozen waterfalls and occasional lines of pine trees, impossibly growing on impossibly narrow ledges, their frozen branches drooped and laden with the frozen snow of six long months gone by. To the east the plateau was bounded by nothing but an abrupt and sharply defined line marking the top of another cliff-face which dropped away perpendicularly into the valleys below.
The plateau itself consisted of a smooth, absolutely level, unbroken expanse of snow, snow which at that height of 2,000 metres and in the brilliant sunshine gave off a glare and dazzling reflection which was positively hurtful to the eyes. In length, it was perhaps half a mile: in width, nowhere more than a hundred yards.
At its southern end, the plateau rose sharply to merge with the cliff-face which here tailed off and ran into the ground.
On this prominence stood two tents, both white, one small, the other a large marquee. Outside the small tent stood two men, talking. The taller and older man, wearing a heavy greatcoat and a pair of smoked glasses, was Colonel Vis, the commandant of a Sarajevo-based brigade of Partisans: the younger, lighter figure was his adjutant, a Captain Vlanovich.
Both men were gazing out over the length of the plateau.
Captain Vlanovich said unhappily: There must be easier ways of doing this, sir.'
'You name it, Boris, my boy, and I'll do it.' Both in appearance and voice Colonel Vis gave the impression of immense calm and competence. 'Bulldozers, I agree, would help. So would snow-ploughs. But you will agree that to drive either of them up vertical cliff-faces in order to reach here would call for considerable skill on the part of the drivers. Besides, what's an army for, if not for marching?' 'Yes, sir,' Vlanovich said, dutifully and doubtfully
Both men gazed out over the length of the plateau to the north.
To the north, and beyond, for all around a score of encircling mountain peaks, some dark and jagged and sombre, others rounded and snow-capped and rose-coloured, soared up into the cloudless washed-out pale blue of the sky. It was an immensely impressive sight.
Even more impressive was the spectacle taking place on the plateau itself. A solid phalanx of a thousand uniformed soldiers, perhaps half in the buff grey of the Yugoslav army, the rest in a motley array of other countries' uniforms, were moving, at a snail-pace, across the virgin snow.
The phalanx was fifty people wide but only twenty deep, each line of fifty linked arm-in-arm, heads and shoulders bowed forward as they laboriously trudged at a painfully slow pace through the snow. That the pace was so slow was no matter for wonder, the leading line of men were ploughing their way through waist-deep snow, and already the signs of strain and exhaustion were showing in their faces. It was killingly hard work, work which, at that altitude, doubled the pulse rate, made a man fight for every gasping breath, turned a man's legs into leaden and agonized limbs where only the pain could convince him that they were still part of him.
And not only men. After the first five lines of soldiers, there were almost as many women and girls in the remainder of the phalanx as there were men, although everyone was so muffled against the freezing cold and biting winds of those high altitudes that it was impossible almost to tell man from woman. The last two lines of the phalanx were composed entirely of partisankas and it was significantly ominous of the murderous labour still to come that even they were sinking knee-deep in the snow.
It was a fantastic sight, but a sight that was far from unique in wartime Yugoslavia. The airfields of the lowlands, completely dominated by the armoured divisions of the Wehrmacht, were permanently barred to the Yugoslavs and it was thus that the Partisans constructed many of their airstrips in the mountains. In snow of this depth and in areas completely inaccessible to powered mechanical aids, there was no other way open to them.
Colonel Vis looked away and turned to Captain Vlanovich.
'Well, Boris, my boy, do you think you're up here for the winter sports? Get the food and soup kitchens organized. We'll use up a whole week's rations of hot food and hot soup in this one day.'
'Yes, sir.' Vlanovich cocked his head, then removed his ear-flapped fur cap the better to listen to the newly- begun sound of distant explosions to the north. 'What on earth is that?'
Vis said amusingly: 'Sound does carry far in our pure Yugoslavian mountain air, does it not?'
'Sir? Please?'
'That, my boy,' Vis said with considerable satisfaction, 'is the Messerschmitt fighter base at Novo Derventa getting the biggest plastering of its lifetime.'
'Sir?'
Vis sighed in long-suffering patience. 'I'll make a soldier of you some day. Messerschmitts, Boris, are fighters, carrying all sorts of nasty cannons and machine-guns. What, at this moment, is the finest fighter target in Yugoslavia?'
'What is — ' Vlanovich broke off and looked again at the trudging phalanx. 'Oh!'
