'This is madness, Colonel, madness! It's — it's impossible, you can see it's impossible. We'll never — look, sir, two hundred and fifty dropped out in the first two hours. The altitude, the cold, sheer physical exhaustion. It's madness.'
'All war is madness,' Vis said calmly. 'Get on the radio. We require five hundred more men.'
CHAPTER EIGHT
Now it had come, Mallory knew. He looked at Andrea and Miller and Reynolds and Groves and knew that they knew it too. In their faces he could see very clearly reflected what lay at the very surface of his own mind, the explosive tension, the hair-trigger alertness straining to be translated into equally explosive action. Always it came, this moment of truth that stripped men bare and showed them for what they were. He wondered how Reynolds and Groves would be: he suspected they might acquit themselves well. It never occurred to him to wonder about Miller and Andrea, for he knew them too well: Miller, when all seemed I lost, was a man above himself, while the normally easy-going, almost lethargic Andrea was transformed into an unrecognizable human being, an impossible combination of an icily calculating mind and berserker fighting machine entirely without the remotest parallel in Mallory's knowledge or experience. When Mallory spoke his voice was as calmly impersonal as ever.
'We're due to leave at four. It's now three. With any luck we'll catch them napping. Is everything clear?'
Reynolds said wonderingly, almost unbelievingly: 'You mean if anything goes wrong we're to shoot our way out?'
'You're to shoot and shoot to kill. That, Sergeant, is an order.'
'Honest to God,' Reynolds said, 'I just don't know what's going on.' The expression on his face clearly indicated that he had given up all attempts to understand what was going on.
Mallory and Andrea left the hut and walked casually across the compound towards Neufeld's hut. Mallory said: 'They're on to us, you know.'
'I know. Where are Petar and Maria?'
'Asleep, perhaps? They left the hut a couple of hours ago. We'll collect them later.'
'Later may be too late… They are in great peril my Keith.'
'What can a man do, Andrea? I've thought of nothing else in the past ten hours. It's a crucifying risk to have to take, but I have to take it. They are expendable Andrea. You know what it would mean if I showed my hand now.'
'I know what it would mean,' Andrea said heavily 'The end of everything.'
They entered Neufeld's hut without benefit of knocking. Neufeld, sitting behind his desk with Droshny by his side, looked up in irritated surprise and glanced at his watch.
He said curtly: 'Four o'clock, I said, not three.'
'Our mistake,' Mallory apologized. He closed tin door. 'Please do not be foolish.'
Neufeld and Droshny were not foolish, few people would have been while staring down the muzzles of two Lugers with perforated silencers screwed to tin end: they just sat there, immobile, the shock slowly draining from their faces. There was a long pause then Neufeld spoke, the words coming almost haltingly.
'I have been seriously guilty of underestimating — 'Be quiet. Broznik's spies have discovered the whereabouts of the four captured Allied agents. We know roughly where they are. You know precisely where are. You will take us there. Now.
'You're mad,' Neufeld said with conviction.
'We don't require you to tell us that.' Andrea walked round behind Neufeld and Droshny, removed their pistols from their holsters, ejected the shells and replaced pistols. He then crossed to a corner of the hut, opened up two Schmeisser machine-pistols, emptied them, walked back round to the front of the table placed the Schmeissers on its top, one in front Neufeld, one in front of Droshny.
'There you are, gentlemen,' Andrea said affably, armed to the teeth.' Droshny said viciously: 'Suppose we decide not I come with you?'
I Andrea's affability vanished. He walked unhurriedly round the table and rammed the Luger's silencer with such force against Droshny's teeth that he gasped in pain. 'Please — ' Andrea's voice was almost beseeching 'please don't tempt me.'
Droshny didn't tempt him. Mallory moved to the window and peered out over the compound. There were, he saw, at least a dozen Cetniks within thirty feet of Neufeld's hut, all of them armed. Across the other side of the compound he could see that the door the stables was open indicating that Miller and the two sergeants were in position.
'You will walk across the compound to the stables,' Mallory said. 'You will talk to nobody, warn nobody, make no signals. We will follow about ten yards behind.'
'Ten yards behind. What's to prevent us making a break for it? You wouldn't dare hold a gun on us out there.' 'That's so,' Mallory agreed. 'From the moment you open this door you'll be covered by three Schmeissers from the stables. If you try anything — anything — you'll be cut to pieces. That's why we're keeping well behind you — we don't want to be cut to pieces too.'
At a gesture from Andrea, Neufeld and Droshny slung their empty Schmeissers in angry silence. Mallory looked at them consideringly and said: 'I think you'd better do something about your expressions. They're a dead giveaway that something is wrong. If you open that door with faces like that, Miller will cut you down before you reach the bottom step. Please try to believe me.'
They believed him and by the time Mallory opened the door had managed to arrange their features into a near enough imitation of normality. They went down the steps and set off across the compound to the stables. When they had reached halfway Andrea and Mallory left Neufeld's hut and followed them. One or two glances of idle curiosity came their way, but clearly no one suspected that anything was amiss. The crossing to the stables was completely uneventful.
So also, two minutes later, was their departure from the camp. Neufeld and Droshny, as would have been proper and expected, rode together in the lead, Droshny in particular looking very warlike with his Schmeisser, pistol and the wickedly-curved knives at his waist. Behind them rode Andrea, who appeared to be having some trouble with the action of his Schmeisser, for he had it in his hands and was examining it closely: he certainly wasn't looking at either Droshny or Neufeld and the fact that the gun barrel, which Andrea had sensibly pointed towards the ground, had only to be lifted a foot and the trigger pressed to riddle the two men ahead was a preposterous idea that would not have occurred to even the most suspicious. Behind Andrea,
Mallory and Miller rode abreast: like Andrea, they peered unconcerned, even slightly bored. Reynolds and Groves brought up the rear, almost but not quite attaining the degree of nonchalance of the other three: their still faces and restlessly darting eyes betrayed the strain they were under. But their anxiety was needless all seven passed from the camp not only unmolested without as much as even an enquiring glance being it in their direction.
They rode for over two and a half hours, climbing nearly all the time, and a blood-red sun was setting long the thinning pines to the west when they came across a clearing set on, for once, a level stretch of ground. Neufeld and Droshny halted their ponies and tatted until the others came up with them. Mallory rained in and gazed at the building in the middle of the clearing, a low, squat, immensely strong-looking dock-house, with narrow, heavily barred windows and two chimneys, from one of which smoke was coming. 'This is the place?' Mallory asked. 'Hardly a necessary question.' Neufeld's voice was dry, but the underlying resentment and anger unmistakable.
'You think I spent all this time leading you the wrong place?'
'I wouldn't put it past you,' Mallory said. He examined the building more closely. 'A hospitable-looking place.'
'Yugoslav Army ammunition dumps were never intended as first-class hotels.'
'I dare say not,' Mallory agreed. At a signal from im they urged their ponies forward into the clearing, and as they did so two metal strips in the facing wall of the block-house slid back to reveal a air of embrasures with machine-pistols protruding. Exposed as they were, the seven mounted men were completely at the mercy of those menacing muzzles.
