Where Eagles Dare Part 35

He broke off as he suddenly recognised one of the officers as the Alpenkorps captain to whom in his temporary capacity of Major Bernd Himmler, he'd spoken in 'Zum Wilden Hirsch' earlier that evening. A second later the recognition was mutual, the captain's mouth fell open in total incredulity and before he had time to close it Smith's foot was flat on the accelerator and the bus heading for the southern gates, soldiers flinging themselves to both sides to avoid the scything sweep of the giant snow-plough. Such was the element of surprise that fully thirty yards had been covered before most of the back windows of the bus were holed and broken, the shattering of gla.s.s mingling with the sound of the ragged fusillade of shots from behind. And then Smith, wrenching desperately on the wheel, came careering through the southern gates back on to the main road, giving them at least temporary protection from the sharp-shooters on the parade ground.

But they had, it seemed, only changed from the frying pan to the fire. Temporary protection they might have obtained from one enemy -- but from another and far deadlier enemy they had no protection at all. Smith all but lost control of the bus as something struck a glancing blow low down on his cab door, ricocheted off into the night with a viciously screaming whine and exploded in a white Sash of snow-flurried light less than fifty yards ahead.

'The Tiger tank,' Schaffer shouted. That G.o.dd.a.m.ned 88-millimetre -- '

'Get down!' Smith jack-knifed down and to one side of the wheel until his eyes were only an inch above the foot of the windscreen. 'That one was low. The next one -- '

The next one came through the top of the back door, traversed the length of the bus and exited through the front of the roof, just above the windscreen. This time there was no explosion.

'A dud?' Schaffer said hopefully. 'Or maybe a dummy practice -- '

'Dummy nothing!' Upright again, Smith was swinging the bus madly, dangerously, from side to side of the road in an attempt to confuse the tank gunner's aim. 'Armour-piercing sh.e.l.ls, laddie, designed to go through two inches of steel plate in a tank before they explode.' He winced and ducked low as a third sh.e.l.l took out most of the left-hand windows of the bus, showering himself and Schaffer with a flying cloud of shattered gla.s.s fragments. 'Just let one of those sh.e.l.ls strike a cha.s.sis member, instead of thin sheet metal, or the engine block, or the snow-plough -- '

'Don't!' Schaffer begged. 'Just let it creep up on me all unbeknownst, like.' He paused, then continued: 'Taking his time, isn't he? Lining up for the Sunday one.'

'No.' Smith glanced in the rear-view mirror and steadied the wildly swaying bus up on a steadier course. 'Never thought I'd be glad to see a few car-loads or track loads of Alpenkorps coming after me.' He changed into top gear and pushed the accelerator to the floor. 'I'm happy to make an exception this time.'

Schaffer turned and looked through the shattered rear windows. He could count at least three pairs of headlights on the road behind them, with two others swinging out through the southern gates: between them, they effectively blotted the post-bus from the view of the tank gunner.

'Happy isn't the word for it. Me, I'm ecstatic. Tiger tanks are one thing but little itsy-bitsy trucks are another.' Schaffer strode rapidly down the central aisle, pa.s.sing by Mary, Heidi and Carnaby-Jones, all of whom were struggling rather shakily to their feet, and looked at the crates stacked in the rear seats.

'Six crates!' he said to Heidi. 'And we asked for only two. Honey, you're going to make me the happiest man alive.' He opened the rear door and began to empty the contents of the crate on to the road. A few of the bottles just bounced harmlessly on ridges of hard-packed snow, but the speed of the bus was now such that most of them shattered on impact.

The first of the two leading pursuit cars was within three hundred yards of the bus when it ran into the area of broken gla.s.s. From Schaffer's point of view it was impossible to tell what exactly happened, but such indications as could be gathered by long-range sight and sound were satisfying enough. The headlights of the leading car suddenly began to slew violently from side to side, the screeching of brakes was clearly audible above the sound of the post-bus's diesel, but not nearly as loud as the rending crash of metal as the second car smashed into the rear of the first. For a few seconds both cars seemed locked together, then they skidded wildly out of control, coming to rest with the nose of the first car in the right hand ditch, the tail of the second in the left hand ditch. The headlamps of both cars had failed just after the moment of impact but there was more than sufficient illumination from the lamps of the first of the tracks coming up behind them to show that the road was completely blocked.

'Neat,' Schaffer said admiringly. 'Very neat, Schaffer.' He called to Smith: That'll hold them, boss.'

'Sure, it'll hold them,' Smith said grimly. 'It'll hold them for all of a minute. You can't burst heavy truck tyres that way and it won't take them long to bull-doze those cars out of the way. Heidi?'

Heidi walked forward, shivering in the icy gale blowing through both the shattered front and side windows. 'Yes, Major?'

'How far to the turn off?'

'A mile.'

'And to the wooden bridge -- what do you call it, Zur Alten Briicke?'

'Another mile.'

"Three minutes. At the most, that.' He raised his voice. Three minutes, Lieutenant. Can you do it?'

'I can do it.' Schaffer was already lashing together packages of plastic explosives. He used transparent adhesive tape, leaving long streamers dangling from the bound packages. He had just secured the last package in position when he lurched heavily as the post-bus, now clear of the Blau See and running through a pine forest, swung abruptly to the left on to a side road.

'Sorry,' Smith called. 'Almost missed that one. Less than a mile, Lieutenant.'

'No panic;,' Schaffer said cheerfully. He fished out a knife to start cutting the fuses to their 'shortest possible length, then went very still indeed as he glanced through where the rear windows had once been. In the middle distance were the vertically wavering beams of powerful headlights, closing rapidly. The cheerfulness left Schaffer's voice. 'Well, maybe there is a little bit panic, at that. I've got bad news, boss.'

'And I have a rear mirror. How far, Heidi?'

'Next corner.'

While Schaffer worked quickly on the fuses, Smith concentrated on getting the post-bus round the next corner as quickly as possible without leaving the road. And then they were on and round the corner and the bridge was no more than a hundred yards away.

It was not, Smith thought, a bridge he would have chosen to have crossed with a bicycle, much less a six ton bus. Had it been a bridge crossing some gently meandering stream, then, yes, possibly: but not a bridge such as this one was, a fifty-foot bridge surfaced with untied railway sleepers, spanning a ravine two hundred feet in depth and supported by trestles, very ancient wooden trestles which, from what little he could see of them from his acute angle of approach, he wouldn't have trusted to support the tables at the vicar's garden party.

Smith hit this elderly and decrepit edifice at forty miles per hour. A more cautious and understandable approach might have been to crawl over it at less than walking pace but Smith's conviction that the less time he spent on each ancient sleeper the better was as instantaneous as it was complete. The heavy snow chains on each tyre bit into and dislodged each successive sleeper with a terrifying rumble, the post-bus bounced up and down as if on a giant cake-walk while the entire structure of the bridge swayed from side to side like the bridge of a destroyer at speed in a heavy cross-sea. It had been Smith's original intention to stop in the middle of the bridge but once embarked upon the crossing he would no more have done so than dallied to pick up an edelweiss in the path of an Alpine avalanche. Ten feet from the edge of the bridge he stamped on the brakes and skidded to a sliding halt, on solid ground again, in less than twenty yards.

Schaffer had already the back door open and the two packages of plastic explosives in his hands before the bus stopped. Five seconds after hitting the road he was back on the bridge again, skipping nimbly over a dozen dislodged sleepers until he had arrived at the main supports of the central trestle. It took him less than twenty seconds to tape one package to the right hand support, cross the bridge and tape the second package to the left hand support. He heard the deepening roar of a rapidly approaching engine, glanced up, saw the swathe of unseen headlamp beams shining round the corner they had just pa.s.sed, tore off the ignition fuse, crossed the bridge, tore off the other and raced for the bus. Smith had already the bus in gear and was moving away when Schaffer flung himself through the back doorway and was hauled inside by helping hands.

Schaffer twisted round till he was sitting on the pa.s.sage-way, his legs dangling through the open doorway, just in time to see the headlamps of the,pursuing car sweep into sight round the corner. It was now less than a hundred yards from the bridge, and accelerating. For a brief, almost panic-stricken, moment, Schaffer wondered wildly if he had cut the fuses short enough, he hadn't realised the following car had been quite as close as it was: and from the tense and strained expressions on the faces of the two girls and the man beside him, expressions sensed rather than seen, he knew that exactly the same thought was in their minds.

The two loud, flat detonations, each fractionally preceded by the brilliant white flash characteristic of the plastic explosive, came within one second of each other. Baulks of timber and railway sleepers were hurled forty feet into the air, spinning lazily around in a curious kind of slow motion, many of them falling back again on to the now tottering support structure with an impact sufficient to carry away the central trestle. One moment, a bridge: the next, an empty ravine with, on the far side of it, the wildly swinging headlamp beams as the driver flung his car from side to side in a nothing-to-be-lost attempt to prevent the car from sliding over the edge of the ravine. It seemed certain that he must fail until the moment when the car, sliding broadside on along the road, struck a large rock, rolled over twice and came to a halt less than six feet from the edge of the ravine.

Schaffer shook his head in wonder, rose, closed the rear door, sat in the back seat, lit a cigarette, tossed the spent match through the smashed rear window and observed: 'You're a lucky lot to have me around.'

'All this and modesty, too,' Heidi said admiringly.

'A rare combination,' Schaffer acknowledged. 'You'll find lots of other pleasant surprises in store for you as we grow old together. How far to this airfield now?'

'Five miles. Perhaps eight minutes. But this is the only road in. With the bridge gone, there's no hurry now.'

'That's as maybe. Schaffer is anxious to be gone. Tell me, honey, were all those beer bottles empty?'

'The ones we threw away were.'

'I just simply don't deserve you,' Schaffer said reverently.

'We're thinking along the same lines at last,' Heidi said acidly.

Schaffer grinned, took two beer bottles and went forward to relieve Smith, who moved out only too willingly with the bus still in motion. Smith's right hand, Schaffer saw, hadn't a sc.r.a.p of bandage left that wasn't wholly saturated in blood and die face was very pale. But he made no comment.

Three minutes later they were out of the forest, running along through open farm-land, and five minutes after that, acting on Heidi's directions, Schaffer swung the bus through a narrow gateway on the left hand side of the road. The headlamps successively illuminated two small hangars, a narrow, cleared runway stretching into the distance and, finally, a bullet-riddled Mosquito bomber with a crumpled undercarriage.

'Ain't that a beautiful sight, now?' Schaffer nodded at the damaged plane. 'Carnaby-Jones's transport?'

Smith nodded. 'It began with a Mosquito and it will end -- we hope -- in a Mosquito. This is Oberhausen airfield. H.Q. of the Bavarian Mountain Rescue pilots.'

Three cheers for the Bavarian Mountain Rescue pilots.' Schaffer stopped the bus facing up the length of the runway, switched off the lights and turned off the engine. They sat silently in the darkness, waiting.

Colonel Wyatt-Turner glanced through the side-screen and breathed with relief as, for the first time that knight, the ground fell away sharply beneath the Mosquito. He said sarcastically: 'Losing your nerve, Wing Commander?'

'I lost that September 3rd, 1939,' Carpenter said cheerfully. 'Got to climb. Can't expect to see any recognition signals down among the bushes there.'

'You're sure we're on the right course?'

'No question. That's the Weissspitze there. Three minutes' flying time.' Carpenter paused and went on thoughtfully. 'Looks uncommon like Guy Fawkes night up there, don't you think.'

The Wing Commander was hardly exaggerating. In the far distance the silhouette of the Weissspitze was but dimly seen, but there was no mistaking the intensity of the great fire blazing half-way up the mountain-side. Occasionally, great gouts of red flame and what looked like gigantic fireworks could be seen soaring high above the main body of the fire.