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Andrea said, ‘Enough.’
Hugues stopped talking as if someone had flipped a switch. Mallory said to Andrea and Miller, ‘We’re stuck with this. We need the transport. If we move, they’ll lose us. We’ll have to wait. Take cover.’
Andrea and Miller were already fading into the dark, taking up positions not in the cave, but among the rocks on the valley floor.
The night became quiet, except for the sigh of the wind and the swish of the rain, and the drowsy clonk of a goat bell from inside the cave.
This is all wrong, thought Mallory. We have been inadequately briefed, and we are dependent on a Resistance organisation that seems completely disorganised. It sounds as if the SAS have already compromised us. If the enemy comes up the valley there is no way out, except into an internment camp in Spain.
Mallory lay and strained his ears into the wet dark rain, wind, goat bells -
And another sound. A mechanical sound, but not a motor. The sound of metal on metal, gears turning. The sound of a bicycle.
There was a sudden crash. The old sounds returned, with behind them the noise of a back wheel spinning, ticking to a stop.
Mallory waited. Then he heard the brief, otherworldly bleep of a Scops owl.
Mallory had as yet heard no Scops owls in the Pyrenees. But there had been plenty in Crete, where he had served his time with Andrea.
Something moved at his shoulder: something huge, blacker than the night. Andrea said, ‘I found this,’ and dropped something on the gritty ground beside him, something that drew breath and started to croak.
Mallory allowed the muzzle of the Schmeisser to rest gently in the hollow under the something’s ear. He said, ‘Quiet.’
The something became quiet.
Mallory said, ‘I am a British officer. What do you want?’
The something said, ‘Hugues.’
‘Good God,’ said Mallory.
The something was a woman.
The woman got her voice back. She batted at Mallory with her hands. She was strong. She said, ‘Laisse-moi,’ in a voice both vigorous and tough.
Out in the dark and the rain, Hugues’ voice said, ‘Bon Dieu!’ Mallory thought he could hear something new in it: shock, and awe. He heard the uncoordinated stumble of Hugues’ boots in the dark. ‘Lisette!’ cried Hugues.
‘Hugues!’ cried the woman. ‘C’est bien toi?
Then Hugues was embracing her. The fear was gone now. All the terrible things were gone. All Hugues’ life, people had taken what he loved away from him, for reasons that seemed excellent to them but incomprehensible to him. They had taken away his parents and sent him to a stupid English school. They had taken away Mireille and the children because he was a saboteur. And then he had met Lisette, in the Resistance, and become her lover. When SOE had flown him out in the Lysander, he had thought that that had been the end of Lisette, too.
But here she was. In his arms. As large as life, if not larger.
‘My darling,’ he said.
She kissed him on the cheek, murmuring what sounded like pet names. Then Mallory heard her tone change. She sounded frantic about something.
‘Merde,’ said Hugues, in his new, firm voice. ‘We must leave. Now.’
Mallory said, quietly, ‘Who is this?’
‘Lisette,’ said Hugues. ‘A friend. A rеsistante.’
‘Is she the person you wanted to see who did not arrive?’
‘Yes. She is an old friend. She knows the people on the ground in the region. It is an excellent thing that she has found us. Providential. She says there are sixty Germans coming up the valley.’
‘Three lorries,’ she said. Her accent was heavy, but comprehensible. ‘The ones who reached Jonz?re told me they caught two of your reception committee, found them with parachutes.’
‘How long ago?’
‘Half an hour,’ said Lisette. ‘At the most. They told me to warn you.’
Mallory’s stomach felt shrivelled like a walnut. One and a half hours in France, and the operation was as good as over. He pushed the thought into the back of his mind. ‘Jaime!’ he said.
Jaime appeared out of the night. ‘Lisette,’ he said, without surprise.
‘Bonjour, Jaime.’
Briskly, Mallory explained the position.
Jaime said, ‘We must go to Spain. It is over. Finished.’
In his mind Mallory saw a soldier, pack on his back, seasickness in his belly and fear in his soul, squashed against the steel side of a ship by a thousand other soldiers. And suddenly, without warning, something stove in the side of that ship, smashed the soldier like an egg, and the cold green water poured in.
Once Mallory had been in a little steel room on a ship in the Mediterranean, checking grenades. There had been a bang. Someone had said, ‘Torpedo.’ Then the room had started to fill up with water, and the ship with screams, quickly cut off. Mallory had been one of four survivors. Four out of three hundred.
If the Werwolf pack got out intact, there could be a thousand such ships.
Mallory said, ‘No other way?’
‘None.’ Jaime seemed to hesitate. ‘Except the Chemin des Anges.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing. A goat track, no more. It runs from Jonz?re, at the bottom of the valley, up the ridge, in the manner of the old roads. The pilgrims used to use it, the men with the cockle shells in their hats, bound for Santiago de Compostela, when there were bandits in the mountains. It is a dangerous road. It killed almost as many pilgrims as the bandits did.’
‘Where is it?’
Against the dark sky Jaime’s small shoulders appeared to shrug. He pointed upwards. ‘On the spine of the hill. Here it runs three hundred metres above the valley. Above the cliff. Then it turns over the mountain and down to Colbis. There were pilgrims’ inns in Colbis. But we can’t go to Jonz?re, to the start of the track. It’ll be full of Germans-’
‘We’ll go up the cliff,’ said Mallory, as if he were proposing a walk in the park.
There was a second’s silence. Then Jaime said, ‘To join the Chemin des Anges here? That is not possible.’
Mallory said, ‘It is necessary.’
The chill of his voice silenced Jaime for a moment. Then he said, ‘But you do not understand. Nobody can climb those cliffs.’
‘That is what the Germans will think. Miller?’
Miller had been sitting on a boulder. He knew what Mallory was going to say, and he found the knowledge depressing. ‘Yep?’
‘Round up the people. Andrea and I are going up the cliff. We’ll do a pitch, belay and drop you a fixed rope. Make sure everyone comes.’
Miller pushed his SS helmet back on his head and looked up. For a moment it was like being in a tunnel. Then, far overhead, clouds shifted, and there appeared between the two cliff-masses a thread-fine crack of sky. The wind was blowing up the valley. He could hear no lorries. The dark bulk that was Mallory slung a coil of wire-cored rope over his shoulder and walked towards the cliff. Wearily, Miller rounded up Hugues and Lisette, and Jaime, and Thierry the radio operator, and assembled the stores, and the radio, and the two wooden boxes of explosives, under the cliff. Mallory and Andrea seemed to vanish into the solid rock. The group at the cliff foot sat huddled against the icy rain. From above came the infrequent sound of a low word spoken, the clink of hammer on spike, the scuff of nailed boot on rock. The sounds receded quickly upwards. Human goddamn flies, thought Miller, gloomily. Personally, he had no suckers on his feet, and no plans to grow any. He stood up, cocked his Schmeisser and moved fifty yards down the valley in the rain. Someone had to stand sentry, and the only person on the valley floor Miller trusted was Miller.
Fall in with bad companions and what do you get?
I tell you what you get, he told himself, settling into a natural embrasure in the rock and preparing for the first of the sixty Germans to come round the corner.
You get problems.
There had been times in Mallory’s life when he would have enjoyed a good crack at a limestone cliff in the dark. On a cold morning, perhaps, in a gorge in the Southern Alps, when you had got up at one in the morning, the stars floating silver and unwinking between the ice-white peaks of the range.
This was not one of those times.
This was a vertical slab of rock he could barely see. This was climbing by Braille, running fingers and feet over the smooth surface looking for pockmarks and indentations, tapping spikes into hair-cracks, standing with the tip of a boot-toe balanced on a foothold slim as a goose-quill.
But Mallory knew that there is a greater spur to climbing a cliff in the dark than a wish to dwell in the white Olympus of the high peaks. It is to get you and your comrades away from three lorry loads of Germans.
So Mallory climbed that sopping wall until his fingernails were gone, and the sweat stung his eyes, and the breath rasped in his tobacco-seared throat. And after fifty feet, he found a chimney.
It was a useful chimney, the edge of a huge flake of rock that would in a few hundred years separate from the face of the cliff and slide into the gorge. Mallory made a belay, called down to Andrea, and went up the chimney as if it had been a flight of stairs.
At first the chimney was vertical. After thirty feet it started to trend leftward. Then suddenly there was a chockstone, a great boulder that had rolled down the cliff and jammed in the chimney. It formed a level floor embraced on two sides by buttresses of rock, invisible from the bottom of the valley. It was more than Mallory had dared hope for. Fifty people could have hidden up there while the Germans rumbled up the valley and flattened their noses against the Spanish border. Over which they would assume the Storm Force had fled -
Mallory felt a sensation he hardly recognised.
Hope.
Don’t count your chickens.
Jaime was the first to arrive. He was carrying the bulky, square-edged radio pack. Jaime was a useful man on a mountain. There was a pause, and Andrea came up, carrying the second rope. ‘All at the base of the chimney,’ he said. ‘Stores too.’
‘Good,’ said Mallory, belaying the rope and letting the end go.
Now that there were two ropes, things started to move fast. Thierry came up one, breathing in a high, frightened whimper, his straw hat crammed over his eyebrows. The second rope seemed to be taking a long time. ‘It’s the woman,’ said Andrea. ‘She doesn’t have the strength in her arms.’ Mallory saw his huge back dark against the sky as he bent to the rope. She was a big woman; there were not many fat people in wartime France, but she was one of them. She must have weighed ten stone. But Andrea hauled her up as if she had been a bag of sugar, set her on her feet, and dusted down her bulk.
‘Merci,’ she said.
Andrea’s white teeth flashed under his moustache. He had the smile of a musketeer, this Greek giant. Even now, with the rain lashing down and Germans in the valley, Lisette felt enveloped in a protective cloak of courtesy and understanding. Andrea bowed, as if she had been a lady of Versailles, not a shapeless bundle of overcoats crouched on a cliff ledge. Then he let the rope go again.
Hugues came up, too breathless to complain, and went to Lisette’s side. Mallory had a nagging moment of worry. Hugues’ priorities had to be with the operation, not his girlfriend. Mallory did not know enough about this woman. And he did not know enough about Hugues. For the moment, if her information was good, she had saved their bacon. But if Mallory’s instincts were right, she was going to be a distraction. And distractions had no place on an operation like this. On this operation there was a single priority: find and destroy the Werwolf pack.
Hugues would need watching.
Mallory turned away, and hauled up the boxes of explosives and a couple of packs. The rain was turning even colder, developing a grainy feel. Mallory thought, soon it will be snowing. His hands were cracked and sore, and the plaster had peeled off the reopening wounds. God knew how Andrea must be feeling. But the stores were up, stacked on the edge of the boulder, and Miller was on his way up, but with no rope yet. Must get a rope to him; Miller was no climber.
The wind moaned and died. Andrea said, ‘Listen.’
There was a new sound in the raw, snow-laden air. Lorry engines.
All the way up the bottom forty feet of the cliff, Miller had been feeling the void snapping at his heels. The wind was freezing, but inside his uniform a Niagara of hot sweat was running. His knees felt weak, his hands shaky. Miller had been raised on the flatlands of the American Midwest. One hold at a time, he told himself. Don’t look down. Don’t think of the sheer face down there -
Miller patted the cliff above his head, groping for chinks and crevices. Mallory must have found some. But as far as Miller was concerned he might as well have been trying to climb a plate glass window. Both ropes were in use …
Hurry, please, thought Miller politely. For forty feet down, things were happening. On the wind from the valley came the sharp whiff of exhaust. He looked up.
The cold, slushy rain battered his face. What he could see of the cliff was black and shiny, the chimney a dark streak rising to the chockstone. He had seen Mallory in a chimney, his shoulders one side, his heels the other, gliding his way skyward with that weightless fluency of his. Miller’s limbs were too lanky for that, and his body wanted to plaster itself against the rock, not sit out over the emptiness as Mallory did, applying weight where it was needed, on fingers and toes -
Without a rope there was no way of getting to the chimney.
He pressed his face into the rock. The earthy smell of wet stone filled his nostrils. There was a lightening of the walls. Headlights down the valley.
He moved his hands again. The rock was rough, but there was nothing you could hold on to. Not unless you were a human fly like Mallory. Can’t go up, thought Miller. Can’t go down. So you just stand here, and hold on, and try not to follow that voice in your head that is telling you to shout and scream and keel gently out and back and plummet into space.
There were lights under his feet, and the gorge was churning with engines. A voice above him said, ‘Rope coming!’
The lorries were directly below him now. By the grind of their engines they were moving at a slow, walking pace. Searching. Nobody looks up. It is fine. Nobody ever looks up. Particularly not up sheer cliffs.
Not even Germans. No matter how thorough they may be.
You wish.
The rope nudged his face, cautiously. Miller said a quiet, polite thank you. Then he wound his hands into it and began to climb.
‘He’s coming up now,’ said Andrea, in his soft, imperturbable voice.
They were standing at the back of the ledge formed by the chockstone. Its edge was a horizon now, backlit by the glow of the lorries’ headlamps. Against the edge was something hard-edged and square. The radio.
‘Move that,’ said Mallory to Thierry.
Thierry started forward, shuffling, his great bulk moving against the lights. He was tired, thought Mallory. Tired and frightened, in a wet straw hat.
If he had been less tired himself, he might have prevented what happened next.
Thierry scooped up the radio and slung it over his shoulder. As he turned, his foot hit something that could have been a tuft of grass but was actually a rock. The rock went over the edge.
It whizzed past Dusty Miller’s head. At the base of the chimney it bounced, removing a fair-sized boulder. By the time it hit the valley floor it was a junior landslide. It landed with a roar fifteen feet to the right of the second truck in the convoy. Small stones pattered against the passenger door of the cab.
The truck stopped. A searchlight on the roof sent a white disc of light sliding across the black face of the cliff.
Miller was fifteen feet from the top, sweating, his breath coming in gasps. Clamp a hand on the rope. Pull up, shoving with feet. Clamp the other hand. There was shouting down below. Clamp the other hand. The hands like grey spiders against the cliff. They could have belonged to anyone, those hands, except for the pain, and the heavy thump of his heart.
And suddenly the other hand was not grey, but blazing, brilliant flesh-colour, and every fibre of the rope stood out in microscopic detail. And Miller was a moth, kicking on the pin of the searchlight.
A rifle cracked, then another. Chips of rock stung his face. His back crawled with the expectation of bullets. Ten feet to go. It might as well have been ten miles.
