Where Eagles Dare

The first three rooms he came to were locked and he wasted neither time nor the precious ammunition of his silenced Luger in trying to open them. But each of the next five rooms was unlocked. In the first three, all bedrooms, he placed charges in a Dresden fruit bowl, under an officer's cap and under a pillow: in the fourth room, a bathroom, he placed it behind a W.C. and in the fifth, a store-room, high up on a shelf beside some highly inflammable-looking cardboard cartons.

Smith, meanwhile, had ushered the others from the still smoke-filled, eye-watering, throat-irritating atmosphere of the radio room into the comparatively purer air of the passageway beyond, and was waiting the return of Schaffer when his face became suddenly thoughtful at the sight of some fire-fighting gear -- a big CO2 extinguisher, buckets of sand and a fireman's axe -- on a low platform by the passage wall.

'You are slipping, Major Smith.' Mary's eyes were red-rimmed and her tear-streaked face white as paper, but she (could still smile at him. 'Distractions, you said. I've had the same thought myself, and I'm only me.'

Smith gave her a half-smile, the way his hand, hurt he felt he couldn't afford the other half, and tried the handle of a door beside the low platform, a door lettered AKTEN RAUM -- Records Office. Such a door, inevitably, was locked. He took the Luger in his left hand, placed it against the lock, squeezed the trigger and went inside.

It certainly looked like a Records Office. The room was heavily shelved and piled ceiling-high with files and papers. Smith crossed to the window, opened it wide to increase the draught then scattered large piles of paper on the floor and put a match to them. The paper flared up at once, the flames feet high within seconds.

The cylinder disappeared through the open window. The room was already so furiously ablaze that Schaffer had difficulty in finding his way back to the door again. As he stumbled out, his clothes and hair singed and face smoke-blackened, a deep-toned bell far down in the depths of the Schloss Adler began to ring with a strident urgency. 'For God's sake, what next,' Schaffer said in despair. 'The fire brigade?'

'Just about,' Smith said bitterly. 'Damn it, why couldn't I have checked first? Now they know where we are.'

'A heat-sensing device linked to an indicator?'

'What else? Come on.'

They ran along the central passage-way, driving the prisoners in front of them, dropped down a central flight of stairs and were making for the next when they heard the shouting of voices and the clattering of feet on treads as soldiers came running up from the castle courtyard.

'Quickly! In behind there!' Smith pointed to a curtained alcove. 'Hurry up! Oh, God -- -I've forgotten something!' He turned and ran back the way he had come.

"Where the hell has he -- ' Schaffer broke off as he realised the approaching men were almost upon them, whirled and jabbed the nearest prisoner painfully with the muzzle of his Schmeisser. 'In that alcove. Fast.' In the dim light behind the curtains he changed his machine-pistol for the silenced Luger. 'Don't even think of touching those curtains. With the racket that bell's making, they won't even hear you die.'

Nobody touched the curtains. Jack-booted men, gasping heavily for breath, passed by within feet of them. They clattered furiously up the next flight of stairs, the one Smith and the others had just descended, and then u the footsteps stopped abruptly. From the next shouted words it was obvious that they had just caught sight of the fire and had abruptly and for the first time realised the magnitude of the task they had to cope with.

The corporal didn't answer, the sound of jutting heels striking the treads as he raced down the stairs was answer enough. He ran by the alcove and ran down the next flight of stairs until the sound of his footfalls was lost in the metallic clamour of the alarm bell. Schaffer risked a peep through a crack in the curtains just as Smith came running up on tiptoe.

'Where the hell have you been?' Schaffer's voice was low and fierce.

'Come on, come on! Out of it!' Smith said urgently. 'No, Jones, not down that flight of stairs, you want to meet a whole regiment of Alpenkorps coming up it? Along the passage to the west wing. We'll use the side stairs. For God's sake, hurry. This place will be like Piccadilly Circus in a matter of seconds.'

Schaffer pounded along the passage beside Smith and when he spoke again the anxiety-born fierceness of tone had a certain plaintive equality to it. 'Well, where the bloody hell have you been?'

'The man we left tied up in the room beside the telephone exchange. The Records Office is directly above. I just remembered. I cut him free and dragged him out to the passage. He'd have burnt to death.'

'You did that, did you?' Schaffer said wonderingly. 'You do think of the most goddamned unimportant things, don't you?'