Where Eagles Dare

They slipped cautiously through the doorway then strode briskly and confidently along the passage, making no attempt to conceal their presence. The bag with the Schmeissers, rope, grenades and explosives Smith swung carelessly from one hand. They passed a bespectacled soldier carrying a sheaf of papers and a girl carrying a laden tray, neither of whom paid any attention to them. They turned right at the end of the passage, reached a circular flight of stairs and went down three floors until they came to the level of the courtyard. A short broad passage, with two doors on either side, took them to the main door leading out to the courtyard.

Smith opened the door and looked out. The scene was very much as Schaffer had feelingly described it, with far too many armed guards and police dogs around for anyone's peace of mind. The overalled mechanic was still at work on the helicopter's engine. Smith quietly closed the door and turned his attention to the nearest right-hand door in the passage. It was locked. He said to Schaffer: “Keep an eye open at the end of the passage there.”

Schaffer went. As soon as he was in position, Smith brought out skeleton keys. The third key fitted and the door, gave under his hand. He signalled Schaffer to return.

With the door closed and locked behind them, they looked around the room, a room faintly but for their purposes adequately lit by the backwash of light shining through the un-suited window from the courtyard. It was, quite apparently, the fire-fighting H.Q. of the castle. The walls were hung with drums of rolled hoses, asbestos suits, helmets and fire-axes: wheeled handpumps, CO, cylinders and a variety of smaller cylinders for fighting oil and electrical fires took up much of the floor space.

“Ideal,” Smith murmured.

“Couldn't be better,” Schaffer agreed. “What are you talking about?”

“If we leave anyone in here,” Smith explained, “he's unlikely to be discovered unless there's an actual outbreak of fire. Agreed? So.” He took Schaffer by the arm and led him to the window. “The lad working on the chopper there. About your size, wouldn't you say?”

“I wouldn't know,” Schaffer said. “And if you've got in mind what I think you have in mind, then I don't want to know, either.”

Smith drew the shutters, crossed to the door and switched on the overhead light.

“You got any better ideas?”

“Give me time,” he complained.

“I can't give you what we haven't got. Take your jacket off and keep your Luger lined up on that door. I'll be back in a minute.”

Smith left, closing but not locking the door behind him. He passed through the outer doorway, walked a few paces across the courtyard, halted at the base of a set of steps leading up to the helicopter and looked up at the man working above him, a tall rangy man with a thin intelligent face and a lugubrious expression on it. If he'd been working bare-handed with metal tools in that freezing temperature, Smith thought, he'd have had a lugubrious expression on his face, too.

“You the pilot?” Smith asked.

“You wouldn't think so, would you?” the overalled man said bitterly. He laid down a spanner and blew on his hands. “Back in Tempelhof I have two mechanics for this machine, one a farm-hand from Swabia, the other a blacksmith's assistant from the Harz. If I want to keep alive I do my own mechanics. What do you want?”

“Not me. Reichsmarschall Rosemeyer. The phone.”

“The Reichsmarschall?” The pilot was puzzled. “I was speaking to him less than fifteen minutes ago.”

“A call just came through from the Chancellory in Berlin. It seems urgent.” Smith let a slight note of impatience creep into his voice. “You better hurry. Through the main door there, then the first on the right.”

Smith stood aside as the pilot clambered down, looked casually around him. A guard with a leashed Doberman was no more than twenty feet away, but paying no attention to them: with his pinched bluish face sunk deep in his upturned collar, his hands thrust down into his great-coat pockets and his frozen breath hanging heavily in the air, he was too busy concentrating on his own miseries to have time to spare for ridiculous suspicions. Smith turned to follow the pilot through the main door, unobtrusively unholstering his Luger and gripping it by the barrel.

Smith hadn't intended chopping down the pilot with his gun butt but was left with no option. As soon as the pilot had passed through the side door and seen Schaffer's Luger pointing at his chest from a distance of four feet his shoulders lifted—the preliminary, Smith knew, not to violence or resistance but to a shout for help. Schaffer caught him as he pitched forward and lowered him to the floor.

Quickly they unzipped the overall from the unconscious man, bound and gagged him and left him lying in a corner. The overall was hardly a perfect fit for Schaffer, but, then, overalls are rarely a perfect fit for anybody. Schaffer switched the pilot's hat for his own, pulled the peak low over his eyes and left.