Where Eagles Dare

“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, passing 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 glass. 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 bulldoze 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 Brücke?”

“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.