'Not even a footprint, Herr Colonel.'

Weissner straightened and turned.

'There wouldn't be,' he said sombrely. 'I've just seen a hat floating in the water. A squalid end for such brave men, Sergeant. A squalid end."

The cable-car moved slowly out of the lower station at the beginning of its long climb up to the castle. An impossible climb, Mary thought, a dangerous and impossible climb. Peering through the front windows she could just distinguish the outline of the first pylon through the thinly-driving snow. The second and third pylons were invisible, but the intermittently shining cl.u.s.ter of lights suspended impossibly high in the sky showed clearly enough where they had to go. People have made it before, she thought dully, we'll probably make it, too. The way she felt then, with the bottom gone from her world, she didn't particularly care whether she made it or not.

The cable-car was a twelve-pa.s.senger vehicle, painted bright red outside, well-lit inside. There were no seats, only grab-rails along the two sides. That the grab-rails were very necessary became immediately and alarmingly obvious. The wind was now very strong and the car began to sway alarmingly only seconds after clearing the shelter of the lower station.

Apart from two soldiers and an apparent civilian, the only other pa.s.sengers consisted of von Brauchitsch, Mary and Heidi, the last now with a heavy woollen coat and cossack fur hat over her ordinary clothes. Von Brauchitsch, holding on to the grab-rail with one hand, had his free arm round

Mary's shoulders. He gave them a rea.s.suring squeeze and smiled down at her.

'Scared?' he asked.

'No.' And she wasn't, she hadn't enough emotion left to be scared, but even with no hope left she was supposed to be a professional. 'No, I'm not scared. I'm terrified. I feel seasick already. Does--does this cable ever break.'

'Never.' Von Brauchitsch was rea.s.surance itself. 'Just hang on to me and you'll be all right.'

That's what he used to say to me,' Heidi said coldly.

'Fraulein,' von Brauchitsch explained patiently, 'I am gifted beyond the average, but I haven't yet managed to grow a third arm. Guests first.'

With a cupped cigarette in his hand, Schaffer leaned against the base of an unmistakable telephone pole and gazed thoughtfully into the middle distance. There was reason both for the hooded cigarette and the thoughtful expression. Less than a hundred yards away from where he stood at the edge of the pines bordering the road running alongside the sh.o.r.e of the Blau See he could see guards, clearly illuminated by over-head lights, moving briskly to and fro in the vicinity of the barrack gates. Dimly seen behind them were the outline of the barracks themselves.

Schaffer shifted his stance and gazed upwards. The snow was almost gone now, the moon was threatening to break through, and he had no difficulty at all in distinguishing the form of Smith, his legs straddled across the lowest crossbar.

Smith was busily employed with a knife, a specially designed commando knife which, among other advanced features, had a built-in wire cutter. Carefully, methodically, he brought the wire-cutter to bear. With eight consecutive snips eight consecutive telephone wires fell to the ground. Smith closed and pocketed his knife, disentangled his legs from the cross-bar, wrapped his arms round the pole and slid down to the ground. He grinned at Schaffer.

'Every little helps,' he said.

'Should hold them for a while,' Schaffer agreed. Once more they gathered up their guns and moved off to the east, vanishing into the pine woods which bordered the rear of the barracks.

The cable-car swayed more alarmingly than ever. It had now entered upon the last near-vertical lap of its journey. With von Brauchitsch's arm still around her shoulders, with her face still pressed against the front windows of the car, Mary stared up at the towering battlements, white as the driving snow, and thought that they reached up almost to the clouds themselves. As she watched, a break came in the wisping clouds and the whole fairy-tale castle was bathed in bright moonlight. Fear touched her eyes, she moistened her lips and gave an involuntary shiver. Nothing escaped von Brauchitsch's acute perception. He gave her shoulders another rea.s.suring squeeze, perhaps the twentieth in that brief journey. 'Not to worry, Fraulein. It will be all right.' 'I hope so.' Her voice was the ghost of a whisper.

The same unexpected moonlight almost caught Smith and Schaffer. They had just crossed the station tracks and were moving stealthily along towards the left luggage office when the moon broke through. But they were still in the shadows of u the over-hanging station roof. They pressed back into those shadows and peered along the tracks, past the/hydraulic b.u.mpers which marked the end of the line. Clearly now, sharply-limned as if in full daylight, red etched against the white, they could see one cable-car approaching the lower station, the other climbing the last few vertical feet towards the header station and, above that, the dazzling outline of the Schloss Adler glittering under the bright moon.

That helps,' Schaffer said bitterly. 'That helps a lot.'

'Sky's still full of clouds,' Smith said mildly. He bent to the keyhole of the left luggage office, used his skeleton keys and moved inside. Schaffer followed, closing the door.

Smith located their rucksacks, cut a length of rope from the nylon, wrapped it round his waist and began stuffing some hand grenades and plastic explosives into a canvas bag. He raised his head as Schaffer diffidently cleared his throat.

'Boss?' This with an apprehensive glance through the window.

'huh-huh?'

'Boss, has it occurred to you that Colonel Weissner probably knows all about this cache by this time? What I mean is, we may have company soon.'

'We may indeed,' Smith admitted. 'Surprised if we don't have. That's why I've cut this itsy-bitsy piece of rope off the big coil and why I'm taking the explosives and grenades only from my rucksack and yours. It's a very big coil--and no one knows what's inside our rucksacks. So it's unlikely that anything will be missed.'

'But the radio--'

'If we broadcast from here we might be caught in the act. If we take it away and they find it gone they'll know that that car at the bottom of the Blau See is empty. Is that it?'

'More or less.'

'So we compromise. We remove it, but we return it here after we've broadcast from a safe place.'

'What do you mean "safe place",' Schaffer demanded plaintively. The darkly saturnine face was unhappy. 'There isn't a safe place in Bavaria.'

'There's one not twenty yards away. Last place they'd look.' He tossed Schaffer a bunch of skeleton keys. 'Ever been inside a Bavarian ladies' cloakroom?'

Schaffer fielded the keys, stared at Smith, shook his head and left. Quickly he moved down the tracks, his torch flashing briefly on and off. Finally his torch settled on a doorway with, above it, the legend DAMEN.

Schaffer looked at it, pursed his lips, shrugged his shoulders and got to work on the lock.

Slowly, with apparently infinite labour, the cable-car completed the last few feet of its ascent and pa.s.sed in under the roof of the Schloss Adler header station. It juddered to a halt, the front door opened and the pa.s.sengers disembarked. They moved from the header station--built into the north-west base of the castle--up through a steeply-climbing twenty-five foot tunnel which had heavy iron doors and guards at either end. Pa.s.sing the top gateway, they emerged into the courtyard, the entrance of which was (sealed off by a ma.s.sively-barred iron gate guarded by heavily armed soldiers and Dobermann pinchers. The courtyard itself was brightly illuminated by the light of dozens of uncurtained interior windows. In the very centre of the courtyard stood the helicopter which had that morning brought Reichsmarschall Rosemeyer to the Schloss Adler. Under the cover of a heavy tarpaulin -- momentarily unnecessary because of the cessation of the snow -- a dungareed figure, possibly the pilot, worked on the helicopter engine with the aid of a small but powerful arc-lamp.

Mary turned to von Brauchitsch, still holding a proprietary grip on her arm, and smiled ruefully.

'So many soldiers. So many men -- and, I'm sure, so few women. What happens if I want to escape from the licentious soldiery?'

'Easy.' Von Brauchitsch really did have, Mary thought dully, a most charming smile. 'Just jump from your bedroom window. One hundred metres straight down and there you are. Free!'

The ladies' cloakroom in the station was a superlatively nondescript place, bleakly furnished with hard-backed benches, chairs, deal tables and a sagging wooden floor. The Spartans would have turned up their noses at it, in its sheer lack of decorative inspiration it could have been surpa.s.sed only by its counterpart in England. The expiring remains of a fire burnt dully in a black enamel stove.

Smith was seated by the central table, radio beside him, consulting a small book by the light of a hooded pencil-flash and writing on a slip of paper. He checked what he had written, straightened and handed the book to Schaffer.

'Burn it. Page by page.'

'Page by page? All?' Surprise in the saturnine face. 'You won't be requiring this any more?'

Smith shook his head and began to crank the radio handle.

There was a very much better fire in the Operations Room in Whitehall, a pine-log fire with a healthy crackle and flames of a respectable size. But the two men sitting on either side of the fire were a great deal less alert than the two men sitting by the dying embers of the fire in the Bavarian Alps. Admiral Rolland and Colonel Wyatt-Turner were frankly dozing, eyes shut, more asleep than awake. But they came to full wakeful-ness, jerking upright, almost instantly, when the long-awaited call-sign came through on the big transceiver manned by the civilian operator at the far end of the room. They glanced at each other, heaved themselves out of their deep arm-chairs.

'Broadsword calling Danny Boy.' The voice on the radio was faint but clear. 'Broadsword calling Danny Boy. You hear me? Over.'

The civilian operator spoke into his microphone, 'We hear you. Over.'

'Code. Ready? Over.'

'Ready. Over.'

Rolland and Wyatt-Turner were by the operator's shoulder now, his eyes fixed on his pencil as he began to make an instantaneous transcription of the meaningless jumble of letters beginning to come over the radio. Swiftly the message was spelt Out : TORRANCE-SMYTHE MURDERED. THOMAS CHRISTIANSEN AND CARRACIOLA CAPTURED.

As if triggered by an unheard signal, the eyes of Rolland and Wyatt-Turner lifted and met. Their faces were strained and grim. Their eyes returned to the flickering pencil.