The Heights of Zervos (27 page)

'Exactly what I was thinking, but there are bound to be more men inside.'

Ford grabbed his arm and his voice reflected a rare excitement for the phlegmatic sergeant. 'It's a bloody half-track! Look!'

The clanking sound grew louder as the vehicle came out with painful slowness and the dazed driver remained still unaware of their proximity. Capless, he was wearing the uniform of the Alpenkorps, but it was the vehicle itself which Macomber was staring at as he put his hand inside his coat pocket and began to move forward purposefully over the grass. A long vehicle without any roof, its body was painted a drab olive-grey and at the front it was supported by two normal wheels, but there were no wheels at the rear; instead it was held up by two large caterpillar tracks. As Ford had said, a half-track -half-tank, half-car. The grinding of the tracks was muffled as they moved down onto the grass and now the driver lifted his head to see where he was going and saw Macomber standing a few feet away. The Scot spoke swiftly, rapping out the words in German.

'Brake! Colonel Burckhardt is here. He needs this vehicle at once!'

The driver reacted automatically to the command in German, braked, then stared hard at the man who had given the order. His eyes travelled over the Scot's shoulder to where Prentice and Ford were moving forward while Grapos watched the road behind. As he made a sudden movement to reach something Macomber pulled out the Luger and struck him across the temples. He had the door open and was hauling the soldier out before he had sagged to the floor while Prentice and Ford ran to either side of the open mouth of the glider. Heaving the driver out onto the grass with one hand while the other still retained the Luger, he looked up as another German soldier appeared at the open nose, his rifle at the ready. Two shots were fired within the fraction of a second. The first, fired by the soldier, struck Ford. The second, fired by Macomber, entered the German's body as Prentice ran round the back of the vehicle, arriving at the moment when the Alpenkorps man slumped down in the space between the rear of the tracks.

'Heads down!' it was Prentice who shouted as he snatched a grenade dangling from the fallen German's belt. The grenade sailed into the interior of the glider and detonated near the back. A moment earlier Macomber had caught a glimpse of movement from inside the plane, but when he raised his head after the thumping explosion there was no further sign of activity aboard the Gotha. Ford was holding onto the side of the tracks as he stooped forward on his knees, but he was trying to clamber up as Prentice and Macomber reached him. The passage of the bullet was marked by a neat tear on the right shoulder of his sheepskin coat. Prentice had an arm round his chest and was helping him to his feet as Macomber spoke.

'Get him aboard quick! I'll have to try and drive this blasted thing - they'll be on to us in a minute.'

Ford was upright now, one arm clutching Prentice round the waist for support as he clambered inside a cut-out aperture which was the rear-door of the half-track. He spoke through his teeth to Macomber. 'Drives like a car ... any car ... the tracks move with the wheels.' Macomber was turning to go to the front when he saw the distinctive Alpenkorps cap on the head of the soldier slumped between the tracks. He scooped it off and rammed it down over his own head as Grapos arrived, running at a shuffling jog-trot with his rifle between his hands.

'The mules are here,' he gasped out. 'Coming over the hill quickly. I think the first man...'

'Get in, for God's sake.'

Prentice had successfully manoeuvred Ford into one of the benches behind the two front seats and Macomber was behind the wheel as Grapos climbed aboard. Brake, clutch-pedal, gear-lever - it
looked
like an ordinary car. Ford told Prentice to shut up a minute and leaned forward. 'An ordinary car, Macomber, that's all it is - for driving, anyway.' He sagged back against the bench seat as Prentice grabbed at a first-aid kit attached to the rear of the driving-seat and then the vehicle began moving forward over the grass towards the road. The tracks clanked gently as they revolved over the field and the vehicle had a feeling of great stability.

Macomber was concentrating on three things at once - on getting to know how this queer monster worked, on keeping an eye on the hilltop over which the Alpenkorps might stream at any moment, and with what little attention he had left he cast quick glances to the south where the road ran past the landing zone. The sky was littered with a fresh wave of falling parachutists and another transport plane had just come to a halt after a bumpy landing. Dammit, he said to himself and speeded up. The half-track reached the road at the moment when the leading Alpenkorps soldier crested the rise on his mule.

Hahnemann! Macomber felt certain it was the German lieutenant on that animal. He must have been hurled overboard into the sea when the
Hydra
blew up, must have been one of those men swimming in the water. The thought darted through his brain as it all became a kaleidoscope and he reacted with pure instinct. Two more men on mules appeared behind Hahnemann. Parachutists hitting the earth, their 'chutes landing and pulling sideways. A giant glider cruising in to land on the brownish area. The steady throb of planes' engines overhead mingling with the urgent shouts of the men on the mules. Still feeling like a man towing a caravan, he turned the wheel and the half-track climbed onto the road. As its great metal tracks ground their teeth into the hard tar they set up a jarring vibration sound and the unexpected barrage of noise panicked the mules. There was more shouting, frantic now, as the animals headed across the hilltop, threading their way nimbly among the boulders and away from the strange machine. Macomber completed his turn, hunched his shoulders, pressed his foot down, and the half-track began to build up speed as the wheels spun and the tracks churned round faster and faster, half-deafening its passengers with the pounding beat of metal on tar.

'How fast can it go?' shouted the Scot.

'Twenty ... thirty ... forty. Fifty would be pushing it.* Ford had his arm out of the sleeve now and was taking off the right side of his jacket as he replied. There were three rows of bench seats across the vehicle behind the front seats and Grapos occupied the rear position. He had aimed his rifle at Hahnemann but the half-track had lurched at the wrong moment, almost throwing him off, and he hadn't fired a shot. Now there was no target - the mules and their riders were lost somewhere inside the tangle of boulders. He swore colourfully in Greek when Macomber shouted over his shoulder for him to get down on the floor out of sight - Grapos was rather too distinctive a figure for his Liking at the moment.

Ahead more transport planes were droning in the sky as they waited their moment to come down, and already the plateau to the right of the road had the look of a disorganized military tattoo. So far there were no troops close to the road but a few hundred yards away parachutists were grappling with the supply containers and a number of men were already armed with machine-pistols. Several looked up as the half-track roared past and their uniform was very different from that of the Alpenkorps, so different that they might have belonged to another army. They wore pot-shaped helmets not dissimilar to diving helmets, smocks camouflaged with mottled dark green and brown, and overall trousers which gave them a deceptively clumsy appearance, but there was nothing clumsy about their movements as they began to form np in sections.- Macomber, having got the feel of the vehicle, was now sitting very erect so his Alpenkorps cap was prominently on view and frequently he drove with one hand while he waved with the other to the men assembling in the field, a performance which Prentice witnessed with some trepidation. It was typical of Macomber, he was thinking., to carry the bluff to its utmost limit,

'Lookout!'

Prentice shrieked out the warning. Like Macomber, all his attention had been fixed on the airborne force's landing area and it was only by chance that he glanced to the left. A Gotha assault glider released from its tow-rope was coming in to land from the east. It was already flying very low, perhaps twenty feet above the ground, flying on a course which would take it directly across the road just ahead of the speeding half-track. Prentice guessed that the pilot was desperately trying to maintain Sight long enough to take his machine beyond the marshland area and it was horribly clear that the two very different forms of transport were headed on a collision course. Macomber had time to slow down but nearby a drawn-up section of parachutists was marching steadily towards the road. If he slowed, stopped, they'd get a damn good look at who was inside the vehicle and they had machine-pistols looped over their shoulders. Without hesitation he accelerated and it became a race towards destruction.

His shoulders hunched again, he watched road and oncoming glider. It was an uncomfortably fine calculation -known speed of half-track against estimated speed of glider, with the added element of tie plane's angle of descent. The half-track was now thundering down the road, which had begun to slope, at a pace which alarmed Prentice, the tracks rotating madly under increasing tension as the moving racial smashed its way forward with a rattling cannonade of sound.

Across the green field the glider grew larger as it maintained its course unerringly and lost more height. He must be mad, Prentice was thinking. Macomber's going to try and beat the bloody thing, to sneak past ahead of it! The glider was so close now that he wanted to close his eyes, to look away, but he felt a terrible compulsion to stare at the oncoming machine which now seemed enormous.

'We won't make it,' said Ford who had now become aware of what was happening, and Ford was good at this sort of hair's breadth calculation. Prentice would have felt even less happy had he known that exactly the same thought was pressing down on Macomber, and now it was too late to think of reducing speed. The converging projectiles were so close that he would probably smash into the tail of the glider as it passed. The only answer was a little more speed.

The downward gradient of the road was increasing as he pressed his foot harder and prayed - prayed against two catastrophes. He had heard somewhere that if you drive a tracked vehicle too fast a caterpillar could break loose, freeing itself from the small wheels over which it revolved and leave the vehicle altogether. If that happened at the speed they were moving at now there would be very little hope of survival. Grimly, he kept his foot down, his mind totally concentrated on the straight road ahead, the tortured gyrations of the overstrained tracks, and that huge drifting shape about to move across his bows. Prentice had one arm steadying Ford while the other hand gripped the side of the vehicle as the glider lost more height and cruised forward barely six feet above the plateau and less than fifty yards from the road. Grapos, tying resentfully on the floor with his feet under a bench and his back against the rear of the vehicle, had the shock of his life when he looked up and saw the bulk of the Gotha loom up. The half-track raced forward, Grapos involuntarily ducked, and the wing of the Gotha passed over the rear of the vehicle, landing a short distance beyond the road.

Prentice sagged against the back of the bench and stared at the back of the huge Scot, his lips moving soundlessly. Macomber was already slowing down to a safer speed, expecting some uncomplimentary comment from his passengers, but the occupants of the bench were stunned, so he was saved an argument. In the distance a transport plane was stationary close to the road and Macomber whistled under his breath when he saw something which looked like a part of a field-gun coming down a ramp through a large opening in the fuselage. "How is Ford?' he called out over his shoulder.

'Ford is surviving,' Ford replied.

'The bullet grazed him,' amplified Prentice who was now fixing a bandage to his final satisfaction. 'He's lost a bit of blood and he looks like Banquo's ghost but the fresh air will probably tone him up a treat.'

'There's a plane ahead with something coming out - better try and identify it so we know what we're up against.'

'We can see what we're up against,' Prentice told him bluntly. 'The cream of the Wehrmacht. And I suppose you've seen there are more half-tracks over to the right? One's just nosed its way out of that Gotha which just missed us.'

'Do you think we're nearly clear of them?' asked Ford and there was a note of anxiety in his voice.

'Not much ahead as far as I can see. Why?' Macomber had detected the anxious note and was wondering what had struck the technically minded Ford.

'Because we've been lucky so far - it's wireless communication that worries me. If the Alpenkorps who came over the hill can send a message ahead we may have a reception committee waiting for us.'.

It was a point which had worried Prentice but he hadn't seen any point in raising new problems at this particular juncture. So far they had got away with their audacious dash along the fringe of the assembly area, and this didn't entirely surprise him: the Germans had just landed on enemy territory and were taken up with carrying out a certain vital routine - collection of weapons from the supply containers, the unloading of heavy equipment from the gliders and transport planes, and the assembling of the men into their units. They had no reason, when their attention was so divided, to see anything strange in one of their own recently landed half-tracks speeding along the road to Zervos. But wireless communication was a different matter.