‘Now,’ said Wolf. ‘Come here, Captain Mallory.’ He beckoned, with the dagger held out in front of him. As he beckoned, he advanced.
Mallory felt for his own knife, then remembered both of them were gone. He tested his ankle. Not good. He stood his ground, watching the knife.
They were two figures standing on that sheet of floodlit cobbles, feet apart, intent at the hub of their radiating shadows. One with pack on back, unmoving; the other stealthy, feline almost. Both of them focused on the little starburst of light on the point of Wolf’s dagger.
Wolf was close enough for Mallory to smell his sweat. It was a sour smell, violent, disgusting. Mallory watched the knife wrist sinking for the first upward thrust. He shifted his weight until it was on his good leg. Wolf’s eyes betrayed no feeling. His knife hand came round and up, hooking at Mallory’s belly. But Mallory was not there any more. He had arched away like a bullfighter from the horns, grabbing at Wolf’s wrist as it came past, to transfer the man’s momentum into a twist that would dislocate the elbow.
But as his hands locked on Wolf’s wrist, he knew it was not going to work. The SS man’s arm was thick as a telegraph pole. It was an arm whose owner had slept well and eaten well. Mallory’s fingers were worn with cliff and battle, and his reserves were close to rock bottom. He could not hold on. The arm wrenched away. Wolf brought his left hand round, fast, a closed-fist blow that made Mallory’s ears ring. He kept his feet with difficulty. Wolf came in again, hooking with the knife. Mallory aimed a kick at his knee, made contact, but he had kicked with his right foot, the bad foot, and pain shot up his leg and he fell over, feeling something burn his ribs, cool air on his side. Wolf had cut him. Not badly: a surface cut to the ribs.
It would get worse.
He struggled to his feet.
Wolf was waiting for him. His breathing was steady and even. Little bubbles of spit formed and burst in the corner of his wrecked mouth. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘I’ll give it to you now.’ He came in, knife in front of him like a sword. Mallory knew he was in bad trouble. He had lost sight of the fact he was going to die. There was no time for fear, or thinking ahead. The name of the game was survival, every second a bonus wrenched from the crooked jaws of death.
He got inside the knife, trapped the huge arm under his own arm, butted his steel helmet into that disgusting jaw, heard a tooth or two pop, brought his knee up into the groin, found it blocked by a leg that might as well have been made of wood. The arm was coming round behind him. He tried to cringe away from the knife, but the arms were remorseless, and he was exhausted –
The world went mad.
The square filled with a gigantic noise, the noise of a thousand typewriters, the whine of many hornets’ nests kicked to hell, two, maybe more huge explosions. Sensing a minute faltering of Wolf’s hold, Mallory smashed his helmet once more into the SS man’s face. This time the nose went, and the man grunted and reeled, and behind Mallory the knife clattered on the cobbles. But then the arms came on Mallory’s neck, tilting his head sideways, and Mallory knew that this time he had had it for sure, and for the first time the fear of death showed itself in his mind, a dark and ugly thing –
But only for a split second.
Because suddenly those terrible arms were off his neck and he was lurching back, free, and a voice was saying, ‘Get your weapon.’ A familiar voice.
Andrea’s voice.
It had, Miller reflected, been a bad five minutes.
They had been sitting in the belfry nice and peaceful. Miller had even managed to get a little shuteye — a very little, seeing that he did not trust Carstairs, and that Spiro was trembling like a frightened rabbit and muttering about bulletses and gunses and getting outses of here. Miller was worrying about Mallory, sure, especially after all that stuff with the lights. But when you knew Mallory as well as Miller, you could tell when he was in real trouble and when he was staging a diversionary action. The stuff with the lights, though it had made Miller’s flesh creep, was definitely a diversionary action. When Mallory had vanished from the end of the cable, there had been silence. A silence that Miller had very definitely appreciated. Then had come the shooting, and the voice in the square.
The voice in the square had been different.
It had woken Miller up, a thing he held against it. When he put his eye to the waterspout in the belfry floor, he saw the big man in the breeches and jackboots and high-fronted cap, standing tough and arrogant among the sprawled bodies of the Germans. He saw Mallory hobble out to meet him. Miller’s stomach became hollow with apprehension.
It was not just that Mallory looked tired, and the monstrous figure in the jackboots looked fresh as paint.
There were other things to be seen: things invisible to Mallory, but visible to Miller in his eminence. It was what staff would call a fluid situation. Staff could call it what they liked. To Miller, it looked like a mess.
Round the corner from Mallory, out of his line of sight, a machine-gun post had been set up. Miller did not know why, but he had a nasty feeling it could have something to do with reprisals on the civilian workers. He was not actually worried about the civilian workers, because when those rockets went up, the Germans were going to need all the manpower they could get.
What really worried him was something else: a shadow he had seen floating from darkness to darkness in the alley on the far side of the square. A big shadow, impossibly big: a shadow with the shoulders of a bear and the lightness of a butterfly.
He dug Carstairs in the ribs. ‘Stand by to give covering fire,’ he said.
‘You’re joking,’ said Carstairs, huddling into his corner of the bell tower. ‘They’ll have us in a second.’
‘Listen up, Captain,’ said Miller. ‘If you don’t give covering fire, I’ll blow your Goddamn head off.’
‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?’ said Carstairs.
‘I’ll blow your head off, sir,’ said Miller. Then he gave him his orders.
Down below, there was the sound of a dagger clattering on to cobbles. The man in the breeches had Mallory in a headlock and appeared to be breaking his neck.
‘Open fire,’ said Miller. He stood up, tossed two grenades, sighted the Schmeisser on the three heads inside the Spandau emplacement, and fired two short bursts. Behind him the belfry trap door slammed open, and Carstairs’ boots clattered down the ladder. A man stood up in the Spandau emplacement and fell across his gun. The grenades exploded, blowing him out again, accompanied by the two other men. There was movement in other windows as a squad of Germans took cover, Miller waited for the withering fire that would lash Mallory to the ground –
But while he had been disposing of the machine gun, the shadow had detached itself from the alley and moved in half-a-dozen great strides across the cobbles. The shadow was no longer a shadow, but had become Andrea. And Andrea had put a mighty forearm around the neck of the man with the crooked head, and wrenched him away from Mallory, and tucked Mallory in behind him like a hen protecting its chicks, and reversed towards the church door, using the crooked-headed man, Hauptmann Wolf in person, as a human shield, though human was not the word anyone who knew Wolf would have used.
Miller found it all very impressive. He heard the church door below burst open, Carstairs open up. Then he flung himself through the trap door in the belfry floor and went down the ladder into the dark, into the middle of a knot of people that consisted of Carstairs and Spiro, Mallory and Andrea, with Wolf instead of sandbags.