The valley road he was following seemed to be fairly well screened by trees. There was nobody actually on the viaduct or its approaches yet. It was just possible that he could run the car up to the arches without being spotted. In any case he would have to try. As quietly as he could, he urged the DS onward.
Overhanging trees and the steepness of the banks prevented him from seeing the ground beyond the lip of the valley—and presumably prevented those up there from seeing him—until he was almost below the bridge. But the slope on which the great piles were built was much gentler, and the trees had all been cut down. For a short distance on each side of the viaduct the road and all traffic on it would be visible to anyone above, if they happened to be watching.
Solo hoped they weren't watching as he coasted the Citroën to a halt under the third archway. It was over the fourth—through which ran the stream that had carved out the valley—that the section of old permanent way was most dangerous, according to Annike. Solo got carefully out of the car and gazed upward.
The viaduct seemed to be immensely high—a multiple façade soaring toward the sky on slender feet that tapered gently toward the top. Solo estimated its height at around a hundred and fifty-feet… and now that he was actually beneath it, he could see how precariously the pillars supported the old track far above. The stonework was cracked and fissured in dozens of places, and there were great gaps at the apex of the central arch where chunks of masonry had fallen away from the part immediately below the road.
He peered around the edge of the pillar and looked up the bank. He could just see the top of the truck's cab, but the steepness of the slope hid the rest of the vehicle and the people working on it. At any minute now, though, the cab might start moving over the bridge... and that would mean Illya Kuryakin would be moving too, moving to a certain death when the roadway collapsed.
Solo scanned the exposed slope bordering the revetment of the viaduct. The arch was wide enough at the bottom to conceal the DS parked behind it. But if he waded in to the rescue up that bank, he would rise into view as soon as he had scrambled up the first few yards, and for Bartoluzzi and his helper, he would be as easy a target as a duck in a shooting gallery.
Somewhere up there, Annike would be waiting to help him. He had told her to hide along the approach road and contact him when he appeared. But time was running out; he had no time to find her now. He had to get up there and stop that truck from reaching the unsafe part of the bridge.
And from where he was, deep in the valley, there was only one way to do it—he would have to scale the weathered face of the pillar itself!
It was an idea born of desperation. But there was a slim chance it might work. First, he could begin the climb by the car, on the inner side of the pillar, where he would be hidden from the truck. And when he reached the beginning of the curvature of the arch and had to move around to the outside, he could at least profit from the fact that the pile tapered and would thus be leaning very slightly away from him. Instead of forcing himself up a perpendicular face, he would only have to cope with a slope one or two degrees off the vertical!
On the other hand, of course, there was the rain.... Solo shrugged. There was no point in hanging around. He took a half dozen steel climber's pitons from the interior of the car and stuffed them into his jacket pocket with a small, heavy-headed hammer, slid a streamlined Walther model PP automatic into his waistband, and approached the face of the pillar.
Napoleon Solo had done a great many dangerous things in his life, and a good many mad ones too. But the maddest and most dangerous of all was that wild climb in the rain up the crumbling façade of the viaduct near Tharandt.
For the first twenty or thirty feet the sandstone blocks were fairly large and the interstices between them correspondingly wide; climbing was simply a matter of wedging in the toes, reaching up and finding a handhold, taking the weight of the body on the fingers as the foot scrabbled for a higher toehold—and then starting the process over again.
But, as soon as the blocks got smaller and the cracks narrower, the trouble began. Rain was gusting across the valley now in great clouds, plastering Solo's hair to his face, weighing down his clothing, and rendering slippery the polished surfaces of the stone. It was also turning the crumbs of old mortar and eroded flakes of sandstone in the gaps into a greasy paste in which fingers and toes skidded more easily than grasped. Under such circumstances climbing without a rope up an almost vertical face was a nightmare.
Every foot became a test of willpower, coaxing the screaming muscles and overtaxed sinews to hang on for just that second longer while the questing foot found a temporary resting-place that would take the strain, the groping fingers a crevice that wouldn't flake away the moment any weight was put on it.
When Solo was seventy-five or eighty feet from the ground, the face he was climbing began to curve outward over his head. He had reached the curvature of the arch. Now he would have to move around to the outside of the pillar.
Gritting his teeth, he started to edge around the corner. For a moment he was splayed out, like a butterfly on a pin, with his right hand and foot on the inner face of the pillar and his left on the outer. The problem now was to swing the right hand and foot outward and around the edge without losing purchase with the left while doing it!
Solo knew better than to look down. Behind him was an eighty foot drop to certain death, a dizzying perspective of wet stone dropping away to the road and the stream far below. But he did look up. He had to.
There was more than forty feet of smooth, damp stonework to climb before he reached the parapet. His glance raked the whole wide expanse of the viaduct, and his eye was drawn by the clouds scudding across the sky. As they streamed out of sight behind the façade, it appeared that the clouds stood still and the bridge moved, leaned over toward him… falling toward him, forcing him back and back.
Abruptly the niche into which his left toe was wedged crumbled away and the foot shot into space. He plunged downward.
The shock of the fall tore his right hand and toe away from their holds around the corner, and for a breathtaking moment his body dropped to the full extent of his left arm and he hung giddily over the void supported only by the four fingers of that hand. The air was torn from his lungs in an agonized gasp. From below—seconds later, it seemed
—he heard clearly the patter of rubble on the Citroën's roof. Desperately he fought for purchase, pressing himself as close to the wet stone as he could to minimize the strain on those fingers... and at last his foot found a ledge, it held firm, and then his fingers groped for and found a crack, level and strong enough to hold him.
For the moment the panic was over! With laboring breath, he continued the climb.
The next crisis came when he was only ten feet from the top. The rain increased in volume, stinging his face. The wind plucked at his drenched trousers. And suddenly he could go no further. Shrieking muscles refused to drag his weight up against the pull of gravity any more. Spread eagled between heaven and earth, he dropped his face to the cold stone. His breath sobbed hoarsely in the extremity of his exhaustion. He would have to use the pitons and risk the attention the noise of the hammering would draw.
As he moved one hand warily toward his pocket he heard from somewhere above a curious rhythmic squeaking. Turning his head slowly, he squinted along the line of the bridge toward the abandoned permanent way leading to it.