Horizon
Authors: Helen Macinnes
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Espionage, #Suspense, #War & Military
ALSO BY HELEN MacINNES
Pray for a Brave Heart
Above Suspicion
Assignment in Brittany
North From Rome
Decision at Delphi
The Venetian Affair
The Salzburg Connection
Message From Málaga
While We Still Live
The Double Image
Neither Five Nor Three
Snare of the Hunter
Agent in Place
Horizon
Print edition ISBN: 9781781163276
E-book edition ISBN: 9781781164341
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: December 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
© 1945, 2012 by the Estate of Helen MacInnes. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
What did you think of this book?
We love to hear from our readers. Please email us at:
[email protected]
, or write to us at the above address.To receive advance information, news, competitions, and exclusive offers online, please sign up for the Titan newsletter on our website.
For my Brother Ian
We are but warriors for the working-day;
Our gayness and our guilt are all besmirch’d
With rainy marching in the painful field;
There’s not a piece of feather in our host...
And time hath worn us into slovenry:
But, by the mass, our hearts are in the trim.
KING HENRY THE FIFTH
1
When you rested on one elbow the third strand of wire cut across the mountain-tops. When you sat up and stared at the grey faces of the precipices, irregular and massive against the high blue sky, it was the top strand of wire which now spoiled their line. However you looked you were always forced to remember you were caught, caged like an animal. The only way to see the mountains and enjoy them was to walk right up to the ten-foot wall of barbed wire and look between two of its strands. Even then, although you weren’t actually looking at the barbs, you could feel them, twisted and jagged, trying to draw your eyes away from the mountain peaks. And then a sentry would yell some fine Italian curses at you, and if you didn’t move quickly enough out of the twenty-foot zone behind the wire a bullet would whistle towards you. It depended on the Italian’s temper whether it whistled high above or unpleasantly near your shoulder.
Peter Lennox’s set face—grim, hard, expressionless—turned away from the view of mountains. He felt his tense body might give his thoughts away; he leaned back on his elbow again. His fingers touched a solitary tuft of grass-blades, pitifully small and yet growing in spite of the heavy boots which paced over this ground. You have a view, Lennox was thinking, but you cannot enjoy it. You’ve fresh air, coming down from the freedom of the mountains, but all you can smell is the tannery which lies between them and you. The smell seemed always ripest at this late afternoon hour, just at the time when the prisoners were exercised. Perhaps that was why this period was chosen for their daily forty minutes of fresh air. (As a prisoner you had come to believe that anyway, whether it were true or not: it just fitted in naturally with all the pettiness of malicious restrictions and unnecessary domination which had become the background to your life.) Lennox began counting the short blades of grass... Nine. One more than yesterday. He began remembering how it felt to walk over a whole stretch of soft, fine grass. Hundreds and hundreds of blades—thousands, millions, of blades of grass. And here he could touch nine. He began admiring their defiance and their determination. And somehow his confidence—which had seemed to desert him this morning—began to return.
He turned his head carefully to look at the walls of the prison behind him. You could tell from their appearance that they were thick and clammy, enclosing small dank rooms behind the boarded-up windows. Once the place had been called a castle—it was set proudly enough on the mountainside above the valley. Then it had become a nunnery, with its upper rooms walled into small cells. Later still it had become a
hospital for the poor and the despairing. It had been a natural choice for housing prisoners of war, where men who had tried unsuccessful escapes from other camps could be taught that hope was abandoned by all those who entered here.
Dispassionately Lennox studied the walls; the scabby plaster, once white and now weathered into green and brown streaks; the eternally shuttered windows. Only the windows in the left wing of the castle were not boarded up. That was where the Italian Commandant and his staff had their quarters. They, too, suffered from the perpetually sweating walls. But at least they had heating when they needed it, and furniture and rugs and other aids to comfort. Lennox smiled grimly as he wondered where the Commandant’s friends were this afternoon. The windows were empty: no one there to stare down at the men below as at some monstrous wild animals in a zoo. The Adjutant’s windows were empty, too. No girls laughing up there today. No gramophone records being played. Even the guard-room windows were silent, staring blindly at the mountains rising on the other side of the valley.
Lennox shifted his weight to his other elbow. Something’s wrong, he thought, something’s wrong with the Italians. It seemed as if the other prisoners felt that too, for they were enjoying their forty minutes of fresh air with a good deal more zest and noise than usual. The stretch of grass outside the barbed wire was empty of the customary spectators. Generally some civilians from the town would choose this time of day for their late afternoon stroll past the camp. There, on the wide slope of grass at the prescribed (and safe) distance from the barbed wire, some would stand, some would stare, and some would laugh. “Eighth Army!” was the usual gibe, spat out with
a good deal of venom as an arm was raised to point—in the silly way in which a mocking child points—at the ragged men crowded into the meagre exercise ground.
But today there was no one there, no one except scattered sentries. And the prisoners—at least, those who were fit enough—were enjoying themselves. Some thirty of them had gathered round the “goal-post”—the solitary tree which never blossomed, but in some strange way still stood erect in a patch of bald earth—and were playing a game of mock football. There wasn’t enough room for a proper game: the men had to content themselves with taking odd shots at the goal. The ball was a wad of old newspapers tied into shape with knotted string. (Last week the leather ball which the Red Cross provided had been confiscated, after it had accidentally smashed the Adjutant’s bedroom window, scattering his squealing guests with the broken pane.) The men had slipped off their tunics and were playing either in shirt-sleeves or vests. The deep bite of the North African sun was still on their skin. Their months of captivity, of work in the near by tannery, of fresh air and exercise measured by minutes in the late afternoon, had only bleached the varieties of brick-red and walnut-brown into a sickly tan. Lennox looked down at his hand, with its bones and sinews now so prominent. A most sickly and unbecoming tan, he decided. His wound didn’t improve the general appearance: it had healed in an angry white gash across the back of his hand. He began flexing his muscles, slowly and carefully. The wound had healed, but every month the hand seemed tighter. It might be merely worry or imagination which tightened it. Once he got out of here the hand would probably be strong once more.
About a hundred other men, less energetic than the players, lounged on the hard patch of earth. They were content to be spectators, content to catch the last rays of autumn sunshine before they were herded behind the thick walls for the long night. Besides, dysentery doesn’t encourage a man to chase after a football, or to plod round and round a meagre rectangle of restricted space as a few of the more determinedly hearty were now doing.
From the scrambling group of players there was a shout, “To me, lad, to me!” That was the sergeant-major, square-set, broad-voiced, and as Yorkshire as his vowels. He was waiting impatiently for a pass from Miller, the New Zealander. And Miller, swerving aside from two of the walkers who doggedly kept their even pace in spite of footballers and bodies strewn over the ground, obliged. The sergeant-major swung into position, and missed the goal by a foot. There was a laugh, and a mock cheer.
Miller had dropped out of the game. He was limping slightly, as if his wound was troubling him again. He picked up his shapeless jersey, wiped his brow with it, and pulled it over his cropped fair hair. He was walking slowly, at a tangent, stopping here and there to speak a word or reply to a question. Gradually he drew near the waiting Lennox. The sentries guarding the double wall of barbed wire would have thought there was only chance in the meeting of the two men. Lennox’s tight mouth relaxed as he glanced over his shoulder once more and saw that the Commandant’s and Adjutant’s windows were still quite lifeless. He felt in his pocket for a cigarette, and expertly halved it.
“Thanks,” Miller said. “I’ve a match.” He bent down to
light Lennox’s half. “Mountain-gazing as usual, I see.” Lennox half-smiled as he pulled steadily at the mutilated cigarette. His grey eyes flickered over the New Zealander’s face and then returned to the wire. The sentries were still bored. The bell, which would end this reprieve in the open air, would not ring for another six minutes. It looked as if Miller and he could talk before they were shut away into their separate sections of the prison. Miller was pretending to watch the game of football. They were two men drawn together by a cigarette and a match, with no other interest at the moment except the game and a row of mountains. They seemed to be as bored as their guards.
The New Zealander was speaking, quietly, lips scarcely moving, head unturned. “Johann has come through.” Lennox’s lips tightened on his quickly burning cigarette. “No,” he said at last.
“Yes. Told you he was all right.”
“The buttons?”
“Complete set. German infantry, as you wanted.”
When Lennox didn’t answer, Miller said quickly, “Johann’s all right. I’ve told you. He’s Austrian. Tyrolese. Hates the Eyties. Hates the Germans, who abandoned him and his people to Mussolini.”
“You are taking a steep chance,” Lennox said. Seven months of planning, of alarms and subterfuge. Seven months of tedious preparation, of gathering a disguise together. Seven months of giving up most of his precious food-packages to pay the more bribable guards, so that he could secure a piece of string or sewing thread or a small tube of glue. Seven months of worry and strain, of perpetual threat of discovery, of working out a map, of learning more German and enough Italian. And now
the buttons, which would give the finishing touch to his old army coat, bleached and dyed so secretly and painstakingly, had materialised. They came too easily. After so much trouble and worry they came much too easily. He stared at the wire, and it seemed to tighten round his throat.