He fired again. The spent cartridge fell and bounced off my chest.
I moved my hand slowly to my side and drew the Webley from its holster. Then, in one movement, I raised my arm and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. There wasn't even a click. The trigger seemed to have jammed.
The man looked down. He said something.
Bloody saliva splashed on my face.
He swung the gun down and pointed it at me.
I pulled the trigger again, and this time the Webley fired.
His head jolted back, but then he fell forward, collapsing on top of me.
I cried out and pushed him off. His body rolled away. I scrabbled back across the ground. Then I climbed shakily to my feet, my head still numb from the explosions. I looked around for Forbes, but he wasn't there, so I went into the building by myself.
At first, there was too much smoke to see. Then I made out scraps of paper burning on the floor. As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I could discern a staircase leading up the right-hand wall of the room. At the bottom of these
stairs lay a man. He was bald, with a thick roll of skin between the top of his neck and the base of his skull. He lay facedown against the bottom step. He wore no helmet or tunic, only a dirty gray shirt tucked into his trousers. A pair of braces stretched across his shoulders.
I pointed the gun at him, but he didn't move.
Outside, the gunfire had slackened.
Sugden was shouting, but I couldn't tell what he was saying.
Over the sound of his yelling, I heard a noise in the next room. Pressing my ear to the wall, I made out a muffled voice on the other side.
In a quiet, urgent tone, the man was repeating the same words over and over.
Standing back, I broke open the Webley, tipped out the empty cases, and reloaded the cylinder as best I could with my shaking fingers. Then I snapped the Webley shut, cocked the hammer, and fired into the wall at the place where I'd heard the voice. The darkness blinked with fire, and in the confines of the room, the noise was deafening. I kept firing until the cylinder clicked empty. Then I dashed through the doorway, down a short corridor, and into the room where I'd heard the voice. The door had been blown off its hinges by one of the earlier explosions. I couldn't see anything in there. Cordite smoke whirled around me.
Groping in my pocket, I took out my torch and turned it on.
Through the burning gray mist, I saw the heavy beams which supported the roof. In the middle stood a table, the legs of which were made of sawn-off branches with the bark still attached. On the table lay pieces of equipmentâa gas-mask canister, canteens and a bread bag, binoculars.
As I played the beam around, hunting for the man whose
voice I'd heard, the light caught on bunks with chicken-wire netting instead of mattresses.
The smell of gunpowder clogged my lungs. I could taste it in my spit, like a coin in my mouth.
When the torch beam reached the corner of the room, I noticed a man sitting at a field desk, half hidden in the smoke as if behind a veil of dirty lace. Set up on a desk in front of him was a radio in a leather case. Wires snaked up from the radio, through the wall, and out of the customs house. Pale gouges, like splashes of paint, showed where my bullets had come through the wall.
The man was leaning forward, facing away from me. From the silver on his shoulder boards, I could tell he was an officer. He breathed heavily, still holding the black telephone receiver and whispering the same words over and over. He did not seem to notice the light of the torch.
I took one step forward and my feet crunched on broken glass.
He straightened up as he heard the noise, but still without turning around.
I aimed the gun at him but realized I had forgotten to reload it.
Slowly, he set down the receiver and turned to face me, squinting into the light.
At first it looked exactly as if he were wearing a red shirt beneath his unbuttoned tunic, but then I saw that he had been wounded in his chest.
In his hand, he clutched a small pistol.
“Drop that,” I told him.
The man's pale eyes were shallow-set, his nose long and straight. He had a small, rounded chin. He spoke and his lips became flecked with blood.
I couldn't understand him. “Get up,” I said, and jerked the barrel of the Webley away from the desk, hoping he could not see that my gun was empty.
The officer gently touched his hand to his neck and noticed the blood that came away on his fingers. He sighed and clicked his teeth together.
Outside the gunfire had stopped.
“For Christ's sake,” I told him. “Getâ” But I never finished the sentence.
The officer turned the pistol in his hand, his thumb inside the trigger guard, as if he meant to hand it to me. But instead of doing that, he set the barrel of the pistol against his forehead and pulled the trigger. His body jumped back in the chair, which fell against the wall but did not tip over. The man's feet dangled off the floor and his hands fell to his sides. His eyes were closed. The pistol dropped. Smoke slithered from the hole in his head. Behind him, blood ran down the wall.
I kept the Webley pointed at him for a long time, before finally lowering it.
My heart was beating too fast.
Sugden called my name.
I stumbled down the corridor and out into the night. The rain had stopped. Stars clustered in the sky.
Sugden called again.
“I'm here!” I croaked.
Wind moaned around the angles of the roof. The sound was like voices whispering all around me.
“Forbes is hurt!” shouted Sugden. “I can't find the medical kit!” His voice was shrill with panic.
I ran towards the sound of his voice, shining the torch in front of me.
Sugden was down in the trench, hunched over Forbes.
I jumped down beside them.
“I can't see enough to know where he is hit,” Sugden shouted.
It was only now that I realized the trench was lined with concrete. It appeared to be some kind of drainage ditch for channeling runoff water from the lake past the customs house and down the steep slope on the other side.
“Let me take a look,” I said.
When Sugden moved aside, the first thing I saw were Forbes's open eyes. The pupils were not dilated, but he continued to breathe in heavy and uneven gasps.
Moving the torch beam down the length of his body, I realized he has been shot in the stomach, as well as in the hip.
Past where he lay were two dead Germans, their bodies twisted against the side of the drainage ditch.
We cut open Forbes's clothing and discovered that both wounds had been caused by the same bullet, which had gone into his hip and exited out of his stomach.
Even with my limited medical training I knew he was not going to make it. I didn't say this to Sugden, but instead climbed out of the trench and ran back to find my pack, in which I'd stored the kit. Beyond the wire, I could make out the marks our crawling bodies had made when we'd come in.
When I got back, the medical kit clutched in my hand, I found Sugden slapping Forbes over and over on the cheek. “Wake up, wake up,” he chanted under his breath.
Setting the green metal box on the ground, I opened it and looked at the neat little bundles of bandages, the white tape, and the sulfa powder. Then I set aside the angled scissors and the little morphine syrettes.
Looking at Forbes's wounds, I found myself already thinking past his death. The fact was that the mission had failed.
Sugden and I could not carry all the components for the beacon by ourselves. It would take two trips up the mountain, possibly three, and if that officer's radio was working, it would not be long before reinforcements arrived from down in the valley. We had to destroy the equipment and get out of here while we still could. The only question in my mind was whether to bring Forbes with us, on the slim chance that he might survive the journey, or to leave him here, hoping that the Germans might be able to save him, or to overdose him with morphine and put an end to his suffering as quickly as possible.
I was stunned by the coldness of my calculations. In the past, I'd been proud of my ability to think clearly, even in the most difficult situations we had faced together in the mountains. But this time, even though I knew it was more important than ever to think and act quickly, inside I felt as lifeless as the bodies of the dead men sprawled beside me in this trench.
Sugden sat back and put his face in his hands. “We should have turned back,” he sobbed.
“You listen to me,” I said, but my voice was so roughened by smoke that I barely recognized it. “If we had gone back down into the valley, the only thing we'd have run into would be half the bloody German army. Even if we'd given up trying to climb the mountain and pushed on to Switzerland, we'd still have had to come through here. That's why they chose this place to wait for us.”
“But why were they here at all?” he moaned.
“I don't know. What we have to think about now is getting out of here, before another patrol comes up from the valley.” I took Sugden by the arm and shook him. “Are you listening to me?”
I still didn't know if I was getting through to him.
“We'll take Forbes with us to Switzerland,” I told him, making my decision. “That's the best we can do for him. Our job now is to get back alive.”
Sugden lowered his hands to his knees. Dirt was smeared across his face. He nodded. My last words had brought him to his senses.
While Sugden did his best to dress the wound in Forbes's stomach, I went back into the customs house to find a stretcher. But there wasn't one. Instead, propped up against the side of the house, I found a wooden sled with a harness attached to it.
We gave Forbes a syrette of morphine, then loaded him onto the sled and wrapped him in gray blankets which we'd found on the beds in the customs house.
Behind the house we discovered a portable radio antenna, about six feet tall, standing on a collapsible tripod. The wires snaked back through a small hole drilled into the wall of the building. Only a few paces behind the customs house, the ground fell away steeply, patched with snow and boulders. A stone rolled off this place probably wouldn't have stopped until it reached the valley far below.
I unwrapped the pieces of the beacon and threw some of them as far out as I could into the lake. The rest I pitched off the steep slope. They clattered away down the mountain, shedding screws and wires and ringing against the rocks until they had vanished from sight
With two hours to go before dawn, we could hear the sound of trucks moving down in the valley. More soldiers had arrived, and we knew they would not wait for daylight before heading up the mountain.
As quickly as we could, Sugden and I headed out. Sugden carried a pack containing food and a tent, and I hauled the sled.
It was cold. Wind rumbled in the caverns of the glacier. Ice glowed blue in the light of the pale yellow moon.
Â
Â
“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” It was Stanley. He stood in front of me, a cigarette smoldering in his fingers.
“What?” I asked.
“You were talking to yourself.”
I shivered. I had no idea how much time had passed or what I had said. “This place,” I muttered. I did not need to say more.
“I thought as much,” he said, “with all these bullet cases lying around.”
I got up from where I had been sitting on the coffin and walked out into the road.
“William,” said Stanley.
I turned. “Yes?”
“I think it's time you told me everything, whether I want to hear it or not.”
There was something in the way he spoke, a kind of absoluteness in his voice, which made clear that this chance would never come again. Stanley was the only one who could share this burden with me, and if I did not share it now, I would carry it alone and for the rest of my life. I had carried the weight of it already longer than I could stand, and I could not bear it anymore.
I told him all that I could remember, from the first days of training at Achnacarry, from the first gunshots, which had killed Armstrong and Whistler, to the memory of Sugden and me, after the customs house disaster, hauling the sled towards Switzerland.
I went on to tell him how Sugden did not speak on that long walk along the ruined road that led towards the border. It was noon of the following day before we realized that Forbes was dead. As I sat beside him, seeing the life gone out of his eyes, I could not summon any grief. That emotion, and others like it, had been swallowed in the darkness inside me. Instead, all I could think about was that despite all the time we had spent together, I had never really known him. We buried Forbes under a cairn of stones almost within sight of the Swiss frontier, too tired to speak or to feel anything more than exhaustion. Then Sugden and I sat on his grave and ate our emergency rations in silence. From there, we could just make out the summit of Carton's Rock, rising from the distant plain of ice.