Authors: Dennis Wheatley
Yet her final bid to outwit the Great Ram was doomed to failure. He had followed her wild flight at only walking pace, but as soon as he reached the rock platform his intuition told him where she was. She had not been crouching beneath the overhang for much more than a minute when she heard him call to her from above to come out.
She tried to crouch further back against the rock, but it was no good. Despite her efforts to remain where she was
she found herself standing up and walking forward. The ledge was about ten feet wide. When she had covered half the distance he ordered her to stop, turn round and look up at him. Unresisting now, she did as she was bid.
Tall, dark, saturnine, he stood right on the edge of the big platform looking down at her, his thin mouth curved in a smile. To her amazement his expression was no longer harsh or cynical, but, for the first time she had seen it on his face, a kindly one. And when he spoke his voice was gentle.
‘Circe, sometime neophyte of the Ram, I did you an injustice. Although it was impossible for you to defeat me, you have proved a more worthy opponent than I supposed any woman could. It is a tragedy that you should have chosen to adhere to the Christian heresy; otherwise you might have shared with me in ten minutes’ time the triumph for which I have worked so long. Had we met earlier I would have converted you to the true faith, and done you the honour to allow you to serve me both as a woman and a friend. As it is, in recognition of your courage, I will accord you mercy. Instead of inflicting my curse upon you, or sending my dark inner self to consume you in agony, as I did with the stupid giant you made your tool, I decree for you a swift and painless death. Turn about now and walk forward to the end decreed for you.’
Before Mary had grasped the full significance of his words, she found that she had turned round. An intangible but irresistible force pressed upon her back. She strove to keep her legs rigid and her feet planted firmly, but the pressure against her shoulders increased, bending her forward. To keep her balance she was compelled to put out first one foot and then the other. Two more steps and she was on the edge of the ledge. Immediately below her was a nearly sheer drop of a thousand feet.
In front of her the snow-capped peaks of the range on the other side of the valley glistened in the sunshine. Owing to the clear, rarefied atmosphere they looked so near that she could almost have stepped across to them, but actually they were miles away. Above them puffs of white cloud hung
unmoving in a blue summer sky. Her eyes dropped to the green valley, with its toy tanks and tiny figures on the far side of the narrow, rushing stream. Then, much nearer, there were the teams of climbers. They had all halted and some men among them had rifles to their shoulders. One flashed. It was only then her brain registered the fact that they had been firing for some minutes.
Suddenly she realised that they were firing at the Great Ram. A final hope stirred in her. If he were hit she would be reprieved from death. Frantically now she dug her heels into the hard snow and used every ounce of strength she had to throw herself backward. But her effort was useless. All she could achieve was to remain upright And deep down in herself she knew that the Great Ram would not be hit. The magic aura with which he could surround himself would deflect the bullets.
Still she battled to maintain her balance, pitting her will against his. But his was the stronger. Her head bowed under the pressure so that she was staring down into the abyss. Then, like an officer giving the order to a firing squad to shoot, she heard him call down to her the one word, ‘Jump.’
She flexed her knees, swayed sideways, threw up her arms, and with a wild cry fell outward into space.
. . . . .
Immediately after receiving the radio message about Lothar’s broadcast Verney asked the Lieutenant leading his party to circulate to all the other climbing teams an urgent signal. So far the troops had been told only that they were on an emergency operation and must get up to the cave for the purpose of arresting with the least possible delay anyone they found in it. Now they were told that in the cave there was a madman who had stolen an H-bomb, and that he planned to let it off at midday. They were then called on to take risks if necessary and make an all-out effort to reach the cave in time. Verney also took it on himself to promise quadruple pensions for the dependants of men who might be injured or killed in the attempt, and
rich rewards and honours for the first three teams to reach the cave. They were told, too, that although other teams were on the way to the far entrance of the cave, these had had to make a wide detour before starting their climb, so there was no chance of their reaching the goal first. In consequence, success or failure depended on teams that had set out on the direct route up from the wrecked engine-house.
There was no more that he could do; yet within the next few minutes it was apparent that the message had galvanised the troops into considerably swifter progress, and his own party resumed the climb at a faster pace.
As the officer or N.C.O. leading each party carried a walkie-talkie set the Sergeant with Barney’s team had received the radio message relayed from Berne at the same time as his Lieutenant. The moment Barney heard of it he too realised that only a superhuman effort could enable them to reach the cave before midday, and without waiting for C.B.’s message he urged his party to greater speed.
For the amateurs the pace on the easier stretches became grinding; yet the harder ones caused them more distress from their very slowness on them, and the time it took to cut steps in the ice or plough through patches of soft snow. Many times they slipped and would, perhaps, have fallen to their deaths had it not been for the strong surefooted Alpine troops to whom they were roped before and behind.
At times Barney almost despaired of reaching the cave at all. Every hundred feet or so his party found itself confronted with a great mass of overhanging rock, round which a way had to be worked, or a narrow, almost vertical chimney that had to be climbed as the only means of continuing the ascent. In one case they had to cross a glacier and, in another, edge their way along thirty feet of ledge that was In no place more than eighteen inches wide. Not daring to look down, he kept his eyes fixed on the man in front of him, endeavouring to follow his footsteps exactly, but a dozen times his heart was in his mouth and he feared that at any moment he would fall headlong over the precipice.
As they made their way upwards he lost all sense of time until, on coming out from beneath an overhang, he caught sight of the opening of the cave about three hundred feet above him. A quick glance at his watch showed that it was half past eleven. They had, he knew, performed marvels in the past hour, but to scale that last three hundred feet of snow and ice in less than the remaining thirty minutes seemed beyond even the greatest human endeavour.
For a further quarter of an hour, sweating and straining, they toiled on. Then he heard a shout. It came from a member of another party some way to the left of his. The shout was quickly answered by another from higher up. Looking upward, he saw that a woman had emerged from the cave. A moment later he recognised her as Mary. His relief at knowing her still to be alive was so great that, although he waved, for a moment he could not utter a sound. Tears started to his eyes and he was choking with emotion.
Within a few minutes all the men in the climbing teams who were in sight of the cave were staring up at her in wonder, as they saw her turn to the cable-railway platform then risk a fall to death by wriggling out over its edge and supporting herself only by a precarious hold on one of its girders.
As she slid to the ledge and picked herself up, Barney let his breath go in a gasp of relief. Finding his voice he urged his team to still greater efforts, but they had covered no more than a dozen paces when Lothar appeared on the upper platform. Verney and Barney both recognised him and almost simultaneously shouted:
‘There he is! Shoot him! Shoot! Shoot!’
Some of the troops were armed with Sten guns and others with pistols. Only a few carried rifles, but those who did swiftly unslung them and opened fire. None of their bullets appeared to score a hit and in the next two minutes all the climbers who could see the cave watched with horror as Mary’s tragedy was played out.
Verney, Otto and Barney alone among them fully understood what was taking place. But the others realised instinctively
that the tall, dark man on the upper ledge was ordering the woman on the lower to throw herself over the precipice.
Barney drew the pistol he had been lent and aimed it at Lothar, then lowered his arm. At that range even rifles were proving ineffective, and a pistol bullet might as easily have hit Mary as the man who was driving her to her death. He closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them again Mary had thrown herself sideways and was hurtling into the abyss.
. . . . .
The parties had started upward again. The rifles had ceased to crack. Lothar had disappeared unharmed into the cave. Barney was climbing now as an automaton. Grief and pain filled his mind to the exclusion of all other thoughts. Instinctively he continued to place his feet in the footsteps of the man ahead and to advance or halt as he was told.
That he should have been robbed of Mary at the eleventh hour caused him a sick misery the like of which he had never before known in all his life. During the past unbearably anxious days he had come to realise that she meant everything to him; that no other woman could ever compensate him for the loss. Almost he had resigned himself to it, believing it next to impossible that the Great Ram would allow her to live after she had thrown the crucifix in his face. Yet he had. Only a few minutes ago she had still been alive, and unharmed. Now she was dead, a broken twisted body grotesquely doubled across some spur of rock, or buried deep in snow, far down below.
The Sergeant rounded a shoulder of the mountain that brought the cable railway again into full view. Suddenly he gave a shout:
‘There she is! Blessed God, a miracle!’
The others clambered round the corner after him. He had come out on a humpy ledge of rock broad enough for all his team to stand on. Opposite to them and about ten feet away sagged one of the long swags of triple cable
along which the cage of the railway ran. Twenty feet lower down there stood one of the tall T-shaped steel pylons that supported the cables. At the base of the pylon, where snow had piled up, Mary was lying on her stomach clinging with one arm to the nearest steel strut.
Her sideways lurch as she fell had temorarily saved her. Instead of plunging to the depths she had shot forward beneath the railway terminus platform, hit one of its outer stanchions, checked, slid, bounced, rolled and finally brought up on the drift of snow that had accumulated against the first great pylon some eighty feet below the level of the cave.
‘Mary! Mary!’ Barney’s voice cracked as he shouted down to her. ‘Hang on! Can you hang on? Are you all right?’
She squirmed round and her feeble cry came back, ‘I’ve a broken arm. Ribs too I think. But go on up. Twelve o’clock! Twelve o’clock!’
Barney did not need to look at his watch. From the time that had elapsed since he had seen her fall he knew that it could now be only a few minutes to noon. To complete their climb in the tiny fraction of an hour that was left was beyond the bounds of possibility. And the other teams were no nearer to the cave then his.
The Great Ram had won. He would launch his accursed rocket and bring incalculable death and suffering on the world. But for some time at least the mountain areas of Switzerland would remain unaffected. And Mary was lying there still within a hair’s breadth of death. To save her was now the highest priority.
Turning to the Sergeant, Barney cried, ‘How can we get her up? What’s the drill?’
The Sergeant shook his head. ‘We can do nothing from here. We must first complete our climb to the cave. From there one of us can be lowered to get a rope round her.’
‘But that will take half an hour, longer perhaps,’ Barney burst out. ‘At any moment the slope of snow on which she’s lying may collapse. Anyhow, it’s freezing and one of her
arms is broken. She’ll never be able to hang on that long.’
‘There is no other way.’ The Sergeant pointed. ‘Look for yourself, Sir. We can get down to her only from above. Even if we threw her a rope and she could catch and make herself fast to it, that would not help. If the snow gives or she lets go her hold on the pylon, she would swing out and be dashed to death against the cliff face below us.’
‘There is a way,’ Barney retorted. ‘Quick, give me an extra rope, and lengthen the one attached to me. I’m going to jump to the cable, shin along it to the pylon, and go down to her.’
A chorus of protest arose from the five soldiers. They declared that he was mad - that it would be suicide - that the jump was too far for him to catch the cable – that if he missed it the rope could not save him as he, in that case, would be dashed to death as he swung violently against the rock face.
His Irish temper flaming at their opposition, he shouted them down, then bullied them into reluctantly equipping him with ropes in the way he had demanded. Eyeing him with mixed amazement, admiration and distress, they stood back to give him the best run that the ledge afforded. At that moment a single shot rang out, but none of them heeded it. Drawing a deep breath, he took his run and launched himself across the gaping chasm.
He hit the nearest cable with his body. His hands were held open and stretched high above his head. The cable gave under the impact. As it snapped back like a twanged bowstring his body doubled across it, his head went down and he was within an ace of somersaulting over it to his death. But he managed to grab it with his gloved hands and, next moment, was hanging by them from it.
The Sergeant and his men let out a spontaneous cheer, then watched spellbound as he made his way foot by foot along the now sagging cable, expecting every moment that the weight of his body would prove too much for his arms, and that he would drop like a stone into the depths above which he was swinging.