please, thought Miller politely. For forty feet down, things were happening. On the wind from the valley came the sharp whiff of exhaust. He looked up.
The cold, slushy rain battered his face. What he could see of the cliff was black and shiny, the chimney a dark streak rising to the chockstone. He had seen Mallory in a chimney, his shoulders one side, his heels the other, gliding his way skyward with that weightless fluency of his. Miller’s limbs were too lanky for that, and his body wanted to plaster itself against the rock, not sit out over the emptiness as Mallory did, applying weight where it was needed, on fingers and toes -
Without a rope there was no way of getting to the chimney.
He pressed his face into the rock. The earthy smell of wet stone filled his nostrils. There was a lightening of the walls. Headlights down the valley.
He moved his hands again. The rock was rough, but there was nothing you could hold on to. Not unless you were a human fly like Mallory. Can’t go up, thought Miller. Can’t go down. So you just stand here, and hold on, and try not to follow that voice in your head that is telling you to shout and scream and keel gently out and back and plummet into space.
There were lights under his feet, and the gorge was churning with engines. A voice above him said, ‘Rope coming!’
The lorries were directly below him now. By the grind of their engines they were moving at a slow, walking pace. Searching. Nobody looks up. It is fine. Nobody ever looks up. Particularly not up sheer cliffs.
Not even Germans. No matter how thorough they may be.
You wish.
The rope nudged his face, cautiously. Miller said a quiet, polite thank you. Then he wound his hands into it and began to climb.
‘He’s coming up now,’ said Andrea, in his soft, imperturbable voice.
They were standing at the back of the ledge formed by the chockstone. Its edge was a horizon now, backlit by the glow of the lorries’ headlamps. Against the edge was something hard-edged and square. The radio.
‘Move that,’ said Mallory to Thierry.
Thierry started forward, shuffling, his great bulk moving against the lights. He was tired, thought Mallory. Tired and frightened, in a wet straw hat.
If he had been less tired himself, he might have prevented what happened next.
Thierry scooped up the radio and slung it over his shoulder. As he turned, his foot hit something that could have been a tuft of grass but was actually a rock. The rock went over the edge.
It whizzed past Dusty Miller’s head. At the base of the chimney it bounced, removing a fair-sized boulder. By the time it hit the valley floor it was a junior landslide. It landed with a roar fifteen feet to the right of the second truck in the convoy. Small stones pattered against the passenger door of the cab.
The truck stopped. A searchlight on the roof sent a white disc of light sliding across the black face of the cliff.
Miller was fifteen feet from the top, sweating, his breath coming in gasps. Clamp a hand on the rope. Pull up, shoving with feet. Clamp the other hand. There was shouting down below. Clamp the other hand. The hands like grey spiders against the cliff. They could have belonged to anyone, those hands, except for the pain, and the heavy thump of his heart.
And suddenly the other hand was not grey, but blazing, brilliant flesh-colour, and every fibre of the rope stood out in microscopic detail. And Miller was a moth, kicking on the pin of the searchlight.
A rifle cracked, then another. Chips of rock stung his face. His back crawled with the expectation of bullets. Ten feet to go. It might as well have been ten miles.
But there was a burst of machine-gun fire from above, and the searchlight went out, and suddenly the rope in his hands was alive, moving upwards like the rope of a ski tow. And he looked up and saw a huge shape, dim above the cliff, shoulders working. Andrea.
Andrea pulled him up those last ten feet as if he had weighed two hundred ounces instead of two hundred pounds. Miller hit the dirt in cover, rolled, and unslung his Schmeisser. Trouble, he thought. I am not a goddamn human fly, and as a result we are in it up to our necks, and sinking.
Beyond the boulder the cliffs were brilliant white. In their light he could see Andrea cocking a Bren.
‘I’ll cover you,’ said Andrea, in his unruffled craftsman’s voice. ‘Grenades?’
Miller and Mallory each took two grenades from their belt pouches and pulled the pins. Two, three,’ said Mallory. ‘Throw.’
There was a moment of silence, broken only by the metallic clatter of the grenades bouncing down the cliff, two left, two right. The world seemed to hold its breath. They would be setting up a mortar down there; taking up positions, radioing for reinforcements. Though, in a gorge like this, radio reception would be terrible -
Then the night flashed white, and four explosions rang as one, followed by a deeper explosion. Andrea crawled to the edge of the ledge. The lights had gone out. There was a new light, orange and black: a burning lorry. The firing lulled, then began again.
Mallory said, ‘Cover us for ten minutes. We’ll meet you at the top.’
Andrea’s head was a black silhouette against the orange flicker of the gasoline fire. The silhouette nodded. For a moment his huge shoulders showed against the sky, the Bren slung over the right. Then he faded into the rocks. The five other men and Lisette gathered up the packs. Jaime said, in a voice apparently unaffected by fear, ‘There is a path. A little higher.’
‘Miller,’ said Mallory. ‘We don’t want those trucks to get back. Or anywhere with anything like decent radio reception. Anything you can do?’
Miller shrugged. ‘I’ll give it the old college try,’ he said. His hands were already busy in the first of the brass-bound boxes. He felt for one of the five-pound bricks of plastic explosive, laid it on the ground, latched the first box and unlatched the second. The second box was thickly lined with felt. Unclipping a flashlight from the breast pocket of his smock, he used it to select a green time pencil: thirty seconds’ delay. Delicately he pressed the pencil into the primer and looked at the radium-bright numerals on his watch. Then he snapped the time pencil, yawned, and carefully lit a cigarette. By the time he had pocketed his Zippo, twenty-five seconds had elapsed. He took the brick in both hands and heaved it out and over the vehicles in the valley below.
Miller really hated heights. But nice, safe explosives were familiar territory. It felt great to be back.
For the space of a breath, there was darkness and silence in which the sound of Germanic shouting rose from the valley, mixed with the scrape of steel on rock as they set up the mortars. Then the night turned white, whiter than the searchlights, and Mallory was blasted against the cliff by a huge metallic clang that felt as if it would drive his eardrums together in the middle of his head.
‘Go,’ he said, the sound small and distant behind the ringing in his ears.
They began to file up the cliff: Mallory in the lead, then Jaime, Lisette, and Hugues, with Miller bringing up the rear. Andrea climbed the fifty-degree face behind the chockstone until he found another boulder. There he stopped, unfolded the Bren’s bipod, and rested it on the stone.
Fires
