Farnham thought it a good place to dig in for the rest of the night and following day. He suggested as much to Morgan, who overrode his instinctive desire to push on and reluctantly agreed.
By this time it was almost two in the morning, and much of the next hour was spent in excavating two cross-shaped hides. Both were about two feet deep, with an arm for each of the four occupants and a central well for their equipment. The men’s groundsheets, supported by cut branches and covered in foliage, offered both concealment and shelter from the rain. ‘We might be soaked to the skin, but we’re not going to get any wetter,’ Morrie Beckwith announced hopefully.
‘Someone shoot the bugger,’ came a voice from the other hide.
For the next sixteen hours six of the eight men only left their scrapes to relieve themselves in the surrounding trees. It was still raining when dawn came, though by this time the heavy downpour had subsided into a drifting mist. Visibility didn’t improve much until around noon, when the mist suddenly grew thinner and wafted away, revealing brightening clouds in the branches above. These too soon broke apart, revealing not only the sun but an arc of mostly invisible rainbow in the eastern sky.
‘That’s a good omen,’ Corrigan decided.
‘Just about cancels out your diving into a rock with the radio,’ Beckwith told him brutally.
The inhabitants of the other hide were still laughing when Morgan appeared in Farnham’s observation slit. ‘I’m going back up the hill to take a recce,’ he announced. ‘Get a decent fix on where we are. And Rafferty might as well come with me. I’ve heard he can read a map.’
Rafferty gave his companions an ‘aren’t I the lucky one’ grin and crawled out of the hide to join the captain. They walked cautiously up through the still-dripping trees, whose branches seemed full of birds eager to make up for lost warbling time, and stood watching for a few moments on the uppermost edge of the wood before starting up the slope which they had descended the previous night. It was just as bare by daylight – there were no signs of human use, no buildings in the distance, no grazing animals, just rocks and rough mountain grass.
A couple of hundred yards up the slope there was more to see. Looking south, they could see the snowcapped peaks of the Monti Sibillini shining like a row of blazing torches in the afternoon sun; looking east, their eyes could follow the parallel valleys of the rivers Potenza and Chienti to the far-distant sea. About five miles from where they stood a dark line seemed to snake across the hills between the two valleys, and Morgan’s binoculars confirmed that this was the railway they’d been sent to cripple.
San Severino was still hidden from view, but looking out across the wooded cleft in which they were camped the two men could see the land fall away into a much deeper and broader valley. The town was down there somewhere, and training his binoculars in its likely direction Morgan thought he could make out several diaphanous trails of rising smoke against the wall of hills beyond.
‘Look,’ Rafferty said suddenly, and following his arm Morgan could see another trail of smoke, this one moving towards him on the distant railway. Before the train vanished from view in the valley below them, he had counted twenty-three flat wagons, each carrying a Wehrmacht tank. He was probably only imagining it, but several minutes later he seemed to hear the train rattling across the bridge they had come to destroy.
Darkness fell soon after five, but there was another seven hours of boredom to be endured before the time came to leave the security of the hides. By then the clouds had returned and the temperature had plummeted, giving the damp air a distinctly raw edge, but at least it hadn’t started to rain again. The eight men had changed into their only other set of undergarments, and the chances of getting the first set dry seemed remote. ‘Another night like last night and we’ll all come down with fucking pneumonia,’ Trevor Corrigan observed as he disentangled a groundsheet from the wet foliage which had been laid across it.
‘You know the flu epidemic after the last war killed more people than the war did?’ Roger Imrie offered.
‘A fountain of knowledge,’ McCaigh said sardonically.
‘A fountain of crap,’ Beckwith snorted.
‘It’s true,’ Imrie protested, as if they cared.
‘So instead of dropping bombs on the Germans perhaps we should just parachute in people with runny noses,’ McCaigh offered.
‘OK, OK,’ Morgan said, cutting through the laughter. ‘Let’s have a bit of hush. We might not be the only people in Italy.’
‘I bet we’re the only people this wet,’ Corrigan said under his breath.
‘You are,’ Beckwith muttered back.
They set off on their night march, Morgan in the lead, Beckwith close behind him. It was almost as dark as it had been the previous night, but the CO had spent a considerable part of the day trying to memorize the map, and intended using his torch only as a last resort.
They had walked about three-quarters of a mile down the valley when it became apparent that the ground beneath their feet was now a fairly well-beaten path. A little further and they could see the gaunt silhouettes of buildings on the slope above them. ‘Stigliano,’ Morgan murmured to himself, just as the sound of a dog barking cut through the silence. His mental map confirmed, Morgan turned away from the village, heading up the slope to his right. The dog continued to bark, and eventually a human voice responded with what was presumably a string of Italian curses.
The team reached the top of the ridge and started down the other side. Another small village – Serripola on Morgan’s map – became dimly visible, clinging precariously to the other side of the valley. They bypassed it by following the stream which tumbled along the bottom, then clambered up what they hoped was the last ridge before San Severino.
It was. The moon was now making an effort to shine through the clouds, and the roofs of the town below glowed in the pale light. It wasn’t a big town, but Farnham guessed it would be a pretty one in daylight. It had apparently been founded about fifteen hundred years earlier by Romans on the run from Barbarians, and was said to have a lovely elliptical square and some nice churches. After the war, Farnham told himself. For now it was just a lot of buildings next door to a bridge.
The latter was still hidden from view by the curve of the ridge, but a faint yellow glow seemed to be emanating from its presumed position, suggesting a degree of illumination which reflected the enemy’s understanding of its strategic importance. The thought crossed Farnham’s mind that this was not going to be as easy as Morgan seemed to think.
‘I think another recce’s in order,’ Morgan said softly, breaking Farnham’s reverie. ‘We need to find a spot for an OP with a decent view of the bridge,’ he continued, ‘and there’s no sense in all of us stumbling around in the dark. I’ll take Rafferty.’
Farnham nodded, his eyes still on the town below. It looked so peaceful.
It took Morgan and Rafferty twenty minutes to reach their destination, but the view was worth the trip. From the edge of the trees which covered the end of the snub-nosed ridge the land fell steeply away to the railway, which itself followed a narrow shelf between cliff and river. To their right, across the rushing waters of the Potenza, the town slept, cloaked in grey. About two hundred yards to their left, the single track swept across the river on a simple underslung truss bridge. It was about seventy-five feet long, and extremely well lit by searchlights at either end. At the far end, which alone seemed to offer easy access, a railwaymen’s hut had been turned into a guardhouse. There was a light in the window, and even
