Italian raised both eyebrows. ‘You are thinking of a rescue?’ he asked.
‘If it is possible.’
Enzio blew a silent whistle with his lips. ‘The town is full of Germans now. Your broken bridge – well, they are like flies around shit. But maybe the town hall…I don’t know…’
‘Could you get us into the town to take a look?’ Farnham asked.
The Italian nodded. ‘Two of you, perhaps. Early in the morning, when there are many carts on the road.’
‘That would be wonderful. Now, I must tell the others what you have told me.’
Enzio nodded, turned away, and then turned back again. ‘And I have other news for you. Better news. Your armies have landed this morning on the coast south of Rome.’ He smiled. ‘You were expecting this, I suppose.’
‘It is why we came to blow the bridge, to make it harder for the Germans to reinforce their armies in the south.’
Enzio smiled again, and left.
Farnham turned to the others. Their grim faces told him they had guessed the gist, but he went through the conversation in detail. This was the SAS, not the regular army, and they needed to know everything he did before a decision could be taken on what to do next.
‘So what do you think, boss?’ McCaigh asked, once all the information had been shared.
Farnham chose his words carefully. ‘If there’s any chance of getting the two of them back without getting everyone – including them – killed, then I think we’ll have to give it a shot. And if that means blowing the boat…’
‘We can always steal a boat,’ Rafferty said with a sniff. Both he and Tobin seemed to be developing colds. ‘The Adriatic can’t be that wide.’
‘Yeah, but Yugoslavia’s on the other side,’ McCaigh said. ‘And I seem to remember a German invasion.’
‘So we sail south,’ Rafferty said. ‘We’re bound to hit Africa sooner or later.’
Farnham did a round of the faces. They all knew that staying where they were was risky, let alone taking a trip back into the lion’s den, but he could detect no real desire to cut and run. They’d rather head for the sea and home – who wouldn’t? – but they wouldn’t desert their mates without a damn good reason.
He felt proud of them. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘I’ll give Enzio the good news.’
The cart left the following morning as dawn was breaking, Farnham and Rafferty sharing the back with seven villagers, while Enzio, Giancarlo and a woman called Carmela sat in the front. Most of their fellow passengers seemed friendly, but Farnham couldn’t help noticing the resentment in a few of the eyes. In their place, he thought, he might well have felt the same.
The rain and clouds had vanished overnight, giving the two Englishmen their first real view of the village and surrounding countryside. The twenty or so dwellings of San Giuseppe were perched high on a hillside, above the fields which its inhabitants worked, staring out across the mile-wide valley at a similar-sized village on the opposite slope. About six hundred feet below them the Chienti, exhausted after its precipitous descent from the mountains, was beginning its lazy meander to the sea.
Enzio had explained that by taking a roundabout route they could avoid the usual checkpoint at the eastern approach to the town, and it was almost two hours before the horses toiled across the brow of a bare hill and San Severino came into view below them. The descending road wound through a series of hairpin bends, and it was above the last of these, by the side of an apparently endless orchard, that Enzio pulled the animals to a halt and gave Farnham the bad news. ‘There’s a checkpoint ahead,’ he said.
Looking over the Italian’s shoulder, the SAS man could see the posse of helmeted guards and their motorcycles astride a small bridge at the southern entrance to the town.
‘You’ll have to wait for us here,’ Enzio said. ‘There’s plenty of cover,’ he added, indicating the orchard.
Farnham agreed reluctantly. There was no point in denying that neither he nor Rafferty looked like a local.
They climbed down and headed for the shelter of the trees as the horses resumed their downhill plod.
‘We could try circling round,’ Rafferty suggested, more in hope than expectation.
‘We could,’ Farnham agreed, ‘but we wouldn’t know where to look once we were in. How about up there?’ he said, indicating a shelf of rock some fifty yards above them which looked out across both the orchard and the town.
They reached it just as their cart was drawing up at the checkpoint below. Enzio seemed to be talking to the German for a long time, and for a fleeting moment Farnham imagined the Italian suddenly pointing up the hillside to where they lay, but then the cart moved on into the town and he felt momentarily ashamed of his lack of trust.
Taking out his binoculars, he began to study the town below. Not surprisingly, his first point of call was the bridge they had brought down, and he was pleased to see that nothing much in the way of repair work seemed to have been done since their departure. The bridge sat in the rushing water, and there was as yet no sign of a crane to lift it out. The train which had come so fortuitously between them and the German troops was still standing where they’d left it, and on the track beyond it a later arrival could just be made out, stretching away into the distance.
Flies on shit, Enzio had said, and there was certainly no shortage of Germans in evidence. Troop carriers surrounded the station like a wagon train from a Western, two tanks were parked like book-ends either side of the road bridge over the river and several infantry patrols were visible on the town’s already busy streets. The chances of rescuing Corrigan and Imrie seemed poised somewhere between slim and zero.
He trained the binoculars on the elliptical square he’d noticed two nights before, wondering if this was where the town hall would be. Perhaps it was the sunshine, but the square looked even more beautiful from this angle. The strange shape was pretty enough in its own right, but the colonnaded buildings which lined the perimeter would have looked lovely anywhere.
Farnham was just wondering why the square was so empty when a group of men suddenly walked into view. All but two were helmeted, and it didn’t take Farnham many seconds to realize that the odd men out were Corrigan and Imrie. He couldn’t actually see their faces, but Imrie’s blond hair was a give-away. And in any case, who else could they be? The closest Allied op to Jacaranda was more than a hundred miles to the north.
‘What is it?’ Rafferty asked, sensing the other man’s excitement.
‘Corrigan and Imrie. In the square, but they’re out of sight now.’
‘Did they look OK?’
‘They were walking all right,’ Farnham said. He hoped Enzio would be able to find out where they’d been taken, and that it would be somewhere more accessible than the town hall of a town swarming with Germans. ‘I didn’t get…’
The volley of shots cut him off. A swarm of birds rose squawking into the air above the distant square and the rippling echo of gunfire seemed to bounce from one side of the valley to the other.
‘Oh
