eased the door a few inches to test whether it was moving freely. With the door only fractionally open the suddenly deepened roar from the engines was startling but nowhere nearly as dismaying as the snow-laden gust of icy wind that whistled into the fuselage. The parachutists exchanged carefully expressionless glances, glances correctly interpreted by the sergeant who closed the door and nodded again.
‘I agree, gentlemen. No night for man nor beast.’
Wing Commander Carpenter, his head once again poked through the side-screen, didn’t think so either. Five seconds’ exposure to that arctic wind and driving snow and your face was full of porcupine quills: fifteen seconds and the totally numbed skin conveyed no sensation at all, it was when you withdrew your head and waited for the exquisite pain of returning circulation that the fun really started: but this time Carpenter was determined not to withdraw his head until he had complete justification for doing so: and the only justification would be the sighting of the Weissspitze. Mechanically, industriously, he rubbed the chamois leather across his goggles, stared unblinkingly into the greyly swirling gloom and hoped that he saw the Weisspitze before the Weissspitze saw him.
Inside, Tremayne’s eyes continued on their rhythmic, unvarying pattern of movement: the compass, the altimeter, Carpenter, the compass, the altimeter, Carpenter. But now his gaze was resting fractionally longer on Carpenter each time, waiting for the sudden signal that would galvanize him into throwing the big Lancaster into a violent bank to port, the only avoiding action they could possibly take. Carpenter’s left hand was moving, but he wasn’t giving any signal, the fingers of his left hand were drumming gently on his knee. This, Tremayne suddenly and incredulously realized, was probably the highest state of excitement that Carpenter was capable of achieving.
Ten seconds passed. Five. And another five. Tremayne was conscious that, even in that ice-cold cabin, the sweat was pouring down his face. The urge to pull the bomber away to the left, to avoid the shattering, annihilating collision that could be only seconds away now, was almost overpowering. He was aware of a fear, a fear bordering on a reason-abdicating panic, such as he had never previously guessed at, let alone experienced. And then he became aware of something else. The drumming of Carpenter’s left fingers had abruptly ceased.
Carpenter had it now. It was more imagined than real, more guessed at than seen, but he had it now. Then gradually, almost imperceptibly, ahead and a little to the right of the direction of flight, he became aware of something more solidly tangible than wishful thinking beginning to materialize out of the nothingness. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t materializing any more, it was solidly, unmistakably there, the smooth, unbroken side of an almost vertically towering mountain soaring up at a dizzy 80° until it vanished in the grey darkness above. Carpenter withdrew his head, leaving the screen open this time, and pressed his head-switch.
‘Sergeant Johnson?’ The words came out stiffly, mechanically, not because of any crisis of emotion that the Wing Commander was passing through but because his entire face, lips included, was so frozen that he could no longer articulate properly.
‘Sir?’ Johnson’s voice over the intercom was disembodied, empty, but even the metallic impersonality of that single word could not disguise the bowtaut tension behind it.
Carpenter said: ‘I think Flying Officer Johnson a much nicer name.’
‘Sir?’
‘Relax. I have it. You can go back to sleep.’ He switched off, took a quick look through the side-screen, reached up and touched an overhead switch.
Above the starboard door in the fuselage, a red light came on. The sergeant air-gunner laid his hand on the door.
‘One minute, gentlemen.’ He jerked the door wide open, securing it on its standing latch, and a miniature blizzard howled into the belly of the Lancaster. ‘When the red light turns green—’
He left the sentence unfinished, partly because those few words were crystal clear in themselves, partly because he had to shout so loudly to make himself heard over the combined roar of wind and engines that any superfluity of words was only that much wasted effort.
No one else said anything, mainly because of the near impossibility of making oneself heard. In any event, the parachutists’ silently exchanged glances conveyed more eloquently than words the very obvious thought that was in the minds of all of them: if it was like that inside, what the hell was it like outside? At a gesture from the sergeant, they moved up in line to the open door, Sergeant Harrod in the lead. On his face was the expression of a Christian martyr meeting his first and last lion.
The Lancaster, like some great black pterodactyl from out of the primeval past, roared on through the driving snow alongside the smoothly precipitous side of the Weissspitze. That sheer wall of ice-encrusted rock seemed very close indeed. Tremayne was convinced that it was impossibly close. He stared through the still open screen by Carpenter’s head and would have sworn that the starboard wing-tip must be brushing the side of the mountain. Tremayne could still feel the sweat that bathed his face but his lips were as dry as ashes. He licked them, surreptitiously, so that Carpenter would not see him, but it didn’t do any good at all: as dry as ashes they remained.
Sergeant Harrod’s lips weren’t dry, but that was only because his face was taking the full brunt of the horizontally driving snowstorm that lashed along the bomber’s fuselage. Otherwise, he shared Tremayne’s sentiments and apprehensions to a very marked degree. He stood in the doorway, gripping the fuselage on each side to hold him in position against the gale of wind, his storm-lashed face showing no fear, just a peculiarly resigned expression. His eyes were turned to the left, looking forward with an almost hypnotized fixity at that point in space where it seemed that at any second now the star-board wing-tip must strike against the Weissspitze.
Inside the fuselage, the red lamp still burned. The sergeant air-gunner’s hand fell on Harrod’s shoulder in an encouraging gesture. It took Harrod all of three seconds to free himself from his thrall-like fixation with that starboard wing-tip and take a half step back inside. He reached up and firmly removed the sergeant’s hand.
‘Don’t shove, mate.’ He had to shout to make himself heard. ‘If I’m to commit suicide, let me do it in the old-fashioned way. By my own hand.’ He again took up position by the open door.
At the same instant Carpenter took a last quick look through the side-screen and made the gesture that Tremayne had been waiting for, been praying for, a slight turning motion of the left hand. Quickly Tremayne banked the big bomber, as quickly straightened up again.
Slowly, the mountain-side fell away. The mountain-brushing episode had been no mere bravado or folly, Carpenter had been deliberately lining up for his pre-determined course across the narrow plateau. Once again, and for the last time, he had his head outside, while his left hand slowly—interminably slowly, it seemed to Tremayne—reached up for the button on the bulkhead above the screen, located it, paused, then pressed it.
Sergeant Harrod, head craned back at a neck-straining angle, saw the red light turn to green, brought his head down, screwed shut his eyes and, with a convulsive jerk of his arms, launched himself out into the snow and the darkness, not a very expert launching, for instead of jumping out he had stepped out and was already twisting in mid-air as the parachute opened. Schaffer was the next to go, smoothly, cleanly, feet and knees together, then Carraciola followed by Smith.
Smith glanced down below him and his lips tightened. Just dimly visible in the greyness beneath, Harrod, a very erratic human pendulum, was swinging wildly across the sky. The parachute cords were already badly twisted and his clumsily desperate attempts to untwist them resulted only in their becoming more entangled than ever. His left-hand cords were pulled too far down, air was spilling from
