The Doomsday Testament(69)

We marked the grave with a makeshift cross and I scrawled the names of the dead on a page from the journal and placed it under a rock. When we were done, we drove on in silence until we were south of the town of Blumberg about four miles from the Swiss border. Stan parked the jeep along a forest track outside a small hamlet. I told him to make camp there and wait for me. At first I thought he was going to argue, but the discipline of his long service prevailed. Once he was organized I shook hands with him and got back into the jeep with the three Nazis. I’d spent two months before the war walking in this countryside to the west of Lake Constance, what the Germans call the Bodensee, so I knew the area well. We were on the northern edge of the Hoher Randen, the hill country that straddles the border between Germany and Switzerland, and beyond it, on the far side of Schaffhausen, lay the upper reaches of the Rhine. I drove two miles further up the track before I stopped again. ‘We walk from here,’ I told them. ‘When we reach the border we will be met by a representative from the US State Department who will arrange your onward journey from Switzerland.’ The Germans laughed, even Klosse, and talked about what they’d do when they reached America, what they’d buy and what they’d eat. They made me sick. ‘You are to say nothing to anyone, not even your guide about who and what you are,’ I told them. ‘Nothing.’ I stared at Brohm. ‘Nothing, Walter. You talk too much.’ He just grinned at me and clutched his briefcase tighter to his chest.





XXXIV


WHAT STARTED AS a slide quickly turned into a roll and eventually a flailing tumble. Somewhere on the way down Jamie lost Sarah’s hand. His world gyrated through impossible angles and planes. Rocks that would have bashed his brains out missed his head by fractions so fine he felt them touch his hair. He knew it couldn’t last so he closed his eyes to make them go away and prayed that Sarah was as fortunate during the helter-skelter plunge down the steep hillside. A final lurch and a mouthful of dirt announced an unlikely and relatively safe landing and he was just opening his eyes when something landed on top of him and drove all the breath from his body.

For a few ominous seconds Sarah lay unmoving, a dead weight across his ribs, but the rhythm of her breathing told him she hadn’t suffered any serious injuries. ‘You feel like you’re still in one piece?’

‘Give me five minutes and I’ll let you know,’ she groaned. ‘Also, remind me never to go out on a date with you again.’

He dragged her into the shadow of the cliff where they would be out of the line of fire of the shooter with the machine pistol. They’d landed a few feet from the river in a pile of dust and pebbles that had fallen from the cliff above. From here, the Oder looked much deeper and wider than it had from above. Rain-dampened dust caked them from head to foot and Sarah’s hair looked as if it had been styled by a 1970s punk. Jamie could see her mentally checking for any damage. She patted herself down and his heart sank when he saw a moment of panic cross her face. She reached into her jacket.

‘My mobile.’ She withdrew the phone from her inside pocket. It took only one look to know it was smashed beyond repair. A little cry of anguish escaped her lips.

‘Better the phone than you,’ he pointed out.

‘You don’t . . . OK,’ she said resignedly. ‘Let’s get to it.’

Jamie studied the dark swirls of the swift-flowing river. ‘If we try to cross, we’ll only make ourselves targets, and I don’t much fancy our chances of getting to the other side in any case. So upstream or down?’

‘The going is the same either way. Bad. Down is Braunlage. They’ll expect us to head there, won’t they?’

‘So upstream.’

‘Unless they second guess us.’

They froze at a series of shouted orders from above. Clearly it was only a matter of time before their hunters found a route to the valley bottom.

‘It looks like we’ll need to take our chances.’

Jamie remembered holding the dead German’s pistol as he jumped and he felt a momentary panic as he realized he’d lost it on the way down. Surreptitiously, he searched the area where they’d landed, but could find no sign of it. He decided not to mention it to Sarah. He doubted it would be much use against a machine gun in any case.

Staying tight to the valley wall, they made their way north, upstream towards the Oderteich dam. It was almost as tough going in the gorge bottom as it had been through the wild spruce at the top of the cliff. They clambered over boulders, between the roots of upturned trees, or amongst the skeletal branches of others carried into the gorge by generations of floods. Occasionally they were forced to take to the water’s edge. The terrain did have one compensation. The further north they went, the narrower the gorge became and the less likely they were to be spotted from above.