Free The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins Page B

kit when I was wounded at the Albert Canal.'
     
     
'I should have let you go,' Ritter said. 'Look what you got me into. Crete, then a commission I didn't want, Russia and now this. What a bargain.' He closed his eyes and added softly, 'Sorry, Kurt, but it's no good.'
     
     
Quite suddenly, they were caught in a great eddy of water that swept them in towards the rocks of L'Equet on the tip of Burhou. There was a ship there, or half one; all that was left of a French coaster that had run on the reef in a storm earlier in the year. What was left of her stern deck sloped into deep water. A wave swept them in, the torpedo high on the swell and Steiner rolled away from it, grabbing for the ship's rail with one hand and hanging on to Neumann's lifeline with the other.
     
     
The wave receded, taking the torpedo with it. Steiner got to his feet and went up the sloping deck to what was left of the wheelhouse. He wedged himself in the broken doorway and hauled his companion after him. They crouched in the roofless shell of the wheelhouse and it started to rain softly.
     
     
'What happens now?' Neumann asked weakly.
     
     
'We sit tight,' Steiner said. 'Brandt will be out with the recovery boat as soon as this fog clears a little.'
     
     
'I could do with a cigarette,' Neumann said, and then he stiffened suddenly and pointed out through the broken doorway. 'Look at that.'
     
     
Steiner went to the rail. The water was moving fast now as the tide ebbed, twisting and turning amongst the reefs and rocks, carrying with it the refuse of war, a floating carpet of wreckage that was all that was left of the Joseph Johnson.
     
     
'So, we got her,' Neumann said. Then he tried to get up. 'There's a man down there, Kurt, in a yellow lifejacket. Look, under the stern.'
     
     
Steiner slid down the deck into the water and turned under the stern, pushing his way through a mass of planks to the man who floated there, head back, eyes closed. He was very young with blond hair plastered to the skull. Steiner grabbed him by the life-jacket and started to tow him towards the safety of the shattered stern, and he opened his eyes and stared at him. Then he shook his head, trying to speak.
     
     
Steiner floated beside him for a moment. 'What is it?' he said in English.
     
     
'Please,' the boy whispered. 'Let me go.'
     
     
His eyes closed again and Steiner swam with him to the stern. Neumann, watching from the wheelhouse, saw Steiner start to drag him up the sloping deck. He paused for a long moment, then slid the boy gently back into the water. A current took him away and out of sight beyond the reef, and Steiner clambered wearily back up the deck again.
     
     
'What was it?' Neumann demanded weakly.
     
     
'Both legs were gone from the knees down.' Steiner sat very carefully and braced his feet against the rail. 'What was that poem of Eliot's that you were always quoting at Stalingrad? The one I didn't like?'
     
     
'I think we are in rat's alley,' Neumann said, 'Where the dead men lost their bones.'
     
     
'Now I understand it,' Steiner told him. 'Now I see exactly what he meant.'
     
     
They sat there in silence. It was colder now, the rain increasing in force, clearing the fog rapidly. About twenty minutes later they heard an engine not too far away. Steiner took the small signalling pistol from the pouch on his right leg. charged it with a waterproof cartridge and fired a maroon.
     
     
A few moments later, the recovery launch appeared from the fog and slowed, drifting in towards them Sergeant-Major Brandt was in the prow with a line ready to throw. He was an enormous figure of a man, well over six feet tall and broad in proportion, rather incongruously wearing a yellow oilskin coat with Roval National Lifeboat Institution on the back. The rest of the crew were all Steiner's men Sergeant Sturm at the wheel, Lance-Corporal Briegel and Private Berg acting as deckhands Brandt jumped for the sloping deck of the wreck and hitched the