The Fragile Hour Read online

  Anna had not thought that her fear could be greater than it was, but it increased now. She had seen handlers with those dogs, great savage beasts that snarled and leapt with fangs gleaming whenever anyone else came near.

  The bridge across the river came into sight, a narrow wooden structure just wide enough for a horse and cart. They shot across it and into the fir forest on the opposite side. Then the slope began to rise so sharply that they would have to climb.

  “Follow the waterfall!” Karl ordered as they snapped off their skis. “I’ll catch you up. Go!”

  The first dogs had streaked out from the trees like grey wolves with fangs bared and they were making for the bridge. Anna, running up the hard snow, her skis over her shoulder, heard him fire a revolver six times in quick succession and then there came the shouts of soldiers hoping at least one or two of their dogs had escaped the bullets to reach their prey.

  To her relief, Karl was already catching her up. “Don’t slacken your pace! Some of the soldiers are on skis and very near! Be ready when I tell you to stop.”

  She knew what he meant and steeled herself for the moment when it came. Even now their pursuers would be crossing the bridge. Yet everything was curiously still, all sounds of pursuit lost as the fir forest closed in like a screen in their wake.

  Karl was keeping close to the great waterfall for some reason of his own, although neither of them had eyes for its frozen magnificence in their flight. Anna could feel trickles of sweat running down her back and her skis grew heavier on her shoulder with every fresh step. The only sounds were the crunching of snow underfoot and their hard breathing in the effort they were maintaining.

  Suddenly the stillness was broken by bullets zinging through the trees and some orders were being shouted out. Anna gasped and stumbled, but Karl hauled her upright with his arm under hers.

  “Another few yards, Anna! And then lodge your skis and rucksack with mine in the rocks jutting out over the waterfall.”

  Her leg muscles were pulling agonisingly, but she joined him in an extra spurt of speed. As they brushed past low branches, the disturbed snow plopped down on them, one lot slipping inside her collar. It seemed to be getting darker and she realised the sky was losing light under the threat of a fresh snowfall. More rifle fire came, bullets wide of their mark, and a startled hare in his white winter coat sprang out from under a bush and leapt ahead out of sight. Anna envied him his speed.

  “Now!” Karl snapped.

  She tossed her skis and ski-sticks down beside his. After filling all her pockets with the ammunition, she threw her rucksack down too before flinging herself flat on her stomach behind a large fir tree. Pulling off her gloves, she loaded her rifle swiftly and aimed it in readiness. Karl had taken cover behind a neighbouring tree. They looked across at each other once and the meeting of their eyes at such an intense moment had a profound effect on her. It was the unique experience of total empathy with another human being, a losing of self that was also discovery. If she came out of this situation alive, she would remember it to her last day.

  Now Germans were appearing amid the trees below the vantage point that she and Karl held. They had discarded their skis to follow unhampered at speed. One slithered and tumbled to his knees, but he sprang up and came on again. Anna took careful aim.

  She and Karl fired almost simultaneously. Two of the enemy fell, one only wounded, but groaning and writhing where he lay. She fired again and again, picking off those who kept appearing, getting some of them even as they threw themselves down to fire back. Still the soldiers came, gaining more control of the situation. Anna reloaded her rifle again, but her ammunition was running low. Karl shouted at her as more and more bullets zinged in their direction amid the large snowflakes that had just begun to fall.

  “Go! But stay by the waterfall all the way! I’ll cover you!”

  Anna ran almost blindly as she darted on up the forested slope, but she had no intention of going far. To her dismay she stumbled into a widely cleared area where trees had been felled and sawn through into great logs that were stacked up, supported at the base by two low stumps.

  Anna doubled up to avoid any chance bullet and plunged across the clearing to take shelter behind the stack. She did not have to wait long before Karl appeared sprinting low across the clearing while she covered him by firing in quick succession. He slid down on his knees beside her.

  “I told you to get out of this!” he said fiercely.

  She dodged down as counter-fire came again. “I’m not leaving!” she gave back angrily. “But I haven’t much ammunition left.”

  “Neither have I.” He looked about and snatched up a thick stake-like length of wood sticking up out of the snow. “But keep firing until I tell you to stop.”

  Instantly she understood his intentions. The snowflakes were falling faster now and they settled on her lashes, face and hands as she continued to shoot at the enemy. But it was becoming difficult to see clearly. Karl was levering the stake up and down, grunting with effort. Then the trigger of her rifle clicked uselessly.

  “Take my revolver,” he instructed. “I can’t let go of this stake. But don’t fire unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “All right.” Quickly she removed his revolver from its holster.

  “Now take that package from inside my jacket and bury it under the snow by that tree behind you.”

  Everything was done in less than a minute. Visibility was getting worse all the time in the thickly falling snow. When the enemy’s firing ceased, she could discern shadowy figures moving out cautiously from behind trees and rocks.

  “Are they in the clearing yet?” Karl asked quietly, his knuckles whitening as he tightened his grip on the stake.

  “Not yet,” she whispered.

  An order was suddenly barked at them in German. “Achtung! Throw down your weapons and come out with your hands up!”

  Neither Anna nor Karl moved. She could hear her own heart hammering and Karl’s strong breathing in his suspense. The same harsh voice came again.

  “If you don’t come out, grenades will be thrown!”

  She could see that Karl’s last desperate plan to save them both would come to nothing if the Germans did not move nearer, but they were suspicious, uncertain whether she and Karl were only holding fire.

  Then came the final threat. “This is your last chance to surrender! I’m counting to ten! One! Two! Three!...”

  Anna moved quickly. Karl’s agonised shout did not halt her as she darted to the side of the stacked timber into the Germans’ view. She flung both the revolver and the rifle on to the snow in front of her and threw up her hands.

  “My comrade is wounded!” she bluffed desperately. “You’ll have to move him yourselves.”

  “Come forward!”

  She saw that they were not going to come out from their cover until she was in their grasp. Keeping in a direct line, she went down across the clearing. Two soldiers seized her and struck her viciously before forcing her to her knees and keeping her arms twisted behind her. But she was left in charge of only one of them as the other joined those running forward to take Karl, about a dozen of them in all. Her head was down and she watched through her hair until the moment was right. Then she raised her head and shrieked out at the top of her voice.

  “Now!”

  There came a tremendous crack as the great logs were released to come tossing and tumbling down towards the soldiers. Anna took quick advantage of her captor’s horrified astonishment to lunge herself upwards in a trick she had been taught and butt him in the groin. As his hold on her fell away, she sprang to her feet and struck him another blow from her training days that sent him off his feet. Darting away, she raced back up the slope to where Karl was waiting for her, the package retrieved. He broke into a run at her side and they kept going until the thickly falling snow shut away the screams and yells and the crashing of the great logs against the trunks of trees in an unstoppable descent down the mountainside.

&
nbsp; At that point both Karl and Anna slowed their flight by unspoken agreement and dropped sprawling on their backs in the snow, their breath rasping. Neither spoke, but after a while, they looked at each other in overwhelming relief that they had got away.

  Karl sat up first. “Are you OK?”

  She nodded, sitting up. “Yes, all thanks to you.”

  He dismissed this with an impatient gesture. “I’d seen that a snowfall was on its way and had counted on that for cover, but it held off longer than I’d expected. It was sheer luck that we found that stack of timber in the nick of time.”

  “What now?” she asked as they stood up together. Although they brushed some of the snow off their wet clothes, more was settling on them. She could just see part of the frozen waterfall, but the far side was veiled completely in the falling flakes.

  “We’ll get going.” Karl looked purposefully ahead in spite of the poor visibility.

  “I know all the survival rules and walking blindly about in a circle is not one of them, Karl.”

  “As I told you once, I know these mountains. That’s why I was insistent that we keep close to the waterfall all the time and then we wouldn’t lose ourselves later when the snow came.” He took her hand into his. “Keep close to me.”

  His clasp was as cold as hers, for their gloves were lost. Anna thought to herself that it was a measure of her trust in him that she was venturing deeper into this white wilderness at his side when all her mountain training for such weather dictated otherwise. Maybe she was too tired to protest in any case and her legs had become as heavy as lead.

  After a while Karl released her hand and put a supporting arm about her waist, for which she was grateful. It was not long before the ground levelled out, but with the layer of new snow every step was a physical strain, for they plunged calf-deep each time. Mostly she kept her eyes closed, weary of brushing away the snowflakes, which were coming straight down, for the air was perfectly still. All around complete silence reigned.

  Just when Anna thought she must drop, Karl took his arm away from her and gave a triumphant shout. “We’re here!”

  Swaying on her feet, Anna opened her eyes wearily to see that a mountain cabin had loomed up before them amid the flakes. “Did you know this was here?” she cried thankfully.

  “Yes, I knew we should come to it by following the frozen river after leaving the waterfall.” He made no attempt to search for a key, but put his shoulder to the door and burst it open.

  As he disappeared inside, Anna lurched forward into the cabin after him and stood slumped against the wall in exhaustion. The windows were shuttered and it was pitch dark, no warmer than outside, but Karl lit a match and grinned at her in its golden glow.

  “We’re safe now, Anna!” he proclaimed before glancing about until the match burnt his fingers, making him swear. For no reason at all this struck her as extremely funny and she laughed weakly, letting her back slide down the wall until she was sitting on the floor. He struck another match and this time he lit a large candle set in a wooden candlestick and it illuminated the cabin with its soft light. “That’s better,” he said with satisfaction.

  When she did not move, he came across to her and raised her up by her elbows to her feet again. Now that there was time to think, she felt numbed by the impact of Nils’s arrest and all that had happened in the forest. He saw the need to get her busy.

  “See if you can find coffee,” he urged, “and there’ll be a coffee pot somewhere. I’m going up on the roof to take the snow-lid off the top of the chimney and then I’ll get a fire going in the stove.”

  He went out again, taking with him two large saucepans from a shelf to get some snow to melt for hot water.

  Anna was thankful to have something to do. She moved, stiff with cold, across to a cupboard. The furnishings of the cabin were typical in their simplicity; a wooden table and chairs, a bench with a single cushion striped blue and green, and red gingham curtains at the windows. Plates stood in a fretworked wall-rack, and fishing tackle took up one of three shelves with books, a vase of dried lavender and a collection of smooth river stones, pink and grey and pearl-like. There were several spare fishing rods stacked in a corner by the entrance with a snow shovel. A door at the opposite end of the room would lead to the sleeping quarter with bunks and somewhere outside was a privy. Aunt Rosa’s skiing cabin had been far more luxurious, but Anna had no complaints, liking everything about this small haven.

  Opening a cupboard door, Anna saw a jar labelled Kaffe waiting there. She had known, as Karl had, that even in these days of ersatz coffee, no cabin would be without some. Whether applying to family or friends, it was an unwritten rule of the mountains that whoever took coffee to a cabin would leave what was left as well as replacing a stock of dry wood and matches for the stove.

  She looked to see what else might be in the cupboard. There were plenty of candles and the usual container of salt left permanently, this one of pottery shaped like a comic troll with his bobble-topped red cap as a lid. Beside it was a bottle of oil and a pre-war Christmas biscuit tin containing homemade lefse, which was a kind of dry pancake. Most surprising of all was a shop-bought tin of fish-pudding. It was like finding gold in present circumstances.

  “Look what I’ve found!” she exclaimed to Karl when he returned with both saucepans piled high with snow.

  “Splendid! We won’t starve.” He stopped down in front of the stove and drew out from under it a box full of small logs and strips of birch bark, which would ignite instantly. Soon the stove was crackling noisily as the flames leapt onto the tinder-dry fuel, their brilliance flickering through the grating.

  Anna sat down on the floor beside him and tried to unfasten her ski-boots, but her icy fingers fumbled with the laces. Karl removed his own and set them by the entrance door, which he had bolted. He had also hung up his ski jacket before she had taken off one boot.

  “Let me,” he offered, kneeling down to do it for her. Already warmth from the stove was making a difference to the chill air, and he took her hands between his in turn to rub the circulation back into them. “Is that better?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, flexing her fingers. “I can feel them again now.”

  “All you need now is that coffee.”

  He helped her to take off her ski-jacket, but left her to hang it on a peg as he put coffee ready in a pot. Anna took two cups and saucers from the wall-rack and put them on the table.

  “Do you think there are any spare clothes here?” she asked. “After all that kneeling and sprawling in the snow, my own are damp right through.”

  “Let’s see what we can find.” Karl took up the candle and led the way into the little bedroom. There were two bunks, one on either side, and each with a pillow and a rolled-up sleeping bag. A large old chest of drawers stood by the wall in the middle. “Take a look. Nobody would mind after what you’ve been through.”

  There were caps, scarves, socks and gloves in the top drawer, some woollen jerseys in the next and three clean, but well-worn, ski garments in the last one. He took a pair of the trousers and a jersey and left her alone to put on those she had selected.

  When she emerged, Karl was seated at the table waiting to pour the coffee. After hanging up her own clothes to dry out on pegs beside his, Anna sat down on the opposite side of the table. Her expression was strained and serious as she looked across at him over the cup of coffee that she held in both hands.

  “You hoped I’d find this cabin when you tried to send me on ahead, didn’t you?”

  He inclined his head. “Yes, I thought you’d use your intelligence and guess I’d given you specific instructions for some reason.”

  Anna looked down at her coffee, too moved to speak. When it had seemed as if they had no chance as the Germans began to close in, he had wanted her life to be saved. Gaining control of herself again, she looked at him once more. “You wouldn’t have been here or been nearly killed in the forest if it hadn’t been for me.”

  He looked p
uzzled. “How have you worked that out?”

  “It’s obvious. Somewhere I messed up everything by going into the church instead of taking a chance and coming straight up the valley. If I’d done that, Nils wouldn’t have been caught and you’d have taken the package from me and left without any trouble.”

  “For one thing,” he answered patiently, “the bus driver knew what he was doing when he advised you to hide where you did. There must have been patrols everywhere. If you’d been picked up with that package, the Gestapo would have taken you into their charge. And what would be worse,” he added bluntly, “that could have meant the destruction of a most secret plan and the loss of countless lives.” Then to needle her out of demoralising remorse, he continued: “So drink up your coffee and let’s have no more self-pity.”

  “It’s not that,” she retorted on a flare of anger. “I was taking the blame for whatever mistakes were made and I’m more than ashamed of them.”

  He shook his head wearily. “We all make mistakes sometimes. It happens. But in this case you’re as blameless as anybody else, believe me.”

  She fell silent, remembering what Margot had told her about his tragic error over his late wife, and yet he had acted in her best interests. Her own outburst had revived painful memories for him.

  “Do you think Eirik Haug and his wife will be interrogated?” she asked in a quiet tone. It was another thing that was worrying her.

  “They’ll be questioned, but we were far enough away from the house when we were sighted and could have been coming from any direction. But it means that for his sake and that of his family the Resistance can’t make use of his safe house again.”

  She took hold of the coffee pot and refilled his cup and hers. “How are we going to get out of here, Karl? We can eke out what food there is for three days at the most, but without skis we can’t go anywhere. The German survivors in the forest will know that.”

  “But they won’t know that this cabin is here and it’s unlikely they’ll be told. Yet we can’t take a chance. I left my skis jutting out over the rocks by the waterfall and I hope to retrieve both pairs tomorrow if the snow eases.”