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.''I know.''Why ask then, for Christ's sake?' Reader flared up.'We come here to help you people out and you try and stand me in the witness box.Why did you do this? Why didn't you do that? My boss is going to love you.''And just who is your boss?' Paco asked sharply.'Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean.' Reader leaned his face close to Paco's.'And let me tell you something.He's been in more scraps than you've had hot dinners.We started fighting 'itler in 1939.You joined the party a bit late, didn't you?''I think that's enough, Sergeant,' Lindsay intervened.'Well keep your girlfriend off my back or I'm liable to get a bit shirty.She wouldn't like that is my guess.'Taking his sten from Lindsay, Reader marched away at a steady one-two, one-two.Paco waited until he was out of hearing before she spoke.'Lindsay, I don't trust that man.''Just because you didn't hit it off with him? He's come a long way to.''It's the classic manoeuvre of the suspect under interrogation,' she insisted.'Pick a quarrel, break the trend when the questions get dangerous.''He just hasn't attuned himself to the atmosphere out here.He only dropped out of the blue a few days ago.''You're sure of that? Milk found him roaming about.No one saw him coming down in a parachute.He's sensitive about that 'chute, as he calls it.And why did he call me your girlfriend?'The question, idly thrown into the conversation, caught Lindsay off guard.Paco was standing very close to him.He was excruciatingly aware of her physical proximity.The emotions he had clamped a lid down on flooded out.The lid was blown sky-high.Damn Reader and his careless remark to the flames of hell.He stood very still, not looking at her.She waited in silence.He knew she was watching him as closely as she had so recently watched Reader.He took out one of his few remaining packs of cigarettes, cupped his hand against the breeze which was blowing up, and lit it.'Could I have one?' Paco asked quietly.'Here you are, take this one.'He would have liked to place it between her lips but refrained from even this small gesture of intimacy.Instead, he handed it to her.He was pleased to see his hand was steady.This was unadulterated hell.Paco took short, quick puffs and then opened Pandora's box.'Lindsay, I like you.' She paused.'I like you a lot.But that's all.I'm sorry.''The feeling's mutual.'He didn't know how he'd managed to get the words out.He was worried his voice had sounded forced, unnatural.Paco, he knew, was a very perceptive girl.God knows he'd done his best to conceal his real feelings.If she went on like this he was going to give himself away.'You're still very carefully not looking at me.'I'm watching Reader traipsing about.You said don't trust him.''Now you're changing the subject.What's your next move — to manufacture a row between us?'He swung round violently and stared straight at her.'What do you want me to say then?''Let's go for a stroll.I want to talk to you.'She linked her arm inside his and he felt the gentle pressure of her right breast.They walked in step as she began talking.'You don't know much about me.There is no one else, by the way.The war seems to have stultified my emotions.I've seen so much horror I've grown almost immune.That worries me, worries me more than you might imagine, Lindsay.I know how you feel - I wish I felt the same way.I don't.And a quick roll in the hay after dark isn't going to help either of us.I thought bringing it out into the open might help.I made a mistake.I can see that now.War is not the most amusing of human activities.'She let go of his arm, bent down to stub out her cigarette on a rock and then dropped the dead stub in her pocket.Her voice changed, became matter-of- fact.'The first rule of Partisan survival.Leave no traces for the enemy to find.'She walked away, a slow, purposeful tread.The sun came out.It showed up the gleam of her neat, blonde hair.She had never looked more desirable.Lindsay stopped at the edge of the abyss.The rock wall fell a thousand feet to a scatter of boulders far below.They looked no larger than pebbles.He had to get his priorities sorted out.He was carrying - inside his head, in his diary – priceless information which London must know.It could even affect the outcome of the war.Getting back to Allied territory was his prime objective.He found it poor consolation.He felt humiliated.Paco knew.It was, he now realized, her presumed ignorance of his feelings which had sustained him.He felt an emotional wreck.How often had he imagined making love to her in every erotic detail - her equally passionate response.'We could make a break for it now, Wing Commander.I've found a hidden gulch which leads into the valley.'It was Sergeant Len Reader.Of course.Chapter Thirty-Five'That bloody colonel commanding this column needs shooting,' Jaeger commented savagely to Schmidt.'Yugoslavia isn't France, it isn't even Russia.To understand this theatre of war you go back to Wellington and the Peninsular War - the Spanish guerrillas.He's going to lead us straight into an ambush.''At least you persuaded him to position the mortar teams at the rear of the column,' Schmidt replied.'Only by waving the Fuhrer's signed order,' Jaeger growled.'Look at the terrain - the way he's crammed everything together.We should be spread out in well- separated sections.'They were well south of Zagreb and dusk was beginning to descend on all sides like a sinister, cloud.The armoured column - comprising tanks, mobile guns and motorized infantry was entering a narrow,winding defile.On both sides rose precipitous heights.Jaeger frowned and raised the field-glasseslooped from his neck to focus on a rampart of huge boulders which lay strewn along the brink of theright-hand ridge.They were travelling as passengers in a half-track, the last vehicle in the straggled column.Immediately ahead of them crawled two canvas-sided trucks carrying the mortar teams.It was very silent apart from the purr of slow-moving engines and Jaeger sat as rigid as a statue, his twin lenses studying the boulder rampart poised far above them.'There's something funny about those damned rocks,' he told Schmidt.'Here, you take a look.''What am I looking for?' Schmidt asked as he peered through the glasses.'The slightest sign of movement up there.That's a geological oddity — that line of boulders.There are too many of them.They're too evenly spaced.They're all perched just on the brink.That crazy fool, Schrenk, should have sent a patrol up there before he entered the defile
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