The Schirmer Inheritance 1953

Author:Eric Ambler
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-09-29T19:59:03+00:00

EIGHT

Vodena, which used to be called Edessa and was once the seat of the kings of Macedon, is some fifty miles west of Salonika. It hangs, amid lush growth of vine and wild pomegranate, fig, and mulberry trees, in the foothills of Mount Chakirka six hundred feet above the Yiannitsa plain. Sparkling mountain streams cascade lyrically down the hillsides into Nisia Voda, the tributary of the Vadar which flows swiftly past the town on its way to the parent river. The old tiled houses glow in the sun. There are no tourist hotels.

George and MissKolinwere driven there in a car hired in Salonika. It was not an enjoyable trip. The day was hot and the road bad. The condition of their stomachs denied them even the consolations of a good lunch and a bottle of wine at their destination. While the chauffeur went off heartily in search of food and wine, they went intoa café,fought the flies for long enough to drink some brandy, and then dragged themselves off dispiritedly in search of information.

Almost immediately luck was with them. A sweetmeat peddler in the market not only remembered the ambush well, but had actually been working in a nearby vineyard at the time. He had been warned to keep clear by theandartes,who had arrived an hour before the German trucks came.

When the chauffeur returned they persuaded the peddler to leave his tray of fly-​blown titbits with a friend and guide them to the scene.

The fuel dump had been near a railway siding about three miles out of Vodena, on the side road to Apsalos. The tracks had been caught about two miles along this stretch of road.

It was an ideal place for an ambush. The road was climbing steadily and at that point made a hairpin turn below a hillside with plenty of cover for the attackers among its trees and thickets. Below and beyond the road there was no cover at all. The mines had been placed well past the turn so that, when the first truck hit, it would block the road for those following at a point where they could neither turn their vehicles nor find cover from which to reply to the fire from above. For theandartesconcealed on the hillside the business must have been easy. The remarkable thing was that as many as two of the eleven Germans in the trucks had managed to get back down the road alive. They must have been exceptionally nimble or the fire from the hillside very wild.

Those who had died had been buried lower down the hill in a patch of level ground just off the road. According to the peddler, the ground had been damp with rain at the time. The neat row of graves was still discernible in the undergrowth. Lieutenant Leubner and his men had piled stones in a small cairn on each. George had seen wayside German graves in France and Italy and guessed that originally each grave had also borne its occupant’s steel helmet, and perhaps a wooden stake with his number, name, and rank.

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