The Salzburg Connection Read Free Page A

he came closer, leaning forward—slowly does it, small sure steps, keep a grip on the rope and the breathing regular—he decided it wasn’t a chest at all, but a lump of stone that had fallen down the mountainside and ended here with a thud. It was only when he was close to it and could stoop over with his flashlight full on it that he saw it was really a huge lump of mud and moss-like growths. He unsheathed his knife and went to work on the deposit of twenty-one years, cutting and scraping gently, always mindful of the danger of disturbed silt, until he struck something hard. It glinted under the light. His depression vanished. It was a chest made of some bright metal that did not rust. Not iron, thank God. If it was aluminium, it would be all the more easily raised. (After all, the Nazis who had lowered it here wouldn’t want any difficulties in salvage. They planned ahead, those boys.) His one problem now was to get it free of the mud, and then ease it along to the spot where he had descended.
    He began scraping cautiously at the encrustation until he found that, if he got his hands against the box and pushed up against the caked deposit, it peeled off like a matted carpet and floated away in broken chunks. There were long fraying fragments of hemp on the side handles of the chest, all that was left of the cords that had lowered it. He pulled them off quickly. Too quickly. There were shreds of thin wire embedded in the cord, and their broken edges ripped the palms of his gloves. Lucky his suit hadn’t been torn by one of these thin jags of wire—that would have been real trouble. He worked more carefully, using wire cutters, and at last released the chest completely. Now to secure it, his way.
    He released the clamp at his waist and started twisting the freed rope around the chest and through its handles. Under water, its weight was no problem, and once he had it freed from the mud it had settled into, the task was only a matter of care and quiet movements. He used all the rope he could spare, and then clamped it to hold. The hardest job, because it was most worrying, was to find the place where he had descended. But by tugging on the rope overhead every few steps back along the ledge, lifting the chest with him as he moved so that it lay always beside his feet when he paused, he found the spot where the rope no longer strained at an angle between his hand and the tree, but fell straight as a plumb line.
    Quickly, he released the buckle of his weighted belt, the flashlight hooked to it, and let them drop away. The wire cutter, which he had been too late to use when his mitts had been torn, went too. He started to float. Keep a firm grip on the rope, he warned himself, and don’t hold your breath; move slowly; don’t hold your breath! He rose to the surface, half swimming, halfpulling upwards on the rope, and hauled himself on to land. He staggered towards the cover of the tree. He tore off the mask, wrenched free from the rest of his equipment. The fresh air twisted his lungs. Twenty-seven, he noted with difficulty, twenty-seven minutes all told. The box... Better rest before he salvaged the box.
    He did more than rest. He collapsed, face down, his cheek against the tree’s root. When he became conscious again, he had lost a valuable twenty minutes. Daylight was spreading from over the eastern ridge.
    He rolled slowly over on his back, and lay there, unable to rise, his body heavy with fatigue. He was chilled to the bone. He shivered violently, remembering the last few minutes under water when the cold started to penetrate his body; colder, colder, the embrace of death. He sat up with an effort. Everything seemed out of control. He wanted to fall back again, let himself drift into deep, deep sleep. He rubbed the back of his neck, gently; that was where the headache began that encircled his brow. The box could wait. He had made sure it was lying safely on the ledge, well wrapped in tight coils of rope. First, he