"It is the Finns. Before turning north east again the railway crosses a bridge at this point, which spans a river running into the creek. The Finnish frontier is only sixty miles from here. This is the fourth time during the war that one of what the Finns call their `death companies' has come through the forests unknown to us and blown up this bridge in the middle of the night. They creep up so quietly that the sentries cannot see them and they are always cutting the telephone and telegraph wires, because it is impossible for us, to keep sentries posted every fifty yards along the line."
"When did this happen?" Gregory asked.
"It has only just occurred. The man with the light is surprised that we did not hear the explosion, but the roar of the engine must have drowned it and we should not have seen the flash because of the curve in the line and the surrounding trees.
The Finns are cunning fellows and they always try to blow the bridges up Just as a train is passing over."
"Good God!" exclaimed Gregory. "Do you mean that the train ahead of us has been wrecked and gone crashing headlong on to the ice of the river?"
"No. This time the Finns exploded their dynamite a few minutes too late and the train was almost across; only the two last coaches were wrecked. It was lucky, though, that this man happened to see the sparks flying from our engine; our train is not due here for another two hours yet. If he hadn't pulled us up we should have gone through the broken bridge and all been killed.
The man with the lamp climbed on to the running board of the engine and the driver turned over the lever. Puffing on slowly for a few hundred yards they rounded the curve and pulled up again. Ahead of them they could now see the silhouette of the bridge and moving lights beyond it where the people from the train were examining the wrecked rear coaches and rescuing their occupants.
Gregory was half numb with cold and most terribly tired but his brain was still quick enough to realize that, for him, the wrecking of the train ahead was a blessing in disguise. He had only to cross the river to find out whether or not the Nazis were on the train. If they were not, he had got ahead of them by his dash across Lake Ladoga; if they were, it mattered no longer now that they could not possibly reach Kandalaksha before him; but the confirmation of either fact would be a blessed relief after the crushing anxiety that had tortured him for so many hours.
Leaving the engine they walked to the river bank and scrambled down it on to the ice. Shouts and cries came from ahead and they could now see that it was the furthest of the three spans of the bridge which had been wrecked. The last two coaches of the train had snapped their couplings, run backwards down the collapsed span of the bridge and crashed through the ice, where they lay, half submerged, one on top of the other.
As Gregory's party mingled with the crowd of people from the train he learned that one of the coaches contained only military stores and that the other was the guard's van in which eight or ten people had been travelling. An officer had taken charge of the proceedings and was directing some of the troops as they tried to rescue the poor, shouting wretches entrapped in
the van; while the rest stood on the ice round the great hole which the two coaches and the broken bridgework had made in it.
A number of the men had torches or lanterns so there was quite enough light in which to see people's features, and for ten minutes Gregory moved among them trying to ascertain if the Gestapo agents were anywhere in the crowd; but he could see no one who looked even remotely like a German S.S. man. Yet there were two or three hundred people standing there in the uncertain light, so having sent Boroski off with his suitcase to secure seats for them in the train, which he assumed would start again when the injured and dead had been got out of the guard's van, he continued his search.
Suddenly a cry of terror went up from a dozen men all round him. The ice upon which they were standing had begun to move. It tilted beneath him quite slowly but he instantly, guessed what had happened; the falling coaches had cracked the heavy ice for some distance round the hole that they had made, and the weight of so many people as they all crowded together at the jagged edge of one huge slab that had broken free was causing it to turn over. With screams and shouts the terrified men strove to dash for safety but as the ice tilted more sharply they could not scramble up its slope and slid backwards from it into the water. Swept off his feet in the press, Gregory was carried in with them.
As he went under the cold was so intense that it seemed to pierce his heart like a knife. Striking out blindly he came to the surface; only to be clawed round the neck by a frantic soldier who could not swim. Gregory knew that he would be dead himself in another minute if he could not get out of that deadly, gripping cold which went through his furs as though they were paper and paralyzed his muscles. In a fierce determination to live he thrust the man off and grabbed the edge of the ice which, being relieved of its weight, had now fallen back into place. Next moment a man who had managed to retain his balance hauled him to safety and as he crouched, shuddering where he lay, he suddenly realized that it was Orloff who had rescued him.
Half a dozen other men had also been saved but a number of their comrades had died instantly from the shock of the immersion while others, again, had come up under the ice and so were past all aid.
The cold was so intense that the drips from the victims of this new catastrophe were already freezing into icicles as they were hurried away up tire far bank towards the train. By the time they got to the engine their clothes were frozen on them; but huddled by the furnace they thawed out and as soon as it was possible began to strip. In spite of the heat from the furnace the, cold of the air seemed to burn them as parts of their bodies were exposed to it, but blankets were brought to wrap them in while their clothes were dried. The cab of the engine was only just large enough to hold them all but they huddled up there, with their teeth chattering and their limbs aching, until their clothes, which the driver was holding garment by garment to the engine fire, were dry enough to put on again.
It was an hour before Gregory was able to rejoin his companions. He still felt chilled to the bone and had a splitting headache; but he resisted their attempts to persuade him to lie down as he was determined to make certain whether or not the Gestapo men were on the train. Now that he had succeeded in catching the train it no longer mattered in the least, since he had Voroshilov's order for Erika's release in his pocket and General Kuporovitch would naturally accept that as a higher authority than any document the Gestapo men might produce from the Foreign Office, but to find out if the Nazis had caught the 1.40 from Leningrad on the previous day had now become an obsession with him.
When they had arrived at the bridgehead it had been three o'clock in the morning. It was half past five before a move was made for the train to proceed again. As the people climbed on board Gregory went from carriage to carriage and he was still at it long after the train was in motion. It was after seven before he had fully convinced himself that the S.S. men were not on this train either. Half dazed with fatigue, but completely satisfied, he made his way back to Boroski and Orloff and sank down to sleep in the seat they had kept for him for the rest of the way to Kandalaksha.
It was after ten o'clock when they roused him to tell him that they had at last reached their journey's end. When he awoke he felt positively ghastly and knew that he was running a high temperature. Ire could hardly think for himself any more, except to realize in a dazed way that he had done the job which he had set out to do. He had beaten the Gestapo men and got to Kandalaksha before them. Boroski and Orloff, seeing his state, took charge of him, secured a drosky outside the station and drove with him to the castle.