The wind in his face told him the direction from which he'd been dragged, and he had some sense of the distance, so after stuffing his chute into the drop bag, he slung the packframe over one shoulder and backtracked. The drift chute had had 10 or 15 seconds to drift on its own. Its course shouldn't have differed from his, but it might have descended more slowly, thus drifting longer. And worse, if it had blown along the ground after landing, where might it be now?
He wished it were white instead of orange.
At his guessed point of impact, he stopped and peered around. It could be right in front of you, afoot away, he told himself. Best stay where you are till the moon rises, and then hunt for it. Even a sickle moon will help.
Meanwhile he realized, to his disgust, that the smell of manure was too strong to come from his surroundings. The wind must have dragged him through a fairly fresh cow plop, presumably smeared down the back of his jumpsuit. He was also aware that the wind was chilly, so he tapped into the Web of the World for warmth, then laid back on the ground to wait the necessary hour and a half for moonrise.
"Macurdy," he muttered, "this better not be an omen, that's all to hell I've got to say," then sat berating himself for not putting the fuse and caps in the bag with his other gear. You should have known better, he thought glumly. If you don't find the sonofabitch, you've got a serious problem.
After a few minutes of futile cycling through failure, imagined consequences, and blame, he took himself by the figurative scruff, and sitting up, began the meditation Varia had taught him: breathing with his diaphragm, inhaling through his nose and exhaling through pursed lips. Given the circumstances, it took awhile, but after a bit his mind smoothed out, and he let the occasional vagrant thought drift past and disappear.
One of those thoughts was the realization that as he'd blown along the ground, there'd been a thudding of hooves nearby.
Cows, he knew, saw better in the dark than humans; apparently he'd spooked some.
Even before it rose, the moon paled the night a bit, and when it cleared the ridge east of the lake, it made more difference than he'd expected. But still he could see no drift chute. Vaguely he discerned cows grazing in a loose band some distance away.
It was light enough now to orient himself. He was about halfway between the road on the east, with its bordering trees, the lakeside woods on the west, and a bit farther from the forest at the pasture's south end. He'd come down perfectly on target, despite the wind and visibility. If you're going to believe in omens, he told himself, that's the one to believe in.
Meanwhile he needed to be out of sight before daylight; he and his chute. Someone would arrive grout sunup, perhaps earlier, to drive the cows to the barn for milking. And while his invisibility cloak might hide him from a farmer, whoever came for the cows might have a dog to help them, and he wasn't at all sure the cloak would hide him from a dog.
In less than an hour, dawn paled the sky, its thin gray light exposing details. Cloaking himself, Macurdy started toward the lakeside woods, going out of his way to approach the cows. They looked up as he came, poised to run, so he veered off. They saw through his spell; dogs would too.
The lakeside woods, he discovered, consisted entirely of old trees, mostly beeches fire-scarred and hollow, standing above thin grass speckled with violets. Browsing had eliminate brush and young trees, except for ground juniper, which grew in scattered patches, prostrate and dense. He selected a patch, and lying on his belly, shoved the white chute as far as he could beneath the sprawling evergreen shrubs, shoving his helmet after it. Then, shouldering his packframe, he sat waiting on a rock, still cloaked, thinking he'd have to do something about the stink on his jumpsuit. Close up or in a closed space, he might be unseen, but hardly unnoticed.
He didn't wait long. His watch read local 0512, and the sun was up, when he saw the herd girl walking up the road. Reaching the pasture gate, she swung it open and yodelled.
The cows started briskly toward her, ready for the relief of being milked, and the grain that went with it.
When they were gone, he spent half an hour quartering the pasture in the sunlit morning, protected by his cloak, looking for anything orange. In the downwind direction, he went all the way to the pasture fence; to hunt upwind made no sense. While searching, three ways occurred to him of bypassing his need for the missing fuse and caps; two were iffy, the other suicidal. Iffy meant possible failure, but he wasn't at all sure he was ready for deliberate suicide, even if it saved far more lives than the one he'd lose.
Then another thought occurred to him: Suppose the drift chute had come down on a cow, and caught on a horn? Although the odds of it happening were minute, it was possible. On the other hand, any cow he'd ever known, and he'd known many, would have bolted, run to the woods if a chute had settled on its head. And he'd surely have noticed when it came out to answer the herd girl's call.
Nonetheless, for a while he wandered about the woods, looking, because if it had happened that way, the cow would have tried to rid herself of the chute, and perhaps rubbed it off against a tree. After a bit, though, he gave it up and went down to the shore, where he ate a K ration, topped off his canteen, then removed his jumpsuit and used moss and icy lake water to scrub off the cow manure. Most of it had been on his chute pack, but there was some on a shoulder and one pants leg. When he'd finished, they remained stained, but the manure was gone, and after it dried, it wouldn't smell nearly as strong.
As far as he could see, there was nothing useful left to do there, so he started for the schloss, hiking along the lakeshore to avoid sharp eyes that might otherwise penetrate his cloak in the bright sunlight.
Avoiding the road, Macurdy approached the schloss through the forest. On this lovely, if chill and breezy spring morning, the SS platoon was doing morning exercises on the large front lawn, shouting cadence, young voices strong and vigorous. So he crossed the lawn behind the building, to the end of the near wing and the cellar's rear entryway. Presumably the whole platoon was in front. No one would be in a position to see him unless they were on duty in the stable, perhaps feeding the colonel's horses.
Moving quietly down the entryway steps, he tried the door to the cellar. It was Thursday, and he didn't really expect to find it unbarred, except perhaps on Friday and Saturday evenings when guardsmen would bring party girls from town. But to his surprise, it gave. Opening it a few inches, he listened hard, and hearing nothing, peered in. The long corridor was empty, so he entered, closing the door behind him, beginning toy eel optimistic again. Someone, he noticed, had put fresh bulbs in two fixtures that had been lightless before. It was still poorly lit, but lighter than it had been.
Though his initial business was not in this wing, he paused to pick the lock of the first explosives magazine, to make sure the TNT was still there. It was. He checked the second with the same result, then moved on into unknown territory, the cellar beneath the south wing, the Voitar's wing. It seemed indistinguishable from the wing he knew, except that it had a back entrance. Nor did it open into the sacrificial chamber at the base of the tower.
From its end, he worked his way back toward the main section, doors. None that he checked were locked. Three were half full of furnishings protected by large sheets. The others had nothing more than some bugs and a damp earthy smell until, halfway to the ell, he found the one he'd use.