They moved steadily on.
How much time had gone by?
Suddenly, from behind a stack of crates on the lefthand side a target, a German-soldier cut-out, jumped into view. Even as Dirk's gun barked twice, another target shot out on Sig's side. Instantly he shifted to face it squarely — and fired. Two rounds.
He felt an enormous excitement course through him.
A shooting gallery… The barn was one huge house-of-horrors shooting gallery!
In a flash he was back at Coney Island. When he first came to the States, he had often taken his girl there. He'd loved the rides, the bizarre attractions and the shooting galleries. Especially the shooting galleries. Shooting at the bear going back and forth through the little painted metal forest, making him turn and turn and turn. The row of paint-chipped ducks keeling over one by one. The shooting galleries had been great. But nothing like the barn!
Dirk grinned at him.
“Let's go get ’em!” he said.
Sig enjoyed himself immensely. He'd been enormously gratified to find that he'd hit the first unexpected target squarely. Right through the chest.
The corridor had made another U-turn, this time to the right. There had been two more targets for each of them — and finally they stood before a closed door at the end of the corridor.
The exit.
Had to be.
They exchanged quick glances. They had it made.
Quickly they burst through the door.
And stopped dead.
Before them was a large, well-lit enclosure. A deep, wide trench had been dug wall to wall in the dirt floor, cutting the area in half. From the ceiling a large, heavy net was suspended, a transparent curtain dipping down into the middle of the trench. A single, narrow, twelve-foot plank had been placed across the trench, running through a vertical slit in the coarse netting. In the far wall was a door.
It was marked- EXIT.
Off to one side an instructor sat at a small table. Stony-faced, he made a notation in a logbook as Dirk and Sig entered.
Dirk looked around quickly.
“Oh, shit'” he swore. “A fucking Noodle Test!”
Sig looked at his teammate with a questioning frown.
“To test your smarts,” Dirk said. “Some goddamned stupid problem to solve.”
“How much time have we left?” Sig wanted to know.
“Beats me.”
Sig glanced toward the silently observing instructor.
“Can we ask him?”
Dirk did not bother to look. “That SOB wouldn't tell you the time if you loaned him your watch,” he said. He walked up to the gangplank. A sign next to it read MAXIMUM LOAD CAPACITY 200 POUNDS.
“Figures,” Dirk said. “I'll just be able to squeeze across.” He shrugged off the pack. He glanced at Sig.
“A hundred eighty-five,” Sig said. “How do we get that damned forty-pound pack across?”
“That, my boy,” said Dirk, “is the Noodle Test!”
Sig's mind raced. There had to be a way.
“Okay,” he said crisply. “Let's look at what we can not do.” He frowned. “Neither you nor I can carry the pack across. Too great a combined weight. We can't go around. We can't toss it across the trench because of the net….
“We can break out the pack and haul a few rocks at a time. Make several trips,” Dirk suggested.
Sig shook his head.
“Take too much time. No go…”
Dirk glared at the pack.
“Too bad the damn thing can't walk across by itself,” he said bitterly.
Sig looked up quickly.
“Why not?” he said.
Dirk glanced at him sharply. He said nothing.
“Go on across,” Sig said hurriedly. “Wait on the other side.”
Without hesitation, Dirk started across the narrow plank. He slipped through the slit in the net and hurried to the far side. He turned toward Sig.
Sig had the pack on the ground next to the plank. As soon as Dirk stepped off, he lifted the plank end up — and slipped it through the shoulder straps of the pack.
“Hold on to your end!” he called to Dirk. “Keep it on the ground.”
He took hold of his end of the plank and lifted it. Higher. Higher — until it was above his head. Slowly the pack began to slide down the slanting plank. It gathered momentum, slid through the opening in the net and came to rest at Dirk's feet!
At once Sig replaced the plank on the ground and sped across to Dirk….
Seconds later the teammates burst from the barn into the bright sunlight.
Rosenfeld and Slim were waiting for them.
Rosenfeld clicked his stopwatch. He glanced at it.
“Six minutes, forty-seven seconds,” he said. “Cutting it close.”
Slim consulted his stopwatch.
“Twenty-nine minutes, thirty-eight seconds total,” he announced. “Just under average.”
Despite himself, he sounded impressed.
Sig sank down on the grass. It seemed ages ago he'd been lying on the ground before the barbed-wire fence at Station #1. A lifetime of happenings ago.
Rosenfeld's briefing suddenly rang in his mind. The obstacle course is a test, he'd said. A test designed to measure your physical fitness at the end of your training period, your agility and coordination. To make you rely less on gadgets — more on ingenuity. To test your courage, your alertness and your ability to follow instructions. Your initiative, imagination and power of analysis. Your endurance. And — your teamwork…. He had been mildly amused. It had seemed to him nothing but a string of self-important words and phrases.
He had changed his mind. He had learned a lot about himself — in just half an hour And about Dirk.
Not a bad guy to have on your side.
Somehow all his self-doubt and misgivings about their mission had evaporated.
If they could beat that damn obstacle course, they could do anything!
Dirk was shrugging out of the heavy pack. He stretched luxuriously.
He, too, felt good. He'd actually enjoyed running the damn course.
Sig stood up. He rubbed his ribs. They were still tender. He turned to Rosenfeld.
“Is the jar okay?” he asked.
Rosenfeld looked blank.
“What jar?”
“The jar. In the pack. With the rocks.”
Rosenfeld laughed.
“Hell — there's no jar! Just thought we'd worry you a little….”
Sig felt the blood rise to the tip of his ears. He looked at Dirk, deeply affronted.
“Scheissdreck, nochmal!” he swore. “Shit and double shit!”
The corners of Dirk's mouth twitched. He began to laugh. Sig stared at him; then suddenly he, too, was laughing.
Rosenfeld regarded them soberly.
“Okay,” he said. “Come on. Back to camp. There is a lot to be done. You leave tomorrow for London.”
Sig looked at the OSS officer. To do what? he thought. It's about time we found out. He opened his mouth to speak. Dirk beat him to it.
“Isn't it about time you told us what the hell this is all about?” he asked tersely.
Rosenfeld nodded solemnly.
“It is.”
He told them.
11
Dirk was bored.
He considered Captain Cornelius Everett, Jr., USA, a colossal pain in the ass.
He and Sig had arrived five days before at the secluded OSS training-and-staging center at Milton Hall, a grand old manor house a hundred miles from London — and ever since they'd had to listen to Everett run off at the mouth. He talked and talked and talked with the stilted verbosity of a dull book. Too damned bad, Dirk thought wryly, that he couldn't be shut up the same way.