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of them had worked round the shore
and crossed the hillside fifty yards above him to cut off his retreat. He
was surrounded.
    At the head of the fjord there is a little mound, covered with small
birch trees. Behind it the hills rise steeply for about two hundred feet.
A shallow gully divides them. Within the gully the snow lies deeply, a
smooth steep slope only broken by two large boulders. The patrol
came floundering down the hill, pausing to kneel in the snow and
snipe at Jan with rifles. Caught between them and the fire from the
ship he could find no cover. But to reach him the patrol had to cross
the little dip behind the mound, and there for a moment they were
out of sight. He got up and ran towards them. He could not tell
whether they would come over the mound, through the birches, or
skirt round it to the left. He crept round it to the right. He had been
wearing rubber sea-boots, but had lost one of them when he was
swimming, and one of his feet was bare. He heard the soldiers crashing through the brittle bushes. Soon, as he and the patrol each circled
round the mound, he come upon their tracks and crossed them. It
could only be seconds before they came to his. But now the foot of
the gully was near, and he broke cover and ran towards it.
    They saw him at once, and they were even closer than before. An
officer called on him to halt. He struggled up the first part of the
gully, through the soft sliding snow. The officer fired at him with a revolver and missed, and he got to cover behind the first boulder in
the gully and drew his automatic.

    Looking back down the snow slope, he watched the officer climbing up towards him with the three soldiers following close behind.
The officer was in Gestapo uniform. They came on with confidence,
and Jan remembered that so far he had not fired a shot, so they possibly did not know that he was armed. He waited, not to waste his
fire. Beyond the four figures close below him, he was aware of uproar
and confusion, shouting and stray shots in the fjord. As he climbed,
the officer called to Jan to surrender. He was out of breath. Jan fixed
on a spot in the snow six yards below him. When they reached there,
he would shoot.
    The officer reached it first. Jan squeezed the trigger. The pistol
clicked. It was full of ice. Twice more he tried, but it would not work,
and the men were within three paces. He ejected to cartridges and it
fired. He shot the Gestapo officer twice and he fell dead in the snow
and his body rolled down the slope over and over towards the feet of
his men. Jan fired again and the next man went down, wounded. The
last two turned and ran, sliding down the snow to find cover. Jan
jumped to his feet and began the long climb up the gully.
    For a little while, it was strangely quiet. He was hidden from the
fjord by one side of the gully. The snow was soft and deep and difficult, and he often slipped with his rubber boot. With all his strength,
he could only climb slowly.
    Above the second boulder, for the last hundred feet, the gully
opened out into a wide snow slope, perfectly clean and white and
smooth, and as soon as he set foot on it he came into sight of the
German ship behind him.
    In his dark naval uniform against the gleaming snow up there he
was exposed as a perfect target for every gun on the warship and the
rifles of the soldiers on the beaches. He struggled in desperation with
the powdery snow, climbing a yard and slipping back, clawing frantically with his hands at the yielding surface which offered no hold. The virgin slope was torn to chaos by the storm of bullets from
behind him. Three-pounder shells exploding in it blew clouds of
snow powder in the air. He could feel with sickening expectation the
thud and the searing pain in his back which would be the end of it
all. The impulse to hide, to seek any refuge from this horror, was
overwhelming. But there was nowhere to hide, no help, no escape
from the dreadful thing