Читать книгу The Complete Navarone 4-Book Collection: The Guns of Navarone, Force Ten From Navarone, Storm Force from Navarone, Thunderbolt from Navarone - Alistair MacLean, Alistair MacLean, John Denis - Страница 11

‘Brilliant!’ said Mallory bitterly. ‘Ruddy well brilliant! “Come into my parlour said the spider to the fly.”’ He swore in chagrin and exasperated disgust, eased aside the edge of the tarpaulin that covered the for’ard hatchway, peered out through the slackening curtain of rain and took a second and longer look at the rocky bluff that elbowed out into the bend of the creek, shutting them off from the sea. There was no difficulty in seeing now, none at all: the drenching cloudburst had yielded to a gentle drizzle, and grey and white cloud streamers, shredding in the lifting wind, had already pursued the blackly towering cumulonimbus over the far horizon. In a clear band of sky far to the west, the sinking, flame-red sun was balanced on the rim of the sea. From the shadowed waters of the creek it was invisible, but its presence unmistakable from the gold-shot gauze of the falling rain, high above their heads.

The same golden rays highlighted the crumbling old watch-tower on the very point of the cliff, a hundred feet above the river. They burnished its fine-grained white Parian marble, mellowed it to a delicate rose: they gleamed on the glittering steel, the evil mouths of the Spandau machine-guns reaching out from the slotted embrasures in the massive walls, illumined the hooked cross of the swastika on the flag that streamed out stiffly from the staff above the parapet. Solid even in its decay, impregnable in its position, commanding in its lofty outlook, the tower completely dominated both waterborne approaches, from the sea and, upriver, down the narrow, winding channel that lay between the moored caique and the foot of the cliff.

Slowly, reluctantly almost, Mallory turned away and gently lowered the tarpaulin. His face was grim as he turned round to Andrea and Stevens, ill-defined shadows in the twilit gloom of the cabin.

‘Brilliant!’ he repeated. ‘Sheer genius. Mastermind Mallory. Probably the only bloody creek within a hundred miles – and in a hundred islands – with a German guard post on it. And of course I had to go and pick it. Let’s have another look at that chart, will you, Stevens?’

Stevens passed it across, watched Mallory study it in the pale light filtering in under the tarpaulin, leaned back against the bulkhead and drew heavily on his cigarette. It tasted foul, stale and acrid, but the tobacco was fresh enough, he knew. The old, sick fear was back again, as strongly as ever. He looked at the great bulk of Andrea across from him, felt an illogical resentment towards him for having spotted the emplacement a few minutes ago. They’ll have cannon up there, he thought dully, they’re bound to have cannon – couldn’t control the creek otherwise. He gripped his thigh fiercely, just above the knee, but the tremor lay too deep to be controlled: he blessed the merciful darkness of the tiny cabin. But his voice was casual enough as he spoke.

‘You’re wasting your time, sir, looking at that chart and blaming yourself. This is the only possible anchorage within hours of sailing time from here. With that wind there was nowhere else we could have gone.’

‘Exactly. That’s just it.’ Mallory folded the chart, handed it back. ‘There was nowhere else we could have gone. There was nowhere else anyone could have gone. Must be a very popular port in a storm, this – a fact which must have become apparent to the Germans a long, long time ago. That’s why I should have known they were almost bound to have a post here. However, spilt milk, as you say.’ He raised his voice. ‘Chief?’

‘Hallo!’ Brown’s muffled voice carried faintly from the depths of the engine-room.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Not too bad, sir. Assembling it now.’

Mallory nodded in relief.

‘How long?’ he called. ‘An hour?’

‘Aye, easy, sir.’

‘An hour.’ Again Mallory glanced through the tarpaulin, looked back at Andrea and Stevens. ‘Just about right. We’ll leave in an hour. Dark enough to give us some protection from our friends up top, but enough light left to navigate our way out of this damned corkscrew of a channel.’

‘Do you think they’ll try to stop us, sir?’ Stevens’s voice was just too casual, too matter of fact. He was pretty sure Mallory would notice.

‘It’s unlikely they’ll line the banks and give us three hearty cheers,’ Mallory said dryly. ‘How many men do you reckon they’ll have up there, Andrea?’

‘I’ve seen two moving around,’ Andrea said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe three or four altogether, Captain. A small post. The Germans don’t waste men on these.’

‘I think you’re about right,’ Mallory agreed. ‘Most of them’ll be in the garrison in the village – about seven miles from here, according to the chart, and due west. It’s not likely –’

He broke off sharply, stiffened in rigid attention. Again the call came, louder this time, imperative in its tone. Cursing himself for his negligence in not posting a guard – such carelessness would have cost him his life in Crete – Mallory pulled the tarpaulin aside, clambered slowly on to the deck. He carried no arms, but a half-empty bottle of Moselle dangled from his left hand; as part of a plan prepared before they had left Alexandria, he’d snatched it from a locker at the foot of the tiny companionway.

He lurched convincingly across the deck, grabbed at a stay in time to save himself from falling overboard. Insolently he stared down at the figure on the bank, less than ten yards away – it hadn’t mattered about a guard, Mallory realised, for the soldier carried his automatic carbine slung over his shoulder – insolently he tilted the wine to his mouth and swallowed deeply before condescending to talk to him.

He could see the mounting anger in the lean, tanned face of the young German below him. Mallory ignored it. Slowly, an inherent contempt in the gesture, he dragged the frayed sleeve of his black jacket across his lips, looked the soldier even more slowly up and down in a minutely provocative inspection as disdainful as it was prolonged.

‘Well?’ he asked truculently in the slow speech of the islands. ‘What the hell do you want?’

Even in the deepening dusk he could see the knuckles whitening on the stock of the carbine, and for an instant Mallory thought he had gone too far. He knew he was in no danger – all noise in the engine-room had ceased, and Dusty Miller’s hand was never far from his silenced automatic – but he didn’t want trouble. Not just yet. Not while there were a couple of manned Spandaus in that watchtower.

With an almost visible effort the young soldier regained his control. It needed little help from the imagination to see the draining anger, the first tentative stirrings of hesitation and bewilderment. It was the reaction Mallory had hoped for. Greeks – even half-drunk Greeks – didn’t talk to their over-lords like that – not unless they had an overpoweringly good reason.

‘What vessel is this?’ The Greek was slow and halting but passable. ‘Where are you bound for?’

Mallory tilted the bottle again, smacked his lips in noisy satisfaction. He held the bottle at arm’s length, regarded it with a loving respect.

‘One thing about you Germans,’ he confided loudly. ‘You do know how to make a fine wine. I’ll wager you can’t lay your hands on this stuff, eh? And the swill they’re making up above’ – the island term for the mainland – ‘is so full of resin that it’s only good for lighting fires.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Of course, if you know the right people in the islands, they might let you have some ouzo. But some of us can get ouzo and the best Hocks and the best Moselles.’

The soldier wrinkled his face in disgust. Like almost every fighting man he despised Quislings, even when they were on his side: in Greece they were very few indeed.

‘I asked you a question,’ he said coldly. ‘What vessel, and where bound?’

‘The caique Aigion,’ Mallory replied loftily. ‘In ballast, for Samos. Under orders,’ he said significantly.

‘Whose orders?’ the soldier demanded. Shrewdly Mallory judged the confidence as superficial only. The guard was impressed in spite of himself.

‘Herr Commandant in Vathy. General Graebel,’ Mallory said softly. ‘You will have heard of the Herr General before, yes?’ He was on safe ground here, Mallory knew. The reputation of Graebel, both as a paratroop commander and an iron disciplinarian, had spread far beyond these islands.

Even in the half-light Mallory could have sworn that the guard’s complexion turned paler. But he was dogged enough.

‘You have papers? Letters of authority?’

Mallory sighed wearily, looked over his shoulder.

‘Andrea!’ he bawled.

‘What do you want?’ Andrea’s great bulk loomed through the hatchway. He had heard every word that passed, had taken his cue from Mallory: a newly-opened wine bottle was almost engulfed in one vast hand and he was scowling hugely. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’ he asked surlily. He stopped short at the sight of the German and scowled again, irritably. ‘And what does this halfling want?’

‘Our passes and letters of authority from Herr General. They’re down below.’

Andrea disappeared, grumbling deep in his throat. A rope was thrown ashore, the stern pulled in against the sluggish current and the papers passed over. The papers – a set different from those to be used if emergency arose in Navarone – proved to be satisfactory, eminently so. Mallory would have been surprised had they been anything else. The preparation of these, even down to the photostatic facsimile of General Graebel’s signature, was all in the day’s work for Jensen’s bureau in Cairo.

The soldier folded the papers, handed them back with a muttered word of thanks. He was only a kid, Mallory could see now – if he was more than nineteen his looks belied him. A pleasant, open-faced kid – of a different stamp altogether from the young fanatics of the SS Panzer Division – and far too thin. Mallory’s chief reaction was one of relief: he would have hated to have to kill a boy like this. But he had to find out all he could. He signalled to Stevens to hand him up the almost empty crate of Moselle. Jensen, he mused, had been very thorough indeed: the man had literally thought of everything … Mallory gestured in the direction of the watch-tower.

‘How many of you are up there?’ he asked.

The boy was instantly suspicious. His face had tightened up, stilled in hostile surmise.

‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked stiffly.

Mallory groaned, lifted his hands in despair, turned sadly to Andrea.

‘You see what it is to be one of them?’ he asked in mournful complaint. ‘Trust nobody. Think everyone is as twisted as …’ He broke off hurriedly, turned to the soldier again. ‘It’s just that we don’t want to have the same trouble every time we come in here,’ he explained. ‘We’ll be back in Samos in a couple of days, and we’ve still another case of Moselle to work through. General Graebel keeps his – ah – special envoys well supplied … It must be thirsty work up there in the sun. Come on, now, a bottle each. How many bottles?’

The reassuring mention that they would be back again, the equally reassuring mention of Graebel’s name, plus, probably, the attraction of the offer and his comrades’ reaction if he told them he had refused it, tipped the balance, overcame scruples and suspicions.

‘There are only three of us,’ he said grudgingly.

‘Three it is,’ Mallory said cheerfully. ‘We’ll bring you some Hock next time we return.’ He tilted his own bottle. ‘Prosit!’ he said, an islander proud of airing his German, and then, more proudly still, ‘Auf Wiedersehen!’

The boy murmured something in return. He stood hesitating for a moment, slightly shame-faced, then wheeled abruptly, walked off slowly along the river bank, clutching his bottles of Moselle.

‘So!’ Mallory said thoughtfully. ‘There are only three of them. That should make things easier –’

‘Well done, sir!’ It was Stevens who interrupted, his voice warm, his face alive with admiration. ‘Jolly good show!’

‘Jolly good show!’ Miller mimicked. He heaved his lanky length over the coaming of the engine hatchway, ‘“Good” be damned! I couldn’t understand a gawddamned word, but for my money that rates an Oscar. That was terrific, boss!’

‘Thank you, one and all,’ Mallory murmured. ‘But I’m afraid the congratulations are a bit premature.’ The sudden chill in his voice struck at them, so that their eyes aligned along his pointing finger even before he went on. ‘Take a look,’ he said quietly.

The young soldier had halted suddenly about two hundred yards along the bank, looked into the forest on his left in startled surprise, then dived in among the trees. For a moment the watchers on the boat could see another soldier, talking excitedly to the boy and gesticulating in the direction of their boat, and then both were gone, lost in the gloom of the forest.

‘That’s torn it!’ Mallory said softly. He turned away. ‘Right, that’s enough. Back to where you were. It would look fishy if we ignored that incident altogether, but it would look a damned sight fishier if we paid too much attention to it. Don’t let’s appear to be holding a conference.’

Miller slipped down into the engine-room with Brown, and Stevens went back to the little for’ard cabin. Mallory and Andrea remained on deck, bottles in their hands. The rain had stopped now, completely, but the wind was still rising, climbing the scale with imperceptible steadiness, beginning to bend the tops of the tallest of the pines. Temporarily the bluff was affording them almost complete protection. Mallory deliberately shut his mind to what it must be like outside. They had to put out to sea – Spandaus permitting – and that was that.

‘What do you think has happened, sir?’ Stevens’s voice carried up from the gloom of the cabin.

‘Pretty obvious, isn’t it?’ Mallory asked. He spoke loudly enough for all to hear. ‘They’ve been tipped off. Don’t ask me how. This is the second time – and their suspicions are going to be considerably reinforced by the absence of a report from the caique that was sent to investigate us. She was carrying a wireless aerial, remember?’

‘But why should they get so damned suspicious all of a sudden?’ Miller asked. ‘It doesn’t make sense to me, boss.’

‘Must be in radio contact with their HQ. Or a telephone – probably a telephone. They’ve just been given the old tic-tac. Consternation on all sides.’

‘So mebbe they’ll be sending a small army over from their HQ to deal with us,’ Miller said lugubriously.

Mallory shook his head definitely. His mind was working quickly and well, and he felt oddly certain, confident of himself.

‘No, not a chance. Seven miles as the crow flies. Ten, maybe twelve miles over rough hill and forest tracks – and in pitch darkness. They wouldn’t think of it.’ He waved his bottle in the direction of the watch-tower. ‘Tonight’s their big night.’

‘So we can expect the Spandaus to open up any minute?’ Again the abnormal matter-of-factness of Stevens’s voice.

Mallory shook his head a second time.

‘They won’t. I’m positive of that. No matter how suspicious they may be, how certain they are that we’re the big bad wolf, they are going to be shaken to the core when that kid tells them we’re carrying papers and letters of authority signed by General Graebel himself. For all they know, curtains for us may be the firing squad for them. Unlikely, but you get the general idea. So they’re going to contact HQ, and the commandant on a small island like this isn’t going to take a chance on rubbing out a bunch of characters who may be the special envoys of the Herr General himself. So what? So he codes a message and radios it to Vathy in Samos and bites his nails off to the elbow till a message comes back saying Graebel has never heard of us and why the hell haven’t we all been shot dead?’ Mallory looked at the luminous dial of his watch. ‘I’d say we have at least half an hour.’

‘And meantime we all sit around with our little bits of paper and pencil and write out our last wills and testaments.’ Miller scowled. ‘No percentage in that, boss. We gotta do somethin’.’

Mallory grinned.

‘Don’t worry, Corporal, we are going to do something. We’re going to hold a nice little bottle party, right here on the poop.’

The last words of their song – a shockingly corrupted Grecian version of ‘Lilli Marlene’, and their third song in the past few minutes – died away in the evening air. Mallory doubted whether more than faint snatches of the singing would be carried to the watch-tower against the wind, but the rhythmical stamping of feet and waving of bottles were in themselves sufficient evidence of drunken musical hilarity to all but the totally blind and deaf. Mallory grinned to himself as he thought of the complete confusion and uncertainty the Germans in the tower must have been feeling then. This was not the behaviour of enemy spies, especially enemy spies who know that suspicions had been aroused and that their time was running out.

Mallory tilted the bottle to his mouth, held it there for several seconds, then set it down again, the wine untasted. He looked round slowly at the three men squatting there with him on the poop, Miller, Stevens and Brown. Andrea was not there, but he didn’t have to turn his head to look for him. Andrea, he knew, was crouched in the shelter of the wheelhouse, a waterproof bag with grenades and a revolver strapped to his back.

‘Right!’ Mallory said crisply. ‘Now’s your big chance for your Oscar. Let’s make this as convincing as we can.’ He bent forward, jabbed his finger into Miller’s chest and shouted angrily at him.

Miller shouted back. For a few moments they sat there, gesticulating angrily and, to all appearances, quarrelling furiously with each other. Then Miller was on his feet, swaying in drunken imbalance as he leaned threateningly over Mallory, clenched fists ready to strike. He stood back as Mallory struggled to his feet, and in a moment they were fighting fiercely, raining apparently heavy blows on each other. Then a haymaker from the American sent Mallory reeling back to crash convincingly against the wheelhouse.

‘Right, Andrea.’ He spoke quietly, without looking round. ‘This is it. Five seconds. Good luck.’ He scrambled to his feet, picked up a bottle by the neck and rushed at Miller, upraised arm and bludgeon swinging fiercely down. Miller dodged, swung a vicious foot, and Mallory roared in pain as his shins caught on the edge of the bulwarks. Silhouetted against the pale gleam of the creek, he stood poised for a second, arms flailing wildly, then plunged heavily, with a loud splash, into the waters of the creek.

For the next half-minute – it would take about that time for Andrea to swim underwater round the next upstream corner of the creek – everything was a confusion and a bedlam of noise. Mallory trod water as he tried to pull himself aboard: Miller had seized a boathook and was trying to smash it down on his head: and the others, on their feet now, had flung their arms round Miller, trying to restrain him: finally they managed to knock him off his feet, pin him to the deck and help the dripping Mallory aboard. A minute later, after the immemorial fashion of drunken men, the two combatants had shaken hands with one another and were sitting on the engine-room hatch, arms round each other’s shoulders and drinking in perfect amity from the same freshly-opened bottle of wine.

‘Very nicely done,’ Mallory said approvingly. ‘Very nicely indeed. An Oscar, definitely, for Corporal Miller.’

Dusty Miller said nothing. Taciturn and depressed, he looked moodily at the bottle in his hand. At last he stirred.

‘I don’t like it, boss,’ he muttered unhappily. ‘I don’t like the set-up one little bit. You shoulda let me go with Andrea. It’s three to one up there, and they’re waiting and ready.’ He looked accusingly at Mallory. ‘Dammit to hell, boss, you’re always telling us how desperately important this mission is!’

‘I know,’ Mallory said quietly. ‘That’s why I didn’t send you with him. That’s why none of us has gone with him. We’d only be a liability to him, get in his way.’ Mallory shook his head. ‘You don’t know Andrea, Dusty.’ It was the first time Mallory had called him that: Miller was warmed by the unexpected familiarity, secretly pleased. ‘None of you know him. But I know him.’ He gestured towards the watch-tower, its square-cut lines in sharp silhouette against the darkening sky. ‘Just a big, fat, good-natured chap, always laughing and joking.’ Mallory paused, shook his head again, went on slowly. ‘He’s up there now, padding through that forest like a cat, the biggest and most dangerous cat you’ll ever see. Unless they offer no resistance – Andrea never kills unnecessarily – when I send him up there after these three poor bastards I’m executing them just as surely as if they were in the electric chair and I was pulling the switch.’

In spite of himself Miller was impressed, profoundly so.

‘Known him a long time, boss, huh?’ It was half question, half statement.

‘A long time. Andrea was in the Albanian war – he was in the regular army. They tell me the Italians went in terror of him – his long-range patrols against the Iulia division, the Wolves of Tuscany, did more to wreck the Italian morale in Albania than any other single factor. I’ve heard a good many stories about them – not from Andrea – and they’re all incredible. And they’re all true. But it was afterwards I met him, when we were trying to hold the Servia Pass. I was a very junior liaison lieutenant in the Anzac brigade at the time. Andrea’ – he paused deliberately for effect – ‘Andrea was a lieutenant-colonel in the 19th Greek Motorised Division.’

‘A what?’ Miller demanded in astonishment. Stevens and Brown were equally incredulous.

‘You heard me. Lieutenant-colonel. Outranks me by a fairish bit, you might say.’ He smiled at them quizzically. ‘Puts Andrea in rather a different light, doesn’t it?’

They nodded silently but said nothing. The genial, hail-fellow Andrea – a good-natured, almost simpleminded buffoon – a senior army officer. The idea had come too suddenly, was too incongruous for easy assimilation and immediate comprehension. But, gradually, it began to make sense to them. It explained many things about Andrea to them – his repose, his confidence, the unerring sureness of his lightning reactions, and, above all, the implicit faith Mallory had in him, the respect he showed for Andrea’s opinions whenever he consulted him, which was frequently. Without surprise now, Miller slowly recalled that he’d never yet heard Mallory give Andrea a direct order. And Mallory never hesitated to pull his rank, when necessary.

‘After Servia,’ Mallory went on, ‘everything was pretty confused. Andrea had heard that Trikkala – a small country town where his wife and three daughters lived – had been flattened by the Stukas and Heinkels. He reached there all right, but there was nothing he could do. A land-mine had landed in the front garden and there wasn’t even rubble left.’

Mallory paused, lit a cigarette. He stared through the drifting smoke at the fading outlines of the tower.

‘The only person he found there was his brother-in-law, George. George was with us in Crete – he’s still there. From George he heard for the first time of the Bulgarian atrocities in Thrace and Macedonia – and his parents lived there. So they dressed in German uniforms – you can imagine how Andrea got those – commandeered a German army truck and drove to Protosami.’ The cigarette in Mallory’s hand snapped suddenly, was sent spinning over the side. Miller was vaguely surprised: emotion, or rather, emotional displays, were so completely foreign to that very tough New Zealander. But Mallory went on quietly enough.

‘They arrived in the evening of the infamous Protosami massacre. George has told me how Andrea stood there, clad in his German uniform and laughing as he watched a party of nine or ten Bulgarian soldiers lash couples together and throw them into the river. The first couple in were his father and stepmother, both dead.’

‘My Gawd above!’ Even Miller was shocked out of his usual equanimity. ‘It’s just not possible –’

‘You know nothing,’ Mallory interrupted impatiently. ‘Hundreds of Greeks in Macedonia died the same way – but usually alive when they were thrown in. Until you know how the Greeks hate the Bulgarians, you don’t even begin to know what hate is … Andrea shared a couple of bottles of wine with the soldiers, found out that they had killed his parents earlier in the afternoon – they had been foolish enough to resist. After dusk he followed them up to an old corrugated-iron shed where they were billeted for the night. All he had was a knife. They left a guard outside. Andrea broke his neck, went inside, locked the door and smashed the oil lamp. George doesn’t know what happened except that Andrea went berserk. He was back outside in two minutes, completely sodden, his uniform soaked in blood from head to foot. There wasn’t a sound, not even a groan to be heard from the hut when they left, George says.’

He paused again, but this time there was no interruption, nothing said. Stevens shivered, drew his shabby jacket closer round his shoulders: the air seemed to have become suddenly chill. Mallory lit another cigarette, smiled faintly at Miller, nodded towards the watch-tower.

‘See what I mean by saying we’d only be a liability to Andrea up there?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do,’ Miller admitted. ‘I had no idea, I had no idea … Not all of them, boss! He couldn’t have killed –’

‘He did,’ Mallory interrupted flatly. ‘After that he formed his own band, made life hell for the Bulgarian outposts in Thrace. At one time there was almost an entire division chasing him through the Rhodope mountains. Finally he was betrayed and captured, and he, George and four others were shipped to Stavros – they were to go on to Salonika for trial. They overpowered their guards – Andrea got loose among them on deck at night – and sailed the boat to Turkey. The Turks tried to intern him – they might as well have tried to intern an earthquake. Finally he arrived in Palestine, tried to join the Greek Commando Battalion that was being formed in the Middle East – mainly veterans of the Albanian campaign, like himself.’ Mallory laughed mirthlessly. ‘He was arrested as a deserter. He was released eventually, but there was no place for him in the new Greek Army. But Jensen’s bureau heard about him, knew he was a natural for Subversive Operations … And so we went to Crete together.’

Five minutes passed, perhaps ten, but nobody broke the silence. Occasionally, for the benefit of any watchers, they went through the motions of drinking; but even the half-light was fading now and Mallory knew they could only be half-seen blurs, shadowy and indistinct, from the heights of the watch-tower. The caique was beginning to rock in the surge from the open sea round the bluff. The tall, reaching pines, black now as midnight cypress and looming impossibly high against the star-dusted cloud wrack that scudded palely overhead, were closing in on them from either side, sombre, watchful and vaguely threatening, the wind moaning in lost and mournful requiem through their swaying topmost branches. A bad night, an eerie and an ominous night, pregnant with that indefinable foreboding that reaches down and touches the well-springs of the nameless fears, the dim and haunting memories of a million years ago, the ancient racial superstitions of mankind: a night that sloughed off the tissue veneer of civilisation and the shivering man complains that someone is walking over his grave.

Suddenly, incongruously, the spell was shattered and Andrea’s cheerful hail from the bank had them all on their feet in a moment. They heard his booming laugh and even the forests seemed to shrink back in defeat. Without waiting for the stern to be pulled in, he plunged into the creek, reached the caique in half a dozen powerful strokes and hoisted himself easily aboard. Grinning down from his great height, he shook himself like some shaggy mastiff and reached out a hand for a convenient wine bottle.

‘No need to ask how things went, eh?’ Mallory asked, smiling.

‘None at all. It was just too easy. They were only boys and they never even saw me.’ Andrea took another long swig from the bottle and grinned in sheer delight. ‘And I didn’t lay a finger on them,’ he went on triumphantly. ‘Well, maybe a couple of little taps. They were all looking down here, staring out over the parapet when I arrived. Held them up, took their guns off them and locked them in a cellar. And then I bent their Spandaus – just a little bit.’

This is it, Mallory thought dully, this is the end. This is the finish of everything, the strivings, the hopes, the fears, the loves and laughter of each one of us. This is what it all comes to. This is the end, the end for us, the end for a thousand boys on Kheros. In unconscious futility his hand came up, slowly wiped lips salt from the spray bulleting off the wind-flattened wave-tops, then lifted farther to shade bloodshot eyes that peered out hopelessly into the storm-filled darkness ahead. For a moment the dullness lifted, and an almost intolerable bitterness welled through his mind. All gone, everything – everything except the guns of Navarone. The guns of Navarone. They would live on, they were indestructible. Damn them, damn them, damn them! Dear God, the blind waste, the terrible uselessness of it all!

The caique was dying, coming apart at the seams. She was literally being pounded to death, being shaken apart by the constant battering shocks of wind and sea. Time and time again the poop-deck dipped beneath the foam-streaked cauldron at the stern, the fo’c’sle rearing crazily into the air, dripping forefoot showing clear: then the plummeting drop, the shotgun, shuddering impact as broad-beamed bows crashed vertically down into the cliff-walled trough beyond, an explosive collision that threw so unendurable a strain on the ancient timbers and planks and gradually tore them apart.

It had been bad enough when they’d cleared the creek just as darkness fell, and plunged and wallowed their way through a quartering sea on a northward course for Navarone. Steering the unwieldy old caique had become difficult in the extreme: with the seas fine on the starboard quarter she had yawed wildly and unpredictably through a fifty degree arc, but at least her seams had been tight then, the rolling waves overtaking her in regular formation and the wind settled and steady somewhere east of south. But now all that was gone. With half a dozen planks sprung from the stem-post and working loose from the apron, and leaking heavily through the stuffing-gland of the propeller shaft, she was making water far faster than the ancient, vertical hand-pump could cope with: the wind-truncated seas were heavier, but broken and confused, sweeping down on them now from this quarter, now from that: and the wind itself, redoubled in its shrieking violence, veered and backed insanely from south-west to south-east. Just then it was steady from the south, driving the unmanageable craft blindly on to the closing iron cliffs of Navarone, cliffs that loomed invisibly ahead, somewhere in that all-encompassing darkness.

Momentarily Mallory straightened, tried to ease the agony of the pincers that were clawing into the muscles of the small of his back. For over two hours now he had been bending and straightening, bending and straightening, lifting a thousand buckets that Dusty Miller filled interminably from the well of the hold. God only knew how Miller felt. If anything, he had the harder job of the two and he had been violently and almost continuously sea-sick for hours on end. He looked ghastly, and he must have been feeling like death itself: the sustained effort, the sheer iron will-power to drive himself on in that condition reached beyond the limits of understanding. Mallory shook his head wonderingly. ‘My God, but he’s tough, that Yank.’ Unbidden, the words framed themselves in his mind, and he shook his head in anger, vaguely conscious of the complete inadequacy of the words.

Fighting for his breath, he looked aft to see how the others were faring. Casey Brown, of course, he couldn’t see. Bent double in the cramped confines of the engine-room, he, too, was constantly sick and suffering a blinding headache from the oil fumes and exhaust gases still filtering from the replacement stand-pipe, neither of which could find any escape in the unventilated engine-room: but, crouched over the engine, he had not once left his post since they had cleared the mouth of the creek, had nursed the straining, ancient Kelvin along with the loving care, the exquisite skill of a man born into a long and proud tradition of engineering. That engine had only to falter once, to break down for the time in which a man might draw a deep breath, and the end would be as immediate as it was violent. Their steerage way, their lives, depended entirely on the continuous thrust of that screw, the laboured thudding of that rusted old two-cylinder. It was the heart of the boat, and when that heart stopped beating the boat died too, slewed broadside on and foundering in the waiting chasms between the waves.

For’ard of the engine-room, straddle-legged and braced against the corner pillar of the splintered skeleton that was all that remained of the wheelhouse, Andrea laboured unceasingly at the pump, never once lifting his head, oblivious of the crazy lurching of the deck of the caique, oblivious, too, of the biting wind and stinging, sleet-cold spray that numbed bare arms and moulded the sodden shirt to the hunched and massive shoulders. Ceaselessly, tirelessly, his arm thrust up and down, up and down, with the metronomic regularity of a piston. He had been there for close on three hours now, and he looked as if he could go on for ever. Mallory, who had yielded him the pump in complete exhaustion after less than twenty minutes’ cruel labour, wondered if there was any limit to the man’s endurance.

He wondered, too, about Stevens. For four endless hours now Andy Stevens had fought and overcome a wheel that leapt and struggled in his hands as if possessed of a convulsive life and will of its own – the will to wrench itself out of exhausted hands and turn them into the troughs: he had done a superb job, Mallory thought, had handled the clumsy craft magnificently. He peered at him closely, but the spray lashed viciously across his eyes and blinded him with tears. All he could gather was a vague impression of a tightly-set mouth, sleepless, sunken eyes and little patches of skin unnaturally pale against the mask of blood that covered almost the entire face from hairline to throat. The twisting, towering comber that had stove in the planks of the wheelhouse and driven in the windows with such savage force had been completely unexpected: Stevens hadn’t had a chance. The cut above the right temple was particularly bad, ugly and deep: the blood still pulsed over the ragged edge of the wound, dripped monotonously into the water that sloshed and gurgled about the floor of the wheelhouse.

Sick to his heart, Mallory turned away, reached down for another bucket of water. What a crew, he thought to himself, what a really terrific bunch of – of … He sought for words to describe them, even to himself, but he knew his mind was far too tired. It didn’t matter anyway, for there were no words for men like that, nothing that could do them justice.

He could almost taste the bitterness in his mouth, the bitterness that washed in waves through his exhausted mind. God, how wrong it was, how terribly unfair! Why did such men have to die, he wondered savagely, why did they have to die so uselessly. Or maybe it wasn’t necessary to justify dying, even dying ingloriously empty of achievement. Could one not die for intangibles, for the abstract and the ideal? What had the martyrs at the stake achieved? Or what was the old tag – dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. If one lives well, what matter how one dies. Unconsciously his lips tightened in quick revulsion and he thought of Jensen’s remarks about the High Command playing who’s-the-king-of-the-castle. Well, they were right bang in the middle of their playground now, just a few more pawns sliding into the limbo. Not that it mattered – they had thousands more left to play with.

For the first time Mallory thought of himself. Not with bitterness or self-pity or regret that it was all over. He thought of himself only as the leader of this party, his responsibility for the present situation. It’s my fault, he told himself over and over again, it’s all my fault. I brought them here. I made them come. Even while one part of his mind was telling him that he’d had no option, that his hand had been forced, that if they had remained in the creek they would have been wiped out long before the dawn, irrationally he still blamed himself the more. Shackleton, of all the men that ever lived, maybe Ernest Shackleton could have helped them now. But not Keith Mallory. There was nothing he could do, no more than the others were doing, and they were just waiting for the end. But he was the leader, he thought dully, he should be planning something, he should be doing something … But there was nothing he could do. There was nothing anyone on God’s earth could do. The sense of guilt, of utter inadequacy, settled and deepened with every shudder of the ancient timbers.

He dropped his bucket, grabbed for the security of the mast as a heavy wave swept over the deck, the breaking foam quicksilver in its seething phosphorescence. The waters swirled hungrily round his legs and feet, but he ignored them, stared out into the darkness. The darkness – that was the devil of it. The old caique rolled and pitched and staggered and plunged, but as if disembodied, in a vacuum. They could see nothing – not where the last wave had gone, nor where the next was coming from. A sea invisible and strangely remote, doubly frightening in its palpable immediacy.

Mallory stared down into the hold, was vaguely conscious of the white blur of Miller’s face: he had swallowed some sea-water and was retching painfully, salt water laced with blood. But Mallory ignored it, involuntarily: all his mind was concentrated elsewhere, trying to reduce some fleeting impression, as vague as it had been evanescent, to a coherent realisation. It seemed desperately urgent that he should do so. Then another and still heavier wave broke over the side and all at once he had it.

The wind! The wind had dropped away, was lessening with every second that passed. Even as he stood there, arms locked round the mast as the second wave fought to carry him away, he remembered how often in the high hills at home he had stood at the foot of a precipice as an onrushing wind, seeking the path of least resistance, had curved and lifted up the sheer face, leaving him standing in a pocket of relative immunity. It was a common enough mountaineering phenomenon. And these two freak waves – the surging backwash! The significance struck at him like a blow. The cliffs! They were on the cliffs of Navarone!

With a hoarse, wordless cry of warning, reckless of his own safety, he flung himself aft, dived full length through the swirling waters for the engine-room hatchway.

‘Full astern!’ he shouted. The startled white smudge that was Casey Brown’s face twisted up to his. ‘For God’s sake, man, full astern! We’re heading for the cliffs!’

He scrambled to his feet, reached the wheelhouse in two strides, hand pawing frantically for the flare pocket.

‘The cliffs, Stevens! We’re almost on them! Andrea – Miller’s still down below!’

He flicked a glance at Stevens, caught the slow nod of the set, blood-masked face, followed the line of sight of the expressionless eyes, saw the whitely phosphorescent line ahead, irregular but almost continuous, blooming and fading, blooming and fading, as the pounding seas smashed against and fell back from cliffs still invisible in the darkness. Desperately his hands fumbled with the flare.

And then, abruptly, it was gone, hissing and spluttering along the near-horizontal trajectory of its flight. For a moment, Mallory thought it had gone out, and he clenched his fists in impotent bitterness. Then it smashed against the rock face, fell back on to a ledge about a dozen feet above the water, and lay there smoking and intermittently burning in the driving rain, in the heavy spray that cascaded from the booming breakers.

The light was feeble, but it was enough. The cliffs were barely fifty yards away, black and wetly shining in the fitful radiance of the flare – a flare that illuminated a vertical circle of less than five yards in radius, and left the cliff below the ledge shrouded in the treacherous dark. And straight ahead, twenty, maybe fifteen yards from the shore, stretched the evil length of a reef, gap-toothed and needle-pointed, vanishing at either end into the outer darkness.

‘Can you take her through?’ he yelled at Stevens.

‘God knows! I’ll try!’ He shouted something else about ‘steerage way’, but Mallory was already half-way to the for’ard cabin. As always in an emergency, his mind was racing ahead with that abnormal sureness and clarity of thought for which he could never afterwards account.

Grasping spikes, mallet and a wire-cored rope, he was back on deck in seconds. He stood stock still, rooted in an almost intolerable tension as he saw the towering, jagged rock bearing down upon them, fine on the starboard bow, a rock that reached half-way to the wheelhouse. It struck the boat with a crash that sent him to his knees, rasped and grated along half the length of the buckled, splintered gunwales: and then the caique had rolled over to port and she was through. Stevens frantically spinning the wheel and shouting for full astern.

Mallory’s breath escaped in a long, heavy sigh of relief – he had been quite unaware that he had stopped breathing – and he hurriedly looped the coil of rope round his neck and under his left shoulder and stuck spikes and hammer in his belt. The caique was slewing heavily round now, port side to, plunging and corkscrewing violently as she began to fall broadside into the troughs of the waves, waves shorter and steeper than ever under the double thrust of the wind and the waves and the backwash recoiling from the cliffs: but she was still in the grip of the sea and her own momentum, and the distance was closing with frightening speed. It’s a chance I have to take, Mallory repeated to himself over and over again; it’s a chance I have to take. But that little ledge remote and just inaccessible, was fate’s last refinement of cruelty, the salt in the wound of extinction, and he knew in his heart of hearts that it wasn’t a chance at all, but just a suicidal gesture. And then Andrea had heaved the last of the tenders – worn truck tyres – outboard, and was towering above him, grinning down hugely into his face: and suddenly Mallory wasn’t so sure any more.

‘The ledge?’ Andrea’s vast, reassuring hand was on his shoulder.

Mallory nodded, knees bent in readiness, feet braced on the plunging, slippery deck.

‘Jump for it,’ Andrea boomed. ‘Then keep your legs stiff.’

There was no time for any more. The caique was swinging in broadside to, teetering on the crest of a wave, as high up the cliff as she would ever be, and Mallory knew it was now or never. His hands swung back behind his body, his knees bent farther, and then, in one convulsive leap he had flung himself upwards, fingers scrabbling on the wet rock of the cliff, then hooking over the rim of the ledge. For an instant he hung there at the length of his arms, unable to move, wincing as he heard the foremast crash against the ledge and snap in two, then his fingers left the ledge without their own volition, and he was almost half-way over, propelled by one gigantic heave from below.

He was not up yet. He was held only by the buckle of his belt, caught on the edge of the rock, a buckle now dragged up to his breastbone by the weight of his body. But he did not paw frantically for a handhold, or wriggle his body or flail his legs in the air – and any of these actions would have sent him crashing down again. At last, and once again, he was a man utterly at home in his own element. The greatest rock climber of his time, men called him, and this was what he had been born for.

Slowly, methodically, he felt the surface of the ledge, and almost at once he discovered a crack running back from the face. It would have been better had it been parallel to the face – and more than the width of a match-stick. But it was enough for Mallory. With infinite care he eased the hammer and a couple of spikes from his belt, worked a spike into the crack to obtain a minimal purchase, slid the other in some inches nearer, hooked his left wrist round the first, held the second spike with the fingers of the same hand and brought up the hammer in his free hand. Fifteen seconds later he was standing on the ledge.

Working quickly and surely, catlike in his balance on the slippery, shelving rock, he hammered a spike into the face of the cliff, securely and at a downward angle, about three feet above the ledge, dropped a clove hitch over the top and kicked the rest of the coil over the ledge. Then, and only then, he turned round and looked below him.

Less than a minute had passed since the caique had struck, but already she was a broken-masted, splintered shambles, sides caving in and visibly disintegrating as he watched. Every seven or eight seconds a giant comber would pick her up and fling her bodily against the cliff, the heavy truck tyres taking up only a fraction of the impact that followed, the sickening, rending crash that reduced the gunwales to matchwood, holed and split the sides and cracked the oaken timbers: and then she would roll clear, port side showing, the hungry sea pouring in through the torn and ruptured planking.

Three men were standing by what was left of the wheelhouse. Three men – suddenly, he realised that Casey Brown was missing, realised, too, that the engine was still running, its clamour rising and falling then rising again, at irregular intervals. Brown was edging the caique backwards and forwards along the cliff, keeping her as nearly as humanly possible in the same position, for he knew their lives depended on Mallory – and on himself. ‘The fool!’ Mallory swore. ‘The crazy fool!’

The caique surged back in a receding trough, steadied, then swept in against the cliff again, heeling over so wildly that the roof of the wheelhouse smashed and telescoped against the wall of the cliff. The impact was so fierce, the shock so sudden, that Stevens lost both handgrip and footing and was catapulted into the rock face, upflung arms raised for protection. For a moment he hung there, as if pinned against the wall, then fell back into the sea, limbs and head relaxed, lifeless in his limp acquiescence. He should have died then, drowned under the hammer-blows of the sea or crushed by the next battering-ram collision of caique and cliff. He should have died and he would have died but for the great arm that hooked down and plucked him out of the water like a limp and sodden rag doll and heaved him inboard a bare second before the next bludgeoning impact of the boat against the rock would have crushed the life out of him.

‘Come on, for God’s sake!’ Mallory shouted desperately. ‘She’ll be gone in a minute! The rope – use the rope!’ He saw Andrea and Miller exchange a few quick words, saw them shake and pummel Stevens and stand him on his feet, dazed and retching sea-water, but conscious. Andrea was speaking in his ear, emphasising something and guiding the rope into his hands, and then the caique was swinging in again, Stevens automatically shortening his grip on the rope. A tremendous boost from below by Andrea, Mallory’s long arm reaching out and Stevens was on the ledge, sitting with his back to the cliff and hanging on to the spike, dazed still and shaking a muzzy head, but safe.

‘You’re next, Miller!’ Mallory called. ‘Hurry up, man – jump for it!’

Miller looked at him and Mallory could have sworn that he was grinning. Instead of taking the rope from Andrea, he ran for’ard to the cabin.

‘Just a minute, boss!’ he bawled. ‘I’ve forgotten my toothbrush.’

He reappeared in a few seconds, but without the toothbrush. He was carrying the big, green box of explosives, and before Mallory had appreciated what was happening the box, all fifty pounds of it, was curving up into the air, upthrust by the Greek’s tireless arms. Automatically Mallory’s hands reached for and caught it. He overbalanced, stumbled and toppled forward, still clutching the box, then was brought up with a jerk. Stevens, still clutching the spike, was on his feet now, free hand hooked in Mallory’s belt: he was shivering violently, with cold and exhaustion and an oddly fear-laced excitement. But, like Mallory, he was a hillman at home again.

Mallory was just straightening up when the waterproofed radio set came soaring up. He caught it, placed it down, looked over the side.

‘Leave that bloody stuff alone!’ he shouted furiously. ‘Get up here yourselves – now!’

Two coils of rope landed on the ledge beside him, then the first of the rucksacks with the food and clothing. He was vaguely aware that Stevens was trying to stack the equipment in some sort of order.

‘Do you hear me?’ Mallory roared. ‘Get up here at once! That’s an order. The boat’s sinking, you bloody idiots!’

The caique was sinking. She was filling up quickly and Casey Brown had abandoned the flooded Kelvin. But she was a far steadier platform now, rolling through a much shorter arc, less violent in her soggy, yielding collisions with the cliff wall. For a moment Mallory thought the sea was dropping away, then he realised that the tons of water in the caique’s hold had drastically lowered her centre of gravity, were acting as a counter-balancing weight.

Miller cupped a hand to his ear. Even in the near darkness of the sinking flare his face had an oddly greenish pallor.

‘Can’t hear a word you say, boss. Besides, she ain’t sinkin’ yet.’ Once again he disappeared into the for’ard cabin.

Within thirty seconds, with all five men working furiously, the remainder of the equipment was on the ledge. The caique was down by the stern, the poop-deck covered and water pouring down the engine-room hatch-way as Brown struggled up the rope, the fo’c’sle awash as Miller grabbed the rope and started after him, and as Andrea reached up and swung in against the cliff his legs dangled over an empty sea. The caique had foundered, completely gone from sight: no drifting flotsam, not even an air bubble marked where she had so lately been.

The ledge was narrow, not three feet wide at its broadest, tapering off into the gloom on either side. Worse still, apart from the few square feet where Stevens had piled the gear, it shelved sharply outwards, the rock underfoot treacherous and slippery. Backs to the wall, Andrea and Miller had to stand on their heels, hands outspread and palms inward against the cliff, pressing in to it as closely as possible to maintain their balance. But in less than a minute Mallory had another two spikes hammered in about twenty inches above the ledge, ten feet apart and joined with a rope, a secure lifeline for all of them.

Wearily Miller slid down to a sitting position, leaned his chest in heartfelt thankfulness against the safe barrier of the rope. He fumbled in his breast pocket, produced a pack of cigarettes and handed them round, oblivious to the rain that soaked them in an instant. He was soaking wet from the waist downwards and both his knees had been badly bruised against the cliff wall: he was bitterly cold, drenched by heavy rain and the sheets of spray that broke continually over the ledge: the sharp edge of the rock bit cruelly into the calves of his legs, the tight rope constricted his breathing and he was still ashen-faced and exhausted from long hours of labour and seasickness: but when he spoke, it was with a voice of utter sincerity.

‘My Gawd!’ he said reverently. ‘Ain’t this wonderful!’