Читать книгу Thunderbolt from Navarone - Sam Llewellyn, Sam Llewellyn - Страница 6

It was raining in Plymouth, a warmish Atlantic rain that blanketed the Hoe and blurred the MTB s and ML s sliding in the Roads. In the early hours of their captivity the three men in the top-floor suite of the Hotel Majestic had spent time looking out of the window. They had long ago given up. Now they sprawled in armchairs round a low table on which were two empty brandy bottles and three overflowing ashtrays: men past their first youth and even their second, faces burned dark by the sun, eye-sockets hollow with the corrosive exhaustion of battle. They were in khaki battledress, without insignia. One was huge and black-haired. Another was tall and lean, with the hard jaw and steady eyes of a climber. The third was a rangy individual with a lugubrious face, glass of brandy in one hand, cigarette in mouth.

It was the third man who spoke. ‘This is not,’ he said, ‘what I call a vacation.’

The third man’s name was Miller. In so far as he had a rank, he was a corporal in the US Army Catering Corps. He was also the greatest demolition expert in the Allied armies.

The man who looked like a climber nodded, and lit a cigarette, and returned to his thoughts. This was a man you could imagine waiting for ever, if necessary; a man completely in control of himself. This was Captain Mallory, the New Zealander who before the war had been a world-famous mountaineer, and who had since done more damage to Hitler’s armies than the entire Brigade of Guards. ‘It’s better than being machine-gunned,’ he said.

Miller thought about that. ‘I guess,’ he said. He did not look sure.

‘Soon,’ said the big man, ‘there will be work to do.’ His accent was Greek, his voice soft but heavy, spreading a blanket of silence through the room. Andrea was a sleepy-eyed bear of a man, dark enough to look perpetually in need of a shave, his upper lip infested with a black stubble of regrowing moustache. He looked like the less respectable type of bandit, a mountain of sloth and debauchery. This impression had misled many of his enemies, most of them fatally. In fact, Andrea was a full colonel in the Greek army. Furthermore, he was as strong as a mobile crane, as fast and light on his feet as a cat, and as level-headed as an Edinburgh lawyer. When he spoke, which was not often, people gave him their full attention.

Miller and Mallory closed their minds to the soft rain on the window.

‘They think we are spies,’ said Andrea. ‘They think we have made a deal with somebody and run away. It is not an unreasonable suspicion. Do you blame them?’

Miller took a swig out of his glass. ‘They asked us to blow the guns on Navarone,’ he said. ‘We blew ‘em. They asked us to destroy the Neretva Dam. Up goes the Neretva Dam. They sent us after the Werwolf subs. The Werwolf submarines get broken.’ His long face was lugubrious. ‘And now they tell us they have another job for us, and they pick us up in the Bay of Biscay and bring us all the way to Plymouth, and to demonstrate their everlasting admiration they lock us up in a fleabag hotel and put sentries on the door.’ He coughed, long and loose and nasty. ‘Sure, I blame them.’

‘They’ve had ten-tenths cloud since the Werwolf raid,’ said Mallory. ‘They haven’t been able to do a photographic recce, and there’s no independent confirmation. And if you remember, it wasn’t an easy job.’

‘I remember,’ said Miller, grimly.

‘So look at it like this,’ said Mallory. ‘They locked us up here because they don’t believe we could have achieved our objective. But we know we did. So we’re right and they’re wrong, and when they find out they are going to be very sorry. So it is all a very nice compliment, really.’

‘I don’t want compliments,’ said Miller. ‘I want a few drinks and some decent food and a little feminine society. For Chrissakes, Jensen knows what we can do. Why doesn’t he tell them?’

Andrea put his hands together. ‘Who can tell what Jensen knows?’

There was a small silence. Then Mallory said, ‘I think we should go and talk to him.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Miller. ‘Very amusing. There are thirty commandos on the landing.’

‘I did not,’ said Mallory, ‘notice any commandos on the window- sill.’

Miller’s face was suddenly a mask of horror. ‘Oh, no,’ he said.

Andrea smiled, a pure, innocent smile of great sweetness. ‘Captain Jensen takes cocktails in the mess at ten minutes past six. The mess is in the basement of this hotel. It is now five past.’

‘How did you know that?’

‘I looked at my watch.’

‘About the cocktail hour.’

‘There is a chambermaid here from Roumeli,’ purred Andrea. ‘I talked to the poor girl. She was very pleased – are we ready?’

The room had filled with damp air. Mallory had raised the window. He was standing with his hands on the sill, looking down the sheer face of the hotel. ‘Child could do it,’ he said. ‘We’re off.’

The cocktail bar of the Hotel Majestic in Plymouth had been a fashionable West Country rendezvous in the 1930s, largely because it was the only cocktail bar in Plymouth, a town which otherwise found its entertainment in the more violent type of public house. It was eminently suited to wartime use. For one thing, it was mostly below ground, a comforting feature for those wishing their business to be undisturbed by the Nazi bombs that had all but obliterated large areas of the city. For another, its proximity to the naval dockyard gave the barman, an alert Devonian called Enrico, privileged access to the bottomless wells of gin which were as indispensable a fuel for His Majesty’s warships as the more conventional bunker crude.

At six, the usual crowd were in: seven-eighths male, eight- eighths in uniform, talking in low voices from faces haggard with overwork and lack of exercise. At five past, Captain Jensen walked to his usual table: a small man in naval uniform with a captain’s gold rings on the sleeve, a sardonic smile, and eyes of an astonishing mildness, except when no one was looking, at which point they might have belonged to one of the hungrier species of shark. With him was a stout man with a florid face and the heavy braid of an admiral.

‘Submarines/ the Admiral was saying. ‘Damn cowardly, hugely overrated in my opinion.’ He gulped his pink gin and called for another.

‘Yes?’ said Jensen, taking a microscopic sip of his own gin. ‘Interesting point of view.’

‘Not fashionable, I grant you,’ said the Admiral, whose name was Dixon. ‘But fashion is a fickle jade, what? Capital ships, I can tell you. The rest of it, well… Submarines, aircraft carriers, here today, gone tomorrow.’

Jensen raised a polite eyebrow. The Admiral’s face was mottled with drink. He had recently arrived as OC Special Operations, Mediterranean, having been booted sideways from duties in the narrow seas before he could do any real damage. Jensen was interested in the Mediterranean himself – had, indeed, conceived and commanded some Special Operations of his own. It would have been reasonable to assume that he would have resented the arrival of a desk-bound blimp like Dixon as his superior officer. But if he did feel resentment, he showed no sign. Jensen was a subtle man, as his enemies had found out to their cost. Acting on Jensen’s information, two Japanese infantry divisions had fought each other for three bloody days, each under the impression that the other was commanded by Orde Wingate. A German Panzer division had vanished without trace in the Pripet marshes, following a road on a map drawn from cartographic information supplied by Jensen’s agents. Since early in the war, others of his agents had been the unfailing fountainhead of the cigars smoked by the most important man in Britain. Jensen had a finger in all pies. He had paid close attention to the development of his own career, but even closer attention to the question of winning the war. In the second as well as the first, he was known to be completely ruthless – a fact that might have given a more intelligent man than Dixon cause for worry.

But Dixon could not see over the mountain of his self- importance. Dixon had room in his mind for only one thing at a time. Just at the moment, that thing was gin.

‘Lovely thing, drink after hard day at office,’ said the Admiral, waving for his third pinkers.

The Werwolf reconnaissance photographs/ said Jensen. ‘I’ve seen them. Total success.’

‘Yes,’ said the Admiral. ‘Where’s that damn waitress?’

‘Can I have your order to release my men?’

‘Men?’

‘The men you had confined to quarters.’

‘Tomorrow, for God’s sake. During office hours.’

‘They might value a little liberty before the mission.’

‘They’ll do as they’re damn well ordered. Waitress!’

Jensen’s small, hard face did not lose its mildness, but he was conscious of a little twitch of anticipation. He knew Mallory, Miller and Andrea well; had indeed hand-picked them from a pool of the hardest of hard men. He knew them for excellent soldiers. But he also knew that they were not the kind of troops the Admiral was accustomed to. Locking them in a hotel room under heavy guard because you did not have the imagination to understand the stupendous success of their last mission was not a tactful move. Mallory, Miller and Andrea were not used to the close proximity of superior officers. They obeyed orders to the letter, of course. Still, Jensen had a distinct feeling that there would be trouble –

There was a small commotion by the entrance.

The Majestic was the kind of hotel whose frontage is criss-crossed with string-courses, cornices and swags of stone fruit. Mallory had sniffed the wet sea air, sighted on the fire-escape two windows along. Then he had lowered himself from the windowsill on to the bunch of limestone plums that decorated the lintel of the window below. Here he had paused, then hopped on to its neighbour. Miller, cursing inwardly, took a deep breath and followed him. Six storeys below, a cat the size of a flea prowled in a yard of trash cans. Miller got his feet on the fruit. He took another breath, and jumped for the next lintel. It was not more than six inches wide. Mallory had landed on it soft and quiet and confident as if it had been the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. To Miller, it looked about as accommodating as a child’s eyebrow. His mouth dried out in midair. He felt his boot make contact, the toe bite, then slither. His stomach shrank, and as he teetered and began to fall his mind had room for one thought and one thought only. Navarone, Yugoslavia, the Pyrenees, and it ends here at the Hotel Majestic, Plymouth. How stupid –

Then a steely hand grabbed his wrist and Mallory’s voice said, ‘Hold up, there.’ Then he was standing on the lintel, breathing deep to slow the thumping of his heart. Suddenly the fumes of the brandy and the cigarettes were blowing away and he had the sense that something had started again, like a machine that was winding up, moving on to the road for which it had been designed. The hesitancy was gone. Thought and action were the same thing.

He took the next two lintels in his stride. On the fire-escape landing he looked back. Andrea was drifting across the face of the hotel like a gigantic shadow. The Greek landed light as a feather next to them. They trotted down the iron stairs, spread out, automatically, with the discipline that had established itself these last weeks. Covering each other, covering themselves … Going out for a drink.

They flitted off the fire-escape, trotted through the alley to the front of the hotel, and up the grand stone steps into the lobby. The man behind the desk saw three men in khaki battledress without insignia. He had been a hall porter on civvy street, and he knew trouble when he saw it. Among the immaculate officers walking through the lobby, these men stuck out like wolves at a poodle show. Their boots were dirty, their eyes bloodshot, and they moved at a murderous lope that made him wish he could leave, fast, and become far away. Alarm bells started ringing in his head. Deserters, he thought, and dangerous ones. It did not occur to him that deserters were unlikely to be hanging around in smart hotels. These men made him too nervous to think. His hand went for the telephone. He knew the number of the Military Police by heart.

He told the operator what he wanted. But when he looked up, the men had gone. For good, he imagined, dabbing sweat from his pale brow with a clean handkerchief. There had been no time for them to cause any trouble, and they would not get past the sentries on the cocktail bar. He cancelled the call.

But the men had not gone; and they had indeed got past the sentries.

It had happened like this: three men in battledress without insignia had attempted to gain entrance to the mess bar. Challenged, one of them had barked the sentries to attention, an order the sentries had (for reasons they did not properly understand) found themselves obeying. Another, a very big man with black curly hair, had taken away their rifles with the confidence of a kind father removing a dangerous toy from a fractious child. The third, having passed remarks uncomplimentary to their personal turnout and the cleanliness of their weapons, which he had inspected, had followed his two companions into the hallowed portals.

As they gazed upon the shut door, the sentries became aware that they had failed in their duty. There had been no chance of their succeeding, of course; the situation had been out of their hands. But that was not going to make matters any easier to explain to the sergeant. They were on a fizzer, for sure. As one, both sentries went through the door.

Through the fog of smoke, they saw their quarry. All three of them were with a small naval captain. They were standing rigidly to attention. The small captain caught the sentries’ eyes, and waved them away. ‘Really,’ he said, mildly, to the three men. ‘You’ll frighten the horses.’

‘Thought we’d pop out for a drink,’ said Mallory.

Jensen raised an eyebrow. Thirty commandos, said the eyebrow, and I hope you haven’t bent any of them.

‘We came down the fire-escape,’ said Mallory. ‘We were very thirsty.’

Into Admiral Dixon’s brain there had sunk the idea that something untoward was happening. He did not expect his evenings to be interrupted by soldiers, particularly soldiers as scruffy and badgeless as this lot. He was further amazed when he heard Captain Jensen say, ‘Oh, well. While you’re here, I can tell you we’ve got the snapshots. Total success. Well done. Briefing scheduled for 2300 hours.’

Admiral Dixon said, in a voice like a glacier calving, ‘Who are these men?’

‘Sorry,’ said Jensen. ‘Captain Mallory. Corporal Miller. Colonel Andrea, Greek Army, 19th Motorized Division. Admiral Dixon, OC Special Operations, Mediterranean.’

The Admiral rested his gooseberry eyes on the three men. Miller watched the veins in his neck and wondered idly how much pressure a blood vessel could take before it burst. ‘Why,’ said the Admiral, ‘are they improperly dressed?’

‘Disgraceful,’ said Jensen, with severity. ‘But as you will remember, they have just completed a mission. They were confined to quarters on suspicion of collusion with the enemy, so they haven’t had a chance to pop up to Savile Row. I think that in view of reconnaissance reports on the outcome of their mission, we can give them the benefit of the doubt. Unless you feel an Inquiry is necessary?’

‘Hrmph,’ said the Admiral, mauve-faced. ‘Mission or no mission, can’t have this sort of nonsense –’

‘Walls have ears,’ said Jensen smoothly. ‘You have called a briefing for 2300 hours. That will be the moment to discuss this. Now, gentlemen. Refreshment?’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ said Miller. There was a waitress. Jensen ordered. The three men raised their glasses to Jensen, then the Admiral. ‘Mud in your eye,’ said Miller.

‘Here’s how,’ said Jensen.

The Admiral grunted ungraciously. He swallowed his gin and left.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ said Jensen. ‘We’re very pleased with you; most of us, anyway.’ He smiled, that gleaming, carnivorous smile. ‘You will be collected at 2245 hours. Till then, I bid you sweet dreams.’

‘Dreams?’ said Miller. It was not yet seven o’clock.

‘I always think a little nap can be most refreshing before a lot of hard work.’

‘Work?’ said Mallory.

But Jensen was gone.

‘Sleep?’ said Mallory. ‘Or drinks?’

Andrea pushed his glass forward. ‘You can sleep on aeroplanes,’ he said.

‘Drinks it is,’ said Mallory.

A car with a sub-lieutenant raced them through the blacked-out streets of Plymouth. The city was stirring like a huge, secret animal. The tyres kicked fans of water from deep puddles as they skirted piles of rubble and came to a set of high wire gates with naval sentries in greatcoats and bell-bottomed trousers. Beyond the gate was the dark bulk of a squat building with a sand-bagged entrance. The sentry led them through a heavy steel door into a disinfectant-smelling hall and down a flight of cement stairs, then another and another. Mallory felt the depth and silence pressing in on him. Suddenly he was tired, achingly tired, with the tiredness of two months of special operations, and the months before that…

But there was no time for being tired, because another steel door had sighed open, and they were in a windowless room painted green and cream. There were chairs, and a blackboard. Everything was anonymous. There was no clue as to where they were bound. There were three naval officers in the room, fresh-faced and wind- burned. Sitting apart was a willowy man in a Sam Browne over a tunic of excessively perfect cut. He was smoking a fat cigarette that smelt Turkish, gazing from under unnecessarily long eyelashes at the fire instructions behind the dais, and fingering a thin moustache. Mallory found himself thinking of Hollywood. It was an odd mixture of people to find a hundred or so feet under Plymouth.

Admiral Dixon and Captain Jensen walked into the room. With a scuffing of chair legs, the men stood to attention. ‘Good evening,’ said Jensen. ‘Stand easy. You may smoke.’ Dixon ignored them. He sat down heavily in a chair. His eyes were glassy and he was breathing hard, presumably from the effort of walking down all those stairs. Mallory reflected that if coming down had been that bad, someone would have to carry him up. Jensen, on the other hand, looked fresh as the morning dew. He stood on the balls of his feet, perky as a bantamweight boxer, while an orderly unrolled maps on the board.

Mallory knew that in the coastlines and contours of those maps their fates were written. There were the three fingers of the Peloponnese, blue sea, Crete, the island-splatter of the Dodecanese. And larger-scale maps: an island. Not an island he recognized, though when he glanced across at Andrea he saw him straight- backed and frowning.

‘Very good,’ said Jensen, when the orderly had finished. ‘Now I said I had a job for you, a tiny little job, really. It’s a bit of a rush, I suppose, but there it is, can’t be helped.’

‘Rush?’ said Mallory.

‘All in good time,’ said Jensen. ‘First things first. Admiral Dixon you already know. Gentlemen – ‘ here he turned to Mallory, Miller and Andrea ‘– certain people are very pleased with what you achieved last week.’ Admiral Dixon shook his head and sighed. ‘So pleased, in fact,’ said Jensen, ‘that they want you to do something else. Probably much easier, actually.’ He turned to the map at his back. Miller listened to the hum of the ventilation fans. It was all very well Jensen saying things were easy. He was not the one getting shot at. Miller doubted that he knew the meaning of the word.

The central map showed plenty of blue sea, and an island. It was the shape of a child’s drawing of a beetle, this island: a fat body dark with close-set contours and a head attached to its north-eastern end by a narrower neck. ‘Kynthos,’ said Jensen. ‘Lovely place. Delightful beaches. Very few Germans, but the ones there are particularly interesting, we think.’

Mallory and Miller slumped in their chairs. As far as they were concerned the only interesting German was a German they were a couple of hundred miles away from. But Andrea was still upright in his chair, his black eyes gleaming. Andrea was a Greek. The things the Germans had done to his country were bad, but they were much, much better than the things the Germans had done to his family. Andrea found Germans very interesting indeed.

‘I’ll start at the beginning,’ said Jensen. ‘Last year we bombed a place called Peenemunde, on the Baltic. Seems the Germans were building some sort of rocket bomb there; doodlebugs first, bloody awful things, but there was supposed to be something else. Germans called it the A3. Goes into outer space, if you can believe this, and comes back, wallop, faster than the speed of sound. Blows a hole in you before you’ve even heard it coming. Good weapon against civilians.’ Mallory searched Jensen’s face for signs of irony, and found none. ‘We’re expecting it any day now. And there’s something else; bigger version, larger, longer range, more dangerous, good for use against troops. Questions so far?’

‘Why bother with outer space?’ said Miller.

‘Think of a shell. Longer the range, higher the trajectory.’

‘You’d need a hell of a bang to get it up there.’

Jensen smiled. ‘Very good, Miller,’ he said. ‘Now what we believe is this. These A3 things are rockets. Thing about outer space, there’s no air to burn your fuel. So your rocket needs to take its own air with it. These A3 things are supposed to burn a mixture of alcohol and liquid oxygen. One of our submarines sank a ship off Kynthos the other day, surfaced to look for, er, survivors. All they found was oxygen bottles. And a stink of alcohol.’

‘Schnapps,’ said Miller.

Jensen smiled, and this time even the artificial warmth was gone from the ice-white display of teeth. ‘Thank you, Corporal,’ he said. ‘If that is all, I shall hand you over to Lieutenant, er, Robinson.’

Lieutenant Robinson was a tall, stooping man with round tortoiseshell spectacles and a donnish air. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Hmmyes. Kynthos. Typical Vesuvian post-volcanic structure, Santorini series, basalts, pumice, tufa, with an asymmetric central deposition zone –’

‘Lieutenant Robinson used to teach geology at Cambridge,’ said Jensen. ‘Once more, this time in English, if you please, Lieutenant.’

Robinson blushed to the tops of his spectacles. ‘Hmmyes,’ he said. ‘Kynthos is, er, mountainous. Very mountainous. There’s a town at the south-western end, Parmatia, more a village really, on a small alluvial plain. The road from the town transits a raised beach – ‘ he caught Jensen’s eye – ‘follows the coast, that is, mostly on a sort of shelf in the cliffs. There is no road across the interior suitable for motor transport. To the north-east of the mountain massif is another island, smaller, Antikynthos, connected to the main massif by a plain of eroded debris and alluvium –’ here Jensen coughed ‘– a stretch of flat land and marshes. This smaller island is itself rocky, taking the form of a volcanic plug with associated basalt and tufa masses, and on this there stands an old Turkish fort and the remains of a village: the Acropolis, they call it, the High Town. There has always been a jetty on Antikynthos. Recently this has been greatly improved, and the aerodrome upgraded. In the view of, er, contacts on the island, some sort of factory is being established.’ He took a photograph out of a file and laid it in an overhead projector. A man’s face appeared on the screen: a round face, mild, heavy-lidded eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘Sigismund von Heydrich,’ he said. ‘Injured during the bombing of Peenemunde. Highly talented ballistician – ‘ Jensen’s eye again ‘– rocket scientist. He was spotted boarding a plane at Trieste, and we know the plane landed on Kynthos. They’ve built workshops in the caves under the Acropolis. But there’s only a light military presence. Couple of platoons of Wehrmacht, nothing worse, as far as we know.’

Jensen stood up. Thank you, Lieutenant,’ he said. The Lieutenant looked disappointed, as if he had planned to go on for some time. ‘Well, there you are. Simple little operation, really. We want you to land on Kynthos and make a recce of this Acropolis. You’ll be briefed on the development of the V4, which is what they’re calling this one. Any sign of it, and we’d like it disposed of: air strikes will be available, but if they’ve got it a long way underground, well, Miller, we have the greatest confidence in your ability to wreck the happy home. Questions so far?’

‘Yessir,’ said Mallory. ‘You say we’ve got someone on the island already?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Jensen. ‘There was a transmitter.’

‘Was?’

‘Transmissions ceased a week ago. It may be that the Germans found it. Or it may equally be that someone dropped it. Frightfully stony place, as you know.’

Mallory caught Miller’s eye, and saw the wary resignation he felt himself. Jensen did not pick them for the easy ones.

‘And of course there’ll be Carstairs in case you need help. Now if you’ve got any questions, ask them now, and we’ll get into the detail.’

Miller said, ‘Who’s Carstairs?’

‘Good Lord,’ said Jensen. ‘Hasn’t anybody introduced you? Very remiss. Perhaps Admiral Dixon will do the honours. Admiral?’

Dixon heaved himself to his feet. ‘Captain Carstairs, make yourself known,’ he said, and there was something in his face that much resembled smugness.

The man in the beautiful uniform stood up and saluted. His hair was brown and wavy, his moustache clipped into a perfect eyebrow. ‘Gentlemen, how d’ye do?’ he said.

‘Captain Carstairs is a rocket expert,’ said the Admiral. ‘He is also experienced in special operations. Before the war he led expeditions up the Niger and in the Matto Grosso. He has overflown the North and South Poles, and climbed the north face of Nanga Parbat.’

Andrea caught Mallory’s eye. Mallory’s head moved almost imperceptibly from side to side. Never heard of him, he was saying.

‘Wow,’ said Miller. The Admiral looked at him sharply, but the American’s eyes were shining with honest reverence.

‘So I am very happy to say,’ said the Admiral, ‘that Captain Carstairs will make an ideal commanding officer for this expedition.’

There was a deep silence, full of the hum of the fans. Mallory looked at Jensen. Jensen was gazing at the place where the ceiling met the wall.

‘Any questions?’ said the Admiral.

‘Yessir,’ said Mallory. ‘When do we start training, sir?’

The Admiral frowned. ‘Training?’

‘It’ll take a month. Six weeks, maybe.’

Blood swelled the Admiral’s neck. ‘You’re out of here on a Liberator at 0200 hours. You will transfer to an MTB near Benghazi. You’ll be ashore and operating by 0300 tomorrow. There will be no training.’

‘MTB?’ said Mallory.

‘Motor Torpedo Boat,’ said Dixon.

‘Bit indiscreet,’ said Mallory, who knew what an MTB was. ‘Noisy.’

‘Can’t be helped,’ said Jensen. ‘Sorry about the training, sorry about the MTB. But it’s a matter of… well, put it like this. There’s a bit of a flap on. These damned rockets are a menace to our rear and our flank in Italy. They can deliver three tons of HE with an accuracy of fifty yards. They need disposing of before they’re operational, and we think that will be soon. We’d fly you in, but Staff say it’s the wrong place for a parachute drop. So MTB it’ll have to be. Time is of the essence.’

‘Can’t be done,’ said Mallory. Suddenly he felt Jensen’s eyes upon him like rods of ice.

The Admiral’s neck veins swelled. ‘Look here,’ he said, in a sort of muted bellow. ‘It is against my better judgement that I am using an insubordinate shower like you to perform a delicate operation. But Captain Jensen assures me that you know what you are doing, and takes responsibility for you. Well, let me make myself clear. If you do not obey my orders and the orders of Captain Carstairs in this matter, you will be charged with mutiny so fast your feet will not touch the ground – what are you doing?’

Mallory was on his feet, and so were Miller and Andrea. They were standing rigidly to attention. ‘Permission to speak, sah,’ said Mallory. ‘You can get your court martial ready, sah.’

The Admiral stared, flabby-faced. ‘By God,’ he said. ‘By God, I’ll have you – ‘

Jensen cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me, Admiral,’ he said. ‘Might I make a suggestion?’ The Admiral seemed to be beyond speech. ‘These men work as a unit. Their record is good. Might I suggest that rather than operating as a top-down command structure they be attached to Captain Carstairs as a force of observers, leaving Captain Carstairs in command of his own unit but without specific responsibility for these men, who would, as it were, be attached yet separate? This would obviate the need for special training, and establish the possibility of cross-unit liaison and cooperation rather than intra-unit response to ad hoc and de facto command structures.’

The Admiral’s jaw had dropped. ‘What?’ he said.

‘Mallory’s the senior captain,’ said Jensen. ‘And of course there is a colonel in the force.’

‘Who’s a colonel?’

‘I am,’ said Andrea.

Now it was Carstairs’ turn to stare. Andrea needed a haircut, and his second shave of the day. His uniform needed a laundry. Carstairs raised an eyebrow. ‘Colonel?’ he said, and Miller could hear his lip curl even if he could not see it.

The air in the briefing room was thick and ugly. ‘Greek army,’ said Andrea. ‘Under Captain Mallory’s command, for operational purposes.’

‘Uh,’ said the Admiral, looking like a man who had just trodden on a fair-sized mine.

Jensen said, ‘Come out here, all of you,’ and marched into the corridor. Out there, he said, ‘You’ve got Carstairs whether you like him or not. I want you on this mission. I’m ordering you to take him along.’

‘And wipe his nose.’

‘Also his shoes, if necessary.’ Jensen’s eyes were bright chips of steel.

‘Under my command,’ said Mallory.

‘I know about rockets,’ said Miller. ‘I know as much about rockets as anyone. We don’t need this guy. He’ll get in the way. We’ll wind up carrying him, he’ll–’

‘We would be fascinated to hear your views,’ said Jensen in a freezing voice. ‘Some other time, though, I think.’

‘So who needs this guy?’

‘If you mean Captain Carstairs, the Admiral wants him. And that, gentlemen, is that. Now get back in there.’

They knew Jensen.

They got back in there.

The Admiral said, ‘Captain Carstairs will be a separate unit, taking his orders directly from me.’

Carstairs smiled a smooth, inward-looking smile. Technically, Mallory was his superior officer. All the Admiral was doing was muddying waters already troubled. They stood wooden-faced, potential disasters playing like newsreels in their minds.

‘Last but not least,’ said Jensen. ‘Local support. Lieutenant.’

Robinson stood up, spectacles gleaming. ‘There is Resistance activity on the island,’ he said. ‘But we want your operation kept separate. Civilian reprisals, er, do not help anyone.’ Andrea’s face was dark as a thundercloud. He had found the bodies of his parents on a sandbank in the River Drava. They had been lashed together and thrown in to drown. He knew about reprisals: and so did the Germans who had done the deed, once he had finished with them. Robinson continued, ‘We will be landing you in Parmatia. There is a gentleman called Achilles at three, Mavrocordato Street in Parmatia. He will provide you with motor transport up the island to the Acropolis. We’ll have a submarine standing by at a position you will be given at midnight on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. If you’re there, hang up a yellow fishing lantern as a signal. If not … well, he’ll wait until 0030 on Saturday, then you’re on your own. Got it?’

‘Got it.’

‘But avoid all other contact. We’d like you to be a surprise. A thunderbolt of a surprise. That’s what this operation is called, by the way. Operation Thunderbolt.’

‘After the weather forecast?’ said Miller.

‘How did you guess?’ said Jensen.

‘You did it last time,’ said Miller.

Jensen did not seem to hear. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘The detail.’

For the next two hours, in the company of the geologist and a man from SOE, they studied the detail.

‘All right,’ said Jensen, as they folded away their maps. ‘Armoury next.’

The armoury was the usual harshly-lit room with racks of Lee Enfields. The Armourer was a Royal Marine with a bad limp and verbal diarrhoea. ‘Schmeissers, ‘e said you wanted,’ said the Marine, pulling out boxes. ‘Quite right, quite right, don’t want those bloody Stens, blow up on you as soon as Jerry, go on, ‘ave a look, yes, Corporal? Oh, I see you are the more discriminating type of customer, grenades, was it?’ But even his flow of talk could not hold up over the grim silence that filled that little room. Mallory and Andrea sat down on the bench and disassembled a Schmeisser each, craftsmen assessing the tools of a deadly trade. The hush filled with small, metallic noises. Andrea rejected two of the machine-pistols before he found one to his liking, then another. Miller, meanwhile, was in a corner of the room, by a cupboard the size of a cigar humidor. He had a special pack, lined with wood and padded. Into this he was stowing, with a surgeon’s delicacy of touch, buff-coloured bricks of plastic explosives, brightly-coloured time pencils, and a whole hardware store of other little packets and bottles.

Mallory reassembled his second Schmeisser. ‘For you, Carstairs,’ he said.

Carstairs looked languidly up from the sights of a Mauser. ‘Never touch ‘em, old boy.’

‘You’ll need one.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ said Carstairs, tapping a Turkish cigarette on a gold case. A silenced Browning automatic lay across his knees. ‘Stand off is my motto. Works with impala. Works with Germans. Now look here, Sergeant, have you got a hard case for this?’ He held up the Mauser carbine and a Zeiss 4X sniperscope. Several Mausers would be going to Kynthos – they were rugged carbines essential for long-range work. But the sniperscope was delicate as a prima ballerina’s tutu – nothing to do with the kind of knockabout you could expect if you were storming a hollow mountain full of rockets.

As they left the armoury, Andrea fell in beside Mallory. ‘What do you think?’ he said.

‘I think we should keep our eyes open.’

‘Exactly, my Keith.’ They walked on in silence. ‘And what is this Nanga Parbat?’

‘A mountain. In the Himalayas. There was an expedition to climb it in 1938.’ Mallory paused. He hated what came next. ‘A German expedition.’

‘There was no war in 1938.’

‘No.’

But all of a sudden Mallory’s stomach was a tight ball. There was something wrong with this. It was the same feeling he had had on the south icefield of Mount Cook, watching his right boot go up and forward, watching the weight go on, but because of that feeling, not committing himself. Which had been just as well. Because when it felt the weight of that boot – brownish-black leather, new-greased, criss-cross laces in the lugs, that boot – the world crumbled and slid away, and what had been smooth ice had turned into a cornice over a ravine, a cornice that had crumbled under him and was swallowing him up.

Except that he had taken warning from that knot in the stomach, and kept his weight back, and walloped his ice axe behind him at the full reach of his arm, felt it bite, and hauled himself out of the jaws of death and back on to clean ice. And climbed the mountain.

The knot in the stomach was not fear, or at least not only fear. It was a warning. It needed listening to.