Читать книгу Thunderbolt from Navarone - Sam Llewellyn, Sam Llewellyn - Страница 7

Al-Gubiya Bay is a small notch in the coast west of Benghazi. That morning, it contained a group of khaki tents, a concrete jetty, and one and a half billion flies. Alongside the jetty an MTB crouched like a grey shark. Her commander, Lieutenant Bob Wills, was sitting on the forward port-hand torpedo tube. The sun balanced on his head like a hot iron bar, and the flies were driving him crazy, but not as crazy as the orders he had received. He wondered what the hell they were dropping him in this time.

A three-ton lorry clattered on to the quay, stopped, and stood snorting in its cloud of Libyan dust. The canvas back of the lorry twitched and parted. Four men got down.

Three of them walked together, silent, closed-faced. Their faces were gaunt and sunburned. They looked at the same time exhausted and relaxed, and under their heavy equipment they walked with a steady, mile-devouring lope. Ahead of the three was a slenderer man. He was dressed like them in battledress without badges of rank. But his walk had more of a strut in it, as if he thought someone might be watching, and at the same time he moved uneasily in the straps of his pack. This and a certain finicky neatness in his uniform made the Lieutenant think that he was not completely at home.

The neat man had quick brown eyes that checked the MTB and the cuff-rings of the Lieutenant’s tunic, hung from the barrel of the five-pounder. He said, ‘Good morning. I’m Captain Carstairs.’ The man smiled, a white, film-star sort of a smile. Wills was tired from months of night operations, and the smile was too dazzling.

He said, ‘How d’ye do?’ Carstairs’ handshake was a bonecrusher. Wills’ feeling of tiredness increased. ‘Good fight?’

‘Dreadful,’ said Carstairs. ‘Bloody Liberators. Can’t hear a thing. Bring back Imperial. The Cairo run, what?’

‘Yes,’ said Wills. Himself, he had never been able to afford to fly in the Sunderlands of Imperial Airways. Lot of side, this Carstairs, he thought. He raised a hand to Chief Petty Officer Smith, who was loading stores down the quay. ‘Chiefy. Help Captain Carstairs with his stuff, there’s a good chap.’

During his brief chat with Carstairs, the other three men had climbed aboard the MTB and stowed their equipment. Without appearing to move very much they seemed to get a surprising amount done. The shortest of the three introduced himself as Mallory in a voice with a faint New Zealand twang.

‘Morning,’ said Wills.

Mallory saw a square youth with sun-bleached curly hair and a sunburned nose.

‘Made yourself at home, I hope,’ said Wills.

‘Hope that’s all right.’

Wills grinned. ‘Top-hole,’ he said. ‘We don’t stand on ceremony here.’ He embraced with a sweep of his arm the blue bay, the parched dunes, the concrete jetty. ‘You get out of the habit, in a tropical paradise.’

‘Very attractive,’ said Mallory, brushing away a couple of thousand flies.

‘Wait till we get to sea,’ said Wills. He was older than he looked, Mallory realized. From a distance, he might have been your standard British sixth-former. Close up, you could see the eyes. The eyes were a thousand years old.

‘Been here long?’ said Mallory.

‘Long enough. Stooging around causing trouble on the island. Yachting with big bangs, really. Speak a bit of the lingo. Do what we can to make a nuisance of ourselves.’

‘Quite,’ said Mallory. He liked this youth. There was something in his eye that said he could really cause the Germans some trouble, if he put his mind to it, and putting his mind to it was what he was good at.

‘We ready?’ said Wills.

Mallory nodded.

‘Top-hole,’ said Wills. Carstairs was not his cup of tea, but these men were different. They spoke quietly, and looked at him steady-eyed, and when they shook his hand their grip was firm but economical, as if in this, as in anything else they did, they would use just enough force to get the job done properly, no more, no less. This fitted neatly with Wills’ view of life, and he found himself favourably impressed. There was also another sensation lurking on the fringes of his conscious mind, and for a moment he did not know what it was. But ten minutes later, pouring the gin in the cupboard-sized wardroom, it came to him.

He was very glad they were on the same side as him.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Couple of things to organize.’

The heavy throb of the MTB’s engines came through the wardroom bulkheads, and the stink of high octane gasoline. The sleek grey boat scrawled a white question mark on the blue bay, roared out to sea and turned east.

It was a calm and beautiful day. Carstairs went on deck, thrusting his chiselled profile into the twenty-knot slipstream. Mallory, Miller and Andrea found plywood bunks, rolled on to them, and closed their eyes: except Mallory. Mallory lay and felt the bound of the MTB over the swell, and the tremor of the Merlin engines, and rested his eyes on the plywood deck above him. There were matters he needed to ponder before he slept.

As they had left the armoury, a runner had caught him by the arm. ‘Telephone, sir,’ he had said.

The voice on the telephone had been light but hard: Jensen.

‘No names,’ it had said. ‘Something I wanted to say, between us two, really.’

‘Yessir.’

‘I wanted to say the best of luck, and all that.’

‘Yessir.’ Jensen would not have rung his mother to wish her luck. Mallory waited.

‘Our new friend,’ said Jensen. ‘The expert. He’s okay, but you might like to keep your eye on him.’

‘Eye?’

‘Just a thought,’ said Jensen. ‘I’ve got a feeling he might be on a sort of treasure hunt.’

‘Treasure hunt? What sort of treasure hunt?’

‘If I knew, I wouldn’t be telling you to keep an eye on him, would I? Well, I expect you’ll be wanting to get on your way.’

Mallory lay and watched the deckhead. There were undoubtedly problems on Kynthos. But Mallory strongly suspected there was also a problem on the MTB, a problem called Carstairs. Mallory did not trust the man. Nor, it seemed, did Jensen. So why did Jensen insist that Carstairs be part of the mission? Of course, it had not been Jensen who had insisted. It had been Admiral Dixon. Mallory found himself thinking that a spell on the bridge of a destroyer would do Dixon a lot of good: or on an MTB, a floating fuel-tank, a bladder of aviation fuel with two Merlin engines…

But Dixon was safe behind his desk, and that was a law of nature. Just like the fact that Carstairs was along for the duration.

Railing against the laws of nature was entirely pointless. Mallory was not given to doing pointless things.

A new vibration added itself to the bone-jarring roar of the twin Merlins. Mallory was snoring.

He awoke much later, prised a cup of coffee out of the galley, and climbed on to the bridge. The sun was sinking towards the western horizon, North Africa a low dun line to the south. As far as any German aircraft were concerned they were heading east, for somewhere in the Allied territory in the gathering shadows ahead.

A rating brought up a plate of corned beef sandwiches and more coffee. It was quieter on the bridge. Mallory wedged a deck chair in a corner. As he ate his mind kept coming back to Carstairs. Why would an experienced guerrilla fighter have chosen a sniper rifle with a notoriously delicate sight? If they were all on the same operation, why were they notionally two separate units? Why –

A shadow fell across him. It was Carstairs, slender fingers in the pocket of his battledress blouse: like Clark Gable, thought Mallory. His hand came out with the gold cigarette case. He opened it, offered it to Mallory. ‘Turkish this side, Virginian that,’ he said.

‘Just put one out,’ said Mallory. ‘Tell me something. What are you doing on this trip?’

‘Same as you,’ said Carstairs.

‘So what … qualifies you?’

Carstairs smiled. ‘I’ve knocked about a bit.’

‘And you’re a rocket expert.’

‘So I am.’

‘Where did you pick that up?’

‘Here and there,’ said Carstairs, vaguely. ‘Here and there.’

You got used to vagueness on Special Operations. It was a mistake to know more than you needed to know. So why did Mallory have the feeling that Carstairs was using this fact for his own purposes?

‘Ever done armed insurgency work?’ he said.

‘Not exactly. But there have been … parallel episodes in my life.’

‘What’s a parallel episode?’ said a new voice: Miller’s.

‘A not dissimilar operation.’

‘I had one of those, but the wheels dropped off.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Carstairs’ face was stiffening.

‘All right,’ said Mallory. Carstairs, it seemed, was too important to have a sense of humour. ‘You’re good in mountains. You can shoot.’

Carstairs yawned. ‘So they told me on Nanga Parbat.’

‘I thought that was a German expedition.’

‘It was.’ They stared at him. ‘The Duke of Windsor asked me to go. Rather a chum of mine, actually, so one couldn’t refuse. I speak pretty good German. I’m a climber. What’s wrong with that?’

Mallory said nothing. The Nanga Parbat expedition had been supervised by Himmler in person. It had conquered the peak, but only by cementing in spikes and installing fixed ladders and ropes. They might as well have put scaffolding up the face. It was not what Mallory called climbing.

Carstairs said, ‘The idea was to get to the top.’

Well, that was true.

‘And the rockets,’ said Miller, doggedly. ‘Where did you find out all this stuff you know about rockets?’

Carstairs was not smiling any more. He said, ‘We have all led complicated lives I am sure, and a lot of the things we have done we would not necessarily have told our mummies about. You can take it from me that I know what I know, and I am under orders from Admiral Dixon, Corporal. Now if you will excuse me I could do with forty winks.’ And he went below.

‘Temper,’ said Miller, mildly.

Mallory lit a cigarettee. He did not look at the American. ‘I would remind you,’ he said, ‘that Captain Carstairs is a superior officer, and as such is entitled to respect. I would like you to give this thought your earnest attention.’ His eyes came up and locked with Miller’s. ‘Your very close attention,’ he said.

Miller smiled. ‘My pleasure,’ he said.

The MTB churned on down the coast. The sun sank below the horizon. Miller lay on the wing of the bridge, watching the last light of day leave the sky, and the sky fade to black, and upon it a huge field of silver stars come into being. Wills murmured an order to the man at the helm. Over Miller’s head, the stars began to wheel until the Big Dipper lay across the horizon, the last two stars in its rhomboidal end pointing across an empty expanse to a single star riding over the MTB’s bow.

They had turned north.

It was eight hours’ hard steaming from Al-Gubiya to Kynthos. Rafts of cloud began to drift across the sky, blotting out patches of stars. The breeze was up, ruffling the sea into long ridges of swell. M-109 made heavy weather, jolting and banging and shuddering as she jumped from bank of water to bank of water. Nobody slept, any more than they would have slept in an oil drum rolling down a flight of concrete steps.

Up on the bridge, Wills peered into the black and tried not to dwell upon the fact that M-109 was the tip of a huge phosphorescent arrowhead of wake that shouted to anyone in an aeroplane ‘Here we are, here we are’. This was not a subtle operation. ‘Weave her,’ he shouted into the helmsman’s ear. The helmsman began to weave her port and starboard, panning the beam of the fixed radar scanner across the sea ahead.

‘What you got?’ said Wills to the man with his head in the radar’s rubber eyepiece.

‘Clutter,’ said the man. ‘Bloody waves–’

The MTB hit a wave, shot off into the air, and came down with a slam that blasted spray sixty feet in the air and buckled Wills’ knees. His coffee cup shot across the bridge and exploded in a corner. Somewhere, probably in the galley, a lot of glass broke.

‘Shite,’ said the radar operator, and twiddled knobs. ‘Dead,’ he said.

‘What do you mean, dead?’ said Wills, though he knew perfectly well, because this always happened with radar. But they were deep in bandit country here, and the MTB was his first command, and this was his first Special Ops run, and he wanted things to go right, not cock up –

‘Valve gone,’ said the radar operator. ‘Two, three valves.’

‘How long?’

‘Twenty minutes.’

Could be worse, thought Wills, lighting his sixty-third cigarette of the day. Could be better. Half an hour without radar, well, you can survive that.

So the MTB swept on blind under the stars: blind, but not unseen. Far down on the horizon, a dirty fishing caique was hauling nets. In her wheelhouse, a man trained German-issue binoculars on the pale streak of water to the westward. Then he picked up the microphone of a military radio, and began to speak, giving first a call sign, then a course and speed that corresponded to the MTB’s.

‘Done, sir,’ said the radar operator. ‘No contacts.’

‘Nice work,’ said Wills, looking at his watch, then at the chart on the table under the red night-lights. ‘Top-hole.’ He rang for port engine shutdown, half-ahead starboard. M-109’s nose settled into her bow wave. One engine burbling heavily, she crept towards Kynthos, twenty miles away now. The breeze had dropped: the sea was like black glass.

‘Still clear?’ said Wills to the radar operator.

‘Clear,’ said the operator.

‘Top-hole,’ said Wills.

But of course the radar could not see astern.

As the engine note faded smoothly, Miller fell just as smoothly from a doze into a deep sleep. After what seemed like a couple of seconds he was awakened by somebody shaking him. ‘Morning, sir,’ said a voice, and an enamel mug was shoved into his hand, a mug hot enough to wake him up and make him curse and hear Mallory and Andrea and Carstairs stirring, too. When they had drunk the sweet, scalding tea, they went on deck.

There was no moon, but the Milky Way hung in a heavy swathe across the sky. By its light he could see a crumpled heap of rubberized canvas on the deck on the forward face of the wheelhouse. He groped for a foot pump, found one, plugged in the hose and started tramping away. The crumpled heap swelled and unfolded like a night-blooming flower, and became a rubber dinghy; an aircrew dinghy, actually, because unlike the naval dinghies it was boat-shaped instead of circular, and thus rowable; but unlike the dinghies used by the SAS, it was yellow instead of black, and would, if discovered by the enemy, be taken for the relic of a crashed aircraft instead of the transport of a raiding party. Andrea drifted up, silent as a wraith, and Mallory. Carstairs made more noise, his nailed boots squinching on the deck, grunting as he dumped his pack and his rifle.

‘Three minutes to drop,’ said a voice from the bridge.

Here we go again, thought Miller.

Then the night became day.

For a moment there was just stark blue-white light, the faces of the men on the bridge frozen, every pore mercilessly limned, the dinghy and the landing party in the slice of black shadow behind the superstructure. Then, very rapidly, things began to change.

The light blazed from a source as bright as the sun, behind them, low on the water. Someone was shouting on the bridge: Wills’ voice. From behind the light came the heavy chug of a large-calibre machine gun. The bridge windows exploded. Glass splinters hissed around the dinghy, and someone somewhere let out a bubbling howl. Then more guns started firing, some from the MTB now.

‘Stay where you are,’ said Mallory, calm as if he were walking down the Strand. ‘Two minutes to landing.’

‘Shoot that bloody light out!’ roared Wills, from the bridge.

They huddled in the shadow of the superstructure. Suddenly the blue-white glare vanished. The blackness that followed it was no longer black, but criss-crossed with ice-blue and hot-poker-red tracers. The MTB’s deck jumped underfoot like the skin of a well- thrashed drum. Whatever was attacking was big, and heavily armed. They heard Wills’ voice shout, ‘Full ahead both!’ The MTB started to surge forward.

But the tracers were homing in now. There was something like an Oerlikon or a Bofors out there. Into Miller’s mind there popped the picture of the back end of the MTB: a huge tank of aviation gas, contained in a thin skin of aluminium and plywood. One Oerlikon round in there: well, two, one to puncture it, one to light it…

Miller found himself longing passionately for a row in a rubber dinghy on the night-black sea –

Crash, went something on the aft deck. Then there was a jack- hammer succession of further crashes. The MTB’s machine guns fell silent. The engine note faltered and died, and she slowed, wallowing. An ominous red glow came from her after hatches.

Mallory’s mind was clicking like an adding machine. Options: stay on board and get blown to hell; go over the side, with at least a chance that they would get ashore and on with the mission. No contest.

‘Go,’ he said.

The MTB had slewed port-side on to the tracers whipping out of the dark. They manhandled the rubber boat over the starboard rail and into the dark water. Miller climbed down, and stowed the packs and the oilcloth weapon bags as Mallory and Andrea lowered them. The orange glow was heavier now, beginning to jump and flicker, so Mallory could see Miller and Andrea working, and Carstairs, eyes flicking left and right, nervous for himself, not for anybody else. Not a team player, Carstairs. Hard to blame him, on top of a burning bladder of petrol in enemy waters –

Whump, said something the other side of the bridge, and the shock wave blew Mallory on to the deck. Then there was another explosion, bigger, and a blast of air, dreadfully hot, that carried with it a smell of burning eyebrows and more glass. Something crashed on to the deck alongside. By the light of the flames, Mallory saw it was Wills, blown, presumably, out of the glassless windows of the bridge. Unconscious at least, thought Mallory, ears ringing. If not dead –

Wills opened his eyes. His face was coppery with burns, his expression that of a sleepwalker. He started to crawl aft. Another explosion blew him backwards into Mallory’s legs. The flames were very bright now, the air vibrating with heat. ‘Into the dinghy,’ said Mallory.

Carstairs went over the rail at a hard scramble, followed more sedately by Andrea. Aft of the bridge, the MTB was a sheet of flame. A man emerged, blazing, and fell back into the inferno. ‘Come,’ said Mallory to Wills. He half-saw other figures going over the rail, heard the splash of bodies.

Wills looked at him without seeing him, and started to walk into the wall of flame. Mallory grabbed his arm. Wills turned and took a swing at him. Mallory went under the punch, grabbed him by the shirt and trousers, and heaved him overboard. The deck was swelling underfoot like a balloon. Mallory went to the rail and jumped.

It was only when he hit the water that he realized how hot the air had been. He found himself holding the rope on the rubber flanks of the dinghy. ‘Row,’ he said. They already were rowing. There was another head beside him in the water: Wills, eyes wide and rolling. He scrambled into the dinghy and pulled Wills after him. Wills showed a tendency to struggle. He wanted to be with his ship –

The night split in two. There was a blinding flash. A shock wave like a brick wall hurtled across the water and walloped into the dinghy. Torpedoes, thought Mallory, against the ringing in his ears. Torpedoes gone up.

Then a thick chemical smoke rolled down on them. Under its black and reeking blanket they rowed and coughed and rowed again, squinting at the radium-lit north on Mallory’s compass, for what felt like hours. ‘Clearing,’ said Miller at last. Overhead, the sky was lightening. They sat still as the fumes thinned around them, leaving them naked and exposed on the surface of the sea. But there was no one to see them. As the last of the smoke eddied away, it was plain that under its cover they had got clear. All around them was black night, with stars. The best part of a mile to the westward, the dark shape of some sort of coastal patrol boat lay half-wrapped in smoke, moving to and fro in the water, shining lights, looking for survivors.

And in that confusing patchwork of light and smoke, not finding any.

To the eastwards, the sky stopped well short of the horizon, cut out by the jagged tops of mountains: the mountains of Kynthos.

Mallory called the roll.

‘Carstairs.’

‘Here.’

‘Andrea.’

‘Here.’

‘Miller.’

‘Sure.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘Wills,’ said Wills, in a strange, faraway voice.

‘Nelson,’ said another. ‘And Dawkins. ‘E’s unconscious. I’ve ‘urt me arm.’

‘Okay,’ said Mallory, level-voiced, though inwardly he was worried. There was work to do, and not the sort of work you could do if you were carrying maimed and unconscious sailors about with you. They had hardly started Operation Thunderbolt, and already it was in serious trouble.

Save it, he told himself. They were on the deep sea, with three extra people and a job to do. What was necessary now was to get ashore.

‘Row,’ he said.

They rowed.

After a while, a voice said, ‘I’m getting wet.’ A sailor’s voice: Nelson.

It was true. The side of the rubber dinghy, which had been hard, was becoming flaccid. ‘Probably the air inside cooling,’ said Carstairs. ‘The water’s colder than the air, isn’t it? So it’d shrink–’

‘Got a leak,’ said Miller. He found the pump and plugged it into the side. There was no chance of using his feet, so he squeezed the concertina bag between his hands. After two hundred, his arms felt as if they were on fire. But the tube was not deflating any more. ‘Here,’ he said to Carstairs.

‘Sorry, Corporal?’ said the drawling voice in the dark.

‘Your go, sir,’ said Miller.

Carstairs laughed, a light, dangerous laugh. ‘I’m sorry, Corporal,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I’m with you.’

Miller gave a couple more squeezes to the pump. The sweat was running into his eyes. ‘Yessir,’ he said. ‘Yessir, Cap’n, sure thing.’ Carstairs was only a dark shape against the stars, but Miller was sure he was smiling a small, superior smile –

‘Give it to me,’ said Andrea. Miller felt it plucked from his hands, heard the steady, monotonous pant.

‘Carstairs,’ said Mallory. ‘You can row now.’

Carstairs’ shadow froze. But Mallory’s voice had an edge like a hacksaw. ‘Delighted,’ said Carstairs. ‘Jolly boating weather, eh?’

For two endless hours, the oars dipped, and the pump panted, and the black mass of Kynthos crawled slowly up the stars. At 0155, Wills, who had been sitting slumped on the side, suddenly raised his head. ‘Port twenty,’ he said, in a weird, cracked voice.

‘What?’ said Miller, who was rowing.

‘Left a bit.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s a beach.’

‘How do you know?’ said Carstairs.

‘Pilot book. Recognize the horizon.’ Wills made a loose gesture of his hand at the saw-backed ridge plunging towards the sea ahead and to the right.

Carstairs said, ‘You’re in no condition to recognize anything.’

‘So what do you suggest?’ said Mallory, mildly.

‘Straight for the shore,’ said Carstairs. ‘Up the cliffs.’

‘Listen,’ said Wills.

Miller stopped rowing, and Andrea stopped pumping. They listened.

There was the drip of the oars, and the tiny gurgle of the dinghy moving through the water, and something else: the long, low mutter of swell on stone. ‘Cliffs,’ said Wills. ‘Doesn’t feel like much out here, but there’ll be a heave. Lava rock. Like a cross-cut saw. Two foot of swell, bang goes your gear, bang goes you.’

It was a lucid speech, and convincing. Carstairs could find no objection to it. He lapsed into a sulk.

Mallory had seen the beaches on the map, all that time ago in the briefing room under Plymouth. There were half-a-dozen of them at this end of the island, little crescents of sand among writhing contours and hatchings of precipitous cliffs. If it had been him in command of the Kynthos garrison, he would have watched them like a hawk.

The muttering grew.

“Scuse me,’ said the voice of the sailor Nelson. ‘It’s Dawkins, sir. I think ‘e’s dead.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Carstairs, high and sharp. ‘Save it for later. We’ll–’

But Mallory had moved past him, and had his fingers on Dawkins’ neck. The skin was warm, but not as warm as it should have been. There was no pulse. ‘I’m afraid you’re right,’ he said.

‘Throw him overboard,’ said Carstairs. ‘He’s just dead weight.’

‘No,’ said Mallory, pumping.

‘You – ‘

‘I’m taking operational responsibility for Able Seaman Dawkins,’ said Mallory.

There were cliffs on either side and ahead, now, not more than fifty yards away. The dinghy lifted spongily in the swell. They were in a sort of cove.

Andrea said, ‘Wait here.’

‘What are you doing?’ said Carstairs.

Andrea did not answer. He seemed to be taking off his battledress. A pair of huge, furry shoulders gleamed for a moment under the stars. Then he was gone, quiet as a seal in a small roil of water.

‘Reconnaissance,’ said Mallory. ‘Hold her here, Miller.’

Cradled in the bosom of the sea, protected on three sides by a small, jagged alcove of the cliffs, they waited.