The Complete Navarone (100 page)

The wisp of smoke became billows, turning orange at the roots as the Thermite bomb Miller had tossed through the window burned its way through the desk and into the floor, consuming paper and timber and the sentry’s lunch, and most importantly the Bakelite of the telephone system.

‘Now listen to me,’ said Mallory.

They all listened. Even the train driver listened. He did not understand, but he trained his ears with maximum concentration on the string of incomprehensible syllables that came from the New Zealander’s lips. All of them knew that what was about to happen in the next five minutes was a matter of life and death. The train driver thought it would probably be death.

As it turned out, the train driver did not need to understand. The train thundered through dense curtains of rain into the marshes. As he stood trembling with terror, he felt himself seized by strong arms and flung like a human cannonball at the swamp. He landed in a pool of foul-smelling water that stung his eyes like caustic. When he could breathe again, he struggled on to a mud bank and lay there coughing. After a while, he heard a terrible noise.

The engine driver was a railwayman, not a soldier. He decided that discretion was the better part of valour. He still was not seeing too well. But he could locate the noise, all right. He began to crawl, swim and flounder as fast as he could in the opposite direction.

Andrea threw the engine driver out of the right-hand side of the cab, away from the greatest number of prying eyes. Then Mallory hit the throttle and jammed it right forward. Even with a full quota of trucks, the locomotive was over powered for the job. Now it was only half-loaded. As steam blasted into its cylinders it leaped forward, belching smoke, and shot across the last of the embankment. By the time it hit the trestled dumping section, it was travelling at forty miles an hour, all thirty-five tons of it.

‘Go,’ said Mallory.

As Miller jumped, he could see a steam-shovel working, hazy and grey in the rain, but he was not thinking about witnesses, because he had fifty pounds of high explosive in his pack, and besides, Mallory and Andrea were beside him in mid-air. Then they were hitting the side of a pile of crushed stone a terrible whack, rolling over and over in a soup of falling water and wet stone dust.

The train thundered through the buffers, corkscrewed into midair, drive-wheels spinning. It lost momentum, crashed on to the rubble bed of the reclaimed ground, and tobogganed forward into the cliff. The basalt face crumpled its nose like a cardboard mailing tube and drove its boiler back into its firebox. There was a mighty roar and a thunderclap detonation. The reclaimed ground was suddenly obliterated by a scalding fog of escaping steam and rain and stone dust.

In that fog, a voice close to Miller’s ear said, ‘Go now.’ Mallory’s voice. In the background was shouting, and the churn of the concrete mixers, and a klaxon.

Miller got up, and ran behind Andrea in what he assumed was the right direction. Somewhere, the klaxon was still screaming.

Andrea was bleeding. Miller imagined he was probably bleeding himself. There was an entrance ahead, a hole in the cliff. The klaxon noise was coming out of the horn above the hole. Andrea said, in German,
‘Herein.’
In. Somewhere a sergeant was shouting, a
Feldwebel
telling people to take cover. Wait a minute, thought the rational part of Miller, that is a German secret weapon factory, you can’t go in there. Besides, where’s Mallory?

But by that time he was inside the mountain, and with a steady hum of hydraulics the steel door was easing to …

Was shut.

In the cellar of the ruined house above the ledge, Clytemnestra woke suddenly from a fitful sleep. Next to her she could hear the breathing of Wills: regular breathing, shallow. He was improving, she thought. Men do improve after a few days, unless they die … Her thoughts strayed towards Achilles: her own dear brother Achilles, tall and strong and quick to laugh, his falcon’s beak of a nose above the moustache, his eyes glittering with kindness and amusement. The whacking of rifle-butts on the door. The dragging away of Achilles, and her next – her last – sight of him, on the cart in the square, the Nazi swine yanking the noose taut over his head; the look in his poor eyes, that said this is really happening, to me …

Clytemnestra dragged her thoughts back from that thing too dreadful to contemplate. It had filled her mind with a turbulence that broke against the edge of her consciousness in waves of rage. She reached out her hand for her gun. She closed her fingers on the cool metal. It had a grounding effect, drew her back to the here and now.

To what it was that had woken her up.

When she remembered what that had been, she drew in her breath and did not let it out. And in the silence, that thing came again: half-way between a howl and a yelp, the distant sound of a dog. Not the sheepdogs they used in the mountains: a more purposeful sound. The sound of a dog hunting. One of the black-and-tan dogs the
Sonderkommando
used for hunting people.

She reached out and squeezed Wills’ hand. The feel of his warm flesh gave her encouragement. ‘What is it?’ he said.

She told him.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘We’d better do something about it, eh?’ As he said it, he felt a sense of wonder: his head was clear, his thoughts sharp. He remembered very little about the past twenty-four hours, except a blurred procession of images, feet walking over rock, Nelson, terrible dreams …

But that was all over now. He groped for his Schmeisser and snapped in a new magazine. Clytemnestra had her eye to the spy-hole in the wall. ‘How many?’ he said.

‘Four. And the dog.’

‘One feels they may be in for a bit of a shock.’

Clytemnestra said, ‘A very big shock.’ She did not go in for his English understatement. After all, there was no shock like dying.

‘Good dog, Mutzi,’ said Tietmeyer, the handler.

Marsdorff did not agree. This damned animal had dragged him and Schmidt and Kohl up a cliff in the noonday sun. It had relieved itself on a handhold, which he had then put his hand on, and of course everyone had found that very amusing. Marsdorff was a pudgy, maggot-coloured man, who owed his place in the
Sonderkommando
more to a lack of scruple than to any positive military talent. Basically, Marsdorff was very good at hanging people, an accomplished hand with a red-hot iron and a pair of pliers, and no beginner when it came to the process of gang rape – a business that in Marsdorff’s view was often approached crudely and without thought. A really well-handled woman could keep a squad amused for some days –

‘Good dog,’ said the handler. The Doberman on the choke lead growled and slavered, claws scritching on the bare rock as it hauled Tietmeyer up the path towards the ruined house. It had needed some persuasion to come out of the rocks by the tomb, into which it had fled after the death of its previous handler. Now it was back at work, though, it seemed enthusiastic to make amends. ‘There’s been someone in there, all right. Gone now.’

‘Oh, good,’ said Marsdorff, with sarcasm. ‘Eagles, are they? Or mountain goats?’

‘Let’s hope they’re goats,’ said Kohl, who disliked Marsdorff. ‘I don’t mind shagging a goat, but eagles are right out.’

‘You have to draw the line somewhere,’ said Marsdorff, sagely. He was not joking. ‘On a bit.’

Negligently, the four men approached the next group of ruins. They did not believe anyone was on this island who was not supposed to be. Apparently there had been shooting. Well, they would believe it when they saw it.

The path had come to a narrow place, a defile dug out between a blade of rock and the cliff. The defile ended in a sort of groove, shoulder-deep in bare rock, leading to another group of ruined houses, the first of them a massive stone building, with loopholes staring blankly at the defile and the groove. They entered the groove, Tietmeyer in the lead. In one of the loopholes, something moved; a short, slender pipe. The barrel of a machine pistol. Tietmeyer said, nervously, ‘I don’t –’ There was a large and dreadful noise, and the groove filled up with bullets. All of them jumped. None of them hit the ground alive.

Wills walked up to the bodies. He was pale again. ‘Christ,’ he said.

Clytemnestra squatted by Tietmeyer’s body and liberated his Schmeisser, half-a-dozen magazines and a bunch of stick grenades. Then she spat in the dead face, and moved on to the next corpse. Wills watched the place where the path came round the bend in the rocks. ‘They’ll be back,’ he said. ‘Unless they’re deaf.’

Clytemnestra raised a scornful eyebrow. ‘So let them come,’ she said. She pointed upwards, to where the cliff bulged out in an overhang like the brow of a stone genius. ‘If they come there, we swat them like spiders.’ She pointed over the lip of the path. ‘There, they will not come unless they are birds. From this way’ – she pointed to where the path ended among the houses – ‘also, you will need to be a bird. And up the path, all must pass between the narrow rocks. It is like the path at Thermopylae. But you have never heard of Thermopylae, I expect.’

‘Battle in ancient Greece,’ said Wills. ‘Played in a mountain pass. Three hundred Spartans v. a hundred thousand Persians. Home team triumphant. Leonidas played centre forward.’

‘So now help me with these bodies, and we should get back to the houses.’

‘Quite,’ said Wills. It would have been bad taste to point out that the heroes of Thermopylae had died while achieving their victory. He helped Clytemnestra topple the bodies over the cliff. Then he gathered up an armful of guns and bombs and scrambled after Clytemnestra back to the Swallow’s Nest.

They were not the first people to have had the idea of defending this eyrie. The Swallow’s Nest was the fortress-like building commanding the defile, a tower that overhung the abyss like a swallow’s nest in the eaves of a roof. Wills’ boots rang in the thick-walled rooms. He put his head into something that might have been a waterspout, or a nozzle for boiling oil. The valley was full of rain and the mutter of thunder. Far below, the path was a faint zigzag rising to the base of the cliff. And on the path, little creatures crawled: German soldiers.

It occurred to Wills that while the Swallow’s Nest might be an impregnable redoubt, on an island crawling with German soldiers it was also a blind alley.

For a very small moment after the steel door hissed shut, Miller and Andrea stood quite still, listening. There was in all conscience plenty to listen to.

They were standing in a corridor hewn from the basalt. The corridor was lined with doors, full of voices echoing from the hard surfaces of the rock, and the steel plate of the door, and the girders that supported the staircases and the lighting and forced-draught units, and the loudspeakers that at this very moment were squawking klaxon noises into the babel below.

There were men everywhere. There seemed to be a lot of
Wehrmacht
, and a sprinkling of camouflage-smocked
SS
, and civilian workers, some mechanical-looking, in blue overalls, and one man in a white lab coat with pen-clips showing in the breast pocket, and rimless glasses below a head like a pumpkin. A squad of Greeks marched past, dressed in the rags of peasant field clothes, under the guard of four
Waffen-SS
. Everybody was too busy scuttling to and fro to spend any time staring at a couple of filthy, bloodstained men in ripped camouflage smocks.

For the moment.

The moment did not last long. A
Wehrmacht
NCO came marching past. He stopped, stared up at Andrea, and said, ‘What the hell do you think you’ve been doing, killer?’

Andrea stood to attention, eyes front, chin out.

‘How tall are you?’ barked the NCO. The man’s eyes were small and evil. Any minute now, thought Miller, they were going to slide down Andrea’s body to his boots, his British army-issue boots, and that would be that –

Two metres,
Feldwebel
,’ said Andrea.

‘Never seen shit piled so high in my life,’ said the NCO. Andrea’s eyes had slid down the corridor. A door had opened. A wisp of steam floated into the corridor. A man with a drawstring bag came out, fumbling with his tunic buttons. ‘You
Sonderkommando
cutthroats think you can march about the place with your arses filthy, you can –’

‘Permission to take a shower,
Feldwebel?
’ roared Andrea.

‘Permission to take a shower,
Feldwebel?
’ roared Miller.

Andrea turned left, cracked his boots on the concrete, and headed for the door. The
Feldwebel
turned away. If these Nazi animals wanted to take a shower during a general alert, then a shower they would take,
Herr Gott
. They were above the law, these brutes. The best you could hope was that they refrained from cooking and eating your men, and robbing the dead. God knew what the army was coming to. All mixed up with this
Sonderkommando
, and civilian labourers, and boffins, and God alone knew what other riffraff. Apparently some fool had crashed a train in the quarry, too. Beer, thought the
Feldwebel
. That was what you needed in a climate like this, at a time like this. He stumped off in the direction of the Sergeants’ Mess.

The klaxons had stopped.
ALLES KLAR
, said the big metal voice in the corridor. ALL CLEAR. STAND DOWN.

Andrea shoved open the door of the shower room.

It was a big shower room, full of steam and the cursing of men who had stopped their showers and hauled their uniforms on over soapy bodies only to be told that the whole business had been in vain.