The Complete Navarone (109 page)

Something caught his eye. Behind the church was the priest’s house, leaning against the bigger building like a small, drunken man holding on to a fat wife. There was movement on the church roof.

Mallory watched the little figures wait by the parapet, saw the first of them – Spiro, it was – move haltingly towards the triangle of light that lay over the tiles. He unslung the Mauser and put it to his shoulder. Spiro swam into the sight’s circle; Spiro hesitant, Carstairs at his heel, jabbing. Mallory saw the tiles rock as Spiro pressed on. He saw the tile come free, accelerate, check as Miller got his fingers to it, carry on. The palms of his hands were suddenly damp with sweat. He panned the sight down. A line of German soldiers stood under the eaves of the church, at attention, listening to some officer or other, barking orders. The cross-hairs of the sight settled on the helmet of the soldier closest to the church wall. Mallory squeezed the trigger.

All hell broke loose.

The steel helmet flew off the head and smacked into the church wall. The soldier slammed flat on the cobbles, a dark patch of blood spreading around his ruined head. The report of the rifle rolled like thunder on the flat, hard faces of the buildings. Even before the echoes died, Mallory had his Schmeisser in the firing position and was hosing the square with bullets, the stabbing spear of flame from the gun’s muzzle saying here I am, here I am, up here on this cliff.

Down in the square grey bodies rolled and crawled and shouted, taking cover. There was fire coming up from the square now, sporadic bursts, ill-directed, but focused loosely on the crevice in which Mallory was hiding.

But Mallory was no longer there. He had moved away, upwards, in the shadows. Now he was approaching the lights. Below, the village seethed and muttered like a cauldron. Seventy feet above the place he had fired from, he paused and looked down. In the belfry of the church, he glimpsed three heads; visible only from above, those heads.

And what with one thing and another, nobody had noticed anything as trivial as the fall of a tile from a church roof.

Mallory moved on, shoulders and feet, up the crack in the rock. Above him the cliff soared for ever into the wild, cool dark. Below him, the village swarmed like an ants’ nest stirred with a stick. Someone was firing tracer, the rounds smacking the rock face and spinning away into the dark until it must have seemed that there were forty men up here, so more men opened fire from the town …

Really, thought Mallory, climbing fast and steady, it was a deplorable lapse of discipline. But he had no illusions. Soon the brilliant organization of the German army would reassert itself, and life would become even more difficult and dangerous than it was at the moment.

For him, anyway. The men in the village should be left alone: the Germans would assume that the whole squad was on the cliffs of the Acropolis. All he had to do was keep moving, draw away the pursuit.

Keep moving.

For a moment he hung on the face of the cliff and thought of the precipice above him, crag on crag, a couple of thousand feet to be conquered against gravity. He could taste the old cigarettes in his throat, feel the grit of sleeplessness in his eyes, feel the weary ache of continuous action in his bones. The Benzedrine had worn off. If he took any more, he would be seeing things …

Better to see things than to fall off.

Mallory took two of the pills out of the foil and swallowed them. Then, wearily, he began to haul himself up the wall. Forty feet above, he found what he was looking for.

He was on a level with the lights. Bullets still whined and spanged around him, but nobody was aiming. Between the spots of brilliance was only darkness, and it was in that darkness that he existed, anonymous.

He paused, eyeing the face. He could already feel the jump of the Benzedrine at his stomach, his blood beginning to fizz.

Just above his head ran a heavy cable: the cable that brought the power to the floodlights. Mallory pulled the clasp knife from his pocket and wrapped around its handle the rubberized bag in which he kept his shaving kit. He wished he had his commando knife, but the commando knife was gone. He had no idea of the clasp knife’s insulating properties, but rubber was supposed to be all right. Go on, the Benzedrine was telling him, it will be fine, you are immortal, if things don’t work out you can spread your wings and jump clear over the village and into the cool sea –

Steady.

He reached his right hand up, and positioned the blade on the outside of the thick insulation. Then he began to saw.

The edge of the knife sank into the rubber as if it had been butter. He felt the touch of some kind of armour. Then the blade went through the armour, and shorted out the live and the neutral.

The night suddenly turned blue, as if it had been struck by lightning. Then, just as suddenly, it turned black, as the lights went out. Pitch black: black as the inside of a coal hole.

Mallory left the knife wedged in the wire, and looped his silk rope over the cable. He whipped a new tracer magazine from his ammunition pouch and clapped it into his Schmeisser. He went back along the wire twenty feet, until the rope came taut. Then he fired a burst into the square, and let go of the cable.

The rope took him in a great swinging arc across the cliff face. He felt the scrape of rock at his hands and knees, felt himself rise again towards the cable, reached up a hand, gripped the rubber, and found a hold. In the same movement he fired again, another burst into the square, and swung back the way he had come. From the corner of his eye he could see tracers still spinning and ricocheting down there. He fired another burst, swung back. This time he did not shoot. The enemy would have seen three bursts of tracer virtually simultaneously, from places forty feet apart. There would be at least two men up here, they would assume; possibly more. Two men covering the retreat of a whole squad.

Diversion established, thought Mallory. Now it is time to get away from here. Up; gain height.

He hauled himself up on the cable.

The cable came out of the wall.

All of a sudden he was falling, hanging on to the rubber insulation, trying to remember what the hell happened further down the cliff: a wall to smash into, or merely a long drop … He clamped his hands and closed his forearms against the scrape of the rock. He could feel the staples popping up there one by one, the wild rush of the night on his face. It occurred to him that his knife would have fallen out of the wound in the rubber. The circuit would be open again.

Two things happened.

One, a staple held. Mallory found himself hanging there in the night, far above the village, heart pounding, the weight of his two weapons and equipment doing its best to pop his arms from their sockets.

Two, the lights came on. Mallory’s over-brightened brain saw quite clearly the cliff as visible from the square: a towering sheet of rock, with a dotted line of brilliant lights, dislodged from their moorings, dangling down its surface, saying: look here, this direction. And on the end, wriggling like a frog on a hook, a small human figure.

For a second, a great silence hung over village and cliff.

Miller had taken advantage of the darkness to stand in the belfry and assess the situation, secure in the knowledge that nobody could see him. When the lights came on, he had experienced the mild flicker of interest that in Dusty Miller passed for surprise. It had passed through his mind that Mallory, suspended on a bit of wire over about a hundred and twenty heavily-armed Germans, seemed likely to be in some trouble. Miller had already noticed with admiration the streams of tracer that had come pouring from various different spots on the darkened cliff. It had seemed exactly as if a fair-sized body of men was up there. So it would not be amazing if Mallory’s colleagues did a little something to cover him.

All this he thought in the time it took to unclip four grenades from his belt, two for each hand, pull the pins, and heave them over the belfry roof and into the square. All eyes in the square had been on the cliff, raising guns for the fusillade that would blow Mallory to kingdom come. The arrival of the grenades in their midst came as something of a shock.

Miller ducked down, saw the flashes light up the night, heard the crash of the explosions, the whine of shrapnel, the screams of the wounded. There was a sputter of gunfire, sporadic and disconnected. It said to Miller that the troops in the square had realized that they were disagreeably exposed where they stood on that brightly-lit rectangle of paving, and had decided to take cover.

But this was of only passing interest to Miller. What got his immediate attention was that the lighting cable, glaring up there on the cliff, now bore only its light fittings.

Mallory was gone.

‘Here,’ said Clytemnestra.

Wills stamped on the brakes. The lorry halted. Round the corner were the quarry and the landward end of the rail causeway. They were back.

Out in the dark, something moved. Wills cursed gently to himself. There were not supposed to be any sentries until the quarry fence. He flicked on the headlights, feeling a stealthy shift of weight as Andrea, who had been riding on the rear step of the truck, took his departure into the night.

There was a sentry in the lorry’s windscreen; a fat sentry with a sullen expression, blinking in the headlight beams that illuminated the rolls of fat at his belt and the spidery outlines of the quarry machinery and the shed Miller had burned, vanishing into the dark behind him. Wills put his elbow on the window and said, ‘Morning.’

The fat sentry frowned. He said, ‘Where’s Koch?’

Wills’ grin stiffened. His German was not up to deep conversation. Presumably, this man was a friend of the driver. The plan had been to drop Andrea off a mile short of the quarry. But they had overshot.

‘Went flying,’ said Wills, trying to hide his atrocious accent by mumbling.

‘Where?’

‘Back home,’ said Wills.

The sentry frowned again, and switched on his torch. Wills could feel Clytemnestra rigid in the seat beside him. This is bloody stupid, he thought. All the way across the island, no worries. Into Clytemnestra’s brother’s favourite cave for the machine. Grab machine, drive back towards rendezvous, everything tickety-boo.

And now one fat sentry was going to sugar the whole shooting-match.

The torch came closer to the driver’s side window. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing out here, this time of night?’

‘Minding my own business,’ said Wills.

‘Papers,’ said the sentry. Then he said something else – something with no words, that was the sound of all the air being driven out of his body for the last time ever – and slumped with a crash against the lorry door. Behind where he had been standing, a figure that might have been a bear stooped and cleaned what might have been a knife on a tuft of dry grass by the roadside. Andrea swung his pack into the cab. Where he was going, he would need to travel light. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Till dawn, at the airfield jetty.’ He paused, slapped the mahogany box on the passenger seat. ‘And look after this thing, yes?’

‘With my life,’ said Clytemnestra.

Andrea watched the lorry turn in the road and rattle off the way it had come. He looked across at the Acropolis. There were lights; too many lights for his liking. Silent as the night itself, he padded along the road to the quarry gates.

He heard the sound of voices, saw the glow of a cigarette where a couple of sentries were finding courage in conversation. Down the chainlink fence a little, he found a place where the base of the wire was loose. He wormed his way under. The root of the causeway lay just ahead and to the left. Andrea clapped a German steel helmet on his head, straightened up, and began to march steadily along the sleepers towards the Acropolis.

Mallory hung three hundred feet above the village, and wished he could smoke. He had almost forgotten what it was to walk upright on level ground. His bones felt the pull of gravity, and groaned.

As he stood wedged into a crevice, he had the sense that things had gone badly wrong. Below, the village was heaving with German soldiery. Andrea was out there in the night, on an errand that had only the smallest chance of succeeding. Miller, Spiro and Carstairs were treed in the belfry. Benzedrine or not, he was too tired. He needed four hours’ sleep. But in four hours it would be getting light. The enemy were waiting for the light, so they could find the scattered elements of the Thunderbolt Force and pick them off one by one. Command and control were what was needed. Command and control. Big words. Words for men who were not so tired that they could hardly move.

Mallory looked down. The church was below him. He needed to regain the belfry: establish rotas, stand watches, organize a way out, make the second rendezvous at dawn. He needed a way down to the church.

There was no way down that did not go straight through five hundred Germans.

In the square below, sentries had been posted. The world had settled. Hot pursuit had cooled. All the Germans had to do was wait. There had been too many operations, too much action, too little sleep. The Thunderbolt Force was fragmented like quicksilver. This looked very like The End –

Above Mallory’s head, something made a small noise. To his right, a pale streak had come into being on the dark rock. To his left, another. Ropes.

There was a new noise: a clinking and grinding. Boots.