The Complete Navarone (113 page)

Crouching slightly – from habit rather than the expectation of enemy fire – he led his squad to the earthwork and into the fuel dump in a succession of short, textbook rushes.

But the dump was empty. He wandered into the stacked oil drums. There were signs of occupation: spent cartridge cases, a foil wrapper from a bar of chocolate. But they were safely out of the way; out of the sky, too, he thought, chuckling heavily. All that remained were the oil drums, like the stumps of a forest turned to steel.

There was a fungus on one of the stumps. Braun walked closer, to examine it. An odd brown growth, with a pencil-sized object sticking out of it, a pencil with a black stripe on the shaft.

Braun opened his mouth to shout. He never made it.

A black time pencil means a ten-minute delay at twenty-five degrees centigrade. It was a warm spring morning, so the corrosive action of the liquid in the pencil’s barrel was accelerated. As Braun ran towards the oil drum, the fuel dump blew up in his face.

They were sitting in a deep creek in a clump of reeds when the explosion came. The dry stems hissed and shook, and a blast of heat passed overhead, a waft of air hot enough to fill their nostrils with the smell of scorched grass. Then the smoke rolled up, and blotted out the sun.

Mallory put his head on his pack, and squinted up at the lip of the creek. Andrea was up there, standing sentry. When you are dead already, thought Mallory, you don’t have to die …

At which point he fell asleep.

The sun was going down as the four
SS
men and two civilians wound out of the marshes and started along the fence of the aerodrome where it ran by the sea. The wire was bent, the angle-iron posts melted. The launch was where they had left it. Over on the Acropolis, all was quiet.

Reverently, Mallory laid the Enigma machine on the bottom boards of the boat, lifted the engine cover, and screwed the decompression lever back into place. He wound the starting handle, dropped the decompressor. The engine caught with a big, heavy chug.

‘Nice night for a test firing,’ said Miller. The sky was a vault of blue velvet pricked with stars. He looked at his watch again. They must have found the primary charges,’ he said. ‘They should have gone eight hours ago, easy.’

‘Cast off,’ said Mallory.

‘Wer da?’
said a voice from the shore. And suddenly there were figures there: dozens of figures, light gleaming on steel helmets and guns, and Mallory felt a great lurch of the heart, because the Thunderbolt squad were tired and sore and their identification would not stand up to scrutiny, and they had the most secret machine in the world in a sack on the boat’s deck.

‘Out,’ said the voice in the dark.

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ said Mallory.

The voice said, ‘Show us your documents.’

‘Go to hell,’ said Mallory. ‘Refer to
Hauptmann
Wolf.’

‘Hauptmann
Wolf is dead, thank God. Out,’ said the shadowy figure.

The not so shadowy figure.

The whole island was suddenly lit by a gigantic white flash. It illuminated with a pale and deadly light the twisted fence. It flung the shadows of the platoon on the shore up the scorched black berm of the fuel dump, and brought the glare of noonday to the black sheet of the water and the sugar-white houses of the Acropolis.

After the flash came a blast wave that raised a four-foot ridge of water and knocked most of the soldiers on the beach off their feet. The boat lurched high, then down again, bounced off the coping of the jetty. The people on the boat had been facing away from the explosion. The men on the shore had been looking into it. Their vision was a series of red blobs, shifting and wavering. ‘Must help!’ shouted Mallory, ears ringing. ‘Quick!’

The boat’s engine hammered. Water churned under her counter. She moved away from the jetty, towards the Apocalypse.

The mountain was burning. From tunnels and shafts and galleries there spewed gouts of flame and sparks. And from the top of the mountain, presumably the launching area next to which the fuel tanks had stood, there rose huge and twisting tongues of fire that burned and detached themselves and rose into the smoke that climbed and spread like a roof over land and sea.

‘Most impressive, Corporal Miller,’ said Mallory.

‘I was born on the Fourth of July,’ said Miller.

Under the roof of smoke the launch, with Wills at the helm, chugged across the dark water towards the jetty on the opposite shore. Some three cables short of the jetty, anyone watching would have seen the boat turn hard-a-port, run parallel with the eastern shore of the bay, continue its course past the headland and out to sea.

But there was nobody to watch small boats going about their business. All eyes were on the mountain of Antikynthos, erupting for the second time.

The boat’s engine became a fading heartbeat, and vanished into the inky shadows offshore.

Two hours later they were at the rendezvous, on the long, glassy corrugations of the sea. Andrea found a bottle of brandy in his pack. They passed it round. There was a fishing line in a locker. Miller dangled it over the side, smoking and dozing. Mallory lay against the engine box with his eyes closed. Spiro sat and shivered, his eyes jerking left and right, his face a jaundiced yellow in the light of the lantern on the stubby mast. And in the shadows, close together, Wills and Clytemnestra sat holding hands. Into Wills’ mind had come the certainty that the currents of war that had thrust him and Clytemnestra together would soon start running in new directions. He should have been relieved that the long ordeal was over. Instead, sore, battered and burned though he was, he felt something approaching sadness.

Miller was singing ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’ and hauling in his line, when there was a commotion in the water nearby. A long, dark shape rose against the sky. A voice floated across the water. ‘Any of you chaps called Mallory?’

‘Yes,’ said Mallory.

‘Come on, then. Tea’s brewing.’ Pause. ‘Nasty smell of smoke,’ said the voice.

Mallory’s eyes went back across the water to the hot orange glow that had once been the V4 plant.

There was a clang of boots on a steel pressure hull, the slam of a hatch, the whine of ballast-pumps filling tanks. Then there was silence; silence except for a sound that might have been the fading pant of a single-cylinder diesel, and the great, stirring rumour of the sea.