The Complete Navarone (65 page)

They sat three in the front, four in the back. The SAS man was white, and his eyes were closed. When the Jeep hit a boulder, the muscles of his jaw tautened with pain. For an hour the Jeep moaned upwards into the mountains. Jaime and Hugues were talking quietly in French.

Suddenly, Hugues started shouting. His face was purple, contorted with rage. He got his fingers round Jaime’s neck and his knees on his chest, and he picked the small man’s head up and slammed it against the bodywork, and pulled it back, and was going to do it again when Andrea’s hands closed, one on each arm, and, without apparent effort, detached his hands. Jaime rolled away, coughing and retching. Hugues struggled futilely in Andrea’s grip, still shouting.

Mallory said, ‘Shut up,’ in a voice that cracked like a rifle bullet.

Hugues shut up.

‘What’s the problem?’

Hugues’ eyes were the size of saucers. ‘Lisette,’ he said.

‘What about her?’

‘She’s not in the village. She was supposed to be in the village, asleep. But not so. Jaime says he saw her. She was taken away. By a German in a leather overcoat. Gestapo.’ He put his face in his hands.

Mallory’s stomach was hollow with apprehension. He said, ‘Is this true?’

Jaime’s face could have been carved from yellowish stone. He said, ‘It’s true.’

Hugues sat up, suddenly. ‘We must go to Bayonne,’ he said. ‘Immediately. Without delay. With the guns we have, the explosives, we can get into Gestapo HQ –’

Mallory said, ‘How much does Lisette know about this operation?’

‘She knows we are going to St-Jean,’ said Hugues. ‘But she will never talk.’

Jaime said, ‘Everyone talks.’

‘Non!’
shouted Hugues, losing control.

‘She is pregnant,’ said Jaime. ‘What do you think they will do to the child?’

Hugues’ anger evaporated. He seemed to grow smaller. He covered his face with his hands.

Mallory said, ‘How did this happen?’

Jaime looked straight ahead, his face without expression. ‘I saw from the window of the
bordel
. She was led out. They put her in a big car, and drove away.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us earlier?’

‘There is a thing we must do. The mother of Marcel has died for this thing. So has Jules, at Jonzère, and others. It is war. I kept quiet so our decision could not be … influenced.’ He looked at Hugues, then back at Mallory. ‘You would have done what I did.’

Hugues said, ‘Only a monster –’

‘Shut up,’ said Mallory.

Of course Jaime was right. The object of the operation was to destroy submarines, not chase Gestapo cars across the northern foothills of the Pyrenees. By pretending that Lisette was in Colbis until she was definitely beyond help, Jaime had prevented a worse crisis.

Not that it could be much worse for Lisette.

Mallory tried not to think about what would be happening to Lisette. He said, ‘She’ll talk.’

‘Not for two days,’ said Jaime. ‘That is the rule. She will hold out for two days to give us time to get clear.’

Thierry cocked his straw hat over his eye and delivered himself of an offensively cynical chuckle. ‘The Germans know this also. They will be very persuasive.’

Hugues said, ‘Jesus.’ His face was grey and bloodless.

‘But relax,’ said Thierry. ‘If the Gestapo ask the wrong question, they will get the wrong answer. How will they ask the right question?’

Mallory knew that in Gestapo HQ at Bayonne, there would be people who could make you beg to be allowed to tell them everything you knew, without a question being asked. He said to Hugues, ‘There is nothing we can do. I really am very sorry.’

Hugues looked at him with haunted eyes. ‘Old women have lived their lives,’ he said. ‘Soldiers protect their country. Who can use my unborn child as a weapon of war? What has this poor child done?’

Andrea said, ‘These are questions you must ask a priest.’ Mallory did not look at him. The Greek had found the bodies of his parents in the river at Protosami. They had been shot by Bulgarian soldiers, then lashed together and thrown to the fish. Andrea knew about total war. So had his parents’ killers, until they had died, very suddenly and all at once. ‘But the time for asking such questions is when the war is finished. For now, we must only obey orders and fight, because if we think, we go crazy.’

There was no more talking after that.

The Jeep ground on, up and over the mountain, away from the great hazy prospect of the valley. Hugues had opened one of the bottles of brandy Marcel had loaded into the Jeep. His blue eyes turned pink and glassy. A shoulder of wooded hillside interposed itself between the road and the valley. The sun came out from between the shredded clouds. Flies buzzed round Wallace’s bloody tunic. The track left the trees and wound across a marshy saddle between two peaks. High overhead, a pair of vultures hung in the blue. There were no Germans, no sign of the war raging out there in the world. As the road started downhill again, Dusty Miller saw a glittering blue line beyond a notch in the whaleback hills. The sea.

‘Progress,’ he said. ‘And about goddamn time, too.’

But the road dipped down again, into the first rank of the chestnut forests, and the blue line disappeared. As the Jeep ground on downhill, Miller’s spirits suffered the small but definite dip that with him passed for extreme gloom. They were nearing the coast at last. There was two-thirds of a tank of gas left in the Jeep. Keep on driving, and whatever happens will happen –

But there was a hell of a way to go, through Indian country, to a destination at best uncertain.

‘One kilometre now, a big road,’ said Jaime, rising from his gloomy silence like a diver from a lake. ‘Road to the frontier. Patrolled, I guess.’

‘We’ll take it quietly,’ said Mallory. ‘Go on five hundred yards. Turn off the engine. Freewheel.’

The Jeep rolled down the track, silent except for the twang of its springs and the sniffing of Hugues. A light breeze sighed in the chestnuts. It was a beautiful spring morning, quiet except for the song of birds in the trees.

And the guttural voices that drifted up from the road.

Mallory tapped Andrea on the shoulder. The big Greek nodded. He jumped down from the Jeep and started down the track. His gigantic shoulders seemed to merge into the trees in a way not entirely attributable to the camouflage smock he wore. Watching him Hugues shivered, recalling the warm, padded but horribly powerful hands that had pulled him off Jaime as if he had been a light blanket.

His eyes slid to Jaime, to the stony face of the man who had lost him Lisette. Sometimes, being a soldier was impossible.

He looked away. Looking at Jaime hurt his eyes.

Andrea moved down the track quickly and quietly. When he could see the dark glimmer of the road below him he cut into the trees, placing his feet carefully among the ferns and dry leaves. He passed through the forest with the faintest of rustles, more like a breeze than a twenty-stone human. At the edge of the trees, he stopped.

The road was pavé, the square, polished cobblestones of France. Twenty yards to his left was a sandbagged enclosure with a single embrasure from which projected the muzzle of a machine gun. Beside the enclosure, a bar painted in red-and-white stripes blocked off the road. The machine gun was pointing to the right, north, towards France, and, coincidentally, the stretch of road across which the Jeep would have to travel to rejoin the track on the far side, where it dived into the forests at the foot of a tall mountain plated with grey rock.

Andrea absorbed all of this in perhaps ten seconds, checking off a mental list of options. Then he walked quietly back into the trees and inside the wood along the side of the valley, passing above the checkpoint.

From above, he saw that the machine gun was unmanned. Its three-man crew and two other soldiers were lying on the grassy bank of the road, smoking. One of them was telling what Andrea recognised as a dirty joke he had overheard in the town at Navarone. Swiftly, he walked fifty yards through the wood, parallel to the road, in the general direction of Spain. Then he slung his Schmeisser across his stomach, pulled his helmet down over his eyes, and walked out onto the pavé.

At the sound of his boots, the men on the bank looked up. They saw the biggest Waffen-SS they had ever seen, moving light-footed towards them, eyes invisible under the helmet. They had never seen an SS man with a moustache before. Being honest Wehrmacht footsloggers, they did not like the SS, and they did not like moustaches. So the sergeant who had been telling the joke pretended not to see this one until he was on top of them. Then he looked up. ‘What the hell do you want?’ he said. ‘A shave?’

The men in the Jeep on the hillside heard nothing. A thrush was singing. A pigeon crashed out of a chestnut tree. Otherwise, there was silence, a silence that reminded Mallory of the silence on the far side of an operating theatre door. Andrea would be doing his horrible worst. After five minutes, mingled with the thrush’s song came the metallic cry of a Scops owl.

Mallory said, ‘Drive.’

Miller started to drive. This time he used the engine, because there would be no enemies alive to hear it.

Andrea was waiting by the road, wiping a long, curved knife on a tuft of grass. On a grassy bank nearby, five men in grey uniforms were staring at the sky. There was a lot of red among the yellow and white flowers on which they lay. But it was too early for poppies.

Andrea clambered into the Jeep. Miller gunned the engine.

Up the road, a figure in field-grey stumbled out of the trees, buttoning his trousers. When he saw the Jeep, he shouted, ‘Halt!’

Mallory straightened his helmet and gripped his Schmeisser. He said, ‘I’ll deal with him.’ But the brandy Hugues had drunk was heating up his mind. The sky and the trees and the mountains were swimming. It was difficult, being a soldier, obeying orders. When it meant that this woman, the woman you loved, Lisette … her fingernails, he thought, her teeth. They pull them out with pliers. And the baby –

In the centre of his vision, something new was moving. Something grey. A German soldier.

Hugues knew he had made himself look foolish in front of these granite-faced soldiers. But in his mind was a newborn baby, and a man with a pair of pliers in his hand. He heard Lisette scream. Because the man was walking, not towards Lisette, but towards the baby –

The man who was a German, like the soldier.

Of course he would have to be killed. And it should be Hugues who killed him, to redeem himself in the eyes of the soldiers.

And suddenly there was a gun in his hand, and his finger was on the trigger, and the gun was jumping, and the air was full of the clatter of the Schmeisser.

The bullets went high. Somebody snatched the weapon out of his hands. The soldier flung himself to the ground and rolled out of sight into the ditch. His rifle fired three times. The last shot smacked into the Jeep. ‘Let’s go,’ said Mallory, quietly.

The Jeep roared across the road and up the track on the far side. After two hundred yards, Andrea said, ‘Stop here.’

The Jeep stood at the bottom of a long, steep incline. Andrea swung his legs over the side. He plucked the Bren from the back seat, slung it over his shoulder as if it had been a twenty-bore shotgun, and loped away down the track.

He did not have far to go. This side of the valley was armoured with big, grey plates of limestone on which nothing grew. He found a slab that overlooked the road, cast himself flat behind it, and raised his head in time to see the field-grey figure scuttle like a rabbit into the horseshoe of sandbags that was the machine-gun emplacement. The emplacement was full of shadows, but Andrea knew what the man would be doing as surely as if he could see him. There would be a field telephone in there, and the man would be using it to call for reinforcements.

Carefully, Andrea trained the Bren on that shadow-filled horseshoe and adjusted the backsight one notch up. Then he fired four single shots into the lip of the sandbags, spacing them like the four pips on the four of spades. Then he stood up, quickly.

Down in the machine-gun emplacement, the shadow was punctured by something that might have been a grey tortoise, or a steel helmet. The man interrupted his telephone call to defend his life. Andrea watched the tin helmet move as the eyes searched for him. The eyes found him. The helmet became a human figure, struggling to haul the heavy machine gun round on its mount. Andrea watched clinically, without hatred. Should have stayed on the telephone, he thought, with the detached disapproval of a craftsman watching a bodger. Fatal mistake. The Bren’s sight settled on the tin helmet. The huge finger squeezed the trigger.

The burp of the machine gun rolled round the cliffs and precipices of the valley. Down in the emplacement, the little figure flung its arms wide, jerked upright, fell over the sandbag parapet, and lay still. Even before the echoes had died, Andrea was striding back uphill.

He smelt petrol before he saw the Jeep. As he came over the hill the other men were out of the vehicle. ‘Problem solved,’ said Andrea.

‘We’ve got another problem,’ said Mallory. Andrea noticed a curious woodenness in the faces round the Jeep. ‘We’ve got a bullet in the petrol tank. Did your friend have time to contact his headquarters?’