The Complete Navarone (68 page)

Miller wrapped his battledress in his waterproof cape, and went back through the icy water. The rest of them came after him, one by one, dragged under the low roof, breath held, clothes and weapons wrapped against the water, Andrea bringing up the rear. On the far side, they stood and shivered in the tomb-like cold. Wallace was the most worrying. ‘Work your arms,’ said Mallory. ‘Circulation.’

Wallace raised his arms weakly, let them fall again. Miller bent over him, tugging his tunic over his arms. He was too weak to dress himself. ‘Physical jerks,’ he said, and tried to grin. Even the grin suffered from lack of muscle power.

They sat and drank soup brewed on a pressure stove, and checked their weapons. Miller put his oil can down by the edge of the water, and went over the lock of his Schmeisser with a corner of pullthrough. When he had finished the gun, he looked down again at the oil can.

It had been six inches from the water’s edge. Now the water’s edge was lapping against its base.

Up in the world, there was wet snow and rain. Down here in the underworld, the waters of the earth were rising.

Best not tell Mallory.

After five minutes, Mallory stood up. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’re off.’

The gallery ran downhill again. There were a couple more pools, neither of them more than waist-deep. Hugues marched through the blackness head down, hands in pockets, shoulder aching under the pressure of Wallace’s crutch. When he brushed against Wallace’s hand it felt cold as marble. It was obvious to Hugues that this man was going to die. Why carry him, when they had abandoned Lisette? It was folly, madness. Hugues was a soldier. He accepted that in war there were sacrifices to be made. But some things were too precious to sacrifice. Like the life of the woman you loved, and your unborn child. Deep under the mountain, Hugues was making promises to himself. If I live, he was thinking, things will be different. From now on, I will take care of the things I can see and touch with my own eyes and hands. From now on, it is not the big causes I will fight for. From now on, it will be the people I love.

If there is a from now on.

The brandy throbbed in his head. He marched on, detesting Mallory and Miller and this Greek killer Andrea, their cold, sunken eyes, the hard jokes they made, the way they did not care about individual people, thought only of their operation –

Andrea’s boot trod on his heel. He was out of step, stumbling, panting for breath, the blood roaring in his ears.

Not just the blood.

Ever since they had been inside the mountain, the air had been tremulous with a faint rumble. Now the rumble was gaining in intensity. At first it was a long, uniform growl. Then the growl had become a roar that shook the ground underfoot and vibrated in the still air of the gallery. After perhaps a mile the gravel underfoot had become finer, and the ground had started to rise. At the top of a low mound the gallery was suddenly blocked by a wall of rock.

The beam of Mallory’s flashlight wavered up the wall to a crack of darkness at its summit. The crack was a foot wide, the roar as loud as a bomber’s engines. He put a foot on the wall and began to climb.

It was only twenty feet high, but running water had smoothed away the footholds. It took him a careful five minutes to get to the top. And when he did, he wished he had not.

When he put his head through the crack, the thunder of falling water was like a hand that grabbed his head and shook it. He shone his torch into the darkness. The beam lanced into emptiness. He put his head into the racket, and looked down.

Once, the wall must have been the sill of a waterfall. Now the river had found a lower channel, and the place where the waterfall had been was now a cliff, smooth as ivory, falling away below beyond the reach of his flashlight beam, plummeting like a gigantic mine shaft into the bowels of the earth. From the depths rose the bellow of falling water, and a fine mist of spray that chilled Mallory’s face.

Curiously, this hellish hole in the world made Mallory feel better. It might be underground, and dark as the inside of a bank safe. But it was an open space; a problem that with a small stretch of the imagination could be regarded as a problem in mountaineering.

Mallory called for Miller and Andrea. They looked over the edge, and went back to the bottom of the sill. Miller said, ‘Holy cow,’ in a voice not altogether steady.

‘We’ve got two ropes,’ said Mallory. ‘I’m going to put them together, double. If I find anything useful, I’ll pull twice. Send Wallace down first. You’ll have to show the other three how to rappel.’

‘Ideal place to learn,’ said Miller.

Mallory knotted the first two ropes together, slung the last coil over his shoulder, and went over the edge.

The wall was as smooth as it looked: no purchase for feet. He kept his weight well out, rope over shoulder and up between his legs, walking down the wall. By the time he came to the first knot he was walking in complete darkness. Miller’s flashlight was a faint yellow glow far above. The roar of water surrounded him like a thunderstorm. He unclipped his own flashlight and shone it downwards.

Sixty feet below, the beam met something black and gleaming, muscular as the back of a giant slug. For a moment he could not work out what it was. Finally, the truth filtered through. It was a waterfall. A river, a big river, was pouring out of a ragged hole in the side of the shaft, tumbling down into a blackness too deep for the flashlight to penetrate. The roar numbed his mind. He saw a sudden picture of himself suspended like a spider on a string of gossamer, hung in this dreadful shaft. He blanked it out.

The shaft would have been a pothole: a whirlpool a million years old, a spinning auger of carbonic acid sinking its way slowly into the limestone. After the river had gnawed its way down a hundred and fifty feet, it had joined forces with another seam of water, and adopted its course as its own. The new waterfall emerged to his left, almost at right angles to the wall he was descending.

There should be a ledge. Where the old waterfall had been supplanted by the new, there should definitely be a ledge.

He knew he must be getting to the bottom of the second rope. The wall was still smooth. To his left, he could feel the wind of the down-rushing water, falling God knew where. The spray of it had soaked him to the skin. He felt cold and weak. What if there was no ledge, only this smooth wall falling direct to the bottom?

Something touched his back. He almost shouted with the shock. He was lying on his back on a ledge. He shone his flashlight. The ledge was four feet wide, twenty feet long, piled with boulders, crusted white with limy deposits, and shining with water. When he shone his light over the edge, he still saw nothing. There was only the black water rushing past with its mind-numbing roar.

He pulled the rope twice, hard. Then he sat with his back against the wall, and shivered, and gnawed some chocolate.

Wallace came down first, lowered by Andrea. Then there were two loads of packs and weapons and radios, then Thierry and Hugues. Somehow, Thierry had kept his hat. Hugues had had a bad descent: there was blood on his face. Then there were Jaime and Miller, who Mallory imagined would be swearing vigorously, and finally Andrea, leaping down the wall like a huge cat.

When they were all down, Mallory stood up, flexed his aching fingers, looped the ropes over a lime-cemented boulder, and went over the edge again.

This time it was easier. There were footholds, of a sort. Twenty feet after the halfway mark he entered a place where his flashlight, instead of making a yellow disc on black water, created a sort of white halo, as if in fog. The noise was more like an avalanche than a waterfall. There was wind, too, irregular flumes of draught that splattered limestone-tasting water in his face. And suddenly he was standing on dry land again.

This time it was not a ledge. This time the plunging roar of water told him that he was at the base of the waterfall, standing on a beach.

He tugged the rope twice. Then he flicked the flashlight on again, and began to grope his way round the beach. It was a broad horseshoe of broken boulders surrounding a thrashing pool of water. The waterfall must have been twenty feet across and ten feet thick, a solid column of water plunging down two hundred feet and hammering the pool to froth. The pool itself had a circular motion, like a giant bath plughole –

Mallory’s heart thudded unpleasantly in his chest. He walked round the piled boulders to one margin of the waterfall. Then he went all the way back round, as far as the other margin.

If he had expected anything, it had been that the river would turn horizontal at the base of the waterfall, and make its way out through the side of the mountain. But there was no horizontal passage.

The shaft was a tube. The reason the water in the pool was spinning like a bath plughole was because it was finding the way out, as water will …

Straight down.

Mallory sat on a boulder. Carefully, he fished in his blouse pocket for the oilcloth bag with his cigarettes and lighter. He put a cigarette in his mouth, and lit it.

The draught blew the lighter out. He relit it, but the cigarette was soaked.

Soon, the others began to land on the beach. Mallory’s flashlight was dim yellow, the batteries gone. It went out. He flicked his lighter. The petrol caught.

The draught blew it out again.

He sat down, and concentrated on shivering.

Miller came down third, after Wallace, with his eyes shut, cursing. For a man who loathed and despised heights, it struck him that he had been doing an unfair quantity of mountaineering these past few weeks. When he reached the beach, he moved away from the base of the rope; having avoided death by falling, he had no desire to be flattened by a plummeting Frenchman. A gleam of yellow light showed him where Mallory was sitting. Miller flicked on his own flashlight. He was on his last set of batteries. He saw what Mallory had seen: there were no exits. He shivered, too. The reason he shivered was because of the wind –

The wind.

He flashed his torch at Mallory. Mallory’s face looked pinched and white. He looked like a man who had wrestled for a long time with a monster, and had discovered that despite his best efforts the monster was not yet dead.

Two packs arrived down the rope. Miller flicked his torch over them, and onto Wallace. Wallace’s face had the corpse-look, grey and sunken, but he raised a hand. Miller let the torch beam slide over his bandages. The wound did not seem to be bleeding any more.

Miller suddenly stopped thinking about Wallace. The beam of his flashlight had touched the margin of the water. Five minutes ago, there had been a brick-sized stone by Wallace’s foot. Now there was no stone.

Not that the stone had gone – brick-sized stones do not evaporate. What had happened was that the stone was under water.

The water was still rising.

It was not a military problem. But then Miller was not in any strict sense of the word a military person. In fact, having enlisted in the RAF and been posted to the cookhouse, he had simply walked away from his unit; not out of cowardice, but because he wanted to use his talents somewhere they could damage the enemy, not potatoes. He had been astonished when someone had informed him that this constituted desertion. But by then he had been behind enemy lines, causing Rommel severe headaches as a member of the Long Range Desert Force. And nobody had got round to court-martialling him.

But as he stood on that black and shrinking beach, Miller was thinking of a time before the Long Range Desert Force. It was not a time he was particularly proud of, but it was a time when he had caused the maximum possible mayhem using the minimum possible resources.

It had been during Prohibition. For reasons best left undiscussed, even with himself, Miller had found himself in Orcasville, a small white clapboard town on the southern shore of Lake Ontario. It was into Orcasville’s pier that a Canadian bootlegger called Melvin Brassman was wont to bring his cargoes of hooch. None of which would have posed any problems for Miller, except that Brassman’s boys were causing a lot of trouble in the town, culminating in the rape of three girls, one of them the minister’s daughter, and the burning of the warehouses of two merchants Brassman saw as rivals. Having committed these acts of mayhem, Brassman’s men had let it be known that any rival rumrunners would be treated as hostile, rammed, and sunk by the steel ex-tug
Firewater
, in which they plied their trade.

It was Brent Kent, one of the burned-out merchants, who had called in Miller, then dynamiting pine stumps in the Finger Lakes region. Kent had laid his problem before Miller, stressing the need for a swift, untraceable, no-blame vanishment of the
Firewater
. There were no explosives in the town, or at least none that could not be traced.

But Miller was more than a demolitions man. Miller was a practical chemist.

Miller had taken possession of an old but superficially seaworthy steam barge, which he had enigmatically christened
Krakatoa
. He had painted the exterior a pleasing royal blue, and let it be known that he was off to Canada to pick up a cargo of hooch. With great puffings and clankings, he and the
Krakatoa
had set off from the Orcasville quay. Just out of sight of land he had stopped the engine, and waited. After twelve hours, he had attended to the
Krakatoa
’s real cargo.

This consisted not of liquor, but several dozen barrels of tallow, and a similar number of carboys of sulphuric and nitric acids. Descending to the deck of the hold with an axe, Miller staved in the tallow barrels. Then, carefully, he uncorked the acid carboys and let their contents gurgle into the barge’s ancient wooden bilges. After that, he rowed clumsily away in a dinghy, and was collected by the mayor in his catboat. When they arrived ashore, Miller was observed to be the worse for liquor, bragging in a foolish manner about the large quantity of Canadian whiskey bobbing at anchor offshore, which, landed at nightfall, would wreck the Brassman booze market for good and all.