The Complete Navarone (69 page)

These braggings swiftly reached the ears of Brassman’s Orcasville lieutenant, who made certain long-distance telephone calls. That night, a night of full moon, the
Firewater
, steaming out of the north, saw the low silhouette of the
Krakatoa
at anchor, and took anticompetitive action. The
Krakatoa
was known to be rotten. The
Firewater
screwed down her regulator, achieved ramming speed, and ran her down.

What the
Firewater
’s master had not bargained for was Dusty Miller. When Dusty had rowed away, the barge had exuded a sour smell and a greenish chemical cloud. Now, twelve hours later, the acids swilling in her hold had compounded with the fatty fractions of the tallow, and formed a new substance.

So the rotting wooden barge into which the
Firewater
’s bow had knifed at twelve knots was not a rum ship. It was a rotting wooden barge that contained ten tons of impure and highly unstable nitroglycerine.

The explosion that vaporised the
Firewater
also broke most of the windows in Orcasville, and woke the Mayor of Toronto eighty miles away. Miller left town the following morning, and the town reglazed. There was no further trouble from Melvin Brassman.

Hugues came down the rope. He saw by the dim and pearly light of a single torch that the American, Miller, had gone off to a section of beach opposite the waterfall, a section where, to judge by the boulders piled up against the face of the cliff, there had been a rockfall of some kind. Hugues shivered in the chill wind that was blowing from the direction of the rockfall: a wind that reminded him of the outside world.
Merde
, thought Hugues, gazing into the dark. This is not a war in which anything will be solved. And certainly not by these stupid old men who have brought me to the bottom of this well to die.

The light at the other side of the pool seemed to become suddenly animated, bobbing like a drunken firefly. He stared at it dully. Someone was walking, running,
racing
towards him. A hard body whacked him off his rock and onto the wet ground, and he was struggling, indignant, his mouth full of limy pebbles, while a voice, Miller’s voice, bellowed over the thunder of the fall, ‘Cover your ears!’

Suddenly, Hugues was given a vision. The shaft became a vast tube of grey rock, the waterfall a silver column falling out of a sky roofed with more rock, every ridge and ledge and pebble razor-sharp, illuminated by a huge flash of light. The noise of the water was momentarily replaced by a new noise, so loud as hardly to resemble a noise at all.

It was the noise of the five pounds of gelignite that Dusty Miller had packed into the rockfall at the point where the draught had been strongest.

When the rock fragments had ceased to fall Miller walked back across the beach, and examined the scene of the explosion. It was a neat job, though he said it himself. The boulders had separated like a curtain. At the focal point of the explosion was a ragged gap perhaps two feet square, through which the wind howled in a jet like water from a fire hose. Miller sniffed at it hopefully, trying to detect the herbs and aromatic plants of the maquis.

It smelt of damp Norman churches.

Can’t win ’em all, thought Miller. He shone his torch through the hole. There were jumbled boulders, and beyond them the hint of space: a previous bed of the river. Quick, now, before the water rose far enough to spill down the channel. He walked along the beach to Mallory, directed his torch at his hand and gave the thumbs-up sign. The stony rigidity of Mallory’s face relaxed. They assembled the loads and shared them out. Then Miller led the way into the hole in the rockfall. Andrea was the last in. As he stepped up to the hole he found he was walking in water.

The new passage was another tube of water-smoothed rock. The wind was strong in their faces. Mallory looked at his compass. They were heading north. They must have crossed the mountain by now. Mallory was tired, and hungry, and cold, and his feet had been wet for so long that they felt like raw sponges. But they were heading in the right direction. In the gale that was making him shudder with cold he detected the breath of freedom.

Provided there was an exit.

The passage was flattening out. Hugues stumbled. Andrea trod on his heels again; Andrea, who walked with the stolid regularity of a machine. Hugues was exhausted. He wanted to drop his end of the crutch from which Wallace was hanging, stop, rest his blistered feet, sleep in the dark.

Behind him, Andrea’s voice said, ‘I’ll take him for a while.’

Hugues thought, he understands, this one. He understands exactly how weak I am, the way my mind will not be still, but must keep chewing at these questions that have no answers. There was something almost diabolic about that. Hugues felt naked, exposed.

To prove Andrea wrong, he said, ‘I’m fine.’

The stretcher party plodded on in the dark. The last torch was turning yellow. There was no sound but the harsh rasp of breathing, and the rustle of water over rock.

Andrea did not want to say anything, but the water in the passage was definitely getting deeper.

It had started as a wetness on the floor. Now it was shin-deep, and it seemed to be rising faster. He thought of the waterfall. He imagined all that water pouring down here. He imagined it pouring down into a chamber with a small exit, making a pool that spread back into the tunnel, a pool that would fill the tunnel up. That would be a problem for the operation, thought Andrea methodically. If they drowned, the operation would not be completed. It would be best if that did not happen.

Mallory walked on. The water shone under the now orange beam of his flashlight, chuckling merrily downhill.

The flashlight became an orange point, and went out.

Mallory lit his Zippo and held it above his head. The flame flickered in the rush of air.

Ahead, the tunnel broadened and became a flat sheet of water that led to a blank wall of rock. Above, at the height of a cathedral roof, a shaft led upwards. It was down this shaft that the wind was howling. The lighter went out. In the darkness left by its flame it was possible to see at the top of the shaft, bright as a diamond in the cold black velvet of far underground, a speck of light.

An unattainable speck. For as their eyes adjusted to the dim glow they saw that the chamber in which they were standing was roughly the shape of an inverted funnel, with the shaft as the spout.

Mallory’s mountaineering exploits had covered the newspapers of the Empire. But even master mountaineers do not have suckers on their feet.

Mallory felt a presence by his side. Miller raised his own lighter. The sheet of water was a pool, fed by the knee-deep torrent underfoot. Stalactites threw angular shadows across the ceiling, and stalagmites stood neck-deep in the pool. Beyond each stalagmite was a little writhing in the water.

‘It’s flowing,’ said Miller. ‘Must be going somewhere.’

This time he was so wet that there was no point in taking his clothes off. He tied the rope round his waist and waded in.

The first thirty feet was no more than knee-deep. Then, suddenly, the bottom sank away, and he was swimming, treading water rather, swept along by a fierce current in a narrow trench. At the rock wall ahead.

And he knew he had miscalculated.

He opened his mouth to shout, realised it was too late, and grabbed a deep breath of air instead. Then he went under.

The current was like a hand, grabbing him, tearing him down. He went headfirst, felt himself crash against a big rock. Then his shoulders were in a tight opening, too narrow for him to get through, and the current was forcing water into his nose, trying to get it into his lungs. He wriggled convulsively, got free, hit another rock with a bang that made his ears ring. He was in a pipe, a pipe of rock that was such a tight fit that he could not move his arms or legs. The shove of the water was huge. You goddamn idiot, he told himself. You can get away with it once, twice, ten times. But diving into God’s waterworks is asking for trouble.

And trouble is what you got.

His chest was bursting. The blood was hammering in his ears, and his head was roaring and juddering like that waterfall back there. Thirty more seconds of this, and he was going to be dead. And then those other guys would be dead. And then those submarines would go through that invasion fleet like three red-hot pokers through a pound of butter.

Chest full of air, oxygen turning to carbon dioxide. Going to suffocate you.

Make yourself smaller.

Breathe out.

Miller breathed out. The contraction of his chest shrank his girth by a fraction. The tunnel’s grip slackened. The water hauled him along the pipe, and slammed him into a hole through which his head only just fitted, and poured into his nostrils and gaping mouth.

Now he was going to die.

He was going to die with his head in daylight.

Daylight?

With the last of his strength, he writhed like an eel. And suddenly, whatever it was that was holding his right shoulder had given way, and he was through, out, beyond it all, flat on his back in a cheery little brook that was gurgling down a wooded valley under the five o’clock sky, from which a little snow was falling, but only a little.

He breathed twice, big breaths, with coughing. He looked back at the hole in the hill, a hole no bigger than a badger sett, as it burst out and expanded into a raw rent big enough for a bear, or even Andrea. The flow of water seemed to have lessened. He had broken the bottleneck. There might even be air in the tunnel now. He gave the two pulls on the rope.

It was cold in the little valley. The snow had not settled, but white skeins drifted in a half-hearted manner from heavy black clouds sailing in on the westerly breeze. They inspected and cleaned the weapons, fumbling with cold, water-wrinkled fingers. Jaime found some dry branches and knocked up a fire that burned with hardly any smoke. Andrea made soup. Thierry crammed his straw hat on his head, unpacked his radio, and began to inspect the parts.

Miller took Wallace a can of soup. None of them looked in the best of health, but Wallace looked terrible. His skin was like grey paper, but burning hot to the touch. His eyes were glazed. When Miller tipped some soup down his throat, he vomited immediately.

His wound looked pale and bloodless because of its perpetual rinsing in water. But the yellow edges looked yellower, and the red puffiness angrier. There was swelling, and a nasty putrid ooze. ‘Hurts,’ he said.

‘Bloody awful mess you are,’ said Miller. ‘Sooner we get you under a roof the better.’

Wallace opened a dull and rheumy eye. ‘Lea’ me,’ he said.

‘Leave you my ass,’ said Miller, sticking in the morphine syrette and squeezing the tube. ‘We’ll get a dressing on that. Still hurt?’

‘Can’t feel a thing,’ said Wallace.

‘Sure,’ said Miller, as if that was the right answer. ‘Just get a new dressing on that for you.’ He smeared damp sulfa on the wound, bandaged it up again, and covered Wallace with a more-or-less dry blanket.

Mallory said quickly, ‘How is it?’

‘Looks like it’s going wrong,’ said Miller, grim-faced. ‘Plus shock, I guess. I don’t know why he’s still alive.’

Mallory’s deep-sunk eyes were bright and distant. It was a mystery to him why any of them were still alive. ‘We’ll take two hours’ rest,’ he said. ‘Jaime knows where we are. The Germans think we’re dead. Andrea, get your head down.’

He watched as Miller spread a groundsheet over Wallace, rolled himself up in his poncho, and went immediately to sleep. Andrea was sitting with his back to a tree, eyes invisible. Asleep, awake, nobody knew, and nobody would ask. Jaime and Hugues were asleep. Only Thierry was awake, a large, crouching figure, fiddling with his radio, testing it after its immersion.

Mallory said, ‘That thing working?’

He had moved close to Thierry quietly; Mallory knew no other way of moving. Thierry looked up sharply. His fingers moved a switch. An indicator light went out.

Mallory bent and looked at the set. The light had been the TRANSMIT light. He felt the short hairs bristle on his neck. He said with a new, dangerous quietness, ‘Thierry. What are you doing?’

‘Testing the equipment,’ said Thierry.

Mallory said, ‘Just as long as you’re not transmitting.’

‘I heard what you say,’ said Thierry irritably, squashing the straw hat over his face and leaning back against a boulder. Mallory walked to the end of the valley. The snow had stopped. Between the squalls of black cloud deep ravines of blue were appearing. There was real warmth in the gleam of sun that lanced down into the trees. Warmth was what was needed. Particularly, it was what Wallace needed. In four hours it would be dark, and it did not seem likely to Mallory that Wallace would survive a night in the open.

And Wallace was not the only worry. Mallory guessed that they were at best halfway down the mountain. They still had to get down into the valley and walk to the sea, where this Guy Jamalartégui was waiting for them. Whether or not the Germans believed that they had died in the collapsed cave beyond the ridge, the roads to the sea would be heavily patrolled.

Mallory eased his sodden feet in his boots, and squeezed his cracked and abraded hands, to change the nature of the pain. The Benzedrine was wearing off. He felt weary and irritable. What they needed was to get dry. Being dry would change everything.