The Complete Navarone (74 page)

Wallace said, ‘You’ll have a rearguard then.’

Lisette said, ‘Commanded by the Commandant? You’re crazy.’

Wallace said, ‘The Commandant is retired. I am a serving officer. I’ll take command.’

Mallory turned his head, and looked at the papery face, the glassy, fever-bright eyes.

‘I’m not up to a ride in a boat, sir,’ said Wallace. ‘Maybe one of these chaps can get me to Spain when the fuss dies down.’

Jaime said, ‘It is possible. Certainly, these old fools need orders. But
monsieur
cannot stay in Guy’s house. The Boche will destroy it.’

‘Hold on,’ said Mallory. ‘Seventy men arriving at dawn?’

‘Commanded by a drunk,’ said Hugues.

Mallory looked at Wallace. He would be no good in a boat. His only hope was to rest, and get over the border later, in discreet silence.

Mallory said, ‘We will send you the Commandant. We will tell him that you are his commanding officer. You will tell him to go home, and collect you when the fuss has died down.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Wallace.

Hugues looked at him, then at Mallory. ‘The barn where we stayed is quiet. There is a loft. You can see the road, the harbour. It’s a good command post.’

Mallory looked at the transparent face, the cracked lips, the glittering eyes. He walked across the room and shook Wallace by the hand. ‘Best of luck, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘It’s been good having the SAS along. We wouldn’t have got this far without you.’

Wallace grinned. ‘I think you probably would,’ he said.

Mallory said, ‘I’ll send up the Commandant.’ Then he beckoned Miller, and said, ‘Help Lieutenant Wallace up to the barn.’

They separated, leaving Mallory with the memory of a handshake that had been no more than a touch of icy bones.

‘Brave man,’ said Andrea.

Lisette was watching them. She nodded. There were tears on her face.

Miller’s steps faded on the path.

Wallace was gone.

Miller threaded across the dark vines and potato-ridges. He carried his burden up the road, into the barn and up the stairs. In the loft, he propped Wallace on the dusty, sweetish-smelling mow. ‘No smoking,’ said Miller.

‘Sure,’ said Wallace. ‘Thanks.’

‘Good luck,’ said Miller, arranging three canteens of water within reach.

In the yellow light of the lantern, Wallace looked like an Old Master painting: wounded soldier, with pack, Bren, Schmeisser, grenades and sulfa powder. His face wore a faint smile; a weird, faraway smile, Miller thought. ‘Give my regards to England,’ he said.

‘You’ll be there before us,’ said Miller, cheerily. ‘You can buy me a bourbon at the Ritz.’ He went down the stairs in two strides of his beanpole legs, and paused by the door. The view from the barn was excellent. The village lay spread out at the end of its road. Nothing moved in the potato-ridges. The night was still: the wind had dropped flat, and the stars were out. In the loft, Miller heard Wallace stir, a stifled moan of pain. Then hinges creaked.

Miller walked onto the road and down towards the houses. After fifty yards he glanced back. When he had carried Wallace up, the shutters of the loft had been closed. Now, a shutter stood open. From that open shutter Wallace would command a view of the road leading down to the quay.

Miller raised a hand in salute, and walked quietly down to the village.

Hugues said to Mallory, ‘Lisette will come on the boat.’ Mallory watched him from under his heavy brows. The eyes were tired, but they seemed to Hugues to see everything. ‘If we leave her, she may talk,’ said Hugues. ‘And there are often women on fishing boats. She will be … camouflage.’

A pregnant woman, thought Mallory. A hell of a member of a penetrate-and-sabotage expedition.

Lisette did not know where they were going, or why. But if she was picked up, she would talk, all right. This time, the Gestapo would make sure of that.

If she had not talked already.

He said, ‘Bring her along.’

It was twenty to four by the time Miller got back to Guy’s house. There was one dirty glass and one plate on the table. There was no sign that seven men and a woman had spent part of the night there. Mallory was waiting, pack on back, Schmeisser in hand. Miller shouldered his boxes. The Storm Force filed out of the back door, across the garden walls, until they came out onto the field at the top of the cliff from which Andrea had watched the sentries. The wind had dropped flat. The water was smooth as satin, the swells slopping against the jetty with a small roar. One of the rowing boats was gone from the outhaul. From out of the hazy darkness of the bay there came the pop and thump of ancient diesels as the fishing fleet got ready for the tide. Of the sentries there was no sign.

Mallory said to Andrea, ‘We’ll wait till the sentries give their all-clear at 0355. Then we’ll take care of them. That’ll give us half an hour to get clear.’

‘Half an hour?’ said a voice at his side.
‘Monsieur
, you have my personal guarantee that you will have all the time in the world.’

Mallory spun round.

‘Mon Capitaine,’
said the figure, in a gale of old Cognac. ‘Permit me to introduce myself. Le Commandant Cendrars. At your service.’

‘I was telling you about the Commandant,’ said Hugues. ‘A valuable
résistant
.’

‘Pardon me,’ hissed the Commandant, shirtily, in French.
‘Chef de la Résistance
of the region –’

‘Ah, ça!’
said Hugues, scornfully.

Mallory cut off whatever it was he was going to say next. ‘Commandant,’ he said, ‘I am most grateful to you. Hugues, please interpret. Tell the Commandant that his arrival is most timely. I am exceedingly grateful to him for his assistance. I am putting him under the command of Lieutenant Wallace, Commander of His Majesty’s rearguard. Rearguard HQ is the barn above the village. He is to report there immediately for orders. I would remind him that stealth and silence are of the essence.’

The Commandant became still. Down on the rain-blackened quay, a figure was marching slowly: one of the German sentries. The other sentry would be in the command post, standing by the field telephone for the 0355 report. The Commandant said, ‘A rearguard action,
hein?
Under the command of a lieutenant? I must say –’

‘Hey!’ said Miller. ‘Get out of there!’ Dark figures were crouching over the pile of equipment on the ground. ‘Mind your own damn business –’

Next to his head, something exploded, shockingly loud in the still, starlit predawn. It took him several heartbeats to work out that it had been a rifle going off. ‘In the army of the Marne, we do not sneak past the Boche,’ bellowed Cendrars. ‘We shoot him.’ And he fired again.

The German sentry, surprised by the bullet that had smacked into the granite coping of the quay three metres from his right foot, had dived from view. The second shot hit the empty quay.

Miller found that he was on the ground, his Schmeisser cocked and ready in his hands, his heart thumping. You goddamn maniacs, he was thinking.

Mallory saw the Frenchmen still standing against the sky, obvious targets for the machine gunners in the pillbox on the hill opposite. Wallace, he thought, you are on your own.

Perhaps that is what you wanted.

Miller and Andrea had disappeared, as he would have expected. He said, ‘Andrea?’

‘I’ll organize the pillbox,’ said Andrea’s voice from the darkness.

‘Good. Miller?’

‘Here.’

‘Sentries.’

He looked at his watch. The hands were at five to three. The wires would be humming with the sentries’ yelps:
we are under fire, send reinforcements
. The Commandant could not have chosen a worse moment if he had tried.

There was a moment’s eerie silence, in which it was possible to imagine that nothing had happened. Then, on the summit of the hill that rose on the other side of the valley in which the village lay, a stabbing flame began to flicker. The Germans in the pillbox were taking an interest.

The sound of the machine gun came a split second later, with the whip of large-calibre bullets. One of the Commandant’s men went over like a skittle. The rest of them lay down, old bones creaking.
‘Merde!’
said the Commandant. ‘What is that?’

Hugues was lying beside Lisette, clutching her hand. He said, wearily, ‘You foolish old men, why will you not obey orders?’

Jaime felt something that might have been a breeze pass by him, except that it was no breeze, because breezes do not talk; and this breeze said, ‘Come down in five minutes. Bring the equipment,’ in the unmistakable voice of Captain Mallory.

Andrea went down through the village and up the hill the other side at a steady jog, conserving energy. The pillbox was directly above him now, its tracers flicking across the top of his vision. He paid them no attention. He had seen the pillbox before night had fallen. This far south, and next to a friendly neutral neighbour, invasion was not a serious fear. So it was not one of the impregnable strongpoints that you found in Crete, designed to stand days of siege. It was merely a concrete box with a steel door and a slit from which the machine gun could enfilade the bay and the quay.

Something was moving out at sea: something that might have been a fishing boat. Its exact outline was hard to determine, because there was a haziness at sea level, a pale vapour like kettle-steam on the dark face of the waters.

Andrea slowed to a walk. There would be a sentry. He put his face close to the ground and saw the silhouette of a man crouching against the hillside. The silhouette looked nervous, flinching at the occasional bullet that whizzed raggedly overhead from the heroes of the Marne on the hilltop opposite.

The sentry was indeed watching that hilltop. It had taken a lot of wangling to get down here onto the Spanish border, where nothing ever happened. He had no idea what had got into these Resistance idiots. Reinforcements would soon be arriving from St-Jean. There would be shootings and burnings in the morning. Meanwhile, this was annoying.

Or perhaps something worse. Rumours of invasion from England were growing in force, no matter how savagely the SS and Gestapo suppressed such defeatist talk. The sentry felt a dull foreboding. Still, if you were going to survive this damned war, Martigny was the place to be stationed –

A forearm like a steel bar clamped across the sentry’s windpipe. The knife went in and out once, fast as a snake’s tongue. Andrea lowered the body to the ground, put the helmet on his own head, and walked softly to the pillbox door. He took three grenades from his blouse, cradling them like eggs in his vast hand. He pulled the pins from the grenades. He held two of them, levers closed, in his left hand. The other he held in his right hand. He waited for a pause between bursts of fire. Then he banged on the steel door with the grenade.

‘Hey!’ he shouted, in his fluent German. ‘Where is your damned sentry?’

Muffled voices came from within.

‘This is Sturmbannführer Wilp!’ roared Andrea in a voice hoarse with Teutonic rage. ‘This is an exercise. Open up!’

The door opened. The man who opened it saw a large shape topped with a coal-scuttle helmet silhouetted against the stars. He said,
‘Was?’

Andrea kicked him down the stairs and threw the grenades after him. He was already fifty yards down the hill by the time the gun-slits spouted flame and the flat, heavy explosion rolled across the bay.

The sentries were not the Third Reich’s finest. By the time Mallory and Miller arrived on the quay, they were in the guard post with the door shut, yelling at each other and into their field telephone, and someone was yelling back.

Mallory hoped Guy would be quick. There were a lot of German soldiers within five miles, and they would all be here in a very short time.

The guard post had once been a net shed. It had a stable door, in two parts. Mallory kicked both parts open. The Germans by the telephone looked round. They had wide, flabby faces, and looked well over fifty. They made no movement towards their rifles. Instead, their hands went up in the air.

‘Key,’ said Mallory.

The elder of the two handed him the key.

‘Rifles on the ground,’ said Mallory. The weapons clattered to the flagstones. ‘Kick them over here.’ He picked up the rifles. Then he smashed the telephone and closed the door. If by some miracle the Commandant of the St-Jean-de-Luz garrison had not been informed of his sentries’ screams down the telephone, he could hardly fail to ignore an exploding pillbox. The lorries would already be on the road.

‘Now listen,’ said Mallory. ‘This is a British army operation. It has nothing to do with the Resistance. We are about to board one of our submarines and withdraw. The civilian population have not been involved. Do you understand?’

The sentries nodded, dazed, their eyes shifting from the lean and haggard face, down the SS smock to the Schmeisser, unwavering in the hard, battered hands.

‘You will inform your commanding officer,’ said Mallory. ‘This has been a commando raid, to demonstrate our capabilities. Tell him to remember what we can do.’

The sentries nodded. Their minds would be full of the icy winds of the Russian Front. But the message would have got across.