The Complete Navarone (83 page)

Five minutes later, Andrea had arrived, slowly, wearing a straw hat and leading a donkey in whose panniers were more weapons. Andrea had stood a moment, blank-eyed, watching. He saw the woman and the three children hanging from the vine that used to shade the evening drinking of ouzo. He saw the black-uniformed SS men, their thick red faces pouring rivers of sweat under the sun, laughing. The flames began to pour out of the roof of the house. He saw the silhouette of the General standing on the cliff, admiring a distant ruin, smiling complacently at the liquid-agate of the sun in the glass of retsina. He smelt burned flesh.

Then Andrea had seen nothing else.

When he could see again, there were five SS men dead at his feet. Them he fed to Iannis’ pigs. The General he shot in the knees and threw into the privy to drown. He heard later from the people of the village that it had taken three days; not that he was interested. For Andrea had not waited. He had gathered together the bodies of his brother and his sister-in-law and his nieces, and given them to the priest for burial. Then he had left, to fight for his country on other fronts.

Andrea did not like SS officers.

He growled, and started forward, his gigantic hands unclenching.

The SS General dropped the Turkish cigarette he was smoking, and ground it out with a fastidious toe. He said, ‘Unless you really like it here, I think we should leave.’ And his voice was the voice of Mallory.

There was a moment’s stunned silence, broken only by the sound of moaning from the corridor. Then Miller said, ‘Personally, I find it damp.’

Andrea’s eyes were pits of darkness. They moved from Mallory to Miller and back again. Then his teeth showed in a smile that was like the sun among thunderclouds. ‘You should be careful about second-hand clothes,’ he said. ‘You could catch something really nasty. Like a knife in the guts.’

Mallory said, ‘It is true that the owner wasn’t very well when I left him.’

There were two bodies in the corridor. ‘Get their clothes and their paybooks,’ said Mallory. Andrea dragged them into the cell, and shut the door. ‘And now?’ he said.

Mallory looked at Miller. ‘What do you need?’

What Miller really needed was his explosives back. But there was no use crying over spilt Cyclonite. ‘Whatever,’ said Miller. ‘These guys will be carrying torpedoes. You can have a nasty accident with a torpedo. I guess I’d like to see the magazine.’

Andrea nodded gravely. During the weeks he had known Miller, he had learned to take this languid, flippant American very seriously indeed.

‘I have a feeling,’ said Mallory, ‘that there might be a certain amount of confusion out there. So the sooner we get dressed, the better.’

Five minutes later, the SS General left the
fortaleza
by the main gate, escorted by two men in grubby Waffen-SS uniforms, one tall and wide, one tall and lanky, marching eyes front, with Schmeissers strapped across their chests. The sentries on the gate saluted. The General returned their salute with his left hand; the right, being artificial, he held rigidly at his side.

Once across the bridge over the moat, the party turned right, down a flight of wide, shallow stairs that led to a sort of crater in the shoulder of the headland. In the centre of the crater was a squat concrete bunker surrounded with barbed wire.

At a slow and stately pace, Mallory and his escort started down the stairs. There were few other people about. The welding torches still flickered their lightnings at the sky by the harbour, and riveters still rattled in the night. Somewhere, truck engines were rumbling; the evacuation was getting under way. But the armed men of the garrison were still apparently up by the main gate.

The garrison would not stay by the main gate for ever. Sooner or later, someone would decide that the threat might be based on faulty intelligence, or that it was not wise to leave the rest of the Cabo unguarded. Before that happened, there would be fifteen minutes, at best.

They were approaching the gate to the bunker. Seen close up, it was not so much a bunker as a fortified entrance, a steel door set behind a system of concrete baffles giving admittance to a low, tumulus-like mound, covered in salt-blasted turf. The entrance to the magazine.

The soldier at the gate stared straight ahead. ‘Pass?’ he said.

Mallory said, in the General’s harsh whisper, ‘Open the gate.’

‘But Herr General –’

Mallory said, ‘The weather in Russia is terrible at this time of year.’

The man’s face paled under the floodlights. ‘Herr General?’

‘Perhaps when you get there you will send me a postcard,’ rasped Mallory. ‘Now if you would kindly open the gate?’

There was a split second of inner struggle. Then the sentry hauled open the gate in the wire, and Mallory walked through at his cramped, mincing hobble. The sentry must have pressed some sort of switch, because the steel door swung open with a hiss of hydraulics. Mallory and his escorts walked in without pausing. The steel door swung shut behind them. Ahead was a flight of spiral stairs, with at its centre the hoists that fed ammunition to the guns in the fort. Mallory looked at the faces of his companions. They were pale and expressionless, tired, but with a tension to their tiredness that was new. It came from the closing of that steel door.

They were inside now. There were no sandbags to hide behind, no shadows to skulk in. Their only protection against five hundred enemy soldiers was the thin cloth of their uniforms and the shape of the badges they wore. They were small, fragile machines of flesh and blood, armed with small guns. With those small guns and their bare hands, they had to destroy huge machines of steel. It was a nasty feeling; a naked feeling. A feeling from a nightmare.

But this was real. And this was the way it was going to be, from now on.

Down those stairs, Mallory told himself, were the tools for the job. Put Miller near explosives, and his bare hands could shatter an army. Everything was going to be fine.

Except my feet, thought Mallory, hobbling on. His feet felt as if they would never be the same again.

The shaft with the staircase descended into the bowels of the hill. Shells could be carried by hoist. But torpedoes were big, and heavy, and needed to travel horizontally. The floor of the magazine would be on the same level as the floor of the quay.

Miller stamped down the stairs at what he hoped was a convincing Wehrmacht stamp. It was costing him some effort to keep his appearance military. He was a fighter, Miller, but he would have been the first to admit that he was not much of a soldier. As they rounded the last twist of the spiral staircase, he felt a pleasurable anticipation. Once again, it was time to improvise.

At the base of the stairs was a flashproof door. Miller pushed the door open. They were in the magazine.

It was a big magazine. It stretched away in front of them, lit harshly by white bulkhead lights, a devil’s wine cellar of grey concrete compartments, bins for shells, and bays for the trolleys that would roll the torpedoes down to the quays where the submarines waited, black and evil, crouching in the cold Atlantic.

Mallory looked at his watch. It was three forty-five.

Christ.

They went through the door, all three of them, and looked down the stark concrete perspective that was the magazine’s central aisle. This was where they would find the wherewithal to sink three submarines and scupper the Nazis’ last defence against the invading Allies.

But there was a problem.

The concrete bays and alcoves of the magazine contained a few crates. The dollies for the shells lay on their rails, and the torpedo racks, five hundred of them, stood padded with felt. But the crates were cracked open, the dollies burdenless, the torpedo racks bare. A gang of men was dismantling an electric motor.

But apart from the men, the magazine was empty.

They stood there, and watched, and let it sink in. The job was waiting. The tools were missing.

After a minute, Mallory began to hobble down the floor of the magazine, heading for the rails that would have taken the torpedoes to the quay.

The
Stella Maris
was lying on the outside of a raft of fishing boats against the quay wall of San Eusebio. Among the ruined buildings behind the quay, yellow dogs with feathered tails barked maddeningly in the rain. Hugues and Lisette were out of sight below. Jaime was on deck, propped in the splintered remnants of the wheelhouse, smoking. At his side a radio hummed gently to itself. There had been no signals. Jaime was not expecting any more signals.

Across the black water of the harbour, the sheds and quays of the old sardine factory on Cabo de la Calavera, which earlier had flickered with angle-grinder sparks and welder lightnings, were almost dark. It looked as if the work was complete. Now and then, a crane-jib caught the light as it swung. Loading up, thought Jaime. Not long now.

There was activity on the harbour too; the murmur of launches and lighters, moving out to the two five-thousand-ton merchantmen anchored in the deep water half a mile from the quay. On the move, thought Jaime. And who knew where it would all end?

‘Slow,’ said Mallory. ‘Your work is very, very slow. Work faster.’

The Leutnant in charge of the embarkation of the magazine stores felt a hot anger at the injustice of it all. But it was not helpful to be angry with SS Generals. So he clicked his heels and ducked his head and said, ‘As the Herr General wishes.’

‘The Herr General does,’ said Mallory. ‘Now I wish to inspect the magazine.’

‘Herr General?’

Mallory frowned. ‘You speak German, do you not?’

‘Herr General.’ The man had just been rated for slowness. Leading a tour of inspection for some damned Nazi with a skull-and-bones hat was not going to speed things up. But a General was a General.

‘Here were the shells,’ said the Leutnant. ‘All gone now, as per your orders. Here were the torpedoes. They are also gone, naturally.’ He waved a hand at the tunnel leading down to the quay, and walked to another bin lined with empty racks. A pile of grey boxes stood on the floor. ‘And in here, the small arms. A few only remaining. Grenades, mortar bombs. The last consignment will be leaving when the barge comes back alongside.’ He clashed his heels together again, thumbs nailed to the seams of his breeches. ‘I trust the Herr General is satisfied.’

Mallory eyed the three grey wooden boxes the officer had indicated. ‘Quite satisfied,’ he said. He looked round. Nobody was in sight. ‘Andrea?’

The huge Greek took one step forward and crashed his jackboots on the concrete. His shoulders moved. There was a sound like a felling axe hitting a tree trunk. The German officer sighed, and fell down.

‘Hide him,’ said Mallory. ‘Miller, boxes of grenades.’

Miller piled two boxes of grenades one on top of the other: ten grenades to the box, rope handles on either end.

‘We’ll go to the quay,’ said Mallory. His face was the colour of dirty ivory. Exhausted, thought Miller.

Mallory fumbled in his pocket. There were three Benzedrine left in the little foil packet. He gave them out, one each. Benzedrine was not good for you, thought Miller, stooping to pick up the grenades. But then, nor was trying to climb aboard a U-boat to blow it up.

It was a long time since Miller had eaten anything. The pill worked fast. He could feel the strength pouring through him. These pills, thought Miller, dry-mouthed and sweating. You will feel terrible later.

Except that later was hardly worth worrying about, under the circumstances.

Miller laughed. Then he walked with his two companions into the throat of the tunnel that led to the quay.

The tunnel was fifty yards long, lit with the harsh white bulkhead lights installed all over the Cabo. Rails ran down each side, for the torpedo dollies. Down the middle was the walkway. There were men moving up and down the tunnel, moving at a fast clip. When they saw Mallory’s uniform their eyes skidded away. Popular guy, thought Miller.

The three men began to march down the walkways, boots echoing. They had gone twenty yards when a voice behind said,
‘Halt!’

Mallory’s heart walloped heavily. He thrust his all-too-real right hand into his tunic. Andrea’s hands stole to the grips of his Schmeisser. Miller’s hands were sweating into the rope handles of the grenade boxes. Mallory spun on the heel of his agonising jackboot.

He was looking at a small, bald man with rimless glasses and a prissy mouth, bulging out of a badgeless uniform. The small man was holding a book.

‘Was?’
said Mallory.

The small man was not impressed by the death’s-head cap badge, the black uniform, the harsh croak of the voice. He pursed his lips. ‘It is necessary to fill out the requisite forms,’ he said. ‘For the withdrawal of these weapons from the magazine. Otherwise, correct systems cannot be maintained.’

Mallory said, ‘And you are the inventory clerk.’

‘Jawohl.’

‘Well, Herr Corporal,’ said Mallory. ‘Give me your book, and I will sign it.’

The clerk made tutting noises. ‘Signature alone is not enough,’ he said. ‘You will naturally need a requisition form signed by the garrison duty officer.’

Mallory said, in a voice crammed with broken glass, ‘Do you know who I am?’

The clerk moistened his small mouth with a grey tongue. ‘Yess, Herr General. You are the garrison commander, Herr General.’

‘And who signs the requisitions?’

‘The duty officer.’

‘By whose orders?’

‘By your orders, Herr General.’

‘So,’ said Mallory.

The clerk said, ‘I have my orders. The duty officer must sign the requisition.’

Mallory checked his watch. It said 0405. In fifty-five minutes the submarines were due to sail.

In fifty-five minutes, they could still be arguing with this clerk. The only thing stronger than the uniform was the system.

He said, ‘Corporal, I compliment you on your attachment to duty. The duty officer is on the quay. You will accompany us there, please.’

‘But –’

‘Schnell,’
Mallory’s voice was a bark that admitted no contradiction.

The clerk, he had decided, was a blessing. An officious little blessing with rimless glasses, but a blessing nonetheless.

‘Lead on, Corporal,’ said Mallory, in a harsh purr.

The clerk led on.

The mouth of the tunnel was walled off. On one side was an opening for the torpedo dolly track. On the other was a sort of wicket gate for the pedestrian walkway. By the wicket gate was a species of sentry box. In the sentry box were two figures like black paper silhouettes: SS.

From the corner of his eye, Mallory saw that Andrea’s hands had not moved from the grips of his Schmeisser. He wished he had a Schmeisser of his own. But he had a Luger, and the insignia of his uniform. That should be enough –

Except that the face above the uniform was not the right face.

He tugged down the peak of his cap.

The heels rang on. The SS sentries in the box had blank faces the colour of dirty suet. Their uniforms were rusty, their belts grainy, the folds of their jackboots cracking with salt. Their eyes were cold, and vicious, and restless. When they settled on Mallory’s uniform, something happened to them, something that was not the other ranks’ usual reaction to an officer’s uniform. It was a look compounded of furtiveness and pride. Esprit de corps, thought Mallory. Oh, dear.

There were fifty SS men on the Cabo de la Calavera: the élite, keeping an eye on things for Himmler. They would know each other, all right.

But the only way onto the quay was through that night-black wicket by the sentry box.

Mallory shouted, ‘Attention!’

The SS faces became blank and automatic. The General’s uniform was doing its job. The boot heels ground concrete as Mallory, Miller, Andrea, and the magazine clerk marched on. The magazine clerk looked pleased with himself, proud to be part of something important and official. Mallory was profoundly grateful to him. The magazine clerk was credibility. The SS knew the magazine clerk.

They were close now: ten feet away. Mallory walked with his supposedly artificial hand in his breast, head bowed, as if in deep thought. Through the wicket came the smells of the sea, stirring the chill, leaden air of the magazine. The smell of the endgame.

The eyes were on them now, peripherally at least. In the corner of his vision Mallory could see the white, large-pored skin, the brown eyes seamed below with the marks of arrogance and cruelty. He could smell the uniforms, the sour smell of rain-wet black serge badly dried, leather on which polish was fighting a losing battle with mildew. He could smell the oil on the Schmeissers, the tobacco smoke, and garlic on their breath.

Then they were past, and Mallory was sweating –

‘Herr General?’ said a voice, a hard voice, cold, a little tentative: the voice of one of the black-clad sentries.

Mallory took another step.

‘The Herr General will please stop,’ said the voice.

‘Quiet,’ murmured Mallory, in English. Then he said, in his approximation of the General’s bust-larynx rasp, ‘What do you want?’

‘If the Herr General would show us his pass?’

Mallory made a small, exasperated noise. ‘Clerk,’ he said. ‘Show them your pass.’

The clerk’s face was pink and shiny behind the rimless spectacles. He fumbled in his pocket.

‘Quickly,’ grated Mallory. ‘Time is wasting.’

The SS man’s eyes flicked at the clerk’s pass. He handed it back.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘the Herr General’s pass.’

Something seemed to have removed the bottom of Mallory’s stomach. There was a sort of icy purr in the voice, the sound of a cat about to stab a claw into a rat.

Miller put down the boxes of grenades. His hands were wet on the grips of his Schmeisser. He moved it casually, negligently, until it was covering the guard who was not doing the talking. The guard who was doing the talking had an odd expression on his face. Miller understood it.

It was the expression of a man who knew the General well, but who had been conditioned to respond to uniforms, not faces.

Miller knew that something bad was going to happen.

The SS man wet his lips with a grey tongue. He said to Mallory, ‘Herr General, what is the Herr General’s name?’ His right hand was under the level of the desk. There would be an alarm button down there.

Miller thumbed the selector on the Schmeisser to single shot, and took up the first pressure on the trigger. Andrea, he noticed, had his hands off his gun. Andrea said, with a wide, despairing gesture of both spread palms, ‘For God’s sake, who do you think you are talking to?’

The SS sentry opened his mouth to reply. But he never got the words out, because Andrea’s gesture had become something else, and his huge right had gone into the sentry’s face, the heel up and under the nose, driving the bone into the brain, while the other hand, the left, had sprouted a knife that went in and out of the other sentry’s chest, and in and out again. The two helmets clanged on the concrete.

There was a long, dreadful silence that lasted perhaps a second. Then something small scuttled past Miller. The clerk.

He stuck out a foot. The little man went flat on his face. His spectacles skittered away on the concrete. The face he turned to Miller was the face of a blind mole. He said, ‘Please.’

Miller looked at him. This was not an SS man. This man had all the malice of a ticket office clerk in Grand Central Station.

But this man could stop the operation dead.

Miller looked away.

There was a sound like a well-hit baseball. When Miller looked back, the magazine clerk was silent, face down, but breathing.

Andrea sighted along the barrel of his Schmeisser. ‘Thought I’d bent it,’ he said.

They dragged the clerk and the SS men out of sight behind the desk of the sentry box. The clerk was still breathing.

Then they walked onto the quay.

They were standing on the inshore end of the map the late Guy Jamalartégui had drawn beside the chart on his kitchen table with a matchstick and a puddle of wine.

The Basque-American who had donated the port to his sardine-fishing compatriots had not stinted. The quay was built of cut granite, on a scale that would have excited the respectful envy of a Pharaoh. The magazine entrance was set in the low cliff halfway down the long side of the innermost quay. Three more quays ran parallel to the first. There were rails set into the paving of the quays, designed presumably to carry waggonloads of sardines, first to the long sheds at the base of the quays for canning, and then to the sardines-on-toast enthusiasts of Europe.

Now, the black lanes of water between the granite fingers of the quay held no fishing boats; probably they never had. Instead, the long, sleek hulls and oddly streamlined conning towers of three great U-boats lay under the cranes.

Three men walked past, smoking, splashing in the puddles left by the night’s rain. They were wearing baggy blue overalls, and had the hell-with-you air of dockyard mateys the world over. They paid no attention to Mallory and his two guards. Their task was finished. On the nearest submarine – presumably the one that had been reported rammed – a small gang of men was packing up what looked like oxy-acetylene welding gear. For the rest, what was going up and down on the cranes was definitely stores.

Mallory watched a tray of green vegetables and milk cans. Last-minute stores, at that.

More men in blue overalls drifted up the quay. There was a building up there, a green clapboard facade on a tunnel in the cliff. From it there drifted a smell of frying onions. The canteen, thought Mallory. The men going towards the canteen carried tool boxes. The men coming back had bags and bundles as well as the tool boxes. They had gone for a final meal up there, and picked up their possessions. At the far side of the harbour, launch engines puttered in the dawn; the engines of the launches ferrying the dockyard mateys out to the merchant ships waiting in the harbour, Uruguayan flags fluttering on their ensign staffs.

Mallory waited for another pair of workmen to walk past. They studiously avoided his eye, the way a skilled civilian technician of any nationality would avoid the eye of a murderer and torturer. The next pair came. One of them was a huge man, as big as Andrea.

That was what Mallory had been waiting for.

He said, ‘You and you.’

The two men gave him the looks of schoolboys with permanently guilty consciences. One of them dropped his cigarette and stamped on it. The big man’s cigarette dangled, unlit.

‘Don’t worry,’ croaked Mallory. ‘You have committed no crime.’

Their faces remained wooden.

‘Smoke if you wish,’ said Mallory. Another man was walking towards them, by himself. Mallory pulled out the General’s lighter and lit the big man’s cigarette with his left hand. ‘There is one little job,’ he said. ‘Hey! You!’

The solitary man halted. Mallory pointed back at the magazine tunnel.
‘Komm!’

He marched into the tunnel. The lights were very bright after the grey predawn outside. The dockyard men were yawning and sullen. It had been a long night shift, and they wanted to get some food and climb aboard a merchant ship and go to sleep. They did not want to do any more jobs, particularly jobs for this whispering child murderer and his nasty-looking bodyguards. The big one said, ‘What is it then?’

‘Further,’ said the SS General.

They were in the magazine tunnel. There were steel doors let into the wall, and a smell of new blood. The General pointed at one of the doors. ‘In there,’ he said.

The big man turned round. ‘Why?’ he said.

It was then he saw the bodyguards’ guns, foreshortened, looking between his own eyes with their own deadly little black eyes.

‘Take off your overalls,’ said Mallory.

The big man was a bully. He was tired, and hung over, and hungry. Being told to undress had the effect on his temper of a well-flung brick on a wasps’ nest. Nobody talked to him like that, SS General or no SS General. And word was that this SS General was a poof. ‘Take ’em off yourself,’ said the big man, and took a swing at the General’s jaw.

He never saw what hit him. He merely had the dim impression that someone had loaded his head into a cannon, fired it at a sheet of armour plate, and dropped the resulting mess into a black velvet bag.

His two companions watched with their mouths open as Andrea dusted his hands, stripped the overalls off the big man’s prone body, and loaded the tools back into their box.

‘Strip,’ said Mallory.

They stripped at a speed that would have won them first prize in an undressing contest.