The Complete Navarone (84 page)

‘The door,’ said Mallory.

Miller went to the steel door. It closed from the outside, with a latch. Inside was a locker with tins of paint, ten feet on a side.

‘In,’ said Mallory.

One of the men said, ‘How will we ever get out?’ He looked frightened; he was a civilian, caught up in something not his quarrel.

Mallory did not believe that a grown man could stand back from a war. As far as Mallory was concerned, you were on his side, or you were the enemy. He said, ‘How do you get on those U-boats?’

‘With a pass.’

‘What pass?’

The man produced a much-folded card, seamed with oil.

‘Anything else?’

‘No. Who are you?’

Mallory went and stood so that his face was two inches from the German’s. ‘That is for me to know and you to wonder,’ he said. ‘I am going out there. I wish to move freely. If I am captured, I will not say a word about you, and that door is soundproof. So you have a choice.’ He could feel the sweat running down inside his uniform, see the impassive faces of Miller and Andrea. Not much more than half an hour now. ‘If you are telling me the truth, you have nothing to fear. If not, this locker will be your tomb.’

The man’s throat moved violently as he swallowed. He said, ‘There is … in fact … something else. A word.’

‘Ah,’ said Mallory.

‘Ritter,’
said the man. ‘You must say
Ritter
to the gangway sentry.’

Mallory said, ‘If you are not telling the truth, you will die in your underpants.’

‘It is the truth.’

‘Your overalls,’ said Mallory, ‘and what size are your boots?’

‘Forty-two.’

Thank God, thought Mallory. ‘Also your boots,’ he said.

Five minutes later, three dockyard mateys were wandering down the quay towards the ferry. They were carrying much-chipped blue enamel toolboxes and smoking cigarettes. Their faces were surprisingly grim for men bound for Lisbon, home and beauty. But perhaps that would be because of the danger of submarines.

Outside the sheds at the root of the quay, the three men stopped.

Andrea looked up. The clouds had rolled away. The sky was duck-egg blue. Dawn was coming up, a beautiful dawn, above this press of people and their deadly machines.

Mallory said to Andrea in a quiet, level voice, ‘We’ll want the
Stella Maris
standing by.’

‘I’ll arrange that,’ said Andrea.

Mallory looked down the first finger of granite. On either side were foreshortened alleys of water, with the bulbous grey pressure hulls and narrow steel decks of the submarines. There were two gangplanks down there, one leading left, the other right, a crossroads of quay and gangplanks. This was the access to two submarines. If you could get past the sailor at the base of each gangplank, rifle on his shoulder, cap ribbons fluttering at his nape in the small dawn breeze.

Mallory took a deep breath of the morning air, and tried not to think about the little steel rooms inside those pressure hulls, into which he must go with his grenades.

‘Peroxide,’ said Miller, sniffing.

‘Sorry?’

‘Hydrogen peroxide. Smells like a hairdressing parlour. Hunnert per cent, by the smell of it. Don’t get it on you. Corrosive.’

Mallory said, ‘What do you recommend?’

Miller told him.

‘Fascinating,’ said Mallory, taking a deep breath. ‘I’ll do the right-hand one. You do the left.’

Andrea said, ‘Good luck.’

Mallory nodded. There was such a thing as luck, but to acknowledge its existence was to hold two fingers up to fate. What Andrea had to do was potentially even more dangerous than climbing around U-boats with a toolbox full of hand grenades.

Not that there was much to choose between the jobs. Dead was dead, never mind how you got there.

Mallory was not wasting time thinking about death. He was planning the next phase.

Andrea slipped away into the crowds heading for the ferries. Mallory and Miller started to walk down the quay towards the sentries. Miller had his hands in his pockets, and he was whistling.

Good lad, thought Mallory. What would it take to get you really worried?

Miller’s thoughts were less elevated. The smell of peroxide had taken him back to Mme Renard’s house in Montreal, to Minette, a French-Canadian girl with an educated tongue and bright yellow curls. There had been something about Minette, something she had shown him with two goldfish and a bag of cement –

Concentrate.

Down in his saboteur’s treasure-house of a memory, he knew that the catalyst for hydrogen peroxide was manganese dioxide. Manganese dioxide would separate the hydrogen from the oxygen, and make a bang next to which a hand grenade would look stupid.

Manganese dioxide was the obvious stuff.

Unfortunately, it was not the kind of stuff people left lying around.

He was at the bottom of the gangway. He grinned at the sentry and showed him his pass.
‘Ritter,’
he said, rattling his toolbox. ‘Problem with lavatory. Two minutes only.’

The sentry said, ‘Thank God you’ve arrived, then.’

Miller walked up the gangplank.

Andrea shouldered his way through the thickening crowd on the quay. There was a sense of urgency, now, and very little Teutonic efficiency about the milling scrum of men and soldiers. He made his way to the quay’s lip.

And stopped.

The queue might be inefficient, but the embarkation procedures were well up to standard. There were four iron ladders down the quay. At the bottom of each ladder was a launch. At the top of each ladder was an SS officer with a clipboard. As each man arrived at the front of the queue, the SS man scrutinised his identity card, compared the photograph minutely with his face, and checked his name off the list. Only then was he allowed down the ladder.

Once the launches themselves had left the quays they did not hang about. They went straight alongside the two merchant ships anchored in the harbour; merchant ships on whose decks were un-naval but nonetheless efficient sandbag emplacements from which peered the snouts of machine guns.

Even in the evacuation, the Werwolf facility was leaving nothing to chance.

Andrea’s overalls and identity card had belonged to Wulf Tietmeyer. No amount of oily thumbprints could obscure the fact that Tietmeyer, though roughly Andrea’s size, had red hair and pale blue eyes. Furthermore, Andrea had no desire to end up on a Germany-bound merchant ship.

Muttering a curse for the benefit of his neighbours, he turned back into the crowd, forging his way through the press with shoulders the size and hardness of a bank safe, a dockyard matey who had left something behind and was on his way to fetch it.

As he reached the root of the quays one of the submarines emitted a black cloud of exhaust, and the morning filled with the blaring rattle of a cold diesel. Start engines meant that they would be sailing at any minute. He looked at his watch. In eighteen minutes, to be precise. And precise was what they would be.

He looked across the mouth of the harbour at the town of San Eusebio, glowing now in the pale dawn. The windows of its houses were smoke-blackened, empty as dead men’s eyes, the campaniles of its two churches jagged as smashed teeth. But alongside the quays, in front of the blind warehouses lining the harbour, the fishing fleet was anchored two deep. And among them, on the outside near the front, were the tar-black hull and ill-furled red sails of the
Stella Maris
.

Four hundred yards away. A short swim in the Mediterranean. But the four-hundred-yard neck here had a roiling turbulence, with little strips of inexplicable ripples. The tide was going out, sucking at the base of the quay. It looked to Andrea as if there was a very large amount of water trying to get out of a very small exit. Andrea guessed that this might be a long swim indeed.

But Andrea had been brought up on the shores of the Aegean. Among his recent ancestors he numbered divers for sponges, and he himself had spent his childhood as much in as out of the water. Andrea swam like a fish –

A Mediterranean fish.

Slowly and deliberately, Andrea pulled a pencil and notebook from his overall pocket and walked to the seaward end of the outermost quay. Nobody paid him any attention as he passed the sentry at the foot of the gangway of the outermost U-boat. Why should they? He was a large inspector in blue overalls, frowning with his thick black eyebrows at the state of the quay. The Germans were a nation of inspectors. It was natural, in this little German world on the edge of Spain, that even in the final stages of an evacuation someone should be making notes on the condition of the quay.

At the end of the quay, iron rungs led down the granite. For the benefit of anyone watching, Andrea stuck his pencil behind his ear, pursed his lips and shook his head. Then he began to climb down the iron rungs.

As he sank below the level of the quay, he was out of sight of anyone except the sentries in the
fortaleza
, and he was hoping that with sixteen minutes to sailing, the sentries would have been withdrawn. From the bottom rung he let notebook and pencil whisk away on the current. He struggled out of his overalls, kicked off his boots, and removed the rest of his clothes. They hovered a moment in the eddy at the foot of the wall, then sailed off down the tide.

Naked, Andrea was brown and hairy as a bear. He touched the gold crucifix round his neck, and lowered himself into the green swirl at the foot of the rungs. He thought, it is freezing, this Atlantic.

Then he launched himself into the tide.

‘Ritter,’
said Mallory to the sentry at the foot of the gangway opposite the one up which Miller had disappeared.

The sentry was wearing leather trousers and a jersey coming unravelled at the hem. His face as he glanced at Mallory’s identity card and handed it back was pale, with a greasy film of sweat. Scared, thought Mallory, as he walked up the gangplank. These may be secret weapons, but they are still U-boats, and U-boat crews do not live long. To drown in a steel box, inch by inch …

Mallory had tried that once. It was not something he ever wanted to try again.

But he was standing on the U-boat’s grey steel deck, the worn enamel handles of the toolbox slippery in his hand, and there was a hatch forward, standing open. The torpedo room was forward. On a submarine this size, a grenade would do little damage. Unless, Miller had said, you used it as a fuse, a primer, stuck to the tons of Amatol or Torpex or whatever they used. Then you would get a result –

Mallory made himself walk towards the hatch. It would be easier to stay on deck, not go below, into that little steel space that might at any moment go under the water –

Easy or not, it had to be done.

The hatch was a double steel door in the deck. A steel ladder plunged into a yellow-lit gloom. At the bottom of the ladder a face looked up, sallow and bearded, blue bags under the eyes. A Petty Officer.

‘What the hell do you want?’ said the Petty Officer.

‘Check toilets,’ said Mallory, dumb as an ox.

‘I don’t know anything about any toilets,’ said the Petty Officer. ‘Go and see the Kapitän.’

‘Where’s the Kapitän?’ Mallory could feel the minutes ticking.

‘Conning tower. You’d better be quick.’

Mallory went back down the deck, and up the metal rungs on the side of the conning tower. He took a deep breath and let himself down into the tower itself.

The smell was oil and sweat, and something else. Peroxide. A man in a grubby white polo-neck jersey with an Iron Cross was arguing with another man. Both had pale faces and beards.

Mallory cleared his throat. ‘Come to fix the toilet,’ he said.

The man with the Iron Cross was wearing a Kapitän’s cap. ‘Now?’ he said. ‘I didn’t know it was broken. Get off my boat.’

‘Orders,’ said Mallory. The morning was a disc of daylight seen through the hatchway.

‘I’m Kapitän –’

‘The Herr General was most insistent.’

‘I shit on the Herr General,’ said the Kapitän. ‘Hell. Go and look at the toilet, then. But I warn you, we are sailing in ten minutes, and if you’re still on board I’ll put you out through a torpedo tube.’

Mallory said, stolidly, ‘That will not be necessary.’ But the Kapitän was back at his argument, with no time for dockyard mateys.

Engine at the back. Torpedoes at the front. Front it is.

Mallory hefted his toolbox, shinned down the ladder under the periscope and started along the corridor leading forward.

There was a crew messroom, racked torpedoes, bunks everywhere. The lights were yellow. There seemed to be scores of men, packed dense as sardines in a tin; but this was worse, because it was a tin in which the sardines had somehow suddenly come alive. Mallory shoved his way through. There are no windows, said the voice in his mind. You are below the level of the water –

Shut up, he told himself. You are still alongside.

He walked under the open hatch. The Petty Officer glanced at him and glanced away. Ahead, the passage ran through an oval doorway and ended. On the other side of the bulkhead he saw a long chamber lined left and right with fat tubes. The torpedo room.