The Complete Navarone (85 page)

And on his right, a tiny compartment: a lavatory. Head.

He looked round. The Petty Officer was watching him. Mallory winked, went into the lavatory and closed the door. His hand was sweating on the handles of his toolbox. Count to five, he thought.

There was a new sound, a vibration. The engines had started. Somewhere, a klaxon began to moan. Now or never, thought Mallory.

He walked quickly into the corridor, scratching his head, and turned right into the torpedo room.

There were two men in there, securing torpedoes to the racks. They were like horizontal organ pipes, those torpedoes. Both the men were ratings.

‘Shit,’ said one of them. ‘You’d better hurry.’

‘Checking seals,’ said Mallory. ‘Couple of minutes. Which one of these things do you fire first?’

‘Those,’ said the rating, pointing. ‘Now if you would be so good, go away and shut up and let us get on with getting ready to load those damn fish into those damn tubes.’

The torpedoes the rating had pointed at were the first rack, up by one of the ranks of oval doors that must lead into the tubes. Mallory wedged himself in behind the torpedoes, out of sight of the men. He found a stanchion on the steel wall of the submarine and looped the string lanyard on the grenade’s handle over it. Then he unscrewed the grenade’s cap, gently pulled out the porcelain button on the end of the string fuse, and tied it to the shaft of the torpedo’s propeller.

First one.

He took out a spanner and crossed the compartment. The rating did not look up. He attached a second grenade to the port side lower torpedo, where the shadows were thickest. The third and fourth he attached to the next row up.

There were feet moving on steel somewhere above his head. The vibrations of the engine were louder now.

‘That’s okay,’ said Mallory. ‘Don’t want sewage everywhere, do we?’

The ratings ignored him. He walked out of the torpedo compartment, down the corridor. The hatch was still open. He could smell the blessed air. He pushed past a couple of men, put his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.

A hard hand took his arm above the elbow. A quiet voice said, ‘If you’re here to mend the toilets, what were you doing in the torpedo room?’

Mallory looked round.

The voice belonged to the bearded petty officer.

‘Cast off!’ roared a voice on deck.

Above his head, the hatch slammed shut.

Twenty yards away, Dusty Miller was in a different world. Miller was a trained demolitions man. He reckoned he had seven minutes. He had gone straight for the conning tower, checked out the Kapitän and the navigating officer bent over the charts. ‘Come to look at the lavs,’ he said.

The navigating officer gave him the not-interested look of a man ten minutes away from an important feat of underwater navigation. ‘What lavs?’

‘They just said the lavs.’

‘You know where they are.’

Miller shrugged, feeling the weight of his toolbox, the hammer, the spanners, the four stick grenades in the bottom compartment. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

Mallory had gone forward, looking for the torpedoes. Miller went aft.

On most U-boats, the engine room consisted of a big diesel for surface running and to charge huge banks of lead-acid batteries, and an electric motor for underwater running. The Walter process was different. The diesel did all the work. When the U-boat was under water, the engine drew the oxygen for its combustion from disintegrated hydrogen peroxide, and vented the carbon dioxide it produced as a waste gas directly into the water, where it dissolved.

Miller went down the hatch in the control-room deck and crept along the low steel corridor. Men shoved past him. He took no notice. He wandered along, apparently tracing one of the parallel ranks of grey-painted pipes leading aft along the bulkhead.

And after not many steps, he was in the engine room.

It was as it should have been: the thick tubes coming from the fuel tanks, each with its stopcock: oils, water, hydrogen peroxide. There were men working in there, working hard, oiling, establishing settings on the banks of valve wheels. The big diesel was running with a clattering roar too loud to hear. Miller caught an oiler’s eye, winked, nodded. The oiler nodded back. Nobody would be in a submarine’s engine room at a time like this unless he had business there. And at a time like this, the business would certainly be legitimate.

So Miller stooped, apparently examining the pipes, and ran his professional eye over the maze of tubes and chambers.

And made his decision; or rather, confirmed the decision he had made already.

On the surface, the Walter engine was a naturally aspirated diesel. The changeover from air to peroxide was activated by a float switch on the conning tower. It was a simple device; when the water reached a certain level, the switch closed, opening the valve from the peroxide tank to the disintegrator. In Miller’s view, the destruction of the valve would release a lot of inflammable stuff into a space full of nasty sparks.

There was a very real danger of explosions, thought Miller happily, opening his toolbox.

His fingers worked quickly. The float switch controlled a simple gate valve. Tape the grenade to the pipe. Tie the string fuse to one of the struts of the gate valve wheel. When the wheel turned, the string would pull out of the grenade. Five seconds later … well, thought Miller; ladies and gentlemen are requested to extinguish all smoking materials.

He arranged two more grenades, using the length of the string fuses to make for slightly greater delays, one on the water intake and one on the throttle linkage where it passed a dark corner.

Then he walked back, climbed into the conning tower, and said, ‘All done.’

The navigating officer did not look up. Piss off,’ he said.

‘Oh, all right,’ said Miller. He went up the ladder and into the chill, diesel-smelling dawn, and trotted down the gangplank and onto the quay.

He knew something was wrong as soon as his boots hit the stone. Two men were hauling the gangway of the boat opposite back onto the quay. Men were moving on the foredeck, waiting to haul in the lines when the stevedores let them go. Miller saw one of them bend and slam shut an open hatch. To left and right the quay was a desert of granite paving, dotted with a few figures in uniform, a few in overalls. Miller had worked with Mallory for long enough to recognise him, never mind what he was wearing.

None of the figures was Mallory.

So Mallory was still on the boat, and the boat was sailing.

On the boat opposite, a couple of heads showed on the conning tower. One of them wore the cap of a Kapitän.

‘Oi!’ yelled Miller, above the pop and rattle of the diesels. ‘You’ve got my mate on board.’

The Kapitän looked round, frowning. The springs were off. They were down to one-and-one, a bow line and a stern line. They were sailing in two minutes. The Kapitän looked at the scarecrow figure on the dock, the chipped blue toolbox, the lanky arms and legs protruding from the too-short overalls. He shouted to one of the hands on the narrow deck.

The hand shrugged, scratching his head under his grey watch cap. He bent. He caught hold of the handles of the hatch, and pulled.

Mallory’s whole body was covered in sweat. His mind did not seem to be working. Drowned in a steel room, he was thinking. No. Not that –

‘What were you doing in the torpedo room?’ said the Petty Officer.

‘Pipes,’ said Mallory. ‘Checking pipes.’

‘Like hell,’ said the Petty Officer.

And at that moment, there fell from heaven a beam of pure grey light that pierced the reeking yellow gloom of the submarine like the arrow of God.

The hatch was open.

Mallory knew that a miracle had happened. It was a miracle that would take away the death by drowning in a metal room, and let him die under the sky, where he did not mind dying in a just cause.

He also knew that the Petty Officer could not live.

Mallory looked up the hatch. There was a head up there. ‘Now coming,’ he shouted. The head vanished. His hand was in the small of his back, closing round the handle of his dagger in the sheath there. It came round his body low and hard, and thumped into the Petty Officer’s chest, up and under the ribs. He kept the momentum going, shoved the man back onto a bunk, and pulled a blanket over him. Then he went back up the ladder.

The man on deck kicked the hatch shut. A stevedore had cast off the lines. Green water widened between the submarine and the quay. From the conning tower, a voice roared, ‘Jump!’

Mallory looked round. He saw the Kapitän, a cold, vindictive face above the grey armour plate.

‘Doesn’t like dockyard people,’ said the man on the bow line. ‘Nor do I.’ And he put up a seaboot, and shoved.

Mallory could have dodged, broken the man’s leg, saved his dignity. But what he wanted now had nothing to do with dignity. It was to get off this submarine, quick.

He jumped.

He heard the toolbox clatter on the submarine’s pressure hull. He saw the blue wink of it disappear into deep water.

It, and its three grenades.

Then the water was in his mouth and eyes, and he was swimming for the quay. He could hear the Kapitän laughing. He paid no attention.

He was thinking, five minutes to destroy the third U-boat.

How?

Andrea was swimming too. In fact, he was swimming for his life.

The waters of Greece were warm sapphires, blown by the meltemi certainly, but tideless, unmoving.

The waters of Vizcaya were different. The waters of Vizcaya were dark emeralds, cold as a cat’s eye.

And they moved.

When Andrea had lowered his shrinking body into the water and let go of the iron rung, the eddy had taken him and spun him, so that the quays and the harbour whirled around his head. The cold had stolen his breath at first, so he trod water, and watched the harbour wheel a second time. Then he had fixed his eyes on the distant, ill-kempt masts of the
Stella Maris
, and started to swim.

On the face of it, things were fine. But he knew as soon as he entered the channel that this was all wrong.

He could breathe now. He was swimming, the great muscles of his shoulders knotting and bunching, driving his body through the cold salt water. He was swimming breaststroke. If they saw him, they would see only a head, a small head, that they would think was a seal. There had been anti-submarine nets off the end of the quays. But those nets were down now, folded away in the holds of the merchant ships, because the submarines were coming out.

So it was just a four-hundred-yard swim to the
Stella Maris
. Ten minutes. Fine.

Except that it was not working out that way.

The tide was like a river, sweeping him out of the narrows and into the sea. The
Stella Maris
’ masts were sliding away upstream, fast, terrifyingly fast.

This was new. And it was unpleasant, not because it was frightening, because nothing physical, not even death – especially not death – frightened Andrea. But Andrea’s life was based on not letting people down, and allowing the things that had been planned to come to pass. He had perfect faith that Mallory and Miller would accomplish their part of the job.

He was beginning to have less faith that he could do the same.

In spite of the Benzedrine, he was growing tired. Even he, even Andrea, was growing tired. He knew his reserves of strength were finite. There was no point in trying to swim straight at his objective.

Brains, not brawn.

He turned until he was looking at the tall black bows of the merchant ships anchored in the harbour. He could hear the clank of their windlasses as they came up over their anchors, could see a couple of launches crawling across the glossy shield of the water. He began to swim, facing directly into the current and about ten degrees to the right.

For anyone else, it would have been instant exhaustion, suicide.

For Andrea, it was possible.

He swam with short, powerful strokes into the current, building a bow-wave of water on his nose. The quay where he had started had fallen away as he had been washed out to sea. But after five minutes of hard swimming, it had also fallen away to the left.

And the inner of the two merchant ships, which had been stern-on, was now showing its starboard side.

He did not let himself hope that he was making progress. He swam on doggedly, another two hundred strokes. He crossed a spine of white-tipped standing waves. A couple of waves smacked his face. He inhaled salt water, choked. He was really tired now. Now he had to look.

He looked.

The
Stella Maris
was a long way ahead, up-tide. But she was only some twenty degrees to the right.

He was getting across.

But his troubles were by no means over.

There was a bigger lift to the waves now, a regular roll. When he looked ninety degrees left and ninety degrees right, he saw not the quays of the town or the cliffs of the Cabo beneath the walls of the
fortaleza
. He saw open sea.

Andrea swam on. He was holding steady now. There was less tide out here. But he could feel in the screaming muscles of his legs and shoulders and the hammer of his heart that he was approaching the limit of his strength.