The Complete Navarone (88 page)
Read The Complete Navarone Online
Authors: Alistair MacLean
As they watched, the tide caught the ship’s stern, slewing it until the freighter was a great steel wall blocking the channel: the only channel out of the harbour.
For a moment, the gunfire stilled, and a huge sound rolled over that windless frying pan of water.
The sound of Andrea, laughing.
Then the machine guns opened up again.
This time they opened up with a new venom, bred of fury and impotence. The bullets lashed the sea to a white froth, and the fishing boat’s hull shuddered under their impact. Mallory crouched inside the wheelhouse. Another five minutes, he thought. Then we are out of range. The noise was deafening. The air howled with flying metal. And mixed with it, another sound.
Hugues. Hugues, shouting. Hugues was standing on the deck, yelling, pointing at something in the water. Something orange. Something that moved, raised an arm and waved, a feeble wave, but a wave nonetheless. Something that was a hand, holding a fuming orange smoke flare.
And when the orange smoke rolled clear of the face, the face, though coughing and distorted, was unmistakably the face of Dusty Miller.
Mallory spun the wheel. The
Stella
turned broadside onto the merchant ships’ torrent of bullets. Hugues stood upright, insanely conspicuous, out of cover. Miller came floating down the side. ‘Grab him!’ yelled Mallory.
Hugues leaned over the side. As they passed Miller, he stuck his hand down, and Miller put his up, and the hands met and gripped. Now the
Stella
was towing Miller along, and Hugues’ arm was the tow line. Hugues suddenly shuddered, and four dark blotches appeared on his vest. But by then Andrea was there, grasping Miller with his great hand. He gave one heave. And then they were all lying on the deck: Andrea, Hugues and Miller, Miller gasping like a gaffed salmon, leaking water.
Mallory turned the wheel away from the harbour entrance. The orange smoke faded astern. Soon they were out of range, and there were no more bullets.
Miller lit a cigarette. His face was grey and white, the bags under his eyes big enough to hold the equipment of a fair-sized expeditionary force. He said, ‘Good morning. Do we have a drink?’
Mallory handed him the miraculously undamaged bottle of brandy from the riddled locker in the wheelhouse. ‘How did you get out?’ he said.
Miller raised the bottle. ‘I would like to drink to the health of two Krauts,’ he said. ‘Mr Siebe and Mr Gorman. And the cutest little submarine escape apparatus known to science.’ He drank deeply.
Andrea came aft. He said, ‘Hugues needs to talk.’
Hugues was lying on the deck in a red pond. Mallory could hear his chest bubble as he breathed. Hugues said, ‘I am sorry.’ He could speak no more.
Andrea said, ‘This man is a traitor.’
Mallory looked at the blue-white face, the suffocated eyes. He said, ‘Why?’
Hugues’ eyes swivelled from Andrea to Mallory. Andrea said, ‘To save Lisette, and his child. The Gestapo followed her to St-Jean. When they tried to pick her up with Hugues, he made a deal. They did not arrest us there, because it would have been more interesting for them to catch us in the act of sabotage. So when Hugues knew we were on the Cabo, he fed them information.’
Hugues shrugged. ‘I did it for my child,’ he said. Then blood came from his mouth, and he died.
Lisette was standing half-out of the hatch. She looked pale and tired, the shadows under her eyes dark and enormous. The eyes themselves had the thick lustre of tears.
‘He was a man who had lost everything he loved,’ she said. ‘When he was in the Pyrenees the first time, he told me what had happened to his wife, his children. He was a lonely man. I can’t describe to you how lonely. He was a good man.’ The tears were running now. ‘A man of passion. For his country. For me. In war, these things can happen, and they are not so strange.’
‘
Enfin
, he was a traitor,’ said Jaime. Mallory looked at the dark, starved face, the heavy black moustache, the impenetrable eyes. Jaime shrugged, the shrug of a smuggler, of a man who would walk through mountains if he could not walk over them, of a man whose hand was against all other men. Nobody would ever know whether Jaime was fighting because of what he believed in, or because he wanted to survive. Probably, Jaime did not know himself.
Mallory looked at Andrea’s face, dark and closed, and at Miller’s haggard countenance, the oil and salt drying in his crewcut. Perhaps none of them knew why they did these things.
Perhaps, in the end, it was not important, as long as it was necessary to do these things, and these things got done. He clambered to his feet and put his arm around Lisette’s shoulders.
She said, ‘I did not love him. But he is the father of my child. And that is worth something,
hein?
’
It was not the sort of question Mallory knew how to answer.
Wednesday
1400
The
Stella Maris
was heading north on a broad navy-blue sea. Cabo de la Calavera had dropped below the southern horizon an hour ago. A radio message had been sent. Now there was nothing but the blue and cloudless dome of the sky, and dead ahead of the
Stella
, a tenuous black wisp no bigger than an eyelash stuck above the smooth curve of the world.
The eyelash became an eyebrow, then a heavy black plume. The base of the plume resolved itself into the Tribal class destroyer
Masai
, thundering over the low Atlantic swell at thirty-five knots, trailing an oily cloud of black smoke, her boiler pressures trembling on the edge of the red.
The Lieutenant-Commander who was her captain looked down at the filthy black fishing boat, stroked his beard, and hoped he was not going to get any of that rubbish on his nice paint. He walked down to the rail and said, ‘Captain Mallory?’
The villain at the fishing boat’s wheel said, ‘That’s right.’
There were two other villains on deck: red-eyed, sun-scorched, bleeding, unshaven. But the Lieutenant-Commander’s eye had moved over the bullet-scarred decks and gunwales, and caught the glint of a lot of water through the open hatch of what was presumably the fish-hold. The Lieutenant-Commander said, ‘I wonder if you would care for a spot of lunch?’
Mallory looked as if lunch was not a word he understood. He said, ‘Could we have a stretcher party?’
‘You’ve got wounded?’
‘Not exactly wounded,’ said Mallory.
The stretcher party trotted onto the
Stella
’s splintered decks. Mallory pointed them towards the bunkroom. A curious noise came into being, a high, keening wail. The Petty Officer in charge of the stretcher party looked nervously over his shoulder. He had been on the Malta convoys, and he knew about Stukas.
Mallory shook his head.
‘Five for lunch?’ said the Lieutenant-Commander.
‘Six,’ said Mallory.
The Lieutenant-Commander frowned. ‘I thought you lost someone.’
‘You lose some,’ said Miller. ‘You win some.’
The stretcher came up on deck. Behind it was Jaime. Strapped to it was Lisette. And in her arms, wrapped in a red sickbay blanket, was a small bundle that wailed.
The Lieutenant-Commander gripped the rail. ‘See what you mean,’ he said.
‘I was a little more pregnant than the Captain thought,’ said Lisette. ‘I hope I cause no trouble.’
‘Quite the reverse,’ said the Lieutenant-Commander.
They walked onto the destroyer’s beautifully painted deck. A Lieutenant took them to the tiny but spotless wardroom, and poured them gigantic pink gins. ‘I expect you chaps have had quite a party,’ he said.
They stared at him, bleary-eyed, until he went as pink as his gin. A signalman trotted in, flimsy in hand. The Lieutenant read it. ‘Captain Mallory,’ he said. ‘For you.’
Mallory’s eyes were closed. ‘Read it,’ he said.
This was a horrid breach of etiquette. The Lieutenant said, ‘But –’
‘Read it.’
The Lieutenant squared his shoulders. ‘Reads as follows,
CONGRATULATIONS SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF STORM FORCE. TIMING PROVIDENTIAL. HAVE ANOTHER LITTLE JOB FOR YOU. REPORT SOONEST. JENSEN.
Mallory looked at Andrea and Miller. Their eyes were bloodshot and horrified. So, presumably, were his.
He said: ‘
SIGNAL TO CAPTAIN JENSEN. MESSAGE NOT UNDERSTOOD, BAFFLED, STORM FORCE.
’ He held out his glass. ‘Now before we all die of thirst, could we have a spot more gin?’
Thunderbolt from Navarone
DEDICATION
To Hex, Bert and Garlinda
Kapitän
Helmholz looked at his watch. It was ten fifty-four and thirty-three seconds. Twenty-seven seconds until coffee time on the bridge of the armed merchantman
Kormoran
. At
Kapitän
Helmholz’s insistence, coffee time was ten fifty-five precisely. A precise man, Helmholz, which was perhaps why he had been appointed to the command that had put him here in this steel room with big windows, below the red and black
Kriegsmarine
ensign with its iron cross and swastika board-stiff in the meltemi, the afternoon wind of the Aegean. Outside the windows were numbers one and two hatches, and under the hatches the cargo, and forward of the hatches the bow gun on the fo’c’sle and the bow itself, kicking through the short, steep chop. Beyond the rusty iron bow the sea sparkled, a dazzling sheet of sapphire all the way to the horizon. Beyond the horizon lay his destination, hanging like a cloud: a solid cloud – the mountains of Kynthos, blue with distance. It was all going well; neat, tidy, perfectly on schedule. Helmholz looked at his watch again.
With fifteen seconds to go until the time appointed, there it was: the faint jingle of the coffee tray. It always jingled when Spiro carried it. Spiro was Greek and suffered from bad nerves.
Kapitän
Helmholz raised his clean-cut jaw, directed his ice-blue eyes down his long straight nose, and watched the fat little Greek pour the coffee into the cups and hand them round. The man’s body odour was pungent, his apron less than scrupulously clean. His face was filmed with sweat, or possibly grease. Still, thought Helmholz with unusual tolerance, degenerate Southerner he might be, but his coffee was good, and punctual. He picked up the cup, enjoying the smell of the coffee and the tension on the bridge as his junior officers waited for the
Herr Kapitän
to drink so they could drink too. Helmholz pretended interest in the blue smudge of Kynthos, feeling the tension rise, enjoying the sensation that in small ways as well as in large, he was the man in control.
A mile away, in an iron tube jammed with men and machinery, a bearded man called Smith, with even worse body odour than Spiro, crammed his eyes against the rubber eyepieces of his attack periscope and said, ‘Usual shambles up forward, Derek?’
‘Probably,’ said Derek, who was similarly bearded and smelt worse. ‘Blue touchpaper lit and burning.’
‘Jolly good. Fire one, then.’
From the spider’s eyes of the torpedo tubes at the bow of His Majesty’s submarine
Sea Leopard
, a drift of bubbles emerged, followed by the lean and purposeful Mark 8 torpedo. Tracking the deflection scale across the merchantman’s rust-brown hull, Smith stifled a nervous yawn, and wished he could smoke. Three-island ship. Next fish under the bridge. That would do it. ‘Fire two,’ he said. It was not every day you bumped into a German armed merchantman swanning around on her own in the middle of nowhere. Sitting duck, really. ‘We’ll hang around a bit,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’ll have some Schnapps.’
‘Can but hope,’ said the Number Two.
Helmholz’s feeling of control did not survive even as long as it took to put his cup to his lips. It was one of the great ironies of his life that while at sea he was an automaton, as soon as he came in sight of land he was racked with an intellectually unjustifiable impatience. Suddenly his mind flooded with pictures of the
Kormoran
alongside the Kynthos jetty, unloading. The sweat of impatience slimed his palms. It was crazy to be out here with no escort; against reason. But there was such a shortage of aircraft for the direct defence of the Reich that the maintenance fitters had mostly been called back to Germany. So most of the air escort was out of action. The E-boats were not much better. Which left the
Kormoran
alone on the windy blue Aegean, with an important cargo and a pick-up crew …
He put his coffee cup to his lips.
Over the white china rim, he saw something terrible.
He saw a gout of orange flame leap up on the starboard side, level with number one hatch. He saw number one hatch itself bulge upward and burst in a huge bubble of fire that came roaring back at him and caved in the bridge windows. That was the last thing he saw, because that same blast drove the coffee cup right through his face and out of the back of his head. His junior officers suffered similar lethal trauma, but their good manners ensured that this was to the ribcage, not the skull. Perhaps Helmholz would have been consoled that things had been in order right until the moment of oblivion.
‘Bullseye,’ said Lieutenant Smith. ‘Oh, bloody hell, she’s burning.’
Burning was not good. Even if there was no escort waiting in the sun, the plume of black smoke crawling into the sky was as good as a distress flare. His thoughts locked into familiar patterns. The
Sea Leopard
had been submerged a long time. If there was to be a pursuit, now was the moment to prepare for it.