The Complete Navarone (98 page)

They were on a sort of plateau now, a high, windswept place without cover, still cold with the morning chill, but brilliantly lit by the low sun. They marched on, towing long shadows from their boot heels, squinting against the sun in their eyes. Mallory hoped nobody would put any aeroplanes up. It was a forlorn hope, he was pretty sure. German uniforms or no German uniforms, German radio procedures were cast in stone. A dud procedure meant trouble. And these were not the kind of people who closed their eyes to trouble –

Someone stumbled into Mallory’s back. He looked round in time to see Wills plough off to the right, trip over a stone and fall flat on his face.

‘Leave him,’ said Carstairs.

Mallory ignored him. He went and crouched beside Wills. For the first time, he saw the damage the
Leutnant
’s boot had done. The man’s face was a mask of blood, the bruise on his temple the colour of blue-black ink.

‘Leave me,’ mumbled Wills.

Miller came up, squatted and took out the first-aid kit. He said, ‘Hold up,’ and trickled drinking water between his cracked lips. ‘Think you can walk?’

‘Course,’ croaked Wills. ‘Dizzy spell.’ He got half-way to his feet, then toppled sideways in the dust.

Andrea said, ‘Come.’ He lifted Wills like a child, and hauled him on to his back. ‘We’ll find some shade.’

‘Quickly.’ Clytemnestra was chewing her lower lip. ‘We must cross this part. Then the ground is broken. Safer –’

Mallory held up his hand.

The breeze sighed in the rocks. Above the breeze, another sound: the small, faint drone of an aeroplane’s engine.

It was the Storch again; the same Storch. It saw them straight away, circled lazily in the deep blue morning.

‘Wave,’ said Mallory.

They all waved, even Wills, on Andrea’s back, raised a lethargic hand: a patrol of
Waffen-SS
saluting their comrades in the wilderness.

But Mallory was thinking radio. The observer would have been talking. Either the ground patrols had a listening schedule, to which they should have responded. Or he was talking to his base station, reporting five men and a Greek heading east, and the base station would be checking where the Greek fitted in …

After another half-hour’s march they were in broken ground, sloping away to the eastward. Clytemnestra walked out ahead now, moving fast and light among the hillocks and boulders like a hound making a cast. After ten minutes, she stopped and beckoned. They walked over to her.

She was standing at the head of a seam of the ground, deepened by running water into a groove no more than three feet wide. She led them down the groove. After a hundred yards it was already a ravine, plunging steeply downwards, disappearing from view round a colossal buttress of rotten stone. There was a path along the right-hand side of the ravine; a narrow ribbon of flat ground. This path Clytemnestra took. Another Goddamned goat path, thought Miller gloomily, trudging along. The German who had originally owned the smock he was wearing had been an eater of raw onions, by the smell of it –

‘Here,’ said Clytemnestra.

They had arrived at the end of the gorge, on a ledge balanced like an epaulette on a vast shoulder of rock. The ledge was perhaps thirty feet wide. On it were a couple of walls that might once have been part of dwellings. On its inside edge the cliff was patched with the stone fronts of cave-houses. ‘Very hard place to find,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘Once, klephts live here, bandits. Now, nobody.’ She walked across to a patch of green moss and ferns between two of the walled caves. A trickle of water fell from a projecting rock into a bowl roughly carved from the stone. ‘Everything you need,’ she said. Mallory was looking east.

Beyond the ledge, the ground dropped away three thousand feet in a series of precipices over a vast and hazy gulf. The bottom of the gulf was flat and green, marked into rectangular fields. At the southern end of the fields, a dark line, presumably a fence, separated out what looked like a group of huts and a brown-and-yellow expanse of baked earth and dry grass that must be an aerodrome, its eastern and northern sides formed by the sea.

Mallory raised his glasses to his eyes.

Beyond the fields was a stretch of reeds and whitish flats in which water glittered under the sun. It must have been the best part of a mile wide. On the far side the ground rose again, steep and black; the remains of a plug of magma, Lieutenant Robinson’s volcano, remnants of a cone of pumice and ash washed away by time. There were buildings up there, some white and gleaming, others ruined; and some, as Mallory focused his glasses, trailing a faint plume of dust.

‘Aerial,’ said Carstairs.

Mallory panned his glasses up an apparently endless face of bare black cliff. At the cliff’s summit, he saw the spider-like tracery of wires and pylons. An aerial array, all right.

‘They are building something,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘They take stone across, from the place down there.’

Three thousand feet below, a ruler-straight line ran from the base of the cliff, across the marshes, to a group of huts at the base of the Acropolis. ‘What is it?’ said Carstairs.

‘Railway line,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘For stone and gravel.’

‘Where’s the quarry?’ said Mallory.

She pointed straight down.

I’m a guy, not a fly,’ said Miller.

Mallory was not listening. He said, ‘Ropes. Weapons. Anything not vital, leave it up here. Clytemnestra, can you stay here for twenty-four hours? We’ll be back.’

She pointed down the ledge, to a place where the path narrowed, and there were the hard outlines of more ruined buildings. ‘There is the Swallow’s Nest,’ she said.

‘Password,’ said Mallory. ‘You’ll need one.’

‘Jolly boating weather,’ said Wills.

‘Shoot anyone who doesn’t use it.’

‘Jolly what?’ said Clytemnestra.

‘Never mind –’

‘Quiet,’ said Andrea. Over the dim rumour of humanity from the vale below there came once again the sound of an aeroplane engine.

They were standing on a wide part of the ledge, smooth as a parade ground, without cover. Standing up or lying down, they would stick out like a poached egg on a black table.

‘Wave,’ said Mallory.

The Storch came round the escarpment at eighty knots, not more than a hundred feet out. The people in SS uniform waved, the way they had waved last time. Mallory could see the faces of the pilot and the observer, curious, blank behind their goggles, not waving back. It went past once. ‘That’s it,’ said Carstairs.

The Storch dropped a wing and turned, so slow and low it almost seemed to hover. Mallory could see the observer’s lips moving as he spoke into his microphone. They were being checked up on. The carnage by the tomb would have been discovered by now.

‘Wave,’ said Mallory. Bluff, and bluff again, and hope like hell it worked, though hope grew harder to sustain –

But Carstairs had his Schmeisser at his shoulder, and its clatter was ringing in the cliffs, and the Storch was banking away, and a long line of pock marks appeared in the Storch’s unarmoured belly. The plane’s bank became a roll, a staggering roll that turned into a sideslip that would have been a spin except that half-way through the first turn the face of the escarpment came out to meet the aircraft. A wing touched delicately, crumpled like the foil from a cigarette packet. The propeller churned into the rock, the nose telescoped, a tiny spark of flame flicked back on the cowling, and among the noise of buckled and cracking metal came the big, solid whoomp of the fuel tank blowing. The Storch came momentarily to rest, perched nose-up on a sixty-degree slope, blazing from propeller boss to tailskid. Mallory could see the observer beating at the cockpit cover, jammed because of the heat. Then the plane began to slide tail-first into the abyss, gathering speed, leaving a long plume of black smoke, bouncing out from the cliff, over and over, breaking up as it fell.

Then it was gone, and all that remained was the smoke, tangled in the crags and bushes in the morning calm.

If you wanted a pointer to this place, thought Miller, you could not have done much better unless you had picked up a dirty great paintbrush and made an arrow on the cliff and marked it SHOOT HERE.

‘Good show,’ said Carstairs, stroking his silly moustache.

‘Excellent,’ said Miller, wearily.

Mallory felt tired to the marrow of his bones. And it had not yet begun. There would be men up here. A lot of men.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘As I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted. We’ll get down there. Clytemnestra. Situation’s changed. You’d better come too.’

Clytemnestra said, ‘No.’

‘Oh?’

‘Wills cannot move, not just now. The hiding places up here are very good. There will be no trouble. If we came, we would be in the way.’ She smiled, a ferocious flash of teeth in her face. ‘I think you are good fighters, you three.’ She turned to Carstairs. ‘But you will get yourself killed.’ She said in Greek, ‘And these other people, too. You are like a barnyard cock. A lot of noise and fuss, but that is all. No patience. A child, not a man.’

‘What does she say?’ said Carstairs.

‘She admires you intensely,’ said Miller, who had learned good Greek in the process of blowing up targets in Crete and the Peloponnese.

‘Objectives,’ said Mallory, hurriedly. ‘Listen.’

‘Permission to, er, speak,’ said Carstairs.

Mallory grinned at him, a grin without humour. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You will for the purposes of the next phase of this operation consider yourself under my orders, and keep quiet. Do I make myself clear?’

Behind its mask of sweat and grime Carstairs’ face was smooth, his eyes remote and distant. ‘Perfectly,’ he said.

‘Our objective is to destroy the rocket factory,’ said Mallory. ‘Yours is different. I authorize you to disclose it, to avoid confusion.’

‘It would be a great pity if we … interfered with one another,’ said Andrea. His big hands were resting on the Schmeisser, light and casual. The ledge was full of a studied politeness; but under the politeness lay a wire-taut thread of violence.

Carstairs was not stupid. He knew that for the third time, he had made life complicated and dangerous for the rest of the Thunderbolt Force. He knew that these men were used to achieving their objectives, and did not let anyone or anything stand in their way. The time had come for a dose of frankness – carefully measured, but a dose none the less. ‘I’ll go after the aerials,’ he said.

Mallory had been sitting apart, binoculars on the plain and the Acropolis. ‘It’s a bad climb to solo,’ he said.

‘I’ll manage,’ said Carstairs. He had his own glasses out. Things were moving on the airfield. A Trimotor was taxiing, and a group of vehicles was parked at the root of the causeway that took the road across the marsh to the Acropolis. There was an ambulance among them. ‘I’m off,’ he said.

‘Your objectives,’ said Andrea. This time, the hands on the Schmeisser looked firmer. ‘The aerials. Then this person you have to … debrief?’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Carstairs. ‘This is need-to-know information.’

‘We need to know,’ said Andrea flatly.

Far below, the Trimotor was taxiing to the downwind end of the runway.

‘Very well,’ said Carstairs. ‘If you insist. The
Kormoran
was boarded before she sank. She was carrying new German code books. Maybe this … survivor saw the boarding party. Highly likely, actually. In Parmatia they said he was unconscious. I’m hoping he still is. If he has woken up and told the Germans what he saw and they transmit the news back to Berlin, or Italy, or anywhere else, then bang goes a very useful intelligence source. A vital intelligence source, you might say. So I don’t care what you men are doing, I’m going after those aerials to shut them up. And then I’m going to find the man who was in the ambulance, awake or asleep.’

‘And then?’ said Mallory.

Carstairs’ face was hard as stone. ‘Use your imagination, Captain,’ he said.

So now they were assassins, thought Mallory. Not soldiers. There was a difference.

‘Over there,’ said Mallory, pointing at the dark massif opposite. ‘Northern end. There’s a village.’

‘Once a village,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘Now a prison. For slaves.’

‘Slaves?’

‘The men of the island. The Germans make them work in their factory.’

‘Well, well,’ said Mallory. ‘We rendezvous there at midnight.’

‘Where?’

‘There is a little street by the church,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘Athenai Street. It is dark. There are no guards.’

‘How do you know?’

‘We go there.’

‘I thought it was a prison.’

‘It is. But we are Greeks. We will wait from midnight here.’ She pointed to a spot on the map in her hand. ‘Then if you have not found us we will come to find you at dawn.’

Far below, the Trimotor was up and off the runway, a minute grey cross chasing its shadow over the dim marshes. Soon, the plateau above would be full of paratroops.

‘Moving out,’ said Mallory.

How come I always say never again, thought Miller, and every time I say it I am doing it again within twenty minutes?