The Complete Navarone (14 page)

‘Andrea!’ Stevens laughed, then cried out as the movement triggered off a crepitant agony in his bone-shattered leg. For a moment Mallory thought he had lost consciousness, but almost at once he spoke again, his voice husky with pain. ‘Andrea!’ he whispered. ‘Scared! I don’t believe it.’

‘Andrea
was
afraid.’ The big Greek’s voice was very gentle. ‘Andrea
is
afraid. Andrea is always afraid. That is why I have lived so long.’ He stared down at his great hands. ‘And why so many have died. They were not so afraid as I. They were not afraid of everything a man could be afraid of, there was always something they forgot to fear, to guard against. But Andrea was afraid of everything – and he forgot nothing. It is as simple as that.’

He looked across at Stevens and smiled.

‘There are no brave men and cowardly men in the world, my son. There are only brave men. To be born, to live, to die – that takes courage enough in itself, and more than enough. We are all brave men and we are all afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he, too, is brave and afraid like all the rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer. Or sometimes ten minutes, or twenty minutes – or the time it takes a man sick and bleeding and afraid to climb a cliff.’

Stevens said nothing. His head was sunk on his chest, and his face was hidden. He had seldom felt so happy, seldom so at peace with himself. He had known that he could not hide things from men like Andrea and Mallory, but he had not known that it would not matter. He felt he should say something, but he could not think what and he was deathly tired. He knew, deep down, that Andrea was speaking the truth, but not the whole truth; but he was too tired to care, to try to work things out.

Miller cleared his throat noisily.

‘No more talkin’, Lieutenant,’ he said firmly. ‘You gotta lie down, get yourself some sleep.’

Stevens looked at him, then at Mallory in puzzled inquiry.

‘Better do what you’re told, Andy.’ Mallory smiled. ‘Your surgeon and medical adviser talking. He fixed your leg.’

‘Oh! I didn’t know. Thanks, Dusty. Was it very – difficult?’

Miller waved a deprecatory hand.

‘Not for a man of my experience. Just a simple break,’ he lied easily. ‘Almost let one of the others do it … Give him a hand to lie down, will you, Andrea?’ He jerked his head towards Mallory. ‘Boss?’

The two men moved outside, turning their backs to the icy wind.

‘We gotta get a fire, dry clothing, for that kid,’ Miller said urgently. ‘His pulse is about 140, temperature 103. He’s runnin’ a fever, and he’s losin’ ground all the time.’

‘I know, I know,’ Mallory said worriedly. ‘And there’s not a hope of getting any fuel on this damned mountain. Let’s go in and see how much dried clothing we can muster between us.’

He lifted the edge of the canvas and stepped inside. Stevens was still awake, Brown and Andrea on either side of him. Miller was on his heels.

‘We’re going to stay here for the night,’ Mallory announced, ‘so let’s make things as snug as possible. Mind you,’ he admitted, ‘we’re a bit too near the cliff for comfort, but old Jerry hasn’t a clue we’re on the island, and we’re out of sight of the coast. Might as well make ourselves comfortable.’

‘Boss …’ Miller made to speak, then fell silent again. Mallory looked at him in surprise, saw that he, Brown and Stevens were looking at one another, uncertainty, then doubt and a dawning, sick comprehension in their eyes. A sudden anxiety, the sure knowledge that something was far wrong, struck at Mallory like a blow.

‘What’s up?’ he demanded, sharply. ‘What is it?’

‘We have bad news for you, boss,’ Miller said carefully. ‘We should have told you right away. Guess we all thought that one of the others would have told you … Remember that sentry you and Andrea shoved over the side?’

Mallory nodded, sombrely. He knew what was coming.

‘He fell on top of that reef twenty-thirty feet or so from the cliff,’ Miller went on. ‘Wasn’t much of him left, I guess, but what was was jammed between two rocks. He was really stuck good and fast.’

‘I see,’ Mallory murmured. ‘I’ve been wondering all night how you managed to get so wet under your rubber cape.’

‘I tried four times, boss,’ Miller said quietly. ‘The others had a rope round me.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Not a chance. Them gawddamned waves just flung me back against the cliff every time.’

‘It will be light in three or four hours,’ Mallory murmured. ‘In four hours they will know we are on the island. They will see him as soon as it’s dawn and send a boat to investigate.’

‘Does it really matter, sir,’ Stevens suggested. ‘He could still have fallen.’

Mallory eased the canvas aside and looked out into the night. It was bitterly cold and the snow was beginning to fall all around them. He dropped the canvas again.

‘Five minutes,’ he said absently. ‘We will leave in five minutes.’ He looked at Stevens and smiled faintly. ‘We are forgetful too. We should have told you. Andrea stabbed the sentry through the heart.’

The hours that followed were hours plucked from the darkest nightmare, endless, numbing hours of stumbling and tripping and falling and getting up again, of racked bodies and aching, tortured muscles, of dropped loads and frantic pawing around in the deepening snow, of hunger and thirst and all-encompassing exhaustion.

They had retraced their steps now, were heading WNW back across the shoulder of the mountain – almost certainly the Germans would think they had gone due north, heading for the centre of the island. Without compass, stars or moon to guide, Mallory had nothing to orientate them but the feel of the slope of the mountain and the memory of the map Vlachos had shown them in Alexandria. But by and by he was reasonably certain that they had rounded the mountain and were pushing up some narrow gorge into the interior.

The snow was the deadly enemy. Heavy, wet and feathery, it swirled all around them in a blanketing curtain of grey, sifted down their necks and jackboots, worked its insidious way under their clothes and up their sleeves, blocked their eyes and ears and mouths, pierced and then anaesthetised exposed faces, and turned gloveless hands into leaden lumps of ice, benumbed and all but powerless. All suffered, and suffered badly, but Stevens most of all. He had lost consciousness again within minutes of leaving the cave and clad in clinging, sodden clothes as he was, he now lacked even the saving warmth generated by physical activity. Twice Andrea had stopped and felt for the beating of the heart, for he thought that the boy had died: but he could feel nothing for there was no feeling left in his hands, and he could only wonder and stumble on again.

About five in the morning, as they were climbing up the steep valley head above the gorge, a treacherous, slippery slope with only a few stunted carob trees for anchor in the sliding scree, Mallory decided that they must rope up for safety’s sake. In single file they scrambled and struggled up the ever-steepening slope for the next twenty minutes: Mallory, in the lead, did not even dare to think how Andrea was getting on behind him. Suddenly the slope eased, flattened out completely, and almost before they realised what was happening they had crossed the high divide, still roped together and in driving, blinding snow with zero visibility, and were sliding down the valley on the other side.

They came to the cave at dawn, just as the first grey stirrings of a bleak and cheerless day struggled palely through the lowering, snow-filled sky to the east. Monsieur Vlachos had told them that the south of Navarone was honey-combed with caves, but this was the first they had seen, and even then it was no cave but a dark, narrow tunnel in a great heap of piled volcanic slabs, huge, twisted layers of rock precariously poised in a gully that threaded down the slope towards some broad and unknown valley a thousand, two thousand feet, beneath them, a valley still shrouded in the gloom of night.

It was no cave, but it was enough. For frozen, exhausted, sleep-haunted men, it was more than enough, it was more than they had ever hoped for. There was room for them all, the few cracks were quickly blocked against the drifting snow, the entrance curtained off by the boulder-weighted tent. Somehow, impossibly almost in the cramped darkness, they stripped Stevens of his sea- and rain-soaked clothes, eased him into a providentially zipped sleeping-bag, forced some brandy down his throat and cushioned the bloodstained head on some dry clothing. And then the four men, even the tireless Andrea, slumped down to the sodden, snow-chilled floor of the cave and slept like men already dead, oblivious alike of the rocks on the floor, the cold, their hunger and their clammy, saturated clothing, oblivious even to the agony of returning circulation in their frozen hands and faces.

The sun, rime-ringed and palely luminous behind the drifting cloud-wrack, was far beyond its zenith and dipping swiftly westwards to the snow-limned shoulder of the mountain when Andrea lifted the edge of the tent, pushed it gently aside and peered out warily down the smooth sweep of the mountainside. For a few moments he remained almost motionless behind the canvas, automatically easing cramped and aching leg muscles, narrowed, roving eyes gradually accustoming themselves to the white glare of the glistening, crystalline snow. And then he had flitted noiselessly out of the mouth of the tunnel and reached far up the bank of the gully in half a dozen steps; stretched full length against the snow, he eased himself smoothly up the slope, lifted a cautious eye over the top.

Far below him stretched the great, curved sweep of an almost perfectly symmetrical valley – a valley born abruptly in the cradling embrace of steep-walled mountains and falling away gently to the north. That towering, buttressed giant on his right that brooded darkly over the head of the valley, its peak hidden in the snow clouds – there could be no doubt about that, Andrea thought. Mt Kostos, the highest mountain in Navarone: they had crossed its western flank during the darkness of the night. Due east and facing his own at perhaps five miles’ distance, the third mountain was barely less high: but its northern flank fell away more quickly, debouching on to the plains that lay to the north-east of Navarone. And about four miles away to the north-north-east, far beneath the snowline and the isolated shepherds’ huts, a tiny, flat-roofed township lay in a fold in the hills, along the bank of the little stream that wound its way through the valley. That could only be the village of Margaritha.

Even as he absorbed the topography of the valley, his eyes probing every dip and cranny in the hills for a possible source of danger, Andrea’s mind was racing back over the last two minutes of time, trying to isolate, to remember the nature of the alien sound that had cut through the cocoon of sleep and brought him instantly to his feet, alert and completely awake, even before his conscious mind had time to register the memory of the sound. And then he heard it again, three times in as many seconds, the high-pitched, lonely wheep of a whistle, shrill peremptory blasts that echoed briefly and died along the lower slopes of Mt Kostos: the final echo still hung faintly on the air as Andrea pushed himself backwards and slid down to the floor of the gully.

He was back on the bank within thirty seconds, cheek muscles contracting involuntarily as the ice-chill eyepieces of Mallory’s Zeiss-Ikon binoculars screwed into his face. There was no mistaking them now, he thought grimly, his first, fleeting impression had been all too accurate. Twenty-five, perhaps thirty soldiers in all, strung out in a long, irregular line, they were advancing slowly across the flank of Kostos, combing every gully, each jumbled confusion of boulders that lay in their path. Every man was clad in a snow-suit, but even at a distance of two miles they were easy to locate: the arrow-heads of their strapped skis angled up above shoulders and hooded heads: startlingly black against the sheer whiteness of the snow, the skis bobbed and weaved in disembodied drunkenness as the men slipped and stumbled along the scree-strewn slopes of the mountain. From time to time a man near the centre of the line pointed and gestured with an alpenstock, as if co-ordinating the efforts of the search party. The man with the whistle, Andrea guessed.

‘Andrea!’ The call from the cave mouth was very soft. ‘Anything wrong?’

Finger to his lips, Andrea twisted round in the snow. Mallory was standing by the canvas screen. Dark-jowled and crumple-clothed, he held up one hand against the glare of the snow while the other rubbed the sleep from his blood-shot eyes. And then he was limping forward in obedience to the crooking of Andrea’s finger, wincing in pain at every step he took. His toes were swollen and skinned, gummed together with congealed blood. He had not had his boots off since he had taken them from the feet of the dead German sentry: and now he was almost afraid to remove them, afraid of what he would find … He clambered slowly up the bank of the gully and sank down in the snow beside Andrea.

‘Company?’

‘The very worst of company,’ Andrea murmured. ‘Take a look, my Keith.’ He handed over the binoculars, pointed down to the lower slopes of Mt Kostos. ‘Your friend Jensen never told us that they were here.’

Slowly, Mallory quartered the slopes with the binoculars. Suddenly the line of searchers moved into his field of vision. He raised his head, adjusted the focus impatiently, looked briefly once more, then lowered the binoculars with a restrained deliberation of gesture that held a wealth of bitter comment.

‘The WGB,’ he said softly.

‘A Jaeger battalion,’ Andrea conceded. ‘Alpine Corps – their finest mountain troops. This is most inconvenient, my Keith.’

Mallory nodded, rubbed his stubbled chin.

‘If anyone can find us, they can. And they’ll find us.’ He lifted the glasses to look again at the line of advancing men. The painstaking thoroughness of the search was disturbing enough: but even more threatening, more frightening, was the snail-like relentlessness, the inevitability of the approach of these tiny figures. ‘God knows what the Alpenkorps is doing here,’ Mallory went on. ‘It’s enough that they are here. They must know that we’ve landed and spent the morning searching the eastern saddle of Kostos – that was the obvious route for us to break into the interior. They’ve drawn a blank there, so now they’re working their way over to the other saddle. They must be pretty nearly certain that we’re carrying a wounded man with us and that we can’t have got very far. It’s only going to be a matter of time, Andrea.’

‘A matter of time,’ Andrea echoed. He glanced up at the sun, a sun all but invisible in the darkening sky. ‘An hour, an hour and a half at the most. They’ll be here before the sun goes down. And we’ll still be here.’ He glanced quizzically at Mallory. ‘We cannot leave the boy. And we cannot get away if we take the boy – and then he would die anyway.’

‘We will not be here,’ Mallory said flatly. ‘If we stay we all die. Or finish up in one of those nice little dungeons that Monsieur Vlachos told us about.’

‘The greatest good of the greatest number,’ Andrea nodded slowly. ‘That’s how it has to be, has it not, my Keith? The greatest number. That is what Captain Jensen would say.’ Mallory stirred uncomfortably, but his voice was steady enough when he spoke.

‘That’s how I see it, too, Andrea. Simple proportion – twelve hundred to one. You know it has to be this way.’ Mallory sounded tired.

‘Yes, I know. But you are worrying about nothing.’ Andrea smiled. ‘Come, my friend. Let us tell the others the good news.’

Miller looked up as the two men came in, letting the canvas screen fall shut behind them. He had unzipped the side of Stevens’s sleeping-bag and was working on the mangled leg. A pencil flashlight was propped on a rucksack beside him.

‘When are we goin’ to do somethin’ about this kid, boss?’ The voice was abrupt, angry, like his gesture towards the sleep-drugged boy beside him. ‘This damned waterproof sleeping-bag is soaked right through. So’s the kid – and he’s about frozen stiff: his leg feels like a side of chilled beef. He’s gotta have heat, boss, a warm room and hot drinks – or he’s finished. Twenty-four hours.’ Miller shivered and looked slowly round the broken walls of the rock-shelter. ‘I reckon he’d have less than an even chance in a first-class general hospital … He’s just wastin’ his time keepin’ on breathin’ in this gawddamned ice-box.’

Miller hardly exaggerated. Water from the melting snow above trickled continuously down the clammy, green-lichened walls of the cave or dripped directly on to the half-frozen gravelly slush on the floor of the cave. With no through ventilation and no escape for the water accumulating at the sides of the shelter, the whole place was dank and airless and terribly chill.

‘Maybe he’ll be hospitalised sooner than you think,’ Mallory said dryly. ‘How’s his leg?’

‘Worse.’ Miller was blunt. ‘A helluva sight worse. I’ve just chucked in another handful of sulpha and tied things up again. That’s all I can do, boss, and it’s just a waste of time anyway … What was that crack about a hospital?’ he added suspiciously.

‘That was no crack,’ Mallory said soberly, ‘but one of the more unpleasant facts of life. There’s a German search party heading this way. They mean business. They’ll find us, all right.’

Miller swore. ‘That’s handy, that’s just wonderful,’ he said bitterly. ‘How far away, boss?’

‘An hour, maybe a little more.’

‘And what are we goin’ to do with Junior, here? Leave him? It’s his only chance, I reckon.’

‘Stevens comes with us.’ There was a flat finality in Mallory’s voice. Miller looked at him for a long time in silence: his face was very cold.

‘Stevens comes with us,’ Miller repeated. ‘We drag him along with us until he’s dead – that won’t take long – and then we leave him in the snow. Just like that, huh?’

‘Just like that, Dusty.’ Absently Mallory brushed some snow off his clothes, and looked up again at Miller. ‘Stevens knows too much. The Germans will have guessed why we’re on the island, but they don’t know how we propose to get inside the fortress – and they don’t know when the Navy’s coming through. But Stevens does. They’ll make him talk. Scopolamine will make anyone talk.’

‘Scopolamine! On a dying man?’ Miller was openly incredulous.

‘Why not? I’d do the same myself. If you were the German commandant and you knew that your big guns and half the men in your fortress were liable to be blown to hell any moment, you’d do the same.’

Miller looked at him, grinned wryly, shook his head.

‘Me and my –’

‘I know. You and your big mouth.’ Mallory smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I don’t like it one little bit more than you do, Dusty.’ He turned away and crossed to the other side of the cave. ‘How are you feeling, Chief?’

‘Not too bad, sir.’ Casey Brown was only just awake, numbed and shivering in sodden clothes. ‘Anything wrong?’

‘Plenty,’ Mallory assured him. ‘Search party moving this way. We’ll have to pull out inside half an hour.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Just on four o’clock. Do you think you could raise Cairo on the set?’

‘Lord only knows,’ Brown said frankly. He rose stiffly to his feet. ‘The radio didn’t get just the best of treatment yesterday. I’ll have a go.’

‘Thanks, Chief. See that your aerial doesn’t stick up above the sides of the gully.’ Mallory turned to leave the cave, but halted abruptly at the sight of Andrea squatting on a boulder just beside the entrance. His head bent in concentration, the big Greek had just finished screwing telescopic sights on to the barrel of his 7.92 mm Mauser and was now deftly wrapping a sleeping-bag lining round its barrel and butt until the entire rifle was wrapped in a white cocoon.

Mallory watched him in silence. Andrea glanced up at him, smiled, rose to his feet and reached out for his rucksack. Within thirty seconds he was clad from head to toe in his mountain camouflage suit, was drawing tight the purse-strings of his snow-hood and easing his feet into the rucked elastic anklets of his canvas boots. Then he picked up the Mauser and smiled slightly.

‘I thought I might be taking a little walk, Captain,’ he said apologetically. ‘With your permission, of course.’

Mallory nodded his head several times in slow recollection.

‘You said I was worrying about nothing,’ he murmured. ‘I should have known. You might have told me, Andrea.’ But the protest was automatic, without significance. Mallory felt neither anger nor even annoyance at this tacit arrogation of his authority. The habit of command died hard in Andrea: on such occasions as he ostensibly sought approval for or consulted about a proposed course of action it was generally as a matter of courtesy and to give information as to his intentions. Instead of resentment, Mallory could feel only an overwhelming relief and gratitude to the smiling giant who towered above him: he had talked casually to Miller about driving Stevens till he died and then abandoning him, talked with an indifference that masked a mind sombre with bitterness at what he must do, but even so he had not known how depressed, how sick at heart this decision had left him until he knew it was no longer necessary.

‘I am sorry.’ Andrea was half-contrite, half-smiling. ‘I should have told you. I thought you understood … It is the best thing to do, yes?’

‘It is the only thing to do,’ Mallory said frankly. ‘You’re going to draw them off up the saddle?’

‘There is no other way. With their skis they would overtake me in minutes if I went down into the valley. I cannot come back, of course, until it is dark. You will be here?’

‘Some of us will.’ Mallory glanced across the shelter where a waking Stevens was trying to sit up, heels of his palms screwing into his exhausted eyes. ‘We must have food and fuel, Andrea,’ he said softly. ‘I am going down into the valley tonight.’

‘Of course, of course. We must do what we can.’ Andrea’s face was grave, his voice only a murmur. ‘As long as we can. He is only a boy, a child almost … Perhaps it will not be long.’ He pulled back the curtain, looked out at the evening sky. ‘I will be back by seven o’clock.’

‘Seven o’clock,’ Mallory repeated. The sky, he could see, was darkening already, darkening with the gloom of coming snow, and the lifting wind was beginning to puff little clouds of air-spun, flossy white into the little gully. Mallory shivered and caught hold of the massive arm. ‘For God’s sake, Andrea,’ he urged quietly, ‘look after yourself!’