The Complete Navarone (23 page)

‘Get to the edge of the trees up there!’ Mallory shouted. ‘Quickly! Stay there and stay under cover – we’re going to have to break for that gap in the rocks.’ He gestured through the trees at a jagged fissure in the cliff-side, barely forty yards from where he stood, blessed Louki for his foresight in choosing a hideout with so convenient a bolt-hole. ‘Wait till I give the word. Andrea!’ He turned round, then broke off, the words unneeded. Andrea had already scooped up the dying boy in his arms, just as he lay in stretcher and blankets and was weaving his way uphill in and out among the trees.

‘What’s up, boss?’ Miller was by Mallory’s side as he plunged up the slope. ‘I don’t see nothin’.’

‘You can hear something if you’d just stop talking for a moment,’ Mallory said grimly. ‘Or just take a look up there.’

Miller, flat on his stomach now, and less than a dozen feet from the edge of the grove, twisted round and craned his neck upwards. He picked up the planes immediately.

‘Stukas!’ he said incredulously. ‘A squadron of gawddamned Stukas! It can’t be, boss!’

‘It can and it is,’ Mallory said grimly. ‘Jensen told me that Jerry has stripped the Italian front of them – over two hundred pulled out in the last few weeks.’ Mallory squinted up at the squadron, less than half a mile away now. ‘And he’s brought the whole damn issue down to the Aegean.’

‘But they’re not lookin’ for us,’ Miller protested.

‘I’m afraid they are,’ Mallory said grimly. The two bomber echelons had just dove-tailed into line-ahead formation. ‘I’m afraid Panayis was right.’

‘But – but they’re passin’ us by –’

‘They aren’t,’ Mallory said flatly. ‘They’re here to stay. Just keep your eyes on that leading plane.’

Even as he spoke, the flight-commander tilted his gull-winged Junkers 87 sharply over to port, half-turned, fell straight out of the sky in a screaming power-dive, plummeting straight for the carob grove.

‘Leave him alone!’ Mallory shouted. ‘Don’t fire!’ The Stukas, air-brakes at maximum depression, had steadied on the centre of the grove. Nothing could stop him now – but a chance shot might bring him down directly on top of them: the chances were poor enough as it was … ‘Keep your hands over your heads – and your heads down!’

He ignored his own advice, his gaze following the bomber every foot of the way down. Five hundred, four hundred, three, the rising crescendo of the heavy engine was beginning to hurt his ears, and the Stuka was pulling sharply out of its plunging fall, its bomb gone.

Bomb! Mallory sat up sharply, screwing up his eyes against the blue of the sky. Not one bomb but dozens of them, clustered so thickly that they appeared to be jostling each other as they arrowed into the centre of the grove, striking the gnarled and stunted trees, breaking off branches and burying themselves to their fins in the soft and shingled slope. Incendiaries! Mallory had barely time to realise that they had been spared the horror of a 500-kilo HE bomb when the incendiaries erupted into hissing, guttering life, into an incandescent magnesium whiteness that reached out and completely destroyed the shadowed gloom of the carob grove. Within a matter of seconds the dazzling coruscation had given way to thick, evil-smelling clouds of acrid black smoke, smoke laced with flickering tongues of red, small at first then licking and twisting resinously upwards until entire trees were enveloped in a cocoon of flame. The Stuka was still pulling upwards out of its dive, had not yet levelled off when the heart of the grove, old and dry and tindery, was fiercely ablaze.

Miller twisted up and round, nudging Mallory to catch his attention through the crackling roar of the flames.

‘Incendiaries, boss,’ he announced.

‘What did you think they were using?’ Mallory asked shortly. ‘Matches? They’re trying to smoke us out, to burn us out, get us in the open. High explosive’s not so good among trees. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred this would have worked.’ He coughed as the acrid smoke bit into his lungs, peered up with watering eyes through the tree-tops. ‘But not this time. Not if we’re lucky. Not if they hold off another half-minute or so. Just look at that smoke!’

Miller looked. Thick, convoluted, shot through with fiery sparks, the rolling cloud was already a third of the way across the gap between grove and cliff, borne uphill by the wandering catspaws from the sea. It was the complete, the perfect smoke-screen. Miller nodded.

‘Gonna make a break for it, huh, boss?’

‘There’s no choice – we either go, or we stay and get fried or blown into very little bits. Probably both.’ He raised his voice. ‘Anybody see what’s happening up top?’

‘Queuing up for another go at us, sir,’ Brown said lugubriously. ‘The first bloke’s still circling around.’

‘Waiting to see how we break cover. They won’t wait long. This is where we take off.’ He peered uphill through the rolling smoke, but it was too thick, laced his watering eyes until everything was blurred through a misted sheen of tears. There was no saying how far uphill the smoke-bank had reached, and they couldn’t afford to wait until they were sure. Stuka pilots had never been renowned for their patience.

‘Right, everybody!’ he shouted. ‘Fifteen yards along the tree-line to that wash, then straight up into the gorge. Don’t stop till you’re at least a hundred yards inside. Andrea, you lead the way. Off you go!’ He peered through the blinding smoke. ‘Where’s Panayis?’

There was no reply.

‘Panayis!’ Mallory called. ‘Panayis!’

‘Perhaps he went back for somethin’.’ Miller had stopped, half-turned. ‘Shall I go –’

‘Get on your way!’ Mallory said savagely. ‘And if anything happens to young Stevens I’ll hold you –’ But Miller, wisely, was already gone, Andrea stumbling and coughing by his side.

For a couple of seconds Mallory stood irresolute, then plunged back downhill towards the centre of the grove. Maybe Panayis had gone back for something – and he couldn’t understand English. Mallory had hardly gone five yards when he was forced to halt and fling his arm up before his face: the heat was searing. Panayis couldn’t be down there; no one could have been down there, could have lived for seconds in that furnace. Gasping for air, hair singeing and clothes smouldering with fire, Mallory clawed his way back up the slope, colliding with trees, slipping, falling, then stumbling desperately to his feet again.

He ran along to the east end of the wood. No one there. Back to the other end again, towards the wash, almost completely blind now, the superheated air searing viciously through throat and lungs till he was suffocating, till his breath was coming in great, whooping, agonised breaths. No sense in waiting longer, nothing he could do, nothing anyone could do except save himself. There was a noise in his ears, the roaring of the flames, the roaring of his own blood – and the screaming, heart-stopping roar of a Stuka in a power-dive. Desperately he flung himself forward over the sliding scree, stumbled and pitched headlong down to the floor of the wash.

Hurt or not, he did not know and he did not care. Sobbing aloud for breath, he rose to his feet, forced his aching legs to drive him somehow up the hill. The air was full of the thunder of engines, he knew the entire squadron was coming in to the attack, and then he had flung himself uncaringly to the ground as the first of the high explosive bombs erupted in its concussive blast of smoke and flame – erupted not forty yards away, to his left and ahead of him.
Ahead
of him! Even as he struggled upright again, lurched forward and upward once more, Mallory cursed himself again and again and again. You madman, he thought bitterly, confusedly, you damned crazy madman. Sending the others out to be killed. He should have thought of it – oh, God, he should have thought of it, a five-year-old could have thought of it. Of course Jerry wasn’t going to bomb the grove: they had seen the obvious, the inevitable, as quickly as he had, were dive-bombing the pall of smoke between the grove and the cliff! A five-year-old – the earth exploded beneath his feet, a giant hand plucked him up and smashed him to the ground and the darkness closed over him.

Once, twice, half a dozen times, Mallory struggled up from the depths of a black, trance-like stupor and momentarily touched the surface of consciousness only to slide back into the darkness again. Desperately, each time, he tried to hang on to these fleeting moments of awareness, but his mind was like the void, dark and sinewless, and even as he knew that his mind was slipping backwards again, loosing its grip on reality, the knowledge was gone, and there was only the void once more. Nightmare, he thought vaguely during one of the longer glimmerings of comprehension, I’m having a nightmare, like when you know you are having a nightmare and that if you could open your eyes it would be gone, but you can’t open your eyes. He tried it now, tried to open his eyes, but it was no good, it was still as dark as ever and he was still sunk in this evil dream, for the sun had been shining brightly in the sky. He shook his head in slow despair.

‘Aha! Observe! Signs of life at last!’ There was no mistaking the slow, nasal drawl. ‘Ol’ Medicine Man Miller triumphs again!’ There was a moment’s silence, a moment in which Mallory was increasingly aware of the diminishing thunder of aero engines, the acrid, resinous smoke that stung his nostrils and eyes, and then an arm had passed under his shoulders and Miller’s persuasive voice was in his ear. ‘Just try a little of this, boss. Ye olde vintage brandy. Nothin’ like it anywhere.’

Mallory felt the cold neck of the bottle, tilted his head back, took a long pull. Almost immediately he had jerked himself upright and forward to a sitting position, gagging, spluttering and fighting for breath as the raw, fiery ouzo bit into the mucous membrane of cheeks and throat. He tried to speak but could do no more than croak, gasp for fresh air and stare indignantly at the shadowy figure that knelt by his side. Miller, for his part, looked at him with unconcealed admiration.

‘See, boss? Just like I said – nothin’ like it.’ He shook his head admiringly. ‘Wide awake in an instant, as the literary boys would say. Never saw a shock and concussion victim recover so fast!’

‘What the hell are you trying to do?’ Mallory demanded. The fire had died down in his throat, and he could breathe again. ‘Poison me?’ Angrily he shook his head, fighting off the pounding ache, the fog that still swirled round the fringes of his mind. ‘Bloody fine physician you are! Shock, you say, yet the first thing you do is administer a dose of spirits –’

‘Take your pick,’ Miller interrupted grimly. ‘Either that or a damned sight bigger shock in about fifteen minutes or so when brother Jerry gets here.’

‘But they’ve gone away. I can’t hear the Stukas any more.’

‘This lot’s comin’ up from the town,’ Miller said morosely. ‘Louki’s just reported them. Half a dozen armoured cars and a couple of trucks with field guns the length of a telegraph pole.’

‘I see.’ Mallory twisted round, saw a gleam of light at a bend in the wall. A cave – a tunnel, almost. Little Cyprus, Louki had said some of the older people had called it – the Devil’s Playground was riddled with a honeycomb of caves. He grinned wryly at the memory of his momentary panic when he thought his eyes had gone and turned again to Miller. ‘Trouble again, Dusty, nothing but trouble. Thanks for bringing me round.’

‘Had to,’ Miller said briefly. ‘I guess we couldn’t have carried you very far, boss.’

Mallory nodded. ‘Not just the flattest of country hereabouts.’

‘There’s that, too,’ Miller agreed. ‘What I really meant is that there’s hardly anyone left to carry you. Casey Brown and Panayis have both been hurt, boss.’

‘What! Both of them?’ Mallory screwed his eyes shut, shook his head in slow anger. ‘My God, Dusty, I’d forgotten all about the bomb – the bombs.’ He reached out his hand, caught Miller by the arm. ‘How – how bad are they?’ There was so little time left, so much to do.

‘How bad?’ Miller shook out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Mallory. ‘Not bad at all – if we could get them into hospital. But hellish painful and cripplin’ if they gotta start hikin’ up and down those gawddamned ravines hereabouts. First time I’ve seen canyon floors more nearly vertical than the walls themselves.’

‘You still haven’t told me –’

‘Sorry, boss, sorry. Shrapnel wounds, both of them, in exactly the same place – left thigh, just above the knee. No bones gone, no tendons cut. I’ve just finished tying up Casey’s leg – it’s a pretty wicked-lookin’ gash. He’s gonna know all about it when he starts walkin’.’

‘And Panayis?’

‘Fixed his own leg,’ Miller said briefly. ‘A queer character. Wouldn’t even let me look at it, far less bandage it. I reckon he’d have knifed me if I’d tried.’

‘Better to leave him alone anyway,’ Mallory advised. ‘Some of these islanders have strange taboos and superstitions. Just as long as he’s alive. Though I still don’t see how the hell he managed to get here.’

‘He was the first to leave,’ Miller explained. ‘Along with Casey. You must have missed him in the smoke. They were climbin’ together when they got hit.’

‘And how did I get here?’

‘No prizes for the first correct answer.’ Miller jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the huge form that blocked half the width of the cave. ‘Junior here did his St Bernard act once again. I wanted to go with him, but he wasn’t keen. Said he reckoned it would be difficult to carry both of us up the hill. My feelin’s were hurt considerable.’ Miller sighed. ‘I guess I just wasn’t born to be a hero, that’s all.’

Mallory smiled. ‘Thanks again, Andrea.’

‘Thanks!’ Miller was indignant. ‘A guy saves your life and all you can say is “thanks”!’

‘After the first dozen times or so you run out of suitable speeches,’ Mallory said dryly. ‘How’s Stevens?’

‘Breathin’.’

Mallory nodded forward towards the source of light, wrinkled his nose. ‘Just round the corner, isn’t he?’

‘Yeah, it’s pretty grim,’ Miller admitted. ‘The gangrene’s spread up beyond the knee.’

Mallory rose groggily to his feet, picked up his gun. ‘How is he really, Dusty?’

‘He’s dead, but he just won’t die. He’ll be gone by sundown. Gawd only knows what’s kept him goin’ so far.’

‘It may sound presumptuous,’ Mallory murmured; ‘but I think I know too.’

‘The first-class medical attention?’ Miller said hopefully.

‘Looks that way, doesn’t it?’ Mallory smiled down at the still kneeling Miller. ‘But that wasn’t what I meant at all. Come, gentlemen, we have some business to attend to.’

‘Me, all I’m good for is blowin’ up bridges and droppin’ a handful of sand in engine bearin’s,’ Miller announced. ‘Strategy and tactics are far beyond my simple mind. But I still think those characters down there are pickin’ a very stupid way of committin’ suicide. It would be a damned sight easier for all concerned if they just shot themselves.’

‘I’m inclined to agree with you.’ Mallory settled himself more firmly behind the jumbled rocks in the mouth of the ravine that opened on the charred and smoking remains of the carob grove directly below and took another look at the Alpenkorps troops advancing in extended order up the steep, shelterless slope. ‘They’re no children at this game. I bet they don’t like it one little bit, either.’

‘Then why the hell are they doin’ it, boss?’

‘No option, probably. First off, this place can only be attacked frontally.’ Mallory smiled down at the little Greek lying between himself and Andrea. ‘Louki here chose the place well. It would require a long detour to attack from the rear – and it would take them a week to advance through that devil’s scrap-heap behind us. Secondly, it’ll be sunset in a couple of hours, and they know they haven’t a hope of getting us after it’s dark. And finally – and I think this is more important than the other two reasons put together – it’s a hundred to one that the commandant in the town is being pretty severely prodded by his High Command. There’s too much at stake, even in the one in a thousand chance of us getting at the guns. They can’t afford to have Kheros evacuated under their noses, to lose –’

‘Why not?’ Miller interrupted. He gestured largely with his hands. ‘Just a lot of useless rocks –’

‘They can’t afford to lose face with the Turks,’ Mallory went on patiently. ‘The strategic importance of these islands in the Sporades is negligible, but their political importance is tremendous. Adolph badly needs another ally in these parts. So he flies in Alpenkorps troops by the thousand and the Stukas by the hundred, the best he has – and he needs them desperately on the Italian front. But you’ve got to convince your potential ally that you’re a pretty safe bet before you can persuade him to give up his nice, safe seat on the fence and jump down on your side.’

‘Very interestin’,’ Miller observed. ‘So?’

‘So the Germans are going to have no compunction about thirty or forty of their best troops being cut into little pieces. It’s no trouble at all when you’re sitting behind a desk a thousand miles away … Let ’em come another hundred yards or so closer. Louki and I will start from the middle and work out: you and Andrea start from the outside.’

‘I don’t like it, boss,’ Miller complained.

‘Don’t think that I do either,’ Mallory said quietly. ‘Slaughtering men forced to do a suicidal job like this is not my idea of fun – or even of war. But if we don’t get them, they get us.’ He broke off and pointed across the burnished sea to where Kheros lay peacefully on the hazed horizon, striking golden glints off the western sun. ‘What do you think they would have us do, Dusty?’

‘I know, I know, boss.’ Miller stirred uncomfortably. ‘Don’t rub it in.’ He pulled his woollen cap low over his forehead and stared bleakly down the slope. ‘How soon do the mass executions begin?’

‘Another hundred yards, I said.’ Mallory looked down the slope again towards the coast road and grinned suddenly, glad to change the topic. ‘Never saw telegraph poles shrink so suddenly before, Dusty.’

Miller studied the guns drawn up on the roads behind the two trucks and cleared his throat.

‘I was only sayin’ what Louki told me,’ he said defensively.

‘What Louki told you!’ The little Greek was indignant. ‘Before God, Major, the Americano is full of lies!’

‘Ah, well, mebbe I was mistaken,’ Miller said magnanimously. He squinted again at the guns, forehead lined in puzzlement. ‘That first one’s a mortar, I reckon. But what in the universe that other weird-looking contraption can be –’

‘Also a mortar,’ Mallory explained. ‘A five-barrelled job, and very nasty. The
Nebelwerfer
or Moanin’ Minnie. Howls like all the lost souls in hell. Guaranteed to turn the knees to jelly, especially after nightfall – but it’s still the other one you have to watch. A six-inch mortar, almost certainly using fragmentation bombs – you use a brush and shovel for clearing up afterwards.’

That’s right,’ Miller growled. ‘Cheer us all up.’ But he was grateful to the New Zealander for trying to take their minds off what they had to do. ‘Why don’t they use them?’

‘They will,’ Mallory assured him. ‘Just as soon as we fire and they find out where we are.’

‘Gawd help us,’ Miller muttered. ‘Fragmentation bombs, you said!’ He lapsed into gloomy silence.

‘Any second now,’ Mallory said softly. ‘I only hope that our friend Turzig isn’t among this lot.’ He reached out for his field-glasses but stopped in surprise as Andrea leaned across Louki and caught him by the wrist before he could line the binoculars. ‘What’s the matter, Andrea?’

‘I would not be using these, my Captain. They have betrayed us once already. I have been thinking, and it can be nothing else. The sunlight reflecting from the lenses …’

Mallory stared at him, slowly released his grip on the glasses, nodded several times in succession.

‘Of course, of course! I had been wondering … Someone has been careless. There was no other way, there
could
have been no other way. It would only require a single flash to tip them off.’ He paused, remembering, then grinned wryly. ‘It could have been myself. All this started just after I had been on watch – and Panayis didn’t have the glasses.’ He shook his head in mortification. ‘It must have been me, Andrea.’

‘I do not believe it,’ Andrea said flatly. ‘You couldn’t make a mistake like that, my Captain.’

‘Not only could, but did, I’m afraid. But we’ll worry about that afterwards.’ The middle of the ragged line of advancing soldiers, slipping and stumbling on the treacherous scree, had almost reached the lower limits of the blackened, stunted remains of the copse. ‘They’ve come far enough. I’ll take the white helmet in the middle, Louki.’ Even as he spoke he could hear the soft scrape as the three others slid their automatic barrels across and between the protective rocks in front of them, could feel the wave of revulsion that washed through his mind. But his voice was steady enough as he spoke, relaxed and almost casual. ‘Right. Let them have it now!’

His last words were caught up and drowned in the tearing, rapid-fire crash of the automatic carbines. With four machine-guns in their hands – two Brens and two 9 mm Schmeissers – it was no war, as he had said, but sheer, pitiful massacre, with the defenceless figures on the slope below, figures still stunned and uncomprehending, jerking, spinning round and collapsing like marionettes in the hands of a mad puppeteer, some to lie where they fell, others to roll down the steep slope, legs and arms flailing in the grotesque disjointedness of death. Only a couple stood still where they had been hit, vacant surprise mirrored in their lifeless faces, then slipped down tiredly to the stony ground at their feet. Almost three seconds had passed before the handful of those who still lived – about a quarter of the way in from either end of the line where the converging streams of fire had not yet met – realised what was happening and flung themselves desperately to the ground in search of the cover that didn’t exist.