The Complete Navarone (64 page)

Marcel’s face had turned as white as his flour. He said, ‘What are you doing?’

‘Fighting a war,’ said the officer. ‘When we have these people out here, we shall shoot one every ten minutes until I am told the truth. Your bread will be burning, baker.’ He smiled. ‘You had better go.’

Miller had been with the Long Range Desert Force, so he had been hot all right. But nothing on the parched ergs or the wind-blasted scarps of the Sahara had prepared him for the heat behind that bread oven.

He kept talking. He could feel that Mallory needed to be talked to. It was not easy to talk while being cooked, but it must, he thought, be a lot easier to talk while you were only hot than while you were hot and in a state of flat panic. Andrea talked too, reminiscing in a low rumble about the cave in Crete where he and Mallory had resided. And all the time the heat grew, hotter and hotter, searing the skin. There were smells, too: wood smoke and baking smells, with over it all another baking smell that Miller recognised but did not want to mention. It was the smell of confectioner’s almonds; the smell of gelignite cooking in its box.

There was a consolation, thought Miller. A small one. If the gelignite set off the Cyclonite, it was going to take some Germans with it. Not to mention the village of Colbis, and a fair-sized chunk of the northern Pyrenees –

A new sound floated through the wall: a harsh judder, dulled by layers of stone. The sound of a machine gun.

Mallory knew he had won. He had beaten his glands, or whatever it was that weakened the knees and liquefied the guts. The machine gun had taken him into the outside world. He was thinking ahead now. ‘We’re going to need transport to St-Jean-de-Luz.’

‘Transport?’

‘It’s thirty miles by road. The submarines sail the day after tomorrow, at noon. It’s too tight to march.’

‘Bicycles?’

There was a silence. They were all thinking the same: a pregnant woman and an SAS man with a bullet in the guts were no good on bicycles. A ruthless man who wanted to move fast would leave such impediments behind. Mallory did not know if he was that ruthless. Luckily, there was no chance of his being tested. The SAS man and Lisette knew too much to be allowed to fall into enemy hands.

Like it or not, they were along for the ride.

The SAS man had been lying very still, conserving energy in the heat, listening to the three men talking. Chattering was for girls and wimps and other classes of humanity despised by the SAS. Now he said, ‘There’s a Jeep.’

A Jeep. Presumably with Union Jacks all over it, two-way radios, heavy machine guns, mobile cocktail bar and sun lounge. You could not beat the SAS. Not unless you were the enemy.

‘Well, well,’ said Miller. ‘This is excellent news.’

Mallory said, ‘Where?’

‘In the barn at the back of the bakery. It’s the Jeep they dropped with us. Under the bracken. Marcel told me they brought it in.’

Mallory said, ‘Thank you, er …’

‘Wallace.’ Miller was surprised to feel a hand reach across him. He shook it. It shook his back. So that’s all right, he thought. We’ve been introduced, and now he’s lending us his car. And we’re walled up in an oven, cooking.

Goddamn limeys.

There was a new sound outside: a voice, at one of the air holes. Marcel’s voice. ‘You must come out,’ said the voice.

‘We’ll take the Jeep.’

‘Yes.’ The voice sounded strained. ‘You must go away from here. You know where. Your comrades are by the barn. Go soon.’

‘Just open the door.’

‘Yes.’

A pause. There were movements, felt in the walls rather than heard. Someone was raking the fuel out of the oven. The door separating them from the oven opened, admitting a scorching blast of air. ‘Tray coming in,’ said Marcel’s voice.

Afterwards, Mallory could not remember how they got out. There was a hellish blast of heat, and a smell of burning hair, and then they were standing in the bakehouse, surrounded by large, beautiful volumes of space.

The barn,’ said Marcel. He looked suddenly thinner, and his face was a bad greyish colour. ‘Follow me.’

Andrea gave Wallace his shoulder. They went into the yard and through a green door. The barn was half-full of bundles of dry bracken stalks.
‘Allons,’
said Marcel, and began tearing with more frenzy than effect at the faggots on the right-hand side. ‘Here.’

They began pulling the bundles away. After a couple of minutes the rear bumper of a vehicle emerged from the bracken.

‘Hey,’
said Miller. ‘SAS, we love you.’

The vehicle was a Jeep, but not just any Jeep. There was no cocktail bar, and no sun lounge, but they were about the only amenities missing. Mounted in the rear were a pair of Brownings. There was another pair mounted on the hood in front of the passenger seat. The ammunition belts were still in place.

‘Here are the other passengers now,’ said Marcel. ‘They have been in bed. Perhaps sleeping, perhaps not.’ He made a sound that might have been a laugh.

Thierry, Hugues and Jaime lurched into the barn. Thierry’s hat had a slept-in look. Hugues’ eyes were snapping, and he was chewing his lips. He said, ‘Where is Lisette?’

There was a spreading of hands and a shrugging of shoulders. Jaime said, ‘She is tired. Sleeping. It is best we leave.’ His face was grim. ‘She has good false papers. She will be safe there.’

Perhaps he was right, thought Mallory. He had better be. There was no time to dig her out wherever she was resting. It was a hitch, but not a setback.

Hugues said,
‘Non, merde
–’

‘Jaime is right,’ said Marcel. Another burst of Spandau fire sounded from the square. He looked as if he was going to cry. He said, ‘Please. Be quick. Someone will talk.’

‘Talk?’

‘They are shooting people. One every ten minutes.’ His face collapsed. He put his hands to his eyes.

Hugues said, ‘For God’s sake, be a man.’

Marcel looked at him vacantly. His cheeks were wet with tears. He said, ‘The first person they shot was my mother.’

Hugues went red as blood, then pale.

‘God rest her soul,’ mumbled Andrea.

Mallory said, ‘She has died that others may live. We thank you for her great courage. And yours.’

Marcel met his eye firmly. He said,
‘Vive la France.’
He took a deep breath. ‘For her sake, I ask that you complete your mission.’

‘It will be done.’

He shook Mallory’s hand. Andrea put his great paw on his shoulder.

Hugues said, ‘I leave Lisette in your care.’

‘I am honoured,’ said Marcel. ‘Now you must go. Then I can make them stop.’

‘How?’

‘I will tell the girls to say they saw you.’

‘The girls?’

‘They are friends with some of the Germans. The Germans who come to this brothel. That is why they leave us alone. Used to leave us alone. The Germans will not hurt the girls.’

Mallory said, ‘How do we get out?’

‘Drive ahead,’ said Marcel. ‘The entry is beyond the bracken.’

Hugues said, ‘I must say goodbye to Lisette.’

‘You must go,’ said Marcel. ‘Please.’ He rummaged in a crate, came back with four bottles of Cognac. ‘Take these. Go.’

‘Non,’
said Hugues, his voice rising. ‘The child –’

He did not finish what he was going to say because Andrea had reached out a crane-hook hand and gripped his shoulder. Andrea said, ‘Like this brave Marcel, you are a soldier,’ and pushed him into the back of the Jeep.

Hugues said, shamefaced, ‘Tell her I love her.’

Marcel nodded dumbly.

‘Miller,’ said Mallory. ‘Drive on.’

‘By the square?’

Mallory turned upon him his cool brown eyes. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Don’t you?’

The Jeep’s engine started first time. They lifted Wallace into the back and climbed aboard as best they could. The engine sounded very loud in the confined space. It would sound very loud in the village, too; there were no other engines running in Colbis.

Miller slammed the Jeep into four-wheel drive. The engine howled as he stamped on the throttle. He let out the clutch. The Jeep plunged into the dried bracken, and kept on plunging. The brittle fronds piled up against the windscreen and spilled into the back. Miller saw daylight, and aimed for it. Covered in a haystack mound of bracken, the Jeep shot out of the barn doorway and into the lane, turned on two wheels, and turned right again. At the end of the lane was a slice of the square, with plane trees. In the slice of square, three SS men were crouched round a Spandau. ‘Civilians keep down,’ said Mallory, cocking the Brownings on the bonnet and flicking off the safety catches. ‘Open fire.’

The Spandau gunners did not enjoy shooting innocent civilians. It was, frankly, a disagreeable duty, only marginally better than cleaning latrines. But
Befehl ist Befehl
. Orders are orders.

They were sitting there, ignoring the two clusters of bloody pockmarks on the church wall above the crumpled bodies of their first two victims, and concentrating on the third victim, the priest’s housekeeper, a thin, slope-shouldered old woman, standing stiffly to attention in a flannel dressing gown. The machine gunners were looking grim and efficient, because they were dying for a smoke. The sooner they got this over with, the better –

From the back of the square came a clatter like a giant typewriter. Something hammered the Spandau into the air and sent it spinning, tripod and all, across the square. Ricochets whined into the sky. Two of the machine gunners performed sudden ragged acrobatics and fell down. The third had enough time to spin round and think,
machine-gun fire
, and see a haystack with four wheels howling out of an alleyway, the muzzle-flash of machine guns dancing in the hay, which seemed to be catching fire. Then a succession of hammers walloped the last gunner in the chest and his legs lost their strength and his mouth filled with blood. And as his head bounced limply on the pavé of the square he saw his comrades, drawn up in lines, start tumbling like corn before the scythe, and heard the
whoomp
of a petrol tank exploding.

Then the machine gunner’s eyes grew dim, and he died.

Miller yanked the Jeep’s steering wheel to the right. The main road out of the square gaped in front of him. The clatter of the Brownings was a mechanical thunder in his ears. Something was burning, with a smell that reminded him of burning tumbleweeds when he had worked a summer in the Kansas oil fields. It was not tumbleweed, of course. It was bracken, set on fire by the muzzle-flashes of the heavy machine guns. It was dry as tinder, that bracken. Mallory and Andrea were still firing short sharp bursts. Miller yelled, ‘Get it off!’

From the square there came a higher, sharper crackle: rifle fire. A bullet spanged off the Jeep’s suspension and moaned away skyward.

Mallory said, calmly, ‘Fire low.’

A patrol of Germans had appeared in the road ahead. The Brownings thundered. More bullets cracked over the Jeep. Then the Germans were down, rolling, and the suspension was jouncing as the wheels went over the bodies. The street behind had vanished in a pall of grey-white smoke. The houses were thinning. The crackle of the bracken was a roar.

‘Get rid of it!’ yelled Miller.

Hugues’ coat was smouldering as he unfolded himself from the bed of the Jeep. He was coughing, his eyes streaming. He began to kick blazing faggots of bracken onto the road. Jaime was doing it too, and Thierry, who was making small, frightened prodding movements, clearing his precious radio first.

‘St-Jean-de-Luz,’ said Mallory, over the slipstream. ‘Which way?’

‘Up the road,’ said Jaime. ‘Then there’s a track.’ He brushed burning bracken from his sleeve.
‘Merde.’

There were strips of blue sky between heavy squalls of cloud. The last of the bracken lay fuming in the road, receding fast. Ahead the pavé stretched, polished black and gently curving. It was the main road out of the valley. A road crawling with Germans – Germans who would by now have found out by radio that a unit of the British army was on the loose in a Jeep. At least, Mallory hoped they would think they were a unit of the British army. That way, there might be no civilian reprisals.

But how had the Germans known to come to Colbis?

It seems quite possible that the Germans will, in a manner of speaking, be waiting for you
.

Mallory said, ‘Where were you hiding in the village?’

‘They spread us round,’ said Jaime. ‘Me, I was in the brothel. In bed. In the most innocent way, of course.’

‘But they searched the brothel.’

‘My papers are in order,’ said Jaime. His face was dark and closed. ‘What have I to fear?’

Mallory nodded. Unanswered questions buzzed around his ears like flies.

‘Left,’ said Jaime.

Left was a track that turned off the main road, crept along the side of a mountain and into a wood. The Jeep ground through a deserted farmyard and onto a road of ancient cobbles.

‘The back way,’ said Jaime. ‘Arrives close to St-Jean-de-Luz. The main road goes down the valley and joins the big road to St-Jean-de-Luz at the foot of the mountains. This one takes us over a hill, into a valley, then over another hill, and down to St-Jean. But it is only good for mule or Jeep. It’s a small road. It doesn’t run over the frontier, so the Germans don’t pay much attention to it.’