The Complete Navarone (71 page)

He hoped that Hugues and Lisette were in the sort of mental state that permitted clear thinking. He doubted it.

Quiet as a shadow, he slid away through the bushes. Ten minutes later, he was back in the farmyard.

Mallory said, ‘Where’s Hugues?’

Miller told him.

Mallory lit a cigarette. Then he dropped it on the floor and stamped it out, and shouldered into his webbing. ‘We’re off,’ he said.

‘Off where?’ said Miller.

‘Martigny.’

‘What if they talk?’

‘They talk,’ said Mallory. ‘The Germans will react. If they don’t react, nobody’s talked.’

And if they do, thought Miller, gloomily, we’re dead.

Again.

There was a peak in the Southern Alps that had done this to him: Mount Capps, a treacherous peak, full of crevasses and rotten rock, its upper slopes decorated with snow fields that in the morning sun fired salvoes of boulders and later in the day became loose on their foundations and came slithering down like tank regiments, roaring and trailing plumes of pulverised rock and ice.

Mallory had left his base camp on the third day of the climb, leaving Beryl and George, his companions, waiting. He had bivouacked in the lee of a huge rock, halfway up an ice field, and spent a cold, restless night among the cracks and booms of the refreezing ice.

He had woken at four, and gone out. The sky had been clear, the peak of Mount Capps a peaceful pyramid of pink-tinged sugar icing over whose slopes Venus hung like a silver ball. It was a beautiful morning.

Mallory had walked ten feet away from the tent, into the cover of the rocks he used as his lavatory. He dropped his trousers.

A rumble came from the mountain. Feathers of snow fluttered away from the rocks. The rumble became a roar. He looked back at his tent.

A fifty-foot wall of snow and ice and rock thundered across his field of vision. It must have been moving at two hundred miles an hour. The icy breath of its passage slammed him against the rocks.

Ears ringing, he dragged himself back on his feet.

In the tent had been his pack, with spare ropes, food, extra clothes, sleeping bag.

The tent was gone. In its place was a deep, rubble-filled scar in the mountainside. All he had left was the rope he had taken to the rocks, his ice axe, and the fact that he had been climbing mountains since his tenth birthday.

Mallory buckled his trousers. Beryl and George were down there, waiting for him. They had spent six weeks planning this expedition. Nobody had ever climbed the southeast face of Mount Capps.

Mallory had thought at four o’clock that December morning, nine thousand feet above sea level: Beryl and George and the rest of the team are counting on you. It is not just your life. You have responsibilities. So you get killed going up. On this mountain you are just as likely to get killed going down. Three hours to the summit, then nine hours to base camp.

If you are going to die, you might as well die advancing as die retreating.

So he had shouldered his single coil of rope and his ice axe, and made it back to base camp in eight hours.

Via the summit.

The papers had said he was a hero. As far as Mallory was concerned, he had done the job, and not let the team down, and that was enough.

And now the team were out there on the south coast of England, hundreds of thousands strong, waiting to embark on the transports.

It was a job with risks. But that did not make it any less of a job.

They left quickly across the fields, Andrea carrying Wallace. There had been very little sleep: enough to make men groggy and dazed, but not enough for anything approaching rest. As they tramped through the orchards and fields of young corn it was raining again, and a blustery wind clattered branch against branch.

The town lay in darkness under the evening sky. Night fell as Jaime led them round its southern fringes, crossing darkened roads, climbing a couple of low ridges and scrambling down terraces. Engines were roaring in St-Jean-de-Luz. On the other side of the bay the Germans were moving, there was no way of telling where, or who against. All they could do was hope that the movements had nothing to do with Hugues and Lisette.

One step at a time.

‘Wait here,’ said Jaime.

They had arrived on a cobbled lane that headed steeply downhill. At the bottom of the lane water flexed like a sheet of metal.

Jaime drifted off into the dark.

Mallory said, ‘Andrea. Recce?’

Andrea put Wallace down behind a wall, in what might have been a potato patch, and gently pressed a Schmeisser into his hand. Wallace’s head was buzzing with fever and morphine. At first, he had thought that these people were SOE bunglers, rank amateurs. Now he had changed his mind, or what was left of it. They were the coolest, most matter-of-factly competent team he had ever met up with. It was something that he would never have admitted to himself if he had been a well man. But frankly, they were a lot better than any SAS he had ever seen.

Think rugby. Think of a team that has trained itself not by running up and down the pitch and practising, but by playing first-class matches, and winning. Team spirit was for children. These men were in a different league.

Wallace wanted to live up to their standards. But it was hard to know how. He knew enough about wounds to know he was bad; really bad. Behind the morphine he was cold, except for the big, throbbing lump in his stomach. The lump seemed to be getting bigger, sending sickly fingers of poison into the rest of his body. Should have rested it, he thought. Should have stayed in the brothel.

But staying in the brothel would have meant a German bullet, probably with torture first.

There had been torture, bouncing along those dark, wet passages underground, metal twisting in his belly, burning up with fever, all those weeks – was it only hours? – ago. But it was a torture you could come through, if you were one of a team of grown men.

Hell of a life. Wallace felt the fever-taut skin of his face stretch in a grin. You think you’re doing fine in the children’s team, with the bombs and the Jeeps and the old gung ho. Then you get into the men’s team, and for a minute or two you feel like a man.

And after that, what?

Andrea went quietly over the back garden walls of the village. Somewhere a dog began to bark. Soon all the dogs were barking. In one of the houses a man flung open a window and swore. A light drizzle fell. At the base of the hill – more a cliff, really – the sea shifted silver under the sky.

But for the lack of lights, it could have been peacetime. Somewhere in Andrea’s mind there appeared the memory of a wedding, long tables with bottles, laughter and tobacco smoke rising into the hot Aegean night, the moon coming up out of deep blue water. This place could have been like that. And would be again.

But the memory was small, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope, shrunk not by lenses, but by years of war. It was suffocated by the picture of his parents’ bodies, bloodless on the shingle bank of the river. It was suffocated by a choir of death-grunts, and hundreds of night-stalks on which Andrea had not been a full colonel in the Greek army – had hardly indeed been human; had been a huge, lethal animal with a mind full of death.

Andrea slid over the last of the garden walls, and walked across the field that led to the edge of the low cliff. There was a jetty at the bottom of the village, a crook of stone quay in whose shelter a couple of dinghies shifted uneasily on outhaul moorings.

The rain swished gently down. Andrea watched, patient as stone.

And was rewarded.

Down there in the lee of a shed at the root of the quay, a match flared, illuminating a face under the sharp-cut brim of a steel helmet, silhouetting a second helmet.

The rain fell. The dogs were still barking. Andrea returned the way he had come.

Mallory, Miller and Jaime were already under the wall.

‘Pillbox on the hill opposite,’ said Mallory. ‘Covers the harbour.’

‘Two sentries,’ said Andrea. ‘On the quay. No pillbox this side.’

‘No soldiers in the village,’ said Miller. ‘This Guy’s house is the third house up from the quay.’

‘Bring Wallace,’ said Mallory.

The dogs were still barking as the five of them went over three walls and came to the back of a cottage. A dog lunged at Andrea, yelling with rage. Andrea laid a great paw on its head and spoke quietly to it in Greek: soothing, earthy words, the words of a man used to working with animals. The dog fell silent. Very quickly, Mallory opened the back door. Miller and Jaime were well into the room before the man at the table even realised they were there.

He was small and thin, with a bald, brown head, a much-broken nose and crooked yellow teeth. There was a spoon in his right hand, a wedge of bread in his left. He was eating something out of a bowl.

He looked up, mouth hanging open, eyes shifting, looking for ways of escape and finding none. He took a deep breath, and prepared to speak.

‘We are friends of Admiral Beaufort,’ said Jaime. ‘Monsieur Guy Jamalartégui?’

The black eyes narrowed. The mouth closed and recommenced chewing. The head nodded. The mouth said, ‘Have you brought the money?’

‘We have.’

Jamalartégui said, ‘There are a lot of you. Only one person will speak at a time. There are Germans.’

‘Four in the pillbox. Two on the quay,’ said Mallory. ‘Is that all?’

Jamalartégui nodded. ‘Unless we get a patrol.’ He looked vaguely impressed. Andrea laid Wallace in a chair by the stove. Wallace was breathing badly. His face was bluish-white.

For a moment there was silence, except for the wheeze of the cooking range and the rattle of rain against the windows. There was a smell of garlic and tomatoes, wine and wood smoke.

‘Jaime,’ said Mallory. ‘Interpret.’

Jamalartégui dug thick glass tumblers and bowls out of the cupboard by the range, and spread them on the table. ‘The Germans steal the meat,’ he said. ‘But there are eggs, and many fish in the sea.’ He got up, and threw onions, peppers and eggs into a frying pan. The room filled with the smell.
‘Piperade
,’ he said.

Then there was silence.

Mallory ate until he could eat no more. Then he mopped his plate with bread and refilled his wine glass. He said to Jaime, ‘Tell him he has some information for me.’

‘I am a poor fisherman,’ said Jamalartégui, after Jaime had spoken. ‘One does not eat without paying.’

‘What is a meal, without conversation?’ said Jaime. Mallory did not understand the words, but he understood the tone of voice. He reached into his pack, took out the watertight box, and opened it. In the dim yellow light of the oil lamp it was packed with sheets of white paper, bearing a copperplate inscription and the signature of Mr Peppiatt, Chief Cashier of the Bank of England. ‘One thousand pounds,’ said Mallory. ‘For the information, and transport to the site.’

The old man’s eyes rested on the five-pound notes. They glittered. He opened his mouth to haggle. ‘Take it or leave it,’ said Mallory.

‘I take half now,’ said Guy, through Jaime.

‘No.’

‘Perhaps you will not like the information I will give you.’

‘We shall see. Now talk.’

‘How do I know –’

Mallory stiffened in his chair. ‘Tell him that it is the duty of a British officer not to abuse the hospitality of an ally.’

Jaime spoke. Guy shrugged. Mallory watched him. This was the moment: the crucial moment, when they would know whether they were on a military operation or a wild-goose chase. The moment for which many people had died.

There was a silence that seemed to last for hours. Mallory found he was holding his breath.

Finally, Guy said,
‘Bien.’
Mallory let his breath out. Guy began to talk.

‘It is like this,’ said Jaime, when he had finished. ‘He has seen these submarines. They are at a place called San Eusebio.’

In his mind, Mallory searched the map. The coast of France south of Bordeaux was straight and low-lying: a hundred and fifty miles of beach, continuously battered by a huge Atlantic surf. The only ports of refuge were Hendaye, St-Jean-de-Luz, Bayonne, Capbreton and Arcachon: all shallow, all unsatisfactory for three gigantic submarines. He did not remember seeing any San Eusebio on the map. So we have been looking in the wrong place, he thought. All those people have died in vain.

He said, ‘Where’s that?’

‘Fifty kilometres from here.’ Mallory felt the blood course once again through his veins. All they needed to do was pinpoint the place and call in an air strike. The bombers would do the rest. Even if the submarines were in hardened pens – unlikely, or he would have heard of them – there were the new earthquake bombs –

‘In Spain,’ said Jaime.

Mallory felt cool air in his mouth. His jaw was hanging open. He said, ‘Spain is a neutral country.’

Jaime’s dark Basque face was impassive. He shrugged. ‘But that is where they are. To be in a neutral country could be a convenience,
hein?
And Franco and Hitler are both of them Fascists,
c’est pareil.’