The Complete Navarone (77 page)

Mallory flattened the chart on the filleting table. ‘The sea’s coming from the west.’ He pointed to the northerly bulge of the shore. ‘In behind here there’s a wreck; Guy’s friend Didier Jaulerry’s fishing boat went up the beach four months ago. Jaime says that with the sea from the west, you sometimes get a smooth patch in the lee of the wreck.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘During the bottom half of the tide. Till about 2100 hours tonight.’

Andrea said, ‘It’s not full dark at 2100.’

‘It is at 2130.’

Miller said, ‘But what if the waves are breaking clear over that wreck at 2130?’

Mallory folded the chart briskly, and stuck it in the pocket of his battledress blouse. ‘Oh, I expect we’ll manage,’ he said.

There was more silence. There was a lot to hope for. They had to hope that the
guarda-costa
had not got a radio message off, and that the dinghy would not be spotted by the Germans or smash against the cliff, and that the
Stella Maris
’ remaining complement would escape notice in San Eusebio.

The wind went up, and so did the waves. Lisette put her swollen ankles out of her bunk, and moved towards the filthy galley. Hugues stopped her. ‘I’ll cook,’ he said. ‘You rest.’

She looked at him with the dark-shadowed eyes of late pregnancy. He saw hostility and frustration. He said, ‘What is it?’ and tried to put his arm round her.

She pulled away. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’m tired.’ She turned her face to the wall. Hugues went grim-faced into the galley and rummaged in the boxes that lined the bulkhead. Half an hour later, smoke was issuing from the chimney, and the smell of frying onions mingled horribly with the stench of the
Stella
’s fish-hold. And in an hour, a stew of tomatoes, hard chorizo, onions and potatoes was steaming in a blackened tureen. Jaime pulled a bottle of suspiciously good red wine out of a locker. Mallory, Andrea and Miller sat themselves at the table in the saloon. Mallory and Andrea ate hard and long. There was no talk. This was the grim refuelling of war machines. At the end, Andrea poured another tumbler of wine, lit a cigarette and leaned back against the fishing boat’s side, eyes closed, humming a Greek tune full of Oriental runs and quarter-tones. Mallory looked across at him, the massive neck running into the colossal shoulders, the face peaceful in repose. He looked at Miller, smoking, pale-green under the eyes, in front of his largely untouched plate of stew. They looked like fishermen: tired fishermen, who smoked too much and drank too much when they could get hold of it. They looked like the kind of fishermen you would expect to find aboard this leaky boat with no bloody fish in the hold, and a smuggler, and an eight-months-pregnant woman, and the man who had got her pregnant.

They did not look like the cutting edge of a Storm Force whose task it was to climb a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot cliff in the dark, penetrate a strong and watchful garrison, and destroy the submarines of the Werwolf squadron.

Still, thought Mallory. Nobody would have believed the distance they had come to arrive at this point. But here they were. It was just a matter of carrying on: dividing the big problem into small, manageable problems, and solving them, one by one, with the tools at his disposal.

And a hell of a lot of luck.

Miller said, ‘I guess I’ll go turn in.’ He shambled forward to the bunks.

When they were alone, Andrea said, ‘What do you think about this?’

Mallory had known the Greek long enough to realise that he did not want an opinion, but a discussion. Mallory was in command of the expedition – there was no argument about that. But Andrea was a full colonel in the Greek army as well as one of the most dangerous and experienced guerrilla fighters in the Mediterranean. To fight at his most lethally efficient, Andrea needed to understand the situation.

Mallory said, ‘It’s a good place to keep some submarines.’

‘Some hidden submarines.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Good security.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And that patrol boat. That was part of the security?’

‘The gun crews looked German.’

‘True.’ Andrea stroked the place where his moustache should have been. ‘And that was a routine patrol.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Not based on specific information.’

Mallory shrugged. ‘No way of knowing,’ he said.

‘Quite.’

‘Do we trust all these people?’

Mallory had been wondering the same thing. Jaime had a smuggler’s capacity for double-dealing. Hugues was brave, but he had an irrational streak a mile wide. And Lisette … well, Lisette under Storm Force control was safer than Lisette at large.

‘We’ve got to,’ he said.

Andrea nodded. There was a pause. Then he said, ‘It seems to me that the Germans will have problems of their own.’

That had also occurred to Mallory. Spain was full of spies. To keep the occupation of Cabo de la Calavera secret, the garrison would be manned and supplied from the sea, or across the Pyrenees, by night. Either way, it would be a smuggling operation, with all the inconveniences attendant on such operations. And German efficiency or no German efficiency, it seemed likely that a garrison hastily convened and furtively supplied would be a less well-organised garrison than the garrison of, say, Navarone. Confusion would be to the Storm Force’s advantage.

Andrea poured the last of the wine into the two glasses, and raised his to Mallory. ‘My Keith,’ he said. ‘Victory, or a clean death.’

‘And two days’ kip to follow,’ said Mallory.

He thought, in five hours, we will be on hard rock again, climbing. He raised his own glass and drank. Andrea swung his boots up onto the bench, put his head on his pack, and closed his eyes.

The door opened. Miller came in.

At first, Mallory thought he had been shot. His face was bloodless, his lips the colour of ashes. But he was walking well, braced against the heave of the
Stella Maris
’ deck. In his hands he was carrying the big, brass-bound boxes that held his explosives and his fuses.

Mallory said, ‘Sleep first. Check gear later.’

Miller shook his head. He did not speak: it was as if something had happened that had removed his voice. He lifted the boxes and placed them side by side on the gutting table. He unlatched them, opened the lids, and gestured at the contents.

If the Storm Force was a bomb, the personnel were the fuse and the casing and the fins. What was inside those two brass-bound mahogany boxes was the charge: the stuff that would do the job, blast those three Werwolf submarines into water-filled hulks and save the lives of all those men crammed into transports on the Channel.

Mallory looked into the boxes. His mouth became dry. His mind went back six hours, to the bay of St-Jean-de-Luz, the red ball of the sun hauling itself up through the fog, the heavy explosions coming from the land. He had thought that Commandant Cendrars’ old soldiers had got their hands on some quarry explosive.

He had been wrong.

They had been fifteen minutes on the cliff at Martigny, while Andrea disposed of the pillbox and Mallory and Miller had explained their wishes to the sentries. During that fifteen minutes, the boxes had been in the care of Commandant Cendrars’ enthusiastic veterans.

The veterans had profited from those fifteen minutes. Possibly their arsenal had been running low, or possibly they merely suffered from an enthusiastic lightness of finger. Whichever the case, the outcome was the same.

The brass-bound boxes that had contained the explosives and detonators that were going to blow the Werwolf pack to hell now contained, besides a few blades of wet grass and a couple of small stones, half a hundredweight of best Martigny mud.

There was a silence that seemed to last five years. It was Andrea who broke it. He yawned. ‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘Now I must sleep.’

‘Take the bunk,’ said Miller, through lips numb with shock.

‘Thank you,’ said Andrea, and shuffled bear-like into the sleeping cabin. It was as if he understood Miller’s sense of failure, and attached to it little enough weight to accept the offer of the bunk as full reparation.

Miller said, ‘I let it out of my sight.’ Never let your tools out of your sight. If you carry a gun, carry it at all times. Keep your knife strapped on, even in the bathtub. And never, ever, leave your Cyclonite and your detonators to be guarded by heroes of the Marne with the wind under their tails. ‘We have grenades.’

‘Ten grenades,’ said Mallory. His knees felt weak. He was sweating. So this is how it ends, he thought.

Miller said, ‘Four. We used eight on the patrol boat.’ He was thinking again. ‘Anyway, grenades won’t work on U-boat pressure hulls.’ But he did not say it nervously. He said it in a measured, judicious voice, like a prosecution lawyer assessing the chances of convicting a known murderer on circumstantial evidence. If grenades would not work, the voice implied, it would be necessary to find something else that would.

Mallory heard that new voice.

For a moment, he had felt it all slipping away from him. That was because in his exhaustion he had forgotten that this was Dusty Miller, who had destroyed the guns at Navarone and the dam at Zenica, not to mention an Afrika Korps ammunition dump with a Cairo tart’s hairpins. Confidence began to tiptoe back into Mallory’s thoughts.

‘So I guess they’ll have a magazine there,’ said Miller. ‘And they’ll have to load the torpedoes some time. Your torpedoes take up most of the space on a U-boat. You couldn’t refit with torpedoes on board, could you?’ He folded his hands. ‘So there’s that. And then there’s the engines. Those Walter engines. Hydrogen peroxide, you said. Fuel oil. Water. Interesting stuff, hydrogen peroxide.’ He leaned his long back against the bulkhead, hands folded across his concave stomach, boots propped on the opposite bench, eyes closed. He seemed to be thinking.

Finally, Mallory could stand it no longer. ‘What about hydrogen peroxide?’ he said.

But Miller was asleep.

Mallory thought about waking him, then decided against it. If the Werwolf pack was sailing tomorrow at noon, would they not already have loaded the torpedoes? And what was so interesting about hydrogen peroxide?

He lit another cigarette. Relax, he told himself. Miller and Andrea were of the opinion that the operation was possible. So the operation was possible. Easy as that.

Within thirty seconds, Mallory, too, was asleep.

It was the gulls that were the first sign. All afternoon, after the turn of the tide, they had been thickening in the sky. When Mallory went on deck, groggy in the mind after too little and too shallow sleep, their cries filled the air.

The
Stella Maris
had moved out to sea again. A stiffish breeze was blowing from the northwest, and on it the gulls slid and balanced with frantic voices and perfect self-possession. The wind seemed to be blowing out of the sun, which had appeared pale and brilliant below the roof of grey cloud. It was twenty minutes before sunset, but there was no red in that sun. It glared like a big metal eye across the water, draining the colour from everything its rays touched, making the
Stella Maris
black and the seas grey, and the cliffs the dull non-colour of slate. And shining into the eyes of anyone watching from the land.

Mallory lit a cigarette, stuck it between the nicotine-stained fingers of his left hand, and pulled his Zeiss glasses out of their case. He panned the disc of vision across the crawling waves until he found the black line of the land: a flat black line, a continuous cliff, marred here and there by pillars of rock over which a mist of spray hung, silvering the towers of gulls. He moved the glasses to the west.

The line of the cliff suddenly rose into a rounded hump, sheer-sided. The sides plunged straight down into the sea. The structure looked like a steel helmet, or a skull. Cabo de la Calavera. The cape of the skull.

Mallory breathed smoke, and made a fine adjustment to the focus wheel.

On the crown of the skull, at the apex, a stubby white pencil jutted skyward: the lighthouse. The lighthouse was not showing a light. To the right of the lighthouse, on what might have been the skull’s forehead, were square-edged masses, topped by a tower. The fortress: an efficient fortress, dug into the cliff to cover the entrance to the harbour of San Eusebio. He moved the disc of the glasses eastward, along the spine of the ridge.

There was a structure of some kind slung across what must have been the throat of the peninsula, but they were too far away for Mallory to see what it was. He could guess, though. It looked like a stone wall, probably with battlements and a moat. The Germans would have supplemented it with a line of fences and trenches. As far as he could tell, it stopped abruptly some distance above the sea – where the cliff became vertical, he guessed. The base of the cliff was a continuous line of white water.

Mallory walked aft. Jaime was at the wheel. Mallory said, ‘You have come out of some port. You are in trouble. You are making repairs to the engine. Do you know anybody in San Eusebio?’

‘Only professionally.’

‘That will do. Get estimates for repairs.’ Mallory pointed at the radio set in the wheelhouse. ‘That work?’

Jaime grinned. ‘A smuggler’s radio always works.’

‘Keep it switched on. Now let’s go ashore.’