The Complete Navarone (78 page)

‘How are you getting ashore?’ said Jaime.

Mallory said, ‘We’ll manage.’ At this stage in the expedition, there was no sense in telling anyone on the
Stella Maris
any more than he needed to know. He looked at his watch. It said 2015. ‘We’ll get to you before 1500 tomorrow. Be alongside the fish quay. We’ll sail immediately we’re on board.’

‘For where?’

Mallory looked pious. ‘The Lord will provide,’ he said.

Jaime looked at the black rock skull of the Cabo, with its cloud of gulls, tinted by the now-pinkening sun. ‘A-okay,’ he said.
‘Bonne chance.’

The
Stella Maris
’ nose turned and settled on the brow of the skull. The sun was sinking fast now, and as it sank its pink turned to blood, dabbling the cloud-roof with crimson. ‘Looks like hell,’ said Jaime.

‘Sorry?’ said Mallory. To him it looked like a sunset, followed by a hard climb in the dark.

‘No importa,’
said Jaime.

Darkness fell.

An hour later, Mallory, Miller and Andrea were in the
Stella Maris
’ dinghy, heaving up and down on the seven-foot swell rolling out of the Atlantic wastes. The pant of the
Stella
’s engine was receding eastward. In the dinghy with the three men were the two coils of wire-cored climbing rope, three Schmeissers with five spare magazines each, and the grenades. They were dressed in Waffen-SS smocks, camouflage trousers and steel helmets. In the breast pocket of his smock, Mallory carried the special pitons Jonas Schenck had made for him in 1938, out of the rear springs of a Model A Ford. Anything else they needed they would have to find on the Cabo.

At least, that was the idea.

Miller sat in the bow of the boat, his knees close to his ears, clutching the lock of his machine pistol to keep out the wet. Miller was fairly sure that this was it: the end. He would not have minded, except that he did not wish the end, when it came, to have anything to do with the sea. Miller had had enough of the sea.

The dinghy rose and sank again, vertiginously, on a glossy black wave like the back of a man-eating animal. Andrea dug in the oars and took a couple of strokes towards the darkness above the booming white line that separated vertical rock from Atlantic ocean.

There,’ said Mallory.

In the line of white there was a break; the merest hint of a break, the sort of paling that would come of a wave whose force was spent before it hit the wall. Spent, for instance, by the wreck of a fishing boat once the property of a M. Jaulerry, impaled on the boulders at the base of the cliff.

Miller thought, we will at any rate have the advantage of surprise. And if we live, nobody will be as surprised as me.

Then Andrea gave a final heave and the dinghy went up on the back of another wave, as huge and black as the last. Only this one did not stay huge and black, but while the dinghy was on its crest turned white and foaming, insufficiently substantial to support the dinghy, which was falling, with the whole of the rest of the world, stern-first, in a cataclysm of water that made a sound like an earthquake, and had no bottom –

They found the bottom. They found it with a sudden splintering crash that knocked the seat from under Miller. He discovered that things previously available for holding on to were no longer available for that purpose. Then the wave had him, and he was rolling away somewhere, he could not tell where, except that he had a Schmeisser slung round him, a couple of kilos of negative buoyancy that were going to drag him to a watery grave among the boulders at the base of the cliff, and he thought, so this is it.

But then something had him by the collar of his smock, and was dragging him in the opposite direction from the direction in which the water wanted to take him. And he was out of that black whirl, and on something hard and slimy that he realised must be the deck of the wrecked fishing boat. And Andrea’s voice was saying into his ear, ‘When we get ashore, check your weapon.’ And things were back to normal.

Or what passed for normal, on the seaward side of the Cabo de la Calavera.

At the base of the cliff was a beach of boulders which had fallen from the crags above, forming a sort of glacis on which the waves beat themselves to white tatters. The fishing boat had hit this beach, been driven up to its summit, and landed wedged with a northeast-southwest orientation, its bow rammed against the main face of the cliff, which ran east-west.

Mallory, Andrea and Miller crouched for a moment on the slimy deck, tilted away from the hammer of the seas, feeling the concussion of the rollers in their bones. Then Mallory handed his Schmeisser to Andrea, slung one of the coils of rope over his shoulder, and stepped on nailed soles down the deck towards the ink-black rise of the cliff.

The first ten feet were boulders, slippery with bladder wrack, treacherous in the complete blackness, but by no means steep. Mallory went up carefully but fast, until his hands met something that was not seaweed. Lichen. Then a cushion of vegetation set in sand and peat that crumbled under his fingers. His fingers crawled above it, looking for a hold. They found loose rock. The cliffs of Cabo de la Calavera were not as solid as they looked.

He glanced downwards. The backwash of the breaking waves was a broad white road, cut aslant by the hull of the fishing boat. He felt wet on his face as a big wave hit.

He started to climb.

It was a bad climb. The rock down here was as rotten as cheese, and a sparse vegetation of moss and sea-thrift had taken hold in the cracks. Each hold meant a sweep with the fingers to remove loose soil, a gradual increase of pressure from the fingers until they bore his full weight, resting on at least two firm points while he tested a third, slow and sure, never committing himself. He went up the cliff inch by inch, chest sore from the cigarettes of the past three days, finger muscles burning, horribly aware of the clatter of loose stone down the cliff below him.

After five minutes the climbing became mechanical, as it always did: a delicate shifting of balance from hold to hold, working from the hips, so he seemed to float rather than crawl. And the part of his mind not filled with testing holds and balancing on rock went ahead, onto the Cabo. There were Totenkopf-SS up here, from what Guy had said. There would be Wehrmacht too. And Kriegsmarine, and dockyard workers. A force hastily assembled, wearing a diversity of uniforms, strangers to each other, probably in the final stages of preparing for departure. There would be confusion. Mallory devoutly hoped it would be a confusion he could exploit.

He was seventy feet up now. The wind was battering his ears, and the rumble of the seas had receded until it had become a dull, continuous roar. He reached out his hand for the next hold, fumbling like a blind man.

Suddenly he was no longer blind. Suddenly his hand emerged from the darkness, a pale spider groping its way across quartz and matrix towards the dark shadow of a hold. The cliff face had come into an odd, shadowed relief, a landscape of vertical hills and vales stretching down to a sea whose waves now looked not so much black as silver-grey.

And above the horizon of the cliff, where the sky had been a matt emptiness of squally cloud, there had taken place the change that had brought about all the other changes. The squalls had turned and separated. Between them fingers of deep black sky had appeared, specked with the needle-tips of stars. And into one of those bottomless chasms of darkness swam like a silver lamp a brilliant quarter moon.

Mallory froze, clinging to the face of the cliff. Far below, he saw white surf and the wreck of the fishing boat sheltering its tiny eddy of black water. He could distinctly see shattered wreckage from the dinghy spinning in the vortex. This was bad. Potentially, this was very bad. All it needed was a casual glance down the moonlit cliff. The Storm Force would be pinned down, brushed off the rock face like flies. And the Werwolf pack would sail at noon tomorrow, unmolested.

The wind blew, eddied, became for a second still.

Directly above Mallory’s head, someone coughed.

Mallory’s stillness intensified until it was like the stillness of the rock face itself. He turned his eyes upwards. The moon was sliding towards a lip of cloud. But before it went and darkness swept back over the cliff, he saw something he had not noticed before.

Up there on the cliff face was an overhang of rock too regular to be natural.

The coughing came again. There was a brief splash of yellow light. A little spark dropped past Mallory’s head. A spent match.

Mallory eased his feet on their minute ledges, and leaned in against the cliff. He turned his face upwards and watched.

To his dark-accustomed eyes, the regular glow of the cigarette was as bright as a lighthouse. Against it, he analysed the little bulge of masonry projecting from the cliff. It was a half-moon of stone or concrete, a demilune, a strongpoint built out from a narrow ledge of the cliff. Mallory rested, recreating in his mind the fortifications of the Cabo. This would be the seaward end of the line of fortifications running across the neck of the peninsula.

The moon slid out again. By its light he could see the joins in the masonry. Not German, he thought. Older than this war.

Something gleamed in the moonlight: something shaped like a small funnel. The flash eliminator on the muzzle of a light machine gun. The old Spanish defences had new tenants.

For the blink of an eye, Mallory took stock.

To his right, the cliff was sheer, but climbable. But the moon was painting it a brilliant grey. Figures climbing over there would be plainly visible from the demilune. To the left, the cliff looked even easier, the summit concealed behind a shoulder of rock. There was no way of telling what was on that summit. There was only one thing you could be sure of: even if the top was undefended, and you could arrive there without being seen, you would be the wrong side of the fortifications at the top, and there would still be the gates to get through.

So there was only one way.

Straight up.

He eased the commando knife in the sheath on his right hip, and began once again to climb.

The moon was swimming in a wider gulf now. But Mallory climbed fast and efficiently, knowing that he was directly underneath the demilune, invisible. It took him ten minutes to cover the hundred feet: ten quiet minutes, choosing holds with a surgeon’s delicacy, breathing slow and deep through his nose. This was the Mallory who had moved remorselessly up the southeast face of Mount Cook, above the Caroline Glacier. A crumbling Atlantic cliff was a stroll in the park to this Mallory.

The base of the demilune was a bulge of masonry rooted in the natural rock. Mallory paused on an exiguous ridge ten feet underneath it. He collected his breath, then took off his boots and socks and hung them round his neck. The sea was a dull mutter two hundred feet below. Above, he could hear a pair of boots walking four steps left, pause, four steps right, pause. He stood for a moment, fingers and toes gripping their holds, balancing like a man on springs, waiting for the four steps left, two steps right –

He took a deep breath, and went up the final ten feet like a spider up a wall.

If you had asked him then or afterwards what holds he had used or what route he had followed, he would not have been able to say. It seemed to him that one moment he was poised below the emplacement, and the next he was alongside it, looking over a waist-high wall at the silhouette of a figure in German uniform. The figure had its back to him, at the far end of the four steps left. And there was a bonus, because the figure stayed there, shoulders bowed, helmet brim lit flickering yellow from below. Lighting another cigarette. Very soon after the last one –

Mallory loosened the knife in its sheath, put his left hand on the parapet of the demilune, his right on the ledge at its side –

Two things happened.

Mallory’s right hand landed in a pile of twigs and dry seaweed and something warm and feathery that suddenly came alive and started to shriek in a high, furious voice. And the moon came out from behind its cloud.

For a split second, Mallory hung by his left hand on the wall, staring into the slack-jawed faces of not one, but two young German soldiers. Then he realised that he had no foothold, and fell, feet kicking air, to the full extent of his left arm.
Fool
, he told himself, feeling the crack of muscle and sinew, gritting his teeth against the agony of his clawed fingers on the rock of the parapet. He waited a split second that felt like a year, waited for the rifle butt to smash his fingers, waited for the Germans to start yelling, alert the garrison –

His right hand was on the cliff face now, clawing for a hold, finding one. Somewhere he could hear the squawking of a frightened gull, the harsh breathing of young, panic-stricken Germans trying to work out a way of getting rid of this
thing
from the cliff, and forgetting that the easiest way of doing it was to yell and let their five hundred comrades do it for them.

Mallory had an idea.

He said,
‘Hilfe.’

He had learned his German at Heidelberg University before the war, and on the high crags of the Bavarian Alps in the sunlit middle years of the 1930s. His accent was perfect; so perfect that the Germans hesitated.

‘Get a hold of me,’ said Mallory, in German. ‘I fell.’

The soldiers were bamboozled with relief. This was not an enemy but a victim, a comrade in need –