The Complete Navarone (81 page)

Mallory started climbing again. He was in a hurry now, but he did not let it alter the steady rhythm of his movements. The rain was becoming heavier, driving in hard and steady on the wind. After the sixth spike he found he could hook his fingers over the parapet. Then he was up, standing on the stone deck inside the battlements in his boots and socks, flexing his stiff fingers.

The top of the tower was flat, except for the turret with the staircase. Its door faced inland, away from the prevailing wind. On the roof of the turret were chimneys, emitting wood smoke, and a group of radio aerials. There were four aerials: three whips and a big shortwave array, and a flagpole. At the top of the flagpole something waved and bumped in the wind – something that was not a flag: a vaguely man-shaped mass against the clouds, but with a disgusting raggedness about the outline. Something that had once been Juanito the smuggler.

Mallory was cold and stiff from a dangerous hour crawling up a vertical wall. Now he felt an angry warmth spread through him, against a lunatic enemy who wanted to rip the world back into the Middle Ages.

His wool-padded boots thudded softly on the stones as he walked across the roof of the tower and flattened himself against the wall of the turret. He could hear a man coughing inside the door. Cigarette smoke wafted out through the keyhole. The sentry was alone.

Mallory waited with the patience of a hunting animal. The rain slackened.

The door opened.

The sentry never saw what hit him. There was a sudden, agonising pain in the left-hand side of his chest. Then there were no more thoughts.

Carefully Mallory wiped the blade of his knife on the dead man’s tunic. He unstrapped the man’s Schmeisser, and took the two spare clips from his bandolier. He went through the pockets and found the man’s paybook. Then he dragged the corpse across the wet roof to the parapet he had climbed, and rolled it over.

It fell with no sound, the way Mallory would have fallen, if he had fallen. Mallory did not stay to watch it.

He took the rags of his socks off his boots. The rain had washed a certain amount of the sewage from his tunic. He squared his shoulders, and checked the Schmeisser with his rope-raw hands. Then he went through the door, closed it silently behind him, and started down the spiral stone stairs inside.

He smelt cigarette smoke, and old stone, and sewage on his tunic. After fourteen steps there was a Gothic-arched doorway, closed with an iron-studded door. A cardboard notice on the door said, in Gothic script,
WACHSTUBE:
guardroom. God bless the orderly German mind, thought Mallory, with renewed hope. It may yet be the saving of us all.

Beneath the guardroom was another door. From behind it came voices, and the clatter of Morse keys. Radio room. A new noise was coming from below, a busy, many-voiced buzz of ringing telephones and scurrying feet and shouted instructions; the noise of a human anthill, bustling. If the submarines were moving out at noon, this would be the sound of last-minute arrangements being made, repairs finished, evacuations planned. Mallory permitted himself a small, grim smile. It was the kind of bustle that could with a little thought be turned into confusion, and taken advantage of.

He rounded the last turn in the stairs.

Ahead of him was a corridor lined on one side with doors, and on the other with windows looking out onto a darkened courtyard. The corridor was lit with dim yellow bulbs. Mallory began to walk down the corridor at a measured sentry’s tread, towards the stone balustrading round the stairway at its end. Cardboard signs labelled a navy office, a dock office, stores. Inside, men leaned over desks tottering with piles of papers, smoking and talking into telephones, and scribbling in the pools of light from their lamps. A German machine: dotting the last i, crossing the last t, before it closed itself down.

Two soldiers, pale men, clerkish, passed him. One of them wrinkled his nose and said, ‘What a stink.’ Mallory kept his face blank. The clerks accelerated away. Mallory tramped on, slow and steady, towards the stairs at the far end of the corridor, hiding in his measured tread the fact that he did not know where he was, or how to find what he was looking for. What Mallory needed was a clue, any clue. And in an operation like this, strolling tired and sore through the heart of an enemy installation, clues were not easy to come by.

Mallory arrived at the top of the stairs at the end of the corridor. A Kapitän of the Kriegsmarine was coming up. Mallory waited, crashed his heels together, extended a stiff right arm.
‘Heil Hitler,’
he said.

The Kriegsmarine Kapitän touched a negligent hand to the peak of his cap, frowning at the wall, not looking at him. To a German, the uniform signified more than the man. And of course, there was the stink.

Mallory offered silent thanks to the
fortaleza
’s sewage, which had let him in and was now keeping people away from him. He started to go down the stairs.

Then he was vouchsafed his clue.

Into the smell of sweat, and smoke, and sewage, and cold stone, had come another smell; a smell that transported Mallory for a split second back to Cairo three years ago, with the tinkle of fountains in marble patios, the murmur of staff officers with creased trousers and soft handshakes making assignations for drinks at Shepherd’s Hotel while the frontline troops died hot, flyblown deaths under the desert sky.

The smell of expensive Turkish tobacco.

It was rising up the stairs, a mere hint of it in the column of cold, wet air. Mallory followed it like a hound.

He went down the stone-balustraded steps, and found himself on a corridor identical to the one above, except that this one was blocked off halfway by a door; not studded, this door, but made of black oak, with elaborate wrought-iron hinges, their strapwork in the form of stylised olive branches. It was an elegant door, built to please the eye as well as turn aside weapons of war. From the orientation of the corridor, Mallory guessed that the rooms beyond would look south, over the harbour. Once, these would have been the Commandant’s quarters.

The smell of Turkish cigarettes was stronger here.

These were still the Commandant’s quarters.

As Mallory walked up to the door, it opened. An Obersturmführer in the black uniform of the Totenkopf-SS marched quickly out, glanced at Mallory without curiosity, closed the door behind him, and marched on. In his hand was a sheet of paper, and on his face an expression of sulky haste. An odd, harsh voice pursued him. ‘Within one hour!’ it barked. It sounded as if there was something wrong with the speaker’s throat.

‘Jawohl, Herr General,’
muttered the ADC, and disappeared down the stairs.

Mallory pushed the door open.

The smell of Turkish cigarettes rolled out to meet him. Ahead, the corridor continued to a Gothic window full of night. Moroccan rugs covered the flagstones. The air was warm, and the smell of damp stone had disappeared. The light came from a gilt chandelier. Pictures of Spanish saints adorned the walls: male saints, stripped to the waist, bearing the marks of torture.

Mallory was not concerned with the interior appointments. There were two doors each side of the corridor. Three of them were closed; it was inconceivable that they would contain anything as vulgar and tasteless as a sentry. The fourth was open.

It was a huge room, forty feet on a side, with a sofa, two armchairs, a coffee table. There was a vast fireplace, surmounted by the carved arms of a Spanish duke. At the far end was a Gothic solar window. In front of the window was a desk with two telephones, a green onyx desk set, a bell-push and an ashtray from which the smoke of a Turkish cigarette rose vertically into the still, warm air. Behind the desk was a man with a pointed head, bald on top but fringed with close-clipped grey-blond hair.

No sentries. How could there be no sentries?

If nobody could get into the castle, there was no need of sentries inside the castle. That was logical.

Mallory walked into the room and shut the door. The man at the desk did not look up. The lights of the room moved in the silver insignia of an SS General, the lightning-flash runes on the collar, the silver skull-and-bones below the eagle on the high-crowned cap on the desk. The thin fingers reached out for the cigarette. The sausage lips sucked, blew smoke. The eyes came up to meet Mallory’s.

The eyes were the colour of water, set above high cheekbones in a fleshless face with a cleft chin. The Adam’s apple moved in the neck. There was something wrong with the Adam’s apple: a dent in the right-hand side, a groove the thickness and depth of a finger. An old wound, perhaps. Striated webs of muscle shifted in the wasted areas where the cheeks should have been. ‘What?’ said the General, in his thin, harsh croak. He clipped his cigarette into his right hand. Mallory saw the hand was artificial, an unlifelike imitation of hard orange rubber.

Mallory reached in his pocket for the paybook he had taken from the dead sentry, stepped forward to the desk and held it out to the General. The General waved it away impatiently, wrinkling his nose at the smell. Private soldiers did not roll in sewage, then burst into Generals’ rooms and identify themselves. What on earth did this
Dummkopf
think he was doing? The orange rubber fingers of the prosthesis strayed to the bell-push.

Mallory plastered a foolish grin on his face, and swatted the artificial hand away from the bell. The General was looking up at him now. A ropy vein was swelling on either side of his neck. He ignored the hand with the paybook. He opened his mouth to shout.

The hand holding the paybook kept moving. The General ignored it. He was watching Mallory’s face. The anger was turning to something else, something like puzzlement, or even fear. But the hand with the paybook had gone further than a hand with a paybook need go, and it had dropped the paybook and folded the fingers under a hard ridge of knuckle and accelerated until it was an axehead aimed at the ruined Adam’s apple in that stringy neck.

Mallory put his whole weight behind that punch. It was designed to smash the larynx. But whatever the General saw in the brown eyes above Mallory’s foolish grin made him move his head at the final split instant, so the knuckles caught him on the side of the neck, bruising the larynx instead of smashing it, and he went backwards out of the carved-gilt chair and into the bow of the window, groping for the flap of his holster as he fell.

Mallory scrambled over the desk after him, his boot-nails leaving tears in the red Morocco top. The General was halfway up to his feet, his back against the stone tracery of the window. Mallory covered him with his Schmeisser. He said, ‘Put your hands in the air.’

The General said in a rasping whisper, ‘Have you gone mad?’

‘Do as you are told,’ said Mallory.

‘You are not a German soldier,’ said the General.

Mallory said, ‘No.’

The General’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. Self-possession returned to the cold-water eyes. He said, ‘If you shoot me there will be ten of my men in here before you can take your finger off the trigger.’

‘And you will be dead,’ said Mallory. ‘What good will that do you?’ He saw the flicker of calculation in the colourless eyes, and knew that this was not an argument that would work. It might have cut some ice with a junior officer. But for one of Heinrich Himmler’s inner circle, there were more frightening things than death.

‘So,’ whispered the General, with a smile that was no more than a stretch of the lips over the teeth. ‘We have been expecting you.’

‘That was clever of you,’ said Mallory. ‘How?’

The General said, ‘You will die wondering, I think.’

Mallory yawned. ‘Pardon,’ he said. It was the old chess game of lies and evasions. ‘You captured two men,’ he said. ‘Where are they?’

The General’s face had relaxed. Mallory had shown weakness. He was in control. His orange artificial hand rested on the red leather desk. ‘Where you will shortly be,’ said the General. The bell-push was six inches away. ‘What are you trying to achieve?’ This one will hang from piano wire, his brain hissed furiously. From a meathook. He has no idea of the extent of his presumption. But he will learn, kicking his life out on the hook with the cut of thin steel at his damned impudent neck.

‘My objectives,’ said Mallory. The barrel of the Schmeisser moved like a snake’s tongue, and smashed into the General’s good arm above the elbow.

The General pulled his hand back. The pain was abominable. The arm was definitely broken. He said, in a whisper unstable with agony, ‘For this you will die.’

‘Oh, quite,’ said Mallory. ‘Where are your prisoners?’

The General stood there, cradling his good hand with his orange rubber fingers to take the weight off the upper arm. Nobody had spoken to him like this since the SA purge in 1934. The pain was terrible. He wanted to shout, but his vocal cords were paralysed. He wanted to push the bell, but he was frightened that some other part of him would be broken. When would von Kratow the aide-decamp be back? An hour. He had told von Kratow to leave him alone for an hour.

He was alone and helpless under those pitiless brown eyes. And he knew, with the sure instinct of the merciless, that the man behind those eyes had as little mercy as himself.

In that moment, he recognised him. The Abwehr had circulated the name, the description, holograph cuttings from the London
Times
and the
Frankfurter Zeitung
, from before the war. Cuttings with pictures of this face, those eyes, fixed without mercy on the next peak to be conquered.