The Complete Navarone (92 page)

‘Still clear?’ said Wills to the radar operator.

‘Clear,’ said the operator.

‘Top-hole,’ said Wills.

But of course the radar could not see astern.

As the engine note faded smoothly, Miller fell just as smoothly from a doze into a deep sleep. After what seemed like a couple of seconds he was awakened by somebody shaking him. ‘Morning, sir,’ said a voice, and an enamel mug was shoved into his hand, a mug hot enough to wake him up and make him curse and hear Mallory and Andrea and Carstairs stirring, too. When they had drunk the sweet, scalding tea, they went on deck.

There was no moon, but the Milky Way hung in a heavy swathe across the sky. By its light he could see a crumpled heap of rubberized canvas on the deck on the forward face of the wheelhouse. He groped for a foot pump, found one, plugged in the hose and started tramping away. The crumpled heap swelled and unfolded like a night-blooming flower, and became a rubber dinghy; an aircrew dinghy, actually, because unlike the naval dinghies it was boat-shaped instead of circular, and thus rowable; but unlike the dinghies used by the SAS, it was yellow instead of black, and would, if discovered by the enemy, be taken for the relic of a crashed aircraft instead of the transport of a raiding party. Andrea drifted up, silent as a wraith, and Mallory. Carstairs made more noise, his nailed boots squinching on the deck, grunting as he dumped his pack and his rifle.

‘Three minutes to drop,’ said a voice from the bridge.

Here we go again, thought Miller.

Then the night became day.

For a moment there was just stark blue-white light, the faces of the men on the bridge frozen, every pore mercilessly limned, the dinghy and the landing party in the slice of black shadow behind the superstructure. Then, very rapidly, things began to change.

The light blazed from a source as bright as the sun, behind them, low on the water. Someone was shouting on the bridge: Wills’ voice. From behind the light came the heavy chug of a large-calibre machine gun. The bridge windows exploded. Glass splinters hissed around the dinghy, and someone somewhere let out a bubbling howl. Then more guns started firing, some from the MTB now.

‘Stay where you are,’ said Mallory, calm as if he were walking down the Strand. ‘Two minutes to landing.’

‘Shoot that bloody light out!’ roared Wills, from the bridge.

They huddled in the shadow of the superstructure. Suddenly the blue-white glare vanished. The blackness that followed it was no longer black, but criss-crossed with ice-blue and hot-poker-red tracers. The MTB’s deck jumped underfoot like the skin of a well-thrashed drum. Whatever was attacking was big, and heavily armed. They heard Wills’ voice shout, ‘Full ahead both!’ The MTB started to surge forward.

But the tracers were homing in now. There was something like an Oerlikon or a Bofors out there. Into Miller’s mind there popped the picture of the back end of the MTB: a huge tank of aviation gas, contained in a thin skin of aluminium and plywood. One Oerlikon round in there: well, two, one to puncture it, one to light it …

Miller found himself longing passionately for a row in a rubber dinghy on the night-black sea –

Crash, went something on the aft deck. Then there was a jackhammer succession of further crashes. The MTB’s machine guns fell silent. The engine note faltered and died, and she slowed, wallowing. An ominous red glow came from her after hatches.

Mallory’s mind was clicking like an adding machine. Options: stay on board and get blown to hell; go over the side, with at least a chance that they would get ashore and on with the mission. No contest.

‘Go,’ he said.

The MTB had slewed port-side on to the tracers whipping out of the dark. They manhandled the rubber boat over the starboard rail and into the dark water. Miller climbed down, and stowed the packs and the oilcloth weapon bags as Mallory and Andrea lowered them. The orange glow was heavier now, beginning to jump and flicker, so Mallory could see Miller and Andrea working, and Carstairs, eyes flicking left and right, nervous for himself, not for anybody else. Not a team player, Carstairs. Hard to blame him, on top of a burning bladder of petrol in enemy waters –

Whump
, said something the other side of the bridge, and the shock wave blew Mallory on to the deck. Then there was another explosion, bigger, and a blast of air, dreadfully hot, that carried with it a smell of burning eyebrows and more glass. Something crashed on to the deck alongside. By the light of the flames, Mallory saw it was Wills, blown, presumably, out of the glassless windows of the bridge. Unconscious at least, thought Mallory, ears ringing. If not dead –

Wills opened his eyes. His face was coppery with burns, his expression that of a sleepwalker. He started to crawl aft. Another explosion blew him backwards into Mallory’s legs. The flames were very bright now, the air vibrating with heat. ‘Into the dinghy,’ said Mallory.

Carstairs went over the rail at a hard scramble, followed more sedately by Andrea. Aft of the bridge, the MTB was a sheet of flame. A man emerged, blazing, and fell back into the inferno. ‘Come,’ said Mallory to Wills. He half-saw other figures going over the rail, heard the splash of bodies.

Wills looked at him without seeing him, and started to walk into the wall of flame. Mallory grabbed his arm. Wills turned and took a swing at him. Mallory went under the punch, grabbed him by the shirt and trousers, and heaved him overboard. The deck was swelling underfoot like a balloon. Mallory went to the rail and jumped.

It was only when he hit the water that he realized how hot the air had been. He found himself holding the rope on the rubber flanks of the dinghy. ‘Row,’ he said. They already were rowing. There was another head beside him in the water: Wills, eyes wide and rolling. He scrambled into the dinghy and pulled Wills after him. Wills showed a tendency to struggle. He wanted to be with his ship –

The night split in two. There was a blinding flash. A shock wave like a brick wall hurtled across the water and walloped into the dinghy. Torpedoes, thought Mallory, against the ringing in his ears. Torpedoes gone up.

Then a thick chemical smoke rolled down on them. Under its black and reeking blanket they rowed and coughed and rowed again, squinting at the radium-lit north on Mallory’s compass, for what felt like hours. ‘Clearing,’ said Miller at last. Overhead, the sky was lightening. They sat still as the fumes thinned around them, leaving them naked and exposed on the surface of the sea. But there was no one to see them. As the last of the smoke eddied away, it was plain that under its cover they had got clear. All around them was black night, with stars. The best part of a mile to the westward, the dark shape of some sort of coastal patrol boat lay half-wrapped in smoke, moving to and fro in the water, shining lights, looking for survivors.

And in that confusing patchwork of light and smoke, not finding any.

To the eastwards, the sky stopped well short of the horizon, cut out by the jagged tops of mountains: the mountains of Kynthos.

Mallory called the roll.

‘Carstairs.’

‘Here.’

‘Andrea.’

‘Here.’

‘Miller.’

‘Sure.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘Wills,’ said Wills, in a strange, faraway voice.

‘Nelson,’ said another. ‘And Dawkins. ‘E’s unconscious. I’ve ’urt me arm.’

‘Okay,’ said Mallory, level-voiced, though inwardly he was worried. There was work to do, and not the sort of work you could do if you were carrying maimed and unconscious sailors about with you. They had hardly started Operation Thunderbolt, and already it was in serious trouble.

Save it, he told himself. They were on the deep sea, with three extra people and a job to do. What was necessary now was to get ashore.

‘Row,’ he said.

They rowed.

After a while, a voice said, ‘I’m getting wet.’ A sailor’s voice: Nelson.

It was true. The side of the rubber dinghy, which had been hard, was becoming flaccid. ‘Probably the air inside cooling,’ said Carstairs. ‘The water’s colder than the air, isn’t it? So it’d shrink –’

‘Got a leak,’ said Miller. He found the pump and plugged it into the side. There was no chance of using his feet, so he squeezed the concertina bag between his hands. After two hundred, his arms felt as if they were on fire. But the tube was not deflating any more. ‘Here,’ he said to Carstairs.

‘Sorry, Corporal?’ said the drawling voice in the dark.

‘Your go, sir,’ said Miller.

Carstairs laughed, a light, dangerous laugh. ‘I’m sorry, Corporal,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I’m with you.’

Miller gave a couple more squeezes to the pump. The sweat was running into his eyes. ‘Yessir,’ he said. ‘Yessir, Cap’n, sure thing.’ Carstairs was only a dark shape against the stars, but Miller was sure he was smiling a small, superior smile –

‘Give it to me,’ said Andrea. Miller felt it plucked from his hands, heard the steady, monotonous pant.

‘Carstairs,’ said Mallory. ‘You can row now.’

Carstairs’ shadow froze. But Mallory’s voice had an edge like a hacksaw. ‘Delighted,’ said Carstairs. ‘Jolly boating weather, eh?’

For two endless hours, the oars dipped, and the pump panted, and the black mass of Kynthos crawled slowly up the stars. At 0155, Wills, who had been sitting slumped on the side, suddenly raised his head. ‘Port twenty,’ he said, in a weird, cracked voice.

‘What?’ said Miller, who was rowing.

‘Left a bit.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s a beach.’

‘How do you know?’ said Carstairs.

‘Pilot book. Recognize the horizon.’ Wills made a loose gesture of his hand at the saw-backed ridge plunging towards the sea ahead and to the right.

Carstairs said, ‘You’re in no condition to recognize anything.’

‘So what do you suggest?’ said Mallory, mildly.

‘Straight for the shore,’ said Carstairs. ‘Up the cliffs.’

‘Listen,’ said Wills.

Miller stopped rowing, and Andrea stopped pumping. They listened.

There was the drip of the oars, and the tiny gurgle of the dinghy moving through the water, and something else: the long, low mutter of swell on stone. ‘Cliffs,’ said Wills. ‘Doesn’t feel like much out here, but there’ll be a heave. Lava rock. Like a cross-cut saw. Two foot of swell, bang goes your gear, bang goes you.’

It was a lucid speech, and convincing. Carstairs could find no objection to it. He lapsed into a sulk.

Mallory had seen the beaches on the map, all that time ago in the briefing room under Plymouth. There were half-a-dozen of them at this end of the island, little crescents of sand among writhing contours and hatchings of precipitous cliffs. If it had been him in command of the Kynthos garrison, he would have watched them like a hawk.

The muttering grew.

“Scuse me,’ said the voice of the sailor Nelson. ‘It’s Dawkins, sir. I think ’e’s dead.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Carstairs, high and sharp. ‘Save it for later. We’ll –’

But Mallory had moved past him, and had his fingers on Dawkins’ neck. The skin was warm, but not as warm as it should have been. There was no pulse. I’m afraid you’re right,’ he said.

‘Throw him overboard,’ said Carstairs. ‘He’s just dead weight.’

‘No,’ said Mallory, pumping.

‘You –’

I’m taking operational responsibility for Able Seaman Dawkins,’ said Mallory.

There were cliffs on either side and ahead, now, not more than fifty yards away. The dinghy lifted spongily in the swell. They were in a sort of cove.

Andrea said, ‘Wait here.’

‘What are you doing?’ said Carstairs.

Andrea did not answer. He seemed to be taking off his battle-dress. A pair of huge, furry shoulders gleamed for a moment under the stars. Then he was gone, quiet as a seal in a small roil of water.

‘Reconnaissance,’ said Mallory. ‘Hold her here, Miller.’

Cradled in the bosom of the sea, protected on three sides by a small, jagged alcove of the cliffs, they waited.

Private Gottfried Schenck was not in favour of Greek islands. The beer was terrible, the food oily and the women hostile, particularly in the last couple of days. Still, it was better than the Russian Front, he supposed. He had thought it a place completely without danger, until the unpleasantness on Saturday. Tonight he had seen the flick of tracer and the flash of a big explosion out at sea. It looked as if things were getting worse. He had commandeered a bottle of wine from a peasant he had met with a flock of goats; vile stuff, tasted like disinfectant, but at least it stopped the jitters. He looked at his watch. Two o’clock. Four hours till his relief at dawn. Time to have a look in the next cove, perhaps have a crafty fag with his mate Willi.

He turned and walked along the edge of the sea, his boots making only the faintest of crunches on the sand.

From his vantage point by a rock thirty yards to seaward, Andrea watched him go, waited, counting; saw the sudden flare of a match beyond the headland …

Not that anybody normal would have seen this. But Andrea’s eyes were used to weighing matters of life and death in thick darkness. He waited in the milk-warm water, counting, watched the sentry come back on to the beach, throw away the glowing butt. Then, with no fuss or turbulence, he sank below the surface.

The cigarette had not done Private Schenck any good. He felt sleepy, and there was a filthy taste in his mouth. What he really needed was a swim, but if anyone caught him swimming on duty there would be hell to pay –

He had arrived at the end of the beach. He turned round and started back, moving smartly to wake himself up, shoulders square, eyes on the tip of his nose, trying as he often did to feel the way he had felt all those years ago at Nuremberg in the temple of searchlights, when he had believed in all this damned Nazi nonsense –

Behind him, something rose from the water beyond the small waves that broke on the shore: something impossibly huge that gleamed with water in the starlight and took two loping steps towards him, clapped a vast hard hand over his mouth and hauled him through the breakers and bent him creaking towards the water, as he tried to shout, but managed no sound at all, like a child in the hands of this terrible thing from the sea. Schenck had given up even before his face hit the water, gently, oh so gently, and stayed there, under those huge, remorseless hands, until his mouth opened and the bad taste of cigarettes and old wine became the taste of salt, and he breathed.

Andrea waited until the bubbles ceased to rise. Then he swam back to the dinghy, and talked low and short to Mallory. A minute later, the dinghy was heading for the beach.

Things now began to move very fast for the still-dazed Wills. As soon as the dinghy’s nose touched the sand, they were out, dragging the packs on to their backs, hustling him and Nelson up the beach and into the low scrub of thorn and oleander at its back. ‘Watch them,’ said Mallory to Carstairs. Carstairs looked as if he was going to protest, but suddenly Mallory and Miller were gone, and there was nowhere else to go, so Carstairs had no option.

Dimly in the starlight they saw Andrea drag Dawkins’ body from the dinghy, and tow him out through the little breakers and into deep water. Nelson started forward, but Wills put a hand on his arm. They heard the hiss as Miller enlarged the hole in the dinghy and left it in the surf, watched Mallory and Miller brush out the footprints on the beach, reversing up into the bushes.

Wills’ head was buzzing like a hive full of bees. He was streaming sweat, and he felt sick, or rather he felt as if someone else a lot like him felt sick, because he was somewhere else. Nearby, Andrea was climbing back into his fatigues. Wills heard himself say, ‘All right, Nelson?’

‘Shouldn’t have done that to poor Dawks,’ said Nelson.

‘He’s dead,’ said Wills. ‘He doesn’t know. He’s being useful.’

‘It ain’t right,’ said Nelson. He sounded aggrieved: bit of a barrack-room lawyer, Nelson. “E needs burying. There’s no call to chuck ‘im in the sea.’

‘There was a guard,’ said Andrea. I killed him. Now the Germans will think he found poor Dawkins, and they fought, and both drowned.’

‘You ’ope,’ said Nelson, who did not hold with foreigners.

‘Yes,’ said the foreigner, in that lion-like purr of his. ‘And so should you, if you do not want to die.’

Hearing the voice, Nelson realized that he desperately and passionately wanted to live.

‘Miller,’ said Andrea. ‘Have a look at Nelson’s arm.’

Miller pulled out a pencil light, lodged it between his teeth, and unwrapped the strip of rag from the seaman’s right forearm. The cut gaped long and red against the white skin. ‘You’ll live,’ said Miller. ‘Sew you up later.’

‘Jesus,’ said Nelson weakly. ‘It’s really bad. Oh Jesus. It feels bloody terrible.’

‘You won’t die,’ said Miller. ‘Not of a cut arm, anyway. No bleeding, and all nice and clean and tidy with seawater.’ He sprinkled sulfa into the wound, bound it swiftly and expertly with a bandage from the first-aid kit, and made a sling out of the rag. ‘Good as new,’ he said.

But as he tied the sling, he could feel that despite the warmth of the night, Nelson was shivering.

Mallory said, very quiet, ‘Put out that light and let’s go.’

They crossed a stony track along the back of the beach. Inland, the ground rose steeply. Mallory halted them in a grove of oleanders. ‘Wait here,’ he said. Nelson sat down with a heavy thump.

‘Shut up,’ said Carstairs, too loud.

Silence fell: a silence full of the rustle of the breeze in the oleanders, and the trill of the cicadas, and the small crunch of the surf on the shore.

And German voices, talking, from the next beach.

It was just the chatting of sentries bored by a long night duty. But it ran a bristle of small hairs up Nelson’s spine. And suddenly the silence of the group was not just six people keeping quiet, but a sort of frozen hole in the middle of the night noises. He felt sick, with burning petrol, and his shipmates gone, and a nauseating pain in his arm, and poor old Dawks chucked in the sea. And now he was mixed up in God knew what with a bunch of bandits, in enemy territory. He had signed up for the Navy, not the bleeding Commandos. What he wanted now was a nice POW camp, not to get shot out of hand for raiding enemy territory with the skipper and these four hard nuts …

These two hard nuts.

As Nelson counted the heads against the sky, he saw that in the middle of the silence – quieter than the silence itself, in fact – the big one and the thin one had vanished.

Mallory and Andrea went quickly down the track, one either side. They moved quiet as shadows, stooping to avoid the tell-tale flick of a silhouette against the sky. Their packs were with Miller in the oleanders. They carried knives and Schmeissers, and the knowledge that if they used either they were dead, and the mission was finished.

As he trotted on, part of Mallory’s mind was chewing at the problems of the mission. There were several ways of adding up a fire at sea, a cut-up rubber dinghy, a dead British matlow and a drowned German sentry. Some of them were innocent – a survivor of the wreck, a fight in the shallows. Others were not. The rubber boat was a type used in aircraft, not MTBs. Why would a guard drown, having fractured a British seaman’s skull? Anyone with any brains was going to bump into these questions, particularly on an island as sleepy as Kynthos. Perhaps in a couple of
Wehrmacht
platoons, there would not be too many brains.

But from Mallory’s experience, there would be brains in plenty: thorough, inquisitive, fine-slicing brains …

Speed was what was needed.

They had rounded a headland. There was a low, regular lump that might have been an observation post. They skirted it to the rear, and found the road improving, running round the back of a half-mile beach of pale sand washed with the drowsy roar of the small surf. Behind the beach, an untidy huddle of rectilinear blocks gleamed white in the starlight. Houses. Parmatia.

They moved inland, through a belt of scrub and onto a valley floor tiled with little gardens and lemon groves. A couple of dogs barked lazily as they passed. The air was warm and still.

Mavrocordato Street was a long jumble of small farms and sheds. Number three was shuttered up tight against the sickly influences of the night air. Round the back, a shutter stood open. Andrea and Mallory took a last look over the dark plain. Then Andrea went in through the window.

If Miller had not been Miller, he would have been getting bored. Instead, once he had closed the cut in Nelson’s forearm with a neat line of stitches, he had propped his head on his pack, felt a large regret that in their present circumstances it was not possible to light a cigarette, and closed his eyes. Not that he was asleep. It was merely that Miller was a man who hated unnecessary effort. In the darkness of the rocks, the only thing you got from a visual inspection of your surroundings was eye-ache. Also, by closing your eyes you gave your ears the best possible chance. He lay there, and sorted the sounds of the night: breeze in the leaves, the rustle of the sea, cicadas, the small click of a beetle rolling a pebble, the breathing of Wills and Nelson and Carstairs –

No breathing from Carstairs.

Carstairs had gone.

Carstairs had gone God knew where.

Miller was a gambler. Before the war, he had spent much of his life in the weighing of odds. Since he had been mixed up with Mallory and Andrea, not much had changed, except that the consequences of losing a bet had become more deadly. And even in the old days, the kind of people Miller had played poker with were not the kind of people you welshed on and lived.

So Miller weighed up the odds. Carstairs was reputed to know what he was doing. Miller was a corporal, Carstairs was a captain, running his own show under the Admiral.

Carstairs was on his own.

Mallory waited outside the window in a horrible silence, the dreary silence of the hours before the dawn, when nature is at its lowest ebb and sleep most closely approximates to death. His finger rested on the trigger of his Schmeisser. He tested the night sounds, found nothing amiss. He was a soldier, Mallory, and a mountaineer, a man not given to fantasy or speculation. But once again he felt the tightness in his stomach he had felt on the way out of the armoury in Plymouth. This warm world that smelt of farms lay under the shadow of death –

The shutter creaked faintly. Andrea’s voice said, ‘Come.’

Mallory found himself in a cool room that smelt of scrubbed floors and old wine. The shutter closed, and there were fumbling sounds, as if someone was draping the window with a cloth. A match scraped, and a mantle flared and began to glow. The person who had lit it was small, with a hood over his head and a long, Bedouin sort of robe. ‘Achilles?’ said Mallory.

‘Achilles is dead,’ said Andrea. ‘The partisans have blown up the road. The Germans took reprisals. One hundred and thirty-one people were killed in the square on Saturday. Achilles was one of them.’

Mallory said nothing. If there was no road, it would be hard to get the Thunderbolt force across the mountains even if there were no wounded. With wounded, it would be next to impossible –

‘I will take you,’ said their host, and swept back the hood of the robe. Swept it back from a tangled mass of black hair, and a smooth face with a straight nose and big, black eyes that glowed with tears and fury.

This,’ said Andrea, ‘is Clytemnestra. She was the sister of Achilles.’

‘For twenty-three years,’ said the woman. ‘Twenty-three years, and two months, and three days, and four hours, before those pigs … those worse than pigs’ – here she plunged into a machine-gun rattle of abuse in a dialect that Mallory recognized from his months in the White Mountains in Crete – ‘saw fit to take him away and murder him.’ She pulled a wine bottle and some glasses out of a worm-eaten cupboard. ‘But we are together,’ she said. ‘We will be together again. Together, we will take you across the mountains.’ She sloshed wine into the glasses.

‘You know the paths,’ said Andrea.

‘Of course I know,’ she said. ‘And if I do not know, then my brother Achilles will walk at my side, and show me.’

They drank in silence. Mallory heard the glass rattle against her teeth. Too wild, thought Mallory. He made his voice calm and level, the voice of a policeman at the scene of an accident. ‘Could you bear to tell me what’s been going on, this past week?’

She did not look up. ‘The more people who know, the better,’ she said. ‘It should be carved in letters four feet high on the cliff of the Acropolis, so people can see –’ She caught Andrea’s eye. Then her head bowed again, and she took his mighty hand, and for some time could not speak.

After a little while, she dried her eyes on her rusty black shirt and took a deep breath. ‘Forgive me,’ she said.

‘There is nothing to forgive,’ said Andrea, and the slow fire in his eyes kindled hers, and she nodded. ‘Tell us, and we will avenge your brother.’

‘Achilles was a farmer,’ she said. ‘A farmer and a policeman. There were half-a-dozen men in the mountains, klephts, thieves, what have you. We all on this island hate the Germans, we do what we can to make their lives awkward, in small ways, you understand. But these klephts in the mountains, they were always causing trouble. For their own pleasure, not Greece’s freedom. They stole Iannis’s wine, and Spiro’s sheep, and they raped poor Athene, and every man’s hand was against them, because they were bandits, not fighters. Then last Monday they tried to steal a German patrol truck, and they were drunk, so they made a mess of it and one of them got killed.’ Her head dropped.