The Complete Navarone (99 page)

‘Go,’ said Mallory.

Miller did not look down. He knew what was underneath him: three hundred feet of cliff, with a slope of sharp scree to bounce on, then another precipice –

He braced the doubled rope over his shoulder and up between his legs, and started to walk backwards down the cliff. His packful of explosives wanted to unbalance him. His knees wanted to shake him loose. His breakfast wanted to fling itself into the glad light of day –

‘Hold up,’ said Carstairs’ voice. Miller found himself teetering on something that Mallory would probably have called a ledge, but as far as Miller was concerned was no bigger than a bookshelf, and a shelf for small books at that.

‘Between the legs,’ said Carstairs, with his oily smile. ‘Up the back. Round the –’

But Miller had gone, bounding out into space, half a hundredweight of explosives on his back. He did not like heights, but he liked Carstairs even less.

When Miller hit the scree slope, Andrea was already there. Carstairs and Mallory followed, pulled the ropes down and belayed again. Andrea and Carstairs, then Miller and Mallory went down again, and again, until they were standing on a scrubby shoulder of rock, a stratum that had stood up to rain and wind and sun better than the rest of the cliff. Mallory and Carstairs were coiling the ropes, making the coils fast, slinging them on their small packs.

Once Miller’s knees had stopped shaking, he had time to recognize a change in Carstairs. Miller on a cliff was a fish out of water. But as he watched Carstairs coil the rope and run his eye over the next pitch, he recognized that this was a man in his element.

The hard stratum made a broad, rubbly road along the cliff face, inaccessible from above and below. They had already lost two thousand feet in height. The valley floor was closer now, and from somewhere ahead and downhill came the pant and clank of heavy machinery.

The Tante Ju had gone overhead twenty minutes previously. If the Germans had dogs, they would be on the ledge by now. Miller wondered how Wills would be doing. Okay, as long as he had Clytemnestra there.

Miller frowned.

Clytemnestra reminded him of someone, for a moment he could not think who. As he scrambled through the dense and thorny underbrush, he remembered. Those eyes, that jaw, that figure; Darling Miss Daisy.

Darling Miss Daisy had been a good friend of his in Chicago during the Dirty Thirties. Darling Miss Daisy’s speciality had been removing all her clothes except a garter in front of the patrons of the El Cairo Tearooms, a rendezvous whose definition of tea was loose at best. As a token of their appreciation, the tea drinkers would stuff high-denomination banknotes into Miss Daisy’s garter. Miss Daisy had been a good friend of Miller’s, and had one night asked him along to witness the performance. This he had done with much appreciation. By the close of her act Darling Miss Daisy, nude except for the garter and a pair of high-heeled pumps, had collected some eight hundred dollars, in those days a most considerable sum.

At this point, a citizen called Moose Michael had jumped out of the crowd, grabbed Miss Daisy from behind, and pushed a gun into her swan-like neck. Miss Daisy was no stranger to this sort of carryon, and relaxed. Guys with what this guy had on his mind on their minds always made a bad move sometime, and that was when you set the dogs on them.

But Moose Michael’s hand was not groping for Darling Miss Daisy’s outstanding assets. It was groping for the money in the garter. This was not in the rules. Miss Daisy clenched her perfectly-formed fist, rolled her flashing black eyes, and gun in her neck or not, broke Moose Michael’s jaw in four places.

Miller could see a lot of Darling Miss Daisy in Clytemnestra. Trudging on through the scrub, he crossed her and Wills off the worry-list.

Ahead, the clank of machinery was getting louder.

Leutnant
Priem had been in North Africa, and at the invasion of Crete, and most recently in Yugoslavia. As he skirted the shoulder of the ravine (they could have done with a dog; but the dogs had disappeared) he thought: this could be a great posting, this island, if the commanding officer used his brains. One stupid Storch crashes, observer’s been drinking Metaxa, screaming down the radio, and Wolf panics, and here we are pretending to be mountain goats, heading for his bloody map reference as if we were doing a security sweep for a Führer visit …

The path came out on the ledge. Cicadas trilled in the noonday sun, and the air was heavy with the whiff of thyme and rue. Priem cast a scornful eye over the ruined buildings. How could you believe in the glories of Greek culture when the people lived in such hovels? Degenerate scum. No better than animals. Of course, nobody had been here for years …

‘Search the place!’ he barked. He lit a cigarette and sat in the shade. A lizard lay on a slab of rock, bringing itself up to temperature for the next hunting trip. Lucky damned lizard. Nothing to do but sit around in the sun all day. While Priem had to make a pretence of searching these places where nobody had been, ever. That was Wolf for you. Savage, but
gründlich
. Thorough –

‘Herr Leutnant?’
yelled a voice.

Priem stamped out his cigarette and went to interview the sergeant.

‘Buildings empty,’ said the sergeant. ‘Found this here, sir.’ He pointed with the tip of his jackboot at a little pile of golden cylinders. Cartridge cases.

Priem was suddenly not relaxed any more. ‘Good,’ he said. They were Schmeisser cases. ‘And the aeroplane?’ he said.

‘Over here,’ said the sergeant. ‘One hundred and three metres down.’

‘Rope,’ said Priem.

‘Rope in place,’ said the NCO.

The wreckage of the Storch was draped over a crag. Priem climbed round it, scrutinized the burned remains of the pilot and the observer, frowning slightly. He paused to examine the line of bullet-holes starting at the wing-root and vanishing under the belly.

He climbed back to the ledge in silence. ‘Sergeant,’ he said. ‘We will establish a field HQ here. Search again, particularly down the cliffs. And give me that radio.’

Higher on the mountain, in what would once have been the uppermost street of the bandit village, Clytemnestra and Wills lay in darkness. It was a cool darkness, smelling slightly of mould, but that was not surprising, since their hiding place was situated under the ruins of the washing-copper in the corner of four walls that had once served as a laundry.

This village of bandits was a village for which searches and razzias were no novelty. The crusaders had rummaged it, then the Turks, then the Greeks. The Germans were merely the latest in line.

Just as long (Clytemnestra reflected, listening to the concussed muttering of Wills) as they did not bring their dogs.

It was a tidy enough quarry, as quarries went; a big horseshoe cut in the cliff, fans of fallen stone at the base, a couple of diggers moving across a white floor trailing clouds of dust. There was a crusher, a big machine with a hopper and a black funnel that belched smoke, panting and grinding, discharging crushed stone into another, larger hopper. Under the larger hopper ran a railway track. As the men on the quarry lip watched, a train reversed into the quarry and positioned the first of its four trucks under the hopper. The hopper-release opened. A dose of crushed stone roared into the truck. The locomotive moved on. Another dose roared into the second truck. Move. Roar. Move. Roar. The locomotive hissed steam and began to pull out, gathering speed.

‘Well?’ said Carstairs.

‘Wait,’ said Mallory, eyes down on his watch.

The train bustled off across the plain, shrinking on its converging lines, speeding on to a causeway across the marsh, shrinking still. At the far end a cloud of white dust rose, then whipped away on the breeze. The breeze was up, now. A long edge of grey was travelling down the sky from the north. ‘Twelve minutes,’ said Mallory. ‘Down we go.’

‘Why?’ said Carstairs.

The other men were slinging their packs. Miller pointed behind them, up the cliff, where little figures were descending on ropes, rummaging every ledge and hollow. ‘They’re still looking,’ said Mallory. ‘If we don’t keep moving, they’ll spot us.’ Carstairs’ mouth went dry. He scrambled to his feet, and down the flank of the quarry.

Far away, a long steam-whistle blew. The stone train had emptied its trucks. Now it was on its way back.

The four men went down the big fan of rubble on the quarry’s northern side. The sun beat hot on the white stone as they ran, jumping from stone to stone, slithering in the small gravel, dust trailing from their heels. Men below looked up; labourers, mostly, in dusty overalls, trailing shovels, smoking cigarettes. They saw four men in camouflage smocks and
Wehrmacht
caps sliding down a pile of rubble. They were used to seeing soldiers; too many soldiers.

A sentry walked over,
Wehrmacht
, a
Feldwebel
, bored and dusty. The
Sonderkommando
had only been on the island three days. Mallory was betting that between the
Wehrmacht
guards and the
Sonderkommando
there would be no love lost. ‘What do you want?’ said the
Feldwebel
.

Mallory said, ‘Mind your own damned business.’

The
Feldwebel
blinked. ‘It is my business.’

‘Perhaps you would like to explain that to
Hauptmann
Wolf.’

It did not work. ‘I have my own officers,’ said the
Feldwebel
. ‘I do not need to talk to your nasty little
Hauptmann
.’

Mallory said, ‘Very wise,’ and started to walk past him towards the rock crusher.

‘One moment,’ said the sentry. ‘Papers.’

‘Don’t be bloody stupid,’ said Mallory. They were all walking now, towards the shade of the crusher, the sentry nearly running alongside them. The cloud had covered the sun. The air felt thick and moist.

The sentry got in front of them and unslung his rifle. ‘Papers,’ he said, and in his eye there was a meticulous glint, the legendary obstinacy of the German NCO. Mallory’s heart sank.

‘All right,’ said Mallory. ‘Shall we go and see your commanding officer?’ Andrea was standing close behind him. Above them, the stilts of the rock crusher towered like the legs of an enormous insect. Mallory could feel Andrea moving. The guard’s life was hanging by a thread. He looked Mallory up and down …

And saw his boots.

They were caked with dust, scuffed and battered. They were variations on a theme of British paratrooper’s boots, manufactured for Mallory by Lobb of St James’ Street, London, in collaboration and discussion with Black’s of Holborn, expedition outfitters, fitted on his personal last, studded with pyramid nails hand-sharpened with the file Mallory carried in his pocket.

They should have been regulation German army jackboots.

There was no way of knowing what was in the
Feldwebel
’s mind, but Mallory could guess. The
Feldwebel
was a high priest of order and regulation, and the boots were heresy and sacrilege. The rifle came up. The eyes went round. The mouth opened to shout.

Mallory caught hold of the rifle barrel and pushed it sharply aside, stepping aside himself as he did so. Something very big and very fast came past him. The
Feldwebel
made a loud whooshing sigh, and crumpled forward over Andrea’s fist. Andrea heaved him upright. He whipped out the knife he had driven up and under the man’s ribs and into his heart, and in the same movement pushed the body back into the shadows under the crusher. The air was thick and still. A couple of big raindrops made dark blots in the dust.

Mallory lit a cigarette. Nobody said anything. Mallory blew smoke and said, ‘Listen.’

They listened. Thunder rumbled. The rails were humming. Three minutes later, the train came in.

In the cab, the driver yawned. He was German, and so was his fireman. Give a Greek this job, and nothing would get done. The soldiers were as bad. They were meant to sign each load in and out as the train went through the gate in the fence by the guard-house. But they were
Wehrmacht
, not railwaymen. They had made him do all the signing at the beginning of his shift, so he could come and go as he liked –

The hopper roared. He pulled forward to the second red post, applied the brakes, turned to tell the fireman to chuck a bit more coal on. The fireman was blond, with blue eyes in a sooty face. The engine driver’s mouth fell open.

This was not him. This was a man with a lean brown face and the coldest grey eyes the driver had ever seen.

The engine driver was about to shout when he felt something press against his leather jerkin. Something sharp. He felt the sting of cold steel in the fat on his belly. He closed his mouth. Fill up,’ said the man. ‘Then drive.’

The engine driver did not ask what had happened to his fireman. He said, ‘The pressure is down.’

There were two men in the cab with him now: the lean-faced man and another with an eyebrow moustache. The man with the eyebrow moustache opened the firebox, and shovelled in coal. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Off we go, what?’

The driver blew out his oil-stained moustache. ‘No,’ he said. The thing in his belly moved a couple of inches. Skin broke. Blood rolled. It was raining now, hot, steamy rain, but the driver was suddenly bathed in cold sweat. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Yes. Of course. Very well.’ His hand went to the regulator.

The leg of the hopper started to move. The train gathered speed. The quarry face faded into a grey curtain of rain. The gate loomed, guard post beside it. Mallory crouched on the footplate, and Carstairs bent, shovelling. The driver stared straight ahead, not acknowledging the wave of the crop-headed sentry drinking coffee in the wooden hut. And the train was travelling on an embankment over green fields. To the right was young corn and rain-grey sea. To the left was more young corn, terminated abruptly by a tall fence of mesh and barbed wire, with sheds and what looked like a fuel dump. Tailplanes stood like blunt sharks’ fins beyond the sheds. Ahead, down the cylinder of the ancient locomotive, the fields fell away. The train rattled through a belt of reeds. Then there were rain-pocked pools of water on either side, dead-looking, dotted with clumps of sickly vegetation. The margins of the pools were crusted with white deposits. The place had a flat, washing-soda stink. When Mallory licked his lips, his tongue was dry with lime.

Over to the left was another causeway, carrying a road. At its landward side it passed between high fences, with red-and-white-striped barriers, huts for a platoon of soldiers, and a machine-gun post on either side, one to cover the approach, the other to cover the causeway itself. Mallory was glad he had decided to come by train.

The far shore was upon them: first a glacis of new stone, then a flat area that looked as if it had been reclaimed from the marsh. Beyond the flat area, the basalt colossus of the Acropolis rose like a wall. On the far side of the reclaimed area, behind a chainlink fence, was a vehicle park. As Mallory watched, an ambulance rolled in. The doors opened. A pair of orderlies lifted out a stretcher and ran with it through the rain and into a steel door set in the face of the cliff.

Mallory glanced at Carstairs. Carstairs was watching the ambulance too.

The tracks ran across the reclaimed area on a trestled viaduct ending in a set of buffers. Below the viaduct was a pile of crushed stone. Two huge concrete mixers churned alongside the rock piles.

The train slowed to a crawl. The driver raised his hand to another lever and pulled it. The train shuddered. Looking back over the tender, Mallory saw the hopper of the first wagon tilt sideways, and dump its cargo over the side of the trestle with a roar. An explosion of dust mingled with the rain and spread over the cab.

‘Out,’ said Mallory into the fog.

When the dust settled, Carstairs was gone.

The driver reversed the engine and opened the throttle. The train shuttled back across the marshes and the fields, past the bored sentry and into the quarry. Men were still moving on the escarpment, searching. They were lower down, now.

It was only a matter of time, thought Mallory. The clock had been ticking. And now it was about to strike.

The train slowed. The locomotive came to a halt by the first red post. The driver pointed. On the steel staging beside the cab was a lever. Mallory stepped off the footplate and hauled. The hopper opened with a roar. The truck filled. Miller and Andrea appeared out of the shadows. ‘In,’ said Mallory.

Up ahead in the sentry box, there was turbulent movement. The sweaty guard came out of the door into the rain, cramming a steel helmet on to his cropped head with one hand, waving a rifle in the other. He was shouting, his words drowned by the roar of the diggers and the huge metallic pant and grind of the crusher.

It was time to leave.

The sentry had slung his rifle and was dragging the gates shut across the railway line, boots slipping in the big puddles. The train picked up speed. Mallory saw his face, red-eyed. Then the locomotive hit the gates with a crash, and there was a squeal of tortured metal, and the train was through. When Mallory looked back, he saw a wisp of smoke coming from the guardhouse window. His eyes fell on Miller. ‘I guess he sat in his ashtray,’ said Miller, returning his gaze with great innocence.