The Heights of Zervos (26 page)

When Macomber looked back as they started to climb the hill, the line of mounted troops was already appreciably closer and he knew that they must bide soon or be captured. With the Scot in the lead they ascended the winding road at a slow trot, but long before they reached the top they were slowing down badly. The gradient was steep and wound its way between huge boulders which seemed on the verge of toppling down the rugged incline. Groves of bare olive trees studded the hill slope and the frequent twists in the road soon hid them from the plain below, which had the advantage of hiding them from the Alpenkorps mule train, but had the disadvantage of preventing them seeing how close their pursuers were drawing. Cover was what they needed, Macomber was telling himself, and he was tempted to leave the road altogether and hide on the hill slope, but this would mean throwing in the sponge: the Alpenkorps would ride past and continue on to Zervos. I'm damned if I'm giving up as easily as that, he thought, after surviving that voyage from Istanbul.

'I'd say we have another thirty minutes left - at the outside,' Prentice called up to him.

'At the outside,' Macomber agreed. Thirty minutes before the leading Alpenkorps troops overhauled them. It was beginning to get a bit desperate and he was pinning all his hopes on seeing a chance to escape when they reached that plateau which stretched six miles to the base of the mountain. This was one area where he had very little idea of the topography because when he had travelled this way five years before it had been drenched in mist while they drove over the tableland. The stitch in his side was getting worse as he forced his legs to keep up the route-march pace and now each thud of his boots on the road pounded up his side like a sledgehammer. To counter the pain he stooped forward a little, cursing inwardly as Prentice caught up with him.

'Take it easy, Mac, you'll kill yourself. You're streaming with sweat,'

'Time is running out - we had a head start on them and we've lost it. We'll have to make a quick decision when we reach the top.' The effort of speaking was a major strain now but he was damned if he was going to give up. Keep moving, you'll work it off! Prentice was walking alongside him now and this gave him a pacemaker to keep up with. He forced himself to resist the impulse to look at the ground because this brought on greater fatigue. Straightening up, he stared at the ridge they were approaching. Was this the rim of the plateau at long last? He had thought so hopefully with three lower ridges and had been disappointed each time. In his state of extreme pained exertion the plateau above was now taking on the character of a promised land, a haven where there must be some salvation from the relentless Alpenkorps coming up behind.

He was hardly aware of the landscape they were passing as the pain grew worse and pulled at him like a steel wire contracting inside his body. Boulders, olive groves, clumps of shrubbery moved past in a blur as he fixed his eyes on the wobbling ridge moving down towards them as they turned another bend and then another. Despite his robot-like condition he was conscious that the air was cooler, that a breeze was growing stronger, and this gave him fresh hope that they were close to the head of the tortuous road which went on and on forever - another bend, another stretch of white dust3 another bend...

'Must be nearly there - with this wind,' Prentice commented.

Macomber only grunted and stared upwards. Was he breaking the grip of the stitch? It seemed a little less agonizing, a little less inclined to screw up his muscles into complex knots. It left him quite suddenly and with the realization that he had conquered it he began to take long loping strides which Prentice could hardly keep up with. He wiped his face dry as he walked and then accelerated his pace, feeling a sense of triumph as he saw only sky beyond the lowering ridge. They were almost there! Revived by the small quantity of food and the wine he began moving faster still as the gradient of the road lessened, leaving Prentice behind in his anxiety to catch his first glimpse of the plateau. There must be no hesitation here - they must decide swiftly what they were going to do and do it. There might even be a convenient farm at the top. With a lot of luck there might even be bicycles - he had seen men cycling when he had visited Katyra before the war. A cycle should be a match for a mule. They needed some form of transport which would take them the six miles across the plateau, something which would put them well ahead of that blasted mule train of Burckhardt's. He put on a spurt, came over the top and the plateau lay before him.

The disappointment was so crushing that he stood quite still until Prentice reached him. A classic tableland spread out into the distance, an area of flatness devoid of any form of cover for several miles. In fact, he could hardly have imagined a region less suited for them to escape the Alpenkorps. The road was a surprise, too: a highway of recently laid tar which ran straight across to the mountain, the land greenish on one side and brownish on the other. They must have started the highway from the peninsula tip, a highway which in due course would be extended to Katyra.

'Not quite what we're in the market for,' Prentice remarked.

'It might as well be the sea for all the good it is to us.' Macomber glanced over his shoulder. 'How's the Greek?'

'Had a bit of trouble with his limp coming up. Ford stayed back to keep him company. What's exciting them now, I wonder?'

Ford and Grapos had appeared but they were standing together on an outcrop of rock a short distance from the road as they waved their hands with a beckoning motion. Prentice left Macomber gazing bleakly at the plateau and went back to the outcrop. The ground he scrambled up was dry and gritty, which confirmed that the storm of the night before must have blown itself out somewhere near Cape Zervos. And there was a trace of excitement in Ford's voice as he called down. 'Hurry up or you'll miss it.'

'Miss what?'

The sun which shone on the back of Prentice's neck as he hauled himself up on the rock had no warmth in it and the coldness of the light breeze was a reminder that they were approaching a zone of low temperature. Standing beside Grapos, he adjusted his sheepskin coat. It was too big and flopped off the shoulders; Ford, who was wearing another coat belonging to the same man, fitted far more comfortably inside his sheepskin. Had the Greek possessed a third coat? The thought had never struck Prentice during the flurry to get away from the house. Following the line of Ford's pointed arm he could see the top of the house now, its faded red tiles so levelled by the height that it looked flat-roofed. And only a few yards beyond the cypresses the head of the Alpenkorps column was approaching the foot of the hill road. 'There they come,' said Ford, 'the first of the many.'

'You're sure they are the first? There may be more of them already coming up the hill.'

'No, sir. You and Macomber were in such a perishing hurry to get up here I don't imagine you ever looked back - but we caught sight of them more than once and that's the head of the column.'

Prentice was surprised. Earlier he had been startled to find German troops in front of them when they came over the hilltop near the pipe, and now he was surprised at how long it had taken them to reach this point since he had glanced back when they rushed out of the house below. He waited for two or three men to turn aside and enter the house, but the column went straight past and vanished as it began to mount the hill road. The wagon had been left behind the cypresses, which also concealed the house, and the Alpenkorps were going to ride up the hill without ever realizing its existence. With a feeling of relief he jumped down from the platform and hurried back to where Macomber still stood, stood like a man of stone as he gazed upwards, his hands inside his coat pockets, the expression on his face so grim that it recalled his impersonation of Dietrich.

'What's the matter?' asked Prentice. He tilted his head. "What's that -I can hear something?"

'The reinforcements - Burckhardt's reinforcements. By God, I expected something but I hadn't expected this. They must have half the Wehrmacht up there coming in.'

The sky to the north-east was still clear, more than clear enough for them to see the huge aerial armada which was descending on Zervos. The steady purr of their engines grew louder as they flew over the peninsula at a height of less than a thousand feet and they were close enough already for Macomber to see that they were three-engined machines with an iron cross on the fuselage and the swastika on the tail. Transport planes,' Ford said in his ear. "They'll very likely have parachutists aboard.' In the distance, flying even lower, came more planes and these were towing other machines with different silhouettes. Macomber was focusing his glass on them as Prentice spoke.

"The Alpenkorps have just started to come up the hill behind us.'

'They'll take Zervos before nightfall. There's nothing to stop them,' said Macomber.

'Unless this airborne crowd is heading for the mainland,' Ford suggested without much conviction.

Macomber stared through the glass, holding his head tilted back as the planes flew in closer. The aircraft towing other machines were losing height rapidly while the transport planes circled above the plateau, their engines a muted roar. There were no Allied fighters to intercept them, of course, although a flight of Messerschmitts had now appeared: the bulk of the over-strained RAF was supporting the Greek war in Albania and even these formations were few and far between. With a feeling of appalled helplessness they watched the aerial fleet droning casually over the plateau like a flying circus putting on a show before an invited audience, although the only audience to watch this display of Luftwaffe air power was the group of four men on the plateau rim. There were probably between twenty and thirty planes, but it was the thought of what they might contain which frightened Prentice. 'Those machines they're towing are gliders,' said Ford. He saw Macomber nod in confirmation and now the shadows of the planes were flitting over the level surface of the plateau, a perfect landing ground for putting down an airborne force. A moment later a cluster of black dots sprayed from one of the transport machines and the dots became cones as the parachutists floated downwards. A machine detached itself from its powered carrier and the gliders started to come in to land.

The four men were retreating from the plateau towards the hillside above the road when Macomber called out. 'Wait a minute, Prentice! Something's going wrong with this one.' A glider detached from its powered transport was wobbling unstably as it headed for the earth and had the appearance of being out of control as it descended towards the rim of the plateau close to where Macomber waited. An ugly, ungainly beast, it was twin-tailed and the fuselage was squat, suggesting great carrying capacity.

Half a mile along the road more parachutists were floating down over the brownish ground which seemed to be the main landing area and the sunlight caught their tilting cones - white for parachutists and various colours for the 'chutes supporting supply containers. Only one transport plane had attempted a landing to the left of the road and his machine was propped at a dangerous angle with the nose well down and its tail angled in the air. On the other side of the road two transports had already touched down safely and a third was just coming in.

'That plane on the left will be in trouble,' Prentice said tersely. 'It's marshland on that side.'

'How do you know that?' Macomber asked quickly.

'Because I persuaded the pilot to make a detour and fly over here on our way to Istanbul. We'd been discussing Zervos before I left Athens and I wanted to see what the place looked like. He told me that the green area was marshy...'

'Those transport machines are JU 52/3s,' Ford interjected professionally. 'I've heard they can carry mountain guns...'

'This is hardly a good time to start cataloguing German equipment,' Prentice snapped. 'I say we'd better get out of here - and fast.'

'And this brute of a glider coming towards us is a Gotha unless I'm very much mistaken,' Ford continued, and then found he was alone as the others ran back towards the boulders and scrub at the top of the hill. As he followed them he could hear the whine of the wind rising and the steady beat-beat of more transports coming in. Ford, who had a fatalistic streak in his make-up had little doubt that this was the end of the line; they would spend the rest of the war in some German prison camp, unless they were shot in the process of being captured. He was close to the first boulders when the machine-pistol slipped off his shoulder and he had to turn back to pick it up.

The huge Gotha assault cargo glider was flying down at an unpleasantly acute angle less than a hundred yards away. If it wasn't very lucky it was going to miss the rim of the plateau and go crashing down onto the plain below. Fascinated by the spectacle of the imminent disaster he stayed out in the open. Macomber seemed similarly affected, because now he came cut from behind the rocks and stood close to Ford as the massive glider swooped down, tried to level out at the last moment, and then thudded into the soft earth a bare hundred feet away.

'For God's sake get under cover, you idiots!' Prentice shouted from behind them. Ford, the spell broken, turned to go, but Macomber still waited as he gazed at the machine. The shock of landing had righted the fuselage and now the whole of the nose of the aircraft was lifting back like an immense hood. A soldier stood near the entrance as the aperture yawned larger, exposing a vehicle like a large car which waited to emerge. The German was moving unsteadily as he climbed behind the driver's seat and he paused to wipe something which might have been blood from his forehead. The engine started up and the vehicle began to move slowly out of the nose with a rattling sound as the driver slumped over the wheel as though he could hardly hold himself up. There was little doubt that he had been badly knocked about by the crash-landing. Prentice, who had come out from cover with Grapos, spoke over the Scot's shoulder. 'If we could just grab that...'