The Complete Navarone (107 page)

‘You pretended to be in a coma for a week?’ said Mallory.

‘Just about. Yes,’ said Spiro, with some smugness. ‘Eat, drink when nobody lookings. When you are very very frightens you can be very very brave.’

Carstairs said, ‘You are very brave and we admire you like hell, but we will tell you all about that later. Where is the machine?’

‘I remembers,’ said Spiro. ‘This chap who give me drink of water on beach. He said he was hiding this thing in a place that only he know, nobody else, ever. So is okay. He is a good guy, I think: hate Germans scums, fight for us, our side. And he give me his name. So now we go find him, tell him, British armies arrived, hand over, me old cocky. Everything hunky-boo.’

‘So what was his name?’ said Carstairs.

‘Achilles,’ said Spiro. Then, by Mallory’s computation about a thousand years later, ‘What wrong? You get problem?’

‘Yes,’ said Mallory. ‘Just a bit.’

Because Achilles was the name of the brother of Clytemnestra, who had been hanged in the Parmatia razzia. So it seemed very much as if the seven-rotor Enigma machine was somewhat lost.

In the dark very close behind them, someone cleared his throat. Mallory’s hand jumped automatically on the cocking lever of his Schmeisser.

‘Not today, thanks,’ said a voice. And Miller stepped into the lamplight, with Andrea close beside him.

‘I’ll go and find her,’ said Andrea.

‘Find who?’ said Carstairs.

‘Clytemnestra. Achilles’ sister.’

‘You heard.’

‘He wasn’t exactly whispering.’

Carstairs laughed, his short, patronizing bark. ‘Clytemnestra could be anywhere.’

‘We have a rendezvous,’ said Andrea. ‘The road’s open, again. We’ll take transport. We’ll find this machine.’

Carstairs nodded his head, wincing slightly. ‘I expect you will,’ he said. Then he swayed and lay down, suddenly.

‘What is it?’ said Mallory.

‘Giddy,’ said Carstairs. He tried to sit up, fell down again. ‘Christ.’

‘Stay there,’ said Mallory. You could not expect a man who had smashed himself unconscious on a rock to laugh lightly and carry on as if nothing had happened. ‘Andrea, get going. Miller, what’s your timing?’

‘Eight-hour fuses,’ said Miller.

‘Yes,’ said Mallory. ‘And the rest of it?’

‘Depends when they start pumping fuel,’ said Miller.

‘Any sign of anyone doing any rocket firing?’

‘Dunno,’ said Miller. ‘They’ve got one standing right there, pointed out of the roof. There weren’t no action we could see. But I guess they could have that sucker ready to go in, what, two hours, from a standing start?’

Andrea said, ‘I’ll be at the jetty by sunrise.’ There was no sound of movement. One moment he was there; the next, the darkness had flowed in to occupy the place where he had been standing.

‘Well,’ said Miller. ‘This is real nice.’ Miller was a man who believed in reconnaissance. On the way to the village, he had checked the place out. Once, it had probably been a thriving little community. Now, by the look of it, the original inhabitants had been displaced, the houses turned into dormitories for the men who worked inside the mountain, the church desecrated, a field kitchen on its mosaic floors turning out coarse bread and a soup whose smell did not inspire Miller to make its further acquaintance.

There was one bonus. The village was a prison, with the guards on the outside. The Germans would be looking for escapers, not intruders.

Miller left Mallory with Carstairs and Spiro, and went scouting. He walked quietly among the little knots of men in the village square. Soon, he observed a man with a disc-shaped loaf of white bread and a bottle of wine. Miller had lived through Prohibition in the States, and his nose for a bootlegger was practically supernatural. So he followed on down a narrow alley, and found a lamplit door and inside it an old man with a white bandit’s moustache, who looked at Miller’s gold drachmae with a face that did not budge an inch, but was still extremely impressed. ‘Where you from?’ he said.

‘Crete,’ said Miller.

‘How did you find me?’

‘I found you,’ said Miller, dour. He did not want to be gossiped about. ‘What you got?’

The old man hauled bread, wine and olives from a wormy wooden box. Miller blessed him, and walked out.

At the back of the church was a little house; the priest’s house, perhaps, built right up against the wall. It was dusty and cobwebbed, and had an odour suggestive of graveyards, and its floors were connected not by stairs but by a movable ladder, somewhat worm-eaten. But it was dry and secure, and to Miller it looked better than the Waldorf Astoria. He went back for Mallory and Carstairs and Spiro. Inside, he took out sardines and chocolate, and the bread and olives, and the wine. They ate like hungry wolves, tearing great lumps of bread and washing them down with draughts of turpentine-flavoured retsina. It seemed to Miller that for a man suffering from delayed concussion, Carstairs seemed to have a hearty appetite; a very hearty appetite indeed. Miller had taken a good few knocks on the head in his time as gold-miner and bootlegger. As far as he remembered – which was not, admittedly, very far, given the nature of the injury – for some weeks afterwards the very thought of food had been enough to make him spew his guts up …

Different strokes for different folks, thought Miller, watching Carstairs tap a cigarette on his gold case and light up. Very different folks. Carstairs was very different indeed.

Soon after this, in fact about ten seconds after this, he left his body behind, the sore eyes and the aching bones, and drifted down and down into a soft void, a place of no pain and total rest –

Then someone had hold of him and was yanking at his shoulder, and the softness was gone and the soreness in his head and his bones was back at double strength, and he was awake, looking at his watch. The watch that said he had been asleep for only ten minutes.

But during that ten minutes, the world had changed completely.

The crack under the door of the house had become a white-hot bar of light. Outside, there was noise; the noise of sirens squawking, of feet running; jackbooted feet. German feet.

Miller grabbed his thoughts by the scruff of the neck and told them to get themselves organized. They resisted, floating in and out of focus. Perhaps Andrea had got himself caught. Perhaps the Greek with the white moustache had reported that a stranger with a Cretan accent had paid him in gold. Perhaps they had found the plastic explosive charges on the rocket …

Or perhaps they had discovered all these things.

Mallory’s voice came out of the darkness by his ear. ‘Look after these two,’ it said. ‘I’ll do the rest.’

Miller opened his mouth to complain. But the words never came out. For at that moment, there was a thunderous knocking on the door.

‘The ladder,’ said Mallory.

The knocking ceased, then came again. This time, it did not stop.

Andrea had had no trouble so far.

He had left unhindered by the gate. From there he had walked down to the transport compound, drifting through strips of shadow, a darker patch of the general darkness. He watched a truck come in over the causeway, unload, reload, heard the driver receive his orders in the traditional
Wehrmacht
bellow. The truck was returning across the causeway to the aerodrome. Andrea crept up to it, attached two rope slings to the back axle leaf springs, and lay across them as another man might have lain in a hammock. The truck started up and roared across the causeway. The driver showed his pass, and was allowed into the aerodrome. The truck rolled to a halt by a group of sheds; by the sound of voices and crockery, a mess room.

Andrea waited for the driver to get out, then dropped to the ground. Two pairs of boots were walking away towards the Acropolis. Otherwise there was nobody in sight.

Staying in the shadows, Andrea walked quickly into the open darkness of the airfield, heading for the far side of the perimeter. Once the runway lights flicked on, and he lay flat as a twin-engined plane landed and taxied to the dispersal area. Otherwise the world seemed quiet, out here in the warm breeze and the smell of dust and bruised dry grass. He accelerated to a trot, came to the fence, took out the little wire-cutters from his pack, and made himself a small trap door in the mesh, a door just big enough to squeeze through, its lower edge camouflaged in the dirt. Against the sky he could see the leggy alien form of a guard tower. There would be sentries –

There was a sentry.

The man strolled by. Andrea smelt the smoke of the cigarette in his cupped hand. This was not a sentry on lookout; this was a sentry going through the motions. If he was looking for anybody, he would be looking for people trying to break in, not out. The sentry passed. Andrea moved on, keeping very low.

Suddenly the night turned white.

Andrea saw his hand in front of him, a great brown spider on the bare, gravelly soil. He saw the guard tower, every plank and strut lit in remorseless detail; he saw the sentry, half-turned, mouth open, eyes round with fear.

For a moment, Andrea thought they had turned on the searchlights, and braced himself grimly for the shouts, the thwack of bullets. Then he realized that the light was not coming from close at hand, but from behind him, beyond the marshes. He turned his head, glanced over his shoulder. The Acropolis was lit up like a wedding cake. Klaxons whooped in the night. Whatever was happening, it seemed unlikely to be an air raid.

In the tower a telephone started ringing. The sound broke the sentry’s trance. He trotted up the ladder. By the time Andrea heard his voice he was already moving on hands and knees across that flat gravelly stretch.

Then he was on his feet, loping away into the darkness. Behind him the perimeter lights jumped into life. But by then, he was far into the dark fringes of the night, less than a shadow against the loom of the mountains.

He was running across a checkerboard of fields, splashing through little irrigation gulleys, his feet brushing wheat and carrots, clogging with the rich volcanic soil of the plain. After a while, the ground began to rise. He was approaching the mountains.

Wills was in a churchyard. He seemed to be spending most of his time among the dead, nowadays. He hoped it was not an omen.

He had woken two hours ago, in the tomb above the Swallow’s Nest. There had been something on his face: Clytemnestra’s hand. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘We must go.’

He was groggy with sleeplessness. For a moment he did not want to go anywhere, except back into the comfortable dark. Then he remembered about Clytemnestra, and he got his feet under him, and told himself that there was a reason for moving, and that was to go wherever Clytemnestra was going …

Then he was out again in the soft night, climbing something that he knew in daylight would have scared the wits out of him, but which at this hour was merely a near-vertical wall of rock with foot and handholds at strategic intervals; a path, in fact; a vertical path.

They went up it and on to a flat place. Clytemnestra took his hand and squeezed it, signalling silence. They walked past the dark shape of a German sentry, all the way past until he realized that she was still holding his hand and he hers, which he put down to forgetting to let go. Then they were off, heading north, as far as he could tell, over a dizzy and bewildering series of paths and precipices, tending gently downhill. After perhaps two hours they burst from a maze of boulders on to a ledge or cornice of rock, spiked with black cypresses. They walked through a small area of grass, on which daisies glittered faintly under the stars, and into a plain white building. Nailed double doors swung open as they approached a church. A small figure, black as the sky and wearing a hat like a pygmy oil drum, flitted away into the night without speaking.

‘What was that?’ said Wills, unnerved.

‘The Patriarch,’ said Clytemnestra, and drew him in through the door, and closed it.

At first, there was darkness, musty with incense. Then there was the little yellow glow of a sanctuary lamp. Clytemnestra had taken her hand away from his. As his eyes got used to the gold-tinged gloom, Wills saw that she was kneeling, head bowed in prayer.

Wills had done a bit of praying himself, in chapel at school with the other chaps, and then less formally but more sincerely on lonely nights at sea with the E-boat tracers floating out of the dark at him. But up here in this strange, musty place, he felt there were more important things to do than pray.

He opened the door and slipped out.

There was a low parapet around the churchyard. Below it, the valley lay spread like a dark map. There were lights down there: runway markers flicking on, the roar of a plane landing, the markers flicking off again. The village on the Acropolis was lit, too, with the smaller yellow lights of candles. Then suddenly the airfield had become a blue-white square, dazzling in its intensity, and all over the Acropolis floodlights had leaped into being. And floating across the intervening gulf of air there came the sound of klaxons.

Something was happening.

Wills checked the clip in his Schmeisser. Then he hunkered down in the black pit of shadow between a wall and a cypress tree, and waited.

Time passed. There was only the thyme-scented breeze, and the night, and whatever devilry they were hatching on the other side of the marshes. Earlier, in his dazed wanderings, Wills had not cared whether he lived or died. He had lost his ship, and his men, and he was far, far out on the most precarious of limbs.