The Complete Navarone (66 page)

‘No way of telling,’ said Andrea. ‘Gas all gone?’

‘All gone.’

Mallory, Miller and Jaime got behind the vehicle. Andrea lent his shoulder. The wheels started to roll. Miller twitched the wheel. The Jeep gathered speed, bounced on a boulder, and disappeared with a metallic crash into a ravine.

Thierry had been squatting by his radio, tinkering with the tuning dial. Mallory said, ‘Radio silence from now on, please.’

Thierry nodded. He shouldered the pack. ‘How far?’

‘Twenty kilometres to the sea,’ said Jaime. ‘There is one ridge in between. A high ridge.’

Miller yawned and shouldered his brass-bound boxes. ‘Nice to stretch your legs after a drive in the country.’

Andrea said, ‘I’ll help Mr Wallace.’

The SAS man was upright. His face was the colour of wood ash, with dark circles under his eyes. He said, ‘I’m all right.’

Andrea said, ‘Come,’ and walked towards him, hands out.

Wallace raised his crutch and held it against Andrea’s breastbone. He said, ‘I can manage.’

Andrea said, ‘Sometimes it is the bravest man who surrenders.’

But Wallace was in a corner, his eyes hardening, getting that berserk look. He said, ‘No SOE bastard tells me what brave men do.’ His hand was going to the automatic in the holster at his side.

Andrea shrugged and turned away. For a moment his eyes caught Mallory’s. There was no expression in them, but Mallory knew him well enough to see he was worried. They were on an island of limestone in a sea of Germans. There was more to worry about than regimental pride.

‘Don’t want you holding us up,’ said Mallory.

The SAS man snapped, ‘Nobody’s going to hold you up.’ He recollected himself. ‘Sir.’

Mallory shrugged. ‘Jaime first,’ he said. ‘March.’

They marched.

Things had improved, Mallory reflected.

There were too many of them, one of them was drunk, another wounded, and they had no transport. But they had a destination. That was the plus side.

On the minus side, there was a trail of dead Germans stretching back across the Pyrenees. But there was nothing to be done about that.

Except keep going.

The track climbed from the valley floor, rising steeply and trending northward. It was a good track, built for mules, with wide steps separated by six-inch copings of stone. The vegetation was sparse. The limestone plates lower in the valley continued, less broken up here, until they were walking up a dry gorge between huge, overhanging crags. Wallace plodded on, wincing at each grind of his crutch against rock, the flies buzzing and crawling round the blackened dressing on his belly.

At first it was hot. But the sun grew hazy behind veils of cirrus, and by eleven the sun had gone in and a black edge of cloud had crept across the sky. The adrenaline of the pursuit was gone, oxidised in the weariness of a night without sleep. Life was the slog against gravity, one foot in front of the other, up the interminable mule-steps along the dry valley towards a horizon that always gave way to another, higher horizon. Jaime moved at the steady, straight-legged pace of the mountaineer. Thierry plodded on under the weight of the radio, sweat running down his great jowls, darkening the collar of his shirt and the band of his straw hat. Hugues let his head roll on his neck, stumbled a lot, and would not speak when spoken to. And Wallace kept struggling grimly on, crutch grinding on the stones, face contorted with pain and effort.

By noon it was cold and spitting with rain. Another front was coming in from the Atlantic. Mallory said, ‘How far to the top?’

‘One hour,’ said Jaime. He squinted his small black eyes at the lowering clouds. ‘Soon we will need shelter.’

‘Why?’

‘Snow,’ said Jaime. ‘I know a cave.’

‘No more caves,’ said Mallory. ‘We must go on.’

‘This is a … particular cave,’ said Jaime. ‘Twenty minutes more.’

‘Particular?’

‘There will be a storm,’ said Jaime. ‘For now, we should save our breath for the road.’

‘On,’ said Mallory. ‘Twenty minutes.’

There was a crash and a clatter. Wallace had fallen. He was not moving. Andrea squatted by his side, hand on his forehead. He looked up at Mallory. His face, normally unreadable, was worried. ‘Fever,’ he said.

‘Can you carry him?’

‘Of course.’ Andrea picked the SAS man up, slung him over his shoulder, and began to march. The rain started, then stopped again. The cloud was still high, but patches of dirty mist were hanging in the crags, and the air was damp and raw on their faces.

The floor of the gorge rose until they were walking on a bare slope of limestone. It steepened to forty-five degrees. Mallory could hear Andrea’s breathing.

‘At the top,’ said Jaime.

At the top of the slope was a cliff. In front of the cliff was a little plateau that narrowed into a curious little gully, like a gorge in embryo. The gully went back into the cliff, steep-sided, and ended abruptly in a tangle of boulders.

‘In here,’ said Jaime. ‘Behind the rocks.’

Mallory paused at the top of the slope, listening to the breath in his throat, the pound of the blood in his ears.

And another sound.

‘Get into the cave,’ he said. ‘Quick.’

They began to run, slithering on the loose flakes of limestone that carpeted the ground. They had all heard it: the steady drone of an aeroplane engine.

They were not going to make it to the cave. ‘Down!’ roared Mallory.

They fell on their faces between the boulders. The droning intensified. The Fieseler Storch observation plane came slowly up the path. Between two boulders, Mallory was close enough to see the glint of the observer’s binoculars as the plane circled over the little plateau.

The Storch flew on, down the other side of the mountain. Slowly and with great effort, the Storm Force dragged itself into the cave.

The entrance was little more than a crack in the rock, but inside it became a room-sized chamber, with a floor of broken stones and goat droppings, and a ceiling that faded upwards into shadow. The walls were smooth, as if they had been worn by water. There was no water now, except for a few drips from the roof. A cold draught blew from the inside of the cave, bearing the musty smell of stone.

Thierry said, ‘Did they see us?’

Mallory shrugged out of his pack. ‘No way of telling,’ he said. ‘Twenty minutes. Then we move on.’

Andrea caught Mallory’s eye, and slipped back out of the entrance.

‘If they had seen us, they would have turned back the way they had come, and made their report.’ Thierry’s eyes were anxious under the brim of the straw hat. ‘Do you not think?’

‘Sure,’ said Mallory, not because he was sure, but to keep him quiet. ‘Food.’ He began rummaging in his pack, pulling out cans of sardines and blocks of chocolate.

‘Brew up?’ said Miller.

‘Not yet,’ said Mallory casually. ‘Take a look at Wallace, would you?’

Wallace was lying on the stony floor. Andrea had put a pack under his head. The flesh had fallen away from his face, so the nose and cheekbones looked as if they would burst through the skin. He seemed to radiate a dry heat. His eyes were open, but were dull and glazed. ‘Hurts,’ he said.

Miller crouched at his side. ‘Just a little prick,’ he said. ‘As the actress said to the bishop.’ He pushed a morphine syrette into the ice-white skin of the SAS man’s dangling upper arm. Wallace moaned and stirred, and said something in a high, incomprehensible voice. Then his eyes closed. Miller unbuttoned the tunic and started to unwrap the bandages on the stomach.

When he had unwrapped them he sat very still for a moment, face immobile. Then he lit a cigarette and took a deep, soothing drag.

The wound was by no means soothing. It was a crater on the right-hand side of the belly; a crater puffed at the edges to an unhealthy redness that shaded to yellow. A faint odour rose from it, the smell of a meat-safe the morning after a hot night. And that was only the outside. It looked as if the bullet had been travelling from right to left. It had passed behind the abdominal muscles. It was still in there, somewhere. Miller had no means of finding out what damage it had done, and very little inclination to do so.

He rummaged in his first-aid box and pulled out a can of sulfa powder. He sprinkled a heavy dusting on the entrance hole, and applied fresh dressings. While Andrea held Wallace up, he rebound the bandages so it looked neat and white and tidy.

Mallory said, ‘How is he?’

Miller lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one. ‘Could be lucky,’ he said, without conviction.

‘Nothing you can do?’

‘You can sit there with your mouth open and wonder how the hell he managed to climb a three-thousand-foot mountain,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, I’ve packed it with sulfa. I may also pray a little.’

Mallory nodded. The weeks of effort were telling on Miller. His eyes were sunk deep in his head, and they held a manic gleam. Miller had always had an over-developed sense of humour, but now it was developing an edge colder than bayonet steel.

‘But I tell you something,’ said Miller. ‘If he can climb with a stomach like that, he can probably bloody well fly as well.’ He rummaged in his pack, pulled out a can of sardines and ate the fish in concentrated silence, using a knife.

Mallory sat down, let his aching limbs relax, and ate some sardines of his own. He was exhausted. Forty-eight hours from now, the Werwolf pack was due to sail. They were going to have to keep moving.

But if they left Wallace, he would die.

Drowsily, he debated with himself. They had already left Lisette. Why not leave Wallace?

If the Storch had spotted them, they would find him here. And he would talk.

Mallory found himself dozing. He sat up quickly, took a Benzedrine out of his pack and swallowed it.

Hugues was nodding over his bottle of brandy. Mallory leaned over and took it out of his hand. He washed the pill down with a fiery gulp and passed the bottle on to Jaime. Andrea was going to have to carry Wallace.

He looked around the grey, cheerless shadows. Andrea was not there. He would be standing sentry. Mallory climbed stiffly to his feet and went to the mouth of the cave.

The gully stretched away like a corridor roofed with sky. In the ten minutes they had been inside, the roof had become lower, changed from black to soft grey. And from out of the grey, whirling on the eddies of a bitter wind, there floated billions of snowflakes. Already the outlines of boulders in the gully were melting and fusing under the chill, white blanket. Of Andrea there was no sign.

Jaime appeared at his side. He said, ‘Now only one small hill to the sea.’

‘How far?’

‘Twelve kilometres.’

‘It’s snowing.’

‘Not down below. Snow up here, rain down below.’ Jaime laughed. The brandy had given his eyes a mischievous glitter. ‘We can go the inside way, if you want.’

‘What do you mean?’

Jaime took his arm, led him back into the cave, and pointed at its shadowy inner recesses. ‘Once this was where a river came out of the cliff. The river is still in there, but it has found new ways out. Now it arrives in the valley close to the Hendaye road. And in other places, they say, it springs from the hill. I once met a man, Norbert Casteret, who told me he had walked inside this mountain.

He was a great bore. In great detail he told me: shafts, waterfalls, and the rest.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Mallory. The Benzedrine was making his ears ring in the intense, snow-muffled silence. There was only Wallace’s stertorous breathing, and the drip of water from the cave roof. And now that Jaime came to mention it, something else, something more a vibration than a sound, as if far away, something hugely powerful was roaring and thundering. A waterfall, for instance.

Mallory’s muscles tensed and his palms sweated. Caves and water … Not fear, he told himself. Only the Benzedrine. He looked at his watch. They had been here fifteen minutes. Time they were moving on. He said to Jaime, ‘Moving out in three minutes. The outside route.’

Hugues and Thierry groaned, stretching their cold-stiffened limbs. Miller gathered his pack and his precious boxes. Mallory shouldered his own pack and his weapons. He went once again to the mouth of the cave and down the gully, and looked onto the little plateau. It was empty, except for snowflakes. Where the hell was Andrea?

Then something moved in the snow: a giant moustache, and a pair of black eyebrows that grew larger. Mallory realised that he was looking at Andrea; Andrea wearing a white snow smock, carrying the Bren.

Andrea said, ‘My Keith, we have a German patrol.’ He spoke calmly, but he was moving fast.

Mallory’s ears sang in the silence. ‘How many?’

‘Perhaps thirty.’

At the edge of the plateau, a ragged line of dark shapes was materialising in the snow. The shapes of German soldiers. And with the soldiers, other shapes, from which came the sound of whining and baying.

Dogs.

There was no point in trying to draw the men away from the cave: the dogs would not be distracted, even if the handlers were.