The Complete Navarone (75 page)

Mallory and Miller went out onto the empty quay. Mallory padlocked the door.

There was a dampness in the air, mixed with the faint, industrial reek of high explosive from the pillbox. It was quiet, except for the sploosh of the waves and the nearby thud of the fishing boat’s engine.

And in the far background, on the edge of hearing, the sound of lorry engines.

The reinforcements were arriving.

Hugues scrambled down the cliff onto the quay, with Jaime and Lisette and Miller’s boxes. Andrea was back, too. The fishing boat was coming out of the horizon, masts moving across the stars in the handle of the Plough.

Mallory noticed that the lower stars of the Plough’s share had disappeared. He checked it off on a mental list. In the middle of all these disasters, that was something that could be useful.

He said to Jaime, ‘Where are those old men?’

‘Preparing for a final stand.’

‘Go and tell them that for every German they kill, ten Frenchmen will be shot in reprisal. Tell them that this is a British army operation, and that the British army is withdrawing. Tell them that I have informed the sentries accordingly. Make it quick.’

Jaime nodded, and trotted up the cliff. Hugues said, ‘For God’s sake, where is this fishing boat?’

A dark shape came out of the murk. The fishing boat glided alongside. Andrea said, ‘We won’t get far without air support.’

It was a joke. It was a joke that was too true to be good. If lorry loads of Germans soldiers arrived on the quay now, they would have no trouble sinking Guy’s boat. Machine guns, grenades, mortars, they would do the job.

If they arrived on the quay now.

Mallory thought of Wallace, the look in those china-blue eyes. Wallace was a berserker.

Good luck, Wallace, thought Mallory.

The fishing boat was a dark hulk alongside the quay now, the sound of its engine a clanging thump like the beat of a metal heart.

The lorry engines were nearly as loud, approaching the top houses of the village.

‘Bon,’
said a small figure in Guy’s voice, but higher than usual. ‘All on boat. Quick, quick.’

Jaime had materialised out of the night, panting. ‘I told them,’ he said. They went aboard. The propeller churned water under the transom. The bow swung out and steadied on the strip of absolute blackness between the sea and the stars. For a moment the land astern lay dark and quiet, the houses of the sleeping village draped across their valley under the stars.

Then the valley erupted like the crater of a volcano.

In the cab of the lead lorry, the Hauptmann had been tired and bored. The bloody Resistance were having one of their fits. Whoever had knocked off the SS patrol in the mountains had in the Hauptmann’s opinion done a good job. It was just that the Hauptmann wished that, having shot the bastards up, they had gone to ground, instead of making a bloody nuisance of themselves in the suburbs of St-Jean-de-Luz and scaring the wits out of his sentries in hopeless little shallow-water ports like Martigny. Until someone had hammered on his door, the Hauptmann had been entertaining Big Suzette in his billet. Suzette might be large, but she was a person of surprising skill. And instead of testing those skills to the limit, the Hauptmann was sitting half-drunk, very tired, and in a state of aggravated coitus interruptus in a truck at the head of a column of three other trucks, one hundred men in all, on the way to sort out a bit of local difficulty in Martigny, on pain of transfer to the Russian Front.

Sod it, thought the Hauptmann.

The lead truck rounded a corner in the lane and started downhill, into the beginning of the valley, where the houses began. There was an old barn a hundred metres down the road on the right. The Hauptmann paid it no attention, because he was peering at the southern side of the valley, where the pillbox stood. The pillbox should have been heavily engaged, if there was real trouble. But the pillbox was silent. As the truck drew level with the barn it seemed to the Hauptmann that the gun-slits of the pillbox were illuminated by a dull orange glow that waxed and waned. But the brandy was playing monkey’s tricks with his eyesight –

A tight cluster of Bren rounds blew the windscreen in with a hellish jangle of broken glass. The driver went halfway out of the window and collapsed like a wet rag. The lorry slewed sideways across the lane, demolishing a wall and coming to rest against a boulder. One of the men in the back saw a jabbing flicker of flame in the open shutter under the roof of the barn by the roadside. As he opened his mouth to point it out, a line of bullets stitched across his abdomen. The last bullet hit one of the stick grenades at his belt. The explosion that followed set fire to the lorry’s gas tank. Men spilled out of the three lorries following, and took up positions in ditches and behind potato-ridges. There was obviously a considerable force in the barn. A machine gunner slammed his weapon on the ground in the lee of a ruined pigsty and fumbled for the trigger. He was a badly shaken man, partially blinded by the flames of the burning lorry. His first long burst went wild, the tracers striking sparks from the coping of the quay and whipping out over the water of the harbour. For a moment, half the weapons in the squad fired after his tracers, and the black water of the port was churned to foam. Then a Feldwebel who had been invalided home from the Eastern Front and knew what he was doing started screaming orders, and the squad turned its attention to the shutter under the barn roof.

There must be at least a company in there, thought the squad, hugging the ground and pouring in fire. The black opening became silent. The squad’s firing lulled. A man got up and scuttled in with a grenade. A hoarse, agonised bellowing came from the shutter, followed by the burp of two sub-machine guns. The streams of bullets started low and went high, almost as if the men firing them were too weak to hold the muzzles down. The man with the grenade ran into the first burst, and fell down. The Germans opened up again.

This time, the machine gunner put an accurate stream of bullets through the open shutter, one in three of them tracer. A light was then seen inside, yellow and blue, and volumes of smoke obscured the sky. The hay was on fire. And suddenly against that light there appeared the figure of a man; a man crawling on one hand and two knees. In the hand he was not using to support himself he held a Schmeisser, which he fired until it was empty.

Now they could see him, they shot him quickly, and he fell to the ground in front of the barn, which was burning well now as the last year’s hay rose in the draughts. The flames spread quickly to the rafters.

The Germans kept on shooting. They had killed one man, sure. But there was no possibility that only one man could have done so much damage.

So they poured lead into the burning barn, the flames dazzling their eyes, until the ridge went and the roof fell in, and a fountain of orange sparks rose at the cold and hazy stars. And when the place was merely a heap of glowing ashes and there was no possibility of anyone being left alive, someone went and looked at the body that had come out of the shutter.

He was lying on his back. His face was peaceful, pale, with a trickle of blood from the corner of the mouth. He was wearing a beret, with the flying dagger of the SAS. The two privates next to the body were almost too frightened to touch it.

‘Doesn’t look very healthy,’ said one of them.

‘That’s because he’s dead,’ said the other one.

The battledress blouse was open. The bandages round the belly shone black and wet in the flames. ‘Ach,’ said one of them. ‘Stinks.’

‘Brave man,’ said the first German. ‘To fight like that with his guts hanging out.’

‘Bloody idiot,’ said the second. He bent and closed the eyes, which were blue, and berserk, and open.

It was four o’clock by the time they got the burning truck out of the lane and moved on down to the quay. This time, nobody was taking any chances.

But when they got down to the sea, there was only the sloosh of the ripples against the quay, and the smooth expanse of the harbour at high water, lightening now with the dawn.

Guy Jamalartégui did not see the huge bloom of flame at the top of the valley. From the wheelhouse window, he was saying, in broken English,
‘Messieurs,’ ‘dames
, welcome to the
Stella Maris
. And now,
Capitaine
Mallory, it is a question of my money –’

Then the guns started up, and Jamalartégui stopped.

One moment the water was dark and smooth. Then it was churning with tracers from the fusillade following the first wild burst the German machine gunner had fired after Wallace had shot up the lorry. The air was whining like injured dogs, and a flock of hammers slammed into the wheelhouse. Guy said, ‘Oh,’ a curious, breathy sound, as if the air was coming out of more places than his throat. He fell on the deck with a crash like a bag of coal. There were more tracers, but random, whizzing into the air like fireworks, passing over the spidery masts of the
Stella Maris
, dimming and vanishing.

Miller knelt by the body and felt for the pulse in the scrawny neck. He said, ‘He’s dead.’

Mallory looked down at them through eyes sore with sleeplessness. He realised that it was getting light. He could see Miller, crouched on the deck, his bony knees by his ears. And down there beside him in a pool of something that looked black but was not black, was Guy. A Guy who was no longer breathing; whom that random burst of fire from the hill had caught fair and square across the rib cage.

Mallory stepped over the body. He took the wheel. From the chart he recalled that the shore of the bay ran southwest. So he steered southwest, aiming at the horizon, as the light grew.

The engine thumped on. The sea was black like an asphalt parade ground, the horizon clogged with pale haze.

Andrea fingered the upper lip where his moustache was meant to be, and reached for the bottle of Cognac, and took a long swig. ‘No rocks, my Keith, if you please,’ he said. ‘Only peace and quiet.’ Then he lay down in the lee of the wheelhouse.

Mallory kept the bow southwest and motored for the horizon, waiting for the drone of engines, aircraft or marine, that would mean that after all this time, it was all over.

After three or four minutes, he realised that there was something wrong with that horizon. It should have been a knife-sharp line. Instead it looked lumpy and ragged, as if it was made of grey wool. And suddenly the grey skein ahead rose and touched the sky, and the air was wet on his face, and he realised the truth. The
Stella Maris
had sailed into thick fog.

The world was a round room, with walls of grey vapour. It was a room that moved with the
Stella Maris
, southwest. It was a room impenetrable by ships and aircraft, except by accident. A most fortunate room.

As long as you did not mind being off a rocky shore in tides of unknown strength, not knowing where you were going.

The sun rolled up, a blood-coloured disc above the ramparts of vapour. From somewhere – astern, possibly, it was hard to tell – heavy explosions thumped across the water. They sounded to Mallory like blasting charges.

Andrea said, ‘Wallace was a good man, my Keith.’

Mallory nodded. His eyes hurt with peering into the fog. Wallace had done his duty; more than his duty. Now he was another offering on the altar of war. Unlike most such offerings, his death had not been in vain. Mallory felt sadness, and gratitude.

And puzzlement.

Wallace had not had any high explosives with him. It was unlikely the Germans would have used such explosives to winkle one man out of a hayloft.

It must be Cendrars and his men. They must have got their hands on some quarry explosive, and be slugging it out with the Germans. Mallory profoundly hoped that he was wrong. A pitched battle between the Germans and the heroes of the Marne would only bring down horrors on the civilian population. But he turned his face resolutely away from such speculations. What mattered was what lay ahead, in San Eusebio.

The light grew. They wrapped Guy in a tarpaulin and weighted his feet with a chunk of old scrap iron from the
Stella Maris
’ noxious bilges. Jaime took off his beret and said a couple of Basque prayers. Hugues said,
‘Vive la France!’
The body pierced the black surface of the sea with scarcely a ripple, and was gone.

The sea was getting to Mallory. In the globe of fog it was quiet, and grey, and solitary: an oasis in the desert of battle and violence that he wandered like a Tuareg. But Mallory disliked the peace of the sea in the same way a Tuareg might find an oasis cloying. It produced in him a nervous sickness, the sickness that the Tuareg might feel under green palms among people he did not know, as he watered his camels and longed to return to the real life of furnace winds and red-hot sands. Mallory experienced a moment of longing for the rock and ice of mountains: hard mountains whose habits he understood. Mountains in which he was not the hunter and the destroyer; mountains in which the only enemies were the failure of finger and foot to cling to hold, or human will to continue upwards.

He looked down at Andrea. The Greek was lying by the wheelhouse, smoking, watching the oily heave of the sea. He felt Mallory’s eyes on him. He looked up. ‘This is a most disgusting ocean,’ he said.

Mallory nodded.

‘These tides,’ said Andrea. They are a thing of barbarians. How can men make ideas when the world they inhabit is being dragged here and there by the moon? It is for this that you are so restless, you of the North.’

Mallory laughed. They had escaped from a burning village and were on their way to attack a fortified rock. And Andrea was complaining about the tides.

But when he looked again at Andrea’s face, he saw something that stopped his laughing. Despite his claims to the contrary, Andrea was not afraid of men or bullets, night or war. But unless Mallory was very much mistaken, Andrea was afraid of the cold black waters of the Atlantic.

He lit a cigarette. There was a breeze now, enough to whip the smoke away. The sun had gone, and the sky was a leaden grey. Mallory wedged himself into the corner of the wheelhouse. Twelve hours, he thought. He took inventory.

The
Stella Maris
was forty-five feet long. She had a tall mast at the front end and a short mast at the back end, which probably made her a ketch. There were what looked like sails on the booms, which Mallory devoutly hoped they would not have to use. There was a big fish-hold amidships, a dirty little fo’c’sle, and an engine room abaft the wheelhouse. The engine was a single-cylinder Bolander hot-bulb diesel, with a rust-caked flywheel the size and weight of a millstone. In the bullet-shattered wheelhouse was a compass of unknown accuracy, and the bloodstained Admiralty chart Guy had spread on his kitchen table all those weeks – hours – ago. The
Stella
Maris
was thumping southwest through the fog at something like five knots, Mallory estimated. They should have moved out of French waters into Spanish. There would be patrol boats.

He offered a cigarette to Andrea. Andrea took it and lit it, scowling from under his black brows at the grey and sunless sea. ‘A cold hell,’ he said. He began to rummage restlessly in lockers. He found a new bottle of brandy, sniffed it, took a swig, and passed it to Mallory. One of the lockers was full of flags. He pulled out a yellow one. ‘Quarantine,’ he said. ‘For when you have disease on board.’ His white teeth showed in his black and bristly jaw. ‘Or when you have goods to declare. This flag has never been used, I think.’

He’s beaten it, thought Mallory. Andrea was not one to let irrational fears occupy space more profitably reserved for rational fears, like fear of failure in the face of the enemy. ‘Guy said there was a Spanish flag,’ he said.

Andrea rummaged some more, and came up with a red-and-yellow ensign. It was big, for easy visibility, and looked as if it had done long, solid service. Mallory gave Andrea the wheel, walked out of the wheelhouse and ran the ensign up to the top of the mizzen mast.

So now the
Stella Maris
was a Spanish boat, and all they had to worry about was motoring full ahead into the cliffs of Northern Spain.

The wind was definitely freshening. Ahead, the fog was becoming pale and ragged, and the slow Atlantic heave of the waves was taking on a sharper, more urgent feel.

Behind the wheelhouse, Miller stirred and opened his eyes. He lay for a moment, watching the Spanish flag snapping in the crisp breeze. Then he sat up and lit a cigarette.
‘Buenos dias,’
he said. ‘Coffee?’

‘If you please,’ said Mallory.

Miller stumbled down a flight of steps into the grease-varnished galley. From its door there emerged the smell first of paraffin, and then of coffee. He brought Mallory and Andrea mugs, well dosed with condensed milk and brandy. ‘Nice as this is,’ said Miller, eyeing the sea with scorn and dislike, ‘how long does it last?’

‘At least till nightfall.’

The
Stella Maris
thumped on, rolling heavily in the swell from the west. The fog was thinning in the breeze, piling into banks. One particularly heavy bank hung to the south, a heap of grey vapour that should, if Mallory’s dead reckoning was right, hide the land. Miller drank another cup of coffee and smoked two cigarettes in quick succession. His bony face, already pale with exhaustion, was turning greenish under the eyes. Mallory said to Andrea, ‘Better let him steer,’ and lay down on the bench at the back of the wheelhouse.

Sleep came immediately, deep as a lake. It all went: the submarines, fog, the approaching cliffs of Spain.

It was a peaceful sleep: not the two-inches-below-the-surface doze of action, but a deep, heavy coma, a sleep of the interregnum between the confusions of the Pyrenees and the task waiting on the Cabo de la Calavera. Watching him, Andrea saw the broad forehead smoothed of the tensions of the last three days, saw the knots at the hinges of the jaw relax. Rest well, my Keith, he thought. You have brought us a long way, but you have only brought us to the beginning.

Mallory dreamed. He dreamed he was in a place in the mountains, in a valley of grey stone through which a glacier inched. He dreamed that there were great birds wheeling in the sky that were not birds, but aeroplanes: Stukas. The Stukas were diving, dropping their bombs, which were bursting around him in red flowers of flame. But Mallory felt nothing, heard nothing, because he was separate from it all. A voice told him, ‘You are in the ice.’ Wallace’s voice. And Mallory realised that it was true. He was encased in a huge block of clear ice, which was saving him from the bombs. But at the same time it was preventing him from feeling anything, and that was bad –

Then someone was shaking him, and he was coming up out of that ice, his mind clicking into awareness that something had changed. The engine was still panting, the boat still rolling. But he seemed to be wet, and there was a new sound: a shrill wailing, an ululation, the sound of the Stukas –

He swung his feet to the deck, eyes searching the sky. There were no Stukas. There were only clouds, arranged in long squalls, their bellies trailing rain. Against them, the
Stella Maris
’ masts described jerky loops. Her stub nose rose and fell like a blunt wooden hammer, walloping the troughs into spray that came back down the deck in bucketfuls. The wailing was the wind in the rigging.

‘Land, er, ho,’ said Miller.

As Mallory stood up he saw the fog bank, smaller and lighter now, shift and writhe. Then a great hand of air seemed to grab it and wrench it aside.

Five miles away, across a grey and gnarled sea, the black cliffs of Spain stood high and clear. Through his glasses Mallory could see a bay, with a cluster of grey houses, and on one of the headlands, the ruins of what might have been a fortress. He took a bearing and checked the chart. ‘Forty miles to go,’ he said. Miller nodded, without enthusiasm. Miller did not like the sea. As far as he was concerned, four miles would have been better; a lot better, even if there were two SS regiments at the end of it. ‘Get Jaime on deck,’ said Mallory.

Miller went below. Mallory kept the boat’s head to the sea, blinking the spray out of his eyes. It had almost been better in the fog. He felt horribly exposed, out here in the clear grey breeze. And by the feel of it, they would be here all day; the
Stella Maris
was making four knots at best, labouring over these humpbacked seas like a weak-hearted charwoman climbing a flight of stairs.

Jaime appeared on deck, bleary-eyed. He squinted around him, said, ‘That’s Cabo del Lobo. Long way to go.’

‘What about patrol boats?’ said Mallory.

Jaime shrugged. ‘They make big trouble on the border. This far down the coast, maybe they don’t bother. Either way, they like money.’

‘Stay on deck,’ said Mallory.

Jaime nodded. He said, ‘One thing. If you stay out here, people will be suspicious. You’re a fishing boat. So we go in under the cliffs, no? That way, you are fishing. And nobody can see you from the land. And if we do get a problem, we throw some lobster pots in the sea.’

Mallory said, ‘You know a lot about this.’

Jaime grinned, the grin of a man in his element. ‘Frontiers are my business,’ he said.

Mallory nodded. Without Jaime, they would not have found the Chemin des Anges, or the cave system. Without Jaime, they would have been dead.

The
Stella Maris
closed the shore. Across two hundred yards of grey and lumpy sea the cliffs reared three hundred feet into the grubby sky swept by the white motes of innumerable seabirds. Miller did not like the look of them at all. At least when their caïque had blown into the south cliff at Navarone it had been decently dark. If Miller was going to get smashed to bits, he would rather not get smashed to bits in broad daylight.

Hugues was on deck, looking as nervous as Miller felt. ‘Is okay,’ said Lisette, showing her white teeth. ‘Jaime has sailed this route many times.’

‘I didn’t know you were a fisherman,’ said Miller.

Jaime grinned, his dark eyes glinting under his beret. ‘There are many people in the cigarette fishery,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you fish from a mule, sometimes from a boat.’

‘It is not only lobsters you find in the pots here,’ said Lisette.

Through the horrid queasiness of his belly, Miller thought that he saw in her something new, a confidence that she had not had in France. Of course, getting away from the Gestapo and into neutral territory would tend to improve your confidence, particularly if your guide in neutral territory was Jaime.

A sharp-crested hill of water swept under the
Stella Maris
’ bow and dropped her into a trough. For a moment, Miller was once again weightless. To seaward a great hole had appeared in the sea, floored with weedy rock. ‘Caja del Muerto,’ said Jaime. ‘Dead man’s chest.’ The waters closed over the rock with a boom, sending a depth-charge burst of ice-white spray a hundred feet into the wind.

For the next two hours the
Stella Maris
ground on down the inshore channel, invisible from the land. Mallory began to regain confidence. He went to Miller, who was lying in the scuppers alongside the wheelhouse, and said, ‘Four hours’ sleep. Then check your gear, and I’ll brief the team.’

Miller groaned and dragged himself to the fo’c’sle, where Hugues was snoring on his bunk. He rolled into the bunk underneath, and passed out.

Mallory leaned against the wheelhouse, apparently watching the gulls on the cliffs. He had been thinking about Guy’s chart of the Cabo de la Calavera and the harbour of San Eusebio. The approach was from the town quay, across the harbour, through the beach defences onto the Cape and into the U-boat repair docks. That was obvious.

Far too obvious.

The tide would be low, just after dark. The beach would be exposed and easy.

Far too easy.

Mallory lit a cigarette, and rested his head against the wheelhouse doorpost. There were features of the San Eusebio chart that had been making him think hard about cliffs; particularly if, as seemed likely, the wind fixed itself in the west.

‘Capitaine,’
said Jaime in a new, sharp voice, and pointed.

Mallory followed his finger.

Halfway to the horizon was the silhouette of a grey launch. As Mallory watched, the silhouette foreshortened until he could see the moustache of foam on either side of the bow.