The Complete Navarone (76 page)

He felt the muscles of his stomach clench and become rigid. San Eusebio seemed suddenly a long way away.

‘Well,’ he said, calm as a goldfish pond. ‘I suppose it’s time we hauled the pots.’

El Teniente Diego Menendez y Zurbaran was in a vile mood. It was not being posted to this wet green corner of Spain; he had fought hard for the Nationalists in the Civil War, so he had no objection to the sight of Basque towns in ruins and Basque children starving. It was worse than rain and Basques. A week ago, he had been told in an unpleasant interview with Almirante Juan de Sanlucar, his cousin and commanding officer, that he was to double his patrols and increase his vigilance generally. The Teniente had pointed out that his vigilance was as always at maximum, and that the patrol boat, known to its crew as the
Cacafuego
, was operating all the hours its ancient engine and weary rivets could stand. Sanlucar had assumed a dour, bellicose look, and told him that instructions from above did not take account of such objections. It was the will of … someone very exalted (here Sanlucar’s lips framed the words
el Caudillo
) that patrols on the stretch of coast for which the Teniente was responsible should be greatly increased.

At the framing of the Dictator’s august title, never lightly spoken aloud, the Teniente’s heart had started to bang nastily in his chest. At first he had interpreted it as a general rebuke for his laxity; the pay of a Naval officer was scarcely a living wage in this dreary province of surly people and expensive food, so he had fallen into the habit of accepting the voluntary contributions of the smuggling fraternity. But he realised that there was more to it than that after a conversation with Jorge, his bosun. Jorge had observed military activity on the Cabo de la Calavera, and had approached the sentries on the gate, who were dressed in the uniforms of the First Zaragoza Regiment, to offer them the services of certain Basque women he maintained in the Calle Brujo in Bilbao. The soldiers had chased Jorge away, cursing him in a language that was not Spanish. Jorge had expressed to the Teniente the opinion, based on certain military vehicles and black uniforms he had half-glimpsed through the heavily-fortified gate that cut off the neck of the peninsula, that the garrison on the Cabo de la Calavera was German.

And thirty-six hours ago, just before this patrol, the Teniente had been notified that his bow gun crew was to be replaced, as were the port and starboard machine gunners. When the replacements had turned up, they had been German.

The Teniente had nothing against Germans. He disliked them only insofar as he disliked everyone except himself. But their presence on Cabo de la Calavera made him nervous, and their presence at his guns insulted his pride. He valued Spain’s neutrality, because it meant his life was not in danger. He needed his bribes. And he had not taken kindly to standing on that worn patch of carpet in front of the Almirante’s desk in Santander, being subjected by the Almirante to a diatribe on the importance of duty under the cold grey eyes of an obvious homosexual from the German Embassy in Madrid. This coast was the Teniente’s personal patch. The fact that his superior officers’ new jumpiness was obviously German-inspired made him feel, insofar as such a feeling was possible for a Fascist, frankly bolshy.

So it was with no great sense of mission that he bore down on the familiar black hull of the
Stella Maris
, hauling lobster pots under the cliff.

He paused a hundred feet away, snarling at Paco the coxswain to keep the boat steady. The
Stella Maris
was head to wind, fat and black as ever. There were a couple of unfamiliar faces: two men who might have been northern Portuguese or even German, tall and lean, wearing singlets despite the cut of the west wind. They lurched uneasily on the
Stella Maris
’ splintery deck; it looked to the Teniente as if they were not used to hauling lobster pots. But they were hauling all right. And back in the wheelhouse – it looked as if something had happened to the wheelhouse – Jaime Baragwanath was waving and grinning from under his beret. There seemed to be a woman with him.

The Teniente knew Jaime of old, as a fixer and a smuggler. He brought coffee out of Spain to France, and in the other direction the wines of Bordeaux, to alleviate the suffering caused by
vino negro
. If Jaime was personally on board the
Stella
, she would be carrying a high bulk, high value cargo, like wine.

The Teniente was partial to a few bottles of claret of an evening. Normally, he would have taken his cut at the landing. But he saw in the
Stella Maris
a way to impress his new gunners – and thus, he suspected, the Almirante – with his zeal.

The Teniente lit a thin black cigar and tilted his cap rakishly over his right eye. Plucking the brass megaphone from its clips on the bridge, he put its oxide-green business end to his mouth. ‘Halt,’ he shouted. ‘I am boarding you.’ On the foredeck, the crew of the 75-mm gun swivelled their piece to cover the
Stella
.

Mallory put a couple of loops of tail-line round a Samson post, and tied it off with a knot that had more to do with rock faces than boats. He shuffled aft at a fisherman’s slouch. He said to Jaime, ‘What is this?’

‘Routine inspection,’ said Jaime, his dark face still, avoiding Mallory’s eye. ‘This officer takes bribes. He’s used to seeing the
Stella
under the Spanish flag, as long as he get money. He maybe want some money. Or maybe some tobacco, drink, who knows?’

‘Jaime knows,’ said Hugues.

Mallory ignored him. He said, ‘Does he normally point guns?’

‘Not normally.’ Jaime frowned at the men on the
Cacafuego’s
foredeck. ‘He’s got new gunners.’

Mallory nodded and grinned, a simple fisherman’s grin, full of salty good nature, for the benefit of anyone watching from the gunboat. His eyes were not good-natured. They checked off the rusting grey paint of the bow, the two blond men balancing easily on the deck by the breech of the 75-mm gun. The Captain was on the bridge. Aft of the bridge, another two men stood at machine guns. Spandaus. Spandaus were light guns, but they could still unzip a boat the size of the
Stella
. A 75-mm gun could blow her right out of the water.

But the guns were not the main problem. The main problem was the array of radio aerials between the two masts.

In his mind, he followed the trail of wreckage back into the Pyrenees. If the
guarda-costa
sent out a signal about unusual occurrences off the Vizcayan coast, any German with a map and eyes to see would be able to grasp the general direction of this dotted line of mayhem.

There was only one solution.

Mallory trotted forward and shouted down the main hatch. Jaime started yelling at the patrol boat in Spanish. The patrol boat was yelling back. Mallory cast off the tail-line of the lobster pots. Then he went aft to the wheelhouse. He said to Lisette, ‘Get down, please.’ He politely took the wheel from Jaime, spun it hard-a-starboard, and drove the
Stella Maris
straight at the patrol boat’s mid point.

The teniente started screaming into the megaphone. That was a mistake. By the time he had realised screaming was no good, the
Stella Maris
was twenty feet away. The 75-mm gun banged once. The shell screamed past the
Stella
’s wheelhouse and burst on the black cliff face two hundred yards behind. The Spandaus opened up, bullets fanning across the sky as the gunboat rolled. Then Andrea and Miller came out of the
Stella
’s forehatch like jack-in-the-boxes. Andrea hosed the gun’s crew with Bren bullets. They disappeared. Hit or not, it did not matter, as long as they were away from the gun. Miller took the Spandau crews. By the time he had finished his burst, the
Stella Maris
was in a trough, the gunboat on a wave. The patrol boat’s grey side came down with a rending crash on the
Stella
’s stem, and stuck there. The gunners on the patrol boat could not depress their sights far enough to bear on the
Stella
. Andrea had the Bren going by now, hammering a tight pattern of bullets into the patrol boat’s hull, at the place where the radios might be. Miller pulled the pins out of four grenades. He tossed them up the patrol boat’s side, heard them rattle down her decks, and heard the
blat
of their explosions in the wind. The two boats hung together in the form of a T, bashed and wrenched by the short inshore chop, the
Stella
’s bow borne down by the patrol boat’s side. There was a hole in that side. The
Cacafuego
’s plates were no thicker than a tin can: a rusty tin can –

A wave came under. The
Stella
pitched away from the gunboat at the same time as the gunboat rolled away from the
Stella
. The gunboat’s plates gave with a wrenching groan. The two boats came apart, the
Stella
’s bow rearing high as Mallory took her round and away.

‘Fire!’ screamed the Teniente. His ears were ringing from the grenade explosions. The radio aerials were gone, streaming in the breeze. The Teniente heard the bullets clang and whizz, and felt an odd sogginess in his ship’s movements. ‘Fire!’ he screamed again. The
Stella Maris
was twenty yards away now. He saw the Spandau crews sprawled over their guns, and the foredeck by the 75-mm swept clean of men. He found that his feet were wet, and realised that his ship was sinking. He had been sunk by the
Stella Maris
. He opened his mouth to scream for help.

Then he thought of what his cousin would say when he told him that his armed patrol boat had been sunk by a bunch of smugglers.

The Teniente realised that the time had come to die.

He stood to attention, and shut his mouth.

The patrol boat rolled and sank in the space of twenty seconds. There was a tremendous eructation of bubbles. An oar came to the surface. Then nothing.

‘Jesus,’
said Jaime, pale to the lips.

Mallory turned his eyes away from the satiny patch of water where the patrol boat had been. Andrea’s eyes were blank. The blankness had very little to do with shock, or the violent sinking of a
guarda-costa
with half a dozen crew. He and Mallory were both calculating whether the
guarda-costa
had announced its attentions on the radio before it had tried to come alongside the
Stella Maris
.

Mallory said, ‘Full ahead, I think.’

Andrea nodded, and lowered his great bulk into the engine room.

The Bolander took on a more urgent thump. Mallory cut the tail-lines free from the bow. The
Stella Maris
heaved on westward, the wind cold in Mallory’s face.

Jaime came on deck with Lisette. She looked pale. She had reason to look pale. Jaime said,
‘Capitaine
, I need a word.’

Lisette watched them walk to the wheelhouse, watched Mallory’s straight back, the precise step. Even on this filthy boat, that one walked like a soldier.

Jaime said, ‘That was not normal.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I know this man,’ said Jaime. ‘The officer commanding the
guarda-costa
. He is a bastard, but a careful bastard. He would never stop the
Stella
. He takes money from smugglers, but not on the sea. Only in the bar, after they have gone ashore. The only reason he stopped us is because someone told him stop any ship.’

‘So the Werwolf pack hasn’t left,’ said Mallory. ‘Good.’

Jaime said, ‘Was it necessary to kill those people?’

Mallory was not interested. ‘There’s a war on.’

‘So you kill these men. Life into death. Like a mule turning food into shit.’

‘War is nasty like that,’ said Mallory. ‘The reason we are here is to destroy submarines.’

Jaime grinned, a grin that held a horrible irony. ‘Perhaps it is just that I do not like to destroy a useful trading partner.’

‘There will be better trading after we have won the war,’ said Mallory. ‘Now, there are some things I need to know about the Cabo de la Calavera.’

By the middle of the day the sky was whitening under a veil of cirrus, and Miller had been sick fourteen times. Andrea was taking his spell at the pump; Andrea never got tired. Mallory came down into the fish-hold.

‘Briefing,’ he said. ‘Ready for this?’

Andrea nodded, impassive behind his three days’ growth of beard. Miller would have done the same, but nodding required energy, and he was saving his energy for when he really needed it.

Mallory said, ‘There’s a cliff on the seaward side of this Calavera place. Guy said it’s not climbable. So the Germans won’t be watching it. With luck.’

There was a silence, filled with the pant of the engine and the distant boom of waves on rock.

Miller said, ‘If it’s climbable, what do we do?’

Mallory lit his sixtieth cigarette since dawn. ‘Climb it,’ he said.

Miller shook his head weakly. ‘Ask a silly question,’ he said.

‘We’ll go over the side after dark,’ said Mallory. ‘In the dinghy. Jaime and Hugues and Lisette will take the
Stella
on into the harbour. They’ll look like fishermen in to make repairs. The Germans have put big defences on the harbour side of the Cabo. As far as I can see, there’s very little on the seaward side, because they’ve decided the cliffs will do the job. We’ll go up in the dark, get ourselves some uniforms. Dusty, you’ll want to check your equipment. We’ll all need to shave. Questions?’

Miller listened to the boom of waves on rock. He said, ‘How do we get from the dinghy onto the cliff? Seems to me that the sea has all these waves on it.’