The Complete Navarone (80 page)

Before he had been climbing diagonally upwards towards the parapet. But the sky above the parapet was glowing with a nimbus of ice-grey floodlights. So he headed low, towards the sea, acquiring the grammar of the crumbling stone through fingers and toes, keeping the bulge of an overhang between him and the parapet.

Soon the floodlights went out, and the Cabo de la Calavera was once again a domed and sinister lump of darkness against the sky. Whatever had happened had happened. Mallory took a deep breath. He knew that nobody would be there to meet him at the rendezvous by the generator sheds.

He was on his own.

Steady.

Worrying about Miller and Andrea was a waste of time. He kept his mind on the operation. One man needed to operate differently from three. Time spent on reconnaissance was time wasted now. He needed to penetrate the Cabo. He needed a weak spot.

He had one in mind.

He began to climb upwards.

Whatever Moor-hating grandee had built the
fortaleza
on the tip of the Cabo de la Calavera had chosen his spot well. The cliffs came sheer out of the sea – more than sheer, on some of the pitches. Mallory concentrated on the rock. Here on the sheer cliffs, it was less friable, and grass and sea-pink had failed to find a foothold. There were little cracks and corrugations that would have given pause to a fly with common sense. But Mallory was desperate. So Mallory went up the face, slow but sure, moving from the hips, gracefully, almost without effort. He worked his way steadily westwards, towards the point on which the
fortaleza
stood, working his way steadily higher. The clouds were thickening again, and the moon had gone. That was useful, even if it meant climbing by feel. The sea was a heavy murmur far below, the wind a tenuous hand pressing on his back.

After perhaps an hour, the wind brought him the stench of drains. When he next looked up, he saw the cliff above him had changed nature. It was no longer natural granite. It had become the outer wall of the
fortaleza
.

Mallory paused, standing on the sheer precipice connecting sky and sea. Cliffs were no problem, and masonry walls he could deal with. It was the transition between the living rock of the cliff and the cut stone of the fortress wall that would be the difficulty.

For where masonry met rock face, a heavy black line crossed the darkness of the wall. The outer face of the masonry was cantilevered out over the rock: machicolated, Mallory seemed to remember. Machicolation or cantilever, it boiled down to the same thing. What he had up there was a bloody great overhang. Mallory was solo, no rope, four spikes. Normally, he would have looked for another route to avoid an overhang. But this time, there was no going round.

Suddenly, Mallory was horribly tired.

He hung there for a moment. The smell of sewage was powerful in his nostrils. When he reached for the next hold, his right hand landed in a foul slime.

A foul slime that must have come from somewhere.

Suddenly, Mallory’s weariness was gone. Thank God for Spanish sanitation, he thought. For medieval Spanish sanitation, invented by Arabs, bringers of civilisation to the European world.

And with a bit of luck, bringer of Mallory onto the walls of the Fortaleza de la Calavera.

He started to climb again, keeping to the left, out of the stream of sewage. In two minutes, he was up against the bottom course of the machicolations.

He could see the detail of the overhang now. It was like an inverted flight of seven steps, a foot each, angled outwards at forty-five degrees. Impassable without a rope.

But ten feet to Mallory’s right, a vertical line of darkness broke the steps: a line perhaps two feet wide that was not a line, but a crevasse. To the designers of the
fortaleza
’s sanitation, it was the outlet from the castle garderobes. To a climber like Mallory, it was a practicable chimney in an impracticable overhang. The tiredness left him. There was a route here. In the face of a route, it was not possible to feel tired.

He crouched on a nearly invisible ledge and checked his spikes. He took his boots and socks off. He put his boots back on his bare feet, and pulled the socks over the boots. Then he swung himself round, face to the cliff, and started to move crabwise towards the chimney.

He knew he was under it from the stinging reek of urine and ammonia. He looked up, sighting against the sky with watering eyes. The slot in the machicolations reached out as far as the last two steps. If he could reach those last two steps, he would be able to get a hand up and onto the masonry of the vertical wall, and find a place to get a spike in.

Garderobe or no garderobe, it was a hideously difficult place. But the thought did not even occur to Mallory. It was a climbing problem, and climbing problems were there to be solved.

He reached in the pocket of his smock, checking his spikes and the leather-wrapped lead mallet he used as a hammer. Then he moved into the dreadful recesses of the chimney.

As he had suspected, it was a chimney of cut stone built out from the living rock. At first, he was climbing the slippery natural rock. When the rock gave way to masonry, he put his shoulders against one side, his feet against the other, and pushed.

The socks over his boots gave him a grip through the slime. The slime lubricated his shoulders as they slid up the cut stone blocks. Easy chimneying, if you could cut out the stench. He was moving outwards now, away from the face of the cliff, following the line of the machicolations. Once, the cliff’s sheerness had been daunting. Any minute now, it was going to seem almost like home.

As long as he ignored the black hole above his head, and what might come down it.

Brace the shoulders. Keep the feet against the far wall, hard, so the socks bite through the film of filth and the boot-nails grind into the solid rock. Do it again. And again –

Mallory’s helmet clanked against stone. He had run out of chimney.

He stood there, wedged shoulders and feet in that slot in the masonry, his breathing shallow. Two hundred feet below, white tongues of foam curled round jagged rocks and licked up the cliff wall.

Mallory fumbled in his pocket for a spike. Before the war, he would not have considered using spikes. Spikes were for Germans, during the assaults on the north face of the Eiger, the attempts on Kanchenjunga for the greater glory of the Third Reich. Mallory had on one occasion climbed the Big Wall on Mount Cook, removing the spikes left there by an unsportsmanlike German expedition. But in Zermatt he had met Schenck, an American blacksmith and climber who ran a forge in the back of his pickup truck. Schenck had seen a war coming, and foreseen the kind of things that someone would ask Mallory to do. He had forced on Mallory half a dozen of his specials: three-inch blades of steel cut from the rear springs of a Model A Ford, pierced to hold a loop of rope. When Mallory had demurred, Schenck had pointed out that whatever he thought about using a spike to beat a mountain, using a spike to beat a German was fine.

God bless you, Schenck, wherever you are, thought Mallory in his stinking chimney. He looped a spike’s cord round his wrist. Then he reached up and out and round the last two steps of the overhang, running the spike’s point across the stones like the point of a pencil until he felt the check that would mean a seam of mortar. Then, gingerly, one-handed, he began to tap it in.

He tapped slowly, with infinite caution, partly for the sake of quietness, but mostly because he had only four of those three-inch splinters of metal left, survivors of the original half-dozen. And much depended on these four: his life, Andrea’s and Miller’s, the lives of the invasion fleet. He tapped for a full two minutes, until he was sure. Then he put in another spike inside the chimney, level with his eyes. This one went in more easily; he was not working at arm’s length, and the mortar in the gully, attacked by hundreds of years of carbonic acid from the rain and uric acid from the garrison, was softer than the mortar on the outside of the wall.

When it was in, he tugged at it stealthily. It held firm. Reaching up, he found the loop of rope on the head of the first spike, shoved his hand through, and applied weight, without loosening his grip on the walls of the chimney.

The spike held firm.

He took a deep breath. Then he gripped that loop of rope and swung his weight out over the abyss. For a moment he was dangling free, a spider hanging from a cornice, a little creature of flesh suspended by a metal spike and a loop of quarter-inch cord two hundred feet above the sullen moil of white surf in sharp black rock. Then he put his left leg up, searching for the spike he had driven into the side of the chimney.

He put the sole of his boot onto that spike, applied his weight like a man applying weight to the pedal of a bicycle, and straightened his leg until he was standing, his leg in under the overhang, his torso vertical, parallel with the wall of masonry that went up, up, into the black sky. His left hand went to his pocket, found another spike, placed it above the first, made the pencil-like scribbling movements until the point caught, burrowed it in the first millimetres until it held, brought up the hammer, and began to tap. The muscles of his right arm and left leg were yelling that they could not be expected to keep this up, that they were going to cause pain, and cramp, until Mallory bloody well stopped this abuse. Mallory forced himself to pay no attention. Tap the spike gently, take your time –

There was the smallest of small movements under the sole of his left boot.

And suddenly he was falling, the full extent of his right arm, until the loop brought him up with a crunch of armpit sinews, and he was dangling once again from the edge of the cornice above the hungry rocks below.

The spike under his foot had fallen out.

Falling, the reflex is to open the hands, make the fingers a feeble approximation of feathers of flesh, spread the limbs, try to turn a solid body into a gliding thing that will fly away from danger.

Mallory knew about reflexes. He knew that the only direction humans fly is vertically downwards. Even as he swung, he kept his left hand clamped around the hammer.

After what felt like ten hours but was more like ten seconds, the swinging stopped. Mallory hung there.
Rest
, his body told him. But he knew that as he hung, the strength would be draining out of him, the blood leaving that arm. The muscles of the right arm needed all the blood they could get. Even if using them meant that the spike up there would pull out of the wall, and drop him through all that air onto all those rocks.

Damned if you hang. Not necessarily damned if you don’t.

Carefully, Mallory put the hammer into his pocket. Then he reached his left hand up to join his right, and pulled himself up like a gymnast chinning the bar.

The muscles crunched in his arms. His teeth bared in a rictus of effort. The blood roared in his skull.

But there were his hands, and the spike, and the blessed stones, level with his eyes.

He held on with his right hand, pulled a fold of his smock over the projection of the spike, and lowered himself until he was hanging by the methodical German canvas. Then, very carefully, he teased the last spike out of his pocket, and the hammer, and raised his arms above his head, and began to tap.

Two minutes later he was up, left hand holding the upper spike, right boot on the lower, right hand putting in the next spike. The overhang was a full two feet below: out of sight, out of mind. The wall of the fortress stretched above him, eighty-five feet of sheer masonry to the top of the tower. Mallory kept tapping the spike, not letting himself stop, because stopping meant reaction, and reaction meant the shakes, and the shakes were no good when you were balanced on two little stubs of steel, with no spares.

So Mallory did not stop. Mallory went on up.

It became a rhythm. Tap the spike. Test the spike. New hand. New foot. Shake out the bottom spike, move it to the top …

Keep climbing.

To the observer, Mallory would have seemed to drift up that wall in defiance of gravity. But of course there were no observers. The murmur of the sea receded. Small, thick-walled windows passed by to the left and right. Mallory ignored them. He heard the breath in his throat, the blood in his ears, mingled with the roar of the sea.
Tap the spike. Test the spike
. It had started to rain, a thin, persistent Atlantic rain, coming in with the wind on his back. The rain was a help. The reason he was climbing this stone oil drum was that anybody standing sentry on top of a tower rising three hundred feet above the sea would be watching halfheartedly at best. And this was the kind of rain that would turn half-heartedness into actual neglect of duty.
New hand. New foot
. Mallory had an idea that depended on the neglect of duty.
Tap the spike. Test the spike
.

Above, the tower was no longer a cliff losing itself in the dark. It was a wall, a sharp-cut semicircle of stone. Mallory was nearly at the top.

He paused, stuck to the wall like a fly, listening. The wind rushed round his ears, and the rain pulled a flat, mouldy smell from the stone. Above the drizzle of the rain he heard another noise: the tramp of booted feet.

Mallory waited.

The feet marched to and fro. The rain eased, then returned, harder now. A voice above his head said,
‘Scheisse.’
The footsteps changed sound, became muffled. There was the metallic click of a latch, a groan of heavy iron hinges. The sentry was taking shelter from the rain.