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‘After the weather forecast?’ said Miller.
‘How did you guess?’ said Jensen.
‘You did it last time,’ said Miller.
Jensen did not seem to hear. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘The detail.’
For the next two hours, in the company of the geologist and a man from SOE, they studied the detail.
‘All right,’ said Jensen, as they folded away their maps. ‘Armoury next.’
The armoury was the usual harshly-lit room with racks of Lee Enfields. The Armourer was a Royal Marine with a bad limp and verbal diarrhoea. ‘Schmeissers, ‘e said you wanted,’ said the Marine, pulling out boxes. ‘Quite right, quite right, don’t want those bloody Stens, blow up on you as soon as Jerry, go on, ‘ave a look, yes, Corporal? Oh, I see you are the more discriminating type of customer, grenades, was it?’ But even his flow of talk could not hold up over the grim silence that filled that little room. Mallory and Andrea sat down on the bench and disassembled a Schmeisser each, craftsmen assessing the tools of a deadly trade. The hush filled with small, metallic noises. Andrea rejected two of the machine-pistols before he found one to his liking, then another. Miller, meanwhile, was in a corner of the room, by a cupboard the size of a cigar humidor. He had a special pack, lined with wood and padded. Into this he was stowing, with a surgeon’s delicacy of touch, buff-coloured bricks of plastic explosives, brightly-coloured time pencils, and a whole hardware store of other little packets and bottles.
Mallory reassembled his second Schmeisser. ‘For you, Carstairs,’ he said.
Carstairs looked languidly up from the sights of a Mauser. ‘Never touch ‘em, old boy.’
‘You’ll need one.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ said Carstairs, tapping a Turkish cigarette on a gold case. A silenced Browning automatic lay across his knees. ‘Stand off is my motto. Works with impala. Works with Germans. Now look here, Sergeant, have you got a hard case for this?’ He held up the Mauser carbine and a Zeiss 4X sniperscope. Several Mausers would be going to Kynthos – they were rugged carbines essential for long-range work. But the sniperscope was delicate as a prima ballerina’s tutu – nothing to do with the kind of knockabout you could expect if you were storming a hollow mountain full of rockets.
As they left the armoury, Andrea fell in beside Mallory. ‘What do you think?’ he said.
‘I think we should keep our eyes open.’
‘Exactly, my Keith.’ They walked on in silence. ‘And what is this Nanga Parbat?’
‘A mountain. In the Himalayas. There was an expedition to climb it in 1938.’ Mallory paused. He hated what came next. ‘A German expedition.’
‘There was no war in 1938.’
‘No.’
But all of a sudden Mallory’s stomach was a tight ball. There was something wrong with this. It was the same feeling he had had on the south icefield of Mount Cook, watching his right boot go up and forward, watching the weight go on, but because of that feeling, not committing himself. Which had been just as well. Because when it felt the weight of that boot – brownish-black leather, new-greased, criss-cross laces in the lugs, that boot – the world crumbled and slid away, and what had been smooth ice had turned into a cornice over a ravine, a cornice that had crumbled under him and was swallowing him up.
Except that he had taken warning from that knot in the stomach, and kept his weight back, and walloped his ice axe behind him at the full reach of his arm, felt it bite, and hauled himself out of the jaws of death and back on to clean ice. And climbed the mountain.
The knot in the stomach was not fear, or at least not only fear. It was a warning. It needed listening to.
TWO (#ulink_b89498e5-22ca-5036-addf-1ffaed835c75)
Tuesday 1000-Wednesday 0200 (#ulink_b89498e5-22ca-5036-addf-1ffaed835c75)
Al-Gubiya Bay is a small notch in the coast west of Benghazi. That morning, it contained a group of khaki tents, a concrete jetty, and one and a half billion flies. Alongside the jetty an MTB crouched like a grey shark. Her commander, Lieutenant Bob Wills, was sitting on the forward port-hand torpedo tube. The sun balanced on his head like a hot iron bar, and the flies were driving him crazy, but not as crazy as the orders he had received. He wondered what the hell they were dropping him in this time.
A three-ton lorry clattered on to the quay, stopped, and stood snorting in its cloud of Libyan dust. The canvas back of the lorry twitched and parted. Four men got down.
Three of them walked together, silent, closed-faced. Their faces were gaunt and sunburned. They looked at the same time exhausted and relaxed, and under their heavy equipment they walked with a steady, mile-devouring lope. Ahead of the three was a slenderer man. He was dressed like them in battledress without badges of rank. But his walk had more of a strut in it, as if he thought someone might be watching, and at the same time he moved uneasily in the straps of his pack. This and a certain finicky neatness in his uniform made the Lieutenant think that he was not completely at home.
The neat man had quick brown eyes that checked the MTB and the cuff-rings of the Lieutenant’s tunic, hung from the barrel of the five-pounder. He said, ‘Good morning. I’m Captain Carstairs.’ The man smiled, a white, film-star sort of a smile. Wills was tired from months of night operations, and the smile was too dazzling.
He said, ‘How d’ye do?’ Carstairs’ handshake was a bonecrusher. Wills’ feeling of tiredness increased. ‘Good fight?’
‘Dreadful,’ said Carstairs. ‘Bloody Liberators. Can’t hear a thing. Bring back Imperial. The Cairo run, what?’
‘Yes,’ said Wills. Himself, he had never been able to afford to fly in the Sunderlands of Imperial Airways. Lot of side, this Carstairs, he thought. He raised a hand to Chief Petty Officer Smith, who was loading stores down the quay. ‘Chiefy. Help Captain Carstairs with his stuff, there’s a good chap.’
During his brief chat with Carstairs, the other three men had climbed aboard the MTB and stowed their equipment. Without appearing to move very much they seemed to get a surprising amount done. The shortest of the three introduced himself as Mallory in a voice with a faint New Zealand twang.
‘Morning,’ said Wills.
Mallory saw a square youth with sun-bleached curly hair and a sunburned nose.
‘Made yourself at home, I hope,’ said Wills.
‘Hope that’s all right.’
Wills grinned. ‘Top-hole,’ he said. ‘We don’t stand on ceremony here.’ He embraced with a sweep of his arm the blue bay, the parched dunes, the concrete jetty. ‘You get out of the habit, in a tropical paradise.’
‘Very attractive,’ said Mallory, brushing away a couple of thousand flies.
‘Wait till we get to sea,’ said Wills. He was older than he looked, Mallory realized. From a distance, he might have been your standard British sixth-former. Close up, you could see the eyes. The eyes were a thousand years old.
‘Been here long?’ said Mallory.
‘Long enough. Stooging around causing trouble on the island. Yachting with big bangs, really. Speak a bit of the lingo. Do what we can to make a nuisance of ourselves.’
‘Quite,’ said Mallory. He liked this youth. There was something in his eye that said he could really cause the Germans some trouble, if he put his mind to it, and putting his mind to it was what he was good at.
‘We ready?’ said Wills.
Mallory nodded.
‘Top-hole,’ said Wills. Carstairs was not his cup of tea, but these men were different. They spoke quietly, and looked at him steady-eyed, and when they shook his hand their grip was firm but economical, as if in this, as in anything else they did, they would use just enough force to get the job done properly, no more, no less. This fitted neatly with Wills’ view of life, and he found himself favourably impressed. There was also another sensation lurking on the fringes of his conscious mind, and for a moment he did not know what it was. But ten minutes later, pouring the gin in the cupboard-sized wardroom, it came to him.
He was very glad they were on the same side as him.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Couple of things to organize.’
The heavy throb of the MTB’s engines came through the wardroom bulkheads, and the stink of high octane gasoline. The sleek grey boat scrawled a white question mark on the blue bay, roared out to sea and turned east.
It was a calm and beautiful day. Carstairs went on deck, thrusting his chiselled profile into the twenty-knot slipstream. Mallory, Miller and Andrea found plywood bunks, rolled on to them, and closed their eyes: except Mallory. Mallory lay and felt the bound of the MTB over the swell, and the tremor of the Merlin engines, and rested his eyes on the plywood deck above him. There were matters he needed to ponder before he slept.
As they had left the armoury, a runner had caught him by the arm. ‘Telephone, sir,’ he had said.
The voice on the telephone had been light but hard: Jensen.
‘No names,’ it had said. ‘Something I wanted to say, between us two, really.’
‘Yessir.’
‘I wanted to say the best of luck, and all that.’
‘Yessir.’ Jensen would not have rung his mother to wish her luck. Mallory waited.
‘Our new friend,’ said Jensen. ‘The expert. He’s okay, but you might like to keep your eye on him.’
‘Eye?’
‘Just a thought,’ said Jensen. ‘I’ve got a feeling he might be on a sort of treasure hunt.’
‘Treasure hunt? What sort of treasure hunt?’
‘If I knew, I wouldn’t be telling you to keep an eye on him, would I? Well, I expect you’ll be wanting to get on your way.’
Mallory lay and watched the deckhead. There were undoubtedly problems on Kynthos. But Mallory strongly suspected there was also a problem on the MTB, a problem called Carstairs. Mallory did not trust the man. Nor, it seemed, did Jensen. So why did Jensen insist that Carstairs be part of the mission? Of course, it had not been Jensen who had insisted. It had been Admiral Dixon. Mallory found himself thinking that a spell on the bridge of a destroyer would do Dixon a lot of good: or on an MTB, a floating fuel-tank, a bladder of aviation fuel with two Merlin engines…
But Dixon was safe behind his desk, and that was a law of nature. Just like the fact that Carstairs was along for the duration.
Railing against the laws of nature was entirely pointless. Mallory was not given to doing pointless things.
A new vibration added itself to the bone-jarring roar of the twin Merlins. Mallory was snoring.
He awoke much later, prised a cup of coffee out of the galley, and climbed on to the bridge. The sun was sinking towards the western horizon, North Africa a low dun line to the south. As far as any German aircraft were concerned they were heading east, for somewhere in the Allied territory in the gathering shadows ahead.
A rating brought up a plate of corned beef sandwiches and more coffee. It was quieter on the bridge. Mallory wedged a deck chair in a corner. As he ate his mind kept coming back to Carstairs. Why would an experienced guerrilla fighter have chosen a sniper rifle with a notoriously delicate sight? If they were all on the same operation, why were they notionally two separate units? Why –
A shadow fell across him. It was Carstairs, slender fingers in the pocket of his battledress blouse: like Clark Gable, thought Mallory. His hand came out with the gold cigarette case. He opened it, offered it to Mallory. ‘Turkish this side, Virginian that,’ he said.
‘Just put one out,’ said Mallory. ‘Tell me something. What are you doing on this trip?’
‘Same as you,’ said Carstairs.
‘So what … qualifies you?’
Carstairs smiled. ‘I’ve knocked about a bit.’
‘And you’re a rocket expert.’
‘So I am.’
‘Where did you pick that up?’
‘Here and there,’ said Carstairs, vaguely. ‘Here and there.’
You got used to vagueness on Special Operations. It was a mistake to know more than you needed to know. So why did Mallory have the feeling that Carstairs was using this fact for his own purposes?
‘Ever done armed insurgency work?’ he said.
‘Not exactly. But there have been … parallel episodes in my life.’
‘What’s a parallel episode?’ said a new voice: Miller’s.
‘A not dissimilar operation.’
‘I had one of those, but the wheels dropped off.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Carstairs’ face was stiffening.
‘All right,’ said Mallory. Carstairs, it seemed, was too important to have a sense of humour. ‘You’re good in mountains. You can shoot.’
Carstairs yawned. ‘So they told me on Nanga Parbat.’
‘I thought that was a German expedition.’
‘It was.’ They stared at him. ‘The Duke of Windsor asked me to go. Rather a chum of mine, actually, so one couldn’t refuse. I speak pretty good German. I’m a climber. What’s wrong with that?’
Mallory said nothing. The Nanga Parbat expedition had been supervised by Himmler in person. It had conquered the peak, but only by cementing in spikes and installing fixed ladders and ropes. They might as well have put scaffolding up the face. It was not what Mallory called climbing.
Carstairs said, ‘The idea was to get to the top.’
Well, that was true.
‘And the rockets,’ said Miller, doggedly. ‘Where did you find out all this stuff you know about rockets?’
Carstairs was not smiling any more. He said, ‘We have all led complicated lives I am sure, and a lot of the things we have done we would not necessarily have told our mummies about. You can take it from me that I know what I know, and I am under orders from Admiral Dixon, Corporal. Now if you will excuse me I could do with forty winks.’ And he went below.
‘Temper,’ said Miller, mildly.
Mallory lit a cigarettee. He did not look at the American. ‘I would remind you,’ he said, ‘that Captain Carstairs is a superior officer, and as such is entitled to respect. I would like you to give this thought your earnest attention.’ His eyes came up and locked with Miller’s. ‘Your very close attention,’ he said.
Miller smiled. ‘My pleasure,’ he said.
The MTB churned on down the coast. The sun sank below the horizon. Miller lay on the wing of the bridge, watching the last light of day leave the sky, and the sky fade to black, and upon it a huge field of silver stars come into being. Wills murmured an order to the man at the helm. Over Miller’s head, the stars began to wheel until the Big Dipper lay across the horizon, the last two stars in its rhomboidal end pointing across an empty expanse to a single star riding over the MTB’s bow.
They had turned north.
It was eight hours’ hard steaming from Al-Gubiya to Kynthos. Rafts of cloud began to drift across the sky, blotting out patches of stars. The breeze was up, ruffling the sea into long ridges of swell. M-109 made heavy weather, jolting and banging and shuddering as she jumped from bank of water to bank of water. Nobody slept, any more than they would have slept in an oil drum rolling down a flight of concrete steps.
Up on the bridge, Wills peered into the black and tried not to dwell upon the fact that M-109 was the tip of a huge phosphorescent arrowhead of wake that shouted to anyone in an aeroplane ‘Here we are, here we are’. This was not a subtle operation. ‘Weave her,’ he shouted into the helmsman’s ear. The helmsman began to weave her port and starboard, panning the beam of the fixed radar scanner across the sea ahead.
‘What you got?’ said Wills to the man with his head in the radar’s rubber eyepiece.
‘Clutter,’ said the man. ‘Bloody waves–’
The MTB hit a wave, shot off into the air, and came down with a slam that blasted spray sixty feet in the air and buckled Wills’ knees. His coffee cup shot across the bridge and exploded in a corner. Somewhere, probably in the galley, a lot of glass broke.
‘Shite,’ said the radar operator, and twiddled knobs. ‘Dead,’ he said.
