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Miller made to speak but changed his mind. The American was a shrewd judge of people. There were those who could be ribbed and those who could not be ribbed. An almost hopeless mission, Miller was quietly aware, and as vital as it was, in his opinion, suicidal, but he was beginning to understand why they’d picked this tough, sunburnt New Zealander to lead it.
They sat in silence for the next five minutes, then looked up as the door opened. Captain Briggs was hatless and wore a white silk muffler round his throat in place of the usual collar and tie. The white contrasted oddly with the puffed red of the heavy neck and face above. These had been red enough when Mallory had first seen them in the colonel’s office – high blood pressure and even higher living, Mallory had supposed: the extra deep shades of red and purple now present probably sprang from a misplaced sense of righteous indignation. A glance at the choleric eyes, gleaming light-blue prawns afloat in a sea of vermilion, was quite enough to confirm the obvious.
‘I think this is a bit much, Captain Mallory!’ The voice was high pitched in anger, more nasal than ever. I’m not the duty errand-boy, you know. I’ve had a damned hard day and –’
‘Save it for your biography,’ Mallory said curtly, ‘and take a gander at this character in the corner.’
Briggs’s face turned an even deeper hue. He stepped into the room, fists balled in anger, then stopped in his tracks as his eye lit on the crumpled, dishevelled figure still crouched in the corner of the room.
‘Good God!’ he ejaculated. ‘Nicolai!’
‘You know him.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘Of course I know him!’ Briggs snorted. ‘Everybody knows him. Nicolai. Our laundry-boy.’
‘Your laundry-boy! Do his duties entail snooping around the corridors at night, listening at keyholes?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I say.’ Mallory was very patient. ‘We caught him listening outside the door.’
‘Nicolai? I don’t believe it!’
‘Watch it, mister,’ Miller growled. ‘Careful who you call a liar. We all saw him.’
Briggs stared in fascination at the black muzzle of the automatic waving negligently in his direction, gulped, looked hastily away.
‘Well, what if you did?’ He forced a smile. ‘Nicolai can’t speak a word of English.’
‘Maybe not,’ Mallory agreed dryly. ‘But he understands it well enough.’ He raised his hand. ‘I’ve no desire to argue all night and I certainly haven’t the time. Will you please have this man placed under arrest, kept in solitary confinement and incommunicado for the next week at least. It’s vital. Whether he’s a spy or just too damned nosy, he knows far too much. After that, do what you like. My advice is to kick him out of Castelrosso.’
‘Your advice, indeed!’ Briggs’s colour returned, and with it his courage. ‘Who the hell are you to give me advice or to give me orders, Captain Mallory?’ There was a heavy emphasis on the word ‘captain’.
‘Then I’m asking it as a favour,’ Mallory pleaded wearily. ‘I can’t explain, but it’s terribly important. There are hundreds of lives –’
‘Hundreds of lives!’ Briggs sneered. ‘Melodramatic stuff and nonsense!’ He smiled unpleasantly. ‘I suggest you keep that for your cloak-and-dagger biography, Captain Mallory.’
Mallory rose, walked round the table, stopped a foot away from Briggs. The brown eyes were still and very cold.
‘I could go and see your colonel, I suppose. But I’m tired of arguing. You’ll do exactly as I say or I’ll go straight to Naval HQ and get on the radio-telephone to Cairo. And if I do,’ Mallory went on, ‘I swear to you that you’ll be on the next ship home to England – and on the troop-deck, at that.’
His last words seemed to echo in the little room for an interminable time: the stillness was intense. And then, as suddenly as it had arisen, the tension was gone and Briggs’s face, a now curiously mottled white and red, was slack and sullen in defeat.
‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘No need for all these damned stupid threats – not if it means all that much to you.’ The attempt to bluster, to patch up the shredded rags of his dignity, was pathetic in its transparency. ‘Matthews – call out the guard.’
The torpedo-boat, great aero engines throttled back half speed, pitched and lifted, pitched and lifted with monotonous regularity as it thrust its way into the long, gentle swell from the WNW. For the hundredth time that night Mallory looked at his watch.
‘Running behind time, sir?’ Stevens suggested.
Mallory nodded.
‘We should have stepped straight into this thing from the Sunderland – there was a hold-up.’
Brown grunted. ‘Engine trouble, for a fiver.’ The Clydeside accent was very heavy.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ Mallory looked up, surprised. ‘How did you know?’
‘Always the same with these blasted MTB engines,’ Brown growled. ‘Temperamental as a film star.’
There was silence for a time in the tiny blacked-out cabin, a silence broken only by the occasional clink of a glass. The Navy was living up to its traditional hospitality.
‘If we’re late,’ Miller observed at last, ‘why doesn’t the skipper open her up? They tell me these crates can do forty to fifty knots.’
‘You look green enough already,’ Stevens said tactlessly. ‘Obviously, you’ve never been in an MTB full out in a heavy sea.’
Miller fell silent a moment. Clearly, he was trying to take his mind off his internal troubles. ‘Captain?’
‘Yes, what is it?’ Mallory answered sleepily. He was stretched full length on a narrow settee, an almost empty glass in his fingers.
‘None of my business, I know, boss, but – would you have carried out that threat you made to Captain Briggs?’
Mallory laughed.
‘It is none of your business, but – well, no, Corporal, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t because I couldn’t. I haven’t all that much authority invested in me – and I didn’t even know whether there was a radio-telephone in Castelrosso.’
‘Yeah. Yeah, do you know, I kinda suspected that.’ Corporal Miller rubbed a stubbled chin. ‘If he’d called your bluff, what would you have done, boss?’
‘I’d have shot Nicolai,’ Mallory said quietly. ‘If the colonel had failed me. I’d have had no choice left.’
‘I knew that too. I really believe you would. For the first time I’m beginning to believe we’ve got a chance…But I kinda wish you had shot him – and little Lord Fauntleroy. I didn’t like the expression on old Briggs’s face when you went out that door. Mean wasn’t the word. He coulda killed you then. You trampled right over his pride, boss – and to a phony like that nothin’ else in the world matters.’
Mallory made no reply. He was already sound asleep, his empty glass fallen from his hand. Not even the banshee clamour of the great engines opening full out as they entered the sheltered calm of the Rhodes channel could plumb his bottomless abyss of sleep.
THREE Monday 0700–1700 (#ulink_ec154811-109c-5713-a471-0e0dd60ba3ee)
‘My dear fellow, you make me feel dreadfully embarrassed.’ Moodily the officer switched his ivory-handled flyswat against an immaculately trousered leg, pointed a contemptuous but gleaming toe-cap at the ancient caique, broad-beamed and two-masted, moored stern on to the even older and more dilapidated wooden pier on which they were standing. ‘I am positively ashamed. The clients of Rutledge and Company, I assure you, are accustomed only to the best.’
Mallory smothered a smile. Major Rutledge of the Buffs, Eton and Sandhurst as to intonation, millimetrically tooth-brushed as to moustache, Savile Row as to the quite dazzling sartorial perfection of his khaki drill, was so magnificently out of place in the wild beauty of the rocky, tree-lined bluffs of that winding creek that his presence there seemed inevitable. Such was the major’s casual assurance, so dominating his majestic unconcern, that it was the creek, if anything, that seemed slightly out of place.
‘It does look as if it has seen better days,’ Mallory admitted. ‘Nevertheless, sir, it’s exactly what we want.’
‘Can’t understand it, I really can’t understand it.’ With an irritable but well-timed swipe the major brought down a harmless passing fly. ‘I’ve been providing chaps with everything during the past eight or nine months – caiques, launches, yachts, fishing boats, everything – but no one has ever yet specified the oldest, most dilapidated derelict I could lay hands on. Quite a job laying hands on it, too, I tell you.’ A pained expression crossed his face. ‘The chaps know I don’t usually deal in this line of stuff.’
‘What chaps?’ Mallory asked curiously.
‘Oh, up the islands; you know.’ Rutledge gestured vaguely to the north and west.
‘But – but those are enemy held –’
‘So’s this one. Chap’s got to have his HQ somewhere,’ Rutledge explained patiently. Suddenly his expression brightened. ‘I say, old boy, I know just the thing for you. A boat to escape observation and investigation – that was what Cairo insisted I get. How about a German E-boat, absolutely perfect condition, one careful owner. Could get ten thou. for her at home. Thirty-six hours. Pal of mine over in Bodrum –’
‘Bodrum?’ Mallory questioned. ‘Bodrum? But – but that’s in Turkey, isn’t it?’
‘Turkey? Well, yes, actually, I believe it is,’ Rutledge admitted. ‘Chap has to get his supplies from somewhere, you know,’ he added defensively.
‘Thanks all the same’ – Mallory smiled – ‘but this is exactly what we want. We can’t wait, anyway.’
‘On your own heads be it!’ Rutledge threw up his hands in admission of defeat. ‘I’ll have a couple of my men shove your stuff aboard.’
‘I’d rather we did it ourselves, sir. It’s – well, it’s a very special cargo.’
‘Right you are,’ the major acknowledged. ‘No questions Rutledge, they call me. Leaving soon?’
Mallory looked at his watch.
‘Half an hour, sir.’
‘Bacon, eggs and coffee in ten minutes?’
‘Thanks very much.’ Mallory grinned. ‘That’s one offer we’ll be very glad to accept.’
He turned away, walked slowly down to the end of the pier. He breathed deeply, savouring the heady, herb-scented air of an Aegean dawn. The salt tang of the sea, the drowsily sweet perfume of honeysuckle, the more delicate, sharper fragrance of mint all subtly merged into an intoxicating whole, indefinable, unforgettable. On either side, the steep slopes, still brilliantly green with pine and walnut and holly, stretched far up to the moorland pastures above, and from these, faintly borne on the perfumed breeze, came the distant melodic tinkling of goats’ bells, a haunting, a nostalgic music, true symbol of the leisured peace the Aegean no longer knew.
Unconsciously almost, Mallory shook his head and walked more quickly to the end of the pier. The others were still sitting where the torpedo boat had landed them just before dawn. Miller, inevitably, was stretched his full length, hat tilted against the golden, level rays of the rising sun.
‘Sorry to disturb you and all that, but we’re leaving in half an hour; breakfast in ten minutes. Let’s get the stuff aboard.’ He turned to Brown. ‘Maybe you’d like to have a look at the engine?’ he suggested.
Brown heaved himself to his feet, looked down unenthusiastically at the weather-beaten, paint-peeled caique.
‘Right you are, sir. But if the engine is on a par with this bloody wreck…’ He shook his head in prophetic gloom and swung nimbly over the side of the pier.
Mallory and Andrea followed him, reaching up for the equipment as the other two passed it down. First they stowed away a sackful of old clothes, then the food, pressure stove and fuel, the heavy boots, spikes, mallets, rock axes and coils of wire-centred rope to be used for climbing, then, more carefully, the combined radio receiver and transmitter and the firing generator fitted with the old-fashioned plunge handle. Next came the guns – two Schmeissers, two Brens, a Mauser and a Colt – then a case containing a weird but carefully selected hodge-podge of torches, mirrors, two sets of identity papers and, incredibly, bottles of Hock, Moselle, ouzo and retsina.
Finally, and with exaggerated care, they stowed away for’ard in the forepeak two wooden boxes, one green in colour, medium sized and bound in brass, the other small and black. The green box held high explosive – TNT., amatol and a few standard sticks of dynamite, together with grenades, gun-cotton primers and canvas hosing; in one corner of the box was a bag of emery dust, another of ground glass, and a sealed jar of potassium, these last three items having been included against the possibility of Dusty Miller’s finding an opportunity to exercise his unique talents as a saboteur. The black box held only detonators, percussion and electrical, detonators with fulminates so unstable that their exposed powder could be triggered off by the impact of a falling feather.
The last box had been stowed away when Casey Brown’s head appeared above the engine hatch. Slowly he examined the mainmast reaching up above his head, as slowly turned for’ard to look at the foremast. His face carefully expressionless, he looked at Mallory.
‘Have we got sails for these things, sir?’
‘I suppose so. Why?’
‘Because God only knows we’re going to need them!’ Brown said bitterly. ‘Have a look at the engine-room, you said. This isn’t an engine-room. It’s a bloody scrap-yard. And the biggest, most rusted bit of scrap down there is attached to the propeller shaft. And what do you think it is? An old Kelvin two-cylinder job built more or less on my own doorstep – about thirty years ago.’ Brown shook his head in despair, his face as stricken as only a Clydeside engineer’s can be at the abuse of a beloved machine. ‘And it’s been falling to bits for years, sir. Place is littered with discarded bits and spares. I’ve seen junk heaps off the Gallowgate that were palaces compared to this.’
‘Major Rutledge said it was running only yesterday,’ Mallory said mildly. ‘Anyway, come on ashore. Breakfast. Remind me we’re to pick up a few heavy stones on the way back, will you?’
‘Stones!’ Miller looked at him in horror. ‘Aboard that thing?’
Mallory nodded, smiling.
‘But that gawddamned ship is sinkin’ already!’ Miller protested. ‘What do you want stones for?’
‘Wait and see.’
Three hours later Miller saw. The caique was chugging steadily north over a glassy, windless sea, less than a mile off the coast of Turkey, when he mournfully finished lashing his blue battledress into a tight ball and heaved it regretfully over the side. Weighted by the heavy stone he had carried aboard, it was gone from sight in a second.
Morosely he surveyed himself in the mirror propped up against the for’ard end of the wheelhouse. Apart from a deep violet sash wrapped round his lean middle and a fancifully embroidered waistcoat with its former glory mercifully faded, he was dressed entirely in black. Black lacing jackboots, black baggy trousers, black shirt and black jacket: even his sandy hair had been dyed to the same colour.
He shuddered and turned away.
‘Thank Gawd the boys back home can’t see me now!’ he said feelingly. He looked critically at the others, dressed, with some minor variations, like himself. ‘Waal, mebbe I ain’t quite so bad after all…Just what is all this quick-change business for, boss?’
‘They tell me you’ve been behind the German lines twice, once as a peasant, once as a mechanic.’ Mallory heaved his own ballasted uniform over the side. ‘Well, now you see what the well-dressed Navaronian wears.’
‘The double change, I meant. Once in the plane, and now.’
‘Oh, I see. Army khaki and naval whites in Alex, blue battledress in Castelrosso and now Greek clothes? Could have been – almost certainly were – snoopers in Alex or Castelrosso or Major Rutledge’s island. And we’ve changed from launch to plane to MTB to caique. Covering our tracks, Corporal. We just can’t take any chances.’
Miller nodded, looked down at the clothes sack at his feet, wrinkled his brows in puzzlement, stooped and dragged out the white clothing that had caught his eye. He held up the long, voluminous clothes for inspection.
‘To be used when passing through the local cemeteries, I suppose.’ He was heavily ironic. ‘Disguised as ghosts.’
‘Camouflage,’ Mallory explained succinctly. ‘Snow-smocks.’
‘What!’
‘Snow. That white stuff. There are some pretty high mountains in Navarone, and we may have to take them. So – snow-smocks.’
Miller looked stunned. Wordlessly he stretched his length on the deck, pillowed his head and closed his eyes. Mallory grinned at Andrea.
‘Picture of a man getting his full quota of sunshine before battling with the Arctic wastes…Not a bad idea. Maybe you should get some sleep, too. I’ll keep watch for a couple of hours.’
For five hours the caique continued on its course parallel to the Turkish coast, slightly west of north and rarely more than two miles off-shore. Relaxed and warm in the still kindly November sun, Mallory sat wedged between the bulwarks of the blunt bows, his eyes ceaselessly quartering sky and horizon. Amidships, Andrea and Miller lay asleep. Casey Brown still defied all attempts to remove him from the engine-room. Occasionally – very occasionally – he came up for a breath of fresh air, but the intervals between his appearances steadily lengthened as he concentrated more and more on the aged Kelvin engine, regulating the erratic drip-fed lubrication, constantly adjusting the air intake: an engineer to his fingertips, he was unhappy about that engine: he was drowsy, too, and headachy – the narrow hatchway gave hardly any ventilation at all.
Alone in the wheelhouse – an unusual feature in so tiny a caique – Lieutenant Andy Stevens watched the Turkish coast slide slowly by. Like Mallory’s, his eyes moved ceaselessly, but not with the same controlled wandering. They shifted from the coast to the chart: from the chart to the islands up ahead off the port bow, islands whose position and relation to each other changed continually and deceptively, islands gradually lifting from the sea and hardening in definition through the haze of blue refraction: from the islands to the old alcohol compass swinging almost imperceptibly on corroded gimbals, and from the compass back to the coast again. Occasionally, he peered up into the sky, or swung a quick glance through a 180-degree sweep of the horizon. But one thing his eyes avoided all the time. The chipped, fly-blown mirror had been hung up in the wheelhouse again, but it was as if his eyes and the mirror were of opposite magnetic poles: he could not bring himself to look at it.
His forearms ached. He had been spelled at the wheel twice, but still they ached, abominably: his lean, tanned hands were ivory-knuckled on the cracked wheel. Repeatedly, consciously, he tried to relax, to ease the tension that was bunching up the muscles of his arms; but always, as if possessed of independent volition, his hands tightened their grip again. There was a funny taste in his mouth, too, a sour and salty taste in a dry, parched mouth, and no matter how often he swallowed, or drank from the sun-warmed pitcher at his side, the taste and the dryness remained. He could no more exorcise them than he could that twisting, cramping ball that was knotting up his insides, just above the solar plexus, or the queer, uncontrollable tremor that gripped his right leg from time to time.
Lieutenant Andy Stevens was afraid. He had never been in action before, but it wasn’t that. This wasn’t the first time he had been afraid. He had been afraid all his life, ever since he could remember: and he could remember a long way back, even to his early prep-school days when his famous father, Sir Cedric Stevens, the most celebrated explorer and mountaineer of his time, had thrown him bodily into the swimming pool at home, telling him that this was the only way he could learn to swim. He could remember still how he had fought and spluttered his way to the side of the pool, panic-stricken and desperate, his nose and mouth blocked with water, the pit of his stomach knotted and constricted in that nameless, terrifying ache he was to come to know so well: how his father and two elder brothers, big and jovial and nerveless like Sir Cedric himself, had wiped the tears of mirth from their eyes and pushed him in again…
His father and brothers…It had been like that all through his schooldays. Together, the three of them had made his life thoroughly miserable. Tough, hearty, open-air types who worshipped at the shrine of athleticism and physical fitness, they could not understand how anyone could fail to revel in diving from a five-metre springboard or setting a hunter at a five-barred gate or climbing the crags of the Peak district or sailing a boat in a storm. All these things they had made him do and often he had failed in the doing, and neither his father nor his brothers could ever have understood how he had come to dread those violent sports in which they excelled, for they were not cruel men, nor even unkind, but simply stupid. And so to the simple physical fear he sometimes and naturally felt was added the fear of failure, the fear that he was bound to fail in whatever he had to do next, the fear of the inevitable mockery and ridicule: and because he had been a sensitive boy and feared the ridicule above all else, he had come to fear these things that provoked the ridicule. Finally, he had come to fear fear itself, and it was in a desperate attempt to overcome this double fear that he had devoted himself – this in his late teens – to crag and mountain climbing: in this he had ultimately become so proficient, developed such a reputation, that father and brothers had come to treat him with respect and as an equal, and the ridicule had ceased. But the fear had not ceased, rather it had grown by what it fed on, and often, on a particularly difficult climb, he had all but fallen to his death, powerless in the grip of sheer, unreasoning terror. But this terror he had always sought, successfully so far, to conceal. As now. He was trying to overcome, to conceal that fear now. He was afraid of failing – in what he wasn’t quite sure – of not measuring up to expectation: he was afraid of being afraid: and he was desperately afraid, above all things, of being seen, of being known to be afraid…
The startling, incredible blue of the Aegean; the soft, hazy silhouette of the Anatolian mountains against the washed-out cerulean of the sky; the heart-catching, magical blending of the blues and violets and purples and indigoes of the sun-soaked islands drifting lazily by, almost on the beam now; the iridescent rippling of the water tanned by the gentle, scent-laden breeze newly sprung from the south-east; the peaceful scene on deck, the reassuring, interminable thump-thump thump-thump of the old Kelvin engine…All was peace and quiet and contentment and warmth and languor, and it seemed impossible that anyone could be afraid. The world and the war were very far away that afternoon.
Or perhaps, after all, the war wasn’t so far away. There were occasional pin-pricks – and constant reminders. Twice a German Arado seaplane had circled curiously overhead, and a Savoia and Fiat, flying in company, had altered course, dipped to have a look at them and flown off, apparently satisfied: Italian planes, these, and probably based on Rhodes, they were almost certainly piloted by Germans who had rounded up their erstwhile Rhodian allies and put them in prison camps after the surrender of the Italian Government. In the morning they had passed within half a mile of a big German caique – it flew a German flag and bristled with mounted machine-guns and a two-pounder far up in the bows; and in the early afternoon a high-speed German launch had roared by so closely that their caique had rolled wickedly in the wash of its passing: Mallory and Andrea had shaken their fists and cursed loudly and fluently at the grinning sailors on deck. But there had been no attempts to molest or detain them: neither British nor German hesitated at any time to violate the neutrality of Turkish territorial waters, but by the strange quixotry of a tacit gentlemen’s agreement hostilities between passing vessels and planes were almost unknown. Like the envoys of warring countries in a neutral capital, their behaviour ranged from the impeccably and frigidly polite to a very pointed unawareness of one another’s existence.
These, then, were the pin-pricks – the visitation and by-goings, harmless though they were, of the ships and planes of the enemy. The other reminders that this was no peace but an illusion, an ephemeral and a frangible thing, were more permanent. Slowly the minute hands of their watches circled, and every tick took them nearer to that great wall of cliff, barely eight hours away, that had to be climbed somehow: and almost dead ahead now, and less than fifty miles distant, they could see the grim, jagged peaks of Navarone topping the shimmering horizon and reaching up darkly against the sapphired sky, desolate and remote and strangely threatening.
At half-past two in the afternoon the engine stopped. There had been no warning coughs or splutters or missed strokes. One moment the regular, reassuring thump-thump: the next, sudden, completely unexpected silence, oppressive and foreboding in its absoluteness.
