The Guns of Navarone

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‘It’s unlikely they’ll line the banks and give us three hearty cheers,’ Mallory said dryly. ‘How many men do you reckon they’ll have up there, Andrea?’

‘I’ve seen two moving around,’ Andrea said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe three or four altogether, Captain. A small post. The Germans don’t waste men on these.’

‘I think you’re about right,’ Mallory agreed. ‘Most of them’ll be in the garrison in the village – about seven miles from here, according to the chart, and due west. It’s not likely –’

He broke off sharply, stiffened in rigid attention. Again the call came, louder this time, imperative in its tone. Cursing himself for his negligence in not posting a guard – such carelessness would have cost him his life in Crete – Mallory pulled the tarpaulin aside, clambered slowly on to the deck. He carried no arms, but a half-empty bottle of Moselle dangled from his left hand; as part of a plan prepared before they had left Alexandria, he’d snatched it from a locker at the foot of the tiny companionway.

He lurched convincingly across the deck, grabbed at a stay in time to save himself from falling overboard. Insolently he stared down at the figure on the bank, less than ten yards away – it hadn’t mattered about a guard, Mallory realised, for the soldier carried his automatic carbine slung over his shoulder – insolently he tilted the wine to his mouth and swallowed deeply before condescending to talk to him.

He could see the mounting anger in the lean, tanned face of the young German below him. Mallory ignored it. Slowly, an inherent contempt in the gesture, he dragged the frayed sleeve of his black jacket across his lips, looked the soldier even more slowly up and down in a minutely provocative inspection as disdainful as it was prolonged.

‘Well?’ he asked truculently in the slow speech of the islands. ‘What the hell do you want?’

Even in the deepening dusk he could see the knuckles whitening on the stock of the carbine, and for an instant Mallory thought he had gone too far. He knew he was in no danger – all noise in the engine-room had ceased, and Dusty Miller’s hand was never far from his silenced automatic – but he didn’t want trouble. Not just yet. Not while there were a couple of manned Spandaus in that watch-tower.

With an almost visible effort the young soldier regained his control. It needed little help from the imagination to see the draining anger, the first tentative stirrings of hesitation and bewilderment. It was the reaction Mallory had hoped for. Greeks – even half-drunk Greeks – didn’t talk to their over-lords like that – not unless they had an overpoweringly good reason.

‘What vessel is this?’ The Greek was slow and halting but passable. ‘Where are you bound for?’

Mallory tilted the bottle again, smacked his lips in noisy satisfaction. He held the bottle at arm’s length, regarded it with a loving respect.

‘One thing about you Germans,’ he confided loudly. ‘You do know how to make a fine wine. I’ll wager you can’t lay your hands on this stuff, eh? And the swill they’re making up above’ – the island term for the mainland – ‘is so full of resin that it’s only good for lighting fires.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Of course, if you know the right people in the islands, they might let you have some ouzo. But some of us can get ouzo and the best Hocks and the best Moselles.’

The soldier wrinkled his face in disgust. Like almost every fighting man he despised Quislings, even when they were on his side: in Greece they were very few indeed.

‘I asked you a question,’ he said coldly. ‘What vessel, and where bound?’

‘The caique Aigion,’ Mallory replied loftily. ‘In ballast, for Samos. Under orders,’ he said significantly.

‘Whose orders?’ the soldier demanded. Shrewdly Mallory judged the confidence as superficial only. The guard was impressed in spite of himself.

‘Herr Commandant in Vathy. General Graebel,’ Mallory said softly. ‘You will have heard of the Herr General before, yes?’ He was on safe ground here, Mallory knew. The reputation of Graebel, both as a paratroop commander and an iron disciplinarian, had spread far beyond these islands.

Even in the half-light Mallory could have sworn that the guard’s complexion turned paler. But he was dogged enough.

‘You have papers? Letters of authority?’

Mallory sighed wearily, looked over his shoulder.

‘Andrea!’ he bawled.

‘What do you want?’ Andrea’s great bulk loomed through the hatchway. He had heard every word that passed, had taken his cue from Mallory: a newly-opened wine bottle was almost engulfed in one vast hand and he was scowling hugely. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’ he asked surlily. He stopped short at the sight of the German and scowled again, irritably. ‘And what does this halfling want?’

‘Our passes and letters of authority from Herr General. They’re down below.’

Andrea disappeared, grumbling deep in his throat. A rope was thrown ashore, the stern pulled in against the sluggish current and the papers passed over. The papers – a set different from those to be used if emergency arose in Navarone – proved to be satisfactory, eminently so. Mallory would have been surprised had they been anything else. The preparation of these, even down to the photostatic facsimile of General Graebel’s signature, was all in the day’s work for Jensen’s bureau in Cairo.

The soldier folded the papers, handed them back with a muttered word of thanks. He was only a kid, Mallory could see now – if he was more than nineteen his looks belied him. A pleasant, open-faced kid – of a different stamp altogether from the young fanatics of the SS Panzer Division – and far too thin. Mallory’s chief reaction was one of relief: he would have hated to have to kill a boy like this. But he had to find out all he could. He signalled to Stevens to hand him up the almost empty crate of Moselle. Jensen, he mused, had been very thorough indeed: the man had literally thought of everything…Mallory gestured in the direction of the watch-tower.

‘How many of you are up there?’ he asked.

The boy was instantly suspicious. His face had tightened up, stilled in hostile surmise.

‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked stiffly.

Mallory groaned, lifted his hands in despair, turned sadly to Andrea.

‘You see what it is to be one of them?’ he asked in mournful complaint. ‘Trust nobody. Think everyone is as twisted as…’ He broke off hurriedly, turned to the soldier again. ‘It’s just that we don’t want to have the same trouble every time we come in here,’ he explained. ‘We’ll be back in Samos in a couple of days, and we’ve still another case of Moselle to work through. General Graebel keeps his – ah – special envoys well supplied…It must be thirsty work up there in the sun. Come on, now, a bottle each. How many bottles?’

The reassuring mention that they would be back again, the equally reassuring mention of Graebel’s name, plus, probably, the attraction of the offer and his comrades’ reaction if he told them he had refused it, tipped the balance, overcame scruples and suspicions.

‘There are only three of us,’ he said grudgingly.

‘Three it is,’ Mallory said cheerfully. ‘We’ll bring you some Hock next time we return.’ He tilted his own bottle. ‘Prosit!’ he said, an islander proud of airing his German, and then, more proudly still, ‘Auf Wiedersehen!’

The boy murmured something in return. He stood hesitating for a moment, slightly shame-faced, then wheeled abruptly, walked off slowly along the river bank, clutching his bottles of Moselle.

‘So!’ Mallory said thoughtfully. ‘There are only three of them. That should make things easier –’

‘Well done, sir!’ It was Stevens who interrupted, his voice warm, his face alive with admiration. ‘Jolly good show!’

‘Jolly good show!’ Miller mimicked. He heaved his lanky length over the coaming of the engine hatchway, ‘“Good” be damned! I couldn’t understand a gawddamned word, but for my money that rates an Oscar. That was terrific, boss!’

‘Thank you, one and all,’ Mallory murmured. ‘But I’m afraid the congratulations are a bit premature.’ The sudden chill in his voice struck at them, so that their eyes aligned along his pointing finger even before he went on. ‘Take a look,’ he said quietly.

The young soldier had halted suddenly about two hundred yards along the bank, looked into the forest on his left in startled surprise, then dived in among the trees. For a moment the watchers on the boat could see another soldier, talking excitedly to the boy and gesticulating in the direction of their boat, and then both were gone, lost in the gloom of the forest.

‘That’s torn it!’ Mallory said softly. He turned away. ‘Right, that’s enough. Back to where you were. It would look fishy if we ignored that incident altogether, but it would look a damned sight fishier if we paid too much attention to it. Don’t let’s appear to be holding a conference.’

Miller slipped down into the engine-room with Brown, and Stevens went back to the little for’ard cabin. Mallory and Andrea remained on deck, bottles in their hands. The rain had stopped now, completely, but the wind was still rising, climbing the scale with imperceptible steadiness, beginning to bend the tops of the tallest of the pines. Temporarily the bluff was affording them almost complete protection. Mallory deliberately shut his mind to what it must be like outside. They had to put out to sea – Spandaus permitting – and that was that.

‘What do you think has happened, sir?’ Stevens’s voice carried up from the gloom of the cabin.

‘Pretty obvious, isn’t it?’ Mallory asked. He spoke loudly enough for all to hear. ‘They’ve been tipped off. Don’t ask me how. This is the second time – and their suspicions are going to be considerably reinforced by the absence of a report from the caique that was sent to investigate us. She was carrying a wireless aerial, remember?’

‘But why should they get so damned suspicious all of a sudden?’ Miller asked. ‘It doesn’t make sense to me, boss.’

‘Must be in radio contact with their HQ. Or a telephone – probably a telephone. They’ve just been given the old tic-tac. Consternation on all sides.’

‘So mebbe they’ll be sending a small army over from their HQ to deal with us,’ Miller said lugubriously.

Mallory shook his head definitely. His mind was working quickly and well, and he felt oddly certain, confident of himself.

‘No, not a chance. Seven miles as the crow flies. Ten, maybe twelve miles over rough hill and forest tracks – and in pitch darkness. They wouldn’t think of it.’ He waved his bottle in the direction of the watch-tower. ‘Tonight’s their big night.’

‘So we can expect the Spandaus to open up any minute?’ Again the abnormal matter-of-factness of Stevens’s voice.

Mallory shook his head a second time.

‘They won’t. I’m positive of that. No matter how suspicious they may be, how certain they are that we’re the big bad wolf, they are going to be shaken to the core when that kid tells them we’re carrying papers and letters of authority signed by General Graebel himself. For all they know, curtains for us may be the firing squad for them. Unlikely, but you get the general idea. So they’re going to contact HQ, and the commandant on a small island like this isn’t going to take a chance on rubbing out a bunch of characters who may be the special envoys of the Herr General himself. So what? So he codes a message and radios it to Vathy in Samos and bites his nails off to the elbow till a message comes back saying Graebel has never heard of us and why the hell haven’t we all been shot dead?’ Mallory looked at the luminous dial of his watch. ‘I’d say we have at least half an hour.’

‘And meantime we all sit around with our little bits of paper and pencil and write out our last wills and testaments.’ Miller scowled. ‘No percentage in that, boss. We gotta do somethin’.’

Mallory grinned.

‘Don’t worry, Corporal, we are going to do something. We’re going to hold a nice little bottle party, right here on the poop.’

The last words of their song – a shockingly corrupted Grecian version of ‘Lilli Marlene’, and their third song in the past few minutes – died away in the evening air. Mallory doubted whether more than faint snatches of the singing would be carried to the watch-tower against the wind, but the rhythmical stamping of feet and waving of bottles were in themselves sufficient evidence of drunken musical hilarity to all but the totally blind and deaf. Mallory grinned to himself as he thought of the complete confusion and uncertainty the Germans in the tower must have been feeling then. This was not the behaviour of enemy spies, especially enemy spies who know that suspicions had been aroused and that their time was running out.

Mallory tilted the bottle to his mouth, held it there for several seconds, then set it down again, the wine untasted. He looked round slowly at the three men squatting there with him on the poop, Miller, Stevens and Brown. Andrea was not there, but he didn’t have to turn his head to look for him. Andrea, he knew, was crouched in the shelter of the wheelhouse, a waterproof bag with grenades and a revolver strapped to his back.

‘Right!’ Mallory said crisply. ‘Now’s your big chance for your Oscar. Let’s make this as convincing as we can.’ He bent forward, jabbed his finger into Miller’s chest and shouted angrily at him.

Miller shouted back. For a few moments they sat there, gesticulating angrily and, to all appearances, quarrelling furiously with each other. Then Miller was on his feet, swaying in drunken imbalance as he leaned threateningly over Mallory, clenched fists ready to strike. He stood back as Mallory struggled to his feet, and in a moment they were fighting fiercely, raining apparently heavy blows on each other. Then a haymaker from the American sent Mallory reeling back to crash convincingly against the wheelhouse.

‘Right, Andrea.’ He spoke quietly, without looking round. ‘This is it. Five seconds. Good luck.’ He scrambled to his feet, picked up a bottle by the neck and rushed at Miller, upraised arm and bludgeon swinging fiercely down. Miller dodged, swung a vicious foot, and Mallory roared in pain as his shins caught on the edge of the bulwarks. Silhouetted against the pale gleam of the creek, he stood poised for a second, arms flailing wildly, then plunged heavily, with a loud splash, into the waters of the creek.

For the next half-minute – it would take about that time for Andrea to swim underwater round the next upstream corner of the creek – everything was a confusion and a bedlam of noise. Mallory trod water as he tried to pull himself aboard: Miller had seized a boathook and was trying to smash it down on his head: and the others, on their feet now, had flung their arms round Miller, trying to restrain him: finally they managed to knock him off his feet, pin him to the deck and help the dripping Mallory aboard. A minute later, after the immemorial fashion of drunken men, the two combatants had shaken hands with one another and were sitting on the engine-room hatch, arms round each other’s shoulders and drinking in perfect amity from the same freshly-opened bottle of wine.

‘Very nicely done,’ Mallory said approvingly. ‘Very nicely indeed. An Oscar, definitely, for Corporal Miller.’

Dusty Miller said nothing. Taciturn and depressed, he looked moodily at the bottle in his hand. At last he stirred.

‘I don’t like it, boss,’ he muttered unhappily. ‘I don’t like the set-up one little bit. You shoulda let me go with Andrea. It’s three to one up there, and they’re waiting and ready.’ He looked accusingly at Mallory. ‘Dammit to hell, boss, you’re always telling us how desperately important this mission is!’

‘I know,’ Mallory said quietly. ‘That’s why I didn’t send you with him. That’s why none of us has gone with him. We’d only be a liability to him, get in his way.’ Mallory shook his head. ‘You don’t know Andrea, Dusty.’ It was the first time Mallory had called him that: Miller was warmed by the unexpected familiarity, secretly pleased. ‘None of you know him. But I know him.’ He gestured towards the watch-tower, its square-cut lines in sharp silhouette against the darkening sky. ‘Just a big, fat, good-natured chap, always laughing and joking.’ Mallory paused, shook his head again, went on slowly. ‘He’s up there now, padding through that forest like a cat, the biggest and most dangerous cat you’ll ever see. Unless they offer no resistance – Andrea never kills unnecessarily – when I send him up there after these three poor bastards I’m executing them just as surely as if they were in the electric chair and I was pulling the switch.’

In spite of himself Miller was impressed, profoundly so.

‘Known him a long time, boss, huh?’ It was half question, half statement.

‘A long time. Andrea was in the Albanian war – he was in the regular army. They tell me the Italians went in terror of him – his long-range patrols against the Iulia division, the Wolves of Tuscany, did more to wreck the Italian morale in Albania than any other single factor. I’ve heard a good many stories about them – not from Andrea – and they’re all incredible. And they’re all true. But it was afterwards I met him, when we were trying to hold the Servia Pass. I was a very junior liaison lieutenant in the Anzac brigade at the time. Andrea’ – he paused deliberately for effect – ‘Andrea was a lieutenant-colonel in the 19th Greek Motorised Division.’

‘A what?’ Miller demanded in astonishment. Stevens and Brown were equally incredulous.

‘You heard me. Lieutenant-colonel. Outranks me by a fairish bit, you might say.’ He smiled at them quizzically. ‘Puts Andrea in rather a different light, doesn’t it?’

They nodded silently but said nothing. The genial, hail-fellow Andrea – a good-natured, almost simpleminded buffoon – a senior army officer. The idea had come too suddenly, was too incongruous for easy assimilation and immediate comprehension. But, gradually, it began to make sense to them. It explained many things about Andrea to them – his repose, his confidence, the unerring sureness of his lightning reactions, and, above all, the implicit faith Mallory had in him, the respect he showed for Andrea’s opinions whenever he consulted him, which was frequently. Without surprise now, Miller slowly recalled that he’d never yet heard Mallory give Andrea a direct order. And Mallory never hesitated to pull his rank, when necessary.