The sun, rime-ringed and palely luminous behind the drifting cloud-wrack, was far beyond its zenith and dipping swiftly westwards to the snow-limned shoulder of the mountain when Andrea lifted the edge of the tent, pushed it gently aside and peered out warily down the smooth sweep of the mountainside. For a few moments he remained almost motionless behind the canvas, automatically easing cramped and aching leg muscles, narrowed, roving eyes gradually accustoming themselves to the white glare of the glistening, crystalline snow. And then he had flitted noiselessly out of the mouth of the tunnel and reached far up the bank of the gully in half a dozen steps; stretched full length against the snow, he eased himself smoothly up the slope, lifted a cautious eye over the top.
Far below him stretched the great, curved sweep of an almost perfectly symmetrical valley – a valley born abruptly in the cradling embrace of steep-walled mountains and falling away gently to the north. That towering, buttressed giant on his right that brooded darkly over the head of the valley, its peak hidden in the snow clouds – there could be no doubt about that, Andrea thought. Mt Kostos, the highest mountain in Navarone: they had crossed its western flank during the darkness of the night. Due east and facing his own at perhaps five miles’ distance, the third mountain was barely less high: but its northern flank fell away more quickly, debouching on to the plains that lay to the north-east of Navarone. And about four miles away to the north-north-east, far beneath the snowline and the isolated shepherds’ huts, a tiny, flat-roofed township lay in a fold in the hills, along the bank of the little stream that wound its way through the valley. That could only be the village of Margaritha.
Even as he absorbed the topography of the valley, his eyes probing every dip and cranny in the hills for a possible source of danger, Andrea’s mind was racing back over the last two minutes of time, trying to isolate, to remember the nature of the alien sound that had cut through the cocoon of sleep and brought him instantly to his feet, alert and completely awake, even before his conscious mind had time to register the memory of the sound. And then he heard it again, three times in as many seconds, the high-pitched, lonely wheep of a whistle, shrill peremptory blasts that echoed briefly and died along the lower slopes of Mt Kostos: the final echo still hung faintly on the air as Andrea pushed himself backwards and slid down to the floor of the gully.
He was back on the bank within thirty seconds, cheek muscles contracting involuntarily as the ice-chill eyepieces of Mallory’s Zeiss-Ikon binoculars screwed into his face. There was no mistaking them now, he thought grimly, his first, fleeting impression had been all too accurate. Twenty-five, perhaps thirty soldiers in all, strung out in a long, irregular line, they were advancing slowly across the flank of Kostos, combing every gully, each jumbled confusion of boulders that lay in their path. Every man was clad in a snow-suit, but even at a distance of two miles they were easy to locate: the arrow-heads of their strapped skis angled up above shoulders and hooded heads: startlingly black against the sheer whiteness of the snow, the skis bobbed and weaved in disembodied drunkenness as the men slipped and stumbled along the scree-strewn slopes of the mountain. From time to time a man near the centre of the line pointed and gestured with an alpenstock, as if co-ordinating the efforts of the search party. The man with the whistle, Andrea guessed.
‘Andrea!’ The call from the cave mouth was very soft. ‘Anything wrong?’
Finger to his lips, Andrea twisted round in the snow. Mallory was standing by the canvas screen. Dark-jowled and crumple-clothed, he held up one hand against the glare of the snow while the other rubbed the sleep from his blood-shot eyes. And then he was limping forward in obedience to the crooking of Andrea’s finger, wincing in pain at every step he took. His toes were swollen and skinned, gummed together with congealed blood. He had not had his boots off since he had taken them from the feet of the dead German sentry: and now he was almost afraid to remove them, afraid of what he would find . . . He clambered slowly up the bank of the gully and sank down in the snow beside Andrea.
‘Company?’
‘The very worst of company,’ Andrea murmured. ‘Take a look, my Keith.’ He handed over the binoculars, pointed down to the lower slopes of Mt Kostos. ‘Your friend Jensen never told us that they were here.’
Slowly, Mallory quartered the slopes with the binoculars. Suddenly the line of searchers moved into his field of vision. He raised his head, adjusted the focus impatiently, looked briefly once more, then lowered the binoculars with a restrained deliberation of gesture that held a wealth of bitter comment.
‘The WGB,’ he said softly.
‘A Jaeger battalion,’ Andrea conceded. ‘Alpine Corps – their finest mountain troops. This is most inconvenient, my Keith.’
Mallory nodded, rubbed his stubbled chin.
‘If anyone can find us, they can. And they’ll find us.’ He lifted the glasses to look again at the line of advancing men. The painstaking thoroughness of the search was disturbing enough: but even more threatening, more frightening, was the snail-like relentlessness, the inevitability of the approach of these tiny figures. ‘God knows what the Alpenkorps is doing here,’ Mallory went on. ‘It’s enough that they are here. They must know that we’ve landed and spent the morning searching the eastern saddle of Kostos – that was the obvious route for us to break into the interior. They’ve drawn a blank there, so now they’re working their way over to the other saddle. They must be pretty nearly certain that we’re carrying a wounded man with us and that we can’t have got very far. It’s only going to be a matter of time, Andrea.’
‘A matter of time,’ Andrea echoed. He glanced up at the sun, a sun all but invisible in the darkening sky. ‘An hour, an hour and a half at the most. They’ll be here before the sun goes down. And we’ll still be here.’ He glanced quizzically at Mallory. ‘We cannot leave the boy. And we cannot get away if we take the boy – and then he would die anyway.’
‘We will not be here,’ Mallory said flatly. ‘If we stay we all die. Or finish up in one of those nice little dungeons that Monsieur Vlachos told us about.’
‘The greatest good of the greatest number,’ Andrea nodded slowly. ‘That’s how it has to be, has it not, my Keith? The greatest number. That is what Captain Jensen would say.’ Mallory stirred uncomfortably, but his voice was steady enough when he spoke.
‘That’s how I see it, too, Andrea. Simple proportion – twelve hundred to one. You know it has to be this way.’ Mallory sounded tired.
‘Yes, I know. But you are worrying about nothing.’ Andrea smiled. ‘Come, my friend. Let us tell the others the good news.’
Miller looked up as the two men came in, letting the canvas screen fall shut behind them. He had unzipped the side of Stevens’s sleeping-bag and was working on the mangled leg. A pencil flashlight was propped on a rucksack beside him.
‘When are we goin’ to do somethin’ about this kid, boss?’ The voice was abrupt, angry, like his gesture towards the sleep-drugged boy beside him. ‘This damned waterproof sleeping-bag is soaked right through. So’s the kid – and he’s about frozen stiff: his leg feels like a side of chilled beef. He’s gotta have heat, boss, a warm room and hot drinks – or he’s finished. Twenty-four hours.’ Miller shivered and looked slowly round the broken walls of the rock-shelter. ‘I reckon he’d have less than an even chance in a first-class general hospital . . . He’s just wastin’ his time keepin’ on breathin’ in this gawddamned ice-box.’
Miller hardly exaggerated. Water from the melting snow above trickled continuously down the clammy, green-lichened walls of the cave or dripped directly on to the half-frozen gravelly slush on the floor of the cave. With no through ventilation and no escape for the water accumulating at the sides of the shelter, the whole place was dank and airless and terribly chill.
‘Maybe he’ll be hospitalised sooner than you think,’ Mallory said dryly. ‘How’s his leg?’
‘Worse.’ Miller was blunt. ‘A helluva sight worse. I’ve just chucked in another handful of sulpha and tie
d things up again. That’s all I can do, boss, and it’s just a waste of time anyway . . . What was that crack about a hospital?’ he added suspiciously.
‘That was no crack,’ Mallory said soberly, ‘but one of the more unpleasant facts of life. There’s a German search party heading this way. They mean business. They’ll find us, all right.’
Miller swore. ‘That’s handy, that’s just wonderful,’ he said bitterly. ‘How far away, boss?’
‘An hour, maybe a little more.’
‘And what are we goin’ to do with Junior, here? Leave him? It’s his only chance, I reckon.’
‘Stevens comes with us.’ There was a flat finality in Mallory’s voice. Miller looked at him for a long time in silence: his face was very cold.
‘Stevens comes with us,’ Miller repeated. ‘We drag him along with us until he’s dead – that won’t take long – and then we leave him in the snow. Just like that, huh?’
‘Just like that, Dusty.’ Absently Mallory brushed some snow off his clothes, and looked up again at Miller. ‘Stevens knows too much. The Germans will have guessed why we’re on the island, but they don’t know how we propose to get inside the fortress – and they don’t know when the Navy’s coming through. But Stevens does. They’ll make him talk. Scopolamine will make anyone talk.’
‘Scopolamine! On a dying man?’ Miller was openly incredulous.
‘Why not? I’d do the same myself. If you were the German commandant and you knew that your big guns and half the men in your fortress were liable to be blown to hell any moment, you’d do the same.’
Miller looked at him, grinned wryly, shook his head.
‘Me and my –’
‘I know. You and your big mouth.’ Mallory smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I don’t like it one little bit more than you do, Dusty.’ He turned away and crossed to the other side of the cave. ‘How are you feeling, Chief?’
‘Not too bad, sir.’ Casey Brown was only just awake, numbed and shivering in sodden clothes. ‘Anything wrong?’
‘Plenty,’ Mallory assured him. ‘Search party moving this way. We’ll have to pull out inside half an hour.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Just on four o’clock. Do you think you could raise Cairo on the set?’
‘Lord only knows,’ Brown said frankly. He rose stiffly to his feet. ‘The radio didn’t get just the best of treatment yesterday. I’ll have a go.’
‘Thanks, Chief. See that your aerial doesn’t stick up above the sides of the gully.’ Mallory turned to leave the cave, but halted abruptly at the sight of Andrea squatting on a boulder just beside the entrance. His head bent in concentration, the big Greek had just finished screwing telescopic sights on to the barrel of his 7.92 mm Mauser and was now deftly wrapping a sleeping-bag lining round its barrel and butt until the entire rifle was wrapped in a white cocoon.
Mallory watched him in silence. Andrea glanced up at him, smiled, rose to his feet and reached out for his rucksack. Within thirty seconds he was clad from head to toe in his mountain camouflage suit, was drawing tight the purse-strings of his snow-hood and easing his feet into the rucked elastic anklets of his canvas boots. Then he picked up the Mauser and smiled slightly.
‘I thought I might be taking a little walk, Captain,’ he said apologetically. ‘With your permission, of course.’
Mallory nodded his head several times in slow recollection.
‘You said I was worrying about nothing,’ he murmured. ‘I should have known. You might have told me, Andrea.’ But the protest was automatic, without significance. Mallory felt neither anger nor even annoyance at this tacit arrogation of his authority. The habit of command died hard in Andrea: on such occasions as he ostensibly sought approval for or consulted about a proposed course of action it was generally as a matter of courtesy and to give information as to his intentions. Instead of resentment, Mallory could feel only an overwhelming relief and gratitude to the smiling giant who towered above him: he had talked casually to Miller about driving Stevens till he died and then abandoning him, talked with an indifference that masked a mind sombre with bitterness at what he must do, but even so he had not known how depressed, how sick at heart this decision had left him until he knew it was no longer necessary.
‘I am sorry.’ Andrea was half-contrite, half-smiling. ‘I should have told you. I thought you understood . . . It is the best thing to do, yes?’
‘It is the only thing to do,’ Mallory said frankly. ‘You’re going to draw them off up the saddle?’
‘There is no other way. With their skis they would overtake me in minutes if I went down into the valley. I cannot come back, of course, until it is dark. You will be here?’
‘Some of us will.’ Mallory glanced across the shelter where a waking Stevens was trying to sit up, heels of his palms screwing into his exhausted eyes. ‘We must have food and fuel, Andrea,’ he said softly. ‘I am going down into the valley tonight.’
‘Of course, of course. We must do what we can.’ Andrea’s face was grave, his voice only a murmur. ‘As long as we can. He is only a boy, a child almost . . . Perhaps it will not be long.’ He pulled back the curtain, looked out at the evening sky. ‘I will be back by seven o’clock.’
‘Seven o’clock,’ Mallory repeated. The sky, he could see, was darkening already, darkening with the gloom of coming snow, and the lifting wind was beginning to puff little clouds of air-spun, flossy white into the little gully. Mallory shivered and caught hold of the massive arm. ‘For God’s sake, Andrea,’ he urged quietly, ‘look after yourself!’
‘Myself?’ Andrea smiled gently, no mirth in his eyes, and as gently he disengaged his arm. ‘Do not think about me.’ The voice was very quiet, with an utter lack of arrogance. ‘If you must speak to God, speak to Him about these poor devils who are looking for us.’ The canvas dropped behind him and he was gone.
For some moments Mallory stood irresolutely at the mouth of the cave, gazing out sightlessly through the gap in the curtain. Then he wheeled abruptly, crossed the floor of the shelter and knelt in front of Stevens. The boy was propped up against Miller’s anxious arm, the eyes lack-lustre and expressionless, bloodless cheeks deep-sunken in a grey and parchment face. Mallory smiled at him: he hoped the shock didn’t show in his face.
‘Well, well, well. The sleeper awakes at last. Better late than never.’ He opened his waterproof cigarette case, proffered it to Stevens. ‘How are you feeling now, Andy?’
‘Frozen, sir.’ Stevens shook his head at the case and tried to grin back at Mallory, a feeble travesty of a smile that made Mallory wince.
‘And the leg?’
‘I think it must be frozen, too.’ Stevens looked down incuriously at the sheathed whiteness of his shattered leg. ‘Anyway, I can’t feel a thing.’
‘Frozen!’ Miller’s sniff was a masterpiece of injured pride. ‘Frozen, he says! Gawddamned ingratitude. It’s the first-class medical care, if I do say so myself!’
Stevens smiled, a fleeting, absent smile that flickered over his face and was gone. For long moments he kept staring down at his leg, then suddenly lifted his head and looked directly at Mallory.
‘Look, sir, there’s no good kidding ourselves.’ The voice was soft, quite toneless. ‘I don’t want to seem ungrateful and I hate even the idea of cheap heroics, but – well, I’m just a damned great millstone round your necks and –’
‘Leave you, eh?’ Mallory interrupted. ‘Leave you to die of the cold or be captured by the Germans. Forget it, laddie. We can look after you – and these ruddy guns – at the same time.’
‘But, sir –’
‘You insult us, Lootenant.’ Miller sniffed again. ‘Our feelings are hurt. Besides, as a professional man I gotta see my case through to convalescence, and if you think I’m goin’ to do that in any gawddamned dripping German dungeon, you can –’
‘Enough!’ Mallory held up his hand. ‘The subject is closed!’ He saw the stain high up on the thin cheeks, the glad light that touched the dulled eyes, and felt th
e self-loathing and the shame well up inside him, shame for the gratitude of a sick man who did not know that their concern stemmed not from solicitude but from fear that he might betray them . . . Mallory bent forward and began to unlace his high jackboots. He spoke without looking up.
‘Dusty.’
‘Yeah?’
‘When you’re finishing boasting about your medical prowess, maybe you’d care to use some of it. Come and have a look at these feet of mine, will you? I’m afraid the sentry’s boots haven’t done them a great deal of good.’
Fifteen painful minutes later Miller snipped off the rough edges of the adhesive bandage that bound Mallory’s right foot, straightened up stiffly and contemplated his handiwork with pride.
‘Beautiful, Miller, beautiful,’ he murmured complacently. ‘Not even in Johns Hopkins in the city of Baltimore . . .’ He broke off suddenly, frowned down at the thickly bandaged feet and coughed apologetically. ‘A small point has just occurred to me, boss.’
‘I thought it might eventually,’ Mallory said grimly. ‘Just how do you propose to get my feet into these damned boots again?’ He shivered involuntarily as he pulled on a pair of thick woollen socks, matted and sodden with melted snow, picked up the German sentry’s boots, held them at arm’s length and examined them in disgust. ‘Sevens, at the most – and a darned small sevens at that!’
‘Nines,’ Stevens said laconically. He handed over his own jackboots, one of them slit neatly down the sides where Andrea had cut it open. ‘You can fix that tear easily enough, and they’re no damned good to me now. No arguments, sir, please.’ He began to laugh softly, broke off in a sharply indrawn hiss of pain as the movement jarred the broken bones, took a couple of deep, quivering breaths, then smiled whitely. ‘My first – and probably my last – contribution to the expedition. What sort of medal do you reckon they’ll give me for that, sir?’
Mallory took the boots, looked at Stevens a long moment in silence, then turned as the tarpaulin was pushed aside. Brown stumbled in, lowered the transmitter and telescopic aerial to the floor of the cave and pulled out a tin of cigarettes. They slipped from his frozen fingers, fell into the icy mud at his feet, became brown and sodden on the instant. He swore briefly, and without enthusiasm, beat his numbed hands across his chest, gave it up and sat down heavily on a convenient boulder. He looked tired and cold and thoroughly miserable.
The Guns of Navarone Page 14
