During part of another day, they explored the much less interesting remains of ancient Argos. That city, too, had had its theatre. It had once seated twenty thousand spectators and was the largest in Greece, but the greater part of it had since fallen into ruin. Then there were their daily bathe, long naps in the afternoons and a driving lesson for Robbie every evening. It was, therefore, with the greatest reluctance that, while they were at lunch on the Thursday, he said:
‘It’s a week today since we arrived here, so our hol. is pretty well over. We must hit the trail again tomorrow morning.’
‘Oh no!’ Stephanie exclaimed. ‘Do let’s stay on here a few days longer.’
He shook his head. He had never even hinted to her that he had pledged himself to Athene; so he had, naturally, made no mention of the owl that had hooted on the evening of their arrival and checked his impulse to give in to her plea that he should abandon his mission. But the owl evidently had its nest somewhere up on the cliff behind the hotel. Every evening since, after dusk had fallen, he had heard it hooting. These hoots had been a nightly reminder to him that he must not linger at Navplion for longer than might serve to make the Czechs believe that they had no more to fear from him. Now he said firmly:
‘No; and please don’t try again to persuade me to throw in my hand. My mind is made up. We are leaving tomorrow morning, so you had better pack tonight.’
There was a quiet authority in his voice that would have been quite foreign to it ten days earlier; so, instead of attempting to argue with him, she asked: ‘Where are we going?’
‘To Olympia,’ he replied. ‘It is about two hundred kilometres. That may not sound very much for a day’s drive, but the hall porter tells me that four-fifths of the way lies through the mountains, so we ought to allow at least five hours. I hope you won’t find it too tiring. If we start at ten o’clock, we should be at Tripolis by twelve. That is the only town of any size through which we pass, so we could take a two-hour break for lunch there and do the longer stretch in the afternoon.’
She shrugged. ‘That suits me all right. But why Olympia? I thought all those groups of Czechs you are interested in were taking up their quarters near the sea.’
‘They are, and the group that I have decided to try and get a good look at will be somewhere near Pirgos. I have chosen that lot because it must be ten days since they landed there, so by now they will have had plenty of time to get to work. But I decided against staying in the city, because there is just a chance that Barak, or some of the others who saw me either in Patras or Corinth, might be there. If I happened to run into one of them, it would put them on their guard. Pirgos is only a little over twenty kilometres from Olympia, so I can easily work from there. Also, by staying at Olympia, I can keep going, for what it’s worth, my cover that I’m writing a book about ancient Greece.’
The first ten miles of their journey the following morning were easy, as the road was almost flat. It ran in a great semicircle, through Argos right round the head of the gulf. On the far side they passed through the little town of Miloi, on the site of the ancient Lerna, near which Hercules had slain the Hydra; and thereabouts the country was very pretty. There were many plantations of oranges and lemons and, in several places, the road was lined with pepper and mimosa trees. The latter, as Robbie had noticed in several other low-lying parts of the country, had much larger blossoms than the varieties imported into England, but that was more than offset by the fact that they had no scent.
Soon after leaving Miloi, the road began to rise in a series of sharp curves, and in a quarter of an hour they had climbed over a thousand feet. As the road zigzagged to and fro round sharp spurs of the mountain, they frequently drove back in the direction from which they had come, only on a higher level; so time and again they got an increasingly bird’s-eye view of the great gulf that they were leaving behind them, with the little castle of Burzi in its centre and Navplion on its further shore.
For a stretch of over fifteen miles the road was cut out of the mountain side and, even on the most dangerous curves, it had no parapet or row of posts which might have prevented a recklessly driven car from going over. There was not much traffic, and during the first hour they met only two tourist coaches, three private cars and half a dozen lorries. Stephanie drove at a fair pace, but carefully, and Robbie was relieved to see that she showed no trace of nerves when passing other vehicles. For that he gave her full marks, as he found his own muscles tensing slightly every time they approached a blind corner, from dread that a long coach would appear just as they were about to go round it.
By eleven o’clock they were up to two thousand five hundred feet and wisps of cloud, coming down from the peaks on either side that were shrouded in it, drifted across the road. But by that time they had reached the pass and for a few miles there were only gentle gradients. Then once more the way became a succession of hairpin bends, now sloping downward and seeming even more dangerous; for, had the car brakes failed when approaching any of the corners, nothing could have stopped them from going straight over the edge of a precipice.
A little before midday they entered Tripolis, the largest town in the interior of the Peloponnesus and almost in its centre. Like most Greek country towns, the streets were crowded with donkey carts, ageing motor vehicles of all descriptions and shouting peasants trying to keep their herds of goats together. Most of the buildings looked shoddy and there were few of more than two stories; but there was a pleasant, arcaded square in the centre of the town and at a restaurant there they had quite a passable lunch.
They still had two-thirds of the journey before them, and Stephanie was in favour of pushing on; so at about half past one they drove out of the town. After a few miles the road began to twist and mount again and, at a height of over three thousand feet, it took them round bend after bend, through a great area of steep slopes covered with firs. At times the road spiralled downward for some distance until the drop over the edge was reduced to a mere hundred feet, but only to snake up again to still loftier heights.
Up there in the mountains the villages were few, small and very far apart. Occasionally, at the bottom of the valleys, there were patches of olive trees, and small strips of vines or corn, but by far the greater part of the land was wild scrub, upon which only goats could browse, rising to vast masses of barren rock. The scenery was magnificent but, as this was a fair sample of two-thirds of Greece, it could not be wondered at that its people were so poor. The great ranges of barren mountains, shutting off the fertile valleys from one another, explained too why in ancient times there had been so many Kings in Greece. Most of them had, in fact, been no more than petty chieftains, submitting only for comparatively short periods to the over-lordship of aggressive monarchs such as Agamemnon and, later, the powerful City States of Athens and Sparta.
Between half-past-two and half-past-three, they passed between peaks rising to six thousand feet on either side of them, and in places the drop from the road to the valley was close on four thousand. The bends seemed to grow still sharper and at scores of them it needed only a small error of judgment on Stephanie’s part to send them both hurtling to their deaths. She kept her eyes fixed steadily on the road ahead, but Robbie was free to look about him. From time to time he could not resist the temptation to glance over the unprotected edge of the road down into the valley three-quarters of a mile below, but each time he swiftly looked away again and tried to comfort himself with the thought that coaches, lorries and cars made this journey safely every day and night; so there was really no reason to fear that they, too, would not do so.
Soon after four o’clock, at a place where there was one of the most precipitous drops from the road, they came upon a small township. Why such a spot should ever have been chosen, and how its houses had been built into the almost perpendicular mountainside above the road were mysteries. But it had a café with a few tables outside; so they pulled up there to give Stephanie a rest and to have a drink. Opposite the café there were only the road
, a strip of pavement and a railing. When they had finished their drinks, they walked across and looked over. There were more houses perched precariously below, and beyond them nothing. A running jump from the front door of any of them would have taken the jumper well over a thousand feet to land in the bottom of the valley.
‘What a place to live!’ Robbie muttered, turning away with a shudder. ‘I’ve no head for heights and within a week I bet I would have thrown myself over.’
‘Fortunately, I don’t mind them,’ Stephanie replied. ‘But, all the same, I’d hate to live here, especially if I had children. I should be worried out of my wits. But I suppose the mothers in these places get used to it and the children soon become as sure-footed as goats.’
The township, as they saw from the map, was called Tropaia, and soon after leaving it they began the long descent. For the better part of another hour they again slewed round bend after bend, occasionally slowing down to pass another vehicle, until they reached the fertile plane through which runs the river Alfios. The last lap was through charming woodland country, and it was just on five o’clock when they drove up a slope to the Spap Hotel.
Its main block, with a fine entrance hall and broad staircase, gave it something of the atmosphere of a big, private villa; but it had recently been built on to, and was now one of the few de-luxe hotels in Greece, outside Athens. From the rooms they were given they could see, about a mile away, a part of the famous ruins and beyond them the curve of the broad river, but most of the ruins were hidden by tall Scotch pines which grew among them.
Their day had been a tiring one, so after resting they dined early with a view to getting in a long night. But before they went to bed, Robbie told Stephanie that he wanted her to drive him into Pirgos in the morning.
She expressed surprise that he was not anxious to see the temples; but he said that, as the next day was Saturday, if he did not make a start with his business in the morning he would have to waste the whole week-end.
As it was quite a short run, they reached the port by ten o’clock. It was nowhere near as large as Patras, but a little bigger than Tripolis, and most of the buildings were of the same shoddy variety. A few sites were occupied only by cracked walls and heaps of rubble, as the town had suffered from a long series of earthquakes.
They parked the car and Stephanie went off to have a ‘hairdo’ while Robbie set about locating the Czech group by the same means he had used in Corinth. In this somewhat larger town it took him longer, and he had to announce himself as a representative of United Kingdom Petroleum at three estate agents before he had any luck. Eventually, he learnt from a Mr. Levantis that the Czechs had bought a small factory some three kilometres to the south of the port. The factory had been partially destroyed by the last earthquake and then abandoned.
At half-past-twelve he rejoined Stephanie and asked her to drive him out of the town along the coast road until they were in sight of the factory. The solitary chimney had broken off about twenty feet up and some of the walls were jagged, with big gaps in them. But a small house to one side of it, in which the owner or manager had probably lived, still appeared intact, and several of the smaller buildings had their roofs on. After Robbie had studied the place for some minutes, Stephanie turned the car round and they drove back to Olympia in time for a late lunch.
Later in the afternoon they paid their first visit to the ruins, set so attractively among the sprinkling of tall pine trees. But Robbie seemed unable to get up much interest in them because his mind was now once more fully occupied with the Czechs.
On the Sunday morning he suggested to Stephanie that they should have a swim in the river; so they collected their bathing things and strolled down to it. The Alfios was several hundred yards wide there, but at that season the greater part of its bed consisted of dry, stony patches, between which the main stream and a few smaller ones meandered. However, after walking some way along the bank, they came upon a good-sized pool about five feet deep where water had collected from a little stream that flowed through it. They changed behind some bushes and on going in found the water delightfully warm, so they spent most of the morning either in it or sunbathing on the sandy bank.
It was not until they were seated at lunch that Robbie announced that he wanted to be driven into Pirgos again that afternoon. He then went on to say that he thought it fairly certain that the Czechs, like other people, would take Sunday off; so the odds were that most, if not all, of the group would have gone into the town, and that would give him a better chance than at any other time during the week to take some photographs without being caught.
Stephanie made no demur and by three o’clock she brought the car to a halt behind a group of tamarisks about two hundred yards from the factory. Instead of making for it, Robbie walked down to the beach, then sauntered slowly along it as though he were looking for pretty shells or brightly coloured stones. One wall round the half-ruined building merged into a stone jetty that ran out into the sea and barred his further progress along the beach. Turning inland, he followed the wall until he reached the first gap in it. He saw at once that it had recently been rendered impassable by a score of strands of barbed wire stretched at intervals of nine inches or less across it. But he had chosen his hour well. It was the middle of the siesta period and, on peering through the wire, he saw that, even if all the Czechs had not gone into the town, none of them was about.
The gap in the wall gave on to a spacious yard. Near the middle there stood a tall, steel tripod with very stout legs, the upper part of which he had already seen from a distance over the top of the wall. Near it, there was a small crane and a bulky piece of machinery, which he took to be some form of powerful motor or electric engine, under a shelter that had been rigged up to protect it from rain. The barbed wire was no impediment to his taking photographs so, resting his camera on one of the strands, he took two shots.
He then moved along the wall to another gap. That, too, was sealed off with barbed wire, and the view through it was the same from a slightly different angle; but it did include a better sight of a big pile of spiral screws, each about six feet long and one foot in diameter, so he took two more shots from there. Lastly, through a third gap round the corner of the wall, he got two photographs of a line of trolleys on rails that were evidently being used for running the earth churned out by the drills down to the jetty and from there into the sea. He then made his way back to the beach, sauntered along it again and so returned to the car.
‘Did you get what you wanted?’ Stephanie asked.
He nodded. ‘Yes; and they are drilling after all.’
‘Drilling?’ she repeated interrogatively.
‘Perhaps I didn’t tell you; but the information my firm secured was that this Czech company meant to drill for oil. We couldn’t believe it because there are not supposed to be sufficient oil deposits in Greece to make it worth while. We thought they might be up to something else. I mean …’ he added hastily, ‘establishing depots with storage tanks, and that sort of thing.’
‘But you are satisfied now that what you were told is right?’
‘Yes. There’s no doubt they are drilling. I’ve got photographs of the plant and the tip-trucks they’re using to run the churned-out earth down into the sea. One can only suppose that by some new radar process, or something, they have been able to detect oil deposits that no one else believed to exist.’
Stephanie gave a sigh of relief. ‘Thank God for that, then. Now you have done your job you won’t have to take any further risks of being beaten up. We can forget all this and concentrate on your book. That is if your firm will give you a few weeks’ leave, and they jolly well ought to.’
Robbie smiled. ‘Oh, I can fix that, all right. I must get these photographs developed as soon as possible and send them in. Then, so far as I am concerned, that will be the end of the matter.’
She drove the car back through Pirgos then, when they were a little way out of the town, let him take the wheel. The road back to Olymp
ia was on low ground, so if he had run off it there would have been no great danger of a fatal accident; and by this time she felt that he was driving quite well enough to apply for a provisional licence as soon as they were again in a town where one could be obtained.
That evening, while he was lying in his bath before dinner, he took stock of the situation and found his feelings very mixed. For his self-imposed mission to be over was a great relief. On the other hand, it was annoying to think that for the past month he had been scheming and exerting himself to no purpose. His belief that there was some sinister design behind the Czech tobacco-oil deal had turned out to be only a figment of his imagination. That meant, too, that he would not now enjoy the triumph of having pulled off a fine coup as a secret agent and so gain the astonished respect of his uncle.
Then, as he thought further about it, he began to wonder if he really had got to the bottom of the matter. That the Czechs were definitely drilling indicated that he had, but the fact remained that Luke Beecham had assured him both that no one believed there was oil in Greece and, that if some new scientific device for discovering it had been invented, he would have heard about it. Could it be then that the Czechs were drilling for some other purpose—perhaps to sink concrete pylons on which rocket launchers could be based? That idea certainly gave much food for thought, and perhaps the photographs he had taken would provide the answer to it. Luke would know if the machinery in them was of a type used for sinking oil wells and, if not, he might be able to deduce from them what the Czechs were up to.
First thing next morning, Robbie walked down to the pharmacy in the village. Handing his camera to the man behind the counter, he asked him to take the spool out because, not being used to a camera, he was not quite certain how to do it. Then he asked that the film should be developed as quickly as possible.
Mayhem in Greece Page 33
