The guns of Navaronne

by Alistair MacLean

  For the first two or three seconds Mallory had lain rigid and unmoving, temporarily paralysed in mind and body: already the guard had advanced four or five steps, carbine held in readiness before him, head turned sideways as he listened into the high, thin whine of the wind and the deep and distant booming of the surf below, trying to isolate the sound that had aroused his suspicions. But now the first Shock was over and Mallory's mind was working again. To go up on to the top of the cliff would be suicidal: ten to one the guard would hear him scrambling over the edge and shoot him out of hand: and if he did get up he had neither the weapons nor, after that exhausting climb, the strength to tackle an armed, fresh man. He would have to go back down. But he would have to slide down slowly, an inch at a time. At night, Mallory knew, side vision is even more acute than direct, and the guard might catch a sudden movement out of the corner of his eye. And then he would only have to turn his head and that would be the end: even in that darkness, Mallory realised, there could be no mistaking the bulk of his silhouette against the sharp line of the edge of the cliff.

  Gradually, every movement as smooth and controlled as possible, every soft and soundless breath a silent prayer, Mallory slipped gradually back over the edge of the cliff. Stifi the guard advanced, making for a point about five yards to Mallory's left, but still he looked away, his ear turned into the wind. And then Mallory was down, only his finger-tips over the top, and Andrea's great bulk was beside him, his mouth to his ear.

  «What is it? Somebody there?»

  «A sentry,» Mallory whispered back. His arms were beginning to ache from the strain. «He's heard something and he's looking for us.»

  Suddenly he shrank away from Andrea, pressed himself as closely as possible to the face of the cliff, was vaguely aware of Andrea doing the same thing. A beam of light, hurtful and dazzling to eyes so long accustomed to the dark, had suddenly stabbed out at the angle over the edge of the cliff, was moving slowly along towards them. The German had his torch out, was methodically examining the rim of the cliff. From the angle of the beam, Mallory judged that he was walking alone about a couple of feet from the edge. On that wild and gusty night he was taking no chances on the crumbly, treacherous top-soil of the cliff: even more likely, he was taking no chances on a pair of sudden hands reaching out for his ankles and jerking him to a mangled death on the rocks and reefs four hundred feet below.

  Slowly, inexorably, the beam approached. Even at that slant, it was bound to catch them. With a sudden sick certainty Mallory realised that the German wasn't just suspicious: he knew there was someone there, and he wouldn't stop looking until he found them. And there was nothing they could do, just nothing at all… . Then Andrea's head was close to his again.

  «A stone,» Andrea whispered. «Over there, behind him.»

  Cautiously at first, then frantically, Mallory pawed the cliff-top with his right hand. Earth, only earth, grass roots and tiny pebbles — there was nothing even half the size of a marble. And then Andrea was thrusting something against him and his hand closed over the metallic smoothness of a spike: even in that moment of desperate urgency, with the slender, searching beam only feet away, Mallory was conscious of a sudden, brief anger with himself — be had still a couple of spikes stuck in his belt and had forgotten all about them.

  His arm swung back, jerked convulsively forward, sent the spike spinning away into the darkness. One second passed, then another, he knew he had missed, the beam was only inches from Andrea's shoulders, and then the metallic clatter of the spike striking a boulder fell upon his ear like a benison. The beam wavered for a second, stabbed out aimlessly into the darkness and then whipped round, probing into the boulders to the left. And then the sentry was running towards them, slipping and stumbling in his haste, the barrel of the carbine gleaming in the light of the torch held clamped to it. He'd gone less than ten yards when Andrea was over the top of the cliff like a great, black cat, was padding noiselessly across the ground to the shelter of the nearest boulder. Wraith-like, he flitted in behind it and was gone, a shadow long among shadows.

  The sentry was about twenty yards away now, the beam of his torch darting fearfully from boulder to boulder when Andrea stuck the haft of his knife against a rock twice. The sentry whirled round, torch shining along the line of the boulders, then started to run clumsily back again, the skirts of the greatcoat fluttering grotesquely in the wind. The torch was swinging wildly now, and Mallory caught a glimpse of a white, straining face, wide-eyed and fearful, incongruously at variance with the gladiatorial strength of the steel helmet above. God only knew, Mallory thought, what wild panic-stricken thoughts were passing through his confused mind: noises from the cliff-top, metallic sound from either side among the boulders, the long, eerie vigil, afraid and companionless, on a deserted cliff edge on a dark and tempest-filled night in a hostile land — suddenly Mallory felt a deep stab of compassion for this man, a man like himself, someone's well-beloved husband or brother or son who was only doing a dirty and dangerous job as best he could and because he was told to, compassion for his loneliness and his anxieties and his fears, for the sure knowledge that before he had drawn breath another three times he would be dead.… Slowly, gauging his time and distance, Mallory raised his head.

  «Help!» he shouted. «Help me! I'm falling!»

  The soldier checked in mid-stride and spun round, less than flve feet from the rock that hid Andrea. For a second the beam of his torch waved wildly around, then settled on Mallory's head. For another moment he stood stock still, then the carbine in his right hand swung up, the left hand reaching down for the barreL Then he grunted once, a violent and convulsive exhalation of breath, and the thud of the hilt of Andrea's knife striking home against the ribs carried clearly to Mallory's ears, even against the wind… .

  Mallory stared down at the dead man, at Andrea's impassive face as he wiped the blade of his knife on the greatcoat, rose slowly 'to his feet, sighed and slid the knife back in its scabbard.

  «So, my Keith!» Andrea reserved the punctilious «Captain» for company only. «This is why our young lieutenant eats his heart out down below.»

  «That is why,» Mallory acknowledged. «I knew it-- or I almost knew it. So did you. Too many coincidences — the German caique investigating, the trouble at the watch-tower — and now this.» Mallory swore, softly and bitterly. «This is the end for our friend Captain Briggs of Castelrosso. He'll be cashiered within the month. Jensen wifi make certain of that.»

  Andrea nodded.

  «He let Nicolai go?»

  «Who else could have known that we were to have landed here, tipped off everyone all along the line?» Mallory paused, dismissed the thought, caught Andrea by the arm. «The Germans are thorough. Even although they must know it's almost an impossibility to land on a night like this, they'li have a dozen sentries scattered along the cliffs.» Unconsciously Mallory had lowered his voice. «But they wouldn't depend on one man to cope with five. So—»

  «Signals,» Andrea finished for him. «They must have some way of letting the others know. Perhaps flares—»

  «No, not that,» Mallory disagreed. «Give their position away. Telephone. It has to be that. Remember how they were in Crete — miles of field telephone wire all over the shop?»

  Andrea nodded, picked up the dead man's torch, hooded it in his huge hand and started searching. He returned in less than a minute.

  «Telephone it is,» he announced softly. «Over there, under the rocks.»

  «Nothing we can do about it,» Mallory said. «If it does ring, I'll have to answer or they'll come hot-footing along. I only hope to heaven they haven't got a bloody password. It would be just like them.»

  He turned away, stopped suddenly.

  «But someone's got to come sometime — a relief, ser geant of the guard, something like that. Probably he's supposed to make an hourly report. Someone's bound to come — and come soon. My God, Andrea, we'll have to make it fast!»

  «And this poor devil?» Andrea gestured to the
huddled shadow at his feet.

  «Over the side with him.» Mallory grimaced in distaste. «Won't make any difference to the poor bastard now, and we can't leave any traces. The odds are they'll think he's gone over the edge — this top-soil's as crumbly and treacherous as hell.… You might see if he's any papers on him — never know how useful they might be.»

  «Not half as useful as these boots on his feet.» Andrea waved a large hand towards the scree-strewn slopes. «You are not going to walk very far there in your stocking soles.»

  Five minutes later Mallory tugged three times on the string that stretched down into the darkness below. Three answering tugs came from the ledge, and then the cord vanished rapidly down over the edge of the overhang, drawing with it the long steel-cored rope that Mallory paid out from the coil on the top of the cliff.

  The box of explosives was the first of the gear to come up. The weighted rope plummetted straight down from the point of the overhang, and padded though the box was on every side with lashed rucksacks and sleeping-bags it still crashed terrifyingly against the cliff on the inner arc of every wind-driven swing of the pendulum. But there was no time for finesse, to wait for the diminishing swing of the pendulum after each tug. Securely anchored to a rope that stretched around the base of a great boulder, Andrea leaned far out over the edge of the precipice and reeled in the seventy-pound deadweight as another man would a trout. In less than three minutes the ammunition box lay beside him on the cliff-top: five minutes later the firing generator, guns and pistols, wrapped in a couple of other sleeping-bags and their lightweight, reversible tent — white on one side brown and green camouflage on the other — lay beside the explosives.

  A third time the rope went down into the rain and the darkness, a third time the tireless Andrea hauled it in, hand over hand. Mallory was behind him, coiling in the slack of the rope, when he heard Andrea's sudden exclamation: two quick strides and he was at the edge of the cliff, his hand on the big Greek's arm.

  «What's up, Andrea? Why have you stopped--?»

  He broke off, peered through the gloom at the rope in Andrea's hand, saw that it was being held between only finger and thumb. Twice Andrea jerked the rope up a foot or two, let it fall again: the weightless rope swayed wildly in the wind.

  «Gone?» Mallory asked quietly.

  Andrea nodded without speaking.

  «Broken?» Mallory was incredulous. «A wire-cored rope?»

  «I don't think so.» Quickly Andrea reeled in the remaining forty feet. The twine was still attached to the same place, about a fathom from the end. The rope was intact.

  «Somebody tied a knot.» Just for a moment the giant's voice sounded tired. «They didn't tie it too well.»

  Mallory made to speak, then flung up an instinctive arm as a great, forked tongue of flame streaked between the cliff-top and unseen clouds above. Their cringing eyes were still screwed tight shut, their nostrils full of the acrid, sulphurous smell of burning, when the first volley of thunder crashed in Titan fury almost directly overhead, a deafening artillery to mock the pitiful efforts of embattled man, doubly terrifying in the total darkness that followed that searing flash. Gradually the echoes pealed and faded inland in diminishing reverberation, were lost among the valleys of the hills.

  «My God!» Mallory murmured. «That was close. We'd better make it fast, Andrea — this cliff is liable to be lit up like a fairground any minute… What was in that last load you were bringing up?» He didn't really have to ask — he himself had arranged for the breaking up of the equipment into three separate loads before he'd left the ledge. It wasn't even that he suspected his tired mind of playing tricks on him; but it was tired enough, too tired, to probe the hidden compulsion, the nameless hope that prompted him to grasp at nameless straws that didn't even exist.

  «The food,» Andrea said gently. «All the food, the stove, the fuel — and the compasses.»

  For five, perhaps ten seconds, Mallory stood motionless. One half of his mind, conscious of the urgency, the desperate need for haste, was jabbing him mercilessly: the other half held him momentarily in a vast irresolution, an irresolution of coldness and numbness that came not from the lashing wind and sleety rain but from his own mind, from the bleak and comfortless imaginings of lost wanderings on the harsh and hostile island, with neither food nor fire.… And then Andrea's great hand was on his shoulder, and he was laughing softly.

  «Just so much less to carry, my Keith. Think how grateful our tired friend Corporal Miller is going to be… . This is only a little thing.»

  «Yes,» Mallory said. «Yes, of course. A little thing.» He turned abruptly, tugged the cord, watched the rope disappear over the edge.

  Fifteen minutes later, in drenching, torrential rain, a great, sheeting downpour almost constantly illumined by the jagged, branching stilettos of the forked lightning, Casey Brown's bedraggled head came into view over the edge of the cliff. The thunder, too, emptily cavernous in that flat and explosive intensity of sound that lies at the heart of a thunderstorm, was almost continuous: but in the brief intervals, Casey's voice, rich in his native Clydeside accent, carried clearly. He was expressing himself fluently in basic Anglo-Saxon, and with cause. He had had the assistance of two ropes on the way up --the one stretched from spike to spike and the one used for raising supplies, which Andrea had kept pulling in as he made the ascent. Casey Brown had secured the end of this round his waist with a bowline, but the bowline had proved to be nothing of the sort but a slip-knot, and Andrea's enthusiastic help had almost cut him in half. He was still sitting on the cliff-top, exhausted head between his knees, the radio still strapped to his back, when two tugs on Andrea's rope announced that Dusty Miller was on his way up.

  Another quarter of an hour elapsed, an interminable fifteen minutes when, in the lulls between the thunderclaps, every slightest sound was an approaching enemy patrol, before Miller materialised slowly out of the darkness, half-way down the rock chimney. He was climbing steadily and methodically, then checked abruptly at the cliff-top, groping hands pawing uncertainly on the topsoil of the cliff. Puzzled, Mallory bent down, peered into the lean face: both the eyes were clamped tightly shut.

  «Relax, Corporal,» Mallory advised kindly. «You have arrived.»

  Dusty Miller slowly opened his eyes, peered round at the edge of the cliff, shuddered and crawled quickly on hands and knees to the shelter of the nearest boulders. Mallory followed and looked down at him curiously.

  «What was the idea of closing your eyes coming over the top?»

  «I did not,» Miller protested.

  Mallory said nothing.

  «I closed them at the bottom,» Miller explained weanly. «I opened them at the top.»

  Mallory looked at him incredulously.

  «What! All the way?»

  «It's like I told you, boss,» Miller complained. «Back in Castelrosso. When I cross a street and step up on to the sidewalk I gotta hang on to the nearest lamp-post. More or less.» He broke off, looked at Andrea leaning far out over the side of the cliff, and shivered again. «Brother! Oh brother! Was I scared!»

  Fear. Terror. Panic. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain. Once, twice, a hundred times, Andy Stevens repeated the words to himself, over and over again, like a litany. A psychiatrist had told him that once and he'd read it a dozen times since. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain. The mind is a limited thing, they had said. It can only hold one thought at a time, one impulse to action. Say to yourself, I am brave, I am overcoming this fear, this stupid, unreasoning panic which has no origin except in my own mind, and because the mind can only hold one thought at a time, and because thinking and feeling are one, then you will be brave, you will overcome and the fear will vanish like a shadow in the night. And so Andy Stevens said these things to himself, and the shadows only lengthened and deepened, lengthened and deepened, and the icy claws of fear dug ever more savagely into his dull exhausted mind, i
nto his twisted, knotted stomach.

  His stomach. That knotted ball of jangled, writhing nerve-ends beneath the solar plexus. No one could ever know how it was, how it felt, except those whose shredded minds were going, collapsing into complete and final breakdown. The waves of panic and nausea and faintness that flooded up through a suffocating throat to a mind dark and spent and sinewless, a mind fighting with woollen fingers to cling on to the edge of the abyss, a tired and lacerated mind, only momentarily in control, wildly rejecting the clamorous demands of a nervous system which had already taken far too much that he should let go, open the torn fingers that were clenched so tightly round the rope. It was just that easy. «Rest after toil, port after stormy seas.» What was that famous stanza of Spenser's? Sobbing aloud, Stevens wrenched out another spike, sent it spinning into the waiting sea three hundred long feet below, pressed himself closely into the face and inched his way despairingly upwards.

  Fear. Fear had been at his elbow all his life, his constant companion, his alter ego, at his elbow, on in close prospect or immediate recall. He had become accustomed to that fear, at times almost reconciled, but the sick agony of this night lay far beyond either tolerance or familiarity. He had never known anything like this before, and even in his terror and confusion he was dimly aware that the fear did not spring from the climb itself. True, the cliff was sheer and almost vertical, and the lightning, the ice-cold rain, the darkness and the bellowing thunder were a waking nightmare. But the climb, technically, was simple: the rope stretched all the way to the top and all he had to do was to follow it and dispose of the spikes as he went. He was sick and bruised and terribly tired, his head ached abominably and he had lost a great deal of blood: but then, more often than not, it is in the darkness of agony and exhaustion that the spirit of man burns most brightly.

  Andy Stevens was afraid because his self-respect was gone. Always, before, that had been his sheet anchor, bad tipped the balance against his ancient enemy — the respect in which other men had held him, the respect he had had for himself. But now these were gone, for his two greatest fears had been realised — he was known to be afraid, he had failed his fellow-man. Both in the fight with the German caique and when anchored above the watch-tower in the creek, he had known that Mallory and Andrea knew. He had never met such men before, and he had known all along that he could never hide his secrets from such men. He should have gone up that cliff with Mallory, but Mallory had made excuses and ten Andrea instead — Mallory knew he was afraid. And twice before, in Castelrosso and when the German boat had closed in on them, he had almost failed his friends — and to-night he had failed them terribly. He had not been thought fit to lead the way with Mallory — and it was he, the sailor of the party, who had made such a botch of tying that last knot, had lost all the food and the fuel that had plummetted into the sea a bare ten feet from where he had stood on the ledge … and a thousand men on Kheros were depending on a failure so abject as himself. Sick and spent, spent in mind and body and spirit, moaning aloud in his anguish of fear and self-loathing, and not knowing where one finished and the other began, Andy Stevens climbed blindly on.