In the end, Mallory almost literally stumbled upon both men and shelter. He was negotiating a narrow, longitudinal spine of rock, had just crossed its razor-back, when he heard the murmur of voices beneath him and saw a tiny glimmer of light behind the canvas stretching down from the overhang of the far wall of the tiny ravine at his feet.
Miller started violently and swung round as he felt the hand on his shoulder: the automatic was half-way out of his pocket before he saw who it was and sunk back heavily on the rock behind him.
«Come, come, now! Trigger-happy.» Thankfully Mallory slid his burden from his aching shoulders and looked across at the softly laughing Andrea. «What's so funny?»
«Our friend here.» Andrea grinned again. «I told him that the first thing he would know of your arrival would be when you touched him on the shoulder. I don't think he believed me.»
«You might have coughed or somethin',» Miller said defensively. «It's my nerves, boss,» he added plaintively. «They're not what they were forty-eight hours ago.»
Mallory looked at him disbelievingly, made to speak, then stopped short as he caught sight of the pale blur of a face propped up against a rucksack. Beneath the white swathe of a bandaged forehead the eyes were open, looking steadily at him. Mallory took a step forward, sank down on one knee.
«So you've come round at last!» He smiled into the sunken parchment face and Stevens smiled back, the bloodless lips whiter than the face itself. He looked ghastly. «How do you feel, Andy?»
«Not too bad, sir. Really. I'm not.» The bloodshot eyes were dark and filled with pain. His gaze fell and he looked down vacantly at his bandaged leg, looked up again, smiled uncertainly at Mallory. «I'm terribly sorry about all this, sir. What a bloody stupid thing to do.»
«It wasn't a stupid thing.» Mallory spoke with slow, heavy emphasis. «It was criminal folly.» He knew everyone was watching them, but knew, also, that Stevens had eyes for him alone. «Criminal, unforgiveable folly,» he went on quietly, «--and I'm the man in the dock. I'd suspected you'd lost a lot of blood on the boat, but I didn't know you had these big gashes on your forehead. I should have made it my business to find out.» He smiled wryly. «You should have heard what these two insubordinate characters had to say to me about it when they got to the top… . And they were right. You should never have been asked to bring up the rear in the state you were in. It was madness.» He grinned again. «You should have been hauled up like a sack of coals like the intrepid mountaineering team of Miller and Brown… . God knows how you ever made it — I'm sure you'll never know.» He leaned forward, touched Stevens's sound knee. «Forgive me, Andy. I honestly didn't realise how far through you were.»
Stevens stirred uncomfortably, but the dead pallor of the high-boned cheeks was stained with embarrassed pleasure.
«Please, sir,» he pleaded. «Don't talk like that. It was just one of these things.» He paused, eyes screwed shut and indrawn breath hissing sharply through his teeth as a wave of pain washed up from his shattered leg. Then he looked at Mallory again. «And there's no credit due to me for the climb,» he went on quietly. «I hardly remember a thing about it.»
Mallory looked at him without speaking, eyebrows arched in mild interrogation.
«I was scared to death every step of the way up,» Stevens said simply. He was conscious of no surprise, no wonder that he was saying the thing he would have died rather than say. «I've never been so scared in all my life.»
Mallory shook his head slowly from side to side, stubbled chin rasping in his cupped palm. He seemed genninely puzzled. Then he looked down at Stevens and smiled quizzically.
«Now I know you are new to this game, Andy.» He smiled again. «Maybe you think I was laughing and singing all the way up that cliff? Maybe you think I wasn't scared?» He lit a cigarette and gazed at Stevens through a cloud of drifting smoke. «Well, I wasn't. 'Scared' isn't the word — I was bloody well terrified. So was Andrea here. We know too much not to be scared.»
«Andrea!» Stevens laughed, then cried out as the movement triggered off a crepitant agony in his boneshattered leg. For a moment Mallory thought he had lost consciousness, but almost at once he spoke again, his voice husky with pain. «Andrea!» he whispered. «Scared! I don't believe it!»
«Andrea was afraid.» The big Greek's voice was very gentle. «Andrea is afraid. Andrea is always afraid. That is why I have lived so long.» He stared down at his great hands. «And why so many have died. They were not so afraid as L They were not afraid of everything a man could be afraid of, there was always something they forgot to fear, to guard against. But Andrea was afraid of everything — and he forgot nothing. It is as simple as that.»
He looked across at Stevens and smiled.
«There are no brave men and cowardly men in the world, my son. There are only brave men. To be born, to live, to die — that takes courage enough in itself, and more than enough. We are all brave men and we are all afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he, too, is brave and afraid like all the rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer. Or sometimes ten minutes, or twenty minutes — or the time it takes a man sick and bleeding and afraid to climb a cliff.»
Stevens said nothing. His head was sunk on his chest, and his face was hidden. He had seldom felt so happy, seldom so at peace with himself, He had known that he could not hide things from men like Andrea and Mallory, but he had not known that it would not matter. He felt he should say something, but he could not think what and he was deathly tired. He knew, deep down, that Andrea was speaking the truth, but not the whole truth; but he was too tired to care, to try to work things out.
Miller cleared his throat noisily.
«No more talkin', Lieutenant,» he said firmly. «You gotta lie down, get yourself some sleep.»
Stevens looked at him, then at Mallory in puzzled inquiry.
«Better do what you're told, Andy,» Mallory smiled. «Your surgeon and medical adviser talking. He fixed your leg.»
«Oh! I didn't know. Thanks, Dusty. Was it very — difficult?»
Miller waved a deprecatory hand.
«Not for a man of my experience. Just a simple break,» he lied easily. «Almost let one of the others do it… . Give him a hand to lie down, will you, Andrea?» He jerked his head towards Mallory. «Boss?»
The two men moved outside, turning their backs to the icy wind.
«We gotta get a fire, dry clothing, for that kid,» Miller said urgently. «His pulse is about 140, temperature 103. He's rnnnin' a fever, and he's losin' ground all the thne.»
«I know, I know,» Mallory said worriedly. «And there's not a hope of getting any fuel on this damned mountain. Let's go in and see how much dried clothing we can muster between us.»
He lifted the edge of the canvas and stepped inside. Stevens was still awake, Brown and Andrea on either side of him. Miller was on his heels.
«We're going to stay here for the night,» Mallory announced, «so let's make things as snug as possible. Mind you,» he admitted, «we're a bit too near the cliff for comfort, but old Jerry hasn't a clue we're on the island, and we're out of sight of the coast. Might as well make ourselves comfortable.»
«Boss …» Miller made to speak, then fell silent again. Mallory looked at him in surprise, saw that he, Brown and Stevens were looking at one another, uncertainty, then doubt and a dawning, sick comprehension in their eyes. A sudden anxiety, the sure knowledge that something was far wrong, struck at Mallory like a blow.
«What's up?» he demanded sharply. «What is it?»
«We have bad news for you, boss,» Miller said carefully. «We should have told you right away. Guess we all thought that one of the others would have told you… . Remember that sentry you and Andrea shoved over the side?»
Mallory nodded, somberly. He knew what was coming.
«He fell on top of that reef twenty-thirty feet or so from the cliff,» Miller went on. «Wasn't much of him left, I guess, but what was was jammed between two rocks. He was really stuck good and fast.»
; «I see,» Mallory murmured. «I've been wondering all night how you managed to get so wet under your rubber cape.»
«I tried four times, boss,» Miller said quietly. «The others had a rope round me.» He shrugged his shoulders. «Not a chance. Them gawddamned waves just flung me back against the cliff every time.»
«It will be light in three or four hours,» Mallory murmured. «In four hours they will know we are on the island. They will see him as soon as it's dawn and send a boat to investigate.»
«Does it really matter, sir,» Stevens suggested. «He could still have fallen.»
Mallory eased the canvas aside and looked out into the night. It was bitterly cold and the snow was beginning to fall all around them. He dropped the canvas again.
«Five minutes,» he said absently. «We will leave in five minutes.» He looked at Stevens and smiled faintly. «We are forgetful, too. We should have told you. Andrea stabbed the sentry through the heart.»
The hours that followed were hours plucked from the darkest nightmare, endless, numbing hours of stumbling and tripping and falling and getting up again, of racked bodies and aching, tortured muscles, of dropped loads and frantic pawing around in the deepening snow, of hunger and thirst and all-encompassing exhaustion.
They had retraced their steps now, were heading W.N.W. back across the shoulder of the mountain — almost certainly the Germans would think they had gone due north, heading for the centre of the island. Without compass, stars or moon to guide, Mallory had nothing to orientate them but the feel of the slope of the mountain and the map Viachos had given them in Alexandria. But by and by he was reasonably certain that they had rounded the mountain and were pushing up some narrow gorge into the interior.
The snow was the deadly enemy. Heavy, wet and feathery, it swirled all around them in a blanketing curtain of grey, sifted down their necks and jackboots, worked its insidious way under their clothes and up their sleeves, blocked their eyes and ears and mouths, pierced and then anaesthetised exposed faces, and turned gloveless hands into leaden lumps of ice, benumbed and all but powerless. All suffered, and suffered badly, but Stevens most of all. He had lost consciousness again within minutes of leaving the cave and clad in clinging, sodden clothes as he was, he now lacked even the saving warmth generated by physical activity. Twice Andrea had stopped and felt for the beating of the heart, for he thought that the boy had died: but he could feel nothing for there was no feeling left in his bands, and could only wonder and stumble on again.
About five in the morning, as they were climbing up the steep valley head above the gorge, a treacherous, slippery slope with only a few stunted carob trees for anchor in the sliding scree, Mallory decided that they must rope up for safety's sake. In single file they scrambled and struggled up the ever-steepening slope for the next twenty minutes: Mallory, in the lead, did not even dare to think how Andrea was getting on behind him. Suddenly the slope eased, flattened out completely, and almost before they realised what was happening they bad crossed the high divide, still roped together and in driving, blinding snow with zero visibility, and were sliding down the valley on the other side. They came to the cave at dawn, just as the first grey stirrings of a bleak and cheerless day struggled palely through the lowering, snow-filled sky to the east. Monsieur Vlachos had told them that the south of Navarone was honeycombed with caves, but this was the first they had seen, and even then it was no cave but a dark, narrow tunnel in a great heap of piled volcanic slabs, huge, twisted layers of rock precariously poised in a gulley that threaded down the slope towards some broad and unknown valley a thousand, two thousand feet beneath them, a valley still shrouded in the gloom of night.
It was no cave, but it was enough. For frozen, exhausted, sleep-haunted men, it was more than enough, it was more than they had ever hoped for. There was room for them all, the few cracks were quickly blocked against the drifting snow, the entrance curtained off by the boulder-weighted tent. Somehow, impossibly almost in the cramped darkness, they stripped Stevens of his sea- and rain-soaked clothes, eased him into a providentially zipped sleeping-bag, forced some brandy down his throat and cushioned the blood-stained head on some dry clothing. And then the four men, even the tireless Andrea, slumped down to the sodden, snow-chilled floor of the cave and slept like men already dead, oblivious alike of the rocks on the floor, the cold, their hunger and their clammy, saturated clothing, oblivious even of the agony of returning circulation in their frozen hands and faces.
CHAPTER 7
Tuesday
15:00--19:00
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 mountain side. 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, cpxved 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, debouchbig on to the plains that lay in the northeast of Navarone. And about four miles away to the north-northeast, far beneath the snowline and the isolated shep herds' 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 stinding by the canvas s
creen. Dark-jowled and crumple-clothed, he held up one hand against the glare of the snow while the other rubbed the sleep from his bloodshot 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, Maliory 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 W.G.B.,» be 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»
The guns of Navaronne Page 13
