«Stop!» Turzig had drawn back sharply, suspicion flaring in his eyes. «Almost I believed you! I believed you because we know more than you think, and so far you have told the truth: But not now. You are clever, fat one, but not so clever as you think. One thing you have forgotten — or maybe you do not know. We are of the Wurttembergische . Gebirgsbataillon--we know mountains, my friend, better than any troops in the world. I myself am a Prussian, but I have climbed everything worth climbing in the Alps and Transylvania — and I tell you that the south cliff cannot be climbed. It is impossible!»
«Impossible perhaps for you.» Andrea shook his head sadly. «These cursed Allies will beat you yet. They are clever, Lieutenant Turzig, damnably clever!»
«Explain yourself,» Turzig ordered curtly.
«Just this. They knew men thought the south cliff could not be climbed. So they determined to climb it. You would never dream that this could be done, that an expedition could land on Navarone that way. But the Allies took a gamble, found a man to lead the expedition. He could not speak Greek, but that did not matter, for what they wanted was a man who could climb — and so they picked the greatest rock-climber in the world to-day.» Andrea paused for effect, flung out his arm dramatically. «And this is the man they picked, Lieutenant Turzig! You are a mountaineer yourself and you are bound to know him. His name is Mallory — Keith Mallory of New Zealand!»
There was a sharp exclamation, the click of a switch, and Turzig had taken a couple of steps forward, thrust the torch almost into Mallory's eyes. For almost ten seconds he stared into the New Zealander's averted, screwed-up face, then slowly lowered his arm, the harsh spotlight limning a dazzling white circle in the snow at his feet. Once, twice, half a dozen times Turzig nodded his head in slow understanding.
«Of course!» he murmured. «Mallory — Keith Mallory! Of course I know him. There's not a man in my Abteilung but has heard of Keith Mallory.» He shook his head. «I should have known him, I should have known him at once.» He stood for some time with his head bent, aimlessly screwing the toe of his right boot into the soft snow, then looked up abruptly. «Before the war, even during it, I would have been proud to have known you, glad to have met you. But not here, not now. Not any more. I wish to God they had sent someone else.» He hesitated, made to carry on, then changed his mind, turned wearily to Andrea. «My apologies, fat one. Indeed you speak the truth. Go on.»
«Certainly!» Andrea's round moon face was one vast smirk of satisfaction. «We climbed the cliff, as I said-- although the boy in the cave there was badly hurt — and silenced the guard. Mallory killed him,» Andrea added unblushingly. «It was fair fight. We spent most of the night crossing the divide and found this cave before dawn. We were almost dead with hunger and cold. We have been here since.»
«And nothing has happened since?»
«On the contrary.» Andrea seemed to be enjoying himself hugely, revelling in being the focus of attention. «Two people came up to see us. Who they were I do not know — they kept their faces hidden all the time — nor do I know where they came from.»
«It is as well that you admitted that,» Turzig said grimly. «I knew someone had been here. I recognised the stove — it belongs to Hauptmann Skoda!»
«Indeed?» Andrea raised his eyebrows in polite surprise. «I did not know. Well, they talked for some time and—»
«Did you manage to overhear anything they were talking about?» Turzig interrupted. The question came so naturally, so spontaneously, that Mallory held his breath. It was beautifully done. Andrea would walk into it — he couldn't help it. But Andrea was a man inspired that night.
«Overhear them!» Andrea clamped his lips shut in sorely-tried forbearance, gazed heavenwards in exasperated appeal. «Lieutenant Turzig, how often must I tell you that I am the interpreter? They could only talk through me. Of course I know what they were talking about. They are going to blow up the big guns in the harbour.»
«I didn't think they had come here for their health!» Turzig said acidly.
«Ah, but you don't know that they have the plans of the fortress. You don't know that Kheros is to be invaded on Saturday morning. You don't know that they are in radio contact with Cairo all the time. You don't know that destroyers of the British Navy are coming through the Maidos Straits on Friday night as soon as the big guns have been silenced. You don't know—»
«Enough!» Turzig clapped his hands together, his face alight with excitement. «The Royal Navy, eh? Wonderful, wonderful! That is what we want to hear. But enough! Keep it for Hauptmann Skoda and the Commandant in the fortress. We must be off. But first — one more thing. The explosives — where are they?»
Andrea's shoulders slumped in dejection. He spread out his arms, palms upward.
«Alas, Lieutenant Turzig, I do not know. They took them out and hid them — some talk about the cave being too hot.» He waved a hand towards the western col, in the diametrically opposite direction to Leri's hut. «That way, I think. But I cannot be sure, for they would not tell me.» He looked bitterly at Mallory. «These Britishens are all the same. They trust nobody.»
«Heaven only knows that I don't blame them for that!» Turzig said feelingly. He looked at Andrea in disgust. «More than ever I would like to see you dangling from the highest scaffold in Navarone. But Herr Kommandant in the town is a kindly man and rewards informers. You may yet live to betray some more comrades.»
«Thank you, thank you, thank you! I knew you were fair and just. I promise you, Lieutenant Turzig—»
«Shut up!» Turzig said contemptuously. He switched into German. «Sergeant, have these men bound. And don't forget the fat one! Later we can untie him, and he can carry the sick man to the post. Leave a man on guard. The rest of you come with me — we must find those explosives.»
«Could we not make one of them tell us, sir?» the sergeant ventured.
«The only man who would tell us can't. He's already told us all he knows. As for the rest — well, I was mistaken about them, Sergeant.» He turned to Mallory, inclined his head briefly, spoke in English. «An error of judgment, Herr Mallory. We are all very tired. I am almost sorry I struck you.» He wheeled abruptly, climbed swiftly up the bank. Two minutes later only a solitary soldier was left on guard.
For the tenth time Mallory shifted his position uncomfortably, strained at the cord that bound his hands together behind his back, for the tenth time recognised the futility of both these actions. No matter how he twisted and turned, the wet snow soaked icily through his clothes until he was chilled to the bone and shaking continually with the cold; and the man who had tied these knots had known his job all too well. Mallory wondered irritably if Turzig and his men meant to spend all night searching for the explosives: they had been gone for more than half an hour already.
He relaxed, lay back on his side in the cushioning snow of the gully bank, and looked thoughtfully at Andrea who was sitting upright just in front of him. He had watched Andrea, with bowed head and hunched and lifting shoulders, making one single, titanic effort to free himself seconds after the guard had gestured to them to sit down, had seen the cords bite and gouge until they had almost disappeared in his flesh, the fractional slump of his shoulders as he gave up. Since then the giant Greek had sat quite still and contented himself with scowling at the sentry in the injured fashion of one who has been grievously wronged. That solitary test of the strength of his bonds had been enough. Oberleutnant Turzig had keen eyes, and swollen, chafed and bleeding wrists would have accorded ill with the character Andrea had created for himself.
A masterly creation, Mallory mused, all the more remarkable for its spontaneity, its improvisation. Andrea had told so much of the truth, so much that was verifiable or could be verified, that belief in the rest of his story followed almost automatically. And at the same time he had told Turzig nothing of importance, nothing the Germans could not have found out for themselves — except the proposed evacuation of Kheros by the Navy. Wryly Mallory remembered his dismay, his shocked unbelief when h
e heard Andrea telling of it-- but Andrea had been far ahead of him. There was a fair chance that the Germans might have guessed anyway-- they would reason, perhaps, that an assault by the British on the guns of Navarone at the same time as the German assault on Kheros would be just that little bit too coincidental: again, escape for them all quite clearly depended upon how thoroughly Andrea managed to convince his captors that he was all he claimed, and the relative freedom of action that he could thereby gain-- and there was no doubt at all that it was the news of the proposed evacuation that had tipped the scales with Turzig: and the fact that Andrea had given Saturday as the invasion date would only carry all the more weight, as that had been Jensen's original date — obviously false information fed to his agents by German counter-Intelligence, who had known it impossible to conceal the invasion preparations themselves; and finally, if Andrea hadn't told Turzig of the destroyers, he might have failed to carry conviction, they might all yet finish on the waiting gallows in the fortress, the guns would remain intact and destroy the naval ships anyway.
It was all very complicated, too complicated for the state his head was in. Mallory sighed and looked away from Andrea towards the other two. Brown and a now conscious Miller were both sitting upright, hands bound behind their backs, staring down into the snow, occasionally shaking muzzy heads from side to side. Mallory could appreciate all too easily how they felt — the whole righthand side of his face ached cruelly, continuously. Nothing but aching, broken heads everywhere, Mallory thought bitterly. He wondered how Andy Stevens was feeling, glanced idly past the sentry towards the dark mouth of the cave, stiffened in sudden, almost uncomprehending shock.
Slowly, with an infinitely careful carelessness, he let his eyes wander away from the cave, let them light indifferently on the sentry who sat on Brown's transmitter, hunched watchfully over the Schmeisser cradled on his knees, finger crooked on the trigger. Pray God he doesn't turn round, Mallory said to himself over and over again, pray God he doesn't turn round. Let him sit like that just for a little while longer, only a little while longer… . In spite of himself, Mallory felt his gaze shifting, being dragged back again towards that cave-mouth.
Andy Stevens was coming out of the cave. Even in the dim starlight every movement was terribly piain as he inched forward agonisingly on chest and belly, dragging his shattered leg behind him. He was placing his hands beneath his shoulders, levering himself upward and forward while his head dropped below his shoulders with pain and the exhaustion of the effort, lowering himself slowly on the soft and sodden snow, then repeating the same heart-sapping process over and over again. Exbausted and pain-filled as the boy might be, Mallory thought, his mind was still working: he bad a white sheet over his shoulders and back as camouflage against the snow, and he carried a climbing spike in his right hand. He must have heard at least some of Tuizig's conversation: there were two or three guns in the cave, he could easily have shot the guard without coming out at all — but he must have known that the sound of a shot would have brought the Germans running, bad them back at the cave long before he could have crawled across the gully, far less cut loose any of his Mends.
Five yards Stevens had to go, Mallory estimated, five yards at the most. Deep down in the gully where they were, the south wind passed them by, was no more than a muted whisper in the night; that apart, there was no sound at all, nothing but their own breathing, the occasional stirring as someone stretched a cramped or frozen leg. He's bound to hear him if he comes any closer, Mallory thought desperately, even in that soft snow he's bound to hear him.
Mallory bent his head, began to cough loudly, almost continuously. The sentry looked at him, in surprise first, then in irritation as the coughing continued.
«Be quiet!» the sentry ordered in German. «Stop that coughing at once!»
«Husten? Hьsten? Coughing, is it? I can't help it,» Mallory protested in English. He coughed again, louder, more persistently than before. «It is your Oberleutnant's fault,» he gasped. «He has knocked out some of my teeth.» Mallory broke into a fresh paroxysm of coughing, recovered himself with an effort. «Is It my fault that I'm choking on my own blood?» he demanded.
Stevens was less than ten feet away now, but his tiny reserves of strength were almost gone. He could no longer raise himself to the full stretch of his arms, was advancing only a few pitiful inches at a time. At length he stopped altogether, lay still for half a minute. Ma!lory thought he had lost consciousness, but by and by ho raised himself up again, to the full stretch this time, had just begun to pivot himself forward when he collapsed, fell heavily in the snow. Mallory began to cough again, but he was too late. The sentry leapt off his box and whirled round all in one movement, the evil mouth of the Schmeisser lined up on the body almost at his feet. Then he relaxed as he realised who it was, lowered the barrel of his gun.
«So!» he said softly. «The fledgling has left its nest. Poor little fledgling!» Mallory winced as he saw the back-swing of the gun ready to smash down on Ste.. vens's defenceless head, but the sentry was a kindly enough man, his reaction had been purely automatic. He arrested the swinging butt inches above the tortured face, bent down and almost gently removed the spike from the feebly threatening hand, sent it spinning over the edge of the gully. Then he lifted Stevens carefully by the shoulders, slid in the bunched-up sheet as pillow for the unconscious head against the bitter cold of the snow, shook his head wonderingly, sadly, went back to his seat on the ammunition box.
Hauptmann Skoda was a small, thin man in his late thirties, neat, dapper, debonair and wholly evil. There was something innately evil about the long, corded neck that stretched up scrawnily above his padded shoulders, something repellent about the incongruously small bullet head perched above. When the thin, bloodless lips parted in a smile, which was often, they revealed a perfect set Of teeth: far from lighting his face, the smile only emphasised the sallow skin stretched abnormally taut across the sharp nose and high cheekbones, puckered up the sabre scar that bisected the left cheek from eyebrow to chin: and whether he smiled or not, the pupils of the deep-set eyes remained always the same, stifi and black and empty. Even at that early hour — it was not yet six o'clock — he was immaculately dressed, freshly shaven, the wetly-gleaming hair — thin, dark, heavily indented above the temples — brushed straight back across his head. Seated behind a flat-topped table, the sole article of furniture in the bench-lined guardroom, only the upper half of his body was visible: even so, one instinctively knew that the crease of the trousers, the polish of the jackboots, would be beyond reproach.
He smiled often, and he was smiling now as Oberleutinant Turzig finished his report. Leaning far back in his chair, elbows on the arm-rests, Skoda steepled his lean fingers under his chin, smiled benignly round the guardroom. The lazy, empty eyes missed nothing — the guard at the door, the two guards behind the bound prisoners, Andrea sitting on the bench where he had just laid Stevens — one lazy sweep of those eyes encompassed them all.
«Excellently done, Oberleutnant Turzigl» he purred. «Most efficient, really most efficient!» He looked speculatively at the three men standing before him, at their bruised and blood-caked faces, switched his glance to Stevens, lying barely conscious on the bench, smiled again and permitted himself a fractional lift of his eyebrows. «A little trouble, perhaps, Turzig? The prisoners were not too — ah---co-operative?»
«They offered no resistance, sir, no resistance at all,» Turzig said stiffly. The tone, the manner, were punctilious, correct, but the distaste, the latent hostility were mirrored in his eyes. «My men were maybe a little onthusiastic. We wanted to make no mistake.»
«Quite right, Lieutenant, quite right,» Skoda murmured approvingly. «These are dangerous men and one cannot take chances with dangerous men.» He pushed back his chair, rose easily to his feet, strolled round the table and stopped in front of Andrea. «Except maybe this one, Lieutenant?»
«He is dangerous only to his friends,» Turzig said shortly. «It is as I told you, sir. He
would betray his mother to save his own skin.»
«And claiming friendship with us, eh?» Skoda asked musingly. «One of our gallant allies, Lieutenant.» Skoda reached out a gentle hand, brought it viciously down and across Andrea's cheek, the heavy signet ring on his middle finger tearing skin and flesh. Andrea cried out in pain, clapped one hand to his bleeding face and cowered away, his right arm raised above his head in blind defence.
«A notable addition to the armed forces of the Third Reich.» Skoda murmured. «You were not mistaken, Lieutenant. A poltroon — the instinctive reaction of a hurt man is an infallible guide. It is curious,» he mused, «how often very big men are thus. Part of nature's compensatory process, I suppose… . What is your name, my brave friend?»
«Papagos,» Andrea muttered sullenly. «Peter Papagos.» He took his hand away from his cheek, looked at it with eyes slowly widening with horror, began to rub it across his trouser leg with jerky, hurried movements, the repugnance on his face plain for every man to see. Skoda watched him with amusement «You do not like to see blood, Papagos, eh?» he suggested. «Especially your own blood?»
A few seconds passed in silence, then Andrea lifted his head suddenly, his fat face screwed up in misery. He looked as if he were going to cry.
«I am only a poor fisherman, your Honour!» he burst out. «You laugh at me and say I do not like blood, and it is true. Nor do I like suffering and war. I want no part of any of these things!» His great fists were clenched in futile appeal, his face puckered in woe, his voice risen an octave. It was a masterly exhibition of despair, and even Mallory found himself almost believing in it. «Why wasn't I left alone?» he went on pathetically. «God only knows I am no fighting man—»
«A highly inaccurate statement,» Skoda interrupted dryly. «That fact must be patently obvious to every person in the room by this time.» He tapped his teeth with a jade cigarette-holder, his eyes speculative. «A fisherman you call yourself—»
The guns of Navaronne Page 19
