Nothing very special. Could I really dismiss it all as lightly as that, even after so many years? I sat there, trapped by memory, and stared blindly into the past.
seven
PASSAGE OF ARMS—MAY 1946
The old caicque we were using had a diesel engine, but the captain, a Greek Navy lieutenant named Demos, was taking her in under sail. He’d spent the war working for the British in the Aegean with the Special Boat Service so there wasn’t much he didn’t know about landings at night on unfriendly shores.
The small cabin was hot and stifling. I’d slept, but not for long and when I woke, there was a dull, nagging pain at the back of my head that wouldn’t go away. The smell of diesel oil was all pervading mixed in with fish and stale urine. An unhappy combination that came close to turning my stomach.
I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for this business, that was the trouble. There had been a time when this kind of action by night was a whole way of life that one accepted because there was a war on and such things had to be done. But the war, in Europe at least, had been over for nearly a year. Certainly long enough for me to have gotten used to the idea that there was no longer the regular prospect that tomorrow might never arrive.
I swung my legs to the floor and sat there, head in hands. There was a knock at the door and Sergeant Johnson looked in. He wouldn’t have gone down well at the depot in Pompey at all. He hadn’t shaved for a week and was wearing an old cloth cap, the kind of patched, incredibly filthy suit that any self-respecting Irish tinker would have been ashamed to wear, and broken boots.
“Twenty minutes, sir. You asked me to call you.”
Before I was commissioned we had served together as sergeants, but these days he was very careful to preserve the niceties of rank. Having said that, he knew me as well as any man can hope to know another.
He said carefully, “Are you all right, sir?”
“Depends entirely on your point of view. I’m beginning to wonder if it was wise of me to learn all that Greek. Some other poor bastard would have been stuck with this one if I hadn’t. What about you?”
He shrugged. “It’s what they pay me for.”
Which was true enough and applied equally well to myself. For some unaccountable reason it made me feel better. I got up and stretched.
“And the others?”
“Ready for anything. You know O’Brien. A fight a night and twice on Saturdays. And young Dawson can’t believe his luck.”
“I can remember when I couldn’t believe mine,” I told him sourly, “but that was a long time ago.”
The other three were waiting in the big cabin that usually housed the crew. Like Johnson and myself, they wore patched, shabby clothing and old boots. In other words, the standing garb of the Greek peasant in the poverty-stricken mountain area of the north.
O’Brien, a twice-a-day shaver, already sported a fair beard and Forbes looked satisfactorily villainous. Young Dawson was as clean as a whistle, mainly because there was nothing he could put a razor to, so he’d had to make do with a liberal application of dirt to the face.
He was the weak link in more ways than one. Still in training when the war ended, he was certain he’d missed out on life’s greatest adventure, convinced as he was that war was some sort of splendid game. In other circumstances I wouldn’t have touched him with a bargepole, but I’d needed a wireless operator and he was the best they could do on such short notice.
They all stood up and I waved them down again. “We’ve got about fifteen minutes so I’ll make it brief. To recap. Phase One of the operation, we go in by dinghy to Thrassos Bay where we’re met by a guide waiting to take us to this farmer, Mikali. Phase Two, we arrive at Mikali’s place and sort out the situation with him. Phase Three, we get Tharakos out of the fort.” Good, positive thinking that. “Phase Four, we get ourselves and Tharakos out by the same way we got in.”
They knew it frontwards and backwards in detail, but there was no harm in rubbing it in.
“Any alternatives, sir, in case things go wrong?” Dawson asked.
And that question alone made me almost decide to leave him for intelligent improvisation was supposed to be one of the most important products of commando training.
“Alternatives are something we make up as we go along,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true, but was good enough for him.
Johnson did an equipment check. Each man carried a sub-machine gun, an automatic pistol and four grenades and Dawson had his radio transmitter in an old German military haversack, the sort of thing Greek partisans used all the time. And that was it, apart from individual emergency food packs.
I left them to it and went up on deck. It was the right kind of night for it. No moon and plenty of cloud so that even the stars only glowed intermittently. A couple of Greek Navy boys dressed like fishermen were inflating the dinghy and Demos was leaning out of the window of the wheelhouse, speaking to them softly.
“How does it look?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s you.” He shook his head. “Not good. Not good at all. There is a very strong current running into the bay here which is what we want, but tonight of all nights there has to be a snag. The wind has turned unexpectedly. An easterly, which means it’s driving straight into the bay.”
“A lee shore?” I said. “No good for a sail boat. You’d end up on the rocks.”
“Exactly, and if I use the engine they hear us come in.”
“So what do we do?”
“We could always try another night.”
I shook my head. “No good. The navy won’t wait. The central government in Athens had a hell of a job stopping them from blowing that fort off the top of the cliffs before now. It’s tonight or not at all.”
He nodded. “All right, if you are willing to have a try, then so am I. I’ll take you into the bay, making my run from the southeast, but I’ll have to turn to come out again almost immediately which leaves you a quarter of a mile to cover in the dinghy.”
“We’ll manage,” I said.
He chuckled grimly. “Let’s hope you can all swim.”
It was a cheerful thought and I left him there and went below to prepare them for the worst.
The caicque was low in the waist which made disembarking simpler than it might otherwise have been, but it was still a tricky business. The run-in to the bay wasn’t too bad although there was little doubt now that conditions in the water were going to be worse than I had anticipated.
We were all waiting in the waist and the inflatable dinghy was already over the side and held in close by the two sailors. Each man carried his own gear and wore a lifejacket. The time to go was when Demos started to turn away from land to commence his run out to sea again because it was then that the boat’s speed would drop though only for a minute or two.
Demos gave a sudden sharp whistle, the prow of the caicque started to turn into the wind and she shuddered and heeled over, almost coming to a dead stop, the great sail fluttering wildly.
Johnson needed no order. He went over the side briskly followed by Forbes and O’Brien. Dawson snagged his haversack on the rail and hung there for a couple of violent moments, struggling desperately while Johnson cursed him.
Already we had picked up speed. Soon it would be too late. I lifted him over the rail bodily, dropped him into the darkness and went after him. A second later and the caicque was a ghost ship fading into the night as silently as it had come.
I’d made a mistake, I knew that as soon as I felt the dinghy heel, water pouring over the gunnel. I adjusted my weight and grabbed for a paddle, but the wind was lifting the waves into whitecaps and it was impossible to keep it from slopping in over the sides.
We were waist-deep in the stuff within seconds, but still floating which was the main thing. I told them to paddle like hell if they wanted to live, which sounds dramatic enough at a distance of years, but was a reasonably accurate statement in view of what happened.
We moved in fast which didn’t surprise me as De
mos had warned of a five- or six-knot current and the land was plain to see now, partly because the low cloud seemed to have moved away, but mainly owing to the surf white in the darkness as it pounded in across the beach at the bottom of the cliffs.
We were moving faster now, the waves dipping in great shallow runs like a moorland burn in spate the morning after heavy rain and we were caught in a current of such strength that there was nothing to be done except to try to keep floating and hang on.
The sea filled the night with its roaring, the waves pounded in across the rocks, tearing the shingle from the beach with a great, angry sucking and the surface of the water trembled and shook, a hundred different cross-currents pulling every which way, spinning the dinghy round and round so that we lost control altogether.
A long comber rolled in out of the darkness, a six-footer with a white, curling head on it that would have warmed the heart of any surf-rider. It was exactly what we didn’t need at this stage. The dinghy shook violently and Forbes went backwards over the stern. O’Brien reached for him desperately and managed to catch him by the top of his lifejacket. Better for him if he had missed for a second later, the dinghy bucked violently to one side and Forbes was swept into the darkness pulling O’Brien in after him.
The current had us then and took us into the final line of breakers at a frightening speed. A great wave swept under, rolling in to dissolve into a cauldron of froth and white spray that boiled for about fifty yards between us and the shore. Another wave took us in so fast that we were suddenly half-way across. For a moment, I thought we might make it and then a giant hand simply tipped us over.
My feet touched bottom at once for it was no more than five or six feet deep. I was aware of the dinghy spinning beside me upside down, reached out blindly and grabbed hold of one of the handlines. There was no sign of Johnson or Dawson and in any event, it was all I could do to help myself.
The world had turned upside down, darkness and spray, no clear way to go and I floundered there in bad trouble for a moment and then a light flashed briefly three times. I thought it my imagination until it came again. I kicked out desperately, in three feet of water.
The sea poured in again, a great final wave that seemed determined to have me back, but I hung on, clawing into the shingle with my right hand for all I was worth. And as it flooded back again, someone grabbed me under the arm and pulled me to my feet. We splashed forward into the darkness and then my feet stumbled in soft dry sand and I fell on to my hands and knees and vomited what felt like half the Aegean.
The sea was in my head, my heart, my brain, its roaring filled the night. I took a deep, deep breath and it stopped and then a dim light dazzled my eyes. I blinked a couple of times to get things into focus and a woman’s face loomed out of the darkness. Great flat cheekbones, slanting eyes, wide nostrils, a mouth that was far too big. She was almost a Tartar. Pure peasant. The most beautifully ugly woman I have ever known.
“You are all right now?” Her voice was low and rough in the way you get in the mountains of the north.
“I’ll do,” I said. “But who in the hell might you be? I was expecting to be met by Mikali—John Mikali.”
“He was killed yesterday at the fort,” she said calmly. “One of the guards shot him by mistake. I am his daughter Anna.”
“And you know what all this is about? You’ll help us?”
“I know what is to be done,” she said, “and I will do it. For my father’s sake I will do it.”
I crouched there, trying to make some sense of it all, aware of the stale, unwashed smell of her, pungent on the clean salt air and then Sergeant Johnson and Dawson staggered out of the surf hanging on to each other for dear life and collapsed beside me.
Both of them had lost everything in the surf. Radio, sub-machine guns, even their supply packs which left them with only a commando knife apiece and the .38 Smith & Wesson automatics we each carried in a shoulder holster. I still had my sub-machine gun and haversack slung round my neck. I gave them a couple of grenades each and we split into two groups and spent a fruitless half-hour searching for Forbes and O’Brien. It was a hopeless task, so dark that you could hardly see your hand in front of your face and the surf seemed to be getting worse all the time.
So, now there were three of us which raised all kinds of new problems, but they would have to wait. The girl indicated a shallow cave where we left the dinghy ready inflated against a quick departure and we moved out, following her across the beach to climb the cliffs by means of a track so narrow and crumbling that it was probably best for all concerned that we had to manage in almost total darkness.
Once out of the bay with its enclosing cliffs, things improved considerably. The low cloud had cleared and the dark night sky was a blaze of stars. The girl didn’t hesitate and started to lead the way across a plateau of short close-cropped grass without the slightest sign of caution.
There was a movement in the bushes ahead of us. I swung, crouching, the sub-machine gun ready. There was the dull clanking of one of those home-made bells that peasants make to hang round the necks of their animals. A goat brushed past me, the stink of it tainting the air.
“It is nothing,” she said calmly. “They wander at will.”
“What about patrols?”
“They stay in the fort,” she said. “They don’t like it out here at night. This is a bad place. There was a city here in ancient times. They say the cliffs crumbled beneath it and the sea swallowed every trace of it in a single night.”
Which was a hell of a thought. Forty or fifty good men and I could have taken the whole damned island. So much for Greek military intelligence.
“It is not far now,” she said. “Half a mile, no more.”
She carried on, leading the way across the plateau, and we climbed a boulder-strewn hillside. Not another word was spoken for the next fifteen minutes and quite suddenly, we came over the shoulder of the mountain and saw a house in a grove of olive trees below.
A dog barked hollowly in the far distance. The girl said, “I will go down alone, just to make sure. Sometimes I have visitors. Men from the fort.”
“Is it likely?” I said. “Do they come often?”
“As often as they feel the need,” she said gravely. “I am the only woman on the island.”
Which was honest enough, however hard to take, but when she was out of earshot, I whispered to Johnson, “I’m going after her. If anything goes wrong, get the hell out of it.”
He didn’t argue and I went down the hillside. The house was small and obviously very old and the yard between the back door and the barn was cobbled, the heavy smell of manure everywhere. I crouched beside a small haystack and waited.
There was a slight, eerie creaking as the barn door eased open and someone said softly in Greek, “The gun—on the ground, quickly now.”
I laid the sub-machine gun down carefully and stood up. The muzzle of a rifle prodded me in the back. It was all I needed. I swung to the left which meant that the muzzle of that gun now pointed into thin air, kicked him under the knee-cap and had him facedown in the dirt in a second.
The door opened, light flooded out, picking us from the darkness, and I saw that my antagonist was not much more than a boy. Perhaps seventeen or eighteen, with a thin, earnest face and a mass of curling black hair. He turned his head awkwardly to glance over his shoulder.
“Anna!” he cried desperately. “It’s me, Spiro!”
She touched me briefly on the shoulder. “It’s all right. Let him go.”
“Who is he?”
“One of them,” she said. “A Red, but he loves me. He’ll do anything for me.” She gave a short, contemptuous laugh. “Men. Always the same, like children who can never have enough sweets.”
The plan of the fort Greek military intelligence had given me, the only one they could find, was about fifty years out of date and Spiro soon put me right on a few things.
“The walls are mostly in ruins,” he said. “Especially on the l
and side and there is no gate any more. Just the open archway.”
“What about sentries?”
“There is someone on the gate at all times. Usually just one man. Most of the building itself is not habitable. They keep Tharakos in the central tower on the first floor.”
“Have you seen him lately?”
“Every day. They take him out on the ramparts, just to show he’s still alive in case they’re watching from the ships. Mind you, I’ve never been very close to him. I’m not important enough. The officers see to him.”
“And what about guards in this tower?”
“There’s usually someone on his door at all times. They’ve turned an old cell next to the entrance on the ground floor into a guardroom.”
“Why do you say usually? Are there times when there isn’t a guard up there?”
“You know how it is?” He shrugged. “Tharakos is locked in and his window is only one of those old arrow slits. How can he go anywhere? We aren’t like the national army. Sometimes men want to please themselves. Stay down in the guardroom and play cards and so on.”
I had another look at the map and thought about it all. Sergeant Johnson said, “It doesn’t look too difficult, sir.”
“That’s what we thought about landing from the caicque in the planning stage.”
I didn’t get a chance to take the argument any further because there was the sound of an engine out there in the darkness. Johnson was already at the window, peering through the curtain.
“Some sort of truck,” he said. “Coming down the track now.” He turned to Anna. “Looks as if you’re going to have company.”
Young Dawson already had his automatic out, his face pale and tense. I grabbed him by the arm and shook him roughly. “Put that away. So we shoot them from cover and what good does that do? They go missing and our friends out at the fort start turning the island upside down.”
Jack Higgins Page 8
