‘Perfectly reasonable,’ said Mallory. Hugues was fine. Pink and eager and bright. But there was still that wild look … Not surprising, in the circumstances. A Resistance liaison would be as vital as a guide and a radio operator. Hugues would do.
The last man was nearly as big as Andrea, wearing a ragged, oddly urban straw hat. Evans introduced him as Thierry, an experienced Resistance radio operator. Then he drew the blinds, and pulled a case of what looked like clothing towards him. ‘Doesn’t matter about the French,’ he said, ‘you can stick to German.’ From the box, he pulled breeches and camouflage smocks of a pattern Mallory had last seen in Crete. ‘I hope we’ve got the size right. And you’d better stay indoors for the next wee while.’
It was true, reflected Mallory wryly, that there would be few better ways of attracting attention on an Allied air base than wandering around wearing the uniform of the Waffen-SS.
‘Try ’em on,’ said Evans.
The Frenchmen watched without curiosity or humour as Mallory, Miller and Andrea pulled the German smocks and trousers over their khaki battledress. Disguising yourself in enemy uniform left you liable to summary execution. But then so did working for the Resistance, or for that matter operating behind German lines in British uniform. In occupied France, Death would be breathing down your neck without looking at the label inside your collar.
‘Okay,’ said Evans, contemplating the Feldwebel with Mallory’s face, and the two privates. ‘Er, Colonel, would you consider shaving off the moustache?’
‘No,’ said Andrea, without changing expression.
‘It’s just that –’
‘SS men do not wear moustaches,’ said Andrea. ‘This I know. But I do not intend to mix with SS men. I intend to kill them.’
Jaime was looking at him with new interest. ‘Colonel?’ he said.
‘Slip of the tongue,’ said Mallory.
Evans looked for a moment faintly flustered. He strode busily to the dais, and unrolled the familiar relief map of the western part of the Pyrenees. There was a blue bite of Atlantic at the top. Along the spine of the mountains writhed the red serpent of the Spanish border.
‘Landing you here,’ said Evans, tapping a brisk pointer on what could have been a hanging valley above St-Jean-Pied-du-Port.
‘Landing?’ said Mallory.
‘Well, dropping then.’
Miller said, ‘I told Captain Jensen. I can’t stand heights.’
‘Heights won’t be a problem,’ said Evans. ‘You’ll be dropping from five hundred feet.’ He smiled, the happy smile of a man who would not be dropping with them, and unrolled another larger-scale map with contours. ‘There’s a flat spot in this valley. Pretty remote. There’s a road in, from Jonzère. Runs on up to the Spanish border. There’ll be a border post up there, patrols. We don’t want you in Spain. We’ve got Franco leaning our way at the moment, and we don’t want anything to happen that would, er, make it necessary for him to have to show what a beefy sort of chap he is. Plus you’d get yourselves interned and the camps are really not nice at all. So when you leave the drop site go downhill. Jaime’ll remind you. Uphill is Spain. Downhill is France.’
Andrea was frowning at the map. The contours on either side of the valley were close together. Very close. In fact, the valley sides looked more like cliffs than slopes. He said, ‘It’s not a good place to drop.’
Evans said, ‘There are no good places to drop just now in France.’ There was a silence. ‘Anyway,’ he said briskly. ‘You’ll be met by a man called Jules. Hugues knows him.’
The fair-haired Norman nodded. ‘Good man,’ he said.
‘Jules has been making a bit of a speciality of the Werwolf project. He’ll brief you and pass you on. After that, you’ll be on your own. But I hear you’re used to that.’ He looked at the grim faces. He thought, with a young man’s arrogance: they’re old, and they’re tired. Does Jensen know what he’s doing?
Then he remembered that Jensen always knew what he was doing.
Mallory looked at Evans’ pink cheeks and crisp uniform. We all know you have been told to say this, he thought. And we all know that it is not true. We are not on our own at all. We are at the mercy of these three Frenchmen.
Evans said, ‘There is a password. When anyone says to you, “L’Amiral”, you will reply “Beaufort”. And vice versa. We put it out on the BBC. The SAS used it, I’m afraid. No time to put out another one. Use with care.’ He handed out bulky brown envelopes. ‘Callsigns,’ said Evans. ‘Orders. Maps. Everything you need. Commit to memory and destroy. Any questions?’
There were no questions. Or rather, there were too many questions for it to be worth asking any of them.
‘Storm Force,’ said Miller, who had torn open his envelope. ‘What’s that?’
‘That’s you. This is Operation Storm,’ said Evans. ‘You were Force 10 in Yugoslavia. This follows on. Plus …’ he hesitated.
‘Yes?’ said Mallory.
‘Joke, really,’ said Evans, grinning pinkly. ‘But, well, Captain Jensen said we might as well call you after the weather forecast.’
‘Great,’ said Miller. ‘Just great. All this and parachutes too.’
TWO
Sunday 1900–Monday 0900
‘Ladies and gentlemen, sorry, gentlemen,’ said Wing Commander Maurice Hartford. ‘We are now one hour from drop. Air Pyrenees hopes you are enjoying the ride. Personally, I think you are all crazy.’
Naturally, nobody could hear him, because the intercom was turned off. But it relieved his feelings. Why, he thought, is it always me?
It had been a nice takeoff. Six men plus the crew, not much equipment: a trivial load for the Albemarle, droning up from Termoli, over the wrinkled peaks of the Apennines, and into the sunset. The red sunset.
Hartford switched on the intercom. ‘Captain Mallory,’ he said, ‘why don’t you pop up to the sharp end?’
Mallory stirred in his steel bucket seat. He had slept for a couple of hours this afternoon. So had Andrea and Dusty Miller. An orderly had woken them for a dinner of steak and red wine, upon which they had fallen like wolves. The Frenchmen had picked at the food; nobody had wanted to talk. Jaime had remained dour. Hugues, unless Mallory was much mistaken, had developed a bad case of the jitters. Nothing wrong with that, though. The bravest men were not those who did not know fear, but those who knew it and conquered it. On the aeroplane, the Frenchmen had stayed awake while Andrea made himself a bed with his head on the box of fuses, and Miller sank low in his bucket seat, propped his endless legs on the radio, and began a snore that rivalled the clattering thunder of the Albemarle’s Merlins.
Mallory had slept lightly. What he wanted was ten days of unconsciousness, broken only by huge meals at four-hour intervals. But that would have to wait. Among the rockfalls and avalanches of the Southern Alps, and during the long, dangerous months in Crete, he had learned to sleep a couple of inches below the surface, a wild animal’s sleep that could give way to complete wakefulness in a fraction of a second.
He clambered out of his seat and went to the cockpit. The pilot gestured to the co-pilot’s seat. Mallory sat down and plugged in the intercom.
‘Cup of tea?’ said the pilot, whose ginger moustache rose four inches above his mask, partially obscuring the goggles he wore to keep it out of his eyes.
Mallory said, ‘Please.’
‘Co-pilot’s having a kip.’ The pilot waved a thermos over a mug. ‘Sunset,’ he said, gesturing ahead.
There was indeed a sunset. The western sky was full of an archipelago of fiery islands, on which the last beams of the sun burst in a surf of gold. Above, the sky was dappled with cirrus. Below, the Mediterranean was darkening through steel to ink.
‘Red sky at night,’ said the pilot. ‘Pilot gets fright.’
The plane bounced. Mallory captured a mouthful of tea and hot enamel. ‘Why?’ he said.
Quiet sort of chap, thought Hartford. Not bashful. Just quiet. Quiet like a bomb nobody had armed yet. Bro
wn eyes that looked completely at home, completely competent, wherever they found themselves. A lean, tired face, motionless, conserving energy. Dangerous-looking blighter, thought Hartford, cheerfully. Lucky old Jerry.
‘Weather,’ he said. ‘Bloody awful weather up there. Front coming in. All right for shepherds. Shepherds walk. But we’re flying straight into the brute. Going to get very bumpy.’
‘Okay for a drop?’
Hartford said, ‘We’ll get you down.’ Actually, it was not okay for a drop. But he had orders to get these people onto the ground, okay or not. ‘Tell your chaps to strap in, could you?’ He pulled a dustbin-sized briar from his flying-suit pocket, stuffed it with tobacco, and lit it. The cockpit filled with acrid smoke. He pulled back the sliding window, admitting the tooth-jarring bellow of the engines. ‘Smell that sea,’ he said, inhaling deeply. ‘Wizard. Yup. We’ll go in at five hundred feet. Nice wide valley. All you have to do is jump when the light goes on. All at once.’
‘Five hundred feet?’
‘Piece of cake.’
‘They’ll hear us coming.’
The pilot grinned, revealing canines socketed into the holes they had worn in the stem of the pipe. ‘Not unless they’re Spanish,’ he said.
They hit the front over the coast, and flew on, minute after endless minute, until the minutes became hours. The Albemarle swooped and plunged, wings battered by the turbulent up currents. By the dark-grey light that crept through the little windows, Mallory looked at his team. Andrea and Miller he took for granted. But the Frenchmen he was not so sure about. He could see the flash of the whites of Jaime’s eyes, the nervous movement of Thierry’s mouth as he chewed his lips from inside. And Hugues, contemplating his hands, hands with heavily-bitten fingernails, locked on his knees. Mallory felt suddenly weary. He had been in too many little metal rooms, watched too many people, wondered too many times how they would shape up when the pressure was on and the lid had blown off …
The Albemarle banked steeply to port, then starboard. Mallory thought there was a new kind of turbulence out there: not just the moil of air masses in collision, but the upward smack of waves of air breaking on sheer faces of rock. He looked round.
The doorway into the cockpit was open. Beyond the windscreen the flannel-coloured clouds separated and wisped away. Suddenly Mallory was looking down a valley whose steep sides rose out of sight on either side. The upper slopes were white with snow. There was a grey village perched up there – up there, above the aeroplane. A couple of yellow lights showed in the gloom. No blackout: Spain, thought Mallory –
A pine tree loomed ahead. It approached at two hundred miles an hour. He saw the pilot’s shoulders move as he hauled on the yoke. The tree was higher than the plane. Hey, thought Mallory, we’re going to hit that –
But the Albemarle roared up and over. Something slapped the deck under his feet. Then the tree was gone, and the aircraft was banking steeply to port, into the next valley.
Mallory got up and closed the door. There were some things it was not necessary to see. Pine trees were, what? A hundred feet high? Maximum. Mallory decided if he was going to be flown into a mountain, he did not want to see the mountain coming.
It went on: the howl of the wind, the bucket of the airframe, the bellow of the engines. Mallory fell asleep.
Next thing he knew the racket was still there, and someone was shaking his shoulder. He felt terrible: head aching, thoughts slow as cold oil. The Albemarle’s bomb-aimer was pushing a cup of tea in his face. Benzedrine, he thought. No. Not yet. This is only the beginning.
He had woken into a different world: the sick-at-the-stomach world of dangerous things about to happen. He badly wanted a cigarette. But there would be no time for cigarettes for a while.
A dim yellow light was burning in the fuselage. Bulky camouflaged forms swore and collided, struggling into their parachutes and rounding up equipment.
‘Five minutes,’ said the bomb-aimer with repellent cheerfulness, when he had finished checking the harnesses. ‘Onto the trench.’
‘Trench?’ said Miller.
The bomb-aimer indicated a long slot in the floor of the aircraft. ‘Get on there,’ he said. ‘Stand at ease, one foot either side.’ He pointed at a pair of light bulbs. ‘When the light goes green, shun!’
‘Gee, thanks,’ said Miller, and shuffled into position. The first light bulb flicked on: red.
Hugues was behind him. Hugues’ mind would not stay still. It kept flicking back over the past two years, with the weary insistence of a stuck gramophone record. After the SS had done what they had done to his family, he had not cared if he lived or died. Then Lisette had come along. And in Lisette, he had found a new reason for living …
On a night like this, a reason for living was the last thing you needed. Remember what they taught you in school, he thought. Keep it buttoned up. Don’t let anything show –
Lisette. When shall I see you again?
Fear prised his mind apart and climbed in. Fear became terror. His bowels were water, and icy sweat was pouring down him.
First, there was the parachute descent, and of course it was possible that the parachute would not open. Then, even if the parachute did open, that big thin man Miller had two boxes balanced in front of him – attached to him, for the love of God! – full of explosives. So they were all dropping out of this plane, six humans and a land mine, in a lump. Jesus. He would be all over the landscape. He would never see Lisette –
Underfoot, he felt a new vibration, like gears winding. The trench opened. The night howled in, black and full of wind. He felt stuck, trapped, cramped by this damned harness, Schmeisser, pack, equipment.
A hand landed on his shoulder. He looked round so fast he almost overbalanced.
It belonged to the big man who did not speak, the bear with the moustache. The big face was impassive. A reflection of the little red bulb swam in each black eye. One of the eyes winked. Jesus, thought Hugues. He knows what I’m thinking. What will he think of me?
But surprisingly, he found that the fear had lessened.
Jaime was not comfortable either, but for different reasons. He had the short legs of the mountaineer. In his mind, he had been tracking their route: up the Valle de Tena, then north, across the Col de Pourtalet. He had walked it himself, first with bales of cigarettes, then with mules bearing arms for the Republican cause in the last days of the Spanish Civil War. He reckoned that now they would be coming down on Colbis. He did not like the feel of the weather out there. Nor did he like the fact that they were flying in cloud down a fifty-degree hillside at two hundred miles an hour. Feet on the ground were safe. Mules were safer. He wanted to get back on the ground, because his legs were aching, straddled over the trench, and he could feel the fear radiating from Thierry, slung about with his radios, straw hat stuffed in his pack, his big face improbably healthy in the red light –
Thierry’s face turned suddenly green.
Shun.
Six pairs of heels crashed together. The static lines ran out and tautened. The hold was empty.
Through the bomb doors the bomb-aimer glimpsed points of yellow light forming a tenuous L. He said into the intercom, ‘All gone.’ The pilot hauled back on the stick, and the clouds intervened. The Albemarle banked steeply and set its nose for Italy.
The ground hit Mallory like a huge, wet hammer. There were lights looping in his eyes as he rolled. A rock made his ears ring. He got rid of the parachute, invisible now in the dark, flattened himself against the ground, and worked the cocking lever of the Schmeisser, taut as an animal at bay. For a moment there was the moan of the wind and the feel of grit on his cheek. Then a voice close at hand said, ‘L’Amiral.’
‘Beaufort,’ he said.
There was shouting. Then more lights – a lot of lights, a ridiculous number – in his eyes. He levelled the Schmeisser. The lights wavered away, and someone shouted, ‘Non! Non! L’Amiral Beaufort. Welcome to France, mon officier.’
Unnecessa
ry hands pulled him to his feet. He said, ‘Where are the others?’
‘Safe.’ A flask found his hand. ‘Buvez. Drink. Vive la France!’ He drank. It was brandy. It drilled a hole in the cold and the rain. People were lighting cigarettes. There was a lot of unmilitary noise, several bottles. A dark figure materialised at his side, then another.
Miller’s voice said, ‘Any minute now someone is going to start playing the goddamn accordion.’
‘All here?’ There were grunts from the darkness. There were too many people, too much noise, not enough discipline. ‘Hugues.’
‘Sir.’
‘Tell these people to put the bloody lights out. Where’s Jules?’
There was a conversation in French. Hugues replied, his voice rising, expostulating. ‘Merde,’ he said finally.
‘What is it?’
‘These idiots. These goddamn Trotskyite sons of –’
‘Quick.’ Mallory’s voice brought him up sharp as a choke-chain.
‘Jules is held up in Colbis. There was an incident with your forces last week. The Germans are nervous.’
That would have been the SAS, thought Mallory, charging around like bulls in a china shop.
‘But Colbis is only in the next valley. We will take you there, when we have transport. There is a problem with the transport. They don’t know what. A lorry will come soon, they say. Franchement,’ said Hugues, his voice rising, ‘I do not believe these people. They are like the Spanish, always mañana –’
‘Ask them how soon.’ And calm them down, thought Mallory. Calm them down.
‘They say to wait,’ said Hugues, not at all calm. ‘It is seven miles to the village. There may be patrols. There is a cave they know. It is dry there, and German patrols do not visit it. They say it will be a good place to wait. The lorry will come to collect you, in one hour, maybe two.’
The Complete Navarone Page 57
