The Complete Navarone

by Alistair MacLean

  He pulled the rope twice, hard. Then he sat with his back against the wall, and shivered, and gnawed some chocolate.

  Wallace came down first, lowered by Andrea. Then there were two loads of packs and weapons and radios, then Thierry and Hugues. Somehow, Thierry had kept his hat. Hugues had had a bad descent: there was blood on his face. Then there were Jaime and Miller, who Mallory imagined would be swearing vigorously, and finally Andrea, leaping down the wall like a huge cat.

  When they were all down, Mallory stood up, flexed his aching fingers, looped the ropes over a lime-cemented boulder, and went over the edge again.

  This time it was easier. There were footholds, of a sort. Twenty feet after the halfway mark he entered a place where his flashlight, instead of making a yellow disc on black water, created a sort of white halo, as if in fog. The noise was more like an avalanche than a waterfall. There was wind, too, irregular flumes of draught that splattered limestone-tasting water in his face. And suddenly he was standing on dry land again.

  This time it was not a ledge. This time the plunging roar of water told him that he was at the base of the waterfall, standing on a beach.

  He tugged the rope twice. Then he flicked the flashlight on again, and began to grope his way round the beach. It was a broad horseshoe of broken boulders surrounding a thrashing pool of water. The waterfall must have been twenty feet across and ten feet thick, a solid column of water plunging down two hundred feet and hammering the pool to froth. The pool itself had a circular motion, like a giant bath plughole –

  Mallory’s heart thudded unpleasantly in his chest. He walked round the piled boulders to one margin of the waterfall. Then he went all the way back round, as far as the other margin.

  If he had expected anything, it had been that the river would turn horizontal at the base of the waterfall, and make its way out through the side of the mountain. But there was no horizontal passage.

  The shaft was a tube. The reason the water in the pool was spinning like a bath plughole was because it was finding the way out, as water will …

  Straight down.

  Mallory sat on a boulder. Carefully, he fished in his blouse pocket for the oilcloth bag with his cigarettes and lighter. He put a cigarette in his mouth, and lit it.

  The draught blew the lighter out. He relit it, but the cigarette was soaked.

  Soon, the others began to land on the beach. Mallory’s flashlight was dim yellow, the batteries gone. It went out. He flicked his lighter. The petrol caught.

  The draught blew it out again.

  He sat down, and concentrated on shivering.

  Miller came down third, after Wallace, with his eyes shut, cursing. For a man who loathed and despised heights, it struck him that he had been doing an unfair quantity of mountaineering these past few weeks. When he reached the beach, he moved away from the base of the rope; having avoided death by falling, he had no desire to be flattened by a plummeting Frenchman. A gleam of yellow light showed him where Mallory was sitting. Miller flicked on his own flashlight. He was on his last set of batteries. He saw what Mallory had seen: there were no exits. He shivered, too. The reason he shivered was because of the wind –

  The wind.

  He flashed his torch at Mallory. Mallory’s face looked pinched and white. He looked like a man who had wrestled for a long time with a monster, and had discovered that despite his best efforts the monster was not yet dead.

  Two packs arrived down the rope. Miller flicked his torch over them, and onto Wallace. Wallace’s face had the corpse-look, grey and sunken, but he raised a hand. Miller let the torch beam slide over his bandages. The wound did not seem to be bleeding any more.

  Miller suddenly stopped thinking about Wallace. The beam of his flashlight had touched the margin of the water. Five minutes ago, there had been a brick-sized stone by Wallace’s foot. Now there was no stone.

  Not that the stone had gone – brick-sized stones do not evaporate. What had happened was that the stone was under water.

  The water was still rising.

  It was not a military problem. But then Miller was not in any strict sense of the word a military person. In fact, having enlisted in the RAF and been posted to the cookhouse, he had simply walked away from his unit; not out of cowardice, but because he wanted to use his talents somewhere they could damage the enemy, not potatoes. He had been astonished when someone had informed him that this constituted desertion. But by then he had been behind enemy lines, causing Rommel severe headaches as a member of the Long Range Desert Force. And nobody had got round to court-martialling him.

  But as he stood on that black and shrinking beach, Miller was thinking of a time before the Long Range Desert Force. It was not a time he was particularly proud of, but it was a time when he had caused the maximum possible mayhem using the minimum possible resources.

  It had been during Prohibition. For reasons best left undiscussed, even with himself, Miller had found himself in Orcasville, a small white clapboard town on the southern shore of Lake Ontario. It was into Orcasville’s pier that a Canadian bootlegger called Melvin Brassman was wont to bring his cargoes of hooch. None of which would have posed any problems for Miller, except that Brassman’s boys were causing a lot of trouble in the town, culminating in the rape of three girls, one of them the minister’s daughter, and the burning of the warehouses of two merchants Brassman saw as rivals. Having committed these acts of mayhem, Brassman’s men had let it be known that any rival rumrunners would be treated as hostile, rammed, and sunk by the steel ex-tug Firewater, in which they plied their trade.

  It was Brent Kent, one of the burned-out merchants, who had called in Miller, then dynamiting pine stumps in the Finger Lakes region. Kent had laid his problem before Miller, stressing the need for a swift, untraceable, no-blame vanishment of the Firewater. There were no explosives in the town, or at least none that could not be traced.

  But Miller was more than a demolitions man. Miller was a practical chemist.

  Miller had taken possession of an old but superficially seaworthy steam barge, which he had enigmatically christened Krakatoa. He had painted the exterior a pleasing royal blue, and let it be known that he was off to Canada to pick up a cargo of hooch. With great puffings and clankings, he and the Krakatoa had set off from the Orcasville quay. Just out of sight of land he had stopped the engine, and waited. After twelve hours, he had attended to the Krakatoa’s real cargo.

  This consisted not of liquor, but several dozen barrels of tallow, and a similar number of carboys of sulphuric and nitric acids. Descending to the deck of the hold with an axe, Miller staved in the tallow barrels. Then, carefully, he uncorked the acid carboys and let their contents gurgle into the barge’s ancient wooden bilges. After that, he rowed clumsily away in a dinghy, and was collected by the mayor in his catboat. When they arrived ashore, Miller was observed to be the worse for liquor, bragging in a foolish manner about the large quantity of Canadian whiskey bobbing at anchor offshore, which, landed at nightfall, would wreck the Brassman booze market for good and all.

  These braggings swiftly reached the ears of Brassman’s Orcasville lieutenant, who made certain long-distance telephone calls. That night, a night of full moon, the Firewater, steaming out of the north, saw the low silhouette of the Krakatoa at anchor, and took anticompetitive action. The Krakatoa was known to be rotten. The Firewater screwed down her regulator, achieved ramming speed, and ran her down.

  What the Firewater’s master had not bargained for was Dusty Miller. When Dusty had rowed away, the barge had exuded a sour smell and a greenish chemical cloud. Now, twelve hours later, the acids swilling in her hold had compounded with the fatty fractions of the tallow, and formed a new substance.

  So the rotting wooden barge into which the Firewater’s bow had knifed at twelve knots was not a rum ship. It was a rotting wooden barge that contained ten tons of impure and highly unstable nitroglycerine.

  The explosion that vaporised the Firewater also broke most of the windows
in Orcasville, and woke the Mayor of Toronto eighty miles away. Miller left town the following morning, and the town reglazed. There was no further trouble from Melvin Brassman.

  Hugues came down the rope. He saw by the dim and pearly light of a single torch that the American, Miller, had gone off to a section of beach opposite the waterfall, a section where, to judge by the boulders piled up against the face of the cliff, there had been a rockfall of some kind. Hugues shivered in the chill wind that was blowing from the direction of the rockfall: a wind that reminded him of the outside world. Merde, thought Hugues, gazing into the dark. This is not a war in which anything will be solved. And certainly not by these stupid old men who have brought me to the bottom of this well to die.

  The light at the other side of the pool seemed to become suddenly animated, bobbing like a drunken firefly. He stared at it dully. Someone was walking, running, racing towards him. A hard body whacked him off his rock and onto the wet ground, and he was struggling, indignant, his mouth full of limy pebbles, while a voice, Miller’s voice, bellowed over the thunder of the fall, ‘Cover your ears!’

  Suddenly, Hugues was given a vision. The shaft became a vast tube of grey rock, the waterfall a silver column falling out of a sky roofed with more rock, every ridge and ledge and pebble razor-sharp, illuminated by a huge flash of light. The noise of the water was momentarily replaced by a new noise, so loud as hardly to resemble a noise at all.

  It was the noise of the five pounds of gelignite that Dusty Miller had packed into the rockfall at the point where the draught had been strongest.

  When the rock fragments had ceased to fall Miller walked back across the beach, and examined the scene of the explosion. It was a neat job, though he said it himself. The boulders had separated like a curtain. At the focal point of the explosion was a ragged gap perhaps two feet square, through which the wind howled in a jet like water from a fire hose. Miller sniffed at it hopefully, trying to detect the herbs and aromatic plants of the maquis.

  It smelt of damp Norman churches.

  Can’t win ’em all, thought Miller. He shone his torch through the hole. There were jumbled boulders, and beyond them the hint of space: a previous bed of the river. Quick, now, before the water rose far enough to spill down the channel. He walked along the beach to Mallory, directed his torch at his hand and gave the thumbs-up sign. The stony rigidity of Mallory’s face relaxed. They assembled the loads and shared them out. Then Miller led the way into the hole in the rockfall. Andrea was the last in. As he stepped up to the hole he found he was walking in water.

  The new passage was another tube of water-smoothed rock. The wind was strong in their faces. Mallory looked at his compass. They were heading north. They must have crossed the mountain by now. Mallory was tired, and hungry, and cold, and his feet had been wet for so long that they felt like raw sponges. But they were heading in the right direction. In the gale that was making him shudder with cold he detected the breath of freedom.

  Provided there was an exit.

  The passage was flattening out. Hugues stumbled. Andrea trod on his heels again; Andrea, who walked with the stolid regularity of a machine. Hugues was exhausted. He wanted to drop his end of the crutch from which Wallace was hanging, stop, rest his blistered feet, sleep in the dark.

  Behind him, Andrea’s voice said, ‘I’ll take him for a while.’

  Hugues thought, he understands, this one. He understands exactly how weak I am, the way my mind will not be still, but must keep chewing at these questions that have no answers. There was something almost diabolic about that. Hugues felt naked, exposed.

  To prove Andrea wrong, he said, ‘I’m fine.’

  The stretcher party plodded on in the dark. The last torch was turning yellow. There was no sound but the harsh rasp of breathing, and the rustle of water over rock.

  Andrea did not want to say anything, but the water in the passage was definitely getting deeper.

  It had started as a wetness on the floor. Now it was shin-deep, and it seemed to be rising faster. He thought of the waterfall. He imagined all that water pouring down here. He imagined it pouring down into a chamber with a small exit, making a pool that spread back into the tunnel, a pool that would fill the tunnel up. That would be a problem for the operation, thought Andrea methodically. If they drowned, the operation would not be completed. It would be best if that did not happen.

  Mallory walked on. The water shone under the now orange beam of his flashlight, chuckling merrily downhill.

  The flashlight became an orange point, and went out.

  Mallory lit his Zippo and held it above his head. The flame flickered in the rush of air.

  Ahead, the tunnel broadened and became a flat sheet of water that led to a blank wall of rock. Above, at the height of a cathedral roof, a shaft led upwards. It was down this shaft that the wind was howling. The lighter went out. In the darkness left by its flame it was possible to see at the top of the shaft, bright as a diamond in the cold black velvet of far underground, a speck of light.

  An unattainable speck. For as their eyes adjusted to the dim glow they saw that the chamber in which they were standing was roughly the shape of an inverted funnel, with the shaft as the spout.

  Mallory’s mountaineering exploits had covered the newspapers of the Empire. But even master mountaineers do not have suckers on their feet.

  Mallory felt a presence by his side. Miller raised his own lighter. The sheet of water was a pool, fed by the knee-deep torrent underfoot. Stalactites threw angular shadows across the ceiling, and stalagmites stood neck-deep in the pool. Beyond each stalagmite was a little writhing in the water.

  ‘It’s flowing,’ said Miller. ‘Must be going somewhere.’

  This time he was so wet that there was no point in taking his clothes off. He tied the rope round his waist and waded in.

  The first thirty feet was no more than knee-deep. Then, suddenly, the bottom sank away, and he was swimming, treading water rather, swept along by a fierce current in a narrow trench. At the rock wall ahead.

  And he knew he had miscalculated.

  He opened his mouth to shout, realised it was too late, and grabbed a deep breath of air instead. Then he went under.

  The current was like a hand, grabbing him, tearing him down. He went headfirst, felt himself crash against a big rock. Then his shoulders were in a tight opening, too narrow for him to get through, and the current was forcing water into his nose, trying to get it into his lungs. He wriggled convulsively, got free, hit another rock with a bang that made his ears ring. He was in a pipe, a pipe of rock that was such a tight fit that he could not move his arms or legs. The shove of the water was huge. You goddamn idiot, he told himself. You can get away with it once, twice, ten times. But diving into God’s waterworks is asking for trouble.

  And trouble is what you got.

  His chest was bursting. The blood was hammering in his ears, and his head was roaring and juddering like that waterfall back there. Thirty more seconds of this, and he was going to be dead. And then those other guys would be dead. And then those submarines would go through that invasion fleet like three red-hot pokers through a pound of butter.

  Chest full of air, oxygen turning to carbon dioxide. Going to suffocate you.

  Make yourself smaller.

  Breathe out.

  Miller breathed out. The contraction of his chest shrank his girth by a fraction. The tunnel’s grip slackened. The water hauled him along the pipe, and slammed him into a hole through which his head only just fitted, and poured into his nostrils and gaping mouth.

  Now he was going to die.

  He was going to die with his head in daylight.

  Daylight?

  With the last of his strength, he writhed like an eel. And suddenly, whatever it was that was holding his right shoulder had given way, and he was through, out, beyond it all, flat on his back in a cheery little brook that was gurgling down a wooded valley under the five o’clock sky, from which a little snow was fall
ing, but only a little.

  He breathed twice, big breaths, with coughing. He looked back at the hole in the hill, a hole no bigger than a badger sett, as it burst out and expanded into a raw rent big enough for a bear, or even Andrea. The flow of water seemed to have lessened. He had broken the bottleneck. There might even be air in the tunnel now. He gave the two pulls on the rope.

  It was cold in the little valley. The snow had not settled, but white skeins drifted in a half-hearted manner from heavy black clouds sailing in on the westerly breeze. They inspected and cleaned the weapons, fumbling with cold, water-wrinkled fingers. Jaime found some dry branches and knocked up a fire that burned with hardly any smoke. Andrea made soup. Thierry crammed his straw hat on his head, unpacked his radio, and began to inspect the parts.

  Miller took Wallace a can of soup. None of them looked in the best of health, but Wallace looked terrible. His skin was like grey paper, but burning hot to the touch. His eyes were glazed. When Miller tipped some soup down his throat, he vomited immediately.

  His wound looked pale and bloodless because of its perpetual rinsing in water. But the yellow edges looked yellower, and the red puffiness angrier. There was swelling, and a nasty putrid ooze. ‘Hurts,’ he said.

  ‘Bloody awful mess you are,’ said Miller. ‘Sooner we get you under a roof the better.’

  Wallace opened a dull and rheumy eye. ‘Lea’ me,’ he said.

  ‘Leave you my ass,’ said Miller, sticking in the morphine syrette and squeezing the tube. ‘We’ll get a dressing on that. Still hurt?’

  ‘Can’t feel a thing,’ said Wallace.

  ‘Sure,’ said Miller, as if that was the right answer. ‘Just get a new dressing on that for you.’ He smeared damp sulfa on the wound, bandaged it up again, and covered Wallace with a more-or-less dry blanket.

  Mallory said quickly, ‘How is it?’

  ‘Looks like it’s going wrong,’ said Miller, grim-faced. ‘Plus shock, I guess. I don’t know why he’s still alive.’