Mallory’s deep-sunk eyes were bright and distant. It was a mystery to him why any of them were still alive. ‘We’ll take two hours’ rest,’ he said. ‘Jaime knows where we are. The Germans think we’re dead. Andrea, get your head down.’
He watched as Miller spread a groundsheet over Wallace, rolled himself up in his poncho, and went immediately to sleep. Andrea was sitting with his back to a tree, eyes invisible. Asleep, awake, nobody knew, and nobody would ask. Jaime and Hugues were asleep. Only Thierry was awake, a large, crouching figure, fiddling with his radio, testing it after its immersion.
Mallory said, ‘That thing working?’
He had moved close to Thierry quietly; Mallory knew no other way of moving. Thierry looked up sharply. His fingers moved a switch. An indicator light went out.
Mallory bent and looked at the set. The light had been the TRANSMIT light. He felt the short hairs bristle on his neck. He said with a new, dangerous quietness, ‘Thierry. What are you doing?’
‘Testing the equipment,’ said Thierry.
Mallory said, ‘Just as long as you’re not transmitting.’
‘I heard what you say,’ said Thierry irritably, squashing the straw hat over his face and leaning back against a boulder. Mallory walked to the end of the valley. The snow had stopped. Between the squalls of black cloud deep ravines of blue were appearing. There was real warmth in the gleam of sun that lanced down into the trees. Warmth was what was needed. Particularly, it was what Wallace needed. In four hours it would be dark, and it did not seem likely to Mallory that Wallace would survive a night in the open.
And Wallace was not the only worry. Mallory guessed that they were at best halfway down the mountain. They still had to get down into the valley and walk to the sea, where this Guy Jamalartégui was waiting for them. Whether or not the Germans believed that they had died in the collapsed cave beyond the ridge, the roads to the sea would be heavily patrolled.
Mallory eased his sodden feet in his boots, and squeezed his cracked and abraded hands, to change the nature of the pain. The Benzedrine was wearing off. He felt weary and irritable. What they needed was to get dry. Being dry would change everything.
He was too jumpy to rest. He patrolled the wood, walking downhill until the trees started thinning.
Below him a meadow dropped steeply into the smoky blue deeps of the valley. The sun was out again. He could feel its warmth on his face. This far down the mountain the snow had melted as quickly as it had fallen, and the meadow grass was a brilliant green space in which swam constellations of wild flowers, falling away to a hazy gulf in which a village lay like a group of toys, and beyond it a shoulder of mountain, more heavy black clouds, and the metal sheet of the sea.
But Mallory was not looking at the view. He had faded back into the shadow of a stand of pines. He had his binoculars at his eyes. His grey-brown face was stony under the stubble on cheeks and jaw.
In the disc of the glasses the lower slopes of the meadow were lousy with grey mites. The sun gleamed off windscreens: the windscreens of half-tracks and lorries, and of an odd, boxy van with a steel loop on its roof, like the frame of a giant tennis racket.
A radio-direction-finding van.
It came upon Mallory like a flash of revelation: not a flash of lightning, but the dull, red blink of the TRANSMIT light on Thierry’s radio.
Thierry had not been checking the equipment. He had been transmitting.
Things began tumbling into place. That damn silly straw hat that Thierry insisted on wearing, rain or no rain, had nothing to do with vanity. It was an identification mark. Don’t shoot the man in the straw hat, the orders would have said. The rest, kill them. Not the man in the hat.
In a manner of speaking, Jensen had said, they will be waiting for you.
Courtesy first of the SAS. And now Thierry.
A short mile away, at the foot of the meadows, three armoured cars had begun to grind uphill, hub-deep in the lush spring grass, leaving tracks like railway lines. Mallory faded back into the woods.
At the gully, everyone was asleep except Thierry, who was still squatting in front of his radio like a lard Buddha. Mallory did not look at him. Andrea was snoring heavily. Mallory shook him by the shoulder. He said, ‘I think you should shave off your moustache.’
Andrea said, ‘Wha –’
‘Quick.’
Andrea’s hand went to his upper lip. For the first time since Mallory had known him there was uncertainty in his eyes. ‘No,’ he said.
Mallory said, ‘The Germans are coming. Five hundred men. Armoured cars. Listen.’
Andrea listened. He hung his head. Then, finally, he nodded. Reluctantly, he pulled a razor from his pack and began hacking at the luxuriant growth on his upper lip. ‘Twenty years,’ he said.
But Mallory was gone, waking the others.
Within two minutes the upper lip was bare, except for a black stubble that matched the rest of his face. A new Andrea stood up: an Andrea clean-shaven, olive-skinned, with a nose increased and cheeks enlarged by the lack of moustache. And there was something else on his normally impassive countenance. Andrea would shave his moustache in the name of duty, but that did not mean he was going to be happy about the man who had caused his loss.
Andrea was angry.
Up on his rock Thierry was beginning to be nervous. People were stirring in the camp, when there should have been no stirring. He looked at the steep walls of trees on either side of him, the valley, the stream babbling out of the mountain. These people would fight to the death. He could imagine the chug of machine guns, the blast of mortar bombs. He was working for the Germans to keep himself safe, not expose himself to danger. A stupid straw hat would not save him from Spandau rounds or shrapnel.
Thierry found that he was on his feet, and that his feet were moving, sidling away towards the woods. He found he was yearning with his whole being for the anonymous shade of the trees. The sky was a bright, hopeful blue beyond those green leaves. His mission was over; there was no shame in running. He would collect the money Herr Sachs of the Gestapo had promised him, buy a bar, listen to dance music, run a couple of girls upstairs; and the sky would never, ever be anything but blue again.
There was no more sidling, now. He was running in earnest, his great bulk crashing through wild raspberries and chestnut saplings. From the corner of his eye he could see someone coming after him. His bowels were loose with terror. He thought he could hear engines now, and the crash of jackboots in the undergrowth. Holding the identifying straw hat on his head with one hand, he shouted, ‘Hilfe! Hilfe!’
The hat and the shouting must have slowed him down. He knew that something had smacked him hard from behind, on the left-hand side of the rib cage. He pitched forward. A voice in his ear said, ‘This is from Lisette, animal.’ He thought, surprised, that was Hugues, the stupid Norman. What happens now?
There had been something wrong with the blow on his ribs. It hurt too much. It hurt very badly indeed, as if there was a red-hot iron bar in there. A heart attack? thought Thierry. The doctor had warned him: lose weight. But to die of a heart attack in a war. How stupid, thought Thierry, covered in cold sweat. How very stupid. Perhaps one can recover –
He tried to breathe. But his lungs were full of liquid. He coughed. Something poured out of his mouth.
Blood.
In front of him loomed the blank face of the blond Norman, Hugues. He was doing something to a knife. Cleaning it with a handful of chestnut leaves.
He stabbed me, thought Thierry, in a panic. With a knife. I may die.
He died.
The SS men in the armoured car stopped on the edge of the wood, and waited. The Gestapo were manoeuvring the third detector van into position, so the position of the radio could be pinpointed exactly. The terrorists could then be surrounded, and methodically crushed.
The SS men in the armoured car were ready to wait for as long as it took.
For there were rumours in circulation that made it sound very unwi
se to take any risks with these people. They had, it appeared, already accounted for almost a hundred men. The logical way of dealing with them was massive force. And massive force, thank God, was what was being applied to the problem.
The SS Obersturmführer was not like other men. He turned and watched scornfully as the grey straggles of soldiers marched doggedly up the mountain, and curled a lip. His men might welcome this great application of force. But it looked to the Obersturmführer like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut. There were only five or six men, terrorists, Frenchmen, British: mongrels, members of inferior races. In the Obersturmführer’s view, it was time to get them out of the way, and get on with the war.
At that point, five men walked out of the edge of the wood; or rather, four men walked, carrying a fifth on an improvised stretcher. Three of the walkers and the man on the stretcher were wearing British battledress. Behind them, walking at a safe distance, was a fat, dark man, holding a Schmeisser trained on his companions, with two more Schmeisser’s slung round his neck. As planned, he was wearing a straw hat.
He looked up at the armoured car. His dark eyes took in the Obersturmführer’s black uniform with the lightning-flashes on the collar of the tunic. He said, in heavily-accented German, ‘Three English and two French bastards.’
The Obersturmführer allowed a clammy blue eye to rest on the man. He was disgustingly unshaven, and his clothes were too small and too wet. His accent sounded French, but not quite French. The Obersturmführer said, ‘There were supposed to be six of them.’
‘One of them is inside the mountain,’ said the man in the straw hat. ‘And ever more shall be so.’
‘Good,’ said the SS man. The chilly eyes flicked across the bedraggled group of Englishmen and their two French companions. He jumped down from the armoured car. ‘Werner and Groen. Bring the Spandau. Altmeier, radio Search HQ and tell them that the problem has been dealt with.’ He gazed clammily upon the prisoners. Herr Gruber, the Chief of the Gestapo in St-Jean-de-Luz, might want to interrogate them. But Herr Gruber was a civilian, an expert at pulling out women’s fingernails; he knew very little about the wars fought between man and man. The Obersturmführer sniffed. There was only one cure for vermin. ‘A clean death,’ he said. ‘It is probably more than you deserve. Komm.’
They set up the Spandau twenty-five yards away from the armoured car, pointing at a low cliff of limestone. Thirty or forty Wehrmacht soldiers in field-grey hung around, watching. ‘Good,’ said the Obersturmführer to the man in the straw hat. ‘Now tell them to dig.’
‘Dig?’
‘Not too deep,’ said the Obersturmführer. ‘Thirty centimetres will suffice.’
Two SS men unstrapped spades from the back of the armoured car, and threw them at the men. Mallory began to dig. So did Hugues and Miller. Wallace, on his knees, picked feebly at the spongy soil. The Wehrmacht men looked disgusted, and began to drift away.
‘Good,’ said the Obersturmführer ten minutes later, contemplating the shallow pit. ‘Tell them to undress.’
They undressed, slowly. The last of the soldiers in field-grey had gone. They hated the revolting tricks of the SS. A man who was a man could not watch this kind of thing. The execution party and its victims were alone under the birdsong and the dripping green trees by the little cliff at the margin of the wood.
There were the three men round the Spandau: the Obersturmführer, and two more SS. Facing them, white-skinned and goose-pimpled in the low sun, were the prisoners. Mallory said in German, ‘What about a cigarette?’
The man in the straw hat said, ‘Give them a cigarette.’
The Obersturmführer said, ‘For a traitor, you are a generous man.’
The man in the straw hat walked across to Mallory, gave him a cigarette, and lit it for him. The Obersturmführer had a sudden feeling that there was something wrong with the transaction.
It was the last feeling he ever had about anything.
Because as the man in the straw hat lit the cigarette for the man with no clothes on, he must have passed over the Schmeisser as well. And suddenly the Schmeisser was firing a long burst at the Spandau crew, who seemed to make a sitting jump backwards and lay twitching, gazing at the sky with sightless eyes. That left the Obersturmführer, his Luger halfway out of his holster. The Schmeisser turned on him. The firing pin clicked on an empty chamber.
The Obersturmführer started to run.
He ran well for a man wearing breeches and jackboots, but not well enough for a man running for his life. Deliberately, Andrea reached into his belt and pulled out a knife. Silver flashed in the sun. The figure in the black uniform stopped running suddenly and collapsed in an untidy tangle of arms and legs. His cap rolled away and came to rest against a thistle. The breeze fluttered his close-cropped yellow hair.
Andrea pulled his knife from the nape of the Obersturmführer’s neck and wiped it on the wet grass, waving away the flies that were buzzing over the wound. Already Mallory and Miller were stripping the uniforms from the bodies of the SS men. The Obersturmführer’s uniform more or less fitted Mallory.
They tumbled the corpses into the graves they had dug for themselves. They drove back to the little valley and loaded the gear and Miller’s boxes into the armoured car. Mallory sat bolt upright, head out of the turret, face grey and unshaven. ‘Go,’ he said.
Miller put his foot on the throttle. The armoured car jounced down the hill, through the remnants of the Wehrmacht force. The field-grey soldiers looked away. They knew what those Totenkopf bastards had been up to on the mountain.
Up on the edge of the wood the air was silent, except for the buzz of the flies over certain dark patches on the fresh-turned earth, and the whistle of a griffon vulture wheeling high between two clouds.
Down in the valley, the armoured car turned onto the pavé, and began to clatter officiously towards St-Jean-de-Luz.
FOUR
Monday 1900–Tuesday 0500
The inhabitants of St-Jean-de-Luz paid very little attention to an SS armoured car; they saw too many of them. Mallory stared straight ahead at the thickening houses. He said to Jaime, ‘We need a safe place. Not a cave this time.’
Jaime nodded. On the outskirts of the town he said, ‘Halt here.’
Miller turned the armoured car down a track, through a rusty iron gate with a chain and a padlock bearing a swastika seal. Jaime cut the chain, let them in, and hooked the broken links closed behind them.
Beyond the gate was a farmyard. It looked as if it had been abandoned in a hurry. The farmhouse windows were open, the remnants of shutters flapping in the breeze from the sea. The cattle-sheds were empty too. ‘The Nazis took the people,’ said Jaime. ‘The men to forced labour. ‘Later, the women were sheltering résistants. They also went. Nobody has come here since.’
Mallory walked round the place. It had an evil, septic smell. There was mouldy hay in the mangers and dried manure still in the cowshed gutters. In the house, the bedclothes were still on the beds, and in the kitchen a saucepan full of mould stood on the cold stove. It was like a house visited by a plague.
But Mallory was less interested in the house than in the exits. The exits were fine. The house stood in a grove of ilex in open fields, plentifully laced with deep, useful ditches. The nearest house was two hundred yards away; the wall it turned on the farm was blank and windowless. And best of all, they were behind an iron gate with an apparently unbroken Nazi seal.
They drove the armoured car into the barn and heaved the door shut. They sat on the broken chairs round the kitchen table and lit cigarettes, while the fleas from the floor attacked their ankles. The westering sun made yellow shafts in the curling smoke. Mallory could have slept for a year.
Hugues said, ‘We must go to the café.’
Mallory nodded. Hugues’ face was pouchy with exhaustion. Mallory wished he trusted him more. It would be dangerous in the café. He said, ‘What if Lisette has talked?’
‘If she has talked, she has talked,’ said Hu
gues. ‘That is a risk I will take.’
After Colbis, Mallory had begun to think of Hugues as a weak link. But then he had seen him run down Thierry, a Thierry screaming for help, about to break cover under the eyes of the Germans. It had been a nasty job, a job Mallory had been glad he had not had to do himself. Hugues had done it.
And under the one eye of the SS Spandau, standing by the graves they had dug themselves, it had been the same. Certainly, Hugues was frightened. But he was a man who had the courage to face down his fear. And that, in Mallory’s book, was the true bravery.
But Hugues’ courage was not the issue. The issue was to find out the whereabouts of Guy Jamalartégui.
I am sorry, thought Mallory. But brave or not, I cannot trust you, not one hundred per cent. Once you are out from under our eyes it will be too tempting to bargain for Lisette’s life, and the life of your unborn child.
Mallory looked into the veil of smoke surrounding the head of Miller, sprawled in a chair with his boots on the table, and caught his eye. ‘I’ll go along,’ said Miller. ‘I could just about handle a drink.’
Ten minutes later they were walking towards the port of St-Jeande-Luz. Miller made an improbably tall Frenchman, loping along in a black beret and a blue canvas workman’s suit whose trousers flapped round his calves. He had found the clothes in a wardrobe at the farm. They stank of rats. His papers, however, had been supplied by SOE and were in order. Hugues was dressed in the sweater and corduroys in which he had clambered through the mountain, and another beret. They were dirty and unshaven. They were chewing raw garlic, and they had rubbed dirt into the cracks and scrapes on their hands. They were convincing peasants on their way from the fields to the café.
St-Jean-de-Luz could almost have been a town outside the war zone. The golden evening light held the particular sparkle that comes from proximity to large expanses of water. The inhabitants were out enjoying the weather. A dark-haired girl haughtily ignored Miller’s wink. Miller sighed, and wished he had a cigarette. But all he had was blond tobacco, and smoking blond tobacco in this town would be like hauling up the Stars and Stripes and running out the guns.
The Complete Navarone Page 66
