The Commandant became still. Down on the rain-blackened quay, a figure was marching slowly: one of the German sentries. The other sentry would be in the command post, standing by the field telephone for the 0355 report. The Commandant said, ‘A rearguard action, hein? Under the command of a lieutenant? I must say –’
‘Hey!’ said Miller. ‘Get out of there!’ Dark figures were crouching over the pile of equipment on the ground. ‘Mind your own damn business –’
Next to his head, something exploded, shockingly loud in the still, starlit predawn. It took him several heartbeats to work out that it had been a rifle going off. ‘In the army of the Marne, we do not sneak past the Boche,’ bellowed Cendrars. ‘We shoot him.’ And he fired again.
The German sentry, surprised by the bullet that had smacked into the granite coping of the quay three metres from his right foot, had dived from view. The second shot hit the empty quay.
Miller found that he was on the ground, his Schmeisser cocked and ready in his hands, his heart thumping. You goddamn maniacs, he was thinking.
Mallory saw the Frenchmen still standing against the sky, obvious targets for the machine gunners in the pillbox on the hill opposite. Wallace, he thought, you are on your own.
Perhaps that is what you wanted.
Miller and Andrea had disappeared, as he would have expected. He said, ‘Andrea?’
‘I’ll organize the pillbox,’ said Andrea’s voice from the darkness.
‘Good. Miller?’
‘Here.’
‘Sentries.’
He looked at his watch. The hands were at five to three. The wires would be humming with the sentries’ yelps: we are under fire, send reinforcements. The Commandant could not have chosen a worse moment if he had tried.
There was a moment’s eerie silence, in which it was possible to imagine that nothing had happened. Then, on the summit of the hill that rose on the other side of the valley in which the village lay, a stabbing flame began to flicker. The Germans in the pillbox were taking an interest.
The sound of the machine gun came a split second later, with the whip of large-calibre bullets. One of the Commandant’s men went over like a skittle. The rest of them lay down, old bones creaking. ‘Merde!’ said the Commandant. ‘What is that?’
Hugues was lying beside Lisette, clutching her hand. He said, wearily, ‘You foolish old men, why will you not obey orders?’
Jaime felt something that might have been a breeze pass by him, except that it was no breeze, because breezes do not talk; and this breeze said, ‘Come down in five minutes. Bring the equipment,’ in the unmistakable voice of Captain Mallory.
Andrea went down through the village and up the hill the other side at a steady jog, conserving energy. The pillbox was directly above him now, its tracers flicking across the top of his vision. He paid them no attention. He had seen the pillbox before night had fallen. This far south, and next to a friendly neutral neighbour, invasion was not a serious fear. So it was not one of the impregnable strongpoints that you found in Crete, designed to stand days of siege. It was merely a concrete box with a steel door and a slit from which the machine gun could enfilade the bay and the quay.
Something was moving out at sea: something that might have been a fishing boat. Its exact outline was hard to determine, because there was a haziness at sea level, a pale vapour like kettle-steam on the dark face of the waters.
Andrea slowed to a walk. There would be a sentry. He put his face close to the ground and saw the silhouette of a man crouching against the hillside. The silhouette looked nervous, flinching at the occasional bullet that whizzed raggedly overhead from the heroes of the Marne on the hilltop opposite.
The sentry was indeed watching that hilltop. It had taken a lot of wangling to get down here onto the Spanish border, where nothing ever happened. He had no idea what had got into these Resistance idiots. Reinforcements would soon be arriving from St-Jean. There would be shootings and burnings in the morning. Meanwhile, this was annoying.
Or perhaps something worse. Rumours of invasion from England were growing in force, no matter how savagely the SS and Gestapo suppressed such defeatist talk. The sentry felt a dull foreboding. Still, if you were going to survive this damned war, Martigny was the place to be stationed –
A forearm like a steel bar clamped across the sentry’s windpipe. The knife went in and out once, fast as a snake’s tongue. Andrea lowered the body to the ground, put the helmet on his own head, and walked softly to the pillbox door. He took three grenades from his blouse, cradling them like eggs in his vast hand. He pulled the pins from the grenades. He held two of them, levers closed, in his left hand. The other he held in his right hand. He waited for a pause between bursts of fire. Then he banged on the steel door with the grenade.
‘Hey!’ he shouted, in his fluent German. ‘Where is your damned sentry?’
Muffled voices came from within.
‘This is Sturmbannführer Wilp!’ roared Andrea in a voice hoarse with Teutonic rage. ‘This is an exercise. Open up!’
The door opened. The man who opened it saw a large shape topped with a coal-scuttle helmet silhouetted against the stars. He said, ‘Was?’
Andrea kicked him down the stairs and threw the grenades after him. He was already fifty yards down the hill by the time the gun-slits spouted flame and the flat, heavy explosion rolled across the bay.
The sentries were not the Third Reich’s finest. By the time Mallory and Miller arrived on the quay, they were in the guard post with the door shut, yelling at each other and into their field telephone, and someone was yelling back.
Mallory hoped Guy would be quick. There were a lot of German soldiers within five miles, and they would all be here in a very short time.
The guard post had once been a net shed. It had a stable door, in two parts. Mallory kicked both parts open. The Germans by the telephone looked round. They had wide, flabby faces, and looked well over fifty. They made no movement towards their rifles. Instead, their hands went up in the air.
‘Key,’ said Mallory.
The elder of the two handed him the key.
‘Rifles on the ground,’ said Mallory. The weapons clattered to the flagstones. ‘Kick them over here.’ He picked up the rifles. Then he smashed the telephone and closed the door. If by some miracle the Commandant of the St-Jean-de-Luz garrison had not been informed of his sentries’ screams down the telephone, he could hardly fail to ignore an exploding pillbox. The lorries would already be on the road.
‘Now listen,’ said Mallory. ‘This is a British army operation. It has nothing to do with the Resistance. We are about to board one of our submarines and withdraw. The civilian population have not been involved. Do you understand?’
The sentries nodded, dazed, their eyes shifting from the lean and haggard face, down the SS smock to the Schmeisser, unwavering in the hard, battered hands.
‘You will inform your commanding officer,’ said Mallory. ‘This has been a commando raid, to demonstrate our capabilities. Tell him to remember what we can do.’
The sentries nodded. Their minds would be full of the icy winds of the Russian Front. But the message would have got across.
Mallory and Miller went out onto the empty quay. Mallory padlocked the door.
There was a dampness in the air, mixed with the faint, industrial reek of high explosive from the pillbox. It was quiet, except for the sploosh of the waves and the nearby thud of the fishing boat’s engine.
And in the far background, on the edge of hearing, the sound of lorry engines.
The reinforcements were arriving.
Hugues scrambled down the cliff onto the quay, with Jaime and Lisette and Miller’s boxes. Andrea was back, too. The fishing boat was coming out of the horizon, masts moving across the stars in the handle of the Plough.
Mallory noticed that the lower stars of the Plough’s share had disappeared. He checked it off on a mental list. In the middle of all these disasters, that was something that co
uld be useful.
He said to Jaime, ‘Where are those old men?’
‘Preparing for a final stand.’
‘Go and tell them that for every German they kill, ten Frenchmen will be shot in reprisal. Tell them that this is a British army operation, and that the British army is withdrawing. Tell them that I have informed the sentries accordingly. Make it quick.’
Jaime nodded, and trotted up the cliff. Hugues said, ‘For God’s sake, where is this fishing boat?’
A dark shape came out of the murk. The fishing boat glided alongside. Andrea said, ‘We won’t get far without air support.’
It was a joke. It was a joke that was too true to be good. If lorry loads of Germans soldiers arrived on the quay now, they would have no trouble sinking Guy’s boat. Machine guns, grenades, mortars, they would do the job.
If they arrived on the quay now.
Mallory thought of Wallace, the look in those china-blue eyes. Wallace was a berserker.
Good luck, Wallace, thought Mallory.
The fishing boat was a dark hulk alongside the quay now, the sound of its engine a clanging thump like the beat of a metal heart.
The lorry engines were nearly as loud, approaching the top houses of the village.
‘Bon,’ said a small figure in Guy’s voice, but higher than usual. ‘All on boat. Quick, quick.’
Jaime had materialised out of the night, panting. ‘I told them,’ he said. They went aboard. The propeller churned water under the transom. The bow swung out and steadied on the strip of absolute blackness between the sea and the stars. For a moment the land astern lay dark and quiet, the houses of the sleeping village draped across their valley under the stars.
Then the valley erupted like the crater of a volcano.
In the cab of the lead lorry, the Hauptmann had been tired and bored. The bloody Resistance were having one of their fits. Whoever had knocked off the SS patrol in the mountains had in the Hauptmann’s opinion done a good job. It was just that the Hauptmann wished that, having shot the bastards up, they had gone to ground, instead of making a bloody nuisance of themselves in the suburbs of St-Jean-de-Luz and scaring the wits out of his sentries in hopeless little shallow-water ports like Martigny. Until someone had hammered on his door, the Hauptmann had been entertaining Big Suzette in his billet. Suzette might be large, but she was a person of surprising skill. And instead of testing those skills to the limit, the Hauptmann was sitting half-drunk, very tired, and in a state of aggravated coitus interruptus in a truck at the head of a column of three other trucks, one hundred men in all, on the way to sort out a bit of local difficulty in Martigny, on pain of transfer to the Russian Front.
Sod it, thought the Hauptmann.
The lead truck rounded a corner in the lane and started downhill, into the beginning of the valley, where the houses began. There was an old barn a hundred metres down the road on the right. The Hauptmann paid it no attention, because he was peering at the southern side of the valley, where the pillbox stood. The pillbox should have been heavily engaged, if there was real trouble. But the pillbox was silent. As the truck drew level with the barn it seemed to the Hauptmann that the gun-slits of the pillbox were illuminated by a dull orange glow that waxed and waned. But the brandy was playing monkey’s tricks with his eyesight –
A tight cluster of Bren rounds blew the windscreen in with a hellish jangle of broken glass. The driver went halfway out of the window and collapsed like a wet rag. The lorry slewed sideways across the lane, demolishing a wall and coming to rest against a boulder. One of the men in the back saw a jabbing flicker of flame in the open shutter under the roof of the barn by the roadside. As he opened his mouth to point it out, a line of bullets stitched across his abdomen. The last bullet hit one of the stick grenades at his belt. The explosion that followed set fire to the lorry’s gas tank. Men spilled out of the three lorries following, and took up positions in ditches and behind potato-ridges. There was obviously a considerable force in the barn. A machine gunner slammed his weapon on the ground in the lee of a ruined pigsty and fumbled for the trigger. He was a badly shaken man, partially blinded by the flames of the burning lorry. His first long burst went wild, the tracers striking sparks from the coping of the quay and whipping out over the water of the harbour. For a moment, half the weapons in the squad fired after his tracers, and the black water of the port was churned to foam. Then a Feldwebel who had been invalided home from the Eastern Front and knew what he was doing started screaming orders, and the squad turned its attention to the shutter under the barn roof.
There must be at least a company in there, thought the squad, hugging the ground and pouring in fire. The black opening became silent. The squad’s firing lulled. A man got up and scuttled in with a grenade. A hoarse, agonised bellowing came from the shutter, followed by the burp of two sub-machine guns. The streams of bullets started low and went high, almost as if the men firing them were too weak to hold the muzzles down. The man with the grenade ran into the first burst, and fell down. The Germans opened up again.
This time, the machine gunner put an accurate stream of bullets through the open shutter, one in three of them tracer. A light was then seen inside, yellow and blue, and volumes of smoke obscured the sky. The hay was on fire. And suddenly against that light there appeared the figure of a man; a man crawling on one hand and two knees. In the hand he was not using to support himself he held a Schmeisser, which he fired until it was empty.
Now they could see him, they shot him quickly, and he fell to the ground in front of the barn, which was burning well now as the last year’s hay rose in the draughts. The flames spread quickly to the rafters.
The Germans kept on shooting. They had killed one man, sure. But there was no possibility that only one man could have done so much damage.
So they poured lead into the burning barn, the flames dazzling their eyes, until the ridge went and the roof fell in, and a fountain of orange sparks rose at the cold and hazy stars. And when the place was merely a heap of glowing ashes and there was no possibility of anyone being left alive, someone went and looked at the body that had come out of the shutter.
He was lying on his back. His face was peaceful, pale, with a trickle of blood from the corner of the mouth. He was wearing a beret, with the flying dagger of the SAS. The two privates next to the body were almost too frightened to touch it.
‘Doesn’t look very healthy,’ said one of them.
‘That’s because he’s dead,’ said the other one.
The battledress blouse was open. The bandages round the belly shone black and wet in the flames. ‘Ach,’ said one of them. ‘Stinks.’
‘Brave man,’ said the first German. ‘To fight like that with his guts hanging out.’
‘Bloody idiot,’ said the second. He bent and closed the eyes, which were blue, and berserk, and open.
It was four o’clock by the time they got the burning truck out of the lane and moved on down to the quay. This time, nobody was taking any chances.
But when they got down to the sea, there was only the sloosh of the ripples against the quay, and the smooth expanse of the harbour at high water, lightening now with the dawn.
Guy Jamalartégui did not see the huge bloom of flame at the top of the valley. From the wheelhouse window, he was saying, in broken English, ‘Messieurs,’ ‘dames, welcome to the Stella Maris. And now, Capitaine Mallory, it is a question of my money –’
Then the guns started up, and Jamalartégui stopped.
One moment the water was dark and smooth. Then it was churning with tracers from the fusillade following the first wild burst the German machine gunner had fired after Wallace had shot up the lorry. The air was whining like injured dogs, and a flock of hammers slammed into the wheelhouse. Guy said, ‘Oh,’ a curious, breathy sound, as if the air was coming out of more places than his throat. He fell on the deck with a crash like a bag of coal. There were more tracers, but random, whizzing into the air like fireworks, passing over the spidery mast
s of the Stella Maris, dimming and vanishing.
Miller knelt by the body and felt for the pulse in the scrawny neck. He said, ‘He’s dead.’
Mallory looked down at them through eyes sore with sleeplessness. He realised that it was getting light. He could see Miller, crouched on the deck, his bony knees by his ears. And down there beside him in a pool of something that looked black but was not black, was Guy. A Guy who was no longer breathing; whom that random burst of fire from the hill had caught fair and square across the rib cage.
Mallory stepped over the body. He took the wheel. From the chart he recalled that the shore of the bay ran southwest. So he steered southwest, aiming at the horizon, as the light grew.
The engine thumped on. The sea was black like an asphalt parade ground, the horizon clogged with pale haze.
Andrea fingered the upper lip where his moustache was meant to be, and reached for the bottle of Cognac, and took a long swig. ‘No rocks, my Keith, if you please,’ he said. ‘Only peace and quiet.’ Then he lay down in the lee of the wheelhouse.
Mallory kept the bow southwest and motored for the horizon, waiting for the drone of engines, aircraft or marine, that would mean that after all this time, it was all over.
After three or four minutes, he realised that there was something wrong with that horizon. It should have been a knife-sharp line. Instead it looked lumpy and ragged, as if it was made of grey wool. And suddenly the grey skein ahead rose and touched the sky, and the air was wet on his face, and he realised the truth. The Stella Maris had sailed into thick fog.
The world was a round room, with walls of grey vapour. It was a room that moved with the Stella Maris, southwest. It was a room impenetrable by ships and aircraft, except by accident. A most fortunate room.
The Complete Navarone Page 70
