Even Carstairs.
Out of the shadow of the cave, it was hot; hot enough to swell Mallory’s tongue in his head and bring the sweat rolling down the creases at the corners of his eyes and down his hollow cheeks. The air in the valley hung still and heavy, full of the smell of thyme and baking stone, and the cigarettes Mallory had smoked all these days and nights and weeks of bad food and snatched sleep.
At first his head felt sore and out of step with the world. But after a couple of minutes he got his mind fixed on Carstairs. Carstairs taking off on his own, with a long-range weapon. Carstairs was a dirty little mystery who needed solving before he blew the mission.
So Mallory hitched up his Schmeisser and trotted across the bottom of the valley, and went straight up the cliff on the far side, feeling the life return to his fingers and back and legs as he shifted from hold to hold on the firm, warm rock. Within half an hour he was standing on the crest of the ridge: not on top, where someone could see him, but below the skyline, in the little puddle of shade at the foot of a boulder. Here he pulled out his binoculars.
It took ten patient minutes of searching that wilderness of rock and scrub before he saw the little flicker of movement: a man, moving at a steady, plodding walk towards a range of low ridges in the distance. Khaki battledress, slung rifle. Carstairs.
Mallory started after him.
The Englishman was not more than twenty minutes ahead. Not even a mile, in this terrain. Steadily, Mallory wore down his lead.
They crossed a couple of low spurs of hill. Mallory checked his compass, and pulled the map out of his blouse pocket. After an hour and a quarter, the ground dipped sharply. Ahead, Carstairs flicked into shadow, and became invisible. Mallory was not worried. He knew where his man was heading.
What he did not know was why. He brushed through a fringe of scrub, and stopped dead.
In front of him there was no more ground. Beyond the lip of the cliff was a deep gulf of air, in which swallows hawked and swooped, and beyond that, the vast blue void of the sea. He lay down, and peered over the edge. He was looking down a three-thousand-foot precipice. Somewhere far below, hidden by overhangs, the sea muttered at the island’s rocky skirts. A thousand feet below, the swoop of the cliff was interrupted by a flat platform of rock that ran along it like a step. It was fifty yards wide, this step, its outside edge scattered with wind-blasted shrubs, its inside blurred with the rock falls of centuries.
Vertically below Mallory’s eyes, a green fur of trees grew on a glacis of rubble. To his right, the glacis was huge, extending most of the way up the thousand-odd feet of the cliff, new and raw, blocking the shelf completely.
Along the shelf there snaked the white ribbon of the road, vanishing into the great cone of rubble. This must be what was left of the overhang the partisans had blasted down to cut the island in half.
It was not going to stay cut long. The sound of diesel engines clattered up to Mallory’s ears. Round the bulge of the landslide, there ran a pale band of levelled and compacted rock. As Mallory watched, a mechanical digger trundled round and deposited a load of rubble into what might have been a hole. It looked very much as if the road was nearly open again.
And Mallory was not the only one who thought that way. At the foot of the slide stood a little queue of vehicles: a horse and cart, three German army trucks, and a field ambulance, the red cross on its roof shimmering in the heat. A small knot of men sat in the shade of a little stand of pines.
And a couple of hundred feet down the cliff, masked from the vehicles by a buttress the size of a cathedral tower, a little khaki figure dangling like a spider on a thread.
Carstairs, descending.
Mallory watched him for a moment, weighing the odds. Let him go, catch him. Shoot him. Shooting him was the option he would have preferred, just now. But the Admiral was Jensen’s superior officer. Shooting involved noise, which would attract attention, and besides, he was well out of Schmeisser range. Shooting was just a beautiful dream.
Mallory moved in dead ground to the top of the buttress. Carstairs had doubled his rope around a natural fin of rock. Mallory pinched the ropes together and tied a constrictor knot around the pair. If Carstairs wanted to pull the rope down so he could descend further, he was in for a disappointment.
Mallory looked down. The rope was a white line ruled down the cliff, disappearing at an overhang. Mallory measured out enough of his own rope to reach the overhang. Then he belayed it on a knob of rock, turned his back to the void, and leaped out and down. The pyramid nails of his boots bit once, twice. Then he was by the overhang, holding, looking down.
There was a ledge below, thirty feet wide, running diagonally downwards to the slide area. It was broad enough to have trees on it, and an undergrowth of juniper and caper bushes. The doubled rope terminated in a small area of broken stone. Carstairs was nowhere to be seen.
Mallory went down Carstairs’ rope, braking just before he reached the bottom to avoid the tell-tale crunch of boots. Carstairs had left a flattened trail in the scorched grass by the bushes. Very quietly, Mallory pulled out his knife and followed it.
The ledge followed the curve of the cliff face for fifty yards, wide as a road, sloping towards the ravine floor at an angle of forty-five degrees. Through the head-high scrub Mallory could see grey vehicles, men moving, the red cross on the field ambulance’s roof. He moved on, very stealthy –
‘Don’t move,’ said a voice in his left ear. Something pushed into his left kidney. He knew without looking that it was the barrel of a silenced Browning.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he said.
‘Minding my own business,’ said Carstairs. His immaculate hair was disarranged, and sweat was rolling into his silly moustache. His eyes had a wild, dangerous look.
Mallory said, ‘If you shoot me, you’ll have fifty Germans after us.’
The gun in his kidney did not waver. ‘Why are you following me about?’ he said.
‘Because you were standing sentry and deserted your post.’
‘Don’t be damn silly –’
‘You listen here,’ said Mallory. ‘I don’t care how many admirals you are taking your orders from, I am your superior officer by seniority and I would remind you that you are subject to my orders even if you are not directly under my command.’
There was a very faint lessening of pressure. Seventy-five feet below, the red cross on the ambulance roof glowed in the sun.
‘You won’t get through this alone,’ said Mallory. ‘It’s team work, or nothing.’
The pressure of the Browning faded. Mallory watched as Carstairs holstered it and half-turned, performing some operation that made a small, metallic sound, putting something in his pocket. Carstairs nodded, smoothed his hair, gave a rueful film-star smile slightly marred by the scabbing graze on his upper lip. ‘Just thought I’d pop and have a look,’ he said. ‘When I was in the town they said the road would be opening soon. So I thought, well, it’d shorten the journey, know what I mean?’
Mallory had a very good idea of what he meant. But what Carstairs meant had nothing to do with what Carstairs said. ‘We’ll carry on over the mountains,’ he said.
Carstairs shrugged. He bent and picked up his sniper rifle, and started back up the path towards the rope. A dove, disturbed by his passing, clattered out of a holm oak tree. Three more, disturbed by the first, zigzagged away over the road in a kerfuffle of wings. Carstairs and Mallory stood still, holding their breath. For a moment, a thick, pregnant silence hung over the gorge. Then there broke into that silence a voice, giving orders, steady and professional, in German. ‘Schmidt,’ it said. ‘Take two men and get on to that ledge and see what’s going on.’
Mallory and Carstairs turned and ran. ‘Go,’ said Mallory, when they reached the bottom of the rope.
Carstairs grabbed hold and went up, kicking his feet into the rock, making a lot of noise about it, Mallory thought as he unslung his Schmeisser, but travelling at commendable sp
eed. When Carstairs got to the overhang, Mallory shouted, ‘Cover me!’ turned and gripped the rope, and started to walk up the wall.
The rock was coarse and pitted, so it took no more than a couple of minutes to reach the base of the overhang. German shouts came from below. Mallory decided that this was one of those occasions when speed was more important than technique. He went over the overhang hands only, expecting to find Carstairs waiting, covering the cliff base, ready to open fire. But Carstairs had not bothered to wait: look after number one was Carstairs’ motto. He was a pair of bootsoles half-way up the cliff. Even as Mallory glanced up, a rifle banged down below, and a bullet kicked chips from the wall by Carstairs’ shoulder. The fixed rope was taut over the overhang. A German was coming up. Mallory pulled the pin from a grenade, let the lever spring back and counted to three, listening to the fizz of the internal fuse. On four, he tossed the grenade over the edge.
The sound of the airburst rolled around the hard faces of the cliff. The rope slackened suddenly. There were screams. Mallory tossed another grenade, five seconds this time, and started up his own rope. By the time he heard the flat bang from the ledge, he was half-way up. Someone was firing down there. He could hear the bullets strike, wild and far away. He found a perch, pulled another grenade out of his pouch, hauled the pin out with his teeth, and let it rattle down behind him. There was traffic manoeuvring in front of the landslip. They would be trying to get some vehicle-mounted weapons to bear. Bang, said the grenade. No sound from above. He was at the top.
Carstairs was hauling in his rope, coiling it. He glanced at Mallory, completed his coil, and started away uphill. Mallory caught him.
‘I said cover me,’ he said.
Carstairs cocked an eyebrow. ‘Didn’t hear,’ he said.
‘We’ve got to show ourselves.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
Mallory found that his Schmeisser was in his hands, pointed at the ground between him and Carstairs. ‘We need to show them it’s an Allied operation. Not partisans. In case of reprisals.’
‘Oh for God’s sake –’
‘If you disobey a direct order I shall regard it as a mutinous act.’
Carstairs saw in Mallory’s face what that meant. He flinched as if he had received a smack in the teeth. He laughed, a weak laugh. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘I … oh, if you say so.’
Mallory took him along the clifftop in dead ground. Above the slide, he went to the edge of the cliff. The vehicles were still below. The men had gone: taking cover. Mallory stood up, dragging Carstairs with him. ‘Allied regular troops!’ he roared, in English and German. Then he threw his last grenade into the void and stepped back. A storm of machine-gun fire tore the air where they had been standing.
‘Now move,’ said Mallory, and started back the way they had come.
They were in trouble. The element of surprise was gone. If that had been Wehrmacht down there, it was big trouble. If it was Dieter Wolf’s Sonderkommando, it was big, big trouble.
Whatever shape the trouble came in, there was no doubt who lay at the root of it.
Carstairs.
They got over the top of the first ridge without being shot at, trotted into the valley beyond and scaled the far side. As Mallory went up the last low cliff to the summit, a bullet cracked by his ear. A rock by his right hand exploded into stinging chips. The ridge was there, knife-sharp against the blue sky. He jumped for it and hauled himself over. As he lay in cover to calm his breath, a burst of machine-gun fire pulverized the top six inches of the rock plates behind which he lay. Carstairs was beside him, spitting out powdered stone.
‘Give me the rifle,’ said Mallory. ‘Go and tell the rest of them.’
Carstairs said, ‘Oh, really.’ Then perhaps he remembered the conversation in the dead ground above the cliff, or perhaps he saw the look in Mallory’s eye. Whichever the case, he handed over the rifle and ran.
Mallory moved fifty yards below the skyline, resurfacing in a notch between two boulders, and rested the fore end of the Mauser on the ground in front of him. He snapped the guards off the telescopic sight, took a couple of deep breaths, and cuddled the butt to his shoulder. Into the disc of the sight floated rocks, low, dark-green bushes. The disc settled. And across it jogged a figure in field-grey uniform, coal-scuttle helmet, Schmeisser held across the body.
Mallory put the cross hairs on the centre of the chest and squeezed the trigger. The Mauser bucked. The grey figure flung its arms out and slammed backwards into the rocks. Behind it, Mallory saw the quick, dancing flicker of a machine-gun’s muzzle flash, heard the crash and whine of the rounds smacking rock. He paid no attention. His eye was back on the sight, and he was searching among the rocks, finding the grey cobblestones of the Spandau crew’s helmets. The machine gun opened up again. Mallory could just see the dark upright of the loader’s jackboot as he knelt by the weapon. He raised the sight a couple of clicks. Then he shot the man just below the knee. The gunner turned his face. Mallory shot him in the side of the head, and transferred his attention to the men advancing across the notched and rock-strewn plain –
There were no men. On the grey, ridged valley floor nothing moved but the bushes, fretted by the small wind from the sea.
Mallory began to crawl backwards, knees and elbows, behind the cover of the ridge. Once in cover, he doubled under the lee of the rocks. A Wehrmacht garrison would have been ragged and dull-edged. The men in cover looked sharp and well-disciplined. Behind the smell of thyme and rosemary and his own sweat, he seemed to detect the keen, ugly whiff of Dieter Wolf.
He went back to the ridge. A figure moved over to the right, out of the ground, over a rock, back into cover, fast as a rabbit. He sent a Mauser round after it, heard the whine of the ricochet. Missed. He slung the rifle and ran down the ridge, from stone to stone across the valley floor, hurdled the stream, went up the other side and into the cave.
Carstairs was back. He and the others were waiting, loaded up, ready to go. Mallory glanced in his direction. ‘You’re under arrest,’ he said.
Carstairs’ face turned blank, fish-white. ‘You can’t –’
‘Disarm him,’ said Mallory to Miller. Mallory’s Schmeisser just happened to be pointing at Carstairs’ stomach.
Stiff-faced, Miller removed Carstairs’ Browning and knife.
Carstairs said, ‘I didn’t mean –’
‘You have jeopardized the operation,’ said Mallory. ‘You will be dealt with later.’ He pulled out a map, beckoned Clytemnestra. ‘We’ve got thirty men after us,’ he said. ‘Where do we go?’ He gave her a pencil.
She drew a line: a tenuous line that zigzagged on to a tight bunch of contours until the contours ceased, giving way to the hatchings of rock faces. ‘We’ll mark the path with piled stones,’ she said.
He put his finger on a narrow white stripe among the contours and hatchings. ‘What’s this?’ he asked.
She told him. Then they made a rendezvous, and she led the party out and along the ridge: Wills and Nelson, Wills still dazed-looking and rubber-legged, Nelson scared, sunburned under his carroty thatch, hugging his arm, grey-faced with pain or fear or both, and Miller with his big pack, and Carstairs somewhere between hangdog and arrogant.
‘Get up in those hills,’ said Mallory, handing Miller a copy of the map reference. ‘See you later.’
Miller tilted his head back, looking at the hills. If they were hills, so were the Goddamned Himalayas, he thought. And soon he was going to be up there, making like the abominable snowman or an eagle or something. Miller was a creature of the American Midwest. His idea of the ideal landscape was a billiard table, flattened out a little.
‘Take it easy,’ he said to Mallory.
‘We’ll do our best.’ Mallory’s face was set, his eyes remote. He was loading rounds into a Schmeisser magazine, already working on the problem of thirty Germans against two Allied troops who had first to fight a rearguard action and then to complete an operation.
‘We’ll be with
you in two hours, maximum,’ he said. ‘If we’re not, you go on.’
Miller turned away, grim-faced. He shouldered his big pack, and set off in the wake of Carstairs, Clytemnestra and the two sailors.
The path led upwards: over the ridge, down the other side, along a little ribbon of flat ground that wove through a great field of boulders, and on to the face of a mountain – hill, Miller told himself, remember it’s only a hill – that if it had been by the seaside you would have called it a cliff.
The sweat ran into Miller’s eyes. The pack straps dug into his shoulders. From below came the hammer and crack of small-arms fire. Mallory and Andrea were busy.
Ahead, Wills stumbled and crashed into a rock. ‘All right,’ he mumbled. ‘All right.’
‘Help him,’ said Miller.
Clytemnestra pulled at his arm. She said, ‘He is too big for me, poor man.’
‘Cap’n Carstairs?’ said Miller.
Carstairs scowled at him. Then, grudgingly, he hauled the sailor’s arm around his neck. ‘Move it,’ he said.
Haltingly, the procession climbed on.
Back by the cave, things were getting complicated.
The Sonderkommando had sneaked up behind the ridge, making maximum use of cover. It had done them very little good. There was always a moment when they were going to be silhouetted against the skyline. They were superior in numbers. But they had no artillery and no mortars, and it did not look as if they ran to air support. While it was small arms against small arms, there was not a lot of progress that could be made against two determined defenders.
The Complete Navarone Page 88
