The Complete Navarone

by Alistair MacLean

  But Mallory was thinking radio. The observer would have been talking. Either the ground patrols had a listening schedule, to which they should have responded. Or he was talking to his base station, reporting five men and a Greek heading east, and the base station would be checking where the Greek fitted in …

  After another half-hour’s march they were in broken ground, sloping away to the eastward. Clytemnestra walked out ahead now, moving fast and light among the hillocks and boulders like a hound making a cast. After ten minutes, she stopped and beckoned. They walked over to her.

  She was standing at the head of a seam of the ground, deepened by running water into a groove no more than three feet wide. She led them down the groove. After a hundred yards it was already a ravine, plunging steeply downwards, disappearing from view round a colossal buttress of rotten stone. There was a path along the right-hand side of the ravine; a narrow ribbon of flat ground. This path Clytemnestra took. Another Goddamned goat path, thought Miller gloomily, trudging along. The German who had originally owned the smock he was wearing had been an eater of raw onions, by the smell of it –

  ‘Here,’ said Clytemnestra.

  They had arrived at the end of the gorge, on a ledge balanced like an epaulette on a vast shoulder of rock. The ledge was perhaps thirty feet wide. On it were a couple of walls that might once have been part of dwellings. On its inside edge the cliff was patched with the stone fronts of cave-houses. ‘Very hard place to find,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘Once, klephts live here, bandits. Now, nobody.’ She walked across to a patch of green moss and ferns between two of the walled caves. A trickle of water fell from a projecting rock into a bowl roughly carved from the stone. ‘Everything you need,’ she said. Mallory was looking east.

  Beyond the ledge, the ground dropped away three thousand feet in a series of precipices over a vast and hazy gulf. The bottom of the gulf was flat and green, marked into rectangular fields. At the southern end of the fields, a dark line, presumably a fence, separated out what looked like a group of huts and a brown-and-yellow expanse of baked earth and dry grass that must be an aerodrome, its eastern and northern sides formed by the sea.

  Mallory raised his glasses to his eyes.

  Beyond the fields was a stretch of reeds and whitish flats in which water glittered under the sun. It must have been the best part of a mile wide. On the far side the ground rose again, steep and black; the remains of a plug of magma, Lieutenant Robinson’s volcano, remnants of a cone of pumice and ash washed away by time. There were buildings up there, some white and gleaming, others ruined; and some, as Mallory focused his glasses, trailing a faint plume of dust.

  ‘Aerial,’ said Carstairs.

  Mallory panned his glasses up an apparently endless face of bare black cliff. At the cliff’s summit, he saw the spider-like tracery of wires and pylons. An aerial array, all right.

  ‘They are building something,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘They take stone across, from the place down there.’

  Three thousand feet below, a ruler-straight line ran from the base of the cliff, across the marshes, to a group of huts at the base of the Acropolis. ‘What is it?’ said Carstairs.

  ‘Railway line,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘For stone and gravel.’

  ‘Where’s the quarry?’ said Mallory.

  She pointed straight down.

  I’m a guy, not a fly,’ said Miller.

  Mallory was not listening. He said, ‘Ropes. Weapons. Anything not vital, leave it up here. Clytemnestra, can you stay here for twenty-four hours? We’ll be back.’

  She pointed down the ledge, to a place where the path narrowed, and there were the hard outlines of more ruined buildings. ‘There is the Swallow’s Nest,’ she said.

  ‘Password,’ said Mallory. ‘You’ll need one.’

  ‘Jolly boating weather,’ said Wills.

  ‘Shoot anyone who doesn’t use it.’

  ‘Jolly what?’ said Clytemnestra.

  ‘Never mind –’

  ‘Quiet,’ said Andrea. Over the dim rumour of humanity from the vale below there came once again the sound of an aeroplane engine.

  They were standing on a wide part of the ledge, smooth as a parade ground, without cover. Standing up or lying down, they would stick out like a poached egg on a black table.

  ‘Wave,’ said Mallory.

  The Storch came round the escarpment at eighty knots, not more than a hundred feet out. The people in SS uniform waved, the way they had waved last time. Mallory could see the faces of the pilot and the observer, curious, blank behind their goggles, not waving back. It went past once. ‘That’s it,’ said Carstairs.

  The Storch dropped a wing and turned, so slow and low it almost seemed to hover. Mallory could see the observer’s lips moving as he spoke into his microphone. They were being checked up on. The carnage by the tomb would have been discovered by now.

  ‘Wave,’ said Mallory. Bluff, and bluff again, and hope like hell it worked, though hope grew harder to sustain –

  But Carstairs had his Schmeisser at his shoulder, and its clatter was ringing in the cliffs, and the Storch was banking away, and a long line of pock marks appeared in the Storch’s unarmoured belly. The plane’s bank became a roll, a staggering roll that turned into a sideslip that would have been a spin except that half-way through the first turn the face of the escarpment came out to meet the aircraft. A wing touched delicately, crumpled like the foil from a cigarette packet. The propeller churned into the rock, the nose telescoped, a tiny spark of flame flicked back on the cowling, and among the noise of buckled and cracking metal came the big, solid whoomp of the fuel tank blowing. The Storch came momentarily to rest, perched nose-up on a sixty-degree slope, blazing from propeller boss to tailskid. Mallory could see the observer beating at the cockpit cover, jammed because of the heat. Then the plane began to slide tail-first into the abyss, gathering speed, leaving a long plume of black smoke, bouncing out from the cliff, over and over, breaking up as it fell.

  Then it was gone, and all that remained was the smoke, tangled in the crags and bushes in the morning calm.

  If you wanted a pointer to this place, thought Miller, you could not have done much better unless you had picked up a dirty great paintbrush and made an arrow on the cliff and marked it SHOOT HERE.

  ‘Good show,’ said Carstairs, stroking his silly moustache.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Miller, wearily.

  Mallory felt tired to the marrow of his bones. And it had not yet begun. There would be men up here. A lot of men.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘As I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted. We’ll get down there. Clytemnestra. Situation’s changed. You’d better come too.’

  Clytemnestra said, ‘No.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Wills cannot move, not just now. The hiding places up here are very good. There will be no trouble. If we came, we would be in the way.’ She smiled, a ferocious flash of teeth in her face. ‘I think you are good fighters, you three.’ She turned to Carstairs. ‘But you will get yourself killed.’ She said in Greek, ‘And these other people, too. You are like a barnyard cock. A lot of noise and fuss, but that is all. No patience. A child, not a man.’

  ‘What does she say?’ said Carstairs.

  ‘She admires you intensely,’ said Miller, who had learned good Greek in the process of blowing up targets in Crete and the Peloponnese.

  ‘Objectives,’ said Mallory, hurriedly. ‘Listen.’

  ‘Permission to, er, speak,’ said Carstairs.

  Mallory grinned at him, a grin without humour. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You will for the purposes of the next phase of this operation consider yourself under my orders, and keep quiet. Do I make myself clear?’

  Behind its mask of sweat and grime Carstairs’ face was smooth, his eyes remote and distant. ‘Perfectly,’ he said.

  ‘Our objective is to destroy the rocket factory,’ said Mallory. ‘Yours is different. I authorize you to disclose it, to avoid confusion.’

 
; ‘It would be a great pity if we … interfered with one another,’ said Andrea. His big hands were resting on the Schmeisser, light and casual. The ledge was full of a studied politeness; but under the politeness lay a wire-taut thread of violence.

  Carstairs was not stupid. He knew that for the third time, he had made life complicated and dangerous for the rest of the Thunderbolt Force. He knew that these men were used to achieving their objectives, and did not let anyone or anything stand in their way. The time had come for a dose of frankness – carefully measured, but a dose none the less. ‘I’ll go after the aerials,’ he said.

  Mallory had been sitting apart, binoculars on the plain and the Acropolis. ‘It’s a bad climb to solo,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll manage,’ said Carstairs. He had his own glasses out. Things were moving on the airfield. A Trimotor was taxiing, and a group of vehicles was parked at the root of the causeway that took the road across the marsh to the Acropolis. There was an ambulance among them. ‘I’m off,’ he said.

  ‘Your objectives,’ said Andrea. This time, the hands on the Schmeisser looked firmer. ‘The aerials. Then this person you have to … debrief?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Carstairs. ‘This is need-to-know information.’

  ‘We need to know,’ said Andrea flatly.

  Far below, the Trimotor was taxiing to the downwind end of the runway.

  ‘Very well,’ said Carstairs. ‘If you insist. The Kormoran was boarded before she sank. She was carrying new German code books. Maybe this … survivor saw the boarding party. Highly likely, actually. In Parmatia they said he was unconscious. I’m hoping he still is. If he has woken up and told the Germans what he saw and they transmit the news back to Berlin, or Italy, or anywhere else, then bang goes a very useful intelligence source. A vital intelligence source, you might say. So I don’t care what you men are doing, I’m going after those aerials to shut them up. And then I’m going to find the man who was in the ambulance, awake or asleep.’

  ‘And then?’ said Mallory.

  Carstairs’ face was hard as stone. ‘Use your imagination, Captain,’ he said.

  So now they were assassins, thought Mallory. Not soldiers. There was a difference.

  ‘Over there,’ said Mallory, pointing at the dark massif opposite. ‘Northern end. There’s a village.’

  ‘Once a village,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘Now a prison. For slaves.’

  ‘Slaves?’

  ‘The men of the island. The Germans make them work in their factory.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Mallory. ‘We rendezvous there at midnight.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There is a little street by the church,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘Athenai Street. It is dark. There are no guards.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘We go there.’

  ‘I thought it was a prison.’

  ‘It is. But we are Greeks. We will wait from midnight here.’ She pointed to a spot on the map in her hand. ‘Then if you have not found us we will come to find you at dawn.’

  Far below, the Trimotor was up and off the runway, a minute grey cross chasing its shadow over the dim marshes. Soon, the plateau above would be full of paratroops.

  ‘Moving out,’ said Mallory.

  How come I always say never again, thought Miller, and every time I say it I am doing it again within twenty minutes?

  ‘Go,’ said Mallory.

  Miller did not look down. He knew what was underneath him: three hundred feet of cliff, with a slope of sharp scree to bounce on, then another precipice –

  He braced the doubled rope over his shoulder and up between his legs, and started to walk backwards down the cliff. His packful of explosives wanted to unbalance him. His knees wanted to shake him loose. His breakfast wanted to fling itself into the glad light of day –

  ‘Hold up,’ said Carstairs’ voice. Miller found himself teetering on something that Mallory would probably have called a ledge, but as far as Miller was concerned was no bigger than a bookshelf, and a shelf for small books at that.

  ‘Between the legs,’ said Carstairs, with his oily smile. ‘Up the back. Round the –’

  But Miller had gone, bounding out into space, half a hundredweight of explosives on his back. He did not like heights, but he liked Carstairs even less.

  When Miller hit the scree slope, Andrea was already there. Carstairs and Mallory followed, pulled the ropes down and belayed again. Andrea and Carstairs, then Miller and Mallory went down again, and again, until they were standing on a scrubby shoulder of rock, a stratum that had stood up to rain and wind and sun better than the rest of the cliff. Mallory and Carstairs were coiling the ropes, making the coils fast, slinging them on their small packs.

  Once Miller’s knees had stopped shaking, he had time to recognize a change in Carstairs. Miller on a cliff was a fish out of water. But as he watched Carstairs coil the rope and run his eye over the next pitch, he recognized that this was a man in his element.

  The hard stratum made a broad, rubbly road along the cliff face, inaccessible from above and below. They had already lost two thousand feet in height. The valley floor was closer now, and from somewhere ahead and downhill came the pant and clank of heavy machinery.

  The Tante Ju had gone overhead twenty minutes previously. If the Germans had dogs, they would be on the ledge by now. Miller wondered how Wills would be doing. Okay, as long as he had Clytemnestra there.

  Miller frowned.

  Clytemnestra reminded him of someone, for a moment he could not think who. As he scrambled through the dense and thorny underbrush, he remembered. Those eyes, that jaw, that figure; Darling Miss Daisy.

  Darling Miss Daisy had been a good friend of his in Chicago during the Dirty Thirties. Darling Miss Daisy’s speciality had been removing all her clothes except a garter in front of the patrons of the El Cairo Tearooms, a rendezvous whose definition of tea was loose at best. As a token of their appreciation, the tea drinkers would stuff high-denomination banknotes into Miss Daisy’s garter. Miss Daisy had been a good friend of Miller’s, and had one night asked him along to witness the performance. This he had done with much appreciation. By the close of her act Darling Miss Daisy, nude except for the garter and a pair of high-heeled pumps, had collected some eight hundred dollars, in those days a most considerable sum.

  At this point, a citizen called Moose Michael had jumped out of the crowd, grabbed Miss Daisy from behind, and pushed a gun into her swan-like neck. Miss Daisy was no stranger to this sort of carryon, and relaxed. Guys with what this guy had on his mind on their minds always made a bad move sometime, and that was when you set the dogs on them.

  But Moose Michael’s hand was not groping for Darling Miss Daisy’s outstanding assets. It was groping for the money in the garter. This was not in the rules. Miss Daisy clenched her perfectly-formed fist, rolled her flashing black eyes, and gun in her neck or not, broke Moose Michael’s jaw in four places.

  Miller could see a lot of Darling Miss Daisy in Clytemnestra. Trudging on through the scrub, he crossed her and Wills off the worry-list.

  Ahead, the clank of machinery was getting louder.

  SEVEN

  Thursday

  1200–2000

  Leutnant Priem had been in North Africa, and at the invasion of Crete, and most recently in Yugoslavia. As he skirted the shoulder of the ravine (they could have done with a dog; but the dogs had disappeared) he thought: this could be a great posting, this island, if the commanding officer used his brains. One stupid Storch crashes, observer’s been drinking Metaxa, screaming down the radio, and Wolf panics, and here we are pretending to be mountain goats, heading for his bloody map reference as if we were doing a security sweep for a Führer visit …

  The path came out on the ledge. Cicadas trilled in the noonday sun, and the air was heavy with the whiff of thyme and rue. Priem cast a scornful eye over the ruined buildings. How could you believe in the glories of Greek culture when the people lived in such hovels? Deg
enerate scum. No better than animals. Of course, nobody had been here for years …

  ‘Search the place!’ he barked. He lit a cigarette and sat in the shade. A lizard lay on a slab of rock, bringing itself up to temperature for the next hunting trip. Lucky damned lizard. Nothing to do but sit around in the sun all day. While Priem had to make a pretence of searching these places where nobody had been, ever. That was Wolf for you. Savage, but gründlich. Thorough –

  ‘Herr Leutnant?’ yelled a voice.

  Priem stamped out his cigarette and went to interview the sergeant.

  ‘Buildings empty,’ said the sergeant. ‘Found this here, sir.’ He pointed with the tip of his jackboot at a little pile of golden cylinders. Cartridge cases.

  Priem was suddenly not relaxed any more. ‘Good,’ he said. They were Schmeisser cases. ‘And the aeroplane?’ he said.

  ‘Over here,’ said the sergeant. ‘One hundred and three metres down.’

  ‘Rope,’ said Priem.

  ‘Rope in place,’ said the NCO.

  The wreckage of the Storch was draped over a crag. Priem climbed round it, scrutinized the burned remains of the pilot and the observer, frowning slightly. He paused to examine the line of bullet-holes starting at the wing-root and vanishing under the belly.

  He climbed back to the ledge in silence. ‘Sergeant,’ he said. ‘We will establish a field HQ here. Search again, particularly down the cliffs. And give me that radio.’

  Higher on the mountain, in what would once have been the uppermost street of the bandit village, Clytemnestra and Wills lay in darkness. It was a cool darkness, smelling slightly of mould, but that was not surprising, since their hiding place was situated under the ruins of the washing-copper in the corner of four walls that had once served as a laundry.

  This village of bandits was a village for which searches and razzias were no novelty. The crusaders had rummaged it, then the Turks, then the Greeks. The Germans were merely the latest in line.

  Just as long (Clytemnestra reflected, listening to the concussed muttering of Wills) as they did not bring their dogs.