Wills walked up to the bodies. He was pale again. ‘Christ,’ he said.
Clytemnestra squatted by Tietmeyer’s body and liberated his Schmeisser, half-a-dozen magazines and a bunch of stick grenades. Then she spat in the dead face, and moved on to the next corpse. Wills watched the place where the path came round the bend in the rocks. ‘They’ll be back,’ he said. ‘Unless they’re deaf.’
Clytemnestra raised a scornful eyebrow. ‘So let them come,’ she said. She pointed upwards, to where the cliff bulged out in an overhang like the brow of a stone genius. ‘If they come there, we swat them like spiders.’ She pointed over the lip of the path. ‘There, they will not come unless they are birds. From this way’ – she pointed to where the path ended among the houses – ‘also, you will need to be a bird. And up the path, all must pass between the narrow rocks. It is like the path at Thermopylae. But you have never heard of Thermopylae, I expect.’
‘Battle in ancient Greece,’ said Wills. ‘Played in a mountain pass. Three hundred Spartans v. a hundred thousand Persians. Home team triumphant. Leonidas played centre forward.’
‘So now help me with these bodies, and we should get back to the houses.’
‘Quite,’ said Wills. It would have been bad taste to point out that the heroes of Thermopylae had died while achieving their victory. He helped Clytemnestra topple the bodies over the cliff. Then he gathered up an armful of guns and bombs and scrambled after Clytemnestra back to the Swallow’s Nest.
They were not the first people to have had the idea of defending this eyrie. The Swallow’s Nest was the fortress-like building commanding the defile, a tower that overhung the abyss like a swallow’s nest in the eaves of a roof. Wills’ boots rang in the thick-walled rooms. He put his head into something that might have been a waterspout, or a nozzle for boiling oil. The valley was full of rain and the mutter of thunder. Far below, the path was a faint zigzag rising to the base of the cliff. And on the path, little creatures crawled: German soldiers.
It occurred to Wills that while the Swallow’s Nest might be an impregnable redoubt, on an island crawling with German soldiers it was also a blind alley.
For a very small moment after the steel door hissed shut, Miller and Andrea stood quite still, listening. There was in all conscience plenty to listen to.
They were standing in a corridor hewn from the basalt. The corridor was lined with doors, full of voices echoing from the hard surfaces of the rock, and the steel plate of the door, and the girders that supported the staircases and the lighting and forced-draught units, and the loudspeakers that at this very moment were squawking klaxon noises into the babel below.
There were men everywhere. There seemed to be a lot of Wehrmacht, and a sprinkling of camouflage-smocked SS, and civilian workers, some mechanical-looking, in blue overalls, and one man in a white lab coat with pen-clips showing in the breast pocket, and rimless glasses below a head like a pumpkin. A squad of Greeks marched past, dressed in the rags of peasant field clothes, under the guard of four Waffen-SS. Everybody was too busy scuttling to and fro to spend any time staring at a couple of filthy, bloodstained men in ripped camouflage smocks.
For the moment.
The moment did not last long. A Wehrmacht NCO came marching past. He stopped, stared up at Andrea, and said, ‘What the hell do you think you’ve been doing, killer?’
Andrea stood to attention, eyes front, chin out.
‘How tall are you?’ barked the NCO. The man’s eyes were small and evil. Any minute now, thought Miller, they were going to slide down Andrea’s body to his boots, his British army-issue boots, and that would be that –
Two metres, Feldwebel,’ said Andrea.
‘Never seen shit piled so high in my life,’ said the NCO. Andrea’s eyes had slid down the corridor. A door had opened. A wisp of steam floated into the corridor. A man with a drawstring bag came out, fumbling with his tunic buttons. ‘You Sonderkommando cutthroats think you can march about the place with your arses filthy, you can –’
‘Permission to take a shower, Feldwebel?’ roared Andrea.
‘Permission to take a shower, Feldwebel?’ roared Miller.
Andrea turned left, cracked his boots on the concrete, and headed for the door. The Feldwebel turned away. If these Nazi animals wanted to take a shower during a general alert, then a shower they would take, Herr Gott. They were above the law, these brutes. The best you could hope was that they refrained from cooking and eating your men, and robbing the dead. God knew what the army was coming to. All mixed up with this Sonderkommando, and civilian labourers, and boffins, and God alone knew what other riffraff. Apparently some fool had crashed a train in the quarry, too. Beer, thought the Feldwebel. That was what you needed in a climate like this, at a time like this. He stumped off in the direction of the Sergeants’ Mess.
The klaxons had stopped. ALLES KLAR, said the big metal voice in the corridor. ALL CLEAR. STAND DOWN.
Andrea shoved open the door of the shower room.
It was a big shower room, full of steam and the cursing of men who had stopped their showers and hauled their uniforms on over soapy bodies only to be told that the whole business had been in vain.
So now they stood under the showers, brown heads and arms and legs and milk-white German torsos, and washed. Miller and Andrea found a steamy corner, took off their tell-tale boots, and buried them and their battledress under the camouflage smocks. Then they stepped under the water.
‘Most refreshing,’ said Miller.
‘Exactly so,’ said Andrea.
‘Murderers,’ said a small man, presumably Wehrmacht, under the next nozzle.
Andrea reached out a huge hand, picked him up by the chin, and said, ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’
The Wehrmacht man was very small and very frightened, but also very brave. ‘What I said.’
Andrea gazed at him. Finally he said, ‘You’re quite right.’ He grinned horribly. The little man ran away.
‘Don’t like each other, do they?’ said Miller, in German.
‘Sometimes,’ said Andrea, grimly, ‘life can be very beautiful.’
He looked around in the steam, scowling, a hairy giant with someone else’s towel wrapped round his waist. Miller had a sudden mental glimpse of this shower room in a few hours: red gouts of flame shooting through the doors, the ceiling bulging in, dust and screams where the steam now hung …
If everything went according to plan.
Meanwhile, he knew what Andrea was looking for. Andrea was looking for someone in the shower with the same size feet as him.
Three hundred yards away, Mallory was thinking boots, too.
After he had jumped out of the train, he had hit the ground with his feet, cradling his Schmeisser. He had rolled, the paratrooper’s roll, come back on his feet like a cat, and started running through the rain and steam and dust for the cliff face. There had been shouts. He paid no attention. Carstairs was up the face of the cliff, heading for the aerials. He did not trust Carstairs. Carstairs needed watching. So Mallory was going up the cliff towards the aerials, to keep an eye on him. He knew the face of that cliff, had summed it up in his mind the way a yachtsman sums up a chart or a fisherman a stretch of river.
He arrived at the locomotive, a crushed barrel issuing jets of scalding steam. He ran up the iron side, avoiding the geysers. The white fog was thick here. Suddenly he was at the rock wall.
Once, it would have dropped straight into the marsh. Since the reclamation of the land it now dropped straight into the platform where the railway and the road causeways arrived at the Acropolis. But there had been building inside the cliff, and ten feet above the platform, a drainpipe had been cemented in. Now, Mallory ran along the locomotive’s boiler, jumped, locked his fingers round the drainpipe, drew up his legs, drove his bootnails into the rock, and straightened his knees. He got a foot to the top of the drainpipe, stood there a moment, perfectly in balance. The rain and steam were thick as porridge up here. Somewhere thunder roa
red, or perhaps it was the locomotive’s boiler, mingled with the sound of the big concrete mixers.
He reached up. At fingertip height, an electric cable ran across the sheer face. He flexed his knees, and jumped. The cable came into his hands, fat and solid, anchored to the wall with good German steel. He drove his boots into the rock and walked his feet up. Tenderly, so as not to pierce the insulation, he got a sole to the cable. Then he shifted his weight, bending his knee. In a couple of seconds he was standing on the cable, walking to the right, northwards, twenty feet off the ground.
From his vantage point he saw grey rain thickening into a solid mat of vapour, from which rose a confused roar of noise. The hiss of escaping steam was fading. The sound of voices was louder; raucous voices, bellowing orders, and the churn of the big concrete mixers. He did not have long. He walked on along the cable, one foot delicately in front of the other, water streaming down the cliff to his left. He was concentrating on his balance, tiptoeing along behind the curtain of the rain.
The concrete mixers were still grinding away below him. You did not stop concrete mixers. You kept them turning, or they went solid. From high above there descended on a cable an angel of mercy in the form of a great steel bucket.
There now began one of the longest minutes of Mallory’s life. He moved along the cable until he was standing on a concrete cornice directly above the concrete mixer. The cornice was eighteen inches wide. He lay along it, face averted from the yard.
Down below, men shouted and milled. The rain sheeted down, soaking Mallory to the skin. The bucket dropped, five feet from his right ear, clanked down into the enclosure in front of the mixer. He heard the flop of the concrete as the operator shot it down the pipe and into the bucket, the groan of the wire as it took the strain. Then the bucket was rising again.
Mallory got back on his feet. He saw the grease-black cable rise before him, no handhold there. He saw the battered steel rim of the big bucket. He knew it was now or not at all.
As the rim came up to eye level, he jumped.
His clawed fingers hit concrete-splattered steel, hung on. His toes found the flange at the top of the bucket.
Down below, someone started shouting. It was a new kind of shouting. It meant only one thing. Trouble.
He looked down. The reclaimed area was a mass of men, swarming around the wreck of the stone train like worker ants around a queen. Mallory scrambled on top of the bucket. His final glimpse stayed with him. Heads, helmeted or capped or just hairy, milling to and fro. And in the middle of all those heads, one face turned upwards into the rain, eyes wide, open-mouthed. Wehrmacht-grey shoulders. An expression of total shock.
Mallory sat on the handle of the bucket out of sight of the ground, and hoped that nobody would pay any attention to one man who had spotted something wrong with the concrete lifting gear. The cliff moved past fifteen feet away, sheer and black. Carstairs was up there somewhere; either that, or dead. Mallory would rather have been climbing. The bucket was a trap. There was no way off it –
The bucket stopped with a jerk, and hung swinging. Seven hundred and fifty feet below, little figures milled. Seven hundred and fifty feet is two hundred and fifty yards. At two hundred and fifty yards a human face is invisible, even if it is staring at you, or looking at you through binoculars, or aiming a rifle at you. Mallory drew his head back sharply. Then he looked up.
Some distance above – it was impossible to tell exactly how far, but it could have been a hundred feet – was a projection in the cliff face. A jetty or platform, crusted, by the look of it, with spilt concrete, and a crane jib. Not a crane, perhaps; a windlass. Call it what you liked, there were people up there. And the odds were that they had been warned by telephone that there was someone on the concrete bucket. So why would they halt the bucket in mid-ascent?
There were a lot of answers. The one that made the most sense to Mallory was that they were waiting for reinforcements.
Mallory looked at the cliff face. It had sloped gradually away from the bucket. Now it was a good twenty-five feet off through the rain, a wall of black basalt, but weathered up here, unsmoothed, pockmarked …
Only twenty-five feet. Too far to jump.
For a moment, Mallory watched that wall with the intensity of a falcon watching a pigeon. Then he unstrapped the lightweight rope from his pack, took a deep breath, and began.
He looped an end of the rope through the handle of the bucket, and hauled in until the two ends were equalized. He grasped the doubled rope, spat on his hands, and went over the side.
It was flimsy stuff, this silk rope, only one up from parachute cord. Harder to grip than the wire-cored Manila they had used on Navarone and in the Pyrenees; but lighter. Infinitely lighter. You could carry twice, three times the length for the same weight –
Comforting things, technicalities. They had brought him down hand over painful hand until he was hanging seventy-five feet below the bucket, like a spider on a thread, turning slowly.
He wound his left hand into the rope above his head, let go with his right. The horizon wheeled around him: clouds, the mountains on the far side of the valley, the sea, a ray of sunlight striking through the clouds making a sudden dazzling path; then the slopes and faces of the Acropolis, the cliff, twenty-five feet away, not far at all. His left hand was agony now, the rope biting like a cheese wire. His right fumbled with the rope, tying a double figure-of-eight as the world turned another forty-five degrees, ninety, to the lengthening shadows of the aeroplanes and the fuel dumps on the dim sward of the airfield. And directly below, spinning with wonderful slowness, the little corpse of the wrecked train.
The knot was finished. The two strands of the rope were tied together. Mallory jammed his right boot into the loop, and put his weight on it, and flexed his left hand to get the blood circulating again. He hung there and let the world turn another two hundred and seventy degrees. Nobody seemed to be shooting at him. When the spin had brought him face to the cliff again, he let his weight drop back.
Seven hundred feet above the wrecked train, seventy-five feet below the bucket, a hundred and seventy feet below the crane, he started to swing.
He swung like a child on a rope hung from a tree branch, except that he was a soldier an eighth of a mile from the ground. The arc grew. He could feel the air dividing in front of his face, smell, as he approached the cliff, that odd smell of hot wet rock, half clammy, half aromatic.
He started to analyse the place where he would land. His present arc would leave him somewhere too smooth. Over to the right, erosion had left a little hook, a semi-detached plate of rock with a tuft of sun-dried grass sprouting from the crevice above. It swept towards him. He reached out his hand, measuring. Just short. The next swing, he moved the axis, gave the rope a little extra pull, gained that extra ounce of speed; so that on the next swing he found himself at the top of the arc, weightless, standing for a split second on nothing, stationary at the apex of his swing. He put out his hand and grasped the little hook of rock, jamming his fingers into the crevice behind it. His weight came on to the flake. He heard his finger joints crack. His boot hit the rock. The nails found a hold. He stood for a second like a starfish, his right hand and right boot holding the cliff, his left arm and left boot engaged with the doubled rope. He shifted the foot. Now he had two boots on the face, his right hand on the flake, his left holding the rope. He would need the rope again –
The flake under his right hand gave way.
There was no warning. One second he was on the wall, getting balanced. The next he was out, falling, no holds anywhere except in his left hand, where the thin rope was sliding through his palm, and the ground far below was coming up to meet him.
He clamped his teeth and his fist at the same time. His fist slid to the knot he had tied in the end of the rope, the bulky double figure-of-eight. He stopped with a crack that tried to tear his arm out by the roots. Each swing tried to shake him off. He held on grimly. As the oscillations grew smaller, the centrifugal
force was not so tormenting. He got his right hand on to the rope, then his foot. He manoeuvred himself into a standing position. He thought his knees into not shaking.
Then he started all over again.
This time, he left nothing to chance. He found a new handhold, and went for it. But this time, he committed himself only when he was quite sure. He found himself a place to stand, and he stood there, and methodically untied the figure-of-eight, and coiled the rope, and slung it, and started to climb up and to the left, into a sort of shallow gully or couloir, where he would be out of sight from below and above.
He went up hard and steady, climbing from the hips, his mind fixed on the next hold, never mind the top; the top was just another rest, and would look after itself. It was not until he got into the couloir that he started to shake.
Up in the Swallow’s Nest, Wills’ head was getting clearer by the minute. One of the things becoming clearest was that he was in a tightish spot, with a woman. He opened a tin of sardines, and looked at Clytemnestra, the olive curve of her cheek against the black fringe of her shawl; hard as a steel spring, light on her feet as a feather. The other thing he had noticed, now that his brain was working again, was that she was extremely beautiful. In Wills’ experience of women, which was limited to a few devoted hours spent carrying the golf clubs of his cousin Cynthia, they were not to be counted on in tight spots. Well, not not counted on, exactly; but their place was not in the line of fire, but on the … well … home front. Clytemnestra seemed to be different. This had come as a shock to Wills, though not a disagreeable one. He ate another sardine.
The Complete Navarone Page 94
