A couple of Wehrmacht privates rattled down the stairs. One of them aimed a kick at his SS ribs. It hurt. But Mallory grinned. Dissension in the enemy camp was truly a marvellous thing.
Dissension in his own was a different matter. He spat blood, and hurried stiffly down the steps. Three minutes later, he came to a door. On the rock above the door was stencilled a broad black number three. Mallory went through it.
He was at the opposite end of the long, steel-floored corridor from the place where Andrea and Miller had taken the lift. ‘Papers!’ screamed a voice. It belonged to a Wehrmacht Leutnant, white in the face and greasy with sweat. Behind him, at the far end of the corridor where the lift doors had once stood, there was a throng of men, noise and smoke and shouting.
‘Papers!’ screamed the Leutnant, again.
Mallory gazed upon the man with freezing eyes. ‘There are wounded men down there,’ he said. ‘They need you.’ Then he walked straight through him. The Leutnant reeled back into the wall. His hand went to his holster flap. Mallory allowed his own hand to stray to the grip of his Schmeisser. The Wehrmacht officer thought better of his move, and hurried towards the lift door. Mallory walked through the doorway with the red cross above it. An orderly looked up from a desk. ‘The man from the shipwreck,’ said Mallory.
The orderly looked nervous. There had been too many alarm bells, and he really hated these SS. ‘Down there,’ he said, pointing down the corridor. ‘Your friend’s already with him.’
‘When I want your conversation I’ll ask for it,’ said Mallory, to pour oil on the flames. Then he crashed off down the corridor.
The door the orderly had indicated was closed. Mallory twisted the handle. It was locked. It was a hospital door, not a military door; a flimsy thing of cheap deal. Mallory hit it with his boot, hard, next to the handle. The orderly had been watching him. When he caught his eye he quickly looked away. The door held. Mallory knew he was on the edge. Never mind how much trouble there was between Wehrmacht and SS and boffins, there came a time when he would no longer get away with disobeying orders and wrecking government property. But Carstairs was behind that door, with a man Mallory was interested in, and who would not be alive for long, unless –
His boot hit the door again. This time it burst open with a splintering crash.
It was a small, green room, with a smell of cleanliness, a bed and a chair. There were two men on the bed: one lying down, legs thrashing, the other bent over him. The bending man was Carstairs. The reason for his bending was that he had a pillow in his hands, a pillow he was pressing over the face of whoever it was that was lying on the bed. The survivor of the Kormoran, at a rough guess.
Mallory could kill, all right. But he was a soldier, not an assassin. There was a difference between killing and murder.
He said, ‘Stop that.’
Carstairs did not answer. His face was set and ugly, ridged with muscle, holding the pillow down. Mallory lifted his Schmeisser. ‘Stop it now,’ he said.
Carstairs raised one hand to swat the barrel aside. ‘No noise,’ he said. ‘Quiet, you idiot.’ The assumption that he would not use the weapon fed Mallory’s irritation. He jabbed Carstairs on the arm with the barrel. The flapping of the supine figure’s legs was weakening. ‘All right,’ said Carstairs, face twisted with effort. ‘So fire.’
Mallory did not fire. Instead, he kicked Carstairs very hard on the bundle of nerves inside his right knee. It was a kick that would hurt like hell, but do no permanent damage.
It worked.
Carstairs crashed to the ground, grabbing for his dagger. Mallory stamped on his hand and let him look down the black tube of the machine pistol’s muzzle.
The man on the bed said, ‘Jesoos.’
‘Shut up!’ hissed Carstairs.
‘Hold your tongue,’ said Mallory.
The man on the bed was small and stout, with curly black hair and a thick black moustache and a very bad colour. ‘Don’ kill me,’ he said. ‘Don’ kill me. For why you want to kill me?’
Mallory looked at Carstairs, then at the black-haired man. He said, in English, ‘What happened to you?’
The small man’s eyes narrowed. He said, in German, ‘Why are you speaking English?’
Mallory lay wearily back in the chair. Carstairs was spluttering like an unexploded bomb on the floor. ‘Because I’m English,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’
‘Shut your bloody mouth,’ said Carstairs, frantic. ‘I forbid you to speak.’
‘So,’ said the short man, indignation getting the better of suspicion. ‘I answer your damned question, and you tries to suffocate me. And now there is another German SS who talk English and want to know. Is it for this that I swim, I paddle, I bring –’
‘Start at the beginning,’ said Carstairs, wearily. ‘Go on.’
‘How do I know who you are?’ said the Greek.
Mallory offered the man a cigarette, lit one himself, closing his mind to the idea that outside that door was bandit country, crawling with people who would kill him as quick as blow their noses. Carstairs had had orders from Admiral Dixon to assassinate this man. Mallory had countermanded them. There would be trouble in England, too. Wearily, he took off his helmet.
The Greek made a sound half-way between a gasp and a squeak. ‘Mallory!’ he said. ‘Is no possible.’
Mallory looked at him, one eyebrow up.
‘Mount Cook,’ said the Greek. ‘My cousin Latsis he went to New Zealand for the farm. But the farm no work out good so he get work with expedition, because he know how make food in fire far from roof. He cook with you. He send me photograph, newspaper story. You and Latsis. You remember? My cousin Latsis. Sure you remember. Yes, yes, you remember.’
Mallory remembered, all right. He remembered the Mount Cook expedition, the first and last major expedition he had led in the Southern Alps, after his lone climbs. He remembered far too many people, far too much organization: the green New Zealand sky over the white prisms of the mountains, the crisp new air, the sound of too many voices; the taste of burned beans. He remembered a charming Greek with a huge nose, a ready smile, and absolutely no talent in the kitchen.
‘Big nose,’ said Mallory.
If there had been wine in the little hospital room, someone would have opened it. As it was, the Greek seized Mallory’s right hand in both of his and shook it furiously. ‘I am Spiro,’ he said. ‘And I must tell you what I told your … this man.’ Here he narrowly failed to spit on Carstairs. ‘I have got the machine.’
‘The machine?’
Carstairs said, ‘Now look here –’
‘The seven-rotor Enigma,’ said Spiro. ‘Of course.’
‘What is the seven-rotor Enigma?’ said Mallory.
‘Nothing,’ said Carstairs. ‘Spiro, I should warn you –’
‘Shut the mouth,’ said Spiro. ‘I am tired. So bloody tired you would not believe. Always I keeps my mouth shut –’
‘A little longer,’ said Mallory. ‘First, we must get you out of here.’
‘So let’s get out,’ said Spiro. ‘And then I show you machine.’
‘Show us?’ said Carstairs. ‘You don’t really mean you’ve got it?’
‘Yes,’ said Spiro. ‘What did you think?’
Carstairs’ face had gone a nasty shade of grey. ‘They told me you knew about it,’ he said. ‘That you had been sent to steal it. But that there was no hope, what with the shipwreck. I was to … silence you before you were tortured. If I’d known …’
‘Of courses,’ said Spiro, nastily. ‘First murder, then asking questions. Fool.’
Carstairs gave him a sickly smile. ‘Awfully sorry,’ he said, ‘but I’m sure you understand, what? Now, then. This is marvellous. Exactly where is it?’
Spiro turned upon him a puffed and hostile gaze. ‘I tell your friend when we are out,’ he said. ‘Just for now, it is in a safe place. Okay?’
‘Where?’
‘Out first,’ said Spiro. ‘Where later.’
&nbs
p; Miller found the workshops most impressive. In the lava bubbles of the cold volcano, the Germans had built a fair-sized factory. There were machine shops and an assembly line staffed by brown-coated engineers, with Greek slave labourers in blue boiler suits wheeling racks of parts and tools. The air was full of the limey reek of wet concrete. Someone somewhere was building something. Miller found an abandoned trolley and loaded in the explosives pack. They trundled it along the lines of benches, through tunnels into new caverns, with curved alloy castings and cylindrical motors of huge complexity with nozzles and no driveshafts, fuel and lubricant tanks, steel doors marked with skull-and-crossbones stencils, until at the end they came to a series of concrete baffles built out across the passage. Standing in front of the baffles was an SS man with a Schmeisser. Above his head, a large sign said: Eingang Verboten.
‘Looks like it,’ said Miller. ‘Plan?’
Andrea did not answer. But Miller saw from the corner of his eye the huge Greek’s right hand go to the place on his belt occupied by his knife. And not before time: from behind, there was the sound of shouting and running feet. The confusion by the lift seemed to have sorted itself out.
Somewhere ahead, a field telephone rang. The SS man picked up the receiver and gave what must have been a password. Then his eyes bulged out of their sockets and his mouth opened and no sound came out, because Andrea had walked straight up to him and slammed his knife between his fourth and fifth ribs and into his heart, and as he slid to the ground had plucked the telephone from the dead fingers. ‘Bitte?’ said Andrea.
‘Intruders,’ said the voice. ‘Two men.’ The voice gave a fair description of Andrea and Miller. ‘Shoot on sight,’ it said. ‘Tell Hauptmann Weiss.’
‘Zu Befehl,’ said Andrea. He put the telephone down and tore the wire out of the junction box.
Miller had dragged the corpse out of sight. They walked round the baffles, and found themselves confronted by a huge steel door. Andrea rapped on it with his gun-butt. ‘Hauptmann Weiss!’ he said.
A slider on the door went back. ‘Who wants him?’
‘Wolf. Immediately.’
There was the sound of grumbling. A wicket opened in the steel door. A man in SS uniform started through. The silenced Browning jumped in Miller’s hand. The SS man fell back. The two men ran in, and shut the door behind them. Two SS privates were hauling their Schmeissers into firing position. Miller shot both of them.
‘Christos,’ said Andrea.
It was the first time Miller had ever heard him blaspheme. But he could see why.
They were on the concrete floor of an enormous yard. There were very few people. In the middle of the area, a hundred yards away, stood a cylindrical object painted in a black and white checkerboard pattern that gave it the look of an obscene toy made for the children of giants.
But it was not a toy. It was a rocket – a rocket so much bigger than any other rocket Andrea or Miller had ever seen that it removed the breath from their lungs.
It was standing in a framework of gantries. High above, a roof of camouflage netting billowed gently in the night breeze. From connection points on its bulging flanks, hoses snaked away to doors behind blast-deflection baffles in the sides of the … hole, was what it was, thought Miller; not a crater, but a hole left by the parting of the ways of three magma streams in three different directions.
‘Most impressive,’ he said.
Andrea just shook his head.
Behind them, someone was hammering on the steel door.
Miller rubbed his hands. They had now entered his area of special expertise. The gentle art of destruction, of which Miller was one of the world’s great exponents.
‘Now listen here,’ said Corporal Miller to Colonel Andrea, and opened the big wooden pack. Andrea listened. After a couple of minutes, he stowed four packages in his haversack, walked across the concrete to the gantry. Whistling, he trotted up the steps until he came to the level just below what he presumed was the business end. Here he paused, and moulded the putty-like explosive to the surface, leaving a thickness in the middle. Into the thickness he pushed an eight-hour time cartridge, crushed the tube, and withdrew the tag.
When he turned, a scientist was staring at him. ‘Monitoring,’ said Andrea. ‘Telemetry.’
The man pointed at the charge, mouthing. ‘Oh, all right,’ said Andrea, and kicked the man off the platform and on to the concrete. Then he started down.
Miller was nowhere to be seen.
He had strolled across to the baffles in front of the place where the pipes came out of the wall. Brennstoff, said stencilled letters. Fuel. He unlatched the door. There were no guards: nobody except another engineer in a brown coat, who simply nodded at him as he let himself into the chamber.
It was a squared-off cave, lit with harsh fluorescent lights. On the concrete floor, rank after rank of huge steel tanks lay like sleeping pigs. Half of them were thick-walled, pressurized: liquid oxygen. The rest were of riveted steel. Miller felt a momentary gloom at the thought of all that good alcohol going to waste. Then he sighed, took a little toolkit out of his pocket, and followed the hoses to their starting point. There were two tanks, one of oxygen, one of alcohol, the one next to the other. As he had hoped, their contents were indicated by ordinary Luftwaffe-pattern flow gauges downstream of the outlet valve. Humming, Miller pulled a tub of grease from the pocket of his overall. He unscrewed the cover of the valve, scooped some of the tub’s contents out with a wooden spatula, and greased the innards heavily.
‘Wer da?’ said a voice at his shoulder.
Miller turned to see an SS man pointing a machine pistol at him.
‘Maintenance,’ he said.
‘Vas?’
Miller shoved the grease under his nose. ‘Slippery stuff, cretin,’ he said. ‘Feel.’
But the soldier, thinking perhaps about the cleanliness of his uniform, said, ‘Nein,’ and pushed the tub away.
‘Suit yourself,’ said Miller, under whose arms the sweat was falling like rain. ‘Only twenty more to do.’
The soldier grunted. The rifle muzzle dropped. ‘Get on with it, then,’ he said.
‘So what’s all the fuss about?’ said Miller.
‘Someone’s stolen some uniforms in the showers,’ said the SS man. ‘So they’re all going crazy. Now the telephones are dead.’ He yawned. ‘So they panic, these Wehrmacht bastards. Some of us have got work to do. No time to panic.’
Miller grunted, took himself along to the next tank, unscrewed the gauge cover, smeared on the paste from his tub: his own patent paste, compounded of carborundum powder, magnesium, iron oxide and powdered aluminium. When the gauges started to spin, the carborundum would heat up. When it reached the right temperature, the magnesium would ignite and start the aluminium powder reacting with the iron oxide: an exothermic reaction, they called it, meaning that it got hot as hell, hot enough to melt iron and burn concrete. Certainly enough heat to ignite alcohol. And if by any chance an oxygen tank should rupture, well, the structural integrity of the entire V4 plant would be severely compromised. If not destroyed.
Personally, Miller was betting on destruction.
He did a couple more valves, for luck. Then he shoved his hands into his pockets and strolled, whistling, out of the fuel store.
Andrea was standing by the door, Schmeisser at the ready, as if on guard. ‘Hey!’ said Miller. ‘You!’
Andrea snapped to attention.
‘Follow me!’ Miller started up the wall of the crater. He marched quickly, though his leg muscles were suddenly cracking with weariness, the blood pounding in his skull and his breath rasping in his throat. They scrambled from rock to rock, pushed under the edge of the roof of tarpaulins and camouflage nets. Behind them, the crater glowed under its blue floodlights. They began to scramble over the rocks towards the rendezvous.
Outside the hospital, the corridor was an ants’ nest. Nobody paid any attention to two SS men with a stretcher. Mallory and Carstairs carried Spiro down two fli
ghts of steel stairs. The shift was changing. Greek workers were shuffling down a corridor Mallory had not previously visited. There were few light bulbs, and a smell of cheap rice cooking, and latrines badly cleaned. A hundred yards later they rounded a corner and came to a wire-mesh fence with a gate, beside which stood a bored-looking SS man. ‘Throw it into the sea,’ said the sentry, when he saw the stretcher.
‘First, it has work to do,’ said Mallory. The sentry laughed. ‘We’ll be a while.’
‘Long as you like,’ said the sentry, heaving the gate open. ‘Don’t touch the women, though. They’ll claw it off.’
Mallory could feel Spiro’s shivering transmitted along the handles of the stretcher. He walked on.
The camp was no more nor less than the old village of the Acropolis, cordoned off from the rest of the island by a wire fence, so the precipices and fortifications that had once kept out the Turk now served to hold prisoner the Greek. It was a depressed, ruinous place, harshly lit by the floodlights set in the cliff face above. They carried the stretcher into the shadows of Athenai Street, and set it down.
Mallory lit a cigarette, drawing the harsh smoke into his lungs. In the blue-white streets, black-overalled figures came and went. There was no curiosity. A village without curiosity, thought Mallory, is a village that is dead: and for a moment he felt a pure, clear disgust for the men who had killed it.
Then he said, ‘This machine.’
The Complete Navarone Page 98
