His gaze left Casey Brown, wandered round the room, took in what he could see of the stone walls and floor, the hooks, the ventilation ducts, the heavy grille door. A dungeon, a torture dungeon, one would have thought, but Andrea had seen such places before. A castle, they called this place, but it was really only an old keep, no more than a manor house built round the crenellated towers. And the long-dead Frankish nobles who had built these keeps had lived well. No dungeon this, Andrea knew, but simply the larder where they had hung their meat and game, and done without windows and light for the sake of . . .
The light! Andrea twisted round, looking at the smoking oil-lamp, his eyes narrowing.
‘Louki!’ he called softly. The little Greek turned round to look at him.
‘Can you reach the lamp?’
‘I think so . . . Yes, I can.’
‘Take the glass off,’ Andrea whispered. ‘Use a cloth – it will be hot. Then wrap it in the cloth, hit it on the floor – gently. The glass is thick – you can cut me loose in a minute or two.’
Louki stared at him for an uncomprehending moment, then nodded in understanding. He shuffled across the floor – his legs were still bound – reached out, then halted his hand abruptly, only inches from the glass. The peremptory, metallic clang had been only feet away, and he raised his head slowly to see what had caused it.
He could have stretched out his hand, touched the barrel of the Mauser that protruded threateningly through the bars of the grille door. Again the guard rattled the rifle angrily between the bars, shouted something he didn’t understand.
‘Leave it alone, Louki,’ Andrea said quietly. His voice was tranquil, unshadowed by disappointment. ‘Come back here. Our friend outside is not too pleased.’ Obediently Louki moved back, heard the guttural voice again, rapid and alarmed this time, the rattle as the guard withdrew his rifle quickly from the bars of the door, the urgent pounding of his feet on the flagstones outside as he raced up the passage.
‘What’s the matter with our little friend?’ Casey Brown was as lugubrious, as weary as ever. ‘He seems upset.’
‘He is upset.’ Andrea smiled. ‘He’s just realised that Louki’s hands are untied.’
‘Well, why doesn’t he tie them up again?’
‘Slow in the head he may be, but he is no fool,’ Andrea explained. ‘This could be a trap and he’s gone for his friends.’
Almost at once they heard a thud, like the closing of a distant door, the sound of more than one pair of feet running down the passage, the tinny rattling of keys on a ring, the rasp of a key against the lock, a sharp click, the squeal of rusty hinges and then two soldiers were in the room, dark and menacing with their jackboots and ready guns. Two or three seconds elapsed while they looked around them, accustoming their eyes to the gloom, then the man nearest the door spoke.
‘A terrible thing, boss, nothin’ short of deplorable! Leave ’em alone for a couple of minutes and see what happens? The whole damn bunch tied up like Houdini on an off night!’
There was a brief, incredulous silence, then all three were sitting upright, staring at them. Brown recovered first.
‘High time, too,’ he complained. ‘Thought you were never going to get here.’
‘What he means is that he thought we were never going to see you again,’ Andrea said quietly. ‘Neither did I. But here you are, safe and sound.’
‘Yes,’ Mallory nodded. ‘Thanks to Dusty and his nasty suspicious mind that cottoned on to Panayis while all the rest of us were asleep.’
‘Where is he?’ Louki asked.
‘Panayis?’ Miller waved a negligent hand. ‘We left him behind – he met with a sorta accident.’ He was across at the other side of the room now, carefully cutting the cords that pinioned Brown’s injured leg, whistling tunelessly as he sawed away with his sheath knife. Mallory, too, was busy, slicing through Andrea’s bonds, explaining rapidly what had happened, listening to the big Greek’s equally concise account of what had befallen the other in the keep. And then Andrea was on his feet, massaging his numbed hands, looking across at Miller.
‘That whistling, my Captain. It sounds terrible and, what is worse, it is very loud. The guards –’
‘No worry there,’ Mallory said grimly. ‘They never expected to see Dusty and myself again . . . They kept a poor watch.’ He turned round to look at Brown, now hobbling across the floor.
‘How’s the leg, Casey?’
‘Fine, sir.’ Brown brushed it aside as of no importance. ‘I got through to Cairo, tonight, sir. The report –’
‘It’ll have to wait, Casey. We must get out as fast as we can. You all right, Louki?’
‘I am heart-broken, Major Mallory. That a countryman of mine – a trusted friend –’
‘That too, will have to wait. Come on!’
‘You are in a great hurry,’ Andrea protested mildly. They were already out in the passage, stepping over the cell guard lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. ‘Surely if they’re all like our friend here –’
‘No danger from this quarter,’ Mallory interrupted impatiently. ‘The soldiers in the town – they’re bound to know by now that we’ve either missed Panayis or disposed of him. In either case they’ll know that we’re certain to come hot-footing out here. Work it out for yourself. They’re probably half-way here already, and if they do come . . .’ He broke off, stared at the smashed generator and the ruins of Casey Brown’s transmitter set lying in one corner of the entrance hall. ‘Done a pretty good job on those, haven’t they?’ he said bitterly.
‘Thank the Lord,’ Miller said piously. ‘All the less to tote around, is what I say. If you could only see the state of my back with that damned generator –’
‘Sir!’ Brown had caught Mallory’s arm, an action so foreign to the usually punctilious petty officer that Mallory halted in surprise. ‘Sir, it’s terribly important – the report, I mean. You must listen, sir!’
The action, the deadly earnestness, caught and held Mallory’s full attention. He turned to face Brown with a smile.
‘OK, Casey, let’s have it,’ he said quietly. ‘Things can’t possibly be any worse than they are now.’
‘They can, sir.’ There was something tired, defeated about Casey Brown, and the great, stone hall seemed strangely chill. ‘I’m afraid they can, sir. I got through tonight. First-class reception. Captain Jensen himself, and he was hopping mad. Been waiting all day for us to come on the air. Asked how things were, and I told him that you were outside the fortress just then, and hoped to be inside the magazine in an hour or so.’
‘Go on.’
‘He said that was the best news he’d ever had. He said his information had been wrong, he’d been fooled, that the invasion fleet didn’t hole up overnight in the Cyclades, that they had come straight through under the heaviest air and E-boat escort ever seen in the Med, and are due to hit the beaches on Kheros some time before dawn tomorrow. He said our destroyers had been waiting to the south all day, moved up at dusk and were waiting word from him to see whether they would attempt the passage of the Maidos Straits. I told him maybe something could go wrong, but he said not with Captain Mallory and Miller inside and besides he wasn’t – he couldn’t risk the lives of twelve hundred men on Kheros just on the off chance that he might be wrong.’ Brown broke off suddenly and looked down miserably at his feet. No one else in the hall moved or made any sound at all.
‘Go on,’ Mallory repeated in a whisper. His face was very pale.
‘That’s all, sir. That’s all there is. The destroyers are coming through the Straits at midnight.’ Brown looked down at his luminous watch. ‘Midnight. Four hours to go.’
‘Oh, God! Midnight!’ Mallory was stricken, his eyes for the moment unseeing, ivory-knuckled hands clenched in futility and despair. ‘They’re coming through at midnight! God help them! God help them all now!’
FIFTEEN
Wednesday Night
2000–2115
Eight-thirty, his watch said. Eight-thi
rty. Exactly half an hour to curfew. Mallory flattened himself on the roof, pressed himself as closely as possible against the low retaining wall that almost touched the great, sheering sides of the fortress, swore softly to himself. It only required one man with a torch in his hand to look over the top of the fortress wall – a cat-walk ran the whole length of the inside of the wall, four feet from the top – and it would be the end of them all. The wandering beam of a torch and they were bound to be seen, it was impossible not to be seen: he and Dusty Miller – the American was stretched out behind him and clutching the big truck battery in his arms – were wide open to the view of anyone who happened to glance down that way. Perhaps they should have stayed with the others a couple of roofs away, with Casey and Louki, the one busy tying spaced knots in a rope, the other busy splicing a bent wire hook on to a long bamboo they had torn from a bamboo hedge just outside the town, where they had hurriedly taken shelter as a convoy of three trucks had roared past them heading for the castle Vygos.
Eight thirty-two. What the devil was Andrea doing down there, Mallory wondered irritably and at once regretted his irritation. Andrea wouldn’t waste an unnecessary second. Speed was vital, haste fatal. It seemed unlikely that there would be any officers inside – from what they had seen, practically half the garrison were combing either the town or the countryside out in the direction of Vygos – but if there were and even one gave a cry it would be the end.
Mallory stared down at the burn on the back of his hand, thought of the truck they had set on fire and grinned wryly to himself. Setting the truck on fire had been his only contribution to the night’s performance so far. All the other credit went to either Andrea or Miller. It was Andrea who had seen in this house on the west side of the square – one of several adjoining houses used as officers’ billets – the only possible answer to their problem. It was Miller, now lacking all time-fuses, clockwork, generator and every other source of electric power who had suddenly stated that he must have a battery, and again it was Andrea, hearing the distant approach of a truck, who had blocked the entrance to the long driveway to the keep with heavy stones from the flanking pillars, forcing the soldiers to abandon their truck at the gates and run up the drive towards their house. To overcome the driver and his mate and bundle them senseless into a ditch had taken seconds only, scarcely more time than it had taken Miller to unscrew the terminals of the heavy battery, find the inevitable jerry-can below the tailboard and pour the contents over engine, cab and body. The truck had gone up in a roar and whoosh of flames: as Louki had said earlier in the night, setting petrol-soaked vehicles on fire was not without its dangers – the charred patch on his hand stung painfully – but, again as Louki had said it had burned magnificently. A pity, in a way – it had attracted attention to their escape sooner than was necessary – but it had been vital to destroy the evidence, the fact that a battery was missing. Mallory had too much experience of and respect for the Germans ever to underrate them: they could put two and two together better than most.
He felt Miller tug at his ankle, started, twisted round quickly. The American was pointing beyond him, and he turned again and saw Andrea signalling to him from the raised trap in the far corner: he had been so engrossed in his thinking, the giant Greek so catlike in his silence, that he had completely failed to notice his arrival. Mallory shook his head, momentarily angered at his own abstraction, took the battery from Miller, whispered to him to get the others, then edged slowly across the roof, as noiselessly as possible. The sheer deadweight of the battery was astonishing, it felt as if it weighed a ton, but Andrea plucked it from his hands, lifted it over the trap coaming, tucked it under one arm and nimbly descended the stairs to the tiny hall-way as if it weighed nothing at all.
Andrea moved out through the open doorway to the covered balcony that overlooked the darkened harbour, almost a hundred vertical feet beneath, Mallory, following close behind, touched him on the shoulder as he lowered the battery gently to the ground.
‘Any trouble?’ he asked softly.
‘None at all, my Keith.’ Andrea straightened. ‘The house is empty. I was so surprised that I went over it all, twice, just to make sure.’
‘Fine! Wonderful! I suppose the whole bunch of them are out scouring the country for us – interesting to know what they would say if they were told we were sitting in their front parlour?’
‘They would never believe it,’ Andrea said without hesitation. ‘This is the last place they would ever think to look for us.’
‘I’ve never hoped so much that you’re right!’ Mallory murmured fervently. He moved across to the latticed railing that enclosed the balcony, gazed down into the blackness beneath his feet and shivered. A long, long drop and it was very cold, that sluicing, vertical rain chilled one to the bone . . . He stepped back, shook the railing.
‘This thing strong enough, do you think?’ he whispered.
‘I don’t know, my Keith. I don’t know at all.’ Andrea shrugged. ‘I hope so.’
‘I hope so,’ Mallory echoed. ‘It doesn’t really matter. This is how it has to be.’ Again he leaned far out over the railing, twisted his head to the right and upwards. In the rain-filled gloom of the night he could just faintly make out the still darker gloom of the mouth of the cave housing the two great guns, perhaps forty feet away from where he stood, at least thirty feet higher – and all vertical cliff-face between. As far as accessibility went, the cave mouth could have been on the moon.
He drew back, turned round as he heard Brown limping on to the balcony.
‘Go to the front of the house and stay there, Casey, will you? Stay by the window. Leave the front door unlocked. If we have any visitors let them in.’
‘Club ’em, knife ’em, no guns,’ Brown murmured. ‘Is that it, sir?’
‘That’s it, Casey.’
‘Just leave this little thing to me,’ Brown said grimly. He hobbled away through the doorway.
Mallory turned to Andrea. ‘I make it twenty-three minutes.’
‘I, too. Twenty-three minutes to nine.’
‘Good luck,’ Mallory murmured. He grinned at Miller. ‘Come on, Dusty. Opening time.’
Five minutes later, Mallory and Miller were seated in a taverna just off the south side of the town square. Despite the garish blue paint with which the tavernaris had covered everything in sight – walls, tables, chairs, shelves all in the same execrably vivid colour (blue and red for the wine shops, green for the sweetmeat shops was the almost invariable rule throughout the islands) – it was a gloomy, ill-lit place, as gloomy almost as the stern, righteous, magnificently-moustached heroes of the Wars of Independence whose dark, burning eyes glared down at them from a dozen faded prints scattered at eye-level along the walls. Between each pair of portraits was a brightly-coloured wall advertisement for Fix’s beer: the effect of the décor, taken as a whole, was indescribable, and Mallory shuddered to think what it would have been like had the tavernaris had at his disposal any illumination more powerful than the two smoking oil-lamps placed on the counter before him.
As it was, the gloom suited him well. Their dark clothes, braided jackets, tsantas and jack-boots looked genuine enough, Mallory knew, and the black-fringed turbans Louki had mysteriously obtained for them looked as they ought to look in a tavern where every islander there – about eight of them – wore nothing else on their heads. Their clothes had been good enough to pass muster with the tavernaris – but then even the keeper of a wine shop could hardly be expected to know every man in a town of five thousand, and a patriotic Greek, as Louki had declared this man to be, wasn’t going to lift even a faintly suspicious eyebrow as long as there were German soldiers present. And there were Germans present – four of them, sitting round a table near the counter. Which was why Mallory had been glad of the semi-darkness. Not, he was certain, that he and Dusty Miller had any reason to be physically afraid of these men. Louki had dismissed them contemptuously as a bunch of old women – headquarters clerks, Mallory guessed – who
came to this tavern every night of the week. But there was no point in sticking out their necks unnecessarily.
Miller lit one of the pungent, evil-smelling local cigarettes, wrinkling his nose in distaste.
‘Damn funny smell in this joint, boss.’
‘Put your cigarette out,’ Mallory suggested.
‘You wouldn’t believe it, but the smell I’m smelling is a damn sight worse than that.’
‘Hashish,’ Mallory said briefly. ‘The curse of these island ports.’ He nodded over towards a dark corner. ‘The lads of the village over there will be at it every night in life. It’s all they live for.’
‘Do they have to make that gawddamned awful racket when they’re at it?’ Miller asked peevishly. ‘Toscanini should see this lot!’
Mallory looked at the small group in the corner, clustered round the young man playing a bouzouko – a long-necked mandolin – and singing the haunting, nostalgic rembetika songs of the hashish smokers of the Piraeus. He supposed the music did have a certain melancholy, lotus-land attraction, but right then it jarred on him. One had to be in a certain twilit, untroubled mood to appreciate that sort of thing; and he had never felt less untroubled in his life.
‘I suppose it is a bit grim,’ he admitted. ‘But at least it lets us talk together, which we couldn’t do if they all packed up and went home.’
‘I wish to hell they would,’ Miller said morosely. ‘I’d gladly keep my mouth shut.’ He picked distastefully at the meze – a mixture of chopped olives, liver, cheese and apples – on the plate before him: as a good American and a bourbon drinker of long standing he disapproved strongly of the invariable Greek custom of eating when drinking. Suddenly he looked up and crushed his cigarette against the table top. ‘For Gawd’s sake, boss, how much longer?’
Mallory looked at him, then looked away. He knew exactly how Dusty Miller felt, for he felt that way himself – tense, keyed-up, every nerve strung to the tautest pitch of efficiency. So much depended on the next few minutes; whether all their labour and their suffering had been necessary, whether the men on Kheros would live or die, whether Andy Stevens had lived and died in vain. Mallory looked at Miller again, saw the nervous hands, the deepened wrinkles round the eyes, the tightly compressed mouth, white at the outer corners, saw all these signs of strain, noted them and discounted them. Excepting Andrea alone, of all the men he had ever known he would have picked the lean, morose American to be his companion that night. Or maybe even including Andrea. ‘The finest saboteur in southern Europe’ Captain Jensen had called him back in Alexandria. Miller had come a long way from Alexandria, and he had come for this alone. Tonight was Miller’s night.