‘Possibly not, possibly not.’ Skoda was quite unruffled. ‘Nevertheless, I shall have the information I want, and within five minutes.’ He walked unhurriedly across to his desk, pressed a button, screwed his cigarette into its jade holder, and leaned against the table, an arrogance, a careless contempt in every action, even to the leisurely crossing of the gleaming jack-boots.
Suddenly a side door was flung open and two men stumbled into the room, prodded by a rifle barrel. Mallory caught his breath, felt his nails dig savagely into the palms of his hands. Louki and Panayis! Louki and Panayis, bound and bleeding, Louki from a cut above the eye, Panayis from a scalp wound. So they’d got them too, and in spite of his warnings. Both men were shirt-sleeved; Louki, minus his magnificently frogged jacket, scarlet stanta and the small arsenal of weapons that he carried stuck beneath it, looked strangely pathetic and woebegone – strangely, for he was red-faced with anger, the moustache bristling more ferociously than ever. Mallory looked at him with eyes empty of all recognition, his face expressionless.
‘Come now, Captain Mallory,’ Skoda said reproachfully. ‘Have you no word of greeting for two old friends? No? Or perhaps you are just overwhelmed?’ he suggested smoothly. ‘You had not expected to see them so soon again, eh, Captain Mallory?’
‘What cheap trick is this?’ Mallory asked contemptuously. ‘I’ve never seen these men before in my life.’ His eyes caught those of Panayis, held there involuntarily: the black hate that stared out of those eyes, the feral malevolence – there was something appalling about it.
‘Of course not,’ Skoda sighed wearily. ‘Oh, of course not. Human memory is so short, is it not, Captain Mallory.’ The sigh was pure theatre – Skoda was enjoying himself immensely, the cat playing with the mouse. ‘However, we will try again.’ He swung round, crossed over to the bench where Stevens lay, pulled off the blanket and, before anyone could guess his intentions, chopped the outside of his right hand against Stevens’s smashed leg, just below the knee … Stevens’s entire body leapt in a convulsive spasm, but without even a whisper of a moan: he was still fully conscious, smiling at Skoda, blood trickling down his chin from where his teeth had gashed his lower lip.
‘You shouldn’t have done that, Hauptmann Skoda,’ Mallory said. His voice was barely a whisper, but unnaturally loud in the frozen silence of the room. ‘You are going to die for that, Hauptmann Skoda.’
‘So? I am going to die, am I?’ Again he chopped his hand against the fractured leg, again without reaction. ‘Then I may as well die twice over – eh, Captain Mallory? This young man is very, very tough – but the British have soft hearts, have they not, my dear Captain?’ Gently his hand slid down Stevens’s leg, closed round the stockinged ankle. ‘You have exactly five seconds to tell me the truth, Captain Mallory, and then I fear I will be compelled to rearrange these splints – Gott in Himmel! What’s the matter with that great oaf?’
Andrea had taken a couple of steps forward, was standing only a yard away, swaying on his feet.
‘Outside! Let me outside!’ His breath came in short, fast gasps. He bowed his head, one hand to his throat, one over his stomach. ‘I cannot stand it! Air! Air! I must have air!’
‘Ah, no, my dear Papagos, you shall remain here and enjoy – Corporal! Quickly!’ He had seen Andrea’s eyes roll upwards until only the whites showed. ‘The fool is going to faint! Take him away before he falls on top of us!’
Mallory had one fleeting glimpse of the two guards hurrying forwards, of the incredulous contempt on Louki’s face, then he flicked a glance at Miller and Brown, caught the lazy droop of the American’s eyelid in return, the millimetric inclination of Brown’s head. Even as the two guards came up behind Andrea and lifted the flaccid arms across their shoulders, Mallory glanced half-left, saw the nearest sentry less than four feet away now, absorbed in the spectacle of the toppling giant. Easy, dead easy – the gun dangling by his side: he could hit him between wind and water before he knew what was happening …
Fascinated, Mallory watched Andrea’s forearms slipping nervelessly down the shoulders of the supporting guards till his wrists rested loosely beside their necks, palms facing inwards. And then there was the sudden leap of the great shoulder muscles and Mallory had hurled himself convulsively sidewards and back, his shoulder socketing with vicious force into the guard’s stomach, inches below the breastbone: an explosive ouf! of agony, the crash against the wooden walls of the room and Mallory knew the guard would be out of action for some time to come.
Even as he dived, Mallory had heard the sickening thud of heads being swept together. Now, as he twisted round on his side, he had a fleeting glimpse of another guard thrashing feebly on the floor under the combined weights of Miller and Brown, and then of Andrea tearing an automatic rifle from the guard who had been standing at his right shoulder: the Schmeisser was cradled in his great hands, lined up on Skoda’s chest even before the unconscious man had hit the floor.
For one second, maybe two, all movement in the room ceased, every sound sheared off by a knife edge: the silence was abrupt, absolute – and infinitely more clamorous than the clamour that had gone before. No one moved, no one spoke, no one even breathed: the shock, the utter unexpectedness of what had happened held them all in thrall.
And then the silence erupted in a staccato crashing of sound, deafening in that confined space. Once, twice, three times, wordlessly, and with great care, Andrea shot Hauptmann Skoda through the heart. The blast of the shells lifted the little man off his feet, smashed him against the wall of the hut, pinned him there for one incredible second, arms outflung as though nailed against the rough planks in spread-eagle crucifixion; and then he collapsed, fell limply to the ground a grotesque and broken doll that struck its heedless head against the edge of the bench before coming to rest on its back on the floor. The eyes were still wide open, as cold, as dark, as empty in death as they had been in life.
His Schmeisser waving in a gentle arc that covered Turzig and the sergeant, Andrea picked up Skoda’s sheath knife, sliced through the ropes that bound Mallory’s wrists.
‘Can you hold this gun, my Captain?’
Mallory flexed his stiffened hands once or twice, nodded, took the gun in silence. In three steps Andrea was behind the blind side of the door leading to the ante-room, pressed to the wall, waiting, gesturing to Mallory to move as far back as possible out of the line of sight.
Suddenly the door was flung open. Andrea could just see the tip of the rifle barrel projecting beyond it.
‘Oberleutnant Turzig! Was ist los? Wer schoss …’ The voice broke off in a coughing grunt of agony as Andrea smashed the sole of his foot against the door. He was round the outside of the door in a moment, caught the man as he fell, pulled him clear of the doorway and peered into the adjacent hut. A brief inspection, then he closed the door, bolted it from the inside.
‘Nobody else there, my Captain,’ Andrea reported. ‘Just the one gaoler, it seems.’
‘Fine! Cut the others loose, will you, Andrea?’ He wheeled round towards Louki, smiled at the comical expression on the little man’s face, the tentative, spreading, finally ear-to-ear grin that cut through the baffled incredulity.
‘Where do the men sleep, Louki – the soldiers, I mean?’
‘In a hut in the middle of the compound, Major. This is the officers’ quarters.’
‘Compound? You mean –?’
‘Barbed wire,’ Louki said succinctly. ‘Ten feet high – and all the way round.’
‘Exits?’
‘One and one only. Two guards.’
‘Good! Andrea – everybody into the side room. No, not you, Lieutenant. You sit down here.’ He gestured to the chair behind the big desk. ‘Somebody’s bound to come. Tell him you killed one of us – trying to escape. Then send for the guards at the gate.’
For a moment Turzig didn’t answer. He watched unseeingly as Andrea walked past him, dragging two unconscious soldiers by their collars. Then he smiled. It was a wry sort of smile
.
‘I am sorry to disappoint you, Captain Mallory. Too much has been lost already through my blind stupidity. I won’t do it.’
‘Andrea!’ Mallory called softly.
‘Yes?’ Andrea stood in the ante-room doorway.
‘I think I hear someone coming. Is there a way out of that side room?’
Andrea nodded silently.
‘Outside! The front door. Take your knife. If the Lieutenant …’ But he was talking to himself, Andrea was already gone, slipping out through the back door, soundless as a ghost.
‘You will do exactly as I say,’ Mallory said softly. He took position himself in the doorway to the side room, where he could see the front entrance between door and jamb: his automatic rifle was trained on Turzig. ‘If you don’t, Andrea will kill the man at the door. Then we will kill you and the guards inside. Then we will knife the sentries at the gate. Nine dead men – and all for nothing, for we will escape anyway … Here he is now.’ Mallory’s voice was barely a whisper, eyes pitiless in a pitiless face. ‘Nine dead men, Lieutenant – and just because your pride is hurt.’ Deliberately, the last sentence was in German, fluent, colloquial, and Mallory’s mouth twisted as he saw the almost imperceptible sag of Turzig’s shoulders. He knew he had won, that Turzig had been going to take a last gamble on his ignorance of German, that this last hope was gone.
The door burst open and a soldier stood on the threshold, breathing heavily. He was armed, but clad only in a singlet and trousers, oblivious of the cold.
‘Lieutenant! Lieutenant!’ He spoke in German. ‘We heard the shots –’
‘It is nothing, Sergeant.’ Turzig bent his head over an open drawer, pretended to be searching for something to account for his solitary presence in the room. ‘One of our prisoners tried to escape … We stopped him.’
‘Perhaps the medical orderly –’
‘I’m afraid we stopped him rather permanently.’ Turzig smiled tiredly. ‘You can organise a burial detail in the morning. Meantime, you might tell the guards at the gate to come here for a minute. Then get to bed yourself – you’ll catch your death of cold!’
‘Shall I detail a relief guard –’
‘Of course not!’ Turzig said impatiently. ‘It’s just for a minute. Besides, the only people to guard against are already in here.’ His lips tightened for a second as he realised what he had said, the unconscious irony of the words. ‘Hurry up, man! We haven’t got all night!’ He waited till the sound of the running footsteps died away, then looked steadily at Mallory. ‘Satisfied?’
‘Perfectly. And my very sincere apologies,’ Mallory said quietly. ‘I hate to do a thing like this to a man like you.’ He looked round the door as Andrea came into the room. ‘Andrea, ask Louki and Panayis if there’s a telephone switchboard in this block of huts. Tell them to smash it up and any receivers they can find.’ He grinned. ‘Then hurry back for our visitors from the gate. I’d be lost without you on the reception committee.’
Turzig’s gaze followed the broad, retreating back.
‘Captain Skoda was right. I still have much to learn.’ There was neither bitterness nor rancour in his voice. ‘He fooled me completely, that big one.’
‘You’re not the first,’ Mallory reassured him. ‘He’s fooled more people than I’ll ever know … You’re not the first,’ he repeated. ‘But I think you must be just about the luckiest.’
‘Because I’m still alive?’
‘Because you’re still alive,’ Mallory echoed.
Less than ten minutes later the two guards at the gates had joined their comrades in the back room, captured, disarmed, bound and gagged with a speed and noiseless efficiency that excited Turzig’s professional admiration, chagrined though he was. Securely tied hand and foot, he lay in a corner of the room, not yet gagged.
‘I think I understand now why your High Command chose you for this task, Captain Mallory. If anyone could succeed, you would – but you must fail. The impossible must always remain so. Nevertheless, you have a great team.’
‘We get by,’ Mallory said modestly. He took a last look round the room, then grinned down at Stevens.
‘Ready to take off on your travels again, young man, or do you find this becoming rather monotonous?’
‘Ready when you are, sir.’ Lying on a stretcher which Louki had miraculously procured, he sighed in bliss. ‘First-class travel, this time, as befits an officer. Sheer luxury. I don’t mind how far we go!’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Miller growled morosely. He had been allocated first stint at the front or heavy end of the stretcher. But the quirk of his eyebrows robbed the words of all offence.
‘Right, then, we’re off. One last thing. Where is the camp radio, Lieutenant Turzig?’
‘So you can smash it up, I suppose?’
‘Precisely.’
‘I have no idea.’
‘What if I threaten to blow your head off?’
‘You won’t.’ Turzig smiled, though the smile was a trifle lopsided. ‘Given certain circumstances, you would kill me as you would a fly. But you wouldn’t kill a man for refusing such information.’
‘You haven’t as much to learn as your late and unlamented captain thought,’ Mallory admitted. ‘It’s not all that important … I regret we have to do all this. I trust we do not meet again – not at least, until the war is over. Who knows, some day we might even go climbing together.’ He signed to Louki to fix Turzig’s gag and walked quickly out of the room. Two minutes later they had cleared the barracks and were safely lost in the darkness and the olive groves that stretched to the south of Margaritha.
When they cleared the groves, a long time later, it was almost dawn. Already the black silhouette of Kostos was softening in the first feathery greyness of the coming day. The wind was from the south, and warm, and the snow was beginning to melt on the hills.
ELEVEN
Wednesday
1400–1600
All day long they lay hidden in the carob grove, a thick clump of stunted, gnarled trees that clung grimly to the treacherous, scree-strewn slope abutting what Louki called the ‘Devil’s Playground’. A poor shelter and an uncomfortable one, but in every other way all they could wish for: it offered concealment, a first-class defensive position immediately behind, a gentle breeze drawn up from the sea by the sun-baked rocks to the south, shade from the sun that rode from dawn to dusk in a cloudless sky – and an incomparable view of a sun-drenched, shimmering Aegean.
Away to their left, fading through diminishing shades of blue and indigo and violet into faraway nothingness, stretched the islands of the Lerades, the nearest of them, Maidos, so close that they could see isolated fisher cottages sparkling whitely in the sun: through that narrow, intervening gap of water would pass the ships of the Royal Navy in just over a day’s time. To the right, and even farther away, remote, featureless, back-dropped by the towering Anatolian mountains, the coast of Turkey hooked north and west in a great curving scimitar: to the north itself, the thrusting spear of Cape Demirci, rock-rimmed but dimpled with sandy coves of white, reached far out into the placid blue of the Aegean: and north again beyond the Cape, haze-blurred in the purple distance, the island of Kheros lay dreaming on the surface of the sea.
It was a breath-taking panorama, a heart-catching beauty sweeping majestically through a great semicircle over the sunlit sea. But Mallory had no eyes for it, had spared it only a passing glance when he had come on guard less than half an hour previously, just after two o’clock. He had dismissed it with one quick glance, settled by the bole of a tree, gazed for endless minutes, gazed until his eyes ached with strain at what he had so long waited to see. Had waited to see and come to destroy – the guns of the fortress of Navarone.
The town of Navarone – a town of from four to five thousand people, Mallory judged – lay sprawled round the deep, volcanic crescent of the harbour, a crescent so deep, so embracing, that it was almost a complete circle with only a narrow bottleneck of an entrance to the north-west,
a gateway dominated by searchlights and mortar and machine-gun batteries on either side. Less than three miles distant to the north-east from the carob grove, every detail, every street, every building, every caique and launch in the harbour were clearly visible to Mallory and he studied them over and over again until he knew them by heart: the way the land to the west of the harbour sloped up gently to the olive groves, the dusty streets running down to the water’s edge: the way the ground rose more sharply to the south, the streets now running parallel to the water down to the old town: the way the cliffs to the east – cliffs pock-marked by the bombs of Torrance’s Liberator Squadron – stretched a hundred and fifty sheer feet above the water, then curved dizzily out over and above the harbour, and the great mound of volcanic rock towering above that again, a mound barricaded off from the town below by the high wall that ended flush with the cliff itself: and, finally, the way the twin rows of AA guns, the great radar scanners and the barracks of the fortress, squat, narrow-embrasured, built of big blocks of masonry, dominated everything in sight – including that great, black gash in the rock, below the fantastic overhang of the cliff.
Unconsciously, almost, Mallory nodded to himself in slow understanding. This was the fortress that had defied the Allies for eighteen long months, that had dominated the entire naval strategy in the Sporades since the Germans had reached out from the mainland into the isles, that had blocked all naval activity in that 2,000 square mile triangle between the Lerades and the Turkish coast. And now, when he saw it, it all made sense. Impregnable to land attack – the commanding fortress saw to that: impregnable to air attack – Mallory realised just how suicidal it had been to send out Torrance’s squadron against the great guns protected by that jutting cliff, against those bristling rows of anti-aircraft guns: and impregnable to sea attack – the waiting squadrons of the Luftwaffe on Samos saw to that. Jensen had been right – only a guerrilla sabotage mission stood any chance at all: a remote chance, an all but suicidal chance, but still a chance, and Mallory knew he couldn’t ask for more.