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.
Mallory looked at his watch.
‘Curfew in fifteen minutes,’ he said quietly. ‘The balloon goes up in twelve minutes. For us, another four minutes to go.’
Miller nodded, but said nothing. He filled his glass again from the beaker in the middle of the table, lit a cigarette. Mallory could see a nerve twitching high up in his temple and wondered dryly how many twitching nerves Miller could see in his own face. He wondered, too, how the crippled Casey Brown was getting on in the house they had just left. In many ways he had the most responsible job of all – and at the critical moment he would have to leave the door unguarded, move back to the balcony. One slip up there … He saw Miller look strangely at him and grinned crookedly. This had to come off, it just had to: he thought of what must surely happen if he failed, then shied away from the thought. It wasn’t good to think of these things, not now, not at this time.
He wondered if the other two were at their posts, unmolested; they should be, the search party had long passed through the upper part of the town; but you never knew what could go wrong, there was so much that could go wrong, and so easily. Mallory looked at his watch again: he had never seen a second hand move so slowly. He lit a last cigarette, poured a final glass of wine, listened without really hearing to the weird, keening threnody of the rembetika song in the corner. And then the song of the hashish singers died plaintively away, the glasses were empty and Mallory was on his feet.
‘Time bringeth all things,’ he murmured. ‘Here we go again.’
He sauntered easily towards the door, calling good night to the tavernaris. Just at the doorway he paused, began to search impatiently through his pockets as if he had lost something: it was a windless night, and it was raining, he saw, raining heavily, the lances of rain bouncing inches off the cobbled street – and the street itself was deserted as far as he could see in either direction. Satisfied, Mallory swung round with a curse, forehead furrowed in exasperation, started to walk back towards the table he had just left, right hand now delving into the capacious inner pocket of his jacket. He saw without seeming to that Dusty Miller was pushing his chair back, rising to his feet. And then Mallory had halted, his face clearing and his hands no longer searching. He was exactly three feet from the table where the four Germans were sitting.
‘Keep quite still!’ He spoke in German, his voice low but as steady, as menacing, as the Navy Colt .455 balanced in his right hand. ‘We are desperate men. If you move we will kill you.’
For a full three seconds the soldiers sat immobile, expressionless except for the shocked widening of their eyes. And then there was a quick flicker of the eyelids from the man sitting nearest the counter, a twitching of the shoulder and then a grunt of agony as the .32 bullet smashed into his upper arm. The soft thud of Miller’s silenced automatic couldn’t have been heard beyond the doorway.
‘Sorry, boss,’ Miller apologised. ‘Mebbe he’s only sufferin’ from St. Vitus’ dance.’ He looked with interest at the pain-twisted face, the blood welling darkly between the fingers clasped tightly over the wound. ‘But he looks kinda cured to me.’
‘He is cured,’ Mallory said grimly. He turned to the innkeeper, a tall, melancholy man with a thin face and mandarin moustache that drooped forlornly over either corner of his mouth, spoke to him in the quick, colloquial speech of the islands. ‘Do these men speak Greek?’
The tavernaris shook his head. Completely unruffled and unimpressed, he seemed to regard armed hold-ups in his tavern as the rule rather than the exception.
‘Not them!’ he said contemptuously. ‘English a little, I think – I am sure. But not our language. That I do know.’
‘Good. I am a British Intelligence officer. Have you a place where I can hide these men?’
‘You shouldn’t have done this,’ the tavernaris protested mildly. ‘I will surely die for this.’
‘Oh, no, you won’t.’ Mallory had slid across the counter, his pistol boring into the man’s midriff. No one could doubt that the man was being threatened – and violently threatened – no one, that is, who couldn’t see the broad wink that Mallory had given the innkeeper. ‘I’m going to tie you up with them. All right?’
‘All right. There is a trap-door at the end of the counter here. Steps lead down to the cellar.’
‘Good enough. I’ll find it by accident.’ Mallory gave him a vicious and all too convincing sh
ove that sent the man staggering, vaulted back across the counter, walked over to the rembetika singers at the far corner of the room.
‘Go home,’ he said quickly. ‘It is almost curfew time anyway. Go out the back way, and remember – you have seen nothing, no one. You understand?’
‘We understand.’ It was the young bouzouko player who spoke. He jerked his thumb at his companions and grinned. ‘Bad men – but good Greeks. Can we help you?’
‘No!’ Mallory was emphatic. ‘Think of your families – these soldiers have recognised you. They must know you well – you and they are here most nights, is that not so?’
The young man nodded.
‘Off you go, then. Thank you all the same.’
A minute later, in the dim, candle-lit cellar, Miller prodded the soldier nearest him – the one most like himself in height and build. ‘Take your clothes off!’ he ordered.
‘English pig!’ the German snarled.
‘Not English,’ Miller protested. ‘I’ll give you thirty seconds to get your coat and pants off.’
The man swore at him, viciously, but made no move to obey. Miller sighed. The German had guts, but time was running out. He took a careful bead on the soldier’s hand and pulled the trigger. Again the soft plop and the man was staring down stupidly at the hole torn in the heel of his left hand.
‘Mustn’t spoil the nice uniforms, must we?’ Miller asked conversationally. He lifted the automatic until the soldier was staring down the barrel of the gun. ‘The next goes between the eyes.’ The casual drawl carried complete conviction. ‘It won’t take me long to undress you, I guess.’ But the man had already started to tear his uniform off, sobbing with anger and the pain of his wounded hand.
Less than another five minutes had passed when Mallory, clad like Miller in German uniform, unlocked the front door of the tavern and peered cautiously out. The rain, if anything, was heavier than ever – and there wasn’t a soul in sight. Mallory beckoned Miller to follow and locked the door behind him. Together the two men walked up the middle of the street, making no attempt to seek either shelter or shadows. Fifty yards took them into the town square, where they turned right along the south side of the square, then left along the east side, not breaking step as they passed the old house where they had hidden earlier in the evening, not even as Louki’s hand appeared mysteriously behind the partly opened door, a hand weighted down with two German Army rucksacks – rucksacks packed with rope, fuses, wire and high explosive. A few yards farther on they stopped suddenly, crouched down behind a couple of huge wine barrels outside a barber’s shop, gazed at the two armed guards in the arched gateway, less than a hundred feet away, as they shrugged into their packs and waited for their cue.
They had only moments to wait – the timing had been split-second throughout. Mallory was just tightening the waist-belt of his rucksack when a series of explosions shook the centre of the town, not three hundred yards away, explosions followed by the vicious rattle of a machine-gun, then by further explosions. Andrea was doing his stuff magnificently with his grenades and homemade bombs.
Both men suddenly shrank back as a broad, white beam of light stabbed out from a platform high above the gateway, a beam that paralleled the top of the wall to the east, showed up every hooked spike and strand of barbed wire as clearly as sunlight. Mallory and Miller looked at each other for a fleeting moment, their faces grim. Panayis hadn’t missed a thing: they would have been pinned on these strands like flies on fly-paper and cut to ribbons by machine-guns.
Mallory waited another half-minute, touched Miller’s arm, rose to his feet and started running madly across the square, the long hooked bamboo pressed close to his side, the American pounding behind him. In a few seconds they had reached the gates of the fortress, the startled guards running the last few feet to meet them.
‘Every man to the Street of Steps!’ Mallory shouted. ‘Those damned English saboteurs are trapped in a house down there! We’ve got to have some mortars. Hurry, man, hurry, in the name of God!’
‘But the gate!’ one of the two guards protested. ‘We cannot leave the gate!’ The man had no suspicions, none at all: in the circumstances – the near darkness, the pouring rain, the German-clad soldier speaking perfect German, the obvious truth that there was a gun-battle being fought near-at-hand – it would have been remarkable had he shown any signs of doubt.
‘Idiot!’ Mallory screamed at him. ‘Dummkopf! What is there to guard against here? The English swine are in the Street of Steps. They must be destroyed! For God’s sake, hurry!’ he shouted desperately. ‘If they escape again it’ll be the Russian Front for all of us!’
Mallory had his hand on the man’s shoulder now, ready to push him on his way, but his hand fell to his side unneeded. The two men were already gone, running pell-mell across the square, had vanished into the rain and the darkness already. Seconds later Mallory and Miller were deep inside the fortress of Navarone.
Everywhere there was complete confusion – a bustling, purposeful confusion as one would expect with the seasoned troops of the Alpenkorps, but confusion nevertheless, with much shouting of orders, blowing of whistles, starting of truck engines, sergeants running to and fro chivvying their men into marching order or into the waiting transports. Mallory and Miller ran too, once or twice through groups of men milling round the tailboard of a truck. Not that they were in any desperate hurry for themselves, but nothing could have been more conspicuous – and suspicious – than the sight of a couple of men walking calmly along in the middle of all that urgent activity. And so they ran, heads down or averted whenever they passed through a pool of light, Miller cursing feelingly and often at the unaccustomed exercise.
They skirted two barrack blocks on their right, then the powerhouse on their left, then an ordnance depot on their right and then the Abteilung garage on their left. They were climbing, now, almost in darkness, but Mallory knew where he was to the inch: he had so thoroughly memorised the closely tallying descriptions given him by Vlachos and Panayis that he would have been confident of finding his way with complete accuracy, even if the darkness had been absolute.
‘What’s that, boss?’ Miller had caught Mallory by the arm, was pointing to a large, uncompromisingly rectangular building that loomed gauntly against the horizon. ‘The local hoosegow?’
‘Water storage tank,’ Mallory said briefly. ‘Panayis estimates there’s half a million gallons in there – magazine flooding in an emergency. The magazines are directly below.’ He pointed to a squat, box-like, concrete structure a little farther on. ‘The only entrance to the magazine. Locked and guarded.’
They were approaching the senior officers’ quarters now – the commandant had his own flat on the second storey, directly overlooking the massive, reinforced ferro-concrete control tower that controlled the two great guns below. Mallory suddenly stopped, picked up a handful of dirt, rubbed it on his face and told Miller to do the same.
‘Disguise,’ he explained. ‘The experts would consider it a bit on the elementary side, but it’ll have to do. The lighting’s apt to be a bit brighter inside this place.’
He went up the steps to the officers’ quarters at a dead run, crashed through the swing doors with a force that almost took them off their hinges. The sentry at the keyboard looked at him in astonishment, the barrel of his sub-machine-gun lining up on the New Zealander’s chest.
‘Put that thing down, you damned idiot!’ Mallory snapped furiously. ‘Where’s the commandant? Quickly, you oaf! It’s life or death!’
‘Herr – Herr Kommandant?’ the sentry stuttered. ‘He’s left – they are all gone, just a minute ago.’
‘What? All gone?’ Mallory was staring at him with narrowed, dangerous eyes. ‘Did you say “all gone”?’ he asked softly.
‘Yes. I – I’m sure they’re …’ He broke off abruptly as Mallory’s eyes shifted to a point behind his shoulder.
‘Then who the hell is that?’ Mallory demanded savagely.
The sent
ry would have been less than human not to fall for it. Even as he was swinging round to look, the vicious judo cut took him just below the left ear. Mallory had smashed open the glass of the keyboard before the unfortunate guard had hit the floor, swept all the keys – about a dozen in all – off their rings and into his pocket. It took them another twenty seconds to tape the man’s mouth and hands and lock him in a convenient cupboard; then they were on their way again, still running.
One more obstacle to overcome, Mallory thought as they pounded along in the darkness, the last of the triple defences. He did not know how many men would be guarding the locked door to the magazine, and in that moment of fierce exaltation he didn’t particularly care. Neither, he felt sure, did Miller. There were no worries now, no taut-nerved tensions or nameless anxieties. Mallory would have been the last man in the world to admit it, or even believe it, but this was what men like Miller and himself had been born for.
They had their hand-torches out now, the powerful beams swinging in wild arcs as they plunged along, skirting the massed batteries of AA guns. To anyone observing their approach from the front, there could have been nothing more calculated to disarm suspicion than the sight and sound of the two men running towards them without any attempt at concealment, one of them shouting to the other in German, both with lit torches whose beams lifted and fell, lifted and fell as the men’s arms windmilled by their sides. But these same torches were deeply hooded, and only a very alert observer indeed would have noticed that the downward arc of the light never passed backwards beyond the runners’ feet.
Suddenly Mallory saw two shadows detaching themselves from the darker shadow of the magazine entrance, steadied his torch for a brief second to check. He slackened speed.
‘Right!’ he said softly. ‘Here they come – only two of them. One each – get as close as possible first. Quick and quiet – a shout, a shot, and we’re finished. And for God’s sake don’t start clubbing ’em with your torch. There’ll be no lights on in that magazine and I’m not going to start crawling around there with a box of bloody matches in my hand!’ He transferred his torch to his left hand, pulled out his Navy Colt, reversed it, caught it by the barrel, brought up sharply only inches away from the guards now running to meet them.