The part of the German that had caught the coil had been his neck. Mallory left him to hang while he tipped the first German over the edge. Then he began to untangle the rope.
‘Okay, Schlegel?’ yelled a voice in German from above.
‘Fine,’ shouted Mallory. Thirty feet below the demilune, the corpse of the second German swung like a clock pendulum over the dizzy swoop of the cliff and the rock-smashed waves at its base.
The moon went in. Mallory let an end of the rope go. The hanging German became a patch of darkness falling through greater darkness to the ribbon of white below. He thought he saw a little splash. Then he finished untangling the rope, and let it drop to where Miller and Andrea were waiting. While they climbed, he put his boots and socks back on.
Five minutes later, Miller and Andrea were with him in the demilune, breathing heavily. He pulled up the rope, coiled it, clambered over the parapet and hung it in the branches of a stunted juniper in the cliff, out of sight below the base. By the time he got back, he could no longer hear their breathing.
‘Ready?’ he said.
The silhouettes of the two coal-scuttle helmets nodded.
Mallory looked at his watch. The radium-bright hands said 2215. He said, ‘I’ll meet you by the generators at midnight. Check the sentries on the repair sheds. Look at rotas, timings. And Dusty. Your department. Bangs and so on.’
‘Sir,’ said Miller.
‘And if you could avoid getting caught?’
Andrea’s teeth gleamed suddenly in the moonlight. ‘But without my moustache, where shall I hide?’
Mallory laughed quietly. ‘See you at midnight,’ he said. He stepped lightly onto the parapet of the demilune, reached out a hand and a foot, and stepped onto the naked cliff.
For a moment, he hung there in the moonlight, poised easily on the apparently sheer rock wall. Miller closed his eyes and held onto the first of the iron rungs leading upwards from the demilune, his stomach weightless with vertigo. Climbing a rope was one thing. This human-fly business was another altogether.
When he opened his eyes again, the little cloud was passing away from the moon, and the face of the cliff was once more covered with light. But of Mallory there was no sign.
‘Off we jolly well go,’ said Andrea.
Andrea led the way up the iron rungs in the cliff face. It was a fifty-foot climb. At the top was a sort of stile in the parapet. Before he reached it, Andrea hooked an arm through the rung, brushed the worst of the cliff-dirt from his SS smock, and pulled back the cocking lever of his Schmeisser. This was easier than thrashing around in the Pyrenees. Here, you knew whom you could trust. It was the old team, without distractions: a well-oiled machine.
He stepped up onto the parapet, keeping his shoulders hunched to reduce his mighty bulk. He probably looked nothing like either of the men Mallory had killed. But it was elementary to suppose that if two men had clambered down a set of iron rungs to a stone gull’s nest, below which was a precipice and some sea, then the two men who came back up the rungs were the same two men, even if they looked different.
He said, in his perfect German, ‘Hell, it’s cold down there.’
The parapet formed the edge of a sort of terrace ten yards wide, down a flight of stone steps from another fortified level. A line of ancient cannons stood rotting at their embrasures. At the end of the line of cannons were the silhouettes of two men with a machine gun. One of the men said, ‘Bloody cold up here, too.’
Private soldiers, thought Andrea. No problem. ‘Coffee,’ he said.
‘There’s over an hour to midnight,’ said one of the shadows. ‘Befehl ist Befehl.’
Andrea shrugged. He looked down over the edge. The moonlit precipice fell away sheer to the sea. No sign of Mallory. ‘Hurry up, you.’
Miller came up and onto the terrace.
Andrea said, ‘We’ll get the coffee and take it down.’ The note of authority in Andrea’s voice had not escaped them. An officer. Officers had their reasons.
‘Marsch,’ said Andrea.
Miller in the lead, they stamped up the stone steps from the terrace to the summit level.
‘Right turn,’ said Andrea.
The two of them were marching along a flat plain, paved with stone, silvery under the moon. To their right, the parapet marked the edge of the cliff. Ahead and to the left, the ground sloped away and downwards into the black pit, beyond which guttered the few yellow lights of San Eusebio. Immediately to the left, cracks of light showed round the poorly blacked-out panes of what must be a guardhouse. Immediately behind them was an ancient battlement, topped with modern barbed wire, that looked as if it stretched from the cliffs to the beach facing the town.
They were in. In, but horribly in the open.
Somewhere in the guardhouse a bell rang and a man’s voice began screaming: a parade-ground scream, a scream of military emergency requiring immediate action. Lights jumped on. The surface on which Andrea and Miller were standing was suddenly a harshly illuminated plain on which each was the focus of an asterisk of shadows. Men in jackboots were pouring out of doors, lining up shoulder to shoulder, distancing off, shuffling jackboot heels on the granite stones. Miller could feel the sweat now, not climbing sweat, but the sweat of being in the middle of five hundred Germans.
Andrea yelled, ‘Shun!’ Miller crashed to a halt.
They were in, all right. But not all the way.
What they had not been able to see without the floodlights was straight: a second fence, running parallel with the wall, fifteen feet tall, topped with barbed wire strung between insulators, stretching from the rim of the cliff down to the black waters of the harbour. The area between the fences was a no-man’s land, bathed in a pitiless grey-white light that limned every speck of grit, every button and buckle on the hundred-and-twenty German soldiers fallen in between the guardhouse and the sandbagged machine-gun posts on either side of the main gate.
Miller could feel a trickle of sweat on his forehead. Andrea was massive and silent at his side.
In the middle of the inner fence was another gate. The gate stood open. On either side were more machine-gun emplacements. The floodlights gleamed off the steel helmets by the guns.
Andrea’s eyes flicked round the yard. The soldiers were Wehrmacht, not SS. His shoulders squared. In a voice of brass, he said, ‘Marsch!’ Holding their Schmeissers rigidly across their chests, the two men tramped steadily across the paving. The gate loomed up ahead, a goal of darkness in the palisade of the fence. Miller could feel the mouths of the machine guns pouting at him from their emplacements. At his side, he could see that Andrea’s helmet was tilted a fraction, and there was dirt on his camouflage smock. Must have been when he went up the cliff. Wehrmacht hated dirt. Almost as much as they hated SS …
Someone, thought Miller, had raised the alarm. It must have been those guys down by the cannons. They had waited for the intruders to walk right into the hornet’s nest, and then stirred it up with a pole. They would be looking for two men in SS uniforms. And here were these two men, in wet, dirty SS uniforms, marching across the killing floor under the floodlights.
Miller marched on. A small seed of hope took root and began to grow. Nobody was doing anything about it. Maybe, thought Miller, this is an exercise. Or maybe they are so frightened of the SS that they will not even screw with the uniform. Maybe this is just a regular night in a major military installation, and you have been skulking in the mountains so long you have forgotten.
Pace by pace, the sandbags reached out and funnelled them towards the black gate. Behind them, someone was bellowing orders. On the right, three privates and a Feldwebel were standing rigidly to attention. Miller could feel the Feldwebel’s eyes flicking up and down: the eyes of a stickler, used to cataloguing a minute smear on the surface of a boot, a tiny flaw in the polish of a leather strap. And these SS guys were marching through his gate squelching with Atlantic and covered in half a cliff.
Andrea marched on, regular as a metronome, out
of the gate area and away from the eyes and into the darkness beyond. The darkness that held the docks and those U-boats, waiting to slide out of the harbour and back into their black underwater world –
They were through. The lights were dimming, shaded by the brim of Miller’s helmet. Made it, he thought. We have goddamn well made it –
The darkness was suddenly full of metallic noises. Ahead and to the left, brilliant suns of light came into being. A voice said, in English, ‘Do not touch your guns. The hands out to the sides, if you please. You are completely surrounded.’
Miller squinted to one side of the light, but saw nothing. There could be one man or a hundred men back there. A hundred seemed more likely.
Slowly and reluctantly, he spread his arms out in an attitude of crucifixion.
So this is how it really ends, thought Miller.
Figures emerged from the dark, figures in SS uniform. The figures looped the Schmeisser straps over Miller’s head and stood on tiptoe to disarm Andrea.
‘Welcome, gentlemen,’ said the SS Hauptsturmführer. His accent was very good. ‘We have been expecting you.’
Then they marched them away.
SIX
Tuesday 2300–Wednesday 0400
They marched them through a little village of wooden huts, past a wire-fenced concrete building that throbbed with diesels. Living quarters, thought Miller, collecting information he would never use. Generator shed. Down on the left, the jackhammer rattle of riveting guns sounded, and the tame lightnings of arc welders flashed blue in the dark. Dockyard stuff. A privileged overview of the whole layout.
‘Halt!’ yelled the Hauptsturmführer in charge of their escort.
They were standing on a bridge in front of a gateway in a tall, windowless granite wall. The gate was studded with iron bolts. Above it were battlements. The sweat was cold on Miller’s body, and his body ached. He was exhausted.
A wicket opened in the gate. The Hauptsturmführer stepped forward and showed a pass to the gatekeeper. There was a pause, with the sound of telephoning. Then the double gates opened, and a machine pistol jabbed Miller in the kidney. The squad marched in. The gates clashed to behind them.
They were in a yard, paved with granite, surveyed by the barrels of three machine guns sited on the battlements. Same old thing, thought Miller. ‘No imagination,’ he said.
‘But very competent,’ said Andrea, his eyes moving, mapping the yard. ‘Thorough.’
‘That’s Germans for you,’ said Miller. ‘Thorough.’
The gun muzzle behind him jabbed him painfully in the kidney. ‘Silence!’ barked the Hauptsturmführer.
‘Don’t understand,’ said Andrea.
‘Don’t speak German,’ said Miller.
And for a second there was a small warmth in the notion that although they were in the hands of the enemy, mission not accomplished and never to be so, they had something up their sleeves.
Two things. There was also Mallory, still at large.
A door opened in the wall opposite. This was not your studded oak, medieval style. This was your basic twentieth-century armour plate, four good inches of Nazi steel. It gaped wide, exhaling a stink of damp stone and sewage. Then it swallowed them in, and the door clashed to at their backs.
They went down granite stairs, through corridors with bombproof roofs and whitewash blistered with mildew. There was a spiral staircase like the entrance to a tomb. At the bottom, a corridor lit glaring white was lined with steel doors. One of the steel doors was open.
‘In there,’ said the Hauptsturmführer.
‘We will take a look,’ said Miller. ‘If we don’t like the linen, we will speak to the manager about –’
The soldier behind him smashed him on the ear with the barrel of his Schmeisser. Miller’s head rang with pain. A jackboot shot him through the door. Andrea followed. The steel door clashed shut. Outside, jackboots tramped off down the corridor.
There was brilliant white light, and dirt, and silence.
The warmth had gone. They were in the stone bowels of the earth, and it was cold.
The silence was the worst part.
The room might have been designed as a magazine, or a cell. It had a domed roof, and no window. The floor was of granite flagstones, patched with concrete. There was a grating in one corner, presumably for use as a lavatory. From it there came a vile smell.
The silence was the silence of a place buried beneath tons of masonry and rock. It was the silence of a place with no secret passages, no hope of overpowering guards, no hope of escape. The silence of the tomb.
Mallory, reflected Miller, would have hated it.
Andrea yawned. He said, ‘This is really most unpleasant.’ Then, with the massive grace of an animal that refuses to be concerned about the future because it inhabits the perpetual present, he located a cleanish patch of floor, lay down, and closed his eyes.
They had left Miller his cigarettes. He pulled out the packet, found a dry one, and lit it.
Then he waited.
The hands on his watch ticked along to eleven-thirty. At eleventhirty-one, a key clashed in the door, and five men came in.
Four of them were big Waffen-SS whose torsos strained at their camouflage smocks. The fifth was a man of about twenty-five, wearing civilian clothes: a blue double-breasted suit, with a stiff collar and a dark-blue tie. His hair was blond, with a wave. His mouth was a little red rosebud, his eyes blue slugs that crawled over the prisoners’ faces.
He waved a handkerchief under his nose. ‘Really,’ he said, in prissy, faintly-accented English. ‘They should do something about the smell.’ He smiled, a cherubic smile. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I am Herr Gruber.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Chair.’
One of the burly SS men trotted into the corridor, and returned with a hard chair. Herr Gruber flicked the seat with his handkerchief and sat down.
Miller and Andrea sat side by side, slouched against the wall. Miller yawned. Andrea watched Gruber with eyes that managed to be simultaneously hostile and condescending. In their travels in occupied Greece, both of them had had experience of the Gestapo. Neither of them understood why they were still alive. Herr Gruber was going to provide the answers.
Miller said, ‘So can we help you? Only I am kinda sleepy, and –’
Gruber had made a gesture to one of the SS men. The barrel of the man’s gun came round quickly, slamming into Miller’s already bruised ear. The pain of the cartilage trapped between metal and skull was ferocious. Miller’s eyes watered. He kept his anger down. Save it for later.
If there was a later.
‘So,’ said Herr Gruber. ‘I understand that now you would like to kill me and these soldiers.’ He smiled, his cherubic smile. ‘And the SS is not what it used to be. So I expect you could probably do it. But I would point out that the odds against you are most impressive. Even if you were to escape this cell, you would quickly lose your own lives. Which if you listen to me may not be necessary.’
Gruber watched the two men closely. Normally, when he told prisoners that there was a road to survival, they could not wait to get onto it and start running, jostling each other off the edge if necessary.
Not these two.
Their faces were haggard under the weatherbeaten glow. They were old: forty at least, and looking older. Herr Gruber could hardly believe that these people had done what they were reputed to have done: evaded a regiment of Panzerjäger, murdered a platoon of SS, found this place. But they had done it. And Herr Gruber was absolutely delighted with their success, which had turned a run-of-the-mill secret weapon into something much more important. They had played, as the saying went, into his hands.
But as they sat there, the big one with the flat, black-eyed stare of a Byzantine icon, and the thin American with the blood running red from his ear into the collar of his tunic, they did not look like men who were playing into anyone’s hands at all.
‘You have come here to destroy certain weapons,’ said Herr Gruber. ‘Which
of course we cannot permit, not only because we value these weapons, but because of the diplomatic problems this would cause for our friends in Madrid.’ The smile did not falter. ‘Soon we shall be leaving. And I think that we shall leave you behind us. You seem quite comfortable here. A rest will do you good after your busy time. After which I suspect the Guardia Civil will receive an anonymous call to say that some Allied soldiers have become … locked in what will certainly be perceived as an embarrassing position. I hope you will still be alive then.’ The smile left his face. The lips were wet and shiny, the eyes icy. ‘Though I doubt you will last long in a Spanish internment camp. The guards are trigger-happy. Also the food is neither wholesome nor plentiful, and there is much typhus.’ The smile returned. ‘And I doubt that anyone at the British Embassy will be too keen to see you again, after the embarrassment you will have caused them. Spain is, after all, a neutral country, and your presence will be held to constitute a most cynical violation of this neutrality.’ He licked his lips. In his future he saw sunlit vistas of promotion, victory, universal success. ‘Your diplomats are bringing pressure to bear on the Spanish government just now to stop our wolfram exports, and to withdraw Spanish troops from the Russian Front. Your visit here will I think change all that. In fact, it seems to me not unlikely that at the end of this little … adventure, Germany will have a new ally.’ He sighed. There is only one disappointment, of course. That is that politics prevents me from having you shot out of hand.’
Andrea spat in the general direction of the grating. The Gestapo man tutted. ‘Keep your spit,’ he said. ‘I think you will need it. Now. There is one thing. Your comrade. Where is he?’
Andrea said, ‘Comrade?’
Miller looked across at him. In the American’s posture the Gestapo man read the bitterness of defeat. Miller said to Andrea, ‘What are you trying to prove?’
Andrea said, ‘We have no comrade.’
Miller seemed to have developed a nasty twitch in his right cheek. His tongue ran round his dry lips. The Gestapo man spotted the signs of fear, an emotion he had had much practice recognising.