The villain at the fishing boat’s wheel said, ‘That’s right.’
There were two other villains on deck: red-eyed, sun-scorched, bleeding, unshaven. But the Lieutenant-Commander’s eye had moved over the bullet-scarred decks and gunwales, and caught the glint of a lot of water through the open hatch of what was presumably the fish-hold. The Lieutenant-Commander said, ‘I wonder if you would care for a spot of lunch?’
Mallory looked as if lunch was not a word he understood. He said, ‘Could we have a stretcher party?’
‘You’ve got wounded?’
‘Not exactly wounded,’ said Mallory.
The stretcher party trotted onto the Stella’s splintered decks. Mallory pointed them towards the bunkroom. A curious noise came into being, a high, keening wail. The Petty Officer in charge of the stretcher party looked nervously over his shoulder. He had been on the Malta convoys, and he knew about Stukas.
Mallory shook his head.
‘Five for lunch?’ said the Lieutenant-Commander.
‘Six,’ said Mallory.
The Lieutenant-Commander frowned. ‘I thought you lost someone.’
‘You lose some,’ said Miller. ‘You win some.’
The stretcher came up on deck. Behind it was Jaime. Strapped to it was Lisette. And in her arms, wrapped in a red sickbay blanket, was a small bundle that wailed.
The Lieutenant-Commander gripped the rail. ‘See what you mean,’ he said.
‘I was a little more pregnant than the Captain thought,’ said Lisette. ‘I hope I cause no trouble.’
‘Quite the reverse,’ said the Lieutenant-Commander.
They walked onto the destroyer’s beautifully painted deck. A Lieutenant took them to the tiny but spotless wardroom, and poured them gigantic pink gins. ‘I expect you chaps have had quite a party,’ he said.
They stared at him, bleary-eyed, until he went as pink as his gin. A signalman trotted in, flimsy in hand. The Lieutenant read it. ‘Captain Mallory,’ he said. ‘For you.’
Mallory’s eyes were closed. ‘Read it,’ he said.
This was a horrid breach of etiquette. The Lieutenant said, ‘But –’
‘Read it.’
The Lieutenant squared his shoulders. ‘Reads as follows,
CONGRATULATIONS SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF STORM FORCE. TIMING PROVIDENTIAL. HAVE ANOTHER LITTLE JOB FOR YOU. REPORT SOONEST. JENSEN.
Mallory looked at Andrea and Miller. Their eyes were bloodshot and horrified. So, presumably, were his.
He said: ‘SIGNAL TO CAPTAIN JENSEN. MESSAGE NOT UNDERSTOOD, BAFFLED, STORM FORCE.’ He held out his glass. ‘Now before we all die of thirst, could we have a spot more gin?’
SAM LLEWELLYN
Thunderbolt from Navarone
DEDICATION
To Hex, Bert and Garlinda
PROLOGUE
Kapitän Helmholz looked at his watch. It was ten fifty-four and thirty-three seconds. Twenty-seven seconds until coffee time on the bridge of the armed merchantman Kormoran. At Kapitän Helmholz’s insistence, coffee time was ten fifty-five precisely. A precise man, Helmholz, which was perhaps why he had been appointed to the command that had put him here in this steel room with big windows, below the red and black Kriegsmarine ensign with its iron cross and swastika board-stiff in the meltemi, the afternoon wind of the Aegean. Outside the windows were numbers one and two hatches, and under the hatches the cargo, and forward of the hatches the bow gun on the fo’c’sle and the bow itself, kicking through the short, steep chop. Beyond the rusty iron bow the sea sparkled, a dazzling sheet of sapphire all the way to the horizon. Beyond the horizon lay his destination, hanging like a cloud: a solid cloud – the mountains of Kynthos, blue with distance. It was all going well; neat, tidy, perfectly on schedule. Helmholz looked at his watch again.
With fifteen seconds to go until the time appointed, there it was: the faint jingle of the coffee tray. It always jingled when Spiro carried it. Spiro was Greek and suffered from bad nerves. Kapitän Helmholz raised his clean-cut jaw, directed his ice-blue eyes down his long straight nose, and watched the fat little Greek pour the coffee into the cups and hand them round. The man’s body odour was pungent, his apron less than scrupulously clean. His face was filmed with sweat, or possibly grease. Still, thought Helmholz with unusual tolerance, degenerate Southerner he might be, but his coffee was good, and punctual. He picked up the cup, enjoying the smell of the coffee and the tension on the bridge as his junior officers waited for the Herr Kapitän to drink so they could drink too. Helmholz pretended interest in the blue smudge of Kynthos, feeling the tension rise, enjoying the sensation that in small ways as well as in large, he was the man in control.
A mile away, in an iron tube jammed with men and machinery, a bearded man called Smith, with even worse body odour than Spiro, crammed his eyes against the rubber eyepieces of his attack periscope and said, ‘Usual shambles up forward, Derek?’
‘Probably,’ said Derek, who was similarly bearded and smelt worse. ‘Blue touchpaper lit and burning.’
‘Jolly good. Fire one, then.’
From the spider’s eyes of the torpedo tubes at the bow of His Majesty’s submarine Sea Leopard, a drift of bubbles emerged, followed by the lean and purposeful Mark 8 torpedo. Tracking the deflection scale across the merchantman’s rust-brown hull, Smith stifled a nervous yawn, and wished he could smoke. Three-island ship. Next fish under the bridge. That would do it. ‘Fire two,’ he said. It was not every day you bumped into a German armed merchantman swanning around on her own in the middle of nowhere. Sitting duck, really. ‘We’ll hang around a bit,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’ll have some Schnapps.’
‘Can but hope,’ said the Number Two.
Helmholz’s feeling of control did not survive even as long as it took to put his cup to his lips. It was one of the great ironies of his life that while at sea he was an automaton, as soon as he came in sight of land he was racked with an intellectually unjustifiable impatience. Suddenly his mind flooded with pictures of the Kormoran alongside the Kynthos jetty, unloading. The sweat of impatience slimed his palms. It was crazy to be out here with no escort; against reason. But there was such a shortage of aircraft for the direct defence of the Reich that the maintenance fitters had mostly been called back to Germany. So most of the air escort was out of action. The E-boats were not much better. Which left the Kormoran alone on the windy blue Aegean, with an important cargo and a pick-up crew …
He put his coffee cup to his lips.
Over the white china rim, he saw something terrible.
He saw a gout of orange flame leap up on the starboard side, level with number one hatch. He saw number one hatch itself bulge upward and burst in a huge bubble of fire that came roaring back at him and caved in the bridge windows. That was the last thing he saw, because that same blast drove the coffee cup right through his face and out of the back of his head. His junior officers suffered similar lethal trauma, but their good manners ensured that this was to the ribcage, not the skull. Perhaps Helmholz would have been consoled that things had been in order right until the moment of oblivion.
‘Bullseye,’ said Lieutenant Smith. ‘Oh, bloody hell, she’s burning.’
Burning was not good. Even if there was no escort waiting in the sun, the plume of black smoke crawling into the sky was as good as a distress flare. His thoughts locked into familiar patterns. The Sea Leopard had been submerged a long time. If there was to be a pursuit, now was the moment to prepare for it.
‘Breath of fresh air, I think,’ said Smith. ‘Up she goes.’
And with a whine of pumps and electric engines, HMS Sea Leopard began to rise through the gin-clear sea.
They were not more than half a mile from the Kormoran. Great creakings came to them, the sound of collapsing bulkheads. Poor devils, thought Smith, in a vague sort of way; they were all poor devils in this war. They were all men stuck in little metal rooms into which water might at any minute start pouring.
‘She’s going,’ said Braith
waite, the Number Two.
Sea Leopard broke surface, shrugging tons of Aegean from her decks. Smith was up the conning tower ladder and on deck with the speed of a human cannonball. The sea was steep and blue, the wavecrests blown ice-white by the meltemi. The black smoke of the burning ship leaped from the pale flame at its roots and tumbled away towards Kynthos. She was settling fast by the bow. One torpedo in her forward hold, one under her bridge. Nice shooting, thought Smith, wrinkling his nostrils against the sharp, volatile smell of the air. Not petrol. An altogether homelier smell; the aroma of stoves in the cabins of the little yachts Smith had sailed in the North Sea before the war. Alcohol. Not Schnapps: fuel alcohol.
The submarine began to move ahead, towards the wreck. In the crust of floating debris that covered the water were shoals of long cylindrical objects. Smith’s heart jumped. They looked like torpedoes. But they were too small. Gas bottles, they were; cylinders. He put his heavy rubber-armoured glasses on them. O2, said the stencilled letters. Oxygen. No bloody good to anyone.
There was a flash and an ear-splitting bang. When Smith could take notice again, he saw a great boil of bubbles. The ship was in half. Both halves sank quickly and without fuss.
The black cloud of smoke blew away. Except for the flotsam, the sea was empty, as far as you could see from a ten-foot conning tower among eight-foot waves. Petty Officer Jordan and a couple of ratings hooked a crate and hauled it aboard. ‘Aircraft parts,’ said Jordan.
Smith was disappointed. He really had been hoping for Schnapps. ‘Better get going, what?’ he said.
Jordan went below. Sea Leopard turned her nose west, for the friendlier waters of Sicily, away from the threatening smudge of German-held Kynthos. No survivors, thought Smith, raking the waves with his glasses. Pity. Couldn’t be helped –
He paused. A couple of miles downwind, something rolled on the top of a wave, and what might have been an arm lifted. He opened his mouth to say, steer ninety degrees. A human? Wreckage? Worth a look.
But at that point his eye went up, climbing the vaults of the blue blue sky. And in that sky, he saw a little square of black dots. Aircraft.
He hit the klaxon and went down the conning tower and spun the hatch wheel. Sea Leopard sank into the deeps. Kormoran had been just another merchant ship in just another attack. Now it was time for Sea Leopard to take measures to ensure her own survival, to do more damage.
‘Tea,’ said Smith. They usually had a cup of tea sometime between eleven and half-past. Just now, he saw, looking at his watch before he wrote up the log, it was eleven minutes past.
ONE
Monday 1800–Tuesday 1000
It was raining in Plymouth, a warmish Atlantic rain that blanketed the Hoe and blurred the MTBs and MLs sliding in the Roads. In the early hours of their captivity the three men in the top-floor suite of the Hotel Majestic had spent time looking out of the window. They had long ago given up. Now they sprawled in armchairs round a low table on which were two empty brandy bottles and three overflowing ashtrays: men past their first youth and even their second, faces burned dark by the sun, eye-sockets hollow with the corrosive exhaustion of battle. They were in khaki battledress, without insignia. One was huge and black-haired. Another was tall and lean, with the hard jaw and steady eyes of a climber. The third was a rangy individual with a lugubrious face, glass of brandy in one hand, cigarette in mouth.
It was the third man who spoke. ‘This is not,’ he said, ‘what I call a vacation.’
The third man’s name was Miller. In so far as he had a rank, he was a corporal in the RAF. He was also the greatest demolition expert in the Allied armies.
The man who looked like a climber nodded, and lit a cigarette, and returned to his thoughts. This was a man you could imagine waiting for ever, if necessary; a man completely in control of himself. This was Captain Mallory, the New Zealander who before the war had been a world-famous mountaineer, and who had since done more damage to Hitler’s armies than the entire Brigade of Guards. ‘It’s better than being machine-gunned,’ he said.
Miller thought about that. ‘I guess,’ he said. He did not look sure.
‘Soon,’ said the big man, ‘there will be work to do.’ His accent was Greek, his voice soft but heavy, spreading a blanket of silence through the room. Andrea was a sleepy-eyed bear of a man, dark enough to look perpetually in need of a shave, his upper lip infested with a black stubble of regrowing moustache. He looked like the less respectable type of bandit, a mountain of sloth and debauchery. This impression had misled many of his enemies, most of them fatally. In fact, Andrea was a full colonel in the Greek army. Furthermore, he was as strong as a mobile crane, as fast and light on his feet as a cat, and as level-headed as an Edinburgh lawyer. When he spoke, which was not often, people gave him their full attention.
Miller and Mallory closed their minds to the soft rain on the window.
‘They think we are spies,’ said Andrea. ‘They think we have made a deal with somebody and run away. It is not an unreasonable suspicion. Do you blame them?’
Miller took a swig out of his glass. ‘They asked us to blow the guns on Navarone,’ he said. ‘We blew ’em. They asked us to destroy the Neretva Dam. Up goes the Neretva Dam. They sent us after the Werwolf subs. The Werwolf submarines get broken.’ His long face was lugubrious. ‘And now they tell us they have another job for us, and they pick us up in the Bay of Biscay and bring us all the way to Plymouth, and to demonstrate their everlasting admiration they lock us up in a fleabag hotel and put sentries on the door.’ He coughed, long and loose and nasty. ‘Sure, I blame them.’
‘They’ve had ten-tenths cloud since the Werwolf raid,’ said Mallory. ‘They haven’t been able to do a photographic recce, and there’s no independent confirmation. And if you remember, it wasn’t an easy job.’
‘I remember,’ said Miller, grimly.
‘So look at it like this,’ said Mallory. ‘They locked us up here because they don’t believe we could have achieved our objective. But we know we did. So we’re right and they’re wrong, and when they find out they are going to be very sorry. So it is all a very nice compliment, really.’
‘I don’t want compliments,’ said Miller. ‘I want a few drinks and some decent food and a little feminine society. For Chrissakes, Jensen knows what we can do. Why doesn’t he tell them?’
Andrea put his hands together. ‘Who can tell what Jensen knows?’
There was a small silence. Then Mallory said, ‘I think we should go and talk to him.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Miller. ‘Very amusing. There are thirty commandos on the landing.’
‘I did not,’ said Mallory, ‘notice any commandos on the windowsill.’
Miller’s face was suddenly a mask of horror. ‘Oh, no,’ he said.
Andrea smiled, a pure, innocent smile of great sweetness. ‘Captain Jensen takes cocktails in the mess at ten minutes past six. The mess is in the basement of this hotel. It is now five past.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘I looked at my watch.’
‘About the cocktail hour.’
‘There is a chambermaid here from Roumeli,’ purred Andrea. ‘I talked to the poor girl. She was very pleased – are we ready?’
The room had filled with damp air. Mallory had raised the window. He was standing with his hands on the sill, looking down the sheer face of the hotel. ‘Child could do it,’ he said. ‘We’re off.’
The cocktail bar of the Hotel Majestic in Plymouth had been a fashionable West Country rendezvous in the 1930s, largely because it was the only cocktail bar in Plymouth, a town which otherwise found its entertainment in the more violent type of public house. It was eminently suited to wartime use. For one thing, it was mostly below ground, a comforting feature for those wishing their business to be undisturbed by the Nazi bombs that had all but obliterated large areas of the city. For another, its proximity to the naval dockyard gave the barman, an alert Devonian called Enrico, privileged access to the botto
mless wells of gin which were as indispensable a fuel for His Majesty’s warships as the more conventional bunker crude.
At six, the usual crowd were in: seven-eighths male, eight-eighths in uniform, talking in low voices from faces haggard with overwork and lack of exercise. At five past, Captain Jensen walked to his usual table: a small man in naval uniform with a captain’s gold rings on the sleeve, a sardonic smile, and eyes of an astonishing mildness, except when no one was looking, at which point they might have belonged to one of the hungrier species of shark. With him was a stout man with a florid face and the heavy braid of an admiral.
‘Submarines,’ the Admiral was saying. ‘Damn cowardly, hugely overrated in my opinion.’ He gulped his pink gin and called for another.
‘Yes?’ said Jensen, taking a microscopic sip of his own gin. ‘Interesting point of view.’
‘Not fashionable, I grant you,’ said the Admiral, whose name was Dixon. ‘But fashion is a fickle jade, what? Capital ships, I can tell you. The rest of it, well … Submarines, aircraft carriers, here today, gone tomorrow.’
Jensen raised a polite eyebrow. The Admiral’s face was mottled with drink. He had recently arrived as OC Special Operations, Mediterranean, having been booted sideways from duties in the narrow seas before he could do any real damage. Jensen was interested in the Mediterranean himself – had, indeed, conceived and commanded some Special Operations of his own. It would have been reasonable to assume that he would have resented the arrival of a desk-bound blimp like Dixon as his superior officer. But if he did feel resentment, he showed no sign. Jensen was a subtle man, as his enemies had found out to their cost. Acting on Jensen’s information, two Japanese infantry divisions had fought each other for three bloody days, each under the impression that the other was commanded by Orde Wingate. A German Panzer division had vanished without trace in the Pripet Marshes, following a road on a map drawn from cartographic information supplied by Jensen’s agents. Since early in the war, others of his agents had been the unfailing fountainhead of the cigars smoked by the most important man in Britain. Jensen had a finger in all pies. He had paid close attention to the development of his own career, but even closer attention to the question of winning the war. In the second as well as the first, he was known to be completely ruthless – a fact that might have given a more intelligent man than Dixon cause for worry.