‘How long till dark?’ said Mallory.
Clytemnestra shrugged. ‘Forty minutes,’ she said.
Mallory looked at the slow laborious trudge of Wills, the agonized hobble of Nelson. The men on the parachutes were fresh. The people on this cliff path had climbed five thousand feet, and had not slept for twenty-four hours.
The path they were on was a narrow ledge running across the face of a sheer cliff. Ten minutes later, the ledge joined another ledge. The main path went off to the left. Another, scarcely visible, snaked away to the right. Andrea spoke at length with Clytemnestra, in Greek, then to Mallory. They bent their heads over the map. Then Mallory said, ‘Carstairs. You go with Clytemnestra and the wounded. Andrea, Miller, come with me.’
‘Smashing,’ said Carstairs, with a frank Boy Scout grin.
Mallory did not smile back. He said, ‘The Germans will be here in twenty minutes. Get a move on.’
Carstairs got a move on. The small, shuffling file disappeared up the thready path to the right.
Miller sat on a boulder. Twelve hundred feet below his boots, stunted olives rocked in the small evening wind. Beyond them, a file of tiny grey figures trotted towards the base of the slope. Miller lit a cigarette.
‘Okay,’ said Mallory. ‘Now listen.’
Miller listened. When Mallory had finished, he said, ‘Are you serious?’
Mallory looked him in the eye, hard and steely. He said, ‘What do you think, Corporal?’
Miller sighed. He reached above his head and stubbed his cigarette on the left-hand fork of the track, wide, obvious, well-used by men and goats. He said, ‘I guess you’re serious.’
‘Thank you,’ said Mallory. ‘Now, shall we get on with it?’
Averting his eyes from the frightful emptiness below, Miller began to scramble along the left-hand path.
It did not take long to find what he was looking for: a place where the ledge bulged out from the cliff face on a cornice of rock, with a little pile of debris at its inner edge. Miller dropped to his knees and began scuffling in the dirt on the inside of the ledge. He found what he was looking for: a letter-box-sized crack in the rock. Reverently, he opened his pack, took out four sticks of gelignite, and taped to them a time pencil. He snapped the glass ampoule in the time pencil, tamped the bomb into the letter box, wedged rocks over the top, and replanted the rosemary and spurge he had disturbed with his digging.
‘Done,’ he said.
Andrea nodded. The lower limb of the sun was kissing the horizon, drawing a road of fire across the sea. He was watching the place where he and Mallory had been hiding when they first heard the Storch. It lay empty under the sky, pink in the sunset.
Then it was not empty any more.
Suddenly, the empty area was striped with the shadows of men; one shadow, then two, shadows that dispersed quickly into the rough ground, taking cover. Andrea had counted sixty parachutes. He waited until he had lost count of the men on the outcrop. Then he took his Mauser, settled the sight on one of the helmets down below, and took up the first pressure on the trigger.
‘Ready?’ he said to Miller.
Miller was never ready for this kind of thing. But he nodded anyway. Andrea fired.
A quarter of a mile up the path, Mallory had found a narrow chimney; a seam between two plates of rock, polished smooth by the action of winter rains. He settled the two coils of silk climbing rope around his shoulders. Then he put in a boot, turned his foot to wedge the sole, stepped up, and raised his hand. He heard the crash of Andrea’s rifle, and the clatter of a Schmeisser. He kept climbing. The crack got narrower up here. He jammed in his right forefinger, and bent it to enlarge the knuckle. With his free boot, he groped the wall until he found a hold, no more than a pimple of rock. The pyramid nail of his boot bit home. He moved the first foot, got a new hold in the crack with the knuckle of his other hand. If he had looked down, he would have seen that he was already a man’s height above the ledge with the path, that the precipice was opening out below him. He did not look down. Instead, he concentrated on the rock-sheets in front of him, climbing from the hips, body out from the wall. Before the war, they had called it the Mallory Float; a perfectly balanced stance on the face that took him drifting up, defying gravity. One of the great rock climbers, they called him: and one of the great mountaineers. A man who could walk for thirty-six hours, and climb five thousand vertical feet at the end of it.
As long as nobody shot him.
After a couple of hundred feet the crack petered out. Mallory paused, drove in a spike with the leather-bound lead hammer in his belt, belayed to it the first of the two silk climbing ropes around his shoulders, and paid out the coil. The rope fell away into the shadows below. Then he went on up, climbing on hammered-in spikes until he came to a zone of rougher rock; rock about as rough as an old brick wall. To any climber except Mallory, it would have looked smooth and impossible. To Mallory, it might as well have been a stepladder. He went on up, slow and steady, not bothering with spikes. At three hundred and thirty feet, he came upon an area of rotten rock that gave way to soil. He had arrived at the top.
He belayed the second rope to a boulder, and dropped the free end down the face of the cliff. Then he lit a cigarette and told the weary ache in his limbs to be still, and settled down to wait.
Andrea and Miller were sitting down too; but not for reasons of repose. The inside of the path represented dead ground, so on the inside of the path they were sitting, backs to the wall, while a steady covering fire from the German troops below whanged up into the cliff face above their heads. Every now and then, Andrea stuck the barrel of his Schmeisser over the edge and squeezed off a short burst.
‘Go,’ said Andrea, after ten minutes.
They went.
As they belly-crawled along the ledge, the sun was a small red glow on the western horizon, and the stars were coming out. Andrea leaned over the path edge, blasted half-a-dozen rounds into the void, ducked quickly back, and carried on up the path. The space below suddenly crackled with blue-red muzzle flashes, the bullets splashing against the rocks safely to the rear. On the hook, thought Miller, with a solemn cheerfulness. Bless your innocent hearts.
On they crawled, the full quarter-mile, until Miller’s hand brushed the rope. He took a deep breath, and swallowed whatever it is that you swallow when your mouth is as dry as a Saharan cave floor. Then he grasped the rope and started to climb.
Down on the ledge, Andrea took the clip from his Schmeisser and groped for one he had reserved in a special pocket of his pack. His fingers found the two tapes he had wrapped around the magazine to identify it as tracer. He slapped it into the machine pistol, and fired: fired along the line of the ledge this time, back the way he and Miller had come, five rounds, tracer. The bullets smacked rock, tumbled in a firework display that said: up here; we went this-away. Then he fired another burst off to the right. From below, on the plain where the parachutists had landed, and where a radio operator might be sitting, it would look as if a battle was starting on the path.
Andrea slung his Schmeisser, gripped the rope and started to climb. When he reached the spike, he coiled the first rope and worked the spring-steel piton out of the rock. Then, light as a feather, he went up the second rope and over the cliff edge.
Mallory and Miller were sitting with their backs against boulders, dim, looming figures against the stars. From three hundred feet below, there came the clink of metal and the crunch of jackboots on shale: men, running in silence, chasing an enemy.
An enemy who was no longer there.
When the sound of pursuit had died away, Mallory, Miller and Andrea turned their faces east, for the precipices of Mount Skaphos and the plains beyond.
Private Emmanuel Gruber was a proud man and a good soldier. He was proud to be in the Sonderkommando: proud that Hauptmann Wolf had singled him out, proud that he had achieved the objectives of the training course, proud to have received a hint that he was in line for promotion to Feldwebel. And prou
d that tonight he had been ordered to bring up the rear of the pursuit squad; forty men, another twenty waiting at base as reinforcements. It was safe back here, too; though of course (Gruber told himself hastily) if Hauptmann Wolf ordered him into the jaws of death he would leap in without hesitation.
So on went Gruber at the double, supremely fit, right shoulder to the cliff, left shoulder to the void. He could have run all night.
Except that on the inside of the widening in the path he had passed a second previously, the time pencil of Miller’s blasting charge had come to the end of its sixty-minute career.
A gout of flame blasted straight out of the cliff face, and a clap of thunder drove Gruber’s eardrums together in the middle of his head. He staggered, head ringing. A flying chunk of stone caught him in the small of the back, and he would have staggered again, except that the foot meant to take his weight found not ground but space.
He fell with a long, depressed cry, bounced twice, and had time to regain terminal velocity before he went into the olive trees below.
So he was not in a position to see what his comrades in the pursuit squad of the Wolf commando saw: that in the area of the blast the path they had been following no longer existed, and in its place was a cliff face as clear and lacking in footholds as a billiard table stood on its end.
Not that there was any point worrying about it. As the Leutnant lost no time in explaining, nobody was going back anyway. The order of the night was hot pursuit. The enemy had attempted to mine the path. Poor Gruber had taken what had been meant for all of them. Meanwhile, there was no time for hanging around.
The Sonderkommando turned and resumed the chase.
They trotted up the path, along the cliff, into a steep-sided valley. It was dark, and the radio did not work in this place of cliffs and ravines. After three hours’ running, they found themselves on a bare mountainside, in a steep-canted field of boulders that stood silent and ominous on the starlit rock. Here the Leutnant rejected with fury a suggestion that they should bivouac, the better to continue the search at dawn. ‘Vorwärts!’ he cried. ‘Onward!’
At that precise moment, seven miles, three gorges and two thousand five hundred vertical feet away, Able Seaman Nelson was reaching the end of his tether.
They were still walking. Nelson had difficulty remembering a time when he had not been walking. His feet were sliding in his boots, whether in blood or the fluid of burst blisters he did not dare look. The cut in his arm had always been painful. Now it had set up a deep, deadly throb that travelled up the inside of his bicep and into his armpit. It would have been at the centre of his world, that throbbing, had there been room for it.
But all there was room for at the centre of Nelson’s world was terror.
Not that he was a coward. You could not be an AB on an MTB, and fight your way through nights full of tracer bullets and high-octane petrol, and be a coward. Ashore in Portsmouth, after an air raid, he had come close to a George Cross, burrowing into the teetering pile of rubble that had once been a house, ARP and fire brigade shouting at him, don’t be a bloody fool, come back, she’ll collapse; but Nelson had kept going, found the middle-aged woman in the flowery housecoat, dragged her back out into the rain and the searchlights and the metallic clink of falling shrapnel.
But the MTB and Portsmouth had been with his mates. Now, Nelson had a hole in his arm the size of a slit trench, and he was blundering around some mountains with the Old Man, who had gone barmy, four bandits in uniforms without insignia, and a Greek bint with rolling eyes and grinding teeth who gave him the willies. It was the people and the mountains that were getting to Nelson. At sea, you fought your gun and took your chance with your mates, and while you did not like it unless you were bloody cracked, you could put up with it, like. The dry land was too bloody dry, and the people were too bloody violent, and you could see the look in their eye while they tried to kill you, and that was just not bloody on. A couple of hours ago there had been all that shooting down the hill, and a hell of a bang, God knew what that had been about. And now they were on this terrible path, black as the inside of a cow, and any minute now some Jerry might pop out from behind a rock and say, boo, you’re dead –
For the seventy-third time since sunset, Nelson caught his boot on a rock, stumbled, jolted his arm, and bit his lip to stop himself whimpering. Because this was not going to end. You had to face it. Things were going to get worse, not better. It gave him the willies, and that was bleeding that.
Ahead, Clytemnestra’s voice said something in Greek. Nelson followed the dim hulk of the person in front up a steep slope towards a small light that had somehow started to shine. Another bloody cave.
But it was not a cave. The walls were too smooth, the angles too perfect. In the middle of the floor was a sort of raised stone plinth. On the plinth, the big Greek man – he must have joined the file in the dark, though Nelson could not remember seeing it happen – was spreading the little tins of compo rations, a bottle of brandy, a radio.
Nelson slumped to the ground, propped his back against the wall, and let his head loll on his breast. The lanky American spoke, in Greek. Clytemnestra replied. Nelson did not like not understanding. ‘What does she say?’ he said, querulous.
Miller looked at him, saw a blue-white face, black circles under haunted eyes. ‘I said what is this place. She said it’s a tomb.’ He gestured at the plinth. ‘The dining table there is where they laid the stiff. Eat something.’ He waved a hand at the compo and the brandy.
But Nelson’s stomach was a small, clenched fist. He could not eat. He could only sit there and strain his ears at the night, at the thousand miniature nights contained in the shadows of this house of the dead. This house of the soon-to-be-dead …
He tried to get up. The muscles of his legs were too stiff. He toppled sideways. Someone was shouting, frantic, in his voice. Hands grabbed him, laid him out, tipped brandy down his throat.
He fell into a sort of coma. He was dimly aware of someone doing something to his bad arm, of a pinprick. Then there was a deep, buzzing silence.
They sat around the stove. The little blue flames cast fluttering shadows on the tomb’s ceiling. Nelson and Wills sprawled along a wall, Nelson’s arm new-dressed, half a syrette of morphine running in his blood; Wills snoring in a heavy, exhausted drone. Clytemnestra had folded her hands over her stomach and put her head on her pack, and was sleeping quietly as the tomb’s original tenant.
The remaining four men did not sleep; not yet. Their cigarettes pulsed and glowed. They were resting, but it was the rest of a hunting animal, or a latched spring, ready to leap from repose into violence with no intervening period of acceleration. Carstairs sat a little apart from the others, cleaning his machine pistol.
Mallory said, ‘Captain Carstairs, the court martial is in session.’
Carstairs raised an eyebrow, not lifting his eyes from the breech mechanism.
Mallory said, ‘By your actions this afternoon you have endangered the lives of your comrades and the success of the operation.’
‘Operational necessity,’ said Carstairs. He yawned, and lay back on the musty floor.
Andrea spoke. His voice had a note in it that Mallory had never heard before, and in the flicker of the stove-flames his bear-like shoulders seemed to fill the vault of the tomb. ‘Captain Carstairs,’ he said. ‘The charge is that today, having been posted sentry, you did desert your post in the face of the enemy. The penalty is death. You may speak in your defence.’
Under the cold lash of that voice, Carstairs seemed for a moment to freeze. Then he laughed, a thin, nervous laugh. ‘I don’t think Admiral Dixon will agree,’ he said.
‘I am not interested in Admiral Dixon.’ Andrea’s hands moved. There was the metallic sound of a Schmeisser cocking lever.
Carstairs looked at his own weapon, in pieces on the groundsheet. He looked at Mallory and Miller, and found no comfort. His face was impassive, faintly quizzical, but there was a little sheen of sweat on the upp
er lip. He said, ‘If you put it like that.’ He took out the gold case, and selected a cigarette with deliberation.
There is an explanation,’ he said, eventually. ‘I have orders of my own, from Admiral Dixon. Who incidentally will not be very pleased to hear that you see fit to override his authority and haul me in front of a kangaroo court –’
The Schmeisser in Andrea’s hand moved upwards an inch, so Carstairs could see all the way down the barrel. Carstairs did his best to look bored. ‘But since you want an explanation, you can have one. There was a survivor.’
‘A survivor?’
‘After the Kormoran was torpedoed. Before she went down. Apparently someone hopped on to a life raft, bit of driftwood, God knows, and paddled off downwind and landed on Kynthos. This person was picked up by the Germans, in a very bad way, in a coma, actually, just before the partisans blocked the road.’
‘How do we know this?’ said Andrea.
‘Agent in Parmatia radioed in,’ said Carstairs. ‘That’s who I was looking for in town last night.’ He made it sound as if he had been doing the rounds of the night spots. ‘But apparently they got themselves killed shortly after they sent the signal.’ Andrea’s face was like stone. ‘Anyway, they told me in the village that this survivor was in the ambulance, in the convoy heading over the road as soon as it opened. Like today. He’s still unconscious, apparently. Important fellow in ways I am not at liberty to disclose. I have orders to debrief him. If you don’t like that, you can always check with Admiral Dixon, or your Captain, what d’ye call him, Jensen.’
Andrea said, ‘That’s it?’
Carstairs shrugged, nonchalant as his voice. His eyes were not nonchalant, though. They shifted between Mallory and Miller. ‘Just about,’ he said. He put his hands on his knees, and composed his features into something like manly frankness. ‘Look here. I can’t say I liked sliding off into the blue. But I thought, well, an hour and a half, make a recce, and it would be just my neck, not everyone else’s. How was I to know that Captain Mallory would come bumbling in and queer my pitch, what?’