Mallory thought for a moment.
There was no telling where Carstairs had gone. The only certainty was that in (he looked at his watch) four minutes, anywhere near the aerial site was going to be a very unhealthy place to be.
Hauling down his rope from the summit belay, he made it fast again, wrapped it round himself, and slid rapidly into the thickening shadows below.
For Miller, the shower he took in the entrance lobby of the Acropolis V4 complex was not the most refreshing in living memory. The water was hot, the soap plentiful, the hygiene nothing to complain about by the standards of twenty-four hours on a Sporadic mountainside. It was the company Miller objected to. Mixed at best, he thought gloomily, watching a rat-faced Wehrmacht private disrobe, pick his nose, and waddle under the showerhead. At worst –
‘Scrub my back?’ said a voice behind him. He turned to see a large blond individual with no neck and a crew cut smiling upon him tenderly.
‘Can’t reach,’ said Miller. The blond man pouted, and started to lather his vast acreage with violet-scented soap. He was about the same size as Andrea, something (Miller observed) that Andrea had not been slow to notice. Andrea was out of the shower, had dried himself on someone else’s towel, and was sidling towards the locker where the blond man’s clothes were hanging.
The blond man finished soaping himself. He had a disappointed air. He put himself under the jet of water and rinsed off the lather. There were SS lightning-flash runes tattooed on his mighty bicep. Miller could see Andrea struggling into a pair of jackboots. It looked as if he would be some time. The outside door opened. A man came in, lanky, about Miller’s height, with a brown engineer’s coat and a clipboard. The coat would be useful. The clipboard was a blessing from God. Miller said to the blond man, ‘You off, then?’
‘Not much happening here,’ said the blond man, sulkily.
‘Ah,’ said Miller. ‘Well I think this is your lucky day. See that guy just come in?’ He pointed at the man in the engineer’s coat. ‘Very nice guy,’ said Miller. ‘Likes a bit of fun.’
‘Zat so?’ said the blond. ‘Thanks, friend.’
‘Any time,’ said Miller, and sashayed rapidly on to dry land.
As he dried himself, he watched the lanky engineer hang up his overall coat with finicky precision, put his trousers on a hanger, arrange on the floor of the locker a pair of brown suede shoes, become indistinct in the steam, and start soaping himself. Miller saw the large figure of the blond SS man start making his way casually towards him. He tweaked open the locker, removed the engineer’s clothes and marched over to his own untidy pile. He put on his own undergarments and the engineer’s overalls, slung his pack on his back, and bundled his own clothes up inside the scarf so they looked like washing. When he turned he found himself looking at an SS leutnant with Andrea’s face and a washing bundle of his own.
‘Come,’ said Andrea. ‘Quick.’
Some sort of fight seemed to have broken out in the shower. ‘Ja, Herr Leutnant,’ said Miller. They walked out of the door, an SS man and an engineer, the engineer carrying a load of laundry, the SS man talking to him with earnestness and concentration.
‘What now?’ said Miller.
‘Find out the geography. What’s on your clipboard?’
There was a list of bolt sizes, with under it some blank paper. Miller shuffled the blank paper to the top. The pair of them walked off, Andrea chin up and arrogant, Miller trailing behind doing his best to look dazed and acquiescent, struggling under the awkward load of clothes and explosives.
‘Hey!’ said Andrea. ‘You!’
A small Wehrmacht man had been passing. He said, ‘Me?’
‘None other,’ drawled Andrea. ‘Take these clothes. Throw them away.’
‘Away?’ The man’s eyes were dull and stupid.
‘A tubercular patient in the village,’ said Andrea. ‘They are to be burned. Now. Where is the hospital?’
‘Third level,’ said the soldier.
‘Remember this,’ said Andrea. ‘The faster you go, the more likely you are to live. And don’t tell anyone, or they’ll give you the treatment.’
‘Treatment, Herr Leutnant?’
‘Paraffin enemas,’ said Miller, with a ghastly grin.
The private gulped and scuttled off, holding the bundles as far away from him as possible.
‘Now,’ said Andrea. ‘Let us see to the state of the wiring in this pest hole.’
‘Yes indeed,’ said Miller, bowing his head over his clipboard and writing diligently. ‘After you, Herr Leutnant.’
They walked up the steel stairs, slowly, but putting distance between themselves and the crisis that would be developing in the shower. The base level seemed by a thrum in the rock to consist of machinery and shelters. Above were living quarters: they passed rooms in which double-tiered bunks stretched away to impossibly distant vanishing points, a couple of mess rooms wafting the sour smell of boiled sausage and fried onions. A Wehrmacht major was marching towards them. ‘Two hundred and ten,’ said Andrea. Miller scribbled on his clipboard. The Wehrmacht major stopped, frowning. Miller felt his stomach hollow out.
‘What are you doing?’ said the major.
Andrea crashed to attention. ‘Heil Hitler!’ he yelled, shooting out his right arm.
‘Oh,’ said the major, who had a mild, clerkish, non-Nazi sort of face. ‘Heil, er, Hitler.’ He gave the army salute. ‘What are you doing?’ he said again.
‘Light bulb audit,’ said Andrea, with a face like granite.
‘Light bulbs?’ said the major, frowning at the SS runes on Andrea’s smock.
‘Those are my orders,’ said Andrea.
‘Jawohl,’ said Miller, squinting furiously at the bridge of his nose and trying by willpower to stop the sweat running down his face.
The major sighed. ‘So they fly you from the Harz specially to count the light bulbs,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t you be torturing women or something?’
‘Herr Major?’ Andrea’s face was as stiff as a poker.
The major shook his head. There was drink on his breath. ‘Oh, hell,’ he said. ‘I suppose someone’s got to do it.’
‘Jawohl Herr Major,’ shouted Andrea.
‘Carry on,’ said the major. He walked away, muttering.
They carried on. They went up more stairs to something that seemed from the smell of antiseptic to be a hospital level: though there was no hospital to be seen, merely a horizontal corridor with a steel catwalk suspended over a rough floor of volcanic rock. The hospital was an opening off the tunnel. At the tunnel’s end was a concrete doorframe with a lift inside it. On the right of the lift was a small wooden structure, like a sentry box, but bigger.
There were fewer people up here. A couple of men walked past, deep in conversation, wearing engineers’ coats like Miller’s. They looked at him as they passed. He nodded. They nodded back and walked on without altering their step. At the end they paused by the sentry box, fished out passes of some kind. An SS man came out of the sentry box. He looked at the passes, the engineers, back at the passes, the engineers again. Then the engineers signed a book, and moved on to the lift.
‘They’ve got keys,’ said Andrea.
‘You would almost think,’ said Miller, ‘that they did not want anyone to get in.’
As he spoke, there was a small, distinct bump that seemed to come not down the tunnel but through the rock itself. Miller felt a twinge of significant happiness. He was always suspicious of the ability of anyone but himself to use explosives. But it seemed likely now that Mallory had managed to make the stuff go off. And knowing Mallory, he would have put it in the right place.
All this he thought very fast indeed. There were klaxons moaning again, and he found that he was walking, walking alongside Andrea – not into the great mass of people seething and swirling behind them on the lower levels, but forward; forward towards the sentry box at the foot of the lift shaft.
Up in the Swallow’s Nest, Wills lay with his head o
n Clytemnestra’s belly and dust in his eyes and wondered why he was not dead yet.
He did not lie for long. He got up and grabbed at a Schmeisser and went once again to the loophole. The sun was all the way down now; outside, the world lay in deep shadow, deepest over the bodies crumpled in the gulley of the path. The killing ground was quiet, empty of living things. The last ray of sun lit the summit of the mountain above the Acropolis, where the aerials were.
From that summit there came a small, brilliant flash, followed some time later by the tiny thump of an explosion.
He raised his glasses to his eyes.
A black smear of smoke drifted in the light. The aerials had gone.
Down in the valley, the 88 crashed again. The shell smashed into the cliff, miles above their heads. Wills thought for a moment, then went back to Clytemnestra. He wanted to talk; but he found himself grinning too hard.
‘What is it?’ she said. She was picking herself up now.
‘They were talking to the radio room on the mountain,’ said Wills. ‘Someone was spotting for the 88. The aerials have gone. They’re firing blind.’
Clytemnestra got up and reeled to the loophole. She pushed the hair out of her eyes. Wills gave her a water bottle. She spat out the first mouthful, then drank deeply. ‘Fine,’ she said.
Wills had stopped grinning. The immediate danger was past. Longer-term, the situation had not changed. ‘We’re still stuck,’ he said. ‘All they’ve got to do is wait there till we starve.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘Not true, my sad English friend. Now it is dark.’
‘Can’t eat dark,’ said Wills.
She laughed. It was a confident laugh, most encouraging. ‘Tonight,’ she said, ‘we eat not dark, but sheep.’
Concussion, thought Wills. Poor girl, what the hell will I do with her now? ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘More water.’
‘I have sat down enough,’ she said. ‘Also, I have drunk all a woman needs to drink, who is about to take a journey.’
‘Journey?’ said Wills, fogged.
‘We are leaving,’ said Clytemnestra, shouldering her pack. ‘Follow me.’
‘Top-hole,’ said Wills. He strapped on his pack and slung his Schmeisser. Once, before he had started skulking in the mountains with beautiful Furies, he had been the commander of an MTB. That had been in another life, over twenty-four hours ago. He squeezed a burst out of the loophole at the slot in the rocks, the muzzle flash making blue lightnings in the dark. Then he was jogging down the stone stairs into the mould-smelling lower room of the Swallow’s Nest, out into the warm night, up the alley that did duty as this hamlet’s main street, his back crawling with the expectation of bullets, through a passage so narrow he had to turn sideways, following the faint scuff of Clytemnestra’s boots in front. The passage became a path. Thick bushes brushed against his legs, and once something that looked like a wall of trees reared up in front of him and whipped his face, and he knew he had gone through a curtain of some kind. Then they were climbing athwart a slope so steep he could touch the ground with his right hand, while on his left he felt the presence of a dark and mighty gulf. At last, the voice in front said, ‘Stop.’ He groped his way along until he found an opening, and slid in. There was a scrape and a flare of light as Clytemnestra lit a match. She ran her hand along a ledge, and came down with a stub of candle. They were in a cave, square-sided: another tomb. ‘They won’t find us here,’ she said. ‘Not without dogs.’
There had been dogs everywhere. But Wills found himself so tired that he would not have batted an eyelid if the whole pack of the hounds of Hell had been baying at his heels. Tired or not, Wills had been decently educated at public school, and he knew how to treat a lady. ‘Are you quite comfortable?’ he said.
Clytemnestra yawned, the yawn of a sleepy cat. ‘I have killed some Germans,’ she said. ‘I am free in my country. How should I not be comfortable?’
‘You might have a nice armchair,’ said Wills. ‘Dinner at Ciro’s. Bottle of Romanée-Conti. Nip along to the Mottled Oyster afterwards –’
‘Mottled Oyster?’ said Clytemnestra.
‘Night club,’ said Wills. ‘Dancing.’
‘And you would need a woman,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘A beautiful girl.’
There was a short silence. Then Wills said, ‘No shortage here,’ and lay back, head on pack, so that even in the candlelight there would be no chance of her seeing the crimson in his face. When he glanced furtively across at her, he saw that she was smiling a small, contented smile. It suddenly struck him that he had been manoeuvred into saying what he had just said. Hello, he thought. Hello …
But before his thoughts could develop further, he was asleep.
Mallory welcomed the darkness as if it had been a long-lost brother. What he did not welcome was the fact that he had lost Carstairs. If he had fallen, that was very bad. If he had not fallen, then knowing Carstairs that was probably even worse.
He scrutinized the face of the cliff with a pair of small but powerful Zeisses that he had removed from a Panzer general, the Panzer general being at the time en route for a British prison camp having been plucked from the Cretan mountains by Mallory and his comrades. In the disc of his vision, Mallory saw the corrugations of the cliffs, ridge and gulley, boulder and boiler plate, precipice and ledge –
The disc stopped. Mallory balanced on two toes and a hand, and moved the focus wheel as gently as a biologist focusing on a new bacillus.
Across the cliff wall two hundred yards to his right, a shadow was moving – a shadow like a four-legged spider, scuttling and pausing.
Mallory shifted the disc of the glasses ahead, in the direction Carstairs was travelling. He saw a ledge; a ledge too sharp and clearly-defined in construction to be altogether natural. A way into the mountain. A way through to the Kormoran survivor. His objective.
But as Mallory started once more to watch him move across the cliff, he frowned. There was something wrong with the way the man was moving. He watched the right hand, a pale crab against the dark rock. It scuttled, then paused, patting the surface as if the mind guiding it was working in short bursts, going numb between bursts of lucidity. The mind, Mallory realized, of a man who had recently hit his head very hard on the side of a mountain.
Something on the ledge caught Mallory’s eye: a sudden flare of light, a face and a helmet-brim suddenly glowing sharp and clear as a soldier sheltered a match in cupped hands to light a cigarette.
Carstairs kept struggling on, as if he had not noticed anything. Perhaps he had not. Mallory would have cursed if there had been time for cursing. Instead, he took his boots off and hung them round his neck. Then he stepped across on to the wall and started climbing, fast and smooth.
He was travelling four feet to Carstairs’ three, but Carstairs had a long start. As he climbed, Mallory saw with increasing clarity that to Carstairs, the ledge was simply a way in, and that his brain was not working well enough for him to be cautious. What was going to happen was that he was going to blunder straight into the guard, who would have the advantage of surprise, and a clear head. If Carstairs was captured alive, Dieter Wolf would have him answering questions in about ten minutes. If the sentry killed him, the word would be out that the partisans in the mountains were now inside the Acropolis defences. Presumably, the Germans would have been relying on their security at the gates, rather than running checks inside the Acropolis. But that would change in a moment, and life would get very difficult for anyone who was inside.
Perhaps it already was.
Mallory climbed on, eating up the traverse. Holds were plentiful. Many men might have been made nervous by the six hundred feet of nothingness below. But Mallory had slept on the west face of Mount Cook, in a sleeping bag hung from two pitons over five thousand sheer feet. He climbed carefully, but with nerves untroubled by altitude.
What was preying on his mind was Carstairs, now thirty feet below and twenty yards to the right. Mallory could hear him: the scritch of nai
ls on rock, the harsh gasp of his breathing. And if Mallory could hear him, so could the guard …
Carstairs was a biscuit toss from the ledge now. With his dark-adjusted eyes, Mallory watched the dreadful story unfold.
The guard had been smoking his cigarette and humming, gazing, no doubt, upon the beauty of the sea, now a silver-paved floor under the vault of the stars. Then suddenly he stopped, dropped his cigarette, unslung his rifle, moved right to the back of the ledge, and plastered himself against the cliff wall.
Carstairs’ boots sounded like a marching army. Mallory knew what was going to happen. There was a low parapet around the ledge. As soon as Carstairs’ head and shoulders came above it, the sentry would open fire, secure in the knowledge that Carstairs’ hands would be fully occupied with climbing.
Mallory as good as ran across the cliff. He could feel the stone tearing at his stockinged feet, but he paid no attention. As the ledge arrived twelve feet below, he began to move slowly. The cliff was gritty up here, and dislodging the smallest pebble could lead to disaster.
Very slowly, he moved across the face until the sentry’s steel helmet was a metallic egg below, the barrel of his rifle trained on the right-hand end of the parapet. If only he had had a silenced Browning, thought Mallory, like the one Carstairs carried, and Miller …
But all Mallory had was a knife.
He moved the last six inches to the left. Now he was in position directly above the sentry. He took the knife from its sheath and gripped it in his hand. He looked down at that steel helmet, and for a fraction of a second there flitted across his mind pity for this boy who was just doing his duty, and disgust at himself, washed by the current of war against this man, now the agent of his drowning.
He shifted his foot half an inch to give him a purchase, and prepared to jump. He felt the pebble roll, and stopped, knowing it was too late. He felt it escape, saw it fall, a tiny crumb of stone, heard the small plink as it hit the brim of the soldier’s helmet. The soldier looked up: a young face, shocked, mouth open. The last thing he saw was Mallory, falling like a thunderbolt, hands down, knife out, felt the crushing weight, the terrible sting of the razor-sharp steel.