The action-filled sequel to two of the
greatest adventure novels of all time - Alistair
Maclean's
The Guns of Navarone and Force 10
from Navarone.
Alistair Maclean's gritty heroes from Navarone
are not dead, and definitely not forgotten.
Mallory, Miller and Andrea, the surviving commandos from
Force 10 from Navarone are sent on operation Storm
Force: a perilous mission through the Pyrenees to disable the
greatest threat to the success of the D-Day landings
- the 'Werwolf' U-boats.
The Storm Force have less than six days to
locate the submarines and destroy them. With
communications insecure they must operate outside normal
channels, cut off from any back-up. Their Basque
guides declare it mission impossible.
But they have never worked with
Mallory.
The radar operator said, 'Contact. Three bloody
contacts. Jesus.'
The Liberator dipped a wing, bucking heavily as
it carved through one of the squalls of cloud streaming over the
Atlantic towards Cabo Ortegal, at the top left-hand corner of
Spain. 'Language,' said the pilot mildly.
'bombaimer?'
Down in the nose the bombaimer said, 'Ready.'
The pilot's leather-gloved hand went to the throttles. The note of
the four Pratt and Whitney engines climbed to a tooth-rattling
roar. The pilot eased the yoke forward. Girders creaking, the
Liberator bounced down into the clouds.
Vapour streamed past the bombaimer's Perspex
window, thick and grey as coal smoke. At five hundred feet it
became patchy. There was sea down there: grey sea, laced with nets
of foam.
The bombaimer's mouth was dry. Just looking at
the heave of that sea made you feel sick. But there was something
else: a wide, smooth road across those rough-backed swells, as if
they had been ironed -
'See them yet?' said the pilot.
The bombaimer could hear his heart beat, even
above the crackle of the intercom and the roar of the engines. 'See
them,' he said.
At the end of the smooth road three long, low
hulls were tearing chevrons of foam from the sea. The hulls were
slim and grey, with streamlined conning towers. Slim, grey sitting
ducks.
'They're bloody enormous,' said the radar
operator, peering over the pilot's shoulder. 'What the hell are
they?'
They were submarines, but submarines twice the
size of any British or German craft the pilot had seen in four
years of long flights over weary seas that had made him an expert
on submarines. They were indeed bloody enormous.
The pilot frowned at the foam-crested waves of
their wakes. Hard to tell, of course, but they looked as if they
were making at least thirty-five knots. If they were theirs,
thought the pilot, they could really do some damage. Hope they're
ours -
Glowing red balls rose lazily from the conning
towers and flicked past the cockpit canopy.
Theirs,' said the pilot, slamming the plane
into a tight 180° turn. The tracers had stripped him of his
mildness. 'Commencing run.'
There was a lot of tracer now, pouring past the
Liberator's cockpit, mixed with the black puffs of heavier flak.
The Liberator bucked, its rivets groaning in the heat-wrenched sky.
The bomb-aimer tried not to think about his unprotected belly, and
closed his mind to the bad-egg fumes of the shell bursts and the
yammer of the nose-gunner's Brownings above his head. It was an
easy two miles to bombs away: twenty endless seconds, at a hundred
and eighty knots.
'Funny,' said the pilot. 'Why aren't they
diving?'
The bombaimer stared into his sight. 'Bomb
doors open,' he said. He felt the new tremor of the airframe as the
doors spoilt the streamlining. The sight filled with grey and
wrinkled sea. The submarines swam in V-formation down the
stepladder markings towards the release point, innocent as three
trout in a stream, except for the lazy red bubbles of the
tracer.
The bombaimer frowned, pressing his face into
the eyepiece of the sight. There was something wrong with the
submarine in the middle. The deck forward of the conning tower
looked twisted and bent. Christ, thought the bombaimer, someone's
rammed her. Nearly cut her in half. That's why she's not diving.
She's damaged -
Something burst with a clang out on the port
side. Icy air was suddenly howling at the bombaimer's neck. The
little submarines in the bomb-sight drifted off to starboard.
'Right a bit,' said the bombaimer, calmly, over the hammer of his
heart. 'Right a bit.' The three grey fish slid back onto the line.
'Steady.' His leather thumb found the release button. The tracer
was horrible now, thick as a blizzard. The bombaimer concentrated
on hoping that Pearl in the mess wouldn't overcook his bloody egg
again, like cement it was yesterday -
'Steady,' he said. The grey triangle was half
an inch from the release point. 'Going,' he said.
'Going-'
A giant hammer smashed into the fuselage
somewhere behind him. He felt a terrible agony in his left leg.
Hit, he thought. Bastard hit us. His hand clenched on the
bomb-release button. He felt the upward bound of the aircraft as
the depth charges dropped free.
Too early, he thought.
Then there was no more thinking, because his
face was full of smoke and his head was full of the agony of a leg
broken in four places, and someone was howling like a dog, and as
the grey clouds reached down and closed their hands round the
Liberator, he realised that the person making all that racket was
him.
Ten minutes later the radar operator finished
the dressing and threw the morphine syrette out of one of the rents
torn in the fuselage by the shell. He thought the bombaimer looked
bloody awful, but then compound fractures are not guaranteed to
bring a smile to the lips. To cheer him up, the radar operator gave
him the thumbs up and mouthed, 'Got one!' Through pink clouds of
morphine the bombaimer saw his lips move, and tried to look
interested.
'Hit one,' said the radar operator. 'Saw smoke.
One was damaged already, looked like someone rammed it. And we hit
at least one.' But of course he might as well have been talking to
himself because you couldn't hear anything, what with the engines
and a sodding great hole in the fuselage, and anyway, the bombaimer
was asleep.
Bloody great U-boats, though, thought the radar
operator. Never seen anything like them before. Not that big. Nor
that fast.
The Liberator droned north and west across the
Bay of Biscay, above the corrugated mat of cloud, towards the
Coastal Command base at St-Just. There the crew, nervously
preoccupied with the hardness of their eggs, were comprehensively
debriefed.
Andrea stared at Jensen. The huge Greek's face
was horror-stricken. 'Say again?' he said.
'A job,' said Captain Jensen. He was standing
in a shaft of Italian sun that gleamed on his sharp white teeth and
the gold braid on the brim of his cap. 'Just a tiny little job,
really. And I thought, since the three of you were here
anyway...'
As always, Jensen was dreadfully crisp, his
uniform sparkling white, his stance upright and alert, the
expression on his bearded face innocent but slightly piratical. The
three men in the chairs looked the reverse of crisp. Their faces
were hollow with exhaustion. They sat as if they had been dropped
into their seats from a height. The visible parts of their bodies
were laced with sticking plaster and red with Mercurochrome. They
looked one step away from being stone-dead.
But Jensen knew better.
It had cost him considerable effort to assemble
this team. There was Mallory, who before the war had been a
mountaineer, world-famous for his Himalayan exploits, and conqueror
of most of the unclimbed peaks in the Southern Alps of his native
New Zealand. Mallory had spent eighteen months behind enemy lines
in Crete with the man sitting next to him: Andrea. The gigantic
Andrea, strong as a team of bulls, quiet as a shadow, a full
colonel in the Greek army, and one of the deadliest irregular
soldiers ever to knife a sentry. And then there was Corporal Dusty
Miller from Chicago, member of the Long Range Desert Force,
sometime deserter, goldminer, and bootlegger. If it existed. Miller
could wreck it. Miller had a genius for sabotage equalled only by
his genius for insubordination.
But Jensen valued soldiers for their fighting
ability, not their
standard of turnout. In Jensen's view these men
were very useful indeed.
The gleam of those carnivorous teeth hurt
Andrea's eyes. It does not take much to hurt your eyes, when you
have not slept for the best part of a fortnight.
'A tiny little job,' said Mallory. His face was
gaunt and pouchy. Like Andrea, he was by military standards badly
in need of a shave. 'Are you going to tell us about
it?'
The grin widened. 'I thought maybe you would be
feeling a bit unreceptive.'
Corporal Dusty Miller had been almost
horizontal in a leather-buttoned chair, staring with more than
academic interest at the frescoed nudes on the ceiling of the villa
Jensen had commandeered as his HQ. Now he spoke. That never stopped
you before,' he said.
Jensen's bushy right eyebrow rose a millimetre.
This was not the way that captains in the Royal Navy were
accustomed to being addressed by ordinary corporals.
But Dusty Miller was not an ordinary corporal,
in the same way that Captain Mallory was not an ordinary captain,
or for that matter, Andrea was not an ordinary Greek Resistance
fighter. Because of their lack of ordinariness, Jensen knew that he
would have to treat them with a certain respect: the same sort of
respect you would give three deadly weapons with which you wished
to do damage to the enemy.
For in that room full of soldiers who were not
ordinary soldiers, Jensen was not an ordinary naval captain. As an
eighteen-year-old lieutenant, he had run a successful Q-ship,
sinking eight U-boats in the final year of the 14-18 war. Between
the wars he had been, frankly, a spy. He had led Shiite risings in
Iraq; penetrated a scheme to block the Suez Canal; and as a marine
surveyor employed by the Imperial Japanese Navy, perpetrated a set
of alarmingly but intentionally inaccurate charts of the Sulu Sea.
Now, in the fifth year of the war, he was Chief of Operations of
the Subversive Operations Executive. Some said that Allied victory
at El Alamein had been partly due to SOE's clandestine substitution
of a carborundum paste for grease in a fuel dump. And in the last
month he had successfully planned the destruction of
the impregnable battery of Navarone, and the
diversionary raid in Yugoslavia that had led to the fall of the
Gustav Line and the breakout from the Anzio
beachhead.
But Jensen had only done the planning. These
three men -Mallory, the New Zealander, a taciturn mountaineer,
tough as a commando knife; the American Dusty Miller, an Einstein
among saboteurs; and Andrea, the two-hundred-and-fifty-pound
man-mountain with the quietness of a cat and the strength of a bear
- were the weapons he had used.
If there were deadlier weapons in the world
Jensen's enquiries had failed to reveal them. And Jensen's
enquiries were notoriously very searching indeed.
'So,' he said. 'Any of you gentlemen speak
French?'
Mallory frowned. 'German,' he said.
'Greek.'
Andrea yawned and covered his mouth with a
gigantic hand, stilll covered in bandages from the abrasions he had
sustained holding onto the iron rungs of a ladder under the flume
of water from the bursting Zenitsa dam.
'I do,' said Dusty Miller.
'Fluent?'
'I had a job in Montreal once,' said Miller,
his eyes blue and innocent. 'Doorman in a cathouse.'
'Thank you. Corporal,' said
Jensen.
'Il n'y a pas de quoi' said
Miller, with old-world courtesy.
'We've found you some interpreters,' said
Jensen.
Mallory sighed inwardly. He knew Jensen. When
Jensen wanted you aboard, you were aboard, and the only thing to do
was to check the location of the life jackets provided, and settle
in for the ride. He said, 'If you don't mind me asking, sir, why do
we need to speak French?'
Jensen grinned a grin that would have looked
impressive on a hungry shark. He walked across the bronze carpet to
the huge ormolu desk, bare except for two telephones, one red, one
black. He said, 'There is someone I want you to meet,' He picked up
the black telephone. 'Sergeant,' he said. 'Please send in the
gentlemen in the waiting room.'
Mallory gazed at the veining on a marble
pillar. Aircraft were droning overhead, flying air support for the
troops advancing
north from the wreckage of the Gustav Line. He
lit another cigarette, the taste of the last one stilll bitter in
his mouth. He wanted to sleep for a week. Make that a month
-
The door opened, and two men came in. One of
them was a tall major with a Guards moustache. The other was
shorter, stocky and bull-necked. With three pips on his
epaulettes.
'Major Dyas. Intelligence,' said Jensen. 'And
Captain Killigrew. SAS.'
Major Dyas nodded. Captain Killigrew fixed each
man in turn with a searching glare. His face was brick-red from the
sun, and something that Mallory decided was anger. Mallory returned
his salute. Andrea nodded and, being a foreigner, got away with it.
Dusty Miller remained horizontal in his chair, acknowledging
Killigrew by opening one eye and raising a bony
hand.
Killigrew swelled like a toad. Jensen's
ice-blue eyes flicked between the two men. He said quickly. Take a
seat. Captain. Major, do your stuff.'
Killigrew lowered himself stiffly onto a hard
chair, on which he sat bolt upright, not touching the
backrest.
'Yah,' said Dyas. 'You may smoke.' Mallory and
Miller were already smoking. Dyas ran his hand over his high,
intellectual forehead. He could have been a doctor, or a professor
of philosophy.
Jensen said, 'Major Dyas has kindly agreed to
brief you on the background to this ... little job.' Mallory leaned
back in his chair. He was stilll tired, but soon there would be
something to override the tiredness. The same something he
remembered from huts in the Southern Alps, after a gruelling
approach march, two hours' sleep, and waking in the dark chill
before dawn. Soon there would be no way to go but up and over.
Climbing and fighting: plan your campaign, grit your teeth, do the
job or die in the attempt. There were similarities.
'Now then,' said Dyas. 'To start with. What you
are about to hear is known to only seven men in the world, now ten,
including you. Other people have the individual bits and pieces,
but what counts is the ... totality.' He paused to stuff tobacco
into a blackened pipe, and applied an oil well-sized Zippo. 'June
is going to be an important month of this war,' he said from inside
a rolling cloud of smoke. 'Probably the most important
yet.' Miller's eyes had opened. Andrea was sitting forward in his
chair, massive forearms on his stained khaki knees. 'We are going
to take a gamble,' said Dyas. 'A big gamble. And we want you to
adjust the odds for us.'
Miller said, "Trust Captain Jensen to run a
crooked game.'
'Sorry?' said Dyas.
Mallory said. The Corporal was expressing his
enthusiasm.'
'Ah.' Another cloud of smoke.
Mallory could feel that jump of excitement in
his stomach. This gamble,' he said. 'A new front?'
Dyas said, 'Put it like this. What we are going
to need is complete control of the seas. We're good in the air,
we're fine on the surface. But there's a hitch.' Killigrew's face
was darkening. Looks as if he'll burst a blood vessel, thought
Mallory. Wonder what he's got to do with this.
'Submarines,' said Dyas. 'U-boats. There has
been an idea current that between airborne radar and asdic and
huff-duff radio direction finding, we had 'em licked.' Another
cloud of smoke. 'An idea we all had. Un'I'll a couple of months
ago.
'In March we had a bit of trouble with some
Atlantic convoys, and their escorts too. Basically, ships started
to sink in a way we hadn't seen ships sink for two years now.' The
professorial face was grim and hard. 'And it was odd. You'd get a
series of explosions in say a two-hundred-mile circle, and you'd
think, same old thing, U-boats moving together, wolf pack. But it
wasn't a wolf pack, because there was no radio traffic, and the
sinkings were too far apart. So then they thought it was possibly
mines. But it didn't seem to be mines either, because one day in
late March HMS Frantic, an escort destroyer, picked up an
echo seven hundred miles off Cape Finisterre. There had been two
sinkings in the convoy. The destroyer went in pursuit, but lost
it.' He returned to his pipe.
'Nothing unusual about that,' said
Mallory.
Dyas nodded, mildly. 'Except that the destroyer
was steaming full speed ahead at the time, and the submarine just
sailed away from her.'
'Sorry?' said Miller.
'The destroyer was steaming at thirty-five
knots,' said Dyas. The U-boat was doing easily five knots better
than that.'
Miller said, 'Why is this guy telling us all
this stuff?'
Mallory said, 'I think Corporal Miller would
like to know the significance of this fact.'
Jensen said, 'Excuse me. Major Dyas.' His face
wore an expression of strained patience. 'For your information,
U-boats have to spend most of their time on the surface, running
their diesels to make passage and charge their batteries.
Submerged, their best speed has so far been under ten knots, and
they can't keep it up for long because of the limitations of their
batteries.' His face was cold and grim, its deep creases as if
carved from stone. 'So what we're faced with is this: the English
Channel full of the biggest fleet of ships ever assembled, and
these U-boats -big U-boats - carrying a hundred torpedoes each, God
knows they're big enough - travelling at forty knots, under water.
We know Jerry's got at least three of them. That could mean three
hundred ships sunk, and Lord knows how many men
lost.'
Miller said, 'So you get one quick echo. Not
much of a basis for total panic stations. How fast do whales
swim?'
Jensen snapped, 'Try keeping your ears open and
your mouth shut.'
It was only then that Mallory saw the strain
the man was under. The Jensen he knew was relaxed, with that naval
quarterdeck sang-froid. Piratical, yes; aggressive, yes. Those were
his stock in trade. But always calm. As long as Mallory had known
Jensen, he had never known him lose his temper - not even with
Dusty Miller, who did not hold with officers. But this was a Jensen
balanced on a razor-honed knife's edge.
Mallory caught Miller's eye, and frowned. Then
he said, 'Corporal Miller's got a point, sir.'
'Whales,' said Dyas. 'Actually, we thought of
that. But one has been ... adding up two and two.' His mild voice
was balm to the frazzled nerves under the frescoed ceiling.
'Another escort reported ramming a large submarine. Then a
Liberator got shot up bombing two U-boats escorting a third that
bore signs of having been rammed. They were huge, these boats,
steaming at thirty-odd knots on the surface. The Liberator reported
them as damaged. But when we sent more aircraft out to
search for them, they had vanished.
They were reckoned to be in no state to dive,
so they were presumed sunk. Then there was a message picked up -
doesn't matter what sort of message, doesn't matter where, but take
it from me, it was a reliable message - to say that the Werwolf
pack was refitting after damage caused by enemy action. Said refit
to be complete by noon Wednesday of the second week in
May.'
It was now Sunday of the second week in
May.
The painted vaults of the ceiling filled with
silence. Mallory said, 'So these submarines. What are
they?'
'Hard to say,' said Dyas, with an academic
scrupulousness that would have irritated Mallory, if he had been
the sort of man who got irritated about things. 'The Kriegsmarine
have maintained pretty good security, but we've been able to patch
a couple of ideas together. We know they've got a new battery
system for underwater running, which stores a lot of power. A lot
of power. But there've been rumours about something else. We think
it's more likely to be something new. Development of an idea by a
chap called Walter. They've been working on it since the thirties.
An internal combustion engine that runs under water. Burns fuel
oil.'
Miller's eyes had opened now, and he was
sitting in a position that for him was almost upright. He said,
'What in?'
'In?' Dyas frowned.
'You can't burn fuel oil under water. You need
oxygen.'
'Ah. Yes. Quite. Good question.' Miller did not
look flattered. Engines were his business. He knew how to make them
run. He knew even more about destroying them. 'Nothing definite.
But they think it's probably something like hydrogen peroxide. On
the surface, you'd aspirate your engine with air, of course. As you
submerged, you'd have an automatic changeover, a float switch
perhaps, that would close the air intake and start up a
disintegrator that would get you oxygen out of something like
hydrogen peroxide. So you'd get a carbon dioxide exhaust, which
would dissolve in sea water. Or so the theory goes.'
Jensen stood up. 'Theory or no theory,' he
said, 'they're refitting. They must be destroyed before they
can go to sea again. And you're going to do the
destroying.'
Mallory said, 'Where are they?'
Dyas unrolled a map that hung on the wall
behind him. It showed France and Northern Spain, the brown
corrugations of the Pyrenees marching from the Mediterranean to the
Atlantic, and snaking down the spine of the mountains the scarlet
track of the border. He said, 'They were bombed off Cabo Ortegal.
They couldn't dive, so they wouldn't have gone north. We believe
that they are here.' He picked up a billiard cue and tapped the
long, straight stretch of coast that ran from Bordeaux south
through Biarritz and St-Jean-de-Luz to the Spanish
border.
Mallory looked at the pointer. There were three
ports: Hendaye, St-Jean-de-Luz, and Bayonne. Otherwise, the coast
was a straight line that looked as if it probably meant a beach. He
said, 'Where?'
Dyas avoided his eye and fumbled at his
moustache. Since he had been in the room, he had found himself
increasingly unnerved by the stilllness of these men, the wary
relaxation of their deep-eyed faces. The big one with the black
moustache was silent and dangerous, with a horrible son of power
about him. Of the other two, one seemed slovenly and the other
insubordinate. They looked like, well, gangsters. Dashed
unmilitary, thought Dyas. But Jensen knew what he was doing. Famous
for it. stilll, Mallory's question was not a question he much
liked.
He said, 'Well, Spain's a neutral country.' He
forced himself not to laugh nervously. 'And we've got good
intelligence from Bordeaux, so we know they're not there.' He
coughed, more nervously than he had intended. 'In fact, we don't
know where they are.'
The three pairs of eyes watched him in silence.
Finally, Mallory spoke. 'So we've got untill Wednesday noon to find
some submarines and destroy them. The only difficulty is that we
don't know where they are. And, come to that, we don't actually
know if they exist.'
Jensen said, 'Oh yes we do. You'll be dropped
to a reception committee -'
'Dropped?' said Miller, his lugubrious face a
mask of horror.
'By parachute.'
'Oh my stars,' said Miller, in a high,
limp-wristed voice.
Though if you keep interrupting we might forget
the parachute and drop you anyway.' There was a hardness in
Jensen's corsair face that made even Miller realise that he had
said enough. The reception committee, I was saying. They will take
you to a man called Jules, who knows a fisherman who knows the
whereabouts of these U-boats. This fisherman will sell you the
information.'
'Sell?'
'You will be supplied with the
money.'
'So where is this fisherman?'
'We are not as yet aware of his
whereabouts.'
'Ah,' said Mallory, rolling his eyes at the
frescoes. He lit yet another cigarette. 'Well, 1 suppose we'll have
the advantage of surprise.'
Miller pasted an enthusiastic smile to his
doleful features. 'Gosh and golly gee,' he said. 'If they're as
surprised as we are, they'll be amazed.'
Dyas was looking across at Jensen. Mallory
thought he looked like a man in some sort of private agony. Jensen
nodded, and smiled his ferocious smile. He seemed to have recovered
his composure. 'One would rather hope so,' he said, 'because these
submarines have got to be destroyed. No ifs, no buts. I don't care
what you have to do. You'll have carte blanche.' He paused. 'As far
as is consistent with operating absolutely on your own.' He
coughed. If a British Naval officer schooled in Nelsonian
duplicities could ever be said to look shifty, Jensen looked shifty
now. 'As to the element of surprise ... Well. Sorry to disappoint,'
he said, 'but actually, not quite. Thing is, an SAS team went in
last week, and nobody's heard from them since. So we think they've
probably been captured.'
Mallory allowed the lids to droop over his
gritty eyeballs. He knew what that meant, but he wanted to hear
Jensen say it.
'In fact it seems quite possible,' said Jensen,
'that the Germans will, in a manner of speaking, be waiting for
you.'
Killigrew seemed to see this as his cue. He was
a small man, built like a bull, with a bull's rolling eye. He rose,
marched to the centre of the room, planted his feet a good yard apart
on the mosaic floor, and sank his head between his mighty
shoulders. 'Now listen here, you men,' he barked, in the voice of
one used to being the immediate focus of attention.
Jensen looked across at Mallory's lean crusader
face. His eyes were closed. Andrea was gently stroking his
moustache, gazing out of the window, where the late morning sun
shone yellow-green in the leaves of a vine. Dusty Miller had
removed his cigarette from his mouth, and was talking to it.
'Special Air Squads,' he said. They land with goddamn howitzers and
goddamn Jeeps, with a noise like a train wreck. They do not think
it necessary to employ guides or interpreters, let alone speak
foreign languages. They have skulls made of concrete and no goddamn
brains at all - can I help you?'
Killigrew was standing over him with a face of
purple fire. 'Say that again,' he said.
Miller yawned. 'No goddamn brains,' he said.
'Bulls in a china shop.'
Mallory's eyes were open now. The veins in
Killigrew's neck were standing out like ivy on a tree trunk, and
his eyes were suffused with blood. The jaw was out like the ram of
an icebreaker. And to Mallory's amazement, he saw that the right
fist was pulled back, ready to spread Miller's teeth all over the
back of his head.
'Dusty,' he said.
Miller looked at him.
'Miller apologises, sir,' said
Mallory.
'Temper,' said Miller.
Killigrew's fist remained
clenched.
'You're on a charge. Miller,' said Mallory,
mildly.
'Yessir,' said Miller.
Jensen's voice cracked like a whip.
'Captain!'
Killigrew's heels crashed together. His florid
face was suddenly grey. He had come within a whisker of assaulting
another rank. The consequence would have been, well, a
court-martial.
Mallory ground out his cigarette in a marble
ashtray, his eyes flicking round the room, sizing up the situation.
God knew what kind of strain the SAS captain must have been under
to come that close to walloping a corporal. Jensen, he
saw, was hiding a keen curiosity behind a mask of military
indignation. Without apparently taking a step, Andrea had left his
chair and moved halfway across the room towards Killigrew. He stood
loose and relaxed, his bear-like bulk sagging, hands slack at his
sides. Mai-lory knew that Killigrew was half a second away from
violent death. He caught Miller's eye, and shook his head, a
millimetre left, a millimetre right.
Miller yawned. He said, 'Why, thank you.
Captain Killigrew.' Killigrew stared straight ahead, eyes bulging.
'Seeing that there fly crawling towards my ear,' said Miller,
pointing at a bluebottle spiralling towards the chandelier, 'the
Captain was about to have the neighbourliness to swat the little
sucker.' Jensen's eyebrow had cocked. 'I take full
responsibility.'
Jensen did not hesitate. 'No need for that,' he
said. 'Or charges. Carry on. Captain.'
Killigrew swallowed, "ssir." His face was
regaining its colour. 'Right,' he said, with the air of one
wrenching his mind back from an abyss. 'Our men. Five of them.
Dropped Tuesday last, with one Jeep, radio, just south of Lourdes.
They reported that they'd landed, were leaving in the direction of
Hendaye, travelling by night. They were supposed to radio in
eight-hourly. But nothing. Absolutely damn all.'
Once again. Miller caught Mallory's eye. Jeep,
he was thinking. A Jeep, for pity's sake. Have these people never
heard of road blocks?
'Un'I'll last night,' said Killigrew. 'Some
Resistance johnny came on the air. Said there'd been shooting in
some village or other in the mountains twenty miles west of
St-Jean-de-Luz. Casualties. So we think it was them. But there was
a bit of difficulty with the radio message. Code words not used.
Could mean the operator was in a hurry, of course. Or it could mean
that the network's been penetrated.'
Mallory found himself lighting another
cigarette. How long since he had drawn a breath not loaded with
tobacco smoke? He was avoiding Miller's eye. They were brave, these
SAS people. But Miller had been right. They went at things like a
bull at a gate. That was not Mallory's way.
Mallory believed in making war quietly. There
was an old partisan slogan he lived by: if you have a knife you can
get a pistol; if you have a pistol, you can get a rifle; if you
have a rifle, you can get a machine gun -
Thank you, gentlemen,' said Jensen. 'I'm
grateful for your cooperation.' Dyas and Killigrew left,
Killigrew's blood-bloated face looking straight ahead, so as not to
catch Miller's sardonic eye.
'So,' said Jensen, grinning his appallingly
carnivorous grin. Think you can do it?' He did not wait for an
answer. 'Look,' he said. 'You may think this is a damn silly
scheme. I can't help that. It could be that a million men depend on
those submarines not getting to sea. I'm afraid the SAS have made a
balls-up. I just want you to find these damn things. If you can't
blow them up, radio a position. The RAF'll look after the
rest.'
Mallory said, 'Excuse my asking, sir. But what
about the Resistance on the ground?'
Jensen frowned. 'Good question. Two things.
One, you heard that idiot Killigrew. They may have been penetrated.
And two, it may be that these U-boats are tucked up somewhere the
RAF won't be able to get at them.' He grinned. 'I told Mr Churchill
this morning that as far as I was concerned, you lot were
equivalent to a bomber wing. He agreed.' He stood up. 'I'm very
grateful to you. You've done two jolly good operations for me.
Let's make this a third. Detailed briefing at the airfield later.
There's an Albemarle coming in this afternoon for you. Takeoff at
1900.' He looked down at the faces: Mallory, weary but
hatchet-sharp; Andrea, solid behind his vast black moustache; and
Dusty Miller, scratching his crewcut in a manner prejudicial to
discipline. It did not occur to Jensen to worry that in the past
fourteen days they had taken a fearsome battering on scarcely any
sleep. They were the tool for. the job, and that was
that.
'Any questions?' he said.
'Yes,' said Mallory, wearily. 'I don't suppose
there's a drop of brandy about the house, is there?'
An hour later the sentries on the
marble-pillared steps of the villa crashed to attention as the
three men trotted down into the square, where a khaki staff car was waiting.
The sentries did not like the look of them. They were elderly, by
soldier standards -in their forties, and looking older. Their
uniforms were dirty, their boots horrible. It was tempting to ask
for identification and paybooks. But there was something about them
that made the sentries decide that it would on the whole be better
to keep quiet. They moved at a weary, purposeful lope that made the
sentries think of creatures that ate infrequently, and when they
did eat, ate animals they had tracked down patiently over great
distances, and killed without fuss or remorse.
Mallory's mind was not, however, on eating.
'Not bad, that brandy,' he said.
'Five-star,' said Miller. 'Nothing but the best
for the white-haired boys.'
After Jensen's villa the Termoli airfield
lacked style. Typhoons howled overhead, swarming on and off the
half-built runway in clouds of dust. Inevitably, there was another
briefing room. But this one was in a hut with cardboard walls and a
blast-taped window overlooking the propeller-whipped dust-storm and
the fighters taxiing in the aircraft park. Among the fighters was a
bomber, with the long, lumpy nose of a warthog, refuelling from a
khaki bowser. Mallory knew it was an Albemarle. Jensen was making
sure that the momentum of events was being maintained. Evans, one
of Jensen's young, smooth-mannered lieutenants, had brought them
from the staff car. He said, 'I expect you'll have a shopping
list.' He was a pink youth, with an eagerness that made Mallory
feel a thousand years old. But Mallory made himself forget the
tiredness, and the brandy, and the forty years he had been on the
planet. He sat at a table with Andrea and Miller and filled out
stores indents in triplicate. Then they rode a three-tonner down to
the armoury, where Jensen's handiwork was also to be seen, in the
shape of a rack of weapons, and a backpack B2 radio. There were
also two brass-bound boxes whose contents Miller studied with
interest. One of them was packed with explosives: gelignite, and
blocks of something that looked like butter, but was in fact
Cyclonite in a plasticising medium - plastic explosive. The other
box contained primers and time pencils, colour-coded like children's crayons. Miller
sorted through them with practised fingers, making some
substitutions. There were also certain other substances,
independently quite innocent but, used as he knew how to use them,
lethal to enemy vehicles and personnel. Finally, there was a flat
tin box containing a thousand pounds in used Bradbury
fivers.
Andrea stood at a rack of Schmeissers, his
hands moving like the hands of a man reading Braille, his black
eyes looking far away. He rejected two of the machine pistols,
picked out three more, and a Bren light machine gun. He stripped
the Bren down, smacked it together again, nodded, and filled a
haversack with grenades.
Mallory checked over two coils of wire-cored
rope and a bag of climbing gear. 'Okay,' he said. 'Load it
on.'
In the briefing hut, three men were waiting.
They sat separately at the schoolroom tables, each of them
apparently immersed in his own thoughts. 'Everything all right?'
said Lieutenant Evans. 'Oh. Introductions. The team.' The men at
the tables looked up, eyeing Mallory, Andrea and Miller with the
wariness of men who knew that in a few hours these strangers would
have the power of life and death over them.
'No real names, no pack-drill,' said Evans. He
indicated the man on the right: small, the flesh bitten away under
his cheekbones, his mouth hidden by a black moustache. He had the
dour, self-contained look of a man who had lived all his life among
mountains. This is Jaime,' Evans said. 'Jaime has worked in the
Pyrenees. He knows his way around.'
'Worked?' said Mallory.
Jaime's face was sallow and unreadable, his
eyes unwilling to trust. He said, 'I have carried goods. Smuggler,
you would say. I have escaped Fascists. Spanish Fascists, German
Fascists. All die when you shoot them.'
Mallory schooled his face to blankness.
Fanatics could be trustworthy comrades; but that was the exception,
not the rule.
'And that,' said Evans quietly, 'is Hugues.
Hugues is our personnel man. Knows the Resistance on the ground.
Practically encyclopaedic. Looks like a German. Don't be fooled. He
was at Oxford before the war. Went back to Normandy to take over
the family chateau. The SS shot his wife and two children
when he went underground.'
Hugues was tall and broad-shouldered, with
light brown hair, an affable pink-and-white Northern face, and
china-blue eyes. When he shook Mallory's hand his palm was moist
with nervous meat. He said, 'Do you speak French?'
"No." Mallory caught Miller's eye, and held
it.
None of you?'
That's right.' Many virtues had combined to
keep Mallory, Miller and Andrea alive and fighting these past
weeks. But the cardinal virtue was this: reserve your fire, and
never trust anyone.
Hugues said, 'I'm glad to meet you. But... no
French? Jesus.'
Mallory liked his professionalism. 'You can do
the talking,' he said.
'Spent any time behind enemy lines?' said
Hugues.
'A little.' There was a wild look in Hugues'
eye, thought Mallory. He was not sure he liked it.
Evans cleared his throat. 'Word in your ear,
Hugues,' he said, and took him aside. Hugues frowned as the Naval
officer murmured into his ear. Then he blushed red, and said to
Mallory, Oh dear. 'Fraid I made a fool of myself,
sir.'
'Perfectly reasonable,' said Mallory. Hugues
was fine. Pink and eager and bright. But there was stilll that wild
look ... Not surprising, in the circumstances. A Resistance liaison
would be as vital as a guide and a radio operator. Hugues would
do.
The last man was nearly as big as Andrea,
wearing a ragged, oddly urban straw hat. Evans introduced him as
Thierry, an experienced Resistance radio operator. Then he drew the
blinds, and pulled a case of what looked like clothing towards him.
Doesn't matter about the French,' he said, 'you can stick to
German.' From the box, he pulled breeches and camouflage smocks of
a pattern Mallory had last seen in Crete. 'I hope we've got the
size right. And you'd better stay indoors for the next wee
while.'
It was true, reflected Mallory wryly, that
there would be few better ways of attracting attention on a Allied
air base than wandering around wearing the uniform of the
Waffen-SS.
Try 'em on,' said Evans.
The Frenchmen watched without curiosity or
humour as Mai-lory, Miller and Andrea pulled the German smocks and
trousers over their khaki battledress. Disguising yourself in enemy
uniform left you liable to summary execution. But then so did
working for the Resistance, or for that matter operating behind
German lines in British uniform. In occupied France, Death would be
breathing down your neck without looking at the label inside your
collar.
'Okay,' said Evans, contemplating the Feldwebel
with Mallory's face, and the two privates. 'Er, Colonel, would you
consider shaving off the moustache?'
'No,' said Andrea, without changing
expression.
'It's just that-'
'SS men do not wear moustaches,' said Andrea.
This I know. But I do not intend to mix with SS men. I intend to
kill them.'
Jaime was looking at him with new interest.
'Colonel?' he said.
'Slip of the tongue,' said
Mallory.
Evans looked for a moment faintly flustered. He
strode busily to the dais, and unrolled the familiar relief map of
the western part of the Pyrenees. There was a blue bite of Atlantic
at the top. Along the spine of the mountains writhed the red
serpent of the Spanish border.
'Landing you here,' said Evans, tapping a brisk
pointer on what could have been a hanging valley above
St-Jean-Pied-du-Port.
'Landing?' said Mallory.
'Well, dropping then.'
Miller said, 'I told Captain Jensen. I can't
stand heights.'
'Heights won't be a problem,' said Evans.
'You'll be dropping from five hundred feet.' He smiled, the happy
smile of a man who would not be dropping with them, and unrolled
another larger-scale map with contours. There's a flat spot in this
valley. Pretty remote. There's a road in, from Jonzere. Runs on up
to the Spanish border. There'll be a border post up there, patrols.
We don't want you in Spain. We've got Franco leaning our way at the
moment, and we don't want anything to happen that would, er, make
it necessary for him to have to show what a beefy sort of chap he is. Plus you'd get
yourselves interned and the camps are really not nice at all. So
when you leave the drop site go downhill. Jaime'll remind you.
Uphill is Spain. Downhill is France.'
Andrea was frowning at the map. The contours on
either side of the valley were close together. Very close. In fact,
the valley sides looked more like cliffs than slopes. He said,
'It's not a good place to drop.'
Evans said. There are no good places to drop
just now in France.' There was a silence. 'Anyway,' he said
briskly. 'You'll be met by a man called Jules. Hugues knows
him.'
The fair-haired Norman nodded. 'Good man,' he
said.
'Jules has been making a bit of a speciality of
the Werwolf project. He'll brief you and pass you on. After that,
you'll be on your own. But I hear you're used to that.' He looked
at the grim faces. He thought, with a young man's arrogance:
they're old, and they're tired. Does Jensen know what he's
doing?
Then he remembered that Jensen always knew what
he was doing.
Mallory looked at Evans' pink cheeks and crisp
uniform. We all know you have been told to say this, he thought.
And we all know that it is not true. We are not on our own at all.
We are at the mercy of these three Frenchmen.
Evans said, 'There is a password. When anyone
says to you, "L'Amiral", you will reply "Beaufort".
And vice versa. We put it out on the BBC. The SAS used it, I'm
afraid. No time to put out another one. Use with care.' He handed
out bulky brown envelopes. 'Callsigns,' said Evans. 'Orders. Maps.
Everything you need. Commit to memory and destroy. Any
questions?'
There were no questions. Or rather, there were
too many questions for it to be worth asking any of
them.
'Storm Force,' said Miller, who had torn open
his envelope. 'What's that?'
'That's you. This is Operation Storm,' said
Evans. 'You were Force 10 in Yugoslavia. This follows on. Plus ..."
he hesitated.
'Yes?' said Mallory.
'Joke, really,' said Evans, grinning pinkly.
'But, well. Captain Jensen said we might as well call you after the
weather forecast.'
'Great,' said Miller. 'Just great. All this and
parachutes too.'
'Ladies and gentlemen, sorry,
gentlemen,' said Wing-Commander Maurice Hartford. 'We are
now one hour from drop. Air Pyrenees hopes you are enjoying the
ride. Personally, I think you are all crazy.'
Naturally, nobody could hear him, because the
intercom was turned off. But it relieved his feelings. Why, he
thought, is it always me?
It had been a nice takeoff. Six men plus the
crew, not much equipment: a trivial load for the Albemarle, droning
up from Termoli, over the wrinkled peaks of the Apennines, and into
the sunset. The red sunset.
Hartford switched on the intercom. 'Captain
Mallory,' he said, 'why don't you pop up to the sharp
end?'
Mallory stirred in his steel bucket seat. He
had slept for a couple of hours this afternoon. So had Andrea and
Dusty Miller. An orderly had woken them for a dinner of steak and
red wine, upon which they had fallen like wolves. The Frenchmen had
picked at the food; nobody had wanted to talk. Jaime had remained
dour. Hugues, unless Mallory was much mistaken, had developed a bad
case of the jitters. Nothing wrong with that, though. The bravest
men were not those who did not know fear, but those who knew it and
conquered it. On the aeroplane, the Frenchmen had stayed awake
while Andrea made himself a bed with his head on the box of fuses,
and Miller sank low in his bucket seat, propped his endless legs on
the radio, and began a snore that rivalled the clattering thunder
of the Albemarle's Merlins.
Mallory had slept lightly. What he wanted was
ten days of unconsciousness, broken only by huge meals at four-hour
intervals. But that would have to wait. Among the rockfalls and
avalanches of the Southern Alps, and during the long,
dangerous months in Crete, he had learned to sleep a
couple of inches below the surface, a wild animal's sleep that
could give way to complete wakefulness in a fraction of a
second.
He clambered out of his seat and went to the
cockpit. The pilot gestured to the co-pilot's seat. Mallory sat
down and plugged in the intercom.
'Cup of tea?' said the pilot, whose ginger
moustache rose four inches above his mask, partially obscuring the
goggles he wore to keep it out of his eyes.
Mallory said, 'Please.'
'Co-pilot's having a kip.' The pilot waved a
thermos over a mug. 'Sunset,' he said, gesturing
ahead.
There was indeed a sunset. The western sky was
full of an archipelago of fiery islands, on which the last beams of
the sun burst in a surf of gold. Above, the sky was dappled with
cirrus. Below, the Mediterranean was darkening through steel to
ink.
'Red sky at night,' said the pilot. 'Pilot gets
fright.'
The plane bounced. Mallory captured a mouthful
of tea and hot enamel. 'Why?' he said.
Quiet sort of chap, thought Hartford. Not
bashful. Just quiet. Quiet like a bomb nobody had armed yet. Brown
eyes that looked completely at home, completely competent, wherever
they found themselves. A lean, tired face, motionless, conserving
energy. Dangerous-looking blighter, thought Hartford, cheerfully.
Lucky old Jerry.
'Weather,' he said. 'Bloody awful weather up
there. Front coming in. All right for shepherds. Shepherds walk.
But we're flying straight into the brute. Going to get very
bumpy.'
'Okay for a drop?'
Hartford said, 'We'll get you down.' Actually,
it was not okay for a drop. But he had orders to get these people
onto the ground, okay "or not. Tell your chaps to strap in, could
you?' He pulled a dustbin-sized briar from his flying-suit pocket,
stuffed it with tobacco, and lit it. The cockpit filled with acrid
smoke. He pulled back the sliding window, admitting the
tooth-jarring bellow of the engines. 'Smell that sea,' he said,
inhaling deeply. 'Wizard. Yup. We'll go in at five hundred feet.
Nice wide valley. All you have to do is jump when the light goes
on. All at once.'
'Five hundred feet?'
'Piece of cake.'
They'll hear us coming.'
The pilot grinned, revealing canines socketed
into the holes they had worn in the stem of the pipe. 'Not unless
they're Spanish,' he said.
They hit the front over the coast, and flew on,
minute after endless minute, untill the minutes became hours. The
Albemarle swooped and plunged, wings battered by the turbulent
upcurrents. By the dark-grey light that crept through the little
windows, Mallory looked at his team. Andrea and Miller he took for
granted. But the Frenchmen he was not so sure about. He could see
the flash of the whites of Jaime's eyes, the nervous movement of
Thierry's mouth as he chewed his lips from inside. And Hugues,
contemplating his hands, hands with heavily-bitten fingernails,
locked on his knees. Mallory felt suddenly weary. He had been in
too many little metal rooms, watched too many people, wondered too
many times how they would shape up when the pressure was on and the
lid had blown off...
The Albemarle banked steeply to port, then
starboard. Mallory thought there was a new kind of turbulence out
there: not just the moil of air masses in collision, but the upward
smack of waves of air breaking on sheer faces of rock. He looked
round.
The doorway into the cockpit was open. Beyond
the windscreen the flannel-coloured clouds separated and wisped
away. Suddenly Mallory was looking down a valley whose steep sides
rose out of sight on either side. The upper slopes were white with
snow. There was a grey village perched up there - up there,
above the aeroplane. A couple of yellow lights showed in the gloom.
No blackout: Spain, thought Mallory -
A pine tree loomed ahead. It approached at two
hundred miles an hour. He saw the pilot's shoulders move as he
hauled on the yoke. The tree was higher than the plane. Hey,
thought Mallory, we're going to hit that -
But the Albemarle roared up and over. Something
slapped the deck under his feet. Then the tree was gone, and the
aircraft was banking steeply to port, into the next
valley.
Mallory got up and closed the door. There were
some things it was not necessary to see. Pine trees were, what? A
hundred feet high? Maximum. Mallory decided if he was going to be
flown into a mountain, he did not want to see the mountain
coming.
It went on: the howl of the wind, the bucket of
the airframe, the bellow of the engines. Mallory fell
asleep.
Next thing he knew the racket was stilll there,
and someone was shaking his shoulder. He felt terrible: head
aching, thoughts slow as cold oil. The Albemarle's bombaimer was
pushing a cup of tea in his face. Benzedrine, he thought. No. Not
yet. This is only the beginning.
He had woken into a different world: the
sick-at-the-stomach world of dangerous things about to happen. He
badly wanted a cigarette. But there would be no time for cigarettes
for a while.
A dim yellow light was burning in the fuselage.
Bulky camouflage forms swore and collided, struggling into their
parachutes and rounding up equipment.
'Five minutes,' said the bombaimer with
repellent cheerfulness, when he had finished checking the
harnesses. 'Onto the trench.'
'Trench?' said Miller.
The bombaimer indicated a long slot in the
floor of the aircraft. 'Get on there,' he said. 'Stand at ease, one
foot either side.' He pointed at a pair of light bulbs. 'When the
light goes green, shun!'
'Gee, thanks,' said Miller, and shuffled into
position. The first light bulb flicked on: red.
Hugues was behind him. Hugues' mind would not
stay stilll. It kept flicking back over the past two years, with the
weary insistence of a stuck gramophone record. After the SS had
done what they had done to his family, he had not cared if he lived
or died. Then Lisette had come along. And in Lisette, he had found
a new reason for living ...
On a night like this, a reason for living was
the last thing you needed. Remember what they taught you in school,
he thought. Keep it buttoned up. Don't let anything show
-
Lisette. When shall I see you
again?
Fear prised his mind apart and climbed in. Fear
became terror. His bowels were water, and icy sweat was pouring
down him.
First, there was the parachute descent, and of
course it was possible that the parachute would not open. Then,
even if the parachute did open, that big thin man Miller had two
boxes balanced in front of him - attached to him, for the
love of God! - full of explosives. So they were all dropping out of
this plane, six humans and a land mine, in a lump. Jesus. He would
be all over the landscape. He would never see Lisette
-
Underfoot, he felt a new vibration, like gears
winding. The trench opened. The night howled in, black and full of
wind. He felt stuck, trapped, cramped by this damned harness,
Schmeisser, pack, equipment.
A hand landed on his shoulder. He looked round
so fast he almost overbalanced.
It belonged to the big man who did not speak,
the bear with the moustache. The big face was impassive. A
reflection of the little red bulb swam in each black eye. One of
the eyes winked. Jesus, thought Hugues. He knows what I'm
thinking. What will he think of me?
But surprisingly, he found that the fear had
lessened.
Jaime was not comfortable either, but for
different reasons. He had the short legs of the mountaineer. In his
mind, he had been tracking their route: up the Valle de Tena, then
north, across the Col de Pourtalet. He had walked it himself, first
with bales of cigarettes, then with mules bearing arms for the
Republican cause in the last days of the Spanish Civil War. He
reckoned that now they would be coming down on Colbis. He did not
like the feel of the weather out there. Nor did he like the fact
that they were flying in cloud down a fifty-degree hillside at two
hundred miles an hour. Feet on the ground were safe. Mules were
safer. He wanted to get back on the ground, because his legs were
aching, straddled over the trench, and he could feel the fear
radiating from Thierry, slung about with his radios, straw hat
stuffed in his pack, his big face improbably healthy in the red
light -
Thierry's face turned suddenly
green.
Shun.
Six pairs of heels crashed together. The static
lines ran out and tautened. The hold was empty.
Through the bomb doors the bombaimer glimpsed
points of yellow light forming a tenuous L. He said into
the intercom, 'All gone.' The pilot hauled back on the stick, and
the clouds intervened. The Albemarle banked steeply and set its
nose for Italy.
The ground hit Mallory like a huge, wet hammer.
There were lights looping in his eyes as he rolled. A rock made his
ears ring. He got rid of the parachute, invisible now in the dark,
flattened himself against the ground, and worked the cocking lever
of the Schmeisser, taut as an animal at bay. For a moment there was
the moan of the wind and the feel of grit on his cheek. Then a
voice close at hand said, 'L'Amiral.'
'Beaufort.' he said.
There was shouting. Then more lights - a lot of
lights, a ridiculous number - in his eyes. He levelled the
Schmeisser. The lights wavered away, and someone shouted, 'Non!
Non! L 'Amiral Beaufort. Welcome to France, mon
officier.'
Unnecessary hands pulled him to his feet. He
said, 'Where are the others?'
'Safe.' A flask found his hand. 'Buvez.
Drink. Vive la France!' He drank. It was brandy. It drilled
a .hole in the cold and the rain. People were lighting cigarettes.
There was a lot unmilitary of noise, several bottles. A dark figure
materialised at his side, then another.
Miller's voice said, 'Any minute now someone is
going to start playing the goddamn accordion.'
'All here?' There were grunts from the
darkness. There were too many people, too much noise, not enough
discipline. 'Hugues.'
'Sir.'
'Tell these people to put the bloody lights
out. Where's Jules?'
There was a conversation in French. Hugues
replied, his voice rising, expostulating. 'Merde,' he said
finally.
'What is it?'
These idiots. These goddamn Trotskyite sons
of-'
'Quick.' Mallory's voice brought him up sharp
as a choke-chain.
'Jules is held up in Colbis. There was an
incident with your forces last week. The Germans are
nervous.'
That would have been the SAS, thought Mallory,
charging around like bulls in a china shop.
'But Colbis is only in the next valley. We will
take you there, when we have transport. There is a problem with the
transport. They don't know what. A lorry will come soon, they say.
Franchemeni; said Hugues, his voice rising, 'I do not
believe these people. They are like the Spanish, always
manana-'
'Ask them how soon.' And calm them down,
thought Mallory. Calm them down.
They say to wait,' said Hugues, not at all
calm. 'It is seven miles to the village. There may be patrols.
There is a cave they know. It is dry there, and German patrols do
not visit it. They say it will be a good place to wait. The lorry
will come to collect you, in one hour, maybe two.'
Mallory looked at his watch. Raindrops blurred
the glass. Just after midnight. Monday already. And they were being
told to wait on a mountain top in the rain, and the Werwolf pack
was leaving at noon on Wednesday.
He said, 'Where's this cave?'
'I know it,' said Jaime's voice.
Mallory sighed. Patience. 'Let's go,' he
said.
Andrea appeared at his side. Mallory felt the
comfort of his gigantic presence. 'This is not good,' said the
Greek, under the babble of excited talk from the
escort.
'We will make it better,' said Mallory.
'Hugues. Tell these people to be quiet.'
Hugues started shouting. The crowd fell silent.
They started to walk in the lashing rain.
Jaime set a cracking pace up the valley,
towards Spain, following a track that wound through a field of tea
chest-sized boulders which had fallen from the valley's sides. The
map had been right; those sides were not so much slopes as cliffs.
From the rear, Mallory could hear Hugues' voice, speaking French,
raised in violent argument with someone. Mallory was beginning to
worry about Hugues. Staying alive behind enemy lines meant staying
calm. It was beginning to sound as if Hugues was not a calm person.
He called softly, 'Shut up.'
Hugues shut up. The procession became
quiet.
Mallory said to Miller, 'What was that
about?'
'He was looking for someone. Someone who's not
around.'
In ten minutes the valley floor had narrowed to
a hundred yards, and the sides had become vertical walls of rock,
undermined at their base, hidden in inky shadows. 'Here,' said
Jaime's voice from the dark. A flashlight beam illuminated a dark
entrance.
Andrea materialised at Mallory's side. 'Bad
place,' he said. The cave had no exit except into the valley. And
the valley was more a gorge than a valley. It felt bad. It felt
like a trap. 'Hugues,' said Mallory, without looking round. Tell
these people that this is no good.'
Mallory turned. 'Hugues,' he said. 'Tell these
people-'
He stopped. There were no people. Hugues was a
solitary dark figure against the paler grey of the
rocks.
Hugues said. They have left.'
'Left?' said Mallory.
'Gone to look for the transport. Also, there
was a ... person I wished to see who did not arrive. That was why I
had a discussion - yes - an acrimonious discussion.' His voice was
rising. These people are frankly peasants-'
Andrea said, 'Enough.'
Hugues stopped talking as if someone had
flipped a switch. Mallory said to Andrea and Miller, 'We're stuck
with this. We need the transport. If we move, they'll lose us.
We'll have to wait. Take cover.'
Andrea and Miller were already fading into the
dark, taking up positions not in the cave, but among the rocks on
the valley floor.
The night became quiet, except for the sigh of
the wind and the swish of the rain, and the drowsy clonk of a goat
bell from inside the cave.
This is all wrong, thought Mallory. We have
been inadequately briefed, and we are dependent on a Resistance
organisation that seems completely disorganised. It sounds as if
the SAS have already compromised us. If the enemy comes up the
valley there is no way out, except into an internment camp in
Spain.
Mallory lay and strained his ears into the wet
dark rain, wind, goat bells -
And another sound. A mechanical sound, but not
a motor. The sound of metal on metal, gears turning. The sound of a
bicycle.
There was a sudden crash. The old sounds
returned, with behind them the noise of a back wheel spinning,
ticking to a stop.
Mallory waited. Then he heard the brief,
otherworldly bleep of a Scops owl.
Mallory had as yet heard no Scops owls in the
Pyrenees. But there had been plenty in Crete, where he had served
his time with Andrea.
Something moved at his shoulder: something
huge, blacker than the night. Andrea said, 'I found this,' and
dropped something on the gritty ground beside him, something that
drew breath and started to croak.
Mallory allowed the muzzle of the Schmeisser to
rest gently in the hollow under the something's ear. He said,
'Quiet.'
The something became quiet.
Mallory said, 'I am a British officer. What do
you want?'
The something said, 'Hugues.'
'Good God,' said Mallory.
The something was a woman.
The woman got her voice back. She batted at
Mallory with her hands. She was strong. She said,
'Laisse-moi,' in a voice both vigorous and
tough.
Out in the dark and the rain, Hugues' voice
said, 'Bon Dieu!' Mallory thought he could hear something
new in it: shock, and awe. He heard the uncoordinated stumble of
Hugues' boots in the dark. 'Lisette!' cried Hugues.
'Hugues!' cried the woman. 'C'est bien
toi?
Then Hugues was embracing her. The fear was
gone now. All the terrible things were gone. All Hugues' life,
people had taken what he loved away from him, for reasons that
seemed excellent to them but incomprehensible to him. They had
taken away his parents and sent him to a stupid English school.
They had taken away Mireille and the children because he was a
saboteur. And then he had met Lisette, in the Resistance, and
become her lover. When SOE had flown him out in the Lysander, he
had thought that that had been the end of Lisette,
too.
But here she was. In his arms. As large as
life, if not larger.
'My darling,' he said.
She kissed him on the cheek, murmuring what
sounded like pet names. Then Mallory heard her tone change. She
sounded frantic about something.
'Merde,' said Hugues, in his new, firm
voice. 'We must leave. Now.'
Mallory said, quietly, 'Who is
this?'
'Lisette,' said Hugues. 'A friend. A
resistante.'
'Is she the person you wanted to see who did
not arrive?'
'Yes. She is an old friend. She knows the
people on the ground in the region. It is an excellent thing that
she has found us. Providential. She says there are sixty Germans
coming up the valley.'
Three lorries,' she said. Her accent was heavy,
but comprehensible. 'The ones who reached Jonzere told me they
caught two of your reception committee, found them with
parachutes.'
'How long ago?'
'Half an hour,' said Lisette. 'At the most.
They told me to warn you.'
Mallory's stomach felt shrivelled like a
walnut. One and a half hours in France, and the operation was as
good as over. He pushed the thought into the back of his mind.
'Jaime!' he said.
Jaime appeared out of the night. 'Lisette,' he
said, without surprise.
'Bonjour, Jaime.'
Briskly, Mallory explained the
position.
Jaime said, 'We must go to Spain. It is over.
Finished.'
In his mind Mallory saw a soldier, pack on his
back, seasickness in his belly and fear in his soul, squashed
against the steel side of a ship by a thousand other soldiers. And
suddenly, without warning, something stove in the side of that
ship, smashed the soldier like an egg, and the cold green water
poured in.
Once Mallory had been in a little steel room on
a ship in the Mediterranean, checking grenades. There had been a
bang. Someone had said, Torpedo.' Then the room had started to fill
up with water, and the ship with screams, quickly cut off. Mallory
had been one of four survivors. Four out of three
hundred.
If the Werwolf pack got out intact, there could
be a thousand such ships.
Mallory said, 'No other way?'
'None.' Jaime seemed to hesitate. 'Except the
Chemin des Anges.'
'What's that?'
'Nothing. A goat track, no more. It runs from
Jonzere, at the bottom of the valley, up the ridge, in the manner
of the old roads. The pilgrims used to use it, the men with the
cockle shells in their hats, bound for Santiago de Compostela, when
there were bandits in the mountains. It is a dangerous road. It
killed almost as many pilgrims as the bandits did.'
'Where is it?'
Against the dark sky Jaime's small shoulders
appeared to shrug. He pointed upwards. 'On the spine of the hill.
Here it runs three hundred metres above the valley. Above the
cliff. Then it turns over the mountain and down to Colbis. There
were pilgrims' inns in Colbis. But we can't go to Jonzere, to the
start of the track. It'll be full of Germans -'
'We'll go up the cliff,' said Mallory, as if he
were proposing a walk in the park.
There was a second's silence. Then Jaime said,
'To join the Chemin des Anges here? That is not
possible.'
Mallory said, 'It is necessary.'
The chill of his voice silenced Jaime for a
moment. Then he said, 'But you do not understand. Nobody can climb
those cliffs.'
That is what the Germans will think.
Miller?'
Miller had been sitting on a boulder. He knew
what Mallory was going to say, and he found the knowledge
depressing. 'Yep?'
'Round up the people. Andrea and I are going up
the cliff. We'll do a pitch, belay and drop you a fixed rope. Make
sure everyone comes.'
Miller pushed his SS helmet back on his head
and looked up. For a moment it was like being in a tunnel. Then,
far overhead, clouds shifted, and there appeared between the two
cliff-masses a thread-fine crack of sky. The wind was blowing up
the valley. He could hear no lorries. The dark bulk that was
Mallory slung a coil of wire-cored rope over his shoulder and
walked towards the cliff. Wearily, Miller rounded up Hugues and
Lisette, and Jaime, and Thierry the radio operator, and assembled
the stores, and the radio, and the two wooden boxes of
explosives, under the cliff. Mallory and Andrea seemed to vanish
into the solid rock. The group at the cliff foot sat huddled
against the icy rain. From above came the infrequent sound of a low
word spoken, the clink of hammer on spike, the scuff of nailed boot
on rock. The sounds receded quickly upwards. Human goddamn flies,
thought Miller, gloomily. Personally, he had no suckers on his
feet, and no plans to grow any. He stood up, cocked his Schmeisser
and moved fifty yards down the valley in the rain. Someone had to
stand sentry, and the only person on the valley floor Miller
trusted was Miller.
Fall in with bad companions and what do you
get?
I tell you what you get, he told himself,
settling into a natural embrasure in the rock and preparing for the
first of the sixty Germans to come round the corner.
You get problems.
There had been times in Mallory's life when he
would have enjoyed a good crack at a limestone cliff in the dark.
On a cold morning, perhaps, in a gorge in the Southern Alps, when
you had got up at one in the morning, the stars floating silver and
unwinking between the ice-white peaks of the range.
This was not one of those times.
This was a vertical slab of rock he could
barely see. This was climbing by Braille, running fingers and feet
over the smooth surface looking for pockmarks and indentations,
tapping spikes into hair-cracks, standing with the tip of a
boot-toe balanced on a foothold slim as a
goose-quill.
But Mallory knew that there is a greater spur
to climbing a cliff in the dark than a wish to dwell in the white
Olympus of the high peaks. It is to get you and your comrades away
from three lorry loads of Germans.
So Mallory climbed that sopping wall untill his
fingernails were gone, and the sweat stung his eyes, and the breath
rasped in his tobacco-seared throat. And after fifty feet, he found
a chimney.
It was a useful chimney, the edge of a huge
flake of rock that would in a few hundred years separate from the
face of the cliff and slide into the gorge. Mallory made a belay,
called down to Andrea, and went up the chimney as if it had
been a flight of stairs.
At first the chimney was vertical. After thirty
feet it started to trend leftward. Then suddenly there was a
chockstone, a great boulder that had rolled down the cliff and
jammed in the chimney, it formed a level floor embraced on two
sides by buttresses of rock, invisible from the bottom of the
valley. It was more than Mallory had dared hope for. Fifty people
could have hidden up there while the Germans rumbled up the valley
and flattened their noses against the Spanish border. Over which
they would assume the Storm Force had fled -
Mallory felt a sensation he hardly
recognised.
Hope.
Don't count your chickens.
Jaime was the first to arrive. He was carrying
the bulky, square-edged radio pack. Jaime was a useful man on a
mountain. There was a pause, and Andrea came up, carrying the
second rope. 'All at the base of the chimney,' he said. 'Stores
too.'
'Good,' said Mallory, belaying the rope and
letting the end go.
Now that there were two ropes, things started
to move fast. Thierry came up one, breathing in a high, frightened
whimper, his straw hat crammed over his eyebrows. The second rope
seemed to be taking a long time. 'It's the woman,' said Andrea.
'She doesn't have the strength in her arms.' Mallory saw his huge
back dark against the sky as he bent to the rope. She was a big
woman; there were not many fat people in wartime France, but she
was one of them. She must have weighed ten stone. But Andrea hauled
her up as if she had been a bag of sugar, set her on her feet, and
dusted down her bulk.
'Merci,' she said.
Andrea's white teeth flashed under his
moustache. He had the smile of a musketeer, this Greek giant. Even
now, with the rain lashing down and Germans in the valley, Lisette
felt enveloped in a protective cloak of courtesy and understanding.
Andrea bowed, as if she had been a lady of Versailles, not a
shapeless bundle of overcoats crouched on a cliff ledge. Then he
let the rope go again.
Hugues came up, too breathless to complain, and
went to Lisette's side. Mallory had a nagging moment of
worry. Hugues' priorities had to be with the operation, not his
girlfriend. Mallory did not know enough about this woman. And he
did not know enough about Hugues. For the moment, if her
information was good, she had saved their bacon. But if Mallory's
instincts were right, she was going to be a distraction. And
distractions had no place on an operation like this. On this
operation there was a single priority: find and destroy the Werwolf
pack.
Hugues would need watching.
Mallory turned away, and hauled up the boxes of
explosives and a couple of packs. The rain was turning even colder,
developing a grainy feel. Mallory thought, soon it will be snowing.
His hands were cracked and sore, and the plaster had peeled off the
reopening wounds. God knew how Andrea must be feeling. But the
stores were up, stacked on the edge of the boulder, and Miller was
on his way up, but with no rope yet. Must get a rope to him; Miller
was no climber.
The wind moaned and died. Andrea said,
'Listen,'
There was a new sound in the raw, snow-laden
air. Lorry engines.
All the way up the bottom forty feet of the
cliff. Miller had been feeling the void snapping at his heels. The
wind was freezing, but inside his uniform a Niagara of hot sweat
was running. His knees felt weak, his hands shaky. Miller had been
raised on the flatlands of the American Midwest. One hold at a
time, he told himself. Don't look down. Don't think of the sheer
face down there -
Miller patted the cliff above his head, groping
for chinks and crevices. Mallory must have found some. But as far
as Miller was concerned he might as well have been trying to climb
a plate glass window. Both ropes were in use ...
Hurry, please, thought Miller politely. For
forty feet down, things were happening. On the wind from the valley
came the sharp whiff of exhaust. He looked up.
The cold, slushy rain battered his face. What
he could see of the cliff was black and shiny, the chimney a dark
streak rising to the chockstone. He had seen Mallory in a chimney,
his shoulders one side, his heels the other, gliding his way
skyward with that weightless fluency of his. Miller's limbs were
too lanky for that, and his body wanted to plaster itself against
the rock, not sit out over the emptiness as Mallory did, applying
weight where it was needed, on fingers and toes -
Without a rope there was no way of getting to
the chimney.
He pressed his face into the rock. The earthy
smell of wet stone filled his nostrils. There was a lightening of
the walls. Headlights down the valley.
He moved his hands again. The rock was rough,
but there was nothing you could hold on to. Not unless you were a
human fly like Mallory. Can't go up, thought Miller. Can't go down.
So you just stand here, and hold on, and try not to follow that
voice in your head that is telling you to shout and scream and keel
gently out and back and plummet into space.
There were lights under his feet, and the gorge
was churning with engines. A voice above him said, 'Rope
coming!'
The lorries were directly below him now. By the
grind of their engines they were moving at a slow, walking pace.
Searching. Nobody looks up. It is fine. Nobody ever looks
up. Particularly not up sheer cliffs.
Not even Germans. No matter how thorough they
may be.
You wish.
The rope nudged his face, cautiously. Miller
said a quiet, polite thank you. Then he wound his hands into it and
began to climb.
'He's coming up now,' said Andrea, in his soft,
imperturbable voice.
They were standing at the back of the ledge
formed by the chockstone. Its edge was a horizon now, backlit by
the glow of the lorries' headlamps. Against the edge was something
hard-edged and square. The radio.
'Move that,' said Mallory to
Thierry.
Thierry started forward, shuffling, his great
bulk moving against the lights. He was tired, thought Mallory.
Tired and frightened, in a wet straw hat.
If he had been less tired himself, he might
have prevented what happened next.
Thierry scooped up the radio and slung it over
his shoulder. As he turned, his foot hit something that could
have been a tuft of grass but was actually a rock. The rock went
over the edge.
It whizzed past Dusty Miller's head. At the
base of the chimney it bounced, removing a fair-sized boulder. By
the time it hit the valley floor it was a junior landslide. It
landed with a roar fifteen feet to the right of the second truck in
the convoy. Small stones pattered against the passenger door of the
cab.
The truck stopped. A searchlight on the roof
sent a white disc of light sliding across the black face of the
cliff.
Miller was fifteen feet from the top, sweating,
his breath coming in gasps. Clamp a hand on the rope. Pull up,
shoving with feet. Clamp the other hand. There was shouting down
below. Clamp the other hand. The hands like grey spiders against
the cliff. They could have belonged to anyone, those hands, except
for the pain, and the heavy thump of his heart.
And suddenly the other hand was not grey, but
blazing, brilliant flesh-colour, and every fibre of the rope stood
out in microscopic detail. And Miller was a moth, kicking on the
pin of the searchlight.
A rifle cracked, then another. Chips of rock
stung his face. His back crawled with the expectation of bullets.
Ten feet to go. It might as well have been ten
miles.
But there was a burst of machine-gun fire from
above, and the searchlight went out, and suddenly the rope in his
hands was alive, moving upwards like the rope of a ski tow. And he
looked up and saw a huge shape, dim above the cliff, shoulders
working. Andrea.
Andrea pulled him up those last ten feet as if
he had weighed two hundred ounces instead of two hundred pounds.
Miller hit the dirt in cover, rolled, and unslung his Schmeisser.
Trouble, he thought. I am not a goddamn human fly, and as a result
we are in it up to our necks, and sinking.
Beyond the boulder the cliffs were brilliant
white. In their light he could see Andrea cocking a
Bren.
'I'll cover you,' said Andrea, in his unruffled
craftsman's voice. 'Grenades?'
Miller and Mallory each took two grenades from
their belt pouches and pulled the pins. 'Two, three,' said Mallory.
'Throw.'
There was a moment of silence, broken only by
the metallic clatter of the grenades bouncing down the cliff, two
left, two right. The world seemed to hold its breath. They would be
setting up a mortar down there; taking up positions, radioing for
reinforcements. Though, in a gorge like this, radio reception would
be terrible -
Then the night flashed white, and four
explosions rang as one, followed by a deeper explosion. Andrea
crawled to the edge of the ledge. The lights had gone out. There
was a new light, orange and black: a burning lorry. The firing
lulled, then began again.
Mallory said, 'Cover us for ten minutes. We'll
meet you at the top.'
Andrea's head was a black silhouette against
the orange flicker of the gasoline fire. The silhouette nodded. For
a moment his huge shoulders showed against the sky, the Bren slung
over the right. Then he faded into the rocks. The five other men
and Lisette gathered up the packs. Jaime said, in a voice
apparently unaffected by fear. There is a path. A little
higher.'
'Miller,' said Mallory. 'We don't want those
trucks to get back. Or anywhere with anything like decent radio
reception. Anything you can do?'
Miller shrugged. 'I'll give it the old college
try,' he said. His hands were already busy in the first of the
brass-bound boxes. He felt for one of the five-pound bricks of
plastic explosive, laid it on the ground, latched the first box and
unlatched the second. The second box was thickly lined with felt.
Unclipping a flashlight from the breast pocket of his smock, he
used it to select a green time pencil: thirty seconds' delay.
Delicately he pressed the pencil into the primer and looked at the
radium-bright numerals on his watch. Then he snapped the time
pencil, yawned, and carefully lit a cigarette. By the time he had
pocketed his Zippo, twenty-five seconds had elapsed. He took the
brick in both hands and heaved it out and over the vehicles in the
valley below.
Miller really hated heights. But nice, safe
explosives were familiar territory. It felt great to be
back.
For the space of a breath, there was darkness
and silence in which the sound of Germanic shouting rose from the
valley, mixed with the scrape of steel on rock as they set up the
mortars.
Then the night turned white, whiter than the
searchlights, and Mallory was blasted against the cliff by a huge
metallic clang that felt as if it would drive his eardrums
together in the middle of his head.
'Go,' he said, the sound small and distant
behind the ringing in his ears.
They began to file up the cliff: Mallory in the
lead, then Jaime, Lisette, and Hugues, with Miller bringing up the
rear. Andrea climbed the fifty-degree face behind the chockstone
untill he found another boulder. There he stopped, unfolded the
Bren's bipod, and rested it on the stone.
Fires were stilll burning on the valley floor.
The flames cast a flickering light on torn rock and twisted metal,
and many stilll bodies dressed in field-grey. There were three
trucks. Two of them were burning. The other lay like a crushed
beetle under a huge slab of rock prised away from the gorge wall by
the force of the explosion. At the far side of the gorge, three
grey figures were draped over the rocks beside what had once been a
mortar.
One of the figures moved.
Andrea pulled the Bren into his shoulder, and
fired. The heavy drum of the machine gun echoed in the rocks. The
grey figure went over backwards and did not move any
more.
Then there was silence, except for the moan of
the wind and the patter of sleet on rock.
Andrea watched for another five minutes,
patient, not heeding the icy moisture soaking through his smock and
into his battle-dress blouse.
Nothing moved. As far as he could tell, the
radio sets were wrecked, and there were no survivors. But of course
there would be survivors. He had no objection to going down and
cutting the survivors' throats. But if he did, it was unlikely that
he would be able to rejoin the main party.
Andrea thought about it with the deliberation
of a master wine maker deciding on which day he would pick his
grapes: perhaps a little light on sugar today, but if he waited a
week, there was the risk of rain ...
Naturally, the Germans would assume that the
force that had attacked them had gone on to Spain.
Andrea took a final look at the flames and the
metal and the bodies. He felt no emotion. Guerrilla warfare was a
job, a job at which he was an expert. His strength and intelligence
were weapons in the service of his comrades and his country's
allies. He did not like killing German soldiers. But if it was pan
of the job, then he was prepared to do it, and do it
well.
To Andrea, this looked like a decent piece of
work.
He slung the Bren over his shoulder and began
to lope rapidly up the steep mountain. It had begun to
snow.
It was a wet snow that fell in flakes the size
of saucers, each flake landing on skin or cloth or metal with an
icy slap, beginning immediately to melt. They slid into boots and
down necks, becoming paradoxically colder as they melted. Within
ten minutes the whole party was soaked to the skin. And for what
seemed like an eternity, there was only the rasp of breath in
throats, the hammer of hearts, and the sodden rub of boots against
feet as they marched doggedly up the forty-five-degree slope in the
icy blackness. Miller's mind was filled with
anxiety.
He said to Andrea, 'What do you
think?'
Andrea knew what he was being asked. They will
think we have gone to Spain.'
'Perhaps.'
'And they will send out patrols. In case we
have not gone to Spain.'
'Exactly.'
One foot in front of the other. Hammering
hearts. Sore feet. Soon they would have to stop. Food was needed,
and warmth. But they were walking away from food and warmth,
upwards. Into unknown territory. Where they had been assured Jules
would be waiting, somewhere warm and dry. Assured by
Lisette.
Mallory was having to rely on people he did not
know. And that made Mallory nervous.
Mallory said quietly, 'We'd better watch the
rear, in case anyone drops out.'
Andrea stepped to one side. The walkers passed
him: Jaime in the lead. Miller, Thierry. Then, a long way behind,
too far, Hugues and Lisette: Hugues hunched over Lisette,
apparently half-carrying her, their shapes odd and lumpy
against the white snow, like a single, awkward animal. Andrea could
hear Hugues' breathing.
'You all right?' he said.
'Of course,' said Hugues, in a voice whose
cheerfulness even exhaustion could not mar.
Andrea frowned. Then he fell in behind, and
kept on upwards.
It felt like an eternity. But in reality it was
only a little more than an hour before Jaime emitted a bark of
satisfaction, and said, 'Voila!'
The ground had for some time been rising less
steeply. Between snow flurries, Mallory saw a silvery line of snow
lying across the black-lead sky: the ridge. Between the walkers and
the ridge was what might have been a narrow ledge, running
diagonally upwards, its lines softened by six inches of snow. Jaime
kicked at the downhill side with his foot, revealing a coping of
roughly-dressed stone. The Chemin des Anges,' he
said.
The path was easy walking, following the
contours, skirting precipices over which Miller did not allow his
eyes to stray. They followed it up and onto the
ridge.
Lack of effort let them feel the chill of their
sodden clothes. They paused to let Lisette and Hugues catch up.
Mallory took his oilcloth-wrapped cigarettes from the soaking
pocket of his blouse, and gave one to Miller. Their faces were
haggard in the Zippo's flare. Hugues and Lisette
approached.
Hugues said, 'Lisette needs food. Rest,
warmth-'
'Don't be stupid,' said Lisette's voice. She
sounded weak, but resolute.
'But my darling -'
'Don't you darling me,' she said. 'Can we go
on?'
Mallory said nothing. It was possible to admire
this woman's spirit. It was less possible to admire the speed at
which she moved. Too slow, thought Mallory. It was all getting too
slow, and there was a hell of a distance to travel before they even
got to the start line.
His watch said it was 0200 hours. He said to
Jaime, 'How long?'
Two hours. All downhill. The slope is not so
bad now.'
Mallory could hear Hugues' teeth chattering.
There was a thin icy wind up here, and the snow was colder. 'Any
shelter before then?'
'In ten minutes. A shepherd's hut. There will
be nobody.'
'We'll stop for twenty minutes.'
'Thank God.'
The shepherd's hut had a roof and three walls,
facing providentially away from the wind. The floor was covered in
dung-matted straw, but it was dry, and after the snow it was as
good as a Turkish carpet. They burrowed into the filthy straw,
smoking, letting their body heat warm their soaking clothes. Jaime
produced a bottle of brandy. Lisette was half-buried in the straw
next to Hugues. When Mallory shone his flashlight at her, he saw
her face was a dead grey. He took the brandy bottle out of
Thierry's hand and carried it over to her. 'Here,' he
said.
The neck of the bottle rattled against her
teeth. She coughed. Thank you,' she said, when she could
speak.
Mallory said, 'It was a good thing you found
us.'
'Love,' said Hugues. 'It was the power of love.
A sixth sense -'
There was a little more to it than that,' she
said, dryly. 'Hugues, you are getting carried away.'
'Yes,' said Mallory, warming to her toughness.
'So how did you do it?'
She shook her head. Her shivering was lending a
faint seismic movement to the straw. They were talking, the
resistants. One of them I knew. They said the radio signal
arranging your drop mentioned that you were carrying money, I don't
know if it's true. They made a deal with a German officer. They are
demoralised, some of these Germans in the mountains here. And of
course the resistants too; some of them are no more than
bandits. The German was to kill you. Then he was to give them the
money and collect a medal, I guess.' Her teeth gleamed in the pale
reflection from the snow outside. 'I saw them come back to warn the
officer. I knew where they had come from. So I got on my bicycle,
and fell off in the right place. And it didn't work out for those
pigs.'
Thank God,' said Hugues,
fervently.
Mallory found he was smiling. Thank you,' he
said. He got up, his weary knees protesting. It looked as if there
was a new addition to the party. A brave addition, but a slow one.
He hoped that Hugues would get his ardour under control, and
start acting human again. He said, 'We're moving
out.'
An hour and a half later Jaime led them down a
snowy path and into the trees above the village. There was another
barn-like building in the trees.
Jaime opened the door and said, 'Wait in
here.'
Mallory said, 'Where are you
going?'
To find some friends.' There was a fireplace.
Jaime struck a match, lit the piled kindling, and threw on an
armful of logs. 'Be comfortable. Dry yourselves.' His eyes were
invisible in the shadows under his heavy eyebrows.
Mallory's eyes met Andrea's. He did not like
it. Nor, he could tell, did Andrea. But there was nothing he could
do.
Jaime disappeared into the night. Lisette sank
down in front of the fire and began to pull her boots
off.
'Outside,' said Mallory.
She looked at him as if he was
mad.
'What if Jaime comes back with a German
patrol?'
'Mais non,' said Thierry.
'Jaime?' said Lisette. 'Never. He hates
Germans.'
Hugues' face was pink and nervous. 'How do you
know?' he said. 'How does anyone know? The Germans arrived at the
drop site within half an hour. Someone betrayed us-'
'I told you what happened,' said Lisette. 'Now
for God's sake -'
'Outside,' said Hugues.
Something happened to Lisette's face.
'Non.' she said. 'Non, non. non, non. I am
staying.'
'And I also,' said Thierry, his big face the
colour of lard under the straw hat.
'Women,' said Hugues.
'I am not women!' snapped Lisette. 'I am
someone who knows Jaime. And trusts him.'
'Ah. ca!' said Hugues. 'Well
-'
'But perhaps you trust your friends more,' said
Lisette.
And when Hugues looked round, he saw that where
Mallory, Miller and Andrea had been standing were only wet
footprints.
Out in the woods Miller lay and shivered in a
pile of sodden pine needles, and thought longingly of the warm
firelight in the barn. He had watched Hugues storm out, heard the
slam of the door. Then nothing, except the icy drip of rainwater on
his neck, and the mouldy smell of pine needles under his
nose.
After half an hour, the rain stopped. There was
silence, with dripping. And behind the dripping, the wheeze and
clatter of an engine. Some sort of truck came round the corner, no
lights. Miller sighted his Schmeisser on its cab. Three men got
out. As far as Miller could see, the truck was small, and not
German.
A voice said, 'L'Amiral
Beaufort!'
Another voice said, 'Vive la
France!'
The barn door opened and closed.
Mallory saw Hugues come out of the bush in
which he had been hiding, and walk across to the bam. Hugues knew
these men, it appeared. That was Hugues' area of speciality. So
Mallory got up himself, and went in.
The men Jaime had brought wore sweeping
moustaches and huge berets that flopped down over their eyes. They
carried shotguns. Two of them were talking to Hugues in rapid
French. Mallory thought they looked a damned sight too pleased with
themselves.
'There are no Germans in the village,' said
Jaime. 'But there is a small problem. It seems that Jules has had
an accident. A fatal accident, they tell me. He was shot at
Jonzere, last night.'
Mallory stared at him. 'How?' he
said.
'A matter of too much enthusiasm,' said
Jaime.
Hugues ceased his conversation and turned to
Mallory. He said, 'Or to tell the truth, a mess.'
Jaime shrugged. He said, 'The resistants
heard we had landed. There was an idea that we were a regiment,
maybe more, because there were only two survivors from the German
patrol in the gorge. So Jules heard all this and went to Jonzere to
stop these hotheads getting themselves killed. But he was too late.
They were firing on the Germans, and the Germans were firing back,
and they got themselves killed, all right. And Jules got himself
killed with them.'
Hugues blew air, expressing scorn. 'It is not
as it is in the north. These mountain people have too many feelings
and too few brains.'
It was Jules who had known the man who knew
where the Werwolf pack were being repaired. Without Jules, the
chain was broken.
Mallory said, with a mildness he did not feel,
'So how are we to continue with the operation?'
'Ah,' said Jaime. 'Marcel has a surprise for
you, in Colbis.' He did not look as if he approved of
surprises.
'Marcel the baker?' said Hugues.
'That's the one.'
Hugues nodded approvingly. 'A good man,' he
said.
Mallory had the feeling that he was sitting in
on gossip about people he did not know. He said, 'I need
information about the Werwolf pack, not bread.'
'Voila,' said Jaime. 'Marcel proposes
breakfast in the ... in his cafe. Then he will provide you with
transport to where it is you wish to go. He has another Englishman
there, you will be glad to hear, who may have
information.'
May, thought Mallory. Only may. He took a deep,
resigned breath.
'Oh, good,' said Miller, edging towards the
fire. 'And the dancing girls?'
'You may find some dancing
girls.'
'Breakfast would be fine,' said
Miller.
Mallory beckoned Jaime over. The men with the
berets followed him as if glued to his side. 'Why are there no
Germans in the village?'
One of the men with the berets grinned, and
spoke quickly. Jaime translated. 'Because they are all in Jonzere.
First, fighting. Now, trying to catch some bandits before they
arrive in Spain.' There was more talk in a language that was not
French. Basque, Mallory guessed. 'This man says there has been a
battle. Many Germans have been killed. There may be reprisals. It
is said there was an Allied army in the mountains. In the next
valley.'
Mallory raised his eyebrows. 'An army,' he
said. From regiment to army, in the space of three
minutes.
'Yes,' said Jaime, solemn-faced in the dim
light of the torch. And they say it is lucky that we were not
involved, being so few, and one of us a woman.'
Mallory looked at Jaime hard. Was that the
ghost of a wink? Andrea's face was impassive. He had seen it too.
His great head moved, almost imperceptibly. Nodding. Suddenly,
Mallory found himself perilously close to trusting
Jaime.
Mallory hardened his heart. 'Now you listen,'
he said. 'I am grateful for your offers of hospitality. But I don't
want to go into the village, breakfast or no breakfast. I want our
transport out here, and I want to get up to the coast. The more
time we spend in the mountains, the messier it's going to get, the
bigger the rumours. We want to do this quick and quiet. I don't
like rumours and reprisals, or battles. I want intelligence, and I
want transport, and I want them before daylight. Tell these people
to tell Marcel.'
Jaime said, 'I don't know-'
Mallory said, 'And make it
snappy.'
Jaime looked at the steady burn of the
deeply-sunken eyes over the long, unshaven jaw. Jaime thought of
the cliff that nobody could climb, that this man had climbed; of
three burned-out lorries in the pass; and the pursuit on a wild
goose chase towards the Spanish border. This was not a man it was
easy to disobey. Perhaps he had underestimated this
man.
'Bon,' he said.
'And now,' said Mallory, when the men in berets
had gone outside, Thierry. Time to tell the folks at home we've
arrived.'
Thierry nodded. He looked big and pale and
exhausted. His head moved slowly, as if his neck was stiff, the big
jowls creasing and uncreasing, stray strands of straw waving
jauntilly over the burst crown of his hat. He began to unpack the
radio. Miller was in a corner, stretched out full-length on the
straw, humming a Bix Beiderbecke tune. Andrea was relaxed, but
close to a knothole in the door, through which he could keep tabs
on the sentries. Mallory leaned his head against the wall. He could
feel his clothes beginning to steam in the heat from the
fire.
He said to Hugues, quietly, 'What do you know
about this Marcel?'
'Jules' second-in-command,' said Hugues. 'It is
an odd
structure, down here. Security is terrible. But
they are brave men.'
'And we trust them?'
Hugues smiled. He said, 'Is there any
choice?'
Mallory kept hearing Jensen's voice. It
seems quite possible that the Germans will, in a manner of
speaking, be waiting for you.
Damn you, Jensen. What did you know that you
did not tell us?
It was raining again, a steady rattle on the
roof of the bam. On the mountain it would be snowing on their
tracks. Perhaps their tracks would be comprehensively covered, and
the Germans would not be waiting for them. Perhaps they would be
lucky.
But Mallory did not believe in
luck.
Thierry said, 'Contact made and
acknowledged.'
'Messages?'
'No messages,'
Mallory closed his eyes. Sleep lapped at him.
Despite the fire he was cold. Two hours later, he was going to
remember being cold; remember it with nostalgic affection. For the
moment, he lay and shivered, dozing.
Then he was awake.
A lorry engine was running outside. He gripped
his Schmeisser and rose to his feet, instantly alert. He could see
Miller covering the door. Andrea was gone. What -
The door crashed open. A man was standing
there. He was short and fat, with a beret the size of a dinner
plate, and a moustache that spread beyond it like the wings of a
crow. His small black eyes flicked between the Schmeisser barrels
covering him. He grinned broadly. 'Gentlemen,' he said. 'Colbis
welcomes its allies from beyond the seas. Allans, l'Amiral
Beaufort.'
Mallory said, 'Who are you?'
'My name is Marcel,' said the man. 'I am
delighted to see you. I am only sorry that you had some little
problems last night, of which I have already heard.' He bowed. 'My
congratulations. Now, into the lorry. It will soon be light, and
there are many eyes connected to many tongues.'
Outside, a steady rain was falling. In the grey
half-light black pines rose up the steep hillside into a layer of
dirty-grey cloud. The lorry was an old Citroen, converted to
wood-gas, panting and fuming in the yard. 'Messieurs,' said
Marcel. 'Dispose yourselves.'
Mallory closed the Storm Force into the canvas
back of the lorry, and climbed into the front. Marcel ground the
gears, and started to jounce down a narrow track that snaked
through the dripping trees. 'Quite a fuss,' said Marcel. 'The
Germans have met an army of maquisards, it is said. Oh, very
good -'
Mallory said, 'I am looking for three
submarines.'
'Naturally,' said Marcel. 'And I know a man who
will take you to them. We must meet him now. At
breakfast.'
'A man?'
'Wait and see,' said Marcel, hauling the lorry
round a pig in the road.
The trees had stopped. They were crossing open
meadows scattered with small, earth-coloured cottages. Ahead was a
huddle of houses, and the arched campanile of a church. Nothing was
moving; it was four-thirty in the morning. But Mallory did not like
it.
'Where are we going?'
'Breakfast, of course. In the
village.'
'Not the village.' Villages were rat-traps. In
the past eight hours, Mallory had had enough rat-traps for a
lifetime.
Marcel said. There are no Germans in Colbis. No
collaborators. It is important that we go into the village. To see
this person.'
'Who is this person?'
'As I say,' said Marcel, with a winsome smile,
'this will be a surprise.'
Mallory told himself that there was no future
in getting angry. He said, 'Excuse me, but there is very little
time. I do not wish to commit myself to a position from which there
is no retreat.'
Marcel looked at him. Above the jolly cheeks,
the eyes were hard and knowing: the eyes of a lieutenant whose
commanding officer had been killed in the night. Mallory began to
feel better. Marcel said. This person you must meet cannot be
moved. Believe me.'
Mallory gave up. He pulled his SS helmet over
his eyes, checked the magazine of his Schmeisser, and leaned back
in the seat. Slowly the lorry wheezed out of the meadows and wound
its way through streets designed for pack-mules into the centre of
Colbis.
There was a square, flanked on its south side
by the long wall of the church. In the middle were two plane trees
in which roosting chickens clucked drowsily. There was a
mairie, and a line of what must have been shops: butcher's,
baker's, ironmonger's. And on the corner, a row of tall windows
streaming with rain, with a signboard above them bearing the faded
inscription Cafe Des Sports.
''Ere we are,' said Marcel, cheerfully. "Op
out.'
Boots clattered on the wet cobbles. The
etched-glass windows of the cafe reflected the group of civilians
and the three Waffen-SS with heavy packs and Schmeissers; the
civilians might have been prisoners. It was a sight to cause
twitched-aside curtains to drop over windows - not that there was
any visible twitching. The German forces of Occupation in the
frontier zone were remarkably acute about twitched
curtains.
Grinning and puffing. Marcel hustled his
charges into the cafe, and shepherded them up through the beaded
fringe covering the mouth of a staircase behind the bar. Miller's
nostrils dilated. He said, 'Coffee. Real coffee.'
'Comes from Spain,' said Marcel. 'With the
senoritas and the oranges. Particularly the senoritas. Come up,
now.'
Miller went up the stairs. Mallory was behind
him. Miller stopped, dead. Mallory's finger moved to the trigger of
his Schmeisser. At the top of the stairs was a large landing
overlooking the square. The landing had sofas and chairs. Too many
doors opened off it. It smelt of stale scent and unwashed
bodies.
Miller said, 'It's a cathouse.'
Mallory said, 'So you will feel completely at
home.'
They had been walking most of the night.
Mallory was soaking wet and shivering. His hands felt raw, his feet
rubbed and blistered inside the jackboots. He wanted to find the
objective of the operation, and carry the operation out while there
was stilll an operation to carry out.
And instead, they were attending a breakfast
party in a brothel.
'Village this size?' said Miller. 'With a
cathouse?'
It should have meant something. But the smell
of the coffee had blunted Mallory's perceptions. All he knew was
that he had to get hold of some, or die.
It was light outside, cold and grey. But inside
on the sideboard there was coffee, and bread, and goat's cheese,
and a thin, fiery brandy for those who wanted it. Mallory drank a
cup of coffee. He said to Marcel, 'You said there was someone
here.'
Marcel nodded. 'He will be sleeping. Another
croissant? I make them my own self.'
'We'll wake him.'
Marcel shrugged, and opened one of the doors
off the landing.
The smell of sweat and perfume intensified. It
was a bedroom, decorated in dirty pink satin. On the bed was a man
in khaki uniform, lying on his back like a crusader on a tomb.
Bandages showed through the unbuttoned waistband of his battledress
blouse: bandages with rusty stains. On the chair beside the bed was
a beret bearing the winged-hatchet badge of the SAS.
Mallory glanced at the pips on the epaulette.
He said, 'Morning, Lieutenant.'
The man on the bed stirred and moaned. His eyes
half-opened. They focused on Mallory. They saw a man in a
coal-scuttle helmet and a Waffen-SS smock, carrying a
Schmeisser.
'Hiding up in a brothel,' said Mallory. 'All
right for some.'
The man's hand crawled towards his pillow.
Mallory's hand beat him to it. His fingers closed on metal. He came
out with the Browning automatic. 'Relax,' said
Mallory.
The Lieutenant glared at him with berserk blue
eyes. His face was white, with grey shadows. Pain. He was badly
wounded. 'SOE,' said Mallory. 'We've come to bail you out.'
Inwardly, his heart was sinking. This would be one of Killigrew's
men. One of the gung-ho shoot-em-up boys who had been dropped and
got themselves lost. Who had probably compromised the operation
already. Things were in a bad enough mess without a wounded SAS man
to slow them down. A badly wounded SAS man, by the look of him.
Perhaps he could be smuggled over the border into
Spain.
'How do I know that?' said the
Lieutenant.
'Admiral Beaufort will tell you,' said Mallory.
'So did a little man called Captain Killigrew.' He opened the
buttons of the SS smock. 'And this is British battledress. Seemed
tactless to wear it on the outside, somehow.'
'Who told you I was here? Marcel
-'
'Marcel was very discreet,' said Mallory,
soothingly.
Slowly, the blue eyes lost their berserk glare.
The wariness remained. 'Killigrew,' he said. 'Yes. When did you get
in?'
'Albemarle, last night,' said Mallory. There
was no time for chitchat. 'I need to know what happened to
you.'
'Landed on a bit of a plateau ... near here,'
said the SAS man. He obviously wanted to give as little away as
possible. 'Brought a Jeep.' A Jeep, thought Mallory. A full-size
actual Jeep. On parachutes. Amazing. But that was the SAS for you.
'Heading for the coast. Ambushed. Other chaps bought it. I took a
bang on the head and a bullet in the guts.'
Mallory said, 'How did it
happen?'
'Driving down a track,' said the SAS man. 'Next
thing we knew, there were two Spandaus. One either side of the
road. Don't remember much after that. The Resistance brought me
here.' There was a shake in his voice. He was very
young.
'So it was a road block?' said
Mallory.
'Not much of one.'
Mallory nodded. Give me strength, he thought.
Conning your way through a checkpoint behind enemy lines, SAS
style. Two grenades and put your foot down. 'Where were you going
on the coast?'
'Doesn't really matter,' said the Lieutenant.
This was his first operation. It was just like school, on the Rugby
XV. You went for it, and sod the consequences. Your own team
tactics were your own team tactics, and you kept them to yourself.
The only thing different about war was this damned bullet. He did
not let his mind stray too close to the bullet, in case the pain
made him sick again. It felt the size of a cricket ball, down
there. And it hurt. Was hurting worse, lately ... He concentrated
on his dislike for this old man in the Waffen-SS uniform who had
burst in and dropped" a few names, and thought that gave him a
license to pump him, take over the operation, grab the glory. Let
him find out for himself.
The old man's face was close to his. It had a
broad forehead and very young brown eyes; eyes like old Brutus, who
taught Latin at Shrewsbury and climbed Alps in the summer hols. The
eyes seemed to remove the Lieutenant's reserve the way a
tin-opener would take the lid off a tin. The old
man said, 'Where were you going and who were you going to
see?''
The Lieutenant summoned up his undoubted
toughness. 'Doesn't matter.'
The eyes hardened. The old man said, 'Don't be
childish. There's very little time.'
The Lieutenant gritted his teeth. He
desperately wanted to tell someone. It would be less lonely, for
one thing, and he was really, terrifyingly, lonely. But a secret
was a secret. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I don't ... I'm not
authorised.'
Mallory allowed his eyes to rest on this
lieutenant. He really was absurdly young. His was the berserker's
bravery, frenzied and unbending. If the Gestapo got their hands on
him, he would break like a twig.
Mallory sighed inwardly. He got up, opened the
door and put his head out. There seemed to be a party going on. He
said, 'Andrea.'
The huge Greek padded across from his seat
overlooking the square. His shoulders seemed to blot out the light
in the little room. Mallory said, 'If you won't tell me, tell the
Colonel.'
The SAS man frowned. He saw no colonel. He saw
an unshaven giant with a huge moustache. He saw a pair of black
eyes, eyes like the eyes on a Byzantine icon, that understood
everything, forgave everything. 'Colonel?' he said.
'Andrea is a full colonel in the Greek
army.'
'How do I know that's not another bloody
lie?'
Andrea sat down in the pink plush armchair.
Suddenly the SAS man felt weak, and ill, and about fourteen years
old. 'You are frightened,' said Andrea.
'I bloody well am not,' said the Lieutenant.
But even as Andrea spoke, he could feel it draining away, all the
team spirit, the gung ho, war-as-a-game-of-rugby. He saw himself as
he was: a wounded kid who would die in a dirty little room,
alone.
'Not of dying,' said Andrea. 'But of yourself,
of failing. I also am frightened, all the time. So it is not
possible to let myself fail.'
He did not sound like any colonel the
Lieutenant had ever heard. He sounded like a man of warmth and
common sense, like a friend. Careful, said a voice in the
Lieutenant's head. But it was a small voice, fading
fast.
Andrea's eyes alighted on a crude wooden
crutch, a section of pole with a pad whittled roughly to the shape
of an armpit. 'Yours?' he said.
'I'm going to use it,' said the SAS man. 'I can
get around all right.' It was not altogether a lie. He could move.
It was just that when he moved, he could feel that bit of metal in
his guts twisting, doing him damage. But that was not the point.
The point was fighting a war. 'Couple of days,' he said. 'Get into
the hills.'
'Why don't you come with us?' said Andrea,
tactfully. This boy and his crutch would not last an hour in the
mountains. He could see it in his face. 'We will take you with us,'
said Andrea. 'And you and I, and Miller and Mallory, will finish
this operation.'
The Lieutenant's eyes moved back to the first
man, the thin one. 'Mallory?' he said. He saw newspaper front pages
pinned to the board behind the fives courts. On the front pages
were pictures of this man, with a pyramid of snow-covered rock in
the background. That Mallory. He came to a decision. He
said, 'Jules told me. Guy Jamalartegui. At the Cafe de L'Ocean in
St-Jean-de-Luz. We would have told you. But ... there's been a lot
of German activity. Radio silence, except in emergency. Jerry's
very quick.'
Mallory nodded. Radio detector vans would not
be the only reason. The SAS liked to keep their intelligence to
themselves, particularly when it was information that might help
Jensen and SOE.
'Thank you,' he said. Thank you very much.'
Sounds of revelry were percolating through the door. 'Now. Can I
get you some breakfast?'
Once the shock had worn off. Miller had almost
started to enjoy himself. The coffee was undoubtedly coffee, and
the bread was stilll warm from the oven, and while he was not a goat
cheese enthusiast, in his present frame of mind he would have
cheerfully eaten the goat, horns and all. And by the time he had
finished eating, there had been stirrings behind some of the doors.
At the Cognac stage, his glass had been filled by a dark girl in a
red silk nightdress, and Miller was beginning to be
reminded that while occupied France might be occupied, it was stilll
France.
He lay back in his chair, and listened to the
rattle of French and Basque from the maquisards, and sipped
his Cognac. A corner of his mind was on the girl in the red
nightdress. But most of it was out there in the square, patrolling
the darkness under the trees and in the corners. Soon the village's
eyes would start opening and its tongues would start wagging. It
was time they were out of here. The girl in the red nightdress ran
her fingers through his crewcut. Miller grinned, a lazy grin that
to anyone who did not know him would have looked completely
relaxed. Which in a way, he was. Because Mallory thought it was
okay to be here. So it was okay. In a life that had contained about
ten times more incidents than the average citizen's. Miller had
never met a man he trusted more than the New
Zealander.
He was not so sure about the Frenchmen. Jaime
was sitting in a corner, coffee cup between his hands. Jaime seemed
at least to know his way around. Now he was watching Hugues, who
was fussing round Lisette. A lifetime spent in places where
personality carried more weight than law had made Miller acutely
sensitive to the way people got along. Miller had the distinct
feeling that Jaime did not have a lot of time for
Hugues.
Miller had his own doubts about Hugues. Sure,
he knew his way round the Resistance. But he was an excitable guy.
Lotta fuss that guy makes, thought Miller. And a lotta noise, too
much noise. Lisette, now. They were stuck with Lisette. She was
slow; she carried too much weight. But she was one tough cookie
-
Jesus.
Lisette had been removing her outer clothing.
She had been wearing an overcoat, two shawls, and a couple of
peasant smocks of some kind. They had made her look like a football
on legs. Dressed up like that, she had bicycled up a steep valley
road without lights, climbed a vertical cliff and force-marched
fifteen precipitous miles without sleep.
What dropped Miller's jaw on his chest was not
what she had done. It was the fact that she was just about the same
shape without the winter clothes as with them. Face it, thought
Miller.
If you were Hugues, and Lisette was your girl,
you would maybe feel a tad over-protective yourself.
Because the reason Lisette looked like a
gasometer on legs was that she was at least eight months
pregnant.
Somewhere a telephone rang, the tenuous ring of
a hand-cranked exchange. Down the hall someone answered it, and
started shouting in frantic Basque. Miller became suddenly
completely immobile, listening. The voices had stopped. Cocks were
crowing. Otherwise there was silence.
But behind the silence were engines. Lorry
engines, a lot of them.
In the French frontier zone at this particular
time in history, there was only one group of people who had a lot
of lorries, and the fuel to run them.
Miller grabbed his Schmeisser and yanked the
cocking lever. The girl in the red nightdress seemed suddenly to
have vanished. Marcel the baker was standing up, smiling from a
face suddenly grey and wooden. The engines were in the square now:
four trucks with canvas backs. The trucks stopped. Soldiers were
pouring out of the backs, soldiers with coal-scuttle helmets and
field-grey uniforms, their jackboots grinding the wet cobbles of
the square.
A staff car rolled into the square. A tall,
black-uniformed officer got out, said something, and pointed at
Marcel's lorry. Two soldiers bayoneted the tyres. The lorry settled
on its rims.
As Mallory put his head out of the SAS man's
door, Andrea's hand went out and grabbed Marcel by the shoulder.
Marcel was a big man, but Andrea held him at arm's length with his
feet off the ground. He said, 'What are these troops doing
here?'
Marcel's face was a mask of horror. 'I don't
know ... I was assured"...'
In Mallory's mind, gears rolled smoothly and a
conclusion formed. 'It's an SS brothel,' he said. 'Isn't
it?'
Marcel's face turned a dull, embarrassed
purple. 'It is a cover,' he said. 'A good cover. Now, gentlemen
..."
Andrea dropped him. Marcel rubbed his shoulder.
He said, 'Follow me, please.' His voice was calm and urbane: the
voice of the perfect host. Already the girls had cleared
away the traces of the breakfast. He pointed into the SAS man's
room. One of the girls was holding open the door of the wardrobe.
The wardrobe had no back. Instead, a flight of steps led down into
darkness.
Mallory trusted Marcel. But someone had
betrayed them.
Who?
Andrea went to help the SAS man off the bed.
The SAS man pushed him away, reached for his makeshift wooden
crutch and hauled himself moaning to his feet. As Miller brought up
the rear, he could hear the battering of rifle butts on the cafe's
front door.
More rats in more traps, he thought. And all
for a cup of coffee and a girl in a red nightdress.
Maybe the coffee had been worth it, at
that.
The back of the wardrobe slammed behind them.
They went downstairs and out into a small yard, wet and empty under
the sky. At the back of the yard was a shed, the lintel of its door
blackened by smoke. There was a powerful smell of baking
bread.
From over the wall came guttural shouts, and
the barking of dogs. 'Vite,' said Marcel, shooing them into
the shed.
The shed was a bakehouse. There were two bread
ovens. The one on the left was shut. The one on the right was open.
In front of the oven door was a big stone slab. On the slab lay a
metal tray, six feet long by four feet wide. A small, one-eyed man
in a dirty apron did not even glance at them. 'On the tray,' said
Marcel. 'Two at a time.'
'Where are the others?' said
Mallory.
'In the brothel. They speak French, bien
entendu. Their papers are good. Vite.'
Miller jumped up onto the tray, and lay with
his boxes on the big wooden paddle. Mallory climbed up beside him.
'When the tray stops, roll off,' said Marcel. 'Cover your
faces.'
Mallory could hear German voices. A trap, he
thought. Another, smaller trap. After this trap, absolutely no more
-
He was lying on the tray with his pack on his
stomach. He covered his face with his hands. Someone shoved the
paddle. A ferocious heat beat on the backs of his hands. He thought
of the parabolic brick roof of the oven, smelt burning hair. The
ammunition, he thought.
But the heat was gone, and they were shuffling
off the paddle and onto a stone surface that was merely warm.
Mallory raised his head. It was dark, black as ink. After six
inches his forehead hit the roof. There seemed to be air
circulating.
The tray returned, bearing Andrea and the SAS
man. The SAS man was breathing hard and tremulous as Andrea shoved
him off the tray. Somewhere, stones grated. That's it, thought
Miller. You've got your bread oven, circular, made out of bricks.
And there's a little door in the back of it, and we've been pushed
through, and now they've closed the door -
Scraping noises emanated from the
oven.
- and now they are going to bake a little
bread.
He tried to raise his head, to see where the
air was coming from. He hit the ceiling. Eighteen inches high, he
thought. And nothing to see. Buried alive.
He put out his hand, touched his brass-bound
boxes. On the way, his hand touched Mallory's arm.
The arm was rigid, vibrating with what must
have been fear.
No. Not Mallory. Mallory was cool as ice.
Mallory had scaled the South Cliff at Navarone, when Miller had
been mewing with terror at its base.
All right, thought Miller. But down in the
middle of every human being there is a place kept locked tight, and
in that place lives the beast a person fears most. But sometimes
the locks go, and the beast is out, raging in the mind, taking over
all its corners.
Mallory's beast was confined
spaces.
Dusty Miller stared at the invisible ceiling
six inches above his nose, and listened to the sounds coming
through the brick wall of the oven. There was a brisk crackling,
and a sharp whiff of smoke. They had lit a fire in there, to heat
the oven for the next batch of baking. How long do we have to stay
in here? he thought. What if Mallory can't take it?
He began to sing. He sang softly, 'Falling in
loaf with loaf is like falling for make-believe-'
'Shut up,' hissed the SAS man.
This is not well bread of you,' said
Miller,
'For Christ's sake-'
'I'm oven a lovely time,' said Miller. 'And
you're baking the spell-'
Mallory knew it was the torpedoing all over
again: the little metal room with four men jammed together, the
thunder of the terrible blue Mediterranean pouring into the hull,
four faces in six inches of air under the steel ceiling, the air
bad, hot, unbreathable -and Mallory was going to die, of
suffocation, certainly, but first of terror...
Someone seemed to be talking. Talking complete
drivel, in a soft Chicago drawl. Beyond the drawl, far away, there
were other voices. German voices.
Miller.
The terror went. Mallory found himself thinking
that there were worse things than small spaces. Dusty Miller's
puns, for instance.
Miller felt Mallory's hand prod him sharply in
the side. He shut up. Mission accomplished.
Suddenly a dog was barking close at hand. Much
closer than the far side of the fire in the oven. The compartment
where the four men were hiding filled with the scritch of claws on
stone. The air holes, thought Miller. There must be air holes, and
the goddamn dog's smelt us through them.
They lay looking up at the ceiling they could
not see, in the dark that was full of the clamour of the dog. The
little cell behind the oven grew steadily hotter. They began to
sweat.
At the front of the ovens. Marcel was sweating
too. His apron was smeared with flour and the ash of the bracken
stalks he used to fire the oven. But he was not thinking about
baking. He was looking at the SS officer who was leaning against
the doorpost, slapping the barrel of his Luger into the palm of his
black leather glove. The SS officer was smiling with great warmth,
but his stone-grey eyes were the coldest thing Marcel had ever
seen. 'Where are they?' said the officer.
'Pardon?' The yard was full of soldiers.
A dog-handler came through, dragged by an Alsatian on a
choke-chain. The Alsatian's tongue was hanging out, and it was
panting eagerly.
The officer said, with patient friendliness.
The dog has come from the brothel above the cafe. It is
following the scent of someone who was sitting in one of the chairs
in the brothel. The scent leads straight to your oven. Why do you
think this would be?'
The oven was burning well now. Smoke was
pouring out of the door, crawling along the ceiling of the shed and
billowing up at the rainy sky above the yard. Marcel pointed into
the oven door at the incandescent glow of the burning bracken.
'What are these imaginary people?' he said.
'Salamanders?'
The smile did not waver. The SS man said,
mildly, 'If these people are imaginary, why would the dog be so
interested?'
'A mystery.'
The SS man said, 'I have the strong impression
that there are people in this village who have no business
here.'
Marcel said, 'What gives you this
impression?'
The SS man smiled, but did not answer. His eyes
slid over the bakehouse. He said, 'And what is inside the other
oven?'
Marcel yawned. 'Who knows?'
'It is in my mind,' said the SS man, fingering
his long, Aryan chin, 'to pull this oven to pieces.'
'Non,' said Marcel, his eyes discs of
horror. 'My livelihood. Georges. In the oven. What is in the oven,
in the name of God? Tell this gentleman.'
'Pains Flavigny,' said the one-eyed
man.
'Ah!' said Marcel, his face cracking into a
large grin. "Voila!'
'Bine?'
'Georges is from Alsace,' said Marcel. 'So he
bakes from time to time pains Flavigny, whose vital
ingredient is aniseed, beloved of dogs. They do not sell so well,
of course. But you know how it is. One must keep the staff happy.
It is so hard, in a war, to find-'
The SS man allowed the barrel of his pistol to
swing gently towards Georges. 'Open the oven,' he
said.
'But the pains-'
'Open it.'
'They will be destroyed.'
The officer's finger moved onto the trigger.
Georges shrugged. He said, 'It is a crime. But if you insist.' He
flicked up the catch on the door and shoved in a small wooden
paddle. When he
brought it out there was a cake on the end,
round and brown. 'Not yet cooked,' he said. 'See, nom d'un
nom. Sacrilege. Ruin. It is sinking. They will all be
sinking.'
The SS officer took the cake and crumbled it in
his glove. The dog jumped up, lathering his hand with its tongue.
He kicked it in the stomach with his jackboot. It shrank away,
yelping. Delicately, he sniffed the crumbs. They smelt powerfully
of aniseed. 'Excellent,' he said, stilll smiling. He turned, and
walked out into the yard. 'The dogs have led us astray, I fear. But
there are other methods of arriving at the truth.'
Marcel had followed, wiping his hands on his
apron. 'Pardon, monsieur?'
'Your countrymen have been very stupid,' said
the SS man. 'Stupid as pigs. There are rules. We both know that.
Rules have been broken. In Jonzere last night, there was fighting,
with deaths. You people must learn that laws are to be obeyed. I
fear you will find the lesson painful.' The smile. Marcel stood
smiling uncertainly back, his insides congealed with terror,
watching the icy eyes. There is a way of making it less painful.
There are British agents in this village,' said the SS man. 'When I
find them, I will leave.' He walked through the baker's shop, and
into the square, and rested a negligent hand on the tonneau of the
staff car. 'Feldwebel!'
A sergeant crashed to attention.
'Knock on the door of each house in this
square,' he said. 'Politely. Whoever answers the door, bring them
out into the square, and request them to stand...' the cold eyes
checked, then settled on the long, blank north wall of the church,
'against that wall. While you are doing that, I want a Spandau set
up under the trees.'
Marcel's face had turned as white as his flour.
He said, 'What are you doing?'
'Fighting a war,' said the officer. 'When we
have these people out here, we shall shoot one every ten minutes
untill I am told the truth. Your bread will be burning, baker.' He
smiled. 'You had better go.'
Miller had been with the Long Range Desert
Force, so he had been hot all right. But nothing on the parched
ergs or the wind-blasted scarps of the Sahara had prepared him for
the heat behind that bread oven.
He kept talking. He could feel that Mallory
needed to be talked to. It was not easy to talk while being cooked,
but it must, he thought, be a lot easier to talk while you were
only hot than while you were hot and in a state of flat panic.
Andrea talked too, reminiscing in a low rumble about the cave in
Crete where he and Mallory had resided. And all the time the heat
grew, hotter and hotter, searing the skin. There were smells, too:
wood smoke and baking smells, with over it all another baking smell
that Miller recognised but did not want to mention. It was the
smell of confectioner's almonds; the smell of gelignite cooking in
its box.
There was a consolation, thought Miller. A
small one. If the gelignite set off the Cyclonite, it was going to
take some Germans with it. Not to mention the village of Colbis,
and a fair-sized chunk of the northern Pyrenees -
A new sound floated through the wall: a harsh
judder, dulled by layers of stone. The sound of a machine
gun.
Mallory knew he had won. He had beaten his
glands, or whatever it was that weakened the knees and liquefied
the guts. The machine gun had taken him into the outside world. He
was thinking ahead now. 'We're going to need transport to
St-Jean-de-Luz.'
'Transport?'
'It's thirty miles by road. The submarines sail
the day after tomorrow, at noon. It's too tight to
march.'
'Bicycles?'
There was a silence. They were all thinking the
same: a pregnant woman and an SAS man with a bullet in the guts
were no good on bicycles. A ruthless man who wanted to move fast
would leave such impediments behind. Mallory did not know if he was
that ruthless. Luckily, there was no chance of his being tested.
The SAS man and Lisette knew too much to be allowed to fall into
enemy hands.
Like it or not, they were along for the
ride.
The SAS man had been lying very stilll,
conserving energy in the heat, listening to the three men talking.
Chattering was for girls and wimps and other classes of humanity
despised by the SAS. Now he said. There's a Jeep.'
A Jeep. Presumably with Union Jacks all over
it, two-way radios, heavy machine guns, mobile cocktail bar and sun
lounge. You could not beat the SAS. Not unless you were the
enemy.
'Well, well,' said Miller. This is excellent
news.'
Mallory said, 'Where?'
'In the barn at the back of the bakery. It's
the Jeep they dropped with us. Under the bracken. Marcel told me
they brought it in.'
Mallory said. Thank you, er ...'
'Wallace.' Miller was surprised to feel a hand
reach across him. He shook it. It shook his back. So that's all
right, he thought. We've been introduced, and now he's lending us
his car. And we're walled up in an oven, cooking.
Goddamn limeys.
There was a new sound outside: a voice, at one
of the air holes. Marcel's voice. 'You must come out,' said the
voice.
'We'll take the Jeep.'
'Yes.' The voice sounded strained. 'You must go
away from here. You know where. Your comrades are by the barn. Go
soon.'
'Just open the door.'
'Yes.'
A pause. There were movements, felt in the
walls rather than heard. Someone was raking the fuel out of the
oven. The door separating them from the oven opened, admitting a
scorching blast of air. Tray coming in,' said Marcel's
voice.
Afterwards, Mallory could not remember how they
got out. There was a hellish blast of heat, and a smell of burning
hair, and then they were standing in the bakehouse,
surrounded by large, beautiful volumes of space.
The barn,' said Marcel. He looked suddenly
thinner, and his face was a bad greyish colour. 'Follow
me.'
Andrea gave Wallace his shoulder. They went
into the yard and through a green door. The barn was half-full of
bundles of dry bracken stalks. 'Allans,' said Marcel, and
began tearing with more frenzy than effect at the faggots on the
right-hand side. 'Here.'
They began pulling the bundles away. After a
couple of minutes the rear bumper of a vehicle emerged from the
bracken.
'Hey,' said Miller. 'SAS, we love
you.'
The vehicle was a Jeep, but not just any Jeep.
There was no cocktail bar, and no sun lounge, but they were about
the only amenities missing. Mounted in the rear were a pair of
Brownings. There was another pair mounted on the hood in front of
the passenger seat. The ammunition belts were stilll in
place.
'Here are the other passengers now,' said
Marcel. They have been in bed. Perhaps sleeping, perhaps not.' He
made a sound that might have been a laugh.
Thierry, Hugues and Jaime lurched into the
barn. Thierry's hat had a slept-in look. Hugues' eyes were
snapping, and he was chewing his lips. He said, 'Where is
Lisette?'
There was a spreading of hands and a shrugging
of shoulders. Jaime said, 'She is tired. Sleeping. It is best we
leave.' His face was grim. 'She has good false papers. She will be
safe there.'
Perhaps he was right, thought Mallory. He had
better be. There was no time to dig her out wherever she was
resting. It was a hitch, but not a setback.
Hugues said, 'Non,
merde-'
'Jaime is right,' said Marcel. Another burst of
Spandau fire sounded from the square. He looked as if he was going
to cry. He said, 'Please. Be quick. Someone will
talk.'
Talk?'
They are shooting people. One every ten
minutes.' His face collapsed. He put his hands to his
eyes.
Hugues said, 'For God's sake, be a
man.'
Marcel looked at him vacantly. His cheeks were
wet with tears. He said. The first person they shot was my
mother.'
Hugues went red as blood, then
pale.
'God rest her soul,' mumbled
Andrea.
Mallory said, 'She has died that others may
live. We thank you for her great courage. And
yours.'
Marcel met his eye firmly. He said, 'Vive la
France.' He took a deep breath. 'For her sake, I ask that you
complete your mission.'
'It will be done.'
He shook Mallory's hand. Andrea put his great
paw on his shoulder.
Hugues said, 'I leave Lisette in your
care.'
'I am honoured,' said Marcel. 'Now you must go.
Then I can make them stop.'
'How?'
'I will tell the girls to say they saw
you.'
The girls?'
They are friends with some of the Germans. The
Germans who come to this brothel. That is why they leave us alone.
Used to leave us alone. The Germans will not hurt the
girls.'
Mallory said, 'How do we get
out?'
'Drive ahead,' said Marcel. The entry is beyond
the bracken.'
Hugues said, 'I must say goodbye to
Lisette.'
'You must go,' said Marcel. 'Please.' He
rummaged in a crate, came back with four bottles of Cognac. Take
these. Go.'
'Non,' said Hugues, his voice rising.
The child-'
He did not finish what he was going to say
because Andrea had reached out a crane-hook hand and gripped his
shoulder. Andrea said, 'Like this brave Marcel, you are a soldier,'
and pushed him into the back of the Jeep.
Hugues said, shamefaced. Tell her I love
her.'
Marcel nodded dumbly.
'Miller,' said Mallory. 'Drive
on.'
'By the square?'
Mallory turned upon him his cool brown eyes. 'I
think so,' he said. 'Don't you?'
The Jeep's engine started first time. They
lifted Wallace into the back and climbed aboard as best they could.
The engine sounded very loud in the confined space. It would sound
very loud in the village, too; there were no other engines running
in Colbis.
Miller slammed the Jeep into four-wheel drive.
The engine howled as he stamped on the throttle. He let out the
clutch. The Jeep plunged into the dried bracken, and kept on
plunging. The brittle fronds piled up against the windscreen and
spilled into the back. Miller saw daylight, and aimed for it.
Covered in a haystack mound of bracken, the Jeep shot out of the
barn doorway and into the lane, turned on two wheels, and turned
right again. At the end of the lane was a slice of the square, with
plane trees. In the slice of square, three SS men were crouched
round a Spandau. 'Civilians keep down,' said Mallory, cocking the
Brownings on the bonnet and flicking off the safety catches. 'Open
fire.'
The Spandau gunners did not enjoy shooting
innocent civilians. It was, frankly, a disagreeable duty, only
marginally better than cleaning latrines. But Befehl ist
Befehl. Orders are orders.
They were sitting there, ignoring the two
clusters of bloody pockmarks on the church wall above the crumpled
bodies of their first two victims, and concentrating on the third
victim, the priest's housekeeper, a thin, slope-shouldered old
woman, standing stiffly to attention in a flannel dressing gown.
The machine gunners were looking grim and efficient, because they
were dying for a smoke. The sooner they got this over with, the
better -
From the back of the square came a clatter like
a giant typewriter. Something hammered the Spandau into the air and
sent it spinning, tripod and all, across the square. Ricochets
whined into the sky. Two of the machine gunners performed sudden
ragged acrobatics and fell down. The third had enough time to spin
round and think, machine-gun fire, and see a haystack with
four wheels howling out of an alleyway, the muzzle-flash of machine
guns dancing in the hay, which seemed to be catching fire. Then a
succession of hammers walloped the last gunner in the chest and his
legs lost their strength and his mouth filled with blood. And as
his head bounced limply on the pave of the square he saw his comrades, drawn up in lines, start
tumbling like corn before the scythe, and heard the whoomp
of a petrol tank exploding. Then the machine gunner's eyes grew
dim, and he died.
Miller yanked the Jeep's steering wheel to the
right. The main road out of the square gaped in front of him. The
clatter of the Brownings was a mechanical thunder in his ears.
Something was burning, with a smell that reminded him of burning
tumbleweeds when he had worked a summer in the Kansas oil fields.
It was not tumbleweed, of course. It was bracken, set on fire by
the muzzle-flashes of the heavy machine guns. It was dry as tinder,
that bracken. Mallory and Andrea were stilll firing short sharp
bursts. Miller yelled, 'Get it off!'
From the square there came a higher, sharper
crackle: rifle fire. A bullet spanged off the Jeep's suspension and
moaned away skyward.
Mallory said, calmly, 'Fire
low.'
A patrol of Germans had appeared in the road
ahead. The Brownings thundered. More bullets cracked over the Jeep.
Then the Germans were down, rolling, and the suspension was
jouncing as the wheels went over the bodies. The street behind had
vanished in a pall of grey-white smoke. The houses were thinning.
The crackle of the bracken was a roar.
'Get rid of it!' yelled Miller.
Hugues' coat was smouldering as he unfolded
himself from the bed of the Jeep. He was coughing, his eyes
streaming. He began to kick blazing faggots of bracken onto the
road. Jaime was doing it too, and Thierry, who was making small,
frightened prodding movements, clearing his precious radio
first.
'St-Jean-de-Luz,' said Mallory, over the
slipstream. 'Which way?'
'Up the road,' said Jaime. 'Then there's a
track.' He brushed burning bracken from his sleeve.
'Merde.'
There were strips of blue sky between heavy
squalls of cloud. The last of the bracken lay fuming in the road,
receding fast. Ahead the pave stretched, polished black and gently
curving. It was the main road out of the valley. A road crawling
with Germans - Germans who would by now have found
out by radio that a unit of the British army was on the loose in a
Jeep. At least, Mallory hoped they would think they were a unit of
the British army. That way, there might be no civilian
reprisals.
But how had the Germans known to come to
Colbis?
It seems quite possible that the Germans
will, in a manner of speaking, be waiting for
you.
Mallory said, 'Where were you hiding in the
village?'
They spread us round,' said Jaime. 'Me, I was
in the brothel. In bed. In the most innocent way, of
course.'
'But they searched the brothel.'
'My papers are in order,' said Jaime. His face
was dark and closed. 'What have I to fear?'
Mallory nodded. Unanswered questions buzzed
around his ears like flies.
'Left,' said Jaime.
Left was a track that turned off the main road,
crept along the side of a mountain and into a wood. The Jeep ground
through a deserted farmyard and onto a road of ancient
cobbles.
The back way,' said Jaime. 'Arrives close to
St-Jean-de-Luz. The main road goes down the valley and joins the
big road to St-Jean-de-Luz at the foot of the mountains. This one
takes us over a hill, into a valley, then over another hill, and
down to St-Jean. But it is only good for mule or Jeep. It's a small
road. It doesn't run over the frontier, so the Germans don't pay
much attention to it.'
They sat three in the front, four in the back.
The SAS man was white, and his eyes were closed. When the Jeep hit
a boulder, the muscles of his jaw tautened with pain. For an hour
the Jeep moaned upwards into the mountains. Jaime and Hugues were
talking quietly in French.
Suddenly, Hugues started shouting. His face was
purple, contorted with rage. He got his fingers round Jaime's neck
and his knees on his chest, and he picked the small man's head up
and slammed it against the bodywork, and pulled it back, and was
going to do it again when Andrea's hands closed, one on each arm,
and, without apparent effort, detached his hands.
Jaime rolled away, coughing and retching. Hugues
struggled fu'I'llely in Andrea's grip, stilll shouting.
Mallory said, 'Shut up,' in a voice that
cracked like a rifle bullet.
Hugues shut up.
'What's the problem?'
Hugues' eyes were the size of saucers.
'Lisette,' he said.
'What about her?'
'She's not in the village. She was supposed to
be in the village, asleep. But not so. Jaime says he saw her. She
was taken away. By a German in a leather overcoat. Gestapo.' He put
his face in his hands.
Mallory's stomach was hollow with apprehension.
He said, 'Is this true?'
Jaime's face could have been carved from
yellowish stone. He said, 'It's true.'
Hugues sat up, suddenly. 'We must go to
Bayonne,' he said. 'Immediately. Without delay. With the guns we
have, the explosives, we can get into Gestapo HQ -'
Mallory said, 'How much does Lisette know about
this operation?'
'She knows we are going to St-Jean,' said
Hugues. 'But she will never talk.'
Jaime said, 'Everyone talks.'
'Non!' shouted Hugues, losing
control.
'She is pregnant,' said Jaime. 'What do you
think they will do to the child?'
Hugues' anger evaporated. He seemed to grow
smaller. He covered his face with his hands.
Mallory said, 'How did this
happen?'
Jaime looked straight ahead, his face without
expression. 'I saw from the window of the bordel. She was
led out. They put her in a big car, and drove away,'
'Why didn't you tell us
earlier?'
There is a thing we must do. The mother of
Marcel has died for this thing. So has Jules, at Jonzere, and
others. It is war. I kept quiet so our decision could not be ...
influenced,' He looked at Hugues, then back at Mallory. 'You would
have done what I did,'
Hugues said, 'Only a monster-'
'Shut up,' said Mallory.
Of course Jaime was right. The object of the
operation was to destroy submarines, not chase Gestapo cars across
the northern foothills of the Pyrenees. By pretending that Lisette
was in Colbis untill she was definitely beyond help, Jaime had
prevented a worse crisis.
Not that it could be much worse for
Lisette.
Mallory tried not to think about what would be
happening to Lisette. He said, 'She'll talk.'
'Not for two days,' said Jaime. That is the
rule. She will hold out for two days to give us time to get
clear.'
Thierry cocked his straw hat over his eye and
delivered himself of an offensively cynical chuckle. The Germans
know this also. They will be very persuasive.'
Hugues said, 'Jesus.' His face was grey and
bloodless.
'But relax,' said Thierry. 'If the Gestapo ask
the wrong question, they will get the wrong answer. How will they
ask the right question?'
Mallory knew that in Gestapo HQ at Bayonne,
there would be people who could make you beg to be allowed to tell
them everything you knew, without a question being asked. He said
to Hugues, There is nothing we can do. I really am very
sorry.'
Hugues looked at him with haunted eyes. 'Old
women have lived their lives,' he said. 'Soldiers protect their
country. Who can use my unborn child as a weapon of war? What has
this poor child done?'
Andrea said. These are questions you must ask a
priest.' Mallory did not look at him. The Greek had found the
bodies of his parents in the river at Protosami. They had been shot
by Bulgarian soldiers, then lashed together and thrown to the fish.
Andrea knew about total war. So had his parents' killers, untill
they had died, very suddenly and all at once. 'But the time for
asking such questions is when the war is finished. For now, we must
only obey orders and fight, because if we think, we go
crazy.'
There was no more talking after
that.
The Jeep ground on, up and over the mountain,
away from the great hazy prospect of the valley. Hugues
had opened one of the bottles of brandy Marcel had loaded into the
Jeep. His blue eyes turned pink and glassy. A shoulder of wooded
hillside interposed itself between the road and the valley. The sun
came out from between the shredded clouds. Flies buzzed round
Wallace's bloody tunic. The track left the trees and wound across a
marshy saddle between two peaks. High overhead, a pair of vultures
hung in the blue. There were no Germans, no sign of the war raging
out there in the world. As the road started downhill again. Dusty
Miller saw a glittering blue line beyond a notch in the whaleback
hills. The sea.
'Progress,' he said. 'And about goddamn time,
too.'
But the road dipped down again, into the first
rank of the chestnut forests, and the blue line disappeared. As the
Jeep ground on downhill, Miller's spirits suffered the small but
definite dip that with him passed for extreme gloom. They were
nearing the coast at last. There was two-thirds of a tank of gas
left in the Jeep. Keep on driving, and whatever happens will happen
-
But there was a hell of a way to go, through
Indian country, to a destination at best uncertain.
'One kilometre now, a big road,' said Jaime,
rising from his gloomy silence like a diver from a lake. 'Road to
the frontier. Patrolled, I guess.'
'We'll take it quietly,' said Mallory. 'Go on
five hundred yards. Turn off the engine. Freewheel.'
The Jeep rolled down the track, silent except
for the twang of its springs and the sniffing of Hugues. A light
breeze sighed in the chestnuts. It was a beautiful spring morning,
quiet except for the song of birds in the trees.
And the guttural voices that drifted up from
the road.
Mallory tapped Andrea on the shoulder. The big
Greek nodded. He jumped down from the Jeep and started down the
track. His gigantic shoulders seemed to merge into the trees in a
way not entirely attributable to the camouflage smock he wore.
Watching him Hugues shivered, recalling the warm, padded but
horribly powerful hands that had pulled him off Jaime as if he had
been a light blanket.
His eyes slid to Jaime, to the stony face of
the man who had lost him Lisette. Sometimes, being a soldier
was impossible. He looked away. Looking at Jaime hurt his
eyes.
Andrea moved down the track quickly and
quietly. When he could see the dark glimmer of the road below him
he cut into the trees, placing his feet carefully among the ferns
and dry leaves. He passed through the forest with the faintest of
rustles, more like a breeze than a twenty-stone human. At the edge
of the trees, he stopped.
The road was pave, the square, polished
cobblestones of France. Twenty yards to his left was a sandbagged
enclosure with a single embrasure from which projected the muzzle
of a machine gun. Beside the enclosure, a bar painted in
red-and-white stripes blocked off the road. The machine gun was
pointing to the right, north, towards France, and, coincidentally,
the stretch of road across which the Jeep would have to travel to
rejoin the track on the far side, where it dived into the forests
at the foot of a tall mountain plated with grey
rock.
Andrea absorbed all of this in perhaps ten
seconds, checking off a mental list of options. Then he walked
quietly back into the trees and inside the wood along the side of
the valley, passing above the checkpoint.
From above, he saw that the machine gun was
unmanned. Its three-man crew and two other soldiers were lying on
the grassy bank of the road, smoking. One of them was telling what
Andrea recognised as a dirty joke he had overheard in the town at
Navarone. Swiftly, he walked fifty yards through the wood, parallel
to the road, in the general direction of Spain. Then he slung his
Schmeisser across his stomach, pulled his helmet down over his
eyes, and walked out onto the pave.
At the sound of his boots, the men on the bank
looked up. They saw the biggest Waffen-SS they had ever seen,
moving light-footed towards them, eyes invisible under the helmet.
They had never seen an SS man with a moustache before. Being honest
Wehrmacht footsloggers, they did not like the SS, and they did not
like moustaches. So the sergeant who had been telling the joke
pretended not to see this one untill he was on top of them. Then he
looked up. 'What the hell do you want?' he said. 'A
shave?'
The men in the Jeep on the hillside heard
nothing. A thrush was singing. A pigeon crashed out of a chestnut
tree. Otherwise, there was silence, a silence that reminded Mallory
of the silence on the far side of an operating theatre door. Andrea
would be doing his horrible worst. After five minutes, mingled with
the thrush's song came the metallic cry of a Scops
owl.
Mallory said, 'Drive.'
Miller started to drive. This time he used the
engine, because there would be no enemies alive to hear
it.
Andrea was waiting by the road, wiping a long,
curved knife on a tuft of grass. On a grassy bank nearby, five men
in grey uniforms were staring at the sky. There was a lot of red
among the yellow and white flowers on which they lay. But it was
too early for poppies.
Andrea clambered into the Jeep. Miller gunned
the engine.
Up the road, a figure in field-grey stumbled
out of the trees, buttoning his trousers. When he saw the Jeep, he
shouted, 'Halt!'
Mallory straightened his helmet and gripped his
Schmeisser. He said. 'I'll deal with him.' But the brandy Hugues had
drunk was heating up his mind. The sky and the trees and the
mountains were swimming. It was difficult, being a soldier, obeying
orders. When it meant that this woman, the woman you loved, Lisette
... her fingernails, he thought, her teeth. They pull them out with
pliers. And the baby -
In the centre of his vision, something new was
moving. Something grey. A German soldier.
Hugues knew he had made himself look foolish in
front of these granite-faced soldiers. But in his mind was a
newborn baby, and a man with a pair of pliers in his hand. He heard
Lisette scream. Because the man was walking, not towards Lisette,
but towards the baby -
The man who was a German, like the
soldier.
Of course he would have to be killed. And it
should be Hugues who killed him, to redeem himself in the eyes of
the soldiers.
And suddenly there was a gun in his hand, and
his finger was on the trigger, and the gun was jumping, and the air
was full of the clatter of the Schmeisser.
The bullets went high. Somebody snatched the
weapon out of his hands. The soldier flung himself to the
ground and rolled out of sight into the ditch. His rifle fired
three times. The last shot smacked into the Jeep. 'Let's go,' said
Mallory, quietly.
The Jeep roared across the road and up the
track on the far side. After two hundred yards, Andrea said, 'Stop
here.'
The Jeep stood at the bottom of a long, steep
incline. Andrea swung his legs over the side. He plucked the Bren
from the back seat, slung it over his shoulder as if it had been a
twenty-bore shotgun, and loped away down the track.
He did not have far to go. This side of the
valley was armoured with big, grey plates of limestone on which
nothing grew. He found a slab that overlooked the road, cast
himself flat behind it, and raised his head in time to see the
field-grey figure scuttle like a rabbit into the horseshoe of
sandbags that was the machine-gun emplacement. The emplacement was
full of shadows, but Andrea knew what the man would be doing as
surely as if he could see him. There would be a field telephone in
there, and the man would be using it to call for
reinforcements.
Carefully, Andrea trained the Bren on that
shadow-filled horseshoe and adjusted the backsight one notch up.
Then he fired four single shots into the lip of the sandbags,
spacing them like the four pips on the four of spades. Then he
stood up, quickly.
Down in the machine-gun emplacement, the shadow
was punctured by something that might have been a grey tortoise, or
a steel helmet. The man interrupted his telephone call to defend
his life. Andrea watched the tin helmet move as the eyes searched
for him. The eyes found him. The helmet became a human figure,
struggling to haul the heavy machine gun round on its mount. Andrea
watched clinically, without hatred. Should have stayed on the
telephone, he thought, with the detached disapproval of a craftsman
watching a bodger. Fatal mistake. The Bren's sight settled on the
tin helmet. The huge finger squeezed the trigger.
The burp of the machine gun rolled round the
cliffs and precipices of the valley. Down in the emplacement, the
little figure flung its arms wide, jerked upright, fell over the
sandbag parapet, and lay stilll. Even before the echoes had died,
Andrea was striding back uphill.
He smelt petrol before he saw the Jeep. As he
came over the hill the other men were out of the vehicle.
'Problem solved,' said Andrea.
'We've got another problem,' said Mallory.
Andrea noticed a curious woodenness in the faces round the Jeep.
'We've got a bullet in the petrol tank. Did your friend have time
to contact his headquarters?'
'No way of telling,' said Andrea. 'Gas all
gone?'
'All gone.'
Mallory, Miller and Jaime got behind the
vehicle. Andrea lent his shoulder. The wheels started to roll.
Miller twitched the wheel. The Jeep gathered speed, bounced on a
boulder, and disappeared with a metallic crash into a
ravine.
Thierry had been squatting by his radio,
tinkering with the tuning dial. Mallory said, 'Radio silence from
now on, please.'
Thierry nodded. He shouldered the pack. 'How
far?'
Twenty kilometres to the sea,' said Jaime.
There is one ridge in between. A high ridge.'
Miller yawned and shouldered his brass-bound
boxes. 'Nice to stretch your legs after a drive in the
country.'
Andrea said, 'I'll help Mr
Wallace.'
The SAS man was upright. His face was the
colour of wood ash, with dark circles under his eyes. He said, 'I'm
all right.'
Andrea said, 'Come,' and walked towards him,
hands out.
Wallace raised his crutch and held it against
Andrea's breastbone. He said, 'I can manage.'
Andrea said, 'Sometimes it is the bravest man
who surrenders.'
But Wallace was in a corner, his eyes
hardening, getting that berserk look. He said, 'No SOE bastard
tells me what brave men do.' His hand was going to the automatic in
the holster at his side.
Andrea shrugged and turned away. For a moment
his eyes caught Mallory's. There was no expression in them, but
Mallory knew him well enough to see he was worried. They were on an
island of limestone in a sea of Germans. There was more to worry
about than regimental pride.
'Don't want you holding us up,' said
Mallory.
The SAS man snapped, 'Nobody's going to hold
you up.' He recollected himself. 'Sir.'
Mallory shrugged. 'Jaime first,' he said.
'March.'
They marched.
Things had improved, Mallory
reflected.
There were too many of them, one of them was
drunk, another wounded, and they had no transport. But they had a
destination. That was the plus side.
On the minus side, there was a trail of dead
Germans stretching back across the Pyrenees. But there was nothing
to be done about that.
Except keep going.
The track climbed from the valley floor, rising
steeply and trending northward. It was a good track, built for
mules, with wide steps separated by six-inch copings of stone. The
vegetation was sparse. The limestone plates lower in the valley
continued, less broken up here, untill they were walking up a dry
gorge between huge, overhanging crags. Wallace plodded on, wincing
at each grind of his crutch against rock, the flies buzzing and
crawling round the blackened dressing on his belly.
At first it was hot. But the sun grew hazy
behind veils of cirrus, and by eleven the sun had gone in and a
black edge of cloud had crept across the sky. The adrenaline of the
pursuit was gone, oxidised in the weariness of a night without
sleep. Life was the slog against gravity, one foot in front of the
other, up the interminable mule-steps along the dry valley towards
a horizon that always gave way to another, higher horizon. Jaime
moved at the steady, straight-legged pace of the mountaineer.
Thierry plodded on under the weight of the radio, sweat running
down his great jowls, darkening the collar of his shin and the band
of his straw hat. Hugues let his head roll on his neck, stumbled a
lot, and would not speak when spoken to. And Wallace kept
struggling grimly on, crutch grinding on the stones, face contorted
with pain and effort.
By noon it was cold and spitting with rain.
Another front was coming in from the Atlantic. Mallory said, 'How
far to the top?'
'One hour,' said Jaime. He squinted his small
black eyes at the lowering clouds. 'Soon we will need
shelter.'
'Why?'
'Snow,' said Jaime. 'I know a
cave.'
'No more caves,' said Mallory. 'We must go
on.'
This is a ... particular cave,' said Jaime.
'Twenty minutes more.'
'Particular?'
There will be a storm,' said Jaime. 'For now,
we should save our breath for the road.'
'On,' said Mallory. Twenty
minutes.'
There was a crash and a clatter. Wallace had
fallen. He was not moving. Andrea squatted by his side, hand on his
forehead. He looked up at Mallory. His face, normally unreadable,
was worried. 'Fever,' he said.
'Can you carry him?'
'Of course.' Andrea picked the SAS man up,
slung him over his shoulder, and began to march. The rain started,
then stopped again. The cloud was stilll high, but patches of dirty
mist were hanging in the crags, and the air was damp and raw on
their faces.
The floor of the gorge rose untill they were
walking on a bare slope of limestone. It steepened to forty-five
degrees. Mallory could hear Andrea's breathing.
'At the top,' said Jaime.
At the top of the slope was a cliff. In front
of the cliff was a little plateau that narrowed into a curious
little gully, like a gorge in embryo. The gully went back into the
cliff, steep-sided, and ended abruptly in a tangle of
boulders.
'In here,' said Jaime. 'Behind the
rocks.'
Mallory paused at the top of the slope,
listening to the breath in his throat, the pound of the blood in
his ears.
And another sound.
'Get into the cave,' he said.
'Quick.'
They began to run, slithering on the loose
flakes of limestone that carpeted the ground. They had all heard
it: the steady drone of an aeroplane engine.
They were not going to make it to the cave.
'Down!' roared Mallory.
They fell on their faces between the boulders.
The droning intensified. The Fieseler Storch observation plane came
slowly up the path. Between two boulders, Mallory was close enough
to see the glint of the observer's binoculars as
the plane circled over the little plateau.
The Storch flew on, down the other side of the
mountain. Slowly and with great effort, the Storm Force dragged
itself into the cave.
The entrance was little more than a crack in
the rock, but inside it became a room-sized chamber, with a floor
of broken stones and goat droppings, and a ceiling that faded
upwards into shadow. The walls were smooth, as if they had been
worn by water. There was no water now, except for a few drips from
the roof. A cold draught blew from the inside of the cave, bearing
the musty smell of stone.
Thierry said, 'Did they see us?'
Mallory shrugged out of his pack. 'No way of
telling,' he said. Twenty minutes. Then we move on.'
Andrea caught Mallory's eye, and slipped back
out of the entrance.
'If they had seen us, they would have turned
back the way they had come, and made their report.' Thierry's eyes
were anxious under the brim of the straw hat. 'Do you not
think?'
'Sure,' said Mallory, not because he was sure,
but to keep him quiet. 'Food.' He began rummaging in his pack,
pushing out cans of sardines and blocks of
chocolate.
'Brew up?' said Miller.
'Not yet,' said Mallory casually. 'Take a look
at Wallace, would you?'
Wallace was lying on the stony floor. Andrea
had put a pack under his head. The flesh had fallen away from his
face, so the nose and cheekbones looked as if they would burst
through the skin. He seemed to radiate a dry heat. His eyes were
open, but were dull and glazed. 'Hurts,' he said.
Miller crouched at his side. 'Just a little
prick,' he said. 'As the actress said to the bishop.' He pushed a
morphine syrette into the ice-white skin of the SAS man's dangling
upper arm. Wallace moaned and stirred, and said something in a
high, incomprehensible voice. Then his eyes closed. Miller
unbuttoned the tunic and started to unwrap the bandages on the
stomach.
When he had unwrapped them he sat very stilll
for a moment.
face immobile. Then he lit a cigarette and took
a deep, soothing drag.
The wound was by no means soothing. It was a
crater on the right-hand side of the belly; a crater puffed at the
edges to an unhealthy redness that shaded to yellow. A faint odour
rose from it, the smell of a meat-safe the morning after a hot
night. And that was only the outside. It looked as if the bullet
had been travelling from right to left. It had passed behind the
abdominal muscles. It was stilll in there, somewhere. Miller had no
means of finding out what damage it had done, and very little
inclination to do so.
He rummaged in his first-aid box and pulled out
a can of sulfa powder. He sprinkled a heavy dusting on the entrance
hole, and applied fresh dressings. While Andrea held Wallace up, he
rebound the bandages so it looked neat and white and
tidy.
Mallory said, 'How is he?'
Miller lit a new cigarette from the stub of the
old one. 'Could be lucky,' he said, without
conviction.
'Nothing you can do?'
'You can sit there with your mouth open and
wonder how the hell he managed to climb a three-thousand-foot
mountain,' he said. 'Otherwise, I've packed it with sulfa. I may
also pray a little.'
Mallory nodded. The weeks of effort were
telling on Miller. His eyes were sunk deep in his head, and they
held a manic gleam. Miller had always had an over-developed sense
of humour, but now it was developing an edge colder than bayonet
steel.
'But I tell you something,' said Miller. 'If he
can climb with a stomach like that, he can probably bloody well fly
as well.' He rummaged in his pack, pulled out a can of sardines and
ate the fish in concentrated silence, using a knife.
Mallory sat down, let his aching limbs relax,
and ate some sardines of his own. He was exhausted. Forty-eight
hours from now, the Werwolf pack was due to sail. They were going
to have to keep moving.
But if they left Wallace, he would
die.
Drowsily, he debated with himself. They had
already left Lisette. Why not leave Wallace?
If the Storch had spotted them, they would find
him here. And he would talk.
Mallory found himself dozing. He sat up
quickly, took a Benzedrine out of his pack and swallowed
it.
Hugues was nodding over his bottle of brandy.
Mallory leaned over and took it out of his hand. He washed the pill
down with a fiery gulp and passed the bottle on to Jaime. Andrea
was going to have to carry Wallace.
He looked around the grey, cheerless shadows.
Andrea was not there. He would be standing sentry. Mallory climbed
stiffly to his feet and went to the mouth of the
cave.
The gully stretched away like a corridor roofed
with sky. In the ten minutes they had been inside, the roof had
become lower, changed from black to soft grey. And from out of the
grey, whirling on the eddies of a bitter wind, there floated
billions of snow-flakes. Already the outlines of boulders in the
gully were melting and fusing under the chill, white blanket. Of
Andrea there was no sign.
Jaime appeared at his side. He said, 'Now only
one small hill to the sea.'
'How far?'
'Twelve kilometres.'
'It's snowing.'
'Not down below. Snow up here, rain down
below.' Jaime laughed. The brandy had given his eyes a mischievous
glitter. 'We can go the inside way, if you want.'
'What do you mean?'
Jaime took his arm, led him back into the cave,
and pointed at its shadowy inner recesses. 'Once this was where a
river came out of the cliff. The river is stilll in there, but it
has found new ways out. Now it arrives in the valley close to the
Hendaye road. And in other places, they say, it springs from the
hill. I once met a man, Norbert Casteret, who told me he had walked
inside this mountain. He was a great bore. In great detail he told
me: shafts, waterfalls, and the rest.'
'Fascinating,' said Mallory. The Benzedrine was
making his ears ring in the intense, snow-muffled silence. There
was only Wallace's stertorous breathing, and the drip of water from
the cave roof. And now that Jaime came to mention it,
something else, something more a vibration than a sound, as if far
away, something hugely powerful was roaring and thundering. A
waterfall, for instance.
-Mallory's muscles tensed and his palms
sweated. Caves and water ... Not fear, he told himself. Only the
Benzedrine. He looked at his watch. They had been here fifteen
minutes. Time they were moving on. He said to Jaime, 'Moving out in
three minutes. The outside route.'
Hugues and Thierry groaned, stretching their
cold-stiffened limbs. Miller gathered his pack and his precious
boxes. Mallory shouldered his own pack and his weapons. He went
once again to the mouth of the cave and down the gully, and looked
onto the little plateau. It was empty, except for snowflakes. Where
the hell was Andrea?
Then something moved in the snow: a giant
moustache, and a pair of black eyebrows that grew larger. Mallory
realised that he was looking at Andrea; Andrea wearing a white snow
smock, carrying the Bren.
Andrea said, 'My Keith, we have a German
patrol.' He spoke calmly, but he was moving fast.
Mallory's ears sang in the silence. 'How
many?'
'Perhaps thirty.'
At the edge of the plateau, a ragged line of
dark shapes was materialising in the snow. The shapes of German
soldiers. And with the soldiers, other shapes, from which came the
sound of whining and baying.
Dogs.
There was no point in trying to draw the men
away from the cave: the dogs would not be distracted, even if the
handlers were.
Andrea stared at him. He said, 'I'll go up the
hill and draw them off.'
'No,' said Mallory. He hated saying it. But the
dogs would not be drawn. 'Back to the cave.'
Andrea said, 'But the cave is a
trap.'
There's a back entrance.'
One of the figures in the snow shouted. The
line stopped.
Andrea sighed, and took aim with the Bren. The
machine gun's stammer fell flat in the soft white world. One
of the figures buckled and collapsed.
Mallory slid back into the gully. The
Schmeisser chattered in his hands as Andrea fell back past him.
Bullets smashed rocks above his head. He felt stone-chips sting his
cheek, and the trickle of blood. He was moving back towards the
cave mouth, Andrea firing past him, covering him. As he arrived at
the cave mouth, four figures in field-grey appeared at the end of
the gully.
Suddenly, Mallory and Andrea were inside the
cave, and Mai-lory's Schmeisser was bucking in his hands again.
Next to him, Andrea was fumbling in his belt. His arm came over,
and a grenade was tumbling through the air like a little dark egg,
bursting with a big, flat slam in the mouth of the gully.
There were screams. But there were a lot of bullets coming in now,
spanging off the cave mouth and zipping into the dark
interior.
The Benzedrine was chewing away in Mallory's
mind. How did they find us? Dogs. Or the Storch. It did not
matter. Either they broke out now, or the patrol would call up
reinforcements. Reinforcements were probably on the way
already.
Outside, there was a big, steady hammering, and
the entrance droned with stinging shards of stone. Reinforcements
or no reinforcements, there was at least one heavy machine gun out
there. Mortars next.
Mallory thought about what a mortar bomb would
do in the mouth of the cave. He saw the air full of razor-sharp
chunks of steel and the shrapnel of blasted rock, the ceiling
falling in -
The ceiling falling in.
'Miller,' he said. Miller came. Mallory spoke
to him. Miller nodded, trotted back into the
shadows.
Mallory called over his shoulder. 'Jaime. The
exit?'
'Found it,' said Jaime.
Oh, God.
Andrea was crouching behind a boulder. He
caught Mallory's eye. His face was the same old face, large and
impassive above the sweeping black moustache. But there was
something about the set of the big, unshaven jaw that shocked
Mallory. Andrea had walked alone from Greece to Bulgaria, through
the heart of occupied Mitteleuropa. He was a full colonel in
the Greek army, and with that army had suffered defeat. With
him, Mallory had spent eighteen months behind German lines in
Crete, stared death right between the eyes on Navarone and in the
Zenica Cage. But in all that time, Mallory had never seen this
expression on his face. Up here, five thousand feet above sea
level, in a dank cave near the summit of this 'I'llted sheet of
limestone, Andrea's face was ... resigned.
Mallory found that his muscles were tense as
boards, and in his mind something was scrambling and scuttling,
like a terrified animal. He made himself think of the Channel
covered with ships, the ships crammed with men, and among them
giant submarines swimming swiftly, undetectable, laden with
torpedoes. A Spandau burst punched into the cave wall above his
head. He said to Andrea, 'Jaime has found the back way.' Andrea's
face relaxed. Resignation gave way to the expression that with
Andrea conveyed anything from polite curiosity to frenzied
enthusiasm. Then we should take it,' he said.
'Soon.'
Pour minutes later Miller was alone, standing
among the boulders at the back of the cave. The entrance was a
narrow white window, pointed at the top. The rest of it was dark,
black as ink, in contrast to the glare of the snow
outside.
Miller filled his eyes with that glare, and
tried for three seconds not to think about anything but daylight,
and sky. But his right hand was chilled by the stone-flavoured
draught blowing from the crack in the cave floor on his right - the
crack down which his companions had vanished, and down which he
must vanish himself, now that his preparations were complete
-
A sleet of bullets lashed through the entrance,
and the air was deafening with ricochets. The snow beyond the
entrance was suddenly peopled with grey figures, running, firing as
they came. Miller fired a burst of his Schmeisser into that
brilliant white lancet. Then he lowered himself into the crack, and
started to climb down the doubled rope into the
dark.
The first two Germans flattened themselves
against the walls outside the entrance. They pulled the string
fuses on two stick grenades, and flung them into the cave mouth.
There was a hollow boom, and smoke rolled out. There was no
sign of life from the black interior. They threw in two more
grenades, to make sure, and waited for the bang.
They did not get it.
What they got was a thunderous roar, and a
sheet of flame that lashed out of the entrance and melted the snow
for fifty feet, and picked up the men who had thrown the grenades
and fired them like cannonballs out of the gully and onto the
plateau, where they lay under a sheet of rock fragments that fell
out of the sky like hard rain. Where the cave had been was a raw
cleft in the mountainside, half-filled with fuming
scree.
'Gott,' said the Feldwebel. 'What are
they putting in the grenades, nowadays?'
'Whatever it is, it's done the job,' said the
Sturmbannfuhrer. 'Now pick up those men and for God's sake let us
get out of this snow.'
Miller was twenty feet down the crack when the
big explosion came. A blast of hot air frizzled his eyebrows and
the doubled rope in his hands became two separate ropes. He
thought, in one compressed moment: one kilo of plastic with a
thirty-second time pencil will not only blow up a limestone cave,
but cut a wire-cored climbing rope.
Then he had landed with a crash on wet stone,
and a big pain in his leg was filling the world, and dust was in
his lungs, and stone was falling on his head.
He became aware that he was lying in a place
lit by yellow torch light, and that the stones falling on his head
were small, and the pain in his leg was ebbing. Bruised, not
broken, he thought. He groped for a cigarette in the breast pocket
of his blouse, and lit it. The smoke rose vertical in the torch
light. Before, there had been a draught.
He said, 'Looks like the roof fell
in.'
'Quite,' said Mallory, in a voice perhaps a
shade lighter than usual. Thank you. Dusty.'
And now all we have to do is get out of here,
thought Miller, and find some submarines.
Mallory lit a cigarette himself. The entrance
to the shaft had been narrow - almost too narrow for Andrea.
Down here it had widened out. It was better down here, as long as
you did not think of all those billions of tons of rock around you,
the dynamited entrance -
His heart was going like a rivet gun. He could
hardly breathe for all that rock up there, sitting on his chest
-
Panic later, he told himself. Once you have
done the job. For now, there are six men depending on you. The
Benzedrine made that sound like a good thing. He took a deep
breath. 'Flashlights off,' he said. 'Use one at a time, only when
moving.' The light went out. Darkness descended, thick and
suffocating as wet velvet. 'Jaime,' he said. 'Your friend Casteret.
What did he tell you?'
'It was two years ago,' said
Jaime.
Try to remember.'
There was a pause, in which he could almost
hear the wheels spinning in Jaime's brain. 'He entered the cave,'
he said. 'The shaft. A river. He said there are many passages: the
river made one way out, then found a way to another, lower down,
then another. So the mountain is full of holes like a Gruyere, some
blocked, some flooded. There is a route, because Casteret found it.
But it took him many days.'
That's it?'
That's it.'
Many days. In this darkness. Mallory could hear
his own breathing, very loud. 'So if we head downhill, we can't go
far wrong.'
'Maybe,' said Jaime.
'Very good,' said Mallory. 'I'll lead. Hugues and
Andrea, carry Wallace.'
They made a sort of sedan chair out of a couple
of webbing straps and Wallace's crutch. Mallory stood up, flexing
his stiff limbs. He turned on his flashlight.
It began.
The beam of the flashlight showed a
water-smoothed gallery heading steeply downwards. It was high, the
gallery, so high in places that the flashlight failed to touch its
roof. Once, it had been a runnel of acid rainwater, dissolving its
way through a seam of limestone. The water had gone now, leaving a
bed of grey pebbles down which they walked as if down the gravel
drive of a house in the suburbs of hell.
They went two hundred yards like this,
downwards at an angle of perhaps forty degrees, heading west by
Mallory's compass. Then the gallery took a turning to the
right.
Mallory was pointing the flashlight down at the
ground. Suddenly there were two flashlight beams, one where he was
pointing it, and another on the roof of the gallery, which was low
here. The reason that it was on the roof was that it was being
reflected by the black pool that spanned the gallery from side to
side before it sloped down into the water.
Dead end.
Mallory's heart was thumping in his ears. In
front of them, the roof ran down into the water. Behind them, the
cave was sealed.
Trapped.
Dusty Miller saw the flashlight stop. He heard
the drip of water, the rasp of the stretcher-bearers' breath. He
remembered the panic-stricken rigidity of Mallory in the bread
oven. He fumbled in his breast pocket, and lit a
cigarette.
'For Christ's sake,' said Hugues, in a voice a
good octave too high. 'You will use up the air.'
'Plenty of air,' said Miller, languidly, for
Mallory's benefit. There used to be a howling draught up that
shaft, remember?' He heard Mallory grunt, as if he did not trust
himself to speak.
'And this is a most commodious cave by cave
standards. Did I ever tell you about the time I was working the Go
Home Point amethyst mine back in Ontario? Little tiny shaft, and we
get a flash flood. So there is me, a half-ton of dynamite, and as
it turns out a rabid skunk, one hundred foot under the Canadian
Shield, and that sucker is filling up quicker'n a whore's bidet
-'
'Some other time,' said Mallory.
Miller could hear his voice was back to normal.
'Sure,' he said. 'Well, seems to me there must be some place above
that water for all that air to have been coming from, before we
blew the cave.' He took a last drag on his cigarette. It made a
bright shower of sparks as he threw it away. 'So it ain't the air
we have a problem with, it's the cigarettes, and I guess they need
smoking right up, because I have a feeling I am going to get real
wet.' He walked forward, eyeing the swim of the
flashlight beam in the water and unbuttoning his
tunic.
Take a rope,' said Mallory.
'Sure.'
Miller's body was long and pale, corded with
stringy muscle in the dimness. He tied the rope round his waist in
a bow line, took the waterproof flashlight in his hand, and stepped
into the pool.
The water was so cold it burned. He set his
teeth and walked on. The gravel under his feet sloped down sharply,
continuing the forty-five degree slope of the cave's floor. Within
three paces the water was up to his chest, and he was gasping for
breath. Within four, he was swimming, the coldest swimming he had
ever done. He swam hard, hoping that he was right, that there was a
way through here, between the gallery roof and the water, for the
draught to blow -
But perhaps the draught had come from somewhere
else, a hole in the rock high in the roof, invisible. Perhaps this
was a blind-ended hole, deep as the mountain was high, full of this
icy water.
What a way to go, thought Miller. Drowning in
mineral water. I promise that if I get out of this, I will never
drink anything but brandy again.
He clamped the flashlight between his teeth and
dived.
Back on the gravel beach Mallory saw the light
fade in the dark water, then vanish. He tried not to think of the
cold under there, the pressing down of the roof, the ridges of
stone that could catch you and keep you under there while you
drowned, in the middle of miles of rock -
But the coils of rope moved slowly through his
fingers and into the water. Miller was making progress
-
The rope became stilll.
He's in the air again, Mallory told
himself.
But the rope remained stilll for a minute, then
two. Mallory's mind told him that it was normal, there was an
explanation. But deep down, that creature was raving at him: he's
stuck, he's drowned, for Christ's sake -
Mallory found he had seized the rope and was
tugging at it, hauling for all he was worth, and the bight of it
was thrashing the black pool. Andrea was at his side, saying
something soothing, but he could not hear what -
And suddenly a flashlight clicked on, and a
voice said, 'Colder 'n the nipple on a witch's tit in there.'
Miller's voice.
For a second, Mallory felt deep
shame.
'It's like the bend in your toilet bowl,' said
Miller. 'There's a little uphill the far side, stalagmites,
stalactites, the whole shebang. I put the rope on a stalactite. Or
'mite, whichever. Anyways, it's cold and wet, but once you get to
the other side you can breathe.'
Mallory put the shame behind him. There was a
lot to do, and he needed a clear mind to do it with.
Miller wrapped his battledress in his
waterproof cape, and went back through the icy water. The rest of
them came after him, one by one, dragged under the low roof, breath
held, clothes and weapons wrapped against the water, Andrea
bringing up the rear. On the far side, they stood and shivered in
the tomb-like cold. Wallace was the most worrying. 'Work your
arms,' said Mallory. 'Circulation.'
Wallace raised his arms weakly, let them fall
again. Miller bent over him, tugging his tunic over his arms. He
was too weak to dress himself. 'Physical jerks,' he said, and tried
to grin. Even the grin suffered from lack of muscle
power.
They sat and drank soup brewed on a pressure
stove, and checked their weapons. Miller put his oil can down by
the edge of the water, and went over the lock of his Schmeisser
with a corner of pullthrough. When he had finished the gun, he
looked down again at the oil can.
It had been six inches from the water's edge.
Now the water's edge was lapping against its base.
Up in the world, there was wet snow and rain.
Down here in the underworld, the waters of the earth were
rising.
Best not tell Mallory.
After five minutes, Mallory stood up. 'Okay,'
he said. 'We're off.'
The gallery ran downhill again. There were a
couple more pools, neither of them more than waist-deep. Hugues
marched through the blackness head down, hands in pockets, shoulder
aching under the pressure of Wallace's crutch. When he brushed
against Wallace's hand it felt cold as marble. It was
obvious to Hugues that this man was going to die. Why carry him,
when they had abandoned Lisette? It was folly, madness. Hugues was
a soldier. He accepted that in war there were sacrifices to be
made. But some things were too precious to sacrifice. Like the life
of the woman you loved, and your unborn child. Deep under the
mountain, Hugues was making promises to himself. If I live, he was
thinking, things will be different. From now on, I will take care
of the things I can see and touch with my own eyes and hands. From
now on, it is not the big causes I will fight for. From now on, it
will be the people I love.
If there is a from now on.
The brandy throbbed in his head. He marched on,
detesting Mallory and Miller and this Greek killer Andrea, their
cold, sunken eyes, the hard jokes they made, the way they did not
care about individual people, thought only of their operation
-
Andrea's boot trod on his heel. He was out of
step, stumbling, panting for breath, the blood roaring in his
ears.
Not just the blood.
Ever since they had been inside the mountain,
the air had been tremulous with a faint rumble. Now the rumble was
gaining in intensity. At first it was a long, uniform growl. Then
the growl had become a roar that shook the ground underfoot and
vibrated in the stilll air of the gallery. After perhaps a mile the
gravel underfoot had become finer, and the ground had started to
rise. At the top of a low mound the gallery was suddenly blocked by
a wall of rock.
The beam of Mallory's flashlight wavered up the
wall to a crack of darkness at its summit. The crack was a foot
wide, the roar as loud as a bomber's engines. He put a foot on the
wall and began to climb.
It was only twenty feet high, but running water
had smoothed away the footholds. It took him a careful five minutes
to get to the top. And when he did, he wished he had
not.
When he put his head through the crack, the
thunder of falling water was like a hand that grabbed his head and
shook it. He shone his torch into the darkness. The .beam lanced
into emptiness. He put his head into the racket, and looked
down.
Once, the wall must have been the sill of a
waterfall. Now the river had found a lower channel, and the place
where the waterfall had been was now a cliff, smooth as ivory,
falling away below beyond the reach of his flashlight beam,
plummeting like a gigantic mine shaft into the bowels of the earth.
From the depths rose the bellow of falling water, and a fine mist
of spray that chilled Mallory's face.
Curiously, this hellish hole in the world made
Mallory feel better. It might be underground, and dark as the
inside of a bank safe. But it was an open space; a problem that
with a small stretch of the imagination could be regarded as a
problem in mountaineering.
Mallory called for Miller and Andrea. They
looked over the edge, and went back to the bottom of the sill.
Miller said, 'Holy cow,' in a voice not altogether
steady.
'We've got two ropes,' said Mallory. 'I'm going
to put them together, double. If I find anything useful, I'll pull
twice. Send Wallace down first. You'll have to show the other three
how to rappel.'
'Ideal place to learn,' said
Miller.
Mallory knotted the first two ropes together,
slung the last coil over his shoulder, and went over the
edge.
The wall was as smooth as it looked: no
purchase for feet. He kept his weight well out, rope over shoulder
and up between his legs, walking down the wall. By the time he came
to the first knot he was walking in complete darkness. Miller's
flashlight was a faint yellow glow far above. The roar of water
surrounded him like a thunderstorm. He undipped his own flashlight
and shone it downwards.
Sixty feet below, the beam met something black
and gleaming, muscular as the back of a giant slug. For a moment he
could not work out"what it was. Finally, the truth filtered
through. It was a waterfall. A river, a big river, was pouring out
of a ragged hole in the side of the shaft, tumbling down into a
blackness too deep for the flashlight to penetrate. The roar numbed
his mind. He saw a sudden picture of himself suspended like a
spider on a string of gossamer, hung in this dreadful shaft. He
blanked it out.
The shaft would have been a pothole: a
whirlpool a million years old, a spinning auger of carbonic acid
sinking its way slowly into the limestone. After the river had
gnawed its way down a hundred and fifty feet, it had joined forces
with another seam of water, and adopted its course as its own. The
new waterfall emerged to his left, almost at right angles to the
wall he was descending.
There should be a ledge. Where the old
waterfall had been supplanted by the new, there should definitely
be a ledge.
He knew he must be getting to the bottom of the
second rope. The wall was stilll smooth. To his left, he could feel
the wind of the down-rushing water, falling God knew where. The
spray of it had soaked him to the skin. He felt cold and weak. What
if there was no ledge, only this smooth wall falling direct to the
bottom?
Something touched his back. He almost shouted
with the shock. He was lying on his back on a ledge. He shone his
flashlight. The ledge was four feet wide, twenty feet long, piled
with boulders, crusted white with limy deposits, and shining with
water. When he shone his light over the edge, he stilll saw nothing.
There was only the black water rushing past with its mind-numbing
roar.
He pulled the rope twice, hard. Then he sat
with his back against the wall, and shivered, and gnawed some
chocolate.
Wallace came down first, lowered by Andrea.
Then there were two loads of packs and weapons and radios, then
Thierry and Hugues. Somehow, Thierry had kept his hat. Hugues had
had a bad descent: there was blood on his face. Then there were
Jaime and Miller, who Mallory imagined would be swearing
vigorously, and finally Andrea, leaping down the wall like a huge
cat.
When they were all down, Mallory stood up,
flexed his aching fingers, looped the ropes over a lime-cemented
boulder, and went over the edge again.
This time it was easier. There were footholds,
of a sort. Twenty feet after the halfway mark he entered a place
where his flashlight, instead of making a yellow disc on black
water, created a sort of white halo, as if in fog. The noise was
more like an avalanche than a waterfall. There was wind, too,
irregular flumes of draught that splattered limestone-tasting water
in his face. And suddenly he was standing on dry land
again.
This time it was not a ledge. This time the
plunging roar of water told him that he was at the base of the
waterfall, standing on a beach.
He tugged the rope twice. Then he flicked the
flashlight on again, and began to grope his way round the beach. It
was a broad horseshoe of broken boulders surrounding a thrashing
pool of water. The waterfall must have been twenty feet across and
ten feet thick, a solid column of water plunging down two hundred
feet and hammering the pool to froth. The pool itself had a
circular motion, like a giant bath plug -
Mallory's heart thudded unpleasantly in his
chest. He walked round the piled boulders to one margin of the
waterfall. Then he went all the way back round, as far as the other
margin.
If he had expected anything, it had been that
the river would turn horizontal at the base of the waterfall, and
make its way out through the side of the mountain. But there was no
horizontal passage.
The shaft was a tube. The reason the water in
the pool was spinning like a bath plug was because it was finding
the way out, as water will...
Straight down.
Mallory sat on a boulder. Carefully, he fished
in his blouse pocket for the oilcloth bag with his cigarettes and
lighter. He put a cigarette in his mouth, and lit
it.
The draught blew the lighter out. He relit it,
but the cigarette was soaked.
Soon, the others began to land on the beach.
Mallory's flashlight was dim yellow, the batteries gone. It went
out. He flicked his lighter. The petrol caught.
The draught blew it out again.
He sat down, and concentrated on
shivering.
Miller came down third, after Wallace, with his
eyes shut, cursing. For a man who loathed and despised heights, it
struck him that he had been doing an unfair quantity of
mountaineering these past few weeks. When he reached the beach, he
moved away from the base of the rope; having avoided death by
falling, he had no desire to be flattened by a plummeting
Frenchman. A gleam of yellow light showed him where Mallory
was sitting. Miller flicked on his own flashlight. He was on his
last set of batteries. He saw what Mallory had seen: there were no
exits. He shivered, too. The reason he shivered was because of the
wind -
The wind.
He flashed his torch at Mallory. Mallory's face
looked pinched and white. He looked like a man who had wrestled for
a long time with a monster, and had discovered that despite his
best efforts the monster was not yet dead.
Two packs arrived down the rope. Miller flicked
his torch over them, and onto Wallace. Wallace's face had the
corpse-look, grey and sunken, but he raised a hand. Miller let the
torch beam slide over his bandages. The wound did not seem to be
bleeding any more.
Miller suddenly stopped thinking about Wallace.
The beam of his flashlight had touched the margin of the water.
Five minutes ago, there had been a brick-sized stone by Wallace's
foot. Now there was no stone.
Not that the stone had gone - brick-sized
stones do not evaporate. What had happened was that the stone was
under water.
The water was stilll rising.
It was not a military problem. But then Miller
was not in any stria sense of the word a military person. In fact,
having enlisted in the RAF and been posted to the cookhouse, he had
simply walked away from his unit; not out of cowardice, but because
he wanted to use his talents somewhere they could damage the enemy,
not potatoes. He had been astonished when someone had informed him
that this constituted desertion. But by then he had been behind
enemy lines, causing Rommel severe headaches as a member of the
Long Range Desert Force. And nobody had got round to
court-martialling him.
But as he stood on that black and shrinking
beach, Miller was thinking of a time before the Long Range Desert
Force. It was not a time he was particularly proud of, but it was a
time when he had caused the maximum possible mayhem using the
minimum possible resources.
It had been during Prohibition. For reasons
best left undiscussed, even with himself. Miller had found himself
in Orcasville, a small white clapboard town on the southern
shore of Lake Ontario. It was into Orcasville's pier that a
Canadian bootlegger called Melvin Brassman was wont to bring his
cargoes of hooch. None of which would have posed any problems for
Miller, except that Brassman's boys were causing a lot of trouble
in the town, culminating in the rape of three girls, one of them
the minister's daughter, and the burning of the warehouses of two
merchants Brassman saw as rivals. Having committed these acts of
mayhem, Brassman's men had let it be known that any rival
rumrunners would be treated as hostille, rammed, and sunk by the
steel ex-tug Firewater, in which they plied their
trade.
It was Brent Kent, one of the burned-out
merchants, who had called in Miller, then dynamiting pine stumps in
the Finger Lakes region. Kent had laid his problem before Miller,
stressing the need for a swift, untraceable, no-blame vanishment of
the Firewater. There were no explosives in the town, or at
least none that could not be traced.
But Miller was more than a demolitions man.
Miller was a practical chemist.
Miller had taken possession of an old but
superficially seaworthy steam barge, which he had enigmatically
christened Krakatoa. He had painted the exterior a pleasing
royal blue, and let it be known that he was off to Canada to pick
up a cargo of hooch. With great puffings and clankings, he and the
Krakatoa had set off from the Orcasville quay. Just out of
sight of land he had stopped the engine, and waited. After twelve
hours, he had attended to the Krakatoa's real
cargo.
This consisted not of liquor, but several dozen
barrels of tallow, and a similar number of carboys of sulphuric and
nitric acids. Descending to the deck of the hold with an axe.
Miller staved in the tallow barrels. Then, carefully, he uncorked
the acid carboys and let their contents gurgle into the barge's
ancient wooden bilges. After that, he rowed clumsily away in a
dinghy, and was collected by the mayor in his catboat. When they
arrived ashore. Miller was observed to be the worse for liquor,
bragging in a foolish manner about the large quantity of Canadian
whiskey bobbing at anchor offshore, which, landed at nightfall,
would wreck the Brassman booze market for good and
all.
These braggings swiftly reached the ears of
Brassman's Orcasville lieutenant, who made certain long-distance
telephone calls. That night, a night of full moon, the
Firewater, steaming out of the north, saw the low silhouette
of the Krakatoa at anchor, and took anticompetitive action.
The Krakatoa was known to be rotten. The Firewater
screwed down her regulator, achieved ramming speed, and ran her
down.
What the Firewater's master had not
bargained for was Dusty Miller. When Dusty had rowed away, the
barge had exuded a sour smell and a greenish chemical cloud. Now,
twelve hours later, the acids swilling in her hold had compounded
with the fatty fractions of the tallow, and formed a new
substance.
So the rotting wooden barge into which the
Firewater's bow had knifed at twelve knots was not a rum
ship. It was a rotting wooden barge that contained ten tons of
impure and highly unstable nitro-glycerine.
The explosion that vaporised the
Firewater also broke most of the windows in Orcasville, and
woke the Mayor of Toronto eighty miles away. Miller left town the
following morning, and the town reglazed. There was no further
trouble from Melvin Brassman.
Hugues came down the rope. He saw by the dim
and pearly light of a single torch that the American, Miller, had
gone off to a section of beach opposite the waterfall, a section
where, to judge by the boulders piled up against the face of the
cliff, there had been a rockfall of some kind. Hugues shivered in
the chill wind that was blowing from the direction of the rockfall:
a wind that reminded him of the outside world. Merde,
thought Hugues, gazing into the dark. This is not a war in which
anything will be solved. And certainly not by these stupid old men
who have brought me to the bottom of this well to
die.
The light at the other side of the pool seemed
to become suddenly animated, bobbing like a drunken firefly. He
stared at it dully. Someone was walking, running, racing
towards him. A hard body whacked him off his rock and onto the wet
ground, and he was struggling, indignant, his mouth full of limy
pebbles, while a voice, Miller's voice, bellowed over the thunder
of the fall, 'Cover your ears!'
Suddenly, Hugues was given a vision. The shaft
became a vast tube of grey rock, the waterfall a silver column
falling out of a sky roofed with more rock, every ridge and ledge
and pebble razor-sharp, illuminated by a huge flash of light. The
noise of the water was momentarily replaced by a new noise, so loud
as hardly to resemble a noise at all.
It was the noise of the five pounds of
gelignite that Dusty Miller had packed into the rockfall at the
point where the draught had been strongest.
When the rock fragments had ceased to fall
Miller walked back across the beach, and examined the scene of the
explosion. It was a neat job, though he said it himself. The
boulders had separated like a curtain. At the focal point of the
explosion was a ragged gap perhaps two feet square, through which
the wind howled in a jet like water from a fire hose. Miller
sniffed at it hopefully, trying to detect the herbs and aromatic
plants of the maquis.
It smelt of damp Norman
churches.
Can't win 'em all, thought Miller. He shone his
torch through the hole. There were jumbled boulders, and beyond
them the hint of space: a previous bed of the river. Quick, now,
before the water rose far enough to spill down the channel. He
walked along the beach to Mallory, directed his torch at his hand
and gave the thumbs-up sign. The stony rigidity of Mallory's face
relaxed. They assembled the loads and shared them out. Then Miller
led the way into the hole in the rockfall. Andrea was the last in.
As he stepped up to the hole he found he was walking in
water.
The new passage was another tube of
water-smoothed rock. The wind was strong in their faces. Mallory
looked at his compass. They were heading north. They must have
crossed the mountain by now. Mallory was tired, and hungry, and
cold, and his feet had been wet for so long that they felt like raw
sponges. But they were heading in the right direction. In the gale
that was making him shudder with cold he detected the breath of
freedom.
Provided there was an exit.
The passage was flattening out. Hugues
stumbled. Andrea trod on his heels again; Andrea, who walked with
the stolid regularity of a machine. Hugues was exhausted. He wanted
to drop his end of the crutch from which Wallace was hanging,
stop, rest his blistered feet, sleep in the dark.
Behind him, Andrea's voice said. 'I'll take him
for a while.'
Hugues thought, he understands, this one. He
understands exactly how weak I am, the way my mind will not be
stilll, but must keep chewing at these questions that have no
answers. There was something almost diabolic about that. Hugues
felt naked, exposed.
To prove Andrea wrong, he said, 'I'm
fine.'
The stretcher party plodded on in the dark. The
last torch was turning yellow. There was no sound but the harsh
rasp of breathing, and the rustle of water over
rock.
Andrea did not want to say anything, but the
water in the passage was definitely getting deeper.
It had started as a wetness on the floor. Now
it was shin-deep, and it seemed to be rising faster. He thought of
the waterfall. He imagined all that water pouring down here. He
imagined it pouring down into a chamber with a small exit, making a
pool that spread back into the tunnel, a pool that would fill the
tunnel up. That would be a problem for the operation, thought
Andrea methodically. If they drowned, the operation would not be
completed. It would be best if that did not happen.
Mallory walked on. The water shone under the
now orange beam of his flashlight, chuckling merrily
downhill.
The flashlight became an orange point, and went
out.
Mallory lit his Zippo and held it above his
head. The flame flickered in the rush of air.
Ahead, the tunnel broadened and became a flat
sheet of water that led to a blank wall of rock. Above, at the
height of a cathedral roof, a shaft led upwards. It was down this
shaft that the wind was howling. The lighter went out. In the
darkness left by its flame it was possible to see at the top of the
shaft, bright as a diamond in the cold black velvet of far
underground, a speck of light.
An unattainable speck. For as their eyes
adjusted to the dim glow they saw that the chamber in which they
were standing was roughly the shape of an inverted funnel, with the
shaft as the spout.
Mallory's mountaineering exploits had covered
the newspapers of the Empire. But even master mountaineers do not
have suckers on their feet.
Mallory felt a presence by his side. Miller
raised his own lighter. The sheet of water was a pool, fed by the
knee-deep torrent underfoot. Stalactites threw angular shadows
across the ceiling, and stalagmites stood neck-deep in the pool.
Beyond each stalagmite was a little writhing in the
water.
'It's flowing,' said Miller. 'Must be going
somewhere.'
This time he was so wet that there was no point
in taking his clothes off. He tied the rope round his waist and
waded in.
The first thirty feet was no more than
knee-deep. Then, suddenly, the bottom sank away, and he was
swimming, treading water rather, swept along by a fierce current in
a narrow trench. At the rock wall ahead.
And he knew he had
miscalculated.
He opened his mouth to shout, realised it was
too late, and grabbed a deep breath of air instead. Then he went
under.
The current was like a hand, grabbing him,
tearing him down. He went headfirst, felt himself crash against a
big rock. Then his shoulders were in a tight opening, too narrow
for him to get through, and the current was forcing water into his
nose, trying to get it into his lungs. He wriggled convulsively,
got free, hit another rock with a bang that made his ears ring. He
was in a pipe, a pipe of rock that was such a tight fit that he
could not move his arms or legs. The shove of the water was huge.
You goddamn idiot, he told himself. You can get away with it once,
twice, ten times. But diving into God's waterworks is asking for
trouble.
And trouble is what you got.
His chest was bursting. The blood was hammering
in his ears, and his head was roaring and juddering like that
waterfall back there. Thirty more seconds of this, and he was going
to be dead. And then those other guys would be dead. And then those
submarines would go through that invasion fleet like three red-hot
pokers through a pound of butter.
Chest full of air, oxygen turning to carbon
dioxide. Going to suffocate you.
Make yourself smaller.
Breathe out.
Miller breathed out. The contraction of his
chest shrank his girth by a fraction. The tunnel's grip slackened.
The water hauled him along the pipe, and slammed him into a hole
through which his head only just fitted, and poured into his
nostrils and gaping mouth.
Now he was going to die.
He was going to die with his head in
daylight.
Daylight?
With the last of his strength, he writhed like
an eel. And suddenly, whatever it was that was holding his right
shoulder had given way, and he was through, out, beyond it all,
flat on his back in a cheery little brook that was gurgling down a
wooded valley under the five o'clock sky, from which a little snow
was falling, but only a little.
He breathed twice, big breaths, with coughing.
He looked back at the hole in the hill, a hole no bigger than a
badger sett, as it burst out and expanded into a raw rent big
enough for a bear, or even Andrea. The flow of water seemed to have
lessened. He had broken the bottleneck. There might even be air in
the tunnel now. He gave the two pulls on the rope.
It was cold in the little valley. The snow had
not settled, but white skeins drifted in a half-hearted manner from
heavy black clouds sailing in on the westerly breeze. They
inspected and cleaned the weapons, fumbling with cold,
water-wrinkled fingers. Jaime found some dry branches and knocked
up a fire that burned with hardly any smoke. Andrea made soup.
Thierry crammed his straw hat on his head, unpacked his radio, and
began to inspect the parts.
Miller took Wallace a can of soup. None of them
looked in the best of health, but Wallace looked terrible. His skin
was like grey paper, but burning hot to the touch. His eyes were
glazed. When Miller tipped some soup down his throat, he vomited
immediately.
His wound looked pale and bloodless because of
its perpetual rinsing in water. But the yellow edges looked
yellower, and the red puffiness angrier. There was swelling, and
a nasty putrid ooze. 'Hurts,' he said.
'Bloody awful mess you are,' said Miller.
'Sooner we get you under a roof the better.'
Wallace opened a dull and rheumy eye. 'Lea'
me,' he said.
'Leave you my ass,' said Miller, sticking in
the morphine syrette and squeezing the tube. 'We'll get a dressing
on that. stilll hurt?'
'Can't feel a thing,' said
Wallace.
'Sure,' said Miller, as if that was the right
answer. 'Just get a new dressing on that for you.' He smeared damp
sulfa on the wound, bandaged it up again, and covered Wallace with
a more-or-less dry blanket.
Mallory said quickly, 'How is
it?'
'Looks like it's going wrong,' said Miller,
grim-faced. 'Plus shock, I guess. I don't know why he's stilll
alive.'
Mallory's deep-sunk eyes were bright and
distant. It was a mystery to him why any of them were stilll alive.
'We'll take two hours' rest,' he said. 'Jaime knows where we are.
The Germans think we're dead. Andrea, get your head
down.'
He watched as Miller spread a groundsheet over
Wallace, rolled himself up in his poncho, and went immediately to
sleep. Andrea was sitting with his back to a tree, eyes invisible.
Asleep, awake, nobody knew, and nobody would ask. Jaime and Hugues
were asleep. Only Thierry was awake, a large, crouching figure,
fiddling with his radio, testing it after its
immersion.
Mallory said. That thing
working?'
He had moved close to Thierry quietly; Mallory
knew no other way of moving. Thierry looked up sharply. His fingers
moved a switch. An indicator light went out.
Mallory bent and looked at the set. The light
had been the TRANSMIT light. He felt the short hairs bristle on his
neck. He said with a new, dangerous quietness, Thierry. What are
you doing?'
Testing the equipment,' said
Thierry.
Mallory said, 'Just as long as you're not
transmitting.'
'I heard what you say,' said Thierry irritably,
squashing the straw hat over his face and leaning back against a
boulder. Mallory walked to the end of the valley. The snow had
stopped. Between the squalls of black cloud deep ravines of blue were
appearing. There was real warmth in the gleam of sun that lanced
down into the trees. Warmth was what was needed. Particularly, it
was what Wallace needed. In four hours it would be dark, and it did
not seem likely to Mallory that Wallace would survive a night in
the open.
And Wallace was not the only worry. Mallory
guessed that they were at best halfway down the mountain. They
stilll had to get down into the valley and walk to the sea, where
this Guy Jamalartegui was waiting for them. Whether or not the
Germans believed that they had died in the collapsed cave beyond
the ridge, the roads to the sea would be heavily
patrolled.
Mallory eased his sodden feet in his boots, and
squeezed his cracked and abraded hands, to change the nature of the
pain. The Benzedrine was wearing off. He felt weary and irritable.
What they needed was to get dry. Being dry would change
everything.
He was too jumpy to rest. He patrolled the
wood, walking downhill untill the trees started
thinning.
Below him a meadow dropped steeply into the
smoky blue deeps of the valley. The sun was out again. He could
feel its warmth on his face. This far down the mountain the snow
had melted as quickly as it had fallen, and the meadow grass was a
brilliant green space in which swam constellations of wild flowers,
falling away to a hazy gulf in which a village lay like a group of
toys, and beyond it a shoulder of mountain, more heavy black
clouds, and the metal sheet of the sea.
But Mallory was not looking at the view. He had
faded back into the shadow of a stand of pines. He had his
binoculars at his eyes. His grey-brown face was stony under the
stubble on cheeks and jaw.
In the disc of the glasses the lower slopes of
the meadow were lousy with grey mites. The sun gleamed off
windscreens: the windscreens of half-tracks and lorries, and of an
odd, boxy van with a steel loop on its roof, like the frame of a
giant tennis racket.
A radio-direction-finding van.
It came upon Mallory like a flash of
revelation: not a flash of lightning, but the dull, red blink of
the TRANSMIT light on Thierry's radio.
Thierry had not been checking the equipment. He
had been transmitting.
Things began tumbling into place. That damn
silly straw hat that Thierry insisted on wearing, rain or no rain,
had nothing to do with vanity. It was an identification mark.
Don't shoot the man in the straw hat, the orders would have
said. The rest, kill them. Not the man in the
hat.
In a manner of speaking, Jensen had said, they
will be waiting for you.
Courtesy first of the SAS. And now
Thierry.
A short mile away, at the foot of the meadows,
three armoured cars had begun to grind uphill, hub-deep in the lush
spring grass, leaving tracks like railway lines. Mallory faded back
into the woods.
At the gully, everyone was asleep except
Thierry, who was stilll squatting in front of his radio like a lard
Buddha. Mallory did not look at him. Andrea was snoring heavily.
Mallory shook him by the shoulder. He said, 'I think you should
shave off your moustache.'
Andrea said, 'Wha-'
'Quick.'
Andrea's hand went to his upper lip. For the
first time since Mallory had known him there was uncertainty in his
eyes. 'No,' he said.
Mallory said, 'The Germans are coming. Five
hundred men. Armoured cars. Listen.'
Andrea listened. He hung his head. Then,
finally, he nodded. Reluctantly, he pulled a razor from his pack
and began hacking at the luxuriant growth on his upper lip. 'Twenty
years,' he said.
But Mallory was gone, waking the
others.
Within two minutes the upper lip was bare,
except for a black stubble that matched the rest of his face. A new
Andrea stood up: an Andrea clean-shaven, olive-skinned, with a nose
increased and cheeks enlarged by the lack of moustache. And there
was something else on his normally impassive countenance. Andrea
would shave his moustache in the name of duty, but that did not
mean he was going to be happy about the man who had caused his
loss.
Andrea was angry.
Up on his rock Thierry was beginning to be
nervous. People were stirring in the camp, when there should have
been no stirring. He looked at the steep walls of trees on either
side of him, the valley, the stream babbling out of the mountain.
These people would fight to the death. He could imagine the chug of
machine guns, the blast of mortar bombs. He was working for the
Germans to keep himself safe, not expose himself to danger. A
stupid straw hat would not save him from Spandau rounds or
shrapnel.
Thierry found that he was on his feet, and that
his feet were moving, sidling away towards the woods. He found he
was yearning with his whole being for the anonymous shade of the
trees. The sky was a bright, hopeful blue beyond those green
leaves. His mission was over; there was no shame in running. He
would collect the money Herr Sachs of the Gestapo had promised him,
buy a bar, listen to dance music, run a couple of girls upstairs;
and the sky would never, ever be anything but blue
again.
There was no more sidling, now. He was running
in earnest, his great bulk crashing through wild raspberries and
chestnut saplings. From the corner of his eye he could see someone
coming after him. His bowels were loose with terror. He thought he
could hear engines now, and the crash of jackboots in the
undergrowth.. Holding the identifying straw hat on his head with
one hand, he shouted, 'Hilfe! Hilfe!'
The hat and the shouting must have slowed him
down. He knew that something had smacked him hard from behind, on
the left-hand side of the rib cage. He pitched forward. A voice in
his ear said. This is from Lisette, animal.' He thought, surprised,
that was Hugues, the stupid Norman. What happens
now?
There had been something wrong with the blow on
his ribs. It hurt too much. It hurt very badly indeed, as if there
was a red-hot iron bar in there. A heart attack? thought Thierry.
The doctor had warned him: lose weight. But to die of a heart
attack in a war. How stupid, thought Thierry, covered in cold
sweat. How very stupid. Perhaps one can recover -
He tried to breathe. But his lungs were full of
liquid. He coughed. Something poured out of his
mouth.
Blood.
In front of him loomed the blank face of the
blond Norman, Hugues. He was doing something to a knife. Cleaning
it with a handful of chestnut leaves.
He stabbed me, thought Thierry, in a panic.
With a knife. I may die.
He died.
The SS men in the armoured car stopped on the
edge of the wood, and waited. The Gestapo were manoeuvring the
third detector van into position, so the position of the radio
could be pinpointed exactly. The terrorists could then be
surrounded, and methodically crushed.
The SS men in the armoured car were ready to
wait for as long as it took.
For there were rumours in circulation that made
it sound very unwise to take any risks with these people. They had,
it appeared, already accounted for almost a hundred men. The
logical way of dealing with them was massive force. And massive
force, thank God, was what was being applied to the
problem.
The SS Obersturmfuhrer was not like other men.
He turned and watched scornfully as the grey straggles of soldiers
marched doggedly up the mountain, and curled a lip. His men might
welcome this great application of force. But it looked to the
Obersturmfuhrer like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut. There
were only five or six men, terrorists. Frenchmen, British:
mongrels, members of inferior races. In the Obersturmfuhrer's view,
it was time to get them out of the way, and get on with the
war.
At that point, five men walked out of the edge
of the wood; or rather, four men walked, carrying a fifth on an
improvised stretcher. Three of the walkers and the man on the
stretcher were wearing British battledress. Behind them, walking at
a safe distance, was a fat, dark man, holding a Schmeisser trained
on his companions, with two more Schmeissers slung round his neck.
As planned, he was wearing a straw hat.
He looked up at the armoured car. His dark eyes
took in the Obersturmfuhrer's black uniform with the
lightning-flashes on the collar of the tunic. He said, in
heavily-accented German, Three English and two French
bastards.'
The Obersturmfuhrer allowed a clammy blue eye
to rest on the man. He was disgustingly unshaven, and his clothes
were too small and too wet. His accent sounded French, but not
quite French. The Obersturmfuhrer said. There were supposed to be
six of them.'
'One of them is inside the mountain,' said the
man in the straw hat. 'And ever more shall be so.'
'Good,' said the SS man. The chilly eyes
flicked across the bedraggled group of Englishmen and their two
French companions. He jumped down from the armoured car. 'Werner
and Groen. Bring the Spandau. Altmeier, radio Search HQ and tell
them that the problem has been dealt with.' He gazed clammily upon
the prisoners. Herr Gruber, the Chief of the Gestapo in
St-Jean-de-Luz, might want to interrogate them. But Herr Gruber was
a civilian, an expert at pulling out women's fingernails; he knew
very little about the wars fought between man and man. The
Obersturmfuhrer sniffed. There was only one cure for vermin. 'A
dean death,' he said. 'It is probably more than you deserve.
Komm.'
They set up the Spandau twenty-five yards away
from the armoured car, pointing at a low cliff of limestone. Thirty
or forty Wehrmacht soldiers in field-grey hung around, watching.
'Good,' said the Obersturmfuhrer to the man in the straw hat. 'Now
tell them to dig.'
'Dig?'
'Not too deep,' said the Obersturmfuhrer.
Thirty centimetres will suffice.'
Two SS men unstrapped spades from the back of
the armoured car, and threw them at the men. Mallory began to dig.
So did Hugues and Miller. Wallace, on his knees, picked feebly at
the spongy soil. The Wehrmacht men looked disgusted, and began to
drift away.
'Good,' said the Obersturmfuhrer ten minutes
later, contemplating the shallow pit. Tell them to
undress.'
They undressed, slowly. The last of the
soldiers in field-grey had gone. They hated the revolting tricks of
the SS. A man who was a man could not watch this kind of thing. The
execution party and its victims were alone under the birdsong and
the dripping green trees by the little cliff at the
margin of the wood.
There were the three men round the Spandau: the
Obersturmfuhrer, and two more SS. Facing them, white-skinned and
goose-pimpled in the low sun, were the prisoners. Mallory said in
German, 'What about a cigarette?'
The man in the straw hat said, 'Give them a
cigarette.'
The Obersturmfuhrer said, 'For a traitor, you
are a generous man.'
The man in the straw hat walked across to
Mallory, gave him a cigarette, and lit it for him. The
Obersturmfuhrer had a sudden feeling that there was something wrong
with the transaction.
It was the last feeling he ever had about
anything.
Because as the man in the straw hat lit the
cigarette for the man with no clothes on, he must have passed over
the Schmeisser as well. And suddenly the Schmeisser was firing a
long burst at the Spandau crew, who seemed to make a sitting jump
backwards and lay twitching, gazing at the sky with sightless eyes.
That left the Obersturmfuhrer, his Luger halfway out of his
holster. The Schmeisser turned on him. The firing pin clicked on an
empty chamber.
The Obersturmfuhrer started to
run.
He ran well for a man wearing breeches and
jackboots, but not well enough for a man running for his life.
Deliberately, Andrea reached into his belt and pulled out a knife.
Silver flashed in the sun. The figure in the black uniform stopped
running suddenly and collapsed in an untidy tangle of arms and
legs. His cap rolled away and came to rest against a thistle. The
breeze fluttered his close-cropped yellow hair.
Andrea pulled his knife from the nape of the
Obersturmfuhrer's neck and wiped it on the wet grass, waving away
the flies that were buzzing over the wound. Already Mallory and
Miller were stripping The uniforms from the bodies of the SS men.
The Obersturmfuhrer's uniform more or less fitted
Mallory.
They tumbled the corpses into the graves they
had dug for themselves. They drove back to the little valley and
loaded the gear and Miller's boxes into the armoured car. Mallory
sat bolt upright, head out of the turret, face grey and unshaven.
'Go,' he said.
Miller put his foot on the throttle. The
armoured car jounced down the hill, through the remnants of the
Wehrmacht force. The field-grey soldiers looked away. They knew
what those Totenkopf bastards had been up to on the
mountain.
Up on the edge of the wood the air was silent,
except for the buzz of the flies over certain dark patches on the
fresh-turned earth, and the whistle of a griffon vulture wheeling
high between two clouds.
Down in the valley, the armoured car turned
onto the pave, and began to clatter officiously towards
St-Jean-de-Luz.
The inhabitants of St-Jean-de-Luz paid very
little attention to an SS armoured car; they saw too many of them.
Mallory stared straight ahead at the thickening houses. He said to
Jaime, 'We need a safe place. Not a cave this time.'
Jaime nodded. On the outskirts of the town he
said, 'Halt here.'
Miller turned the armoured car down a track,
through a rusty iron gate with a chain and a padlock bearing a
swastika seal. Jaime cut the chain, let them in, and hooked the
broken links closed behind them.
Beyond the gate was a farmyard. It looked as if
it had been abandoned in a hurry. The farmhouse windows were open,
the remnants of shutters flapping in the breeze from the sea. The
cattle-sheds were empty too. The Nazis took the people,' said
Jaime. 'The men to forced labour. Later, the women were sheltering
resistants. They also went. Nobody has come here
since.'
Mallory walked round the place. It had an evil,
septic smell. There was mouldy hay in the mangers and dried manure
stilll in the cowshed gutters. In the house, the bedclothes were
stilll on the beds, and in the kitchen a saucepan full of mould
stood on the cold stove. It was like a house visited by a
plague.
But Mallory was less interested in the house
than in the exits. The exits were fine. The house stood in a grove
of ilex in open fields, plentifully laced with deep, useful
ditches. The nearest house was two hundred yards away; the wall it
turned on the farm was blank and windowless. And best of all, they
were behind an iron gate with an apparently unbroken Nazi
seal.
They drove the armoured car into the barn and
heaved the door shut. They sat on the broken chairs round the
kitchen table and lit cigarettes, while the fleas from the floor
attacked their ankles. The westering sun made yellow shafts in
the curling smoke. Mallory could have slept for a
year.
Hugues said, 'We must go to the
cafe.'
Mallory nodded. Hugues' face was pouchy with
exhaustion. Mallory wished he trusted him more. It would be
dangerous in the cafe. He said, 'What if Lisette has
talked?'
'If she has talked, she has talked,' said
Hugues. 'That is a risk I will take.'
After Colbis, Mallory had begun to think of
Hugues as a weak link. But then he had seen him run down Thierry, a
Thierry screaming for help, about to break cover under the eyes of
the Germans. It had been a nasty job, a job Mallory had been glad
he had not had to do himself. Hugues had done it.
And under the one eye of the SS Spandau,
standing by the graves they had dug themselves, it had been the
same. Certainly, Hugues was frightened. But he was a man who had
the courage to face down his fear. And that, in Mallory's book, was
the true bravery.
But Hugues' courage was not the issue. The
issue was to find out the whereabouts of Guy
Jamalartegui.
I am sorry, thought Mallory. But brave or not,
I cannot trust you, not one hundred per cent. Once you are out from
under our eyes it will be too tempting to bargain for Lisette's
life, and the life of your unborn child.
Mallory looked into the veil of smoke
surrounding the head of Miller, sprawled in a chair with his boots
on the table, and caught his eye. 'I'll go along,' said Miller. 'I
could just about handle a drink.'
Ten minutes later they were walking towards the
port of St-Jean-de-Luz. Miller made an improbably tall Frenchman,
loping along in a black beret and a blue canvas workman's suit
whose trousers flapped round his calves. He had found the clothes
in a wardrobe at the farm. They stank of rats. His papers, however,
had been supplied by SOE and were in order. Hugues was dressed in
the sweater and corduroys in which he had clambered through the
mountain, and another beret. They were dirty and unshaven. They
were chewing raw garlic, and they had rubbed dirt into
the cracks and scrapes on their hands. They were
convincing peasants on their way from the fields to the
cafe.
St-Jean-de-Luz could almost have been a town
outside the war zone. The golden evening light held the particular
sparkle that comes from proximity to large expanses of water. The
inhabitants were out enjoying the weather. A dark-haired girl
haugh'I'lly ignored Miller's wink. Miller sighed, and wished he had a
cigarette. But all he had was blond tobacco, and smoking blond
tobacco in this town would be like hauling up the Stars and Stripes
and running out the guns.
The Cafe de l'Ocean was strategically sited on
the crossing of two narrow alleys in the Quartier Barre, north of
the harbour. At the end of the alley Miller saw two grey-uniformed
Germans with a motorcycle combination parked on the quay under a
crowd of squalling gulls. They looked as if they were having a
pleasant seaside smoke. Soon, an SS armoured car and six men would
have failed to respond to signals enough times for there to be
noise and fuss. But not. Miller devoutly hoped, too
soon.
Outside the cafe, Hugues looked up and down the
alley with the air of a conspirator in a bad play. 'Get in here,'
said Miller, not unkindly, and shoved the door open for
him.
The Cafe' de l'Ocean was a room twenty feet on
a side, with a bar across the inside corner. It contained some
thirty men, five women, and a fug of cigarette smoke. Two
field-grey Germans were playing draughts at a table in the comer.
Seeing them, Hugues stiffened like a pointer at a grouse. Miller
knocked his arm and said, 'Camouflage.' He hoped he was
right.
Hugues swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing in
his throat above the frayed collar of his shirt. He elbowed his way
up to the bar, next to an elderly gentleman with a beret, a large
grey moustache and red-and-yellow eyeballs. He said to the fat man
behind the bar, 'A Cognac for me, and a Cognac for my friend the
Admiral.'
The barman had eyes like sharp currants.
'L'Amiral Beaufort?'
That's the one.' A fine sheen of sweat glazed
Hugues' pink-and-white features. The BBC had sent the password down
the line. But it was always possible that something would have gone
astray, that this impenetrable barman, whom he knew to
be a resistant, would refuse to make the next link in the
chain.
But that was all right, now.
The barman gave them the brandy, and scribbled
a laborious bill with a stub of pencil. Hugues passed a glass to
Miller, said, 'Salut,' and looked at the bill. Pencilled on
the paper were the words Guy Jamalartegui - 7 Rue du Port,
Martigny. Hugues pulled money from his pocket and passed it to
the barman with the bill. The barman put the money in the 'I'lll,
tore the bill into tiny fragments, and dropped the fragments in the
wastepaper bin.
'Bon,' said Hugues. 'On s'en
va?
Next to him, a voice said in a hoarse whisper,
'Vive la France!'
Hugues' heart lurched in his chest. The voice
belonged to the man with the grey moustache. He turned
away.
'I saw the paper. He is a good man, Guy,' said
the man with the moustache. His breath smelt like a distilllery. 'A
very good man. Permit me to introduce myself. I am Commandant
Cendrars. Perhaps,' he said, 'you have heard of me?'
Hugues' eyes flicked to the Germans at their
draughts game. He smiled, an agonised smile. 'Alas no,' he said.
'Excuse me-'
'Croix de Guerre at the Marne,' said the
old man. 'A sword long sheathed, but stilll bright. And ready to be
drawn again.' He put his head close to Hugues. A silence had fallen
around him. Cendrars' alcoholic rasp was singularly penetrating,
his attitude visibly conspiratorial. 'I am not the only one. There
are others like me, waiting the moment. The moment which is
arriving. Arriving even now. The great fight for the resurrection
of France from under the Nazi heel. We are not Communists,
monsieur. Nor are we Socialists, like the resistant!.
I trust you are not a Communist. Non. We are simple
Frenchmen-'
'Excuse me,' said Hugues. 'It will soon be
curfew.'
Cendrars said, with a significant narrowing of
his orange eyes, 'In the mountains today, it is said that they
killed six SS.'
The silence had become intense: a listening
silence. Miller drained his glass, grabbed Hugues firmly by the
arm, and marched him out into the alley. 'What was he
saying?'
'Madness,' said Hugues. 'Stupid old bastard.
Stupid old Royalist con-'
'No politics,' said Miller. 'Home,
James.'
They started to walk.
Miller kept a little behind Hugues. He did not
like this Cendrars. He liked even less the fact that the news about
the killing of the SS on the mountain was already gossip in the
town. Germans did not sit stilll and mourn dead SS men. There would
be searches and reprisals -
In front of him, Hugues stopped dead. He was
talking to someone: someone small, in a woollen hat and a big
overcoat. He had thrown his arms round the small person, was
embracing this person, making an odd baying noise that might have
been laughing but sounded a lot more like crying. It was a weird
and dreadful noise, the son of noise guaranteed to attract
attention. It caused Miller to pull the beret down over his eyes
and start his feet moving in a new direction.
Suddenly, the person said in French, 'For God's
sake, shut up.' Hugues leaped back as if shot. His face was amazed,
mouth open.
'Be a man,' said the small
figure.
The small figure of Lisette.
Miller said, 'Hugues. We have to
go.'
'You have to go,' said Lisette.
This is all we need, thought
Miller.
Hugues stared at her. He did not understand the
words she was saying. Through his tears of joy, her face looked
luminous, like an angel's. He had forgotten he was a soldier. He
was a man, and this woman was bearing his child. There was nothing
else he needed to know. Now they could be happy for
ever.
'Free,' he said.
'Correct,' said Lisette. 'Now for God's sake
get moving.'
'Moving?'
Miller cleared his throat. Lisette looked as
good as new. Not a mark on her. Eight months pregnant. Blooming
with health.
That was bad. That was very bad.
Miller said. They told us that you were taken
to Gestapo HQ in Bayonne.'
'I was,' said Lisette. She looked up and down
the alleyway. It was empty, except for the deepening shadows of
evening. They let me go. Because of the baby.'
Her face was the same as ever: pale, aquiline,
with the dark-shadowed eyes and transparent skin of late pregnancy.
This was not a woman who had been tortured.
Miller said, 'What happened,
exactly?'
They asked me what I knew, how I came to be in
that village. I said I was visiting, that I knew nothing. They ...
well, they seemed to believe me. They said that a woman in my...
condition would not tell them lies, out of respect for her unborn
child.' Her face split in a white grin that sent the shadows
scuttling for cover. 'Of course, I agreed.'
'Sure you did,' said Miller. 'How did you find
us here?'
'I knew you were heading for St-Jean-de-Luz. It
is a known thing that if you require information in St-Jean, you
will find it in the Cafe de l'Ocean.'
'Is it?' Miller did not like this. In fact, he
hated it. No Gestapo man had ever been worried about an unborn
child, let alone an unborn child whose mother had been apprehended
in a raid on a Resistance stronghold. The only reason the Gestapo
would have let Lisette out was so they could follow her to her
friends.
Miller said, 'I have to go.'
'You?' said Hugues.
Miller said, 'We have a military operation
here. It seems to me that this town is going to get real hot, real
soon. And we have to be moving right along.'
'So Lisette accompanies us.'
Miller looked at him with a face grey as
concrete, 'It is whoever has accompanied Lisette from Bayonne that
gives me the problems.' He watched Hugues' face. He saw the frown,
the struggle. He knew what the answer was going to be. Hugues had
abandoned Lisette once in the name of duty. He would not do it
again.
Lisette said, 'You must go.'
Hugues said, 'No.'
Miller turned away and started to walk, hands
in pockets, stopping himself from running, keeping to a stolid
peasant shuffle, heading towards the farmyard.
He heard footsteps behind him: one pair of
short legs, one pair of long. In a pane of glass he saw their
reflection. Hugues had his arm round Lisette's shoulders and an
agonised expression on his face. The steps slowed and halted. Miller
walked on, faster, heading for the edge of town.
God damn it, thought Miller. Hugues had seen
the address pencilled on the bill at the Cafe de l'Ocean. And it
would not take the Germans long to get it out of
him.
It was a mess. A five-star, copper-bottomed,
stinking Benghazi nine-hole latrine of a father and mother of a
mess.
The houses were thinning. A truck engine
clattered on the road ahead. Miller faded gently off the verge and
into some bushes. A lorry load of soldiers rolled by, blank-faced
under their coal-scuttle helmets. Hugues and Lisette had not jumped
into the hedge. The lorry stopped alongside them with a wheeze of
brakes. An officer climbed down from the cab. Miller heard him
bark, 'Papiers?'
In Miller's pocket was an identity card, work
permit, ration card, tobacco card, frontier zone permit, and a
medical certificate signed by a Doctor Lebayon of Pau explaining
that chronic lumbago had prevented him from being deported to
Germany as a forced labourer. Miller derived a certain sense of
security from carrying them, but he knew that a detailed
cross-examination about his maternal uncles or the colour of Doctor
Lebayon's beard would scupper him, quick.
He hoped that Hugues and Lisette were in the
sort of mental state that permitted clear thinking. He doubted
it.
Quiet as a shadow, he slid away through the
bushes. Ten minutes later, he was back in the
farmyard.
Mallory said, 'Where's Hugues?'
-
Miller told him.
Mallory lit a cigarette. Then he dropped it on
the floor and stamped it out, and shouldered into his webbing.
'We're off,' he said.
'Off where?' said Miller.
'Martigny.'
'What if they talk?'
They talk,' said Mallory. 'The Germans will
react. If they don't react, nobody's talked.'
And if they do, thought Miller, gloomily, we're
dead.
Again.
There was a peak in the Southern Alps that had
done this to him: Mount Capps, a treacherous peak, full of
crevasses and rotten rock, its upper slopes decorated with snow
fields that in the morning sun fired salvoes of boulders and later
in the day became loose on their foundations and came slithering
down like tank regiments, roaring and trailing plumes of pulverised
rock and ice.
Mallory had left his base camp on the third day
of the climb, leaving Beryl and George, his companions, waiting. He
had bivouacked in the lee of a huge rock, halfway up an ice field,
and spent a cold, restless night among the cracks and booms of the
refreezing ice.
He had woken at four, and gone out. The sky had
been clear, the peak of Mount Capps a peaceful pyramid of
pink-tinged sugar icing over whose slopes Venus hung like a silver
ball. It was a beautiful morning.
Mallory had walked ten feet away from the tent,
into the cover of the rocks he used as his lavatory. He dropped his
trousers.
A rumble came from the mountain. Feathers of
snow fluttered away from the rocks. The rumble became a roar. He
looked back at his tent.
A fifty-foot wall of snow and ice and rock
thundered across his field of vision. It must have been moving at
two hundred miles an hour. The icy breath of its passage slammed
him against the rocks.
Ears ringing, he dragged himself back on his
feet.
In the tent had been his pack, with spare
ropes, food, extra clothes, sleeping bag.
The tent was gone. In its place was a deep,
rubble-filled scar in the mountainside. All he had left was the
rope he had taken to the rocks, his ice axe, and the fact
that he had been climbing mountains since his tenth
birthday.
Mallory buckled his trousers. Beryl and George
were down there, waiting for him. They had spent six weeks planning
this expedition. Nobody had ever climbed the southeast face of
Mount Capps.
Mallory had thought at four o'clock that
December morning, nine thousand feet above sea level: Beryl and
George and the rest of the team are counting on you. It is not just
your life. You have responsibilities. So you get killed going up.
On this mountain you are just as likely to get killed going down.
Three hours to the summit, then nine hours to base
camp.
If you are going to die, you might as well die
advancing as die retreating.
So he had shouldered his single coil of rope
and his ice axe, and made it back to base camp in eight
hours.
Via the summit.
The papers had said he was a hero. As far as
Mallory was concerned, he had done the job, and not let the team
down, and that was enough.
And now the team were out there on the south
coast of England, hundreds of thousands strong, waiting to embark
on the transports.
It was a job with risks. But that did not make
it any less of a job.
They left quickly across the fields, Andrea
carrying Wallace. There had been very little sleep: enough to make
men groggy and dazed, but not enough for anything approaching rest.
As they tramped through the orchards and fields of young corn it
was raining again, and a blustery wind clattered branch against
branch.
The town lay in darkness under the evening sky.
Night fell as Jaime led them round its southern fringes, crossing
darkened roads, climbing a couple of low ridges and scrambling down
terraces. Engines were roaring in St-Jean-de-Luz. On the other side
of the bay the Germans were moving, there was no way of telling
where, or who against. All they could do was hope that the
movements had nothing to do with Hugues and Lisette.
One step at a time.
'Wait here,' said Jaime.
They had arrived on a cobbled lane that headed
steeply downhill. At the bottom of the lane water flexed like a
sheet of metal.
Jaime drifted off into the dark.
Mallory said, 'Andrea. Recce?'
Andrea put Wallace down behind a wall, in what
might have been a potato patch, and gently pressed a Schmeisser
into his hand. Wallace's head was buzzing with fever and
morphine. At first, he had thought that these people were SOE
bunglers, rank amateurs. Now he had changed his mind, or what was
left of it. They were the coolest, most matter-of-factly competent
team he had ever met up with. It was something that he would never
have admitted to himself if he had been a well man. But frankly,
they were a lot better than any SAS he had ever
seen.
Think rugby. Think of a team that has trained
itself not by running up and down the pitch and practising, but by
playing first-class matches, and winning. Team spirit was for
children. These men were in a different league.
Wallace wanted to live up to their standards.
But it was hard to know how. He knew enough about wounds to know he
was bad; really bad. Behind the morphine he was cold, except for
the big, throbbing lump in his stomach. The lump seemed to be
getting bigger, sending sickly fingers of poison into the rest of
his body. Should have rested it, he thought. Should have stayed in
the brothel.
But staying in the brothel would have meant a
German bullet, probably with torture first.
There had been torture, bouncing along those
dark, wet passages underground, metal twisting in his belly,
burning up with fever, all those weeks - was it only hours? - ago.
But it was a torture you could come through, if you were one of a
team of grown men.
Hell of a life. Wallace felt the fever-taut
skin of his face stretch in a grin. You think you're doing fine in
the children's team, with the bombs and the Jeeps and the old gung
ho. Then you get into the men's team, and for a minute or two you
feel like a man.
And after that, what?
Andrea went quietly over the back garden walls
of the village. Somewhere a dog began to bark. Soon all the dogs
were barking. In one of the houses a man flung open a window and
swore. A light drizzle fell. At the base of the hill - more a
cliff, really - the sea shifted silver under the
sky.
But for the lack of lights, it could have been
peacetime. Somewhere in Andrea's mind there appeared the memory of
a wedding, long tables with bottles, laughter and
tobacco smoke rising into the hot Aegean night, the moon coming up
out of deep blue water. This place could have been like that. And
would be again.
But the memory was small, as if seen through
the wrong end of a telescope, shrunk not by lenses, but by years of
war. It was suffocated by the picture of his parents' bodies,
bloodless on the shingle bank of the river. It was suffocated by a
choir of death-grunts, and hundreds of night-stalks on which Andrea
had not been a full colonel in the Greek army - had hardly indeed
been human; had been a huge, lethal animal with a mind full of
death.
Andrea slid over the last of the garden walls,
and walked across the field that led to the edge of the low cliff.
There was a jetty at the bottom of the village, a crook of stone
quay in whose shelter a couple of dinghies shifted uneasily on
outhaul moorings.
The rain swished gently down. Andrea watched,
patient as stone.
And was rewarded.
Down there in the lee of a shed at the root of
the quay, a match flared, illuminating a face under the sharp-cut
brim of a steel helmet, silhouetting a second
helmet.
The rain fell. The dogs were stilll barking.
Andrea returned the way he had come.
Mallory, Miller and Jaime were already under
the wall.
'Pillbox on the hill opposite,' said Mallory.
'Covers the harbour.'
'Two sentries,' said Andrea. 'On the quay. No
pillbox this side.'
'No soldiers in the village,' said Miller. This
Guy's house is the third house up from the quay.'
'Bring Wallace,' said Mallory.
The dogs were stilll barking as the five of them
went over three walls and came to the back of a cottage. A dog
lunged at Andrea, yelling with rage. Andrea laid a great paw on its
head and spoke quietly to it in Greek: soothing, earthy words, the
words of a man used to working with animals. The dog fell silent.
Very quickly, Mallory opened the back door. Miller and Jaime were
well into the room before the man at the table even realised they
were there.
He was small and thin, with a bald, brown head,
a much-broken nose and crooked yellow teeth. There was a
spoon in his right hand, a wedge of bread in his left. He was
eating something out of a bowl.
He looked up, mouth hanging open, eyes
shifting, looking for ways of escape and finding none. He took a
deep breath, and prepared to speak.
'We are friends of Admiral Beaufort,' said
Jaime. 'Monsieur Guy Jamalartegui?'
The black eyes narrowed. The mouth closed and
recommenced chewing. The head nodded. The mouth said, 'Have you
brought the money?'
'We have.'
Jamalartegui said. There are a lot of you. Only
one person will speak at a time. There are Germans.'
'Four in the pillbox. Two on the quay,' said
Mallory. 'Is that all?'
Jamalartegui nodded. 'Unless we get a patrol.'
He looked vaguely impressed. Andrea laid Wallace in a chair by the
stove. Wallace was breathing badly. His face was
bluish-white.
For a moment there was silence, except for the
wheeze of the cooking range and the rattle of rain against the
windows. There was a smell of garlic and tomatoes, wine and wood
smoke.
'Jaime,' said Mallory.
'Interpret.'
Jamalartegui dug thick glass tumblers and bowls
out of the cupboard by the range, and spread them on the table.
'The Germans steal the meat,' he said. 'But there are eggs, and
many fish in the sea.' He got up, and threw onions, peppers and
eggs into a frying pan. The room filled with the smell.
'Piperade,' he said.
Then there was silence.
Mallory ate untill he could eat no more. Then he
mopped his plate with bread and refilled his wine glass. He said to
Jaime, Tell him he has some information for me.'
'I am a poor fisherman,' said Jamalartegui,
after Jaime had spoken. 'One does not eat without
paying.'
'What is a meal, without conversation?' said
Jaime. Mallory did not understand the words, but he understood the
tone of voice. He reached into his pack, took out the
watertight box, and opened it. In the dim yellow light of the oil
lamp it was packed with sheets of white paper, bearing a
copperplate inscription and the signature of Mr Peppiatt, Chief
Cashier of the Bank of England. 'One thousand pounds,' said
Mallory. 'For the information, and transport to the
site.'
The old man's eyes rested on the five-pound
notes. They glittered. He opened his mouth to haggle. 'Take it or
leave it,' said Mallory.
'I take half now,' said Guy, through
Jaime.
'No.'
'Perhaps you will not like the information I
will give you.'
'We shall see. Now talk.'
'How do I know -'
Mallory stiffened in his chair. Tell him that
it is the duty of a British officer not to abuse the hospitality of
an ally.'
Jaime spoke. Guy shrugged. Mallory watched him.
This was the moment: the crucial moment, when they would know
whether they were on a military operation or a wild-goose chase.
The moment for which many people had died.
There was a silence that seemed to last for
hours. Mallory found he was holding his breath.
Finally, Guy said, 'Bien.' Mallory let
his breath out. Guy began to talk.
'It is like this,' said Jaime, when he had
finished. 'He has seen these submarines. They are at a place called
San Eusebio.'
In his mind, Mallory searched the map. The
coast of France south of Bordeaux was straight and low-lying: a
hundred and fifty miles of beach, continuously battered by a huge
Atlantic surf. The only ports of refuge were Hendaye,
St-Jean-de-Luz, Bayonne, Capbreton and Arcachon: all shallow, all
unsatisfactory for three gigantic submarines. He did not remember
seeing any San Eusebio on the map. So we have been looking in the
wrong place, he thought. All those people have died in
vain.
He said, 'Where's that?'
'Fifty kilometres from here.' Mallory felt the
blood course once again through his veins. All they needed to do
was pinpoint the place and call in an air strike. The bombers
would do the rest. Even if the submarines were in hardened pens -
unlikely, or he would have heard of them - there were the new
earthquake bombs -'In Spain,' said Jaime.
Mallory felt cool air in his mouth. His jaw was
hanging open. He said, 'Spain is a neutral country,'
Jaime's dark Basque face was impassive. He
shrugged. 'But that is where they are. To be in a neutral country
could be a convenience, hein? And Franco and Hitler are both
of them Fascists, c'est pareil.'
Mallory said, 'Neutral is
neutral,'
'But submarines are submarines,' said Andrea,
quietly.
And as he so often did, Andrea made everything
clear in Mai-lory's mind.
For a moment he was not in this fisherman's
cottage, with the gale nudging the 'I'lles, and the stove hissing,
and the sentries on the quay and the pillbox on the hill. He was
back in that briefing room in the villa on the square at Termoli,
hot and cool at the same time, tracing the veins in the marble of
the columns. It had sounded like a throwaway line then: You'll
be absolutely on your own. Jensen had said.
But of course, that was what Jensen had to say.
Jensen could not order an operation against a neutral
country.
There would be no RAF. No support of any kind.
The Storm Force was absolutely on its own.
'What the hell is this about?' said
Miller.
'We get to blow up some submarines,' said
Mallory. 'Very, very quietly,'
'Oh,' said Miller, with the air of a man saved
from a great disappointment. 'Is that right? I thought maybe Spain
being nootral and all, you know? Fine,'
Mallory poured himself more wine, and lit a
cigarette. It was at times like this that he knew he would never be
anything but a simple soldier. Jensen had stuck knives between
German ribs, and slipped bromide in the wine of Kapitan Langsdorff
of the pocket battleship Graf Spee the night before she was
scuttled. But he was also a diplomat; it was rumoured that he
had been offered the crown of Albania, and to many Bedouin
chieftains he was the official voice of the British
Empire.
This business bore all the hallmarks of Jensen
at his devious best. And perhaps the imprint of another hand, more
powerful, normally seen clamped round a huge Havana
cigar.
Spain's neutrality was at best idiosyncratic.
Twenty thousand Spaniards were fighting for Hitler on the Russian
Front. The German consulate in Tangier - a Spanish possession -
monitored Allied shipping movements in the Straits of Gibraltar.
And Spanish wolfram provided a vital raw material for German
steelworks.
But the British ambassador in Madrid, Sir
Samuel Hoare, was prepared to ignore all this hostille activity in
the name of keeping lines of communication open. He had set his
face firmly against SOE operations in Spain, for fear of being
compromised.
So Hoare would have been kept in the dark about
the Storm Force. This operation was not just to prevent a repaired
Werwolf pack carving a terrible swathe through an invasion fleet in
the Channel. It was to send a signal over Hoare's head to Franco.
To tell the Spanish dictator that the Allies knew just how far he
was bending the rules, and to give him an object lesson as to the
kind of thing he could expect if the rule-bending
continued.
As long as Storm Force achieved its
objectives.
If it failed...
Mallory lit another cigarette, and tried not to
think of being paraded through the streets of Madrid as a saboteur,
an infringer of the rights of a neutral state.
Out of the question.
Damn you. Captain Lord Nelson
Jensen.
He ground out his cigarette in his wine glass.
He said, 'We'll be needing a map.'
Hugues and Lisette had been having a difficult
evening. The inspection of their papers by the roadside had passed
off well enough: the Germans seemed to be in too much of a hurry
for more than a perfunctory cross-examination of an obviously
pregnant woman and her lover. There was, after all, a dead SS
patrol in the mountains, and justice to be done.
But Hugues was rattled. Was it possible that
Lisette was a traitor? Knowingly, no. Unknowingly ... yes, it was
possible.
Hugues made his decision. The operation must
continue without them. He took Lisette by the arm. They turned
back, towards the middle of town. They had been a pair of lovers
out for a stroll, and had been overtaken by the rain and the
approaching curfew. What could be more natural than that they
should now head home?
'Where do we go?' said Lisette.
Hugues forced a smile. To make contact with our
other friends,' he said.
So they walked back to the Cafe de L'Ocean, and
Lisette sat gratefully at a table while Hugues ordered two coups
de rouge, and wondered what the hell they did
next.
The Gate had emptied out. It was blowing half a
gale now, and flurries of wind agitated the puddles in the road
leading down to the port. But the Commandant was stilll at the bar,
speaking in a low, warlike voice to the barman, who was looking
sceptical. He glanced round at Hugues, caressed his strawberry nose
at Lisette, and returned to his conversation.
A hundred metres away, on the quay, two men in
raincoats were talking quietly in German. 'She went in,' one of
them said. The man with her.'
'Did she make any other
contacts?'
'Not that I saw. I lost her for twenty
minutes.'
'Scheisse,' said the taller of the two
men. 'It'll be curfew in a moment, and we'll lose her completely. I
think it is time to start our hare.'
'Pardon?'
'Flush her out, and see where she
runs.'
'Ah.'
They walked into the house of M. Walvis, the
undertaker, who was a nark for the Milice, the Vichy police. The
taller of the two picked up the telephone and jiggled the cradle.
When the operator answered, the man said in his heavily-accented
French, 'Give me the garrison commander.'
There was a pause while the switchboard
operator plugged him in on her board. Then a harsh German voice
said, 'Wer da?'
'Cafe de l'Ocean,' said the man. 'Immediately.'
He hung up.
The garrison commander hung up too. At the
telephone exchange, the operator released the breath she had been
holding while she listened to the conversation, and reached for her
plugs.
Two minutes later, the telephone at the Cafe de
l'Ocean rang. A woman's voice said, 'Fire at the
Mairie.'
'Merde,' said the man behind the bar.
'Les baches arrivent.'
Hugues had been expecting this moment, he
realised. But now that it was upon him, he was paralysed. Being
with those soldiers had taken away his willpower.
Not that willpower was any help, in a situation
like this.
He stood irresolute, sweating, 'Lisette,' he
said. 'Hide yourself.'
'No need,' said the barman, wiping his fat
hands on his gigantic apron. 'Our friend in the telephone exchange
gives us ten minutes' warning.' He poured himself a small Cognac.
'Drink?'
The Commandant twirled his moustache, and
accepted a Cognac for himself. 'At moments like this,' he said, 'it
is vital to steady the nerves.'
Hugues was beside himself. 'Non,' he
said. Was this walrus-faced cretin seriously proposing to sit here
and wait to be shot? These were reistants. If Lisette was
found in their company, she would be arrested again. And there was
the matter of his papers. His papers would never stand up under
detailed scrutiny -
A roaring and clanging sounded in the street
outside. With a squeal of tyres, an ancient fire engine skidded to
a halt on the cobbles. The Commandant finished his drink and said,
'All aboard!' Leaping into the passenger seat, he clapped a huge
brass helmet on his head.
'Allez-y,' said the
barman.
Hugues stared at him. The barman made shooing
movements with his fat hands. 'Vite,' he said. Lisette's
hand grasped Hugues'. 'Come,' she said. The Commandant was
beckoning with arthritic sweeps of his arm. She hustled Hugues out
and into the cab. The fire engine took off.
There seemed to be seven or eight other men on
the engine, all elderly. 'Where are we going?' said Hugues to the
Commandant.
'The hour has come,' said the Commandant. 'We
go to assist our friends the English.'
'No,' said Hugues. 'You must
not.'
'And why?' roared the Commandant,
alcoholically. 'Every man on this engine has fought for la
patrie at the Marne. We are ready to fight and die. For the
glory of France. Not for your damned Lenin, nom d'un
nom-'
Hugues said, 'It must be said that I am
not a Leninist.' Stupid old man, he was thinking. Gate firebrand
-
'Sir,' said the Commandant, drawing himself up.
'I am a soldier. We are all soldiers, and we are fighting an honest
war, face to face with the enemy, honourably, not hole-in-corner.
Seventy men, hand-picked, will at dawn be rallying to the house of
Guy Jamalartegui. The time has come.'
Hugues opened his mouth to tell him that he
should keep his childish fantasies to himself. But Lisette got
there before him. She said in a conciliatory voice, 'You cannot do
this.'
The Commandant raised a hoary eyebrow that
fluttered with the speed of the hurtling engine. 'Cannot? Madame, I
must tell you that at the Marne, I and thirty of my comrades held
our redoubt for three days against a regiment of Boches. Nothing
has changed.'
'Man Commandant,' said Lisette. 'I will
place confidence in you. What I am about to tell you is of the
highest importance, a great secret.' The parts of the Commandant's
face not concealed by the slipstream-whipped expanses of his
moustache were pinkening with pleasure. 'You will endanger an
important Allied mission.'
'My little cabbage, I thank you,' said the
Commandant. 'I accept your secret. Do not bother your pretty head
with it further. And if you please. Mademoiselle, do not speak to
me of fighting and other things you do not understand. A woman's
place is in the bedroom and the kitchen.' He pinched her cheek.
'Leave this to the men.'
The crack of Lisette's palm on his ear was
audible even over the sound of the bell. 'Vieux con!' she
said. 'Buffoon! At least do not arrive in your stupid fire
engine.'
'Monsieur,' said Hugues. This lady has
only this morning escaped the clutches of the Gestapo, while you
have been in the cafe since lunchtime.'
The fire engine was bowling along the southern
side of the
port. It was raining. From some secret locker
in the back, one of the ex-poilus had hauled out rifles of
ancient design. 'We also fight, who sit in the cafe,' said the
Commandant sulkily, rubbing his ear. On the far side of the
harbour, a few fishing boats were tied up at the town quay. Behind
them, two large grey trucks were moving through the
twilight.
'Look,' said Hugues, pointing. They are
following us. I beg you. You are endangering this British
operation. Secrecy is vital-'
The Commandant said, as if scoring a debating
point, 'It is you that they are following.'
Lisette said, 'Man Commandant, the end
result will be the same.'
'I will not skulk,' said the Commandant. 'I am
not listening to you.'
The road left the shore and began to wind
uphill between small houses. 'Bien,' said Lisette, between
clenched teeth. 'In that case, there is only one solution.' She
reached forward, twitched the key from the fire engine's ignition,
and flung it as far as she could into the bushes that lined the
road.
'Now run,' said Lisette.
She jumped from the cab. Hugues went after her.
She ran well, for a woman who was eight months pregnant. My God,
thought Hugues, this is certainly a remarkable woman. He had never
loved her as much as he loved her then.
For they were free, she and he. She had left
the Commandant, that old fool of a Commandant, to divert the
pursuit. The Commandant would get himself killed, and the knowledge
of Guy Jamalartegui's address would die with him. And he and
Lisette and their child could go to Rue du Port in Martigny, safe
from pursuit, and reunite themselves with the English. And Lisette
and the child would be safe again.
War was war. But Lisette was what
mattered.
It was getting dark; it was after curfew, and
the port of Martigny would certainly be guarded. But what other
option was there?
At the top of the hill he paused and looked
back the way they had come. Three broad-bottomed veterans of the
Marne were head down in the bushes, looking for the keys. Beside
him, Lisette was making a peculiar sound, as if she was
weeping.
But she was not weeping. She was
laughing.
Hugues took her hand and started walking uphill
at a brisk clip. After five minutes there was firing behind them.
Good, thought Hugues. So far, so good.
'Nice place,' said Dusty Miller. 'Sea views.
Sheltered bathing.'
They were looking at an Admiralty chart spread
out on the scrubbed pine planks of the kitchen table of Guy
Jamalartegui. It showed a coastline, steep-to, indented with small,
stony coves exposed to the huge bight of the Bay of Biscay. But in
the centre of that stretch of coast was something
different.
In the times when the world was molten and
rocks flowed like water, a huge geyser of liquid stone had forced
itself through and at an angle to the other strata. Now, that great
irruption of granite formed a peninsula that flung a protecting arm
round the bay of San Eusebio. The arm was marked Cabo de la
Calavera.
At its entrance, the bay was not more than a
hundred yards wide; but inside, it broadened into a two-mile oval
of water, deepening to twenty fathoms. The village of San Eusebio
was on the landward side of the bay. On the tip of the peninsula,
the chart said FORTALEZA: fortress. Below the fortress were
buildings, with a note that said CHIMNEY CONSPIC.
There is a fort overlooking the entrance to the
harbour,' said Guy, through Jaime. The Germans have put new guns.
There is a magazine in the fort, well defended, vous voyez,
I suppose for the ammunition of the guns and the torpedoes of the
U-boats. Also, there is a line of fortifications here.' He put a
cracked and filthy thumb across the neck of the peninsula at its
narrowest point. This is the only way onto the Cabo. There are
ancient fortifications, originally against the Arabs, and now also
new ones from the Germans, I think. To seaward, the cliffs are
high. The land slopes from the seaward side towards the harbour, so
that there is a beach of sand looking across towards the town. On
this beach- there is much barbed wire, and a quantity of mines.
These defences run from the inland end of the fortifications along
to the buildings of the old sardine factory. There are also two
merchant ships in the harbour, which arrived with supplies,
ostensibly from Uruguay. These ships discharged their cargo at the
fish factory quays. Now they are anchored off the factory. They
have many machine guns on their decks, to cover the
waters of the harbour.'
'So where are the U-boats?'
Guy shrugged. This is a very big fish factory,'
he said. 'There was an American, a Basque who made a lot of money
in the Pacific salmon fishing, and wanted to help his home town. He
built four quays, with a dry dock, and many boats, and wanted to
make a big sardine fishery. Naturally, it failed. There were not
enough sardines in those years, or ever, on that scale: this was a
madman, an American, need one say more? But the buildings are there
stilll. It is a perfect place to make repairs on a ship, or a
submarine, bien entendu.' He drew with a matchstick,
extending a puddle of red wine on the table. He drew four quays
like the tines of a fork, forming three bays parallel to the shore.
The innermost quay ran along the base of the rock. On the
crosspiece connecting the tines, he hatched in a group of sheds.
There are the quays, the buildings, even the cranes. And it is an
easy place to defend.'
Mallory's eyes rested on the chart and the
spidery puddle of wine beside it. It was indeed an easy place to
defend; and a difficult one to attack. But there were glimmers of
light. The brightest was the fact that it was in a neutral country.
He said, 'What size is the garrison?'
Guy shrugged. 'It is not a good place to visit,
to count soldiers. Perhaps five hundred. Some Wehrmacht. A certain
number of SS. The crew from the U-boats. And the technicians, the
dockyard people who make the repairs. They came in from Germany,
they say, on these so-called Uruguayan ships in the harbour.
Perhaps two thousand men in total. They are under the command of a
man of importance. A man with a black uniform, I am told. A
general, I think; or an admiral. SS or Kriegsmarine, nobody could
tell me.'
They get their supplies from the ships,' said
Mallory. 'Where do they get their power?'
They brought it with them,' said Guy. 'Behind
the fortaleza is a little town of wooden huts where the men
live. Between the huts and the fortaleza is a building that
was once the laundry. Now they have installed many diesels, with
generators. Naturally, it is heavily guarded. There is also a
magazine, in a cave in the rock.'
Andrea had been sitting back in his chair, eyes
closed, as if asleep. Now he said, 'You know a lot about this
place, monsieur. How?'
'My friends work on the fishing boats out of
San Eusebio. They tell me.'
'There is stilll fishing at San
Eusebio?'
'But naturally,' said Guy. 'It is a port in a
neutral country. There is a railway, to take the fish to San
Sebastian. The town, it was destroyed by the Fascists. But the quay
is a good quay. And the customs ... well, there is always a need
for money, so close to the border.'
Andrea said, 'What does that
mean?'
There are those who have business with the
inhabitants. Business not strictly legal, and for which the
cooperation of the customs is important.'
Jaime cleared his throat. This I know to be
true,' he said.
'You know this place?' said
Andrea.
'In the course of business,' said Jaime. 'I did
not know about these submarines, of course. For me, it was only a
useful harbour for cigarettes, wine, commodities of this kind.
There was only a little of the town left standing, after these
Fascist bastards had finished with it. I have business contacts
there.'
'Had,' said Guy.
'Pardon?'
'You are speaking of Juanito,' said Guy. 'It
was Juanito who told me all these things. Two months
ago.'
'I was last at San Eusebio four months ago,'
said Jaime, his eyes on Andrea. He was deeply conscious of what
Andrea could do to a traitor. He wished passionately for Andrea to
be quite certain that he was not holding out on him.
Andrea nodded. He said. This knowledge will be
useful.'
'Bon,' said Guy. 'So Juanito was found
on the Cabo. He had been there two, three times before. This time
he was selling Cognac to the troops. The Germans caught him. They
hanged him from the top of the fortaleza. He is stilll there,
what the gulls have left of him. On the flagpole. Pour
encourager les autres.' His eyes strayed to the tin of bank
notes. 'So this is a dangerous game.'
Andrea nodded, his great neck creasing and
uncreasing like a seal's. 'In war,' he said, 'there is
unfortunately a great deal of danger.'
There was silence, except for the sough of the
wind in the 'I'lles. The Frenchmen seemed improbably interested in
their hands. Andrea's presence occupied the room like a ticking
bomb. Mallory waited. This was the crucial moment: the moment when
the running stopped, and the troops had a chance to draw breath and
reflect; reflect on the fact that now they had deliberately and
with their eyes open to walk out over the abyss, and jump. The time
for hot blood was passing. The time for cold blood had
begun.
Mallory let Andrea's presence sink in for a
moment, as he had done so many times in so many small, hushed rooms
these last eighteen months. When the silence had gone on long
enough, he said, 'And the seaward defences?'
The change of subject earthed the tension in
the room like a lightning rod. Guy laughed, a short, scornful
laugh. 'Round the quays they have put anti-submarine nets. Beyond
the nets are the cliffs,' he said. 'Eighty metres. And at the
bottom of the cliffs, the sea, with waves that come all the way
from America.'
'No fortifications?'
Guy's eyebrows rose under his beret. He smiled,
the smile of a man who has the welcome sensation that he is once
more on familiar ground. 'Man Capitaine,' he said. 'With
such cliffs and such seas, fortifications are not necessary. Only
four months ago, Didier Jaulerry was blown onto the base of the
cliff, under the fortifications. He drowned, with his crew. His
boat is stilll there, what is left of it. You can see it at
half-tide.'
Mallory nodded. He said, 'What time of tide was
it when he went ashore?'
'High water. A spring tide.'
'And the boat is stilll there, you
say.'
Guy's mouth opened and closed again.
'Monsieur. You are not -'
Mallory did not seem to hear him. He was
looking at the chart, rubbing the stubble on his chin with a
meditative thumb. At its narrowest, the neck of the peninsula was
no more than a hundred yards wide. It would unquestionably be
fortified.
'What are the cliffs made of?' he
said.
'Granite,' said Guy. 'But rotten granite. Many
birds nest there.'
'And at the bottom of the
cliff?'
Guy looked at him as if he was mad. 'Rocks. The
sea. A big sea, with big waves. Listen,' he said. 'If I were you, I
would think about the town. It is destroyed, this town. I told you.
In the Civil War, the Republicans held out there. The Fascists
burned everything. So there are not too many people, and those who
remain live like rats in the ruins. No food, no water. Now that
would be your place to land. If you could pass the fortifications
in the harbour, you could make an attack...'
Guy fell into an uncomfortable silence. These
men gave him the idea that he said too much, too lightly; that he
was a child in the presence of his elders, babbling. 'So,' said
Mallory, finally. 'Your boat.'
Guy's eyes moved to the flat tin box of bank
notes under Mai-lory's hand.
'You will be paid as we land,' said
Mallory.
'But, monsieur-'
'These are the conditions. And of course, you
will be inspired by the idea that you are helping make a world in
which it will be possible to spend this money.'
'Ah, fa,' said Guy, shrugging with a
smuggler's realism. War was pan of politics. Money was money; money
was different.
'Agreed?'
'Agreed.'
'When can we leave?' Mallory watched him with
his cool, steady brown eyes.
Guy was not an impressionable man. But he found
himself thinking, thank God this one is not my enemy. There will be
water in the harbour at four o'clock,' he said. The sentries do not
pay big attention then. The hour will be too early, the port too
small. They will be half-asleep. Be in hiding near the quay. When
it is time for you to come aboard, I will show lights for five
seconds, by accident.'
'And if there are Germans watching?' said
Andrea.
Guy smiled, a weary smile, the smile of a man
who has already gone further than he intended and sees no way of
getting back to safety. 'I am sure you will know what to do with
them,' he said. 'And once you are aboard ... well, we are a fishing
boat.
We are one hour from the border here. I shall
fly the Spanish ensign. The Germans will respect a neutral flag on
the high seas, in territorial waters. It is not the same as the
things that happen in secret on the Cabo de la
Calavera.'
Andrea nodded. Guy was glad he had
nodded.
Thank you,' said Mallory, and reached for the
bottle of wine. From the direction of St-Jean-de-Luz there came the
sound of gunfire, mingled with explosions. Mallory lay back in his
chair and listened to the clatter of the rain on the roof, the
bluster of the gale at the windows, and closed his eyes. Miller and
Jaime were already snoring; Wallace was quiet. The gusts seemed to
be losing their force, becoming more widely separated. Miller will
be happy about that, thought Mallory. And so will I. Miller hated
the sea as much as Mallory hated confined spaces. Mallory did not
hate it, but he did not understand it, and did not want to
-
Then he was asleep.
When he woke up, it was dark. He had been
asleep for no longer than four hours, by the taste in his mouth and
the ache of his head. There was a voice in the darkness near him:
Andrea's voice.
Andrea said, 'There are people
outside.'
Knuckles rapped the door. A voice said,
'L'Amiral Beaufort.' Hugues' voice.
Guy said, 'Entrez.'
Hugues came in. Lisette was with him. She
looked round at the grey, fleshless faces, pouched and
deep-shadowed in the yellow lamplight. She said,
'Bonjour.'
'Bonjour,' said Mallory, urbane and
polite.
There was a silence.
Finally Hugues said, 'Miller has told you, I
think. Lisette was released. We have evaded pursuit. For some hours
we have been hiding in a barn above the village. I kept watch. You
can see the road from there. Nobody approached. The Germans have
lost sight of us.'
Mallory rested his head on the back of the
chair. Hugues looked pale and nervous. Lisette was holding his
hand. There was shooting,' said Mallory.
The Commandant and his men,' Hugues explained.
They are clever, those ones; clever and stupid, at the
same time. They will occupy the Germans.'
Mallory nodded. Once again, he had the feeling
that events were moving beyond his control. But at least Guy's boat
was a means of getting them back in hand.
The wind had become a series of squalls now.
Between the squalls there was calm, except for the distant rustle
of the sea.
'Guy,' he said, as if he were proposing a game
of tennis. 'I think it is time you went to fetch your boat. And the
rest of us should move out of here. How long?'
Guy said, 'I could be alongside in half an
hour. There will not be much water. But maybe there will be
enough.' He pulled a large, tarnished watch from the pocket of his
greasy waistcoat. 'At four-thirty.' He cleared his throat. 'As I
said, it will be important for you to be discreet.'
'Zat right?' said Miller.
'Monsieur,' said Guy. 'I assure you. The
sentries may be sleepy, but they make reports at five minutes to
every hour, via a field telephone. I suggest you be very careful.'
Guy smiled, a nervous, perfunctory smile. He slid out of the back
door and into the night.
Mallory looked at his watch. It was half-past
two. Once again he was in a room, with his back to the sea, relying
on other people to get him out of trouble. He hoped it would be the
last time. He said to Andrea, 'Bring Wallace. We'll get out of
here.'
Hugues said, 'What will you do about the
Commandant?'
Mallory had the sensation that he had not slept
enough. He said, The Commandant?'
The Commandant will be arriving before dawn, he
said. With seventy men.'
The Commandant was drunk,' said
Lisette.
Hugues sighed. 'I know this Commandant,' he
said. 'He will arrive at dawn.'
Wallace said, 'You'll have a rearguard
then.'
Lisette said, 'Commanded by the Commandant?
You're crazy.'
Wallace said. The Commandant is retired. I am a
serving officer. I'll take command.'
Mallory turned his head, and looked at the
papery face, the glassy, fever-bright eyes.
'I'm not up to a ride in a boat, sir,' said
Wallace. 'Maybe one of these chaps can get me to Spain when the
fuss dies down.'
Jaime said, 'It is possible. Certainly, these
old fools need orders. But monsieur cannot stay in Guy's
house. The Boche will destroy it.'
'Hold on,' said Mallory. 'Seventy men arriving
at dawn?'
'Commanded by a drunk,' said
Hugues.
Mallory looked at Wallace. He would be no good
in a boat. His only hope was to rest, and get over the border
later, in discreet silence.
Mallory said, 'We will send you the Commandant.
We will tell him that you are his commanding officer. You will tell
him to go home, and collect you when the fuss has died
down.'
'Yes, sir,' said Wallace.
Hugues looked at him, then at Mallory. The barn
where we stayed is quiet. There is a loft. You can see the road,
the harbour. It's a good command post.'
Mallory looked at the transparent face, the
cracked lips, the glittering eyes. He walked across the room and
shook Wallace by the hand. 'Best of luck. Lieutenant,' he said.
'It's been good having the SAS along. We wouldn't have got this far
without you.'
Wallace grinned. 'I think you probably would,'
he said.
Mallory said. 'I'll send up the Commandant.' Then
he beckoned Miller, and said, 'Help Lieutenant Wallace up to the
barn.'
They separated, leaving Mallory with the memory
of a handshake that had been no more than a touch of icy
bones.
'Brave man,' said Andrea.
Lisette was watching them. She nodded. There
were tears on her face.
Miller's steps faded on the
path.
Wallace was gone.
Miller threaded across the dark vines and
potato-ridges. He carried his burden up the road, into the barn and
up the stairs. In the loft, he propped Wallace on the dusty,
sweetish-smelling mow. 'No smoking,' said Miller. 'Sure,' said
Wallace. 'Thanks.'
'Good luck,' said Miller, arranging three
canteens of water within reach.
In the yellow light of the lantern, Wallace
looked like an Old Master painting: wounded soldier, with pack,
Bren, Schmeisser, grenades and sulfa powder. His face wore a faint
smile; a weird, faraway smile. Miller thought. 'Give my regards to
England,' he said.
'You'll be there before us,' said Miller,
cheerily. 'You can buy me a bourbon at the Ritz.' He went down the
stairs in two strides of his beanpole legs, and paused by the door.
The view from the bam was excellent. The village lay spread out at
the end of its road. Nothing moved in the potato-ridges. The night
was stilll: the wind had dropped flat, and the stars were out. In
the loft. Miller heard Wallace stir, a stifled moan of pain. Then
hinges creaked.
Miller walked onto the road and down towards
the houses. After fifty yards he glanced back. When he had carried
Wallace up, the shutters of the loft had been closed. Now, a
shutter stood open. From that open shutter Wallace would command a
view of the road leading down to the quay.
Miller raised a hand in salute, and walked
quietly down to the village.
Hugues said to Mallory, 'Lisette will come on
the boat.' Mallory watched him from under his heavy brows. The eyes
were tired, but they seemed to Hugues to see everything. 'If we
leave her, she may talk,' said Hugues. 'And there are often women
on fishing boats. She will be ... camouflage.'
A pregnant woman, thought Mallory. A hell of a
member of a penetrate-and-sabotage expedition.
Lisette did not know where they were going, or
why. But if she was picked up, she would talk, all right. This
time, the Gestapo would make sure of that.
If she had not talked already.
He said, 'Bring her along.'
It was twenty to four by the time Miller got
back to Guy's house. There was one dirty glass and one plate on the
table. There was no sign that seven men and a woman had spent part
of the night
there. Mallory was waiting, pack on back,
Schmeisser in hand. Miller shouldered his boxes. The Storm Force
filed out of the back door, across the garden walls, untill they
came out onto the field at the top of the cliff from which Andrea
had watched the sentries. The wind had dropped flat. The water was
smooth as satin, the swells slopping against the jetty with a small
roar. One of the rowing boats was gone from the outhaul. From out
of the hazy darkness of the bay there came the pop and thump of
ancient diesels as the fishing fleet got ready for the tide. Of the
sentries there was no sign.
Mallory said to Andrea, 'We'll wait 'I'lll the
sentries give their all-clear at 0355. Then we'll take care of
them. That'll give us half an hour to get clear.'
'Half an hour?' said a voice at his side.
'Monsieur, you have my personal guarantee that you will have
all the time in the world.'
Mallory spun round.
'Man Capitaine,' said the figure, in a
gale of old Cognac. 'Permit me to introduce myself. Le Commandant
Cendrars. At your service.'
'I was telling you about the Commandant,' said
Hugues. 'A valuable resistant.'
'Pardon me,' hissed the Commandant, shir'I'lly,
in French. 'Chef de la Resistance of the region
-'
'Ah, ca!' said Hugues,
scornfully.
Mallory cut off whatever it was he was going to
say next. 'Commandant,' he said. 'I am most grateful to you.
Hugues, please interpret. Tell the Commandant that his arrival is
most timely. I am exceedingly grateful to him for his assistance. I
am putting him under the command of Lieutenant Wallace, Commander
of His Majesty's rearguard. Rearguard HQ is the barn above the
village. He, is to report there immediately for orders. I would
remind him that stealth and silence are of the
essence.'
The Commandant became stilll. Down on the
rain-blackened quay, a figure was marching slowly: one of the
German sentries. The other sentry would be in the command post,
standing by the field telephone for the 0355 report. The Commandant
said, 'A rearguard action, hein? Under the command of a
lieutenant? I must say -'
'Hey!' said Miller. 'Get out of there!' Dark
figures were crouching over the pile of equipment on the ground.
'Mind your own damn business -'
Next to his head, something exploded,
shockingly loud in the stilll, starlit predawn. It took him several
heartbeats to work out that it had been a rifle going off. 'In the
army of the Marne, we do not sneak past the Boche,' bellowed
Cendrars. 'We shoot him.' And he fired again.
The German sentry, surprised by the bullet that
had smacked into the granite coping of the quay three metres from
his right foot, had dived from view. The second shot hit the empty
quay.
Miller found that he was on the ground, his
Schmeisser cocked and ready in his hands, his heart thumping. You
goddamn maniacs, he was thinking.
Mallory saw the Frenchmen stilll standing
against the sky, obvious targets for the machine gunners in the
pillbox on the hill opposite. Wallace, he thought, you are on your
own.
Perhaps that is what you wanted.
Miller and Andrea had disappeared, as he would
have expected. He said, 'Andrea?'
'I'll organize the pillbox,' said Andrea's voice
from the darkness.
'Good. Miller?'
'Here.'
'Sentries.'
He looked at his watch. The hands were at five
to three. The wires would be humming with the sentries' yelps:
we are under fire, send reinforcements. The Commandant could
not have chosen a worse moment if he had tried.
There was a moment's eerie silence, in which it
was possible to imagine that nothing had happened. Then, on the
summit of the hill that rose on the other side of the valley in
which the village lay, a stabbing flame began to flicker. The
Germans in the pillbox were taking an interest.
The sound of the machine gun came a split
second later, with the whip of large-calibre bullets. One of the
Commandant's men went over like a skittle. The rest of them lay
down, old bones creaking. 'Merde!' said the Commandant.
'What is that?'
Hugues was lying beside Lisette, clutching her
hand. He said, wearily, 'You foolish old men, why will you not
obey orders?'
Jaime felt something that might have been a
breeze pass by him, except that it was no breeze, because breezes
do not talk; and this breeze said, 'Come down in five minutes.
Bring the equipment,' in the unmistakable voice of Captain
Mallory.
Andrea went down through the village and up the
hill the other side at a steady jog, conserving energy. The pillbox
was directly above him now, its tracers flicking across the top of
his vision. He paid them no attention. He had seen the pillbox
before night had fallen. This far south, and next to a friendly
neutral neighbour, invasion was not a serious fear. So it was not
one of the impregnable strong points that you found in Crete,
designed to stand days of siege. It was merely a concrete box with
a steel door and a slit from which the machine gun could enfilade
the bay and the quay.
Something was moving out at sea: something that
might have been a fishing boat. Its exact outline was hard to
determine, because there was a haziness at sea level, a pale vapour
like kettle-steam on the dark face of the waters.
Andrea slowed to a walk. There would be a
sentry. He put his face close to the ground and saw the silhouette
of a man crouching against the hillside. The silhouette looked
nervous, flinching at the occasional bullet that whizzed raggedly
overhead from the heroes of the Marne on the hilltop
opposite.
The sentry was indeed watching that hilltop. It
had taken a lot of wangling to get down here onto the Spanish
border, where nothing ever happened. He had no idea what had got
into these Resistance idiots. Reinforcements would soon be arriving
from St-Jean. There would be shootings and burnings in the morning.
Meanwhile, this was annoying.
Or perhaps something worse. Rumours of invasion
from England were growing in force, no matter how savagely the SS
and Gestapo suppressed such defeatist talk. The sentry felt a dull
foreboding. stilll, if you were going to survive this damned war,
Martigny was the place to be stationed -
A forearm like a steel bar clamped across the
sentry's windpipe. The knife went in and out once, fast as a
snake's tongue. Andrea lowered the body to the ground, put the helmet
on his own head, and walked softly to the pillbox door. He took
three grenades from his blouse, cradling them like eggs in his vast
hand. He pulled the pins from the grenades. He held two of them,
levers closed, in his left hand. The other he held in his right
hand. He waited for a pause between bursts of fire. Then he banged
on the steel door with the grenade.
'Hey!' he shouted, in his fluent German. 'Where
is your damned sentry?'
Muffled voices came from within.
This is Sturmbannfuhrer Wilp!' roared Andrea in
a voice hoarse with Teutonic rage. This is an exercise. Open
up!'
The door opened. The man who opened it saw a
large shape topped with a coal-scuttle helmet silhouetted against
the stars. He said, 'Was?'
Andrea kicked him down the stairs and threw the
grenades after him. He was already fifty yards down the hill by the
time the gun-slits spouted flame and the flat, heavy explosion
rolled across the bay.
The sentries were not the Third Reich's finest.
By the time Mallory and Miller arrived on the quay, they were in
the guard post with the door shut, yelling at each other and into
their field telephone, and someone was yelling back.
Mallory hoped Guy would be quick. There were a
lot of German soldiers within five miles, and they would all be
here in a very short time.
The guard post had once been a net shed. It had
a stable door, in two parts. Mallory kicked both parts open. The
Germans by the telephone looked round. They had wide, flabby faces,
and looked well over fifty. They made no movement towards their
rifles. Instead, their hands went up in the air.
'Key,' said Mallory.
The elder of the two handed him the
key.
'Rifles on the ground,' said Mallory. The
weapons clattered to the flagstones. 'Kick them over here.' He
picked up the rifles. Then he smashed the telephone and closed the
door. If by some miracle the Commandant of the St-Jean-de-Luz
garrison had not been informed of his sentries' screams down the
telephone, he could hardly fail to ignore an exploding pillbox. The
lorries would already be on the road.
'Now listen,' said Mallory. 'This is a British
army operation. It has nothing to do with the Resistance. We are
about to board one of our submarines and withdraw. The civilian
population have not been involved. Do you
understand?'
The sentries nodded, dazed, their eyes shifting
from the lean and haggard face, down the SS smock to the
Schmeisser, unwavering in the hard, battered hands.
'You will inform your commanding officer,' said
Mallory. This has been a commando raid, to demonstrate our
capabilities. Tell him to remember what we can do.'
The sentries nodded. Their minds would be full
of the icy winds of the Russian Front. But the message would have
got across.
Mallory and Miller went out onto the empty
quay. Mallory padlocked the door.
There was a dampness in the air, mixed with the
faint, industrial reek of high explosive from the pillbox. It was
quiet, except for the sploosh of the waves and the nearby thud of
the fishing boat's engine.
And in the far background, on the edge of
hearing, the sound of lorry engines.
The reinforcements were
arriving.
Hugues scrambled down the cliff onto the quay,
with Jaime and Lisette and Miller's boxes. Andrea was back, too.
The fishing boat was coming out of the horizon, masts moving across
the stars in the handle of the Plough.
Mallory noticed that the lower stars of the
Plough's share had disappeared. He checked it off on a mental list.
In the middle of all these disasters, that was something that could
be useful.
He said to Jaime, 'Where are those old
men?'
'Preparing for a final stand.'
'Go and tell them that for every German they
kill, ten Frenchmen will be shot in reprisal. Tell them that this
is a British army operation, and that the British army is
withdrawing. Tell them that I have informed the sentries
accordingly. Make it quick.'
Jaime nodded, and trotted up the cliff. Hugues
said, 'For God's sake, where is this fishing boat?'
A dark shape came out of the murk. The fishing
boat glided alongside. Andrea said, 'We won't get far without air
support.'
It was a joke. It was a joke that was too true
to be good. If lorry loads of Germans soldiers arrived on the quay
now, they would have no trouble sinking Guy's boat. Machine guns,
grenades, mortars, they would do the job.
If they arrived on the quay now.
Mallory thought of Wallace, the look in those
china-blue eyes. Wallace was a berserker.
Good luck, Wallace, thought
Mallory.
The fishing boat was a dark hulk alongside the
quay now, the sound of its engine a clanging thump like the beat of
a metal heart. The lorry engines were nearly as loud, approaching
the top houses of the village.
'Bon,' said a small figure in Guy's
voice, but higher than usual. 'All on boat. Quick,
quick.'
Jaime had materialised out of the night,
panting. 'I told them,' he said. They went aboard. The propeller
churned water under the transom. The bow swung out and steadied on
the strip of absolute blackness between the sea and the stars. For
a moment the land astern lay dark and quiet, the houses of the
sleeping village draped across their valley under the
stars.
Then the valley erupted like the crater of a
volcano.
In the cab of the lead lorry, the Hauptmann had
been tired and bored. The bloody Resistance were having one of
their fits. Whoever had knocked off the SS patrol in the mountains
had in the Hauptmann's opinion done a good job. It was just that
the Hauptmann wished that, having shot the bastards up, they had
gone to ground, instead of making a bloody nuisance of themselves
in the suburbs of St-Jean-de-Luz and scaring the wits out of his
sentries in hopeless little shallow-water ports like Martigny.
Un'I'll someone had hammered on his door, the Hauptmann had been
entertaining Big Suzette in his billet. Suzette might be large, but
she was a person of surprising skill. And instead of testing those
skills to the limit, the Hauptmann was sitting half-drunk, very
tired, and in a state of aggravated coitus interruptus
in a truck at the head of a column of three other trucks, one
hundred men in all, on the way to sort out a bit of local
difficulty in Martigny, on pain of transfer to the Russian
Front.
Sod it, thought the Hauptmann.
The lead truck rounded a corner in the lane and
started downhill, into the beginning of the valley, where the
houses began. There was an old barn a hundred metres down the road
on the right. The Hauptmann paid it no attention, because he was
peering at the southern side of the valley, where the pillbox
stood. The pillbox should have been heavily engaged, if there was
real trouble. But the pillbox was silent. As the truck drew level
with the barn it seemed to the Hauptmann that the gun-slits of the
pillbox were illuminated by a dull orange glow that waxed and
waned. But the brandy was playing monkey's tricks with his eyesight
-
A tight cluster of Bren rounds blew the
windscreen in with a hellish jangle of broken glass. The driver
went halfway out of the window and collapsed like a wet rag. The
lorry slewed sideways across the lane, demolishing a wall and
coming to rest against a boulder. One of the men in the back saw a
jabbing flicker of flame in the open shutter under the roof of the
barn by the roadside. As he opened his mouth to point it out, a
line of bullets stitched across his abdomen. The last bullet hit
one of the stick grenades at his belt. The explosion that followed
set fire to the lorry's gas tank. Men spilled out of the three
lorries following, and took up positions in ditches and behind
potato-ridges. There was obviously a considerable force in the
barn. A machine gunner slammed his weapon on the ground in the lee
of a ruined pigsty and fumbled for the trigger. He was a badly
shaken man, partially blinded by the flames of the burning lorry.
His first long burst went wild, the tracers striking sparks from
the coping of the quay and whipping out over the water of the
harbour. For a moment, half the weapons in the squad fired after
his tracers, and the black water of the port was churned to foam.
Then a Feldwebel who had been invalided home from the Eastern Front
and knew what he was doing started screaming orders, and the squad
turned its attention to the shutter under the barn
roof.
There must be at least a company in there,
thought the squad hugging the ground and pouring in fire. The black
opening became silent. The squad's firing lulled. A man got up and
scuttled in with a grenade. A hoarse, agonised bellowing came from
the shutter, followed by the burp of two sub-machine guns. The
streams of bullets started low and went high, almost as if the men
firing them were too weak to hold the muzzles down. The man with
the grenade ran into the first burst, and fell down. The Germans
opened up again.
This time, the machine gunner put an accurate
stream of bullets through the open shutter, one in three of them
tracer. A light was then seen inside, yellow and blue, and volumes
of smoke obscured the sky. The hay was on fire. And suddenly
against that light there appeared the figure of a man; a man
crawling on one hand and two knees. In the hand he was not using to
support himself he held a Schmeisser, which he fired untill it was
empty.
Now they could see him, they shot him quickly,
and he fell to the ground in front of the barn, which was burning
well now as the last year's hay rose in the draughts. The flames
spread quickly to the rafters.
The Germans kept on shooting. They had killed
one man, sure. But there was no possibility that only one man could
have done so much damage.
So they poured lead into the burning barn, the
flames dazzling their eyes, untill the ridge went and the roof fell
in, and a fountain of orange sparks rose at the cold and hazy
stars. And when the place was merely a heap of glowing ashes and
there was no possibility of anyone being left alive, someone went
and looked at the body that had come out of the
shutter.
He was lying on his back. His face was
peaceful, pale, with a trickle of blood from the corner of the
mouth. He was wearing a beret, with the flying hatchet of the SAS.
The two privates next to the body were almost too frightened to
touch it.
'Doesn't look very healthy,' said one of
them.
That's because he's dead,' said the other
one.
The battledress blouse was open. The bandages
round the belly shone black and wet in the flames. 'Ach,' said one
of them. 'Stinks.'
'Brave man,' said the first German. 'To fight
like that with his guts hanging out.'
'Bloody idiot,' said the second. He bent and
closed the eyes, which were blue, and berserk, and
open.
It was four o'clock by the time they got the
burning truck out of the lane and moved on down to the quay. This
time, nobody was taking any chances.
But when they got down to the sea, there was
only the sloosh of the ripples against the quay, and the smooth
expanse of the harbour at high water, lightening now with the
dawn.
Guy Jamalartegui did not see the huge bloom of
flame at the top of the valley. From the wheelhouse window, he was
saying, in broken English, 'Messieurs, 'dames, welcome to
the Stella Maris. And now, Capitaine Mallory, it is a
question of my money -'
Then the guns started up, and Jamalartegui
stopped.
One moment the water was dark and smooth. Then
it was churning with tracers from the fusillade following the first
wild burst the German machine gunner had fired after Wallace had
shot up the lorry. The air was whining like injured dogs, and a
flock of hammers slammed into the wheelhouse. Guy said, 'Oh,' a
curious, breathy sound, as if the air was coming out of more places
than his throat. He fell on the deck with a crash like a bag of
coal. There were more tracers, but random, whizzing into the air
like fireworks, passing over the spidery masts of the Stella
Maris, dimming and vanishing.
Miller knelt by the body and felt for the pulse
in the scrawny neck. He said, 'He's dead,'
Mallory looked down at them through eyes sore
with sleeplessness. He realised that it was getting light. He could
see Miller, crouched on the deck, his bony knees by his ears. And
down there beside him in a pool of something that looked black but
was not black, was Guy. A Guy who was no longer breathing; whom
that random burst of fire from the hill had caught fair and square
across the rib cage.
Mallory stepped over the body. He took the
wheel. From the chart he recalled that the shore of the bay ran
southwest. So he steered southwest, aiming at the horizon, as the
light grew.
The engine thumped on. The sea was black like
an asphalt parade ground, the horizon clogged with pale
haze.
Andrea fingered the upper lip where his
moustache was meant to be, and reached for the bottle of Cognac,
and took a long swig. 'No rocks, my Keith, if you please,' he said.
'Only peace and quiet.' Then he lay down in the lee of the
wheelhouse.
Mallory kept the bow southwest and motored for
the horizon, waiting for the drone of engines, aircraft or marine,
that would mean that after all this time, it was all
over.
After three or four minutes, he realised that
there was something wrong with that horizon. It should have been a
knife-sharp line. Instead it looked lumpy and ragged, as if it was
made of grey wool. And suddenly the grey skein ahead rose and
touched the sky, and the air was wet on his face, and he realised
the truth. The Stella Maris had sailed into thick
fog.
The world was a round room, with walls of grey
vapour. It was a room that moved with the Stella Maris,
southwest. It was a room impenetrable by ships and aircraft, except
by accident. A most fortunate room.
As long as you did not mind being off a rocky
shore in tides of unknown strength, not knowing where you were
going.
The sun rolled up, a blood-coloured disc above
the ramparts of vapour. From somewhere - astern, possibly, it was
hard to tell -heavy explosions thumped across the water. They
sounded to Mallory like blasting charges.
Andrea said, 'Wallace was a good man, my
Keith.'
Mallory nodded. His eyes hurt with peering into
the fog. Wallace had done his duty; more than his duty. Now he was
another offering on the altar of war. Unlike most such offerings,
his death had not been in vain. Mallory felt sadness, and
gratitude.
And puzzlement.
Wallace had not had any high explosives with
him. It was unlikely the Germans would have used such explosives to
winkle one man out of a hayloft.
It must be Cendrars and his men. They must have
got their hands on some quarry explosive, and be slugging it out
with the Germans. Mallory profoundly hoped that he was wrong. A
pitched battle between the Germans and the heroes of the Marne
would only bring down horrors on the civilian population. But he
turned his face resolutely away from such speculations. What
mattered was what lay ahead, in San Eusebio.
The light grew. They wrapped Guy in a tarpaulin
and weighted his feet with a chunk of old scrap iron from the
Stella Moris' noxious bilges. Jaime took off his beret and
said a couple of Basque prayers. Hugues said, 'Vive la
France!' The body pierced the black surface of the sea with
scarcely a ripple, and was gone.
The sea was getting to Mallory- In the globe of
fog it was quiet, and grey, and solitary: an oasis in the desert of
battle and violence that he wandered like a Tuareg. But Mallory
disliked the peace of the sea in the same way a Tuareg might find
an oasis cloying. It produced in him a nervous sickness, the
sickness that the Tuareg might feel under green palms among people he
did not know, as he watered his camels and longed to return to the
real life of furnace winds and red-hot sands. Mallory experienced a
moment of longing for the rock and ice of mountains: hard mountains
whose habits he understood. Mountains in which he was not the
hunter and the destroyer; mountains in which the only enemies were
the failure of finger and foot to cling to hold, or human will to
continue upwards.
He looked down at Andrea. The Greek was lying
by the wheelhouse, smoking, watching the oily heave of the sea. He
felt Mallory's eyes on him. He looked up. 'This is a most
disgusting ocean,' he said.
Mallory nodded.
These tides,' said Andrea. They are a thing of
barbarians. How can men make ideas when the world they inhabit is
being dragged here and there by the moon? It is for this that you
are so restless, you of the North.'
Mallory laughed. They had escaped from a
burning village and were on their way to attack a fortified rock.
And Andrea was complaining about the tides.
But when he looked again at Andrea's face, he
saw something that stopped his laughing. Despite his claims to the
contrary, Andrea was not afraid of men or bullets, night or war.
But unless Mallory was very much mistaken, Andrea was afraid of the
cold black waters of the Atlantic.
He lit a cigarette. There was a breeze now,
enough to whip the smoke away. The sun had gone, and the sky was a
leaden grey. Mallory wedged himself into the corner of the
wheelhouse. Twelve hours, he thought. He took
inventory.
The Stella Maris was forty-five feet
long. She had a tall mast at the front end and a short mast at the
back end, which probably made her a ketch. There were what looked
like sails on the booms, which Mallory devoutly hoped they would
not have to use. There was a big fish-hold amidships, a dirty
little fo'c'sle, and an engine room abaft the wheelhouse. The
engine was a single-cylinder Bolander hot-bulb diesel, with a
rust-caked flywheel the size and weight of a millstone. In the
bullet-shattered wheelhouse was a compass of unknown accuracy, and
the bloodstained Admiralty chart Guy had spread on his kitchen table all
those weeks - hours - ago. The Stella Maris was thumping
southwest through the fog at something like five knots, Mallory
estimated. They should have moved out of French waters into
Spanish. There would be patrol boats.
He offered a cigarette to Andrea. Andrea took
it and lit it, scowling from under his black brows at the grey and
sunless sea. 'A cold hell,' he said. He began to rummage restlessly
in lockers. He found a new bottle of brandy, sniffed it, took a
swig, and passed it to Mallory. One of the lockers was full of
flags. He pulled out a yellow one. 'Quarantine,' he said. 'For when
you have disease on board.' His white teeth showed in his black and
bristly jaw. 'Or when you have goods to declare. This flag has
never been used, I think.'
He's beaten it, thought Mallory. Andrea was not
one to let irrational fears occupy space more profitably reserved
for rational fears, like fear of failure in the face of the enemy.
'Guy said there was a Spanish flag,' he said.
Andrea rummaged some more, and came up with a
red-and-yellow ensign. It was big, for easy visibility, and looked
as if it had done long, solid service. Mallory gave Andrea the
wheel, walked out of the wheelhouse and ran the ensign up to the
top of the mizzen mast.
So now the Stella Maris was a Spanish
boat, and all they had to worry about was motoring full ahead into
the cliffs of Northern Spain.
The wind was definitely freshening. Ahead, the
fog was becoming pale and ragged, and the slow Atlantic heave of
the waves was taking on a sharper, more urgent feel.
Behind the wheelhouse. Miller stirred and
opened his eyes. He lay for a moment, watching the Spanish flag
snapping in the crisp breeze. Then he sat up and lit a cigarette.
'Buenos dias,' he said. 'Coffee?'
'If you please,' said Mallory.
Miller stumbled down a flight of steps into the
grease-varnished galley. From its door there emerged the smell
first of paraffin, and then of coffee. He brought Mallory and
Andrea mugs, well dosed with condensed milk and brandy. 'Nice as
this is,' said Miller, eyeing the sea with scorn and dislike,
'how long does it last?'
'At least 'I'lll nightfall.'
The Stella Maris thumped on, rolling
heavily in the swell from the west. The fog was thinning in the
breeze, piling into banks. One particularly heavy bank hung to the
south, a heap of grey vapour that should, if Mallory's dead
reckoning was right, hide the land. Miller drank another cup of
coffee and smoked two cigarettes in quick succession. His bony
face, already pale with exhaustion, was turning greenish under the
eyes. Mallory said to Andrea, 'Better let him steer,' and lay down
on the bench at the back of the wheelhouse.
Sleep came immediately, deep as a lake. It all
went: the submarines, fog, the approaching cliffs of
Spain.
It was a peaceful sleep: not the
two-inches-below-the-surface doze of action, but a deep, heavy
coma, a sleep of the interregnum between the confusions of the
Pyrenees and the task waiting on the Cabo de la Calavera. Watching
him, Andrea saw the broad forehead smoothed of the tensions of the
last three days, saw the knots at the hinges of the jaw relax. Rest
well, my Keith, he thought. You have brought us a long way, but you
have only brought us to the beginning.
Mallory dreamed. He dreamed he was in a place
in the mountains, in a valley of grey stone through which a glacier
inched. He dreamed that there were great birds wheeling in the sky
that were not birds, but aeroplanes: Stukas. The Stukas were
diving, dropping their bombs, which were bursting around him in red
flowers of flame. But Mallory felt nothing, heard nothing, because
he was separate from it all. A voice told him, 'You are in the
ice.' Wallace's voice. And Mallory realised that it was true. He
was encased in a huge block of clear ice, which was saving him from
the bombs. But at the same time it was preventing him from feeling
anything, and that was bad -
Then someone was shaking him, and he was coming
up out of that ice, his mind clicking into awareness that something
had changed. The engine was stilll panting, the boat stilll rolling.
But he seemed to be wet, and there was a new sound: a shrill
wailing, an ululation, the sound of the Stukas -
He swung his feet to the deck, eyes searching
the sky. There were no Stukas. There were only clouds, arranged in
long squalls, their bellies trailing rain. Against them, the
Stella Moris' masts described jerky loops. Her stub nose
rose and fell like a blunt wooden hammer, walloping the troughs
into spray that came back down the deck in bucketfuls. The wailing
was the wind in the rigging.
'Land, er, ho,' said Miller.
As Mallory stood up he saw the fog bank,
smaller and lighter now, shift and writhe. Then a great hand of air
seemed to grab it and wrench it aside.
Five miles away, across a grey and gnarled sea,
the black cliffs of Spain stood high and clear. Through his glasses
Mallory could see a bay, with a cluster of grey houses, and on one
of the headlands, the ruins of what might have been a fortress. He
took a bearing and checked the chart. 'Forty miles to go,' he said.
Miller nodded, without enthusiasm. Miller did not like the sea. As
far as he was concerned, four miles would have been better; a lot
better, even if there were two SS regiments at the end of it. 'Get
Jaime on deck,' said Mallory.
Miller went below. Mallory kept the boat's head
to the sea, blinking the spray out of his eyes. It had almost been
better in the fog. He felt horribly exposed, out here in the clear
grey breeze. And by the feel of it, they would be here all day; the
Stella Maris was making four knots at best, labouring over
these humpbacked seas like a weak-hearted charwoman climbing
a flight of stairs.
Jaime appeared on deck, bleary-eyed. He
squinted around him, said, 'That's Cabo del Lobo. Long way to
go.'
'What about patrol boats?' said
Mallory.
Jaime shrugged. They make big trouble on the
border. This far down the coast, maybe they don't bother. Either
way, they like money.'
'Stay on deck,' said Mallory.
Jaime nodded. He said, 'One thing. If you stay
out here, people will be suspicious. You're a fishing boat. So we
go in under the cliffs, no? That way, you are fishing. And nobody
can see you from the land. And if we do get a problem, we throw
some lobster pots in the sea.'
ISO
Mallory said, 'You know a lot about
this.'
Jaime grinned, the grin of a man in his
element. 'Frontiers are my business,' he said.
Mallory nodded. Without Jaime, they would not
have found the Chemin des Anges, or the cave system. Without Jaime,
they would have been dead.
The Stella Mara closed the shore. Across
two hundred yards of grey and lumpy sea the cliffs reared three
hundred feet into the grubby sky swept by the white motes of
innumerable seabirds. Miller did not like the look of them at all.
At least when their caique had blown into the south cliff at
Navarone it had been decently dark. If Miller was going to get
smashed to bits, he would rather not get smashed to bits in broad
daylight.
Hugues was on deck, looking as nervous as
Miller felt. 'Is okay,' said Lisette, showing her white teeth.
'Jaime has sailed this route many times.'
'I didn't know you were a fisherman,' said
Miller.
Jaime grinned, his dark eyes glinting under his
beret. There are many people in the cigarette fishery,' he said.
'Sometimes you fish from a mule, sometimes from a
boat,'
'It is not only lobsters you find in the pots
here,' said Lisette.
Through the horrid queasiness of his belly.
Miller thought that he saw in her something new, a confidence that
she had not had in France. Of course, getting away from the Gestapo
and into neutral territory would tend to improve your confidence,
particularly if your guide in neutral territory was
Jaime.
A sharp-crested hill of water swept under the
Stella Maris' bow and dropped her into a trough. For a
moment. Miller was once again weightless. To seaward a great hole
had appeared in the sea, floored with weedy rock. 'Caja del
Muerto,' said Jaime. 'Dead man's chest,' The waters closed over the
rock with a boom, sending a depth-charge burst of ice-white spray a
hundred feet into the wind.
For the next two hours the Stella Maris
ground on down the inshore channel, invisible from the land.
Mallory began to regain confidence. He went to Miller, who was
lying in the scuppers alongside the wheelhouse, and said, 'Four
hours' sleep. Then check your gear, and I'll brief the
team,'
Miller groaned and dragged himself to the
fo'c'sle, where Hugues was snoring on his bunk. He rolled into the
bunk underneath, and passed out.
Mallory leaned against the wheelhouse,
apparently watching the gulls on the cliffs. He had been thinking
about Guy's chart of the Cabo de la Calavera and the harbour of San
Eusebio. The approach was from the town quay, across the harbour,
through the beach defences onto the Cape and into the U-boat repair
docks. That was obvious.
Far too obvious.
The tide would be low, just after dark. The
beach would be exposed and easy.
Far too easy.
Mallory lit a cigarette, and rested his head
against the wheelhouse doorpost. There were features of the San
Eusebio chart that had been making him think hard about cliffs;
particularly if, as seemed likely, the wind fixed itself in the
west.
'Capitaine,' said Jaime in a new, sharp
voice, and pointed.
Mallory followed his finger.
Halfway to the horizon was the silhouette of a
grey launch. As Mallory watched, the silhouette foreshortened untill
he could see the moustache of foam on either side of the
bow.
He felt the muscles of his stomach clench and
become rigid. San Eusebio seemed suddenly a long way
away.
'Well,' he said, calm as a goldfish pond. 'I
suppose it's time we hauled the pots.'
El Teniente Diego Menendez y Zurbaran was in a
vile mood. It was not being posted to this wet green corner of
Spain; he had fought hard for the Nationalists in the Civil War, so
he had no objection to the sight of Basque towns in ruins and
Basque children starving. It was worse than rain and Basques. A
week ago, he had been told in an unpleasant interview with
Almirante Juan de Sanlucar, his cousin and commanding officer, that
he was to double his patrols and increase his vigilance generally.
The Teniente had pointed out that his vigilance was as always at
maximum, and that the patrol boat, known to its crew as the
Cacafuego, was operating all the hours its ancient engine
and weary rivets could stand. Sanlucar had assumed a dour, bellicose
look, and told him that instructions from above did not take
account of such objections. It was the will of... someone very
exalted (here Sanlucar's lips framed the words el Caudillo)
that patrols on the stretch of coast for which the Teniente was
responsible should be greatly increased.
At the framing of the Dictator's august title,
never lightly spoken aloud, the Teniente's heart had started to
bang nastilly in his chest. At first he had interpreted it as a
general rebuke for his laxity; the pay of a Naval officer was
scarcely a living wage in this dreary province of surly people and
expensive food, so he had fallen into the habit of accepting the
voluntary contributions of the smuggling fraternity. But he
realised that there was more to it than that after a conversation
with Jorge, his bosun. Jorge had observed military activity on the
Cabo de la Calavera, and had approached the sentries on the gate,
who were dressed in the uniforms of the First Zaragoza Regiment, to
offer them the services of certain Basque women he maintained in
the Calle Brujo in Bilbao. The soldiers had chased Jorge away,
cursing him in a language that was not Spanish. Jorge had expressed
to the Teniente the opinion, based on certain military vehicles and
black uniforms he had half-glimpsed through the heavily-fortified
gate that cut off the neck of the peninsula, that the garrison on
the Cabo de la Calavera was German.
And thirty-six hours ago, just before this
patrol, the Teniente had been notified that his bow gun crew was to
be replaced, as were the port and starboard machine gunners. When
the replacements had turned up, they had been
German.
The Teniente had nothing against Germans. He
disliked them only insofar as he disliked everyone except himself.
But their presence on Cabo de la Calavera made him nervous, and
their presence at his guns insulted his pride. He valued Spain's
neutrality, because it meant his life was not in danger. He needed
his bribes. And he had not taken kindly to standing on that worn
patch of carpet in front of the Almirante's desk in Santander,
being subjected by the Almirante to a diatribe on the importance of
duty under the cold grey eyes of an obvious homosexual from the
German Embassy in Madrid. This coast was the
Teniente's
personal patch. The fact that his superior
officers' new jumpiness was obviously German-inspired made him
feel, insofar as such a feeling was possible for a Fascist, frankly
bolshy.
So it was with no great sense of mission that
he bore down on the familiar black hull of the Stella Maris,
hauling lobster pots under the cliff.
He paused a hundred feet away, snarling at Paco
the coxswain to keep the boat steady. The Stella Maris was
head to wind, fat and black as ever. There were a couple of
unfamiliar faces: two men who might have been northern Portuguese
or even German, tall and lean, wearing singlets despite the cut of
the west wind. They lurched uneasily on the Stella Maris'
splintery deck; it looked to the Teniente as if they were not used
to hauling lobster pots. But they were hauling all right. And back
in the wheelhouse - it looked as if something had happened to the
wheelhouse - Jaime Baragwanath was waving and grinning from under
his beret. There seemed to be a woman with him.
The Teniente knew Jaime of old, as a fixer and
a smuggler. He brought coffee out of Spain to France, and in the
other direction the wines of Bordeaux, to alleviate the suffering
caused by vino negro. If Jaime was personally on board the
Stella, she would be carrying a high bulk, high value cargo,
like wine.
The Teniente was partial to a few bottles of
claret of an evening. Normally, he would have taken his cut at the
landing. But he saw in the Stella Maris a way to impress his
new gunners - and thus, he suspected, the Almirante - with his
zeal.
The Teniente lit a thin black cigar and 'I'llted
his cap rakishly over his right eye. Plucking the brass megaphone
from its clips on the bridge, he put its oxide-green business end
to his mouth. 'Halt!' he shouted. 'I am boarding you.' On the
foredeck, the crew of the 75-mm gun swivelled their piece to cover
the Stella.
Mallory put a couple of loops of tail-line
round a samson post, and tied it off with a knot that had more to
do with rock faces than boats. He shuffled aft at a fisherman's
slouch. He said to Jaime, 'What is this?'
'Routine inspection,' said Jaime, his dark face
stilll, avoiding Mallory's eye. This officer takes bribes. He's used
to seeing the Stella under the Spanish flag, as long as he
get money. He maybe
want some money. Or maybe some tobacco, drink,
who knows?'
'Jaime knows,' said Hugues.
Mallory ignored him. He said, 'Does he normally
point guns?'
'Not normally.' Jaime frowned at the men on the
Cacafuego's foredeck. 'He's got new gunners.'
Mallory nodded and grinned, a simple
fisherman's grin, full of salty good nature, for the benefit of
anyone watching from the gunboat. His eyes were not good-natured.
They checked off the rusting grey paint of the bow, the two blond
men balancing easily on the deck by the breech of the 75-mm gun.
The Captain was on the bridge. Aft of the bridge, another two men
stood at machine guns. Spandaus. Spandaus were light guns, but they
could stilll unzip a boat the size of the Stella. A 75-mm gun
could blow her right out of the water.
But the guns were not the main problem. The
main problem was the array of radio aerials between the two
masts.
In his mind, he followed the trail of wreckage
back into the Pyrenees. If the guarda-costa sent out a
signal about unusual occurrences off the Vizcayan coast, any German
with a map and eyes to see would be able to grasp the general
direction of this dotted line of mayhem.
There was only one solution.
Mallory trotted forward and shouted down the
main hatch. Jaime started yelling at the patrol boat in Spanish.
The patrol boat was yelling back. Mallory cast off the tail-line of
the lobster pots. Then he went aft to the wheelhouse. He said to
Lisette, 'Get down, please.' He politely took the wheel from Jaime,
spun it hard-a-starboard, and drove the Stella Maris
straight at the patrol boat's mid point.
The Teniente started screaming into the
megaphone. That was a mistake. By the time he had realised
screaming was no good, the Stella Maris was twenty feet
away. The 75-mm gun banged once. The shell screamed past the
Stella's wheelhouse and burst on the black cliff face two
hundred yards behind. The Spandaus opened up, bullets fanning
across the sky as the gunboat rolled. Then Andrea and Miller came
out of the Stella's forehatch like jack-in-the-boxes. Andrea
hosed the gun's crew with Bren bullets. They disappeared. Hit or
not, it did not matter, as long as they were away from the gun. Miller took the Spandau
crews. By the time he had finished his burst, the Stella
Maris was in a trough, the gunboat on a wave. The patrol boat's
grey side came down with a rending crash on the Stella's
stem, and stuck there. The gunners on the patrol boat could not
depress their sights far enough to bear on the Stella.
Andrea had the Bren going by now, hammering a tight pattern of
bullets into the patrol boat's hull, at the place where the radios
might be. Miller pulled the pins out of four grenades. He tossed
them up the patrol boat's side, heard them rattle down her decks,
and heard the blat of their explosions in the wind. The two
boats hung together in the form of a T, bashed and wrenched by the
short inshore chop, the Stella's bow borne down by the
patrol boat's side. There was a hole in that side. The
Cacafuego's plates were no thicker than a tin can: a rusty
tin can -
A wave came under. The Stella pitched
away from the gunboat at the same time as the gunboat rolled away
from the Stella. The gunboat's plates gave with a wrenching
groan. The two boats came apart, the Stella's bow rearing
high as Mallory took her round and away.
'Fire!' screamed the Teniente. His ears were
ringing from the grenade explosions. The radio aerials were gone,
streaming in the breeze. The Teniente heard the bullets clang and
whizz, and felt an odd sogginess in his ship's movements. 'Fire!'
he screamed again. The Stella Maris was twenty yards away
now. He saw the Spandau crews sprawled over their guns, and the
foredeck by the 75-mm swept clean of men. He found that his feet
were wet, and realised that his ship was sinking. He had been sunk
by the Stella Maris. He opened his mouth to scream for
help.
Then he thought of what his cousin would say
when he told him that his armed patrol boat had been sunk by a
bunch of smugglers.
The Teniente realised that the time had come to
die.
He stood to attention, and shut his
mouth.
The patrol boat rolled and sank in the space of
twenty seconds. There was a tremendous eructation of bubbles. An
oar came to the surface. Then nothing.
'Jesus,' said Jaime, pale to the
lips.
Mallory turned his eyes away from the satiny
patch of water where the patrol boat had been. Andrea's eyes were
blank. The blankness had very little to do with shock, or the
violent sinking of a guarda-costa with half a dozen crew. He
and Mallory were both calculating whether the guarda-costa
had announced its attentions on the radio before it had tried to
come alongside the Stella Maris.
Mallory said, 'Full ahead, I
think.'
Andrea nodded, and lowered his great bulk into
the engine room.
The Bolander took on a more urgent thump.
Mallory cut the tail-lines free from the bow. The Stella
Maris heaved on westward, the wind cold in Mallory's
face.
Jaime came on deck with Lisette. She looked
pale. She had reason to look pale. Jaime said, 'Capitaine, I
need a word.'
Lisette watched them walk to the wheelhouse,
watched Mallory's straight back, the precise step. Even on this
filthy boat, that one walked like a soldier.
Jaime said, 'That was not
normal.'
'Sorry?'
'I know this man,' said Jaime. The officer
commanding the guarda-costa. He is a bastard, but a careful
bastard. He would never stop the Stella. He takes money from
smugglers, but not on the sea. Only in the bar, after they have
gone ashore. The only reason he stopped us is because someone told
him stop any ship.'
'So the Werwolf pack hasn't left,' said
Mallory. 'Good.'
Jaime said, 'Was it necessary to kill those
people?'
Mallory was not interested. There's a war
on.'
'So you kill these men. Life into death. Like a
mule turning food into shit.'
'War is nasty like that,' said Mallory. The
reason we are here is to destroy submarines.'
Jaime grinned, a grin that held a horrible
irony. 'Perhaps it is just that I do not like to destroy a useful
trading partner.'
There will be better trading after we have won
the war,' said Mallory. 'Now, there are some things I need to know
about the Cabo de la Calavera.'
By the middle of the day the sky was whitening
under a veil of cirrus, and Miller had been sick fourteen times.
Andrea was taking his spell at the pump; Andrea never got tired.
Mallory came down into the fish-hold.
'Briefing,' he said. 'Ready for
this?'
Andrea nodded, impassive behind his three days'
growth of beard. Miller would have done the same, but nodding
required energy, and he was saving his energy for when he really
needed it.
Mallory said. There's a cliff on the seaward
side of this Calavera place. Guy said it's not climbable. So the
Germans won't be watching it. With luck.'
There was a silence, filled with the pant of
the engine and the distant boom of waves on rock.
Miller said, 'If it's climbable, what do we
do?'
Mallory lit his sixtieth cigarette since dawn.
'Climb it,' he said.
Miller shook his head weakly. 'Ask a silly
question,' he said.
'We'll go over the side after dark,' said
Mallory. 'In the dinghy. Jaime and Hugues and Lisette will take the
Stella on into the harbour. They'll look like fishermen in
to make repairs. The Germans have put big defences on the harbour
side of the Cabo. As far as I can see, there's very little on the
seaward side, because they've decided the cliffs will do the job.
We'll go up in the dark, get ourselves some uniforms. Dusty, you'll
want to check your equipment. We'll all need to shave.
Questions?'
Miller listened to the boom of waves on rock.
He said, 'How do we get from the dinghy onto the cliff? Seems to me
that the sea has all these waves on it.'
Mallory flattened the chart on the filleting
table. The sea's coming from the west.' He pointed to the northerly
bulge of the shore. 'In behind here there's a wreck; Guy's friend
Didier Jaulerry's fishing boat, went up the beach four months ago.
Jaime says that with the sea from the west, you sometimes get a
smooth patch in the lee of the wreck.'
'Sometimes.'
'During the bottom half of the tide. 'I'lll about
2100 hours tonight.'
Andrea said, 'It's not full dark at
2100.'
'It is at 2130.'
Miller said, 'But what if the waves are
breaking clear over that wreck at 2130?'
Mallory folded the chart briskly, and stuck it
in the pocket of his battledress blouse. 'Oh, I expect we'll
manage,' he said.
There was more silence. There was a lot to hope
for. They had to hope that the guarda-costa had not got a
radio message off, and that the dinghy would not be spotted by the
Germans or smash against the cliff, and that the Stella
Moris' remaining complement would escape notice in San
Eusebio.
The wind went up, and so did the waves. Lisette
put her swollen ankles out of her bunk, and moved towards the
filthy galley. Hugues stopped her. 'I'll cook,' he said. 'You
rest.'
She looked at him with the dark-shadowed eyes
of late pregnancy. He saw hostillity and frustration. He said, 'What
is it?' and tried to put his arm round her.
She pulled away. 'You're right,' she said. 'I'm
tired.' She turned her face to the wall. Hugues went grim-faced
into the galley and rummaged in the boxes that lined the bulkhead.
Half an hour later, smoke was issuing from the chimney, and the
smell of frying onions mingled horribly with the stench of the
Stella's fish-hold. And in an hour, a stew of tomatoes, hard
chorizo, onions and potatoes was steaming in a blackened tureen.
Jaime pulled a bottle of suspiciously good red wine out of a
locker. Mallory, Andrea and Miller sat themselves at the table in
the saloon. Mallory and Andrea ate hard and long. There was no
talk. This was the grim refuelling of war machines. At the end,
Andrea poured another tumbler of wine, lit a cigarette and leaned
back against the fishing boat's side, eyes closed, humming a Greek
tune full of Oriental runs and quarter-tones. Mallory looked across
at him, the massive neck running into the colossal shoulders, the
face peaceful in repose. He looked at Miller, smoking, pale-green
under the eyes, in front of his largely untouched plate of stew.
They looked like fishermen: tired fishermen, who smoked too much
and drank too much when they could get hold of it. They looked like
the kind of fishermen you would expect to find aboard this leaky
boat with no bloody fish in the hold, and a smuggler, and
an eight-months-pregnant woman, and the man who
had got her pregnant.
They did not look like the cutting edge of a
Storm Force whose task it was to climb a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot
cliff in the dark, penetrate a strong and watchful garrison, and
destroy the submarines of the Werwolf squadron.
stilll, thought Mallory. Nobody would have
believed the distance they had come to arrive at this point. But
here they were. It was just a matter of carrying on: dividing the
big problem into small, manageable problems, and solving them, one
by one, with the tools at his disposal.
And a hell of a lot of luck.
Miller said, 'I guess I'll go turn in.' He
shambled forward to the bunks.
When they were alone, Andrea said, 'What do you
think about this?'
Mallory had known the Greek long enough to
realise that he did not want an opinion, but a discussion. Mallory
was in command of the expedition - there was no argument about
that. But Andrea was a full colonel in the Greek army as well as
one of the most dangerous and experienced guerrilla fighters in the
Mediterranean. To fight at his most lethally efficient, Andrea
needed to understand the situation.
Mallory said, 'It's a good place to keep some
submarines.'
'Some hidden submarines.'
That's right.'
'Good security.'
'That's right.'
'And that patrol boat. That was part of the
security?'
The gun crews looked German.'
True.' Andrea stroked the place where his
moustache should have been. 'And that was a routine
patrol.'
'Sorry?'
'Not based on specific
information.'
Mallory shrugged. 'No way of knowing,' he
said.
'Quite.'
'Do we trust all these people?'
Mallory had been wondering the same thing.
Jaime had a smuggler's capacity for double-dealing. Hugues
was brave, but he had an irrational streak a mile wide. And Lisette
... well, Lisette under Storm Force control was safer than Lisette
at large.
'We've got to,' he said.
Andrea nodded. There was a pause. Then he said,
'It seems to me that the Germans will have problems of their
own.'
That had also occurred to Mallory. Spain was
full of spies. To keep the occupation of Cabo de la Calavera
secret, the garrison would be manned and supplied from the sea, or
across the Pyrenees, by night. Either way, it would be a smuggling
operation, with all the inconveniences attendant on such
operations. And German efficiency or no German efficiency, it
seemed likely that a garrison hastilly convened and furtively
supplied would be a less well-organised garrison than the garrison
of, say, Navarone. Confusion would be to the Storm Force's
advantage.
Andrea poured the last of the wine into the two
glasses, and raised his to Mallory. 'My Keith,' he said. 'Victory,
or a clean death.'
'And two days' kip to follow,' said
Mallory.
He thought, in five hours, we will be on hard
rock again, climbing. He raised his own glass and drank. Andrea
swung his boots up onto the bench, put his head on his pack, and
closed his eyes.
The door opened. Miller came in.
At first, Mallory thought he had been shot. His
face was bloodless, his lips the colour of ashes. But he was
walking well, braced against the heave of the Stella Moris'
deck. In his hands he was carrying the big, brass-bound boxes that
held his explosives and his fuses.
Mallory said, 'Sleep first. Check gear
later.'
Miller shook his head. He did not speak: it was
as if something had happened that had removed his voice. He lifted
the boxes and placed them side by side on the gutting table. He
unlatched them, opened the lids, and gestured at the
contents.
If the Storm Force was a bomb, the personnel
were the fuse and the casing and the fins. What was inside those
two brass-bound mahogany boxes was the charge: the stuff that would
do the job, blast those three Werwolf submarines into water-filled
hulks and save the lives of all those men crammed into
transports on the Channel.
Mallory looked into the boxes. His mouth became
dry. His mind went back six hours, to the bay of St-Jean-de-Luz,
the red ball of the sun hauling itself up through the fog, the
heavy explosions coming from the land. He had thought that
Commandant Cendrars' old soldiers had got their hands on some
quarry explosive.
He had been wrong.
They had been fifteen minutes on the cliff at
Martigny, while Andrea disposed of the pillbox and Mallory and
Miller had explained their wishes to the sentries. During that
fifteen minutes, the boxes had been in the care of Commandant
Cendrars' enthusiastic veterans.
The veterans had profited from those fifteen
minutes. Possibly their arsenal had been running low, or possibly
they merely suffered from an enthusiastic lightness of finger.
Whichever the case, the outcome was the same.
The brass-bound boxes that had contained the
explosives and detonators that were going to blow the Werwolf pack
to hell now contained, besides a few blades of wet grass and a
couple of small stones, half a hundredweight of best Martigny
mud.
There was a silence that seemed to last five
years. It was Andrea who broke it. He yawned. 'Oh, dear,' he said.
'Now I must sleep.'
'Take the bunk,' said Miller, through lips numb
with shock.
'Thank you,' said Andrea, and shuffled
bear-like into the sleeping cabin. It was as if he understood
Miller's sense of failure, and attached to it little enough weight
to accept the offer of the bunk as full reparation.
Miller said, 'I let it out of my sight.' Never
let your tools out of your sight. If you carry a gun, carry it at
all times. Keep your knife strapped on, even in the bathtub. And
never, ever, leave your Cyclonite and your detonators to be guarded
by heroes of the Marne with the wind under their tails. 'We have
grenades.'
'Ten grenades,' said Mallory. His knees felt
weak. He was sweating. So this is how it ends, he
thought.
Miller said, 'Four. We used eight on the patrol
boat.' He was thinking again. 'Anyway, grenades won't work on
U-boat pressure hulls.' But he did not say it nervously.
He said it in a measured, judicious voice, like a prosecution
lawyer assessing the chances of convicting a known murderer on
circumstantial evidence. If grenades would not work, the voice
implied, it would be necessary to find something else that
would.
Mallory heard that new voice.
For a moment, he had felt it all slipping away
from him. That was because in his exhaustion he had forgotten that
this was Dusty Miller, who had destroyed the guns at Navarone and
the dam at Zenica, not to mention an Afrika Korps ammunition dump
with a Cairo tart's hairpins. Confidence began to tiptoe back into
Mallory's thoughts.
'So I guess they'll have a magazine there,'
said Miller. 'And they'll have to load the torpedoes some time.
Your torpedoes take up most of the space on a U-boat. You couldn't
refit with torpedoes on board, could you?' He folded his hands. 'So
there's that. And then there's the engines. Those Walter engines.
Hydrogen peroxide, you said. Fuel oil. Water. Interesting stuff,
hydrogen peroxide.' He leaned his long back against the bulkhead,
hands folded across his concave stomach, boots propped on the
opposite bench, eyes closed. He seemed to be
thinking.
Finally, Mallory could stand it no longer.
'What about hydrogen peroxide?' he said.
But Miller was asleep.
Mallory thought about waking him, then decided
against it. If the Werwolf pack was sailing tomorrow at noon, would
they not already have loaded the torpedoes? And what was so
interesting about hydrogen peroxide?
He lit another cigarette. Relax, he told
himself. Miller and Andrea were of the opinion that the operation
was possible. So the operation was possible. Easy as
that.
Within thirty seconds, Mallory, too, was
asleep.
It was the gulls that were the first sign. All
afternoon, after the turn of the tide, they had been thickening in
the sky. When Mallory went on deck, groggy in the mind after too
little and too shallow sleep, their cries filled the air. The
Stella Maris was blowing from the northwest, and on it the
gulls slid and balanced with frantic voices and perfect
self-possession. The wind seemed to be blowing out of the sun,
which had appeared pale and brilliant below the roof of grey cloud.
It was twenty minutes before sunset, but there was no red in that
sun. It glared like a big metal eye across the water, draining the
colour from everything its rays touched, making the Stella
Maris black and the seas grey, and the cliffs the dull
non-colour of slate. And shining into the eyes of anyone watching
from the land.
Mallory lit a cigarette, stuck it between the
nicotine-stained fingers of his left hand, and pulled his Zeiss
glasses out of their case. He panned the disc of vision across the
crawling waves untill he found the black line of the land: a flat
black line, a continuous cliff, marred here and there by pillars of
rock over which a mist of spray hung, silvering the towers of
gulls. He moved the glasses to the west.
The line of the cliff suddenly rose into a
rounded hump, sheer-sided. The sides plunged straight down into the
sea. The structure looked like a steel helmet, or a skull. Cabo de
la Calavera. The cape of the skull.
Mallory breathed smoke, and made a fine
adjustment to the focus wheel.
On the crown of the skull, at the apex, a
stubby white pencil jutted skyward: the lighthouse. The lighthouse
was not showing a light. To the right of the lighthouse, on what
might have been the skull's forehead, were square-edged masses,
topped by a tower. The fortress: an efficient fortress, dug into
the cliff to cover the entrance to the harbour of San Eusebio. He
moved the disc of the glasses eastward, along the spine of the
ridge.
There was a structure of some kind slung across
what must have been the throat of the peninsula, but they were too
far away for Mallory to see what it was. He could guess, though. It
looked like a stone wall, probably with battlements and a moat. The
Germans would have supplemented it with a line of fences and
trenches. As far as he could tell, it stopped abruptly some
distance above the sea - where the cliff became vertical, he
guessed. The base of the cliff was a continuous line of white
water.
Mallory walked aft. Jaime was at the wheel.
Mallory said, 'You have come out of some port. You are in trouble.
You are making repairs to the engine. Do you know anybody in San
Eusebio?'
'Only professionally.'
That will do. Get estimates for repairs.'
Mallory pointed at the radio set in the wheelhouse. That
work?'
Jaime grinned. 'A smuggler's radio always
works.'
'Keep it switched on. Now let's go
ashore.'
'How are you getting ashore?' said
Jaime.
Mallory said, 'We'll manage.' At this stage in
the expedition, there was no sense in telling anyone on the
Stella Maris any more than he needed to know. He looked at
his watch. It said 2015. 'We'll get to you before 1500 tomorrow. Be
alongside the fish quay. We'll sail immediately we're on
board.'
'For where?'
Mallory looked pious. The Lord will provide,'
he said.
Jaime looked at the black rock skull of the
Cabo, with its cloud of gulls, tinted by the now-pinkening sun.
'A-okay,' he said. 'Bonne chance.'
The Stella Maris' nose turned and
settled on the brow of the skull. The sun was sinking fast now, and
as it sank its pink turned to blood, dabbling the cloud-roof with
crimson. 'Looks like hell,' said Jaime.
'Sorry?' said Mallory. To him it looked like a
sunset, followed by a hard climb in the dark.
'No importa,' said Jaime.
Darkness fell.
An hour later, Mallory, Miller and Andrea were
in the Stella Moris' dinghy, heaving up and down on the
seven-foot swell rolling out of the Atlantic wastes. The pant of
the Stella's engine was receding eastward. In the dinghy
with the three men were the two coils of wire-cored climbing rope,
three Schmeissers with five spare magazines each, and the grenades.
They were dressed in Waffen-SS smocks, camouflage trousers and
steel helmets. In the breast pocket of his smock, Mallory carried
the special pitons Jonas Schenck had made for him in 1938, out of
the rear springs of a Model A Ford. Anything else they needed they
would have to find on the Cabo.
At least, that was the idea.
Miller sat in the bow of the boat, his knees
close to his ears, clutching the lock of his machine pistol to keep
out the wet. Miller was fairly sure that this was it: the end. He
would not have minded, except that he did not wish the end, when it
came, to have anything to do with the sea. Miller had had enough of
the sea.
The dinghy rose and sank again, vertiginously,
on a glossy black wave like the back of a man-eating animal. Andrea
dug in the oars and took a couple of strokes towards the darkness
above the booming white line that separated vertical rock from
Atlantic ocean.
'There,' said Mallory.
In the line of white there was a break; the
merest hint of a break, the sort of paling that would come of a
wave whose force was spent before it hit the wall. Spent, for
instance, by the wreck of a fishing boat once the property
of a M. Jaulerry, impaled on the boulders at the base of the
cliff.
Miller thought, we will at any rate have the
advantage of surprise. And if we live, nobody will be as surprised
as me.
Then Andrea gave a final heave and the dinghy
went up on the back of another wave, as huge and black as the last.
Only this one did not stay huge and black, but while the dinghy was
on its crest turned white and foaming, insufficiently substantial
to support the dinghy, which was falling, with the whole of the
rest of the world, stern-first, in a cataclysm of water that made a
sound like an earthquake, and had no bottom -
They found the bottom. They found it with a
sudden splintering crash that knocked the seat from under Miller.
He discovered that things previously available for holding on to
were no longer available for that purpose. Then the wave had him,
and he was rolling away somewhere, he could not tell where, except
that he had a Schmeisser slung round him, a couple of kilos of
negative buoyancy that were going to drag him a watery grave among
the boulders at the base of the cliff, and he thought, so this is
it.
But then something had him by the collar of his
smock, and was dragging him in the opposite direction from the
direction in which the water wanted to take him. And he was out of
that
black whirl, and on something hard and slimy
that he realised must be the deck of the wrecked fishing boat. And
Andrea's voice was saying into his ear, 'When we get ashore, check
your weapon.' And things were back to normal.
Or what passed for normal, on the seaward side
of the Cabo de la Calavera.
At the base of the cliff was a beach of
boulders which had fallen from the crags above, forming a sort of
glacis on which the waves beat themselves to white tatters. The
fishing boat had hit this beach, been driven up to its summit, and
landed wedged with a northeast-southwest orientation, its bow
rammed against the main face of the cliff, which ran
east-west.
Mallory, Andrea and Miller crouched for a
moment on the slimy deck, 'I'llted away from the hammer of the seas,
feeling the concussion of the rollers in their bones. Then Mallory
handed bis Schmeisser to Andrea, slung one of the coils of
rope over his shoulder, and stepped on nailed soles down the deck
towards the ink-black rise of the cliff.
The first ten feet were boulders, slippery with
bladder wrack, treacherous in the complete blackness, but by no
means steep. Mallory went up carefully but fast, untill his hands
met something that was not seaweed. Lichen. Then a cushion of
vegetation set in sand and peat that crumbled under his fingers.
His fingers crawled above it, looking for a hold. They found loose
rock. The cliffs of Cabo de la Calavera were not as solid as they
looked.
He glanced downwards. The backwash of the
breaking waves was a broad white road, cut aslant by the hull of
the fishing boat. He felt wet on his face as a big wave
hit.
He started to climb.
It was a bad climb. The rock down here was as
rotten as cheese, and a sparse vegetation of moss and sea-thrift
had taken hold in the cracks. Each hold meant a sweep with the
fingers to remove loose soil, a gradual increase of pressure from
the fingers untill they bore his full weight, resting on at least
two firm points while he tested a third, slow and sure, never
committing himself. He went up the cliff inch by inch, chest sore
from the cigarettes of the past three days, finger muscles burning,
horribly aware of the clatter of loose stone down the cliff below
him.
After five minutes the climbing became
mechanical, as it always did: a delicate shifting of balance from
hold to hold, working from the hips, so he seemed to float rather
than crawl. And the part of his mind not filled with testing holds
and balancing on rock went ahead, onto the Cabo. There were
Totenkopf-SS up here, from what Guy had said. There would be
Wehrmacht too. And Kriegsmarine, and dockyard workers. A force
hastilly assembled, wearing a diversity of uniforms, strangers to
each other, probably in the final stages of preparing for
departure. There would be confusion. Mallory devoutly hoped it
would be a confusion he could exploit.
He was seventy feet up now. The wind was
battering his ears, and the rumble of the seas had receded untill it
had become a dull, continuous roar. He reached out his hand for the
next hold, fumbling like a blind man.
Suddenly he was no longer blind. Suddenly his
hand emerged from the darkness, a pale spider groping its way
across quartz and matrix towards the dark shadow of a hold. The
cliff face had come into an odd, shadowed relief, a landscape of
vertical hills and vales stretching down to a sea whose waves now
looked not so much black as silver-grey.
And above the horizon of the cliff, where the
sky had been a matt emptiness of squally cloud, there had taken
place the change that had brought about all the other changes. The
squalls had turned and separated. Between them fingers of deep
black sky had appeared, specked with the needle-tips of stars. And
into one of those bottomless chasms of darkness swam like a silver
lamp a brilliant quarter moon.
Mallory froze, clinging to the face of the
cliff. Far below, he saw white surf and the wreck of the fishing
boat sheltering its tiny eddy of black water. He could distinctly
see shattered wreckage from the dinghy spinning in the vortex. This
was bad. Potentially, this was very bad. All it needed was a casual
glance down the moonlit cliff. The Storm Force would be pinned
down, brushed off the rock face like flies. And the Werwolf pack
would sail at noon tomorrow, unmolested.
The wind blew, eddied, became for a second
stilll.
Directly above Mallory's head, someone
coughed.
Mallory's stilllness intensified untill it was
like the stilllness of the rock face itself. He turned his eyes
upwards. The moon was sliding towards a lip of cloud. But before it
went and darkness swept back over the cliff, he saw something he
had not noticed before.
Up there on the cliff face was an overhang of
rock too regular to be natural.
The coughing came again. There was a brief
splash of yellow light. A little spark dropped past Mallory's head.
A spent match.
Mallory eased his feet on their minute ledges,
and leaned in against the cliff. He turned his face upwards and
watched.
To his dark-accustomed eyes, the regular glow
of the cigarette was as bright as a lighthouse. Against it, he
analysed the little bulge of masonry projecting from the cliff. It
was a half-moon of stone or concrete, a demilune, a strongpoint
built out from a narrow ledge of the cliff. Mallory rested,
recreating in his mind the fortifications of the Cabo. This would
be the seaward end of the line of fortifications running across the
neck of the peninsula.
The moon slid out again. By its light he could
see the joins in the masonry. Not German, he thought. Older than
this war.
Something gleamed in the moonlight: something
shaped like a small funnel. The flame deflector on the muzzle of a
light machine gun. The old Spanish defences had new
tenants.
For the blink of an eye, Mallory took
stock.
To his right, the cliff was sheer, but
climbable. But the moon was painting it a brilliant grey. Figures
climbing over there would be plainly visible from the demilune. To
the left, the cliff looked even easier, the summit concealed behind
a shoulder of rock. There was no way of telling what was on that
summit. There was only one thing you could be sure of: even if the
top was undefended, and you could arrive there without being seen,
you would be the wrong side of the fortifications at the top, and
there would stilll be the gates to get through.
So there was only one way.
Straight up.
He eased the commando knife in the sheath on
his right hip, and began once again to climb.
The moon was swimming in a wider gulf now. But
Mallory climbed fast and efficiently, knowing that he
was directly underneath the demilune, invisible. It took him ten
minutes to cover the hundred feet: ten quiet minutes, choosing
holds with a surgeon's delicacy, breathing slow and deep through
his nose. This was the Mallory who had moved remorselessly up the
southeast face of Mount Cook, above the Caroline glacier. A
crumbling Atlantic cliff was a stroll in the park to this
Mallory.
The base of the demilune was a bulge of masonry
rooted in the natural rock. Mallory paused on an exiguous ridge ten
feet underneath it. He collected his breath, then took off his
boots and socks and hung them round his neck. The sea was a dull
mutter two hundred feet below. Above, he could hear a pair of boots
walking four steps left, pause, four steps right, pause. He stood
for a moment, fingers and toes gripping their holds, balancing like
a man on springs, waiting for the four steps left, two steps right
-
He took a deep breath, and went up the final
ten feet like a spider up a wall.
If you had asked him then or afterwards what
holds he had used or what route he had followed, he would not have
been able to say. It seemed to him that one moment he was poised
below the emplacement, and the next he was alongside it, looking
over a waist-high wall at the silhouette of a figure in German
uniform. The figure had its back to him, at the far end of the four
steps left. And there was a bonus, because the figure stayed there,
shoulders bowed, helmet brim lit flickering yellow from below.
Lighting another cigarette. Very soon after the last one
-
Mallory loosened the knife in its sheath, put
his left hand on the parapet of the demilune, his right on the
ledge at its side -
Two things happened.
Mallory's right hand landed in a pile of twigs
and dry seaweed and something warm and feathery that suddenly came
alive and started to shriek in a high, furious voice. And the moon
came out from behind its cloud.
For a split second, Mallory hung by his left
hand on the wall, staring into the slack-jawed faces of not one,
but two young German soldiers. Then he realised that he had no
foothold, and fell, feet kicking air, to the full extent of his
left arm. Fool, he told himself, feeling the crack of muscle and sinew,
gritting his teeth against the agony of his clawed fingers on the
rock of the parapet. He waited a split second that felt like a
year, waited for the rifle butt to smash his fingers, waiting for
the Germans to start yelling, alert the garrison -
His right hand was on the cliff face now,
clawing for a hold, rinding one. Somewhere he could hear the
squawking of a frightened gull, the harsh breathing of young,
panic-stricken Germans trying to work out a way of getting rid of
this thing from the cliff, and forgetting that the easiest
way of doing it was to yell and let their five hundred comrades do
it for them.
Mallory had an idea.
He said, 'Hilfe.'
He had learned his German at Heidelberg
University before the war, and on the high crags of the Bavarian
alps in the sunlit middle years of the 1930s. His accent was
perfect; so perfect that the Germans hesitated.
'Get a hold of me,' said Mallory, in German. 'I
fell.'
The soldiers were bamboozled with relief. This
was not an enemy but a victim, a comrade in need -
The hesitation lasted the fraction of a second.
That was enough for Mallory. He heaved himself up and halfway over
the parapet. The Germans looked undecided. This was a Mallory
undisturbed by seagulls. This was a Mallory who for eighteen months
had lived wild as an animal in the White Mountains of
Crete.
The Germans did not stand a
chance.
Mallory drove his dagger through the first
one's eye and into his brain. The second one opened his mouth to
shout. Mallory drove his fist into his throat. He tugged the knife
from the eye socket. As the body hit the ground the second German
came at him, gasping. The man's momentum carried him on, over
Mai-lory's shoulders and the parapet. Then he was hanging face
down, caught by the toe of his boot, hooked on a small projection
of the stone. If his vocal cords had been functioning, he would
have been screaming.
Mallory felt an odd tugging sensation. He saw
the German's boot slip, millimetre by millimetre, in the moonlight.
Some part of the German had gone through the spare coil of rope
Mallory carried on his shoulder. When he fell, he was
going to take Mallory with him.
Mallory dived inside the parapet. The German
emitted a quiet, rasping croak. The boot went over the edge. A
crushing load came suddenly on the rope. It lifted Mallory. But the
friction of the parapet stopped it dragging him over the
edge.
Cautiously, Mallory found an end of the coil
and belayed it to the iron steps set in the rock above the
demilune. Then he wriggled out of the toils.
The rope ran out. He looked over the
edge.
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
stille 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!1 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 'I'llted 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 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
Hauptsturmfuhrer. His accent was very good. 'We have been expecting
you.'
Then they marched them away.
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 Hauptsturmfuhrer 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
Hauptsturmfuhrer 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
Hauptsturmfuhrer.
'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, stilll 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
Hauptsturmfuhrer.
'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 din, 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 eleven-thirty-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 hostille and condescending. In
their travels in occupied Greece, both of them had had experience
of the Gestapo. Neither of them understood why they were stilll
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 car'I'llage 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
Panzerjager, 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 stilll 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.
Miller said. There's no point.' He turned to
the Gestapo man. 'Listen,' he said. 'He's-'
Andrea moved. He moved suddenly, but with the
lumbering slowness of a bear, across the filthy floor to Miller. He
grabbed Miller round the neck and pulled his head away from the
wall, and the Gestapo man knew that next this big man was going to
bash this thin man's brains out. That would have been a thing he
would have enjoyed watching.
But it was important that it did not
happen.
So he gestured to the guards. The guards
grabbed one of Andrea's arms each, and pulled him off. It was not
as difficult as the Gestapo man had feared. He might be big, but he
was weak. These Mediterranean types. Hot blood, but no
sinews.
Miller was rubbing his neck. 'Hey!' he whined.
'Ain't no call to beat up on a guy -'
'Insect!' hissed Andrea.
'Rep'I'lle!'
'Silence,' said Gruber. The Greek
subsided.
The American said, The third guy. He's
dead.'
'Come,' said the Gestapo man. 'Can you not do
better than that?'
'It's the truth.'
The wet blue eyes were as blank as the
indicator lights on a wrecked tank. 'How did he
die?'
'He fell down the cliff.'
'What was he doing on the
cliff?'
'Hiding.' Steady, thought Miller. The Stella
Maris was in the harbour. No sense involving them. 'He'd led us
round from the mainland. He placed the rope. He fell, poor bastard.
Strangled himself. Take a look at the bottom of the cliff, you'll
find his body. Then you caught us.'
The Gestapo man fingered his chin. Certainly it
would be possible to fall on those cliffs. He said, 'It was not a
clever thing to do, to enter by the cliffs. You made much noise.
Naturally, you were caught.'
Miller hung his head. That was not what the
Hauptsturmfuhrer had said. The Hauptsturmfuhrer had said they were
expected, and Miller was inclined to believe him. 'Shucks,' he
said.
'Quite so,' said Gruber. He stood up. 'Well. I
cannot say it has been a pleasure meeting you.' He snapped his
fingers. 'Chair.'
One of his SS men took the chair away. Herr
Gruber walked across to Andrea, who was propped against the wall.
'Goodbye, Greek,' he said. The cane in his hand lashed out like a
striking adder. It caught Andrea across the eyes.
Muscles swelled at the corners of the Greek's
jaw. Then he smiled, a happy, white-toothed smile of anticipation.
Blood ran from his heavy black eyebrows into the smile. 'For that,'
he said, 'you will die.'
Herr Gruber smiled a superior smile, and strode
out of the cell.
The door slammed. The lock clashed. The light
went out. They were in darkness.
Miller said, 'Colonel?'
'Miller.' The voice sounded
strangled.
'Can you see?'
'I can see.'
'More 'n' I can,' said Miller. A peculiar noise
rattled in the vaulting of the cell.
They might be locked up in the dark, facing the
imminent failure of their mission, the decimation of the invasion
fleet, and a diplomatic disaster in Madrid.
But Mallory was out there somewhere. And Miller
was laughing.
For Mallory, being alone on the cliff had been
a sort of liberation. After all those days and weeks of little rest
and occasional food, the feel of rock under feet and fingers and
the freedom of the great vertical spaces acted like a tonic. He
trusted the other two to reconnoitre the landward side and the
submarine sheds. But he trusted only himself to reconnoitre from
the seaward. There were some things he needed to look at on his
own. Mallory was a team player, but Andrea was too big, and Miller
got vertigo. There were times when solo climbing was what you had
to do.
The moon slid behind a cloud. In the darkness,
he began to move swiftly sideways across the face of the cliff. He
had gone a hundred yards when he heard the commotion up above: a
bell, a voice screaming, the clatter of boots on granite; then the
faraway double tramp of jackboots, and a voice, Andrea's, yelling
Marsch!
The boots stopped.
Mallory could hear nothing after that. But he
did not need ears to tell him that this was trouble. He waited for
the shooting to start. The shooting did not start.
He hung for a moment, waiting for a patch of
moonlight to pass. The cloud returned.
Before he had been climbing diagonally upwards
towards the parapet. But the sky above the parapet was glowing with
a nimbus of ice-grey floodlights. So he headed low, towards the
sea, acquiring the grammar of the crumbling stone through fingers
and toes, keeping the bulge of an overhang between him and the
parapet.
Soon the floodlights went out, and the Cabo de
la Calavera was once again a domed and sinister lump of darkness
against the sky. Whatever had happened had happened. Mallory took a
deep breath. He knew that nobody would be there to meet him at the
rendezvous by the generator sheds.
He was on his own.
Steady.
Worrying about Miller and Andrea was a waste of
time. He kept his mind on the operation. One man needed to operate
differently from three. Time spent on reconnaissance was time
wasted now. He needed to penetrate the Cabo. He needed a weak
spot.
He had one in mind.
He began to climb upwards.
Whatever Moor-hating grandee had built the
fortaleza on the tip of the Cabo de la Calavera had chosen
his spot well. The cliffs came sheer out of the sea - more than
sheer, on some of the pitches. Mallory concentrated on the rock.
Here on the sheer cliffs, it was less friable, and grass and
sea-pink had failed to find a foothold. There were little cracks
and corrugations that would have given pause to a fly with common
sense. But Mallory was desperate. So Mallory went up the face, slow
but sure, moving from the hips, gracefully, almost without effort.
He worked his way steadily westwards, towards the point on which
the fortaleza stood, working his way steadily higher. The
clouds were thickening again, and the moon had gone. That was
useful, even if it meant climbing by feel. The sea was a heavy
murmur far below, the wind a tenuous hand pressing on his
back.
After perhaps an hour, the wind brought him the
stench of drains. When he next looked up, he saw the cliff above
him had changed nature. It was no longer natural granite. It had
become the outer wall of the fortaleza.
Mallory paused, standing on the sheer precipice
connecting sky and sea. Cliffs were no problem, and masonry walls
he could deal with. It was the transition between the living rock
of the cliff and the cut stone of the fortress wall that would be
the difficulty.
For where masonry met rock face, a heavy black
line crossed the darkness of the wall. The outer face of the
masonry was can'I'llevered out over the rock: machicolated, Mallory
seemed to remember. Machicolation or can'I'llever, it boiled down to
the same thing. What he had up there was a bloody great overhang.
Mallory was solo, no rope, four spikes. Normally, he would have
looked for another route to avoid an overhang. But this time, there
was no going round.
Suddenly, Mallory was horribly
tired.
He hung there for a moment. The smell of sewage
was powerful in his nostrils. When he reached for the next hold,
his right hand landed in a foul slime.
A foul slime that must have come from
somewhere.
Suddenly, Mallory's weariness was gone. Thank
God for Spanish sanitation, he thought. For medieval Spanish
sanitation, invented by Arabs, bringers of civilisation to the
European world.
And with a bit of luck, bringer of Mallory onto
the walls of the Fortaleza de la Calavera.
He started to climb again, keeping to the left,
out of the stream of sewage. In two minutes, he was up against the
bottom course of the machicolations.
He could see the detail of the overhang now. It
was like an inverted flight of seven steps, a foot each, angled
outwards at forty-five degrees. Impassable without a
rope.
But ten feet to Mallory's right, a vertical
line of darkness broke the steps: a line perhaps two feet wide that
was not a line, but a crevasse. To the designers of the
fortaleza's sanitation, it was the outlet from the castle
garderobes. To a climber like Mallory, it was a practicable chimney
in an impracticable overhang. The tiredness left him. There was a
route here. In the face of a route, it was not possible to feel
tired.
He crouched on a nearly invisible ledge and
checked his spikes. He took his boots and socks off. He put his
boots back on his bare feet, and pulled the socks over the boots.
Then he swung himself round, face to the cliff, and started to move
crabwise towards the chimney.
He knew he was under it from the stinging reek
of urine and ammonia. He looked up, sighting against the sky with
watering eyes. The slot in the machicolations reached out as far as
the last two steps. If he could reach those last two steps, he
would be able to get 'a hand up and onto the masonry of the
vertical wall, and find a place to get a spike in.
Garderobe or no garderobe, it was a hideously
difficult place. But the thought did not even occur to Mallory. It
was a climbing problem, and climbing problems were there to be
solved.
He reached in the pocket of his smock, checking
his spikes and the leather-wrapped lead mallet he used as a
hammer. Then he moved into the dreadful recesses of the
chimney.
As he had suspected, it was a chimney of cut
stone built out from the living rock. At first, he was climbing the
slippery natural rock. When the rock gave way to masonry, he put
his shoulders against one side, his feet against the other, and
pushed.
The socks over his boots gave him a grip
through the slime. The slime lubricated his shoulders as they slid
up the cut stone blocks. Easy chimneying, if you could cut out the
stench. He was moving outwards now, away from the face of the
cliff, following the line of the machicolations. Once, the cliff's
sheerness had been daunting. Any minute now, it was going to seem
almost like home.
As long as he ignored the black hole above his
head, and what might come down it.
Brace the shoulders. Keep the feet against the
far wall, hard, so the socks bite through the film of filth and the
boot-nails grind into the solid rock. Do it again. And again
-
Mallory's helmet clanked against stone. He had
run out of chimney.
He stood there, wedged shoulders and feet in
that slot in the masonry, his breathing shallow. Two hundred feet
below, white tongues of foam curled round jagged rocks and licked
up the cliff wall.
Mallory fumbled in his pocket for a spike.
Before the war, he would not have considered using spikes. Spikes
were for Germans, during the assaults on the north face of the
Eiger, the attempts on Kanchenjunga for the greater glory of the
Third Reich. Mallory had on one occasion climbed the Big Wall on
Mount Cook, removing the spikes left there by an unsportsmanlike
German expedition. But in Zermatt he had met Schenck, an American
blacksmith and climber who ran a forge in the back of his pickup
truck. Schenck had seen a war coming, and foreseen the kind of
things that someone would ask Mallory to do. He had forced on
Mallory half a dozen of his specials: three-inch blades of steel
cut from the rear springs of a Model A Ford, pierced to hold a loop
of rope. When Mallory had demurred, Schenck had pointed
out
that whatever he thought about using a spike to
beat a mountain, using a spike to beat a German was
fine.
God bless you, Schenck, wherever you are,
thought Mallory in his stinking chimney. He looped a spike's cord
round his wrist. Then he reached up and out and round the last two
steps of the overhang, running the spike's point across the stones
like the point of a pencil untill he felt the check that would mean
a seam of mortar. Then, gingerly, one-handed, he began to tap it
in.
He tapped slowly, with infinite caution, partly
for the sake of quietness, but mostly because he had only four of
those three-inch splinters of metal left, survivors of the original
half-dozen. And much depended on these four: his life, Andrea's and
Miller's, the lives of the invasion fleet. He tapped for a full two
minutes, untill he was sure. Then he put in another spike inside the
chimney, level with his eyes. This one went in more easily; he was
not working at arm's length, and the mortar in the gully, attacked
by hundreds of years of carbonic acid from the rain and uric acid
from the garrison, was softer than the mortar on the outside of the
wall.
When it was in, he tugged at it stealthily. It
held firm. Reaching up, he found the loop of rope on the head of
the first spike, shoved his hand through, and applied weight,
without loosening his grip on the walls of the
chimney.
The spike held firm.
He took a deep breath. Then he gripped that
loop of rope and swung his weight out over the abyss. For a moment
he was dangling free, a spider hanging from a cornice, a little
creature of flesh suspended by a metal spike and a loop of
quarter-inch cord two hundred feet above the sullen moil of white
surf in sharp black rock. Then he put his left leg up, searching
for the spike he had driven into the side of the
chimney.
He put the sole of his boot onto that spike,
applied his weight like a man applying weight to the pedal of a
bicycle, and straightened his leg untill he was standing, his leg in
under the overhang, his torso vertical, parallel with the wall of
masonry that went up, up, into the black sky. His left hand went to
his pocket, found another spike, placed it above the first, made
the pencil-like scribbling movements untill the point caught,
burrowed it in the first millimetres untill it held, brought up the
hammer, and began to tap. The muscles of his right arm and left leg
were yelling that they could not be expected to keep this up, that
they were going to cause pain, and cramp, untill Mallory bloody well
stopped this abuse. Mallory forced himself to pay no attention. Tap
the spike gently, take your time -
There was the smallest of small movements under
the sole of his left boot.
And suddenly he was falling, the full extent of
his right arm, untill the loop brought him up with a crunch of
armpit sinews, and he was dangling once again from the edge of the
cornice above the hungry rocks below.
The spike under his foot had fallen
out.
Falling, the reflex is to open the hands, make
the fingers a feeble approximation of feathers of flesh, spread the
limbs, try to turn a solid body into a gliding thing that will fly
away from danger.
Mallory knew about reflexes. He knew that the
only direction humans fly is vertically downwards. Even as he
swung, he kept his left hand clamped around the
hammer.
After what felt like ten hours but was more
like ten seconds, the swinging stopped. Mallory hung there.
Rest, his body told him. But he knew that as he hung, the
strength would be draining out of him, the blood leaving that arm.
The muscles of the right arm needed all the blood they could get.
Even if using them meant that the spike up there would pull out of
the wall, and drop him through all that air onto all those
rocks.
Damned if you hang. Not necessarily damned if
you don't.
Carefully, Mallory put the hammer into his
pocket. Then he reached his left hand up to join his right, and
pulled himself up like a gymnast chinning the bar.
The muscles crunched in his arms. His teeth
bared in a rictus of effort. The blood roared in his
skull.
But there were his hands, and the spike, and
the blessed stones, level with his eyes.
He held on with his right hand, pulled a fold
of his smock over the projection of the spike, and lowered himself
untill he was hanging by the methodical German canvas. Then, very
carefully.
he teased the last spike out of his pocket, and
the hammer, and raised his arms above his head, and began to
tap.
Two minutes later he was up, left hand holding
the upper spike, right boot on the lower, right hand putting in the
next spike. The overhang was a full two feet below: out of sight,
out of mind. The wall of the fortress stretched above him,
eighty-five feet of sheer masonry to the top of the tower. Mallory
kept tapping the spike, not letting himself stop, because stopping
meant reaction, and reaction meant the shakes, and the shakes were
no good when you were balanced on two little stubs of steel, with
no spares.
So Mallory did not stop. Mallory went on
up.
It became a rhythm. Tap the spike. Test the
spike. New hand. New foot. Shake out the bottom spike, move it to
the top ...
Keep climbing.
To the observer, Mallory would have seemed to
drift up that wall in defiance of gravity. But of course there were
no observers. The murmur of the sea receded. Small, thick-walled
windows passed by to the left and right. Mallory ignored them. He
heard the breath in his throat, the blood in his ears, mingled with
the roar of the sea. Tap the spike. Test the spike. It had
started to rain, a thin, persistent Atlantic rain, coming in with
the wind on his back. The rain was a help. The reason he was
climbing this stone oil drum was that anybody standing sentry on
top of a tower rising three hundred feet above the sea would be
watching halfheartedly at best. And this was the kind of rain that
would turn half-heartedness into actual neglect of duty. New
hand. New foot. Mallory had an idea that depended on the
neglect of duty. Tap the spike. Test the
spike.
Above, the tower was no longer a cliff losing
itself in the dark. It was a wall, a sharp-cut semicircle of stone.
Mallory was nearly at the top.
He paused, stuck to the wall like a fly,
listening. The wind rushed round his ears, and the rain pulled a
flat, mouldy smell from the stone. Above the drizzle of the rain he
heard another noise: the tramp of booted feet.
Mallory waited.
The feet marched to and fro. The rain eased,
then returned.
harder now. A voice above his head said,
'Scheisse.' The footsteps changed sound, became muffled.
There was the metallic click of a latch, a groan of heavy iron
hinges. The sentry was taking shelter from the rain.
Mallory started climbing again. He was in a
hurry now, but he did not let it alter the steady rhythm of his
movements. The rain was becoming heavier, driving in hard and
steady on the wind. After the sixth spike he found he could hook
his fingers over the parapet. Then he was up, standing on the stone
deck inside the battlements in his boots and socks, flexing his
stiff fingers.
The top of the tower was flat, except for the
turret with the staircase. Its door faced inland, away from the
prevailing wind. On the roof of the turret were chimneys, emitting
wood smoke, and a group of radio aerials. There were four aerials:
three whips and a big shortwave array, and a flagpole. At the top
of the flagpole something waved and bumped in the wind - something
that was not a flag: a vaguely man-shaped mass against the clouds,
but with a disgusting raggedness about the outline. Something that
had once been Juanito the smuggler.
Mallory was cold and stiff from a dangerous
hour crawling up a vertical wall. Now he felt an angry warmth
spread through him, against a lunatic enemy who wanted to rip the
world back into the Middle Ages.
His wool-padded boots thudded softly on the
stones as he walked across the roof of the tower and flattened
himself against the wall of the turret. He could hear a man
coughing inside the door. Cigarette smoke wafted out through the
keyhole. The sentry was alone. .
Mallory waited with the patience of a hunting
animal. The rain slackened.
The door opened.
The sentry never saw what hit him. There was a
sudden, agonising pain in the left-hand side of his chest. Then
there were no more thoughts.
Carefully Mallory wiped the blade of his knife
on the dead man's tunic. He unstrapped the man's Schmeisser, and
took the two spare clips from his bandolier. He went through the
pockets and found the man's paybook. Then he dragged the corpse
across
the wet roof to the parapet he had climbed, and
rolled it over.
It fell with no sound, the way Mallory would
have fallen, if he had fallen. Mallory did not stay to watch
it.
He took the rags of his socks off his boots.
The rain had washed a certain amount of the sewage from his tunic.
He squared his shoulders, and checked the Schmeisser with his
rope-raw hands. Then he went through the door, closed it silently
behind him, and started down the spiral stone stairs
inside.
He smelt cigarette smoke, and old stone, and
sewage on his tunic. After fourteen steps there was a Gothic-arched
doorway, closed with an iron-studded door. A cardboard notice on
the door said, in Gothic script, WACHSTUBE: guardroom. God bless
the orderly German mind, thought Mallory, with renewed hope. It may
yet be the saving of us all.
Beneath the guardroom was another door. From
behind it came voices, and the clatter of Morse keys. Radio room. A
new noise was coming from below, a busy, many-voiced buzz of
ringing telephones and scurrying feet and shouted instructions; the
noise of a human anthill, bustling. If the submarines were moving
out at noon, this would be the sound of last-minute arrangements
being made, repairs finished, evacuations planned. Mallory
permitted himself a small, grim smile. It was the kind of bustle
that could with a little thought be turned into confusion, and
taken advantage of.
He rounded the last turn in the
stairs.
Ahead of him was a corridor lined on one side
with doors, and on the other with windows looking out onto a
darkened courtyard. The corridor was lit with dim yellow bulbs.
Mallory began to walk down the corridor at a measured sentry's
tread, towards the stone balustrading round the stairway at its
end. Cardboard signs labelled a navy office, a dock office, stores.
Inside, men leaned over desks tottering with piles of papers,
smoking and talking into telephones, and scribbling in the pools of
light from their lamps. A German machine: dotting the last i,
crossing the last t, before it closed itself down.
Two soldiers, pale men, clerkish, passed him.
One of them wrinkled his nose and said, 'What a stink.' Mallory
kept his face blank. The clerks accelerated away. Mallory tramped
on, slow and steady, towards the stairs at the far end of
the corridor, hiding in his measured tread the fact that he did not
know where he was, or how to find what he was looking for. What
Mallory needed was a clue, any clue. And in an operation like this,
strolling tired and sore through the heart of an enemy
installation, clues were not easy to come by.
Mallory arrived at the top of the stairs at the
end of the corridor. A Kapitan of the Kriegsmarine was coming up.
Mallory waited, crashed his heels together, extended a stiff right
arm. 'Heil Hitler,' he said.
The Kriegsmarine Kapitan touched a negligent
hand to the peak of his cap, frowning at the wall, not looking at
him. To a German, the uniform signified more than the man. And of
course, there was the stink.
Mallory offered silent thanks to the
fortaleza's sewage, which had let him in and was now keeping
people away from him. He started to go down the
stairs.
Then he was vouchsafed his clue.
Into the smell of sweat, and smoke, and sewage,
and cold stone, had come another smell; a smell that transported
Mallory for a split second back to Cairo three years ago, with the
tinkle of fountains in marble patios, the murmur of staff officers
with creased trousers and soft handshakes making assignations for
drinks at Shepherd's Hotel while the front line troops died hot,
flyblown deaths under the desert sky.
The smell of expensive Turkish
tobacco.
It was rising up the stairs, a mere hint of it
in the column of cold, wet air. Mallory followed it like a
hound.
He went down the stone-balustraded steps, and
found himself on a corridor identical to the one above, except that
this one was blocked off halfway by a door; not studded, this door,
but made of black oak, with elaborate wrought-iron hinges, their
strapwork in the form of stylised olive branches. It was an elegant
door, built to please the eye as well as turn aside weapons of war.
From the orientation of the corridor, Mallory guessed that the
rooms beyond would look south, over the harbour. Once, these would
have been the Commandant's quarters.
The smell of Turkish cigarettes was stronger
here.
These were stilll the Commandant's
quarters.
As Mallory walked up to the door, it opened. An
Obersturmfuhrer in the black uniform of the Totenkopf-SS marched
quickly out, glanced at Mallory without curiosity, closed the door
behind him, and marched on. In his hand was a sheet of paper, and
on his face an expression of sulky haste. An odd, harsh voice
pursued him. 'Within one hour!' it barked. It sounded as if there
was something wrong with the speaker's throat.
'Jawohl, Herr General.' muttered the
ADC, and disappeared down the stairs.
Mallory pushed the door open.
The smell of Turkish cigarettes rolled out to
meet him. Ahead, the corridor continued to a Gothic window full of
night. Moroccan rugs covered the flagstones. The air was warm, and
the smell of damp stone had disappeared. The light came from a gilt
chandelier. Pictures of Spanish saints adorned the walls: male
saints, stripped to the waist, bearing the marks of
torture.
Mallory was not concerned with, the interior
appointments. There were two doors each side of the corridor. Three
of them were closed; it was inconceivable that they would contain
anything as vulgar and tasteless as a sentry. The fourth was
open.
It was a huge room, forty feet on a side, with
a sofa, two armchairs, a coffee table. There was a vast fireplace,
surmounted by the carved arms of a Spanish duke. At the far end was
a Gothic solar window. In front of the window was a desk with two
telephones, a green onyx desk set, a bell-push and an ashtray from
which the smoke of a Turkish cigarette rose vertically into the
stilll, warm air. Behind the desk was a man with a pointed head,
bald on top but fringed with close-clipped grey-blond
hair.
No sentries. How could there be no
sentries?
If nobody could get into the castle, there was
no need of sentries inside -the castle. That was
logical.
Mallory walked into the room and shut the door.
The man at the desk did not look up. The lights of the room moved
in the silver insignia of an SS General, the lightning-flash runes
on the collar, the silver skull-and-bones below the eagle on the
high-crowned cap on the desk. The thin fingers reached out for
the cigarette. The sausage lips sucked, blew smoke.
The eyes came up to meet Mallory's.
The eyes were the colour of water, set above
high cheekbones in a fleshless face with a cleft chin. The Adam's
apple moved in the neck. There was something wrong with the Adam's
apple: a dent in the right-hand side, a groove the thickness and
depth of a finger. An old wound, perhaps. Striated webs of muscle
shifted in the wasted areas where the cheeks should have been.
'What?' said the General, in his thin, harsh croak. He clipped his
cigarette into his right hand. Mallory saw the hand was artificial,
an unlife-like imitation of hard orange rubber.
Mallory reached in his pocket for the paybook
he had taken from the dead sentry, stepped forward to the desk and
held it out to the General. The General waved it away impatiently,
wrinkling his nose at the smell. Private soldiers did not roll in
sewage, then burst into General's rooms and identify themselves.
What on earth did this Dummkopf think he was doing? The
orange rubber fingers of the prosthesis strayed to the
bell-push.
Mallory plastered a foolish grin on his face,
and swatted the artificial hand away from the bell. The General was
looking up at him now. A ropy vein was swelling on either side of
his neck. He ignored the hand with the paybook. He opened his mouth
to shout.
The hand holding the paybook kept moving. The
General ignored it. He was watching Mallory's face. The anger was
turning to something else, something like puzzlement, or even fear.
But the hand with the paybook had gone further than a hand with a
paybook need go, and it had dropped the paybook and folded the
fingers under a hard ridge of knuckle and accelerated untill it was
an axehead aimed at the ruined Adam's apple in that stringy
neck.
Mallory put his whole weight behind that punch.
It was designed to smash the larynx. But whatever the General saw
in the brown eyes above Mallory's foolish grin made him move his
head at the final split instant, so the knuckles caught him on the
side of the neck, bruising the larynx instead of smashing it, and
he went backwards out of the carved-gilt chair and into the bow of
the window, groping for the flap of his holster as he
fell.
Mallory scrambled over the desk after him, his
boot-nails leaving tears in the red Morocco top. The General was
halfway up to his feet, his back against the stone tracery of the
window. Mallory covered him with his Schmeisser. He said, 'Put your
hands in the air.'
The General said in a rasping whisper, 'Have
you gone mad?'
'Do as you are told,' said
Mallory.
'You are not a German soldier,' said the
General.
Mallory said, 'No.'
The General's Adam's apple bobbed in his
throat. Self-possession returned to the cold-water eyes. He said,
'If you shoot me there will be ten of my men in here before you can
take your finger off the trigger.'
'And you will be dead,' said Mallory. 'What
good will that do you?' He saw the flicker of calculation in the
colourless eyes, and knew that this was not an argument that would
work. It might have cut some ice with a junior officer. But for one
of Heinrich Himmler's inner circle, there were more frightening
things than death.
'So,' whispered the General, with a smile that
was no more than a stretch of the lips over the teeth. 'We have
been expecting you.'
That was clever of you,' said Mallory.
'How?'
The General said, 'You will die wondering, I
think.'
Mallory yawned. 'Pardon,' he said. It was the
old chess game of lies and evasions. 'You captured two men,' he
said. 'Where are they?'
The General's face had relaxed. Mallory had
shown weakness. He was in control. His orange artificial hand
rested on the red leather desk. 'Where you will shortly be,' said
the General. The bell-push was six inches away. 'What are you
trying to achieve?' This one will hang from piano wire, his brain
hissed furiously. From a meathook. He has no idea of the extent of
his presumption. But he will learn, kicking his life out on the
hook with the cut of thin steel at his damned impudent
neck.
'My objectives,' said Mallory. The barrel of
the Schmeisser moved like a snake's tongue, and smashed into the
General's good arm above the elbow.
The General pulled his hand back. The pain was
abominable. The arm was definitely broken. He said, in a whisper
unstable with agony, 'For this you will die.'
'Oh, quite,' said Mallory. 'Where are your
prisoners?'
The General stood there, cradling his good hand
with his orange rubber fingers to take the weight off the upper
arm. Nobody had spoken to him like this since the SA purge in 1934.
The pain was terrible. He wanted to shout, but his vocal cords were
paralysed. He wanted to push the bell, but he was frightened that
some other part of him would be broken. When would von Kratow the
aide-de-camp be back? An hour. He had told von Kratow to leave him
alone for an hour.
He was alone and helpless under those pitiless
brown eyes. And he knew, with the sure instinct of the merciless,
that the man behind those eyes had as little mercy as
himself.
In that moment, he recognised him. The Abwehr
had circulated the name, the description, holograph cuttings from
the London Times and the Frankfurter Zeitung, from
before the war. Cuttings with pictures of this face, those eyes,
fixed without mercy on the next peak to be
conquered.
He said in his rasping whisper, 'Mallory.' He
breathed hard. 'You will all die together. It will not be an easy
death.'
Mallory felt the sweat of relief flow under his
stinking uniform. Andrea and Miller were stilll alive. He said to
the General, 'Please. Take your clothes off.'
The General's brain felt starved of blood. He
knew the things this man had done. He knew that he was in trouble.
He said, 'No.'
Then he dived for the bell-push.
Mallory saw him go, as if in slow motion. He
lashed out again with the barrel of the Schmeisser. It caught the
General on his bone-white temple. His eyes rolled up. His body went
limp and dropped to the Turkish carpet. His head hit the flagstones
at the carpet's fringe with a loud, wet crunch. He lay
stilll.
Mallory laid the Schmeisser on the desk. He
stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray, took another from the
silver box, lit it, and inhaled deeply. He walked across to the
door and quietly shot the big bolt. Then he crouched by the body on
the floor, and took the pulse in the neck.
There was no pulse.
Mallory began to remove the
uniform.
He pulled off the boots, the tunic, the
breeches. He paused a moment, face immobile, eyebrow cocked. The
uniform was bigger than the body. The General's corpse was white
and fleshless, little better than a skeleton. Under the dead-black
uniform, the man was wearing ivory silk French
knickers.
Mallory began to unbutton his tunic. He threw
his sewage-stained clothes behind the curtain, and climbed into the
General's uniform.
It had been oversized for the General, but was
about the right size for Mallory. He had climbed the castle tower
without socks, and large areas of skin had come away from his feet.
The General's socks were clean and made of silk, which was
soothing; the General's mirror-polished jackboots were a size too
tight, which was not. But Mallory's own boots were not the elegant
boots of a General, so there was no help for it.
When he had finished dressing Mallory
transferred the contents of his battledress pockets to the
General's tunic and breeches. He caught sight of himself reflected
in the glass of the window. He saw a tall, thin SS General, the
hollow-cheeked face shadowed by the cap that came down far over the
eyes, the unscarred neck hidden by the shin collar. Unless he got
too close to someone who knew the General well, he would pass. The
Cabo de la Calavera force would be a scratch team. They would not
know each other well.
You hope.
Stay in the shadows.
He took the cap off, and began to walk round
the office. A door led to a room with a shortwave radio on a
table.
Mallory went into the bathroom. He washed his
hands and face. He changed the blade in the dead man's razor for a
new one. He shaved: SS Generals do not have twelve hours' growth of
stubble. As he shaved he thought about the way that the lights had
come on after the landing, the instantaneous capture of Andrea and
Miller. And what the General had said: we have been expecting
you.
Mallory wiped the remains of the lather from
his face, and decided that, disguise or no disguise, he could not
face the General's violet-scented eau de Cologne. He walked back to
the radio room, stiff-legged because of the pinch of the boots.
Jensen had made sure his men were trained in the use of German
equipment. He flicked on the power, and tuned the dial to the
Stella Moris' frequency. 'Ici l'Amiral Beaufort,' he
said.
There was a wave of static. Then a little voice
said, 'Monsieur l'Amiral.' Even across the static it was
recognisable as Hugues.
Mallory said, 'I have laid large explosive
charges at the main gate. Am expecting reinforcements from the
landward.'
Hugues said, 'What-'
Mallory hit his press-to-talk switch. 'Stay
where you are,' he said. 'Ignore all further radio communications.
Await arrival of main force, one hour. Acknowledge.' He lifted his
thumb from the switch.
Static washed through the earphones. For a
moment he thought Hugues had not received him. Then he realised
that the silence would be the silence of confusion.
Or treachery.
'Acknowledge,' he said again.
'I acknowledge,' said Hugues.
'Out,' said Mallory, and
disconnected.
Mallory hobbled back into the office. Very
quietly he unbolted the door, walked back to the desk and pulled
the body behind the curtain. Then he lit another Turkish cigarette
from the box on the desk, and turned away from the door to face the
window. It was dark out there. He waited five minutes. Suddenly,
the night to the left whitened, as if many lights had come on.
Mallory pressed the button on the desk. The door opened behind him.
A voice said, 'Herr General?'
Mallory could see in the rain-flecked glass the
reflection of a young SS officer, standing to attention with
tremulous rigidity, eyes front. The officer would not be able to
see Mallory's reflection. Mallory was standing too close to the
glass. And of course, the officer was German, so he would notice
uniforms, not faces.
At least, that was the theory Mallory was
backing with his life. And Andrea's, and Miller's.
He said, in what he hoped was a replica of the
General's harsh croak, There seems to be a problem by the gate. The
lights are on. What is happening?'
'We have reports of enemy
action.'
'What do you mean?'
'Intelligence,' said the voice.
Mallory said, 'Investigate this. Personally.
Come back only when you have established the nature of this action,
and neutralized it. Take all forces at your disposal. The whole
garrison, if necessary.'
'But Herr General, the administration ... we
depart at dawn...'
Mallory's heart seemed to stop beating. 'At
what time?' he said.
'At dawn,' said the SS man, worried. The Herr
General will remember ... it was the Herr General who issued the
order...'
The time of dawn, idiot,' snapped
Mallory.
'Of course.' The SS man sounded flustered. 'My
apologies. 0500, Herr General.'
'So you will raise the general alarm,' said
Mallory. 'And you will proceed to the gate.'
'But Herr General-'
'With all the men you can find.'
'But the work-'
'Silence!' barked Mallory. 'Leave only the
sentries, and one man. I need to interview the prisoners. I shall
require an escort. The rest to the gate. I hold you personally
responsible.'
'But-'
'You will go out in the rain,' said Mallory,
'and confront the enemy! There is worse than rain on the
Ostfront!'
He heard boot heels crash together. The officer
said, 'Jawohl, Herr General,' in a tight, offended voice.
The uniform would be occupying the whole of his
vision.
'Send the escort in five minutes,' said
Mallory. 'Dismiss!'
The boot heels crashed again. The door slammed.
Alarm bells started ringing, rackety and imperious. Mallory turned,
stubbed out the cigarette, and lit another.
Five o'clock. The U-boats were sailing seven
hours early. And the Storm Force had not even begun.
There was the stamp of many feet in the
corridor outside: the General's staff, trotting off to the gate,
scared witless by the prospect of the Russian Front. The footsteps
faded. A double knock sounded on the door. Mallory turned back to
the window. 'Komm!' he cried.
A nervous voice said, 'Herr
General.'
'We will visit the prisoners,' said Mallory.
'Lead the way.'
The way?'
'You lead,' rasped Mallory. 'I will follow you.
About turn.'
The soldier about turned. Mallory clasped his
hands behind his back and hobbled out from behind the
desk.
In the corridor, he sank his chin into his
collar and strode stiffly after the private. Anyone watching would
have seen the General, cap pulled low over his eyes, deep in
thought, doing his rounds. But there were only clerks to watch. The
alarm bells had sent the garrison clattering for the assembly
points, and from the assembly points the Feldwebels had bellowed
them to the ramparts on the peninsula.
The escort's boots rang in the vaulting and
crunched grit on the stone stairs. The pain in Mallory's feet and
the aches of his body were small, distant
inconveniences.
He had radioed the Stella Maris with
false information. Within five minutes, that false information had
been relayed to the garrison.
Someone on the Stella Maris was a
traitor.
Lisette was out of France, away from the long
arm of the Gestapo. Hugues had his girlfriend and his child safe
alongside him; if he betrayed the Stella Maris party,
Lisette would be separated from him, and probably killed. Which
left Jaime: Jaime the dark and silent, the smuggler, connoisseur of
secret paths and byways.
Not that it-mattered just now.
The soldier halted, with a stamp of his feet.
'Herr General,' he said.
They were in a long corridor lined with steel
doors. White lights glared harshly from the ceiling. There was a
smell of damp and mould. The sentry standing rigidly at attention
outside the nearest door coughed. Mallory said,
'Key.'
The sentry was stilll coughing.
'Key!' rasped Mallory, holding out his
hand.
The sentry said, 'Heir General,' and fumbled at
his belt. He looked at Mallory's hand.
And Mallory's skin turned suddenly to
ice.
For the sentry was frowning at that
outstretched hand. The right hand. The hand of flesh and
blood.
The hand that on the real General had been an
artificial hand of orange rubber.
'Herr General,' said the sentry, with the face
of one undergoing a nervous breakdown. This is ... you are not the
General.'
The key,' rasped Mallory.
But under the brim of his cap he saw the man's
hands going for the Schmeisser.
The cell had not changed. It was stilll cold,
and it stilll stank, and it was stilll dark, dark with the absolute
blackness of a pocket hewn from living rock. Midnight in the
goddamn dungeons, thought Miller. Ghosts would be walking, witches
doing whatever the hell witches do when it rains. As far as Miller
was concerned, the ghosts and the witches could get on with it.
Right here, midnight meant time for a cigarette.
He gave one to Andrea, put one in his own
mouth, and lit them. The hot little coals began to glow in the
dark, and for a couple of minutes there were warm points in this
cold, evil-smelling universe.
But cigarettes end. And when they were
finished, it was colder again, and lonelier, and worst of all,
quieter.
What felt like two hours later, Andrea said,
'What time is it?'
Andrea would be thinking about the operation.
Miller was thinking about it too. Miller wanted to get finished
up.
Some chance.
He looked at the radium-bright hands of his
watch. 'Five past twelve,' he said.
'Any minute now,' said the rumble of Andrea's
voice. And although Miller knew it was a packet of bullshit, he
felt for a moment that, any minute now, something might
happen.
But nothing did.
Not for thirty seconds, anyway. After thirty
seconds, the silence was broken by an odd noise.
It sounded like a jackhammer. It was not a
jackhammer.
Someone was firing a machine pistol outside the
cell door.
The door swung open. Brilliant light exploded
into the darkness. A figure stood against the light, a black,
angular silhouette. Andrea stared at it, dazzled. From the
monochrome blur there emerged a spidery figure, jackboots set well
apart, hands on hips, face invisible under the high-fronted black
cap. It was the silhouette that stalked Andrea's dreams: the
rusty-black silhouette that had stood against the sun on the low
hill in Greece, with the blue Aegean twinkling like sapphires under
the sky.
Under the hill had been the house of Andrea's
brother, Iannis. It had been a small house, with a vine growing
over a little terrace of red 'I'lles, fanned by the small
thyme-scented breeze that blew up from the sea.
By the time Andrea had got there, the damage
had been done. His brother had been suspected of partisan
activities, and captured in possession of British weapons. Under
the pleasant green shade of the vine, the General had opened a
bottle of Iannis' retsina and poured himself a glass. Then he had
perched elegantly on the wall, gleaming boots crossed at the
ankles, and watched the show.
The show had consisted of lighting the fire of
charcoal on which the family had from time to time cooked an
alfresco meal. Three Croatian SS had then brought Iannis' three
daughters - Athene, six, Eirene, eight, and Helen, nine - out of
the house. In the fire of charcoal they had burned off the girls'
hands. When Iannis' wife had begun to scream, the General had had
her hanged before the eyes of her husband and her stilll living
children. Iannis they had left alive, nailing his hands to the
house door against his attempts to claw out the eyeballs that had
seen this thing, and wrench out the heart that was
broken.
It was only after they had hanged the children
beside their mother that Iannis had managed to tear his hands free
and run, run like a maniac, eyes blinded with tears, to the brink
of the high white cliff, and keep running, though his feet were no
longer running on ground, but running on air, and he was falling
down
the glistening face of that cliff, falling
happily, because he would see his children again, and his wife, and
his parents, murdered by Bulgarians -
Five minutes later, Andrea had arrived, slowly,
wearing a straw hat and leading a donkey in whose panniers were
more weapons. Andrea had stood a moment, blank-eyed, watching. He
saw the woman and the three children hanging from the vine that
used to shade the evening drinking of ouzo. He saw the
black-uniformed SS men, their thick red faces pouring rivers of
sweat under the sun, laughing. The flames began to pour out of the
roof of the house. He saw the silhouette of the General standing on
the cliff, admiring a distant ruin, smiling complacently at the
liquid-agate of the sun in the glass of retsina. He smelt burned
flesh.
Then Andrea had seen nothing
else.
When he could see again, there were five SS men
dead at his feet. Them he fed to Iannis' pigs. The General he shot
in the knees and threw into the privy to drown. He heard later from
the people of the village that it had taken three days; not that he
was interested. For Andrea had not waited. He had gathered together
the bodies of his brother and his sister-in-law and his nieces, and
given them to the priest for burial. Then he had left, to fight for
his country on other fronts.
Andrea did not like SS officers.
He growled, and started forward, his gigantic
hands unclenching.
The SS General dropped the Turkish cigarette he
was smoking, and ground it out with a fastidious toe. He said,
'Unless you really like it here, I think we should leave.' And his
voice was the voice of Mallory.
There was a moment's stunned silence, broken
only by the sound of moaning from the corridor. Then Miller said,
'Personally, I find it damp.'
Andrea's eyes were pits of darkness. They moved
from Mallory to Miller and back again. Then his teeth showed in a
smile that was like the sun among thunderclouds. 'You should be
careful about second-hand clothes,' he said. 'You could catch
something really nasty. Like a knife in the guts.'
Mallory said, 'It is true that the owner wasn't
very well when I left him.'
There were two bodies in the corridor. 'Get
their clothes and their paybooks,' said Mallory. Andrea dragged
them into the cell, and shut the door. 'And now?' he
said.
Mallory looked at Miller. 'What do you
need?'
What Miller really needed was his explosives
back. But there was no use crying over spilt Cyclonite. 'Whatever,'
said Miller. These guys will be carrying torpedoes. You can have a
nasty accident with a torpedo. I guess I'd like to see the
magazine.'
Andrea nodded gravely. During the weeks he had
known Miller, he had learned to take this languid, flippant
American very seriously indeed.
'I have a feeling,' said Mallory, 'that there
might be a certain amount of confusion out there. So the sooner we
get dressed, the better.'
Five minutes later, the SS General left the
fortaleza by the main gate, escorted by two men in grubby
Waffen-SS uniforms, one tall and wide, one tall and lanky, marching
eyes front, with Schmeissers strapped across their chests. The
sentries on the gate saluted. The General returned their salute
with his left hand; the right, being artificial, he held rigidly at
his side.
Once across the bridge over the moat, the party
turned right, down a flight of wide, shallow stairs that led to a
sort of crater in the shoulder of the headland. In the centre of
the crater was a squat concrete bunker surrounded with barbed
wire.
At a slow and stately pace, Mallory and his
escort started down the stairs. There were few other people about.
The welding torches stilll flickered their lightnings at the sky by
the harbour, and riveters stilll rattled in the night. Somewhere,
truck engines were rumbling; the evacuation was getting under way.
But the armed men of the garrison were stilll apparently up by the
main gate.
The garrison would not stay by the main gate
for ever. Sooner or later, someone would decide that the threat
might be based on faulty intelligence, or that it was not wise to
leave the rest of the Cabo unguarded. Before that happened, there
would be fifteen minutes, at best.
They were approaching the gate to the bunker.
Seen close up.
it was not so much a bunker as a fortified
entrance, a steel door set behind a system of concrete baffles
giving admittance to a low, tumulus-like mound, covered in
salt-blasted turf. The entrance to the magazine.
The soldier at the gate stared straight ahead.
'Pass?' he said.
Mallory said, in the General's harsh whisper,
'Open the gate.'
'But Herr General-'
Mallory said. The weather in Russia is terrible
at this time of year.'
The man's face paled under the floodlights.
'Herr General?'
'Perhaps when you get there you will send me a
postcard,' rasped Mallory. 'Now if you would kindly open the
gate?'
There was a split second of inner struggle.
Then the sentry hauled open the gate in the wire, and Mallory
walked through at his cramped, mincing hobble. The sentry must have
pressed some sort of switch, because the steel door swung open with
a hiss of hydraulics. Mallory and his escorts walked in without
pausing. The steel door swung shut behind them. Ahead was a flight
of spiral stairs, with at its centre the hoists that fed ammunition
to the guns in the fort. Mallory looked at the faces of his
companions. They were pale and expressionless, tired, but with a
tension to their tiredness that was new. It came from the closing
of that steel door.
They were inside now. There were no sandbags to
hide behind, no shadows to skulk in. Their only protection against
five hundred enemy soldiers was the thin cloth of their uniforms
and the shape of the badges they wore. They were small, fragile
machines of flesh and blood, armed with small guns. With those
small guns and their bare hands, they had to destroy huge machines
of steel. It was a nasty feeling; a naked feeling. A feeling from a
nightmare.
But this was real. And this was the way it was
going to be, from now on.
Down those stairs, Mallory told himself, were
the tools for the job. Put Miller near explosives, and his bare
hands could shatter an army. Everything was going to be
fine.
Except my feet, thought Mallory, hobbling on.
His feet felt as if they would never be the same
again.
The shaft with the staircase descended into the
bowels of the hill. Shells could be carried by hoist. But
torpedoes were big, and heavy, and needed to travel horizontally.
The floor of the magazine would be on the same level as the floor
of the quay.
Miller stamped down the stairs at what he hoped
was a convincing Wehrmacht stamp. It was costing him some effort to
keep his appearance military. He was a fighter. Miller, but he
would have been the first to admit that he was not much of a
soldier. As they rounded the last twist of the spiral staircase, he
felt a pleasurable anticipation. Once again, it was time to
improvise.
At the base of the stairs was a flashproof
door. Miller pushed the door open. They were in the
magazine.
It was a big magazine. It stretched away in
front of them, lit harshly by white bulkhead lights, a devil's wine
cellar of grey concrete compartments, bins for shells, and bays for
the trolleys that would roll the torpedoes down to the quays where
the submarines waited, black and evil, crouching in the cold
Atlantic.
Mallory looked at his watch. It was three
forty-five.
Christ.
They went through the door, all three of them,
and looked down the stark concrete perspective that was the
magazine's central aisle. This was where they would find the
wherewithal to sink three submarines and scupper the Nazis' last
defence against the invading Allies.
But there was a problem.
The concrete bays and alcoves of the magazine
contained a few crates. The dollies for the shells lay on their
rails, and the torpedo racks, five hundred of them, stood padded
with felt. But the crates were cracked open, the dollies
burdenless, the torpedo racks bare. A gang of men was dismantling
an electric motor.
But apart from the men, the magazine was
empty.
They stood there, and watched, and let it sink
in. The job was waiting. The tools were missing.
After a minute, Mallory began to hobble down
the floor of the magazine, heading for the rails that would have
taken the torpedoes to the quay.
The Stella Maris was lying on the
outside of a raft of fishing boats against the quay wall of San
Eusebio. Among the ruined buildings
behind the quay, yellow dogs with feathered
tails barked maddeningly in the rain. Hugues and Lisette were out
of sight below. Jaime was on deck, propped in the splintered
remnants of the wheelhouse, smoking. At his side a radio hummed
gently to itself. There had been no signals. Jaime was not
expecting any more signals.
Across the black water of the harbour, the
sheds and quays of the old sardine factory on Cabo de la Calavera,
which earlier had flickered with angle-grinder sparks and welder
lightnings, were almost dark. It looked as if the work was
complete. Now and then, a crane-jib caught the light as it swung.
Loading up, thought Jaime. Not long now.
There was activity on the harbour too; the
murmur of launches and lighters, moving out to the two
five-thousand-ton merchantmen anchored in the deep water half a
mile from the quay. On the move, thought Jaime. And who knew where
it would all end?
'Slow,' said Mallory. 'Your work is very, very
slow. Work faster.' The Leutnant in charge of the embarkation of
the magazine stores felt a hot anger at the injustice of it all.
But it was not helpful to be angry with SS Generals. So he clicked
his heels and ducked his head and said, 'As the Herr General
wishes.'
The Herr General does,' said Mallory. 'Now I
wish to inspect the magazine.' 'Herr General?'
Mallory frowned. 'You speak German, do you
not?' 'Herr General.' The man had just been rated for slowness.
Leading a tour of inspection for some damned Nazi with a
skull-and-bones hat was not going to speed things up. But a General
was a General.
'Here were the shells,' said the Leutnant. 'All
gone now, as per your orders. Here were the torpedoes. They are
also gone, naturally.' He waved a hand at the tunnel leading down
to the quay, and walked to another bin lined with empty racks. A
pile of grey boxes stood on the floor. 'And in here, the small
arms. A few only remaining. Grenades, mortar bombs. The last
consignment will be leaving when the barge comes back alongside.'
He clashed his heels together again, thumbs nailed
to the seams of his breeches. 'I trust the Herr General is
satisfied.'
Mallory eyed the three grey wooden boxes the
officer had indicated. 'Quite satisfied,' he said. He looked round.
Nobody was in sight. 'Andrea?'
The huge Greek took one step forward and
crashed his jackboots on the concrete. His shoulders moved. There
was a sound like a felling axe hitting a tree trunk. The German
officer sighed, and fell down.
'Hide him,' said Mallory. 'Miller, boxes of
grenades.'
Miller piled two boxes of grenades one on top
of the other: ten grenades to the box, rope handles on either
end.
'We'll go to the quay,' said Mallory. His face
was the colour of dirty ivory. Exhausted, thought
Miller.
Mallory fumbled in his pocket. There were three
Benzedrine left in the little foil packet. He gave them out, one
each. Benzedrine was not good for you, thought Miller, stooping to
pick up the grenades. But then, nor was trying to climb aboard a
U-boat to blow it up.
It was a long time since Miller had eaten
anything. The pill worked fast. He could feel the strength pouring
through him. These pills, thought Miller, dry-mouthed and sweating.
You will feel terrible later.
Except that later was hardly worth worrying
about, under the circumstances.
Miller laughed. Then he walked with his two
companions into the throat of the tunnel that led to the
quay.
The tunnel was fifty yards long, lit with the
harsh white bulkhead lights installed all over the Cabo. Rails ran
down each side, for the torpedo dollies. Down the middle was the
walkway. There were men moving up and down the tunnel, moving at a
fast clip. When they saw Mallory's uniform their eyes skidded away.
Popular guy, thought Miller.
The three men began to march down the walkways,
boots echoing. They had gone twenty yards when a voice behind said,
'Halt!'
Mallory's heart walloped heavily. He thrust his
all-too-real right hand into his tunic. Andrea's hands stole to the
grips of his Schmeisser. Miller's hands were sweating into the rope
handles of the grenade boxes. Mallory spun on the heel of his
agonising jackboot.
He was looking at a small, bald man with
rimless glasses and a prissy mouth, bulging out of a badgeless
uniform. The small man was holding a book.
'Was?' said Mallory.
The small man was not impressed by the
death's-head cap badge, the black uniform, the harsh croak of the
voice. He pursed his lips. 'It is necessary to fill out the
requisite forms,' he said. 'For the withdrawal of these weapons
from the magazine. Otherwise, correct systems cannot be
maintained.'
Mallory said, 'And you are the inventory
clerk.'
'Jawohl.'
'Well, Herr Corporal,' said Mallory. 'Give me
your book, and I will sign it.'
The clerk made tutting noises. 'Signature alone
is not enough,' he said. 'You will naturally need a requisition
form signed by the garrison duty officer.'
Mallory said, in a voice crammed with broken
glass, 'Do you know who I am?'
The clerk moistened his small mouth with a grey
tongue. 'Yess, Herr General. You are the garrison commander, Herr
General.'
'And who signs the
requisitions?'
The duty officer.'
'By whose orders?'
'By your orders, Herr General.'
'So,' said Mallory.
The clerk said, 'I have my orders. The duty
officer must sign the requisition.'
Mallory checked his watch. It said 0405. In
fifty-five minutes the submarines were due to sail.
In fifty-five minutes, they could stilll be
arguing with this clerk. The only thing stronger than the uniform
was the system.
He said, 'Corporal, I compliment you on your
attachment to duty. The duty officer is on the quay. You will
accompany us there, please.'
'But-'
'Schnell.' Mallory's voice was a bark
that admitted no contradiction.
The clerk, he had decided, was a blessing. An
officious little blessing with rimless glasses, but a blessing
nonetheless.
'Lead on. Corporal,' said Mallory, in a harsh
purr.
The clerk led on.
The mouth of the tunnel was walled off. On one
side was an opening for the torpedo dolly track. On the other was a
sort of wicket gate for the pedestrian walkway. By the wicket gate
was a species of sentry box. In the sentry box were two figures
like black paper silhouettes: SS.
From the corner of his eye, Mallory saw that
Andrea's hands had not moved from the grips of his Schmeisser. He
wished he had a Schmeisser of his own. But he had a Luger, and the
insignia of his uniform. That should be enough -
Except that the face above the uniform was not
the right face.
He tugged down the peak of his
cap.
The heels rang on. The SS sentries in the box
had blank faces the colour of dirty suet. Their uniforms were
rusty, their belts grainy, the folds of their jackboots cracking
with salt. Their eyes were cold, and vicious, and restless. When
they settled on Mallory's uniform, something happened to them,
something that was not the other ranks' usual reaction to an-
officer's uniform. It was a look compounded of furtiveness and
pride. Esprit de corps, thought Mallory. Oh, dear.
There were fifty SS men on the Cabo de la
Calavera: the elite, keeping an eye on things for Himmler. They
would know each other, all right.
But the only way onto the quay was through that
night-black wicket by the sentry box.
Mallory shouted, 'Attention!'
The SS faces became blank and automatic. The
General's uniform was doing its job. The boot heels ground concrete
as Mallory, Miller, Andrea, and the magazine clerk marched on. The
magazine clerk looked pleased with himself, proud to be part of
something important and official. Mallory was profoundly grateful
to him. The magazine clerk was credibility. The SS knew the
magazine clerk.
They were close now: ten feet away. Mallory
walked with his supposedly artificial hand in his breast, head
bowed, as if in deep thought. Through the wicket came the smells of
the sea, stirring the chill, leaden air of the magazine. The smell
of the endgame.
The eyes were on them now, peripherally at
least. In the corner of his vision Mallory could see the white,
large-pored skin, the brown eyes seamed below with the marks of
arrogance and cruelty. He could smell the uniforms, the sour smell
of rain-wet black serge badly dried, leather on which polish was
fighting a losing battle with mildew. He could smell the oil on the
Schmeissers, the tobacco smoke, and garlic on their
breath.
Then they were past, and Mallory was sweating
-
'Herr General?' said a voice, a hard voice,
cold, a little tentative: the voice of one of the black-clad
sentries.
Mallory took another step.
The Herr General will please stop,' said the
voice.
'Quiet,' murmured Mallory, in English. Then he
said, in his approximation of the General's bust-larynx rasp, 'What
do you want?'
'If the Herr General would show us his
pass?'
Mallory made a small, exasperated noise.
'Clerk,' he said. 'Show them your pass.'
The clerk's face was pink and shiny behind the
rimless spectacles. He fumbled in his pocket.
'Quickly,' grated Mallory. 'Time is
wasting.'
The SS man's eyes flicked at the clerk's pass.
He handed it back.
'And now,' he said, 'the Herr General's
pass,'
Something seemed to have removed the bottom of
Mallory's stomach. There was a sort of icy purr in the voice, the
sound of a cat about to stab a claw into a rat.
Miller put down the boxes of grenades. His
hands were wet on the grips of his Schmeisser. He moved it
casually, negligently, untill it was covering the guard who was not
doing the talking. The guard who was doing the talking had an odd
expression on his face. Miller understood it.
It was the expression of a man who knew the
General well, but who had been conditioned to respond to uniforms,
not faces.
Miller knew that something bad was going to
happen.
The SS man wet his lips with a grey tongue. He
said to Mallory, 'Herr General, what is the Herr General's name?'
His right hand was under the level of the desk. There would be an
alarm button down there.
Miller thumbed the selector on the Schmeisser
to single shot, and took up the first pressure on the trigger.
Andrea, he noticed, had his hands off his gun. Andrea said, with a
wide, despairing gesture of both spread palms, 'For God's sake, who
do you think you are talking to?'
The SS sentry opened his mouth to reply. But he
never got the words out, because Andrea's gesture had become
something else, and his huge right had gone into the sentry's face,
the heel up and under the nose, driving the bone into the brain,
while the other hand, the left, had sprouted a knife that went in
and out of the other sentry's chest, and in and out again. The two
helmets clanged on the concrete.
There was a long, dreadful silence that lasted
perhaps a second. Then something small scuttled past Miller. The
clerk.
He stuck out a foot. The little man went flat
on his face. His spectacles skittered away on the concrete. The
face he turned to Miller was the face of a blind mole. He said,
'Please.'
Miller looked at him. This was not an SS man.
This man had all the malice of a ticket office clerk in Grand
Central Station.
But this man could stop the operation
dead.
Miller looked away.
There was a sound like a well-hit baseball.
When Miller looked back, the magazine clerk was silent, face down,
but breathing.
Andrea sighted along the barrel of his
Schmeisser. Thought I'd bent it,' he said.
They dragged the clerk and the SS men out of
sight behind the desk of the sentry box. The clerk was stilll
breathing.
Then they walked onto the quay.
They were standing on the inshore end of the
map the late Guy Jamalartegui had drawn beside the chart on his
kitchen table with a matchstick and a puddle of
wine.
The Basque-American who had donated the port to
his sardine-fishing compatriots had not stinted. The quay was built
of cut granite, on a scale that would have excited the respectful
envy of a Pharaoh. The magazine entrance was set in the low cliff
halfway down the long side of the innermost quay. Three more quays
ran parallel to the first. There were rails set into the paving of
the quays, designed presumably to carry waggonloads of sardines,
first to the long sheds at the base of the quays for canning, and
then to the sardines-on-toast enthusiasts of Europe.
Now, the black lanes of water between the
granite fingers of the quay held no fishing boats; probably they
never had. Instead, the long, sleek hulls and oddly streamlined
conning towers of three great U-boats lay under the
cranes.
Three men walked past, smoking, splashing in
the puddles left by the night's rain. They were wearing baggy blue
overalls, and had the hell-with-you air of dockyard mateys the
world over. They paid no attention to Mallory and his two guards.
Their task was finished. On the nearest submarine - presumably the
one that had been reported rammed - a small gang of men was packing
up what looked like oxy-acetylene welding gear. For the rest, what
was going up and down on the cranes was definitely
stores.
Mallory watched a tray of green vegetables and
milk cans. Last-minute stores, at that.
More men in blue overalls drifted up the quay.
There was a building up there, a green clapboard facade on a tunnel
in the cliff. From it there drifted a smell of frying onions. The
canteen, thought Mallory. The men going towards the canteen carried
tool boxes. The men coming back had bags and bundles as well as the
tool boxes. They had gone for a final meal up there, and picked up
their possessions. At the far side of the harbour, launch engines
puttered in the dawn; the engines of the launches ferrying the
dockyard mateys out to the merchant ships waiting in the harbour,
Uruguayan flags fluttering on their ensign staffs.
Mallory waited for another pair of workmen to
walk past. They studiously avoided his eye, the way a skilled
civilian technician of any nationality would avoid the eye of a
murderer and torturer. The next pair came. One of them was a huge
man, as big as Andrea.
That was what Mallory had been waiting
for.
He said, 'You and you.'
The two men gave him the looks of schoolboys
with permanently guilty consciences. One of them dropped his
cigarette and stamped on it. The big man's cigarette dangled,
unlit.
'Don't worry,' croaked Mallory. 'You have
committed no crime.'
Their faces remained wooden.
'Smoke if you wish,' said Mallory. Another man
was walking towards them, by himself. Mallory pulled out the
General's lighter and lit the big man's cigarette with his left
hand. There is one little job,' he said. 'Hey! You!'
The solitary man halted. Mallory pointed back
at the magazine tunnel. 'Komm!'
He marched into the tunnel. The lights were
very bright after the grey predawn outside. The dockyard men were
yawning and sullen. It had been a long night shift, and they wanted
to get some food and climb aboard a merchant ship and go to sleep.
They did not want to do any more jobs, particularly jobs for this
whispering child murderer and his nasty-looking bodyguards. The big
one said, 'What is it then?'
'Further,' said the SS General.
They were in the magazine tunnel. There were
steel doors let into the wall, and a smell of new blood. The
General pointed at one of the doors. 'In there,' he
said.
The big man turned round. 'Why?' he
said.
It was then he saw the bodyguards' guns,
foreshortened, looking between his own eyes with their own deadly
little black eyes.
Take off your overalls,' said
Mallory.
The big man was a bully. He was tired, and hung
over, and hungry. Being told to undress had the effect on his
temper of a well-flung brick on a wasps' nest. Nobody talked to him
like that, SS General or no SS General. And word was that this SS
General was a poof. 'Take 'em off yourself,' said the big man, and
took a swing at the General's jaw.
He never saw what hit him. He merely had the
dim impression that someone had loaded his head into a cannon,
fired it at a sheet of armour plate, and dropped the resulting mess
into a black velvet bag.
His two companions watched with their mouths
open as Andrea dusted his hands, stripped the overalls off the big
man's prone body, and loaded the tools back into their
box.
'Strip,' said Mallory.
They stripped at a speed that would have won
them first prize in an undressing contest.
The door,' said Mallory.
Miller went to the steel door. It closed from
the outside, with a latch. Inside was a locker with tins of paint,
ten feet on a side.
'In,' said Mallory.
One of the men said, 'How will we ever get
out?' He looked frightened; he was a civilian, caught up in
something not his quarrel.
Mallory did not believe that a grown man could
stand back from a war. As far as Mallory was concerned, you were on
his side, or you were the enemy. He said, 'How do you get on those
U-boats?'
'With a pass.'
'What pass?'
The man produced a much-folded card, seamed
with oil.
'Anything else?'
'No. Who are you?'
Mallory went and stood so that his face was two
inches from the German's. That is for me to know and you to
wonder,' he said. 'I am going out there. I wish to move freely. If
I am captured, I will not say a word about you, and that door is
soundproof. So you have a choice.' He could feel the sweat running
down inside his uniform, see the impassive faces of Miller and
Andrea. Not much more than half an hour now. 'If you are telling me
the truth, you have nothing to fear. If not, this locker will be
your tomb.'
The man's throat moved violently as he
swallowed. He said. There is ... in fact... something else. A
word.'
'Ah,' said Mallory.
'Ritter,' said the man. 'You must say
Ritter to the gangway sentry.'
Mallory said, 'If you are not telling the
truth, you will die in your underpants.'
'It is the truth.'
'Your overalls,' said Mallory, 'and what size
are your boots?'
'Forty-two.'
Thank God, thought Mallory. 'Also your boots,'
he said.
Five minutes later, three dockyard mateys were
wandering down the quay towards the ferry. They were carrying
much-chipped blue enamel toolboxes and smoking cigarettes. Their
faces were surprisingly grim for men bound for Lisbon, home and
beauty. But perhaps that would be because of the danger of
submarines.
Outside the sheds at the root of the quay, the
three men stopped.
Andrea looked up. The clouds had rolled away.
The sky was duck-egg blue. Dawn was coming up, a beautiful dawn,
above this press of people and their deadly
machines.
Mallory said to Andrea in a quiet, level voice,
'We'll want the Stella Maris standing by.'
'I'll arrange that,' said Andrea.
Mallory looked down the first finger of
granite. On either side were foreshortened alleys of water, with
the bulbous grey
pressure hulls and narrow steel decks of the
submarines. There were two gangplanks down there, one leading left,
the other right, a crossroads of quay and gangplanks. This was the
access to two submarines. If you could get past the sailor at the
base of each gangplank, rifle on his shoulder, cap ribbons
fluttering at his nape in the small dawn breeze.
Mallory took a deep breath of the morning air,
and tried not to think about the little steel rooms inside those
pressure hulls, into which he must go with his
grenades.
'Peroxide,' said Miller,
sniffing.
'Sorry?'
'Hydrogen peroxide. Smells like a hairdressing
parlour. Hunnert per cent, by the smell of it. Don't get it on you.
Corrosive.'
Mallory said, 'What do you
recommend?'
Miller told him.
'Fascinating,' said Mallory, taking a deep
breath. 'I'll do the right-hand one. You do the
left.'
Andrea said, 'Good luck.'
Mallory nodded. There was such a thing as luck,
but to acknowledge its existence was to hold two fingers up to
fate. What Andrea had to do was potentially even more dangerous
than climbing around U-boats with a toolbox full of hand
grenades.
Not that there was much to choose between the
jobs. Dead was dead, never mind how you got there.
Mallory was not wasting time thinking about
death. He was planning the next phase.
Andrea slipped away into the crowds heading for
the ferries. Mallory and Miller started to walk down the quay
towards the sentries. Miller had his hands in his pockets, and he
was whistling.
Good lad, thought Mallory. What would it take
to get you really worried?
Miller's thoughts were less elevated. The smell
of peroxide had taken him back to Mme Renard's house in Montreal,
to Minette, a French-Canadian girl with an educated tongue and
bright yellow curls. There had been something about Minette,
something she had shown him with two goldfish and a bag of cement
-
Concentrate.
Down in his saboteur's treasure-house of a
memory, he knew
that the catalyst for hydrogen peroxide was
manganese dioxide. Manganese dioxide would separate the hydrogen
from the oxygen, and make a bang next to which a hand grenade would
look stupid.
Manganese dioxide was the obvious
stuff.
Unfortunately, it was not the kind of stuff
people left lying around.
He was at the bottom of the gangway. He grinned
at the sentry and showed him his pass. 'Ritter,' he said,
rattling his toolbox. 'Problem with lavatory. Two minutes
only.'
The sentry said, 'Thank God you've arrived,
then.'
Miller walked up the gangplank.
Andrea shouldered his way through the
thickening crowd on the quay. There was a sense of urgency, now,
and very little Teutonic efficiency about the milling scrum of men
and soldiers. He made his way to the quay's lip.
And stopped.
The queue might be inefficient, but the
embarkation procedures were well up to standard. There were four
iron ladders down the quay. At the bottom of each ladder was a
launch. At the top of each ladder was an SS officer with a
clipboard. As each man arrived at the front of the queue, the SS
man scrutinised his identity card, compared the photograph minutely
with his face, and checked his name off the list. Only then was he
allowed down the ladder.
Once the launches themselves had left the quays
they did not hang about. They went straight alongside the two
merchant ships anchored in the harbour; merchant ships on whose
decks were un-naval but nonetheless efficient sandbag emplacements
from which peered the snouts of machine guns.
Even in the evacuation, the Werwolf facility
was leaving nothing to chance.
Andrea's overalls and identity card had
belonged to Wulf Tietmeyer. No amount of oily thumbprints could
obscure the fact that Tietmeyer, though roughly Andrea's size, had
red hair and pale blue eyes. Furthermore, Andrea had no desire to
end up on a Germany-bound merchant ship.
Muttering a curse for the benefit of his
neighbours, he turned back into the crowd, forging his way through
the press with shoulders the size and hardness of a bank safe, a
dockyard matey who had left something behind and was on his way to
fetch it.
As he reached the root of the quays one of the
submarines emitted a black cloud of exhaust, and the morning filled
with the blaring rattle of a cold diesel. Start engines meant that
they would be sailing at any minute. He looked at his watch. In
eighteen minutes, to be precise. And precise was what they would
be.
He looked across the mouth of the harbour at
the town of San Eusebio, glowing now in the pale dawn. The windows
of its houses were smoke-blackened, empty as dead men's eyes, the
campaniles of its two churches jagged as smashed teeth. But
alongside the quays, in front of the blind warehouses lining the
harbour, the fishing fleet was anchored two deep. And among them,
on the outside near the front, were the tar-black hull and
ill-furled red sails of the Stella Maris.
Four hundred yards away. A short swim in the
Mediterranean. But the four-hundred-yard neck here had a roiling
turbulence, with little strips of inexplicable ripples. The tide
was going out, sucking at the base of the quay. It looked to Andrea
as if there was a very large amount of water trying to get out of a
very small exit. Andrea guessed that this might be a long swim
indeed.
But Andrea had been brought up on the shores of
the Aegean. Among his recent ancestors he numbered divers for
sponges, and he himself had spent his childhood as much in as out
of the water. Andrea swam like a fish -
A Mediterranean fish.
Slowly and deliberately, Andrea pulled a pencil
and notebook from his overall pocket and walked to the seaward end
of the outermost quay. Nobody paid him any attention as he passed
the sentry at the foot of the gangway of the outermost U-boat. Why
should they? He was a large inspector in blue overalls, frowning
with his thick black eyebrows at the state of the quay. The Germans
were a nation of inspectors. It was natural, in this little German
world on the edge of Spain, that even in the final stages of an
evacuation someone should be making notes on the condition of the
quay.
At the end of the quay, iron rungs led down the
granite. For the benefit of anyone watching, Andrea stuck his
pencil behind his ear, pursed his lips and shook his head. Then he
began to climb down the iron rungs.
As he sank below the level of the quay, he was
out of sight of anyone except the sentries in the fortaleza,
and he was hoping that with sixteen minutes to sailing, the
sentries would have been withdrawn. From the bottom rung he let
notebook and pencil whisk away on the current. He struggled out of
his overalls, kicked off his boots, and removed the rest of his
clothes. They hovered a moment in the eddy at the foot of the wall,
then sailed off down the tide.
Naked, Andrea was brown and hairy as a bear. He
touched the gold crucifix round his neck, and lowered himself into
the green swirl at the foot of the rungs. He thought, it is
freezing, this Atlantic.
Then he launched himself into the
tide.
'Ritter,' said Mallory to the sentry at
the foot of the gangway opposite the one up which Miller had
disappeared.
The sentry was wearing leather trousers and a
jersey coming unravelled at the hem. His face as he glanced at
Mallory's identity card and handed it back was pale, with a greasy
film of sweat. Scared, thought Mallory, as he walked up the
gangplank. These may be secret weapons, but they are stilll U-boats,
and U-boat crews do not live long. To drown in a steel box, inch by
inch ...
Mallory had tried that once. It was not
something he ever wanted to try again.
But he was standing on the U-boat's grey steel
deck, the worn enamel handles of the toolbox slippery in his hand,
and there was a hatch forward, standing open. The torpedo
room was forward. On a submarine this size, a grenade would do
little damage. Unless, Miller had said, you used it as a fuse, a
primer, stuck to the tons of Amatol or Torpex or whatever they
used. Then you would get a result -
Mallory made himself walk towards the hatch. It
would be easier to stay on deck, not go below, into that little
steel space that might at any moment go under the water
-
Easy or not, it had to be done.
The hatch was a double steel door in the deck.
A steel ladder plunged into a yellow-lit gloom. At the bottom of
the ladder a face looked up, sallow and bearded, blue bags under
the eyes. A Petty Officer.
'What the hell do you want?' said the Petty
Officer.
'Check toilets,' said Mallory, dumb as an
ox.
'I don't know anything about any toilets,' said
the Petty Officer. 'Go and see the Kapitan.'
'Where's the Kapitan?' Mallory could feel the
minutes ticking.
'Conning tower. You'd better be
quick.'
Mallory went back down the deck, and up the
metal rungs on the side of the conning tower. He took a deep breath
and let himself down into the tower itself.
The smell was oil and sweat, and something
else. Peroxide. A man in a grubby white polo-neck jersey with an
Iron Cross was arguing with another man. Both had pale faces and
beards.
Mallory cleared his throat. 'Come to fix the
toilet,' he said.
The man with the Iron Cross was wearing a
Kapitan's cap. 'Now?' he said. 'I didn't know it was broken. Get
off my boat.'
'Orders,' said Mallory. The morning was a disc
of daylight seen through the hatchway.
'I'm Kapitan -'
The Herr General was most
insistent.'
'I shit on the Herr General,' said the Kapitan.
'Hell. Go and look at the toilet, then. But I warn you, we are
sailing in ten minutes, and if you're stilll on board I'll put you
out through a torpedo tube.'
Mallory said, stolidly. That will not be
necessary.' But the Kapitan was back at his argument, with no time
for dockyard mateys.
Engine at the back. Torpedoes at the front.
Front it is.
Mallory hefted his toolbox, shinned down the
ladder under the periscope and started along the corridor leading
forward.
There was a crew messroom, racked torpedoes,
bunks everywhere. The lights were yellow. There seemed to be scores
of men, packed dense as sardines in a tin; but this was worse,
because it was a tin in which the sardines had somehow suddenly
come
alive. Mallory shoved his way through. There
are no windows, said the voice in his mind. You are below the level
of the water -
Shut up, he told himself. You are stilll
alongside.
He walked under the open hatch. The Petty
Officer glanced at him and glanced away. Ahead, the passage ran
through an oval doorway and ended. On the other side of the
bulkhead he saw a long chamber lined left and right with fat tubes.
The torpedo room.
And on his right, a tiny compartment: a
lavatory. Head.
He looked round. The Petty Officer was watching
him. Mallory winked, went into the lavatory and closed the door.
His hand was sweating on the handles of his toolbox. Count to five,
he thought.
There was a new sound, a vibration. The engines
had started. Somewhere, a klaxon began to moan. Now or never,
thought Mallory.
He walked quickly into the corridor, scratching
his head, and turned right into the torpedo room.
There were two men in there, securing torpedoes
to the racks. They were like horizontal organ pipes, those
torpedoes. Both the men were ratings.
'Shit,' said one of them. 'You'd better
hurry,'
'Checking seals,' said Mallory. 'Couple of
minutes. Which one of these things do you fire
first?'
Those,' said the rating, pointing. 'Now if you
would be so good, go away and shut up and let us get on with
getting ready to load those damn fish into those damn
tubes.'
The torpedoes the rating had pointed at were
the first rack, up by one of the ranks of oval doors that must lead
into the tubes. Mallory wedged himself in behind the torpedoes, out
of sight of the men. He-found a stanchion on the steel wall of the
submarine and looped the string lanyard on the grenade's handle
over it. Then he unscrewed the grenade's cap, gently pulled out the
porcelain button on the end of the string fuse, and tied it to the
shaft of the torpedo's propeller.
First one.
He took out a spanner and crossed the
compartment. The rating did not look up. He attached a second
grenade to the port side
lower torpedo, where the shadows were thickest.
The third and fourth he attached to the next row up.
There were feet moving on steel somewhere above
his head. The vibrations of the engine were louder
now.
That's okay,' said Mallory. 'Don't want sewage
everywhere, do we?'
The ratings ignored him. He walked out of the
torpedo compartment, down the corridor. The hatch was stilll open.
He could smell the blessed air. He pushed past a couple of men, put
his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.
A hard hand took his arm above the elbow. A
quiet voice said, 'If you're here to mend the toilets, what were
you doing in the torpedo room?'
Mallory looked round.
The voice belonged to the bearded Petty
Officer.
'Cast off!' roared a voice on
deck.
Above his head, the hatch slammed
shut.
Twenty yards away, Dusty Miller was in a
different world. Miller was a trained demolitions man. He reckoned
he had seven minutes. He had gone straight for the conning tower,
checked out the Kapitan and the navigating officer bent over the
charts. 'Come to look at the lavs,' he said.
The navigating officer gave him the
not-interested look of a man ten minutes away from an important
feat of underwater navigation. 'What lavs?'
They just said the lavs.'
'You know where they are.'
Miller shrugged, feeling the weight of his
toolbox, the hammer, the spanners, the four stick grenades in the
bottom compartment. 'Yeah,' he said.
Mallory had gone forward, looking for the
torpedoes. Miller went aft.
On most U-boats, the engine room consisted of a
big diesel for surface running and to charge huge banks of
lead-acid batteries, and an electric motor for underwater running.
The Walter process was different. The diesel did all the work. When
the U-boat was under water, the engine drew the oxygen for its
combustion from disintegrated hydrogen peroxide, and vented the
carbon dioxide it produced as a waste gas directly into the water,
where it dissolved.
Miller went down the hatch in the control-room
deck and crept along the low steel corridor. Men shoved past him.
He took no notice. He wandered along, apparently tracing one of the
parallel ranks of grey-painted pipes leading aft along the
bulkhead.
And after not many steps, he was in the engine
room.
It was as it should have been: the thick tubes
coming from the fuel tanks, each with its stopcock: oils, water,
hydrogen peroxide. There were men working in there, working hard,
oiling, establishing settings on the banks of valve wheels. The big
diesel was running with a clattering roar too loud to hear. Miller
caught an oiler's eye, winked, nodded. The oiler nodded back.
Nobody would be in a submarine's engine room at a time like this
unless he had business there. And at a time like this, the business
would certainly be legitimate.
So Miller stooped, apparently examining the
pipes, and ran his professional eye over the maze of tubes and
chambers.
And made his decision; or rather, confirmed the
decision he had made already.
On the surface, the Walter engine was a
naturally aspirated diesel. The changeover from air to peroxide was
activated by a float switch on the conning tower. It was a simple
device; when the water reached a certain level, the switch closed,
opening the valve from the peroxide tank to the disintegrator. In
Miller's view, the destruction of the valve would release a lot of
inflammable stuff into a space full of nasty sparks.
There was a very real danger of explosions,
thought Miller happily, opening his toolbox.
His fingers worked quickly. The float switch
controlled a simple gate valve. Jape the grenade to the pipe. Tie
the string fuse to one of the struts of the gate valve wheel. When
the wheel turned, the string would pull out of the grenade. Five
seconds later ... well, thought Miller; ladies and gentlemen are
requested to extinguish all smoking materials.
He arranged two more grenades, using the length
of the string fuses to make for slightly greater delays, one on the
water intake and one on the throttle linkage where it passed a dark
corner.
Then he walked back, climbed into the conning
tower, and said, 'All done.'
The navigating officer did not look up. 'Piss
off,' he said.
'Oh, all right,' said Miller. He went up the
ladder and into the chill, diesel-smelling dawn, and trotted down
the gangplank and onto the quay.
He knew something was wrong as soon as his
boots hit the stone. Two men were hauling the gangway of the boat
opposite back onto the quay. Men were moving on the foredeck,
waiting to haul in the lines when the stevedores let them go.
Miller saw one of them bend and slam shut an open hatch. To left
and right the quay was a desert of granite paving, dotted with a
few figures in uniform, a few in overalls. Miller had worked with
Mallory for long enough to recognise him, never mind what he was
wearing.
None of the figures was Mallory.
So Mallory was stilll on the boat, and the boat
was sailing.
On the boat opposite, a couple of heads showed
on the conning tower. One of them wore the cap of a
Kapitan.
'Oi!' yelled Miller, above the pop and rattle
of the diesels. 'You've got my mate on board.'
The Kapitan looked round, frowning. The springs
were off. They were down to one-and-one, a bow line and a stern
line. They were sailing in two minutes. The Kapitan looked at the
scarecrow figure on the dock, the chipped blue toolbox, the lanky
arms and legs protruding from the too-short overalls. He shouted to
one of the hands on the narrow deck.
The hand shrugged, scratching his head under
his grey watch cap. He bent. He caught hold of the handles of the
hatch, and pulled.
Mallory's whole body was covered in sweat. His
mind did not seem to be working. Drowned in a steel room, he was
thinking. No. Not that -
'What were you doing in the torpedo room?' said
the Petty Officer.
'Pipes,' said Mallory. 'Checking
pipes.'
'Like hell,' said the Petty
Officer.
And at that moment, there fell from heaven a
beam of pure
grey light that pierced the reeking yellow
gloom of the submarine like the arrow of God.
The hatch was open.
Mallory knew that a miracle had happened. It
was a miracle that would take away the death by drowning in a metal
room, and let him die under the sky, where he did not mind dying in
a just cause.
He also knew that the Petty Officer could not
live.
Mallory looked up the hatch. There was a head
up there. 'Now coming,' he shouted. The head vanished. His hand was
in the small of his back, closing round the handle of his dagger in
the sheath there. It came round his body low and hard, and thumped
into the Petty Officer's chest, up and under the ribs. He kept the
momentum going, shoved the man back onto a bunk, and pulled a
blanket over him. Then he went back up the ladder.
The man on deck kicked the hatch shut. A
stevedore had cast off the lines. Green water widened between the
submarine and the quay. From the conning tower, a voice roared,
'Jump!'
Mallory looked round. He saw the Kapitan, a
cold, vindictive face above the grey armour plate.
'Doesn't like dockyard people,' said the man on
the bow line. 'Nor do I.' And he put up a seaboot, and
shoved.
Mallory could have dodged, broken the man's
leg, saved his dignity. But what he wanted now had nothing to do
with dignity. It was to get off this submarine,
quick.
He jumped.
He heard the toolbox clatter on the submarine's
pressure hull. He saw the blue wink of it disappear into deep
water.
It, and its three grenades.
Then the water was in his mouth and eyes, and
he was swimming for the quay. He could hear the Kapitan laughing.
He paid no attention.
He was thinking, five minutes to destroy the
third U-boat.
How?
Andrea was swimming too. In fact, he was
swimming for his life. The waters of Greece were warm sapphires,
blown by the meltemi certainly, but tideless,
unmoving.
The waters of Vizcaya were different. The
waters of Vizcaya were dark emeralds, cold as a cat's
eye.
And they moved.
When Andrea had lowered his shrinking body into
the water and let go of the iron rung, the eddy had taken him and
spun him, so that the quays and the harbour whirled around his
head. The cold had stolen his breath at first, so he trod water,
and watched the harbour wheel a second time. Then he had fixed his
eyes on the distant, ill-kempt masts of the Stella Maris,
and started to swim.
On the face of it, things were fine. But he
knew as soon as he entered the channel that this was all
wrong.
He could breathe now. He was swimming, the
great muscles of his shoulders knotting and bunching, driving his
body through the cold salt water. He was swimming breaststroke. If
they saw him, they would see only a head, a small head, that they
would think was a seal. There had been anti-submarine nets off the
end of the quays. But those nets were down now, folded away in the
holds of the merchant ships, because the submarines were coming
out.
So it was just a four-hundred yard swim to the
Stella Maris. Ten minutes. Fine.
Except that it was not working out that
way.
The tide was like a river, sweeping him out of
the narrows and into the sea. The Stella Moris' masts were
sliding away upstream, fast, terrifyingly fast.
This was new. And it was unpleasant, not
because it was frightening, because nothing physical, not even
death - especially not death - frightened Andrea. But Andrea's life
was based on not letting people down, and allowing the things that
had been planned to come to pass. He had perfect faith that Mallory
and Miller would accomplish their part of the job.
He was beginning to have less faith that he
could do the same.
In spite of the Benzedrine, he was growing
tired. Even he, even Andrea, was growing tired. He knew his
reserves of strength were finite. There was no point in trying to
swim straight at his objective.
Brains, not brawn.
He turned untill he was looking at the tall
black bows of the merchant ships anchored in the harbour. He could
hear the clank of their windlasses as they came up over their
anchors, could see a couple of launches crawling across the glossy
shield of the water. He began to swim, facing directly into the
current and about ten degrees to the right.
For anyone else, it would have been instant
exhaustion, suicide.
For Andrea, it was possible.
He swam with short, powerful strokes into the
current, building a bow-wave of water on his nose. The quay where
he had started had fallen away as he had been washed out to sea.
But after five minutes of hard swimming, it had also fallen away to
the left.
And the inner of the two merchant ships, which
had been stern-on, was now showing its starboard
side.
He did not let himself hope that he was making
progress. He swam on doggedly, another two hundred strokes. He
crossed a spine of white-tipped standing waves. A couple of waves
smacked his face. He inhaled salt water, choked. He was really
tired now. Now he had to look.
He looked.
The Stella Maris was a long way ahead,
up-tide. But she was only some twenty degrees to the
right.
He was getting across.
But his troubles were by no means
over.
There was a bigger lift to the waves now, a
regular roll. When he looked ninety degrees left and ninety degrees
right, he saw not the quays of the town or the cliffs of the Cabo
beneath the walls of the fortaleza. He saw open
sea.
Andrea swam on. He was holding steady now.
There was less tide out here. But he could feel in the screaming
muscles of his legs and shoulders and the hammer of his heart that
he was approaching the limit of his strength.
In Andrea's book, it was the mark of a man that
he did not admit that there were limits.
Somewhere, Andrea found a reserve. With that
reserve he started to move forwards. Progress heated his blood, and
the heat of his blood helped progress. He found that he was moving
up
the slack water off the beach on the San
Eusebio side of the channel, and that the quays, with their double
ranks of fishing boats end-on, were coming closer.
He trod water for a moment.
His feet touched bottom. He looked back the way
he had come. Except for a strip of deep green in the middle of the
passage, the water on either side of the channel was paling. It
looked as if it dried out at low tide. Ahead, the water was also
pale, darkening only where the channel swept in under the quay
where the fishing fleet was moored.
It had been a big swim.
But if he had waited another five minutes, he
could probably have walked most of it.
Another man might have laughed, or cried, or
felt relief. As far as Andrea was concerned, none of that was
necessary. An exhausting set of conditions had ceased to apply, and
a less exhausting set now obtained. The objective remained: to get
aboard the Stella Maris within the next - he glanced at his
waterproof watch - four minutes.
He began to wade.
Hauptsturmfuhrer von Kratow did not like Spain.
Latins were a slovenly bunch, racially suspect and entirely lacking
in culture. But von Kratow did realise that to an operation such as
Project Werwolf, they had their uses. It was just, he mused,
trotting up the stone stairs of the fortaleza to report to
the Herr General, that there seemed to be something in the air.
Organising an embarkation should not be difficult. But there was a
spirit of... well, manana ... that made even SS order and
system show a tendency to buckle.
stilll, everything was in order now. The attack
at the main gate seemed to have been a false alarm. The embarkation
was almost complete. All that remained was to report to the
General, who would be highly delighted. A bastard, the General,
with his Turkish tobacco and what his troops reckoned was the
limpest artificial wrist in the Reich. But an appreciative bastard,
particularly if, like von Kratow, you were a cleancut Junker with a
nice leg for a jackboot, and you did your work correctly. Von
Kratow was pretty sure that three repaired submarines and a
smooth embarkation would mean promotion.
He pushed open the elaborate door of the
General's quarters, and sniffed for the Turkish
tobacco.
There was no Turkish tobacco.
Von Kratow frowned.
For as long as he had been the General's ADC,
there had been a cigarette smouldering between the General's
artificial fingers. The only time he was not smoking was when he
was asleep. He would not be asleep now, not with the evacuation
nearly finished.
Von Kratow opened the door.
A buttery morning light was pouring through the
part of the Gothic window not covered by the curtains. The tobacco
smell hung stale in the air, and last night's fire had died to
bitter ashes. Von Kratow walked across to the desk, and collected
himself a handful of Turkish cigarettes from the box. The General
would never notice. The Luftwaffe brought him new supplies weekly;
God knew where they found them nowadays.
Von Kratow yawned and stretched. It had been a
long night, in a long series of long nights. But now it was
over.
Beyond the stone fretwork of the windows the
harbour was a sheet of green glass lit by a heavy yellow sun
glaring just above the mountains to the east. The merchant ships
were up over their anchors, the launches heading back on what must
be almost the last of their journeys to pick up the now diminished
clods of men from the quay. Down in the repair facility, the
Werwolf boats were emitting a blue mist of exhaust. The inshore
boat had dropped her shore lines and seemed to be nosing towards
the exit.
So that's it, thought von Kratow. Mission
accomplished. Time to catch the boat. Time to make sure the Herr
General caught the boat.
Von Kratow was a tidy-minded man. Before he
went to knock on the bedroom door, he drew back the heavy brocade
curtain that was half-obscuring the window.
That was when he found the
General.
For perhaps ten seconds von Kratow stared
stony-faced at the oyster silk underwear, the ivory-white skin of
the face, the black flow of dried blood from the right ear. Then
his hand went to the cigarette box on the desk. He lit one of the
General's cigarettes and thought, silk underclothes.
Then he put out a deliberate finger, and
pressed the button behind the curtain.
The general alarm button.
Suddenly, the Cabo de la Calavera was full of
bells.
Mallory crawled up the iron rungs on the
granite wall, coughing water. The quays opened in front of his
eyes: a sheet of granite paving and drying puddles, studded with
cranes, riven by the three great crevasses of the submarine docks.
The innermost submarine was moving. From behind him there came the
clatter of diesels, and the churn of water blowing from ducted
screws over rudders. That submarine - his submarine - was on the
way out too.
The top of the conning tower of the last
submarine was stationary. It stayed in his eye as he rested at the
top of the ladder. He was tired now, Benzedrine or no Benzedrine,
so tired that he could hardly drag himself up a set of rungs in the
quay.
He saw a terrible thing.
He saw Dusty Miller on the conning tower of
that submarine. Miller was arguing with a man in a cap, demanding
admission, by the look of it. The man in the cap, the Kapitan,
presumably, was telling him you are cluttering up the joint, and I
am sailing now, so get off, before you get stuck.
Dusty Miller won. He vanished from
view.
Quick, thought Mallory. For God's sake, be
quick.
He looked at his watch. It was three minutes to
five. Early, he thought. They're leaving early.
Too late.
Mallory began to crawl away from the submarine
he had visited, the submarine with the dead Petty Officer in the
head -
It was then he noticed that the harbour was
full of bells.
The conning tower into which Miller had
vanished began to slide along the quay.
Mallory could almost hear the orders: in the
event of problems, move out.
So three minutes early, the U-boats were moving
out.
And one of them had Miller on
board.
Something snapped in Mallory. He clambered to
his feet, exhaustion forgotten. He stumbled along the quay after
that conning tower, yelling hoarsely with rage. But the conning
tower slid away faster than he could chase it down the
quay.
The three great U-boats gathered in the turning
basin at the end of the quays, stemming the tide: huge grey metal
whales the length of destroyers, solid as rocks with their squat,
streamlined conning towers, white water churning from their
propellers. Men scuttled on their decks, making the final
preparations for sea. Their Kapitans conferred, conning tower to
conning tower, with the casualness of men who knew that a hundred
metres of water made them untouchable.
Mallory looked over the edge of the quay, made
frantic by the bells.
He saw a rowing boat.
It was a small, filthy rowing boat, a quarter
full of water. But it held oars and rowlocks, and it was more or
less afloat.
Mallory grabbed the painter that tied it to the
bollard on the quay. He wound his ruined hands into that rope,
climbed down it and cut it with his knife. The boat floated free.
There was an idea in his mind, a crazy idea, born out of
exhaustion. Go to that U-boat. Hammer on the hull. Tell them there
had been a mistake. Dockyard matey inside. Needs taking off. Quick.
Then they could go on, aboard the Stella Maris, and have at
least some chance -
He pulled with the oars. The dinghy shot across
the eddy at the end of the quay.
The tide caught it.
Four knots of tide.
Mallory could row at two knots, flat
out.
The U-boats were gliding past at horrifying
speed. Mallory turned, tried to get back.
Not a hope. The U-boats might as well have been
in Berlin.
With a great sickness in his heart, Mallory
began to crab across the channel towards the Stella Maris.
Soon the air was full of whipping sounds, and little explosions,
like fireworks. Someone was shooting at him. In fact a lot of
people were shooting at him, from the merchant ships. Dully, he
remembered the rings of sandbags on their hatch covers, the snouts
of machine guns, other guns too. They would probably hit
him.
Mallory found that he did not care. Something
had gone wrong, he did not care what. They had lost Miller. A voice
in his head, a voice like Jensen's, said: if Miller had to die,
this was how he would have wanted to die.
Mallory's own voice answered:
rubbish.
'Orders,' shouted Dusty Miller to the Kapitan
of the last U-boat. 'From the General. I have to check the
officer's head. You do not sail for five minutes.'
The Kapitan had a cropped bullet head and a
broken nose, and a look of extreme exhaustion.
He said to the coxswain at his side. Take this
man below. Make sure that he is on the quay when we sail. This is
your responsibility.'
'Aye, aye,' said the coxswain. He was a small,
pale man, and he did not look pleased to be sent off the conning
tower. 'What is it you want?'
'Engine room head,' said Miller, rattling his
toolbox.
There isn't an engine room
head.'
'I got my orders,' said Miller.
The coxswain said, 'I'll show you, then.' He
started down the ladder, and headed towards the back end of the
boat.
The conning tower hatch was a disc of daylight
above the control room. As Miller started down the ladder, he
thought he heard bells, and shouting. But he knew he had five
minutes in hand. The bells must be meaningless. What was in the
forefront of his mind was how he was going to get rid of this
damned coxswain.
The central alleyway of the U-boat was familiar
territory to Miller now: yellow lights, heat, sweaty faces. What
was not familiar was the sound of the engine. It was stilll a huge,
clattering roar. But now it was a roar that changed pitch, went on
and up, held steady, and went up again.
The coxswain stopped. He looked at Miller. His
lips moved. It was not possible to hear what he said over the
racket of the diesel. But it was easy enough to read his
lips.
Miller's heart thumped once, painfully, in his
chest.
The words the coxswain's lips were framing
were, 'We've sailed.'
For a second, Miller's face felt wooden with
shock. Then he grinned. 'Well, then,' he said, though he knew the
other man would not hear him. 'We've got a load of
time.'
The coxswain arrived at the engine room.
'Look,' he said. 'No head.'
Miller grinned, his wide, starry-eyed idiot's
grin. 'Oh, yeah,' he said.
The coxswain pointed back along the corridor
towards the ladder. Miller could almost see the thoughts running
through the man's mind: this is not my fault, it's because we
sailed early. All I have to do is get this fool back to the
Kapitan. The Kapitan has forgotten him in the heat of the moment. I
will be in the clear -
Miller stared at the coxswain, stilll grinning,
as the coxswain made pointing gestures back towards the ladder.
Miller craved that ladder like a fiend craves dope. The coxswain
came back to him and shoved him towards the ladder.
Miller hit him.
He hit him hard in the stomach. If it had been
Andrea, the punch would have killed the man. But Miller was a
demolition expert, not a bare-hands killer. The coxswain whooped
and doubled up onto the deck. Miller looked round.
There were three men in the alleyway. They were
all watching.
Miller stepped over the body on the deck, and
walked smartly aft. The roar of the engines had steadied now. He
walked through the water-tight door into the engine room. He
slammed it, and dogged the handles quickly behind him. Ahead of
him, hanging from a stanchion in the deckhead, was a chain hoist.
Just like a mine, thought Miller, grabbing the chain. Miller had
spent thousands of hours in mines, some of them very happy. As he
wrapped the chain round the door handles, he felt right at
home.
Someone was trying to undog the door now. When
bare hands did not work, they started to hit the handles with what
sounded like a sledge hammer. Bash away, thought Miller. We are
talking good German chain here, and submarines are not built to
resist the enemy within.
In fact, enemies within were virtually unknown
on submarines.
Because when a submarine went down it went
down, enemy within and all.
Miller told himself: it had to happen, one
day.
It did not help.
He bent and opened the toolbox, and took out
the two grenades.
Suddenly, he smelt tobacco
smoke.
Round the end of the diesel block came a pale,
oil-stained man in a singlet, with an undoubtedly illicit cigarette
in his mouth. He glanced at Miller's face, the glance of a crew
member who knows his shipmates and is baffled by the emergence of a
new face from their midst. Then his eyes moved to Miller's
hands.
Miller grinned at him, and put the grenades
stealthily back in the box.
The man's eyes stayed glued to the
grenades.
He went white as an oily rag. Then he picked up
a wrench, dropped his cigarette, and came at Miller.
He was a short man, almost dwarfish, as wide as
he was high. The coxswain had been out of shape because he only did
whatever they did in the control room. This man was an engine room
artificer, with big muscles under the white skin of his shoulders.
He got both hands on his wrench, and he hefted it like a baseball
bat, and he came down the aisle at Miller like an oil-stained
Nibelung. Miller swung the toolbox at the man. It was an
overconfident swing, inspired by too much Benzedrine and not enough
judgement. It missed by a mile. The Nibelung smacked at the toolbox
with his wrench. The toolbox flew out of Miller's hand, skidding
down the gratings, bursting open as it slid. Tools and grenades
spilled out. Miller caught a glimpse of the grenades, unarmed,
useless, skittering into the tunnel where the propeller shaft ran.
Then he threw himself to one side, and the wrench whacked into the
steel bulkhead where his head had been.
Miller stood there, back to the door, panting,
heart hammering. The yellow lights shone in the short man's sweat.
His face was a flat mask of anger. Then Miller saw it flicker, and
he knew why. There was a new note to the engine: a high-pitched
whine. The deck was 'I'llting underfoot, gently.
The whine was the disintegrator. The engine had
switched from fuel-air to fuel-decomposed hydrogen
peroxide.
The submarine was diving.
The squat man came at Miller again. Miller
kicked him in the stomach. It was like kicking corrugated iron. The
man came on regardless.
Away from the door, thought Miller. Can't move
away from the door, or he'll take the chains off, and the rest of
the crew will get in -
The spanner crashed against the metal. Miller
skipped out of the way. Door or no door, he was no good with his
head caved in.
Miller knew that he was losing.
But the squat man had forgotten the door even
existed. He was a submarine engineer, and when people bring
grenades into their engine rooms, submarine engineers lose the
power of rational thought. He swung again.
Miller dodged clumsily. The wrench caught him
on the shoulder, numbing his arm. He stumbled back against the
engine, head between the clashing tappets, and rolled down to the
grating.
He saw another wrench. Picked it up. Too heavy
to swing. Better than nothing.
The Nibelung came at him again. Miller scuttled
round the far side of the engine. Retreating, always retreating.
This was a man who knew his patch, and what he was going to do was
hound Miller into a corner, and kill him, and that would be that. A
Werwolf on the loose, and all that work in vain.
It was the thought of the wasted effort that
really upset Miller. Energy stormed through his veins. As the man
came in again, he swung his wrench. The man jumped back. The heavy
steel head whacked a pipe in the wall, just under the thread of a
joint.
And suddenly the engine room smelt like a
hairdresser's salon.
The Nibelung's face had changed, too. He was
staring at that pipe that Miller had hit. And he did not look angry
any more. He looked frightened out of his wits.
Miller felt the weight of the wrench in his
hand. He knew he did not have many more swings left in him. One
more.
The man stilll had half his mind on the
pipe.
Miller swung the wrench at the pipe, then
again, into the side of the man's head.
There was a solid chunk that Miller felt
rather than heard. The man's eyes rolled back, and he went down
like a bag of cement.
Dead, thought Miller. Dead.
Quick.
Peroxide was roaring out of the pipe, gurgling
over the body of the engineer. As it hit the engineer's body, it
foamed.
There was another catalyst that broke down
hydrogen peroxide into hydrogen and oxygen. It was called
peroxidase, and it was found in human blood.
Miller ran to the aft end of the engine room.
There was a sort of cupboard next to the propeller shaft gland, a
steel-doored locker that bore the words
Siebe-Gorman.
The engine room was filling with free oxygen
and hydrogen.
On the deck, the Nibelung's cigarette ceased to
glow and began to burn with a hard, bright flame.
Quick, thought Miller.
It was all feeling very slow to Mallory, as if
the world had started moving through a new kind of time. Viscous
and syrupy. He saw the flat green mirror of the water, the red and
green tracers rising from the merchant ships, slow as little
balloons, queuing up to accelerate round his head and kick the
water to foam. Under the rocky brow of the Cabo de la Calavera he
saw the U-boats moving, hovering, arranging themselves into line
ahead. Miller was on the lead boat. Then came the other boat Miller
had visited. Mai-lory's was last.
The rowing boat rocked in the little waves of a
tide-rip. The sun was warm on his face. Something smashed into the
transom of the rowing boat. He shielded his eyes from the
splinters, felt the rip of flesh on his cheek, the run of liquid
that must be blood. The rowing boat spun in an eddy. He saw the San
Eusebio town quay, the fishing boats tied up alongside. The
movement of the rowing boat in the eddy made the masts of the boats
appear to be moving -
One set of masts was moving. The masts of the
Stella Maris.
They were moving slowly, crawling against the
spars of the other boats and the blank shutters of the quayside
warehouses. They were accelerating, the black hull narrowing, the
masts coming into line as whoever was at the wheel
pointed the nose straight at Mallory. Coming to pick him
up.
But not Miller.
The U-boats were moving out from the quays now,
gliding slowly across the peaceful green satin of the water. The
first was already in the channel, the green water rumpling over its
deck, diving. Diving quickly, so as not to be seen leaving a
neutral harbour. Diving with Miller on board.
Metal smashed into the rowing boat by Mallory's
feet. Suddenly there was water where there had once been planking,
water pouring in through three holes the size of fists. Mallory
tried to stem the water with his foot, but his foot was too small,
and suddenly the rowing boat was part of the harbour, and cold
water was up around Mallory's neck.
An engine was thumping close at hand. The
tar-black nose of the Stella Maris swept up, pushing a white
moustache of foam. A head leaning over the bow said, 'Bonjour,
man Capitaine.' The head of Andrea.
Andrea's hand came down. It grasped Mallory's
wrist. Mallory felt himself plucked skyward, grabbed a wooden rail,
and landed face down on the Stella's filthy
deck.
'Welcome aboard,' said Andrea. 'Where's
Miller?'
A burst of machine-gun fire smacked into the
Stella's stern. Mallory pointed.
The lead U-boat was halfway down the channel.
All that was showing was its conning tower.
Andrea's Byzantine eyes were without
expression. Only the great stilllness of the man gave a clue to his
emotion. The Stella Maris turned, and headed down the
channel. Mallory lurched aft and took the wheel from Jaime. He
steered the Stella right up to the flank of the last U-boat.
There were stilll heads on the U-boat's conning tower. One of the
heads was yelling, a hand waving at this dirty little fishing boat
to keep clear, keep out of the way. The fire from the merchant
ships was slackening now, for fear of hitting the
U-boat.
And down below, thought Mallory, down in the
torpedo room the hands would be manoeuvring the hoists over to the
first torpedo, opening the tube, loading up, ready for an enemy
waiting
out there in the Bay. The hoists would be
lifting, stretching the string fuse of the grenade, scratching the
primer, starting the five-second delay.
Mallory stood there in the cool morning breeze,
watching the two conning towers ahead, one half-submerged, the
other with its base awash. Sixty yards away, the water began to
creep up the deck of the last U-boat. The heads were gone from the
conning tower.
There was no explosion.
They have found the grenades, thought Mallory.
How can you expect to destroy a U-boat with grenades and string? He
wound the wheel to port, to keep the Stella in the narrow
strip of turquoise separating the pale green of the shallows from
the ink-blue of the deep-water channel. The U-boat's hull was under
now.
It was getting away.
' Mallory groped for a cigarette, put it in his
mouth, and watched the channel.
The channel blew up in his face.
It blew up in a jet of searing white flame that
went all the way up into the sky, taking with it millions of tons
of water that climbed and climbed untill it looked as if it would
never stop climbing, a reverse waterfall that made a noise loud
enough to make a thunderclap sound like the dropping of a pin on a
Persian rug. A wall of water smashed into the Stella Maris,
walloped her onto her beam ends and broke over her. When she
lurched upright again, her mainmast was gone. But somehow her
Bolander was stilll thumping away, and Andrea was up among the
rigging with an axe, chopping at shrouds and stays, kicking the
tangle overboard where it lay wallowing like a sea monster,
mingling with the oil and mattresses and other less identifiable
bits of flotsam emanating from the stilll-boiling patch of sand and
water that had once been one-third of the Werwolf
pack.
Must have been right down in the channel,
thought Mallory. Otherwise it would have blown us up with it
-
Further out to sea there was another rumble,
followed by an eruption of bubbles on the surface. The bubbles were
full of smoke. When they burst, they left a film of oil on the
surface.
Hugues said, 'What was that?'
'Another U-boat,' said Mallory. The bubbles
rose for thirty seconds: a lot of Bubbles, big ones. No bodies. No
mattresses. A machine of steel had become air and
oil.
'Bon Dieu,' said Hugues,
appalled.
Jaime said. The ships.' He was looking
backwards, over his shoulder.
The merchant ships had their anchors up.
Magnified and indistinct beyond the pall of smoke and spray stilll
descending from the first U-boat, they looked huge. From the
machine guns on their decks the tracers were rising
again.
'Merde,' said Jaime.
The ships were faster than the Stella
Maris. They would catch her up and sink her. At best, they
would sink her. Well, Dusty, thought Mallory, with a new and
surprising cheerfulness. We are all in this together. Andrea had
pulled the Bren out of the hold, and was lying on the
Stella's afterdeck, taking aim at the lead merchant ship.
Flame danced at the muzzle. A Bren against ships. Not fair, thought
Mallory -
From the seaward there came a rumble that made
the Stella shudder under Mallory's feet. When he looked
round, he saw a white alp of water rise offshore. And he forgot
about the merchant ships, forgot about everything. For that alp,
collapsing as soon as it had risen, was a watery headstone for
Dusty Miller.
Three out of three. One hundred per cent
success.
But Dusty Miller was dead.
Bullets from the merchant ship lashed the air
beside his head, and whacked into the Stella's crapulous
timbers. Mallory paid them no heed. He turned the fishing boat's
nose for the open sea.
It was calm, that sea, its emerald smoothness
marred only by patches of oil and debris. The old fishing boat
laboured towards the northern.horizon, reeking of hot metal from
the engine room hatch, rolling heavily with the volume of water in
her belly.
And on her heels, gaining ground, Uruguayan
flags limp on their halyards, spitting a blizzard of tracer, came
the merchantmen.
Hugues said, 'What now?'
Mallory grinned, a grin that had no humour in
it. His eyes were shining with a brilliance that Hugues found
completely horrible.
'We take cover,' said Mallory. They sink us, or
catch us, or both.'
Bullets were slamming into the Stella's
deck. The air whined with splinters. 'She will fall apart,' said
Hugues.
'Very probably,' said Mallory. They were out of
the harbour now. The leading merchant ship was entering the
narrows, spewing black oil-smoke from its funnel, heading steadily
down the dark-blue water of the channel. Once it was through the
channel, it would speed up. And that would be the end of the
Stella Maris.
They did not bother to take cover. They watched
the bow of the merchant ship: the high bow, with the moustache of
water under its nose, heading busily along the channel. Above its
nose was the bridge, the thin blue smoke of the machine guns on its
wings, and the heads of men, pin-sized, watching. It would be that
moustache of water that would be the last movement. The Stella
Maris would rise on it just before the merchant ship's nose
came down and rolled her under, crushed her into the cold green sea
-
Suddenly, Mallory stopped breathing. Hugues was
by his side, gripping his arm with fingers like steel
bars.
For the moustache of white water at the stem of
the merchant ship had disappeared. The steel knife-edge had risen
in the water, and stopped.
The ship had run aground on the U-boat that had
blown up in the channel five minutes previously.
As they watched, the tide caught the ship's
stern, slewing it untill the freighter was a great steel wall
blocking the channel: the only channel out of the
harbour.
For a moment, the gunfire stillled, and a huge
sound rolled over that windless frying pan of water.
The sound of Andrea, laughing.
Then the machine guns opened up
again.
This time they opened up with a new venom, bred
of fury and impotence. The bullets lashed the sea to a white froth,
and the fishing boat's hull shuddered under their impact. Mallory
crouched inside the wheelhouse. Another five minutes, he thought.
Then we are out of range. The noise was deafening. The air howled
with flying metal. And mixed with it, another sound.
Hugues. Hugues, shouting. Hugues was standing
on the deck,
yelling, pointing at something in the water.
Something orange. Something that moved, raised an arm and waved, a
feeble wave, but a wave nonetheless. Something that was a hand,
holding a fuming orange smoke flare.
And when the orange smoke rolled clear of the
face, the face, though coughing and distorted, was unmistakably the
face of Dusty Miller.
Mallory spun the wheel. The Stella
turned broadside onto the merchant ships' torrent of bullets.
Hugues stood upright, insanely conspicuous, out of cover. Miller
came floating down the side. 'Grab him!' yelled
Mallory.
Hugues leaned over the side. As they passed
Miller, he stuck his hand down, and Miller put his up, and the
hands met and gripped. Now the Stella was towing Miller
along, and Hugues' arm was the tow line. Hugues suddenly shuddered,
and four dark blotches appeared on his vest. But by then Andrea was
there, grasping Miller with his great hand. He gave one heave. And
then they were all lying on the deck: Andrea, Hugues and Miller,
Miller gasping like a gaffed salmon, leaking water.
Mallory turned the wheel away from the harbour
entrance. The orange smoke faded astern. Soon they were out of
range, and there were no more bullets.
Miller lit a cigarette. His face was grey and
white, the bags under his eyes big enough to hold the equipment of
a fair-sized expeditionary force. He said, 'Good morning. Do we
have a drink?'
Mallory handed him the miraculously undamaged
bottle of brandy from the riddled locker in the wheelhouse. 'How
did you get out?' he said.
Miller raised the bottle. 'I would like to
drink to the health of two Krauts,' he said. 'Mr Siebe and Mr
Gorman. And the cutest little submarine escape apparatus known to
science.' He drank deeply.
Andrea came aft. He said, 'Hugues needs to
talk.'
Hugues was lying on the deck in a red pond.
Mallory could hear his chest bubble as he breathed. Hugues said, 'I
am sorry.' He could speak no more.
Andrea said, 'This man is a
traitor.'
Mallory looked at the blue-white face, the
suffocated eyes. He said, 'Why?'
Hugues eyes swivelled from Andrea to Mallory.
Andrea said. To save Lisette, and his child. The Gestapo followed
her to St-Jean. When they tried to pick her up with Hugues, he made
a deal. They did not arrest us there, because it would have been
more interesting for them to catch us in the act of sabotage. So
when Hugues knew we were on the Cabo, he fed them
information.'
Hugues shrugged. 'I did it for my child,' he
said. Then blood came from his mouth, and he died.
Lisette was standing half-out of the hatch. She
looked pale and tired, the shadows under her eyes dark and
enormous. The eyes themselves had the thick lustre of
tears.
'He was a man who had lost everything he
loved,' she said. 'When he was in the Pyrenees the first time, he
told me what had happened to his wife, his children. He was a
lonely man. I can't described to you how lonely. He was a good
man.' The tears were running now. 'A man of passion. For his
country. For me. In war, these things can happen, and they are not
so strange.'
'Enfin, he was a traitor,' said Jaime.
Mallory looked at the dark, starved face, the heavy black
moustache, the impenetrable eyes. Jaime shrugged, the shrug of a
smuggler, of a man who would walk through mountains if he could not
walk over them, of a man whose hand was against all other men.
Nobody would ever know whether Jaime was fighting because of what
he believed in, or because he wanted to survive. Probably, Jaime
did not know himself.
Mallory looked at Andrea's face, dark and
closed, and at Miller's haggard countenance, the oil and salt
drying in his crewcut. Perhaps none of them knew why they did these
things.
Perhaps, in the end, it was not important, as
long as it was necessary to do these things, and these things got
done. He clambered to his feet and put his arm around Lisette's
shoulders.
She said, 'I did not love him. But he is the
father of my child. And that is worth something,
hein?'
It was not the son of question Mallory knew how
to answer.
The Stella Maris was heading north on a
broad navy-blue sea. Cabo de la Calavera had dropped below the
southern horizon an hour ago. A radio message had been sent. Now
there was nothing but the blue and cloudless dome of the sky, and
dead ahead of the Stella, a tenuous black wisp no bigger
than an eyelash stuck above the smooth curve of the
world.
The eyelash became an eyebrow, then a heavy
black plume. The base of the plume resolved itself into the Tribal
class destroyer Masai, thundering over the low Atlantic
swell at thirty-five knots, trailing an oily cloud of black smoke,
her boiler pressures trembling on the edge of the
red.
The Lieutenant-Commander who was her captain
looked down at the filthy black fishing boat, stroked his beard,
and hoped he was not going to get any of that rubbish on his nice
paint. He walked down to the rail and said, 'Captain
Mallory?'
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, untill 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?'