‘Neither would I,’ Brown said morosely. ‘But I think I’d better, sir. Reception is far better at night and I’m going to climb uphill a bit to get a clearance from that damned mountain there: I’d be spotted right away if I tried to do that in daylight.’
‘Right you are, Casey. You know best.’ Mallory looked at him curiously. ‘What’s all the extra gear for?’
‘Putting the set under the groundsheet then getting below it myself with the torch,’ Brown explained. ‘And I’m pegging the rope here, going to pay it out on my way up. I’d like to be able to get back some time.’
‘Good enough,’ Mallory approved. ‘Just watch it a bit higher up. This gully narrows and deepens into a regular ravine.’
‘Don’t you worry about me, sir,’ Brown said firmly. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to Casey Brown.’ A snow-laden gust of wind, the flap of the canvas and Brown was gone.
‘Well, if Brown can do it . . .’ Mallory was on his feet now, pulling his snow-smock over his head. ‘Fuel, gentlemen – old Leri’s hut. Who’s for a midnight stroll?’
Andrea and Louki were on their feet together, but Mallory shook his head.
‘One’s enough. I think someone should stay to look after Stevens.’
‘He’s sound asleep,’ Andrea murmured. ‘He can come to no harm in the short time we are away.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of that. It’s just that we can’t take the chance of him falling into German hands. They’d make him talk, one way or another. It would be no fault of his – but they’d make him talk. It’s too much of a risk.’
‘Pouf!’ Louki snapped his fingers. ‘You worry about nothing, Major. There isn’t a German within miles of here. You have my word.’
Mallory hesitated, then grinned. ‘You’re right. I’m getting the jumps.’ He bent over Stevens, shook him gently. The boy stirred and moaned, opened his eyes slowly.
‘We’re going out for some firewood,’ Mallory said. ‘Back in a few minutes. You be OK?’
‘Of course, sir. What can happen? Just leave a gun by my side – and blow out the candle.’ He smiled. ‘Be sure to call out before you come in!’
Mallory stooped, blew out the candle. For an instant the flame flared then died and every feature, every person in the cave was swallowed up in the thick darkness of a winter midnight. Abruptly Mallory turned on his heel and pushed out through the canvas into the drifting, windblown snow already filling up the floor of the gully, Andrea and Louki close behind.
It took them ten minutes to find the ruined hut of the old goatherd, another five for Andrea to wrench the door off its shattered hinges and smash it up to manageable lengths, along with the wood from the bunk and table, another ten to carry back with them to the rock-shelter as much wood as they could conveniently rope together and carry. The wind, blowing straight north off Kostos, was in their faces now – faces numbed with the chill, wet lash of the driving snow, and blowing almost at gale force: they were not sorry to reach the gully again, drop down gratefully between the sheltering walls.
Mallory called softly at the mouth of the cave. There was no reply, no movement from inside. He called again, listened intently as the silent seconds went by, turned his head and looked briefly at Andrea and Louki. Carefully, he laid his bundle of wood in the snow, pulled out his Colt and torch, eased aside the curtain, lamp switch and Colt safety-catch clicking as one.
The spotlight beam lit up the floor at the mouth of the cave, passed on, settled, wavered, probed into the farthest corner of the shelter, returned again to the middle of the cave and steadied there as if the torch were clamped in a vice. On the floor there was only a crumpled, empty sleeping-bag. Andy Stevens was gone.
NINE
Tuesday Night
0015–0200
‘So I was wrong,’ Andrea murmured. ‘He wasn’t asleep.’
‘He certainly wasn’t,’ Mallory agreed grimly. ‘He fooled me too – and he heard what I said.’ His mouth twisted. ‘He knows now why we’re so anxious to look after him. He knows now that he was right when he spoke about a millstone. I should hate to feel the way he must be feeling right now.’
Andrea nodded. ‘It is not difficult to guess why he has gone.’
Mallory looked quickly at his watch, pushed his way out of the cave.
‘Twenty minutes – he can’t have been gone more than twenty minutes. Probably a bit less to make sure we were well clear. He can only drag himself – fifty yards at the most. We’ll find him in four minutes. Use your torches and take the hoods off – nobody will see us in this damn blizzard. Fan out uphill – I’ll take the gully in the middle.’
‘Uphill?’ Louki’s hand was on his arm, his voice puzzled. ‘But his leg –’
‘Uphill, I said,’ Mallory broke in impatiently. ‘Stevens has brains – and a damn sight more guts than he thinks we credit him with. He’ll figure we’ll think he’s taken the easy way.’ Mallory paused a moment then went on sombrely: ‘Any dying man who drags himself out in this lot is going to do nothing the easy way. Come on!’
They found him in exactly three minutes. He must have suspected that Mallory wouldn’t fall for the obvious, or he had heard them stumbling up the slope, for he had managed to burrow his way in behind the overhanging snowdrift that sealed off the space beneath a projecting ledge just above the rim of the gully. An almost perfect place of concealment, but his leg betrayed him: in the probing light of his torch Andrea’s sharp eyes caught the tiny trickle of blood seeping darkly through the surface of the snow. He was already unconscious when they uncovered him, from cold or exhaustion or the agony of his shattered leg: probably from all three.
Back in the cave again, Mallory tried to pour some ouzo – the fiery, breath-catching local spirit – down Stevens’s throat. He had a vague suspicion that this might be dangerous – or perhaps it was only dangerous in cases of shock, his memory was confused on that point – but it seemed better than nothing. Stevens gagged, spluttered and coughed most of it back up again, but some at least stayed down. With Andrea’s help Mallory tightened the loosened splints on the leg, staunched the oozing blood, and spread below and above the boy every dry covering he could find in the cave. Then he sat back tiredly and fished out a cigarette from his waterproof case. There was nothing more he could do until Dusty Miller returned with Panayis from the village. He was pretty sure there was nothing that Dusty could do for Stevens either. There was nothing anybody could do for him.
Already Louki had a fire burning near the mouth of the cave, the old, tinder-dry wood blazing up in a fierce, crackling blaze with hardly a wisp of smoke. Almost at once its warmth began to spread throughout the cave, and the three men edged gratefully nearer. From half a dozen points in the roof, thin, steadily increasing streams of water from the melting snows above began to splash down on the gravelly floor beneath: with these and with the heat of the blaze, the ground was soon a quagmire. But, especially to Mallory and Andrea, these discomforts were a small price to pay for the privilege of being warm for the first time in over thirty hours. Mallory felt the glow seep through him like a benison, felt his entire body relax, his eyelids grow heavy and drowsy.
Back propped against the wall, he was just drifting off to sleep, still smoking that first cigarette, when there was a gust of wind, a sudden chilling flurry of snow and Brown was inside the cave, wearily slipping the transmitter straps from his shoulders. Lugubrious as ever, his tired eyes lit up momentarily at the sight of the fire. Blue-faced and shuddering with cold – no joke, Mallory thought grimly, squatting motionless for half an hour on that bleak and frozen hillside – he hunched down silently by the fire, dragged out the inevitable cigarette and gazed moodily into the flames, oblivious alike of the clouds of steam that almost immediately enveloped him, of the acrid smell of his singeing clothes. He looked utterly despondent. Mallory reached for a bottle, poured out some of the heated retsina – mainland wine heavily reinforced with resin – and passed it across to Brown.
‘Chuck it straigh
t down the hatch,’ Mallory advised. ‘That way you won’t taste it.’ He prodded the transmitter with his foot and looked up at Brown again. ‘No dice this time either?’
‘Raised them no bother, sir.’ Brown grimaced at the sticky sweetness of the wine. ‘Reception was first class – both here and in Cairo.’
‘You got through!’ Mallory sat up, leaned forward eagerly. ‘And were they pleased to hear from their wandering boys tonight?’
‘They didn’t say. The first thing they told me was to shut up and stay that way.’ Brown poked moodily at the fire with a steaming boot. ‘Don’t ask me how, sir, but they’ve been tipped off that enough equipment for two or three small monitoring stations has been sent here in the past fortnight.’
Mallory swore.
‘Monitoring stations! That’s damned handy, that is!’ He thought briefly of the fugitive, nomad existence these same monitoring stations had compelled Andrea and himself to lead in the White Mountains of Crete. ‘Dammit, Casey, on an island like this, the size of a soup plate, they can pin-point us with their eyes shut!’
‘Aye, they can that, sir,’ Brown nodded heavily.
‘Have you heard anything of these stations, Louki?’ Mallory asked.
‘Nothing, Major, nothing.’ Louki shrugged. ‘I am afraid I do not even know what you are talking about.’
‘I don’t suppose so. Not that it matters – it’s too late now. Let’s have the rest of the good news, Casey.’
‘That’s about it, sir. No sending for me – by order. Restricted to code abbreviations – affirmative, negative, repetitive, wilco and such-like. Continuous sending only in emergency or when concealment’s impossible anyway.’
‘Like from the condemned cell in those ducky little dungeons in Navarone,’ Mallory murmured. ‘“I died with my boots on, ma.”’
‘With all respects, sir, that’s not funny,’ Brown said morosely. ‘Their invasion fleet – mainly caiques and E-boats – sailed this morning from the Piraeus,’ he went on. ‘About four o’clock this morning. Cairo expects they’ll be holing up in the Cyclades somewhere tonight.’
‘That’s very clever of Cairo. Where the hell else could they hole up?’ Mallory lit a fresh cigarette and looked bleakly into the fire. ‘Anyway, it’s nice to know they’re on the way. That the lot, Casey?’
Brown nodded silently.
‘Good enough, then. Thanks a lot for going out. Better turn in, catch up with some sleep while you can . . . Louki reckons we should be down in Margaritha before dawn, hole up there for the day – he’s got some sort of abandoned well all lined up for us – and push on to the town of Navarone tomorrow night.’
‘My God!’ Brown moaned. ‘Tonight a leaking cave. Tomorrow night an abandoned well – half-full of water probably. Where are we staying in Navarone, sir. The crypt in the local cemetery.’
‘A singularly apt lodging, the way things are going,’ Mallory said dryly. ‘We’ll hope for the best. We’re leaving before five.’ He watched Brown lie down beside Stevens and transferred his attention to Louki. The little man was seated on a box on the opposite side of the fire, occasionally turning a heavy stone to be wrapped in cloth and put to Stevens’s numbed feet, and blissfully hugging the flames. By and by he became aware of Mallory’s close scrutiny and looked up.
‘You look worried, Major.’ Louki seemed vexed. ‘You look – what is the word? – concerned. You do not like my plan, no? I thought we had agreed –’
‘I’m not worried about your plan,’ Mallory said frankly. ‘I’m not even worried, about you. It’s that box you’re sitting on. Enough HE in it to blow up a battleship – and you’re only three feet from that fire. It’s not just too healthy, Louki.’
Louki shifted uneasily on his seat, tugged at one end of his moustache.
‘I have heard that you can throw this TNT into a fire and that it just burns up nicely, like a pine full of sap.’
‘True enough,’ Mallory acquiesced. ‘You can also bend it, break it, file it, saw it, jump on it and hit it with a sledge-hammer, and all you’ll get is the benefit of the exercise. But if it starts to sweat in a hot, humid atmosphere – and then the exudation crystallises. Oh, brother! And it’s getting far too hot and sticky in this hole.’
‘Outside with it!’ Louki was on his feet, backing farther into the cave. ‘Outside with it!’ He hesitated. ‘Unless the snow, the moisture –’
‘You can also leave it immersed in salt water for ten years without doing it any harm,’ Mallory interrupted didactically. ‘But there are some primers there that might come to grief – not to mention that box of detonators beside Andrea. We’ll just stick the lot outside, under a cape.’
‘Pouf! Louki has a far better idea!’ The little man was already slipping into his cloak. ‘Old Leri’s hut! The very place. Exactly! We can pick it up there whenever we want – and if you have to leave in a hurry you do not have to worry about it.’ Before Mallory could protest, Louki had bent over the box lifted it with an effort, half-walked, half-staggered round the fire, making for the screen. He had hardly taken three steps when Andrea was by his side, had relieved him firmly of the box and tucked it under one arm.
‘If you will permit me –’
‘No, no!’ Louki was affronted. ‘I can manage easily. It is nothing.’
‘I know, I know,’ Andrea said pacifically. ‘But these explosives – they must be carried a certain way. I have been trained,’ he explained.
‘So? I did not realise. Of course it must be as you say! I, then, will bring the detonators.’ Honour satisfied, Louki thankfully gave up the argument, lifted the little box and scuttled out of the cave close on Andrea’s heels.
Mallory looked at his watch. One o’clock exactly. Miller and Panayis should be back soon, he thought. The wind had passed its peak and the snow was almost gone: the going would be all that easier, but there would be tracks in the snow. Awkward, these tracks, but not fatal – they themselves would be gone before light, cutting straight downhill for the foot of the valley. The snow wouldn’t lie there – and even if there were patches they could take to the stream that wound through the valley, leaving no trace behind.
The fire was sinking and the cold creeping in on them again. Mallory shivered in his still wet clothes, threw some more wood on the fire, watched it blaze up, and flood the cave with light. Brown, huddled on a groundsheet, was already asleep. Stevens, his back to him, was lying motionless, his breathing short and quick. God only knew how long the boy would stay alive: he was dying, Miller said, but ‘dying’ was a very indefinite term: when a man, a terribly injured, dying man, made up his mind not to die he became the toughest, most enduring creature on earth. Mallory had seen it happen before. But maybe Stevens didn’t want to live. To live, to overcome these desperate injuries – that would be to prove himself to himself, and to others, and he was young enough, and sensitive enough and had been hurt and had suffered so much in the past that that could easily be the most important thing in the world to him: on the other hand, he knew what an appalling handicap he had become – he had heard Mallory say so; he knew, too, that Mallory’s primary concern was not for his welfare but the fear that he would be captured, crack under pressure and tell everything – he had heard Mallory say so; and he knew that he had failed his friends. It was all very difficult, impossible to say how the balance of contending forces would work out eventually. Mallory shook his head, sighed, lit a fresh cigarette and moved closer to the fire.
Andrea and Louki returned less than five minutes later, and Miller and Panayis were almost at their heels. They could hear Miller coming some distance away, slipping, falling and swearing almost continuously as he struggled up the gully under a large and awkward load. He practically fell across the threshold of the cave and collapsed wearily by the fire. He gave the impression of a man who had been through a very great deal indeed. Mallory grinned sympathetically at him.
‘Well, Dusty, how did it go? Hope Panayis here didn’t slow you up too much.’
<
br /> Miller didn’t seem to hear him. He was gazing incredulously at the fire, lantern jaw drooping open as its significance slowly dawned on him.
‘Hell’s teeth! Would you look at that!’ He swore bitterly. ‘Here I spend half the gawddamned night climbing up a gawddamned mountain with a stove and enough kerosene to bath a bloody elephant. And what do I find?’ He took a deep breath to tell them what he found, then subsided into a strangled, seething silence.
‘A man your age should watch his blood pressure,’ Mallory advised him. ‘How did the rest of it go?’
‘Okay, I guess.’ Miller had a mug of ouzo in his hand and was beginning to brighten up again. ‘We got the beddin’, the medicine kit –’
‘If you’ll give me the bedding I will get our young friend into it now,’ Andrea interrupted.
‘And food?’ Mallory asked.
‘Yeah. We got the grub, boss. Stacks of it. This guy Panayis is a wonder. Bread, wine, goat-cheese, garlic sausages, rice – everything.’
‘Rice?’ It was Mallory’s turn to be incredulous. ‘But you can’t get the stuff in the islands nowadays, Dusty.’
‘Panayis can.’ Miller was enjoying himself hugely now. ‘He got it from the German commandant’s kitchen. Guy by the name of Skoda.’
‘The German commandant’s – you’re joking!’
‘So help me, boss, that’s Gospel truth.’ Miller drained half the ouzo at a gulp and expelled his breath in a long, gusty sigh of satisfaction. ‘Little ol’ Miller hangs around the back door, knees knockin’ like Carmen Miranda’s castanets, ready for a smart take off in any direction while Junior here goes in and cracks the joint. Back home in the States he’d make a fortune as a cat-burglar. Comes back in about ten minutes, luggin’ that damned suitcase there.’ Miller indicated it with a casual wave of his hand. ‘Not only cleans out the commandant’s pantry, but also borrows his satchel to carry the stuff in. I tell you, boss, associatin’ with this character gives me heart attacks.’
The Guns of Navarone Page 17