The guns of Navaronne

by Alistair MacLean

  The creaming bow-wave died away to a gentle ripple, the throb of the heavy diesel muted to a distant murmur as the German boat slid alongside, barely six feet away. From where he sat on a fish-box on the port- of the fo'c'sle, industriously sewing a button on to the old coat lying on the deck between his legs, Mallory could see six men, all dressed in the uniform of the regular German Navy — one crouched behind a belted Spandau mounted on its tripod just aft of the two-pounder, three others bunched amidships, each armed with an automatic machine carbine — Schmeissers, he thought — the captain, a hard, cold-faced young lieutenant with the Iron Cross on his tunic, looking out the open door of the wheelhouse and, finally, a curious head peering over the edge of the engine-room hatch. From where he sat, Mallory couldn't see the poop-deck — the intermittent ballooning of the lug-sail in the uncertain wind blocked his vision; but from the restricted fore-and-aft lateral sweep of the Spandau, hungrily traversing only the for'ard half of their own caique, be was reasonably sure that there was another machine-gunner similarly engaged on the German's poop.

  The hard-faced, young lieutenant — a real product of the Hitler Jugend that one, Mallory thought — leaned out of the wheelhouse, cupped his hand to his mouth.

  «Lower your sails!» he shouted.

  Mallory stiffened, froze to immobility. The needle had jammed hard into the palm of his band, but he didn't even notice it. The lieutenant had spoken in English! Stevens was so young, so inexperienced. He'll fall for it, Mallory thought with a sudden sick certainty, he's bound to fall for it.

  But Stevens didn't fall for it. He opened the door, leaned out, cupped his hand to his ear and gazed vacantly up to the sky, his mouth wide open. It was so perfect an imitation of dull-Witted failure to catch or comprehend a shouted message that it was almost a caricature. Mallory could have hugged him. Not in his actions alone, but in his dark, shabby clothes and hair as blackly counterfeit as Miller's, Stevens was the slow, suspicious island fisherman to the life.

  «Eh?» he bawled.

  «Lower your sails! We are coming aboard!» English again, Mallory noted; a persistent fellow this.

  Stevens stared at him blankly, looked round helplessly at Andrea and Mallory: their faces registered a lack of comprehension as convincing as his own. He shrugged his shoulders in despair.

  «I am sorry, I do not understand German,» he shouted. «Can you not speak my language?» Stevens's Greek was perfect, fluent and idiomatic. It was also the Greek of Attica, not of the islands; but Mallory felt sure that the lieutenant wouldn't know the difference.

  He didn't. He shook his head in exasperation, called in slow, halting Greek: «Stop your boat at once. We are coming aboard.»

  «Stop my boat!» The indignation was so genuine, the accompanying flood of furious oaths so authentic, that even the lieutenant was momentarily taken back. «And why should I stop my boat for you, you — you—»

  «You have ten seconds,» the lieutenant interrupted. He was on balance again, cold, precise. «Then we will shoot.»

  Stevens gestured in admission of defeat and turned to Andrea and Mallory.

  «Our conquerors have spoken,» he said bitterly. «Lower the sails.»

  Quickly they loosened the sheets from the cleats at the foot of the mast. Mallory pulled the jib down, gathered the sail in his arms and squatted sullenly on the deck — he knew a dozen hostile eyes were watching him — close by the fish box. The sail covering his knees and the old coat, his forearms on his thighs, he sat with head bowed and hands dangling between his knees, the picture of heart-struck dejection. The lug-sail, weighted by the boom at the top, came down with a rush. Andrea stepped over it, walked a couple of uncertain paces aft, then stopped, huge hands hanging emptily by his sides.

  A sudden deepening in the muted throbbing of the diesel, a spin of the wheel and the big German caique was rubbing alongside. Quickly, but carefully enough to keep out of the line of fire of the mounted Spandaus-- there was a second clearly visible now on the poop — the three men armed with the Schmeissers leapt aboard. Immediately one ran forward, whirled round level with the foremast, his automatic carbine circling gently to cover all of the crew. All except Mallory — and be was leaving Mallory in the safe bands of the Spandan gunner in the bows. Detachedly, Mallory admired the precision, the timing, the clockwork inevitability of an old routine.

  He raised his head, looked around him with a slow, peasant indifference. Casey Brown was squatting on the deck abreast the engine-room, working on the big bailsilencer on top of the batch-cover. Dusty Miller, two paces farther for'ard and with his brows furrowed in concentration, was laboriously cutting a section of metal from a little tin box, presumably to help in the engine repairs. He was holding the wire-cutting pliers in his left hand — and Miller, Mallory knew, was right-handed. Neither Stevens nor Andrea had moved. The man beside the foremast still stood there, eyes unwinking. The other two were walking slowly aft, bad just passed Andrea, their carriage relaxed and easy, the bearing of men who know they have everything so completely under control that even the idea of trouble is ridiculous.

  Carefully, coldly and precisely, at point-blank range and through the folds of both coat and sail, Mallory shot the Spandau machine-gunner through the heart, swung the still chattering Bren round and saw the guard by the mast crumple and die, half his chest torn away by the tearing slugs of the machine-gun. But the dead man was still on his feet, still had not hit the deck, when four things happened simultaneously. Casey Brown had had his band on Miller's silenced automatic, lying concealed beneath the ball-silencer, for over a minute. Now he squeezed the trigger four times, for he wanted to mak' siccar; the after machine-gunner leaned forward tiredly over his tripod, lifeless fingers locked on the firing-guard. Miller crimped the three-second chemical fuse with the pliers, lobbed the tin box into the enemy engine-room, Stevens spun the armed stick-grenade into the opposite wheelhouse and Andrea, his great arms reaching out with all the speed and precision of striking cobras, swept the Schmeisser gunners' beads together with sickening force. And then all five men had hurled themselves to the deck and the German caique was erupting in a roar of flame and smoke and flying debris: gradually the echoes faded away over the sea and there was left only the whining stammer of the Spandau, emptying itself uselessly skyward; and then the belt jammed and the Aegean was as silent as ever, more silent than it had ever been.

  Slowly, painfully, dazed by the sheer physical shock and the ear-shattering proximity of the twin explosions, Mallory pushed himself off the wooden deck and stood shakily on his feet. His first conscious reaction was that of surprise, incredulity almost: the concussive blast of a grenade and a couple of lashed blocks of T.N.T., even at such close range, was far beyond anything he had expected.

  The German boat was sinking, sinking fast. Miller's home-made bomb must have torn, the bottom out of the engine-room. She was heavily on fire amidships, and for one dismayed instant Mallory had an apprehensive yision of towering black columns of smoke and enemy reconnaissance planes. But only for an instant: timbers and planking, tinder-dry and resinous, were burning furiously with hardly a trace of smoke, and the flaming, crumbling deck was already canted over sharply to port: she would be gone in seconds. His eyes wandered to the shattered skeleton of the wheelhouse, and he caught his breath suddenly when he saw the lieutenant impaled on the splintered wreck of the wheel, a ghastly, mangled caricature of what had once been a human being, decapitated and wholly horrible: vaguely, some part of Mallory's mind registered the harsh sound of retching, violent and convulsive, coming from the wheelhouse, and he knew Stevens must have seen it too. From deep within the sinking caique came the muffled roar of rupturing fuel tanks: a flame-veined gout of oily black smoke erupted from the engine-room and the caique miraculously struggled back on even keel, her gunwales almost awash, and then the hissing waters had overflowed and overcome the decks and the twisting flames, and the caique was gone, her slender masts sliding vertically down and vanishing in a turbulent welter of cre
aming foam and oil-filmed bubbles. And now the Aegean was calm and peaceful again, as placid as if the caique had never been, and almost as empty: a few charred planks and an inverted helmet drifted lazily on the surface of the shimmering sea.

  With a conscious effort of will, Mallory turned slowly to look to his own ship and his own men. Brown and Miller were on their feet, staring down in fascination at where the caique had been, Stevens was standing at the wheelhouse door. He, too, was unhurt, but his face was ashen: during the brief action he had been a man above himself, but the aftermath, the brief glimpse he'd had of the dead lieutenant had hit him badly. Andrea, bleeding from a gash on the cheek, was looking down at the two Schmeisser gunners lying at his feet. His face was expressionless. For a long moment Mallory looked at him, looked in slow understanding.

  «Dead?» he asked quietly.

  Andrea inclined his head.

  «Yes.» His voice was heavy. «I hit them too bard.»

  Mallory turned away. Of all the men he had ever known, Andrea, he thought, had the most call to hate and to kill his enemies. And kill them he did, with a ruthless efficiency appalling in its single-mindedness and thoroughness of execution. But he rarely killed without regret, without the most bitter self-condemnation, for he did not believe that the lives of his fellow-men were his to take. A destroyer of his fellow-man, he loved his fellow-man above all things. A simple man, a good man, a killer with a kindly heart, be was for ever troubled by his conscience, ill at ease with his inner self. But over and above the wonderings and the reproaches, he was informed by an honesty of thought, by a clearsighted wisdom which sprang from and transcended his innate simplicity. Andrea killed neither for revenge, nor from hate, nor nationalism, nor for the sake of any of the other «isms» which self-seekers and fools and knaves employ as beguilement to the battlefield and justification for the slaughter of millions too young and too unknowing to comprehend the dreadful futility of it alL Andrea killed simply that better men might live.

  «Anybody else hurt?» Mallory's voice was deliberately brisk, cheerful. «Nobody? Good! Right, let's get under way as fast as possible. The farther and the faster we leave this place behind, the better for all of us.» He looked at his watch. «Almost four o'clock — time for our routine check with Cairo. Just leave that scrapyard of for a couple of minutes, Chief. See if you can pick them up.» He looked at the sky to the east, a sky now purply livid and threatening, and shook his head. «Could be that the weather forecast might be worth bearing.»

  It was. Reception was very poor — Brown blamed the violent static on the dark, convoluted thunderheads steadily creeping up astern, now overspreading almost half the sky — but adequate. Adequate enough to hear information they had never expected to hear, information that left them silenced, eyes stilled in troubled speculation. The tiny loudspeaker boomed and faded, boomed and faded, against the scratchy background of static.

  «Rhubarb calling Pimpernel! Rhubarb calling Pimpernell» These were the respective code names for Cairo and Mallory. «Are you receiving me?»

  Brown tapped an acknowledgment. The speaker boomed again.

  «Rhubarb calling Pimpernel. Now X minus one. Repeat, X minus one.» Mallory drew in his breath sharply. X — dawn on Saturday — had been the assumed date for the German attack on Kheros. It must have been advanced by one day — and. Jensen was not the man to speak without certain knowledge. Friday, dawn — just over three days.

  «Send 'X minus one understood,'» Mallory said quietly.

  «Forecast, East Anglia,» the impersonal voice went on: the Northern Sporades, Mallory knew. «Severe electrical storms probable this evening, with heavy rainfall. Visibility poor. Temperature falling, continuing to fall next twenty-four hours. Winds east to south-east, force six, locally eight, moderating early tomorrow.»

  Mallory turned away, ducked under the billowing lug-sail, walked slowly aft. What a set-up, he thought, what a bloody mess. Three days to go, engine u. s. and a first-class storm building up. He thought briefly, hopefully, of Squadron Leader Torrance's low opinion of the backroom boys of the Met. Office, but the hope was never really born. It couldn't be, not unless he was blind. The steep-piled buttresses of the thunderheads towered up darkly terrifying, now almost directly above.

  «Looks pretty bad, huh?» The slow nasal drawl came from immediately behind him. There was something oddly reassuring about that measured voice, about the steadiness of the washed-out blue of the eyes enmeshed in a spider's web of fine wrinkles.

  «It's not so good,» Mallory admitted.

  «What's all this force eight business, boss?»

  «A wind scale,» Mallory explained. «If you're in a boat this size and you're good and tired of life, you can't beat a force eight wind.»

  Miller nodded dolefully.

  «I knew it. I might have known. And me swearing they'd never get me on a gawddamned boat again.» He brooded a while, sighed, slid his legs over the engineroom hatchway, jerked his thumb in the direction of the nearest island, now less than three miles away. «That doesn't look so hot, either.»

  «Not from here,» Mallory agreed. «But the chart shows a creek with a right-angle bend. It'll break the sea and the wind.»

  «Inhabited?»

  «Probably.»

  «Germans?»

  «Probably.»

  Miller shook his head in despair and descended to help Brown. Forty minutes later, in the semi-darkness of the overcast evening and in torrential rain, lance-straight and strangely chill, the anchor of the caique rattled down between the green walls of the forest, a dank and dripping forest, hostile in its silent indifference.

  CHAPTER 4

  Monday Evening

  17:00--23:30

  «Brilliant!» said Mallory bitterly. «Ruddy well brilliant! 'Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly.» He swore in chagrin and exasperated disgust, eased aside the edge of the tarpaulin that covered the for'ard hatchway, peered out through the slackening curtain of rain and took a second and longer look at the rocky bluff that elbowed out into the bend of the creek, shutting them off from the sea. There was no difficulty in seeing now, none at all: the drenching cloudburst had yielded to a gentle drizzle, and grey and white cloud Streamers, shredding in the lifting wind, had already pursued the blackly towering cuniulonimbus over the far horizon. In a clear band of sky far to the west, the sinking, flame-red sun was balanced on the rim of the sea. From the shadowed waters of the creek it was invisible, but its presence unmistakable from the gold-shot gauze of the falling rain, high above their heads.

  The same golden rays highlighted the crumbling old watchtower on the very point of the cliff, a hundred feet above the river. They burnished its fine-grained white Parian marble, mellowed it to a delicate rose: they gleamed on the glittering steel, the evil mouths of the Spandau machine-guns reaching out from the slotted embrasures in the massive walls, illumined the hooked cross of the swastika on the flag that streamed out stiffly from the staff above the parapet. Solid even in its decay, impregnable in its position, commanding in its lofty outlook, the tower completely dominated both waterborne approaches, from the sea and, upriver, down the narrow, winding channel that lay between the moored caique and the foot of the cliff.

  Slowly, reluctantly almost, Mallory turned away and gently lowered the tarpaulin. His face was grim as he turned round to Andrea and Stevens, in-defined shadows in the twilit gloom of the cabin.

  «Brilliant!» he repeated. «Sheer genius. Mastermind Mallory. Probably the only bloody creek within a hundred miles — and in a hundred islands — with a German guard post on it. And of course I had to go and pick it. Let's have another look at that chart, will you, Stevens?»

  Stevens passed it across, watched Mallory study it in the pale light filtering in under the tarpaulin, leaned back against the bulkhead and drew heavily on his cigarette. It tasted foul, stale and acrid, but the tobacco was fresh enough, he knew. The old, sick fear was back again, as strongly as ever. He looked at the great bulk of Andrea across fr
om him, felt an illogical resentment towards him for having spotted the emplacement a few minutes ago. They'll have cannon up there, he thought dully, they're bound to have cannon — couldn't control the creek otherwise. He gripped his thigh fiercely, just above the knee, but the tremor lay too deep to be controlled: he blessed the merciful darkness of the tiny cabin. But his voice was casual enough as he spoke.

  «You're wasting your time, sir, looking at that chart and blaming yourself. This is the only possible anchorage within hours of sailing time from here. With that wind there was nowhere else we could have gone.»

  «Exactly. That's just it.» Mallory folded the chart, handed it back. «There was nowhere else we could have gone. There was nowhere else anyone could have gone. Must be a very popular port in a storm, this — a fact which must have become apparent to the Germans a long, long time ago. That's why I should have known they were almost bound to have a post here. However, spilt milk, as you say.» He raised his voice. «Chief!»

  «Halo!» Brown's muffled voice carried faintly from the depths of the engine-room.

  «How's it going?»

  «Not too bad, sir. Assembling it now.»

  Mallory nodded in relief.

  «How long?» he called. «An hour?»

  «Aye, easy, sir.»

  «An hour.» Again Mallory glanced through the tarpaulin, looked back at Andrea and Stevens. «Just about right. We'll leave in an hour. Dark enough to give us some protection from our friends up top, but enough light left to navigate our way out of this damned corkscrew of a channel.»

  «Do you think they'll try to stop us, sir?» Stevens's voice was just too casual, too matter of fact. He was pretty sure Mallory would notice.

  «It's unlikely they'll line the banks and give us three hearty cheers,» Mallory said dryly. «How many men do you reckon they'll have up there, Andrea?»