The guns of Navaronne

by Alistair MacLean

  «Shall I detail a relief guard—»

  «Of course not!» Turzig said impatiently. «It's just for a minute. Besides, the only people to guard against are already in here.» His lips tightened for a second as he realised what he had said, the unconscious irony of the words. «Hurry up, man! We haven't got all night!» He waited till the sound of the running footsteps died away, then looked steadily at Mallory. «Satisfied?»

  «Perfectly. And my very sincere apologies,» Mallory said quietly. «I hate to do a thing like this to a man like you.» He looked round the door as Andrea came into the room. «Andrea, ask Louki and Panayis if there's a telephone switchboard in this block of huts. Tell them to smash it up and any receivers they can find.» He grinned. «Then hurry back for our visitors from the gate. I'd be lost without you on the reception committee.»

  Turzig's gaze followed the broad retreating back.

  «Captain Skoda was right. I still have much to learn.» There was neither bitterness nor rancour in his voice. «He fooled me completely, that big one.»

  «You're not the first,» Mallory reassured him. «He's fooled more people than I'll ever know… . You're not the first,» he repeated. «But I think you must be just about the luckiest.»

  «Because I'm still alive?»

  «Because. you're still alive,» Mallory echoed.

  Less than ten minutes later the two guards at the gates had joined their comrades in the back room, captured, disarmed, bound and gagged with a speed and noiseless efficiency that excited Turzig's professional admiration, chagrined though he was. Securely tied hand and foot, he lay in a corner of the room, not yet gagged.

  «I think I understand now why your High Command chose you for this task, Captain Mallory. If anyone could succeed, you would — but you must fail. The impossible must always remain so. Nevertheless, you have a great team.»

  «We get by,» Mallory said modestly. He took a last look round the room, then grinned down at Stevens.

  «Ready to take off on your travels again, young man, or do you find this becoming rather monotonous?»

  «Ready when you are, sir.» Lying on a stretcher which Louki had miraculously procured, he sighed in bliss. «First-class travel, this time, as befits an officer. Sheer luxury. I don't mind how far we go!»

  «Speak for yourself,» Miller growled morosely. He had been allocated first stint at the front or heavy end of the stretcher. But the quirk of his eyebrows robbed the words of all offence.

  «Right then, we're off. One last thing. Where is the camp radio, Lieutenant Turzig?»

  «So you can smash it, I suppose?»

  «Precisely.»

  «I have no idea.»

  «What if I threaten to blow your head off?»

  «You won't.» Turzig smiled, though the smile was a trifle lopsided. «Given certain circumstances, you would kill me as you would a fly. But you wouldn't kill a man for refusing such information.»

  «You haven't as much to learn as your late and unlamented captain thought,» Mallory admitted. «It's not all that important… . I regret we have to do all this. I trust we do not meet again — not, at least, until the war is over. Who knows, some day we might even go climbing together.» He signed to Louki to fix Turzig's gag and walked quickly out of the room. Two minutes later they had cleared the barracks and were safely lost in the darkness and the olive groves that stretched to the south of Margaritha.

  When they cleared the groves, a long time later, it was almost dawn. Already the black silhouette of Kostos was softening in the first feathery greyness of the coming day. The wind was from the south, and warm, and the snow was beginning to melt on the hills.

  CHAPTER 11

  Wednesday

  14:00--16:00

  All day long they lay hidden in the carob grove, a thick clump of stunted, gnarled trees that clung grimly to the treacherous, scree-strewn slope abutting what Louki called the «Devil's Playground.» A poor shelter and an uncomfortable one, but in every other way all they could wish for: it offered concealment, a first-class defensive position immediately behind, a gentle breeze drawn up from the sea by the sun-baked rocks to the south, shade from the sun that rode from dawn to dusk in a cloudless sky — and an incomparable view of a sundrenched, shimmering Aegean.

  Away to their left, fading through diminishing shades of blue and indigo and violet into faraway nothingness, stretched the islands of the Lerades, the nearest of them, Maidos, so close that they could see isolated fisher cottages sparkling whitely in the sun: through that narrow, intervening gap of water would pass the ships of the Royal Navy in just over a day's time. To the right, and even farther away, remote, featureless, back-dropped by the towering Anatolian mountains, the coast of Turkey hooked north and west in a great curving scimitar: to the north itself, the thrusting spear of Cape Demirci, rock-rimmed but dimpled with sand coves of white, reached far out into the placid blue of the Aegean: and north again beyond the Cape, haze-blurred in the purple distance, the island of Kheros lay dreaming on the surface of the sea.

  It was a breath-taking panorama, a heart-catching beauty sweeping majestically through a great semi-circle over the sunlit sea. But Mallory had no eyes for it, had spared it only a passing glance when he had come on guard less than half an hour previously, just after two o'clock. He had dismissed it with one quick glance, settled by the bole of a tree, gazed for endless minutes, gazed until his eyes ached with strain atwhat he had so long waited to see. Had waited to see and come to destroy — the guns of the fortress of Navarone.

  The town of Navarone — a town of from four to five thousand people, Mallory judged — lay sprawled round the deep, volcanic crescent of the harbour, a crescent so deep, so embracing, that it was almost a complete circle with only a narrow bottleneck of an entrance to the north-west, a gateway dominated by searchlights and mortar and machine-gun batteries on either side. Less than three miles distant to the north-east from the carob grove, every detail, every street, every building, every caique and launch in the harbour were clearly visible to Mallory and ho studied them over and over again until he knew them by heart: the way the land to the west of the harbour sloped up gently to the olive groves, the dusty streets running down to the water's edge: the way the ground rose more sharply to the south, the streets now running parallel to the water down to the old town: the way the cliffs to the east — cliffs pock-marked by the bombs of Torrance's Liberator Squadron-- stretched a hundred and fifty sheer feet above the water, then curved dizzily out over and above the harbour, and the great mound of volcanic rock towering above that again, a mound barricaded off from the town below by the high wall that ended flush with the cliff itself: and, finally, the way the twin rows of A.A. guns, the great radar scanners and the barracks of the fortress, squat, narrow-embrasured, built of big blocks of masonry, dominated everything in sight — including that great, black gash in the rock, below the fantastic overhang of the cliff.

  Unconsciously, almost, Mallory nodded to himself in slow understanding. This was the fortress that had defied the Allies for eighteen long months, that had dominated the entire naval strategy in the Sporades since the Germans had reached out from the mainland into the isles, that had blocked all naval activity in that 2,000 square mile triangle between the Lerades and the Turkish coast. And now, when he saw it, it all made sense. Impregnable to land attack — the commanding fortress saw to that: impregnable to air attack — Mallory realised just how suicidal it had been to send out Torrance's squadron against the great guns protected by that jutting cliff, against those bristling rows of anti-aircraft guns: and impregnable to sea attack — the waiting squadrons of the Luftwaffe on Samos saw to that. Jensen had been right — only a guerrilla sabotage mission stood any chance at all: a remote chance, an all but suicidal chance, but still a chance, and Mallory knew he couldn't ask for more.

  Thoughtfully he lowered the binoculars and rubbed the back of his hand across aching eyes. At last he felt he knew exactly what he was up against, was grateful for the knowledge, for th
e opportunity he'd been given of this long-range reconnaissance, this familiarising of himself with the terrain, the geography of the town. This was probably the one vantage point in the whole island that offered such an opportunity together with concealment and near immunity. No credit to himself, the leader of the mission, he reflected wryly, that they had found such a place: it had been Louki's idea entirely.

  And he owed a great deal more than that to the sadeyed little Greek. It had been Louki's idea that they first move upvalley from Margaritha, to give Andrea time to recover the explosives from old Leri's hut, and to make certain there was no immediate hue and cry and pursuit — they could have fought a rearguard action up through the olive groves, until they had lost themselves in the foothills of Kostos: it was he who had guided them back past Margaritha when they had doubled on their tracks, had halted them opposite the village while he and Panayis had slipped wraith-like through the lifting twilight, picked up outdoor clothes for themselves, and, on the return journey, slipped into the Abteilung garage, torn away the coil ignitions of the German command car and truck — the only transport in Margaritha — and smashed their distributors for good measure; it was Louki who bad led them by a sunken ditch right up to the roadblock guard post at the mouth of the valley — ft had been almost ludicrously simple to disarm the sentries, only one of whom bad been awake — and, finally, it was Louki who bad insisted that they walk down the muddy centre of the valley track till they came to the metalled road, less than two miles from the town itself. A hundred yards down this they had branched off to the left across a long, sloping field of lava that left no trace behind, arrived in the carob copse just on sunrise.

  And it had worked. All these carefully engineered pointers, pointers that not even the most sceptical could have ignored and denied, had worked magnificently. Miller and Andrea, who had shared the forenoon watch, had seen the Navarone garrison spending long hours making the most intensive house-to-house search of the town. That should make it doubly, trebly safe for them the following day, Mallory reckoned: it was unlikely that the search would be repeated, still more unlikely that, if it were, it would be carried out with a fraction of the same enthusiasm. Louki had done his work welL

  Mallory turned his head to look at him. The little man was still asleep — wedged on the slope behind a couple of tree-trunks, he hadn't stirred for five hours. Still dead tired himself, his legs aching and eyes smarting with sleeplessness, Mallory could not find ft in him to grudge Louki a moment of his rest. He'd earned it all — and he'd been awake all through the previous night. So had Panayis, but Panayis was already awakening, Mallory saw, pushing the long, black hair out of his eyes: awake, rather, for his transition from sleep to full awareness was immediate, as fleeting and as complete as a cat's. A dangerous man, Mallory knew, a desperate man, almost, and a bitter enemy, but he knew nothing of Panayis, nothing at all. He doubted if he ever would.

  Farther up the slope, almost in the centre of the grove, Andrea had built a high platform of broken branches and twigs against a couple of carob poles maybe five feet apart, gradually filling up the space between slope and trees until he had a platform four feet in width, as nearly level as he could make it. Andy Stevens lay on this, still on his stretcher, still conscious. As far as Mallory could tell, Stevens hadn't closed his eyes since they had been marched away by Turzig from their cave in the mountains. He seemed to have passed beyond the need for sleep, or had crushed all desire for it. The stench from the gangrenous leg was nauseating, appalling, poisoned all the air around. Mallory and Miller had had a look at the leg shortly after their arrival in the copse, uncovered it, examined it, smiled at one another, tied it up again and assured Stevens that the wound was closing. Below the knee, the leg bad turned almost completely black.

  Mallory lifted his binoculars to have another look at the town, but lowered them almost at once as someone came sliding down the slope, touched him on the arm. It was Panayis, upset, anxious, almost angry looking. He gesticulated towards the westering sun.

  «The time, Captain Mallory?» He spoke in Greek his voice low, sibilant, urgent — an inevitable voice, Mallory thought, for the lean, dark mysteriousness of the man. «What is the time?» he repeated.

  «Half-past two, or thereabouts.» Mallory lifted an interrogatory eyebrow. «You are concerned, Panayis. Why?»

  «You should have wakened me. You should have wakened me hours ago!» He was angry, Mallory decided. «It is my turn to keep watch.»

  «But you had no sleep last night,» Mallory pointed out reasonably. «It just didn't seem fair—»

  «It is my turn to keep watch, I tell you!» Panayis insisted stubbornly.

  «Very well, then. If you insist.» Mallory knew the high fierce pride of the islanders too well to attempt to argue. «Heaven only knows what we would have done without Louki and yourself.… I'li stay and keep you company for a while.»

  «Ah, so that is why you let me sleep on!» There was no disguising the hurt in the eyes, the voice. «You do not trust Panayis—»

  «Oh, for heaven's sake!» Mallory began in exasperation, checked himself and smiled. «Of course we trust you. Maybe I should go and get some more sleep anyway; you are kind to give me the chance. You will shake me in two hour's time?»

  «Certainly, certainly!» Panayis was almost beaming. «I shall not fail.»

  Mallory scrambled up to the centre of the grove and stretched out lazily along the ledge he had levelled out for himself. For a few idle moments he watched Panayis pacing restlessly to and fro just inside the perimeter of the grove, lost interest when he saw him climbing swiftly up among the branches of a tree, seeking a high lookout vantage point and decided he might as well follow his own advice and get some sleep while he could.

  «Captain Mallory! Captain Mallory!» An urgent, heavy hand was shaking his shoulder. «Wake up! Wake up!»

  Mallory stirred, rolled over on his back, sat up quickly, opening his eyes as he did so. Panayis was stooped over him, the dark, saturnine face alive with anxiety. Mallory shook his head to clear away the mists of sleep and was on his feet in one swift, easy movement.

  «What's the matter; Panayis?»

  «Planes!» he said quickly. «There is a squadron of planes coming our way!»

  «Planes? What planes? Whose planes?»

  «I do not know, Captain. They are yet far away. But—»

  «What direction?» Mallory snapped.

  «They come from the north.»

  Together they ran down to the edge of the grove. Panayis gestured to the north, and Mallory caught sight of them at once, the afternoon sun glinting off the sharp dihedral of the wings. Stukas, all right, he thought grimly. Seven — no, eight of them — less than three miles away, flying in two echelons of four, two thousand, certainly not more than twenty-five hundred feet… . He became aware that Panayis was tugging urgently at his arm.

  «Come, Captain Mallory!» he said excitedly. «We have no time to lose!» He pulled Mallory round, pointed with outstretched arm at the gaunt, shattered cliffs that rose steeply behind them, cliffs crazily riven by rockjumbled ravines that wound their aimless way back into the interior — or stopped as abruptly as they had begun. «The Devil's Playground! We must get in there at once! At once, Captain Mallory!»

  «Why on earth should we?» Mallory looked at him in astonishment. «There's no reason to suppose that they're after us. How can they be? No one knows we're here.»

  «I do not care!» Panayis was stubborn in his conviction. «I know. Do not ask me how I know, for I do not know that myself. Louki will tell you — Panayis knows these things. I know, Captain Mallory, I know!»

  Just for a second Mallory stared at him, uncomprehending. There was no questioning the earnestness, the utter sincerity — but it was the machine-gun staccato of the words that tipped the balance of instinct against reason. Almost without realising it, certainly without realislug why, Mallory found himself running uphill, slipping and stumbling in the scree. He found the others already on their feet,
tense, expectant, shrugging on their packs, the guns already in their hands.

  «Get to the edge of the trees up there!» Mallory shouted. «Quickly! Stay there and stay under cover-we're going to have to break for that gap in the rocks.» He gestured through the trees at a jagged fissure in the cliff-side, barely forty yards from where he stood, blessed Louki for his foresight in choosing a hideout with so convenient a bolt-hole. «Wait till I give the word. Andrea!» He turned round, then broke off, the words unneeded. Andrea had already scooped up the dying boy in his arms, just as he lay in stretcher and blankets and was weaving his way uphill in and out among the trees.

  «What's up, boss?» Miller was by Mallory's side as he plunged up the slope. «I don't see nothin'.»

  «You can hear something if you'd just stop talking for a moment,» Mallory said grimly. «Or just take a look up there.»

  Miller, flat on his stomach now and less than a dozen feet from the edge of the grove, twisted round and craned his neck upwards. He picked up the planes immediately..

  «Stukas!» he said incredulously. «A squadron of gawddamned Stukas! It can't be, boss!»

  «It can and it is,» Mallory said grimly. «Jensen told me that Jerry has stripped the Italian front of them-- over two hundred pulled out in the last few weeks.» Mallory squinted up at the squadron, less than half a mile away now. «And he's brought the whole damn' issue down to the Aegean.»

  «But they're not lookin' for us,» Miller protested.

  «I'm afraid they are,» Mallory said grimly. The two bomber echelons had just dove-tailed into line ahead formation. «I'm afraid Panayis was right.»

  «But — but they're passin' us by—»

  «They aren't,» Mallory said flatly. «They're here to stay. Just keep your eyes on that leading plane.»

  Even as he spoke, the flight-commander tilted his gull-winged Junkers 87 sharply over to port, halfturned, fell straight out of the sky in a screaming power-dive, plummeting straight for the carob grove.