‘Here you are, sir. I’ll just wait in the corridor outside.’
‘Better wait downstairs,’ Mallory advised. ‘No offence, Matthews, but the less you know of this the better.’
He followed the others into the room, closing the door behind him. It was a small, bleak room, heavily curtained. A table and half a dozen chairs took up most of the space. Over in the far corner the springs of the single bed creaked as Corporal Miller stretched himself out luxuriously, hands clasped behind his head.
‘Gee!’ he murmured admiringly. ‘A hotel room. Just like home. Kinda bare, though.’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Where are all you other guys gonna sleep?’
‘We aren’t,’ Mallory said briefly. ‘Neither are you. We’re pulling out in less than two hours.’ Miller groaned. ‘Come on, soldier,’ Mallory went on relentlessly. ‘On your feet.’
Miller groaned again, swung his legs over the edge of the bed and looked curiously at Andrea. The big Greek was quartering the room methodically, pulling out lockers, turning pictures, peering behind curtains and under the bed.
‘What’s he doin’?’ Miller asked. ‘Lookin’ for dust?’
‘Testing for listening devices,’ Mallory said curtly. ‘One of the reasons why Andrea and I have lasted so long.’ He dug into the inside pocket of his tunic, a dark naval battledress with neither badge nor insignia, pulled out a chart and the map Vlachos had given him, unfolded and spread them out. ‘Round the table, all of you. I know you’ve been bursting with curiosity for the past couple of weeks, asking yourselves a hundred questions. Well, here are all the answers. I hope you like them … Let me introduce you to the island of Navarone.’
Mallory’s watch showed exactly eleven o’clock when he finally sat back, folded away the map and chart. He looked quizzically at the four thoughtful faces round the table.
‘Well, gentlemen, there you have it. A lovely set-up, isn’t it?’ He smiled wryly. ‘If this was a film, my next line should be, “Any questions, men?” But we’ll dispense with that because I just wouldn’t have any of the answers. You all know as much as I do.’
‘A quarter of a mile of sheer cliff, four hundred feet high, and he calls it the only break in the defences.’ Miller, his head bent moodily over his tobacco tin, rolled a long, thin cigarette with one expert hand. This is just crazy, boss. Me, I can’t even climb a bloody ladder without falling off.’ He puffed strong, acrid clouds of smoke into the air. ‘Suicidal. That’s the word I was lookin’ for. Suicidal. One buck gets a thousand we never get within five miles of them gawddamned guns!’
‘One in a thousand, eh?’ Mallory looked at him for a long time without speaking. ‘Tell me, Miller, what odds are you offering on the boys on Kheros?’
‘Yeah.’ Miller nodded heavily. ‘Yeah, the boys on Kheros. I’d forgotten about them. I just keep thinkin’ about me and that damned cliff.’ He looked hopefully across the table at the vast bulk of Andrea. ‘Or maybe Andrea there would carry me up. He’s big enough, anyway.’
Andrea made no reply. His eyes were half-closed, his thoughts could have been a thousand miles away.
‘We’ll tie you hand and foot and haul you up on the end of a rope,’ Stevens said unkindly. ‘We’ll try to pick a fairly sound rope,’ he added carelessly. The words, the tone, were jocular enough, but the worry on his face belied them. Mallory apart, only Stevens appreciated the almost insuperable technical difficulties of climbing a sheer, unknown cliff in the darkness. He looked at Mallory questioningly. ‘Going up alone, sir, or –’
‘Excuse me, please.’ Andrea suddenly sat forward, his deep rumble of a voice rapid in the clear, idiomatic English he had learnt during his long association with Mallory. He was scribbling quickly on a piece of paper. ‘I have a plan for climbing this cliff. Here is a diagram. Does the Captain think this is possible?’
He passed the paper across to Mallory. Mallory looked at it, checked, recovered, all in one instant. There was no diagram on it. There were only two large, printed words: ‘Keep talking.’
‘I see,’ Mallory said thoughtfully. ‘Very good indeed, Andrea. This has distinct possibilities.’ He reversed the paper, held it up before him so that they could all see the words. Andrea had already risen to his feet, was padding cat-footed towards the door. ‘Ingenious, isn’t it, Corporal Miller,’ he went on conversationally. ‘Might solve quite a lot of our difficulties.’
‘Yeah.’ The expression on Miller’s face hadn’t altered a fraction, the eyes were still half-closed against the smoke drifting up from the cigarette dangling between his lips. ‘Reckon that might solve the problem, Andrea – and get me up in one piece, too.’ He laughed easily, concentrated on screwing a curiously-shaped cylinder on the barrel of an automatic that had magically appeared in his left hand. ‘But I don’t quite get that funny line and the dot at –’
It was all over in two seconds – literally. With a deceptive ease and nonchalance Andrea opened the door with one hand, reached out with the other, plucked a wildly-struggling figure through the gap, set him on the ground again and closed the door, all in one concerted movement. It had been as soundless as it had been swift. For a second the eavesdropper, a hatchet-faced, swarthy Levantine in badly-fitting white shirt and blue trousers, stood there in shocked immobility, blinking rapidly in the unaccustomed light. Then his hand dived in under his shirt.
‘Look out!’ Miller’s voice was sharp, the automatic lining up as Mallory’s hand closed over his.
‘Watch!’ Mallory said softly.
The men at the table caught only a flicker of blued steel as the knife arm jerked convulsively back and plunged down with vicious speed. And then, incredibly, hand and knife were stopped dead in mid-air, the gleaming point only two inches from Andrea’s chest. There was a sudden scream of agony, the ominous cracking of wrist bones as the giant Greek tightened his grip, and then Andrea had the blade between finger and thumb, had removed the knife with the tender, reproving care of a parent saving a well-loved but irresponsible child from himself. Then the knife was reversed, the point was at the Levantine’s throat and Andrea was smiling down pleasantly into the dark and terror-stricken eyes.
Miller let out a long breath, half-sigh, half-whistle.
‘Well, now,’ he murmured, ‘I guess mebbe Andrea has done that sort of thing before?’
‘I guess maybe he has,’ Mallory mimicked. ‘Let’s have a closer look at exhibit A, Andrea.’
Andrea brought his prisoner close up to the table, well within the circle of light. He stood there sullenly before them, a thin, ferret-faced man, black eyes dulled in pain and fear, left hand cradling his crushed wrist.
‘How long do you reckon this fellow’s been outside, Andrea?’ Mallory asked.
Andrea ran a massive hand through his thick, dark, curling hair, heavily streaked with grey above the temples.
‘I cannot be sure, Captain. I imagined I heard a noise – a kind of shuffle – about ten minutes ago, but I thought my ears were playing tricks. Then I heard the same sound a minute ago. So I am afraid –’
‘Ten minutes, eh?’ Mallory nodded thoughtfully, then looked at the prisoner. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked sharply. ‘What are you doing here?’
There was no reply. There were only the sullen eyes, the sullen silence – a silence that gave way to a sudden yelp of pain as Andrea cuffed the side of his head.
‘The Captain is asking you a question,’ Andrea said reproachfully. He cuffed him again, harder this time. ‘Answer the Captain.’
The stranger broke into rapid, excitable speech, gesticulating wildly with both hands. The words were quite unintelligible. Andrea sighed, shut off the torrent by the simple expedient of almost encircling the scrawny throat with his left hand.
Mallory looked questioningly at Andrea. The giant shook his head.
‘Kurdistan or Armenian, Captain, I think. But I don’t understand it.’
‘I certainly don’t,’ Mallory admitted. ‘Do you speak English?’ he asked suddenly.
/>
Black, hate-filled eyes glared back at him in silence. Andrea cuffed him again.
‘Do you speak English?’ Mallory repeated relentlessly.
‘Eenglish? Eenglish?’ Shoulders and upturned palms lifted in the age-old gesture of incomprehension. ‘Ka Eenglish!’
‘He says he don’t speak English,’ Miller drawled.
‘Maybe he doesn’t and maybe he does,’ Mallory said evenly. ‘All we know is that he has been listening and that we can’t take any chances. There are far too many lives at stake.’ His voice suddenly hardened, the eyes were grim and pitiless. ‘Andrea!’
‘Captain?’
‘You have the knife. Make it clean and quick. Between the shoulder blades!’
Stevens cried out in horror, sent his chair crashing back as he leapt to his feet.
‘Good God, sir, you can’t –’
He broke off and stared in amazement at the sight of the prisoner catapulting himself bodily across the room to crash into a distant corner, one arm up-curved in rigid defence, stark, unreasoning panic lined in every feature of his face. Slowly Stevens looked away, saw the triumphant grin on Andrea’s face, the dawning comprehension in Brown’s and Miller’s. Suddenly he felt a complete fool. Characteristically, Miller was the first to speak.
‘Waal, waal, whaddya know! Mebbe he does speaka da Eenglish after all.’
‘Maybe he does,’ Mallory admitted. ‘A man doesn’t spend ten minutes with his ear glued to a keyhole if he doesn’t understand a word that’s being said … Give Matthews a call, will you, Brown?’
The sentry appeared in the doorway a few seconds later.
‘Get Captain Briggs here, will you, Matthews?’ he asked. ‘At once please.’
The soldier hesitated.
‘Captain Briggs has gone to bed, sir. He left strict orders that he wasn’t to be disturbed.’
‘My heart bleeds for Captain Briggs and his broken slumbers,’ Mallory said acidly. ‘He’s had more sleep in a day than I’ve had in the past week.’ He glanced at his watch and the heavy brows came down in a straight line over the tired, brown eyes. ‘We’ve no time to waste. Get him here at once. Understand? At once!’
Matthews saluted and hurried away. Miller cleared his throat and clucked his tongue sadly.
‘These hotels are all the same. The goin’s-on – you’d never believe your eyes. Remember once I was at a convention in Cincinnati –’
Mallory shook his head wearily.
‘You have a fixation about hotels, Corporal. This is a military establishment and these are army officers’ billets.’
Miller made to speak but changed his mind. The American was a shrewd judge of people. There were those who could be ribbed and those who could not be ribbed. An almost hopeless mission, Miller was quietly aware, and as vital as it was, in his opinion, suicidal, but he was beginning to understand why they’d picked this tough, sunburnt New Zealander to lead it.
They sat in silence for the next five minutes, then looked up as the door opened. Captain Briggs was hatless and wore a white silk muffler round his throat in place of the usual collar and tie. The white contrasted oddly with the puffed red of the heavy neck and face above. These had been red enough when Mallory had first seen them in the colonel’s office – high blood pressure and even higher living, Mallory had supposed: the extra deep shades of red and purple now present probably sprang from a misplaced sense of righteous indignation. A glance at the choleric eyes, gleaming light-blue prawns afloat in a sea of vermilion, was quite enough to confirm the obvious.
‘I think this is a bit much, Captain Mallory!’ The voice was high pitched in anger, more nasal than ever. I’m not the duty errand-boy, you know. I’ve had a damned hard day and –’
‘Save it for your biography,’ Mallory said curtly, ‘and take a gander at this character in the corner.’
Briggs’s face turned an even deeper hue. He stepped into the room, fists balled in anger, then stopped in his tracks as his eye lit on the crumpled, dishevelled figure still crouched in the corner of the room.
‘Good God!’ he ejaculated. ‘Nicolai!’
‘You know him.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘Of course I know him!’ Briggs snorted. ‘Everybody knows him. Nicolai. Our laundry-boy.’
‘Your laundry-boy! Do his duties entail snooping around the corridors at night, listening at keyholes?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I say.’ Mallory was very patient. ‘We caught him listening outside the door.’
‘Nicolai? I don’t believe it!’
‘Watch it, mister,’ Miller growled. ‘Careful who you call a liar. We all saw him.’
Briggs stared in fascination at the black muzzle of the automatic waving negligently in his direction, gulped, looked hastily away.
‘Well, what if you did?’ He forced a smile. ‘Nicolai can’t speak a word of English.’
‘Maybe not,’ Mallory agreed dryly. ‘But he understands it well enough.’ He raised his hand. ‘I’ve no desire to argue all night and I certainly haven’t the time. Will you please have this man placed under arrest, kept in solitary confinement and incommunicado for the next week at least. It’s vital. Whether he’s a spy or just too damned nosy, he knows far too much. After that, do what you like. My advice is to kick him out of Castelrosso.’
‘Your advice, indeed!’ Briggs’s colour returned, and with it his courage. ‘Who the hell are you to give me advice or to give me orders, Captain Mallory?’ There was a heavy emphasis on the word ‘captain’.
‘Then I’m asking it as a favour,’ Mallory pleaded wearily. ‘I can’t explain, but it’s terribly important. There are hundreds of lives –’
‘Hundreds of lives!’ Briggs sneered. ‘Melodramatic stuff and nonsense!’ He smiled unpleasantly. ‘I suggest you keep that for your cloak-and-dagger biography, Captain Mallory.’
Mallory rose, walked round the table, stopped a foot away from Briggs. The brown eyes were still and very cold.
‘I could go and see your colonel, I suppose. But I’m tired of arguing. You’ll do exactly as I say or I’ll go straight to Naval HQ and get on the radio-telephone to Cairo. And if I do,’ Mallory went on, ‘I swear to you that you’ll be on the next ship home to England – and on the troop-deck, at that.’
His last words seemed to echo in the little room for an interminable time: the stillness was intense. And then, as suddenly as it had arisen, the tension was gone and Briggs’s face, a now curiously mottled white and red, was slack and sullen in defeat.
‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘No need for all these damned stupid threats – not if it means all that much to you.’ The attempt to bluster, to patch up the shredded rags of his dignity, was pathetic in its transparency. ‘Matthews – call out the guard.’
The torpedo-boat, great aero engines throttled back half speed, pitched and lifted, pitched and lifted with monotonous regularity as it thrust its way into the long, gentle swell from the WNW. For the hundredth time that night Mallory looked at his watch.
‘Running behind time, sir?’ Stevens suggested.
Mallory nodded.
‘We should have stepped straight into this thing from the Sunderland – there was a hold-up.’
Brown grunted. ‘Engine trouble, for a fiver.’ The Clydeside accent was very heavy.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ Mallory looked up, surprised. ‘How did you know?’
‘Always the same with these blasted MTB engines,’ Brown growled. ‘Temperamental as a film star.’
There was silence for a time in the tiny blacked-out cabin, a silence broken only by the occasional clink of a glass. The Navy was living up to its traditional hospitality.
‘If we’re late,’ Miller observed at last, ‘why doesn’t the skipper open her up? They tell me these crates can do forty to fifty knots.’
‘You look green enough already,’ Stevens said tactlessly. ‘Obviously, you’ve never been in an MTB full out in a heavy sea.
’
Miller fell silent a moment. Clearly, he was trying to take his mind off his internal troubles. ‘Captain?’
‘Yes, what is it?’ Mallory answered sleepily. He was stretched full length on a narrow settee, an almost empty glass in his fingers.
‘None of my business, I know, boss, but – would you have carried out that threat you made to Captain Briggs?’
Mallory laughed.
‘It is none of your business, but – well, no, Corporal, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t because I couldn’t. I haven’t all that much authority invested in me – and I didn’t even know whether there was a radio-telephone in Castelrosso.’
‘Yeah. Yeah, do you know, I kinda suspected that.’ Corporal Miller rubbed a stubbled chin. ‘If he’d called your bluff, what would you have done, boss?’
‘I’d have shot Nicolai,’ Mallory said quietly. ‘If the colonel had failed me. I’d have had no choice left.’
‘I knew that too. I really believe you would. For the first time I’m beginning to believe we’ve got a chance … But I kinda wish you had shot him – and little Lord Fauntleroy. I didn’t like the expression on old Briggs’s face when you went out that door. Mean wasn’t the word. He coulda killed you then. You trampled right over his pride, boss – and to a phony like that nothin’ else in the world matters.’
Mallory made no reply. He was already sound asleep, his empty glass fallen from his hand. Not even the banshee clamour of the great engines opening full out as they entered the sheltered calm of the Rhodes channel could plumb his bottomless abyss of sleep.
THREE
Monday
0700–1700
‘My dear fellow, you make me feel dreadfully embarrassed.’ Moodily the officer switched his ivory-handled flyswat against an immaculately trousered leg, pointed a contemptuous but gleaming toe-cap at the ancient caique, broad-beamed and two-masted, moored stern on to the even older and more dilapidated wooden pier on which they were standing. ‘I am positively ashamed. The clients of Rutledge and Company, I assure you, are accustomed only to the best.’
The Complete Navarone Page 4