‘Well, now, I believe I have.’ Andrea affected vast surprise. ‘Just a scratch, my friend.’
‘Oh, sure, sure, just a scratch! It would be the same if your arm had been blown off. Come on down to the cabin – this is just a kindergarten exercise for a man of my medical skill.’
‘But the captain –’
‘Will have to wait. And your story. Ol’ Medicine Man Miller permits no interference with his patients. Come on!’
‘Very well, very well,’ Andrea said docilely. He shook his head in mock resignation, followed Miller out of the cabin.
Brown opened up to full throttle again, took the launch north almost to Cape Demirci to avoid any hundred to one chance the harbour batteries might make, turned due east for a few miles then headed south into the Maidos Straits. Mallory stood by his side in the wheelhouse, gazing out over the dark, still waters. Suddenly he caught a gleam of white in the distance, touched Brown’s arm and pointed for’ard.
‘Breakers ahead, Casey, I think. Reefs perhaps?’
Casey looked in long silence, finally shook his head.
‘Bow-wave,’ he said unemotionally. ‘It’s the destroyers coming through.’
SEVENTEEN
Wednesday Night
Midnight
Commander Vincent Ryan, RN, Captain (Destroyers) and Commanding Officer of His Majesty’s latest S-class destroyer Sirdar, looked round the cramped chart-room and tugged thoughtfully at his magnificent Captain Kettle beard. A scruffier, a more villainous, a more cut and battered-looking bunch of hard cases he had never seen, he reflected, with the possible exception of a Bias Bay pirate crew he had helped round up when a very junior officer on the China Station. He looked at them more closely, tugged his beard again, thought there was more to it than mere scruffiness. He wouldn’t care to be given the task of rounding this lot up. Dangerous, highly dangerous, he mused, but impossible to say why, there was only this quietness, this relaxed watchfulness that made him feel vaguely uncomfortable. His ‘hatchet-men’, Jensen had called them: Captain Jensen picked his killers well.
‘Any of you gentlemen care to go below,’ he suggested. ‘Plenty of hot water, dry clothes – and warm bunks. We won’t be using them tonight.’
‘Thank you very much, sir.’ Mallory hesitated. ‘But we’d like to see this through.’
‘Right then, the bridge it is,’ Ryan said cheerfully. The Sirdar was beginning to pick up speed again, the deck throbbing beneath their feet. ‘It is at your own risk, of course.’
‘We lead charmed lives,’ Miller drawled. ‘Nothin’ ever happens to us.’
The rain had stopped and they could see the cold twinkling of stars through broadening rifts in the clouds. Mallory looked around him, could see Maidos broad off the port bow and the great bulk of Navarone slipping by to starboard. Aft, about a cable length away, he could just distinguish two other ships, high-curving bow-waves piled whitely against tenebrious silhouettes. Mallory turned to the captain.
‘No transports, sir?’
‘No transports.’ Ryan felt a vague mixture of pleasure and embarrassment that this man should call him ‘sir’. ‘Destroyers only. This is going to be a smash-and-grab job. No time for dawdlers tonight – and we’re behind schedule already.’
‘How long to clear the beaches?’
‘Half an hour.’
‘What! Twelve hundred men?’ Mallory was incredulous.
‘More.’ Ryan sighed. ‘Half the ruddy inhabitants want to come with us, too. We could still do it in half an hour, but we’ll probably take a bit longer. We’ll embark all the mobile equipment we can.’
Mallory nodded, let his eye travel along the slender outlines of the Sirdar. ‘Where are you going to put ’em all, sir.’
‘A fair question,’ Ryan admitted. ‘Five p.m. on the London Underground will be nothing compared to this little lot. But we’ll pack them in somehow.’
Mallory nodded again and looked across the dark waters at Navarone. Two minutes, now, three at the most, and the fortress would open behind that headland. He felt a hand touch his arm, half-turned and smiled down at the sad-eyed little Greek by his side.
‘Not long now, Louki,’ he said quietly.
‘The people, Major,’ he murmured. ‘The people in the town. Will they be all right?’
‘They’ll be all right. Dusty says the roof of the cave will go straight up. Most of the stuff will fall into the harbour.’
‘Yes, but the boats –?’
‘Will you stop worrying! There’s nobody aboard them – you know they have to leave at curfew time.’ He looked round as someone touched his arm.
‘Captain Mallory, this is Lieutenant Beeston, my gunnery officer.’ There was a slight coolness in Ryan’s voice that made Mallory think that he wasn’t overfond of his gunnery officer. ‘Lieutenant Beeston is worried.’
‘I am worried!’ The tone was cold, aloof, with an indefinable hint of condescension. ‘I understand that you have advised the captain not to offer any resistance?’
‘You sound like a BBC communiqué,’ Mallory said shortly. ‘But you’re right, I did say that. You couldn’t locate the guns except by searchlight and that would be fatal. Similarly with gunfire.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’ One could almost see the lift of the eyebrows in the darkness.
‘You’d give away your position,’ Mallory said patiently. ‘They’d nail you first time. Give ’em two minutes and they’d nail you anyway. I have good reason to believe that the accuracy of their gunners is quite fantastic’
‘So has the Navy,’ Ryan interjected quietly. ‘Their third shell got the Sybaris’s B magazine.’
‘Have you got any idea why this should be, Captain Mallory?’ Beeston was quite unconvinced.
‘Radar-controlled guns,’ Mallory said briefly. ‘They have two huge scanners atop the fortress.’
‘The Sirdar had radar installed last month,’ Beeston said stiffly. ‘I imagine we could register some hits ourselves if –’
‘You could hardly miss.’ Miller drawled out the words, the tone dry and provocative. ‘It’s a helluva big island, Mac.’
‘Who – who are you?’ Beeston was rattled. ‘What the devil do you mean?’
‘Corporal Miller.’ The American was unperturbed. ‘Must be a very selective instrument, Lootenant, that can pick out a cave in a hundred square miles of rock.’
There was a moment’s silence, then Beeston muttered something and turned away.
‘You’ve hurt Guns’s feelings, Corporal,’ Ryan murmured. ‘He’s very keen to have a go – but we’ll hold our fire … How long till we clear that point, Captain?’
‘I’m not sure.’ He turned. ‘What do you say, Casey?’
‘A minute, sir. No more.’
Ryan nodded, said nothing. There was a silence on the bridge, a silence only intensified by the sibilant rushing of the waters, the weird, lonesome pinging of the Asdic. Above, the sky was steadily clearing, and the moon, palely luminous, was struggling to appear through a patch of thinning cloud. Nobody spoke, nobody moved. Mallory was conscious of the great bulk of Andrea beside him, of Miller, Brown and Louki behind. Born in the heart of the country, brought up on the foothills of the Southern Alps, Mallory knew himself as a landsman first and last, an alien to the sea and ships: but he had never felt so much at home in his life, never really known till now what it was to belong. He was more than happy, Mallory thought vaguely to himself, he was content. Andrea and his new friends and the impossible well done – how could a man be but content? They weren’t all going home, Andy Stevens wasn’t coming with them, but strangely he could feel no sorrow, only a gentle melancholy … Almost as if he had divined what Mallory was thinking, Andrea leaned towards him, towering over him in the darkness.
‘He should be here,’ he murmured. ‘Andy Stevens should be here. That is what you are thinking, is it not?’
Mallory nodded and smiled, and said nothing.
‘It doesn’t really mat
ter, does it, my Keith?’ No anxiety, no questioning, just a statement of fact. ‘It doesn’t really matter.’
‘It doesn’t matter at all.’
Even as he spoke, he looked up quickly. A light, a bright orange flame had lanced out from the sheering wall of the fortress; they had rounded the headland and he hadn’t even noticed it. There was a whistling roar – Mallory thought incongruously of an express train emerging from a tunnel – directly overhead, and the great shell had crashed into the sea just beyond them. Mallory compressed his lips, unconsciously tightened his clenched fists. It was easy now to see how the Sybaris had died.
He could hear the gunnery officer saying something to the captain, but the words failed to register. They were looking at him and he at them and he did not see them. His mind was strangely detached. Another shell, would that be next? Or would the roar of the gunfire of that first shell come echoing across the sea? Or perhaps … Once again, he was back in that dark magazine entombed in the rocks, only now he could see men down there, doomed, unknowing men, could see the overhead pulleys swinging the great shells and cartridges towards the well of the lift, could see the shell hoist ascending slowly, the bared, waiting wires less than half an inch apart, the shining, spring-loaded wheel running smoothly down the gleaming rail, the gentle bump as the hoist …
A white pillar of flame streaked up hundreds of feet into the night sky as the tremendous detonation tore the heart out of the great fortress of Navarone. No after-fire of any kind, no dark, billowing clouds of smoke, only that one blinding white column that lit up the entire town for a single instant of time, reached up incredibly till it touched the clouds, vanished as if it had never been. And then, by and by, came the shock waves, the solitary thunderclap of the explosion, staggering even at that distance, and finally the deep-throated rumbling as thousands of tons of rock toppled majestically into the harbour – thousands of tons of rock and the two great guns of Navarone.
The rumbling was still in their ears, the echoes fading away far out across the Aegean, when the clouds parted and the moon broke through, a full moon silvering the darkly-rippling waters to starboard, shining iridescently through the spun phosphorescence of the Sirdar’s boiling wake. And dead ahead, bathed in the white moonlight, mysterious, remote, the island of Kheros lay sleeping on the surface of the sea.
ALISTAIR MACLEAN
Force 10 from Navarone
DEDICATION
To Lewis and Caroline
MAP
ONE
Prelude: Thursday
0000–0600
Commander Vincent Ryan, RN, Captain (Destroyers) and commanding officer of His Majesty’s latest S-class destroyer Sirdar, leaned his elbows comfortably on the coaming of his bridge, brought up his night-glasses and gazed out thoughtfully over the calm and silvered waters of the moonlit Aegean.
He looked first of all due north, straight out over the huge and smoothly sculpted and whitely phosphorescent bow-wave thrown up by the knife-edged forefoot of his racing destroyer: four miles away, no more, framed in its backdrop of indigo sky and diamantine stars, lay the brooding mass of a darkly cliff-girt island: the island of Kheros, for months the remote and beleaguered outpost of two thousand British troops who had expected to die that night, and who would now not die.
Ryan swung his glasses through 180° and nodded approvingly. This was what he liked to see. The four destroyers to the south were in such perfect line astern that the hull of the leading vessel, a gleaming bone in its teeth, completely obscured the hulls of the three ships behind. Ryan turned his binoculars to the east.
It was odd, he thought inconsequentially, how unimpressive, even how disappointing, the aftermath of either natural or man-made disaster could be. Were it not for that dull red glow and wisping smoke that emanated from the upper part of the cliff and lent the scene a vaguely Dantean aura of primeval menace and foreboding, the precipitous far wall of the harbour looked as it might have done in the times of Homer. That great ledge of rock that looked from that distance so smooth and regular and somehow inevitable could have been carved out by the wind and weather of a hundred million years: it could equally well have been cut away fifty centuries ago by the masons of Ancient Greece seeking marble for the building of their Ionian temples: what was almost inconceivable, what almost passed rational comprehension, was the fact that ten minutes ago that ledge had not been there at all, that there had been in its place tens of thousands of tons of rock, the most impregnable German fortress in the Aegean and, above all, the two great guns of Navarone, now all buried for ever three hundred feet under the sea. With a slow shake of his head Commander Ryan lowered his binoculars and turned to look at the men responsible for achieving more in five minutes than nature could have done in five million years.
Captain Mallory and Corporal Miller. That was all he knew of them, that and the fact that they had been sent on this mission by an old friend of his, a naval captain by the name of Jensen who, he had learnt only twenty-four hours previously – and that to his total astonishment – was the Head of Allied Intelligence in the Mediterranean. But that was all he knew of them and maybe he didn’t even know that. Maybe their names weren’t Mallory and Miller. Maybe they weren’t even a captain and a corporal. They didn’t look like any captain or corporal he’d ever seen. Come to that, they didn’t look like any soldiers he’d ever seen. Clad in saltwater-and blood-stained German uniforms, filthy, unshaven, quiet and watchful and remote, they belonged to no category of men he’d ever encountered: all he could be certain of as he gazed at the blurred and blood-shot sunken eyes, the gaunt and trenched and stubbled-grey faces of two men no longer young, was that he had never before seen human beings so far gone in total exhaustion.
‘Well, that seems to be about it,’ Ryan said. ‘The troops on Kheros waiting to be taken off, our flotilla going north to take them off and the guns of Navarone no longer in any position to do anything about our flotilla. Satisfied, Captain Mallory?’
‘That was the object of the exercise,’ Mallory agreed.
Ryan lifted his glasses again. This time, almost at the range of night vision, he focused on a rubber dinghy closing in on the rocky shoreline to the west of Navarone harbour. The two figures seated in the dinghy were just discernible, no more: Ryan lowered his glasses and said thoughtfully:
‘Your big friend – and the lady with him – doesn’t believe in hanging about. You didn’t – ah – introduce me to them, Captain Mallory.’
‘I didn’t get the chance to. Maria and Andrea. Andrea’s a colonel in the Greek army: 19th Motorized Division.’
‘Andrea was a colonel in the Greek army,’ Miller said. ‘I think he’s just retired.’
‘I rather think he has. They were in a hurry, Commander, because they’re both patriotic Greeks, they’re both islanders and there is much for both to do in Navarone. Besides, I understand they have some urgent and very personal matters to attend to.’
‘I see.’ Ryan didn’t press the matter, instead he looked out again over the smoking remains of the shattered fortress. ‘Well, that seems to be that. Finished for the evening, gentlemen?’
Mallory smiled faintly. ‘I think so.’
‘Then I would suggest some sleep.’
‘What a wonderful word that is.’ Miller pushed himself wearily off the side of the bridge and stood there swaying as he drew an exhausted forearm over blood-shot, aching eyes. ‘Wake me up in Alexandria.’
‘Alexandria?’ Ryan looked at him in amusement. ‘We won’t be there for thirty hours yet.’
‘That’s what I meant,’ Miller said.
Miller didn’t get his thirty hours. He had, in fact, been asleep for just over thirty minutes when he was wakened by the slow realization that something was hurting his eyes: after he had moaned and feebly protested for some time he managed to get one eye open and saw that that something was a bright overhead light let into the deckhead of the cabin that had been provided for Mallory and himself. Miller propped himself up on a
groggy elbow, managed to get his second eye into commission and looked without enthusiasm at the other two occupants of the cabin: Mallory was seated by a table, apparently transcribing some kind of message, while Commander Ryan stood in the open doorway.
‘This is outrageous,’ Miller said bitterly. ‘I haven’t closed an eye all night.’
‘You’ve been asleep for thirty-five minutes,’ Ryan said. ‘Sorry. But Cairo said this message for Captain Mallory was of the greatest urgency.’
‘It is, is it?’ Miller said suspiciously. He brightened. ‘It’s probably about promotions and medals and leave and so forth.’ He looked hopefully at Mallory who had just straightened after decoding the message. ‘Is it?’
‘Well, no. It starts off promisingly enough, mind you, warmest congratulations and what-have-you, but after that the tone of the message deteriorates a bit.’
Mallory reread the message: SIGNAL RECEIVED WARMEST CONGRATULATIONS MAGNIFICENT ACHIEVEMENT. YOU BLOODY FOOLS WHY YOU LET ANDREA GET AWAY? ESSENTIAL CONTACT HIM IMMEDIATELY. WILL EVACUATE BEFORE DAWN UNDER DIVERSIONARY AIR ATTACK AIR STRIP ONE MILE SOUTH-EAST MANDRAKOS. SEND CE VIA SIRDAR. URGENT 3 REPEAT URGENT 3. BEST LUCK. JENSEN.
Miller took the message from Mallory’s outstretched hand, moved the paper to and fro until he had brought his bleary eyes into focus, read the message in horrified silence, handed it back to Mallory and stretched out his full length on his bunk. He said, ‘Oh, my God!’ and relapsed into what appeared to be a state of shock.
‘That about sums it up,’ Mallory agreed. He shook his head wearily and turned to Ryan. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but we must trouble you for three things. A rubber dinghy, a portable radio transmitter and an immediate return to Navarone. Please arrange to have the radio lined up on a pre-set frequency to be constantly monitored by your WT room. When you receive a CE signal, transmit it to Cairo.’
The Complete Navarone Page 31