Hugues said, ‘Non, merde –’
‘Jaime is right,’ said Marcel. Another burst of Spandau fire sounded from the square. He looked as if he was going to cry. He said, ‘Please. Be quick. Someone will talk.’
‘Talk?’
‘They are shooting people. One every ten minutes.’ His face collapsed. He put his hands to his eyes.
Hugues said, ‘For God’s sake, be a man.’
Marcel looked at him vacantly. His cheeks were wet with tears. He said, ‘The first person they shot was my mother.’
Hugues went red as blood, then pale.
‘God rest her soul,’ mumbled Andrea.
Mallory said, ‘She has died that others may live. We thank you for her great courage. And yours.’
Marcel met his eye firmly. He said, ‘Vive la France.’ He took a deep breath. ‘For her sake, I ask that you complete your mission.’
‘It will be done.’
He shook Mallory’s hand. Andrea put his great paw on his shoulder.
Hugues said, ‘I leave Lisette in your care.’
‘I am honoured,’ said Marcel. ‘Now you must go. Then I can make them stop.’
‘How?’
‘I will tell the girls to say they saw you.’
‘The girls?’
‘They are friends with some of the Germans. The Germans who come to this brothel. That is why they leave us alone. Used to leave us alone. The Germans will not hurt the girls.’
Mallory said, ‘How do we get out?’
‘Drive ahead,’ said Marcel. ‘The entry is beyond the bracken.’
Hugues said, ‘I must say goodbye to Lisette.’
‘You must go,’ said Marcel. ‘Please.’ He rummaged in a crate, came back with four bottles of Cognac. ‘Take these. Go.’
‘Non,’ said Hugues, his voice rising. ‘The child –’
He did not finish what he was going to say because Andrea had reached out a crane-hook hand and gripped his shoulder. Andrea said, ‘Like this brave Marcel, you are a soldier,’ and pushed him into the back of the Jeep.
Hugues said, shamefaced, ‘Tell her I love her.’
Marcel nodded dumbly.
‘Miller,’ said Mallory. ‘Drive on.’
‘By the square?’
Mallory turned upon him his cool brown eyes. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Don’t you?’
The Jeep’s engine started first time. They lifted Wallace into the back and climbed aboard as best they could. The engine sounded very loud in the confined space. It would sound very loud in the village, too; there were no other engines running in Colbis.
Miller slammed the Jeep into four-wheel drive. The engine howled as he stamped on the throttle. He let out the clutch. The Jeep plunged into the dried bracken, and kept on plunging. The brittle fronds piled up against the windscreen and spilled into the back. Miller saw daylight, and aimed for it. Covered in a haystack mound of bracken, the Jeep shot out of the barn doorway and into the lane, turned on two wheels, and turned right again. At the end of the lane was a slice of the square, with plane trees. In the slice of square, three SS men were crouched round a Spandau. ‘Civilians keep down,’ said Mallory, cocking the Brownings on the bonnet and flicking off the safety catches. ‘Open fire.’
The Spandau gunners did not enjoy shooting innocent civilians. It was, frankly, a disagreeable duty, only marginally better than cleaning latrines. But Befehl ist Befehl. Orders are orders.
They were sitting there, ignoring the two clusters of bloody pockmarks on the church wall above the crumpled bodies of their first two victims, and concentrating on the third victim, the priest’s housekeeper, a thin, slope-shouldered old woman, standing stiffly to attention in a flannel dressing gown. The machine gunners were looking grim and efficient, because they were dying for a smoke. The sooner they got this over with, the better –
From the back of the square came a clatter like a giant typewriter. Something hammered the Spandau into the air and sent it spinning, tripod and all, across the square. Ricochets whined into the sky. Two of the machine gunners performed sudden ragged acrobatics and fell down. The third had enough time to spin round and think, machine-gun fire, and see a haystack with four wheels howling out of an alleyway, the muzzle-flash of machine guns dancing in the hay, which seemed to be catching fire. Then a succession of hammers walloped the last gunner in the chest and his legs lost their strength and his mouth filled with blood. And as his head bounced limply on the pavé of the square he saw his comrades, drawn up in lines, start tumbling like corn before the scythe, and heard the whoomp of a petrol tank exploding.
Then the machine gunner’s eyes grew dim, and he died.
Miller yanked the Jeep’s steering wheel to the right. The main road out of the square gaped in front of him. The clatter of the Brownings was a mechanical thunder in his ears. Something was burning, with a smell that reminded him of burning tumbleweeds when he had worked a summer in the Kansas oil fields. It was not tumbleweed, of course. It was bracken, set on fire by the muzzle-flashes of the heavy machine guns. It was dry as tinder, that bracken. Mallory and Andrea were still firing short sharp bursts. Miller yelled, ‘Get it off!’
From the square there came a higher, sharper crackle: rifle fire. A bullet spanged off the Jeep’s suspension and moaned away skyward.
Mallory said, calmly, ‘Fire low.’
A patrol of Germans had appeared in the road ahead. The Brownings thundered. More bullets cracked over the Jeep. Then the Germans were down, rolling, and the suspension was jouncing as the wheels went over the bodies. The street behind had vanished in a pall of grey-white smoke. The houses were thinning. The crackle of the bracken was a roar.
‘Get rid of it!’ yelled Miller.
Hugues’ coat was smouldering as he unfolded himself from the bed of the Jeep. He was coughing, his eyes streaming. He began to kick blazing faggots of bracken onto the road. Jaime was doing it too, and Thierry, who was making small, frightened prodding movements, clearing his precious radio first.
‘St-Jean-de-Luz,’ said Mallory, over the slipstream. ‘Which way?’
‘Up the road,’ said Jaime. ‘Then there’s a track.’ He brushed burning bracken from his sleeve. ‘Merde.’
There were strips of blue sky between heavy squalls of cloud. The last of the bracken lay fuming in the road, receding fast. Ahead the pavé stretched, polished black and gently curving. It was the main road out of the valley. A road crawling with Germans – Germans who would by now have found out by radio that a unit of the British army was on the loose in a Jeep. At least, Mallory hoped they would think they were a unit of the British army. That way, there might be no civilian reprisals.
But how had the Germans known to come to Colbis?
It seems quite possible that the Germans will, in a manner of speaking, be waiting for you.
Mallory said, ‘Where were you hiding in the village?’
‘They spread us round,’ said Jaime. ‘Me, I was in the brothel. In bed. In the most innocent way, of course.’
‘But they searched the brothel.’
‘My papers are in order,’ said Jaime. His face was dark and closed. ‘What have I to fear?’
Mallory nodded. Unanswered questions buzzed around his ears like flies.
‘Left,’ said Jaime.
Left was a track that turned off the main road, crept along the side of a mountain and into a wood. The Jeep ground through a deserted farmyard and onto a road of ancient cobbles.
‘The back way,’ said Jaime. ‘Arrives close to St-Jean-de-Luz. The main road goes down the valley and joins the big road to St-Jean-de-Luz at the foot of the mountains. This one takes us over a hill, into a valley, then over another hill, and down to St-Jean. But it is only good for mule or Jeep. It’s a small road. It doesn’t run over the frontier, so the Germans don’t pay much attention to it.’
They sat three in the front, four in the back. The SAS man was white, and his eyes were closed. When the Jeep hit a boulder, the muscles of
his jaw tautened with pain. For an hour the Jeep moaned upwards into the mountains. Jaime and Hugues were talking quietly in French.
Suddenly, Hugues started shouting. His face was purple, contorted with rage. He got his fingers round Jaime’s neck and his knees on his chest, and he picked the small man’s head up and slammed it against the bodywork, and pulled it back, and was going to do it again when Andrea’s hands closed, one on each arm, and, without apparent effort, detached his hands. Jaime rolled away, coughing and retching. Hugues struggled futilely in Andrea’s grip, still shouting.
Mallory said, ‘Shut up,’ in a voice that cracked like a rifle bullet.
Hugues shut up.
‘What’s the problem?’
Hugues’ eyes were the size of saucers. ‘Lisette,’ he said.
‘What about her?’
‘She’s not in the village. She was supposed to be in the village, asleep. But not so. Jaime says he saw her. She was taken away. By a German in a leather overcoat. Gestapo.’ He put his face in his hands.
Mallory’s stomach was hollow with apprehension. He said, ‘Is this true?’
Jaime’s face could have been carved from yellowish stone. He said, ‘It’s true.’
Hugues sat up, suddenly. ‘We must go to Bayonne,’ he said. ‘Immediately. Without delay. With the guns we have, the explosives, we can get into Gestapo HQ –’
Mallory said, ‘How much does Lisette know about this operation?’
‘She knows we are going to St-Jean,’ said Hugues. ‘But she will never talk.’
Jaime said, ‘Everyone talks.’
‘Non!’ shouted Hugues, losing control.
‘She is pregnant,’ said Jaime. ‘What do you think they will do to the child?’
Hugues’ anger evaporated. He seemed to grow smaller. He covered his face with his hands.
Mallory said, ‘How did this happen?’
Jaime looked straight ahead, his face without expression. ‘I saw from the window of the bordel. She was led out. They put her in a big car, and drove away.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us earlier?’
‘There is a thing we must do. The mother of Marcel has died for this thing. So has Jules, at Jonzère, and others. It is war. I kept quiet so our decision could not be … influenced.’ He looked at Hugues, then back at Mallory. ‘You would have done what I did.’
Hugues said, ‘Only a monster –’
‘Shut up,’ said Mallory.
Of course Jaime was right. The object of the operation was to destroy submarines, not chase Gestapo cars across the northern foothills of the Pyrenees. By pretending that Lisette was in Colbis until she was definitely beyond help, Jaime had prevented a worse crisis.
Not that it could be much worse for Lisette.
Mallory tried not to think about what would be happening to Lisette. He said, ‘She’ll talk.’
‘Not for two days,’ said Jaime. ‘That is the rule. She will hold out for two days to give us time to get clear.’
Thierry cocked his straw hat over his eye and delivered himself of an offensively cynical chuckle. ‘The Germans know this also. They will be very persuasive.’
Hugues said, ‘Jesus.’ His face was grey and bloodless.
‘But relax,’ said Thierry. ‘If the Gestapo ask the wrong question, they will get the wrong answer. How will they ask the right question?’
Mallory knew that in Gestapo HQ at Bayonne, there would be people who could make you beg to be allowed to tell them everything you knew, without a question being asked. He said to Hugues, ‘There is nothing we can do. I really am very sorry.’
Hugues looked at him with haunted eyes. ‘Old women have lived their lives,’ he said. ‘Soldiers protect their country. Who can use my unborn child as a weapon of war? What has this poor child done?’
Andrea said, ‘These are questions you must ask a priest.’ Mallory did not look at him. The Greek had found the bodies of his parents in the river at Protosami. They had been shot by Bulgarian soldiers, then lashed together and thrown to the fish. Andrea knew about total war. So had his parents’ killers, until they had died, very suddenly and all at once. ‘But the time for asking such questions is when the war is finished. For now, we must only obey orders and fight, because if we think, we go crazy.’
There was no more talking after that.
The Jeep ground on, up and over the mountain, away from the great hazy prospect of the valley. Hugues had opened one of the bottles of brandy Marcel had loaded into the Jeep. His blue eyes turned pink and glassy. A shoulder of wooded hillside interposed itself between the road and the valley. The sun came out from between the shredded clouds. Flies buzzed round Wallace’s bloody tunic. The track left the trees and wound across a marshy saddle between two peaks. High overhead, a pair of vultures hung in the blue. There were no Germans, no sign of the war raging out there in the world. As the road started downhill again, Dusty Miller saw a glittering blue line beyond a notch in the whaleback hills. The sea.
‘Progress,’ he said. ‘And about goddamn time, too.’
But the road dipped down again, into the first rank of the chestnut forests, and the blue line disappeared. As the Jeep ground on downhill, Miller’s spirits suffered the small but definite dip that with him passed for extreme gloom. They were nearing the coast at last. There was two-thirds of a tank of gas left in the Jeep. Keep on driving, and whatever happens will happen –
But there was a hell of a way to go, through Indian country, to a destination at best uncertain.
‘One kilometre now, a big road,’ said Jaime, rising from his gloomy silence like a diver from a lake. ‘Road to the frontier. Patrolled, I guess.’
‘We’ll take it quietly,’ said Mallory. ‘Go on five hundred yards. Turn off the engine. Freewheel.’
The Jeep rolled down the track, silent except for the twang of its springs and the sniffing of Hugues. A light breeze sighed in the chestnuts. It was a beautiful spring morning, quiet except for the song of birds in the trees.
And the guttural voices that drifted up from the road.
Mallory tapped Andrea on the shoulder. The big Greek nodded. He jumped down from the Jeep and started down the track. His gigantic shoulders seemed to merge into the trees in a way not entirely attributable to the camouflage smock he wore. Watching him Hugues shivered, recalling the warm, padded but horribly powerful hands that had pulled him off Jaime as if he had been a light blanket.
His eyes slid to Jaime, to the stony face of the man who had lost him Lisette. Sometimes, being a soldier was impossible.
He looked away. Looking at Jaime hurt his eyes.
Andrea moved down the track quickly and quietly. When he could see the dark glimmer of the road below him he cut into the trees, placing his feet carefully among the ferns and dry leaves. He passed through the forest with the faintest of rustles, more like a breeze than a twenty-stone human. At the edge of the trees, he stopped.
The road was pavé, the square, polished cobblestones of France. Twenty yards to his left was a sandbagged enclosure with a single embrasure from which projected the muzzle of a machine gun. Beside the enclosure, a bar painted in red-and-white stripes blocked off the road. The machine gun was pointing to the right, north, towards France, and, coincidentally, the stretch of road across which the Jeep would have to travel to rejoin the track on the far side, where it dived into the forests at the foot of a tall mountain plated with grey rock.
Andrea absorbed all of this in perhaps ten seconds, checking off a mental list of options. Then he walked quietly back into the trees and inside the wood along the side of the valley, passing above the checkpoint.
From above, he saw that the machine gun was unmanned. Its three-man crew and two other soldiers were lying on the grassy bank of the road, smoking. One of them was telling what Andrea recognised as a dirty joke he had overheard in the town at Navarone. Swiftly, he walked fifty yards through the wood, parallel to the road, in the general direction of Spain. Then he slung his Schmeisser a
cross his stomach, pulled his helmet down over his eyes, and walked out onto the pavé.
At the sound of his boots, the men on the bank looked up. They saw the biggest Waffen-SS they had ever seen, moving light-footed towards them, eyes invisible under the helmet. They had never seen an SS man with a moustache before. Being honest Wehrmacht footsloggers, they did not like the SS, and they did not like moustaches. So the sergeant who had been telling the joke pretended not to see this one until he was on top of them. Then he looked up. ‘What the hell do you want?’ he said. ‘A shave?’
The men in the Jeep on the hillside heard nothing. A thrush was singing. A pigeon crashed out of a chestnut tree. Otherwise, there was silence, a silence that reminded Mallory of the silence on the far side of an operating theatre door. Andrea would be doing his horrible worst. After five minutes, mingled with the thrush’s song came the metallic cry of a Scops owl.
Mallory said, ‘Drive.’
Miller started to drive. This time he used the engine, because there would be no enemies alive to hear it.
Andrea was waiting by the road, wiping a long, curved knife on a tuft of grass. On a grassy bank nearby, five men in grey uniforms were staring at the sky. There was a lot of red among the yellow and white flowers on which they lay. But it was too early for poppies.
Andrea clambered into the Jeep. Miller gunned the engine.
Up the road, a figure in field-grey stumbled out of the trees, buttoning his trousers. When he saw the Jeep, he shouted, ‘Halt!’
Mallory straightened his helmet and gripped his Schmeisser. He said, ‘I’ll deal with him.’ But the brandy Hugues had drunk was heating up his mind. The sky and the trees and the mountains were swimming. It was difficult, being a soldier, obeying orders. When it meant that this woman, the woman you loved, Lisette … her fingernails, he thought, her teeth. They pull them out with pliers. And the baby –
In the centre of his vision, something new was moving. Something grey. A German soldier.
The Complete Navarone Page 62