The Complete Navarone

by Alistair MacLean

  Mallory put a couple of loops of tail-line round a Samson post, and tied it off with a knot that had more to do with rock faces than boats. He shuffled aft at a fisherman’s slouch. He said to Jaime, ‘What is this?’

  ‘Routine inspection,’ said Jaime, his dark face still, avoiding Mallory’s eye. ‘This officer takes bribes. He’s used to seeing the Stella under the Spanish flag, as long as he get money. He maybe want some money. Or maybe some tobacco, drink, who knows?’

  ‘Jaime knows,’ said Hugues.

  Mallory ignored him. He said, ‘Does he normally point guns?’

  ‘Not normally.’ Jaime frowned at the men on the Cacafuego’s foredeck. ‘He’s got new gunners.’

  Mallory nodded and grinned, a simple fisherman’s grin, full of salty good nature, for the benefit of anyone watching from the gunboat. His eyes were not good-natured. They checked off the rusting grey paint of the bow, the two blond men balancing easily on the deck by the breech of the 75-mm gun. The Captain was on the bridge. Aft of the bridge, another two men stood at machine guns. Spandaus. Spandaus were light guns, but they could still unzip a boat the size of the Stella. A 75-mm gun could blow her right out of the water.

  But the guns were not the main problem. The main problem was the array of radio aerials between the two masts.

  In his mind, he followed the trail of wreckage back into the Pyrenees. If the guarda-costa sent out a signal about unusual occurrences off the Vizcayan coast, any German with a map and eyes to see would be able to grasp the general direction of this dotted line of mayhem.

  There was only one solution.

  Mallory trotted forward and shouted down the main hatch. Jaime started yelling at the patrol boat in Spanish. The patrol boat was yelling back. Mallory cast off the tail-line of the lobster pots. Then he went aft to the wheelhouse. He said to Lisette, ‘Get down, please.’ He politely took the wheel from Jaime, spun it hard-a-starboard, and drove the Stella Maris straight at the patrol boat’s mid point.

  The teniente started screaming into the megaphone. That was a mistake. By the time he had realised screaming was no good, the Stella Maris was twenty feet away. The 75-mm gun banged once. The shell screamed past the Stella’s wheelhouse and burst on the black cliff face two hundred yards behind. The Spandaus opened up, bullets fanning across the sky as the gunboat rolled. Then Andrea and Miller came out of the Stella’s forehatch like jack-in-the-boxes. Andrea hosed the gun’s crew with Bren bullets. They disappeared. Hit or not, it did not matter, as long as they were away from the gun. Miller took the Spandau crews. By the time he had finished his burst, the Stella Maris was in a trough, the gunboat on a wave. The patrol boat’s grey side came down with a rending crash on the Stella’s stem, and stuck there. The gunners on the patrol boat could not depress their sights far enough to bear on the Stella. Andrea had the Bren going by now, hammering a tight pattern of bullets into the patrol boat’s hull, at the place where the radios might be. Miller pulled the pins out of four grenades. He tossed them up the patrol boat’s side, heard them rattle down her decks, and heard the blat of their explosions in the wind. The two boats hung together in the form of a T, bashed and wrenched by the short inshore chop, the Stella’s bow borne down by the patrol boat’s side. There was a hole in that side. The Cacafuego’s plates were no thicker than a tin can: a rusty tin can –

  A wave came under. The Stella pitched away from the gunboat at the same time as the gunboat rolled away from the Stella. The gunboat’s plates gave with a wrenching groan. The two boats came apart, the Stella’s bow rearing high as Mallory took her round and away.

  ‘Fire!’ screamed the Teniente. His ears were ringing from the grenade explosions. The radio aerials were gone, streaming in the breeze. The Teniente heard the bullets clang and whizz, and felt an odd sogginess in his ship’s movements. ‘Fire!’ he screamed again. The Stella Maris was twenty yards away now. He saw the Spandau crews sprawled over their guns, and the foredeck by the 75-mm swept clean of men. He found that his feet were wet, and realised that his ship was sinking. He had been sunk by the Stella Maris. He opened his mouth to scream for help.

  Then he thought of what his cousin would say when he told him that his armed patrol boat had been sunk by a bunch of smugglers.

  The Teniente realised that the time had come to die.

  He stood to attention, and shut his mouth.

  The patrol boat rolled and sank in the space of twenty seconds. There was a tremendous eructation of bubbles. An oar came to the surface. Then nothing.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Jaime, pale to the lips.

  Mallory turned his eyes away from the satiny patch of water where the patrol boat had been. Andrea’s eyes were blank. The blankness had very little to do with shock, or the violent sinking of a guarda-costa with half a dozen crew. He and Mallory were both calculating whether the guarda-costa had announced its attentions on the radio before it had tried to come alongside the Stella Maris.

  Mallory said, ‘Full ahead, I think.’

  Andrea nodded, and lowered his great bulk into the engine room.

  The Bolander took on a more urgent thump. Mallory cut the tail-lines free from the bow. The Stella Maris heaved on westward, the wind cold in Mallory’s face.

  Jaime came on deck with Lisette. She looked pale. She had reason to look pale. Jaime said, ‘Capitaine, I need a word.’

  Lisette watched them walk to the wheelhouse, watched Mallory’s straight back, the precise step. Even on this filthy boat, that one walked like a soldier.

  Jaime said, ‘That was not normal.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I know this man,’ said Jaime. ‘The officer commanding the guarda-costa. He is a bastard, but a careful bastard. He would never stop the Stella. He takes money from smugglers, but not on the sea. Only in the bar, after they have gone ashore. The only reason he stopped us is because someone told him stop any ship.’

  ‘So the Werwolf pack hasn’t left,’ said Mallory. ‘Good.’

  Jaime said, ‘Was it necessary to kill those people?’

  Mallory was not interested. ‘There’s a war on.’

  ‘So you kill these men. Life into death. Like a mule turning food into shit.’

  ‘War is nasty like that,’ said Mallory. ‘The reason we are here is to destroy submarines.’

  Jaime grinned, a grin that held a horrible irony. ‘Perhaps it is just that I do not like to destroy a useful trading partner.’

  ‘There will be better trading after we have won the war,’ said Mallory. ‘Now, there are some things I need to know about the Cabo de la Calavera.’

  By the middle of the day the sky was whitening under a veil of cirrus, and Miller had been sick fourteen times. Andrea was taking his spell at the pump; Andrea never got tired. Mallory came down into the fish-hold.

  ‘Briefing,’ he said. ‘Ready for this?’

  Andrea nodded, impassive behind his three days’ growth of beard. Miller would have done the same, but nodding required energy, and he was saving his energy for when he really needed it.

  Mallory said, ‘There’s a cliff on the seaward side of this Calavera place. Guy said it’s not climbable. So the Germans won’t be watching it. With luck.’

  There was a silence, filled with the pant of the engine and the distant boom of waves on rock.

  Miller said, ‘If it’s climbable, what do we do?’

  Mallory lit his sixtieth cigarette since dawn. ‘Climb it,’ he said.

  Miller shook his head weakly. ‘Ask a silly question,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll go over the side after dark,’ said Mallory. ‘In the dinghy. Jaime and Hugues and Lisette will take the Stella on into the harbour. They’ll look like fishermen in to make repairs. The Germans have put big defences on the harbour side of the Cabo. As far as I can see, there’s very little on the seaward side, because they’ve decided the cliffs will do the job. We’ll go up in the dark, get ourselves some uniforms. Dusty, you’ll want to check your equipment. We’ll all need to shave. Questio
ns?’

  Miller listened to the boom of waves on rock. He said, ‘How do we get from the dinghy onto the cliff? Seems to me that the sea has all these waves on it.’

  Mallory flattened the chart on the filleting table. ‘The sea’s coming from the west.’ He pointed to the northerly bulge of the shore. ‘In behind here there’s a wreck; Guy’s friend Didier Jaulerry’s fishing boat went up the beach four months ago. Jaime says that with the sea from the west, you sometimes get a smooth patch in the lee of the wreck.’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘During the bottom half of the tide. Till about 2100 hours tonight.’

  Andrea said, ‘It’s not full dark at 2100.’

  ‘It is at 2130.’

  Miller said, ‘But what if the waves are breaking clear over that wreck at 2130?’

  Mallory folded the chart briskly, and stuck it in the pocket of his battledress blouse. ‘Oh, I expect we’ll manage,’ he said.

  There was more silence. There was a lot to hope for. They had to hope that the guarda-costa had not got a radio message off, and that the dinghy would not be spotted by the Germans or smash against the cliff, and that the Stella Maris’ remaining complement would escape notice in San Eusebio.

  The wind went up, and so did the waves. Lisette put her swollen ankles out of her bunk, and moved towards the filthy galley. Hugues stopped her. ‘I’ll cook,’ he said. ‘You rest.’

  She looked at him with the dark-shadowed eyes of late pregnancy. He saw hostility and frustration. He said, ‘What is it?’ and tried to put his arm round her.

  She pulled away. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’m tired.’ She turned her face to the wall. Hugues went grim-faced into the galley and rummaged in the boxes that lined the bulkhead. Half an hour later, smoke was issuing from the chimney, and the smell of frying onions mingled horribly with the stench of the Stella’s fish-hold. And in an hour, a stew of tomatoes, hard chorizo, onions and potatoes was steaming in a blackened tureen. Jaime pulled a bottle of suspiciously good red wine out of a locker. Mallory, Andrea and Miller sat themselves at the table in the saloon. Mallory and Andrea ate hard and long. There was no talk. This was the grim refuelling of war machines. At the end, Andrea poured another tumbler of wine, lit a cigarette and leaned back against the fishing boat’s side, eyes closed, humming a Greek tune full of Oriental runs and quarter-tones. Mallory looked across at him, the massive neck running into the colossal shoulders, the face peaceful in repose. He looked at Miller, smoking, pale-green under the eyes, in front of his largely untouched plate of stew. They looked like fishermen: tired fishermen, who smoked too much and drank too much when they could get hold of it. They looked like the kind of fishermen you would expect to find aboard this leaky boat with no bloody fish in the hold, and a smuggler, and an eight-months-pregnant woman, and the man who had got her pregnant.

  They did not look like the cutting edge of a Storm Force whose task it was to climb a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot cliff in the dark, penetrate a strong and watchful garrison, and destroy the submarines of the Werwolf squadron.

  Still, thought Mallory. Nobody would have believed the distance they had come to arrive at this point. But here they were. It was just a matter of carrying on: dividing the big problem into small, manageable problems, and solving them, one by one, with the tools at his disposal.

  And a hell of a lot of luck.

  Miller said, ‘I guess I’ll go turn in.’ He shambled forward to the bunks.

  When they were alone, Andrea said, ‘What do you think about this?’

  Mallory had known the Greek long enough to realise that he did not want an opinion, but a discussion. Mallory was in command of the expedition – there was no argument about that. But Andrea was a full colonel in the Greek army as well as one of the most dangerous and experienced guerrilla fighters in the Mediterranean. To fight at his most lethally efficient, Andrea needed to understand the situation.

  Mallory said, ‘It’s a good place to keep some submarines.’

  ‘Some hidden submarines.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Good security.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And that patrol boat. That was part of the security?’

  ‘The gun crews looked German.’

  ‘True.’ Andrea stroked the place where his moustache should have been. ‘And that was a routine patrol.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Not based on specific information.’

  Mallory shrugged. ‘No way of knowing,’ he said.

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Do we trust all these people?’

  Mallory had been wondering the same thing. Jaime had a smuggler’s capacity for double-dealing. Hugues was brave, but he had an irrational streak a mile wide. And Lisette … well, Lisette under Storm Force control was safer than Lisette at large.

  ‘We’ve got to,’ he said.

  Andrea nodded. There was a pause. Then he said, ‘It seems to me that the Germans will have problems of their own.’

  That had also occurred to Mallory. Spain was full of spies. To keep the occupation of Cabo de la Calavera secret, the garrison would be manned and supplied from the sea, or across the Pyrenees, by night. Either way, it would be a smuggling operation, with all the inconveniences attendant on such operations. And German efficiency or no German efficiency, it seemed likely that a garrison hastily convened and furtively supplied would be a less well-organised garrison than the garrison of, say, Navarone. Confusion would be to the Storm Force’s advantage.

  Andrea poured the last of the wine into the two glasses, and raised his to Mallory. ‘My Keith,’ he said. ‘Victory, or a clean death.’

  ‘And two days’ kip to follow,’ said Mallory.

  He thought, in five hours, we will be on hard rock again, climbing. He raised his own glass and drank. Andrea swung his boots up onto the bench, put his head on his pack, and closed his eyes.

  The door opened. Miller came in.

  At first, Mallory thought he had been shot. His face was bloodless, his lips the colour of ashes. But he was walking well, braced against the heave of the Stella Maris’ deck. In his hands he was carrying the big, brass-bound boxes that held his explosives and his fuses.

  Mallory said, ‘Sleep first. Check gear later.’

  Miller shook his head. He did not speak: it was as if something had happened that had removed his voice. He lifted the boxes and placed them side by side on the gutting table. He unlatched them, opened the lids, and gestured at the contents.

  If the Storm Force was a bomb, the personnel were the fuse and the casing and the fins. What was inside those two brass-bound mahogany boxes was the charge: the stuff that would do the job, blast those three Werwolf submarines into water-filled hulks and save the lives of all those men crammed into transports on the Channel.

  Mallory looked into the boxes. His mouth became dry. His mind went back six hours, to the bay of St-Jean-de-Luz, the red ball of the sun hauling itself up through the fog, the heavy explosions coming from the land. He had thought that Commandant Cendrars’ old soldiers had got their hands on some quarry explosive.

  He had been wrong.

  They had been fifteen minutes on the cliff at Martigny, while Andrea disposed of the pillbox and Mallory and Miller had explained their wishes to the sentries. During that fifteen minutes, the boxes had been in the care of Commandant Cendrars’ enthusiastic veterans.

  The veterans had profited from those fifteen minutes. Possibly their arsenal had been running low, or possibly they merely suffered from an enthusiastic lightness of finger. Whichever the case, the outcome was the same.

  The brass-bound boxes that had contained the explosives and detonators that were going to blow the Werwolf pack to hell now contained, besides a few blades of wet grass and a couple of small stones, half a hundredweight of best Martigny mud.

  There was a silence that seemed to last five years. It was Andrea who broke it. He yawned. ‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘Now I must sleep.’


  ‘Take the bunk,’ said Miller, through lips numb with shock.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Andrea, and shuffled bear-like into the sleeping cabin. It was as if he understood Miller’s sense of failure, and attached to it little enough weight to accept the offer of the bunk as full reparation.

  Miller said, ‘I let it out of my sight.’ Never let your tools out of your sight. If you carry a gun, carry it at all times. Keep your knife strapped on, even in the bathtub. And never, ever, leave your Cyclonite and your detonators to be guarded by heroes of the Marne with the wind under their tails. ‘We have grenades.’

  ‘Ten grenades,’ said Mallory. His knees felt weak. He was sweating. So this is how it ends, he thought.

  Miller said, ‘Four. We used eight on the patrol boat.’ He was thinking again. ‘Anyway, grenades won’t work on U-boat pressure hulls.’ But he did not say it nervously. He said it in a measured, judicious voice, like a prosecution lawyer assessing the chances of convicting a known murderer on circumstantial evidence. If grenades would not work, the voice implied, it would be necessary to find something else that would.

  Mallory heard that new voice.

  For a moment, he had felt it all slipping away from him. That was because in his exhaustion he had forgotten that this was Dusty Miller, who had destroyed the guns at Navarone and the dam at Zenica, not to mention an Afrika Korps ammunition dump with a Cairo tart’s hairpins. Confidence began to tiptoe back into Mallory’s thoughts.

  ‘So I guess they’ll have a magazine there,’ said Miller. ‘And they’ll have to load the torpedoes some time. Your torpedoes take up most of the space on a U-boat. You couldn’t refit with torpedoes on board, could you?’ He folded his hands. ‘So there’s that. And then there’s the engines. Those Walter engines. Hydrogen peroxide, you said. Fuel oil. Water. Interesting stuff, hydrogen peroxide.’ He leaned his long back against the bulkhead, hands folded across his concave stomach, boots propped on the opposite bench, eyes closed. He seemed to be thinking.