‘But Herr General, the administration … we depart at dawn …’
Mallory’s heart seemed to stop beating. ‘At what time?’ he said.
‘At dawn,’ said the SS man, worried. ‘The Herr General will remember … it was the Herr General who issued the order …’
‘The time of dawn, idiot,’ snapped Mallory.
‘Of course.’ The SS man sounded flustered. ‘My apologies. 0500, Herr General.’
‘So you will raise the general alarm,’ said Mallory. ‘And you will proceed to the gate.’
‘But Herr General –’
‘With all the men you can find.’
‘But the work –’
‘Silence!’ barked Mallory. ‘Leave only the sentries, and one man. I need to interview the prisoners. I shall require an escort. The rest to the gate. I hold you personally responsible.’
‘But –’
‘You will go out in the rain,’ said Mallory, ‘and confront the enemy! There is worse than rain on the Ostfront!’
He heard boot heels crash together. The officer said, ‘Jawohl, Herr General,’ in a tight, offended voice. The uniform would be occupying the whole of his vision.
‘Send the escort in five minutes,’ said Mallory. ‘Dismiss!’
The boot heels crashed again. The door slammed. Alarm bells started ringing, rackety and imperious. Mallory turned, stubbed out the cigarette, and lit another.
Five o’clock. The U-boats were sailing seven hours early. And the Storm Force had not even begun.
There was the stamp of many feet in the corridor outside: the General’s staff, trotting off to the gate, scared witless by the prospect of the Russian Front. The footsteps faded. A double knock sounded on the door. Mallory turned back to the window. ‘Komm!’ he cried.
A nervous voice said, ‘Herr General.’
‘We will visit the prisoners,’ said Mallory. ‘Lead the way.’
‘The way?’
‘You lead,’ rasped Mallory. ‘I will follow you. About turn.’
The soldier about turned. Mallory clasped his hands behind his back and hobbled out from behind the desk.
In the corridor, he sank his chin into his collar and strode stiffly after the private. Anyone watching would have seen the General, cap pulled low over his eyes, deep in thought, doing his rounds. But there were only clerks to watch. The alarm bells had sent the garrison clattering for the assembly points, and from the assembly points the Feldwebels had bellowed them to the ramparts on the peninsula.
The escort’s boots rang in the vaulting and crunched grit on the stone stairs. The pain in Mallory’s feet and the aches of his body were small, distant inconveniences.
He had radioed the Stella Maris with false information. Within five minutes, that false information had been relayed to the garrison.
Someone on the Stella Maris was a traitor.
Lisette was out of France, away from the long arm of the Gestapo. Hugues had his girlfriend and his child safe alongside him; if he betrayed the Stella Maris party, Lisette would be separated from him, and probably killed. Which left Jaime: Jaime the dark and silent, the smuggler, connoisseur of secret paths and byways.
Not that it mattered just now.
The soldier halted, with a stamp of his feet. ‘Herr General,’ he said.
They were in a long corridor lined with steel doors. White lights glared harshly from the ceiling. There was a smell of damp and mould. The sentry standing rigidly at attention outside the nearest door coughed. Mallory said, ‘Key.’
The sentry was still coughing.
‘Key!’ rasped Mallory, holding out his hand.
The sentry said, ‘Herr General,’ and fumbled at his belt. He looked at Mallory’s hand.
And Mallory’s skin turned suddenly to ice.
For the sentry was frowning at that outstretched hand. The right hand. The hand of flesh and blood.
The hand that on the real General had been an artificial hand of orange rubber.
‘Herr General,’ said the sentry, with the face of one undergoing a nervous breakdown. ‘This is … you are not the General.’
‘The key,’ rasped Mallory.
But under the brim of his cap he saw the man’s hands going for the Schmeisser.
The cell had not changed. It was still cold, and it still stank, and it was still dark, dark with the absolute blackness of a pocket hewn from living rock. Midnight in the goddamn dungeons, thought Miller. Ghosts would be walking, witches doing whatever the hell witches do when it rains. As far as Miller was concerned, the ghosts and the witches could get on with it. Right here, midnight meant time for a cigarette.
He gave one to Andrea, put one in his own mouth, and lit them. The hot little coals began to glow in the dark, and for a couple of minutes there were warm points in this cold, evil-smelling universe.
But cigarettes end. And when they were finished, it was colder again, and lonelier, and worst of all, quieter.
What felt like two hours later, Andrea said, ‘What time is it?’
Andrea would be thinking about the operation. Miller was thinking about it too. Miller wanted to get finished up.
Some chance.
He looked at the radium-bright hands of his watch. ‘Five past twelve,’ he said.
‘Any minute now,’ said the rumble of Andrea’s voice. And although Miller knew it was a packet of bullshit, he felt for a moment that, any minute now, something might happen.
But nothing did.
Not for thirty seconds, anyway. After thirty seconds, the silence was broken by an odd noise.
It sounded like a jackhammer. It was not a jackhammer.
Someone was firing a machine pistol outside the cell door.
The door swung open. Brilliant light exploded into the darkness. A figure stood against the light, a black, angular silhouette. Andrea stared at it, dazzled. From the monochrome blur there emerged a spidery figure, jackboots set well apart, hands on hips, face invisible under the high-fronted black cap. It was the silhouette that stalked Andrea’s dreams: the rusty-black silhouette that had stood against the sun on the low hill in Greece, with the blue Aegean twinkling like sapphires under the sky.
Under the hill had been the house of Andrea’s brother, Iannis. It had been a small house, with a vine growing over a little terrace of red tiles, fanned by the small thyme-scented breeze that blew up from the sea.
By the time Andrea had got there, the damage had been done. His brother had been suspected of partisan activities, and captured in possession of British weapons. Under the pleasant green shade of the vine, the General had opened a bottle of Iannis’ retsina and poured himself a glass. Then he had perched elegantly on the wall, gleaming boots crossed at the ankles, and watched the show.
The show had consisted of lighting the fire of charcoal on which the family had from time to time cooked an alfresco meal. Three Croatian SS had then brought Iannis’ three daughters – Athene, six, Eirene, eight, and Helen, nine – out of the house. In the fire of charcoal they had burned off the girls’ hands. When Iannis’ wife had begun to scream, the General had had her hanged before the eyes of her husband and her still living children. Iannis they had left alive, nailing his hands to the house door against his attempts to claw out the eyeballs that had seen this thing, and wrench out the heart that was broken.
It was only after they had hanged the children beside their mother that Iannis had managed to tear his hands free and run, run like a maniac, eyes blinded with tears, to the brink of the high white cliff, and keep running, though his feet were no longer running on ground, but running on air, and he was falling down the glistening face of that cliff, falling happily, because he would see his children again, and his wife, and his parents, murdered by Bulgarians –
Five minutes later, Andrea had arrived, slowly, wearing a straw hat and leading a donkey in whose panniers were more weapons. Andrea had stood a moment, blank-eyed, watching. He saw the woman and the three children hanging from the vine that us
ed to shade the evening drinking of ouzo. He saw the black-uniformed SS men, their thick red faces pouring rivers of sweat under the sun, laughing. The flames began to pour out of the roof of the house. He saw the silhouette of the General standing on the cliff, admiring a distant ruin, smiling complacently at the liquid-agate of the sun in the glass of retsina. He smelt burned flesh.
Then Andrea had seen nothing else.
When he could see again, there were five SS men dead at his feet. Them he fed to Iannis’ pigs. The General he shot in the knees and threw into the privy to drown. He heard later from the people of the village that it had taken three days; not that he was interested. For Andrea had not waited. He had gathered together the bodies of his brother and his sister-in-law and his nieces, and given them to the priest for burial. Then he had left, to fight for his country on other fronts.
Andrea did not like SS officers.
He growled, and started forward, his gigantic hands unclenching.
The SS General dropped the Turkish cigarette he was smoking, and ground it out with a fastidious toe. He said, ‘Unless you really like it here, I think we should leave.’ And his voice was the voice of Mallory.
There was a moment’s stunned silence, broken only by the sound of moaning from the corridor. Then Miller said, ‘Personally, I find it damp.’
Andrea’s eyes were pits of darkness. They moved from Mallory to Miller and back again. Then his teeth showed in a smile that was like the sun among thunderclouds. ‘You should be careful about second-hand clothes,’ he said. ‘You could catch something really nasty. Like a knife in the guts.’
Mallory said, ‘It is true that the owner wasn’t very well when I left him.’
There were two bodies in the corridor. ‘Get their clothes and their paybooks,’ said Mallory. Andrea dragged them into the cell, and shut the door. ‘And now?’ he said.
Mallory looked at Miller. ‘What do you need?’
What Miller really needed was his explosives back. But there was no use crying over spilt Cyclonite. ‘Whatever,’ said Miller. ‘These guys will be carrying torpedoes. You can have a nasty accident with a torpedo. I guess I’d like to see the magazine.’
Andrea nodded gravely. During the weeks he had known Miller, he had learned to take this languid, flippant American very seriously indeed.
‘I have a feeling,’ said Mallory, ‘that there might be a certain amount of confusion out there. So the sooner we get dressed, the better.’
Five minutes later, the SS General left the fortaleza by the main gate, escorted by two men in grubby Waffen-SS uniforms, one tall and wide, one tall and lanky, marching eyes front, with Schmeissers strapped across their chests. The sentries on the gate saluted. The General returned their salute with his left hand; the right, being artificial, he held rigidly at his side.
Once across the bridge over the moat, the party turned right, down a flight of wide, shallow stairs that led to a sort of crater in the shoulder of the headland. In the centre of the crater was a squat concrete bunker surrounded with barbed wire.
At a slow and stately pace, Mallory and his escort started down the stairs. There were few other people about. The welding torches still flickered their lightnings at the sky by the harbour, and riveters still rattled in the night. Somewhere, truck engines were rumbling; the evacuation was getting under way. But the armed men of the garrison were still apparently up by the main gate.
The garrison would not stay by the main gate for ever. Sooner or later, someone would decide that the threat might be based on faulty intelligence, or that it was not wise to leave the rest of the Cabo unguarded. Before that happened, there would be fifteen minutes, at best.
They were approaching the gate to the bunker. Seen close up, it was not so much a bunker as a fortified entrance, a steel door set behind a system of concrete baffles giving admittance to a low, tumulus-like mound, covered in salt-blasted turf. The entrance to the magazine.
The soldier at the gate stared straight ahead. ‘Pass?’ he said.
Mallory said, in the General’s harsh whisper, ‘Open the gate.’
‘But Herr General –’
Mallory said, ‘The weather in Russia is terrible at this time of year.’
The man’s face paled under the floodlights. ‘Herr General?’
‘Perhaps when you get there you will send me a postcard,’ rasped Mallory. ‘Now if you would kindly open the gate?’
There was a split second of inner struggle. Then the sentry hauled open the gate in the wire, and Mallory walked through at his cramped, mincing hobble. The sentry must have pressed some sort of switch, because the steel door swung open with a hiss of hydraulics. Mallory and his escorts walked in without pausing. The steel door swung shut behind them. Ahead was a flight of spiral stairs, with at its centre the hoists that fed ammunition to the guns in the fort. Mallory looked at the faces of his companions. They were pale and expressionless, tired, but with a tension to their tiredness that was new. It came from the closing of that steel door.
They were inside now. There were no sandbags to hide behind, no shadows to skulk in. Their only protection against five hundred enemy soldiers was the thin cloth of their uniforms and the shape of the badges they wore. They were small, fragile machines of flesh and blood, armed with small guns. With those small guns and their bare hands, they had to destroy huge machines of steel. It was a nasty feeling; a naked feeling. A feeling from a nightmare.
But this was real. And this was the way it was going to be, from now on.
Down those stairs, Mallory told himself, were the tools for the job. Put Miller near explosives, and his bare hands could shatter an army. Everything was going to be fine.
Except my feet, thought Mallory, hobbling on. His feet felt as if they would never be the same again.
The shaft with the staircase descended into the bowels of the hill. Shells could be carried by hoist. But torpedoes were big, and heavy, and needed to travel horizontally. The floor of the magazine would be on the same level as the floor of the quay.
Miller stamped down the stairs at what he hoped was a convincing Wehrmacht stamp. It was costing him some effort to keep his appearance military. He was a fighter, Miller, but he would have been the first to admit that he was not much of a soldier. As they rounded the last twist of the spiral staircase, he felt a pleasurable anticipation. Once again, it was time to improvise.
At the base of the stairs was a flashproof door. Miller pushed the door open. They were in the magazine.
It was a big magazine. It stretched away in front of them, lit harshly by white bulkhead lights, a devil’s wine cellar of grey concrete compartments, bins for shells, and bays for the trolleys that would roll the torpedoes down to the quays where the submarines waited, black and evil, crouching in the cold Atlantic.
Mallory looked at his watch. It was three forty-five.
Christ.
They went through the door, all three of them, and looked down the stark concrete perspective that was the magazine’s central aisle. This was where they would find the wherewithal to sink three submarines and scupper the Nazis’ last defence against the invading Allies.
But there was a problem.
The concrete bays and alcoves of the magazine contained a few crates. The dollies for the shells lay on their rails, and the torpedo racks, five hundred of them, stood padded with felt. But the crates were cracked open, the dollies burdenless, the torpedo racks bare. A gang of men was dismantling an electric motor.
But apart from the men, the magazine was empty.
They stood there, and watched, and let it sink in. The job was waiting. The tools were missing.
After a minute, Mallory began to hobble down the floor of the magazine, heading for the rails that would have taken the torpedoes to the quay.
The Stella Maris was lying on the outside of a raft of fishing boats against the quay wall of San Eusebio. Among the ruined buildings behind the quay, yellow dogs with feathered tails barked maddeningly in the rain. Hu
gues and Lisette were out of sight below. Jaime was on deck, propped in the splintered remnants of the wheelhouse, smoking. At his side a radio hummed gently to itself. There had been no signals. Jaime was not expecting any more signals.
Across the black water of the harbour, the sheds and quays of the old sardine factory on Cabo de la Calavera, which earlier had flickered with angle-grinder sparks and welder lightnings, were almost dark. It looked as if the work was complete. Now and then, a crane-jib caught the light as it swung. Loading up, thought Jaime. Not long now.
There was activity on the harbour too; the murmur of launches and lighters, moving out to the two five-thousand-ton merchantmen anchored in the deep water half a mile from the quay. On the move, thought Jaime. And who knew where it would all end?
‘Slow,’ said Mallory. ‘Your work is very, very slow. Work faster.’
The Leutnant in charge of the embarkation of the magazine stores felt a hot anger at the injustice of it all. But it was not helpful to be angry with SS Generals. So he clicked his heels and ducked his head and said, ‘As the Herr General wishes.’
‘The Herr General does,’ said Mallory. ‘Now I wish to inspect the magazine.’
‘Herr General?’
Mallory frowned. ‘You speak German, do you not?’
‘Herr General.’ The man had just been rated for slowness. Leading a tour of inspection for some damned Nazi with a skull-and-bones hat was not going to speed things up. But a General was a General.
‘Here were the shells,’ said the Leutnant. ‘All gone now, as per your orders. Here were the torpedoes. They are also gone, naturally.’ He waved a hand at the tunnel leading down to the quay, and walked to another bin lined with empty racks. A pile of grey boxes stood on the floor. ‘And in here, the small arms. A few only remaining. Grenades, mortar bombs. The last consignment will be leaving when the barge comes back alongside.’ He clashed his heels together again, thumbs nailed to the seams of his breeches. ‘I trust the Herr General is satisfied.’
The Complete Navarone Page 77