Mallory eyed the three grey wooden boxes the officer had indicated. ‘Quite satisfied,’ he said. He looked round. Nobody was in sight. ‘Andrea?’
The huge Greek took one step forward and crashed his jackboots on the concrete. His shoulders moved. There was a sound like a felling axe hitting a tree trunk. The German officer sighed, and fell down.
‘Hide him,’ said Mallory. ‘Miller, boxes of grenades.’
Miller piled two boxes of grenades one on top of the other: ten grenades to the box, rope handles on either end.
‘We’ll go to the quay,’ said Mallory. His face was the colour of dirty ivory. Exhausted, thought Miller.
Mallory fumbled in his pocket. There were three Benzedrine left in the little foil packet. He gave them out, one each. Benzedrine was not good for you, thought Miller, stooping to pick up the grenades. But then, nor was trying to climb aboard a U-boat to blow it up.
It was a long time since Miller had eaten anything. The pill worked fast. He could feel the strength pouring through him. These pills, thought Miller, dry-mouthed and sweating. You will feel terrible later.
Except that later was hardly worth worrying about, under the circumstances.
Miller laughed. Then he walked with his two companions into the throat of the tunnel that led to the quay.
SEVEN
Wednesday
0400–0500
The tunnel was fifty yards long, lit with the harsh white bulkhead lights installed all over the Cabo. Rails ran down each side, for the torpedo dollies. Down the middle was the walkway. There were men moving up and down the tunnel, moving at a fast clip. When they saw Mallory’s uniform their eyes skidded away. Popular guy, thought Miller.
The three men began to march down the walkways, boots echoing. They had gone twenty yards when a voice behind said, ‘Halt!’
Mallory’s heart walloped heavily. He thrust his all-too-real right hand into his tunic. Andrea’s hands stole to the grips of his Schmeisser. Miller’s hands were sweating into the rope handles of the grenade boxes. Mallory spun on the heel of his agonising jackboot.
He was looking at a small, bald man with rimless glasses and a prissy mouth, bulging out of a badgeless uniform. The small man was holding a book.
‘Was?’ said Mallory.
The small man was not impressed by the death’s-head cap badge, the black uniform, the harsh croak of the voice. He pursed his lips. ‘It is necessary to fill out the requisite forms,’ he said. ‘For the withdrawal of these weapons from the magazine. Otherwise, correct systems cannot be maintained.’
Mallory said, ‘And you are the inventory clerk.’
‘Jawohl.’
‘Well, Herr Corporal,’ said Mallory. ‘Give me your book, and I will sign it.’
The clerk made tutting noises. ‘Signature alone is not enough,’ he said. ‘You will naturally need a requisition form signed by the garrison duty officer.’
Mallory said, in a voice crammed with broken glass, ‘Do you know who I am?’
The clerk moistened his small mouth with a grey tongue. ‘Yess, Herr General. You are the garrison commander, Herr General.’
‘And who signs the requisitions?’
‘The duty officer.’
‘By whose orders?’
‘By your orders, Herr General.’
‘So,’ said Mallory.
The clerk said, ‘I have my orders. The duty officer must sign the requisition.’
Mallory checked his watch. It said 0405. In fifty-five minutes the submarines were due to sail.
In fifty-five minutes, they could still be arguing with this clerk. The only thing stronger than the uniform was the system.
He said, ‘Corporal, I compliment you on your attachment to duty. The duty officer is on the quay. You will accompany us there, please.’
‘But –’
‘Schnell,’ Mallory’s voice was a bark that admitted no contradiction.
The clerk, he had decided, was a blessing. An officious little blessing with rimless glasses, but a blessing nonetheless.
‘Lead on, Corporal,’ said Mallory, in a harsh purr.
The clerk led on.
The mouth of the tunnel was walled off. On one side was an opening for the torpedo dolly track. On the other was a sort of wicket gate for the pedestrian walkway. By the wicket gate was a species of sentry box. In the sentry box were two figures like black paper silhouettes: SS.
From the corner of his eye, Mallory saw that Andrea’s hands had not moved from the grips of his Schmeisser. He wished he had a Schmeisser of his own. But he had a Luger, and the insignia of his uniform. That should be enough –
Except that the face above the uniform was not the right face.
He tugged down the peak of his cap.
The heels rang on. The SS sentries in the box had blank faces the colour of dirty suet. Their uniforms were rusty, their belts grainy, the folds of their jackboots cracking with salt. Their eyes were cold, and vicious, and restless. When they settled on Mallory’s uniform, something happened to them, something that was not the other ranks’ usual reaction to an officer’s uniform. It was a look compounded of furtiveness and pride. Esprit de corps, thought Mallory. Oh, dear.
There were fifty SS men on the Cabo de la Calavera: the élite, keeping an eye on things for Himmler. They would know each other, all right.
But the only way onto the quay was through that night-black wicket by the sentry box.
Mallory shouted, ‘Attention!’
The SS faces became blank and automatic. The General’s uniform was doing its job. The boot heels ground concrete as Mallory, Miller, Andrea, and the magazine clerk marched on. The magazine clerk looked pleased with himself, proud to be part of something important and official. Mallory was profoundly grateful to him. The magazine clerk was credibility. The SS knew the magazine clerk.
They were close now: ten feet away. Mallory walked with his supposedly artificial hand in his breast, head bowed, as if in deep thought. Through the wicket came the smells of the sea, stirring the chill, leaden air of the magazine. The smell of the endgame.
The eyes were on them now, peripherally at least. In the corner of his vision Mallory could see the white, large-pored skin, the brown eyes seamed below with the marks of arrogance and cruelty. He could smell the uniforms, the sour smell of rain-wet black serge badly dried, leather on which polish was fighting a losing battle with mildew. He could smell the oil on the Schmeissers, the tobacco smoke, and garlic on their breath.
Then they were past, and Mallory was sweating –
‘Herr General?’ said a voice, a hard voice, cold, a little tentative: the voice of one of the black-clad sentries.
Mallory took another step.
‘The Herr General will please stop,’ said the voice.
‘Quiet,’ murmured Mallory, in English. Then he said, in his approximation of the General’s bust-larynx rasp, ‘What do you want?’
‘If the Herr General would show us his pass?’
Mallory made a small, exasperated noise. ‘Clerk,’ he said. ‘Show them your pass.’
The clerk’s face was pink and shiny behind the rimless spectacles. He fumbled in his pocket.
‘Quickly,’ grated Mallory. ‘Time is wasting.’
The SS man’s eyes flicked at the clerk’s pass. He handed it back.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘the Herr General’s pass.’
Something seemed to have removed the bottom of Mallory’s stomach. There was a sort of icy purr in the voice, the sound of a cat about to stab a claw into a rat.
Miller put down the boxes of grenades. His hands were wet on the grips of his Schmeisser. He moved it casually, negligently, until it was covering the guard who was not doing the talking. The guard who was doing the talking had an odd expression on his face. Miller understood it.
It was the expression of a man who knew the General well, but who had been conditioned to respond to uniforms, not faces.
Miller knew that something ba
d was going to happen.
The SS man wet his lips with a grey tongue. He said to Mallory, ‘Herr General, what is the Herr General’s name?’ His right hand was under the level of the desk. There would be an alarm button down there.
Miller thumbed the selector on the Schmeisser to single shot, and took up the first pressure on the trigger. Andrea, he noticed, had his hands off his gun. Andrea said, with a wide, despairing gesture of both spread palms, ‘For God’s sake, who do you think you are talking to?’
The SS sentry opened his mouth to reply. But he never got the words out, because Andrea’s gesture had become something else, and his huge right had gone into the sentry’s face, the heel up and under the nose, driving the bone into the brain, while the other hand, the left, had sprouted a knife that went in and out of the other sentry’s chest, and in and out again. The two helmets clanged on the concrete.
There was a long, dreadful silence that lasted perhaps a second. Then something small scuttled past Miller. The clerk.
He stuck out a foot. The little man went flat on his face. His spectacles skittered away on the concrete. The face he turned to Miller was the face of a blind mole. He said, ‘Please.’
Miller looked at him. This was not an SS man. This man had all the malice of a ticket office clerk in Grand Central Station.
But this man could stop the operation dead.
Miller looked away.
There was a sound like a well-hit baseball. When Miller looked back, the magazine clerk was silent, face down, but breathing.
Andrea sighted along the barrel of his Schmeisser. ‘Thought I’d bent it,’ he said.
They dragged the clerk and the SS men out of sight behind the desk of the sentry box. The clerk was still breathing.
Then they walked onto the quay.
They were standing on the inshore end of the map the late Guy Jamalartégui had drawn beside the chart on his kitchen table with a matchstick and a puddle of wine.
The Basque-American who had donated the port to his sardine-fishing compatriots had not stinted. The quay was built of cut granite, on a scale that would have excited the respectful envy of a Pharaoh. The magazine entrance was set in the low cliff halfway down the long side of the innermost quay. Three more quays ran parallel to the first. There were rails set into the paving of the quays, designed presumably to carry waggonloads of sardines, first to the long sheds at the base of the quays for canning, and then to the sardines-on-toast enthusiasts of Europe.
Now, the black lanes of water between the granite fingers of the quay held no fishing boats; probably they never had. Instead, the long, sleek hulls and oddly streamlined conning towers of three great U-boats lay under the cranes.
Three men walked past, smoking, splashing in the puddles left by the night’s rain. They were wearing baggy blue overalls, and had the hell-with-you air of dockyard mateys the world over. They paid no attention to Mallory and his two guards. Their task was finished. On the nearest submarine – presumably the one that had been reported rammed – a small gang of men was packing up what looked like oxy-acetylene welding gear. For the rest, what was going up and down on the cranes was definitely stores.
Mallory watched a tray of green vegetables and milk cans. Last-minute stores, at that.
More men in blue overalls drifted up the quay. There was a building up there, a green clapboard facade on a tunnel in the cliff. From it there drifted a smell of frying onions. The canteen, thought Mallory. The men going towards the canteen carried tool boxes. The men coming back had bags and bundles as well as the tool boxes. They had gone for a final meal up there, and picked up their possessions. At the far side of the harbour, launch engines puttered in the dawn; the engines of the launches ferrying the dockyard mateys out to the merchant ships waiting in the harbour, Uruguayan flags fluttering on their ensign staffs.
Mallory waited for another pair of workmen to walk past. They studiously avoided his eye, the way a skilled civilian technician of any nationality would avoid the eye of a murderer and torturer. The next pair came. One of them was a huge man, as big as Andrea.
That was what Mallory had been waiting for.
He said, ‘You and you.’
The two men gave him the looks of schoolboys with permanently guilty consciences. One of them dropped his cigarette and stamped on it. The big man’s cigarette dangled, unlit.
‘Don’t worry,’ croaked Mallory. ‘You have committed no crime.’
Their faces remained wooden.
‘Smoke if you wish,’ said Mallory. Another man was walking towards them, by himself. Mallory pulled out the General’s lighter and lit the big man’s cigarette with his left hand. ‘There is one little job,’ he said. ‘Hey! You!’
The solitary man halted. Mallory pointed back at the magazine tunnel. ‘Komm!’
He marched into the tunnel. The lights were very bright after the grey predawn outside. The dockyard men were yawning and sullen. It had been a long night shift, and they wanted to get some food and climb aboard a merchant ship and go to sleep. They did not want to do any more jobs, particularly jobs for this whispering child murderer and his nasty-looking bodyguards. The big one said, ‘What is it then?’
‘Further,’ said the SS General.
They were in the magazine tunnel. There were steel doors let into the wall, and a smell of new blood. The General pointed at one of the doors. ‘In there,’ he said.
The big man turned round. ‘Why?’ he said.
It was then he saw the bodyguards’ guns, foreshortened, looking between his own eyes with their own deadly little black eyes.
‘Take off your overalls,’ said Mallory.
The big man was a bully. He was tired, and hung over, and hungry. Being told to undress had the effect on his temper of a well-flung brick on a wasps’ nest. Nobody talked to him like that, SS General or no SS General. And word was that this SS General was a poof. ‘Take ’em off yourself,’ said the big man, and took a swing at the General’s jaw.
He never saw what hit him. He merely had the dim impression that someone had loaded his head into a cannon, fired it at a sheet of armour plate, and dropped the resulting mess into a black velvet bag.
His two companions watched with their mouths open as Andrea dusted his hands, stripped the overalls off the big man’s prone body, and loaded the tools back into their box.
‘Strip,’ said Mallory.
They stripped at a speed that would have won them first prize in an undressing contest.
‘The door,’ said Mallory.
Miller went to the steel door. It closed from the outside, with a latch. Inside was a locker with tins of paint, ten feet on a side.
‘In,’ said Mallory.
One of the men said, ‘How will we ever get out?’ He looked frightened; he was a civilian, caught up in something not his quarrel.
Mallory did not believe that a grown man could stand back from a war. As far as Mallory was concerned, you were on his side, or you were the enemy. He said, ‘How do you get on those U-boats?’
‘With a pass.’
‘What pass?’
The man produced a much-folded card, seamed with oil.
‘Anything else?’
‘No. Who are you?’
Mallory went and stood so that his face was two inches from the German’s. ‘That is for me to know and you to wonder,’ he said. ‘I am going out there. I wish to move freely. If I am captured, I will not say a word about you, and that door is soundproof. So you have a choice.’ He could feel the sweat running down inside his uniform, see the impassive faces of Miller and Andrea. Not much more than half an hour now. ‘If you are telling me the truth, you have nothing to fear. If not, this locker will be your tomb.’
The man’s throat moved violently as he swallowed. He said, ‘There is … in fact … something else. A word.’
‘Ah,’ said Mallory.
‘Ritter,’ said the man. ‘You must say Ritter to the gangway sentry.’
Mallory said, ‘If y
ou are not telling the truth, you will die in your underpants.’
‘It is the truth.’
‘Your overalls,’ said Mallory, ‘and what size are your boots?’
‘Forty-two.’
Thank God, thought Mallory. ‘Also your boots,’ he said.
Five minutes later, three dockyard mateys were wandering down the quay towards the ferry. They were carrying much-chipped blue enamel toolboxes and smoking cigarettes. Their faces were surprisingly grim for men bound for Lisbon, home and beauty. But perhaps that would be because of the danger of submarines.
Outside the sheds at the root of the quay, the three men stopped.
Andrea looked up. The clouds had rolled away. The sky was duck-egg blue. Dawn was coming up, a beautiful dawn, above this press of people and their deadly machines.
Mallory said to Andrea in a quiet, level voice, ‘We’ll want the Stella Maris standing by.’
‘I’ll arrange that,’ said Andrea.
Mallory looked down the first finger of granite. On either side were foreshortened alleys of water, with the bulbous grey pressure hulls and narrow steel decks of the submarines. There were two gangplanks down there, one leading left, the other right, a crossroads of quay and gangplanks. This was the access to two submarines. If you could get past the sailor at the base of each gangplank, rifle on his shoulder, cap ribbons fluttering at his nape in the small dawn breeze.
Mallory took a deep breath of the morning air, and tried not to think about the little steel rooms inside those pressure hulls, into which he must go with his grenades.
‘Peroxide,’ said Miller, sniffing.
‘Sorry?’
‘Hydrogen peroxide. Smells like a hairdressing parlour. Hunnert per cent, by the smell of it. Don’t get it on you. Corrosive.’
Mallory said, ‘What do you recommend?’
Miller told him.
‘Fascinating,’ said Mallory, taking a deep breath. ‘I’ll do the right-hand one. You do the left.’
Andrea said, ‘Good luck.’
Mallory nodded. There was such a thing as luck, but to acknowledge its existence was to hold two fingers up to fate. What Andrea had to do was potentially even more dangerous than climbing around U-boats with a toolbox full of hand grenades.
The Complete Navarone Page 78