The Complete Navarone

by Alistair MacLean

  Not that there was much to choose between the jobs. Dead was dead, never mind how you got there.

  Mallory was not wasting time thinking about death. He was planning the next phase.

  Andrea slipped away into the crowds heading for the ferries. Mallory and Miller started to walk down the quay towards the sentries. Miller had his hands in his pockets, and he was whistling.

  Good lad, thought Mallory. What would it take to get you really worried?

  Miller’s thoughts were less elevated. The smell of peroxide had taken him back to Mme Renard’s house in Montreal, to Minette, a French-Canadian girl with an educated tongue and bright yellow curls. There had been something about Minette, something she had shown him with two goldfish and a bag of cement –

  Concentrate.

  Down in his saboteur’s treasure-house of a memory, he knew that the catalyst for hydrogen peroxide was manganese dioxide. Manganese dioxide would separate the hydrogen from the oxygen, and make a bang next to which a hand grenade would look stupid.

  Manganese dioxide was the obvious stuff.

  Unfortunately, it was not the kind of stuff people left lying around.

  He was at the bottom of the gangway. He grinned at the sentry and showed him his pass. ‘Ritter,’ he said, rattling his toolbox. ‘Problem with lavatory. Two minutes only.’

  The sentry said, ‘Thank God you’ve arrived, then.’

  Miller walked up the gangplank.

  Andrea shouldered his way through the thickening crowd on the quay. There was a sense of urgency, now, and very little Teutonic efficiency about the milling scrum of men and soldiers. He made his way to the quay’s lip.

  And stopped.

  The queue might be inefficient, but the embarkation procedures were well up to standard. There were four iron ladders down the quay. At the bottom of each ladder was a launch. At the top of each ladder was an SS officer with a clipboard. As each man arrived at the front of the queue, the SS man scrutinised his identity card, compared the photograph minutely with his face, and checked his name off the list. Only then was he allowed down the ladder.

  Once the launches themselves had left the quays they did not hang about. They went straight alongside the two merchant ships anchored in the harbour; merchant ships on whose decks were un-naval but nonetheless efficient sandbag emplacements from which peered the snouts of machine guns.

  Even in the evacuation, the Werwolf facility was leaving nothing to chance.

  Andrea’s overalls and identity card had belonged to Wulf Tietmeyer. No amount of oily thumbprints could obscure the fact that Tietmeyer, though roughly Andrea’s size, had red hair and pale blue eyes. Furthermore, Andrea had no desire to end up on a Germany-bound merchant ship.

  Muttering a curse for the benefit of his neighbours, he turned back into the crowd, forging his way through the press with shoulders the size and hardness of a bank safe, a dockyard matey who had left something behind and was on his way to fetch it.

  As he reached the root of the quays one of the submarines emitted a black cloud of exhaust, and the morning filled with the blaring rattle of a cold diesel. Start engines meant that they would be sailing at any minute. He looked at his watch. In eighteen minutes, to be precise. And precise was what they would be.

  He looked across the mouth of the harbour at the town of San Eusebio, glowing now in the pale dawn. The windows of its houses were smoke-blackened, empty as dead men’s eyes, the campaniles of its two churches jagged as smashed teeth. But alongside the quays, in front of the blind warehouses lining the harbour, the fishing fleet was anchored two deep. And among them, on the outside near the front, were the tar-black hull and ill-furled red sails of the Stella Maris.

  Four hundred yards away. A short swim in the Mediterranean. But the four-hundred-yard neck here had a roiling turbulence, with little strips of inexplicable ripples. The tide was going out, sucking at the base of the quay. It looked to Andrea as if there was a very large amount of water trying to get out of a very small exit. Andrea guessed that this might be a long swim indeed.

  But Andrea had been brought up on the shores of the Aegean. Among his recent ancestors he numbered divers for sponges, and he himself had spent his childhood as much in as out of the water. Andrea swam like a fish –

  A Mediterranean fish.

  Slowly and deliberately, Andrea pulled a pencil and notebook from his overall pocket and walked to the seaward end of the outermost quay. Nobody paid him any attention as he passed the sentry at the foot of the gangway of the outermost U-boat. Why should they? He was a large inspector in blue overalls, frowning with his thick black eyebrows at the state of the quay. The Germans were a nation of inspectors. It was natural, in this little German world on the edge of Spain, that even in the final stages of an evacuation someone should be making notes on the condition of the quay.

  At the end of the quay, iron rungs led down the granite. For the benefit of anyone watching, Andrea stuck his pencil behind his ear, pursed his lips and shook his head. Then he began to climb down the iron rungs.

  As he sank below the level of the quay, he was out of sight of anyone except the sentries in the fortaleza, and he was hoping that with sixteen minutes to sailing, the sentries would have been withdrawn. From the bottom rung he let notebook and pencil whisk away on the current. He struggled out of his overalls, kicked off his boots, and removed the rest of his clothes. They hovered a moment in the eddy at the foot of the wall, then sailed off down the tide.

  Naked, Andrea was brown and hairy as a bear. He touched the gold crucifix round his neck, and lowered himself into the green swirl at the foot of the rungs. He thought, it is freezing, this Atlantic.

  Then he launched himself into the tide.

  ‘Ritter,’ said Mallory to the sentry at the foot of the gangway opposite the one up which Miller had disappeared.

  The sentry was wearing leather trousers and a jersey coming unravelled at the hem. His face as he glanced at Mallory’s identity card and handed it back was pale, with a greasy film of sweat. Scared, thought Mallory, as he walked up the gangplank. These may be secret weapons, but they are still U-boats, and U-boat crews do not live long. To drown in a steel box, inch by inch …

  Mallory had tried that once. It was not something he ever wanted to try again.

  But he was standing on the U-boat’s grey steel deck, the worn enamel handles of the toolbox slippery in his hand, and there was a hatch forward, standing open. The torpedo room was forward. On a submarine this size, a grenade would do little damage. Unless, Miller had said, you used it as a fuse, a primer, stuck to the tons of Amatol or Torpex or whatever they used. Then you would get a result –

  Mallory made himself walk towards the hatch. It would be easier to stay on deck, not go below, into that little steel space that might at any moment go under the water –

  Easy or not, it had to be done.

  The hatch was a double steel door in the deck. A steel ladder plunged into a yellow-lit gloom. At the bottom of the ladder a face looked up, sallow and bearded, blue bags under the eyes. A Petty Officer.

  ‘What the hell do you want?’ said the Petty Officer.

  ‘Check toilets,’ said Mallory, dumb as an ox.

  ‘I don’t know anything about any toilets,’ said the Petty Officer. ‘Go and see the Kapitän.’

  ‘Where’s the Kapitän?’ Mallory could feel the minutes ticking.

  ‘Conning tower. You’d better be quick.’

  Mallory went back down the deck, and up the metal rungs on the side of the conning tower. He took a deep breath and let himself down into the tower itself.

  The smell was oil and sweat, and something else. Peroxide. A man in a grubby white polo-neck jersey with an Iron Cross was arguing with another man. Both had pale faces and beards.

  Mallory cleared his throat. ‘Come to fix the toilet,’ he said.

  The man with the Iron Cross was wearing a Kapitän’s cap. ‘Now?’ he said. ‘I didn’t know it was broken. Get off my boat.’<
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  ‘Orders,’ said Mallory. The morning was a disc of daylight seen through the hatchway.

  ‘I’m Kapitän –’

  ‘The Herr General was most insistent.’

  ‘I shit on the Herr General,’ said the Kapitän. ‘Hell. Go and look at the toilet, then. But I warn you, we are sailing in ten minutes, and if you’re still on board I’ll put you out through a torpedo tube.’

  Mallory said, stolidly, ‘That will not be necessary.’ But the Kapitän was back at his argument, with no time for dockyard mateys.

  Engine at the back. Torpedoes at the front. Front it is.

  Mallory hefted his toolbox, shinned down the ladder under the periscope and started along the corridor leading forward.

  There was a crew messroom, racked torpedoes, bunks everywhere. The lights were yellow. There seemed to be scores of men, packed dense as sardines in a tin; but this was worse, because it was a tin in which the sardines had somehow suddenly come alive. Mallory shoved his way through. There are no windows, said the voice in his mind. You are below the level of the water –

  Shut up, he told himself. You are still alongside.

  He walked under the open hatch. The Petty Officer glanced at him and glanced away. Ahead, the passage ran through an oval doorway and ended. On the other side of the bulkhead he saw a long chamber lined left and right with fat tubes. The torpedo room.

  And on his right, a tiny compartment: a lavatory. Head.

  He looked round. The Petty Officer was watching him. Mallory winked, went into the lavatory and closed the door. His hand was sweating on the handles of his toolbox. Count to five, he thought.

  There was a new sound, a vibration. The engines had started. Somewhere, a klaxon began to moan. Now or never, thought Mallory.

  He walked quickly into the corridor, scratching his head, and turned right into the torpedo room.

  There were two men in there, securing torpedoes to the racks. They were like horizontal organ pipes, those torpedoes. Both the men were ratings.

  ‘Shit,’ said one of them. ‘You’d better hurry.’

  ‘Checking seals,’ said Mallory. ‘Couple of minutes. Which one of these things do you fire first?’

  ‘Those,’ said the rating, pointing. ‘Now if you would be so good, go away and shut up and let us get on with getting ready to load those damn fish into those damn tubes.’

  The torpedoes the rating had pointed at were the first rack, up by one of the ranks of oval doors that must lead into the tubes. Mallory wedged himself in behind the torpedoes, out of sight of the men. He found a stanchion on the steel wall of the submarine and looped the string lanyard on the grenade’s handle over it. Then he unscrewed the grenade’s cap, gently pulled out the porcelain button on the end of the string fuse, and tied it to the shaft of the torpedo’s propeller.

  First one.

  He took out a spanner and crossed the compartment. The rating did not look up. He attached a second grenade to the port side lower torpedo, where the shadows were thickest. The third and fourth he attached to the next row up.

  There were feet moving on steel somewhere above his head. The vibrations of the engine were louder now.

  ‘That’s okay,’ said Mallory. ‘Don’t want sewage everywhere, do we?’

  The ratings ignored him. He walked out of the torpedo compartment, down the corridor. The hatch was still open. He could smell the blessed air. He pushed past a couple of men, put his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.

  A hard hand took his arm above the elbow. A quiet voice said, ‘If you’re here to mend the toilets, what were you doing in the torpedo room?’

  Mallory looked round.

  The voice belonged to the bearded petty officer.

  ‘Cast off!’ roared a voice on deck.

  Above his head, the hatch slammed shut.

  Twenty yards away, Dusty Miller was in a different world. Miller was a trained demolitions man. He reckoned he had seven minutes. He had gone straight for the conning tower, checked out the Kapitän and the navigating officer bent over the charts. ‘Come to look at the lavs,’ he said.

  The navigating officer gave him the not-interested look of a man ten minutes away from an important feat of underwater navigation. ‘What lavs?’

  ‘They just said the lavs.’

  ‘You know where they are.’

  Miller shrugged, feeling the weight of his toolbox, the hammer, the spanners, the four stick grenades in the bottom compartment. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  Mallory had gone forward, looking for the torpedoes. Miller went aft.

  On most U-boats, the engine room consisted of a big diesel for surface running and to charge huge banks of lead-acid batteries, and an electric motor for underwater running. The Walter process was different. The diesel did all the work. When the U-boat was under water, the engine drew the oxygen for its combustion from disintegrated hydrogen peroxide, and vented the carbon dioxide it produced as a waste gas directly into the water, where it dissolved.

  Miller went down the hatch in the control-room deck and crept along the low steel corridor. Men shoved past him. He took no notice. He wandered along, apparently tracing one of the parallel ranks of grey-painted pipes leading aft along the bulkhead.

  And after not many steps, he was in the engine room.

  It was as it should have been: the thick tubes coming from the fuel tanks, each with its stopcock: oils, water, hydrogen peroxide. There were men working in there, working hard, oiling, establishing settings on the banks of valve wheels. The big diesel was running with a clattering roar too loud to hear. Miller caught an oiler’s eye, winked, nodded. The oiler nodded back. Nobody would be in a submarine’s engine room at a time like this unless he had business there. And at a time like this, the business would certainly be legitimate.

  So Miller stooped, apparently examining the pipes, and ran his professional eye over the maze of tubes and chambers.

  And made his decision; or rather, confirmed the decision he had made already.

  On the surface, the Walter engine was a naturally aspirated diesel. The changeover from air to peroxide was activated by a float switch on the conning tower. It was a simple device; when the water reached a certain level, the switch closed, opening the valve from the peroxide tank to the disintegrator. In Miller’s view, the destruction of the valve would release a lot of inflammable stuff into a space full of nasty sparks.

  There was a very real danger of explosions, thought Miller happily, opening his toolbox.

  His fingers worked quickly. The float switch controlled a simple gate valve. Tape the grenade to the pipe. Tie the string fuse to one of the struts of the gate valve wheel. When the wheel turned, the string would pull out of the grenade. Five seconds later … well, thought Miller; ladies and gentlemen are requested to extinguish all smoking materials.

  He arranged two more grenades, using the length of the string fuses to make for slightly greater delays, one on the water intake and one on the throttle linkage where it passed a dark corner.

  Then he walked back, climbed into the conning tower, and said, ‘All done.’

  The navigating officer did not look up. Piss off,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Miller. He went up the ladder and into the chill, diesel-smelling dawn, and trotted down the gangplank and onto the quay.

  He knew something was wrong as soon as his boots hit the stone. Two men were hauling the gangway of the boat opposite back onto the quay. Men were moving on the foredeck, waiting to haul in the lines when the stevedores let them go. Miller saw one of them bend and slam shut an open hatch. To left and right the quay was a desert of granite paving, dotted with a few figures in uniform, a few in overalls. Miller had worked with Mallory for long enough to recognise him, never mind what he was wearing.

  None of the figures was Mallory.

  So Mallory was still on the boat, and the boat was sailing.

  On the boat opposite, a couple of heads showed on the conning tower. One of them wore th
e cap of a Kapitän.

  ‘Oi!’ yelled Miller, above the pop and rattle of the diesels. ‘You’ve got my mate on board.’

  The Kapitän looked round, frowning. The springs were off. They were down to one-and-one, a bow line and a stern line. They were sailing in two minutes. The Kapitän looked at the scarecrow figure on the dock, the chipped blue toolbox, the lanky arms and legs protruding from the too-short overalls. He shouted to one of the hands on the narrow deck.

  The hand shrugged, scratching his head under his grey watch cap. He bent. He caught hold of the handles of the hatch, and pulled.

  Mallory’s whole body was covered in sweat. His mind did not seem to be working. Drowned in a steel room, he was thinking. No. Not that –

  ‘What were you doing in the torpedo room?’ said the Petty Officer.

  ‘Pipes,’ said Mallory. ‘Checking pipes.’

  ‘Like hell,’ said the Petty Officer.

  And at that moment, there fell from heaven a beam of pure grey light that pierced the reeking yellow gloom of the submarine like the arrow of God.

  The hatch was open.

  Mallory knew that a miracle had happened. It was a miracle that would take away the death by drowning in a metal room, and let him die under the sky, where he did not mind dying in a just cause.

  He also knew that the Petty Officer could not live.

  Mallory looked up the hatch. There was a head up there. ‘Now coming,’ he shouted. The head vanished. His hand was in the small of his back, closing round the handle of his dagger in the sheath there. It came round his body low and hard, and thumped into the Petty Officer’s chest, up and under the ribs. He kept the momentum going, shoved the man back onto a bunk, and pulled a blanket over him. Then he went back up the ladder.

  The man on deck kicked the hatch shut. A stevedore had cast off the lines. Green water widened between the submarine and the quay. From the conning tower, a voice roared, ‘Jump!’

  Mallory looked round. He saw the Kapitän, a cold, vindictive face above the grey armour plate.