It was a tidy enough quarry, as quarries went; a big horseshoe cut in the cliff, fans of fallen stone at the base, a couple of diggers moving across a white floor trailing clouds of dust. There was a crusher, a big machine with a hopper and a black funnel that belched smoke, panting and grinding, discharging crushed stone into another, larger hopper. Under the larger hopper ran a railway track. As the men on the quarry lip watched, a train reversed into the quarry and positioned the first of its four trucks under the hopper. The hopper-release opened. A dose of crushed stone roared into the truck. The locomotive moved on. Another dose roared into the second truck. Move. Roar. Move. Roar. The locomotive hissed steam and began to pull out, gathering speed.
‘Well?’ said Carstairs.
‘Wait,’ said Mallory, eyes down on his watch.
The train bustled off across the plain, shrinking on its converging lines, speeding on to a causeway across the marsh, shrinking still. At the far end a cloud of white dust rose, then whipped away on the breeze. The breeze was up, now. A long edge of grey was travelling down the sky from the north. ‘Twelve minutes,’ said Mallory. ‘Down we go.’
‘Why?’ said Carstairs.
The other men were slinging their packs. Miller pointed behind them, up the cliff, where little figures were descending on ropes, rummaging every ledge and hollow. ‘They’re still looking,’ said Mallory. ‘If we don’t keep moving, they’ll spot us.’ Carstairs’ mouth went dry. He scrambled to his feet, and down the flank of the quarry.
Far away, a long steam-whistle blew. The stone train had emptied its trucks. Now it was on its way back.
The four men went down the big fan of rubble on the quarry’s northern side. The sun beat hot on the white stone as they ran, jumping from stone to stone, slithering in the small gravel, dust trailing from their heels. Men below looked up; labourers, mostly, in dusty overalls, trailing shovels, smoking cigarettes. They saw four men in camouflage smocks and Wehrmacht caps sliding down a pile of rubble. They were used to seeing soldiers; too many soldiers.
A sentry walked over, Wehrmacht, a Feldwebel, bored and dusty. The Sonderkommando had only been on the island three days. Mallory was betting that between the Wehrmacht guards and the Sonderkommando there would be no love lost. ‘What do you want?’ said the Feldwebel.
Mallory said, ‘Mind your own damned business.’
The Feldwebel blinked. ‘It is my business.’
‘Perhaps you would like to explain that to Hauptmann Wolf.’
It did not work. ‘I have my own officers,’ said the Feldwebel. ‘I do not need to talk to your nasty little Hauptmann.’
Mallory said, ‘Very wise,’ and started to walk past him towards the rock crusher.
‘One moment,’ said the sentry. ‘Papers.’
‘Don’t be bloody stupid,’ said Mallory. They were all walking now, towards the shade of the crusher, the sentry nearly running alongside them. The cloud had covered the sun. The air felt thick and moist.
The sentry got in front of them and unslung his rifle. ‘Papers,’ he said, and in his eye there was a meticulous glint, the legendary obstinacy of the German NCO. Mallory’s heart sank.
‘All right,’ said Mallory. ‘Shall we go and see your commanding officer?’ Andrea was standing close behind him. Above them, the stilts of the rock crusher towered like the legs of an enormous insect. Mallory could feel Andrea moving. The guard’s life was hanging by a thread. He looked Mallory up and down …
And saw his boots.
They were caked with dust, scuffed and battered. They were variations on a theme of British paratrooper’s boots, manufactured for Mallory by Lobb of St James’ Street, London, in collaboration and discussion with Black’s of Holborn, expedition outfitters, fitted on his personal last, studded with pyramid nails hand-sharpened with the file Mallory carried in his pocket.
They should have been regulation German army jackboots.
There was no way of knowing what was in the Feldwebel’s mind, but Mallory could guess. The Feldwebel was a high priest of order and regulation, and the boots were heresy and sacrilege. The rifle came up. The eyes went round. The mouth opened to shout.
Mallory caught hold of the rifle barrel and pushed it sharply aside, stepping aside himself as he did so. Something very big and very fast came past him. The Feldwebel made a loud whooshing sigh, and crumpled forward over Andrea’s fist. Andrea heaved him upright. He whipped out the knife he had driven up and under the man’s ribs and into his heart, and in the same movement pushed the body back into the shadows under the crusher. The air was thick and still. A couple of big raindrops made dark blots in the dust.
Mallory lit a cigarette. Nobody said anything. Mallory blew smoke and said, ‘Listen.’
They listened. Thunder rumbled. The rails were humming. Three minutes later, the train came in.
In the cab, the driver yawned. He was German, and so was his fireman. Give a Greek this job, and nothing would get done. The soldiers were as bad. They were meant to sign each load in and out as the train went through the gate in the fence by the guard-house. But they were Wehrmacht, not railwaymen. They had made him do all the signing at the beginning of his shift, so he could come and go as he liked –
The hopper roared. He pulled forward to the second red post, applied the brakes, turned to tell the fireman to chuck a bit more coal on. The fireman was blond, with blue eyes in a sooty face. The engine driver’s mouth fell open.
This was not him. This was a man with a lean brown face and the coldest grey eyes the driver had ever seen.
The engine driver was about to shout when he felt something press against his leather jerkin. Something sharp. He felt the sting of cold steel in the fat on his belly. He closed his mouth. Fill up,’ said the man. ‘Then drive.’
The engine driver did not ask what had happened to his fireman. He said, ‘The pressure is down.’
There were two men in the cab with him now: the lean-faced man and another with an eyebrow moustache. The man with the eyebrow moustache opened the firebox, and shovelled in coal. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Off we go, what?’
The driver blew out his oil-stained moustache. ‘No,’ he said. The thing in his belly moved a couple of inches. Skin broke. Blood rolled. It was raining now, hot, steamy rain, but the driver was suddenly bathed in cold sweat. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Yes. Of course. Very well.’ His hand went to the regulator.
The leg of the hopper started to move. The train gathered speed. The quarry face faded into a grey curtain of rain. The gate loomed, guard post beside it. Mallory crouched on the footplate, and Carstairs bent, shovelling. The driver stared straight ahead, not acknowledging the wave of the crop-headed sentry drinking coffee in the wooden hut. And the train was travelling on an embankment over green fields. To the right was young corn and rain-grey sea. To the left was more young corn, terminated abruptly by a tall fence of mesh and barbed wire, with sheds and what looked like a fuel dump. Tailplanes stood like blunt sharks’ fins beyond the sheds. Ahead, down the cylinder of the ancient locomotive, the fields fell away. The train rattled through a belt of reeds. Then there were rain-pocked pools of water on either side, dead-looking, dotted with clumps of sickly vegetation. The margins of the pools were crusted with white deposits. The place had a flat, washing-soda stink. When Mallory licked his lips, his tongue was dry with lime.
Over to the left was another causeway, carrying a road. At its landward side it passed between high fences, with red-and-white-striped barriers, huts for a platoon of soldiers, and a machine-gun post on either side, one to cover the approach, the other to cover the causeway itself. Mallory was glad he had decided to come by train.
The far shore was upon them: first a glacis of new stone, then a flat area that looked as if it had been reclaimed from the marsh. Beyond the flat area, the basalt colossus of the Acropolis rose like a wall. On the far side of the reclaimed area, behind a chainlink fence, was a vehicle park. As Mallory watched, an ambulance rolled in. The doors opened. A
pair of orderlies lifted out a stretcher and ran with it through the rain and into a steel door set in the face of the cliff.
Mallory glanced at Carstairs. Carstairs was watching the ambulance too.
The tracks ran across the reclaimed area on a trestled viaduct ending in a set of buffers. Below the viaduct was a pile of crushed stone. Two huge concrete mixers churned alongside the rock piles.
The train slowed to a crawl. The driver raised his hand to another lever and pulled it. The train shuddered. Looking back over the tender, Mallory saw the hopper of the first wagon tilt sideways, and dump its cargo over the side of the trestle with a roar. An explosion of dust mingled with the rain and spread over the cab.
‘Out,’ said Mallory into the fog.
When the dust settled, Carstairs was gone.
The driver reversed the engine and opened the throttle. The train shuttled back across the marshes and the fields, past the bored sentry and into the quarry. Men were still moving on the escarpment, searching. They were lower down, now.
It was only a matter of time, thought Mallory. The clock had been ticking. And now it was about to strike.
The train slowed. The locomotive came to a halt by the first red post. The driver pointed. On the steel staging beside the cab was a lever. Mallory stepped off the footplate and hauled. The hopper opened with a roar. The truck filled. Miller and Andrea appeared out of the shadows. ‘In,’ said Mallory.
Up ahead in the sentry box, there was turbulent movement. The sweaty guard came out of the door into the rain, cramming a steel helmet on to his cropped head with one hand, waving a rifle in the other. He was shouting, his words drowned by the roar of the diggers and the huge metallic pant and grind of the crusher.
It was time to leave.
The sentry had slung his rifle and was dragging the gates shut across the railway line, boots slipping in the big puddles. The train picked up speed. Mallory saw his face, red-eyed. Then the locomotive hit the gates with a crash, and there was a squeal of tortured metal, and the train was through. When Mallory looked back, he saw a wisp of smoke coming from the guardhouse window. His eyes fell on Miller. ‘I guess he sat in his ashtray,’ said Miller, returning his gaze with great innocence.
The wisp of smoke became billows, turning orange at the roots as the Thermite bomb Miller had tossed through the window burned its way through the desk and into the floor, consuming paper and timber and the sentry’s lunch, and most importantly the Bakelite of the telephone system.
‘Now listen to me,’ said Mallory.
They all listened. Even the train driver listened. He did not understand, but he trained his ears with maximum concentration on the string of incomprehensible syllables that came from the New Zealander’s lips. All of them knew that what was about to happen in the next five minutes was a matter of life and death. The train driver thought it would probably be death.
As it turned out, the train driver did not need to understand. The train thundered through dense curtains of rain into the marshes. As he stood trembling with terror, he felt himself seized by strong arms and flung like a human cannonball at the swamp. He landed in a pool of foul-smelling water that stung his eyes like caustic. When he could breathe again, he struggled on to a mud bank and lay there coughing. After a while, he heard a terrible noise.
The engine driver was a railwayman, not a soldier. He decided that discretion was the better part of valour. He still was not seeing too well. But he could locate the noise, all right. He began to crawl, swim and flounder as fast as he could in the opposite direction.
Andrea threw the engine driver out of the right-hand side of the cab, away from the greatest number of prying eyes. Then Mallory hit the throttle and jammed it right forward. Even with a full quota of trucks, the locomotive was over powered for the job. Now it was only half-loaded. As steam blasted into its cylinders it leaped forward, belching smoke, and shot across the last of the embankment. By the time it hit the trestled dumping section, it was travelling at forty miles an hour, all thirty-five tons of it.
‘Go,’ said Mallory.
As Miller jumped, he could see a steam-shovel working, hazy and grey in the rain, but he was not thinking about witnesses, because he had fifty pounds of high explosive in his pack, and besides, Mallory and Andrea were beside him in mid-air. Then they were hitting the side of a pile of crushed stone a terrible whack, rolling over and over in a soup of falling water and wet stone dust.
The train thundered through the buffers, corkscrewed into midair, drive-wheels spinning. It lost momentum, crashed on to the rubble bed of the reclaimed ground, and tobogganed forward into the cliff. The basalt face crumpled its nose like a cardboard mailing tube and drove its boiler back into its firebox. There was a mighty roar and a thunderclap detonation. The reclaimed ground was suddenly obliterated by a scalding fog of escaping steam and rain and stone dust.
In that fog, a voice close to Miller’s ear said, ‘Go now.’ Mallory’s voice. In the background was shouting, and the churn of the concrete mixers, and a klaxon.
Miller got up, and ran behind Andrea in what he assumed was the right direction. Somewhere, the klaxon was still screaming.
Andrea was bleeding. Miller imagined he was probably bleeding himself. There was an entrance ahead, a hole in the cliff. The klaxon noise was coming out of the horn above the hole. Andrea said, in German, ‘Herein.’ In. Somewhere a sergeant was shouting, a Feldwebel telling people to take cover. Wait a minute, thought the rational part of Miller, that is a German secret weapon factory, you can’t go in there. Besides, where’s Mallory?
But by that time he was inside the mountain, and with a steady hum of hydraulics the steel door was easing to …
Was shut.
In the cellar of the ruined house above the ledge, Clytemnestra woke suddenly from a fitful sleep. Next to her she could hear the breathing of Wills: regular breathing, shallow. He was improving, she thought. Men do improve after a few days, unless they die … Her thoughts strayed towards Achilles: her own dear brother Achilles, tall and strong and quick to laugh, his falcon’s beak of a nose above the moustache, his eyes glittering with kindness and amusement. The whacking of rifle-butts on the door. The dragging away of Achilles, and her next – her last – sight of him, on the cart in the square, the Nazi swine yanking the noose taut over his head; the look in his poor eyes, that said this is really happening, to me …
Clytemnestra dragged her thoughts back from that thing too dreadful to contemplate. It had filled her mind with a turbulence that broke against the edge of her consciousness in waves of rage. She reached out her hand for her gun. She closed her fingers on the cool metal. It had a grounding effect, drew her back to the here and now.
To what it was that had woken her up.
When she remembered what that had been, she drew in her breath and did not let it out. And in the silence, that thing came again: half-way between a howl and a yelp, the distant sound of a dog. Not the sheepdogs they used in the mountains: a more purposeful sound. The sound of a dog hunting. One of the black-and-tan dogs the Sonderkommando used for hunting people.
She reached out and squeezed Wills’ hand. The feel of his warm flesh gave her encouragement. ‘What is it?’ he said.
She told him.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘We’d better do something about it, eh?’ As he said it, he felt a sense of wonder: his head was clear, his thoughts sharp. He remembered very little about the past twenty-four hours, except a blurred procession of images, feet walking over rock, Nelson, terrible dreams …
But that was all over now. He groped for his Schmeisser and snapped in a new magazine. Clytemnestra had her eye to the spy-hole in the wall. ‘How many?’ he said.
‘Four. And the dog.’
‘One feels they may be in for a bit of a shock.’
Clytemnestra said, ‘A very big shock.’ She did not go in for his English understatement. After all, there was no shock like dying.
‘Good dog, Mutzi,’ said Tietmeyer, the
handler.
Marsdorff did not agree. This damned animal had dragged him and Schmidt and Kohl up a cliff in the noonday sun. It had relieved itself on a handhold, which he had then put his hand on, and of course everyone had found that very amusing. Marsdorff was a pudgy, maggot-coloured man, who owed his place in the Sonderkommando more to a lack of scruple than to any positive military talent. Basically, Marsdorff was very good at hanging people, an accomplished hand with a red-hot iron and a pair of pliers, and no beginner when it came to the process of gang rape – a business that in Marsdorff’s view was often approached crudely and without thought. A really well-handled woman could keep a squad amused for some days –
‘Good dog,’ said the handler. The Doberman on the choke lead growled and slavered, claws scritching on the bare rock as it hauled Tietmeyer up the path towards the ruined house. It had needed some persuasion to come out of the rocks by the tomb, into which it had fled after the death of its previous handler. Now it was back at work, though, it seemed enthusiastic to make amends. ‘There’s been someone in there, all right. Gone now.’
‘Oh, good,’ said Marsdorff, with sarcasm. ‘Eagles, are they? Or mountain goats?’
‘Let’s hope they’re goats,’ said Kohl, who disliked Marsdorff. ‘I don’t mind shagging a goat, but eagles are right out.’
‘You have to draw the line somewhere,’ said Marsdorff, sagely. He was not joking. ‘On a bit.’
Negligently, the four men approached the next group of ruins. They did not believe anyone was on this island who was not supposed to be. Apparently there had been shooting. Well, they would believe it when they saw it.
The path had come to a narrow place, a defile dug out between a blade of rock and the cliff. The defile ended in a sort of groove, shoulder-deep in bare rock, leading to another group of ruined houses, the first of them a massive stone building, with loopholes staring blankly at the defile and the groove. They entered the groove, Tietmeyer in the lead. In one of the loopholes, something moved; a short, slender pipe. The barrel of a machine pistol. Tietmeyer said, nervously, ‘I don’t –’ There was a large and dreadful noise, and the groove filled up with bullets. All of them jumped. None of them hit the ground alive.
The Complete Navarone Page 93