Clytemnestra was peering down one of the spouts of the Swallow’s Nest. As Wills watched, she took a German stick grenade, pulled the toggle, and dropped it through the spout.
Well, thought Wills, fitting her into a known structure. For Clytemnestra and the islanders of Kynthos, this is the home front. He watched the grenade fall, wobbling in the air. The little figures on the zigzag were bigger now, five hundred feet below. They did not look up.
It was a nicely calculated drop. The grenade burst in the air, at about waist height. Wills heard nothing that he could class as an explosion; a flash and a puff of smoke, and a split-second later a flat, ineffectual-sounding whap. Three of the little figures on the path were not on the path any more. The rest stopped and lay down; fifteen of them at the most, with more coming up behind. A lot more. They faltered, all of them. It must be unnerving to find yourself under fire from a place you could not see, on an island of which you were supposed to be in control.
After a while, small voices floated up from below, mingled with birdsong. The men below started to move in little rushes. If they had been on a plain or a hillside, they would undoubtedly have spread out. But this was a cliff, and the path was the only means of access. They were bunching again, directly below the Swallow’s Nest …
Thermopylae!’ yelled Wills, and pulled the strings on two bombs, and let them go.
Again the flash and the puff and the whap. Again the little figures, flung off the path and vanishing over the horizon. Again the silence.
But in that silence, a Single word. Hoch. Up. And all of a sudden, in that huddle of figures, a series of pale discs: faces. And after the faces, the small flicker of muzzle flashes, and the sting and whine of bullets beyond the Swallow’s Nest walls.
Clytemnestra sat back, her legs out in front of her, and took a sip of water, and smiled at Wills, showing those white teeth and those fierce eyes, slapping the dirty floor-slabs as you might pat a horse. What she was saying was that there were six feet of good solid masonry between them and those bullets. Nothing was going to shift them, short of artillery.
Wills grinned back at her, feeling the stretch of burned skin on his face.
A shadow flitted across his thoughts. There were a lot of Germans out there. Up here in the Swallow’s Nest there was food and ammunition for a couple of days, no more. Maybe they would be relieved. The men in the Acropolis were good men, they had proved that already. Four men, said the small, dark voice in Wills’ head. Against a thousand or so.
He heard the scritch of grenade fuses, the blat of the explosions, Clytemnestra hiss a curse. A file of soldiers was running up the last zigzag and into the shelter of the cliff. The grenades knocked three of them down, but that left a dozen. Clytemnestra grabbed for her Schmeisser. The Swallow’s Nest filled with its jackhammer clatter. She swore again, stopped firing. The range was too big. Wills found himself a loophole that covered the mouth of the path, and waited, sighting down the groove in the stone. Clytemnestra had shot the first lot. It was Wills’ turn.
For twenty minutes, nothing moved out there except a lizard, hunting flies on the plates of rock at the mouth of the defile. Then the lizard became suddenly still, as if listening. A fly landed within six inches of it. It paid no attention. Fast as an eye blinking, it was gone.
After it there came, first of all, a boot. Wills rested the foresight of the Schmeisser on the place where the knee would be, and moved the v of the backsight up to cradle it.
A man came out, helmet down, like a rabbit with a ferret on its tail, slap into the sights. Wills fired a four-round burst. The man straightened up and fell backwards into the soldier who was following, stopping him. While he was stopped, Wills shot him in the head. He slammed back. Another man was behind him, and another. Wills fired a longer burst. Hands went up and legs buckled and somebody somewhere began shouting, whether from pain or shock he could not tell. The main thing was that nobody else came through the gap. Like pheasants, he thought. Like pheasants that you take out in front, one, two, except with a machine pistol you could take three, four, five. His head was light, and he thought that he might be going to laugh or cry, he could not tell which. ‘Like pheasants,’ he said.
‘Like Nazi swine,’ said Clytemnestra.
Suddenly, Wills was shaking. Clytemnestra put her hand on his shoulder, and made small, soothing noises. I’m sorry,’ he said, when he could speak. ‘I was in the Navy. It’s a new way of … seeing men die.’
She smiled and nodded. She did not understand, though. She had seen her brother hanged for no reason except that he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was not thinking about the way she felt. She was thinking about the enemy, hoping one of them would show himself and she would have a chance to kill him. Kill or be killed, thought Wills, a little wildly: that is the whole of the Law –
Outside, a machine gun started hammering. The bullets whanged off the stones. None of them found its way through the loophole. Clytemnestra was firing now, short bursts again. She must have learned from someone, thought Wills. Short bursts don’t overheat, and guns that don’t overheat don’t jam. Andrea might have taught her –
‘Four more,’ she said, snapping out the magazine.
It was lives out there, Wills knew. Not weapons training. Seven men bleeding down that hillside. Five left.
The machine gun opened up again. Clytemnestra was still reloading. Wills popped up, saw two more men running along the groove, squeezed the trigger, tumbled the first one like a rabbit, cut the second one’s knees from under him. Don’t do it, you bloody fools, he was thinking. Christ, why am I saying this? I want to live. But now he could see these men, he wanted them to live too, to stop bursting out of the slot in the cliff and running down that gutterful of flying lead –
He got his wish. They stopped. Down below, the path zigzagged empty. Wills offered Clytemnestra a cigarette. She refused. He lit one himself. He could feel the pressure of the silence: fifty men, waiting in dead ground for the next thing to happen.
Whatever that was going to be.
‘They’re getting ready,’ he said.
Clytemnestra showed her teeth. ‘Soon, we kill them all,’ she said; Helen, Medea, the whole vengeful regiment of Greek myth rolled into one and carrying a sub-machine-gun.
They waited.
Nothing happened.
They both watched the slot in the cliff, the things lying in the rock gulley that had once been men, but were now mere bundles of rags drowned in a long gutter of shadow. The sun was going down.
‘What do we do when it gets dark?’ said Wills.
‘Leave,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘There is a way. A way beyond.’
‘So what happens if the Germans find it?’ said Wills.
‘Nobody will find it who was not born on Kynthos,’ she said, with a scorn so magnificent that it drove away the anxieties flocking round Wills, and really made him believe that there were things here invisible to normal eyes, things that only Clytemnestra could see.
‘Top-hole,’ said Wills.
Something that sounded like an express train roared overhead. There was a huge explosion. The floor of the Swallow’s Nest shook as if in an earthquake. ‘Christos!’ said Clytemnestra. ‘What was that?’
‘Gun,’ said Wills. ‘Eighty-eight, probably.’ Now that there was actually a military problem to engage his mind, he felt oddly better. ‘They’ll have them on the airfield, for flak. They’ll be spotting it in, I expect. Chaps round the corner’ll be on the radio.’ His mind rolled on. There would be no radio to the airport gun emplacements. Telephone only. So the chaps round the corner would be transmitting to the big aerials on the top of the Acropolis, and someone up there would be calling the fall of shot to the chaps by the gun. Elaborate, but it seemed to work –
Another express train passed overhead and to the right. Another explosion pummelled their ears. Another earthquake shook the floor. Bracketed. Now all the gunners had to do was dot the i.
The sun was well
behind the mountains, now. Far away across the valley, an edge of shadow was creeping up the sunlit crags of the Acropolis.
A great fist smashed Wills to the ground. He found himself lying with his head on Clytemnestra’s belly, his ears chiming like a belfry, bits of cement and chips of stone raining down on him. Overhead, where the roof should have been, he could see a patch of blue sky veined with little golden wisps of sunset cloud. There was a strong reek of burned stone and high explosive.
‘Wait till they hear about that,’ said Wills, in a voice that did not quite shake.
‘About what?’ Clytemnestra’s hand was in his hair. She stroked it absent-mindedly, as if he was a dog.
‘They’re zeroed in,’ said Wills. ‘Hang on to your hat.’
EIGHT
Thursday
2000–2300
The rain had passed. From the west face of the Acropolis, the sun was a red-hot cannonball falling into a sea of ink. Mallory climbed hard and fast, staying in gullies, where the shadows lay like a dark liquid. He was not interested in the view. He was looking forward to the falling of night. Things were safer in the dark …
He paused, comfortable in his foot- and handholds, and looked about him. He was on a vast, curved face, a sort of oil drum of rock. He had bypassed a couple of vents and entrances; the concrete crane was a thousand feet below him. The oil drum was the final peak on top of which the aerial array stood. He was tired. Fumbling in his pack he found the Benzedrine, popped out a couple of pills, swallowed them.
High on the curved face of the rock, something flickered across Mallory’s vision. A mere speck, crawling from one gulley, across a sun-gilded ridge and into the next gulley. It might have been a bird, a bee, even. But Mallory knew that it was his quarry. Carstairs, climbing very fast, solo. He hoped the man’s technique was up to it.
There was only one way to be sure.
Mallory went after him. The Benzedrine spread cool energy through him as he drifted up that cliff, keeping just below the line of shadow the sinking sun drove up the cliff from the mountains at his back, relying on the contrast between the light and the darkness to hide him. Ten minutes later, he was in the same chimney as Carstairs, an easy chimney, with a chockstone seventy feet up, and the summit just beyond the chockstone. He looked up, shielding his eyes against the grit coming down off Carstairs’ boots. If Carstairs wanted the aerials, two would do the job more easily than one.
Mallory whistled.
Carstairs had never done such a long solo. He was an expedition climber, a man used to ropes and Sherpas and a glass of cold Champagne at base camp. At first, his knees had shaken, and the loneliness had pressed in on him. But he was a good technical climber, so he had taken it easy, taken it slow, driven himself up all those vertical feet, safe as houses, accelerating as he got the hang of it until he was climbing at a pretty fair speed. Oh yes, he had begun to think, I’m good at this. Now, as far as he could see, he was nearly at the top. There would be guards at the top; after all this climbing, fighting …
He was up and under the chockstone now. The boulder jammed into the crack blocked his further progress. He would have to go out on to the lip of the crack, work his way round the boulder, then prepare for the … well, final assault. He belayed his rope. Then he reached up a hand, straining round the boulder for a crack, probing with the tip of a spike. Found a place. The spike went in. He worked it in further; worked it in by hand. There would be guards up there. The clink of a hammer on a spike would carry. The guard would look over …
That was when he heard the whistle.
His heart leaped in his chest. He glanced down, saw the figure in the SS smock. A German. His hands were engaged. He could not get a weapon. He did not know it was Mallory, following him. All he knew was that that figure down there would go for his gun, shoot him out of the sky. He needed to get out of the line of fire. Over the stone. He put his weight on his right hand, swung out of the chimney …
He was half-way out when he lost his grip and fell.
He saw the floor of the world turn under his eyes. For a split second he thought, this is it. Then the rope caught him. He swung wildly. Something smote him a wicked bang on the head, and everything went first red, and then black.
Mallory saw the foreshortened figure above reach out, grab, slip, fall, swing. He heard the wet smack of the head on the rock, saw him twitch, then hang limp on the rope.
He waited for the rope to stop swinging, the deadly swing that could work a spike loose. Then he went up, fast, out of the groove in case Carstairs fell, up the right-hand side on holds a fly would have despised. He reached the spike and checked it. It was deep in the crack, holding; a good belay in a difficult spot. Carstairs knew what he was doing, all right.
Once he had checked the belay, Mallory went to the body. There was a good pulse, a lump rising on the back right-hand bulge of the skull under the hair, sticky with brilliantine and stone-grit. The man would live. Mallory hauled the body up into a sitting position, looped the tail of the rope under its armpits and rolling-hitched it on to the standing part. Now Carstairs was sitting on the end of the rope like a drunk on a bar stool, dangling over a thousand feet of nothing. Perfectly safe.
Mallory went through his pockets, found the cigarette case, the knife, the silenced Browning automatic in a shoulder holster; a murderer’s weapon. In the waist pouches, he found what he was looking for: two blocks of a substance like putty, wrapped in greasy paper. Plastic explosive. But no time pencils.
Mallory stood wedged in the chimney, sweating. Plastic explosive was funny stuff. You could burn it. You could spread it on bread and eat it, if the worst came to the worst. And of course you could blow a hole in steel with it. But only if you had some fulminate of mercury to start it off, in those little colour-coded pencils, the size of a long cigarette.
Mallory went back to Carstairs’ pockets. The gold cigarette case came out. There was lettering on it: ‘Darling Billy, from Betty Grable – What a night!’ Mallory opened the case one-handed.
Turkish this side. Virginian that. And in the middle, the time pencils.
Mallory shoved the case in his breast pocket and climbed on. The cliff face was curving away from him now, becoming less a precipice, more a slope. He could see the aerial pylons glowing as if red-hot in the last rays of the sun. He stayed low, creeping on his belly until he could see the whole dome of the summit. The pylons stuck out of the naked rock, a hundred feet apart, supporting a web of fine wires. There seemed to be a lot more wire than was required for normal short-wave apparatus. Mallory supposed that if you were shooting things into space, you would need some sort of sophisticated radio to find out what was happening to the machinery. Not that he cared. It was as much part of a weapon as a sight was part of a rifle. His job was to destroy it.
He made a circuit of the mountain top. It had the look of a place untrodden except by maintenance engineers. There was a trap door at the far side, a hefty steel object set in concrete. To the east, the Acropolis continued as a series of lower peaks, a series of plugs like the noses of a clip of giant bullets, a hot wilderness of shale and sun-scorched shrubs, its declivities filled with the violet shadows of evening; a hard place, with a sense of pressure underneath it. Mallory was a New Zealander. He knew the sensation of standing on a volcano; the feeling that the ground under his feet had once been a white-hot liquid, pushing to get out into the air, burn and destroy. No change there …
He found himself peering into the deepest of the valleys: more a hole than a valley, really. And in its bottom, instead of the usual dried-up pond with a patch of thorny scrub, was something else. No vegetation: a smooth, dark bowl. It was as if the hole was a deep one, made shallower with carefully-slung camouflage nets.
Mallory filed the information away in his Benzedrine-sharpened mind, and trotted up the dome to the base of the aerials.
There was a faint hum up here, a sense that the ether was troubled by invisible forces. Mallory crouched and wrapped a charge of p
lastic explosive round the base girders of one of the pylons, making sure it was good and close to the wrist-thick wire that snaked along the rock from the hole by the trap door. Should bring one pylon down, break that cobweb of wires. Mending them would take time – time during which the Acropolis would be dumb and deaf.
He packed on the charges, pushed in two black time pencils, crushed them and pulled out the safety tags. The electrolyte began eating away at the corrosion wire that held back the spring-loaded plunger from the blasting cap. Ten minutes, perhaps less on a warm evening like this. The sun was balanced on the horizon. Time to get clear. He went down the slope until the slope became a cliff. He doubled his rope around a projection of the rock, looped it over his shoulder and up between his legs, and walked backwards out and down, casting left and right for the chimney where he had left Carstairs.
He found it on his left, saw the chockstone coming up, slowed his descent. He would need to get the Englishman on to a ledge, keep him warm, get a briefing from him, leave him to recover –
He stopped next to the chockstone. Somewhere behind him and below, deep in the gulf of shadow that was the marsh and the valley, a gun fired: the peculiar flat crack of an 88. Normally, Mallory would have pitied the poor devil who was on the receiving end of that high-velocity, flat-trajectory packet of death. He would also have asked himself who, on this German-controlled island, was shooting at whom.
But he did not ask himself any of this, because he had other things on his mind.
He had left Carstairs unconscious, trussed into a sitting position, hanging from a piton over a thousand-foot drop.
Now, Carstairs was gone.
Mallory looked down. On the floodlit platform three hundred yards below his feet, people were moving, vehicles crawled, a gang was clustered round the engine. (Crack, said the 88 again, down in the valley.) There was none of the ants’-nest activity you would expect if the body of a commando with a Clark Gable moustache had plummeted out of the sky and into their midst.
The Complete Navarone Page 95