by Tom Harper
“Get up here,” he called through the rain. Behind her, a black snout had squeezed through the gap between the bowed-in door and its frame. The gun fired, but the angle was too narrow and the bullet struck one of the display cabinets instead. Something priceless and ancient shattered into dust and fragments.
Marina scampered up the swaying ladder, the tablet tucked into her belt. Grant pulled off his own belt and laid it over the broken window frame, letting the leather take the bite of the glass. He leaned out as far as he dared.
The house trembled again and this time Grant saw the yellow flames of the explosion licking round the battered door, then blasting it in. Marina jumped; the ladder tottered, swayed, then toppled over and crashed down on a stone sarcophagus in the middle of the room. Grant’s hands closed round Marina’s wrists. His hands were torn and bloody; for a moment he felt a stabbing pain and the horrible, heart-stopping sensation of her sliding through his fingers. Then she dug her nails into his forearm and he tightened his grip. She stopped falling and began to rise, flopping over the ridge of the roof just as the first of their enemies burst through the blown-out door below. He was still looking around, wondering where they’d gone, when Grant put two bullets into the top of his skull.
“Should improve the odds.” Grant reloaded the Webley. Together, he and Marina ran to the back edge of the roof and looked down. The grounds behind the house were less mannered than the front garden: an open apron of lawn that ended abruptly in the front ranks of the surrounding pine forest. There, three sodden figures huddled in the trees.
“You first, this time.” Grant found a drainpipe and almost pushed Marina over the edge in his hurry. As soon as she touched the ground he was after her, sliding down the slick metal pipe, trying to ignore the burning in his hands. Anyone watching from the windows would have had a clear shot at them, but that was a risk he had to take. They ran across the grass, their feet sinking into the soft turf, and threw themselves into the cover of the trees.
“Glad you made it.” Muir was crouched behind a tree trunk, his pistol poised to return any fire from the house. “Christ. You look bloody terrible.”
“Did you find the tablet?” said Jackson from behind a rock.
Marina pulled out the damp tablet from her waistband and handed it to Reed. The professor’s hands, white and bloated in the rain, trembled as he took it.
“Did you manage to raise your headquarters on the radio?”
Jackson nodded. “They have no fucking idea about this airstrip of yours, but they’re sending a Dakota where you said. That’s the good news. Bad news is they say the Reds are all over this mountain like a rash. They’re not sure we’ll get through. The other bad news is that they’re running an aerial offensive against the Commies this afternoon. The guy at HQ said he’d try to call off the bombers . . .” He shrugged. “But I brought you this.” Jackson passed Grant the Sten gun. “Only the one clip, so don’t go crazy with it. Unless you have to.”
Grant holstered the Webley and took the sub-machine gun. “I’ll stay here while you get away.”
“No,” said Jackson firmly. “You’re the only one who knows where this goddamn airfield is. We’ll go together.”
“Then let’s go.”
CHAPTER 23
They set off. It was slow going: the forest was thick and tangled, the ground soft. Marina, in particular, struggled with her high-heeled shoes. Eventually, she took them off, removed her stockings and walked barefoot on the carpet of pine needles. All of them were tensed, listening out for any sign they were being followed. The rain had stopped, though they hardly knew it with the steady drip of water from the trees.
“At least with Sourcelles dead, we don’t have to worry about him telling the Russkis what he knows.” Jackson pushed past a low-hanging branch. It snapped back, showering Reed with a spray of water drops. Grant, ahead of Jackson, looked back in disgust. “What? Don’t look at me like some Boy Scout. You’ve played the game. It’s not just what you know; it’s what they don’t know.”
“I never thought killing civilians was the best way to achieve that.”
“No? What about those Yid commandos you were busy selling guns to?” He raised an eyebrow. “Muir told me all about your dirty little past. You know what they did at the King David Hotel? Ninety-one dead. Do you think they give a damn about civilians?”
“They’re fighting a war.”
“So are we.” Jackson looked as though he might have gone on at length. But Grant was no longer paying attention. He stopped and stared at the sky, his head tilted, listening for something. A moment later Jackson heard it too. The thrum of aircraft engines, high overhead.
“Is that ours? Could it’ve got here already?”
Grant shook his head grimly. “That’s not a Dakota.”
“You sure?”
Grant didn’t bother to answer. He’d lost count of the times he’d spent crouched in foxholes or behind boulders, straining his ears for the sound that would spell relief. “I think we can assume your man didn’t manage to call off the bombers.”
“Shit.”
A crack that had nothing to do with wood shattered the stillness of the forest. Grant spun round. The trees were as thick and dark as ever—he could barely tell the way they’d come. But someone was out there.
“Was there supposed to be a ground assault as well?”
Jackson looked as alarmed as the rest of them. “No.”
“Then they’re after us.”
“What do we do?”
“We run. And hope the bombs don’t get us.”
Reed had never known the sheer physical terror of being a fugitive in hostile country. His war had been fought with paper and pencil in the huts at Bletchley Park. It hadn’t been easy: some nights, when the U-boat packs were hunting, the pressure had been immense, too much for some men. But for Reed the stillness of the codes had always been a place of calm, the one corner of the war where battle was decided rationally. The torrent of numbers they battled every day could frustrate, baffle and deceive—but there was a fundamental order behind them, however well the Enigma machines tried to chew it up. And, like the ancient Greeks, Reed had never feared the rational.
But this—this was chaos. This was all the animal forces the Greeks had tried to consign to myth: the harpies, furies, gorgons and bacchantes that had haunted their imaginations let loose. Reed felt he was in a dream, clutching the tablet like a talisman. If he dropped it, he was sure, the chasing pack would be on him in an instant. And so he ran.
So two wild boars spring furious from their den,
Roused with the cries of dogs and voice of men;
On every side the crackling trees they tear,
And root the shrubs, and lay the forest bare;
They gnash their tusks, with fire their eyeballs roll,
Till some wide wound lets out their mighty soul.
The poetry thumped in his heart. He was aware of others around him—Grant, Muir, perhaps Jackson—breaking their stride to pause and return fire, but he carried on relentless. He had never run so far, so hard. His legs were like jelly. When the forest thinned into a bare clearing of rock and scrub he tried to run faster to get back into the safety of the trees, but couldn’t.
Grant turned and squeezed off a few rounds from the Sten. It felt like some lethal fairy tale, being chased through dark woods by a shapeless malevolence. Perhaps they should have made a stand—at least that would have solved the risk of getting a bullet in his back. But the forest stretched away in every direction and their pursuers almost certainly had them outgunned. Probably outnumbered, too.
He reached the edge of some open ground, where a landslide seemed to have carried away the trees. Ahead, he could see Reed flailing frantically between the boulders. Grant fired a short burst into the trees. That might give them pause for thought, give him time to cross the clearing.
The blood was pumping in his ears—but for all that, it was a strangely silent battle. The shots were sporadi
c, quickly swallowed in the damp silence. So although the bomber was high overhead, he heard the buzz of its engines loud and clear. Despite the danger all around he looked up.
The storm had passed and a cool wind was pulling the clouds apart. Grant could see pale-blue sky through the shreds of gray—and, passing in front of it, a dark shadow like a fly or a bird. As Grant watched, it split in two. Part of it seemed to break away, plummeting to the earth, while the other glided serenely on.
“Run!”
The others were already well across the clearing. There was no one to hear Grant’s words but himself. He launched himself toward them, vaulting round the boulders and hurdling the roots and stumps that tried to grab him. Whoever was following them must have reached the edge of the forest: he heard shots, saw one of the rocks throw up a puff of white dust as a bullet struck it only a few feet away. His erratic course, zigzagging between the debris, made him a hard target to hit, but not impossible. The edge of the clearing was agonizingly close, twenty yards distant, but he couldn’t chance it. He slid down into a pocket behind two boulders and peered through the crack between them.
For a second he saw them clearly: seven of them, all in green combat fatigues. They were spread out in a line along the edge of the forest, all with guns at their shoulders. Grant raised the Sten, wondering how many bullets he had left. Behind them, over the trees, a black comet crashed into the woods.
The world seemed to melt into flames. A pillar of fire rose up out of the forest, three times as high as the trees, which turned to tinder in the inferno. It was like no explosion Grant had ever seen. Instead of rolling away, the noise grew, swelling like a train rushing through a tunnel. A high wind blasted through the clearing; Grant was thrown against the boulder as the hungry fire sucked in all the air it could grasp. The wind swept his pursuers off their feet, picking them up like dolls and hurling them into the burning forest.
Black smoke crawled up the wall of flame and swallowed it. The wind subsided, drifting back over Grant like a wave running down a beach. He ran with it, scrambling over the broken ground to the line where the trees resumed. The others were waiting for him there.
“What the hell is that?” Grant’s lungs felt as if they were struggling against a ten-ton boulder on his chest.
“Napalm.” Jackson held a red spotted handkerchief against his mouth. “We use it for smoking out the Reds.”
“Well, we’re going to be served on toast if we don’t get out fast.” The far side of the clearing was completely ablaze and the fire had already started licking round its flanks.
“Did you see Belzig in there?”
“I didn’t have time to look.” Grant glanced back. A black figure ran screaming into the clearing. His head was bald, burned clean, and fiery shapes clung to his back like demons. Three bullets from Jackson’s Colt ended his misery. Then they ran.
Black clouds hid the sky again, but this time they were clouds of fire, not water. Tendrils of smoke reached between the trees, chasing after them. Reed could only think of the Hydra, a slithery ball of sinuous necks and snapping heads. The fire seemed to have receded a bit, but every time he glanced over his shoulder it was still there, a dull orange glow behind the trees.
They reached an outcrop on the shoulder of the mountain, a rocky place, high and very exposed. From there, they could look down into the steep valleys that defined the mountain, and across to the slopes and summits on the far side. The valleys were dark and thickly wooded, with occasional flecks of white where a fast-flowing river showed through.
Muir pushed past Reed to the edge of the outcrop. “So where’s the fucking airstrip, then?”
Grant pointed to the low saddle between the valleys, almost directly beneath them. The mountains on either side pressed close against it and the ridge itself looked barely wide enough for a goat track.
“We’ll never land a plane there.”
“I’ve done it before.”
The metallic click of a bolt shuttling home cut through the open space like a gunshot. They turned. There was no point even trying to raise their guns. A dozen men were standing round them in a rough horseshoe, all armed. More could be seen in the trees and bushes beyond.
One of them stepped forward. He was a scrawny man, far too small for the gun he carried. He wore an expression of earnest concentration. As he turned to share something with one of his subordinates, he showed a red star sewn on the sleeve of his shirt, like the one Grant had seen on the man at Sourcelles’s house. When he looked back, a strange smile had spread across his face.
“Sam Grant,” he said in heavily accented English. “We meet again.”
Grant holstered the Webley and returned the smile with an uneasy grin. “Hello, Panos.”
CHAPTER 24
Who the hell is this?” Jackson demanded. “You know him?”
“Panos Roussakis—we met during the war. He was fighting the Germans on Crete.”
Jackson pointed to the gun. “Who’s he fighting now?”
“For Greece.” Roussakis seemed to stand straighter as he said it and his grip on his gun tightened.
“You wouldn’t like his politics,” Grant warned. “Better not ask too many questions.”
“And them?” The guerrilla jerked his gun at Grant’s companions. His smile had vanished. “Who . . . ?”
He broke off, staring at Marina as if he’d seen a ghost. “You? Why are you here?”
He looked troubled, confusion written on his gaunt face. For the first time Grant began to feel worried. Roussakis looked at Jackson, then up at the sky, a mess of blue and black and gray. The bomber had vanished, but the smell of burning was all around them. “Why you bring them here?”
“The bomber’s nothing to do with us. It’s a long story—and we don’t want to hang around. We’ve got a plane coming to pick us up from the airstrip. If you can just let us get there, we’ll be out of your way.”
Roussakis snapped something at one of his lieutenants. The guerrillas moved closer. “You come with us.”
They surrendered their guns and marched in single file down the mountain. They had no choice. Roussakis’s men surrounded them, keeping them under guard as they negotiated the precipitous stair of rocks and tree roots. The sun had come out, and the air was dense with the moisture steaming off the damp foliage. To Grant, it felt more like the Congo basin than northern Greece.
Jackson, walking behind Grant, asked, “How come you know this guy?”
“We worked together on Crete in the war. He led a group of partisans.”
“So he knew Marina?”
“Not well. He and her brother had . . .” Grant hesitated, “. . . a difference of opinion.”
“That would be one way of putting it,” said Muir.
After what seemed like an interminable descent, the slope began to level off. Grant paused, sniffing the air. He could smell fire again, but not the sticky, oily fire that the plane had brought. This was tinged with the sweetness of pine resin—and the sizzling fat of roasting lamb. A pang of hunger shot through Grant’s belly. He hadn’t eaten since the morning. Now it was almost dusk.
Suddenly the trees thinned out. A hundred yards away sunlight shone through on to a thin scar carved out of the forest: the airstrip. It wasn’t on top of the ridge, but on a natural terrace just below, so that the trees above hid it from almost every angle. The guerrillas had their camp in the forest around it: a handful of pup tents, a cooking fire and a few crates of ammunition. Two women in fatigues were roasting a lamb over the fire. To Reed, whose trip to the pictures was his weekly treat in Oxford, it looked like a scene from The Adventures of Robin Hood. He half expected to see Errol Flynn come through the twilit forest in his feathered cap. Instead, he saw something even more surprising. On the edge of the camp, branches had been lashed together to make the frame of a crude hut, open-sided and roofed with foliage. Roughly hewn log benches were lined up underneath it and all of them were filled with rows of children staring attentively at the front o
f the room, where a gray-haired teacher was writing on a blackboard. A few of them stared curiously at the new arrivals, wide-eyed under their mopped hair and pigtails. Then the teacher rapped her pointer against the blackboard and they turned back dutifully.
“What are they doing?” asked Jackson.
“Their fathers are all wanted men. They can’t go to the local schools, so their families bring them here.”
Roussakis turned round. “Quiet.” He gestured to his men, who herded Grant and the others into a knot on the edge of the airstrip. The only sound was the unsettling chorus of the children chanting a nursery rhyme after their teacher.
“The last time we meet, I tell you never to see me again.”
Grant took a step toward the edge of the circle. A rifle angrily jabbed him back. “Christ, Panos. You know I’m on your side.”
“Yes? Once, maybe. Now I see you are with the Fascists.”
Jackson couldn’t contain himself. “Fascists? We’re the good guys. In case you didn’t notice, we spent four years helping fellas like you get rid of the Fascists. You want to know who the real heirs to Hitler are? Why don’t you ask your buddies in Moscow?”
“There is a man from Moscow who comes here this morning. A colonel in the MGB. He has only one eye.” Roussakis held a palm over the right side of his face to mimic an eyepatch.
“Kurchosov.”
“So. You know him. And he knows you. He says: he is looking for an Ameriki and three English men. Enemies of socialism—very dangerous.” Roussakis walked over to one of the ammunition crates and picked up a fat pistol with a barrel like a drainpipe. None of the others dared to speak. “He offers me money—gold—and many weapons if I go with him to find you.”
“But you didn’t go,” said Grant.
Roussakis loaded a flare into the gun. “He has a man with him—a German. I know this man from Crete. A Fascist; they call him Belzig. He has killed many Greeks in the war. He makes them slaves; he makes them dig; he makes them die. A pig. So I say no.”