by Tom Harper
Grant exhaled. “What happened to Kurchosov?”
Roussakis shrugged. “We have many men in this valley. Maybe he finds someone else who will do his work.”
“I think we ran into them.”
Roussakis said nothing. In the pause the distant hum of airplane engines drifted down through the forest canopy; not the harsh buzzing of the bombers, but the hollow chop of a Dakota.
“And what about her?” He pointed the flare gun at Marina. “It is not the first time I find the Papagiannopouli working with Fascists.”
Roussakis aimed the pistol into the open sky and pulled the trigger. With a searing whoosh, a flare shot up and exploded high above the trees with a puff of red smoke. Half a dozen of Roussakis’s men ran to positions along the sides of the airstrip.
“What happened to Alexei has nothing to do with this,” said Grant. All the guns suddenly seemed to be pointing straight at him, deadly accusing fingers. He was also painfully aware of Marina’s gaze.
“What do you mean?” There was an almost hysterical edge to Marina’s voice now. A shadow passed over them: the Dakota, flying low to reconnoitre the runway. No one looked. “What about Alexei?”
Roussakis’s eyes narrowed. “Grant doesn’t tell you?”
“He was killed in an ambush,” said Grant desperately. The moist air was thick around him; he felt ill.
“The British killed him,” said Marina. “They were afraid that when the Germans were gone, the resistance would try to take over all Greece for Communism. They thought if they eliminated the Communist leaders they could keep Greece for themselves. So they had Alexei killed.”
“No. Not because he was Communist. And not the British. They have tried—they send a man to do it, but he fails.” Roussakis shot Grant a contemptuous look. “But I follow. I go there, to the gorge. I kill Alexei.”
Marina stared at him. “You? Why?”
“You remember what happens three days before he died? All your men—massacred by Germans. There are surviving only three: you, Alexei and Grant.”
“Alexei had sent us to Rethymno to spy out a German fuel dump.”
“Because he knows. He knows what will happen. You know for why the Germans find your men? Alexei tells them.”
Marina shuddered as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. Her face went pale. Grant reached out an arm to steady her, but she shook it away. “Why would he betray us? He spent his life fighting the Germans.”
Roussakis shrugged. “Why do men betray their country? Maybe a girl, maybe gold? Then ksero—I do not know. But I look in his eyes, in the gorge of Imros, and I see it is truth.”
Anything else he might have said was drowned out as the Dakota roared low overhead and thumped down on the landing strip. Its wheels barely bounced on the rain-softened earth. The pilot had done well to get it down, but he still needed all the space he had to bring it to a halt in time. Hidden alongside the runway, Roussakis’s men readied their weapons and looked for his signal. He glanced at them uncertainly—and in that split second Marina pounced. She flew at him; in a single lithe movement she wrapped one arm round his neck and pulled him against her in a choking embrace, while the other twisted the pistol out of his hand. She pressed it against his right ear.
“Is he lying?”
The guerrillas surrounded her like a baying pack of hounds, jabbing with their guns and shouting at her to let Roussakis go. A hot breeze swept through the clearing as they felt the wash from the Dakota’s propellers. But the answer on Grant’s face was plain.
“I swore I would kill the man who killed Alexei,” she hissed.
Roussakis gestured his men to be still. “If you kill me, you die. Your friends die, everyone dies.”
At the far end of the runway the Dakota made a tight turn and readied itself for take-off. Grant could see the pilot through the windscreen, peering out as he looked for his passengers. The partisans, concealed in the trees, must have been invisible to him.
“Can I make a humble suggestion?” said Muir. All eyes—and several guns—turned toward him.
“You?” spat Marina. “What have you got to say? Did you give the order to kill Alexei?”
“Nothing to do with me. That was SOE’s pitch—I was SIS.” Muir flipped open his ivory cigarette case and lit a cigarette. “But as I see it, we could come over all Hamlet here and end up with a pile of corpses—or we could use some fucking common sense. Hands up, everyone who wants to die here today.”
He looked around the knot of men, the press of hard and angry faces. “Good. Now, your brother’s dead and that’s your tragedy, but if Mr. Roussakis hadn’t got him then somebody else would. Maybe you’d have done the deed yourself, if you’d known the truth. So why don’t we make a bargain? You let Roussakis go, he lets us get on that plane and we can all bugger off to more important things.”
Marina tightened her finger on the trigger. The ring of men around her pressed closer. “If I let you go, will you let us get on that plane?”
“If I do, my hands are clean? There is nothing between us?” Roussakis could hardly speak with her arm strangling him.
“Yes.”
“And the Yankee planes stop coming?”
Jackson frowned. “I can’t promise . . .”
Muir whipped round. “For fuck’s sake, Jackson. Think about what’s important.”
“OK, OK.” Jackson raised his hands in surrender. “We’ll stop the bombers.” He shook his head in disgust and looked at Roussakis. “You’re not going to win this war, you know.”
Marina lowered the pistol and loosed her grip.
Roussakis rubbed his neck. “You cannot stop a better world forever.”
They climbed into the Dakota, ducking in the propellers’ slipstream. The sun had dipped below the clouds, and on the upper slopes of the mountain the forest was still burning. They saw the whole valley filled with a viscous golden haze. Reed hugged the tablet to his chest. Marina turned her head away and looked out of the window, trying to hide her tears.
“Think what Kurchosov’s going to say when he finds out his own men helped us escape,” said Jackson gleefully. “By the time he calms down, we’ll have snatched the shield right from under his nose.”
Grant glanced at him. “You will keep your promise to Panos? Send your bombers somewhere else?”
“Sure,” said Jackson nonchalantly.
The plane banked and turned toward Thessalonica. Grant looked back, hoping for a last glimpse of the gilded sky. But the sun had gone, and the valley was lost in smoke and darkness.
CHAPTER 25
It was dark by the time they arrived back in Thessalonica. A staff car met them at the airport and took them to a small hotel. It had no restaurant; the only place they could find that would serve them food was a dingy ouzeria filled with old men playing backgammon and cards. The waiter brought them a tray of olives and stuffed vine leaves, which they ate hungrily.
When the plates had been cleared and the flask of ouzo topped up, Reed took out the tablet and laid it on the tablecloth. Molho hadn’t broken it exactly in half—Sourcelles’s fragment was larger than Pemberton’s, about six inches square. They stared at the painting on the back. It was divided into three panels by two bands of zigzag lines, the stylized sea. In the top panel, just under the crumbling edge where Molho had snapped it, two figures, a man and a woman, stood on either side of a curiously shaped mound. Grant drew a sharp breath. Even three thousand years on he could still recognize the hollowed-out hill on Lemnos where they’d found the sanctuary of the Kabyri. And, in fact, when he looked closer he saw two tiny pot-bellied figures dancing under the mountain, waving hammers. A mottled disc stood between them.
“Those must be the Kabyri. I imagine the two characters in the margins are Hephaestus, the smith god, and Thetis, Achilles’ mother.” Reed’s academic manner couldn’t entirely hide his excitement.
“And that circle—that would be the shield?” said Jackson.
Reed put his hand against his hea
d and tugged a lock of hair. “I suppose it must be.”
“And there, that’s the Trojan war, right?” Jackson pointed to the next panel. The paint had faded here, but the image was still vivid enough. Grant was reminded of the carvings in the shrine on Lemnos. Chariots raced into battle, while under the walls of a hilltop city two files of armed men lined up opposite each other. Between them two men were engaged in combat. One had thrown his spear, which quivered in the other’s round shield as he tried to draw his sword.
“Achilles and Hector.” Marina made to touch the picture, then drew back her finger with a sigh of awe.
Fierce, at the word, his weighty sword he drew,
And, all collected, on Achilles flew.
So Jove’s bold eagle, balanced in the air,
Stoops from the clouds to truss the quivering hare.
Nor less Achilles his fierce soul prepares:
Before his breast the flaming shield he bears.
Jackson looked at Reed sharply. “ ‘Flaming shield’? What does that mean?”
Reed shrugged. “It’s a common epithet applied to Achilles’ armor. The shield was coated with gold. I imagine it just means it gleamed in the sun like fire.”
“Huh.”
“And I take it this is the White Island.” Muir pointed to the bottom part of the tablet. The paint was badly chipped around the edges, but they could make out yet another mountain in the bottom right-hand corner, heavily painted in black. On its summit stood a white tower crowned with sacral horns.
“That must be the temple,” said Reed quietly. “The underworld temple of Achilles.”
He pulled a sheet of stiff paper out of his bag, a full-scale drawing he had made of Pemberton’s piece. He slid it under the tablet. The edge of the drawing and the edge of the tablet fitted together almost perfectly. At last they could see the picture in full. The shrine in the Valley of the Dead stood in the top left-hand corner of what they could now see was the fourth panel, divided from the image below by the pointed waves. All five of them leaned in over the table and stared in wonder.
“Obviously it will require a considerable amount of study.” Reed turned the tablet over, his intellectual mood as changeable as the Oxford weather. “However, at least we now have the rest of the text.”
“Can you read it yet?” Muir asked.
“That’s not the point. The immediate benefit is that we have a clean sample of Linear B. Everything I’ve deduced about the structure of the language so far has been inferred from our existing crop of Linear B inscriptions. Now that I have a new text, I can test my hypotheses, see if the rules I’ve inferred hold true. If my predictions are accurate, then I should be in an excellent position to start attempting a decipherment.”
“To start attempting . . .” Jackson swallowed his ouzo. “Can’t you ever just do something? How long will that take you?”
“I don’t know.” Reed’s donnish affability had vanished, replaced with something curt and testy. Marina had seen a similar effect in Pemberton sometimes, when a new idea or challenge seized him. Courtesy, patience, tact—all went out of the window as the mind withdrew into itself.
“It took Champollion two years to crack the hieroglyphs—and he had the Rosetta Stone to work with.”
“Two years?” All around the ouzeria locals looked up from their drinks and games to stare at the table of foreigners in the corner. Jackson lowered his voice. “Maybe you haven’t noticed what’s been going on the last few days, but we don’t have two years. We likely don’t have two weeks if the Reds are on to us. We need to get hold of this shield pronto, otherwise we’re going to be on the wrong end of the last war in history.”
Everyone at the table stared at him.
Jackson wiped his mouth with his napkin, aware he’d said too much. “Let’s just say you don’t want to be around if the Russians get it. Sourcelles as good as told us where the White Island is. I say we go there straight away, before Belzig figures it out.”
“But the island’s in Soviet territory,” Grant objected.
“All the more reason to get there as soon as we can. If the Commies figure out this thing’s in their backyard, they’ll have it in Moscow before we know anything about it.”
Reed shook his head. “Even if you do reach the island, you won’t just walk up to the temple of Achilles and knock on the door. Without the clues on the tablet you’ll never find it. Grave robbers have been looting the Valley of the Dead on Crete for centuries: none of them ever found the baetyl shrine, until Pemberton turned up with his part of the tablet.”
“That’s not your problem. We’ve got instruments that can detect Element 61. If the shield’s on that island we’ll find it.”
Back in his room, Grant stripped off his shirt and washed himself at the cracked sink in the corner. The whole day seemed to be caked on to his skin: Turkish tobacco from Sourcelles’s silver cigarette holder; dried blood where the glass had cut him; soot from the fire and grease from the airplane. He scraped it off as best he could, and towelled his cut hands gingerly, then flopped down on the mattress. The bed was hard and narrow, but after the day he had endured it felt like heaven. He lay there for a few moments, barefoot and bare chested, enjoying the waft of air against his damp skin.
There was a knock at the door. He reached out for the bedside table and put one hand on the butt of the Webley. “It’s open.”
Marina came in. She was dressed simply in a white blouse and a high black skirt that emphasized her waist. Her hair was loose round her shoulders. She paused for a moment as she saw Grant’s state of undress, then carried on into the room. Her bare feet barely made a sound on the floorboards. She sat down on the edge of the bed and Grant saw the silvered trails of fresh tears on her cheek.
“I can’t stop thinking about Alexei,” she said, perhaps by way of explanation. She turned to look Grant in the eye. “Is it true?”
“Which part?”
“All of it.”
Grant raised his arm and stroked the hair that hung down behind her back. He could feel her skin through the thin cotton blouse. “You don’t want to know.”
She didn’t move. “Tell me.”
“You remember the ambush at Kastro? The entire band—Nikos, Sophoklis, Menelaos and the rest of them—all gunned down by the Germans. Two days later HQ called me in. Apparently Alexei had betrayed us. I was ordered to bring him to a rendezvous at a valley in the White Mountains, near Impros.”
“You went to kill him.”
Grant fell silent for a moment, remembering the taste of dust in his mouth. That awkward last embrace, neither of them meaning it. Thumbing back the hammer of the Webley and the look on Alexei’s face when he realized.
“I couldn’t do it. I looked at him and all I could see was you. I didn’t know Panos had followed me.”
Marina peeled away a splinter in the bedstead and snapped it in her fingers. “You never told me.”
“It was better you didn’t know. I wanted you to remember Alexei as a hero.” Grant had stopped stroking Marina’s hair. “Besides, I never had the chance. Roussakis almost killed me too—thought I must have been in cahoots with Alexei. He said if he ever saw me on Crete again he’d kill me. My career with SOE was over anyway: I’d disobeyed a direct order. They’d never have trusted me with a mission again. So I disappeared.”
“I never knew.”
“Alexei was an embarrassment to the British. They didn’t want it to get out that one of their star allies had been turned by the Nazis. They buried it.”
For what seemed an eternity neither of them moved. Grant lay back with his head on the pillows, while Marina sat on the edge of the bed, stiff-backed and still. Grant saw her wiping away more tears. Then she turned toward him, leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. “You should have told me,” she whispered. “But thank you.”
Grant reacted instinctively. He wrapped his arms round her and pulled her down on top of him. She came willingly. Her lips brushed his cheek, soft and dry a
gainst the stubble, her tongue flicking him with quick serpentine kisses. Putting his hand on her head, he steered her back toward his mouth. She forced her tongue inside him. He tasted aniseed, smelled tobacco and musk and perfume as her hair brushed his face.
Pressing her hands against his chest, she pushed herself up and swept her leg across to straddle him. Her skirt rode up over her thighs, revealing the cream silk slip underneath. Grant slid his hands underneath it and dug his fingers into her. She gasped. Swaying, she pulled back so that she sat up over him. She reached to her throat to unbutton her blouse, but Grant was faster. He put his hands on the hem of the blouse and tore it open, pulling it apart over her breasts. She lifted her arms over her head. The lamp on the side table lit her with a smoldering orange glow. Looking up, Grant saw her shadow swaying on the ceiling behind her. With her breasts cupped in the open blouse, her arms outstretched, the pursed skirt writhing over her hips, she seemed to have become an incarnation of the Minoan goddess: primitive, raw, quivering with creative power.
She pulled off her blouse. He reached up to touch her breasts, but she caught his hands in her own and pushed him back, holding him down. She leaned forward and let her nipples brush his chest. When she felt that Grant had stopped resisting her, she took a hand away and unbuckled his belt. She moved her hand lower, popping the buttons one by one, grinding her palm against his erection.
All of a sudden Grant thrust up. It unbalanced her; in that instant Grant twisted round so that they both rolled over. Now he was on top. She writhed and squirmed under him; she scraped deep welts down his back as she dug in her nails, but she couldn’t dislodge him. He spread her thighs. She hooked her feet round the backs of his legs and squeezed her heels against his buttocks. Grant wrapped his arms under her slender shoulders, lifting her slightly so that her whole body was bent back against him.
He entered her and she swallowed him in darkness.
CHAPTER 26