The Complete Navarone 4-Book Collection: The Guns of Navarone, Force Ten From Navarone, Storm Force from Navarone, Thunderbolt from Navarone

‘Thanks, Corporal. How long, Brown, do you think?’

‘Lord only knows, sir. Two hours, maybe four. Most of the nuts and bolts are locked solid with rust: have to shear or saw ’em – and then hunt for others.’

Mallory said nothing. He turned away heavily, brought up beside Stevens who had abandoned the wheelhouse and was now bent over the sail locker. He looked up questioningly as Mallory approached.

Mallory nodded. ‘Just get them out and up. Maybe four hours, Brown says. Andrea and I will do our landlubbery best to help.’

Two hours later, with the engine still out of commission, they were well outside territorial waters, closing on a big island some eight miles away to the WNW. The wind, warm and oppressive now, had backed to a darkening and thundery east, and with only a lug and a jib – all the sails they had found – bent to the foremast, they could make no way at all into it. Mallory had decided to make for the island – the chances of being observed there were far less than in the open sea. Anxiously he looked at his watch then stared back moodily at the receding safety of the Turkish shore. Then he stiffened, peered closely at the dark line of sea, land and sky that lay to the east.

‘Andrea! Do you see –’

‘I see it, Captain.’ Andrea was at his shoulder. ‘Caique. Three miles. Coming straight towards us,’ he added softly.

‘Coming straight towards us,’ Mallory acquiesced. ‘Tell Miller and Brown. Have them come here.’

Mallory wasted no time when they were all assembled.

‘We’re going to be stopped and investigated,’ he said quickly. ‘Unless I’m much mistaken, it’s that big caique that passed us this morning. Heaven only knows how, but they’ve been tipped off and they’re going to be as suspicious as hell. This’ll be no kid-glove, hands-in-the-pockets inspection. They’ll be armed to the teeth and hunting trouble. There’s going to be no half-measures. Let’s be quite clear about that. Either they go under or we do: we can’t possibly survive an inspection – not with all the gear we’ve got aboard. And,’ he added softly, ‘we’re not going to dump that gear.’ Rapidly he explained his plans. Stevens, leaning out from the wheelhouse window, felt the old sick ache in his stomach, felt the blood leaving his face. He was glad of the protection of the wheelhouse that hid the lower part of his body: that old familiar tremor in his leg was back again. Even his voice was unsteady.

‘But, sir – sir –’

‘Yes, yes, what is it, Stevens?’ Even in his hurry Mallory paused at the sight of the pale, set face, the bloodless nails clenched over the sill of the window.

‘You – you can’t do that, sir!’ The voice burred harshly under the sharp edge of strain. For a moment his mouth worked soundlessly, then he rushed on. ‘It’s massacre, sir, it’s – it’s just murder!’

‘Shut up, kid!’ Miller growled.

‘That’ll do, Corporal!’ Mallory said sharply. He looked at the American for a long moment then turned to Stevens, his eyes cold. ‘Lieutenant, the whole concept of directing a successful war is aimed at placing your enemy at a disadvantage, at not giving him an even chance. We kill them or they kill us. They go under or we do – and a thousand men on Kheros. It’s just as simple as that, Lieutenant. It’s not even a question of conscience.’

For several seconds Stevens stared at Mallory in complete silence. He was vaguely aware that everyone was looking at him. In that instant he hated Mallory, could have killed him. He hated him because – suddenly he was aware that he hated him only for the remorseless logic of what he said. He stared down at his clenched hands. Mallory, the idol of every young mountaineer and cragsman in pre-war England, whose fantastic climbing exploits had made world headlines, in ’38 and ’39: Mallory, who had twice been baulked by the most atrocious ill-fortune from surprising Rommel in his desert headquarters: Mallory, who had three times refused promotion in order to stay with his beloved Cretans who worshipped him the other side of idolatry. Confusedly these thoughts tumbled through his mind and he looked up slowly, looked at the lean, sunburnt face, the sensitive, chiselled mouth, the heavy, dark eyebrows bar-straight over the lined brown eyes that could be so cold or so compassionate, and suddenly he felt ashamed, knew that Captain Mallory lay beyond both his understanding and his judgment.

‘I am very sorry, sir.’ He smiled faintly. ‘As Corporal Miller would say, I was talking out of turn.’ He looked aft at the caique arrowing up from the south-east. Again he felt the sick fear, but his voice was steady enough as he spoke. ‘I won’t let you down, sir.’

‘Good enough. I never thought you would.’ Mallory smiled in turn, looked at Miller and Brown. ‘Get the stuff ready and lay it out, will you? Casual, easy and keep it hidden. They’ll have the glasses on you.’

He turned away, walked for’ard. Andrea followed him.

‘You were very hard on the young man.’ It was neither criticism nor reproach – merely statement of fact.

‘I know.’ Mallory shrugged. ‘I didn’t like it either … I had to do it.’

‘I think you had,’ Andrea said slowly. ‘Yes, I think you had. But it was hard … Do you think they’ll use the big guns in the bows to stop us?’

‘Might – they haven’t turned back after us unless they’re pretty sure we’re up to something fishy. But the warning shot across the bows – they don’t go in for that Captain Teach stuff normally.’

Andrea wrinkled his brows.

‘Captain Teach?’

‘Never mind.’ Mallory smiled. ‘Time we were taking up position now. Remember, wait for me. You won’t have any trouble in hearing my signal,’ he finished dryly.

The creaming bow-wave died away to a gentle ripple, the throb of the heavy diesel muted to a distant murmur as the German boat slid alongside, barely six feet away. From where he sat on a fish-box on the port of the fo’c’sle, industriously sewing a button on to the old coat lying on the deck between his legs, Mallory could see six men, all dressed in the uniform of the regular Germany Navy – one crouched behind a belted Spandau mounted on its tripod just aft of the two-pounder, three others bunched amidships each armed with an automatic machine carbine – Schmeissers, he thought – the captain, a hard, cold-faced young lieutenant with the Iron Cross on his tunic, looking out the open door of the wheelhouse and, finally, a curious head peering over the edge of the engine-room hatch. From where he sat, Mallory couldn’t see the poop-deck – the intermittent ballooning of the lug-sail in the uncertain wind blocked his vision; but from the restricted fore-and-aft lateral sweep of the Spandau, hungrily traversing only the for’ard half of their one caique, he was reasonably sure that there was another machine-gunner similarly engaged on the German’s poop.

The hard-faced young lieutenant – a real product of the Hitler Jugend that one, Mallory thought – leaned out of the wheelhouse, cupped his hand to his mouth.

‘Lower your sails!’ he shouted.

Mallory stiffened, froze to immobility. The needle had jammed hard into the palm of his hand, but he didn’t even notice it. The lieutenant had spoken in English! Stevens was so young, so inexperienced. He’d fall for it, Mallory thought with a sudden sick certainty, he’s bound to fall for it.

But Stevens didn’t fall for it. He opened the door, leaned out, cupped his hand to his ear and gazed vacantly up to the sky, his mouth wide open. It was so perfect an imitation of dull-witted failure to catch or comprehend a shouted message that it was almost a caricature. Mallory could have hugged him. Not in his actions alone, but in his dark, shabby clothes and hair as blackly counterfeit as Miller’s, Stevens was the slow, suspicious island fisherman to the life.

‘Eh?’ he bawled.

‘Lower your sails! We are coming aboard!’ English again, Mallory noted; a persistent fellow this.

Stevens stared at him blankly, looked round helplessly at Andrea and Mallory: their faces registered a lack of comprehension as convincing as his own. He shrugged his shoulders in despair.

‘I am sorry, I do not understand German,’ he shouted. ‘Can you not speak my language?’ Stevens’s Greek was perfect, fluent and idiomatic. It was also, the Greek of Attica, not of the islands; but Mallory felt sure that the lieutenant wouldn’t know the difference.

He didn’t. He shook his head in exasperation, called in slow, halting Greek: ‘Stop your boat at once. We are coming aboard.’

‘Stop my boat!’ The indignation was so genuine, the accompanying flood of furious oaths so authentic, that even the lieutenant was momentarily taken aback. ‘And why should I stop my boat for you, you – you –’

‘You have ten seconds,’ the lieutenant interrupted. He was on balance again, cold, precise. ‘Then we will shoot.’

Stevens gestured in admission of defeat and turned to Andrea and Mallory.

‘Our conquerors have spoken,’ he said bitterly. ‘Lower the sails.’

Quickly they loosened the sheets from the cleats at the foot of the mast. Mallory pulled the jib down, gathered the sail in his arms and squatted sullenly on the deck – he knew a dozen hostile eyes were watching him – close by the fish-box. The sail covering his knees and the old coat, his forearms on his thighs, he sat with head bowed and hands dangling between his knees, the picture of heart-struck dejection. The lug-sail, weighted by the boom at the top, came down with a rush. Andrea stepped over it, walked a couple of uncertain paces aft, then stopped, huge hands hanging emptily by his sides.

A sudden deepening of the muted throbbing of the diesel, a spin of the wheel and the big German caique was rubbing alongside. Quickly, but carefully enough to keep out of the line of fire of the mounted Spandaus – there was a second clearly visible now on the poop – the three men armed with the Schmeissers leapt aboard. Immediately one ran forward, whirled round level with the foremast, his automatic carbine circling gently to cover all of the crew. All except Mallory – and he was leaving Mallory in the safe hands of the Spandau gunner in the bows. Detachedly, Mallory admired the precision, the timing, the clockwork inevitability of an old routine.

He raised his head, looked around him with a slow, peasant indifference. Casey Brown was squatting on the deck abreast the engine-room, working on the big ball-silencer on top of the hatch-cover. Dusty Miller, two paces farther for’ard and with his brows furrowed in concentration, was laboriously cutting a section of metal from a little tin box, presumably to help in the engine repairs. He was holding the wire-cutting pliers in his left hand – and Miller, Mallory knew, was right-handed. Neither Stevens nor Andrea had moved. The man beside the foremast still stood there, eyes unwinking. The other two were walking slowly aft, had just passed Andrea, their carriage relaxed and easy, the bearing of men who know they have everything so completely under control that even the idea of trouble is ridiculous.

Carefully, coldly and precisely, at point-blank range and through the folds of both coat and sail, Mallory shot the Spandau machine-gunner through the heart, swung the still chattering Bren round and saw the guard by the mast crumple and die, half his chest torn away by the tearing slugs of the machine-gun. But the dead man was still on his feet, still had not hit the deck, when four things happened simultaneously. Casey Brown had had his hand on Miller’s silenced automatic, lying concealed beneath the ball-silencer, for over a minute. Now he squeezed the trigger four times, for he wanted to mak’ siccar; the after machine-gunner leaned forward tiredly over his tripod, lifeless fingers locked on the firing-guard. Miller crimped the three-second chemical fuse with the pliers, lobbed the tin box into the enemy engine-room, Stevens spun the armed stick-grenade into the opposite wheelhouse and Andrea, his great arms reaching out with all the speed and precision of striking cobras, swept the Schmeisser gunners’ heads together with sickening force. And then all five men had hurled themselves to the deck and the German caique was erupting in a roar of flame and smoke and flying débris: gradually the echoes faded away over the sea and there was left only the whining stammer of the Spandau, emptying itself uselessly skyward; and then the belt jammed and the Aegean was as silent as ever, more silent than it had ever been.

Slowly, painfully, dazed by the sheer physical shock and the ear-shattering proximity of the twin explosions, Mallory pushed himself off the wooden deck and stood shakily on his feet. His first conscious reaction was that of surprise, incredulity almost: the concussive blast of a grenade and a couple of lashed blocks of TNT, even at such close range, was far beyond anything he had expected.

The German boat was sinking, sinking fast. Miller’s homemade bomb must have torn the bottom out of the engine-room. She was heavily on fire amidships, and for one dismayed instant Mallory had an apprehensive vision of towering black columns of smoke and enemy reconnaissance planes. But only for an instant: timbers and planking, tinder-dry and resinous, were burning furiously with hardly a trace of smoke, and the flaming, crumpling deck was already canted over sharply to port: she would be gone in seconds.

His eyes wandered to the shattered skeleton of the wheelhouse, and he caught his breath suddenly when he saw the lieutenant impaled on the splintered wreck of the wheel, a ghastly, mangled caricature of what had once been a human being, decapitated and wholly horrible: vaguely, some part of Mallory’s mind registered the harsh sound of retching, violent and convulsive, coming from the wheelhouse, and he knew Stevens must have seen it too. From deep within the sinking caique came the muffled roar of rupturing fuel tanks: a flame-veined gout of oily black smoke erupted from the engine-room and the caique miraculously struggled back on even keel, her gunwales almost awash, and then the hissing waters had overflowed and overcome the decks and the twisting flames, and the caique was gone, her slender masts sliding vertically down and vanishing in a turbulent welter of creaming foam and oil-filmed bubbles. And now the Aegean was calm and peaceful again, as placid as if the caique had never been, and almost as empty: a few charred planks and an inverted helmet drifted lazily on the surface of the shimmering sea.

With a conscious effort of will, Mallory turned slowly to look to his own ship and his own men. Brown and Miller were on their feet, staring down in fascination at where the caique had been. Stevens was standing at the wheelhouse door. He, too, was unhurt, but his face was ashen: during the brief action he had been a man above himself, but the aftermath, the brief glimpse he’d had of the dead lieutenant had hit him badly. Andrea, bleeding from a gash on the cheek, was looking down at the two Schmeisser gunners lying at his feet. His face was expressionless. For a long moment Mallory looked at him, looked in slow understanding.

‘Dead?’ he asked quietly.

Andrea inclined his head.