Thunderbolt from Navarone

He took the next two lintels in his stride. On the fire-escape landing he looked back. Andrea was drifting across the face of the hotel like a gigantic shadow. The Greek landed light as a feather next to them. They trotted down the iron stairs, spread out, automatically, with the discipline that had established itself these last weeks. Covering each other, covering themselves … Going out for a drink.

They flitted off the fire-escape, trotted through the alley to the front of the hotel, and up the grand stone steps into the lobby. The man behind the desk saw three men in khaki battledress without insignia. He had been a hall porter on civvy street, and he knew trouble when he saw it. Among the immaculate officers walking through the lobby, these men stuck out like wolves at a poodle show. Their boots were dirty, their eyes bloodshot, and they moved at a murderous lope that made him wish he could leave, fast, and become far away. Alarm bells started ringing in his head. Deserters, he thought, and dangerous ones. It did not occur to him that deserters were unlikely to be hanging around in smart hotels. These men made him too nervous to think. His hand went for the telephone. He knew the number of the Military Police by heart.

He told the operator what he wanted. But when he looked up, the men had gone. For good, he imagined, dabbing sweat from his pale brow with a clean handkerchief. There had been no time for them to cause any trouble, and they would not get past the sentries on the cocktail bar. He cancelled the call.

But the men had not gone; and they had indeed got past the sentries.

It had happened like this: three men in battledress without insignia had attempted to gain entrance to the mess bar. Challenged, one of them had barked the sentries to attention, an order the sentries had (for reasons they did not properly understand) found themselves obeying. Another, a very big man with black curly hair, had taken away their rifles with the confidence of a kind father removing a dangerous toy from a fractious child. The third, having passed remarks uncomplimentary to their personal turnout and the cleanliness of their weapons, which he had inspected, had followed his two companions into the hallowed portals.

As they gazed upon the shut door, the sentries became aware that they had failed in their duty. There had been no chance of their succeeding, of course; the situation had been out of their hands. But that was not going to make matters any easier to explain to the sergeant. They were on a fizzer, for sure. As one, both sentries went through the door.

Through the fog of smoke, they saw their quarry. All three of them were with a small naval captain. They were standing rigidly to attention. The small captain caught the sentries’ eyes, and waved them away. ‘Really,’ he said, mildly, to the three men. ‘You’ll frighten the horses.’

‘Thought we’d pop out for a drink,’ said Mallory.

Jensen raised an eyebrow. Thirty commandos, said the eyebrow, and I hope you haven’t bent any of them.

‘We came down the fire-escape,’ said Mallory. ‘We were very thirsty.’

Into Admiral Dixon’s brain there had sunk the idea that something untoward was happening. He did not expect his evenings to be interrupted by soldiers, particularly soldiers as scruffy and badgeless as this lot. He was further amazed when he heard Captain Jensen say, ‘Oh, well. While you’re here, I can tell you we’ve got the snapshots. Total success. Well done. Briefing scheduled for 2300 hours.’

Admiral Dixon said, in a voice like a glacier calving, ‘Who are these men?’

‘Sorry,’ said Jensen. ‘Captain Mallory. Corporal Miller. Colonel Andrea, Greek Army, 19th Motorized Division. Admiral Dixon, OC Special Operations, Mediterranean.’

The Admiral rested his gooseberry eyes on the three men. Miller watched the veins in his neck and wondered idly how much pressure a blood vessel could take before it burst. ‘Why,’ said the Admiral, ‘are they improperly dressed?’

‘Disgraceful,’ said Jensen, with severity. ‘But as you will remember, they have just completed a mission. They were confined to quarters on suspicion of collusion with the enemy, so they haven’t had a chance to pop up to Savile Row. I think that in view of reconnaissance reports on the outcome of their mission, we can give them the benefit of the doubt. Unless you feel an Inquiry is necessary?’

‘Hrmph,’ said the Admiral, mauve-faced. ‘Mission or no mission, can’t have this sort of nonsense –’

‘Walls have ears,’ said Jensen smoothly. ‘You have called a briefing for 2300 hours. That will be the moment to discuss this. Now, gentlemen. Refreshment?’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ said Miller. There was a waitress. Jensen ordered. The three men raised their glasses to Jensen, then the Admiral. ‘Mud in your eye,’ said Miller.

‘Here’s how,’ said Jensen.

The Admiral grunted ungraciously. He swallowed his gin and left.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ said Jensen. ‘We’re very pleased with you; most of us, anyway.’ He smiled, that gleaming, carnivorous smile. ‘You will be collected at 2245 hours. Till then, I bid you sweet dreams.’

‘Dreams?’ said Miller. It was not yet seven o’clock.

‘I always think a little nap can be most refreshing before a lot of hard work.’

‘Work?’ said Mallory.

But Jensen was gone.

‘Sleep?’ said Mallory. ‘Or drinks?’

Andrea pushed his glass forward. ‘You can sleep on aeroplanes,’ he said.

‘Drinks it is,’ said Mallory.

A car with a sub-lieutenant raced them through the blacked-out streets of Plymouth. The city was stirring like a huge, secret animal. The tyres kicked fans of water from deep puddles as they skirted piles of rubble and came to a set of high wire gates with naval sentries in greatcoats and bell-bottomed trousers. Beyond the gate was the dark bulk of a squat building with a sand-bagged entrance. The sentry led them through a heavy steel door into a disinfectant-smelling hall and down a flight of cement stairs, then another and another. Mallory felt the depth and silence pressing in on him. Suddenly he was tired, achingly tired, with the tiredness of two months of special operations, and the months before that…

But there was no time for being tired, because another steel door had sighed open, and they were in a windowless room painted green and cream. There were chairs, and a blackboard. Everything was anonymous. There was no clue as to where they were bound. There were three naval officers in the room, fresh-faced and wind- burned. Sitting apart was a willowy man in a Sam Browne over a tunic of excessively perfect cut. He was smoking a fat cigarette that smelt Turkish, gazing from under unnecessarily long eyelashes at the fire instructions behind the dais, and fingering a thin moustache. Mallory found himself thinking of Hollywood. It was an odd mixture of people to find a hundred or so feet under Plymouth.

Admiral Dixon and Captain Jensen walked into the room. With a scuffing of chair legs, the men stood to attention. ‘Good evening,’ said Jensen. ‘Stand easy. You may smoke.’ Dixon ignored them. He sat down heavily in a chair. His eyes were glassy and he was breathing hard, presumably from the effort of walking down all those stairs. Mallory reflected that if coming down had been that bad, someone would have to carry him up. Jensen, on the other hand, looked fresh as the morning dew. He stood on the balls of his feet, perky as a bantamweight boxer, while an orderly unrolled maps on the board.

Mallory knew that in the coastlines and contours of those maps their fates were written. There were the three fingers of the Peloponnese, blue sea, Crete, the island-splatter of the Dodecanese. And larger-scale maps: an island. Not an island he recognized, though when he glanced across at Andrea he saw him straight- backed and frowning.

‘Very good,’ said Jensen, when the orderly had finished. ‘Now I said I had a job for you, a tiny little job, really. It’s a bit of a rush, I suppose, but there it is, can’t be helped.’

‘Rush?’ said Mallory.

‘All in good time,’ said Jensen. ‘First things first. Admiral Dixon you already know. Gentlemen – ‘ here he turned to Mallory, Miller and Andrea ‘– certain people are very pleased with what you achieved last week.’ Admiral Dixon shook his head and sighed. ‘So pleased, in fact,’ said Jensen, ‘that they want you to do something else. Probably much easier, actually.’ He turned to the map at his back. Miller listened to the hum of the ventilation fans. It was all very well Jensen saying things were easy. He was not the one getting shot at. Miller doubted that he knew the meaning of the word.

The central map showed plenty of blue sea, and an island. It was the shape of a child’s drawing of a beetle, this island: a fat body dark with close-set contours and a head attached to its north-eastern end by a narrower neck. ‘Kynthos,’ said Jensen. ‘Lovely place. Delightful beaches. Very few Germans, but the ones there are particularly interesting, we think.’

Mallory and Miller slumped in their chairs. As far as they were concerned the only interesting German was a German they were a couple of hundred miles away from. But Andrea was still upright in his chair, his black eyes gleaming. Andrea was a Greek. The things the Germans had done to his country were bad, but they were much, much better than the things the Germans had done to his family. Andrea found Germans very interesting indeed.

‘I’ll start at the beginning,’ said Jensen. ‘Last year we bombed a place called Peenemunde, on the Baltic. Seems the Germans were building some sort of rocket bomb there; doodlebugs first, bloody awful things, but there was supposed to be something else. Germans called it the A3. Goes into outer space, if you can believe this, and comes back, wallop, faster than the speed of sound. Blows a hole in you before you’ve even heard it coming. Good weapon against civilians.’ Mallory searched Jensen’s face for signs of irony, and found none. ‘We’re expecting it any day now. And there’s something else; bigger version, larger, longer range, more dangerous, good for use against troops. Questions so far?’

‘Why bother with outer space?’ said Miller.

‘Think of a shell. Longer the range, higher the trajectory.’

‘You’d need a hell of a bang to get it up there.’

Jensen smiled. ‘Very good, Miller,’ he said. ‘Now what we believe is this. These A3 things are rockets. Thing about outer space, there’s no air to burn your fuel. So your rocket needs to take its own air with it. These A3 things are supposed to burn a mixture of alcohol and liquid oxygen. One of our submarines sank a ship off Kynthos the other day, surfaced to look for, er, survivors. All they found was oxygen bottles. And a stink of alcohol.’

‘Schnapps,’ said Miller.

Jensen smiled, and this time even the artificial warmth was gone from the ice-white display of teeth. ‘Thank you, Corporal,’ he said. ‘If that is all, I shall hand you over to Lieutenant, er, Robinson.’

Lieutenant Robinson was a tall, stooping man with round tortoiseshell spectacles and a donnish air. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Hmmyes. Kynthos. Typical Vesuvian post-volcanic structure, Santorini series, basalts, pumice, tufa, with an asymmetric central deposition zone –’

‘Lieutenant Robinson used to teach geology at Cambridge,’ said Jensen. ‘Once more, this time in English, if you please, Lieutenant.’

Robinson blushed to the tops of his spectacles. ‘Hmmyes,’ he said. ‘Kynthos is, er, mountainous. Very mountainous. There’s a town at the south-western end, Parmatia, more a village really, on a small alluvial plain. The road from the town transits a raised beach – ‘ he caught Jensen’s eye – ‘follows the coast, that is, mostly on a sort of shelf in the cliffs. There is no road across the interior suitable for motor transport. To the north-east of the mountain massif is another island, smaller, Antikynthos, connected to the main massif by a plain of eroded debris and alluvium –’ here Jensen coughed ‘– a stretch of flat land and marshes. This smaller island is itself rocky, taking the form of a volcanic plug with associated basalt and tufa masses, and on this there stands an old Turkish fort and the remains of a village: the Acropolis, they call it, the High Town. There has always been a jetty on Antikynthos. Recently this has been greatly improved, and the aerodrome upgraded. In the view of, er, contacts on the island, some sort of factory is being established.’ He took a photograph out of a file and laid it in an overhead projector. A man’s face appeared on the screen: a round face, mild, heavy-lidded eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘Sigismund von Heydrich,’ he said. ‘Injured during the bombing of Peenemunde. Highly talented ballistician – ‘ Jensen’s eye again ‘– rocket scientist. He was spotted boarding a plane at Trieste, and we know the plane landed on Kynthos. They’ve built workshops in the caves under the Acropolis. But there’s only a light military presence. Couple of platoons of Wehrmacht, nothing worse, as far as we know.’

Jensen stood up. Thank you, Lieutenant,’ he said. The Lieutenant looked disappointed, as if he had planned to go on for some time. ‘Well, there you are. Simple little operation, really. We want you to land on Kynthos and make a recce of this Acropolis. You’ll be briefed on the development of the V4, which is what they’re calling this one. Any sign of it, and we’d like it disposed of: air strikes will be available, but if they’ve got it a long way underground, well, Miller, we have the greatest confidence in your ability to wreck the happy home. Questions so far?’

‘Yessir,’ said Mallory. ‘You say we’ve got someone on the island already?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Jensen. ‘There was a transmitter.’