Colin Forbes - The Heights of Zervos

'It was the big German,' Ford said as he closed the cabin door and re-locked it. 'I caught him on the staircase at the far end -he still had his coat and hat on and he was going up on deck. I don't like it.'

'Don't like what?' Prentice withdrew his hand from where it had rested near the pillow which concealed his Webley. 455 revolver, and began studying the patience cards spread out over his bunk.

'The feel of this old tub – those Jerries being aboard and not talking to each other. They come from the same country and they haven't said a blasted word to each other from what I've seen.'

'Perhaps they're English in disguise – that would explain the non-fraternization.' He picked up a card, placed it over another. 'Not been formally introduced, you see.'

Ford lit the last of his army issue cigarettes, the ones he could only smoke when they were alone, and started thudding a heel against the woodwork as he sat down on his bunk. Prentice looked up and stared pointedly at the thudding heel until Ford stopped the noise, then went back to his game. 'You could always get some kip,' he suggested hopefully.

'Couldn't sleep a wink,' the staff-sergeant told him emphatically. 'Not with those Jerries aboard creeping all over the shop when it's long past their bedtime.' He got up and went over to the porthole, pulling the curtain aside with a jerk. 'That ship's still there, too. Wonder why it's keeping so close to us?'

Prentice slammed down a card and lit a Turkish cigarette quickly while he watched the sergeant who continued staring out of the porthole in his shirt-sleeves. 'Ford, there are things called sea-lanes. Ships are liable to follow them. If you've ever crossed the Channel you'll see quite a few ships not far from each other the whole way across. I really think that Turkish food must have done you a power of harm – you're not normally as jittery as this.'

Ford turned away from the porthole, closing the curtain again. 'And I'm not normally travelling on a boat with a load of Jerries for company. There's something strange going on -I can feel it.'

'Three Jerries…' Prentice started to point out.

'Four! There's that other one the captain mentioned to us earlier in the day – the one that never comes out of his cabin at the end of the companionway.'

'All right, four! But hardly a load of Jerries – you make it sound as though there's a division of them aboard. What can four of them do aboard a Greek ferry in the middle of the Aegean which – when I last heard of it – is controlled by the Royal Navy? If you go on like this, Ford,' he continued with a mischievous grin, 'you'll end up in sick bay with some MO asking you what scared you in your cradle! Now, how do you expect me to get this game out if you persist in banging your foot and peering through portholes as though you anticipated a whole German army arriving at any moment?'

'Sorry. It's probably that last meal we had in Istanbul. What was that dish again?'

'Fried octrangel,' said Prentice absent-mindedly as he turned his attention to the cards. 'It's a baby octopus. A great delicacy.' He didn't look up to see Ford's face, but a few minutes later he became aware again of the restless sergeant's movements and glanced up to see him putting on his coat over his jacket.

'Feel like a breath of fresh air,' Ford explained. 'Don't mind, do you?'

'Yes, I think I do' The lieutenant spoke sharply. 'Going out on your own isn't really a very good idea.'

Ford's eyes gleamed as he dropped the coat onto his bunk. 'You don't much like it either, then?'

'I just don't think it's too clever for us to separate at this time of night. There!' He dropped a card on a small pile. 'You see, it's coming out.' Prentice smiled grimly to himself as he went on playing: Ford had smoked him out there. No, he wasn't entirely happy about the situation aboard this ferry, but he saw no point in alarming the staff-sergeant at this stage. Prentice was a man who, despite his outwardly extrovert air, preferred to keep his fears to himself. Those Germans who were worrying Ford could, of course, be spies, and if they were they had chosen the right place to come – the strategically important peninsula of Zervos. As he played out his game Prentice was thinking of a military conference he had attended in Athens just before departing for Turkey, a conference he had attended because a question of communications had been involved. He could hear Colonel Wilson's clipped voice speaking now as he automatically placed a fresh card.

'It's the very devil,' Wilson had said, 'getting permission to send some of our chaps to Mount Zervos. The official in the Greek War Ministry who's responsible says Zervos is seventy miles from the Bulgarian frontier and in any case the peninsula comes under the command of the Greek army in Macedonia. He just won't have us there.'

'Not even to send a small unit to set up an observation post?' Prentice had ventured. 'From what I gather the monastery under the summit looks clear across the gulf to the coast road taking our supplies up to the Alkiamon Line.'

'You gather correctly,' Wilson had told him crisply. 'But the monastery seems to be the stumbling-block. Apparently for many years the whole peninsula has been a monastic sanctuary and you need a government permit even to land there. They won't grant one of those to a woman – the only women allowed in the area are the wives and relatives of fishermen who live there…' He had paused, his expression icy until the ripple of laughter had died. Perhaps he had sounded unnecessarily indignant on that score. 'The guts of the thing is that this Greek official practically suggests we'd be violating something sacred by sending in a few troops…'

'You believe him?' Prentice had interjected quietly, never backward in speaking up when his interest was aroused. There had been an awkward pause before Wilson had answered that one. Only a tiny fraction of the Greek population was believed to hold secret Nazi sympathies, but it was feared that one or two of these undesirable gentry might occupy key positions inside the Greek government.

'We can only take his word,' Wilson had replied eventually. 'But the thing that sends shivers up the spines of our planning staff is the idea of German troops capturing that monastery. It's perched nearly three thousand feet up at the southern tip of the peninsula and has a clear view across to that vital coast road. And that's not all. There's some freak in the weather up there which means the summit of Mount Zervos is nearly always cloud-free – so you get an uninterrupted view of that road even when visibility's nil a few miles away. A Jerry observation post stuck up there would put us in a proper pickle.'

Afterwards, a Royal Artillery major had further enlightened Prentice: beyond the head of the gulf a range of hills formed a natural defence line, but if the Wehrmacht attacked and were able to emplace heavy guns on the lower slopes they could bring down an annihilating fire on the coast road from behind these hill crests – providing they had an observation post on Mount Zervos which could guide the fall of the bombardment. The major ended up by saying that if the Germans ever did get the Allies in such a position it would be little short of a massacre.*

Prentice dropped another card in place and sighed as the Hydra tilted again, a slow, deliberate roll as though revolving on an axis. While in Turkey he'd almost forgotten that conference, never believing for one instant that he would ever set eyes on Zervos, and here he was less than eight hours' sailing time from that benighted peninsula. And why the hell did ships always have to leave almost at dawn and arrive somewhere else at that Godforsaken hour? Finishing the game, he started shuffling the cards, uncertain whether to play again. * Later in the war the same threat materialized at Monte Cassino where a German observation post reported to the gunners every movement of Allied troops.