Alistair MacLean - The Complete Navarone

‘Andrea!’ he bawled.

‘What do you want?’ Andrea’s great bulk loomed through the hatchway. He had heard every word that passed, had taken his cue from Mallory: a newly-opened wine bottle was almost engulfed in one vast hand and he was scowling hugely. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’ he asked surlily. He stopped short at the sight of the German and scowled again, irritably. ‘And what does this halfling want?’

‘Our passes and letters of authority from Herr General. They’re down below.’

Andrea disappeared, grumbling deep in his throat. A rope was thrown ashore, the stern pulled in against the sluggish current and the papers passed over. The papers — a set different from those to be used if emergency arose in Navarone — proved to be satisfactory, eminently so. Mallory would have been surprised had they been anything else. The preparation of these, even down to the photostatic facsimile of General Graebel’s signature, was all in the day’s work for Jensen’s bureau in Cairo.

The soldier folded the papers, handed them back with a muttered word of thanks. He was only a kid, Mallory could see now — if he was more than nineteen his looks belied him. A pleasant, open-faced kid — of a different stamp altogether from the young fanatics of the SS Panzer Division — and far too thin. Mallory’s chief reaction was one of relief: he would have hated to have to kill a boy like this. But he had to find out all he could. He signalled to Stevens to hand him up the almost empty crate of Moselle. Jensen, he mused, had been very thorough indeed: the man had literally thought of everything … Mallory gestured in the direction of the watch-tower.

‘How many of you are up there?’ he asked.

The boy was instantly suspicious. His face had tightened up, stilled in hostile surmise.

‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked stiffly.

Mallory groaned, lifted his hands in despair, turned sadly to Andrea.

‘You see what it is to be one of them?’ he asked in mournful complaint. ‘Trust nobody. Think everyone is as twisted as …’ He broke off hurriedly, turned to the soldier again. ‘It’s just that we don’t want to have the same trouble every time we come in here,’ he explained. ‘We’ll be back in Samos in a couple of days, and we’ve still another case of Moselle to work through. General Graebel keeps his — ah — special envoys well supplied … It must be thirsty work up there in the sun. Come on, now, a bottle each. How many bottles?’

The reassuring mention that they would be back again, the equally reassuring mention of Graebel’s name, plus, probably, the attraction of the offer and his comrades’ reaction if he told them he had refused it, tipped the balance, overcame scruples and suspicions.

‘There are only three of us,’ he said grudgingly.

‘Three it is,’ Mallory said cheerfully. ‘We’ll bring you some Hock next time we return.’ He tilted his own bottle. ‘Prosit!’ he said, an islander proud of airing his German, and then, more proudly still, ‘Auf Wiedersehen !’

The boy murmured something in return. He stood hesitating for a moment, slightly shame-faced, then wheeled abruptly, walked off slowly along the river bank, clutching his bottles of Moselle.

‘So!’ Mallory said thoughtfully. ‘There are only three of them. That should make things easier —’

‘Well done, sir!’ It was Stevens who interrupted, his voice warm, his face alive with admiration. ‘Jolly good show!’

‘Jolly good show!’ Miller mimicked. He heaved his lanky length over the coaming of the engine hatchway, ‘“Good” be damned! I couldn’t understand a gawddamned word, but for my money that rates an Oscar. That was terrific, boss!’

‘Thank you, one and all,’ Mallory murmured. ‘But I’m afraid the congratulations are a bit premature.’ The sudden chill in his voice struck at them, so that their eyes aligned along his pointing finger even before he went on. ‘Take a look,’ he said quietly.

The young soldier had halted suddenly about two hundred yards along the bank, looked into the forest on his left in startled surprise, then dived in among the trees. For a moment the watchers on the boat could see another soldier, talking excitedly to the boy and gesticulating in the direction of their boat, and then both were gone, lost in the gloom of the forest.

‘That’s torn it!’ Mallory said softly. He turned away. ‘Right, that’s enough. Back to where you were. It would look fishy if we ignored that incident altogether, but it would look a damned sight fishier if we paid too much attention to it. Don’t let’s appear to be holding a conference.’

Miller slipped down into the engine-room with Brown, and Stevens went back to the little for’ard cabin. Mallory and Andrea remained on deck, bottles in their hands. The rain had stopped now, completely, but the wind was still rising, climbing the scale with imperceptible steadiness, beginning to bend the tops of the tallest of the pines. Temporarily the bluff was affording them almost complete protection. Mallory deliberately shut his mind to what it must be like outside. They had to put out to sea — Spandaus permitting — and that was that.

‘What do you think has happened, sir?’ Stevens’s voice carried up from the gloom of the cabin.

‘Pretty obvious, isn’t it?’ Mallory asked. He spoke loudly enough for all to hear. ‘They’ve been tipped off. Don’t ask me how. This is the second time — and their suspicions are going to be considerably reinforced by the absence of a report from the caique that was sent to investigate us. She was carrying a wireless aerial, remember?’

‘But why should they get so damned suspicious all of a sudden?’ Miller asked. ‘It doesn’t make sense to me, boss.’

‘Must be in radio contact with their HQ. Or a telephone — probably a telephone. They’ve just been given the old tic-tac. Consternation on all sides.’

‘So mebbe they’ll be sending a small army over from their HQ to deal with us,’ Miller said lugubriously.

Mallory shook his head definitely. His mind was working quickly and well, and he felt oddly certain, confident of himself.

‘No, not a chance. Seven miles as the crow flies. Ten, maybe twelve miles over rough hill and forest tracks — and in pitch darkness. They wouldn’t think of it.’ He waved his bottle in the direction of the watch-tower. ‘Tonight’s their big night.’

‘So we can expect the Spandaus to open up any minute?’ Again the abnormal matter-of-factness of Stevens’s voice.

Mallory shook his head a second time.

‘They won’t. I’m positive of that. No matter how suspicious they may be, how certain they are that we’re the big bad wolf, they are going to be shaken to the core when that kid tells them we’re carrying papers and letters of authority signed by General Graebel himself. For all they know, curtains for us may be the firing squad for them. Unlikely, but you get the general idea. So they’re going to contact HQ, and the commandant on a small island like this isn’t going to take a chance on rubbing out a bunch of characters who may be the special envoys of the Herr General himself. So what? So he codes a message and radios it to Vathy in Samos and bites his nails off to the elbow till a message comes back saying Graebel has never heard of us and why the hell haven’t we all been shot dead?’ Mallory looked at the luminous dial of his watch. ‘I’d say we have at least half an hour.’

‘And meantime we all sit around with our little bits of paper and pencil and write out our last wills and testaments.’ Miller scowled. ‘No percentage in that, boss. We gotta do somethin’.’

Mallory grinned.

‘Don’t worry, Corporal, we are going to do something. We’re going to hold a nice little bottle party, right here on the poop.’