Alistair MacLean - The Complete Navarone

They were not the first people to have had the idea of defending this eyrie. The Swallow’s Nest was the fortress-like building commanding the defile, a tower that overhung the abyss like a swallow’s nest in the eaves of a roof. Wills’ boots rang in the thick-walled rooms. He put his head into something that might have been a waterspout, or a nozzle for boiling oil. The valley was full of rain and the mutter of thunder. Far below, the path was a faint zigzag rising to the base of the cliff. And on the path, little creatures crawled: German soldiers.

It occurred to Wills that while the Swallow’s Nest might be an impregnable redoubt, on an island crawling with German soldiers it was also a blind alley.

For a very small moment after the steel door hissed shut, Miller and Andrea stood quite still, listening. There was in all conscience plenty to listen to.

They were standing in a corridor hewn from the basalt. The corridor was lined with doors, full of voices echoing from the hard surfaces of the rock, and the steel plate of the door, and the girders that supported the staircases and the lighting and forced-draught units, and the loudspeakers that at this very moment were squawking klaxon noises into the babel below.

There were men everywhere. There seemed to be a lot of Wehrmacht , and a sprinkling of camouflage-smocked SS , and civilian workers, some mechanical-looking, in blue overalls, and one man in a white lab coat with pen-clips showing in the breast pocket, and rimless glasses below a head like a pumpkin. A squad of Greeks marched past, dressed in the rags of peasant field clothes, under the guard of four Waffen-SS . Everybody was too busy scuttling to and fro to spend any time staring at a couple of filthy, bloodstained men in ripped camouflage smocks.

For the moment.

The moment did not last long. A Wehrmacht NCO came marching past. He stopped, stared up at Andrea, and said, ‘What the hell do you think you’ve been doing, killer?’

Andrea stood to attention, eyes front, chin out.

‘How tall are you?’ barked the NCO. The man’s eyes were small and evil. Any minute now, thought Miller, they were going to slide down Andrea’s body to his boots, his British army-issue boots, and that would be that –

Two metres, Feldwebel ,’ said Andrea.

‘Never seen shit piled so high in my life,’ said the NCO. Andrea’s eyes had slid down the corridor. A door had opened. A wisp of steam floated into the corridor. A man with a drawstring bag came out, fumbling with his tunic buttons. ‘You Sonderkommando cutthroats think you can march about the place with your arses filthy, you can —’

‘Permission to take a shower, Feldwebel? ’ roared Andrea.

‘Permission to take a shower, Feldwebel? ’ roared Miller.

Andrea turned left, cracked his boots on the concrete, and headed for the door. The Feldwebel turned away. If these Nazi animals wanted to take a shower during a general alert, then a shower they would take, Herr Gott . They were above the law, these brutes. The best you could hope was that they refrained from cooking and eating your men, and robbing the dead. God knew what the army was coming to. All mixed up with this Sonderkommando , and civilian labourers, and boffins, and God alone knew what other riffraff. Apparently some fool had crashed a train in the quarry, too. Beer, thought the Feldwebel . That was what you needed in a climate like this, at a time like this. He stumped off in the direction of the Sergeants’ Mess.

The klaxons had stopped. ALLES KLAR , said the big metal voice in the corridor. ALL CLEAR. STAND DOWN.

Andrea shoved open the door of the shower room.

It was a big shower room, full of steam and the cursing of men who had stopped their showers and hauled their uniforms on over soapy bodies only to be told that the whole business had been in vain.

So now they stood under the showers, brown heads and arms and legs and milk-white German torsos, and washed. Miller and Andrea found a steamy corner, took off their tell-tale boots, and buried them and their battledress under the camouflage smocks. Then they stepped under the water.

‘Most refreshing,’ said Miller.

‘Exactly so,’ said Andrea.

‘Murderers,’ said a small man, presumably Wehrmacht , under the next nozzle.

Andrea reached out a huge hand, picked him up by the chin, and said, ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’

The Wehrmacht man was very small and very frightened, but also very brave. ‘What I said.’

Andrea gazed at him. Finally he said, ‘You’re quite right.’ He grinned horribly. The little man ran away.

‘Don’t like each other, do they?’ said Miller, in German.

‘Sometimes,’ said Andrea, grimly, ‘life can be very beautiful.’

He looked around in the steam, scowling, a hairy giant with someone else’s towel wrapped round his waist. Miller had a sudden mental glimpse of this shower room in a few hours: red gouts of flame shooting through the doors, the ceiling bulging in, dust and screams where the steam now hung …

If everything went according to plan.

Meanwhile, he knew what Andrea was looking for. Andrea was looking for someone in the shower with the same size feet as him.

Three hundred yards away, Mallory was thinking boots, too.

After he had jumped out of the train, he had hit the ground with his feet, cradling his Schmeisser. He had rolled, the paratrooper’s roll, come back on his feet like a cat, and started running through the rain and steam and dust for the cliff face. There had been shouts. He paid no attention. Carstairs was up the face of the cliff, heading for the aerials. He did not trust Carstairs. Carstairs needed watching. So Mallory was going up the cliff towards the aerials, to keep an eye on him. He knew the face of that cliff, had summed it up in his mind the way a yachtsman sums up a chart or a fisherman a stretch of river.

He arrived at the locomotive, a crushed barrel issuing jets of scalding steam. He ran up the iron side, avoiding the geysers. The white fog was thick here. Suddenly he was at the rock wall.

Once, it would have dropped straight into the marsh. Since the reclamation of the land it now dropped straight into the platform where the railway and the road causeways arrived at the Acropolis. But there had been building inside the cliff, and ten feet above the platform, a drainpipe had been cemented in. Now, Mallory ran along the locomotive’s boiler, jumped, locked his fingers round the drainpipe, drew up his legs, drove his bootnails into the rock, and straightened his knees. He got a foot to the top of the drainpipe, stood there a moment, perfectly in balance. The rain and steam were thick as porridge up here. Somewhere thunder roared, or perhaps it was the locomotive’s boiler, mingled with the sound of the big concrete mixers.

He reached up. At fingertip height, an electric cable ran across the sheer face. He flexed his knees, and jumped. The cable came into his hands, fat and solid, anchored to the wall with good German steel. He drove his boots into the rock and walked his feet up. Tenderly, so as not to pierce the insulation, he got a sole to the cable. Then he shifted his weight, bending his knee. In a couple of seconds he was standing on the cable, walking to the right, northwards, twenty feet off the ground.

From his vantage point he saw grey rain thickening into a solid mat of vapour, from which rose a confused roar of noise. The hiss of escaping steam was fading. The sound of voices was louder; raucous voices, bellowing orders, and the churn of the big concrete mixers. He did not have long. He walked on along the cable, one foot delicately in front of the other, water streaming down the cliff to his left. He was concentrating on his balance, tiptoeing along behind the curtain of the rain.