Alistair MacLean - The Complete Navarone

‘What do we do when it gets dark?’ said Wills.

‘Leave,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘There is a way. A way beyond.’

‘So what happens if the Germans find it?’ said Wills.

‘Nobody will find it who was not born on Kynthos,’ she said, with a scorn so magnificent that it drove away the anxieties flocking round Wills, and really made him believe that there were things here invisible to normal eyes, things that only Clytemnestra could see.

‘Top-hole,’ said Wills.

Something that sounded like an express train roared overhead. There was a huge explosion. The floor of the Swallow’s Nest shook as if in an earthquake. ‘Christos!’ said Clytemnestra. ‘What was that?’

‘Gun,’ said Wills. ‘Eighty-eight, probably.’ Now that there was actually a military problem to engage his mind, he felt oddly better. ‘They’ll have them on the airfield, for flak. They’ll be spotting it in, I expect. Chaps round the corner’ll be on the radio.’ His mind rolled on. There would be no radio to the airport gun emplacements. Telephone only. So the chaps round the corner would be transmitting to the big aerials on the top of the Acropolis, and someone up there would be calling the fall of shot to the chaps by the gun. Elaborate, but it seemed to work –

Another express train passed overhead and to the right. Another explosion pummelled their ears. Another earthquake shook the floor. Bracketed. Now all the gunners had to do was dot the i.

The sun was well behind the mountains, now. Far away across the valley, an edge of shadow was creeping up the sunlit crags of the Acropolis.

A great fist smashed Wills to the ground. He found himself lying with his head on Clytemnestra’s belly, his ears chiming like a belfry, bits of cement and chips of stone raining down on him. Overhead, where the roof should have been, he could see a patch of blue sky veined with little golden wisps of sunset cloud. There was a strong reek of burned stone and high explosive.

‘Wait till they hear about that,’ said Wills, in a voice that did not quite shake.

‘About what?’ Clytemnestra’s hand was in his hair. She stroked it absent-mindedly, as if he was a dog.

‘They’re zeroed in,’ said Wills. ‘Hang on to your hat.’

The rain had passed. From the west face of the Acropolis, the sun was a red-hot cannonball falling into a sea of ink. Mallory climbed hard and fast, staying in gullies, where the shadows lay like a dark liquid. He was not interested in the view. He was looking forward to the falling of night. Things were safer in the dark …

He paused, comfortable in his foot- and handholds, and looked about him. He was on a vast, curved face, a sort of oil drum of rock. He had bypassed a couple of vents and entrances; the concrete crane was a thousand feet below him. The oil drum was the final peak on top of which the aerial array stood. He was tired. Fumbling in his pack he found the Benzedrine, popped out a couple of pills, swallowed them.

High on the curved face of the rock, something flickered across Mallory’s vision. A mere speck, crawling from one gulley, across a sun-gilded ridge and into the next gulley. It might have been a bird, a bee, even. But Mallory knew that it was his quarry. Carstairs, climbing very fast, solo. He hoped the man’s technique was up to it.

There was only one way to be sure.

Mallory went after him. The Benzedrine spread cool energy through him as he drifted up that cliff, keeping just below the line of shadow the sinking sun drove up the cliff from the mountains at his back, relying on the contrast between the light and the darkness to hide him. Ten minutes later, he was in the same chimney as Carstairs, an easy chimney, with a chockstone seventy feet up, and the summit just beyond the chockstone. He looked up, shielding his eyes against the grit coming down off Carstairs’ boots. If Carstairs wanted the aerials, two would do the job more easily than one.

Mallory whistled.

Carstairs had never done such a long solo. He was an expedition climber, a man used to ropes and Sherpas and a glass of cold Champagne at base camp. At first, his knees had shaken, and the loneliness had pressed in on him. But he was a good technical climber, so he had taken it easy, taken it slow, driven himself up all those vertical feet, safe as houses, accelerating as he got the hang of it until he was climbing at a pretty fair speed. Oh yes, he had begun to think, I’m good at this. Now, as far as he could see, he was nearly at the top. There would be guards at the top; after all this climbing, fighting …

He was up and under the chockstone now. The boulder jammed into the crack blocked his further progress. He would have to go out on to the lip of the crack, work his way round the boulder, then prepare for the … well, final assault. He belayed his rope. Then he reached up a hand, straining round the boulder for a crack, probing with the tip of a spike. Found a place. The spike went in. He worked it in further; worked it in by hand. There would be guards up there. The clink of a hammer on a spike would carry. The guard would look over …

That was when he heard the whistle.

His heart leaped in his chest. He glanced down, saw the figure in the SS smock. A German. His hands were engaged. He could not get a weapon. He did not know it was Mallory, following him. All he knew was that that figure down there would go for his gun, shoot him out of the sky. He needed to get out of the line of fire. Over the stone. He put his weight on his right hand, swung out of the chimney …

He was half-way out when he lost his grip and fell.

He saw the floor of the world turn under his eyes. For a split second he thought, this is it. Then the rope caught him. He swung wildly. Something smote him a wicked bang on the head, and everything went first red, and then black.

Mallory saw the foreshortened figure above reach out, grab, slip, fall, swing. He heard the wet smack of the head on the rock, saw him twitch, then hang limp on the rope.

He waited for the rope to stop swinging, the deadly swing that could work a spike loose. Then he went up, fast, out of the groove in case Carstairs fell, up the right-hand side on holds a fly would have despised. He reached the spike and checked it. It was deep in the crack, holding; a good belay in a difficult spot. Carstairs knew what he was doing, all right.

Once he had checked the belay, Mallory went to the body. There was a good pulse, a lump rising on the back right-hand bulge of the skull under the hair, sticky with brilliantine and stone-grit. The man would live. Mallory hauled the body up into a sitting position, looped the tail of the rope under its armpits and rolling-hitched it on to the standing part. Now Carstairs was sitting on the end of the rope like a drunk on a bar stool, dangling over a thousand feet of nothing. Perfectly safe.

Mallory went through his pockets, found the cigarette case, the knife, the silenced Browning automatic in a shoulder holster; a murderer’s weapon. In the waist pouches, he found what he was looking for: two blocks of a substance like putty, wrapped in greasy paper. Plastic explosive. But no time pencils.

Mallory stood wedged in the chimney, sweating. Plastic explosive was funny stuff. You could burn it. You could spread it on bread and eat it, if the worst came to the worst. And of course you could blow a hole in steel with it. But only if you had some fulminate of mercury to start it off, in those little colour-coded pencils, the size of a long cigarette.

Mallory went back to Carstairs’ pockets. The gold cigarette case came out. There was lettering on it: ‘Darling Billy, from Betty Grable — What a night!’ Mallory opened the case one-handed.