Alistair MacLean - The Complete Navarone

Turkish this side. Virginian that. And in the middle, the time pencils.

Mallory shoved the case in his breast pocket and climbed on. The cliff face was curving away from him now, becoming less a precipice, more a slope. He could see the aerial pylons glowing as if red-hot in the last rays of the sun. He stayed low, creeping on his belly until he could see the whole dome of the summit. The pylons stuck out of the naked rock, a hundred feet apart, supporting a web of fine wires. There seemed to be a lot more wire than was required for normal short-wave apparatus. Mallory supposed that if you were shooting things into space, you would need some sort of sophisticated radio to find out what was happening to the machinery. Not that he cared. It was as much part of a weapon as a sight was part of a rifle. His job was to destroy it.

He made a circuit of the mountain top. It had the look of a place untrodden except by maintenance engineers. There was a trap door at the far side, a hefty steel object set in concrete. To the east, the Acropolis continued as a series of lower peaks, a series of plugs like the noses of a clip of giant bullets, a hot wilderness of shale and sun-scorched shrubs, its declivities filled with the violet shadows of evening; a hard place, with a sense of pressure underneath it. Mallory was a New Zealander. He knew the sensation of standing on a volcano; the feeling that the ground under his feet had once been a white-hot liquid, pushing to get out into the air, burn and destroy. No change there …

He found himself peering into the deepest of the valleys: more a hole than a valley, really. And in its bottom, instead of the usual dried-up pond with a patch of thorny scrub, was something else. No vegetation: a smooth, dark bowl. It was as if the hole was a deep one, made shallower with carefully-slung camouflage nets.

Mallory filed the information away in his Benzedrine-sharpened mind, and trotted up the dome to the base of the aerials.

There was a faint hum up here, a sense that the ether was troubled by invisible forces. Mallory crouched and wrapped a charge of plastic explosive round the base girders of one of the pylons, making sure it was good and close to the wrist-thick wire that snaked along the rock from the hole by the trap door. Should bring one pylon down, break that cobweb of wires. Mending them would take time — time during which the Acropolis would be dumb and deaf.

He packed on the charges, pushed in two black time pencils, crushed them and pulled out the safety tags. The electrolyte began eating away at the corrosion wire that held back the spring-loaded plunger from the blasting cap. Ten minutes, perhaps less on a warm evening like this. The sun was balanced on the horizon. Time to get clear. He went down the slope until the slope became a cliff. He doubled his rope around a projection of the rock, looped it over his shoulder and up between his legs, and walked backwards out and down, casting left and right for the chimney where he had left Carstairs.

He found it on his left, saw the chockstone coming up, slowed his descent. He would need to get the Englishman on to a ledge, keep him warm, get a briefing from him, leave him to recover –

He stopped next to the chockstone. Somewhere behind him and below, deep in the gulf of shadow that was the marsh and the valley, a gun fired: the peculiar flat crack of an 88. Normally, Mallory would have pitied the poor devil who was on the receiving end of that high-velocity, flat-trajectory packet of death. He would also have asked himself who, on this German-controlled island, was shooting at whom.

But he did not ask himself any of this, because he had other things on his mind.

He had left Carstairs unconscious, trussed into a sitting position, hanging from a piton over a thousand-foot drop.

Now, Carstairs was gone.

Mallory looked down. On the floodlit platform three hundred yards below his feet, people were moving, vehicles crawled, a gang was clustered round the engine. ( Crack , said the 88 again, down in the valley.) There was none of the ants’-nest activity you would expect if the body of a commando with a Clark Gable moustache had plummeted out of the sky and into their midst.

Mallory thought for a moment.

There was no telling where Carstairs had gone. The only certainty was that in (he looked at his watch) four minutes, anywhere near the aerial site was going to be a very unhealthy place to be.

Hauling down his rope from the summit belay, he made it fast again, wrapped it round himself, and slid rapidly into the thickening shadows below.

For Miller, the shower he took in the entrance lobby of the Acropolis V4 complex was not the most refreshing in living memory. The water was hot, the soap plentiful, the hygiene nothing to complain about by the standards of twenty-four hours on a Sporadic mountainside. It was the company Miller objected to. Mixed at best, he thought gloomily, watching a rat-faced Wehrmacht private disrobe, pick his nose, and waddle under the showerhead. At worst –

‘Scrub my back?’ said a voice behind him. He turned to see a large blond individual with no neck and a crew cut smiling upon him tenderly.

‘Can’t reach,’ said Miller. The blond man pouted, and started to lather his vast acreage with violet-scented soap. He was about the same size as Andrea, something (Miller observed) that Andrea had not been slow to notice. Andrea was out of the shower, had dried himself on someone else’s towel, and was sidling towards the locker where the blond man’s clothes were hanging.

The blond man finished soaping himself. He had a disappointed air. He put himself under the jet of water and rinsed off the lather. There were SS lightning-flash runes tattooed on his mighty bicep. Miller could see Andrea struggling into a pair of jackboots. It looked as if he would be some time. The outside door opened. A man came in, lanky, about Miller’s height, with a brown engineer’s coat and a clipboard. The coat would be useful. The clipboard was a blessing from God. Miller said to the blond man, ‘You off, then?’

‘Not much happening here,’ said the blond man, sulkily.

‘Ah,’ said Miller. ‘Well I think this is your lucky day. See that guy just come in?’ He pointed at the man in the engineer’s coat. ‘Very nice guy,’ said Miller. ‘Likes a bit of fun.’

‘Zat so?’ said the blond. ‘Thanks, friend.’

‘Any time,’ said Miller, and sashayed rapidly on to dry land.

As he dried himself, he watched the lanky engineer hang up his overall coat with finicky precision, put his trousers on a hanger, arrange on the floor of the locker a pair of brown suede shoes, become indistinct in the steam, and start soaping himself. Miller saw the large figure of the blond SS man start making his way casually towards him. He tweaked open the locker, removed the engineer’s clothes and marched over to his own untidy pile. He put on his own undergarments and the engineer’s overalls, slung his pack on his back, and bundled his own clothes up inside the scarf so they looked like washing. When he turned he found himself looking at an SS leutnant with Andrea’s face and a washing bundle of his own.

‘Come,’ said Andrea. ‘Quick.’

Some sort of fight seemed to have broken out in the shower. ‘ Ja, Herr Leutnant ,’ said Miller. They walked out of the door, an SS man and an engineer, the engineer carrying a load of laundry, the SS man talking to him with earnestness and concentration.

‘What now?’ said Miller.

‘Find out the geography. What’s on your clipboard?’

There was a list of bolt sizes, with under it some blank paper. Miller shuffled the blank paper to the top. The pair of them walked off, Andrea chin up and arrogant, Miller trailing behind doing his best to look dazed and acquiescent, struggling under the awkward load of clothes and explosives.