Alistair MacLean - The Complete Navarone

There had been dogs everywhere. But Wills found himself so tired that he would not have batted an eyelid if the whole pack of the hounds of Hell had been baying at his heels. Tired or not, Wills had been decently educated at public school, and he knew how to treat a lady. ‘Are you quite comfortable?’ he said.

Clytemnestra yawned, the yawn of a sleepy cat. ‘I have killed some Germans,’ she said. ‘I am free in my country. How should I not be comfortable?’

‘You might have a nice armchair,’ said Wills. ‘Dinner at Ciro’s. Bottle of Romanée-Conti. Nip along to the Mottled Oyster afterwards —’

‘Mottled Oyster?’ said Clytemnestra.

‘Night club,’ said Wills. ‘Dancing.’

‘And you would need a woman,’ said Clytemnestra. ‘A beautiful girl.’

There was a short silence. Then Wills said, ‘No shortage here,’ and lay back, head on pack, so that even in the candlelight there would be no chance of her seeing the crimson in his face. When he glanced furtively across at her, he saw that she was smiling a small, contented smile. It suddenly struck him that he had been manoeuvred into saying what he had just said. Hello, he thought. Hello …

But before his thoughts could develop further, he was asleep.

Mallory welcomed the darkness as if it had been a long-lost brother. What he did not welcome was the fact that he had lost Carstairs. If he had fallen, that was very bad. If he had not fallen, then knowing Carstairs that was probably even worse.

He scrutinized the face of the cliff with a pair of small but powerful Zeisses that he had removed from a Panzer general, the Panzer general being at the time en route for a British prison camp having been plucked from the Cretan mountains by Mallory and his comrades. In the disc of his vision, Mallory saw the corrugations of the cliffs, ridge and gulley, boulder and boiler plate, precipice and ledge –

The disc stopped. Mallory balanced on two toes and a hand, and moved the focus wheel as gently as a biologist focusing on a new bacillus.

Across the cliff wall two hundred yards to his right, a shadow was moving — a shadow like a four-legged spider, scuttling and pausing.

Mallory shifted the disc of the glasses ahead, in the direction Carstairs was travelling. He saw a ledge; a ledge too sharp and clearly-defined in construction to be altogether natural. A way into the mountain. A way through to the Kormoran survivor. His objective.

But as Mallory started once more to watch him move across the cliff, he frowned. There was something wrong with the way the man was moving. He watched the right hand, a pale crab against the dark rock. It scuttled, then paused, patting the surface as if the mind guiding it was working in short bursts, going numb between bursts of lucidity. The mind, Mallory realized, of a man who had recently hit his head very hard on the side of a mountain.

Something on the ledge caught Mallory’s eye: a sudden flare of light, a face and a helmet-brim suddenly glowing sharp and clear as a soldier sheltered a match in cupped hands to light a cigarette.

Carstairs kept struggling on, as if he had not noticed anything. Perhaps he had not. Mallory would have cursed if there had been time for cursing. Instead, he took his boots off and hung them round his neck. Then he stepped across on to the wall and started climbing, fast and smooth.

He was travelling four feet to Carstairs’ three, but Carstairs had a long start. As he climbed, Mallory saw with increasing clarity that to Carstairs, the ledge was simply a way in, and that his brain was not working well enough for him to be cautious. What was going to happen was that he was going to blunder straight into the guard, who would have the advantage of surprise, and a clear head. If Carstairs was captured alive, Dieter Wolf would have him answering questions in about ten minutes. If the sentry killed him, the word would be out that the partisans in the mountains were now inside the Acropolis defences. Presumably, the Germans would have been relying on their security at the gates, rather than running checks inside the Acropolis. But that would change in a moment, and life would get very difficult for anyone who was inside.

Perhaps it already was.

Mallory climbed on, eating up the traverse. Holds were plentiful. Many men might have been made nervous by the six hundred feet of nothingness below. But Mallory had slept on the west face of Mount Cook, in a sleeping bag hung from two pitons over five thousand sheer feet. He climbed carefully, but with nerves untroubled by altitude.

What was preying on his mind was Carstairs, now thirty feet below and twenty yards to the right. Mallory could hear him: the scritch of nails on rock, the harsh gasp of his breathing. And if Mallory could hear him, so could the guard …

Carstairs was a biscuit toss from the ledge now. With his dark-adjusted eyes, Mallory watched the dreadful story unfold.

The guard had been smoking his cigarette and humming, gazing, no doubt, upon the beauty of the sea, now a silver-paved floor under the vault of the stars. Then suddenly he stopped, dropped his cigarette, unslung his rifle, moved right to the back of the ledge, and plastered himself against the cliff wall.

Carstairs’ boots sounded like a marching army. Mallory knew what was going to happen. There was a low parapet around the ledge. As soon as Carstairs’ head and shoulders came above it, the sentry would open fire, secure in the knowledge that Carstairs’ hands would be fully occupied with climbing.

Mallory as good as ran across the cliff. He could feel the stone tearing at his stockinged feet, but he paid no attention. As the ledge arrived twelve feet below, he began to move slowly. The cliff was gritty up here, and dislodging the smallest pebble could lead to disaster.

Very slowly, he moved across the face until the sentry’s steel helmet was a metallic egg below, the barrel of his rifle trained on the right-hand end of the parapet. If only he had had a silenced Browning, thought Mallory, like the one Carstairs carried, and Miller …

But all Mallory had was a knife.

He moved the last six inches to the left. Now he was in position directly above the sentry. He took the knife from its sheath and gripped it in his hand. He looked down at that steel helmet, and for a fraction of a second there flitted across his mind pity for this boy who was just doing his duty, and disgust at himself, washed by the current of war against this man, now the agent of his drowning.

He shifted his foot half an inch to give him a purchase, and prepared to jump. He felt the pebble roll, and stopped, knowing it was too late. He felt it escape, saw it fall, a tiny crumb of stone, heard the small plink as it hit the brim of the soldier’s helmet. The soldier looked up: a young face, shocked, mouth open. The last thing he saw was Mallory, falling like a thunderbolt, hands down, knife out, felt the crushing weight, the terrible sting of the razor-sharp steel.

Then he saw no more. He struggled for a moment, though: the wild, reflex struggle of an organism already fatally wounded, going through the motions of self-defence, to the limit of its dying strength.

Mallory was not prepared for it. The knife had gone in hard and deep, and he had expected the man to collapse. Instead he found the dagger torn from his hand and the man’s tunic rent away from his fingers as the spasming muscles jerked the man out of his grip and away, over the parapet.

And the ledge was an empty slice of rock, with a steel door concreted into the cliff at its back.

‘Carstairs,’ said Mallory, low-voiced.

Carstairs hauled himself over the parapet. He sat down, and let his head hang, and said, ‘What the hell happened?’

‘You tried to commit suicide,’ said Mallory, cold. ‘You nearly succeeded.’