Alistair MacLean - The Complete Navarone

‘Hide the bodies,’ said Andrea, dragging the Feldwebel out of the shed and round to the back.

Miller nodded. He looked whitish in the face, and his hands were shaking. As he hauled the private back to the shed, the man’s heels clattered on the grating. Andrea bent, and retrieved a key from the ring on the man’s belt.

‘Signature,’ said Andrea, pushing the book at Miller. Both men signed the register. ‘Key,’ said Miller.

Once you had turned the key in the lock, it was a lift like any other lift. The motor hummed. Outside the concertina inner door the wall went by, a rough-hewn shaft that seemed to go on for ever, with iron step-rungs inset. It was an unpleasant sensation, Miller found, standing in this lattice-sided can with rock all around you, two bodies by the downstairs exit, God knew what waiting upstairs –

The lift stopped.

It did not stop at a floor. It stopped between floors. There was nothing to see except the walls, and the steps, and Andrea. ‘I am afraid,’ said Andrea, ‘that someone has found some bodies.’

‘The steps,’ said Miller. He hated this elevator. He wanted out as fast as possible.

‘They will be expecting that,’ said Andrea. ‘We will stay here, my friend. More or less.’

Well, thought Miller, what can you do, Andrea being a colonel and all, God damn it.

‘Up,’ said Andrea, and pointed to the escape hatch in the roof.

Oh, no, thought Miller. Not again. Not standing around waiting to be torn apart by machinery again. Nor waiting for a wire rope to break and the plummeting to start –

But by this time his head and shoulders were already through the trap door, and Andrea was shoving hard from below. Miller found himself standing in darkness on top of the lift, next to an oily cable. Andrea shoved up the pack, then came up himself, and sat on the trap door.

There was a jerk. The lift started upwards. It went up a long way. Miller could hear the engine. He started to sweat. To distract himself he examined as much of the machinery as he could. ‘This is a piece of cheap Kraut rubbish,’ he said, ‘not an Otis.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ said Miller, rummaging in the pack.

Then Andrea said, ‘Quiet.’

They froze. The sound of the machinery was very close above. Out of the corner of his eye, Miller could see a streak of light gleaming on the flange of a huge wheel spinning in the obscurity above. The streak of light from the upper door.

The lift rose past the streak, and stopped. The machinery was close overhead; close enough to touch. Many boots crashed into the car. ‘The ceiling,’ said a German voice. There was a grunting, as if someone was trying to push. Andrea stood on the door, braced against the axle of the winding drum above his head. ‘Help me,’ said the voice below.

Someone presumably helped him. Tall men, they must be, and big. Sweat rolled down Andrea’s face, and the veins in his neck stood out like hawsers. ‘Some fool’s welded it shut,’ said a voice from below. ‘Some bloody Greek.’

Which was not, thought Miller, as he worked at what was in his hand, so far off the mark.

‘No good,’ said a voice with the bark of authority in it. ‘They must be on the steps down below.’

Under Miller’s feet, the lift lurched, and started downwards. Miller and Andrea just had time to grab the axle overhead. It was turning, the axle, but it was greasy. The lift dropped away below, leaving a shaft like a well. Andrea heaved himself over to the wall and hung on to the first of the steps. Miller reached a hand towards Andrea. The big Greek caught him just as his fingers let go. Miller slammed into the ladder, grabbing the cold metal. ‘Out,’ he said.

‘There’ll be a guard —’

‘Out. There’s no safety lock.’

Andrea heard real urgency in his voice. He did not know what Miller was talking about. But he had worked with Miller long enough to trust his instincts.

Miller was right. The door slid open. Andrea and Miller stepped on to the threshold, blinking in the sudden light.

The eight Wehrmacht soldiers outside raised their Schmeissers to belly height. ‘Hände hoch,’ said the officer in charge. ‘Ausweis, bitte.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Miller, in his excellent German. ‘It’s one or the other.’

‘Hände hoch,’ said the officer. He had an efficient look that Miller disliked intensely. The lift was in a sort of lobby, shielded by concrete walls from whatever took place beyond. Andrea and Miller separated, standing one on either side of the door. The officer started rummaging in Miller’s pockets. It was evident to Miller, with four Schmeissers trained upon him, that he and Andrea were in big trouble. But then again, the only thing that really amazed him was that they had got this far.

Andrea had a look of great stupidity on his face. He rolled his eyes towards the empty door of the lift shaft, and gave Miller a wink cunningly judged to be both conspiratorial and obvious. ‘You bloody idiot,’ said Miller, with venom. ‘They’ve had it now.’

The German officer frowned. He said, ‘Cover me,’ to his men. Four of them went to the lift door, and peered down the shaft.

‘Nobody,’ said the officer.

Miller glanced at his watch. ‘Now, boys!’ he said.

From the lift shaft there came the sound of a large, hollow boom, followed by a twang of breaking cable, screams, and a crash. The men at the door were blown backwards by a blast of hot gas. The men covering Andrea and Miller clapped their hands to their scalded eyes. One of them fell into Andrea, who heaved him down the shaft.

Miller felt quietly proud. It was not everyone, he considered, who would, under the kind of pressure he and Andrea had suffered on the lift roof, have noticed that it was a device with neither a safety wire nor a shaft brake. Nor would it have been just anybody who would have taken the time to wrap half a pound of plastique round the cable, with a five-minute time pencil.

Miller flattered himself that it had all gone rather well.

But he did not waste time feeling smug. He pulled a fire extinguisher out of its clips, smashed the button in, and started spraying the men staggering about by the lift gate. ‘Hilfe !’ he yelled. ‘Feuer !’

When the first reinforcements came round the corner, they found a huge SS man and a lanky engineer in a cloud of evil-smelling smoke, dousing the fuming lift shaft and half-a-dozen smouldering soldiers with foam. The reinforcements started yelling as only German reinforcements can yell. More fire extinguishers started going off. And nobody paid any attention when the SS man hefted his pack and vanished into the workshops, accompanied by the engineer.

Herr Doktor Doktor Professor Gunther Helm was a neat man. His brown overall was sharply pressed, his black shoes polished to a mirror-like sheen, and his dark, narrow moustache trimmed with mathematical exactness below his long, mobile nose. Helm was a specialist in inertial guidance systems. It had been bad enough to be removed from his comfortably ancient rooms above the river at Heidelberg University to a shed on a Baltic sand-flat at Peenemunde. This place, this hideous warren of black rock and bare cable and improvised factory space, was unpleasant. Worse, it was untidy.

Boots were crashing in the tunnel ahead. They belonged (Helm saw, as they rounded the corner) to two SS men. To two of the untidiest SS men he had ever seen. For one thing, neither of them seemed to have shaved for at least twenty-four hours. For another they were filthy dirty, smeared with white clay and blood, and unless he was gravely mistaken, wearing non-regulation boots. In addition, one of them had a moustache not unlike his own, but ( Herr Doktor Doktor Professor Helm was compelled in all frankness to admit) considerably blonder and more lustrous. They had a wild look, as if they had been outdoors. They took up more room than seemed necessary. Frankly, Helm found them intimidating.