Alistair MacLean - The Complete Navarone

‘Where’s the hospital?’ said the one without the moustache.

‘The hospital,’ said Helm, flustered. ‘You proceed down this corridor. You will see three fire extinguishers on the wall, then a steel staircase. Ignore this. Proceed until you see a sign saying Ausgang — no, I am wrong; Eintritt , it says —’

‘What level?’ said the SS man, who was Mallory.

Helm was notoriously a hard man to stop, but there was enough violence in the voice to stop him. ‘Third level,’ said Helm, and found himself flung back against the wall by the breeze of their passing. Breathing heavily, he returned to his desk, picked up his slide rule, and re-entered the calm, ordered world of numbers. Somewhere at the periphery of his attention, he heard the klaxons going again. The klaxons were always going in the factory. It was part of the general untidiness. Since there was no way of controlling it, it was in the view of Herr Doktor Doktor Professor Helm best ignored.

He therefore ignored it.

The klaxons started as Mallory and Carstairs clattered down a steep set of spiral stairs. There was the distant crash of steel doors slamming, the bang of running feet. A squad of men ran up the stairs. Mallory braced himself. The squad ran past. Mallory started running again, full-pelt, down the endless latticed-steel corkscrew of the stairs. Endless stairs, in a vertical tube through the solid rock –

Carstairs was right behind Mallory now. Uniform or no uniform, thought Mallory, it was a nasty naked feeling to be inside this hollow mountain, knowing that one look at your papers –

Something hit him in the small of the back. A boot, he had time to think: whose boot?

Then Mallory was down, off balance, diving forwards, his shoulder driving into the sharp steel edge of the step, steel helmet (thank God for the helmet) ringing like a gong against the stair treads. Mallory bunched up and rolled, the way he had been taught to roll in his parachute training, tucking in his hands, protecting his fingers and his elbows and knees from the hammer of acute-edged metal. He went down twenty steps before he hit the wall. He lay there, ears ringing, winded. Carstairs ran past. Carstairs pushed me, he realized. Carstairs wanted time on his own. What for? To find the survivor of the shipwreck. Mallory remembered the grenade, pin out, above the ambulance in the gorge. Not to debrief the survivor. To do something more final than that …

A couple of Wehrmacht privates rattled down the stairs. One of them aimed a kick at his SS ribs. It hurt. But Mallory grinned. Dissension in the enemy camp was truly a marvellous thing.

Dissension in his own was a different matter. He spat blood, and hurried stiffly down the steps. Three minutes later, he came to a door. On the rock above the door was stencilled a broad black number three. Mallory went through it.

He was at the opposite end of the long, steel-floored corridor from the place where Andrea and Miller had taken the lift. ‘Papers!’ screamed a voice. It belonged to a Wehrmacht Leutnant , white in the face and greasy with sweat. Behind him, at the far end of the corridor where the lift doors had once stood, there was a throng of men, noise and smoke and shouting.

‘Papers!’ screamed the Leutnant , again.

Mallory gazed upon the man with freezing eyes. ‘There are wounded men down there,’ he said. ‘They need you.’ Then he walked straight through him. The Leutnant reeled back into the wall. His hand went to his holster flap. Mallory allowed his own hand to stray to the grip of his Schmeisser. The Wehrmacht officer thought better of his move, and hurried towards the lift door. Mallory walked through the doorway with the red cross above it. An orderly looked up from a desk. ‘The man from the shipwreck,’ said Mallory.

The orderly looked nervous. There had been too many alarm bells, and he really hated these SS . ‘Down there,’ he said, pointing down the corridor. ‘Your friend’s already with him.’

‘When I want your conversation I’ll ask for it,’ said Mallory, to pour oil on the flames. Then he crashed off down the corridor.

The door the orderly had indicated was closed. Mallory twisted the handle. It was locked. It was a hospital door, not a military door; a flimsy thing of cheap deal. Mallory hit it with his boot, hard, next to the handle. The orderly had been watching him. When he caught his eye he quickly looked away. The door held. Mallory knew he was on the edge. Never mind how much trouble there was between Wehrmacht and SS and boffins, there came a time when he would no longer get away with disobeying orders and wrecking government property. But Carstairs was behind that door, with a man Mallory was interested in, and who would not be alive for long, unless –

His boot hit the door again. This time it burst open with a splintering crash.

It was a small, green room, with a smell of cleanliness, a bed and a chair. There were two men on the bed: one lying down, legs thrashing, the other bent over him. The bending man was Carstairs. The reason for his bending was that he had a pillow in his hands, a pillow he was pressing over the face of whoever it was that was lying on the bed. The survivor of the Kormoran , at a rough guess.

Mallory could kill, all right. But he was a soldier, not an assassin. There was a difference between killing and murder.

He said, ‘Stop that.’

Carstairs did not answer. His face was set and ugly, ridged with muscle, holding the pillow down. Mallory lifted his Schmeisser. ‘Stop it now,’ he said.

Carstairs raised one hand to swat the barrel aside. ‘No noise,’ he said. ‘Quiet, you idiot.’ The assumption that he would not use the weapon fed Mallory’s irritation. He jabbed Carstairs on the arm with the barrel. The flapping of the supine figure’s legs was weakening. ‘All right,’ said Carstairs, face twisted with effort. ‘So fire.’

Mallory did not fire. Instead, he kicked Carstairs very hard on the bundle of nerves inside his right knee. It was a kick that would hurt like hell, but do no permanent damage.

It worked.

Carstairs crashed to the ground, grabbing for his dagger. Mallory stamped on his hand and let him look down the black tube of the machine pistol’s muzzle.

The man on the bed said, ‘Jesoos.’

‘Shut up!’ hissed Carstairs.

‘Hold your tongue,’ said Mallory.

The man on the bed was small and stout, with curly black hair and a thick black moustache and a very bad colour. ‘Don’ kill me,’ he said. ‘Don’ kill me. For why you want to kill me?’

Mallory looked at Carstairs, then at the black-haired man. He said, in English, ‘What happened to you?’

The small man’s eyes narrowed. He said, in German, ‘Why are you speaking English?’

Mallory lay wearily back in the chair. Carstairs was spluttering like an unexploded bomb on the floor. ‘Because I’m English,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’

‘Shut your bloody mouth,’ said Carstairs, frantic. ‘I forbid you to speak.’

‘So,’ said the short man, indignation getting the better of suspicion. ‘I answer your damned question, and you tries to suffocate me. And now there is another German SS who talk English and want to know. Is it for this that I swim, I paddle, I bring —’

‘Start at the beginning,’ said Carstairs, wearily. ‘Go on.’

‘How do I know who you are?’ said the Greek.

Mallory offered the man a cigarette, lit one himself, closing his mind to the idea that outside that door was bandit country, crawling with people who would kill him as quick as blow their noses. Carstairs had had orders from Admiral Dixon to assassinate this man. Mallory had countermanded them. There would be trouble in England, too. Wearily, he took off his helmet.