Alistair MacLean - The Complete Navarone

‘Wer da?’ said a voice at his shoulder.

Miller turned to see an SS man pointing a machine pistol at him.

‘Maintenance,’ he said.

‘Vas?’

Miller shoved the grease under his nose. ‘Slippery stuff, cretin,’ he said. ‘Feel.’

But the soldier, thinking perhaps about the cleanliness of his uniform, said, ‘Nein,’ and pushed the tub away.

‘Suit yourself,’ said Miller, under whose arms the sweat was falling like rain. ‘Only twenty more to do.’

The soldier grunted. The rifle muzzle dropped. ‘Get on with it, then,’ he said.

‘So what’s all the fuss about?’ said Miller.

‘Someone’s stolen some uniforms in the showers,’ said the SS man. ‘So they’re all going crazy. Now the telephones are dead.’ He yawned. ‘So they panic, these Wehrmacht bastards. Some of us have got work to do. No time to panic.’

Miller grunted, took himself along to the next tank, unscrewed the gauge cover, smeared on the paste from his tub: his own patent paste, compounded of carborundum powder, magnesium, iron oxide and powdered aluminium. When the gauges started to spin, the carborundum would heat up. When it reached the right temperature, the magnesium would ignite and start the aluminium powder reacting with the iron oxide: an exothermic reaction, they called it, meaning that it got hot as hell, hot enough to melt iron and burn concrete. Certainly enough heat to ignite alcohol. And if by any chance an oxygen tank should rupture, well, the structural integrity of the entire V4 plant would be severely compromised. If not destroyed.

Personally, Miller was betting on destruction.

He did a couple more valves, for luck. Then he shoved his hands into his pockets and strolled, whistling, out of the fuel store.

Andrea was standing by the door, Schmeisser at the ready, as if on guard. ‘Hey!’ said Miller. ‘You!’

Andrea snapped to attention.

‘Follow me!’ Miller started up the wall of the crater. He marched quickly, though his leg muscles were suddenly cracking with weariness, the blood pounding in his skull and his breath rasping in his throat. They scrambled from rock to rock, pushed under the edge of the roof of tarpaulins and camouflage nets. Behind them, the crater glowed under its blue floodlights. They began to scramble over the rocks towards the rendezvous.

Outside the hospital, the corridor was an ants’ nest. Nobody paid any attention to two SS men with a stretcher. Mallory and Carstairs carried Spiro down two flights of steel stairs. The shift was changing. Greek workers were shuffling down a corridor Mallory had not previously visited. There were few light bulbs, and a smell of cheap rice cooking, and latrines badly cleaned. A hundred yards later they rounded a corner and came to a wire-mesh fence with a gate, beside which stood a bored-looking SS man. ‘Throw it into the sea,’ said the sentry, when he saw the stretcher.

‘First, it has work to do,’ said Mallory. The sentry laughed. ‘We’ll be a while.’

‘Long as you like,’ said the sentry, heaving the gate open. ‘Don’t touch the women, though. They’ll claw it off.’

Mallory could feel Spiro’s shivering transmitted along the handles of the stretcher. He walked on.

The camp was no more nor less than the old village of the Acropolis, cordoned off from the rest of the island by a wire fence, so the precipices and fortifications that had once kept out the Turk now served to hold prisoner the Greek. It was a depressed, ruinous place, harshly lit by the floodlights set in the cliff face above. They carried the stretcher into the shadows of Athenai Street, and set it down.

Mallory lit a cigarette, drawing the harsh smoke into his lungs. In the blue-white streets, black-overalled figures came and went. There was no curiosity. A village without curiosity, thought Mallory, is a village that is dead: and for a moment he felt a pure, clear disgust for the men who had killed it.

Then he said, ‘This machine.’

‘Po!’ said Spiro. ‘Po, this machina!’ The words began to pour out of him in a torrent.

‘Steady,’ said Mallory.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. Only when they have you in this place, you keep your eyes shut one, two days, breathe slow, they say Ach Gott he sleeps still, they stick in you pins and needles, you do not twitching, wait for you do not know what, then when you think, well, now I will have to be awake but when I awake I will be fear and tell them all about everythings and they will kill me real slows real slows, the hell with it I will rather die than sleep no more, then sudden you get the angels down flap flap.’ Here he cast himself upon Carstairs and began to cover his face with wet kisses.

‘Ugh,’ said Carstairs.

Mallory watched with some enjoyment as Carstairs disentangled himself. ‘So what’s the story?’ he said.

‘The machina —’

‘From the beginning.’

‘Yais,’ said Spiro. ‘Give me cigarette.’

‘Turkish this side, Virginian that,’ said Carstairs automatically, proffering his case.

‘I spit on your Turkish,’ said Spiro.

‘The story,’ said Mallory.

‘Okay, okay. So I am in Trieste. In Trieste I am cook in café by docks, everything nice, when they tell me, Spiro, go on ship.’

‘Who tell you?’

‘SIS. Peoples in London. Spying peoples. They say Spiro, the King of Britains, big friend of the Kings of Greece, he need you stop listening to German mens talking in cafés, go to find cooking mans on Kormoran , arrange bad things. Then get on Kormoran and find out what goings on. So I find cooking man on Kormoran and give him accidents with open window and broken leg, and look at Spiro then, cook on this lousy God damned pig bastard ship Kormoran God rest his poor soul if his mother could see him now —’

‘The story,’ said Mallory.

‘The story, hokay. So I am working in the café with SIS and this guy, my contact, he say, get on this pig bastard ship Kormoran . So I go down to the port and it is a mess, you know, they are bombing him, and all the way down the back end there is this ship, this dirty little ship, and they say sure, the cook’s mate has fell down and broked his leg so we needs a cook’s mate and Spiro we know you are not a cook — normally,’ said Spiro, ‘I working as a thief, but the war, you know. So come aboard, they say. Well me I say I must go and kiss my girl goodbye, nice girl, very big moustache, but they say, no, come aboard now, so there I go, and they put me on that ship, slam door. Very strange ship. Outside dirty filthy like a latrine. Inside more tidy, clean, like German ship. And captain and officers stand-to-attention Heil Hitler sort of mens, must have all things regular and particular. Then big crateses arrives on an army sort of train, and more, gas bottles, I don’t know. Spiro had thinked, oh ho, stupid SIS peoples, false alarm. But then Spiro thinked, oh shits, if it ain’t a false alarm what in hells kind of alarm is this? But I carries on washing up, bringing bridge coffees, all that. Then,’ said Spiro, his vast black pupils swimming with sincerity, ‘come the miracles.’ He drew breath. He was panting. He was also, Mallory realized, very frightened.

‘It was morning,’ he said. ‘I took coffee to bridge. Ten fifty-five hours precisely. Kapitän Helmholz insist, exactly that time, no seconds before, no seconds after. Stupid bastards, dead now. So I get off bridge fast. And I am a little way down the stairs when bam! Something hit ship, then bam! Something else, and I can tell that all this is turning higgledy turvy and it is hot like hell and peoples screamings. So then I see the man go out of the radio rooms and up to the bridge, then one more bang and more broken glasses and he roll down stairses, head gone. Well I have seen before, bringing coffees to Sparks, that code machina, this seven-rotor Enigma, is in radio room, and SIS always pay good money for code machina. So I go quick double quick into the radio rooms and catches up the machina in his cases and jumps overboard double quick, big wind, everything terrible bright, and the case is a heavy thing and she wants to sink and it try to kill me but I do not let him. Well by the mercy of God the Creator the Redeemer may His name be blessed for ever and ever amen and also His holy saints’ — here he caught Mallory’s eye — ‘I am finding a big broken crate of wood, a hatch, who knows? And there is a great wind blowing. And it blow me far and away, and on to the shore of Kynthos. Now you tellings me, is that or is that not a miracles yes or no?’