Alistair MacLean - The Complete Navarone

Carstairs said, ‘Listen, greasy boy. You heard what he said.’ His arm moved slightly.

‘Ow!’ said Spiro again.

‘We don’t really need you any more,’ said Carstairs. ‘So you give me one good reason to stop me carving out your nasty yellow liver.’

Miller was shocked. He did not, however, intervene.

Spiro became lost in deep thought for about three and a half seconds. Then he started to scuttle up the church roof like an overweight monkey.

Carstairs went after him. Miller followed, moving slow and careful. The roof seemed to be in doubtful condition. There was a nasty springiness to it, a suggestion of sag. Mindful of the fifty-foot drop to a hard stone floor that lay below it, Miller found himself holding his breath.

The belfry parapet loomed invitingly ahead. But they were moving out of the shadow now, and between them and the parapet lay a brilliant wedge of floodlit tiles. Spiro did not like the look of it. His pace was slowing perceptibly. He had chosen a bad place to slow down, because they had moved some distance along the roof, and below the eaves of the church was no longer the crumbling shelter of the priest’s house, but the village square. And in the village square, a squad of German soldiers was standing. All it took was for one of them to look up –

‘Go!’ said Carstairs.

Spiro froze.

Carstairs pulled out his dreadful knife and prodded the Greek’s foot. Spiro squeaked, scuttled like lightning up the roof and hauled himself over the parapet. His short legs waved for a moment in the air. Then he vanished. Safe.

Not safe.

In his last frantic scuffle, Spiro had dislodged a tile. It started slowly. It accelerated, rattling down the floodlit section of the roof. Miller stuck out a hand and made a grab for it. For a moment he thought he had it. But Greek roof tiles are heavy affairs, made with plenty of good solid clay, and no human fingertips can restrain one once it has got the bit of gravity between its teeth.

Miller watched that tile loop out into space and fall, tumbling over and over, towards the cobbles of the square where the squad of soldiers stood, only needing to look up.

When Mallory opened the door, light flooded in. There were three soldiers outside, rifles at the ready. Mallory looked them scornfully up and down. ‘What the bloody hell is all the noise about?’ he said, in a German pregnant with the accents of Heidelberg University, where in his pre-war climbing days he had indeed spent six months.

‘Orders to search the house,’ said one of the privates, squinting at this nasty-looking SS Leutnant , with shadowy hollows on his face and a rifle slung negligently over his shoulder.

‘I’ve already searched it,’ said Mallory. One of the soldiers opened his mouth to speak. ‘Give me that gun,’ said Mallory.

The man handed over his rifle without hesitation. Mallory looked it over with the scorn of an epicure who has found a dead rat in his soup. He pulled the bolt out of the rifle and threw it on to the ground. ‘It stinks!’ he said. ‘Clean it! Now get out of my way!’ He marched into the square.

There were a lot of soldiers: a terrible lot of soldiers. Mallory found himself seriously worried. A good search would certainly land them all in trouble. Carstairs he had little confidence in, besides which the man was woozy from his bang on the head. Spiro was a charming personality, but not what you would call a natural athlete. Miller would look after himself. But with that much dead weight round his neck, he was going to need all the help he could get.

Mallory marched briskly across the square, up the street towards the village gates, and turned sharply into Athenai Street where they had made rendezvous. The houses were dark and ruinous. At the end, the cliff face was a pit of blackness in the night. Settling the rifle firmly on his back, Mallory started to climb.

The cliff was steep but pocked with steps and holds where stone had been cut to build the village. Mallory went up until he was looking down on the rooftops illuminated by the blue-white lights mounted on the cliff face. He considered getting above those lights, sixty feet above him now. But he had a feeling that just for the minute, he might be better off below them. He moved along a ledge — a ledge to him, anyway; to anyone else, it was no more than a thread-fine irregularity in the face of the rock — until he came to a broad crack, sunk in black shadow. Into this he fitted himself, and stood invisible.

Below, the roofs of the village shone livid in the floodlights. The streets were stripes of violet-black, except for the square, a handkerchief of naked white under the stars.

In that white rectangle little black shapes moved, precise, mechanical movements, pairs attaching to other pairs to make bigger blocks, which in turn fragmented …

Mallory knew that what he was watching was a search of the town. And what was being searched for was him, Spiro, Carstairs, and Miller –

Something caught his eye. Behind the church was the priest’s house, leaning against the bigger building like a small, drunken man holding on to a fat wife. There was movement on the church roof.

Mallory watched the little figures wait by the parapet, saw the first of them — Spiro, it was — move haltingly towards the triangle of light that lay over the tiles. He unslung the Mauser and put it to his shoulder. Spiro swam into the sight’s circle; Spiro hesitant, Carstairs at his heel, jabbing. Mallory saw the tiles rock as Spiro pressed on. He saw the tile come free, accelerate, check as Miller got his fingers to it, carry on. The palms of his hands were suddenly damp with sweat. He panned the sight down. A line of German soldiers stood under the eaves of the church, at attention, listening to some officer or other, barking orders. The cross-hairs of the sight settled on the helmet of the soldier closest to the church wall. Mallory squeezed the trigger.

All hell broke loose.

The steel helmet flew off the head and smacked into the church wall. The soldier slammed flat on the cobbles, a dark patch of blood spreading around his ruined head. The report of the rifle rolled like thunder on the flat, hard faces of the buildings. Even before the echoes died, Mallory had his Schmeisser in the firing position and was hosing the square with bullets, the stabbing spear of flame from the gun’s muzzle saying here I am, here I am, up here on this cliff.

Down in the square grey bodies rolled and crawled and shouted, taking cover. There was fire coming up from the square now, sporadic bursts, ill-directed, but focused loosely on the crevice in which Mallory was hiding.

But Mallory was no longer there. He had moved away, upwards, in the shadows. Now he was approaching the lights. Below, the village seethed and muttered like a cauldron. Seventy feet above the place he had fired from, he paused and looked down. In the belfry of the church, he glimpsed three heads; visible only from above, those heads.

And what with one thing and another, nobody had noticed anything as trivial as the fall of a tile from a church roof.

Mallory moved on, shoulders and feet, up the crack in the rock. Above him the cliff soared for ever into the wild, cool dark. Below him, the village swarmed like an ants’ nest stirred with a stick. Someone was firing tracer, the rounds smacking the rock face and spinning away into the dark until it must have seemed that there were forty men up here, so more men opened fire from the town …

Really, thought Mallory, climbing fast and steady, it was a deplorable lapse of discipline. But he had no illusions. Soon the brilliant organization of the German army would reassert itself, and life would become even more difficult and dangerous than it was at the moment.

For him, anyway. The men in the village should be left alone: the Germans would assume that the whole squad was on the cliffs of the Acropolis. All he had to do was keep moving, draw away the pursuit.