Alistair MacLean - The Complete Navarone

Keep moving.

For a moment he hung on the face of the cliff and thought of the precipice above him, crag on crag, a couple of thousand feet to be conquered against gravity. He could taste the old cigarettes in his throat, feel the grit of sleeplessness in his eyes, feel the weary ache of continuous action in his bones. The Benzedrine had worn off. If he took any more, he would be seeing things …

Better to see things than to fall off.

Mallory took two of the pills out of the foil and swallowed them. Then, wearily, he began to haul himself up the wall. Forty feet above, he found what he was looking for.

He was on a level with the lights. Bullets still whined and spanged around him, but nobody was aiming. Between the spots of brilliance was only darkness, and it was in that darkness that he existed, anonymous.

He paused, eyeing the face. He could already feel the jump of the Benzedrine at his stomach, his blood beginning to fizz.

Just above his head ran a heavy cable: the cable that brought the power to the floodlights. Mallory pulled the clasp knife from his pocket and wrapped around its handle the rubberized bag in which he kept his shaving kit. He wished he had his commando knife, but the commando knife was gone. He had no idea of the clasp knife’s insulating properties, but rubber was supposed to be all right. Go on, the Benzedrine was telling him, it will be fine, you are immortal, if things don’t work out you can spread your wings and jump clear over the village and into the cool sea –

Steady.

He reached his right hand up, and positioned the blade on the outside of the thick insulation. Then he began to saw.

The edge of the knife sank into the rubber as if it had been butter. He felt the touch of some kind of armour. Then the blade went through the armour, and shorted out the live and the neutral.

The night suddenly turned blue, as if it had been struck by lightning. Then, just as suddenly, it turned black, as the lights went out. Pitch black: black as the inside of a coal hole.

Mallory left the knife wedged in the wire, and looped his silk rope over the cable. He whipped a new tracer magazine from his ammunition pouch and clapped it into his Schmeisser. He went back along the wire twenty feet, until the rope came taut. Then he fired a burst into the square, and let go of the cable.

The rope took him in a great swinging arc across the cliff face. He felt the scrape of rock at his hands and knees, felt himself rise again towards the cable, reached up a hand, gripped the rubber, and found a hold. In the same movement he fired again, another burst into the square, and swung back the way he had come. From the corner of his eye he could see tracers still spinning and ricocheting down there. He fired another burst, swung back. This time he did not shoot. The enemy would have seen three bursts of tracer virtually simultaneously, from places forty feet apart. There would be at least two men up here, they would assume; possibly more. Two men covering the retreat of a whole squad.

Diversion established, thought Mallory. Now it is time to get away from here. Up; gain height.

He hauled himself up on the cable.

The cable came out of the wall.

All of a sudden he was falling, hanging on to the rubber insulation, trying to remember what the hell happened further down the cliff: a wall to smash into, or merely a long drop … He clamped his hands and closed his forearms against the scrape of the rock. He could feel the staples popping up there one by one, the wild rush of the night on his face. It occurred to him that his knife would have fallen out of the wound in the rubber. The circuit would be open again.

Two things happened.

One, a staple held. Mallory found himself hanging there in the night, far above the village, heart pounding, the weight of his two weapons and equipment doing its best to pop his arms from their sockets.

Two, the lights came on. Mallory’s over-brightened brain saw quite clearly the cliff as visible from the square: a towering sheet of rock, with a dotted line of brilliant lights, dislodged from their moorings, dangling down its surface, saying: look here, this direction. And on the end, wriggling like a frog on a hook, a small human figure.

For a second, a great silence hung over village and cliff.

Miller had taken advantage of the darkness to stand in the belfry and assess the situation, secure in the knowledge that nobody could see him. When the lights came on, he had experienced the mild flicker of interest that in Dusty Miller passed for surprise. It had passed through his mind that Mallory, suspended on a bit of wire over about a hundred and twenty heavily-armed Germans, seemed likely to be in some trouble. Miller had already noticed with admiration the streams of tracer that had come pouring from various different spots on the darkened cliff. It had seemed exactly as if a fair-sized body of men was up there. So it would not be amazing if Mallory’s colleagues did a little something to cover him.

All this he thought in the time it took to unclip four grenades from his belt, two for each hand, pull the pins, and heave them over the belfry roof and into the square. All eyes in the square had been on the cliff, raising guns for the fusillade that would blow Mallory to kingdom come. The arrival of the grenades in their midst came as something of a shock.

Miller ducked down, saw the flashes light up the night, heard the crash of the explosions, the whine of shrapnel, the screams of the wounded. There was a sputter of gunfire, sporadic and disconnected. It said to Miller that the troops in the square had realized that they were disagreeably exposed where they stood on that brightly-lit rectangle of paving, and had decided to take cover.

But this was of only passing interest to Miller. What got his immediate attention was that the lighting cable, glaring up there on the cliff, now bore only its light fittings.

Mallory was gone.

‘Here,’ said Clytemnestra.

Wills stamped on the brakes. The lorry halted. Round the corner were the quarry and the landward end of the rail causeway. They were back.

Out in the dark, something moved. Wills cursed gently to himself. There were not supposed to be any sentries until the quarry fence. He flicked on the headlights, feeling a stealthy shift of weight as Andrea, who had been riding on the rear step of the truck, took his departure into the night.

There was a sentry in the lorry’s windscreen; a fat sentry with a sullen expression, blinking in the headlight beams that illuminated the rolls of fat at his belt and the spidery outlines of the quarry machinery and the shed Miller had burned, vanishing into the dark behind him. Wills put his elbow on the window and said, ‘Morning.’

The fat sentry frowned. He said, ‘Where’s Koch?’

Wills’ grin stiffened. His German was not up to deep conversation. Presumably, this man was a friend of the driver. The plan had been to drop Andrea off a mile short of the quarry. But they had overshot.

‘Went flying,’ said Wills, trying to hide his atrocious accent by mumbling.

‘Where?’

‘Back home,’ said Wills.

The sentry frowned again, and switched on his torch. Wills could feel Clytemnestra rigid in the seat beside him. This is bloody stupid, he thought. All the way across the island, no worries. Into Clytemnestra’s brother’s favourite cave for the machine. Grab machine, drive back towards rendezvous, everything tickety-boo.

And now one fat sentry was going to sugar the whole shooting-match.

The torch came closer to the driver’s side window. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing out here, this time of night?’

‘Minding my own business,’ said Wills.

‘Papers,’ said the sentry. Then he said something else — something with no words, that was the sound of all the air being driven out of his body for the last time ever — and slumped with a crash against the lorry door. Behind where he had been standing, a figure that might have been a bear stooped and cleaned what might have been a knife on a tuft of dry grass by the roadside. Andrea swung his pack into the cab. Where he was going, he would need to travel light. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Till dawn, at the airfield jetty.’ He paused, slapped the mahogany box on the passenger seat. ‘And look after this thing, yes?’