Alistair MacLean - The Complete Navarone

Of course there are, said Mallory to himself. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he said, aloud. He was surprised he still had a voice, let alone a voice that sounded clear and normal as it bounced from the surface of the buildings.

‘Hauptmann Dieter Wolf,’ said the voice. And to Mallory’s astonishment, a man walked out into the light. He wore a high-crowned cap, whose peak hid his eyes. Someone at some time had smashed his jaw, and whoever had mended it had not been a master of his craft, not by a long chalk. The lower mandible was horribly skewed; it looked as if it would not shut properly. Spit bubbled in the corner as he breathed, giving his voice its nasty liquid hiss. It gave him a permanent crooked grin; a crocodile grin. There was a Luger in his hand. No grenades, though.

‘Come out here,’ said Wolf.

‘Quite comfortable where I am,’ said Mallory.

Wolf’s twisted jaw writhed. ‘Let me put it like this,’ he said. ‘I have men in position who can drop some things into your hole. This would be a pity, I suppose. I have heard a great deal about you.’

Mallory had to acknowledge that Wolf was right, it would be a pity. He hesitated, his mouth suddenly dry: a dryness he had felt before, high on a Southern Alp without a name, foodless at the top of a couloir, the sun coming on to the ice above, freeing salvos of boulders that swept the gulley clean as a whistle. It was the dryness that came when you had run out of ideas, and you had to put judgement on the shelf, and trust to luck in a place where luck was not in plentiful supply.

Mallory pulled himself to his feet. His ankle hurt, now. Everything hurt. It was most unlikely that Hauptmann Wolf wanted to talk to him about the weather. More probably, he would want to cut him in half with a Schmeisser. ‘Closer,’ said Wolf. He had his Luger pointed at Mallory’s stomach. Mallory could feel the presence of Miller in the belfry. He schooled himself not to look up.

‘So,’ said Wolf. ‘We are honoured that you have been able to visit, Herr Kapitän Mallory. You and your friends, Kolonel Andrea of the defeated rabble once known as the Greek army. And of course Corporal Miller, of the Catering Corps.’

‘Who?’ said Mallory.

The saurian jaw stretched in something approaching a smile. The grin broadened. A thread of drool hung from the corner of the ruined mouth. ‘They are both dead,’ he said. ‘The Kolonel was shot. Miller we hanged.’

‘Sorry to hear that,’ said Mallory. His ankle was killing him. He told himself he did not believe a word of this. But his stomach was hollow with something worse than hunger.

The weariness flowed over him in a heavy wave. Admit it. There were hundreds of them, four Thunderbolts. Wolf was lying about Miller. But Andrea …

‘And now,’ said Wolf, with horrid affability, ‘I am going to kill you.’ Delicately, he put the Luger back in its holster and secured the flap. Removing his cap, he skimmed it on to the mounting block. Fumbling behind him, he pulled out a nine-inch dagger. Mallory had heard of this dagger. Wolf liked to use it to disembowel people.

‘One thing,’ said Mallory. I’m flattered that you recognized me. How did you do it?’

‘I should say that I recognized you from the newspapers before the war,’ said Wolf. ‘But it would not be true. The fact is that your friend Andrea told me, under torture. Just after he had told me where to find the charges you had placed so amateurishly on the Victory weapons.’ It was not just his jaw that had been broken. Without his cap, his whole head looked as if it had been crushed and clumsily reformed. The eyes were cold slits under a white-fuzzed cranium that might have been moulded from dough by a child with a taste for the macabre.

Mallory smiled at him, the bright, enthusiastic smile of someone who has just been given a lovely present. Andrea would not have revealed the time of day under torture. This unpleasant specimen was beyond a shadow of doubt telling lies.

‘Now,’ said Wolf. ‘Come here, Captain Mallory.’ He beckoned, with the dagger held out in front of him. As he beckoned, he advanced.

Mallory felt for his own knife, then remembered both of them were gone. He tested his ankle. Not good. He stood his ground, watching the knife.

They were two figures standing on that sheet of floodlit cobbles, feet apart, intent at the hub of their radiating shadows. One with pack on back, unmoving; the other stealthy, feline almost. Both of them focused on the little starburst of light on the point of Wolf’s dagger.

Wolf was close enough for Mallory to smell his sweat. It was a sour smell, violent, disgusting. Mallory watched the knife wrist sinking for the first upward thrust. He shifted his weight until it was on his good leg. Wolf’s eyes betrayed no feeling. His knife hand came round and up, hooking at Mallory’s belly. But Mallory was not there any more. He had arched away like a bullfighter from the horns, grabbing at Wolf’s wrist as it came past, to transfer the man’s momentum into a twist that would dislocate the elbow.

But as his hands locked on Wolf’s wrist, he knew it was not going to work. The SS man’s arm was thick as a telegraph pole. It was an arm whose owner had slept well and eaten well. Mallory’s fingers were worn with cliff and battle, and his reserves were close to rock bottom. He could not hold on. The arm wrenched away. Wolf brought his left hand round, fast, a closed-fist blow that made Mallory’s ears ring. He kept his feet with difficulty. Wolf came in again, hooking with the knife. Mallory aimed a kick at his knee, made contact, but he had kicked with his right foot, the bad foot, and pain shot up his leg and he fell over, feeling something burn his ribs, cool air on his side. Wolf had cut him. Not badly: a surface cut to the ribs.

It would get worse.

He struggled to his feet.

Wolf was waiting for him. His breathing was steady and even. Little bubbles of spit formed and burst in the corner of his wrecked mouth. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘I’ll give it to you now.’ He came in, knife in front of him like a sword. Mallory knew he was in bad trouble. He had lost sight of the fact he was going to die. There was no time for fear, or thinking ahead. The name of the game was survival, every second a bonus wrenched from the crooked jaws of death.

He got inside the knife, trapped the huge arm under his own arm, butted his steel helmet into that disgusting jaw, heard a tooth or two pop, brought his knee up into the groin, found it blocked by a leg that might as well have been made of wood. The arm was coming round behind him. He tried to cringe away from the knife, but the arms were remorseless, and he was exhausted –

The world went mad.

The square filled with a gigantic noise, the noise of a thousand typewriters, the whine of many hornets’ nests kicked to hell, two, maybe more huge explosions. Sensing a minute faltering of Wolf’s hold, Mallory smashed his helmet once more into the SS man’s face. This time the nose went, and the man grunted and reeled, and behind Mallory the knife clattered on the cobbles. But then the arms came on Mallory’s neck, tilting his head sideways, and Mallory knew that this time he had had it for sure, and for the first time the fear of death showed itself in his mind, a dark and ugly thing –

But only for a split second.

Because suddenly those terrible arms were off his neck and he was lurching back, free, and a voice was saying, ‘Get your weapon.’ A familiar voice.

Andrea’s voice.

It had, Miller reflected, been a bad five minutes.

They had been sitting in the belfry nice and peaceful. Miller had even managed to get a little shuteye — a very little, seeing that he did not trust Carstairs, and that Spiro was trembling like a frightened rabbit and muttering about bulletses and gunses and getting outses of here. Miller was worrying about Mallory, sure, especially after all that stuff with the lights. But when you knew Mallory as well as Miller, you could tell when he was in real trouble and when he was staging a diversionary action. The stuff with the lights, though it had made Miller’s flesh creep, was definitely a diversionary action. When Mallory had vanished from the end of the cable, there had been silence. A silence that Miller had very definitely appreciated. Then had come the shooting, and the voice in the square.