Alistair MacLean - The Complete Navarone

Andrea felt Wolf’s body jump in his arms as the first salvo hit. A bullet scorched a track across the skin of his forearm. The body went limp. He dropped it, rolled back, his uniform wet with blood. Mallory was already over the edge. Andrea yanked the pin from a grenade, laid it carefully under the battlement round which the climbing rope hung noosed, grasped the rope and went over the edge.

He slid in silence through the night, rope crooked in his elbow, braking with the sole of one boot on the instep of the other. Against the sky — much paler seen from the thick blackness down here — he saw a head lean over, two heads, heard covering fire from below, finished counting, hoped the ground was close now –

And from above there came the great flat clang of the grenade detonating in the angle between wall and stone floor. The rope became immediately slack, the noose cut by the explosion. There were yells from above, yells Andrea scarcely heard because the ground had rushed twenty feet up to meet him and hit him with a bang, and he was rolling, once, twice, away from the wall, and behind him there were two crashes as the bodies blown over the wall hit the ground, but by that time he was on his feet, running away from the dark loom of the wall.

And a voice said, ‘Over here.’

Mallory’s voice.

Two more steps, and Andrea was in something that from the evil smell of its bottom and the steepness of its sides must be a drainage ditch. Now that his eyes were accustoming themselves to the dark, he saw that his head was on a level with a flat plain, more of the small fields that covered every horizontal square inch of this island.

‘Here,’ said Mallory again.

Andrea put his head down and began to run. There was tracer overhead. In its lurid flicker he could see reeds, blades of grass, the deep footprints of the rest of the party in the mud ahead. As he ran, his mind went back to a time when he had had a pack, equipment, maps.

Particularly maps.

Andrea was a deadly fighting machine, but fighting ability alone was not enough to make you a colonel. What made you a colonel was tactical sense, the ability to read from a map the features of any given terrain that a force could use to ensure the achieving of an objective.

The objective now was the aerodrome. Between here and the aerodrome, the marsh was at its broadest and stickiest. To the south was the causeway with the road, which would be heavily guarded. To the north, the fields ran up to the beach, and the jetty. According to the briefing, the jetty was heavily guarded too, but less heavily than the road.

It had been obvious for some time that the jetty was the only option.

He caught up with Mallory, who was limping along, bundling the little Greek Spiro along the bottom of the ditch: good man, Spiro, lot of noise of course, but very brave to have got this far. They paused to take stock.

At the base of the Acropolis cliffs, the high walls of the village stood out stark and black. Every now and then a burst of tracer whipped from the battlements into the fields. The shooting seemed to be directed in a northerly direction, towards the causeway. It looked like the spastic twitchings of a military force without a head — twitchings that both Andrea and Mallory knew would not last long. Soon, the superb military organization would reassert itself, and the marshes would be combed, blade of grass by blade of grass, and there would be no escape, for them or the Enigma machine.

‘Well, my Keith,’ said Andrea. ‘I think we must take up yachting.’

So it was that an intelligent owl would have seen a little straggle of men, heavily camouflaged with mud, deploy across the fields of young corn, and start to jog purposefully towards the bay on the northern shore of the Acropolis. They moved in a loose curve, using cover as and when they found it, a clump of oleanders here, a field-shed there. But the focus of their movement was the expanse of hard-packed gravel and mud with the long pier and deep-water jetty, connected to the water gate of the Acropolis by a mile of road.

An hour later, the sky was turning grey, and the island was emerging from the anonymity of the night. Mist hung caught in the olive groves on the slopes of the western massif, and drooled from the notches of invisible hammocks in the high Acropolis. A smear of peach-coloured cloud hung like a banner past the north-eastern capes. Miller was lying in the rough grass by the edge of the road. To the right, the Acropolis loomed in the half-dark. To the left, the shed by the jetty stood dark against the shifting sea. The road connected the two. ‘The morning after the ball,’ he said.

Mallory blinked his gritty eyes. ‘First,’ he said, ‘the telephone line. Then we move in.’

Miller looked down the road towards the sheds. There were other shapes. Concrete shapes, squat and bulbous. Machine-gun posts, if they were lucky. Eighty-eights, if they were not.

He sighed, rolled over, and cut the telephone line. Then he bustled around, making his preparations.

Up and about the Germans might be. But to Dusty Miller, there was a feeling almost of homecoming. This was the old life, the Long Range Desert Group life, crouching in a ditch in flat land, waiting for the convoy.

Miller had always been a great believer in subtlety. During Prohibition, when others had run booze across from Canada in heavily-armed trucks with supercharged engines, Miller had been a master bootlegger. Having disposed of his principal competitors by persuading them to ram a bargeful of unstable nitroglycerine, he had bought himself a railroad wagon. This railroad wagon he had attached to various trains. It left Thunder Bay loaded with Canadian rye, was shunted into a siding north of Duluth, and unloaded into a private ambulance, whose uniformed driver did the rounds of his discriminating clientele. While others shot each other to bits for the sake of fancifully-labelled cleaning fluids, Dusty’s product had been of impeccable quality, and arrived as regularly as the tide. Miller had made a hundred and ten thousand dollars in very short order. Good business was good business, and nothing to do with fast cars and machine guns. It was not his fault that the gold mine he had bought with the profits contained less gold than the average three-year-old child’s teeth. Subtlety, thought Miller, dry grass up his nose. Subtlety was everything –

The first truck of the convoy passed. The second was opposite. Miller clicked the switch in his hand. A sun-bright flash appeared under the truck’s fuel tank. The truck slewed sideways, blocking the road. Thick smoke billowed from the wreck, composed partly of burning truck and partly of the smoke powder Miller included in his patent traffic reduction bombs. There was very little wind.

The smoke settled in a pyramid over the road, blocking it. Someone somewhere was shooting, but Miller could hear no bullets. By the sound of it, Andrea and Mallory were making space for themselves in the front. Miller went to his allotted place in the rear of the lead truck, shooing Carstairs and Spiro ahead of him. The truck picked up speed. The pall of smoke dwindled behind, covering the still forms sprawled on the road. By the swerve and judder, at least two of the tyres were blown. Spiro’s eyes were spinning in his head. Carstairs was stroking his moustache. ‘Nice engines, these trucks,’ said Miller, looking at his watch. ‘Terrible ride, though. Oh, look. They left us a machine gun.’

The truck entered the jetty compound crab-wise, with a tearing roar and a cloud of dust. Faces behind the windows of the harbourmaster’s office hut looked pale and nervous. The telephones were dead, and something had happened on the road, there was no way of telling what. Still, it seemed as if the reinforcements had arrived.