Alistair MacLean - The Complete Navarone

A huge man in a Wehrmacht helmet climbed down from the truck. The men in the hut relaxed. This guy was the kind of guy you wanted on your side when things looked doubtful. Thank God, they thought, he’s one of ours.

‘Morgen,’ said the big man, smiling a huge white smile; Andrea was famous for the size and whiteness of his smile. ‘Telephone’s down.’

‘Tell me about it,’ said the under-harbourmaster. ‘What the hell’s going on up there?’

‘Bit of fuss in the camp,’ said Andrea. ‘SS man found fornicating with a goat. The Greeks didn’t like it.’

‘Poor bloody goat,’ said the harbourmaster, wrinkling his nose.

‘We’re taking a boat,’ said Andrea. ‘Checking the aerodrome perimeter.’

‘Nice day for it,’ said the harbourmaster. ‘Coffee later?’

‘Maybe,’ said Andrea, and loped off. The harbourmaster yawned. It was a lonely life out here on the dusty quay, now that the ships had stopped arriving. All you got was the occasional shipload of stores, and fuel, alcohol and oxygen for the factory, and aviation stuff to be barged across the shallow bay to the airfield landing. Otherwise, the gun crews were getting a tan, and everyone was getting hot, fly-mad and bored. They said there was going to be a rocket firing sometime today. Maybe that was what all the fuss was about –

The big man and his four companions were already on the quay. One of the men seemed to be a civilian. There was something wrong with their boots, but that was none of the harbourmaster’s business. They already had the harbour launch started up, and were climbing aboard. Someone cast off the shore lines. The boat puttered off the quay and into the ink-blue bay that lay between the jetty and the aerodrome. It shrank, heading for the aerodrome fuel jetty. Goodness, thought the harbourmaster, yawning, again. They’re in a hurry.

That was when the motor cycle and sidecar combination clattered out of the smoke. The man in the sidecar hung limp over his machine gun. The rider climbed off and started banging on the harbourmaster’s door, shouting. It took the harbourmaster a good three minutes to get any sense out of him. When he did, he almost wished he had not bothered.

‘Awfully sorry,’ said Carstairs, ‘but how exactly do you propose to get through the fence?’

‘I guess we’ll think of something,’ said Miller. Miller was sitting in the bottom of the boat, the wooden pack open beside him, pushing time pencils into his little buff bricks of plastic explosive. Spiro was looking away, like a child, knowing life was horribly dangerous, but not wanting to admit to himself the full scale of the horror.

‘Get us a plane,’ said Mallory.

‘Of course,’ said Carstairs.

‘What?’ said Spiro, no longer able to deny the evidence of his own ears. ‘You steals plane?’

‘Steal one. Buy one. Borrow one. Who can tell?’ He held out his cigarette case to Spiro. ‘Turkish this side, Virginian that.’

‘I spits on your Turkish,’ said Spiro, mechanically. ‘No smoke. Much explodibles here.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Carstairs, applying the gold Ronson to a Muratti. ‘You can eat that stuff.’

‘No!’ roared Spiro. ‘You want explosion in belly, you eats it! Not Spiro —’

‘Quiet,’ said Mallory. He was looking back at the shore with his glasses. Men were swarming in the vehicle park by the harbourmaster’s shed. There was activity in the 88’s gun-pit, too, alongside where they had left the lorry parked. The boat chugged across the quiet blue surface of the bay. They were half-way. Not far enough. ‘Left a bit,’ he said.

Andrea pushed the tiller with his hip. The boat yawed. In the gun-pit, the muzzle of the 88 flashed. The report came at the same time that the shell kicked water and yellow high explosive smoke in the air eighty feet to the right.

‘Right a bit,’ said Mallory.

Another bang. This time the shell roared past with a sound like a train, clipped the surface of the bay, ricocheted and blew a hole in the beach. Nobody cheered. They were in a little wooden boat in the middle of a little blue bay, feeling very naked indeed.

‘This is it,’ said Carstairs. He was pale now. ‘The next one. Christ, what are we doing here? Like fish in a barrel —’

‘Tchah!’ said Spiro. ‘Coward! Be a mans!’

The 88 spoke again. This time the shell burst close enough to shower them with chemical-tasting spray. Another shell came, made a smaller splash, skipped, burst on the shore.

‘Hah!’ said Spiro, who had worked himself into a sort of frenzy. ‘Missed again! Bloody square-head fools!’

‘Shut up.’ Carstairs’ composure had cracked. ‘We’re dead. What the hell possessed me to —’

A huge explosion sounded from beside the harbourmaster’s hut. A mighty tree of black smoke grew in the sky.

‘Left a bit,’ said Mallory.

Carstairs climbed up from the bottom boards, and gaped at the shore. As the smoke cleared it was apparent that the 88 had been blown out of its pit. It now lay on the edge of a vast crater, a mass of twisted metal. As for the lorry, it had vanished clear off the face of the earth.

‘What was that?’ he said.

Miller gazed at him with blue and innocent eyes. ‘I guess,’ he said, ‘that I must have left a bomb in the truck. Very careless.’

Carstairs swallowed. He did not reply. The boat chugged on. The far shore was coming nearer. Finally, he said, ‘Why aren’t the machine guns firing?’

Mallory kept his eyes outside the boat. ‘It’s all that petrol,’ he said.

‘Petrol?’

Miller pointed a kindly finger at the land ahead. The shore consisted of a strip of white beach with a jetty. Above the jetty was a sun-scorched grass bank. On top of the jetty and the green bank were small, coloured objects. ‘Oil drums,’ he said. ‘Gas cans.’ He pointed over the stern, directly behind them.

‘There’s your guns,’ he said. Then he turned, and pointed straight ahead. ‘And there’s your aerodrome fuel dump. So if they miss us and take a ricochet, up goes the whole caboodle. They have a problem, my man.’

Carstairs thought for a moment of pointing out that it was not only the Germans who would find an aviation fuel dump a problematic place to be in a hail of bullets. Given what he knew of the present company, he kept his mouth shut. It would soon be over.

One way or another.

There were no guard towers along the seaward side of the aerodrome — this far out in the Aegean, the designers of the defences could be forgiven for not expecting shallow-water sea-borne attacks. But as the boat came to within a couple of hundred yards of the shore, a lorry roared down the buff-green strip of vegetation between the security fence and the beach. Andrea gave the tiller to Mallory, sighted down the barrel of the Spandau he had commandeered from the truck, and opened fire. The lorry swerved suddenly and crashed on to the beach. Andrea kept hosing down the little figures that crawled out of the back. Soon none of them was moving. Just to make sure, he loosed a burst at the drums on the jetty. They felt the blast of the flat, oily explosions, smelt the sweetish reek of the black smoke that rolled off the burning drums. Then they were ashore, low, crawling to the fence. There was no time for delicacy. Mallory opened the decompression valve on the boat’s engine, unscrewed the lever, and put it in his pocket. Miller shoved a brick of plastic explosive against the bottom of the wire and snapped the time pencil. ‘Down!’ he yelled.

Thirty seconds later, a roar and a fountain of sand announced that the fence was now metal rain. Odd shots were coming in from the wreckage of the lorry. The Thunderbolt squad used the explosion crater as cover, hauling themselves and the Spandau up the sparse, burned slope of the berm. On the other side, fenced in by a mound of earth, was a half-acre field of oil drums, and a bowser.