Alistair MacLean - The Guns of Navarone

Mallory believed him. For almost a minute he stared down at the sheen of the sea, at the faerie tracery of the stars shimmering across its darkly placid surface. Suddenly he swung round on Jensen.

‘But the Navy, sir! Evacuation! Surely the Navy –’

The Navy,’ Jensen interrupted heavily, ‘is not keen. The Navy is sick and tired of the Eastern Med and the Aegean, sick and tired of sticking out its long-suffering neck and having it regularly chopped off – and all for sweet damn all. We’ve had two battleships wrecked, eight cruisers out of commission – four of them sunk – and over a dozen destroyers gone…I couldn’t even start to count the number of smaller vessels we’ve lost. And for what? I’ve told you – for sweet damn all! Just so’s our High Command can play round-and-round-the-rugged-rocks and who’s-the-king-of-thecastle with their opposite numbers in Berlin. Great fun for all concerned – except, of course, for the thousand or so sailors who’ve been drowned in the course of the game, the ten thousand or so Tommies and Anzacs and Indians who suffered and died on these same islands – and died without knowing why.’

Jensen’s hands were white-knuckled on the wheel, his mouth tight-drawn and bitter. Mallory was surprised, shocked almost, by the vehemence, the depth of feeling; it was so completely out of character…Or perhaps it was in character, perhaps Jensen knew a very great deal indeed about what went on on the inside…

‘Twelve hundred men, you said, sir?’ Mallory asked quietly. ‘You said there were twelve hundred men on Kheros?’

Jensen flickered a glance at him, looked away again.

‘Yes. Twelve hundred men.’ Jensen sighed. ‘You’re right, laddie, of course you’re right. I’m just talking off the top of my head. Of course we can’t leave them there. The Navy will do its damnedest. What’s two or three more destroyers – sorry, boy, sorry, there I go again…Now listen, and listen carefully.

‘Taking ‘em off will have to be a night operation. There isn’t a ghost of a chance in the daytime – not with two-three hundred Stukas just begging for a glimpse of a Royal Naval destroyer. It’ll have to be destroyers – transports and tenders are too slow by half. And they can’t possibly go north about the northern tip of the Lerades – they’d never get back to safety before daylight. It’s too long a trip by hours.’

‘But the Lerades is a pretty long string of islands,’ Mallory ventured. ‘Couldn’t the destroyers go through –’

‘Between a couple of them? Impossible.’ Jensen shook his head. ‘Mined to hell and back again. Every single channel. You couldn’t take a dinghy through.’

‘And the Maidos-Navarone channel. Stiff with mines also, I suppose?’

‘No, that’s a clear channel. Deep water – you can’t moor mines in deep water.’

‘So that’s the route you’ve got to take, isn’t it, sir? I mean, they’re Turkish territorial waters on the other side and we –’

‘We’d go through Turkish territorial waters tomorrow, and in broad daylight, if it would do any good,’ Jensen said flatly. ‘The Turks know it and so do the Germans. But all other things being equal, the Western channel is the one we’re taking. It’s a clearer channel, a shorter route – and it doesn’t involve any unnecessary international complications.’

‘All other things being equal?’

The guns of Navarone.’ Jensen paused for a long time, then repeated the words, slowly, expressionlessly, as one would repeat the name of some feared and ancient enemy. ‘The guns of Navarone. They make everything equal. They cover the Northern entrances to both channels. We could take the twelve hundred men off Kheros tonight – if we could silence the guns of Navarone.’

Mallory sat silent, said nothing. He’s coming to it now, he thought.

‘These guns are no ordinary guns,’ Jensen went on quietly. ‘Our naval experts say they’re about nine-inch rifle barrels. I think myself they’re more likely a version of the 210 mm “crunch” guns that the Germans are using in Italy – our soldiers up there hate and fear those guns more than anything on earth. A dreadful weapon – shell extremely slow in flight and damnably accurate. Anyway,’ he went on grimly, ‘whatever they were they were good enough to dispose of the Sybaris in five minutes flat.’

Mallory nodded slowly.

‘The Sybaris? I think I heard –’

‘An eight-inch cruiser we sent up there about four months ago to try conclusions with the Hun. Just a formality, a routine exercise, we thought. The Sybaris was blasted out of the water. There were seventeen survivors.’

‘Good God!’ Mallory was shocked. ‘I didn’t know –’

‘Two months ago we mounted a large-scale amphibious attack on Navarone.’ Jensen hadn’t even heard the interruption. ‘Commandos, Royal Marine Commandos and Jellicoe’s Special Boat Service. Less than an even chance, we knew – Navarone’s practically solid cliff all the way round. But then these were very special men, probably the finest assault troops in the world today.’ Jensen paused for almost a minute, then went on very quietly. ‘They were cut to ribbons. They were massacred almost to a man.’

‘Finally, twice in the past ten days – we’ve seen this attack on Kheros coming for a long time now – we sent in parachute saboteurs: Special Boat Service men.’ He shrugged his shoulders helplessly. ‘They just vanished.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Just like that. And then tonight – the last desperate fling of the gambler and what have you.’ Jensen laughed, briefly and without humour. ‘That interrogation hut – I kept pretty quiet in there tonight, I tell you. I was the “joker” that Torrance and his boys wanted to heave out over Navarone. I don’t blame them. But I had to do it, I just had to do it. I knew it was hopeless – but it had to be done.’

The big Humber was beginning to slow down now, running silently between the tumble-down shacks and hovels that line the Western approach to Alexandria. The sky ahead was already beginning to streak in the first tenuous greys of the false dawn.

‘I don’t think I’d be much good with a parachute,’ Mallory said doubtfully. ‘In fact, quite frankly, I’ve never even seen a parachute.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Jensen said briefly. ‘You won’t have to use one. You’re going into Navarone the hard way.’

Mallory waited for more, but Jensen had fallen silent, intent on avoiding the large potholes that were beginning to pock the roadway. After a time Mallory asked:

‘Why me, Captain Jensen?’

Jensen’s smile was barely visible in the greying darkness. He swerved violently to avoid a gaping hole and straightened up again.

‘Scared?’

‘Certainly I’m scared. No offence intended, sir, but the way you talk you’d scare anyone…But that wasn’t what I meant.’

‘I know it wasn’t. Just my twisted humour…Why you? Special qualifications, laddie, just like I told you. You speak Greek like a Greek. You speak German like a German. Skilled saboteur, first-class organiser and eighteen unscathed months in the White Mountains of Crete – a convincing demonstration of your ability to survive in enemy-held territory.’ Jensen chuckled. ‘You’d be surprised to know just how complete a dossier I have on you!’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’ Mallory spoke with some feeling. ‘And,’ he added, ‘I know of at least three other officers with the same qualifications.’

‘There are others,’ Jensen agreed. ‘But there are no other Keith Mallorys. Keith Mallory,’ Jensen repeated rhetorically. ‘Who hadn’t heard of Keith Mallory in the palmy, balmy days before the war? The finest mountaineer, the greatest rock climber New Zealand has ever produced – and by that, of course, New Zealanders mean the world. The human fly, the climber of the unclimbable, the scaler of vertical cliffs and impossible precipices. The entire south coast of Navarone,’ said Jensen cheerfully, ‘consists of one vast, impossible precipice. Nary a hand- or foot-hold in sight.’