Alistair MacLean - Force 10 from Navarone

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1968

Copyright © HarperCollins Publishers 1968

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2020

Cover photograph © Stephen Mulcahey

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008337308

Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780007289288

Version: 2020-06-15

To Lewis and Caroline

Contents

Cover

Title Page FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE Alistair MacLean

Copyright

Dedication

Map

ONE: Prelude: Thursday : 0000–0600

TWO: Thursday : 1400–2330

THREE: Friday : 0030–0200

FOUR: Friday : 0200–0330

FIVE: Friday : 0330–0500

SIX: Friday : 0800–1000

SEVEN: Friday : 1000–1200

EIGHT: Friday : 1500–2115

NINE: Friday 2115– Saturday 0040

TEN: Saturday : 0040–0120

ELEVEN: Saturday : 0120–0135

TWELVE: Saturday : 0135–0200

THIRTEEN: Saturday : 0200–0215

EPILOGUE

About the Author

By Alistair MacLean

About the Publisher

Commander Vincent Ryan, RN, Captain (Destroyers) and commanding officer of His Majesty’s latest S-class destroyer Sirdar , leaned his elbows comfortably on the coaming of his bridge, brought up his night-glasses and gazed out thoughtfully over the calm and silvered waters of the moonlit Aegean.

He looked first of all due north, straight out over the huge and smoothly sculpted and whitely phosphorescent bow-wave thrown up by the knife-edged forefoot of his racing destroyer: four miles away, no more, framed in its backdrop of indigo sky and diamantine stars, lay the brooding mass of a darkly cliff-girt island: the island of Kheros, for months the remote and beleaguered outpost of two thousand British troops who had expected to die that night, and who would now not die.

Ryan swung his glasses through 180° and nodded approvingly. This was what he liked to see. The four destroyers to the south were in such perfect line astern that the hull of the leading vessel, a gleaming bone in its teeth, completely obscured the hulls of the three ships behind. Ryan turned his binoculars to the east.

It was odd, he thought inconsequentially, how unimpressive, even how disappointing, the aftermath of either natural or man-made disaster could be. Were it not for that dull red glow and wisping smoke that emanated from the upper part of the cliff and lent the scene a vaguely Dantean aura of primeval menace and foreboding, the precipitous far wall of the harbour looked as it might have done in the times of Homer. That great ledge of rock that looked from that distance so smooth and regular and somehow inevitable could have been carved out by the wind and weather of a hundred million years: it could equally well have been cut away fifty centuries ago by the masons of Ancient Greece seeking marble for the building of their Ionian temples: what was almost inconceivable, what almost passed rational comprehension, was the fact that ten minutes ago that ledge had not been there at all, that there had been in its place tens of thousands of tons of rock, the most impregnable German fortress in the Aegean and, above all, the two great guns of Navarone, now all buried for ever three hundred feet under the sea. With a slow shake of his head Commander Ryan lowered his binoculars and turned to look at the men responsible for achieving more in five minutes than nature could have done in five million years.