Sam Llewellyn - Thunderbolt from Navarone

The black cloud of smoke blew away. Except for the flotsam, the sea was empty, as far as you could see from a ten-foot conning tower among eight-foot waves. Petty Officer Jordan and a couple of ratings hooked a crate and hauled it aboard. ‘Aircraft parts,’ said Jordan.

Smith was disappointed. He really had been hoping for Schnapps. ‘Better get going, what?’ he said.

Jordan went below. Sea Leopard turned her nose west, for the friendlier waters of Sicily, away from the threatening smudge of German-held Kynthos. No survivors, thought Smith, raking the waves with his glasses. Pity. Couldn’t be helped -

He paused. A couple of miles downwind, something rolled on the top of a wave, and what might have been an arm lifted. He opened his mouth to say, steer ninety degrees. A human? Wreckage? Worth a look.

But at that point his eye went up, climbing the vaults of the blue blue sky. And in that sky, he saw a little square of black dots. Aircraft.

He hit the klaxon and went down the conning tower and spun the hatch wheel. Sea Leopard sank into the deeps. Kormoran had been just another merchant ship in just another attack. Now it was time for Sea Leopard to take measures to ensure her own survival, to do more damage.

‘Tea,’ said Smith. They usually had a cup of tea sometime between eleven and half-past. Just now, he saw, looking at his watch before he wrote up the log, it was eleven minutes past.

It was raining in Plymouth, a warmish Atlantic rain that blanketed the Hoe and blurred the MTB s and ML s sliding in the Roads. In the early hours of their captivity the three men in the top-floor suite of the Hotel Majestic had spent time looking out of the window. They had long ago given up. Now they sprawled in armchairs round a low table on which were two empty brandy bottles and three overflowing ashtrays: men past their first youth and even their second, faces burned dark by the sun, eye-sockets hollow with the corrosive exhaustion of battle. They were in khaki battledress, without insignia. One was huge and black-haired. Another was tall and lean, with the hard jaw and steady eyes of a climber. The third was a rangy individual with a lugubrious face, glass of brandy in one hand, cigarette in mouth.

It was the third man who spoke. ‘This is not,’ he said, ‘what I call a vacation.’

The third man’s name was Miller. In so far as he had a rank, he was a corporal in the US Army Catering Corps. He was also the greatest demolition expert in the Allied armies.

The man who looked like a climber nodded, and lit a cigarette, and returned to his thoughts. This was a man you could imagine waiting for ever, if necessary; a man completely in control of himself. This was Captain Mallory, the New Zealander who before the war had been a world-famous mountaineer, and who had since done more damage to Hitler’s armies than the entire Brigade of Guards. ‘It’s better than being machine-gunned,’ he said.

Miller thought about that. ‘I guess,’ he said. He did not look sure.

‘Soon,’ said the big man, ‘there will be work to do.’ His accent was Greek, his voice soft but heavy, spreading a blanket of silence through the room. Andrea was a sleepy-eyed bear of a man, dark enough to look perpetually in need of a shave, his upper lip infested with a black stubble of regrowing moustache. He looked like the less respectable type of bandit, a mountain of sloth and debauchery. This impression had misled many of his enemies, most of them fatally. In fact, Andrea was a full colonel in the Greek army. Furthermore, he was as strong as a mobile crane, as fast and light on his feet as a cat, and as level-headed as an Edinburgh lawyer. When he spoke, which was not often, people gave him their full attention.

Miller and Mallory closed their minds to the soft rain on the window.

‘They think we are spies,’ said Andrea. ‘They think we have made a deal with somebody and run away. It is not an unreasonable suspicion. Do you blame them?’

Miller took a swig out of his glass. ‘They asked us to blow the guns on Navarone,’ he said. ‘We blew ‘em. They asked us to destroy the Neretva Dam. Up goes the Neretva Dam. They sent us after the Werwolf subs. The Werwolf submarines get broken.’ His long face was lugubrious. ‘And now they tell us they have another job for us, and they pick us up in the Bay of Biscay and bring us all the way to Plymouth, and to demonstrate their everlasting admiration they lock us up in a fleabag hotel and put sentries on the door.’ He coughed, long and loose and nasty. ‘Sure, I blame them.’

‘They’ve had ten-tenths cloud since the Werwolf raid,’ said Mallory. ‘They haven’t been able to do a photographic recce, and there’s no independent confirmation. And if you remember, it wasn’t an easy job.’

‘I remember,’ said Miller, grimly.

‘So look at it like this,’ said Mallory. ‘They locked us up here because they don’t believe we could have achieved our objective. But we know we did. So we’re right and they’re wrong, and when they find out they are going to be very sorry. So it is all a very nice compliment, really.’

‘I don’t want compliments,’ said Miller. ‘I want a few drinks and some decent food and a little feminine society. For Chrissakes, Jensen knows what we can do. Why doesn’t he tell them?’

Andrea put his hands together. ‘Who can tell what Jensen knows?’

There was a small silence. Then Mallory said, ‘I think we should go and talk to him.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Miller. ‘Very amusing. There are thirty commandos on the landing.’

‘I did not,’ said Mallory, ‘notice any commandos on the window- sill.’

Miller’s face was suddenly a mask of horror. ‘Oh, no,’ he said.

Andrea smiled, a pure, innocent smile of great sweetness. ‘Captain Jensen takes cocktails in the mess at ten minutes past six. The mess is in the basement of this hotel. It is now five past.’

‘How did you know that?’

‘I looked at my watch.’

‘About the cocktail hour.’

‘There is a chambermaid here from Roumeli,’ purred Andrea. ‘I talked to the poor girl. She was very pleased – are we ready?’

The room had filled with damp air. Mallory had raised the window. He was standing with his hands on the sill, looking down the sheer face of the hotel. ‘Child could do it,’ he said. ‘We’re off.’

The cocktail bar of the Hotel Majestic in Plymouth had been a fashionable West Country rendezvous in the 1930s, largely because it was the only cocktail bar in Plymouth, a town which otherwise found its entertainment in the more violent type of public house. It was eminently suited to wartime use. For one thing, it was mostly below ground, a comforting feature for those wishing their business to be undisturbed by the Nazi bombs that had all but obliterated large areas of the city. For another, its proximity to the naval dockyard gave the barman, an alert Devonian called Enrico, privileged access to the bottomless wells of gin which were as indispensable a fuel for His Majesty’s warships as the more conventional bunker crude.

At six, the usual crowd were in: seven-eighths male, eight- eighths in uniform, talking in low voices from faces haggard with overwork and lack of exercise. At five past, Captain Jensen walked to his usual table: a small man in naval uniform with a captain’s gold rings on the sleeve, a sardonic smile, and eyes of an astonishing mildness, except when no one was looking, at which point they might have belonged to one of the hungrier species of shark. With him was a stout man with a florid face and the heavy braid of an admiral.

‘Submarines/ the Admiral was saying. ‘Damn cowardly, hugely overrated in my opinion.’ He gulped his pink gin and called for another.