Sam Llewellyn: Thunderbolt from Navarone

‘We came down the fire-escape,’ said Mallory. ‘We were very thirsty.’

Into Admiral Dixon’s brain there had sunk the idea that something untoward was happening. He did not expect his evenings to be interrupted by soldiers, particularly soldiers as scruffy and badgeless as this lot. He was further amazed when he heard Captain Jensen say, ‘Oh, well. While you’re here, I can tell you we’ve got the snapshots. Total success. Well done. Briefing scheduled for 2300 hours.’

Admiral Dixon said, in a voice like a glacier calving, ‘Who are these men?’

‘Sorry,’ said Jensen. ‘Captain Mallory. Corporal Miller. Colonel Andrea, Greek Army, 19th Motorized Division. Admiral Dixon, OC Special Operations, Mediterranean.’

The Admiral rested his gooseberry eyes on the three men. Miller watched the veins in his neck and wondered idly how much pressure a blood vessel could take before it burst. ‘Why,’ said the Admiral, ‘are they improperly dressed?’

‘Disgraceful,’ said Jensen, with severity. ‘But as you will remember, they have just completed a mission. They were confined to quarters on suspicion of collusion with the enemy, so they haven’t had a chance to pop up to Savile Row. I think that in view of reconnaissance reports on the outcome of their mission, we can give them the benefit of the doubt. Unless you feel an Inquiry is necessary?’

‘Hrmph,’ said the Admiral, mauve-faced. ‘Mission or no mission, can’t have this sort of nonsense –’

‘Walls have ears,’ said Jensen smoothly. ‘You have called a briefing for 2300 hours. That will be the moment to discuss this. Now, gentlemen. Refreshment?’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ said Miller. There was a waitress. Jensen ordered. The three men raised their glasses to Jensen, then the Admiral. ‘Mud in your eye,’ said Miller.

‘Here’s how,’ said Jensen.

The Admiral grunted ungraciously. He swallowed his gin and left.

‘Well, gentlemen,’ said Jensen. ‘We’re very pleased with you; most of us, anyway.’ He smiled, that gleaming, carnivorous smile. ‘You will be collected at 2245 hours. Till then, I bid you sweet dreams.’

‘Dreams?’ said Miller. It was not yet seven o’clock.

‘I always think a little nap can be most refreshing before a lot of hard work.’

‘Work?’ said Mallory.

But Jensen was gone.

‘Sleep?’ said Mallory. ‘Or drinks?’

Andrea pushed his glass forward. ‘You can sleep on aeroplanes,’ he said.

‘Drinks it is,’ said Mallory.

A car with a sub-lieutenant raced them through the blacked-out streets of Plymouth. The city was stirring like a huge, secret animal. The tyres kicked fans of water from deep puddles as they skirted piles of rubble and came to a set of high wire gates with naval sentries in greatcoats and bell-bottomed trousers. Beyond the gate was the dark bulk of a squat building with a sand-bagged entrance. The sentry led them through a heavy steel door into a disinfectant-smelling hall and down a flight of cement stairs, then another and another. Mallory felt the depth and silence pressing in on him. Suddenly he was tired, achingly tired, with the tiredness of two months of special operations, and the months before that…

But there was no time for being tired, because another steel door had sighed open, and they were in a windowless room painted green and cream. There were chairs, and a blackboard. Everything was anonymous. There was no clue as to where they were bound. There were three naval officers in the room, fresh-faced and wind- burned. Sitting apart was a willowy man in a Sam Browne over a tunic of excessively perfect cut. He was smoking a fat cigarette that smelt Turkish, gazing from under unnecessarily long eyelashes at the fire instructions behind the dais, and fingering a thin moustache. Mallory found himself thinking of Hollywood. It was an odd mixture of people to find a hundred or so feet under Plymouth.

Admiral Dixon and Captain Jensen walked into the room. With a scuffing of chair legs, the men stood to attention. ‘Good evening,’ said Jensen. ‘Stand easy. You may smoke.’ Dixon ignored them. He sat down heavily in a chair. His eyes were glassy and he was breathing hard, presumably from the effort of walking down all those stairs. Mallory reflected that if coming down had been that bad, someone would have to carry him up. Jensen, on the other hand, looked fresh as the morning dew. He stood on the balls of his feet, perky as a bantamweight boxer, while an orderly unrolled maps on the board.

Mallory knew that in the coastlines and contours of those maps their fates were written. There were the three fingers of the Peloponnese, blue sea, Crete, the island-splatter of the Dodecanese. And larger-scale maps: an island. Not an island he recognized, though when he glanced across at Andrea he saw him straight- backed and frowning.

‘Very good,’ said Jensen, when the orderly had finished. ‘Now I said I had a job for you, a tiny little job, really. It’s a bit of a rush, I suppose, but there it is, can’t be helped.’

‘Rush?’ said Mallory.

‘All in good time,’ said Jensen. ‘First things first. Admiral Dixon you already know. Gentlemen – ‘ here he turned to Mallory, Miller and Andrea ‘– certain people are very pleased with what you achieved last week.’ Admiral Dixon shook his head and sighed. ‘So pleased, in fact,’ said Jensen, ‘that they want you to do something else. Probably much easier, actually.’ He turned to the map at his back. Miller listened to the hum of the ventilation fans. It was all very well Jensen saying things were easy. He was not the one getting shot at. Miller doubted that he knew the meaning of the word.

The central map showed plenty of blue sea, and an island. It was the shape of a child’s drawing of a beetle, this island: a fat body dark with close-set contours and a head attached to its north-eastern end by a narrower neck. ‘Kynthos,’ said Jensen. ‘Lovely place. Delightful beaches. Very few Germans, but the ones there are particularly interesting, we think.’

Mallory and Miller slumped in their chairs. As far as they were concerned the only interesting German was a German they were a couple of hundred miles away from. But Andrea was still upright in his chair, his black eyes gleaming. Andrea was a Greek. The things the Germans had done to his country were bad, but they were much, much better than the things the Germans had done to his family. Andrea found Germans very interesting indeed.

‘I’ll start at the beginning,’ said Jensen. ‘Last year we bombed a place called Peenemunde, on the Baltic. Seems the Germans were building some sort of rocket bomb there; doodlebugs first, bloody awful things, but there was supposed to be something else. Germans called it the A3. Goes into outer space, if you can believe this, and comes back, wallop, faster than the speed of sound. Blows a hole in you before you’ve even heard it coming. Good weapon against civilians.’ Mallory searched Jensen’s face for signs of irony, and found none. ‘We’re expecting it any day now. And there’s something else; bigger version, larger, longer range, more dangerous, good for use against troops. Questions so far?’

‘Why bother with outer space?’ said Miller.

‘Think of a shell. Longer the range, higher the trajectory.’

‘You’d need a hell of a bang to get it up there.’

Jensen smiled. ‘Very good, Miller,’ he said. ‘Now what we believe is this. These A3 things are rockets. Thing about outer space, there’s no air to burn your fuel. So your rocket needs to take its own air with it. These A3 things are supposed to burn a mixture of alcohol and liquid oxygen. One of our submarines sank a ship off Kynthos the other day, surfaced to look for, er, survivors. All they found was oxygen bottles. And a stink of alcohol.’