Sam Llewellyn: Thunderbolt from Navarone

He said, ‘How d’ye do?’ Carstairs’ handshake was a bonecrusher. Wills’ feeling of tiredness increased. ‘Good fight?’

‘Dreadful,’ said Carstairs. ‘Bloody Liberators. Can’t hear a thing. Bring back Imperial. The Cairo run, what?’

‘Yes,’ said Wills. Himself, he had never been able to afford to fly in the Sunderlands of Imperial Airways. Lot of side, this Carstairs, he thought. He raised a hand to Chief Petty Officer Smith, who was loading stores down the quay. ‘Chiefy. Help Captain Carstairs with his stuff, there’s a good chap.’

During his brief chat with Carstairs, the other three men had climbed aboard the MTB and stowed their equipment. Without appearing to move very much they seemed to get a surprising amount done. The shortest of the three introduced himself as Mallory in a voice with a faint New Zealand twang.

‘Morning,’ said Wills.

Mallory saw a square youth with sun-bleached curly hair and a sunburned nose.

‘Made yourself at home, I hope,’ said Wills.

‘Hope that’s all right.’

Wills grinned. ‘Top-hole,’ he said. ‘We don’t stand on ceremony here.’ He embraced with a sweep of his arm the blue bay, the parched dunes, the concrete jetty. ‘You get out of the habit, in a tropical paradise.’

‘Very attractive,’ said Mallory, brushing away a couple of thousand flies.

‘Wait till we get to sea,’ said Wills. He was older than he looked, Mallory realized. From a distance, he might have been your standard British sixth-former. Close up, you could see the eyes. The eyes were a thousand years old.

‘Been here long?’ said Mallory.

‘Long enough. Stooging around causing trouble on the island. Yachting with big bangs, really. Speak a bit of the lingo. Do what we can to make a nuisance of ourselves.’

‘Quite,’ said Mallory. He liked this youth. There was something in his eye that said he could really cause the Germans some trouble, if he put his mind to it, and putting his mind to it was what he was good at.

‘We ready?’ said Wills.

Mallory nodded.

‘Top-hole,’ said Wills. Carstairs was not his cup of tea, but these men were different. They spoke quietly, and looked at him steady-eyed, and when they shook his hand their grip was firm but economical, as if in this, as in anything else they did, they would use just enough force to get the job done properly, no more, no less. This fitted neatly with Wills’ view of life, and he found himself favourably impressed. There was also another sensation lurking on the fringes of his conscious mind, and for a moment he did not know what it was. But ten minutes later, pouring the gin in the cupboard-sized wardroom, it came to him.

He was very glad they were on the same side as him.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Couple of things to organize.’

The heavy throb of the MTB’s engines came through the wardroom bulkheads, and the stink of high octane gasoline. The sleek grey boat scrawled a white question mark on the blue bay, roared out to sea and turned east.

It was a calm and beautiful day. Carstairs went on deck, thrusting his chiselled profile into the twenty-knot slipstream. Mallory, Miller and Andrea found plywood bunks, rolled on to them, and closed their eyes: except Mallory. Mallory lay and felt the bound of the MTB over the swell, and the tremor of the Merlin engines, and rested his eyes on the plywood deck above him. There were matters he needed to ponder before he slept.

As they had left the armoury, a runner had caught him by the arm. ‘Telephone, sir,’ he had said.

The voice on the telephone had been light but hard: Jensen.

‘No names,’ it had said. ‘Something I wanted to say, between us two, really.’

‘Yessir.’

‘I wanted to say the best of luck, and all that.’

‘Yessir.’ Jensen would not have rung his mother to wish her luck. Mallory waited.

‘Our new friend,’ said Jensen. ‘The expert. He’s okay, but you might like to keep your eye on him.’

‘Eye?’

‘Just a thought,’ said Jensen. ‘I’ve got a feeling he might be on a sort of treasure hunt.’

‘Treasure hunt? What sort of treasure hunt?’

‘If I knew, I wouldn’t be telling you to keep an eye on him, would I? Well, I expect you’ll be wanting to get on your way.’

Mallory lay and watched the deckhead. There were undoubtedly problems on Kynthos. But Mallory strongly suspected there was also a problem on the MTB, a problem called Carstairs. Mallory did not trust the man. Nor, it seemed, did Jensen. So why did Jensen insist that Carstairs be part of the mission? Of course, it had not been Jensen who had insisted. It had been Admiral Dixon. Mallory found himself thinking that a spell on the bridge of a destroyer would do Dixon a lot of good: or on an MTB, a floating fuel-tank, a bladder of aviation fuel with two Merlin engines…

But Dixon was safe behind his desk, and that was a law of nature. Just like the fact that Carstairs was along for the duration.

Railing against the laws of nature was entirely pointless. Mallory was not given to doing pointless things.

A new vibration added itself to the bone-jarring roar of the twin Merlins. Mallory was snoring.

He awoke much later, prised a cup of coffee out of the galley, and climbed on to the bridge. The sun was sinking towards the western horizon, North Africa a low dun line to the south. As far as any German aircraft were concerned they were heading east, for somewhere in the Allied territory in the gathering shadows ahead.

A rating brought up a plate of corned beef sandwiches and more coffee. It was quieter on the bridge. Mallory wedged a deck chair in a corner. As he ate his mind kept coming back to Carstairs. Why would an experienced guerrilla fighter have chosen a sniper rifle with a notoriously delicate sight? If they were all on the same operation, why were they notionally two separate units? Why –

A shadow fell across him. It was Carstairs, slender fingers in the pocket of his battledress blouse: like Clark Gable, thought Mallory. His hand came out with the gold cigarette case. He opened it, offered it to Mallory. ‘Turkish this side, Virginian that,’ he said.

‘Just put one out,’ said Mallory. ‘Tell me something. What are you doing on this trip?’

‘Same as you,’ said Carstairs.

‘So what … qualifies you?’

Carstairs smiled. ‘I’ve knocked about a bit.’

‘And you’re a rocket expert.’

‘So I am.’

‘Where did you pick that up?’

‘Here and there,’ said Carstairs, vaguely. ‘Here and there.’

You got used to vagueness on Special Operations. It was a mistake to know more than you needed to know. So why did Mallory have the feeling that Carstairs was using this fact for his own purposes?

‘Ever done armed insurgency work?’ he said.

‘Not exactly. But there have been … parallel episodes in my life.’

‘What’s a parallel episode?’ said a new voice: Miller’s.

‘A not dissimilar operation.’

‘I had one of those, but the wheels dropped off.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Carstairs’ face was stiffening.

‘All right,’ said Mallory. Carstairs, it seemed, was too important to have a sense of humour. ‘You’re good in mountains. You can shoot.’

Carstairs yawned. ‘So they told me on Nanga Parbat.’

‘I thought that was a German expedition.’

‘It was.’ They stared at him. ‘The Duke of Windsor asked me to go. Rather a chum of mine, actually, so one couldn’t refuse. I speak pretty good German. I’m a climber. What’s wrong with that?’

Mallory said nothing. The Nanga Parbat expedition had been supervised by Himmler in person. It had conquered the peak, but only by cementing in spikes and installing fixed ladders and ropes. They might as well have put scaffolding up the face. It was not what Mallory called climbing.