Alistair Maclean - The guns of Navaronne

«Telephone it is,» he announced softly. «Over there, under the rocks.»

«Nothing we can do about it,» Mallory said. «If it does ring, I'll have to answer or they'll come hot-footing along. I only hope to heaven they haven't got a bloody password. It would be just like them.»

He turned away, stopped suddenly.

«But someone's got to come sometime — a relief, ser geant of the guard, something like that. Probably he's supposed to make an hourly report. Someone's bound to come — and come soon. My God, Andrea, we'll have to make it fast!»

«And this poor devil?» Andrea gestured to the huddled shadow at his feet.

«Over the side with him.» Mallory grimaced in distaste. «Won't make any difference to the poor bastard now, and we can't leave any traces. The odds are they'll think he's gone over the edge — this top-soil's as crumbly and treacherous as hell.… You might see if he's any papers on him — never know how useful they might be.»

«Not half as useful as these boots on his feet.» Andrea waved a large hand towards the scree-strewn slopes. «You are not going to walk very far there in your stocking soles.»

Five minutes later Mallory tugged three times on the string that stretched down into the darkness below. Three answering tugs came from the ledge, and then the cord vanished rapidly down over the edge of the overhang, drawing with it the long steel-cored rope that Mallory paid out from the coil on the top of the cliff.

The box of explosives was the first of the gear to come up. The weighted rope plummetted straight down from the point of the overhang, and padded though the box was on every side with lashed rucksacks and sleeping-bags it still crashed terrifyingly against the cliff on the inner arc of every wind-driven swing of the pendulum. But there was no time for finesse, to wait for the diminishing swing of the pendulum after each tug. Securely anchored to a rope that stretched around the base of a great boulder, Andrea leaned far out over the edge of the precipice and reeled in the seventy-pound deadweight as another man would a trout. In less than three minutes the ammunition box lay beside him on the cliff-top: five minutes later the firing generator, guns and pistols, wrapped in a couple of other sleeping-bags and their lightweight, reversible tent — white on one side brown and green camouflage on the other — lay beside the explosives.

A third time the rope went down into the rain and the darkness, a third time the tireless Andrea hauled it in, hand over hand. Mallory was behind him, coiling in the slack of the rope, when he heard Andrea's sudden exclamation: two quick strides and he was at the edge of the cliff, his hand on the big Greek's arm.

«What's up, Andrea? Why have you stopped--?»

He broke off, peered through the gloom at the rope in Andrea's hand, saw that it was being held between only finger and thumb. Twice Andrea jerked the rope up a foot or two, let it fall again: the weightless rope swayed wildly in the wind.

«Gone?» Mallory asked quietly.

Andrea nodded without speaking.

«Broken?» Mallory was incredulous. «A wire-cored rope?»

«I don't think so.» Quickly Andrea reeled in the remaining forty feet. The twine was still attached to the same place, about a fathom from the end. The rope was intact.

«Somebody tied a knot.» Just for a moment the giant's voice sounded tired. «They didn't tie it too well.»

Mallory made to speak, then flung up an instinctive arm as a great, forked tongue of flame streaked between the cliff-top and unseen clouds above. Their cringing eyes were still screwed tight shut, their nostrils full of the acrid, sulphurous smell of burning, when the first volley of thunder crashed in Titan fury almost directly overhead, a deafening artillery to mock the pitiful efforts of embattled man, doubly terrifying in the total darkness that followed that searing flash. Gradually the echoes pealed and faded inland in diminishing reverberation, were lost among the valleys of the hills.

«My God!» Mallory murmured. «That was close. We'd better make it fast, Andrea — this cliff is liable to be lit up like a fairground any minute… What was in that last load you were bringing up?» He didn't really have to ask — he himself had arranged for the breaking up of the equipment into three separate loads before he'd left the ledge. It wasn't even that he suspected his tired mind of playing tricks on him; but it was tired enough, too tired, to probe the hidden compulsion, the nameless hope that prompted him to grasp at nameless straws that didn't even exist.

«The food,» Andrea said gently. « All the food, the stove, the fuel — and the compasses.»

For five, perhaps ten seconds, Mallory stood motionless. One half of his mind, conscious of the urgency, the desperate need for haste, was jabbing him mercilessly: the other half held him momentarily in a vast irresolution, an irresolution of coldness and numbness that came not from the lashing wind and sleety rain but from his own mind, from the bleak and comfortless imaginings of lost wanderings on the harsh and hostile island, with neither food nor fire.… And then Andrea's great hand was on his shoulder, and he was laughing softly.

«Just so much less to carry, my Keith. Think how grateful our tired friend Corporal Miller is going to be… . This is only a little thing.»

«Yes,» Mallory said. «Yes, of course. A little thing.» He turned abruptly, tugged the cord, watched the rope disappear over the edge.

Fifteen minutes later, in drenching, torrential rain, a great, sheeting downpour almost constantly illumined by the jagged, branching stilettos of the forked lightning, Casey Brown's bedraggled head came into view over the edge of the cliff. The thunder, too, emptily cavernous in that flat and explosive intensity of sound that lies at the heart of a thunderstorm, was almost continuous: but in the brief intervals, Casey's voice, rich in his native Clydeside accent, carried clearly. He was expressing himself fluently in basic Anglo-Saxon, and with cause. He had had the assistance of two ropes on the way up --the one stretched from spike to spike and the one used for raising supplies, which Andrea had kept pulling in as he made the ascent. Casey Brown had secured the end of this round his waist with a bowline, but the bowline had proved to be nothing of the sort but a slip-knot, and Andrea's enthusiastic help had almost cut him in half. He was still sitting on the cliff-top, exhausted head between his knees, the radio still strapped to his back, when two tugs on Andrea's rope announced that Dusty Miller was on his way up.

Another quarter of an hour elapsed, an interminable fifteen minutes when, in the lulls between the thunderclaps, every slightest sound was an approaching enemy patrol, before Miller materialised slowly out of the darkness, half-way down the rock chimney. He was climbing steadily and methodically, then checked abruptly at the cliff-top, groping hands pawing uncertainly on the topsoil of the cliff. Puzzled, Mallory bent down, peered into the lean face: both the eyes were clamped tightly shut.

«Relax, Corporal,» Mallory advised kindly. «You have arrived.»

Dusty Miller slowly opened his eyes, peered round at the edge of the cliff, shuddered and crawled quickly on hands and knees to the shelter of the nearest boulders. Mallory followed and looked down at him curiously.

«What was the idea of closing your eyes coming over the top?»

«I did not,» Miller protested.

Mallory said nothing.

«I closed them at the bottom,» Miller explained weanly. «I opened them at the top.»

Mallory looked at him incredulously.

«What! All the way?»

«It's like I told you, boss,» Miller complained. «Back in Castelrosso. When I cross a street and step up on to the sidewalk I gotta hang on to the nearest lamp-post. More or less.» He broke off, looked at Andrea leaning far out over the side of the cliff, and shivered again. «Brother! Oh brother! Was I scared!»