Alistair Maclean - The guns of Navaronne

He was back on the bank within thirty seconds, cheek muscles contracting involuntarily as the ice-chill eyepieces of Mallory's Zeiss-Ikon binoculars screwed into his face. There was no mistaking them now, he thought grimly, his first fleeting impression had been all too accurate. Twenty-five, perhaps thirty soldiers in all, strung out in a long, irregular line, they were advancing slowly across the flank of Kostos, combing every gully, each jumbled confusion of boulders that lay in their path. Every man was clad in a snow-suit, but even at a distance of two miles they were easy to locate: the arrow-heads of their strapped skis angled up above shoulders and hooded heads: startlingly black against the sheer whiteness of the snow, the skis bobbed and weaved in disembodied drunkenness as the men slipped and stumbled along the scree-strewn slopes of the mountain. From time to time a man near the centre of the line pointed and gestured with an alpenstock, as if co-ordinating the efforts of the search party. The man with the whistle, Andrea guessed.

«Andrea!» The call from the cave mouth was very soft. «Anything wrong?»

Finger to his lips, Andrea twisted round in the snow. Mallory was stinding by the canvas screen. Dark-jowled and crumple-clothed, he held up one hand against the glare of the snow while the other rubbed the sleep from his bloodshot eyes. And then he was limping forward in obedience to the crooking of Andrea's finger, wincing in pain at every step he took. His toes were swollen and skinned, gummed together with congealed blood. He had not had his boots off since he had taken them from the feet of the dead German sentry: and now he was almost afraid to remove them, afraid of what he would find.… He clambered slowly up the bank of the gully and sank down in the snow beside Andrea.

«Company?»

«The very worst of company,» Andrea murmured. «Take a look, my Keith.» He handed over the binoculars, pointed down to the lower slopes of Mt. Kostos. «Your friend Jensen never told us that they were here.»

Slowly, Maliory quartered the slopes with the binoculars. Suddenly the line of searchers moved into his field of vision. He raised his head, adjusted the focus impatiently, looked briefly once more, then lowered the binoculars with a restrained deliberation of gesture that held a wealth of bitter comment.

«The W.G.B.,» be said softly.

«A Jaeger battalion,» Andrea conceded. «Alpine Corps — their finest mountain troops. This is most inconvenient, my Keith.»

Mallory nodded, rubbed his stubbled chin.

«If anyone can find us, they can. And they'll find us.» He lifted the glasses to look again at the line of advancing men. The painstaking thoroughness of the search was disturbing enough: but even more threatening, more frightening, was the snail-like relentlessness, the inevitability of the approach of these tiny figures. «God knows what the Alpenkorps is doing here,» Mallory went on. «It's enough that they are here. They must know that we've landed and spent the morning searching the eastern saddle of Kostos — that was the obvious route for us to break into the interior. They've drawn a blank there, so now they're working their way over to the other saddle. They must be pretty nearly certain that we're carrying a wounded man with us and that we can't have got very far. It's only going to be a matter of time, Andrea»

«A matter of time,» Andrea echoed. He glanced up at the sun, a sun all but invisible in a darkening sky. «An hour, an hour and a half at the most. They'll be here before the sun goes down. And we'll still be here.» He glanced quizzically at Mallory. «We cannot leave the boy. And we cannot get away if we take the boy — and then he would die anyway.»

«We will not be here,» Mallory said flatly. «If we stay we all die. Or finish up in one of those nice little dungeons that Monsieur Viachos told us about.»

«The greatest good of the greatest number,» Andrea nodded slowly. «That's how it has to be, has it not, my Keith? The greatest number. That is what Captain Jensen would say.» Mallory stirred uncomfortably, but his voice was steady enough when he spoke.

«That's how I see it, too, Andrea. Simple proportion — twelve hundred to one. You know it has to be this way.» Mallory sounded tired.

«Yes, I know. But you are worrying about nothing.» Andrea smiled. «Come, my friend. Let us tell the others the good news.»

Miller looked up as the two men came in, letting the canvas screen fall shut behind them. He had unzipped the side of Stevens's sleeping-bag and was working on the mangled leg. A pencil flashlight was propped on a rucksack beside him.

«When are we goin' to do somethin' about this kid, boss?» The voice was abrupt, angry, like his gesture towards the sleep-drugged boy beside him. «This damned waterproof sleeping-bag is soaked right through. So's the kid — and he's about frozen stiff: his leg feels like a side of chilled beef. He's gotta have heat, boss, a warm room and hot drinks — or he's finished. Twenty-four hours.» Miller shivered and looked slowly round the broken walls of the rock-shelter. «I reckon he'd have less than an even chance in a first-class general hospital. .. . He's just wastin' his time keepin' on breathin' in this gawddamned icebox.»

Miller hardly exaggerated. Water from the melting snow above trickled continuously down the clammy, green-lichened walls of the cave or dripped directly on to the half-frozen gravelly slush on the floor of the cave. With no through ventilation and no escape for the water accumulating at the sides of the shelter, the whole place was dank and airless and terribly chill.

«Maybe he'll be hospitalised sooner than you think,» Mallory said dryly. «How's his leg?»

«Worse.» Miller was blunt. «A helluva sight worse. I've just chucked in another handful of suipha and tied things up again. That's all I can do, boss, and it's just a waste of time anyway… . What was that crack about a hospital?» he added suspiciously.

«That was no crack,» Mallory said soberly, «but one of the more unpleasant facts of life. There's a German search party heading this way. They mean business. They'll find us, all right.»

Miller swore. «That's handy, that's just wonderful,» he said bitterly. «How far away, boss?»

«An hour, maybe a little more.»

«And what are we goin' to do with Junior, here? Leave him? It's his only chance, I reckon.»

«Stevens comes with us.» There was a flat finality in Mallory's voice. Miller looked at him for a long time in silence: his face was very cold.

«Stevens comes with us,» Miller repeated. «We drag him along with us until he's dead — that won't take long — and then we leave him in the snow. Just like that, Huh?»

«Just like that, Dusty.» Absently Mallory brushed some snow off his clothes, and looked up again at Miller. «Stevens knows too much. The Germans will have guessed why we're on the island, but they don't know how we propose to get inside the fortress — and they don't know when the Navy's coming through. But Stevens does. They'll make him talk. Scopolamine will make anyone taik.»

«Scopolamine! On a dying man?» Miller was openly incredulous.

«Why not? I'd do the same myself. If you were the German commandant and you knew that your big guns and half the men in your fortress were liable to be blown to hell any moment, you'd do the same.»

Miller looked at him, grinned wryly, shook his head.

«Me and my—»

«I know. You and your big mouth.» Mallory smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. «I don't like it one little bit more than you do, Dusty.» He turned away and crossed to the other side of the cave. «How are you feeling, Chief?»

«Not too bad, sir.» Casey Brown was only just awake, numbed and shivering in sodden clothes. «Anything wrong?»