Alistair Maclean - The guns of Navaronne

And it had worked. All these carefully engineered pointers, pointers that not even the most sceptical could have ignored and denied, had worked magnificently. Miller and Andrea, who had shared the forenoon watch, had seen the Navarone garrison spending long hours making the most intensive house-to-house search of the town. That should make it doubly, trebly safe for them the following day, Mallory reckoned: it was unlikely that the search would be repeated, still more unlikely that, if it were, it would be carried out with a fraction of the same enthusiasm. Louki had done his work welL

Mallory turned his head to look at him. The little man was still asleep — wedged on the slope behind a couple of tree-trunks, he hadn't stirred for five hours. Still dead tired himself, his legs aching and eyes smarting with sleeplessness, Mallory could not find ft in him to grudge Louki a moment of his rest. He'd earned it all — and he'd been awake all through the previous night. So had Panayis, but Panayis was already awakening, Mallory saw, pushing the long, black hair out of his eyes: awake, rather, for his transition from sleep to full awareness was immediate, as fleeting and as complete as a cat's. A dangerous man, Mallory knew, a desperate man, almost, and a bitter enemy, but he knew nothing of Panayis, nothing at all. He doubted if he ever would.

Farther up the slope, almost in the centre of the grove, Andrea had built a high platform of broken branches and twigs against a couple of carob poles maybe five feet apart, gradually filling up the space between slope and trees until he had a platform four feet in width, as nearly level as he could make it. Andy Stevens lay on this, still on his stretcher, still conscious. As far as Mallory could tell, Stevens hadn't closed his eyes since they had been marched away by Turzig from their cave in the mountains. He seemed to have passed beyond the need for sleep, or had crushed all desire for it. The stench from the gangrenous leg was nauseating, appalling, poisoned all the air around. Mallory and Miller had had a look at the leg shortly after their arrival in the copse, uncovered it, examined it, smiled at one another, tied it up again and assured Stevens that the wound was closing. Below the knee, the leg bad turned almost completely black.

Mallory lifted his binoculars to have another look at the town, but lowered them almost at once as someone came sliding down the slope, touched him on the arm. It was Panayis, upset, anxious, almost angry looking. He gesticulated towards the westering sun.

«The time, Captain Mallory?» He spoke in Greek his voice low, sibilant, urgent — an inevitable voice, Mallory thought, for the lean, dark mysteriousness of the man. «What is the time?» he repeated.

«Half-past two, or thereabouts.» Mallory lifted an interrogatory eyebrow. «You are concerned, Panayis. Why?»

«You should have wakened me. You should have wakened me hours ago!» He was angry, Mallory decided. «It is my turn to keep watch.»

«But you had no sleep last night,» Mallory pointed out reasonably. «It just didn't seem fair—»

«It is my turn to keep watch, I tell you!» Panayis insisted stubbornly.

«Very well, then. If you insist.» Mallory knew the high fierce pride of the islanders too well to attempt to argue. «Heaven only knows what we would have done without Louki and yourself.… I'li stay and keep you company for a while.»

«Ah, so that is why you let me sleep on!» There was no disguising the hurt in the eyes, the voice. «You do not trust Panayis—»

«Oh, for heaven's sake!» Mallory began in exasperation, checked himself and smiled. «Of course we trust you. Maybe I should go and get some more sleep anyway; you are kind to give me the chance. You will shake me in two hour's time?»

«Certainly, certainly!» Panayis was almost beaming. «I shall not fail.»

Mallory scrambled up to the centre of the grove and stretched out lazily along the ledge he had levelled out for himself. For a few idle moments he watched Panayis pacing restlessly to and fro just inside the perimeter of the grove, lost interest when he saw him climbing swiftly up among the branches of a tree, seeking a high lookout vantage point and decided he might as well follow his own advice and get some sleep while he could.

«Captain Mallory! Captain Mallory!» An urgent, heavy hand was shaking his shoulder. «Wake up! Wake up!»

Mallory stirred, rolled over on his back, sat up quickly, opening his eyes as he did so. Panayis was stooped over him, the dark, saturnine face alive with anxiety. Mallory shook his head to clear away the mists of sleep and was on his feet in one swift, easy movement.

«What's the matter; Panayis?»

«Planes!» he said quickly. «There is a squadron of planes coming our way!»

«Planes? What planes? Whose planes?»

«I do not know, Captain. They are yet far away. But—»

«What direction?» Mallory snapped.

«They come from the north.»

Together they ran down to the edge of the grove. Panayis gestured to the north, and Mallory caught sight of them at once, the afternoon sun glinting off the sharp dihedral of the wings. Stukas, all right, he thought grimly. Seven — no, eight of them — less than three miles away, flying in two echelons of four, two thousand, certainly not more than twenty-five hundred feet… . He became aware that Panayis was tugging urgently at his arm.

«Come, Captain Mallory!» he said excitedly. «We have no time to lose!» He pulled Mallory round, pointed with outstretched arm at the gaunt, shattered cliffs that rose steeply behind them, cliffs crazily riven by rockjumbled ravines that wound their aimless way back into the interior — or stopped as abruptly as they had begun. «The Devil's Playground! We must get in there at once! At once, Captain Mallory!»

«Why on earth should we?» Mallory looked at him in astonishment. «There's no reason to suppose that they're after us. How can they be? No one knows we're here.»

«I do not care!» Panayis was stubborn in his conviction. «I know. Do not ask me how I know, for I do not know that myself. Louki will tell you — Panayis knows these things. I know, Captain Mallory, I know! »

Just for a second Mallory stared at him, uncomprehending. There was no questioning the earnestness, the utter sincerity — but it was the machine-gun staccato of the words that tipped the balance of instinct against reason. Almost without realising it, certainly without realislug why, Mallory found himself running uphill, slipping and stumbling in the scree. He found the others already on their feet, tense, expectant, shrugging on their packs, the guns already in their hands.

«Get to the edge of the trees up there!» Mallory shouted. «Quickly! Stay there and stay under cover-we're going to have to break for that gap in the rocks.» He gestured through the trees at a jagged fissure in the cliff-side, barely forty yards from where he stood, blessed Louki for his foresight in choosing a hideout with so convenient a bolt-hole. «Wait till I give the word. Andrea!» He turned round, then broke off, the words unneeded. Andrea had already scooped up the dying boy in his arms, just as he lay in stretcher and blankets and was weaving his way uphill in and out among the trees.

«What's up, boss?» Miller was by Mallory's side as he plunged up the slope. «I don't see nothin'.»

«You can hear something if you'd just stop talking for a moment,» Mallory said grimly. «Or just take a look up there.»

Miller, flat on his stomach now and less than a dozen feet from the edge of the grove, twisted round and craned his neck upwards. He picked up the planes immediately..

«Stukas!» he said incredulously. «A squadron of gawddamned Stukas! It can't be, boss!»

«It can and it is,» Mallory said grimly. «Jensen told me that Jerry has stripped the Italian front of them-- over two hundred pulled out in the last few weeks.» Mallory squinted up at the squadron, less than half a mile away now. «And he's brought the whole damn' issue down to the Aegean.»