Thunderbolt from Navarone

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.’

‘Schnapps,’ said Miller.

Jensen smiled, and this time even the artificial warmth was gone from the ice-white display of teeth. ‘Thank you, Corporal,’ he said. ‘If that is all, I shall hand you over to Lieutenant, er, Robinson.’

Lieutenant Robinson was a tall, stooping man with round tortoiseshell spectacles and a donnish air. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Hmmyes. Kynthos. Typical Vesuvian post-volcanic structure, Santorini series, basalts, pumice, tufa, with an asymmetric central deposition zone –’

‘Lieutenant Robinson used to teach geology at Cambridge,’ said Jensen. ‘Once more, this time in English, if you please, Lieutenant.’

Robinson blushed to the tops of his spectacles. ‘Hmmyes,’ he said. ‘Kynthos is, er, mountainous. Very mountainous. There’s a town at the south-western end, Parmatia, more a village really, on a small alluvial plain. The road from the town transits a raised beach – ‘ he caught Jensen’s eye – ‘follows the coast, that is, mostly on a sort of shelf in the cliffs. There is no road across the interior suitable for motor transport. To the north-east of the mountain massif is another island, smaller, Antikynthos, connected to the main massif by a plain of eroded debris and alluvium –’ here Jensen coughed ‘– a stretch of flat land and marshes. This smaller island is itself rocky, taking the form of a volcanic plug with associated basalt and tufa masses, and on this there stands an old Turkish fort and the remains of a village: the Acropolis, they call it, the High Town. There has always been a jetty on Antikynthos. Recently this has been greatly improved, and the aerodrome upgraded. In the view of, er, contacts on the island, some sort of factory is being established.’ He took a photograph out of a file and laid it in an overhead projector. A man’s face appeared on the screen: a round face, mild, heavy-lidded eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘Sigismund von Heydrich,’ he said. ‘Injured during the bombing of Peenemunde. Highly talented ballistician – ‘ Jensen’s eye again ‘– rocket scientist. He was spotted boarding a plane at Trieste, and we know the plane landed on Kynthos. They’ve built workshops in the caves under the Acropolis. But there’s only a light military presence. Couple of platoons of Wehrmacht, nothing worse, as far as we know.’

Jensen stood up. Thank you, Lieutenant,’ he said. The Lieutenant looked disappointed, as if he had planned to go on for some time. ‘Well, there you are. Simple little operation, really. We want you to land on Kynthos and make a recce of this Acropolis. You’ll be briefed on the development of the V4, which is what they’re calling this one. Any sign of it, and we’d like it disposed of: air strikes will be available, but if they’ve got it a long way underground, well, Miller, we have the greatest confidence in your ability to wreck the happy home. Questions so far?’

‘Yessir,’ said Mallory. ‘You say we’ve got someone on the island already?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Jensen. ‘There was a transmitter.’

‘Was?’

‘Transmissions ceased a week ago. It may be that the Germans found it. Or it may equally be that someone dropped it. Frightfully stony place, as you know.’

Mallory caught Miller’s eye, and saw the wary resignation he felt himself. Jensen did not pick them for the easy ones.

‘And of course there’ll be Carstairs in case you need help. Now if you’ve got any questions, ask them now, and we’ll get into the detail.’

Miller said, ‘Who’s Carstairs?’

‘Good Lord,’ said Jensen. ‘Hasn’t anybody introduced you? Very remiss. Perhaps Admiral Dixon will do the honours. Admiral?’

Dixon heaved himself to his feet. ‘Captain Carstairs, make yourself known,’ he said, and there was something in his face that much resembled smugness.

The man in the beautiful uniform stood up and saluted. His hair was brown and wavy, his moustache clipped into a perfect eyebrow. ‘Gentlemen, how d’ye do?’ he said.

‘Captain Carstairs is a rocket expert,’ said the Admiral. ‘He is also experienced in special operations. Before the war he led expeditions up the Niger and in the Matto Grosso. He has overflown the North and South Poles, and climbed the north face of Nanga Parbat.’

Andrea caught Mallory’s eye. Mallory’s head moved almost imperceptibly from side to side. Never heard of him, he was saying.

‘Wow,’ said Miller. The Admiral looked at him sharply, but the American’s eyes were shining with honest reverence.

‘So I am very happy to say,’ said the Admiral, ‘that Captain Carstairs will make an ideal commanding officer for this expedition.’

There was a deep silence, full of the hum of the fans. Mallory looked at Jensen. Jensen was gazing at the place where the ceiling met the wall.

‘Any questions?’ said the Admiral.

‘Yessir,’ said Mallory. ‘When do we start training, sir?’

The Admiral frowned. ‘Training?’

‘It’ll take a month. Six weeks, maybe.’

Blood swelled the Admiral’s neck. ‘You’re out of here on a Liberator at 0200 hours. You will transfer to an MTB near Benghazi. You’ll be ashore and operating by 0300 tomorrow. There will be no training.’

‘MTB?’ said Mallory.

‘Motor Torpedo Boat,’ said Dixon.

‘Bit indiscreet,’ said Mallory, who knew what an MTB was. ‘Noisy.’

‘Can’t be helped,’ said Jensen. ‘Sorry about the training, sorry about the MTB. But it’s a matter of… well, put it like this. There’s a bit of a flap on. These damned rockets are a menace to our rear and our flank in Italy. They can deliver three tons of HE with an accuracy of fifty yards. They need disposing of before they’re operational, and we think that will be soon. We’d fly you in, but Staff say it’s the wrong place for a parachute drop. So MTB it’ll have to be. Time is of the essence.’

‘Can’t be done,’ said Mallory. Suddenly he felt Jensen’s eyes upon him like rods of ice.

The Admiral’s neck veins swelled. ‘Look here,’ he said, in a sort of muted bellow. ‘It is against my better judgement that I am using an insubordinate shower like you to perform a delicate operation. But Captain Jensen assures me that you know what you are doing, and takes responsibility for you. Well, let me make myself clear. If you do not obey my orders and the orders of Captain Carstairs in this matter, you will be charged with mutiny so fast your feet will not touch the ground – what are you doing?’

Mallory was on his feet, and so were Miller and Andrea. They were standing rigidly to attention. ‘Permission to speak, sah,’ said Mallory. ‘You can get your court martial ready, sah.’

The Admiral stared, flabby-faced. ‘By God,’ he said. ‘By God, I’ll have you – ‘

Jensen cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me, Admiral,’ he said. ‘Might I make a suggestion?’ The Admiral seemed to be beyond speech. ‘These men work as a unit. Their record is good. Might I suggest that rather than operating as a top-down command structure they be attached to Captain Carstairs as a force of observers, leaving Captain Carstairs in command of his own unit but without specific responsibility for these men, who would, as it were, be attached yet separate? This would obviate the need for special training, and establish the possibility of cross-unit liaison and cooperation rather than intra-unit response to ad hoc and de facto command structures.’

The Admiral’s jaw had dropped. ‘What?’ he said.

‘Mallory’s the senior captain,’ said Jensen. ‘And of course there is a colonel in the force.’

‘Who’s a colonel?’

‘I am,’ said Andrea.

Now it was Carstairs’ turn to stare. Andrea needed a haircut, and his second shave of the day. His uniform needed a laundry. Carstairs raised an eyebrow. ‘Colonel?’ he said, and Miller could hear his lip curl even if he could not see it.

The air in the briefing room was thick and ugly. ‘Greek army,’ said Andrea. ‘Under Captain Mallory’s command, for operational purposes.’

‘Uh,’ said the Admiral, looking like a man who had just trodden on a fair-sized mine.

Jensen said, ‘Come out here, all of you,’ and marched into the corridor. Out there, he said, ‘You’ve got Carstairs whether you like him or not. I want you on this mission. I’m ordering you to take him along.’

‘And wipe his nose.’

‘Also his shoes, if necessary.’ Jensen’s eyes were bright chips of steel.

‘Under my command,’ said Mallory.

‘I know about rockets,’ said Miller. ‘I know as much about rockets as anyone. We don’t need this guy. He’ll get in the way. We’ll wind up carrying him, he’ll–’

‘We would be fascinated to hear your views,’ said Jensen in a freezing voice. ‘Some other time, though, I think.’

‘So who needs this guy?’

‘If you mean Captain Carstairs, the Admiral wants him. And that, gentlemen, is that. Now get back in there.’

They knew Jensen.

They got back in there.

The Admiral said, ‘Captain Carstairs will be a separate unit, taking his orders directly from me.’

Carstairs smiled a smooth, inward-looking smile. Technically, Mallory was his superior officer. All the Admiral was doing was muddying waters already troubled. They stood wooden-faced, potential disasters playing like newsreels in their minds.

‘Last but not least,’ said Jensen. ‘Local support. Lieutenant.’

Robinson stood up, spectacles gleaming. ‘There is Resistance activity on the island,’ he said. ‘But we want your operation kept separate. Civilian reprisals, er, do not help anyone.’ Andrea’s face was dark as a thundercloud. He had found the bodies of his parents on a sandbank in the River Drava. They had been lashed together and thrown in to drown. He knew about reprisals: and so did the Germans who had done the deed, once he had finished with them. Robinson continued, ‘We will be landing you in Parmatia. There is a gentleman called Achilles at three, Mavrocordato Street in Parmatia. He will provide you with motor transport up the island to the Acropolis. We’ll have a submarine standing by at a position you will be given at midnight on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. If you’re there, hang up a yellow fishing lantern as a signal. If not … well, he’ll wait until 0030 on Saturday, then you’re on your own. Got it?’

‘Got it.’

‘But avoid all other contact. We’d like you to be a surprise. A thunderbolt of a surprise. That’s what this operation is called, by the way. Operation Thunderbolt.’

‘After the weather forecast?’ said Miller.

‘How did you guess?’ said Jensen.

‘You did it last time,’ said Miller.

Jensen did not seem to hear. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘The detail.’

For the next two hours, in the company of the geologist and a man from SOE, they studied the detail.

‘All right,’ said Jensen, as they folded away their maps. ‘Armoury next.’

The armoury was the usual harshly-lit room with racks of Lee Enfields. The Armourer was a Royal Marine with a bad limp and verbal diarrhoea. ‘Schmeissers, ‘e said you wanted,’ said the Marine, pulling out boxes. ‘Quite right, quite right, don’t want those bloody Stens, blow up on you as soon as Jerry, go on, ‘ave a look, yes, Corporal? Oh, I see you are the more discriminating type of customer, grenades, was it?’ But even his flow of talk could not hold up over the grim silence that filled that little room. Mallory and Andrea sat down on the bench and disassembled a Schmeisser each, craftsmen assessing the tools of a deadly trade. The hush filled with small, metallic noises. Andrea rejected two of the machine-pistols before he found one to his liking, then another. Miller, meanwhile, was in a corner of the room, by a cupboard the size of a cigar humidor. He had a special pack, lined with wood and padded. Into this he was stowing, with a surgeon’s delicacy of touch, buff-coloured bricks of plastic explosives, brightly-coloured time pencils, and a whole hardware store of other little packets and bottles.

Mallory reassembled his second Schmeisser. ‘For you, Carstairs,’ he said.

Carstairs looked languidly up from the sights of a Mauser. ‘Never touch ‘em, old boy.’

‘You’ll need one.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ said Carstairs, tapping a Turkish cigarette on a gold case. A silenced Browning automatic lay across his knees. ‘Stand off is my motto. Works with impala. Works with Germans. Now look here, Sergeant, have you got a hard case for this?’ He held up the Mauser carbine and a Zeiss 4X sniperscope. Several Mausers would be going to Kynthos – they were rugged carbines essential for long-range work. But the sniperscope was delicate as a prima ballerina’s tutu – nothing to do with the kind of knockabout you could expect if you were storming a hollow mountain full of rockets.

As they left the armoury, Andrea fell in beside Mallory. ‘What do you think?’ he said.

‘I think we should keep our eyes open.’

‘Exactly, my Keith.’ They walked on in silence. ‘And what is this Nanga Parbat?’

‘A mountain. In the Himalayas. There was an expedition to climb it in 1938.’ Mallory paused. He hated what came next. ‘A German expedition.’

‘There was no war in 1938.’

‘No.’

But all of a sudden Mallory’s stomach was a tight ball. There was something wrong with this. It was the same feeling he had had on the south icefield of Mount Cook, watching his right boot go up and forward, watching the weight go on, but because of that feeling, not committing himself. Which had been just as well. Because when it felt the weight of that boot – brownish-black leather, new-greased, criss-cross laces in the lugs, that boot – the world crumbled and slid away, and what had been smooth ice had turned into a cornice over a ravine, a cornice that had crumbled under him and was swallowing him up.

Except that he had taken warning from that knot in the stomach, and kept his weight back, and walloped his ice axe behind him at the full reach of his arm, felt it bite, and hauled himself out of the jaws of death and back on to clean ice. And climbed the mountain.

The knot in the stomach was not fear, or at least not only fear. It was a warning. It needed listening to.

TWO

Tuesday 1000-Wednesday 0200

Al-Gubiya Bay is a small notch in the coast west of Benghazi. That morning, it contained a group of khaki tents, a concrete jetty, and one and a half billion flies. Alongside the jetty an MTB crouched like a grey shark. Her commander, Lieutenant Bob Wills, was sitting on the forward port-hand torpedo tube. The sun balanced on his head like a hot iron bar, and the flies were driving him crazy, but not as crazy as the orders he had received. He wondered what the hell they were dropping him in this time.

A three-ton lorry clattered on to the quay, stopped, and stood snorting in its cloud of Libyan dust. The canvas back of the lorry twitched and parted. Four men got down.

Three of them walked together, silent, closed-faced. Their faces were gaunt and sunburned. They looked at the same time exhausted and relaxed, and under their heavy equipment they walked with a steady, mile-devouring lope. Ahead of the three was a slenderer man. He was dressed like them in battledress without badges of rank. But his walk had more of a strut in it, as if he thought someone might be watching, and at the same time he moved uneasily in the straps of his pack. This and a certain finicky neatness in his uniform made the Lieutenant think that he was not completely at home.

The neat man had quick brown eyes that checked the MTB and the cuff-rings of the Lieutenant’s tunic, hung from the barrel of the five-pounder. He said, ‘Good morning. I’m Captain Carstairs.’ The man smiled, a white, film-star sort of a smile. Wills was tired from months of night operations, and the smile was too dazzling.

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.’